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Trinity is dying.
But apparently she can’t even do that in peace, these days.
“I’m coming!”
The insistent knocking continues.
“Jesus, calm down,” she mutters under her breath.
Or her attempts at breathing, at least, which are currently compromised by the tightness in her chest and her newfound affinity for hacking up a lung every three seconds. Yay. That’s the thanks she gets for saving lives: a measly cold that turned into the full-on flu before the week had even truly begun.
With a grunt she pushes off the triple-layered blankets and heaves herself up from the couch, onto her feet. Quick like a band aid seemed like the best way to go about it, but it leaves her clinging to the couch arm with a death grip until the world finally stops spinning and she can stagger to the entryway where someone is still knocking on her front door after she refused to answer the doorbell.
She is forced to take a break after a few steps, leaning against the doorway to stay upright and catch her breath, before powering through the last of it. It takes her three tries to flick the lock, hands nowhere near as steady as they usually are, but she succeeds and opens the door.
And freezes.
“What—“ Trinity blinks, trying to dispel the image in front of her as she tries to remember how high her fever has to be to induce hallucinations “—the fuck.”
“Santos.”
She scrubs a hand over her face to see if that helps. It doesn’t. “Dr Garcia?”
Because there she is, in the flesh: the one person Trinity has successfully avoided interacting with outside of a purely professional and limited context ever since that shitshow of a first day at the ED.
Wearing jeans.
It feels almost sacrilegious, witnessing Garcia out of her royal purple surgery scrubs. It makes sense that she has a life outside of the hospital, but despite the way they had initially hit it off, Trinity is decidedly not a part of that. She doesn’t think she ever considered Garcia owning a wardrobe with anything other than scrubs stacked neatly on the shelves. Which is stupid. But still—
Jeans.
“What—“ she takes a breath, ignoring the way her heart climbs in her chest with rising anxiety. “Are you doing here?”
Her eyes flicker past Garcia to the depressingly grey galley, half-expecting someone else to be there, to explain what is going on, but it’s deserted. She looks back at Garcia, who has yet to answer, and another question pushes its way through the fog inhabiting her feverish mind, her brows narrowing.
“…How do you know where I live?”
Garcia finally moves then, shifting her weight. If Trinity didn’t know better, she’d attribute it to nerves. “I asked Whitaker.”
“And—What, he just gave it to you?”
“He did the second time I asked.”
A heavy sigh falls from her lips. By Garcia’s tone, Trinity figures it was less of a question and more so a strongly worded order. She hates how she can picture it; Garcia pulling Dennis aside after a case, towering over him despite them being practically the same height and just asking again when he tries to avoid answering.
God help her, Trinity has grown—fond of Huckleberry these past few months, but he still folds like a cooked spaghetti noodle at the barest sigh of authority.
(She’ll give him another few months of her presence before he starts to grow out of it. See, do, teach and all that.)
She sags further into the wall, allowing it to hold up most of her weight for her and steadies herself on the edge of the open door. Her joints have been protesting movement since she woke up that morning, and they’re not thanking her for lingering in the entryway now.
“Could I come in?”
It takes Trinity a full minute to process the words, but they don’t make any more sense by the end of it. “What?”
For someone whose usual baseline is snappy, Garcia is uncharacteristically quiet and patient as she simply repeats, “Whether I can come in.”
Trinity’s hand falls from the door without much underlying thought, but Garcia takes it as an invitation, brushing briskly past Trinity. She toes off her boots, leaving them neatly next to the shoe rack that had collapsed after a drunken stumble last weekend and Dennis has yet to fix like he promised. For some reason the action takes Trinity so off-guard she only realises Garcia is holding grocery bags when she’s already turning the corner towards the living room.
In a daze that has little to do with her fever, Trinity shuts the front door and traces Garcia’s path, finding her at the island that separates the kitchen from the living room. Her dark gaze travels around the space, skipping across the bookcase with their collection of medical textbooks, the polaroid pictures taped to the wall and the mismatched armchairs that hold two weeks’ worth of clean laundry that still needs folding and putting away. She lingers longer on the couch, with its collection of soft blankets and the pile of meds and water bottles within arm’s reach on the coffee table, and Trinity starts to feel inexplicably exposed.
She clears her throat and wraps her arms around herself, limbs heavy. “What are you doing here?” she asks again.
Garcia’s eyes snap to hers, piercing and attentive.
(It’s all too easy to remember why she had latched on to Garcia’s attention that first day; it’s the kind of all-consuming focus that can easily be mistaken for being seen.)
“I’m here to apologize.”
Whatever wild and varied options had been floating around Trinity’s hazy brain, this is decidedly not one of them. “What?”
Garcia takes a measured breath and motions for Trinity to take a seat at the kitchen island. Trepidation grows as she does just that, climbing unsteadily onto the bar stool, the relief at finally being off her feet again heavily overshadowed.
“I’m sorry for the way I responded when you came to me with your concerns about Langdon.”
The straightforward, rehearsed words land like a blow, pushing all air out of Trinity’s aching lungs.
“And I apologize for what I said when you told me your suspicions had been correct. No matter my personal relationships, I should have taken you seriously, instead of responding from emotion. It was hurtful and wrong.”
For someone who convinces herself that the past is in the past, Trinity’s chest surely aches an awful lot as the memory of that first day at PTMC emerges from where she has buried it. It is wrapped in hurt and a painful vulnerability she is adept at hiding, and it instantly raises her hackles, brings forth the defence mechanisms she clamped onto at age ten, twelve, sixteen and still now, at twenty-seven, because vulnerability is bad and you can’t be vulnerable if you’re mean and you bite.
She snorts, then laughs hollowly, horribly, digging her nails into her forearms hard enough for it to sting. “Did your therapist help you come up with that?”
“Yes,” Garcia replies without missing a beat.
And the fight seeps right out of Trinity’s body.
She doesn’t know what’s worse. Thinking this ambush-apology is a spur-of-the-moment decision, or knowing it was calculated. A therapy topic, for a woman who Trinity has never witnessed a moment’s weakness of.
Garcia lets silence settle, allows Trinity to process until it becomes obvious she doesn’t know what else to say. “I’m not telling you this for forgiveness,” Garcia says. “If that’s what you’re wondering.”
It’s not. Trinity just never expected an apology.
(People don’t apologize. They justify and tell you to move on. They’re always right. You’re always wrong, even when you’re not. It’s the way of the world.)
“Yeah,” she says instead.
“I just wanted to see if there is a chance you’ll let me make it up to you.”
Trinity sighs, holding her head and pressing her thumbs to her temples in an effort to stave off the pressure headache that’s building behind her eyes. “It’s fine.” She smiles wryly, turning to cough in her elbow. “Forgive and forget, and all that, right?”
She laughs, and hates how fragile it sounds to her own ears. Still, she keeps that smile firmly on her face, ignoring the strain on her warm cheeks. It has convinced plenty of people before. Or at the very least has allowed them to dismiss the kind of emotions she works hard to keep hidden.
“No, it’s not,” Garcia says, and Trinity wants to yell.
Because she wants this to be over and yet—Garcia is right. Forgive and forget is easy to say, but Garcia is at least a part of the reason why the memory of her first day at PTMC still brings a rush of all-consuming anxiety with it that is hard to shake.
(The massive panic attack she’d had in the shower after the fifteen-hour shift and the subsequent relapse into coping mechanisms she’d worked so, so hard to shake are even harder to forget.)
Trinity’s hands drop to her lap and she clamps them between her thighs, her entire body taut with tension that builds and builds until it spills over in the shape of words she never planned to say.
“I realise we barely knew each other,” she’d been stupid, so, so stupid, “But I thought—I thought I could trust you.”
The admission feels foolishly naive in a way that makes her want to crawl out of her skin, but it doesn’t stop the unspoken, apparently I was wrong from echoing loudly in the silence that settles between them after the loaded words have left her mouth.
(Can someone betray trust they didn’t even know they had? Trust Trinity hadn’t known she had hesitantly given, until Garcia had resolutely shot down her comments and questions about Langdon.)
She had thought she’d seen something in Garcia. Had thought that Garcia had seen something in her, something that would see past the initial judgement of intern trying to make trouble.
“And I realise all anyone sees when they look at me is my sparkling, abrasive personality. My ambition.” She pauses, her mind yelling abort! abort! before she says too much, but she had already said too much and she’s sick and she’s tired and Garcia is still here, quiet, and—“But I care. About doing this the right way.”
Right is never easy. She learned that early on in life.
“I know,” Garcia says.
“And what Langdon was doing was all sort of fucked up, compromising the care of others.” Addiction was a disease and an explanation, but not a justification. Neither was the fact that no one but her had seemed to notice. She could try and explain, knows Robby must have cycled through the thoughts too; she’d caught him on a bad day, she’d had a fresh pair of eyes, she’d gotten lucky, but none of that justified it slipping past doctors with years of experience on her.
It always comes back down to her, somehow. Down to her, to carry on her shoulders. Like life is one big joke.
There’s more to say. More she’s angry about, more to the frustration that simmers low in her stomach, swirling in with the nausea she has been fighting since waking up that morning to realise she still hasn’t shaken the flu, but the fight seeps right back out of her at the phantom pressure on her shoulders.
When she says, “I couldn’t stay quiet,” the words are barely more than a murmur.
“I know,” Garcia says again. “I was wrong in making you think you should’ve had to. And I realise the courage it must have taken you to repeat it to Robby anyway.
The words make Trinity feel small, anxiety rising. She doesn’t do small; doesn’t do vulnerable. She has built up a wall and unlearned it until a glimmer of hope for mutual understanding had peeked through for a singular, stupid second, and look where that got her.
You’re trouble.
And so she reins it back in, snapping her mouth shut as she finally turns away from Garcia to stare unseeingly at the peeling paint of the kitchen cabinets.
“If you’re not looking for forgiveness,” Trinity says tiredly. “Why are you here, Garcia? Why now?”
From the corner of her eye, she watches as Garcia steps up to the kitchen island and unpacks the groceries she’d brought. “To see if you’ll let me make it up to you,” she says again.
Trinity looks at her now. “What is that?”
“Food,” Garcia deadpans, then, gentler, “Ingredients.”
Ingredients implies cooking.
Trinity shifts in her seat and wraps her hands around the back of her neck, the contrast in temperature still nice, even if she no longer seems to be radiating heat. “I’m sick,” she tells Garcia, knowing she’s stating the obvious.
Garcia’s responding look says she knows it too. Rude.
Trinity would roll her eyes if she wasn’t already exhausted. “I mean—“ She pauses. What did she mean to say? She clears her throat, then coughs into the crook of her elbow, and—Oh, right. “I mean I’m probably wildly infectious.”
“I don’t get sick.”
Trinity stares at Garcia for a long second. “Of course you don’t,” she finally sighs. “Surgeons and their fucking superiority complexes.”
She’ll have to work on hers when she does her surgery residency. Shouldn’t be too hard.
“I just have a strong immune system.”
She could swear Garcia’s lip twitches in amusement, but she can’t really trust her own perception at this time. Today is quickly turning into a strange day, with its rollercoaster of emotions.
“As to why now—I would have done this while you were in… better condition,” Garcia says, more delicately than Trinity thinks her capable of, which is probably unfair. “But I haven’t been able to find a chance.”
Ah. See: Trinity’s great success at avoiding her in the workplace. It’s unlikely she would have let herself be cornered at work. Not because she doesn’t believe in second chances, but because she had never considered an apology would be on the table.
She has spent the past few months staying resolutely out of Garcia’s way. If a case requires them to work together, Trinity is on her best behaviour. No quips, no jokes, no begging to perform medical procedures—no matter how cool; she just does her job and gets the hell out of the room when she can. And if she has the opportunity to avoid working with Garcia altogether, she takes it. She is already hyperaware of what happens in her surroundings, so she puts those skills to good use.
The downside to that, is that she is constantly aware of where Garcia is at a given time. Of what she’s doing. Who she’s looking at.
(Even after all this time, she can feel Garcia’s dark eyes on her more often than not, if she’s down from the OR.)
“Santos.”
Trinity lifts her gaze to Garcia’s.
“I can go, if you need me to,” Garcia says. “But if you’re open to it—I make a mean chicken noodle soup.”
A hand, held out to her. An opportunity to meet halfway.
It’s easy, to stay angry. It costs less effort to hold on, even if it eats energy.
But…
She doesn’t have to, is the thing. They can’t start over, but they can try again.
It’s up to her.
“Okay.” She takes a deep breath. “Okay, why the hell not.”
“Okay,” Garcia echoes. Her features smooth out, losing tension Trinity hadn’t even realised was there, until it’s gone. She looks at the ingredients she has brought. “You don’t have any food allergies, right?”
After the loaded conversation the question is so hopelessly mundane Trinity fights a huff of amusement. She shakes her head. “No.”
“Good,” Garcia says. She turns towards the fridge, but aborts the movement halfway through to pull her phone from her pocket instead.
Trinity’s brows climb on her forehead until she can’t contain her curiosity. “What are you doing?”
“Texting Whitaker.” Garcia looks up, phone momentarily forgotten. Trinity wonders briefly if there’s anything she does that she doesn’t devote her full attention to. “He agreed to give me your address, but made me promise to update him on whether you’re still alive. Apparently you haven’t been answering your texts.”
Huh.
Maybe she should give Huckleberry a bit more credit.
Trinity glances back and spots her phone on the side table, remembering it had indeed died on her earlier, when she had been in no state to grab a charger.
Garcia finishes her text and puts her phone away. She starts nosing through the kitchen cabinets, pulling down pots and pans and Trinity realises that oh, okay, she’s entirely serious about this.
It’s weird. It’s weirdly not-weird. This entire situation is weird. This day is weird.
“…Do you want help?”
Garcia throws her a look, one brow arched. “You look like you’re about to keel over. Go sit on the couch before you do.”
And whose fault is that, Trinity wants to snark right back, but instead she complies without a word. Her body is grateful for the comfort of the worn cushions, limbs tired and achy, though from the lack of hot flashes and chills she figures her fever might have finally settled for now.
She curls her legs under her body and leans down to fish her charging cable from the floor, plugging her phone in. While it restarts, she pulls a blanket across her lap, fiddling with the frayed edge until she can enter her pin and navigate to her messages. Her intended ‘strongly worded message’ to Huckleberry ends up as a dry dude, wtf, but she figures it conveys the right message.
He's online in seconds, and she hears Garcia’s phone buzz on the kitchen counter before he replies to her with a bunch of sorry!!!’s and pleading emojis that have her rolling her eyes.
Three dots appear, then disappear and appear again in the same breath, a new set of messages popping up in their thread.
huckleberry
everything thing ok tho?
with garcia
Trinity glances at the kitchen, watching Garcia chop vegetables with surgical precision.
trinity
yeah
i think so