Work Text:
It had been raining all day. First, a light drizzle over a grey Pittsburgh, but now it was pouring. Large, heavy droplets kept hitting the windscreen, and no matter how quickly the wipers swept across the glass, it hardly made a difference. While the world outside your car was painted in the hazy grey of a rainy day, your mind was thousands of miles away. Lost in memories of a time you barely dared to stay too long in, lest you get lost in thoughts of what might have been.
The day had started like any other Saturday. You’d had breakfast while an episode of one of your favourite shows played on the TV in the living room. You never paid it any mind since you already knew every dialogue word-for-word, but you mainly used it to drown out the silence in your otherwise big, but lonely, apartment.
The freshly painted walls had finally dried, and the day's goal was to sort through some of the boxes stacked against the wall in the hallway after the move. You had nearly finished filling the bookcases on either side of the TV with your collection of books when your phone rang. Thinking nothing of it, you answered immediately, balancing the phone between your ear and shoulder as you glanced at the two books in a series you were holding in your hands, wondering where the second book was.
Thinking it was probably your sister calling about having dinner later that day, you answered carefree, only to have your world slow down as it usually would when a doctor called you.
“Hello, I’m Dr Melissa King, and I’m calling from Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Hospital.”
When she had asked you if you were the right person she was seeking, your immediate thought had turned to your family. Had someone been in an accident? But why would they call you? As far as you knew, you weren’t any of your family members' first emergency contact. Your parents had each other, and your sister had her spouse, so why would the hospital call you?
“Yes, that is correct. I’m sorry, but what is this about? Has something happened?” you asked, putting down the books to hold your phone closer to your ear.
“I’m afraid to tell you that we have Jack Abbot here in the Emergency Department. He has been in an accident, and I’m afraid it is a very serious one. I think it would be best if you came in to see him, and we can discuss things further then.”
“I’m sorry, but is this a joke?” You had not intended to sound as harsh as you did, but nothing of what the woman calling you had said made any sense to you. You had not heard from or seen Jack in years. The last time had been right before he was going to be shipped off again to the other side of the globe. A small part of you had always hoped that he was alive, but when he had never contacted you again, you had feared the worst and moved on with your life.
“I-I’m sorry?” stuttered the woman on the phone, sounding taken aback by your question. “I assure you it isn’t. Are you sure you’re…?”
“Yes, I’m sure you have the right person,” you said, interrupting Melissa, “I know, well, I knew Jack a long time ago, but why are you calling me?”
“You are registered as his emergency contact. I’m sorry, but is it possible for you to come in? Or do you know someone else you’d wish us to contact?”
While confusion laced with irritation crashed around you like waves, underneath it all, there was a part of you that had longed for this day. For the possibility of Jack being alive. For a second chance to make amends after the fight you had had right before he left.
“No, there is no one else,” you said with a heavy heart, because the fact was clear; if Jack Abbot still had you as his emergency contact, there couldn’t be anyone else in his life to call. His parents had died when he was a teenager, he was an only child, and his wife had been dead for a long time.
“I’m on my way.”
While you had parked your car as close to the hospital as possible, you still had to run through the rain to get to the emergency department because you had forgotten to grab your umbrella in your haste. The clouds hung heavy and dark in the sky, letting barely a flash of sunlight through. Earlier today, the news reporter strongly advised the public not to go outside, and after having to drive through this weather, you completely understand why. It also made you less surprised to see how crowded the waiting room was.
Head injuries, dislocated shoulders and broken wrists, and all soaked to the bone from the rain. With every step you took, the sound of splashing water from under your shoes harmonised with the crying of a child and the humming of the machines of the hospital.
The line to the reception was not too long, and before you knew it, it was your turn.
“Next!” shouted the ward clerk, a short, older woman with some of the kindest dark brown eyes you had seen. While her eyes were kind, her shoulders were rigid, and her hair pulled back into a tight up-do, making you wonder if this was a way for her to guard herself from the hostile attitudes of some of the patients and guests in the waiting room.
“Hi, I’m here for Jack Abbot. Dr Melissa King called me before. She said he’d been in an accident,” you said and held up your ID for the ward clerk to see that you were who you said you were, but she only looked at you with a sympathetic pity you hadn’t seen in years. It was the same kind of pitying gaze your sister had shown you when you had told her that you and Jack had fought, resulting in him breaking things off with you before returning to the army. A place he had promised never to return to.
A night that felt like a lifetime ago.
“Yes, of course, sweetheart. You come right in. When you get in, ask for Dr Robby. He’ll explain everything.”
You thanked her as you stepped back and walked to the emergency department doors. As if stepping through a portal, the humid and brown waiting room was gone, and you were surrounded by white walls, metal, glass, and the coolness of the fluorescent lights. The air felt sterile in a way that made your nostrils itch with a need to sneeze. Taking hesitant steps forward, you walked towards the desk in the middle of the room where doctors and nurses exchanged short sentences before walking their separate ways.
Holding the strap of your shoulder bag in with both hands, you walked up to the tall blond nurse with glasses sitting low on her nose and the young brown-haired doctor who kept tapping her fingers against the desk.
“Hi, excuse me, I’m here for Jack Abbot. The ward clerk said I should talk to Dr Robby?” The last sentence came out more as a question, as you felt more and more insecure by the women’s stares. Before the blond nurse could say anything, the brown-haired doctor jumped into action.
“Yes, of course, I’ll take you to him!” she said with an eagerness you had not expected.
“Santos,” said the nurse sternly as her eyes narrowed.
“Oh, come on, Dana, I can take her to Abbott's room, and you can tell Robby she’s here when you see him.”
Before Dana could say something, Trinity had already walked around the desk to you and signalled for you to follow her deeper into the department. But before you get too far away from the desk with the nurses, you thought you heard someone say, “I bet she’s his neighbour or something. No way he pulled her.”
“What if she’s his...”
“Hush! Both of you!” The stern voice of Dana was the last thing you heard before you were too far away to hear the rest.
Tightening your grip on your bag, you cleared your throat before staring down at the floor. Your soaked shoes made an embarrassingly squeaky sound with every step you took, no matter how lightly you tried to walk.
“Dr Santos?”
“Hm?”
“Can you tell me what happened to him?” The room felt too small and too big at the same time, the lights too bright, the air too filled with the smell of antiseptics. And in the middle of this strange, sterile world stood you, pretending to be someone you’d never been. In your place, should a spouse have stood, not an old fling. An old fuck buddy. A body Jack had once warmed himself with, whilst you had longed to be considered a girlfriend.
You felt utterly filthy. So incredibly vile coming here and pretending he needed you.
“Dr Abbot was hit by a car. He had been at the scene of a car accident earlier today, where four cars collided. He had been helping the victims when a fifth car aquaplaned, lost control and struck him, we think,” said Trinity slowly and gently in the way someone who was used to giving devastating news only could.
“Right, right,” you murmured, “wait, Dr Abbot? Jack’s a doctor?”
All you knew about Jack’s job back in the day was that he worked in the military, but he had never told you exactly what he did, nor had he stayed long enough for you to ask him any personal questions. Had you even been considered a friend?
“What? Yes, Dr Abbot works here,” you could hear the confusion in Trinity's voice at your question, and you sank deeper into yourself.
“Miss, how do you know Abbot?” Had you looked up, you would have seen Trinity send away some of her colleagues, standing a few meters away from you, who were curious about you with only a glance. Instead, you only see her dark-blue trainers with pink laces come into view as she steps forward.
“We used to be... friends. I haven’t seen him in 15 years,” you confessed in a weak voice. Yet the truth made you feel less like a fraud, but the peace from the truth was quickly filled in by the anxious thought that they were going to cast you out for not being what they thought you were. A partner. A loved one. Someone deserving of being considered an emergency contact.
“I still want to see him!” you quickly added, eyes stinging with unshed tears as you looked up at the young doctor who studied you with intensity, “I still care for him. I still consider him a friend, and I want to be there for him.”
Trinity didn’t say anything about your confession. With her hands on her hips, she quickly went through all the different ways this could go wrong. After all, she wasn’t sure that, had she’d been in Jack’s position, she would have wanted to wake up in the hospital with someone she hadn’t seen in over a decade right beside her. But another part of her, a smaller and more destructive part, desperately wished to see how this would play out if she did let you see him. After all, she recognised the light in your eyes. The desperate, but unmistakable, light of love for the one that got away, and she knew how lonely Jack Abbot was. So why should she not let the two of you reconnect?
Fuck! Sometimes she really didn’t like how much of a romantic she could be.
“He’s unconscious right now, and before you ask, no, he doesn’t have any internal or head injuries. We’ve already checked. All we can do now is wait for him to wake up,” she said as she walked closer to the door to the room where Jack stayed. “If you want to, I suggest that you talk to him while we wait.”
The open door to Jack’s room felt miles away to you. The last frontier before your life would change forever. Right here, right now, you still have the opportunity to run away. To return to your apartment and forget this had ever happened. That you lost Jack to a war you had the luxury to forget about. That even if you had only warmed his bed after he lost his wife, he had still made you his emergency contact, but refused to call you a girlfriend.
To forget him would have been the rational thing to do, but there was still hope that lived within you, and it had reared its ugly head, watching the sky for a sunrise it longed to see. Covered in filth and sorrow, you decided to sit with hope and watch for the warmth and sunlight that Jack Abbot had once been to you on the horizon.
Taking three big steps, you walked into the room where Jack Abbot lay in a hospital bed, unconscious. The last time you had seen him, he had still had his auburn hair and freckles on full display. He had been strong and just. A proud man with piercing brown eyes and a cheeky smile that promised laughter and mischief. But that man was gone, and in his place was an older man who looked so small and fragile in the big hospital bed. The curly auburn hair had almost turned completely grey, and his freckles that you once had loved to count when he’d sleep in your bed were almost gone. In fact, he looked much paler than you remembered.
And old. The young 35-year-old Jack Abbot you remembered had, in the blink of an eye, turned into a 50-year-old man who had been hit by a car while helping others. A stranger with an echo in his wrinkles of someone you used to know.
Walking into the room, you sat down heavily and defeated in the chair by the bed. Looking at this strange man with bruises on his face and his right arm in a cast. As you scanned his body, you finally saw it. Something that you had not anticipated, even in your wildest dreams.
Jack Abbot had his foot amputated.
What? How? When?
Looking back at Trinity, your eyes landed on the prosthetic foot standing by the door. Another reminder that you did not know this new, older man at all.
“Thank you, I think I’ll just stay here for a while,” you said, voice shaking, to Trinity as she continued to study you. She only nodded before saying that she would send Dr Robby your way when she saw him, and closed the door.
The room fell into an oppressive silence, except for the beeping of the machines that monitored things that you had no idea what they were. It was in this moment, listening to the machines and watching all the things and liquids Jack was plugged into, that you finally let the tears fall as you put your bag down on the floor and grabbed Jack’s cold hand instead.
You think it was only his hand that was cold, but in reality, yours were just as cold since you had gripped your bag earlier so tightly you had restricted much of your own blood to your hands.
“Why are you so cold? Why is your hand so cold?” you sobbed as you leaned forward, hands shaking as you pulled the blanket higher up his body. Sitting down again, the sorrow you felt for loving a man for 15 years came crashing down around you as anger bit your hand. It’s venom making you close your fist around his hospital shirt and wishing you could pull him closer to you.
“You stubborn, evil bastard. I’ve loved you for 15 long fucking years, and not once have you reached out to me. I thought you were dead! I thought you got blown up or something when you never came home. You never answered your phone or wrote even a letter. You could have at least given me a thumbs up to my messages, so I knew you were alive.” Your hands were shaking violently as you inhaled through your mouth since the crying made it hard for you to breathe.
“Fuck you, you evil, selfish bastard!” you almost shouted into his face before falling back into the chair. Cradling his cold hand to your forehead as you leaned forward. Too weak to sit up as your sobs rocked your body.
“You lost your fucking foot, and if you had just told me, I would have flown to you just to be by your side. I would have been there for you through it all. But you never let me in! I loved you so much it hurt, and you never even talked to me. I loved every second you would give me, you were my world, and you left.”
Taking a deep breath and tightening your hold on his hand, as if you could will him to love you through your hands, you said;
“I would have loved you for an eternity if you had let me. Fucking bastard, I still love you.”
The confession hung heavy in the room. Mingling with the cadence of the hospital but never harmonising with your sobbing, which was slowly calming down. Drying your tears against the sleeve of your shirt, you kissed Jack’s hand. Lips featherlight against his skin, but it felt like a promise written in gold against the back of his hand. A promise of a love long overdue, but one you’d sacrifice at the altar of pain and sorrow. You knew you’d never be free from this man, and you were fine with it. You would always wait beside hope for a sunrise that would never come, and you were fine with it.
At least, you hoped you would be fine in the end.
“Why am I here, Jack? Why did you make me your emergency contact?” you asked, looking at his still face.
This was undeniably a mistake, and a wave of self-criticism washed over you as you murmured to yourself, "I’m so stupid for coming here." Rationality, cold and relentless, took hold of your mind, forcing you to confront the harsh reality: you had hurriedly sought out an old fling without much thought, craving a connection that perhaps wasn't even genuine or healthy. After all, if you had truly been important to Jack, if he truly cared, he would have reached out to you on his own. Right?
Standing up, you got prepared to grab your bag and leave and would have, had it not been for the hand that closed around your fingers. Keeping you in place.
You turned around so quickly that if any of the other doctors had seen you, they would have feared you’d get whiplash. Looking from Jack’s hand holding yours to his face, you realised that he was looking at you. Eyes heavy and bloodshot, but still looking at you with an awareness that you didn’t know you wanted him to have.
“You... you’re? Did you...” you stuttered as Jack’s thumb caressed your knuckles.
“Hear everything? Yeah,” he said almost apologetically, “I’ve been awake since before you came in. I just didn’t want the other to know.”
Sitting down again in the chair, you looked at this strange man in front of you. He had Jack’s voice and his eyes, but his tone and gaze were kinder than you remembered them.
“You’re a bastard,” you said under your breath.
“I know,” answered Jack, a small smile pulling at the corners of his lips.
“I hate you.”
“I know.”
“Had I known that you were awake, I would have never said the things I did.”
“I know.”
“I know? Is that all you can say? After 15 fucking years?”
“Your lips are just as soft as I remembered them.” The smile Jack gave you was just the same as the one you had seen so many years ago. When he had been a different man, and you a different woman.
Stunned at his bold and stupid comment, you could only look at him in disbelief before calling him a bastard again. To which he said ‘I know’ again. Silence fell over the room again before you dared to ask, “Why didn’t you call?”
“Would you believe me if I said I was scared?” sighed Jack and closed his eyes, frowning, as he continued to caress your hand. Especially your ring finger.
“I didn’t think you wanted to see me again.”
“You know that’s not true.”
“Yeah, now I do, but back then I didn’t. Didn’t think you wanted a broken man.”
Leaning forward, you placed your second hand over his, stilling his caresses.
“Jack, you were never broken.” You hoped that the sincerity would bleed through your words and that he wouldn’t think you were only angry at him.
“Yeah, yeah, you say that now, but you didn’t see me when I got back.”
“Because you didn’t let me,” you challenged him, staring him down until he looked away, acknowledging your resolve.
“I was scared that I’d lose you too.” His confession had taken a lot for him to voice, but you were grateful to finally be let in on his feelings, even if it was long overdue.
Not wanting to ruin the moment with unnecessary words, you lifted his hand to your lips again and kissed every one of his knuckles, and when you looked up again, you swore you could see Jack fighting back tears. But you would never say anything about them, for fear that the suborn old bastard would close the doors to his heart again.
“Come here,” he said and started to slowly and gingerly make room on the bed for you to lie down beside him.
Hesitating only for a moment, you crawled into the uncomfortable hospital bed, minding all the things attached to Jack and his injuries. He gently manoeuvred you to lie your head down against his chest with his non-broken arm around you. His heart beat wildly against your cheek in his chest, but you only felt peace and joy over the fact that he was alive.
“Would you believe me if I say I’ve loved you too for all this time?” he whispered into your hair.
With a heavy heart, you honestly said, “No.”
You didn’t see his face, but felt him pulling you closer to him as he said;
“I guess I have a lot to make up for.”
“Only 15 or so years.”
The kiss Jack left on your head burned your skin and made your heart beat as wildly as his did, but you didn’t mind as you were finally in the arms of the man you loved as he pulled you closer to him.
That was how Robby found you. In the arms of Jack, as you both slept together in each other's arms. Instead of waking you, Robby turned the ceiling light off and closed the door again with a small smile on his face.
“Is she still there?” asked Trinity, trying to peer into the room from behind Robby but not seeing much because of his broad back.
“Yes, she is. They're sleeping.”
“Sleeping? Together? As in, in the same bed?” She asked eagerly, making Robby raise an eyebrow in confusion.
“Yes, they are?” he said, almost questioning why Trinity was so invested in his friend and his mysterious emergency contact.
“I fucking knew it! Huckleberry, I won! Now give me my money!”
Behind the door, Jack couldn’t help but laugh a little as he could hear his colleagues arguing outside. While he had tried to be quiet, his laughter had woken you up.
“Hm? What is it?” you asked, barely opening your eyes.
“Nothing, love, go back to sleep.”