Chapter Text
Jack Abbot served in the Army as a combat medic for almost twenty-four years. His first deployment was at nineteen years old, to the desert in Baghdad, where he returned seven times a solider.
On his first deployment, he lost two of his friends. By the time he signed his contract to serve as a combat medic seven years later, he had lost countless more. At twenty-six years old, he was married to both his wife and a promise to start a family by the time his three-year contract was over.
But now at forty-six, he had lost his wife and half of his right leg. In the same year Annie died, Jack had thrown himself into a plane and back into a war zone, where he pulled a twenty-something year old soldier out of the line of fire. But then the wall had exploded behind them when Jack had been trying to place an IV, and the blast had done enough damage to the point where both Jack and (he thinks the soldier’s name was Andrew) had both needed emergency medical evacuation on a Boeing CH-47 Chinook.
Jack also thinks (no, he knows) it’s why he can’t sleep with the ceiling fan on. He can’t sleep without some sort of white noise that drowns out the noise of the rotors that lifted him from the sand, his tibia barely attached to his patella. And he always sleeps facing the bedroom door.
Jack remembers how old he was when Annie died. He was twenty-nine, in the final year of his contract, when he was granted emergency leave from (he thinks it was Iraq) to sit at his wife’s bedside and tell her he was so sorry that he didn’t get to her sooner.
He never told her how sorry he was that they never got to have a child of their own. He figured some apologies were better left unspoken.
He was twenty-nine when he buried Annie. He was twenty-nine when his leg was blasted to pieces, and he had woken up the day after his thirtieth birthday to the surgeon telling him that he had wished he could have done more. That he was lucky to be alive.
He was thirty years old when he was honorably discharged to a one-bedroom apartment with a job as an attending in the Pittsburg Trauma Medical Center. He wore his dog tags under his scrub shirt, and scars that seeped out from under his prosthetic and ached at the end of every shift.
Jack was forty years old when he stood on the other side of the railing on the roof and Michael Robinavitch had told him he needed to get a life. Being the smartass he was, Jack had shot back that he had a life.
(It just wasn’t the one he wanted.)
(Jack suspected Robby shared the same sentiment.)
Jack was three months shy of his forty-first birthday when he joined the Pittsburgh Police Department as a SWAT physician. On his days off, he usually found himself back in the desert, hurtling into some sort of war zone where he only had two objectives: find the injured soldier and bring them back home.
In the five years as SWAT physician, Jack thinks (no, he remembers every single one) he has saved seventy-eight soldiers. Seventy-eight Andrews that were able to go home to their wives and children.
Jack is also painfully aware that he has lost thirteen SWAT members under his watch. Even when Robby and Dana tried to convince him that thirteen in five years was historical, all he could see was Andrew on the cot next to him in the Chinook.
Jack was forty-four when he met Samira Mohan. The then-first-year resident on day shifts under the constant scrutiny of Michael Robinavitch had greeted him on their first shift together with a spare coffee and a dazzling smile that could have found the metal under his scrubs and reflected light off of it.
In the next two years, he rarely found himself on the same shift as Samira. He knew that for someone as young as she was, waking up with the sun was the only way they wouldn’t sink into the hell that was the aftermath of the emergency department. At least then, the horrors would fade in the night.
But as for Jack, war had brought him monsters that stayed under his bed. Not even chatter from the police scanner was enough to keep them at bay, so he would leave them to writhe under the bed slats and go find more to bring home.
At forty-five, Jack found himself with fewer monsters and more shifts with Samira Mohan. He thinks the two are related.
(They are.)
But in the five years he had spent as a SWAT physician, it never came up in a conversation with Samira. Either the staff that knew about his double-life respected him enough to not gossip, or he was just really good at keeping it a secret.
Some nights he would walk in with a cut on his arm, a bruise creeping its way out of his scrub collar from where the vest had pressed against his skin when crouched over and intubating an officer. Once he had been attacked by someone coming up from behind him with a garrote made from fishing wire, and pulled him away from his patient.
The next night he had managed the emergency room with a bandage around his throat and identical cuts on his palms from where he had wrestled with the fishing wire. It had earned him looks from the nurses, the patients, his residents alike. Samira hadn’t been there that night, but the wound on his neck had scabbed over by the time their shifts lined up and she was the first person who didn’t tilt her head at him and make him want to wear a turtleneck until the cut faded completely.
But she had left him a coffee at his computer that day, with a post-it note that read Good luck on your double! and how she knew he was working a double that day, he still didn’t know.
Jack Abbot was twenty-nine when his wife died. He was forty-four when he met Samira Mohan. He was forty-five when they had worked in tandem during the Pittfest shooting, guiding Samira through a pigtail catheter with a faith similar to that of a practiced Catholic believing in Mary and the saints.
And if Samira Mohan was what he had to believe in to become a saint, he would gladly die a martyr.
Jack Abbot was forty-six when he died.
No, he didn’t die. But that Fourth of July was the closest he got to seeing his life flash before his eyes and he had stared into the bright light that he told Andrew to not go into. Because it was the day Samira Mohan almost died.
Samira Mohan was twenty-nine when she almost died.