Work Text:
The sun was just beginning to set when Trinity pushed through the access door to the roof, the first streaks of gold painting the horizon. She knew this was where Robby liked to disappear and stare into the middle distance or whatever else he got up to there; he wasn’t exactly subtle about it, and Trinity was good at noticing things. She’d always sort of wondered about it, the draw of overlooking the Pittsburgh skyline and thinking about your problems and then turning around and going back inside.
Today, she wondered if whatever Robby got out of it was what she needed. Probably not, but it was a quieter place to get fresh air than the ambo bay. It was warmer up there than on the ground, though it was finally starting to cool down, however fractionally. Just her, the odd pigeon, and the thousands of lives carrying on hundreds of feet below her.
And one life carrying on right in front of her.
Langdon.
God forbid she get a moment of uninterrupted peace. Hell, she would’ve taken just about anyone else—except Ogilvie, maybe. He hadn’t noticed her yet, or if he had, he was very talented at pretending otherwise. His back was to her, head tilted slightly back, legs folded criss-cross like a kindergartner at circle time. He was also past the railing, maybe three feet from the ledge. Stupid melodramatic man.
She took a step forward. And then another. And another. Whatever he was doing up there, he was certainly in his own little world. She was nearly at the railing, and this was becoming a problem; she didn’t exactly want to startle him into plummeting off the roof. He was pretty bad, but not fall-off-a-roof bad. She made a point of letting her sneaker scuff against the concrete. He jumped a little in place but didn’t go flying to the pavement below, so that was good.
He twisted in place, craning his neck back, his expression shifting from surprise to something unreadable.
“What are you doing up here?” she asked, stepping up to the railing, placing her palms against it, and leaning forward.
He blinked. “Could ask you the same question.” He said it mildly; he wasn’t wrong.
“Are you going to?” She really, desperately hoped he wouldn’t. She wouldn’t even want to explain herself to the guy who was up there with enough regularity he might as well keep a tent up there.
He shrugged. “If you want me to.”
She decided, in that exact moment, that she didn’t like this new Langdon. This mousy, subdued Langdon was weird. Kind of pathetic, honestly. It made her almost uncomfortable, in a way she couldn’t quite place.
“Fuck no.” She paused before curling her hands around the railing and pulling herself through. She sat down, not next to him, but near enough it made her skin crawl. She shimmied to the right, putting a little more distance between them.
“Clears that up, then.” He wasn’t looking at her, just staring forward at god knows what.
“Are you going to run your mouth this whole time?”
She knew it was a little stupid; he’d barely spoken. She wasn’t even sure exactly why she said it. Not that she regretted it, either. He should know where he stood.
He didn’t answer right away. His brow furrowed for a second—thought, she was pretty sure, not emotion.
“You started the conversation.” He stated it plainly. She wondered what happened to the man who screamed at her.
“I’m regretting that.” She exhaled, something between a huff and a laugh. She was regretting coming up there to begin with by that point.
A little too quickly, he replied, “I can shut up.”
That pissed her off too, which she knew was definitively unfair. He was pitiful now. Too nice. He didn’t deserve her pity.
“No,” she sighed. “No, you don’t have to—” She did not want to sit there and be the one to gently absolve him of whatever people-pleasing kick he’d picked up in rehab. “Don’t do that.”
He glanced at her for a fraction of a moment before fixing his gaze back on the skyline. His mouth opened and just stayed like that for long enough that she considered, briefly, whether he was having some sort of absence seizure.
“Shit,” he finally said, plainly. “Now that I’m supposed to talk, I don’t know what to say.”
Of course. Of course he didn’t. She couldn’t help the dry chuckle.
“God, you’re insufferable. I don’t understand how you’re married.” She really didn’t, to be fair. She wondered, for a moment, if his wife still let him keep that damned goldendoodle after he came home and told her he was a pill-popping thief.
“Met her in undergrad,” he replied, engaging with the rhetorical. “Before I went off the deep end.”
Yeah, she definitely did not like humble Langdon.
Poor... what was his wife’s name? Amy or Abby or something. Poor woman. She rolled her eyes.
“Straight women confuse me.”
“Me too.”
“God, you’re such a man—” Her processing caught up with her mouth, and she stopped. What was he even trying to say? “Wait, are you saying lesbians don’t confuse you?”
She watched him with something between mild curiosity and bewilderment. He just shrugged.
“I dunno. You like women, I like women. We’ve got that in common.”
That didn’t really answer her question in any meaningful way, except that he didn’t put much intelligent thought into what he was saying. Which was its own data point, she supposed.
“And that’s about it.” About all she’d allow it to be. Their hair was a similar color, and they both liked women, and that was about as incidentally similar as she could fathom them being.
His brow was furrowed again. Apparently Langdon had a thinking face. It was sort of funny, watching the gears turn. What he eventually said was distinctly less so.
“You and YoYo are a good thing. I...” He paused. The second half was quieter, more deliberate. “I’m glad you found your place.”
Sure. Of course he was. As if he wasn’t part of what made that difficult in the first place. She wondered how it felt, to dismantle her like that. Wondered if he enjoyed it, if it was personal, if she’d done something wrong. She’d been running this calculus for ten months.
“Can I ask you something?” she asked it before she could fully process the commitment to it. It was too late now.
“Sure. Why not?” he replied, with more hesitance than the word choice strictly implied. He looked vaguely nervous in the way a little kid does when they know they’ve just been busted doing something they’re not supposed to. Whatever those ten months had looked like for him, his bite was long gone.
She continued before she could talk herself out of it. “Were you high or in withdrawal?”
“When?” he clarified.
“You should know when.”
He wasn’t being difficult, and she wasn’t being accusatory. It felt like they were downstairs, standing over a patient, about to peel back a dressing to initially assess the patient’s wound.
Realization flashed in his eyes. He closed them for a moment. “Withdrawal. I fucked up my timing on my day off.” He opened them again, glanced at her, and then down at nothing. “Usually timed things so I wasn’t high on shift but wasn’t going to go into withdrawal.”
Something washed over her that, somehow, felt like relief. “That’s good. That’s...” She turned to stare out at the city skyline; she couldn’t look at him for this. “Fuck, this is gonna sound stupid.” Inhale, exhale. “I figured, if you were withdrawing, maybe it was just irritability, and nothing personal. But if you were high and still...” She glanced over at him again, and then quickly away. He was listening, brow low, eyes anywhere but her. “I figured if you were high, it must’ve meant you hated me.”
It was a sideways confession. It was about as much as he deserved to hear.
He started slowly, words drawn out like he did when he was still thinking them as he spoke. “I didn’t—don’t—hate you.” He seemed to mean both the past and present tense. Neither felt like enough. “I... How do I say this without sounding like a douche?” There was a hint of genuine surprise in his tone. He’d received the confession. “I didn’t expect you cared. Not about the fact that I was a dick to you, but, like... I didn’t think my opinion mattered to you.”
Self-absorbed ass, she thought. Making it about him. He wasn’t that important to her.
But on that day she was new, and he could've been cool, and she did want his approval. She wanted Robby’s, Collins's, Dana’s, Garcia’s (when she was still “Dr. Garcia” and not “Yolanda”). She wanted to fit in, to belong, to be liked.
She got the uncanny, unasked for feeling that he did, too.
“I didn’t hate you either. I still don’t.” She didn’t say it to be kind; it was simply true. She’d been far more hurt by far worse men to bother with hating him. Langdon was just kind of an asshole, and that was it.
“You saved my life, you know.”
Her head turned without her input. He was still staring off into the middle distance, squinting. She laughed, something clipped like a scoff, but lighter.
“Figured you thought I ruined it.”
“No, you...” He stopped himself, took a long exhale before trying again. “I mean, yeah, at first. It sunk in during detox, that I had a much bigger problem than I thought.” Pause, swallow. “I don’t know when I would’ve quit if you hadn’t...” He trailed off, squeezed his eyes shut. She looked away again. “I don’t know what would’ve happened. So, you saved my life.”
Like Louie, she thought, and immediately brushed the image out of her mind. Louie didn’t deserve that fate, and while Langdon deserved a great many things, he didn’t deserve that either. She was, in some way, glad he’d gotten the help he needed; she had seen enough dead addicts in that ED.
He was staring at his lap when she turned to face him again.
“That’s still not an apology.” If anything, she was glad that whatever urgency had propelled him towards Robby all day wasn’t honed on her. The center of his attention was not somewhere she wanted to be.
“I texted my sponsor earlier, after the clusterfuck with Robby.” His shoulders were squared. He sat very still. “He suggested I slow things down with the amends, make sure I’m doing things for the right reasons.”
“It’s fine.” The lack of apology was fine. The rest of it still wasn’t. Tentatively, she trusted him to know the difference. “My father’s an alcoholic. I’m still waiting on those amends. So I guess I’m pretty patient.”
His shoulders relaxed. He fidgeted with the collar of his scrubs. “I’m sorry.” For her father, probably, not for using her as a verbal punching bag. He glanced at her without turning his head—trusting her to know the difference. “He suggested writing a letter.”
She scoffed. “I don’t want a letter.” She wasn’t sure she’d be able to read it anyway, not with his chicken scratch.
“I want to do this the right way for you.”
It was perhaps the most thoughtful thing he’d ever said to her. She wasn’t sure if that said more about him, or her.
“I dunno. Just don’t be a dick.” It seemed pretty straightforward to her. If you did something wrong, you do the opposite moving forward.
“I’ve been trying not to be.”
He had been awkward, sure, but equanimous. She’d been neither kind nor cruel. Something both more mature and more removed. If she’d wanted to hurt him, she could’ve; she probably could’ve hurt him more than anyone else in that ED, except for Robby.
Wanting to hurt someone and not wanting to be hurt were not the same thing. Sometimes she knew the difference.
“I know.” She gave him a tight-lipped look, as close as he was going to get to a smile from her. “I wish you were like this on my first day.”
“Me too.” He breathed slowly, tilting his head back slightly. The silence stretched between them for a while; he broke it first. “Rough day for you?”
The question was so understated she couldn’t help but laugh, breathy and almost-manic and exhausted. She wasn’t sure there was a word either of them could use to capture the actual magnitude.
“You ever have one of those days where nothing goes right?” she asked instead. He responded with a dull laugh, which was a roundabout way of saying me too. “Yeah. One of those.”
He didn’t respond right away, and she could watch the calculus behind his eyes. Eventually, hesitantly, he asked,
“Are you okay?”
She had to fight back the urge to snort. Langdon, of all people, asking if she was okay. Ten months ago she wasn’t, and it was his fault. She still wasn’t, but at least this time he had less of a hand in that.
He was also, she realized, the only person who’d asked her that all day.
“You’re sitting closer to the ledge than I am.” She folded her arms across her chest, leaned back slightly until her side brushed the railing.
He glanced forward at the roof’s edge, then sideways at her, until finally settling his gaze out across the horizon again. “I didn’t say I’m okay.”
“I didn’t ask if you were okay.” She paused, calibrated. “But if you traumatize me by killing yourself right now I’d be pissed.”
“I’ll be sure to kill myself on night shift’s watch.” He barked out a dry chuckle, the kind you give when the joke isn’t actually funny. Trinity knew that laugh well. “I’m not going to jump.” Flat, not quite defensive, not quite reassuring. Just a decision he’d made, that he was now sharing with her; if he told her he was going to stop at Dunkin’ on the way home, it would’ve sounded the same.
“Neither am I.” She might as well have asked him to grab her a cold brew while he was at it.
“Good. Didn’t feel like a suicide pact today.”
He paused, and then the silence stretched on long enough that she turned to look at him again. His brow was knitted, head down, eyes unfocused. That thinking face again. When he finally spoke again, she could barely hear him over the ambience of the city.
“You’ve thought about it?”
That wasn’t something she was going to give him the power of knowing.
“And you haven’t?”
Translation: do we have a third thing in common?
“I thought about a lot of things in detox,” he said quietly, then shrugged. “I don’t know. Remembering I can makes me not want to.”
It was a messy explanation, the kind of thing he probably didn’t quite understand about himself. She probably had a better grasp of his ideation than he did. She was probably the only one there who had any grasp, which was a little ironic and a little exhausting; she was getting sick of being the first to put it together every time something was wrong with Langdon.
You should tell a trusted adult, her brain suggested, which would’ve been helpful if she was still a high schooler and not a doctor. She was, for all intents and purposes, the “trusted adult” now, a fact she hadn’t quite processed until that moment.
“I understand, I think.” She turned to face him and held it until he met her eyes, then glanced down to her thighs, before turning to watch the horizon. He followed her gaze, and through the periphery she could see the slow tide of understanding wash over him. He nodded once.
“My last day, Robby told me that this place will break you if you let it.” There was a certain intentionality to his voice, like he was placing each word in an exact spot. “I... I don’t want to see it break you, too.”
“Robby says a lot of shit.”
Langdon let out a breathy chuckle, half-bitter and half-desperate; she’d struck a nerve.
“Robby told me he’s glad I got the help I need but he doesn’t know if he wants me here.” He didn’t editorialize, didn’t offer some commentary on how this made him feel. Which was good, because a) she didn’t care, and b) she already knew. Doesn’t it suck to be talked down to like that by someone in charge of you?
“Dr. Al said if I can’t keep up with my charting I’ll have to repeat R2,” she said instead, because that was a small kindness—mercy—she was willing to part with.
“Repeating sucks. But it’s not the end of the world.” She did the math quickly in her own head; out for ten months, he was probably repeating his R4. The residency equivalent of a super senior. She wasn’t sure if being incapable of keeping up with charting or getting hooked on benzos was a more embarrassing reason to get held back. “That wasn’t fair of her.”
She glanced up in surprise, spoke with a little less hesitation than she should have. “Wasn’t fair of Robby either.”
He just shrugged. “Consequences of my own actions.” That damned humility again.
“You know, sometimes I think he’s as mad at me for catching you as he is at you for doing it. He just knows he doesn’t have the right to actually take it out on me.” She didn’t try to stop the tiny edge of bitterness from creeping in at the edges this time. She’d wondered this since September, but unfortunately she’d garnered enough heat defaming one beloved fixture of the Pitt, and didn’t care for a repeat. She told no one. “I don’t understand how so many people ended up mad at both of us simultaneously.”
Langdon was quiet for a moment, brow raised high enough to disappear beneath his hair. He was somber when he spoke.
“People are mad at you?”
Obviously. That’s what she’d just said.
“Yeah.” She was used to it enough she could pretty seamlessly apply the PTMC standard for emotional management—pretending it wasn’t there. “Figured they’d be more happy to see you back.”
She didn’t understand how she and Langdon could both be the villains of this story. She didn’t understand why there had to be a villain at all.
“If anyone’s giving you a hard time, let me know and I’ll—”
“Don’t try to fix it for me.” Firm, final, brooking no argument.
He nodded immediately, just once, then stretched his arms out behind him. He leaned back onto his palms. “You’ll be okay?”
“Will you?” Did she care? Probably more than she wanted to, which could mean any amount greater than zero.
“I’ll be alive and sober.” It sounded like the kind of thin mantra people recited at IOPs and support groups. The kind of thing you say before you learn how to promise anything else.
“I’ll be alive and clean.” It was also the kind of thing she’d said a million times before, usually following that was the last time or I’ll throw out the razors.
She distracted herself by watching bands of pink join the skyline, and then watching him watching the same sky. Perspiration shone at his hairline, the nape of his neck. “It’s hot as fuck out here and you’re sweating like a pig.”
She didn’t know how long he’d been out there before she appeared. Didn’t know if she’d gotten what she needed up there (or if he’d gotten whatever he was looking for). But it was hot, and they still had hours left of their shift and their paper charts and their broken fax machine. And she didn’t want to be alone up there, and equally didn’t want him alone up there.
God bless her; she might as well be canonized a saint.
“I’m okay,” he answered automatically (that Pitt conditioning hard at work, she recognized). Then, after a moment, the subtext must’ve clicked, because he walked it back. “I should get heading in. You coming?”
“Yeah.” She was already starting to stand, leveraging against the railing to hoist herself up.
She extended a hand to him before she really thought about it. He stared for a moment, that same dumb, mouth-open thinking face. Finally, he took it. She pulled him up, then ducked back under the railing. Something settled in her gut the second they were both back on the safer side of the railing, the side it was there to keep you on in the first place. They should really post a security guard by that door.
He stared back out over the skyline again before turning and following her to the door. She watched him. Somewhere below their feet, the Pitt waited for them, with all its patients and gossip and air conditioning (its greatest redeeming quality). It would all be over in a few hours.
She understood the appeal of the roof.