Chapter Text
Garcia waves on her way out the door. Santos is conscious of the rejection, embarrassed by how to take it. They’re fucking. They’re casual. Garcia pops in and out of her apartment on a whim and Santos has agreed to this. They’re both got investments in their own careers, and Santos is still lagging somewhere by the starting mark.
You gonna hold my hand or something? She had asked that after the third time Garcia showed up to her apartment, their legs tangled up beneath her sheets, two cups of water positioned neatly on the bedside table. Obviously the answer was no, but she thinks about it every time she catches a glimpse of Garcia’s elegant, gentle looking hands. Are you gonna hold my hand now? Can you please hold my hand?
She thinks about it now. Garcia’s hand is flipped up, fingers slightly splayed, hurried to get out the ER doors without one more crisis popping up because she has plans, other people to see. Santos isn't stupid. Once Garcia came over to her place with a cool toned purple lipstick smudge on her shirt collar, something Garcia doesn't wear. Maybe she's going out now and seeing the woman behind that lipstick. Maybe she'll come into work tomorrow with another lipstick smudge on her throat. Santos doesn't care because there really isn't anything to care about.
She buries herself in charting. Finishes one, actually. She practises indifference for every line as she accounts for the choices made at the time, the course of treatment prescribed. There’s no grey space in work like this. Either her decision was the correct one or it wasn’t. She’s standing, legs aching, and there’s a pain brewing at the base of her skull, a headache from a long day.
Whatever. She won’t be wasting her time again with generative AI writing. Perfection always takes an extra five minutes.
“Hey,” Whitaker greets as he comes up to the computer she’s station at. “I thought you would’ve gone home already.”
“Look around. This is pretty much home 2.0.” Loads of dysfunction, some screaming and yelling, and hey! There’s even a little blood on the floor. “Why are you still here?”
“I…” he flounders, two hands choking the strap of his bag, “have something to do. Tonight. I thought you’d have stuff, anyways, so I don’t know when I’ll be back.”
“Cool.”
“That’s okay, right? Like, you’ve got plans? And won't be sitting at home by yourself?”
She preforms a tightlipped smile for his benefit. “Obviously.”
“I just—”
“Oh my god, Huckleberry. Just go do your stuff. I don’t care. You don’t need to check in with me because you’re planning on painting the town red or whatever. I'm not your mother.”
He hesitates. “Are you with Garcia tonight?”
“Do I look like I’m with Garcia tonight?” She counters, surly and frustrated. She taps in another line about a treatment plan for a patient that succeeded.
“I don’t think she’s good for you.” He blurts the sentence out so fast that her mind has to decipher what he just said: idon’tthinkshe’sgoodforyou.
The blue screen of the monitor stings her eyes slightly and Santos takes a half step back from the computer. Thankfully Princess already went home. The last thing she needs is for Princess and Perlah chirping at her while she tries to finish her charting, hammering on just how much of a mess she is with Garcia. “Thank God I’ve got your opinion on the status of my situation. Just go, okay? You’re gonna do your thing, maybe— I don’t know, shack up with your little situation and have a perfect life.” A red line flashes at her, one word misspelled on the screen. She swallows and contemplates smashing her head against the keyboard. “Seriously, Huckleberry. You just, like, live in the spare room. We’re not swapping life vows and friendship bracelets here.”
His cheeks go a little red. “Are you okay?”
“I’m so okay that I might take a flying leap off of the roof.”
The words spill out of her mouth and she belatedly takes the sting of them after they’re already spoken. She then smiles crookedly at him, an effort to punctuate that grim statement like she’s telling the punchline to a joke. She’s giving him permission to laugh because she’s also laughing.
But Whitaker doesn’t laugh.
She goes right back to charting and he stands for a minute longer before vanishing. She’s three down from the endless pile still waiting when a figure pops up beside her elbow, silent despite being so tall, and she jumps when she realizes she’s under Parker Ellis’s scrutiny. “Where’d Little Boy Nebraska go?”
“Little Boy Nebraska? That’s— that’s actually pretty good.”
“Nightshift has names for everyone on the day shift.”
Santos hesitates. Her fingers are splayed out across the keyboard protectively. “Really?”
Ellis hums a little. “Yup. So? Little Boy Nebraska ride out solo or something?”
“He’s—” probably slashing the tires on Robby’s bike right now, “—got plans,” Santos says awkwardly. A good roommate doesn’t admit to the other roommate’s criminal acts. Or maybe Huckleberry was inspecting the new place Robby was offering, seeing just how much better it could be without her.
“And you’re… here.”
“Yup.” She hits submit on the one chart, but three more pop up instantly. “I’m just trying to get this done.”
“Lemme guess. You heard about Shen’s obsession with Fourth Wing and this is you trying to look super nonchalant discreet just so you can bust open his locker later and get proof.” Ellis widens her eyes slightly, dramatic. “I can save you the trouble. He’s neck deep into those books. Very real. He’s fighting with half the fools on the Fourth Wing subreddit on the way into work.”
Santos blinks, confused. She doesn’t understand anything that Ellis just said.
“I just wanted to know how the second day of your career working with Langdon was.”
She makes an effort to swallow down her vitriol. “Absolutely incredible.”
Ellis swirls her cold brew smoothly. The light catches the small, dainty looking earrings she’s wearing. “You planning on camping out here all night?”
“I’m behind. I need to finish some charts before I get to restart this program.” She sneaks a look at Ellis. “Don’t ask. It has been a really long, incredibly stupid day.”
“Yikes. Been there, done that. What’d you do? Get so excited about doing, you know, everything, that you forgot to show your work for it?”
“Pretty much.”
“Langdon has a theory that we’ve all got ADHD or something and that’s why we do this job. Sometimes we get behind on stuff.”
“Yeah, he’s got some pretty great theories about people here. Look, I really—”
“We call you Hot Shot.”
Santos thinks she can still smell chlorine in the air. It doesn’t matter that the sanitation crew has miraculously scrubbed down the place and the last patient from that intake was discharged for upstairs. She inhales and the chlorine is still there, making her think of the community swimming pool she grew up going to, the sunburns she acquired across her shoulders. “Hot Shot?”
Ellis gives her a half smile. She’s built to take the weight of this place, tall and strong, her hair piled back from her face. “Yep. And do you know what the problem is with being a hot shot?”
Her cheeks go warm. Of course. This is a dig at her. “What?”
“You’re more likely to burn out if you’re not careful.”
She stares at the blank form on the monitor like it’ll keep her holding onto her sanity for just a minute now. Huckleberry is going to finish dismantling the parts to Robby’s bike, they’re going to vanish for some incredibly soulful conversation, and Santos has a hot date with the loneliness that comes with having nobody. “That’s super fantastic, thanks.”
“You look sad.”
“Patients don’t give a shit if I look sad.”
“Yeah, but I don’t like it. C’mon. Something had to be super cool today that made it worth all of the med school, all of the stress. Give me something.”
Apparently Ellis is glued to the floor. She’s not going anywhere. The ER feels incredibly slow now after the hustle of earlier, that clock practically a slow drip of molasses. Santos holds her stethoscope tight with both hands, half for comfort, half out of want to choke herself with it. “I got invited to a furry con.”
That lazy smile pops wider. Ellis has dimples. “No shit. You going?”
“Not really my thing.”
“What is your thing?”
“Going home. Sleeping. Coming back here.”
“That’s pathetic. Are you telling me that after— Jesus, what? Ten, eleven months? You still don’t know how to switch it off? Relax?”
She suspects that Ellis doesn’t want to hear her funny joke about jumping off the hospital’s roof.
“I’ll relax when I’m dead,” Santos says instead.
“What’s it going to take?”
“For what?”
“For a real smile, Hot Shot.”
That doesn’t make sense. Santos stares at her, perplexed, and manages a tight lipped smile.
Ellis rolls her eyes and vanished for a pad of neon pink sticky notes from Dana’s special stash and clicks her pen three times before starting to write. She’s scribbling words down so fast that Santos can’t see what she’s writing before sticking five of them together. She then informs her that the mall is still open. “Buy every single thing,” Ellis tells her sharply.
“Are you serious?”
“Does it look like I’m playing? Relax. I’m telling you to invest in some retail therapy. Stop looking at me like I’m holding a gun on you or something.”
Retail therapy for Santos is about picking the appropriate level of grungy hoodie out from the thrift shop that can be washed clean without disintegrating. She doesn’t know what to do with this. The charting isn’t finished, but she was never going to get to the end of it in a single night. Ellis pushes her very lightly and she goes passively, fetching her backpack from her locker, pretending like she doesn’t see Langdon watching her as she goes, heading outside and seeing neither Robby, Whitaker, or Robby’s bike there.
The mall isn’t far from the hospital. The city planners probably figured there was a correlation between clearance sales and emergency rooms, doing everyone a real solid when they placed it just a short twenty minute walk away.
The humidity has decreased a little with night. People are ambling around, some drunk and some sober, and she sticks out like a sore thumb amongst all these little groups. Someone stabs the bottom of a can of beer and chugs it, balancing precariously on the top of bus bench, and Santos lingers just to see if he’ll fall and crack his head open.
She’s a bit like a vulture sometimes. The excitement she gets when she hears the siren of an ambulance, the way she wants to get to the bottom of a bloody mess just to see what can be patched up…
Something about her is messed up. She can’t deny it.
She’s not good, has never been good, but God—
Trinity Santos does good work.
The mall is another world. Crispy cold AC hits her hard when she pushes the doors open. Inside is blinking lights, music playing from individual stores. She’s lost, mutely taking in the festive chaos, people sporting red, white, and blue. It doesn’t matter that this is a holiday. Someone is always going to be stuck working somewhere while everyone else has all the fun. Thank God for America. The values are baked right into the history of racism and that manifest destiny bullshit.
She digs a hoodie out from her bag and slides it on. She balls the fabric over her hands and takes a moment to consider it, the lights skating around as signs flash. She then looks at the first sticky note and sighs. Ellis has underlined the order twice. This makes it easy. She's good at handling a task.
A map directs her over and she finds the store quickly. She hangs out a table for a few minutes, watching the casher, and tries imagining this as her life. This store is loud, music pulsing from the speakers, and the girl is nodding her head slightly as she sneakily checks her phone out from below the cash register.
It was always about becoming a doctor. Now Santos wonders if she’s fucked up somehow. Her life could’ve ended up somewhere in this mall, lingering over bath salts and body scrubs for five and a half hour shifts, listening to the same corporate inspired playing on repeat day in and day out, asking customers if they want to give their email up for a ten percent discount in return for spam.
Eventually she plucks up the bath bomb Ellis specified and drops it into a paper bag. Heads for that cashier. This store is like walking into a cloud of vanilla and patchouli. A lifetime ago she was thirteen years old and stealing tinted lip balms from places like this.
"Do you wanna sign up with your email and get ten percent off?" The cashier asks as she drops her phone out of sight. Santos shakes her head.
She’s older now. Pays for her things with real money, full price. Takes the receipt and stuffs it into her pocket to toss out later. Ellis has stuck her notes together so she peels the top one away and reads the second task, heaving a monumental sigh when she realizes she’s being sent to a Yankee Candle store.
Jumping from a roof really does seem like an easier option.
“Honey, I’m home,” Santos sings quietly as she gets the door shut and locked, fingers flicking the light switch. She’s juggling two bags and the apartment is completely empty, black and cold from neglect. Whitaker’s little garden of plants rustle on the window ledge in the joke of a kitchen, window cracked open, and unfortunately she can smell the cigarettes her neighbour smokes from the balcony outside.
A cigarette sounds good, but she quit that habit two years ago. Still, Santos considers. One beer and a cigarette on a sweaty, hot-ass summer night.
She dumps the haul on her bed and tries to pretend that Garcia hadn’t forgotten a book of poetry on her nightstand. This is casual. She’ll bring the book back tomorrow and say nothing about it. Just like when Whitaker was broke for money and Santos just happened to order two subs to the ER, one for her and one for him.
She takes her phone and sends a picture to Ellis. She’s got everyone’s contact information from work, but her phone stays pretty quiet. Ratting on beloved Langdon pretty much ostracized her the day after he went to rehab and gossip started going out. Even Garcia had been pretty quiet with her, standoffish if others were around. Their situation only evolved when the heat died down, when people got more pissy about some rules that HR posted in the break room than the fact that Santos was a rat.
Which stung, sure. Santos had tried. Calling Javadi Crash was much more affectionate than it was a slam, and Santos makes sure she never skimps when it’s her turn to pick up the pre shift coffees, fetching all sorts of dairy free, double blended concoctions with that ridiculous coconut milk whipped cream falsehood topping. Reposts her videos quietly whenever she posts. Santos is there with everyone else, doing the exact same job, doing the right moves at the right times, and she’s fumbled, somehow, by reporting Langdon. It took three months before Princess and Perlah silently added her to a Love Island group chat. Her relationship with everyone else simply ends at a single word: coworker.
Whatever. She does all right. Javadi gets her a plain black coffee when she’s picking up coffee for them and Whitaker. Her phone gets crazy when a new episode airs, Princess and Perlah messaging back and forth, Santos chirping something about someone when she can. That’s pretty much the equivalent of a flourishing social network.
She’s got this.
But she’s never texted Ellis like this before. This number was acquired for the sake of having it, some future emergency looming over her shoulders. She adds: what now?
Ten minutes goes by before phone beeps. Use it.
Santos stares at the bags. She then proceeds to fill the tub. She’s alone, but she still locks the bathroom door. It doesn’t matter that Huckleberry is harmless, she’s got bad habits and that includes locking the door behind her. It pisses Garcia off, her fumbling with the handle to brush her teeth in the morning, short on time, Santos showering on the other side. Nobody is here to disturb her habits now, bad or good, and Santos relishes in the tiny click that comes from locking the door.
She then jiggles the handle to verify that the lock is working.
This was something Huckleberry fixed when he first moved in, replacing the old lock for this one. He noticed the last one didn’t engage properly. Now it never fails.
Santos whips the bath curtain out of the way and plugs the tub, proceeding to crank on the hot water from the tap. This isn’t her, not really, but the apartment isn’t friendly tonight. A bath won’t kill her. She yanks the tags off of the pyjamas she just bought, a contrast to the oversized shirt and boxers she usually sleeps in, and lights the candle. There’s a faint hiss from the kettle on the stove in the kitchen as it starts to boil and she fills the mug with hot water and one tea bag, another one of the orders Ellis had given her.
She’s an energy drink pre game before the coffee kind of person. This tea smells like grass, faintly like lemons.
She sips at it as the tub fills, cutting the water when it seems high enough. After that she drops the bath bomb in. It softens shape immediately, fizzing and splitting apart, streaks of blue and purple forming off of it, the whole tub going dark and fragrant with peppermint. If Santos was a nostalgic kind of person with a memory bank full from a happy childhood, she might relate the scent of peppermint to Christmas.
But she doesn’t have that.
Peppermint is only peppermint.
The instructions are obvious. She doesn’t need handholding for this. Her face is golden in the mirror, that tiny flame warming her cheeks, her eyes. She undresses quickly without looking at her legs.
This is something that she never actually looks at. Her fingers can touch, can feel the memory of swiping that razor back and forth, textured history literally locked into her thighs so she won’t forget just how bad it got, why she can’t go home again or pick up the phone to cal her mom, but she averts her eyes every single time.
She’s smart, she’s always been smart, but sometimes she needs the reminder.
What’s this? Garcia had asked, rubbing her palm very gently over those scars the first time.
I fucked up, Santos had told her, meaning a lot of things at once.
She gets into the tub and vanishes under the silvery, blue waters. Texts with one dry hand to Ellis. Happy?
It takes longer this time, but the response still comes. Good girl. :)
Now her cheeks go hot. Santos submerges herself under the water and feels her hair turning into a slick, shapeless mass around her face, painted waters sliding over her legs. Her phone ends up somewhere on the bath mat. She’s doesn’t know what to do with the sensation in her stomach and chest.
The sky outside crackles with fireworks. Santos hears the distant pops and bangs from beneath the water. Eventually her lungs burn and require her to the resurface, gasping down air like she’s starved for it. She stays level for a moment with the water, it lapping at her cheeks and ears, peppermint stinging her nose a little, and she could either sink or float.
She’s not sure.
Eventually the water goes cold and she has to exit the bath. She pulls the drain and sits on the edge of the tub to watch. Her phone stays silent now, Ellis presumably busy by being a bad ass and saving lives, the usual business. A faint trace of glitter remains after all the water has been drained away and Santos dresses quickly, collapsing into bed. She’s almost asleep when there’s a crashing noise, a drunken Whitaker returning to her, and she lurches to her feet with the quick tang of fear in her mouth, automatic reflex. “What the hell is wrong with you?” She drawls as she emerges from her room, knotting a hoodie around her waist so the arms might dangle and cover her bare legs a bit, these shorts unable to hide the scars.
Santos doesn’t know what’s more alarming, the fact that Whitaker is standing in the doorway quivering or that he’s got a bag in one hand, visible goldfish inside also quivering.
“I’m here, okay? And we’ve got a fish now. I thought you’d be cool with it, you know, since you were cool with bringing me home.”
“Is that a boy or a girl fish?”
“Does it matter?"
“I will not be outnumbered in this apartment. We’re calling her Sabrina.”
He hoists the bag up drunkenly and nods. “I forgot to buy a bowl.”
She wrinkles her nose a little as she inspects their new pet. “Geez, Huckleberry. What kind of farmer are you? That’s like not having a barn for a cow.”
“I’m here.”
“Yeah. I can see that. Did you down half your weight in booze?” That new pay cheque was really stretching if he was indulging in this much beer. Santos was impressed. One day into wealth and he was out indulging in liquid bread, clearly handling his pints the way a fresh sorority girl handled her tequila shots.
He wobbles on his feet, trying to slide his boots off without dropping the fish. “You promised last week to help me pick out a tasteful tramp stamp.”
She had been joking about that. Now she's confused why he's bringing it up. “There’s nothing tasteful about a tramp stamp. Literally the name implies lack of taste.”
“Yeah, but you promised,” he says urgently. “That’s a promise you made, Trin. I’m here and you’re here, you have to be here to be here… am I making sense?”
Santos unleashed the bag’s contents into a soup pot and hopes it’ll do until they can get a real bowl for the fish. She then takes a slice of bread from the bread box— Whitaker’s work, apparently fond of baking bread instead of just buying it like anyone else does— and stuffs it into his mouth as she passes. “Try and soak up the alcohol before you go into work still drunk.”
He stumbles sideways into a wall and does get into his bed eventually, mattress from the other room wincing as he drops onto it shamelessly, and Santos dissolves into her own bed. They’ve both got another shift tomorrow and she’s up for grabbing coffees before work. Javadi already requested a ten dollar drink, something that she’ll have to detour for if she wants to find it, and Santos contemplates adding a decaf peppermint mocha to the order as well, rounding the three drinks into four. Garcia does text her eventually, but Santos is fast asleep by the time her phone lights up.