Chapter Text
Samira knew logically there was no real basis for her feeling jealous over Jack Abbott.
It was easier to pass off their relationship as a friendly mentorship. It got harder when he asked for her phone number to send her interesting medical journals and their good natured breakdowns of said studies over the nursing station when she worked nights. If she so happened to pick up more night shifts when people needed coverage it was because she was a workaholic thank you very much and had nothing to do with the warm feeling in her chest when she overheard the handoffs between a certain night attending and Robby. No one even batted an eye so it was even easier for Samira to not acknowledge it. It got harder to deny those feelings when after waking up from her power nap in the on call room, a coffee and a breakfast sandwich waited beside her on the table beside her cot. When she had confronted him about it the next shift under the guise of paying him back, he had shrugged her off and said he never took money from residents and he wasn’t about to start. She knew this was true from the night shift breakfast runs she had gone on with Ellis, who had adopted the same practice of picking up the bill when Samira accompanied her. And if Jack Abbott just so happened to decide that he liked the same specific protein bars Samira did and brought her an extra one, that was none of her business.
Just like it was none of her business when a new travel nurse from Ohio came into the ED and took a clear liking to Jack - to Dr. Abbott. Samira shook her head at her computer where she had been charting. He was Dr. Abbot to her, not Jack. Not her anything.
Samira liked Elise. She was a great nurse and in the times she did get to work with her, she enjoyed their dynamic. Elise had actually knew about Samira because of her research on racial disparities in the ED once she had finally secured funding for it again. They had multiple conversations on it that had honestly filled Samira with a sense of pride that her work mattered and was being received well by her peers. She had bought Samira a drink when the Pitt had gone out to celebrate her Attending position. Elise was great and it made the jealousy in her body that much more nauseating.
It started when she walked past the break room and spotted her and Dr. Abbott speaking over the coffee maker a few weeks ago. Dr. Abbott was pouring coffee into his travel mug and nodding attentively to whatever Elise was telling him. Samira didn’t stop in as she had originally planned for fear of interrupting something. She had already overheard them discussing their war stories of Elise’s stint in the military before transitioning to travel nursing. What sold it for her was Elise had offered to buy him a beer at the bar the night they had all gone out.
She could see over the screen that Elise and Dr. Abbott were staring up at the patient board smiling and discussing God knows what. Not that it was her business anyways. Samira had approximately a million other things that required her attention. Not the fact that Dr. Abbott seemed to only wear shirts that were clearly a size too small and stretched obscen-
“Oh my god, get it together.” Samira muttered under her breath.
She grabbed the protein bar beside her mouse and took a bite out of it. It didn’t taste as good for some reason and it definitely had nothing to do with the fact that this was one she had brought from home herself for the first time in weeks. Absolutely nothing. Samira washed the grittiness of the protein bar down with lukewarm coffee in her travel mug, consciously not looking up from her charting despite seeing Dr. Abbott turn away from the screen and glance at her.
Exiting out of the chart of the 45 year old woman in South 16 who had presented with localized abdominal pain and was finally on her way up to the OR for an appendectomy, Samira pushed away from the desk to make her way to Lena who was on the phone.
Samira had worked in the ER long enough to never utter the “q” or “s” word, but it hadn’t been busy enough for her taste. She had too much time on her hands and it was making her even more antsy. Forget that she only had another 3 hours left on her shift, she was itching to go home for the first time in her career.
Lena looked at Samira over her red frame glasses, still holding the phone in between her ear and shoulder, and said “What can I do for you, sweetheart.”
Samira leaned her elbows on the counter and hummed, “Got anything good? I’ll go to Chairs if you need it for the rest of my shift, if you want?”
Somehow Lena raised her thin eyebrows even higher with an expression of doubt and disbelief. “Since when did spending the last hours of your night shift in Chairs become attractive to you, Miss New Attending?” Lena asked, completely abandoning her phone call.
Samira felt her hackles rise and scoffed, “Chairs aren't above me because I’m an attending, Lena!”
Lena didn’t look particularly convinced and said, “Not what I said, honey. For all they teach you doctors in medical school, you’d think your lot wouldn’t be so blind and more discerning.”
The flush on Samira’s cheeks felt like a confirmation of a conversation she didn’t expect to have. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Samira said, hopefully more confident than she felt, before walking towards Chairs. The last thing she needed was to clue in the nurses even more on what they were speculating.
She couldn’t see Lena’s expression but the tone of her, “Uh huh, right.” was indicative enough.
It was fine. Samira was fine. She was a grown woman, an attending physician of an ER, who harboured a crush for someone who wouldn’t have been appropriate in any way to harbour said crush for. Dr. Abbott clearly viewed her as a mentee. She knew he had been married and widowed young. He had dropped little anecdotal stories about his wife, Gen, that despite the grief were filled with affection. She hoarded their conversations like a greedy little ED dragon despite knowing she was too young for him, too complicated with their respective roles in the ED even before she finally became an attending. She was a fucked up workaholic who consistently stepped over her own emotional boundaries with patients and he didn’t need any of her baggage when it seemed like in the last few months he had been doing better.
Really, Elise would be perfect for him. She was closer to his age and even though she was only on assignment for the next couple of weeks, Ohio wasn’t that far from Pennsylvania. It would be great for both of them.
Elise was great and Jack was great.
Samira took a deep breath and pulled back the curtain for the college student with a suspected UTI.
Jack Abbott was going to go insane. He was always kind of on that knife's edge courtesy of his PTSD but this was something else entirely.
Samira Mohan was avoiding him.
Samira Mohan who was always with him in the thick of it when they worked the night shift was walking away from the charge station to Chairs.
It wasn’t that he thought she was above triage but she hadn’t even come up to the board to see what they had. It was a break in routine - a break in their routine that had been going on since she had been working nights. It's not like they were completely attached at the hip the way Mel and Langdon were, but it was consistent enough that he had come to expect it and rely on it. He looked forward to coming into his shifts knowing she had gotten there even earlier than he had, hearing her steady voice as she took excellent histories of patients.
She took to emergency medicine in a way that had made him want to be better. After all that he had seen, he wanted to meet her standard and be worthy of her attention both personally and professionally. At first yes, it purely came from a place of ensuring that her confidence was nurtured alongside her medical training especially after Robby let the “Slo-Mo” moniker slip months prior.
“What was that?” Jack said as he walked up to Dana and Robby, eyes still on the text he was sending to Dr. Walsh.
Robby glanced at Jack from where he had been talking to Dana and said, “What?”
Jack put his phone down and turned his body so it was fully facing them. “Who’s the intern you’re terrorizing now, Robby?”
Robby frowned and crossed his arms over his chest, a rueful smile pulling at his lips and said, “I do not terrorize my staff, thank you. And it’s not an intern.”
Jack cocked his head to the side and frowned before asking, “Well we both know it isn’t Whittaker. You’ve all but moved him in.”
The flush that bloomed on Robby’s face made Jack take a mental note to probe that reaction further on a later date.
Robby scoffed and shook his head before rubbing his hand over his face, “Samira. Dr. Mohan. Her patient turnover rates only seem to get worse the longer she’s here. The interns see patients in Chairs faster than she does back here and I’m not sure if she’s a good fit.”
Jack felt his eyebrows climb closer to his hairline. There was no actual way he was hearing this correctly. “Are you being serious right now? Please tell me you’re joking.” Jack said, humourlessly letting out a laugh while shifting his weight back and forth on his heels.
Robby frowned, clearly sensing he had missed something but unable to determine what.
Jack rubbed both his eyes and shoved his hands in his scrub pockets before shaking his head, “If you’re going to seriously stand here and say that Dr. Mohan isn’t a cornerstone to the success of this department you should seriously consider extending that sabbatical for longer than 3 months.”
Robby opened his mouth to interrupt and presumably contradict him but Jack continued on.
“You put her directly with me and you during Pitt Fest last year. She was the second person to successfully treat an RV embolism with a pigtail catheter during a mass casualty event. She consistently catches critical conditions through her extensive histories and her patient satisfaction rates are the only reason Gloria hasn’t had an absolute conniption when she comes down here. She’s the best resident that we’ve had come through these halls in years and when she does become an attending we would be lucky if she continues here.”
Robby’s shoulder’s shrug around his ears and he shook his head before saying, “She wastes unnecessary time and money on tests that don’t need to be ordered and looks for things that aren’t there to soothe her own anxiety. Not because she’s seeing something that we can’t.”
Jack waited again to see if Robby was actually being serious because there was no way this man, who Jack did genuinely consider to be a friend and exceptionally intelligent doctor, was not hearing the abject hypocrisy in his words.
Clasping his hand in front of his mouth, Jack said slowly, “Brother, at risk of not completely upending your morning by giving you an alphabetical and chronological history of you doing the exact same thing as both a resident and attending… You are not doing anyone - not the patients, not the hospital, but especially not Dr. Mohan - any favours as her supervising physician by undercutting her confidence and affirming a shitty nickname in a teaching hospital.”
Robby’s frown had grown so deep that to Jack he looked mildly constipated. And given the drivel that had come out of his mouth, he might actually have been.
Jack never told Samira about that conversation but with Robby’s sabbatical he didn’t hear anything further about said bullshit nickname. He was happy to see the shift in her confidence under the tutelage of Dr. Al-Hashimi when she joined them on night shifts. In recent months she had been volunteering to cover more nights and if he had a self indulgent smile when the schedule came out, well no one knew why. Other then Ellis and Dana because nothing got past those women so why try.
Ellis had told him multiple times he was being so obvious. Dana only raised her eyebrows at him judgmentally. Hell, even Jack questioned what the hell he was doing in a Costco line with two boxes of protein bars that he didn’t even eat.
Which brought him to his problem of the night.
Samira Mohan was doing everything she could to avoid directly working with him and he couldn’t for the life of him figure out why.
He hadn’t slept well the night before (not that he ever really did) running over the fact that at the grown age of 43, he, a widowed veteran, attending ER physician, had let his work crush completely run wild to the point of him seriously considering transferring hospitals to either fully confess to her or simply let his feelings die out. Both sounded like terrible options and left him dragging his feet to his shower before getting ready for his shift. He should have been looking forward to this shift. With Shen out of commission due to a broken ankle, Samira had been volunteered to cover. Not that she had offered but had been volunteered. That had given Jack pause immediately when he had heard. Usually she was the first one to cover a shift or pull a double. He was going to ask her about it tonight, see if there were any changes, maybe to her personal life like seeing someone new to explain why his kindred spirit of a workaholic was suddenly not jumping to go into overtime (again). While she didn’t outright run in the other direction when he approached, she might as well have.
He had walked up to his locker to deposit his things and had seen her bun turn the corner before he could even greet her. Only Matteo, their new travel nurse, Elise, and and Lena had been at the nursing station when he had gone up to check the patient board. Dr. Al-Hashimi and Robby were still finishing up in Trauma 2 before they could complete their hand off.
“Good morning. How’s our customer queue looking today?” Jack had murmured while sipping on his coffee. He hadn’t had time to stop at the cafe he had begun frequenting after Samira had mentioned the quality of their espresso and was already regretting it.
Elise came around the desk and said with a tired smile, “It feels offensive to say good morning at 7pm but I’ll let it slide”.
Jack snorted and said, “How benevolent of you.” He could see Samira charting at one of the computers across them and frowned slightly at the tension radiating off of her frame.
Elise narrowed her eyes playfully and said, “Excuse you I am always this kind.”
Jack turned back to the board and asked, “Do we know when South 16 and 18 are going to be discharged? Chairs didn’t look too backed up but I’d like to get things moving before the witching hour.”
Elise hummed and stated, “I’m pretty sure Dr. Mohan was finishing up with them. Shouldn’t be much longer.”
Satisfied with the answer, Jack turned around to approach Samira and do their not so formal debrief of her patients and if he was smart, pull the the reason she was volunteered and not voluntarily stepping up to cover this shift. Before he could even take a step in her direction, she was already turning on her heel towards Chairs. As much as he loved her hair, he was getting tired of only seeing the back of her curly hair walking away from him.
Lena was watching him with what she called her look of eternal suffering for people who couldn’t pull their heads out of their ass.
“Don’t give me that look.” He muttered to her.
Lena sniffed and pushed her glasses up before glancing down at the iPad in her hands, “Pull your head out of your ass and I won’t have to.”
Jack sighed and leaned against the desk before saying, “I haven’t even been here 5 minutes and you’re already busting my balls.”
Lena looked up sharply and propped her hand on her hip, “I left the paediatrics because I thought working with adults would mean less whining but here we are.”
Jack dramatically grabbed his chest in mock pain, “Oh how you wound me.”
Lena shook her head and tapped a few things on the screen she was holding. “I bet you’ve both been up wringing your hands over the same thing. I already put $40 on it.” Lena said with a flash of a smile.
Jack pursed his lips and narrowed his eyes, “Who started the bet?”
Lena dragged her eyes over to where Elise was suspiciously organizing a stack of blank paper by the printer.
Jack looked towards the ceiling and sighed with his own eternal suffering and said, “Do I even want to know how big the pot is at this point?”
Matteo slipped Elise a couple of folded bills in his palm before walking by Jack with a happy, “Absolutely not.”