Archive of Our Own

***

The bench is cool, hard and unforgiving on his back. Yet every day for months now, Jack Abbot has walked from the staff entrance and exit of Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center, across the busy road and found that bench to sit on it. It’s not because his prosthetic rubs from being on his feet all night, or that he simply likes the view from there the best. It’s because of her.

Samira Mohan. Singularly brilliant, the future of medicine, the woman who holds his heart in the palm of his hands but doesn’t know it. (Could never know it, he’d decided a long time ago, torn between self-sacrifice and the belief that if you love something you set it free; if it’s meant to be, it will come back; if it isn’t, it won’t.)

The first time they’d sat on the bench together had been after PittFest. It hadn’t been the first time he’d seen her take her hair down, nor the first time he’d seen her slump against the nearest chair with any form of back support. It had, though, been the first time he’d seen her out for drinks with the rest of the crew, the first time he’d seen her really, truly smile about something other than finding a solution for a patient in need or pulling off a risky procedure.

(Solid work.

That was your call, not mine.

Take the win, Doctor Mohan.

Thanks.)

He hadn’t driven her home that night. He hadn’t worked up the courage. He’d walked her to her car - her shitty 2003 Honda Accord, known more for breaking down than actually getting her to work regularly - and then sat in his truck three spots down, and hyperventilated for twenty minutes.

They hadn’t meant to make a pattern of it. The next couple of times had been a coincidence, after the first. Samira with a coffee from the shop across the way, the one he knew dropped their prices for doctors and nurses and anybody else who came in wearing scrubs, and Jack with his prosthetic off after a long shift — sharing the space for mere minutes, like ships passing in the night.

Their shift pattern wasn’t often synced. It wasn’t until midway through April before her R4 year that something changed. McKay’s advice had been weighing on her, he later learned. And suddenly, without even knowing how or why or when, he found himself in the position of being Samira Mohan’s best friend.

She told him once, shivering in her underscrubs until he shrugged off his Carhartt and draped it over her shoulders, that she was working on ‘getting a life slash being a person.’ He had been poleaxed by the realisation that she was including him in that. In her ‘getting a life,’ and then deeply, selfishly glad.

(He’d taken the ring off shortly after that. Britt would have understood, he knew. She’d want him to be happy, not sequestering his heart away in a tower like some fairytale princess. He knew that just as he knew that she would have had many opinions about how he’d screwed it all up with Samira — about how he let her get away. His pining and stunning ability to fall on his own sword was practically soap opera material for her, wherever she was.)

He hadn’t known how much he had come to rely on this — her mornings (his nights) on that bench, the sun steadily climbing in the sky while they talked about anything and everything — until suddenly the prospect of it all ending was looming over him.

Because Samira Mohan was leaving.

New Jersey, Maryland, Texas, Oregon, California — all her options, programs and applications and letters of recommendation carefully handpicked. Pittsburgh, to his dismay, hadn’t made the list. The inflexible list, the one she’d made as a med student and had stuck on her wall for years, on the page she’d ripped from an old notebook now creased and yellowing.

(He hadn’t known whether to laugh or cry when he found out that was the extent of decorating she’d done in her apartment.)

And then the end was there, swift like a train barrelling towards him. Being hit by a train would have probably hurt less, in hindsight. Our bench, she texted him. One for the road?

Of course he’d gone. Disappointing her was anathema. She wanted him there, so he’d be there, even if it meant swallowing everything he wanted to say. He swallowed every please stay and please let me come with you and you are more radiant than the sun and twice as beautiful that wanted to trip off his tongue, because he couldn’t do that to her. He couldn’t burden her with this, the weight of his desire, the weight of him.

She was the future. So she had to go. She had to be the future.

She didn’t need him, the past, just trying to keep up with her while she blew everyone else out of the water — she needed to be free. So he set her free. He told her to go. He told her she could do this, she could do anything she set her mind to. He told her she was a rockstar, the future, the foundation of a new wave of doctors. He told her to change the world, and never forget how brilliant she is because he never will.

The hair from the hug she had given him that day still lives on the collar of his jacket, hung up in his closet. If he closes his eyes, he can pretend it still smells like her. He can pretend he doesn’t regret every single word he never said.

He’s a sucker for punishment, or maybe just a sucker for her.

Call him sentimental. Call him a fool. Call him delusional, and maybe he’ll agree, he’s never been someone who considered himself to be operating within the bounds of sanity, but he still thinks maybe. Maybe one day she’ll come back and find him here.

It’s a pipe dream. He knows because she doesn’t know he still does this. She doesn’t know that he sits here for an hour after his shift ends every single day, come rain or shine. (Though he’s sure she’d laugh hysterically if she knew how many times he’s gotten his clothes soaked through just by sitting.)

***

Samira Mohan is not someone well acquainted with the feeling of being in love. Everything she had done, from ages 13 to 32, was about becoming a doctor. All else failed to exist, blighted out by the drive of finding her one true purpose in the wake of losing her father, and yet she still planned for it. Still planned for butterflies and rings and that inexorable feeling people get when they’re fully understood for the first time.

Love would come later. It would have to. Come hell or high water, she was going to be the kind of doctor her father never had, one that took the time, one that was careful and thorough and compassionate, still. She dated, sure, but only in undergrad. She pushed it all aside, buried the parts of herself that yearned and wanted, because she had to stick to the plan.

The plan was, as it turns out, a complete crock of shit. In swept Jack Abbot - night shift attending, active suicide risk, most competent man this side of the Mississippi - and the whole board untipped itself, rapidly unspooled like yarn being chased by a kitten. 

She felt like a terrible cliche and yet like this was entirely inevitable.

It had started with McKay. 

(This job can’t be your life, Samira.

It’s not. What, because I’m not in a relationship and I don’t like socialising after work? All that other stuff can wait until I finish my residency and get to where I want to be in my career.)

She hadn’t expected anything to actually happen. Or, maybe, this is just what she’s telling herself now - surviving off seeing him in pixel form and text messages - years after the fact but still so stuck in it. 

The first time she sat beside him on the bench - their bench - had been happenstance. Robby had just left, and Samira’s feet and calves and whole body were aching as though she’d ran a marathon, so she sat. She sat, and then somehow ended up laughing and talking (and crying, but she still pretends she didn’t totally embarrass herself with that) with him and staying while everyone else drifted away. 

It had sort of snowballed after that. Like she was watching herself outside of her own body as she crossed paths with him at first unintentionally and then purposefully, only forgoing the bench once until they realised how loud the coffee shop was. 

(And how much they’d rather be occupying the bench again, but that was something she shoved to the back of her brain to be examined later, like one would a rare fossil.)

Somewhere along the way, between the journals they’d trade and how his name became the first one she’d look for on the board each morning, he became her best friend. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had one of those. Middle school, maybe. High school before they transferred, leaving her bereft and alone. A week in college before she realised how little they had in common. 

It was strange to feel so connected to somebody. To realize she had somehow cultivated this without trying - every other aspect of her life felt like it took so much effort, so much out of her, and yet this felt as easy as breathing. To realize that maybe her grand plan for herself could be shaken by something so paltry as a connection. (She couldn’t name it, then. Hadn’t worked up the courage to admit to herself what she thought everybody else already knew.)

Yet it never faltered. He never pushed, not after the first time he told her he had some pull with the fellowship directors. She told him what she wanted and he helped her. Watched over her shoulder as she wrote out her applications, waxed poetic in a letter of rec that she knew took him a single hour to write.

It wasn’t fair, really. Asking to see him the day she was going to leave and probably never come back. (Only if he wanted her to, she’d say. As if Jack Abbot had ever allowed himself to be selfish in relation to her in the entire time she’d known him.)

She hadn’t liked who she was in Pittsburgh for a long time. Not when she was working under Robby, grinding herself to the bone to meet his ever rising expectations; isolating herself because she didn’t need community if she wasn’t planning on staying; dispensing advice to patients that she’d never take herself. Hypocrisy, meet thyself. (As if the world ever took plans into consideration.)

She had started to, with him. She had started to like what she saw in the mirror, who she was underneath all the neuroses and avoidance, who she saw herself becoming. She had started to make inroads with Santos and Javadi, had her usual game nights with Crus and Ellis, went out for dinner with McKay (and thoroughly embarrassed herself in front of Harrison, but that was okay) and drinks with Mel.

The kind of doctor she had always wanted to be. Confident but not cocky, thorough but not slow, empathetic but not wasteful. Trusting instead of verifying. 

Our bench, she’d typed with steady fingers, because her hands always were even when she wasn’t, and he’d come. They’d sat under the sun together, barely talking, until her alarm had chimed. 

She had memorized his words to her. The words that had fallen so short from the words she wanted to hear, the words she was terrified to hear, but were no less meaningful. No less profound in their simplicity, for his belief in her made her believe she could do anything. 

It had been so hard to walk away. It had been much harder to act like she didn’t want to look back.

She went back to her empty apartment, the bare walls and hardwood. Said goodbye to the empty closet, the tap that always leaked, the window that always rattled. Slept on the thin mattress with her suitcase by her side.

She told herself in the taxi ride to the airport that she is going to change the world. There is power in belief, not quite manifesting, but deciding and knowing something will happen.

It is only on the flight, and every single day since, that she lets herself think it: Samira Mohan is going to change the world, but all she wants is for Jack Abbot to be there to witness it.

It’s not a pipe dream. It’s something more on the edges of a well-worn fantasy, like an old sweater that still stands the test of time. He doesn’t know how often she dreams of their bench, their goodbye and how she wished she (her plans, her hopes, her dreams) could be more flexible. 

He doesn’t know how often she wonders about where he is. He doesn’t know how many different benches she’s sat on in Baltimore, and how on every single one, she’s missed him. 

***

The Pitt was the same as ever, if a little dimmer without her light. An institution, held together by paperclips, wishes and charge nurses. He couldn’t regret staying, as much as he wished to — Crus was thriving doing his ultrasound fellowship, Ellis had rejoined them as an attending after finishing her fellowship, Shen was, by all accounts, still Shen - caffeinated to a definitely dangerous degree each and every night. At least one of Baran’s changes had stuck: two attendings per shift, day or night. The night shift was steady, still ‘the weirdest and the wildest of them all.’

Everything was stable. Everything was good. Everything was fine.

Except everything was not fine, and he wished Parker Ellis, once his second favourite resident and now his second least favourite attending, understood the concept of volume control.

“Hey, old man! You got a minute before you go brood in the park like Mr. Darcy or should I wait for tonight?” She called over the hub, as though he wasn’t standing close enough to hear her at a more regular volume.

Ragging on each other was a time honoured night shift tradition. It wasn’t even the first time someone had brought up his new routine, though it wasn’t so new anymore, in truth. (He hated counting, but it had been over a year. Not quite 365 days of bench sitting, but horrendously close.) He knew that the nurses were all aware — if Dana and Lena knew, the rest weren’t so far behind (and once Princess and Perlah knew, it was safe to assume that everybody in the building knew) — but still. It was the principle of the thing.

They usually reserved it for the breakroom. Or a trauma bay. The last thing he needed was Myrna, complete with her usual wheelchair and jingling handcuffs, in earshot; she’d already called him on his pining for ‘Dollface’ years earlier. She’d be on his ass quicker than a rash if she heard a single word out of Ellis’s mouth. Mr. Darcy. At least it was a better prospective nickname than Fruitcake.

(He really wasn’t ever going to let Robby live that down. It just wasn’t in his nature.)

He hefted his bag up on his shoulder, weary as though he already regretted every second of this encounter despite the fact it had only just begun. His hand clenched around the fabric that scratched at his palm.

(What else do you got in your go bag?

Oh, just wait and see.)

He blinked past the memory that washed over him like a wave on the shore, shaking his head. His hand flexed around the strap of his bag. “I only have a minute for you if you’re not going to rag on me again,” he told Parker, sidestepping around Nolan, likely on a quest to find Dana for something.

The Pitt stopped for no man, or woman.

“Boo, you’re no fun,” she shot back, pivoting around on her stool until she was no longer facing her computer station. The forgotten mouse icon blinked on the screen behind her.

“Not what your mom said last night.” His face didn’t twitch. This was part of the fun — the back and forth, the easy rapport, the lack of worrying about how she’d take what he was saying to her. They’d done this enough times that it was practically background noise to everyone else, but the walls still had ears. And eyes. And a terrible propensity for never letting things go.

Parker snorted. “Oh, we’ve graduated to your mom jokes now? Only a decade behind the times. Real impressive, gramps.”

His lips barely twitched, but the amusement in his eyes betrayed him. Gramps. God, Ellis loved to make him feel ancient. He leaned against the hub, jutting his chin in a small nod.

“You gonna keep making fun of me or tell me what you want? You’re thirty seconds down on that minute,” Jack warned, though it was entirely without heat. They both knew she could drag this out for another twenty minutes and he’d still stand there, waiting for her to get to the point so he could, in fact, go sit out there and brood like he was some modern day Mr. Darcy.

The flat look she bestowed him with proved that.

Eventually, though, she raised her hands in supplication before talking. “Alright, alright… Robby’s, predictably, dodging my emails, so - I need another editor on this paper. I’ve already got one rockstar editor but I’d really appreciate another perspective before I send it out to someone outside the, you know, realm of emergency medicine.”

If something about the way she phrased any of that read as odd, it didn’t occur to him immediately. He was coming off 16 hours (because of course he was) on his feet having had less than 4 hours sleep the night before (sleep wasn’t a friend to him on the best of days) and his residual limb had started aching hours ago so he probably (definitely) wasn’t firing on all cylinders.

(Distantly, he knew, Samira would be upset at him for… All of that. What she didn’t know couldn’t hurt her.)

He rubbed at his jaw, palm catching on his stubble before shrugging in agreement. It wasn’t as if his social life was exploding with opportunities or obligations; he’d stopped volunteering with the SWAT team after Samira had expressed concern about it (and promptly been made fun of by his sisters for it, because they’d hated it viscerally and never managed to get him to do that). “Yeah, sure, what the hell. Send it to me and I’ll get it back to you later today, probably.”

“I appreciate it, old timer.” Old timer. What was he, a relic from the 40s? Still, her words were sincere and earnest, braids bouncing against the back of her neck when she swivelled around to grab her phone.

“Yeah, yeah.” The sincerity of that was a little much for this late - this early? - in the day. He waited for the notification to ding on his phone, barely glancing at the screen, before continuing. “Was that all you needed? ‘Cause I’ve got plans.”

“Yeah, plans for your ass and that bench.” She wasn’t even facing him anymore; had turned her focus back to the computer to continue her charting. Nobody could say she wasn’t quick with a comeback.

He just shook his head, hiked his bag further up his shoulder and pushed off the hub. It wasn’t even worth telling her that his plans were actually meeting up with his niece to talk about her options for medical school. (But before that, yeah. Yeah, he was going to the bench. Sue him.) “Hasta luego, vato.” He half-saluted.

“Say hi to the bench for me, Dr. Darcy!” She called after him, earning herself a middle finger thrown over his shoulder. “God damned heterosexuals.”

He barely made it ten feet. He wasn’t even at the doors yet when he heard the telltale sound of wheels turning and metal thwacking against metal. He pressed his lips together, amusement tangling with mild despair as a familiar voice veering on the edge of rasping spoke.

“What’s this I hear about you and a bench, Dr. Darcy?”

His shoulders slumped. Parker’s laughter rang out behind him.

***

A year and ten months come and go. It’s all good, really. The hospital she’s ended up at is well funded, her attending likes her and she’s finally publishing her research. She’s even made friends — with the neighbours in her apartment complex, the R4s she sees every shift, the barista at her local coffee shop who knows she takes an extra vanilla shot in her iced latte. 

It’s good. It’s fulfilling, finally, in a way PTMC had fallen short of (unless she was on the night shift.)

Still, she misses him. The ease with which they operated in a trauma room. The ability to look up and find him in almost every room she entered. 

It’s not exactly a new thing, her dreams. She’s always had vivid dreams that lurked in the periphery of her consciousness. What was new was that dreaming of Jack had become regular. Something like clockwork. An expected complication or a minor blip she’d filed away. 

It’s always fuzzy. The shape of his smile, the press of his leg against her own, the low timber to his voice as he says something she cannot recall for the life of her—so indistinct, and yet she clings to every morsel. (Her therapist, Suni, tells her that the dreams are normal - right before asking her to write about them, about how they make her feel, in her journal. She hadn’t quite managed to explain the root of the discomfort that flared in her chest she felt at the time.)

She’s having a good one. A nice, pleasant, warm dream. Or at least she thinks she was, before she’s abruptly waking blearily in a cold bed with her phone blaring out some Olivia Rodrigo song into her otherwise silent apartment. 

She ignores the way certain parts of her body ache. 

(Baptism by fire, baby.)

She flings her arms to the side, still barely awake until her phone goes flying onto the faux persian rug. V, the screen flashes at her, complete with a blurry selfie under the green and red icons. 

She lurches off the mattress after it, half tangled in her sheets and attempting to overcorrect until she’s essentially on the floor. 

Her stupid phone keeps blaring even as she curls her fingers around it.

“Wh’t d’you want, Vee?” She manages to get out, blood rushing to her head all the while.

“A hospital to work in that doesn’t have my mother in it.” 

Oh. It’s one of those calls. 

Samira exhales noisily, trying to free her leg from its fabric confines as she stretches on the floor. She knows Victoria didn’t intend on saying that, or perhaps she didn’t intend for it to be put so bluntly. 

“What’d she do now?” She asks, yawning away the grogginess, before her friend - half-mentee, half-confidante - can get another word out.

“It’s more like what didn’t she do,” Victoria’s tone is dark and quiet. If it were coming from anyone else, she’d label it dangerous. “She had another talk with Robby about how disappointing it is that I chose to be in EM.”

It’s a well worn argument - one that Eileen Shamsi returns to every three months. Or whenever there’s been a particularly vulgar showing of ER Cowboy antics. 

“At least she’s consistent.” Samira closes her eyes, listens to the shuffling on the other end. Knows she’s tripped over Dennis’s shoes in the doorway by the muffled curse and that she’s just got in from a shift by the sound of keys hitting hard wood. Muffles a yawn into the corner of her elbow.

“You mean at least the ED attendings aren’t as spineless as the other departments.” Samira huffs out a laugh, which only furthers Victoria’s general state of angst. “I mean it! You’re so lucky your mom’s not a doctor, Samira. You don’t know how good you have it.” 

“I mean, one could argue the whole months of radio silence are evidence that I don’t have it so good, but the image of amma getting paid to berate me at work during my residency? Hard pass.” Her nose scrunches up at just the idea of it. 

“You say that like Abbot — sorry, Jack — would’ve let that happen.” She and Trinity had poked fun at her for hours after the first time she’d called him Jack in their earshot. It had been infuriating, because they were right.

The pause seems to take up forever. It’s not like a bomb went off, just feels like both of them are now holding their breath, a little bit. One much more drowsy than the other. 

Eventually, though, Samira admits, “you’re not wrong. He’s certainly not spineless.” 

“Yeah, well, he might be wishing he was soon with all that time he’s been spending on that bench, that cannot be good for his—” Samira can hear Victoria hesitate, as though she’s said too much. She suddenly feels wide awake, pushing herself upright. 

And then Victoria starts talking again, almost a mile a minute. “I mean, he really isn’t spineless, you’re right. Definition of the opposite, probably. Got his prosthetic all fucked up last month helping Jesse settle a patient and we’ve both seen him hold cold war like standoffs. And mom doesn’t seem to know how to talk to him. He does that eye thing and she gets all bristly and ‘has to go back to a department that knows how to run properly’. Like, he’s intimidating as fuck.” 

Samira holds the phone to her ear, mind not entirely absorbing anything Victoria is saying. She opens her mouth, intending on asking what the hell she means by ‘that bench’, but her brain screeches to a halt. 

“What do you mean he got his prosthetic all fucked up?” 

The conversation, eventually, drifts to other things  — Samira confesses to being on the literal floor, Victoria tells her she spilled Shen’s coffee last night, they talk about study methods for the boards, Mateo and the reality of Samira’s abysmal love life. They only hang up after Victoria’s stomach starts growling so loudly Samira could hear it over the phone. 

It’s only after she hangs up that her mind locks back onto the bench. The bench, the bench, the bench. 

How the hell is she supposed to get up and go to work now?

***

Dr. Darcy had stuck the landing. It was now more common for him to be called that than he was his actual name. Even Robby, the traitor, had started calling him that whenever Jack came up to drag him down from the roof (the only time Jack ever went up there, these days) or shared a patient during handover or were, by some rare happenstance, scheduled on the same shift by the gods that adjudicated their schedules and contracted hours.

So it wasn’t entirely surprising when Santos, the newest senior resident on the night shift, started calling him that. It was, though, still surprising when she dropped beside him one morning on The Bench, as he’d begun to call it, bag clattering to the ground without ceremony. It absolutely did not scare the living shit out of him. (It absolutely did. Santos was, in fact, incredibly fucking lucky he’d taken his leg off when he sat down and that he hadn’t reached straight for the knife in his pocket.)

“Dr. Darcy,” she almost sing-songed, unrepentant in the face of his glare. She should know better than to be startling a man with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, even one she trusts as she apparently has decided to, for reasons unknown to him.

“Santos.” The warning is evident, though he knows she’ll blow past it. Just like she blew past the stop sign the first and only time he let her drive his truck after a PLP flare up when Robby was visiting Heather on his apology tour.

“You know, when I started here, I really didn’t want to like you.” The admittance isn’t surprising. He doesn’t think she wanted to like any of the men she worked with, even before the whole situation with Langdon. He doesn’t even think she believed she would end up liking any of them. Her eyes glimmer just a little bit. “I didn’t really want to like any of you.”

He doesn’t know the details. He doesn’t need to. He knows there’s baggage there, that trusting authority figures - particularly male authority figures - is like pulling teeth for her. He knows that trusting even Whitaker, who had somehow become one of her closest friends as well as her roommate, wasn’t easy for her.

He chews at the inside of his cheek, almost gnawing, instead of saying anything. He knows she isn’t finished, just pausing to let him absorb her words. He watches the side of her face, otherwise entirely still. His hands curl in the fabric of his cargo pants with a force that would be bruising.

“I already did like you, sort of, before that day with the cyber attack,” she admits, half-smiling. As though a full one would take too much out of her. “You were never unfair about the whole thing with Langdon. Never treated me any differently.” They’d never talked about it - not at the time, not in the years since. He’d been told by her in the most clinical way imaginable, not Robby, and had just about burst a blood vessel when he’d been told what Robby’s solution was for the whole thing.

Langdon’s fall from grace had illuminated more than a few things, but they were far from important right now. “But coming in with the SWAT team? That was so unfair. Deeply badass.” Santos steamrolled right ahead, not commenting on his little grin or even blinking before she detonated what she probably knew was something of a kill shot.

“And then I saw you with her.”

(Is the hospital going to pay for that?

I’ll pay for it.

What are you doing?

What you obviously can’t.)

Jack almost stops breathing. It had been over a year since anyone had even mentioned that. The open door, the wound on his back, the shirt draped over his knees as he tried to hold in every physical reaction to her looking at him, touching him, sharing space with him.

(Don’t need the paperwork from the hospital or the police department.

Okay. Our little secret.)

Nothing had happened. Nothing untoward, anyway. She had just… Patched up his wound. Gave him detailed care instructions as though he wasn’t also a doctor, one who had years more experience than her. Told him to put his shirt back on and she’d ‘see him back out there.’ He’d been disappointed at first and then deeply, deeply amused. She was steadfast and professional.

Santos manages to cut in before he can say anything. Like she’s read his mind. Opened it like a book and shook some pages out. “And before you say it, yeah, I know nothing happened. Samira was too focused on everything medicine to even think about romance or dating and you were… You were waiting for her to realize.”

It’s painfully accurate. He had never thought of Samira as being anything other than intelligent, observant, someone who absorbed information like a sponge and still went back for more. He really hadn’t expected her to be totally blind to his interest in her. He probably should have.

“You coming to a point any time soon, Santos?” His voice is low and quiet. She’s right, of course. He knows she’s trying to say something. Maybe that she was suspicious of him after, that her brain had tried to lump him in with that crowd, the one where attendings abuse their power over their residents.

She huffs at him, rolls her eyes. He can almost hear the snide comment about patience that she holds back. “Yeah. My point is. You’re a good guy. So I don’t get… I just don’t…” She gives a frustrated sigh, as if the words just won’t come.

He can almost see her unraveling and she cuts him off, slamming her hand down on the bench as she rounds on him. “God, dude. It’s been years! Aren’t you sick of the pining? I know you still talk to her. Every other conversation I have with her is ‘Jack sent this’ or ‘is Jack on shift today?’ I really do like you, man, but it’s - honestly, it’s getting depressing. And annoying.”

She deflates, visibly, and then puffs up again. “You can’t wait forever. She can’t wait forever. So for God’s sake just tell her you sit on this bench every day like a freak and put us all out of our misery!” And then she seems to nod to herself, like she feels better for letting it all out.

Jack feels shell shocked. He knows he probably looks it, too. He gapes at her, barely managing a semblance of a goodbye when she swings her bag off the ground and leaves him there.

***

It’s sunny. A blessing not in disguise for Samira, even in her box of an apartment (complete with a truly questionable A/C unit) that’s woefully unprepared to host anyone even just for dinner. 

She’s still not entirely certain how she ended up agreeing to it. Cassie, who had foregone a fellowship because she had finally gotten her ankle monitor off and wanted to spend more time with her son, had told her she was taking some time off - that she’d been thinking about vacationing in Cape May for a week and before Samira had even known what she was saying, she was suggesting they meet up for dinner.

Dinner would be fine. Dinner would be good, even. Cassie was a friend - a real one, even if sometimes Samira felt akin to a child around her, despite her own accolades and the fact that she didn’t consider herself easily intimidated by anyone. 

Intimidated wasn’t quite the right word. Embarrassingly and mortifyingly seen was probably a better term for it. Cassie felt like what she imagined a stereotypical older sister would. Smarter and wiser, an empathy streak a mile wide, resilience and an uncanny ability to see right through people - which Samira had, to her dismay, never been exempt from. 

(Though it hadn’t been to her detriment.)

The restaurant, family owned, is beachfront. One that Samira’s frequented a handful of times - metal chairs and rounded garden tables with parasols. A fragment of a daydream floats behind her eyes before she shakes it away: crisp white button up, familiar veined forearms, hazel eyes catching the light. Her smile - the one she’d plastered on in her new car - grows less fake when she spots her friend, almost auburn hair glinting under the sun.

(They’d done this before. Back in Pittsburgh, right around the time she’d found the necessary courage to befriend Mel, Trinity and Victoria, she’d started finally going to the restaurants and cafes that had been recommended to her years earlier—with Cassie and the others, most often Trinity, Crus and Parker—because Parker Ellis could never say no to a meal cooked by hands other than her own or the chance to flirt with Santos outside of work.) 

It’s a miracle that she doesn’t outwardly twitch when Cassie’s first act upon seeing her is to look her up and down. 

“You’re a sight for sore eyes,” she says when Samira is close enough and it makes her laugh. “And I really mean that; next time I tell you I want to drive all the way here, please give me a reality check.”

Samira just grins, letting her fold her into her arms when she’s close enough. “You say that like I have any sway.” 

“You have sway,” Cassie assured her, sunglasses pushed atop her head. 

“Okay, good. It’s good to see you.” The words feel lame but they’re honest. It had been… A while, not accounting for buffering FaceTime calls with Trinity where she swung her phone around the Pitt like she wanted to give Samira vertigo (which truthfully doesn’t seem all that improbable.)

“It’s good to see you, too.” 

It’s the work of a couple minutes to get themselves seated, striking up a meandering conversation before they’re seated. It takes another twenty minutes, Cassie flashing photos of Harrison and monologuing about how she’s become the ‘uncool’ mom at his sports events before Samira even thinks to bring up the conversation she’d had with Victoria last week.  

“Hey, can I, uh, ask you something? It’s not about work or anything scandalous, I just - I know you’ll be honest with me.” Her fingers twitch around her cold glass of water. 

She knows her question is vague. She doesn’t need to show her hand, and is actively weighing the probability that Cassie will outright laugh in her face. She doesn’t think so, but she knows that this will be potentially embarrassing. 

“Of course,” Cassie assures her, tilting her head in a familiar motion that fills Samira with unexpected warmth. “Though you feeling the need to mention that it’s not ‘scandalous’ makes me think it probably is exactly that.”

“Shut up.” 

Cassie just laughs. 

Samira bites back her own laughter, shaking her head just a little. “I was talking with Victoria the other day. She mentioned something about someone.” 

Her fingers tap against the glass before Cassie reaches out, squeezes gently.

The look on her face is almost infuriatingly knowing. “And was this someone a certain night shift attending?” 

Samira thinks about obfuscating, blurrying the lines, but bites the inside of her cheek. It’s better to just bite the bullet, right?

“That might be the case, yes.” 

Cassie doesn’t outwardly display any sign of amusement on her face, but the lean of her body suggests it. “And what was this something that you heard?” 

Samira wrinkles her nose just a little, pads of her fingers following the trail of condensation on her glass until it drips onto the table. “Something about a bench,” she confesses, as though that’ll mean anything to Cassie. “She brushed past it pretty quick — I only remembered afterwards, but she’d already turned off her phone because, you know.”

“Mhmm. What exactly are you wanting me to say, Samira?” 

Samira huffs. “If there’s any, you know, truth to it. She said he spends some time there.” She won’t get her hopes up. (She’s lying.) She’ll keep her hopes buried beneath the floorboards. (Her hopes are already sky high.)

“If by ‘some time’ you mean up to an hour a day then you’re right,” Cassie hums. Seems to consider her words, which have all but knocked Samira flat without actually having done so. “He just sits there. Doesn’t really engage with anybody. I get the feeling he’s waiting. For something or someone, I don’t know.”

Cassie’s a good liar, but Samira knows that the last part is an outright lie. 

“An hour a day?” Samira’s echoing only makes Cassie smile a little.

“Half an hour before a shift, half an hour after.” She seems to consider her before admitting. “You know, I thought for a while that you two were a thing. It’s part of why New Jersey surprised me so badly.” 

Samira could splutter. It would probably be the right thing to do. Instead what happens is she opens her mouth and “Not for lack of trying.” falls out. 

Cassie snorts. “Ahmad’ll be happy to hear it.” Samira doesn’t need to hear an explanation for that. Ahmad and his betting pool are legendary — if only to former and current members of staff at PTMC. 

“He really just sits there?” She double checks. The information seems to settle somewhere in her, but it feels— warm, bubbly, effervescent. 

Cassie nods, but whatever she’s going to say is lost as their server returns to take their order.  

“How’s Harrison?” Samira asks when they’re alone again because she doesn’t need to hear anything else. She already knows what she has to do.

(You got this.)

***

He supposes he knew it might come to this. He’s been avoiding Ellis, and Santos, and anybody else that might call him on his cowardly shit for a little less than a week. But especially those two, especially because he knows they’re now living together and probably plotting some form of intervention. He still doesn’t expect it when he gets home after a shift to find Emery Walsh in his house.

To be fair, though, he almost never expects Emery to be in his house despite the fact that she often is. So often, in fact, that her face graces the hallways and even the left wall of his office — although that photo is years old, and one could be forgiven for comparing her to a baby chipmunk.

The sound of crunching — dry cereal, probably, straight from the box because she’s a heathen — from his kitchen is the first sign. The second is the fact that his dog doesn’t rush to greet him.

He heaves a full body sigh, not even bothering to take off his prosthetic. Instead, he just heads to the kitchen. He knows, instinctively, he’ll find her pretending not to be dropping individual bits of cereal on the floor, and isn’t shocked to find her and her dark head of hair at the counter, clad in oversized t-shirt and denim shorts. It’s no longer painful to see her here, but sometimes it still knocks the breath right out of him.

“You know, they make bowls for that sort of stuff,” he points out. His keys click against the counter when he drops them, moving to grab a drink from the fridge before he has to face what he knows will be an inquisition and quite possibly a demoralising one.

Emery does the work of swallowing before shrugging, dismissing the idea out of hand. “Tastes better straight from the box.” Like hell.

“That’s a bold faced lie. It tastes like shit from the box.” Jack retorts. He’d know, it’s his cereal and his occasional midnight snack when he’s taken his medication and learned via trial and error that he probably shouldn’t use the oven.

She snorts. “Yeah, it does.” She just likes stealing his shit. Which he knows. Has known since he was 18, knocking on her parents door to ask them for their blessing to marry Brittany ‘Britt’ Walsh, Emery’s older sister by 12 years. He hadn’t expected, then, anything that followed — but he knew Emery would be a pain in his ass til the end. For all they give each other shit, he’s still her only brother, and she’s still his youngest sister. The only sister that followed him right into the belly of the beast. The sister that dragged him out of despair every time he fell into it, off ledges and onto flights.

Something he’s apologized for his whole life, and will probably do so in the afterlife, too.

“What’re you doing here? Why aren’t you with Rach and the kids?”

“What, I can’t visit? I gotta have some ulterior motive?”

“Em.”

“Jay.”

He rolls his eyes, half affectionate as he grabs a bottle opener and pops the cap off his beer. She lets him take a long drink before she says anything, or at least nothing too dramatic.

“You do know she has no idea you’re waiting.”

He closes his eyes, clings to the coldness of the bottle against his palms. His voice sounds almost disbelieving, despite the fact that he really does know. “Yeah, I know.”

Her dark eyes pierce him. “Then why haven’t you said something?”

His therapist had questioned it, too. He thinks everyone has. Even the fucked up part of himself that swears he can hear Britt’s voice sometimes questioned it. He lifts the bottle back to his mouth and takes a long drink, until his lungs are burning like fire.

His voice comes out a rasp as he leans his body heavily against his kitchen counter. “Because if I tell her, she’ll feel like she has to do something. She has to want it. I won’t have her feeling obligated to do anything. Not towards me. Not towards anybody.”

Emery takes a second to absorb all of that, blinks as she comes to a conclusion and then states, “God, but you are stupid. I have absolutely no idea how you managed to get not only my sister to fall in love with you but Mohan, too.”

He can’t quite wrap his mind around that last bit. He figures from the way she laughs, quick and sharp, that he looks like a fucking idiot.

“Someone should tell her. She deserves all the facts, Jack. You know how she is about data.” She’s heard all about Samira’s compassion and her need for all the possible data from him. She looks like she can’t believe she has to spell all of it out for him, either.

“I—” Jack starts and then stops. He has no idea what to say. The idea that she’d be in love with him, that she’d return even a fraction of his affections, seems unlikely. And yet.

And yet Emery had been there. At PittFest.

(Nipples to navel is no man's land.

I think I missed that day in medical school.)

In the thick of it.

(Pull the pigtail, Doctor Mohan. You got this.)

And then after. She’d been the first one he’d told, begrudgingly, about the bench. She had looked at him like he was out of his mind. A resident. An R3, a 29 year old, a workaholic who didn't know when to stop pushing. The same one he’d peacocked in front of during an MCI (her words, not his).

He doesn’t quite know what to do with himself. If she’s right, the whole of reality will tilt on its axis. If she’s wrong, he’ll ruin everything. But he wants to believe. He wants to, like he’s only ever wanted two things — for his wife to be alive and for his leg to be whole.

Her whole expression softens, as though she’s opened the shuttered windows into her mind. She throws another handful of cereal into her mouth before squeezing at his arm. “You don’t have to decide anything tonight. Tomorrow, maybe. Just think about it.”

He takes a breath and nods. Tomorrow.

And then she promptly ruins the mood by stealing his beer and drinking the rest.

(God, but he’s glad she’s his little sister.)

***

It takes a couple of days for her internal plan to come together. She knows it’s—crazy, borderline insanity, ill-advised—rushed, but she can’t just wait another, what? Month, six months, a year? He’d wait, she knows that. She’s suddenly more sure of that than she’s been of anything in her whole life other than medicine. She just doesn’t want him to have to. 

And she knows he won’t do anything. That he’s not the kind of man who thinks that he’s allowed to—that he’s allowed to be selfish, allowed to want, allowed to have something good, after everything. So. 

She’s driving back to Pittsburgh, in the car that he’d helped her buy because he “didn’t want her being taken advantage of.” (God forbid he did anything out of her best interest.) 

(What’re you gonna do?

I’m not gonna do anything. You are.) 

After Cassie had left, she’d sent her a link with no explanation. The PTMC forum site, ostensibly used for patient complaints or effusive praise, set up what feels like a millenia ago in an attempt to modernise their strive for transparency. Their version of Yelp except deeply, horrifyingly specific. Moderation had closed the topic (and, apparently, tried to ban the user from posting again) and her eyes linger on the words in front of her. does anyone know who the hot guy in scrubs who basically lives on this bench is lol accompanied by a link to the blurriest photo of Jack she’s ever seen. 

(How does he still look so good when he’s barely in focus?)

She had laughed herself dizzy. 

So, she’s going back to Pittsburgh. She knows how to time it. She knows where to park—exactly how much money she’ll have to shill out to do so, the coffee shop she can rely on to drown herself in espresso. She doesn’t need her phone to tell her the directions, can almost hear Jack telling her to keep her eyes on the road as her phone buzzes across the dashboard. 

When she stops, the necessity of a full bladder, an empty gas tank and a growling stomach demanding it, at a gas station a couple hours from Pittsburgh, she checks her messages. Snorts at the messages from her cousins, scrolls past the UberEats and her study tracker notifications. 

Her fingers pause over her unread messages from Trinity after she buys herself the only non-gross looking sandwich left, bracing for whatever is contained within before she clicks on them.

She exhales a long laugh, leans her arm on the car door. Trust Trinity to immediately catalogue her out of character behaviour from states away, while she was supposed to be working. She knew she should have turned off location sharing. (There are some bone deep similarities between her and Jack: they’re both gluttons for punishment.) 

She’d pressed the mute button about 30 seconds in, and simply watched the messages roll in. It’s amusing—how little any of it has changed. The same witticisms, the same banter, the same tried and true dynamics encapsulated in text form. 

It’s truly the only reason she doesn’t let the phone ring out. She doesn’t know if Emery Walsh has ever called her before. She doesn’t think she’s ever even texted Walsh—except for the one and only time she’d seen Jack get sick. 

103 degree fever and still they’d had to borderline drag him off the floor kicking and screaming, into a patient room to be examined. 

“You better not break his heart,” is the first thing she heard. The muffled sounds that came through with that voice are familiar. The beeping of a monitor. The shuffle of someone in scrub pants trying to keep feeling in their feet. The murmuring of an indistinct voice, as if underwater (or from behind surgical drapes). She blinked, mouth slightly ajar. “I mean it, Mohan. I like you well enough for an ER cowboy and I’ll bitch about and at him until the end of time, but—I’d carve your heart out for him.”

It should make her blanch; it should revolt her, how plainly Emery informs her of exactly how she’ll die if she fucks this up. But it just endears her, really. It’s the closest Emery will ever voice to acceptance, at least to Samira, that is. 

She knows Walsh—no, sorry, Emery—really does like her. Or likes her as much as she is currently capable of. Has known, in theory, that a call like this would be made by her to whomever was lucky enough that Jack fell in love with them. Has known this, the immutable truth, that while they’ll banter and fight and snap at each other like dogs who haven’t had their enrichment time, they’re family. That they’ve been so for a long time, across continents and through unimaginable loss and indescribable joys. 

(She thinks back to the photos. To the suit she knows he keeps in the back of his wardrobe, the one he wore when he gave Emery away, and when he stepped in for her ‘father-daughter’ dance.) 

“I’d give it to you myself if I ever did,” Samira says lowly, eyes following a plastic bag caught in the wind. It felt easier than giving in to the bizarre urge to cry. “I have no plans to hurt him, though. He’s—he’s my best friend.” 

There’s silence for a second and then a huff of air. If she didn’t know any better, she’d call it a laugh. Emery’s voice is wry. “I’d say you have shit taste in men, Mohan, but I’d be insulting my sister, too.”

And your own choice in godfather to your kid, she thinks but doesn’t say. She can almost hear Emery’s snark in return, blaming the drugs and her wife for not stopping her. Her lips turn upwards as she leans her head back against the headrest. “He’d tell us the same himself, you know." 

Then: “What a moron.” Their voices overlap. Samira can’t get a laugh out fast enough. 

“He’s certainly something. Listen, Mohan, I gotta wrap this up—if I don’t see you…” 

“I’ll be back this summer.” Samira can tell she’s sent Emery off kilter. She hadn’t told anybody about her interviewing for positions in Pittsburgh—only Baran and Gloria had known. That had taken a lot of work, and more than a little bribery in the admin offices. Work she hadn’t been sure had paid off. She’s glad it has.

The pause stretches before Emery eventually says, “PTMC? Christ, Mohan.” She can almost hear the tone of the surgeon's thoughts. Jack’s going to lose his tiny fucking mind, is the gist of it. 

“Yeah. Maybe by the time my contract starts there’ll be no HR conflict for me.” Samira’s voice is wry. 

“Wishful thinking. I’ll make sure they turf the moron out for you at a reasonable time—” A muffled curse, voice a little muffled for a second before she speaks again. “Christ, alright, I really gotta go.” 

Samira sits in the car after the call drops, just breathing. And hoping. And then she starts the car up again. 

***

It’s his last shift of the week. Someway, somehow, he’s ended up with a golden weekend. Except now he has no way to fill it. Emery had kidnapped Ozzy — his six year old chihuahua who went grey early — and told him he wouldn’t be getting him back until he’d ‘made progress on the Mohan thing’ as if he couldn’t just break into her house and get him back. (Except she’d foreseen that, and had told her wife not to allow him in. He was really regretting giving them both mace and a taser.)

So now he has no walking buddy, a large gap in his usual routine and an empty home to go back to.

The board isn’t totally full, nor totally empty either and the waiting room is filling up like it always does by seven AM but Robby won’t hear of him staying. Baran won’t either, when he turns to seek support. Javadi smirks at him when he passes, which rings some alarm bells, but he’s both not getting paid to care and it’s nice to see her confidence growing, so he lets it roll right off his back. (That, in hindsight, is his first mistake.)

He still hasn’t been able to bring himself to call Samira. He’d written out a whole paragraph, a script for himself. Scrawled out exactly what to say - that he expected nothing from her, that he just wanted her to know, that she could do whatever she wanted with the information. If she wanted to ignore it, he’d respect that. If she wanted to stop talking to him, he’d respect that, too. The ball is, and always was, squarely in her court. If only he’d be brave enough to actually say any of it.

His residual limb throbs. It’s not a sharp pain, just a present one that gnaws and gnaws at his senses, feeds into the anger that he won’t set free because he knows what it can do. He sees it every day. He just has to make it out and across the road.

His ears twitch when he hears Princess and Perlah as he passes them outside West 14. He really should learn Tagalog, if only to know when they’re really talking about him. He doesn’t need to do so now, though, because he can feel the weight of their stares like hot brands on the back of his neck.

“Do you think he knows?”

“No, he’s got no clue. Idiot man.”

But his leg hurts. He’s tired, despite himself. He just wants to get to the bench and rest for a little while. Recuperate. Think about Samira, out there changing the world. So he brushes it aside. Tells himself he can ask them later, or more likely, ask Dana (omniscient). (His second mistake.)

He adjusts his gait as he walks, nods at the security officers manning the scanners and eventually finds himself emerging from the triage entrance to fresh air and sunlight.

He inhales, tapping his free hand against his left thigh while the other tightens on the strap of his bag. The walk doesn’t take long, even accounting for the road and how busy it often is. (There are many worse places to be potentially hit by a car.) It never does take any longer than a few minutes at most - especially when you’re on autopilot like Jack so often is.

All he notices is the fresh air. The lack of antiseptic, bodily fluids and stench of sweat. He loves the hospital, he loves medicine, he loves helping people. Being of service. All of it — that’s his purpose. The thing that gives his life meaning. But it weighs heavy on the soul, if you believe in that sort of thing. It’s why he used to end up on the roof. Only now he ends up on the ground, amid grass and trees and other people. He just wishes - as he always does, with a fierceness that steals his breath - that Samira were here.

He doesn’t register the faces of people who pass him by. He doesn’t notice anything strange at all. He doesn’t notice the person hovering by the benches, as if psyching themselves up for something. (His third mistake. What is it they say in baseball? )

He’s just dropped down onto the bench, bending to unlatch his prosthetic and hissing a little in relief when he feels it.

It’s always been there when it comes to her, though many would call him insane for voicing it; a pull deep in his chest that he feels unerringly when Samira is there, as if his whole being exists only to orbit around hers. Like she is his True North, his guiding star. His breath catches in his lungs and he closes his eyes as if to shake it away, lifting his prosthetic to rest beside him.

She isn’t here. She can’t be here. She’s in Maryland, changing the world. Revolutionizing medicine. He tells himself this, sinking into the dark while feeling the sun shine on and past him.

He still has his eyes closed when he hears her speak, and for a second, the whole world stops. He knows he hasn’t taken anything, or drank anything, out of the ordinary. He knows his faculties are a bit dinged up, but he’s sure he isn’t hallucinating. This isn’t like his grief fuelled hallucinations of Britt’s voice. No. This is Samira. Flesh and blood and grit.

“Is this where all the cool kids hang out?”

She’s echoing herself. From drinks, after PittFest. He remembers the exact cadence of her voice, her tiredness and thinly veiled nervousness. She sounds more sure of herself now. More secure. It’s enough to get a smile out of him before he blinks his eyes open, almost fearful despite how suddenly and utterly sure he is that she’s real, and then. There she is.

Her curls pulled back by her tortoiseshell claw clip. Her smile, bright and beautiful and so familiar something in his chest cracks right open. Her cheek dimpled and eyes warm and loving. Her fingers are free of rings. Her jeans cling to her legs, green and white striped shirt tied above her belly button. She looks good. (He hopes she knows it.)

“You know it,” he echoes Donnie from years ago.

Her smile almost blinds him, but that’s okay.

Because she’s here. She’s not in Maryland. She came back. His heart races, no longer a steady staccato but a whole symphony.

“A little bird told me I’d find you here.” She can’t stop smiling, leaning towards him even as she pushes herself up off the opposite bench. It’s intoxicating. “Heard maybe you were waiting for somebody?”

A little bird. Who? It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. Nothing could possibly ever be more important than this, than her, than this moment.

His mouth goes dry. Dryer than the Sahara. The closer she steps, he can smell her perfume again. The same, the same, it’s still exactly the same. Coriander and rosemary, lavender and clove, musk and magnolia. Samira, Samira, Samira.

“Yeah. You might know her, actually.”

“Is that right?”

Jack gives a small nod. Just the bounce of his head, but he knows it’s enough by the wattage of her smile. “It is. The future of medicine.”

There’ll be time to ask her the relevant questions later. About who told her, about how she got here, about what all of this means. For now, he’s content with the feel of her lips against his, the taste of the gum she’d chewed on the flight over and her hand sinking into his hair.

***

He tastes like aquaphor and spearmint gum. It probably shouldn’t be as charming as it is, but she’s been in love with him since the first time he paid for an Uber for her patient, so she’ll let it slide.

His hands cradle her face. She knows these hands—knows the strength and gentleness of his fingers, the meat of his palm, the skill with which he can wield a scalpel. She leans heavily into his hold, brushing her nose against his even as she breaks contact with his mouth. 

“The future of medicine, huh?” She examines him as closely as she can without going cross eyed. He looks—the same. “You’re never gonna let that go, are you,” she teases.  

He shakes his head, seemingly mute for a second or two. A grin etches across his face, thumb stroking at her cheekbone. “Of course I’m not,” he breathes. “Some of my finest work.”

Her laugh bursts from her chest, body shaking with the force of it. She feels almost hysterical but she can’t stop.

And he just watches her, that dumbstruck look on his face. She thinks the only reason he believes this isn’t some dream or coma induced hallucination is the fact that he can feel her, and that people walking are staring at them from the sidewalk. 

“How did you know?” He asks after her laugh peters off, a smile on his face that she’s sure is going to end up hurting soon. 

Samira gives a little hum, turning her face until she can scrape her teeth across his palm and press a kiss to the middle of it, buying herself time to think. If his little intake of breath is any indication, something about that will have to be revisited later. Interesting. “I didn’t,” she tells him. “But it turns out our friends, a lot of your co-workers, are a bunch of meddlers.” 

“And that's a surprise to you?” He raised an eyebrow, tilted his head in surprise.

She pressed her lips together, shaking her head. “No, but I certainly wasn’t expecting to hear about you pulling a ‘man who can’t be moved’ on me from Javadi or Cassie.” 

“I was not —” He pauses, before cracking a sheepish smile. His ears are turning red; it’s almost fascinating to see. The last time she’d seen him blush was when he’d been shirtless in the room Orlando Diaz was supposed to be in. “Okay, maybe I was.” 

“Only maybe?” 

“Shut up,” he murmured, while she grinned at him. She felt like a whole new person. One who makes out with her boyfriend partner on benches in public parks and drives across state lines to declare her undying love. (Not that she’d actually done that, yet.) 

“Make me,” she challenged. The joking lilt she’d intended gets lost somewhere between her brain and her tongue.

(Not that she thinks Jack’s going to complain.)

The way his eyes darken makes her want to shiver. “Not here.”

“Oh, so somewhere else, then?” She widens her eyes just a little, pressing her lips together in a failed attempt not to smile. It’s no use, just being around him has made her feel all floaty. Like if he let go, she’d drift off into the sky like a balloon. 

He heaves a sigh as if this is genuinely painful for him. Maybe it is, but Samira can’t bring herself to stop. “You’re trouble.”

She presses a kiss to the distal phalanx on his right hand. “I thought you liked trouble.” It’s a taunt, a tease. Payback, she thinks, for all the things he’s said over the years that she’d never been brave enough to see as meaning anything more, that he’d not been brave (read: selfish) enough to clarify.

“Don’t push it,” he, honest to God, groans. 

She can’t help it, but she giggles. It ends up lost when he leans to kiss her again - soft and slow, almost chaste, a direct antithesis to the banter they’d had going just a minute ago if not for the soft noise he makes into her mouth. His hand drops to the side of her neck, brushing stray hairs away, the other gently squeezing her hip. She eases away from him, almost dazed.

“I forgot to say,” she starts, a little breathless. “I love you.”

There’s a moment where she thinks, somehow, she’s gotten this all horribly wrong, but then. Then he grins, and the whole world lights up. The flecks of gold in his hazel eyes seem to glow from within. “Yeah, I think I could’ve guessed that,” he teases, and then sobers all at once. Something in her chest swells even as she laughs.

His fingers hold her chin, body leaning back just a little so he can really take her in. Really look at her. She’d protest at the loss of his body heat, but she wants to know what he’s about to say. “Samira Mohan, I am completely and utterly in love with you. You have lit up my life from the first day we met, and every day without you has felt like a thousand years. I would follow you to Jupiter and back, just to stay by your side.” 

Her cheeks are starting to ache something fierce and her eyes burn, too. “Only to Jupiter?” She manages to get out, hopeful that she doesn’t sound like she’s about to cry. 

“To Pluto, to the Andromeda galaxy, to wherever the hell you want, baby—” He lifts his hand, strokes under her eyes with the pad of his thumb and she exhales. “Just say the word.”

She knows he doesn’t mean space travel that hasn’t even been invented yet. She knows he means New Jersey, her small one bedroom that she’d shown him over facetime, the hospital she’d told him she hadn’t expected to like so much but does. She knows he’s saying wherever you are, that’s where I want to be. He’d get down on his knees and beg if she’d let him, which she wouldn’t.

She takes a stabilising breath, smile coming easier now. “I would much rather you just take me home. That’s where I’m hoping to be in two months, anyway, if you’ll have me.” Her voice doesn’t tremble and she’s so glad.

She can see the moment it clicks for him. She hadn’t talked with him about attending positions, interviews, anything. She knows he’d assumed she was staying in Jersey, but what did she have to stay for there? His breath seems to leave him in one fell swoop. “Home. I can do that.” He doesn't stammer, but it’s a near thing.

She clears her throat. Untangling from him takes a second (and a few wordless noises of protest), but when she rises to her feet again, her voice is steady and her outstretched hand is steadier. “Good. Come on, then, baby.” 

She watches him secure his prosthetic as quickly as she’s ever seen him do it (and she’d once seen him jump from an on-call room bed to respond to a trauma page, so she’s quite flattered). His hand dwarfs hers but she doesn’t care.

She’s going home.

***