Work Text:
It’s not that Samira doesn’t hear Jack when he comes in. She does — the muted jangle of his keys, the snick of the door closing. She’s just halfway in his fridge, is all, blearily rooting around for Greek yogurt and berries she hopes against hope haven’t begun to fuzz, so it isn’t until he greets her with “well, aren’t you up early,” that she turns and realizes he isn’t alone.
“Is that Baby Jane Doe?”
“The one and only.” Jack shifts the car seat carrier he’d dispatched Nazely to purchase to his other arm, the one already shouldering his go-bag to keep the strap from abrading his injury, just in time for Samira to cozy up to his newly-vacated side and angle her face up for a kiss.
“Hi,” he murmurs against her mouth. Kisses her again after, a moment out of time, so domestic that Samira wonders if she’s still asleep, still dreaming.
“Hi,” she breathes back. She shudders when his lips move to the curve of her jaw in lieu of pulling away entirely. It had been a happy discovery, learning that Jack Abbot was a clinger. She’s glad for it now after the day she’s had. Even with a full eight hours of sleep between her and the worst of it — her mother and Robby, Orlando Diaz and Austin Green — everything still feels as raw as the skin on Jack’s back had been before she’d cleaned and dressed the graze.
Eventually, she takes custody of the carrier so he can shrug off his rucksack and sort through its contents, setting aside what needs to be sterilized or replenished. She knows what Jack’s post-shift routine looks like now, and treasures the knowledge: how he’ll shower next, then fall into bed where she’ll lounge beside him until he falls asleep. How, before succumbing to sleep, he might insist on getting her off at least once, please, honey, simply to ensure she’s awake and alert for the day ahead.
More effective than espresso, she had to concede.
“Wait a minute,” Samira says then, cognition still lagging without the aforementioned caffeine. “CYF still didn’t arrive during the night shift?”
“Nope.” They share a knowing look, one of the ones that drives Parker up the wall when they do it around her. They’ve always been fluent in their own visual language, with no one else privy to the grammar. “No takers on kinship adoption either, so Dana convinced me to take her for the day, buy her some more time and free up the room in Pedes.”
Truthfully, he suspects Dana knows more about his personal life than she’s letting on. That it would be easier for him to play house, for instance, since there’s someone else at home with him, someone whose shifts fall opposite of his. Exactly how she knows, he isn’t quite sure, given that they aren’t living together officially. Not yet, at least. He’s just – taking it slow, doesn’t want to spook her. Especially now, with seemingly every other part of her life giving out from under her, he’s more than content to move unhurriedly, arms outstretched and hands up to show her the heart lines on his exposed palms.
It’s why he hadn’t texted Samira a heads up on his way back with Jane in tow, too. He hadn’t wanted her to feel like he was obligating her to care for a baby on her time off. “Here, you get back to your breakfast,” he says accordingly. “I’ll keep her in view as I grab a quick shower.”
“No, go wind down for real, I’ve got her.” Samira unbuckles Jane and smiles as she wriggles in her hold. “You had a long one, G.I. Joe. Surely you’ve earned yourself more than a military shower. A full five minutes, even,” she says in an exaggerated whisper.
“Dr. Mohan’s got jokes, huh, Janey,” he mutters to the baby, who gurgles in response, but he nonetheless grins and complies; and if he strips a little earlier than he needs to, tugging his shirt over his head from behind before he’s fully rounded the corner, she’s certainly not complaining.
—
The berries, mercifully, are fine.
Samira feels wide, curious eyes on her as she gives one a tentative taste, then nods at the still-right burst of sweet and tart — a little squishy, but they pass muster — and mixes them into a bowl of yogurt, adds in a handful of granola for good measure.
It’s a simple, complimentary mix, not at all like the mix she feels as she holds Jane in the crook of her arm, bouncing her on her hip as she moves them all, breakfast included, to the bedroom. No, it didn’t yield nearly as pleasant a taste in her mouth.
Still, she thinks she’s done a decent job at tamping it all down until Jack returns, towel slung low around his waist and hair slightly darker from the water it’s still holding. He leans easily to take the baby from her, steals a lick of her yogurt to boot, and she feels an epinephrine-like shock of want in her chest at the whole tableau.
“You’re a natural,” she manages around the shape of her heart in her throat. “Did you ever want kids?”
Safer and more nonchalant to frame the question that way than to ask in present tense, she thinks, until Jack gets a wistful look on his face. “Yeah. Annie and I tried casually for a while. Got close once, too,” he says, Adam’s apple bobbing. “It was actually the bloodwork after she miscarried that caught the cancer.”
Samira’s stomach drops.
“Oh my god, Jack. I’m – I’m so sorry, I had no idea.”
“Oh, sweetheart, of course you didn’t, how could you have?” He settles beside her on the mattress and gives her knee a squeeze. Then, carefully — slow, he reminds himself, but braided in with slow is also steady, a need to assure her he isn’t going anywhere — “What about you? Do you want kids?”
She hums, considering. “Yeah, I think so. There’s a lot wrapped up in that, though. I’ve always had a somewhat . . . contentious relationship with my mom, so I don’t really have a model for what this looks like.” There was perceived cultural obligation, too, and her ongoing interrogation of her relationship to gender and femininity, she continues, not for the first time; he’s always been a rapt audience to her musings on her identity. “And then there was the time—”
But to his surprise, she abruptly cuts herself off. “Never mind, it’s stupid.”
“Somehow I doubt that.”
When she eventually speaks again, she can’t meet his gaze. “I really loved my Pedes rotation. I even seriously considered it for my specialty. But there was this guy in my cohort — are you familiar with left-cradling bias? How something like up to ninety percent of women who were studied instinctively hold babies on the left side, because the left side of your body corresponds with the hemisphere of the brain that controls your emotional processing and attunement and so on? Anyway, this guy, he noticed I held babies on my right and brought it up like some sort of gotcha. He even had the nerve to tell me it was something I should work on.”
Jack makes an indignant noise at that but otherwise remains quiet, something Samira is grateful for, because now that she’s begun letting it all leach out, she can’t stop, could probably still perfectly cite the PubMed articles she’d read that evening on lower empathy scores, potential adverse effects on neurodevelopment, and, the sour cherry on top, that participants who reported positive relationships with their own mothers were more likely to exhibit a left-cradling bias than those who didn’t.
“I mean, I know stats aren’t prescriptive, but the idea that I might be predisposed against motherhood really got in my head. I couldn’t even necessarily use my outrage and – and preemptive grief at the insinuation as an indicator of what I wanted, because did I want to be a mother, full stop, or did I want to prove that, despite everything, I could be?” she asks with a thin smile. “That’s a pretty fucked up reason to have a kid, is it not?”
“I think,” Jack begins carefully, his expression soft, “the fact that you’re interrogating yourself this deliberately says more about you than any of that. You don’t need me to tell you, but your heart is your biggest strength, Samira. It always has been.” He huffs. “Clearly he’s the one who needs to worry about empathy. Let’s hope he didn’t actually go into Pediatrics.”
“Derm, actually.”
“Of course,” he deadpans, winning him a twitch of her mouth.
“Back to your question, though,” she murmurs a beat later, nestling further into his side. She exhales the knot in her ribcage, inhales the bergamot of his body wash to ground her. “With the right person . . .”
Jack studies her closely as she trails off. “Yeah?”
From her perch atop his chest, Baby Jane Doe flails a chubby arm out, her fingers catching on one of Samira’s curls. Samira breathes out a laugh, leaning in to make it less of a stretch for the infant, and for a second, she lets herself imagine it: a child with curls of their own, somewhere between his auburn and her deep, deep brown.
“Yeah.”