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Sleep hadn’t meant much to Jack Abbot for most of his adult life. When he was deployed, he’d gotten used to sleeping whenever and wherever he could get it; in broad daylight, in the back of an armored vehicle, in the middle of the desert. Necessity had been the best kind of bedfellow.
It got harder, after Caroline died. He’d managed to adjust back to sleeping at night, with her beside him. Even if he did feel like a shell of a man, missing half a leg and the only thing that had ever given him purpose. He stared up at the ceiling for more hours than he could count, but sleep always found him eventually.
That inevitability left when Caroline did. It’s what drew him to night shifts; he couldn’t count the dots on his ceiling any longer. He needed to do something, fix something, feel something except the vague, chasmic dread that licked at the corners of his vision when he sat in a dark room and tried to convince himself that it was safe to close his eyes.
He liked night shifts. He was good at night shifts. The patients were different. Drunker, more scared, sometimes more critical, medically speaking. He liked to think that if this darkness in him was good for something, it was that he could harness it to show patients and their loved ones and maybe even his colleagues that the dark didn’t have to be so scary.
The only thing was, he had something worth living for in the daytime now.
He and Samira had been…seeing each other, quietly, for a few months now. It only took years of following her around like a lovesick puppy for her to notice and take pity on him. He wasn’t certain he deserved it, but he was smart enough not to question it. It had been a blissful few months, but it was challenging; there were more days than he liked when the only time he saw her was at hand-off, like passing ships. They’d elected to stay private; Samira was still a resident, for at least another few months, and while no one with any sense would ever make such an accusation, the last thing Jack wanted was for anyone to even assume that Samira had gotten all that she deserved for anything other than her skills and her intellect. She had the best brain of anyone he’d ever known, and he wanted everyone to see that first, before anything else they may learn about her. He’d sent her off maybe 45 minutes ago, managed to sneak into the locker room behind her to give her a quick kiss before she left the hospital behind, but he was still thinking about her.
Was she going to her apartment, or his? She had a key to his place, and a drawer full of her own things there, but she only really used it if one of them had the next day off and they’d get to spend some time together. He wished she’d use it more; he wanted her to leave piles of mail on his kitchen counter and her coffee cup in his sink and her hair on the wall of his shower (he thought this was disgusting, but he also couldn’t bring himself to wipe them away when she did come over and wash her hair. He liked the reminder that she’d been here, once she was gone).
Lena’s voice distracts him from his reverie. “Trauma incoming,” she calls confidently across the E.D. “There was an incident on a city bus. Unclear exactly what happened, sounds like a stabbing? There’s also a suspected MI and some minor crowd-related injuries,” she relays from the phone, though it sounds like no one really knows what they’re in for.
“Heard, thank you, Lena,” Jack barks, gesturing for Shen and Ellis and gowning up to head to the ambulance bay.
The first patient shows up, a man in his 30’s, who’s clearly been stabbed. One of the EMTs is applying firm pressure to a dressing on his abdomen that’s turning crimson.
“Derrick Rhone, 38-years old, stab wound to the abdomen,” the EMT announces.
“What happened?” Shen asks as he steps up to the gurney.
“Some guy on the bus had a knife. Didn’t seem in touch with reality. Passengers on the bus subdued him until help arrived. There’s more coming,” the EMT explains. Shen takes the first victim in, and the perpetrator comes in the next ambulance.
“I can take him,” Ellis offers. He’s limp in the bed now; likely sedated by the EMTs and cuffed to the bed by the police.
“No, I’ve got this one,” Jack says. If this guy came to, he wanted to be the one in the room with him. And if something like this happened on day shift, he hoped the attendings there would keep the residents and the interns away from somebody like this.
Which isn’t rational, he thinks as he wheels the patient to BH-1. But he can’t help how he feels. With Lena’s help, he gives the gentleman a physical exam. He’s a bit scuffed up from the altercation, but seems otherwise alright. They’ll just have to hold onto him until he’s awake and they can assess his mental status.
He’s stepping out of the room when he hears a voice he recognizes.
“I did three rounds of compressions in the field and got a faint pulse back,” Dr. Mohan explains breathlessly as she continues to administer CPR to a lifeless patient on a gurney being pushed by EMTs and Ellis towards an open room. “I lost the pulse again as the ambulance arrived.”
“Samira?!” Jack calls across the E.R., crossing through the hub just in time to get into the trauma room with them. Running, he realizes when he has to skid to a stop in front of the gurney. He feels his prosthetic scrape awkwardly against his leg from the force of it. He never calls her Samira here, she’s always Dr. Mohan, but the sight of her on a gurney, even if she was totally in her element and apparently unharmed, had taken his breath away.
“Oh, good,” she says as she carries on with CPR, looking relieved to see him. “This is the bus driver. They gave him a shock in the ambulance but no rhythm,” she explains, as if he’d have no other questions, like are you okay or what in god’s name happened out there or what the fuck were you doing on a goddamn city bus at 10pm.
“You need to swap out. You’re too exhausted to give any more good compressions,” Jack says, casting his questions aside for later and trying as hard as he can to focus on the patient. He places his hands on Samira’s hips and lifts her off the gurney so Ellis can get the EMTs’ electrode pads plugged into the hospital’s machine. Dr. Mohan crumples with a cry of pain the second she’s set on solid ground. “Samira,” he hisses out, holding her up by her forearms.
“My ankle,” she realizes. Lena materializes with a wheelchair and Abbot settles her into it. Ellis flicks her eyes over to the two of them; Dr. Abbot seemed more stressed than she expected. A trauma like this was pretty run-of-the-mill, even if one of the dayshift docs had a sprain.
“You’re bleeding,” Jack says, looking her up and down and realizing how much blood there is. Her shirt sleeve, her face, her abdomen. Fuck. That was bad. Why hadn’t he examined her the second he saw her? What was he thinking?
Ellis looks over again; Abbot is white as a ghost, and while an ankle was basically nothing, blood was serious business. “Go, I got this. Couldn’t get enough of us, huh Mohan? Decided to check in yourself?” Ellis manages to tease as she commands the code of the bus driver.
“I’m alright,” Samira insists breathlessly even as Jack and Lena move her to her own room and lift her into a bed without so much as asking.
“I can’t tell where the blood is coming from,” Jack mutters, more to himself than to her. “Honey, I’m sorry, but I have to cut this off,” he says, reaching for his shears and slicing her underscrub right down the middle despite her protests, leaving her sports bra behind to protect her dignity. He hears her protestations in an abstract sense, knows that she’s yelling at him to stop, but he can’t really make out any words over the pounding of his heart in his ears. Lena’s sectioning her hair, looking for any bumps on her head or any cuts there that could explain all this blood.
“It’s not here,” he says, looking at the smooth and unharmed expanse of her stomach, the little freckle to the left of her navel that he’d kissed a few mornings earlier before she left for work. He starts looking her over again, not as a partner but as a doctor, and finds what he’s looking for, a superficial cut on her bicep. The knife had torn through her underscrub shirt before it broke her skin.
“Did you get stabbed?” He asks, working her arm out of the sleeve so he can take care of it.
“No. I don’t think so, at least,” she tells him, not nearly confident enough for his liking. “Just caught in the crossfire,” she explains, pausing for a moment, as if she’s not sure if she wants to admit the next part. “The guy was sitting in the row behind me.”
“Jesus fuck, Samira,” Jack says, feeling his stomach churn as she recalls it. He looks
her over thoroughly, but doesn’t find any other cuts; most of the blood on her clothes wasn’t hers.
“I got a little mowed down when everyone was running towards the door. That’s what happened to my ankle, I think.” She says. She’s wincing, now, as Lena twists and gently prods at the aforementioned injury.
“And why weren’t you running towards the door, hm?” Jack asks, narrowing his eyes as he looks down at her. It’s clearly the question of a boyfriend and not a doctor. Lena, now confident that Dr. Mohan is out of danger, steps out to assist with another patient.
“Because I was running to see who needed help,” she admits, having the good grace to at least look a little sheepish. Jack sits in the exam stool to tenderly apply antiseptic to her wound.
“You can’t ever do that again,” Jack whispers gruffly.
“I’m a doctor, Jack.” She reminds him, hissing a little when the medicine stings against her open skin.
“You work in a hospital, Samira, not in a combat zone,” he reminds her in turn.
“You would have done the same thing I did,” she insists.
“It’s different,” he dismisses.
“Different how?” Samira challenges.
“Because it just is!” he barks, and she has the good grace not to rebut it. For a moment, at least. He finishes cleaning out her gash and bandages it up. “You need an x- ray,” he remarks, pulling a blanket out of a cabinet and placing it over her. There were already goosebumps over her arms and stomach from the clinically cold air being pumped into the E.D.
“The bus driver would have died if I hadn’t done anything,” Samira points out gently as she settles into the blanket. “What kind of a doctor would I be if I just let him die?”
“We’re supposed to ensure our own safety first. So we don’t become the patients,” he chides, but there’s nothing behind it now, when he’s looking at her tucked into a starchy hospital blanket and thinking about climbing in next to her and wrapping his arms around her, locking the door to keep everything else, keep her safe in here with him.
“Is he gonna be okay?” She asks gently, like she’s afraid to hear the answer. She knows the stats on civilian-performed CPR, but she had to hope that she was a little better.
“I’ll check on him for you,” he promises. “Why were you even on the bus? Where’s your car?” He asks. She’d walk to his apartment sometimes, if she was coming from work, but he only lived a few blocks from here. He would have driven her home if she needed a ride. He would have had to ask Robby to cover him for an hour, but he would have done it, without question.
“My car’s at home. I always take the bus to work, so long as I’m not running late and the weather’s okay,” she says, as if it requires no additional explanation, but Jack is less convinced.
He makes a confused face. “Why? It has to take you twice as long to get here by bus.”
“Our patients need the bus,” she points out to him. “Not to mention our own environmental and dietary staff, who make a fraction of what we make and commute further than we do,” she says astutely. “If people don’t use the bus line that comes out here, the city’ll get rid of it eventually. People will stop going to their specialists appointments and their follow-ups, and they’ll get sicker. And then they’ll end up back in our E.D, with an ambulance bill to boot,” she explains, as if he doesn’t understand the social determinants of health, as if he’s never thought about how much it could take to keep a person healthy in a system that wasn’t set up to support them.
Jack just shakes his head, and leans in to press a kiss to the crown of hers. “Are you okay?” he finally asks her. “Did you hit your head, does it hurt anywhere else?” He asks gently.
“I’m okay,” she promises, reaching for his hand and looking up at him.
“No more city bus at night,” Jack tells her.
“Jack–” she starts, but he cuts her off.
“That’s a boyfriend statement, so if you want to fight, it’s a boyfriend fight and we have to have it at home,” he stops her in her tracks, citing some silly rules she’d insisted upon setting when they started dating and had never found occasion to use. “But since you’re already getting boyfriend privileges, I am going to bump you to the front of the line for an X-ray, and then I will be taking you home myself,” he insists.
“It’s the middle of your shift, and it’ll take you 45 minutes to get to my apartment and back,” she counters.
“But only ten to get to mine,” He points out, taking off his gloves and tossing them in the biohazard bin. “Do you have clean clothes in your locker?” He asks, pulling the ruined underscrub off of the gurney and peeking at the tag. He’d order her a new one, and he’d have to do it without saying anything, because she’d insist that he didn’t need to.
“Why would I be going to your apartment?” She asks, puzzled. “You’ll just have to come back here.”
“No stairs at my place,” he points out as he pulls the wheelchair from earlier back up to the side of her bed.
Samira’s mouth formed a straight line; she hated when he was right, but she lived in a second-floor walk up, which was normally not a problem, but certainly would be with her ankle as swollen and painful as it was.
“Come on, you can be just as stubborn about it in the elevator,” Jack says, helping her back into the wheelchair so he can get her to her x-ray. “Seriously, do you have clothes here? I don’t want to make you put on a gown,” he asks again, knowing she’d find it demoralizing to be pushed around the hospital like a patient.
“I don’t have anything here,” she pouts. “Just give me the damn gown,” she grumbles.
“Hold on,” he says. “Let me just check on your patient and I’ll be right back,” he tells her.
She likes that he refers to the bus driver as her patient, even though Ellis had done all of his care within the hospital walls and she wasn’t even clocked in. Maybe he was doing it to distract her from the fact that actually she was the patient in this scenario, but she didn’t care. He was doing it for her, and she knew that.
He comes back a few minutes later, tosses her a sweatshirt. “They got him back. He’s up in the ICU but stabilizing by the moment,” he tells her as she unfolds the sweatshirt. It’s one of his, a quarter zip with camo on the sleeves. It smells like him. “Good save, Dr. Mohan,” he smiles down at her as she pulls his sweatshirt over her head.
He places his hands on the back of the wheelchair to push her out of the room, but she reaches back and puts her hand over his. “Wait, hold on,” She stops him.
“You okay?” He asks quickly, stepping around to look at her, make sure she was alright, assess her vitals if he needed to.
“Yeah, it’s just—” she starts and then stops. “Shouldn’t you have a med student bring me up or something? Don’t you think people’ll get suspicious, if you’re giving me all this extra attention?” She asks, her brow furrowed as she looks up at him, and he can’t help but laugh.
“Cat’s out of the bag, sweetheart,” he tells her. “Shen and half the nurses had their ear pressed up against the door when I walked out of here; I’m told I lost my cool a little bit when you came in on a gurney, and apparently also I wasn’t very subtle to begin with.”
“We did good, I thought,” Samira says, trying to put the pieces together, remember a time when they could have been caught out. “We were subtle!” She insists.
“No, you weren’t!” Shen calls from the hallway as he passes by. “Go on, X-ray’s waiting for you,” he tells Abbot. “I’ll cover while you get her home.”