Chapter Text
The storm had started sometime around four in the morning. Just rain at first. Hard enough to rattle the ambulance bay doors and blur the city lights beyond the windows into smeared ribbons of yellow and red. The kind of weather Pittsburgh got all the time in winter, ugly and inconvenient and cold enough to settle into your joints.
Nobody in the ED had paid much attention. By six-thirty, though, the wind had started screaming around the corners of the building. And by seven, every television mounted around the department had switched from morning news to weather coverage.
“Jesus Christ,” Ellis muttered, stopping beside the nurses station with a stack of discharge papers tucked against her chest. “That snow band got bigger.”
Mateo glanced up briefly from where he was trying to convince the printer to cooperate. “It’s Pittsburgh,” he said. “The weather guys get hard every time a snowflake lands.”
“Mateo,” Lena called without looking up from her paperwork, “inside thoughts.”
“Sorry, mom.”
“You’re not sorry.”
“No, I’m not.”
The printer gave a horrible mechanical shriek. Mateo slapped it once. It immediately started working.
“See?” he announced triumphantly.
Across the department, Shen barked a laugh from inside Trauma Two.
Jack could hear him through the partially open doors while he stripped off bloody gloves at the sink outside the room. Shen sounded exhausted underneath the amusement. Everybody did. It had been one of those shifts that never really settled, one problem bleeding directly into the next.
Two assaults. One overdose. Three psych holds. A septic leg wound that was trying very hard to become a whole-body problem. An elderly dementia patient with a probable fractured hip who’d been waiting nearly four hours for imaging because radiology was backed up again.
And then the MVA that had rolled in just after five. Unrestrained driver. Head injury. Drunk.
Classic.
Jack dried his hands on his scrub pants and leaned briefly against the counter outside trauma, feeling the ache pulling deep through his residual limb. Cold weather always made it worse.
Inside the trauma bay, Shen finally emerged, pushing damp hair back from his forehead.
“You look terrible,” Shen informed him cheerfully.
“You look terminally smug.”
“Yeah, but mine’s genetic.”
Jack snorted softly.
The overhead speakers crackled suddenly. “Attention all staff. Severe weather advisory remains in effect for Allegheny County and surrounding areas. Staff are advised to monitor emergency communication systems for updates regarding travel conditions.”
Nobody reacted. The ED kept moving. A monitor alarm chirped somewhere down the hall. Phones rang.
Someone in triage started yelling about wait times. Normal stuff really.
The double doors to the ambulance bay burst open hard enough to slam against the wall.
A gust of freezing wind tore through the department alongside Robby Robinavitch.
Snow swirled briefly around him before the doors swung shut again.
“Jesus,” Dana said as she marched out of the locker room in fresh scrubs, while clipping her ID badge onto her scrub top. “You look like shit.”
Robby pointed at her with the hand still clutching his coffee. “I just drove through what I’m pretty sure was the beginning of the apocalypse.”
“You are almost late,” Jack said.
Robby looked over at him. Just for a second, the exhaustion in his face shifted into something softer. That tiny private thing they did without meaning to.
“Oh no,” Robby deadpanned. “Whatever will the department do without one middle-aged Jewish man.”
“Collapse structurally,” Jack replied.
Behind Robby, more day staff started filtering in through the ambulance entrance in clumps of wet coats and miserable expressions. Princess arrived first, swearing under her breath while trying to wrestle off soaked gloves. Perlah followed carrying an entire cardboard tray of coffees like a sacrificial offering to the gods of emergency medicine.
Whitaker stumbled in last, hair dripping wet and nose bright red. “I nearly died,” he announced.
Nobody even looked up.
“That’s the spirit,” Santos called from the break room.
Whitaker pointed accusingly at the windows. “The roads are ice.”
“You’re from Nebraska,” McKay said, appearing beside him, shaking rain out of her fringe.
“And?”
“And legally you’re not allowed to complain about weather.”
Whitaker looked genuinely offended.
Jack moved automatically toward the desk as staff drifted into their usual handover rhythm. Papers exchanged hands. Coffee migrated across counters. Half-finished patient notes got shoved around between departments with all the elegance of a sinking ship redistributing deck chairs.
Outside, the wind screamed louder. The windows along the waiting room rattled faintly in their frames. Nobody noticed yet. Or maybe they did. Maybe healthcare workers just got good at pretending they didn’t.
By eight, the first power flicker hit. Tiny. Barely enough to notice.
The lights dimmed once across the department, monitors chirping angrily before stabilising again.
Somewhere near triage, someone swore.
“Excellent,” Dana muttered without looking up from the tracking board. “That feels promising.”
The storm outside had transformed from inconvenient to biblical with alarming speed. Snow hammered against the windows sideways now, driven hard enough by the wind that visibility beyond the ambulance bay had dropped to almost nothing.
Handover continued as normal, exhausted night shift trying to wrap up their work and pass it alone to the slightly less exhausted day staff. Everyone ignored the lights continuing to flicker.
“Backup generators would kick in if there is an issue,” Whitaker said, sounding like he was trying to reassure himself more than anyone else.
“Generators fail,” Santos replied immediately.
Whitaker stared at her. “Why are you like this?”
“Realism builds character.”
Outside, thunder cracked somewhere over the city. Deep enough that the windows trembled faintly in their frames. Jack looked automatically toward the ambulance bay doors. The wind had become monstrous.
Even through reinforced glass, he could hear it now. Not just noise anymore but force. A living thing throwing itself against the hospital from every direction.
The tracking board chimed with another incoming ambulance.
Dana squinted at the screen. “MVC. Three patients.”
“Roads must be fucked,” McKay muttered.
“They were fucked two hours ago,” Donnie replied.
Robby had settled beside the main desk with his coffee and the expression of a man already mentally rearranging disaster plans. Jack knew that look. Knew the tiny crease between Robby’s brows that only appeared when his brain started running six contingencies ahead of everybody else.
“You think this storm will get worse, weatherman?” Jack asked quietly as he moved beside him. Robby had been sending him links to weather warnings since yesterday midday, already worried about the incoming storm.
Robby took a sip of coffee first. “Depends.”
“On?”
“How dramatic the universe feels today.”
Jack snorted softly. Robby glanced sideways at him then, eyes flicking briefly down toward the subtle stiffness in Jack’s posture.
“Leg?”
“Fine, same old same old.”
“Hm.” That noise meant he totally didn’t believe him.
Jack leaned against the counter beside him. “Don’t therapise me before 9am.”
“You married me. That’s legally binding emotional surveillance.”
“Pretty sure that’s not in Pennsylvania law.”
“It is in Jewish law.”
“I don’t think that’s true either.”
Robby smiled faintly into his coffee. The moment shattered when the ambulance bay doors opened again.
Paramedics burst through pushing a stretcher at speed, snow whipping in behind them hard enough to scatter loose papers off the nurses station.
Everybody moved instantly.
The patient was young. Twenties maybe. Blood down the side of his face. One arm bent wrong beneath thermal blankets soaked grey with slush.
“Single vehicle rollover,” one medic rattled off breathlessly. “Road iced over on the bridge. Passenger self-extricated. Driver still trapped with fire rescue.”
“Jesus,” Dana muttered.
“We almost didn’t make it here,” the second paramedic added. “Visibility’s gone to shit.”
Shen and McKay peeled the stretcher away toward Trauma Two while Robby stepped smoothly into command mode.
“Mateo, get radiology moving please. Ellis, can you chase those outstanding labs? Princess, tell triage we’re likely about to get slammed with weather-related stupidity.”
“Already happening,” Princess called back. “I’ve got two falls and a guy who somehow stabbed himself shovelling.”
There was a beat.
“How?” Whitaker asked helplessly.
Princess pointed vaguely upward. “MVS. Man versus snow. Snow won.”
Jack moved automatically to help transfer the rollover patient across to the trauma bed. The second his
prosthetic twisted against the floor wrong, pain shot viciously up through his residual limb. Sharp enough to make his vision blink white for half a second. He hid it automatically. Years of practice. Nobody noticed except Robby, because of course Robby noticed.
Jack could feel his eyes on him immediately.
“You good?” Robby asked quietly while Shen assessed pupils.
“Mmhm.”
Robby knew it was a lie. Jack saw it register in the slight narrowing of his eyes, the almost imperceptible shift in his posture like part of him was already moving closer.
But the department was filling again.
Another ambulance notification chimed overhead. Then another.
Dana looked up sharply at the board. “You’ve gotta be kidding me.” Lena passed Dana a cup of fresh coffee, not before she took a sip herself, just to check it was good enough, of course.
“Pile-up,” Ellis read aloud from the incoming alert. “Multiple vehicles.”
Outside, lightning flashed blue-white through the storm. And this time, when the power flickered, it didn’t come back immediately. The ED dropped into darkness.
Not complete darkness. Emergency lighting snapped on a second later in dim red strips along the ceilings and floors, throwing the whole department into something eerie and submarine-like.
Monitors rebooted. Alarms screamed. Somewhere in the waiting room, somebody panicked.
“Oh, fuck me,” Santos breathed.
Then the generators kicked in fully with a deep mechanical thrum through the building, and partial power surged back across the department. Not everything returned. Half the overhead lights stayed dead. Several computers remained black-screened. The tracking board blinked once before shutting off entirely.
For one suspended moment, the entire ED seemed to pause around the sudden realization that things had just become very real. Then Robby clapped his hands once.
“Alright,” he barked. “Everybody listen up. Stay calm, alright? I’ll find out what's happening.”
---
The hospital administrator sounded deeply unhappy to be alive. His voice crackled through the overhead speakers less than ten minutes after the partial outage, distorted slightly by interference. Robby had been calling all the senior admin staff he could get a number for, only to be told that an announcement was coming.
“Attention all staff. Due to worsening weather conditions and state emergency guidance, PTMC is initiating shelter-in-place procedures for all personnel.”
A collective groan rolled through the ED. Because everybody immediately understood what that meant. Nobody was going home.
“Oh, you have got to be shitting me,” Ellis muttered, dropping her forehead briefly against the nurses station.
Whitaker looked personally betrayed by the concept. “I brought one granola bar.”
“You say that like it’s our fault,” McKay replied.
“I’m too young to die in this hospital.”
Dana pointed at him without missing a beat. “You work emergency medicine. That ship sailed ages ago.”
The speakers crackled again. “All staff currently on-site are advised to remain in designated departments until further notice. Local authorities are discouraging all travel due to rapidly deteriorating road conditions and whiteout visibility.”
Outside, the storm punctuated the sentence by hurling something large against the side of the building.
Everybody flinched.
“…was that a trash can or a civilian?” Mateo asked quietly.
“No free thinkers today,” Princess replied immediately.
Robby scrubbed a hand over his face.
Jack could practically see the calculations happening behind his eyes now. Staffing. Supplies. Fatigue. Beds. Overflow. Shift overlap. How many people they could realistically keep functional if this stretched overnight.
Because it would stretch overnight.
The roads were already impassable. Snow was piling against the ambulance bay doors in thick windswept drifts. EMS radio chatter had devolved into increasingly stressed reports about abandoned vehicles and jackknifed trucks.
The ED had become an island.
“Okay,” Robby said finally, voice cutting cleanly through the noise. “Nobody panic.”
“Too late,” Whitaker said.
“Whitaker, if you survive this shift I’m buying you a sticker chart.” Whitaker looked genuinely touched by that. Robby ignored him and kept going. “We’re treating this like a prolonged incident response. Day shift and night shift are now one horrifying mega-shift until administration figures out how not to kill us all.”
“Can we unionise against weather?” Mateo asked.
“No.”
“Coward.”
A tired laugh rippled around the desk. Tiny.
Jack leaned against the counter beside Robby, arms folded loosely while the rest of the staff started immediately doing what healthcare workers always did during disaster.
Adapting.
Princess was already reorganising triage flow with Dana.
Ellis and McKay had commandeered an empty hallway workstation to start figuring out sleeping arrangements and supply counts.
Shen was arguing with facilities over the phone about blankets.
“‘Limited availability’ my ass,” Shen snapped. “This hospital has seventeen thousand blankets. I’ve seen them breeding in storage.”
Across the department, someone wheeled out two ancient cots from disaster preparedness storage.
One collapsed immediately.
Santos stared at it. “That feels symbolic.”
The waiting room lights flickered again. A child somewhere near triage started crying.
Jack’s residual limb throbbed harder now with the dropping temperature and hours on his feet. Deep grinding pain buried into the bone. He shifted subtly, trying to relieve pressure without drawing attention.
Robby noticed anyway. “You need to sit down,” Robby said quietly beside him.
“I’m working.”
“No, your shift is done, you are to sit down. You’re limping.”
Jack glanced down automatically before scowling. “Traitorous leg.”
“Hm.”
Jack shot him a look. “Don’t ‘hm’ me in public.”
“It’s not public. We’re trapped in a weather apocalypse together. Social rules no longer apply.”
“That’s not how apocalypse rules work.”
Robby looked genuinely thoughtful for a second. “I feel like they should.”
Then, softer, low enough nobody else could hear:
“You hurting bad?”
There it was.
The real question tucked beneath the casual one.
Jack exhaled slowly through his nose. “Manageable.” Another lie. Not a huge one. But enough.
Robby leaned slightly closer without looking at him directly. Their shoulders bumped briefly beneath the chaos of the department. “You don’t have to impress me, you know.”
Jack looked away first. That was the problem, really.
He never knew how to explain that letting Robby care for him sometimes felt unbearably intimate. Worse than sex. Worse than vulnerability. This quiet unwavering attentiveness that asked for nothing in return.
Jack had spent most of his life surviving by becoming useful. Robby loved him even when he wasn’t. Still did, somehow.
It occasionally felt like standing too close to the edge of something enormous.
“Abbot!”
Jack looked up automatically.
Dana tossed him a bundle of blankets hard enough that he barely caught them one-handed.
“Congrats,” she announced. “You’re in charge of building the world’s saddest sleepover.”
Behind her, the staff room doors had been propped open.
People were already dragging together chairs and spare cots with the grim determination of soldiers preparing trenches.
Princess had somehow acquired an armful of pillows.
“Where did you even get those?” Ellis asked.
Princess clutched them tighter. “Mind your business.”
Whitaker appeared holding a microwave mac and cheese and three packets of saltines like post-apocalyptic treasure.
“I found supplies.”
Mateo looked at the cup in horror. “That expired during the Obama administration.”
Whitaker hugged it protectively. “Food is food.”
Another violent gust slammed snow against the windows.
The lights flickered once more.
And somewhere deep in the hospital, backup generators groaned like something old and overworked trying very hard not to die.