Chapter Text
Any resident of Pittsburgh knew that the month of January was as unforgiving as it was cold. And it was freezing. The winter after Christmas brought three things to the city: overcast skies, nine inches of snow, and patches of black ice. With the holiday spirit rinsed down the drain, people brought in festivals and even culinary events to breathe life back into the subdued city.
But try as they may, whatever melancholy was pushed out of the streets made its way into the Pittsburgh Medical Trauma Center. In the dumpsters out back laid discarded Christmas wreaths, string of lights, and cheap, shiny wall decor that Gloria insisted on adorning the hospital with.
Robby called it a waste of department funds.
Dana said it was a sad attempt at nostalgia – incandescent lights had long been replaced with LEDs, meaning the wistfulness of the old Christmas of the 2000s could no longer be revived.
Jack said it made the kids smile. After all, how bad could it be if stockings on the wall made a terrified child relax in whatever gurney they had been brought on, in whatever chair they had sat in watching the staff treat their family member?
Samira said it made her smile, too.
Contrary to popular belief, January in the Pitt did not mean a fresh start. A new year was not, what people called it, a reset button. Instead, the chairs were full all year-round. The holiday spirit did not discriminate between the weak and the violent, the innocent and the guilty. So despite the changes in the season, Pittsburgh Medical Trauma Center was immune to all of it.
Maybe that was one of the reasons people stayed for so long. Not because of an obligation to serve, or a hippocratic oath, but because the hospital remained a constant. Fixed, uninterrupted. The only thing that changed was the outerwear the staff came in with, or the weather that blew hair out of claw clips and braids.
January brought slick floors and cold wind and red noses, except they felt more miserable and bothersome compared to how back in December people interpreted them as a sign that Christmas was around the corner.
Back in December, people expressed their excitement over the snow, showing pictures of their kids and dogs playing in it. Ellis showed off a photo of her Christmas tree, having chopped it down herself with her partner at a tree farm. Whitaker and Santos took turns presenting photos of their cat staring out the window into the snow. Dana even revealed a rare photo of her kids making a snowman in her front yard. Samira provided photographic evidence of her artificial Christmas tree that everyone doubted she would have time to build. Langdon even shared a photo of his kids drinking hot chocolate in matching reindeer pajamas.
Back in December, the Christmas spirit wormed its way behind Robby’s ribcage and wrapped around his heart, for the Chief of the Emergency Department indulged in a rare treat and visited the Pediatrics Wing in a Santa Claus suit. Dana had assumed Gloria had something to do with it. Everyone else knew that Heather Collins had managed to convince him.
Now the red fleece costume lay among the discarded wreaths in the dumpsters.
Back in December, people kept themselves warm with the thrill of holiday spirit. A department-wide Secret Santa had swept through the ED, with names drawn out of a kidney basin. Mid-shift there would be hushed whispers from people asking for hints as to what their drawn name would like for a gift.
Now, kidney basins were filled with regret and regurgitated alcohol, greasy bar food, and the new wave of stomach flu. January meant there was no holiday spirit to warm the bones after a trek through the cold. The first month of the year meant that instead of a reset button, there was a return to the mundane where nothing surprised them anymore.
On a colder night than usual, the night crawlers were worried about the patches of black ice that had crept onto the road. It was another unsurprising occurrence that even the freshest medical student in the building knew all too well. But it didn’t make it any less dangerous.
“She’s late.” Dana’s voice snapped Jack out of charting, who looked over the computer screen at her.
“Who?” It was a stupid question, designed to feign innocence, but instead he was guilty of knowing who exactly was not in his emergency department.
“Mohan.” Dana looked towards the bay doors as if the name on her lips alone would be enough to make the woman walk in. “She’s usually never late.”
“Shen was late, too. He blamed it on black ice. I’m sure the same could be said for Doctor Mohan.”
“She was working a double, wasn’t she?” Dana asked. “I don’t know why she could have just crashed in an on-call room in between shifts.”
Jack shrugged. “Maybe she wanted to go home and eat something that wasn’t hospital food or junk from the vending machines.”
Shen passed the Hub, slurping down his iced coffee and ignoring the drips of condensation that trailed behind him on the floor. “Santos said a kid threw up on her earlier today. She might have gone home to change.”
That earned a wince from Jack. “Tough luck. The flu doesn’t discriminate between the day shift and the night crawlers. I’m sure we’ll get a couple of sick kids tonight, too.” He glanced towards the clock on the wall. It was 7:08pm. Samira Mohan was many things, but late was not one of them.
He wondered if he should text her. Or call her. He had her number, due to the various work group chats that lived in his iMessage and occasionally blew up his phone when he was trying to sleep. Just to make sure she’s okay.
But then Dana already had her phone to her ear, shrugging on her coat as she listened to the drone of Samira’s ringtone. Jack was close enough to hear her voicemail chime and frowned at the same time the charge nurse did.
“Straight to voicemail.”
“She might be driving,” Jack offered, as if it would appease the nagging feeling slowly building in his ribcage. “If she isn’t here by 7:15, I’ll call her.”
“Text me when she gets here. Just so I know she made it.” Dana slung her bag over her shoulder and gave Jack an encouraging smile. “Have a good shift, Abbot.”
“Get some sleep, Dana.”
Samira Mohan was not standing in the Hub by 7:15. Instead, by 7:45 Jack had left her three missed calls and two voicemails. Normally that sort of behavior would label him as an overbearing boss, but it was January and the city was vicious and cold and the roads were slick and Samira was late for work and Jack–
Well, Jack Abbot was many things but he was most definitely not a hopeless romantic. Any sentimentality on the idea surrounding love and soulmates had been lost on him when his wife died ten years ago. When Jane died, so did the part of him that believed in love after loss. After all, he had seen people remarry. Had known that the idea of such a thing was possible and genuine and–
And Jack Abbot was convinced he would never love again.
Until he met Samira Mohan on her third day of first-year residency when their paths crossed at shift change. It had been a cold day in February, an unusual time for a first-year resident to begin their four-year stint, but then he learned Samira was some sort of medical school prodigy who had been fast-tracked through her intern year because of how much promise she had shown.
Over the next few years, Jack Abbot started to learn more things about Samira.
One: She preferred matcha with vanilla cold foam over any other beverage.
Two: She had a record player and a thousand vinyls, and always put on ‘The Art of Loving’ by Olivia Dean every time she got home from work.
Three: Fall was her favorite season, but she always left her Christmas lights up until January. She said it helped keep the Christmas spirit alive during the horrible liminal space between the holidays and spring.
Four: She picked at her cuticles when she was anxious. Jack always knew it was at an all-time high when she came in with scabbed-over fingertips.
Five: She was an only child and her father died when she was thirteen.
Now Jack Abbot wasn’t in love with Samira Mohan by normal standards. He had convinced himself that he was too old for crushes, too battle-scarred to touch something delicate again, too worn out by funeral planning to even entertain the idea of finding a new beginning, of pursuing something new when his wedding band served as a constant reminder of what he had lost.
But he had to admit there was something about the curly-haired resident that made his chest clench every time she smiled at him. Every time she sought him out specifically for a consult, for a second set of eyes, Jack felt his palms grow slick with sweat and he was sure Samira bore witness to his pupils dilating every time he looked at her.
It was a wonder he managed to hold it together during Pittfest. It had been a horrible day that never should have happened, and yet, Jack harbored fond memories from working alongside Samira in the red zone. Her incredulous laugh from when he brought back the police officer from the brink of death still rang in his ears. The way she had smelled of jasmine and vanilla when she asked what else Jack had in his go-bag and brushed past him still lingered in his nasal orifices.
It had been a horrible day that never should have happened, and yet Jack would do it all over again if it meant he could guide Samira through threading a pigtail catheter with a faith similar to that of a practiced Catholic believing in Mary and the saints.
It was the same faith that had him thanking God that Samira had been the one to walk in on him half-naked and reaching for the bullet wound he had received on July Fourth. He wasn’t sure he would be able to live it down if it had been Michael Robinavitch or Melissa King or Dana Evans or even Frank Langdon instead.
Instead, he had seen the heat rise to her neck, seen the way her eyes softened when he told her he would pay for the Uber to deliver medical supplies to Samira’s patient, seen the soft and teasing smile that ghosted her lips when she told him she was doing what he clearly couldn’t and helped put him back together like one of the king’s horsemen.
Now he was out a hundred and seventeen dollars but had gained a sneaking suspicion that just maybe…Samira liked him, too. He felt stupid even entertaining the idea. After all, he was too old for crushes.
But it was the same sneaking suspicion that buried itself in the hollow of his chest and screamed at him every time Samira slid a spare coffee over to him. It shrieked at him whenever Samira emailed him a compelling case study at three in the morning when she claimed she couldn’t sleep. It shouted at him to wake up when Samira mirrored his body language during consults, angling her body towards him in the way his psychology minor from undergraduate school told him that maybe he wasn’t so stupid for entertaining the idea.
One night, when he was on his second double of the week and was running dangerously low on caffeine, he could have sworn he saw Samira’s pupils dilate when he called her name from across the Hub. But he insisted he was seeing things. (He hadn’t.)
It was the same sort of Catholic faith in Samira that had him tapping his foot nervously on the floor waiting for her to walk through the bay doors. Surely she would run in red-nosed and winded from the cold and blame her tardiness on a traffic jam.
But Samira never showed up, and yet, the emergency department did not seem to care. The very thought irritated him, made him more biting than usual. People brushed his clipped remarks off as leftover holiday stress, his pronounced jaw clench interpreted as residual limb pain from the cold.
But people noticed the Samira-shaped vacancy in the building. They asked each other where she was, usually looking around for the curly haired resident and frowned when someone told them she never showed up for her shift. Ellis wondered if maybe she had slept through her alarm. Shen just slurped his coffee. Lena finally called Langdon and asked him if he could pull an unexpected double.
The constant reminder of her absence made Jack nauseous. It didn’t help that Langdon now stood at his side when it should have been Samira helping him run a code on a sixteen-year old who had fallen through ice trying to cross a pond.
He was seriously contemplating calling the police for a welfare check on her when the phone rang. It wasn’t his phone, but the red touch-tone in the Hub. It made everyone in a twenty-foot radius snap their heads towards the sound, knowing all too well what a call from it meant.
There was no use in praying for a mild casualty incident – the damage was already done if the red phone was shrieking at them to answer. Lena picked up the receiver and Jack watched her from where he had just come out of a room after stabilizing a patient who had fallen from a roof trying to take down Christmas lights.
The patient in Trauma Room One would live. However, judging from Lena’s face, it was about to be a very long night spent wrestling with angels to keep more patients earthside.
Lena exchanged a few words and hung up, searching for Jack. But he was already at her side, brow knitted in concern and holding bated breath.
“There was an MVC on the highway. Dispatch says there were four cars involved and all passengers are headed our way. Ten victims total, but two were DOA.”
Jack did four things:
One: He activated the Massive Transfusion Protocol, knowing he would need all of the blood they could get their hands on.
Two: He ordered his night crawlers to stock their trauma bays with laryngoscopes, chest tube kits, and ventilators.
Three: He sent an advance order for x-ray and called Walsh to prep at least three operating rooms.
Four: He called Samira for the fourth time.
Samira never picked up.
Jack let out a frustrated groan from where he had retreated to the bathroom to apply medical-grade lubricant to his residual limb, knowing that if he didn’t prep his leg it would be shrieking at him for relief by the end of his shift.
But then the sirens wailed from the ambulance bay, where the doctors in triage were waiting to start the tug-of-war between life and death, and Jack had no choice but to put his hand on the rope.
His first patient was a forty-seven year old woman who was talking and had equal pupil reactions. He learned that her name was Olivia, she had two dogs at home, and she was traveling alone when the car in front of her hydroplaned on a patch of ice and spun out.
“It all happened so fast,” she was saying as Jack took her pulse, gloved fingers pressed against her wrist. “I couldn’t stop in time, and then I heard the noise before I felt the impact, and then all I saw was white-”
“Olivia,” Jack interrupted her. “I need you to take a couple of deep breaths. You’re safe now, but my team and I have to do a full body assessment to rule out internal bleeding and broken bones.”
“But nothing hurts,” Olivia said.
“Your body is pumping adrenaline as a part of your fight-or-flight response. When it wears off, you will start to feel pain. We need to make sure we treat your pain before your body goes into shock.” Mateo began to cut Olivia’s clothes off, which elicited a soft whimper from the patient.
“Can someone please call my husband?” she asked. “He’s at home with our eighteen year old. Jacob. My son’s name is Jacob. He’s sick, he came home from school with some sort of stomach bug and I ran out to get him some soup and I don’t think Ethan – that’s my husband’s name. I don't think Ethan even knows what’s happened-”
“Oliva, take a deep breath. We will call your husband as soon as possible. But right now, we’re more worried about you-”
Then Lena stuck her head into the room. “Jack, we have more patients rolling in.”
Ellis was already taking over. “Go, Abbot. We got this.”
The next two hours (Or maybe it was three? Jack lost track of time quickly despite looking at his watch to count heartbeats.) were spent assessing three toddlers who suffered severe whiplash, an elderly couple with deep seatbelt bruises, a young man with a cracked sternum from colliding with his steering wheel when his airbag failed, a sixteen year old girl with a broken nose who wailed about scarring and reminded Jack of the sisters from White Chicks (2004), and the man who hydroplaned on the patch of ice and suffered a traumatic brain injury as a result of the cars behind him colliding into his drivers’ side door.
Jack had called his time of death after an intense seizure resulted in organ failure. He stood in Trauma Bay Two watching a nurse pull the white sheet over his head, surrounded by bloody gauze and gloves.
“You alright, Jack?” Shen asked him. Jack let out a weary breath.
“I suppose I should be thankful we saved more than we lost,” he said.
“But it’s harder when there’s no one to blame for this mess,” Shen sighed. “No drunk driver, no road rage…nothing.”
“Just a patch of black ice,” Jack said bitterly as he snapped off his gloves. He fished out his phone from his pocket, turning on the lock screen so he could see if anyone (Samira) had left him any messages.
Nothing.
Jack felt his stomach churn. It was 10:47pm. If Samira had slept through her alarm (which she never did) she would have answered by now.
“Lena!” Jack called, leaving the trauma bay after a call to the morgue. “You haven’t heard from Mohan, have you?”
Lena shook her head from where she was filling out discharge paperwork for the toddlers in South Fifteen. “No, nothing. I’m sorry. I’m sure she’s alright. Last I heard, she was coming off her third double just this week. Poor girl is probably exhausted and slept-”
“Through her alarm, yeah,” Jack said tightly, looking towards the bay doors as if that alone would be enough to materialize Samira out of thin air. “If she calls, you come tell me.”
Lena frowned, and Jack didn’t know what that meant. “Sure thing. How’s the patient?”
“Dead.” Jack dragged a hand down his face, exhausted now that he had stopped moving for the first time in three hours. “The morgue is coming to get his body soon. He’ll be moved into the family room until then.”
Lena nodded. “I’ll let them know when they stop by. You look like you could use some coffee. Why don’t you just take a minute and sit in the-”
“I can’t,” Jack said. “I’m too wound up to even think about sitting down right now. I’m going to go check on Olivia. Is her husband here yet?”
“He arrived thirty minutes ago.”
Jack turned to make his way to West Thirteen when he heard the ambulance doors slide open.
“We got another one!” he heard someone shout, and he whipped his head around to see three paramedics wheeling in a gurney.
One paramedic had his hand on an ambu-bag, the second steering the gurney into the emergency department, and the third straddling the mattress as he performed CPR on the patient.
Jack felt a weight akin to a semi-truck slam into his chest.
He would recognize those dark curls anywhere.