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…on jupiter and mars
First Thursdays with Cortez and Nielsen are always the same.
They grab a pitcher of whatever's cheapest, a holdover from their service days when they were young and broke, nostalgia through pain or some shit like that. They take a booth if they can get one, or they’ll loiter and glare at some kids until they can steal one.
Cortez is giving some knee surgery update that no one asked for. Jack half-listens, rotates his pint glass a quarter turn, rotates it back.
"—and they've got me doing these check-ups at the VA," Cortez is saying. "Part of some research study. Young doctor, real thorough. I mean thorough, like, she must've talked to me for forty minutes. Didn't rush a single thing." He shakes his head, genuinely impressed. "She's here, actually. Back corner."
Jack doesn't look up right away. He takes a drink. Sets the glass down.
"Which one?" Nielsen asks, already craning.
"Dark hair, sitting by the—"
Later, he’ll question what made him look. But right then, Jack just does it.
He stops twisting his cup.
His pulse thuds in his ears. Once. Twice. Then it’s replaced by a ringing sound, high pitched and fucking awful.
Samira Mohan is sitting in a booth in the back corner of Verdetto’s with a half-empty glass of water and her chin in her hand and she is here, in Pittsburgh, in this bar, at most thirty feet from him, and Jack's chair scrapes back hard against the floor before he's conscious he’s even moving.
His prosthetic catches the table leg. Cortez's beer sloshes, and Jack steadies it with one hand, already upright, already angled toward her, and for a second he just stands there, frozen between the booth and the rest of his life.
"O—One second," he says.
Cortez and Nielsen exchange a look.
"Abbot." Nielsen grins. "That woman is way out of your league."
"No, I know." Jack can barely hear himself. "I just need to—"
The bar is twenty steps long, maybe, give or take, and he takes them without processing a single one. He is aware of the following things, and the following things only: his heart rate (fast), the number of people between him and the back corner (six: a duo and a group of four), his hands (numb), and the fact that Samira's hair is longer than it used to be (and soft, he can tell).
She has her phone face-down on the table. She's alone. She's got a fucking notebook in front of her and she’s writing something, a practical blue pen in her hand, and of course she's working, of course she brought a notebook to a dive bar.
He stops at her table abruptly and sways, momentum thwarted.
She looks up, and her expression is polite at first and then wide-eyed, and the pen makes a mark on the paper when it falls from her grasp.
"Jack?"
"Hey." His voice sounds far away. He’s still hearing the ringing sound. "Hi. Yeah. It’s me."
"What are you— Oh my god." She's standing now, her writing forgotten, but his eyes are still on it: a notebook, shit, she hasn’t changed at all. So it’s out of the corner of his eye that he sees her hands twitch, and then suddenly she’s stepping forward and his gaze is snapping up and she’s got her arms around him, and the ringing stops.
He is very still for a half-second. Maybe a whole one. Then his arms close around her and his chin drops to her shoulder and she is warm. She smells different, some mystery flower and spice.
Well, half-different — the floral note is familiar — but that might as well be totally different, because it’s been two years, and he doesn’t really want to think about what he still remembers.
She pulls back first. Her hands stay on his arms, just above his elbows. He swallows. He tries to speak, and he doesn’t speak.
"I can't believe you're here," she says. "I mean— I can't believe I'm here. I mean—" She laughs. "Hi."
"Hi," he says again. He's smiling, he knows, all toothy and everything. Probably looking like a goddamned fool.
"Sit," she says and slides back into the booth, and he does too, across from her, left hand curled around the edge of the table.
Her eyes drop to his bare ring finger, move to his face, and then very carefully return to his hand. She's trying to be subtle about it, but subtlety has never been her strong suit. That hasn’t changed; he fights back a grin.
After a painful moment, he hums. "You can ask."
"I wasn't—"
"Samira."
Her mouth twitches. "Congratulations?"
It takes him a moment, embarrassingly, to understand what she means.
"Oh— No. No, I'm not— There's no one. I'm not with anyone." He rubs the back of his neck. "I just took it off."
"Oh." She blinks. "When?"
He knows he could say a while ago and let her fill in whatever timeline feels comfortable. He’s planning on it, in fact.
"About two weeks after you left," he says instead, and the booth gets very quiet.
"I was holding onto too much," he continues, suddenly tense, suddenly desperate to explain. He's looking at the table now, at a scratch in the wood, wondering who made that mark and when and why. "After you— I just— I realized I had to start letting go of some things. This— The ring was one of them."
"And what, you’re going to tell me I was another of those things? Something you had to let go of?” Her voice lilts with the words, teasing, and he almost takes the out.
Jack meets her eyes instead.
"I tried to," he says.
Again, she doesn’t say anything. He’s always been fine with silence, but this quiet presses inward. He traces the scratch in the wood.
"Why'd you come back?" he asks eventually.
She allows the diversion. "The fellowship was incredible. I learned so much," she says with a shrug. "But I kept— I don't know. I kept thinking about what I still wanted to do here. The work I started, the patients. The study at the VA is a continuation of my research, and Pittsburgh has the infrastructure for it, and—"
She stops herself. Looks at him.
"I had things I cared about here," she says, quieter. "I could have a life here. I think I had to leave to realize that."
Jack nods. Her words burrow from his ear down to his throat and then his ribs, and they stick there, a pressure that isn’t quite pain. He takes a breath and his lungs feel empty still. "Everyone's going to be happy to have you back."
A beat.
"Everyone?" she says.
He deserves that. He knows how things ended with Robby.
"I'm happy to have you back," he says, and his voice comes out lower than he intends, raspy, and her fingers tighten around her glass, smearing the condensation across it.
Behind them, some college kid whoops.
"Our goodbye was weird," Samira whispers into the air, and he barely hears it.
"Yeah. I mean, no. No, it’s okay. You didn’t have to—"
"I wasn't sure how to— I didn't know what to say to you. Everyone else was easy, I just— With you, I couldn't figure out the right—" She exhales. "I should have said more."
"It's okay."
"It's not, though. I should have—"
"Samira." He waits until she looks at him. "It's okay. You're here now."
She holds his gaze.
"Yeah," she says. "I am."
"I almost asked Parker for your number," Jack says, "at least a hundred times."
"Why didn't you?"
He shrugs. "Because you would've given it to me if you wanted me to have it."
She flinches, a tiny thing, just a blink and a twist of her lips. He would have missed it, should have missed it, if he hadn’t spent years memorizing her face from across the hub and every room they found themselves in together.
"That's not true," she says. "I wasn't sure how to— What we—"
She breaks off. Her eyes drift past his shoulder, and her mouth curves, and Jack knows before turning that it's Cortez and Nielsen.
He doesn't turn around.
"Your friends are staring," she says, a laugh caught in her throat.
"Ignore them. I'm sorry." He rubs his jaw. "Do you want to go somewhere more quiet? I mean— I don't mean— That's not what I—"
"Not what you what?"
He can feel the flush crawling down from his cheeks to his neck, and he just looks at her, and she lets him hang there for exactly long enough to be cruel before she smiles.
"Why don't you walk me home?" she says.
He nods.
They stand at the same time, and he’s struck again by the closeness of her — she’s here, here — and he isn’t ready for it yet, this kind of proximity, this reminder of the scant few inches between their heights that always felt perfect.
Cortez says something stupid as Jack grabs his jacket from the booth. He doesn't catch it. Nielsen is laughing. He throws a middle finger in their direction without turning around, and then he's holding the door, and then they're outside.
The sidewalk is darker than he expects it to be. A symptom of the too-bright bar lights, maybe, or perhaps just her. He looks up out of habit, the way he does when he’s getting some air during a shift, and there are dim stars scattered but no moon.
The air is cool for April, and Samira crosses her arms over her chest.
"Do you want my—"
"I'm fine," she says, shaking her head but grinning too.
"You sure? It's—"
"Jack, I moved back here from New Jersey. I haven’t gone soft, don’t worry."
He shrugs the jacket back up his shoulder from where he'd already started sliding it off. "I didn’t say you had."
She glances at him sideways, and her grin grows. "Thank you, though."
"Of course."
She points left and he follows, and their footsteps align, a rhythm time hasn’t taken from them.
"Did you end up seeing the stars out there?" he asks.
"Yeah." She tilts her head back, still walking. "The skies were—" She breathes out. "Yeah."
He shoves his hands in his pockets. "I tried to, uh— With the light pollution, you can’t see a whole lot."
She slows. He slows with her. They stop just between two lightposts, as much in darkness as they can be.
"You can see them a little more tonight, actually," she says, and she's scanning the sky, her eyes narrowed the way they get when she's reading a chart. "It's a new moon. Makes a difference."
"Yeah?"
"There." She points. "See those two bright ones? The one on the left is Vega. And that one, across— That's Altair."
He looks where she's pointing and sees approximately a hundred stars of more or less equal brightness. "I'll take your word for it."
"Here." She reaches for his hand.
Her fingers close around his wrist, and she lifts his arm, and she's adjusting his index finger, pointing it at the right part of the sky, and her thumb is pressed against his pulse point, and she has to know what she's doing to him. She has to.
"That one," she says. "See it?"
"Yeah," he says.
"And… that one."
He does not see the latter. He is looking at her.
"They're lovers," Samira says, still gazing up. "In the myth. They were separated by the Milky Way, and they only get to meet once a year."
She doesn't say anything else about it. She lowers his hand, but she doesn't let go.
He stares down at her fingers laced through his, and then up at her.
"Your uber came too fast," he blurts out.
She blinks. "What?"
"The night you left. Your last night." He's looking at her and it's too dark, the new moon and the space between streetlights conspiring against him, and he can see the shape of her face but not her expression. "Your uber came too fast, and I— I was going to tell you that I— That we—"
But he’d had a full moon the night she left, all that light, and he still couldn’t say anything, so maybe it’s not the light he needs.
He swallows, and his exhale is an audible thing. He shakes his head.
She steps closer and lifts their joined hands between them, and he looks at them, skin against skin, ungloved, and her free hand comes up and wraps around their hands too so she is holding him in both of her palms.
"I'm not getting in a car now," she says.
"No." His hand tightens around one of hers. "You're not."
Silence again. A car passes, headlights sweeping across them and gone.
"I'm here," Samira says.
"Yeah. You are."
She studies him for a moment, and whatever she finds makes her sigh. Her lips twist. She looks away.
"It's okay." Her voice is gentle. Placating, almost, and he shakes his head again, but she doesn’t seem to notice. She starts to lower their hands. "You don't have to say anything. It's— it's been a long time. It's fine."
"No, I—" The words are fast. He scoffs, at himself, at this, at the way he still can’t say it with her right here like he’s dreamed about too many times, and he looks away at the horizon as he speaks and doesn’t see her look back up at him. "I thought of you every day. Every single day. And then every night I'd go out to the ambulance bay or up to the roof and I'd look at the stars and I'd—" His jaw works. "I'd wonder if you were looking at them too."
"I was looking," she says.
His gaze flicks back; their eyes meet. "Yeah?"
"Yeah."
"Oh." He breathes. "Good."
She grins just a little, and he blinks.
They stand there. A siren wails somewhere across the river, distant but so familiar, the kind of sound that would usually throw him into motion. It doesn't, this time. He stays right where he is.
"So you're, uh." He clears his throat. "Doing a study? At the VA."
She laughs, quiet, startled. "Oh— Yeah. It's— I'm really excited about it, actually."
"Will you tell me about it?"
The streetlight behind her catches the edge of her jaw, the way one stray curl floats free around her ear, and he still can't see her expression, but her hand is in his and her voice is steady and she is here.
"I'll tell you everything," she says, and she pulls him forward, and they walk.