Work Text:
She begged him to come back.
Not to PTMC.
Not to Pittsburgh.
Not even to her.
But come back to somewhere, instead of driving off a cliff into oblivion.
She never could get him to listen.
When they finally found him, his Magen David necklace was in his backpack. He knew what would happen to it if he’d been wearing it at the end, so he put it somewhere safe.
Somewhere they would find it, and give it to her.
They delivered it to her on an obscenely sunny Tuesday, in a little black velvet bag.
She couldn’t wear it - aside from the obvious, the chain was much too long, too big a risk of an angry patient breaking it or using it as weapon against her.
She kept it in the velvet bag, and the bag spent every day in a pocket of her scrubs, one that was hard to get to, one that nobody knew about except her.
She’d pet the bag at work, thinking of him. Sometimes she wondered what he’d do about a difficult case. Sometimes she imagined how he’d handle the antics of the students and residents, or how he’d react to the more bizarre situations. Sometimes she simply wished he was there to smile at her.
But no matter what, she thought of him every day.
When Javadi, the last of the residents who remembered him, finally graduates, she decides it’s time to hang it up. Benji and the girls get her a new necklace, one with all of their birthstones plus those of her grandchildren, and she puts the gold cross she always wore into the bag with his Magen David.
She wears the birthstone necklace every day, and the bag goes into a secret pocket of her purse.
For decades, as purses come and go, it remains with her.
When she’s gone, her daughters find the bag, the fabric worn nearly threadbare, the two necklaces irrevocably tangled together. They bury it with her.