Chapter Text
Jack’s world grew fuzzy at the edges the instant Dana told him that his son was waiting for him in West 13. Every decibel of the ER’s grind was simultaneously amplified and muffled like he was half below the tide, washing in and out of his ears, refusing to allow him to settle.
Hands clamped on his stethoscope, he swung it over his neck. His arms pumped as he sprinted through the ER with the urgency the place often demanded but only somewhat saw. A gurney nearly took him out and Javadi flattened herself to the wall to allow her attending-for-the-shift to dodge through.
Curtains closed, too close to see whose feet were poking underneath, Jack filled his lungs with a long and deep breath. The counting he used to mock in therapy now pulled him like a tether to the linoleum floor. His hand still shook though as it reached up and swiped the curtain open.
His husband sat in one of the notoriously uncomfortable chairs, holding a significantly smaller left hand. Jack’s eyes trailed up the arm and found the owner, his sweet boy, curls tousled, blinking blearily up at Perlah and Dr. Mohan.
“Hey, big fella,” Jack moved swiftly through the staff around the bed like a river bending about smoothed stones.
Tear-stained cheeks shining under the ER’s unforgiving lights, Theo trembled against his instinct to throw his arms in the air, ready to latch around his father’s neck. Jack swooped down to meet his son; his big hands were delicate against his boy’s body.
“Dr. Abbot,” Dr. Mohan greeted in an overly professional tone, suggesting that perhaps the tears he’d spied were as recent as moments ago, “Your partner was just explaining to Dr. Mohan how this happened,”
Theo winced as Jack withdrew and joined his husband at the other side with a quick “hey, honey” and a peck: eyes open and returning to their child, no evident ER care required.
“He was a bit excited at the top of the slide.” Honey spoke in the voice Jack knew was under a tight leash. Any slack and they’d both start crying. When Honey continued, he was paving over the cracks in his voice as best as he could, “He fell from the top, it’s about so high, and he hit his head when he landed on his bike frame at the bottom.”
Nodding, Samira turned to her patient, “Theo, did you fall asleep at all after you hit your head?”
“No.” Theo reached out with his left hand and Honey instantly rejoined it with his own, squeezing gently. But Theo still looked to Jack, his lower lip wobbling, “Papa?”
Jack’s jaw slackened to allow him to answer, but nothing connected his brain to his vocal cords. How could he explain conflict of interest and inappropriate boundaries in the workplace to his nine-year-old?
Samira waited three agonising seconds before interrupting Jack’s thought process, “Theo, I know your dad works here, so he can help us figure out what the best plan is.”
“No, Dad works at home.” Theo shook his head and pointed with his left hand to his other parent, “That’s Papa.”
“But Dr. Mohan is right. Papa knows her very well,” Honey explained calmly, “Dr. Mohan is one of the best here. She knows what to do.”
Jack cleared his throat, dressing his face up with a softer smile, “Daddy’s right. Taught her everything I know.” Then he winked at his son, creating a fragment of a giggle from the kid. That eased his anxiety a fraction.
Samira raised her eyebrows at her mento but allowed him to brag, watching how Theo accepted his fathers’ words as gospel and allowed her to flash the torch in his eyes and ask him questions. The humour seemed to put the room at ease, even if they all bar the child knew it was a mask to maintain an air of comfort.
History, reflex, pain out of ten, Dr. Mohan completed her many tests with a carefully constructed tone and Perlah to help encourage Theo’s engagement. Jack watched from beside his husband, trying desperately not to create more unease within his son and to not suffocate the life out of his resident’s confidence.
Eventually, he couldn’t help but ask, “What’s your plan?”
He listened doggedly to Samira reel off a list of procedures from the tiny stool as she completed her neuro exam, Perlah already acting upon it whilst still absorbing the remaining instructions like a sponge. Honey was equally as attentive, but he still looked to Jack whom he knew was going over Dr. Mohan’s words with a fine-tooth comb. Theo tried to follow along, reaching his left hand across to tug on his right ear lobe, missing on his first attempt.
Dr. Mohan squinted at her patient and swivelled to face him.
“Theo?” She asked softly as she pointed to his right arm, “Can you move this arm?”
Theo blinked, “No, thank you.”
“How does it feel when you’ve tried to move it before?”
“Hurts, sharp.”
“If I touch it, I might be able to figure out what’s causing the hurting. Can I try that?”
Theo blinked again, his wet eyelashes sticking together. He nodded once. Jack felt Honey’s hand in his own, completing the paper chain connection amidst the Abbot family. All eyes were on Mohan’s rubber gloved hands as she rolled up Theo’s long-sleeved Bluey shirt and applied tender pressure where the skin stretched oddly. A whine pitched from Theo, and she released that spot instantly.
“Thank you, Theo.” Samira left the sleeve where it was, turning to Perlah. “Add an X-ray for that arm.”
Theo’s eyes widened in recognition, “Dad had one of them when he went to the dentist, but I had to go out the room.”
“You’re a pro already then,” Perlah reassured, “This time, it’ll be you getting it done.”
Nodding solemnly, Theo spied his papa staring at his arm, expression neutral on the surface but a hardness to his gaze.
“Papa, how does an X-Ray see inside my arm? Can it tell I’ve been drinking lots of milk?”
This, Jack could do: explain a medical procedure in a way that was understandable and soothing. Theo was hanging onto his every word, apart from a minor interlude where Perlah attached his IV. He repeated back the words his papa told him, his dad sweeping his hair from his brow.
“Up to C.T.”
Jack explained that too, Theo looking between both parents with a line folded from concern between his brows. Then he spotted Dr. Mohan walking beside his bed and he began to tell her about when his head hit his bike’s frame.
“When I hit my head, it felt like a bell was going off,” he said earnestly, “Gooooooong.”
“I bet,” she replied, that empathetic aura oozing off her and bundling the boy in its blankets.
Honey squeezed Jack’s hand for the tenth time, his face relaxing with every comfort from his son’s doctor. He squeezed again when he had to let go of Theo, handing him off to Perlah when they continued to C.T. without him.
Neither parent took one of the chairs. Jack hated those chairs. Plastic and cracked and the antithesis of ease, they should be added to the list of things the hospital didn’t have the funding for.
Without a space to relax, Honey was pacing but slowly. That was worse. It was deliberate, forced calm into a shape it couldn’t maintain, spreading like cookie dough in the oven until it no longer resembled the careful cutter shape that had created it. This accident was spiralling inside of him and battling the folded arms that held his chest together.
But Jack’s cortisol-clogged mind took too long to recognise this typical sign of stress. The symptom of his “time abroad” left him with a stare a thousand yards long. He didn’t even clock the number of times his husband had lapped the small section of linoleum until Honey burst out.
“It’s so cliché but it really happened so fast. I was right there and it happened.”
His quick breaths to fill the space of his confession spurred Jack to find his way out of his fog, but he could only make it within shouting distance of the actual problem.
“He’ll be okay,” Jack said and even he could tell that his blank tones were nowhere near the level of reassurance required.
And, just like that, their time as a couple was over. The doors to C.T. opened and the pair clocked back in as parents.
Back in the elevator, Theo’s pain medication had kicked in enough for him to be chatting more. Meanwhile, Jack was a clammy mess and struggling to stomach his anxiety and his husband’s. He tried to conjure up a list of things he’d tell a parent in his position.
Holy shit, none of it was comforting.
Not even his own years of knowledge and understanding of every PMTC staff member - their competency, their expertise, their skills he saw relentlessly - it assuaged none of the turmoil in his gut or his head.
His patient satisfaction score was a sham.
Theo flexed his toes as he was reversed back into West 13, “Can I have a snack please?”
Perlah smiled sympathetically, checking his IV, “Not yet. We gotta make sure you don’t need surgery first.”
“Daddy?” Theo looked up with wide eyes.
Jack watched Honey immediately reply, “Yes?”
“Will surgery hurt?”
“No, not at all. But we don’t know if you need it yet. Let’s get your X-ray first.”
“Will that hurt?”
“Maybe a little when they move your arm, but not for long.”
Jack caught his son’s eye, “You counted to a hundred and thirteen when I cleaned up your grazed knee, you remember?”
“Will it take that long?” Theo’s shoulders curled inwards. Flashbacks of getting a particularly nitty bit of grit from under a flap of skin crossed his eyes.
“No, Theo, nowhere near that long.”
Numbers tumbling quickly out, Theo winced as his arm was shifted through the brace under the X-ray, but the trooper kept found his next number with his parents’ help. Both had to step outside, Theo’s counting wavering when he watched them step away, but they continued numbering in the curtain’s entrance, hands clutching each other’s. The instant the flash was over, Jack and his husband were right back at their son’s side ready to announce forty-four.
Between fielding the requests for food and maintaining the avoidance of looking at where the IV was taped to Theo’s hand, Jack took on the heavy lifting. Even after moving to days, he was still the parent with the least presence compared to Honey, yet Theo was turning to him more and more today for answers to his ceaseless questions. Maybe because Honey was there when it happened-
“Good news, it’s a clean and single break,” Mohan showed the family the X-Ray on an iPad, Theo the most engaged he’d been that day. “No surgery, just a cast and you, Theo, get to choose what colour you’d like.”
The answer was instant. “Green.”
“You know what that means?” Jack patted his son’s pillow. “Anything you want for dinner.”
The gasp paired with beaming eyes melted the older man’s heart as Theo whispered awestruck, “Even Red Robin?”
Not what he thought Theo would go for, but Jack acquiesced, “Sure, big fella, whatever you want. Gotta take it easy these next few weeks though.”
“Okay. Wait!” Theo shuffled up in the bed, not getting too far with his arm strapped down. His expression was distraught and his voice wobbled, “Will I miss the zoo?”
Tears swiftly flooding his eyes, Jack cupped Theo’s head and kissing his brow. Since he brought the permission slip home, not a day had gone by without Theo badgering on about the field trip. Today was no different in spite of everything that had happened.
“As long as you rest up and listen to your daddy and me, and to our friends here, you can still go,” Jack promised.
“Yes, Papa.”
Regardless of the promise for Red Robin, Theo began dozing off sharpish. His head lolled in a way that would cause a crick in his neck. The young boy didn’t seem to care about that; his parents did. Honey propped him up on a fluffed ER pillow and his rolled hoodie, leaving his denim jacket over the back of his chair. Then he pressed a kiss upon Theo’s crown and stroked through his hair. His lips moved with a sound that couldn’t surface over the ER’s wavelengths.
Jack watched the scene unfold, unable to connect to the warmth that he saw. His heart was stuck inside this futility that afflicted every parent when something beyond their control and repair happened to their child. He stood slowly as if he was wading through molasses, the helplessness sticking to every part of him.
“Going to stretch your leg?” It was one of Honey’s favourite awful jokes, yet it stumbled rather than pirouetted out of him. His mouth was stretched too thin.
“Want anything for dinner?” Jack asked instead of inquiring.
“After what I’ve heard about the cafeteria? God no.”
There it was again, this thinness to his husband’s words but not so thin that Jack could see through them to what the source was. Jack pinned it to worry about their son, feeling in himself the residual panic despite knowing that Theo was more than fine now.
“There’s a vending machine,” he offered weakly, “And you heard the man: Red Robin.”
Honey smiled through his son’s auburn curls, “If you’re buyin’.”
So, Jack placed the order and headed to his truck. His phone paired automatically and resumed Cigarette Daydreams from a sing-along he started with Theo two days ago. It vibrated with all the notifications that the Pitt had barricaded from entering his screen, including but not limited to the following: a “thank you” automated email for renewing his subscription to ExpressVPN, motion detected in the back yard, a local theatre’s latest ticket release. Empty booster seat in the rear-view mirror, Jack drove mindlessly to collect the burgers and return with them still warm.
En route back to West 13, Jack occupied his hand and mind with swiping to delete his unnecessary phone notifications. It was a successful plan until he came across the notification from his security system about the back garden again.
Before Jack could talk himself out of it, he was opening the app and scrubbed through the footage until-
The fixed angle gave a full view of the back garden. Theo had been running laps around the space holding a water pistol. Speaker spluttering his cries that someone was “getting away! Go!”, the little lad indelicately banged from fence to fence and around his garden architecture, ducking behind the flower bed his dad still hadn’t finished building.
“Open fire!” Theo screeched, aiming his pistol at the house and squirting.
The arc was pitiful. Not even reaching a foot above Theo’s head, it landed a few feet from its target. Theo’s disappointment was palpable in his slumped shoulders.
Even a stranger to Theo could see the eureka moment strike him. The young boy went ramrod straight and burst into a trot, water sloshing about the plastic magazine eagerly. Theo reached the big orange slide; he made his ascent double time. Jack’s heart stuttered when Theo let go of the railings with both hands to fire water at the house. The splash sounded off camera and Theo roared with jubilation, grabbing both slide railings and heaving his body weight back and forth in some kind of hip-thrust of success.
In the next second, his hands were empty.
The second after that, he was flung into the ground, reverberating the echo of his skull against the hollow of his bike’s frame that Jack had just noticed at the bottom of the slide steps.
Jack’s breath released from his ribcage, clacking along each bar as it slipped past his guard. The video continued, his husband appearing out of thin air at Theo’s side. The boy’s mouth was agape like a torn sore. No sound emerged from him, the camera not even picking up Theo’s winded hiss over the sound of Honey’s reassurance that he was “okay, you’re okay, sweetie”.
Then, on autopilot, Jack’s pointer finger rewound the video back to the initial topple and paused. Theo’s hauling body weight had lifted the end of the slide off the yellowing grass - not enough to tip but plenty to scare his little man into letting go.
“Hey, man!”
A clap on the shoulder shocked Jack out of his tunnel vision. Robby, blissfully unaware of any emotional turmoil, gave his signature close-lipped old teddy bear smile, “Bring any of your SWAT buddies in today?”
“Theo’s broken his arm.”
The smile dropped, “Oh shit, Man.” Robby’s hand followed suit, swinging loose at his side. “I’m sorry. How’d he manage that?”
But before Jack could stumble through an explanation or reveal the video, a voice called out to him.
“Ahoy, Captain.”
Only one person was allowed to call Jack that; Honey waved from an awkward distance away and greeted the other man, “Hi, Robby.”
Thankfully, Robby was already in doctor mode, greeting and offering his apologies for the situation.
“It wasn’t your fault.” Honey’s deflection wobbled on its way out.
Robby redirected back to his coworker, “I’ll start rounds without you. Go be with your son.”
And he was already around the corner by the time he finished his insistences that Jack return to his real job as a father.
“You got the food okay?” Honey gestured to the paper bag under his arm.
Then he stilled, his arm hovering unnaturally between them. Jack traced his husband’s gaze down to his phone, the older man’s settings running his phone’s battery dry to keep that screen on just a little longer.
Jack’s lips grimaced. A cry had crawled up his throat like a J-horror character out the TV except it was pressing up against the glass screen of his mouth, cracking the film, demanding to be heard. He swallowed hard.
“I’m sorry I let this happened to him,” Honey said suddenly, his hands wringing in front of him, “I swear I was watching him. I did everything you said as soon as he fell. But I should’ve been better.”
Jack’s voice seemed to arrive at last, “What?”
“I know I should’ve been keeping a better eye on him, kept my eye on him the whole time!”
His voice snagged at the end like a cloth on a nail, the rip guttural and irreparable. Jack had just enough wherewithal to put their only meal of the day on the floor before he snatched his husband in, tight as a rubber band.
Jack’s breath was hot against his husband’s ear, “Don’t apologise. I mean it. You did everything right.”
Then his whispers shrank, almost inaudible below the intercom overhead, but Honey heard him, felt him mumble, “He was pretending to be me. He fell because he was pretending to be me.”
Feeling Honey exhale, deflating and sagging in his embrace, Jack listened to his husband’s quiet quip: “He does that a lot. Remember when he was learning to walk?”
Such a bittersweet memory. What Jack knew as his swaying gait adapting to his prosthetic, what Honey called his swagger (among other things that weren’t appropriate for their son’s ears), it was also Theo’s waddle once he progressed from crawling. Watching the two walk side by side, it was hard for anyone not to be endeared to the Abbots. Jack went into mourning later that year when he realised Theo had stabilised into a more regular stride.
“You’re his hero.”
“Why can’t he…” Jack pulled back to wipe his eyes despite none falling, “Why the SWAT stuff?”
“Because Papa helps heal people even when he’s not at his job.”
“I don’t even do it anymore.”
“He found your SWAT gear the other day when playing hide and seek.” Honey pulled on Jack’s collection of IDs clipped to his waist, his lanyard snatching it back. “This isn’t your fault either.”
Jack sighed, “I know.” His body didn’t.
“C’mon,” Honey nudged the toe of his boot against Jack’s and then let out a laugh that was still wrapped in a sob, “If I can’t blame me, you can’t blame you.”
Jack drew in a deep breath, his eyes shuttered as his breath shuddered.
Then he tilted his head to his husband’s, “Okay.”
Humour to cope was common, but nothing struck the Abbots so deeply as emotional blackmail/chess. That was also humour to cope with how genuine Honey could be, so genuine it made Jack want to claw his heart out and squeeze it to stop it beating so quickly. His husband’s sweetness was a double-edged sword he was still not armoured against; he hoped he never would be. Jack dried his eyes with the crook of his forefinger as he approached his son’s bed once more.
The sight of Theo practicing hearing Perlah’s heart with Dr. Mohan’s stethoscope in his ears both eased and exacerbated the fathers’ agony. His voice reached them to assure that he was completely fine – even if their alarm bells were still unsettled from the day.
“Why did you put a torch in my eyes before?” Theo asked loudly.
Dr. Mohan’s answer was as patient as she’d always been: “To see how the pupils – the black parts in your eyes– changed. They changed how we wanted them to, so I knew your head was going to be okay.”
Just as it had been evident when Theo was excited on the camera footage, his joy was clear when he spotted his parents through his overly passionate wave from his unbroken arm. It seemed to levitate him off the bed.
“Papa, Dad! I’m gonna be an X-Ray technician!” he exclaimed across the ER.
“You got the experience already,” Honey reached him first, “Got your foot in the door early, and your arm.”
Spurred by Theo’s squeak at the sight of the brown paper bag, Jack ushered his pain aside little by little, fencing fries with his son before eating them. But it wasn’t until they were back home, Theo snoring with his plastered green arm outstretched, the slide upended at the back of the garden with Honey’s help and a crushing hug between the two men to bury their guilt in the spot their son had had a completely normal accident with no fault or blame, that Jack managed to feel a semblance of normalcy once more.