Chapter Text
Trauma, John
135M
History & Physical
Hospital Day 1
~
Wen Qing has always had a touch of foresight. A sixth sense, if you will, that warns her when disaster is coming. Her mother used to say it runs in the family, although the Wens don’t have enough family left for her to get a second opinion. Yī yǔ chéng chèn, her mother also used to say, to remind her to keep her forebodings to herself, lest she invite misfortune with her words.
Wen Sizhui, the youngest of the three remaining Wens, finds this trick of hers fascinating. Last year he went so far as to set up a series of scientific experiments regarding it, drawing charts in his dollar-store composition notebooks, tracking her mood and her diet and her morning breath with the dedication of a Dr. Jekyll. Wei Wuxian thought it was funny, and Wen Ning thought it was creepy, and Wen Qing thought he probably needed more to challenge him at school. He dropped it after Granny died, though, something he called an ‘adverse event as end point.’
Wen Ning, the middle Wen, says it doesn’t count as seeing the future if it only works for bad things—“that’s just being a pessimist, Jiejie!” But still, it’s never steered her wrong.
She’ll wake up with that metallic taste on her tongue, the twist in her gut, and she’ll know. The eviction notice will land on their doorstep later that morning, or Wen Ning will get a fever, or Wei Wuxian’s latest side hustle will blow up in his face. Her hand will prickle as she reaches to pick up the phone and sure enough, there at the other end of the line will be a death, or a debt, or a collect call from Rikers.
She can’t do anything to change it, usually, but she’s learned that there’s a sort of comfort in knowing. At the very least, it gives her the chance to meet bad news with dignity. No wasting time in shock and dismay, no tears, no pleading. Moving right along.
That’s why she’s so stunned by the train. For the first time in her life, she hadn’t seen it coming. She’d had no warning at all.
~
Tuesday
~
“Is that Wei Wuxian? Tell him I wanna be best man!”
“Mianmian! I’m honored, truly, but I could never pull you away from the bride’s side of the aisle.”
“We’re not—“ Wen Qing snatches the phone back. “We’re not having a big wedding. We’re not— Wei Wuxian, could you shut up for one minute and listen—“
“Did you know that you can have weddings at the hospital?”
“That’s a great idea!” Pipes up Mianmian in the background. “Then we could all come!”
“That’s a terrible idea. Wherever did you get an idea like that.”
“I saw it in a movie,” says Wei Wuxian vaguely. “They get married right in the hospital!” There’s the sound of him faking a swoon—how she can tell that noise over the phone is just evidence that she spends too much time talking to lunatics. “It’s so romantic!”
“They get married in the hospital in General Hospital because he’s dying.”
“Yeah, exactly. Romantic!”
“It’s unlucky. Marrying in the hospital would be inviting disaster.”
Wei Wuxian blows a fat raspberry down the phone. “Don’t talk about your precious hospital like that, I know you love it more than me.”
“A-Xian…” There’s the beginning of a pounding headache starting between her eyes, and it’s only 9am. “I told you, we should really think about this more. You should really—“
“I have thought about it! Okay, listen.” There’s the sound of him clattering around the kitchen, making some kind of mess. “I know you’re on the next ten days, right? So you take ten days to think about it, and then next Saturday we’ll go down to the courthouse and sign all the forms and shit. And then we can plan our hospital wedding!”
“Ten days!” squeals Mianmian from behind her, turning heads in the break room.
“You heard that?” Wen Qing glances down to check that she hadn’t, in her exhaustion, been projecting Wei Wuxian to the whole room.
“I don’t need to be on speaker to be heard,” says Wei Wuxian. “I have what has been called a carrying voice. Anyway!” he continues, waxing poetic about the flower arrangements they can’t afford at their still theoretical wedding in her place of employment.
Wen Qing takes a deep breath and reminds herself that Wei Wuxian is her best friend. Her only friend, if she’s being completely honest. That he is trying to do a favor for her—the kind of favor she can never in a lifetime repay. That the least she can do is remember that, when all she wants to do is shake him until his teeth rattle.
She dodges interested coworkers ears as she steps to the door and lets herself out of the resident’s lounge. “Wei Wuxian,” she hisses into the phone. One of the interns, passing by on his way to change, jumps when he hears her tone. She gives him a bland, professional smile, and hurries on down the hallway.
She slaps at the button for the double doors, stalks past the kitchens, and then ducks into a supply closet. “Wei Wuxian!”
“Oh, did you get somewhere you can scold me properly?”
“I wouldn’t need to scold you if you would just listen the first time! Stop telling everyone we’re getting married!”
“This scheme hinges on telling people about it, I’m afraid,” says Wei Wuxian, unfazed. “And we are getting married.”
“I never agreed to this! I said—” She takes another calming breath. It doesn’t help much. “I said, we should think about this.”
“No, you said I should think about this. Which I have. And I concluded the same thing I did the last time you told me to think about it! Which is—“
“Wei Wuxian, stop it—“
“Which is: we should get married.”
“You have to stop telling my coworkers we’re getting married. In ten days. At city hall.”
“Once again, kind of the point of fake marriage—telling people about it.”
“I don’t want the people I work with to think I’m… flighty.”
“And what will they think if you turn up with a husband and they never heard about the wedding, hm? Didn’t invite any of your friends?”
“They’ll think what they already think. Which is that I’m private. And they’re not my friends.”
“Really? Mianmian isn’t your friend? I thought for sure…”
“Mianmian is better friends with you than me, and she’s only met you once.”
“Huh.”
She’s so tired. She eyeballs the floor of the closet, and decides it’s too dirty to risk sitting on. It’s two days into her shift and already one patient has left AMA, one coded himself back to the ICU, and the list is twenty-three and growing. She’s really earning her reputation as the second year class’s black cloud.
When she’s done here she has continuity clinic and Dr. Adams is precepting, which means she’s in for an afternoon of being assigned reading on every hokey folk remedy under the sun, all while he slurps his perpetual pepsi and “forgets” to introduce her as Doctor. And then when she’s out of clinic, if she’s lucky, she might be able to make it home in time to make dinner for Sizhui, and if she’s not lucky Wei Wuxian will have provided pizza for the third time this week. (It’s only Tuesday. She thinks he’s wrapped up in some sort of pizza pyramid scheme right now, but she’s seeing no evil as hard as she can about his shit, as usual.)
“I looked it up on the website,” says Wei Wuxian, when it’s clear she isn’t going to break the silence. “And it says, very distinctly, ‘you don’t have to be married to foster a child.’”
“Okay.”
He makes a ‘duh’ noise in his throat. “So why would they bring that up specifically? If it didn’t help?”
Maybe she’s been spending too much time with Wei Wuxian, but she sort of sees his logic.
Her pager buzzes. She doesn’t have time for this. But the social worker’s latest email is eating a hole right out of her phone and through her pocket, and it seems like it’s going to insist she make the time, somehow, regardless. She sits down, sticky floor be damned. They’re scrubs, they’ll wash.
“It wouldn’t be a fake marriage.” That’s the problem.
“What do you mean?”
“The marriage would be real. Legal. Binding. Everything. It would just be… this. That’s fake.”
“So what?”
She takes a deep breath to say something along the lines of, please, I’m begging you, think of the consequences for once in your life, I cannot think of the consequences for you like I usually do because our interests are at cross-purposes here, so get some self-preservation before it’s too late. She doesn’t get farther than “Please—” before he’s cutting her off.
“I don’t know why you’re making it out to be such a thing! We sign some papers, you look like a stable two-parent home for a-Yuan despite working 80 hour weeks, and I get custody of the kid if you die. What’s mine is yours, blah blah blah, you get to own half of my socks. What else is there?”
“I start making your medical decisions for you, for one thing.”
“See, there you go! I get something out of it too. Ooh, I might even get health insurance—this could be a game changer.”
She doesn’t answer.
“Look. It’s not some big sacrifice, alright? It’s not like I’m dating much, or you’re dating at all.”
“What if you want to. What if you…” meet someone. Fall in love. All the beautiful cliches seem so alien to their situation, to the subway trains and hospitals she lives in, to this dirty closet she’s on the floor of. But if anyone can do it, Wei Wuxian can. The depths of his affection are boundless, he’s endlessly lovable and endlessly loving—he, at least, has a chance for something more. Something he might miss, if she lets him tie himself to her like this.
“If I what? Fall in love?” There’s his bright laugh. “Not likely! Might as well put my neck in a noose.” He shudders performatively. “No, no, this is much better. But if it makes you feel better, if you miraculously meet someone you really like, we can always just tell them the truth.”
“Which is?”
“I’m gay.”
Against her will she laughs.
“Come on, Wen Qing. It’s just you and me. Who else is there?”
They’ve got nobody else. Just him, and her, and nineteen-year-old Wen Ning, and thirteen-year-old Sizhui. And she won’t have Sizhui for much longer if she doesn’t do something fast.
She knows she’s going to fold eventually. She can see it coming, her ‘yes,’ from a long way down the tracks. It occurs to her later that maybe the heavy resignation of that moment was the premonition she’d missed.
~
Wednesday
~
The train she didn’t see coming hits Wei Wuxian at 8:35am on a Wednesday morning.
It had been a really normal morning. Wen Qing had been at the hospital two hours and forty-five minutes already, pushing her way through the ponderously slow revolving doors ten minutes before sign-out, exactly on time.
She’d left the house, with Wei Wuxian in it, three hours and forty minutes ago. He’d run her dollar-store earbuds through the washing machine and wrecked them, again, but she‘d put them in her ears anyway, to deter conversation.
The 5:07 F train to East Broadway had all the familiar faces on it. Coat Lady was overdressed for April, but she’d added a festive scarf with tulips on it in honor of the spring on the breeze. The Standing Man was being weird in the corner like something out of Blair Witch, like always. She sometimes wondered if he did it because he was scared, or if he was trying to scare others, before she remembered those two options encompassed the entirety of the New York population.
The Frown was already on the train, like always, sitting ramrod straight in his expensive suit. He looked almost cheerful, for him, tapping away at his phone with one index finger like a much older man. She wondered if he’d met someone, then dismissed it. He was probably married—she was pretty sure he had a kid. When he smiled at the phone, she decided it must be the kid he was texting, the only person she’d ever seen get a laugh out of him. He gave up his seat for a girl with a knee brace before they even hit the river, but didn’t look up from his phone.
She made it through sign out, chart rounds, and neuro rounds before Wei Wuxian called to kill time waiting for his train.
His train was supposed to be the 8:31, but it was late. So, of course, was Wei Wuxian. Late, and about to be fired. He said as much to her, cheerfully, from the subway platform.
Wei Wuxian had an incredibly irritating habit of making calls while waiting on the platform, meaning that phone conversations with him were loud, short, and abruptly cut off by him jumping on his train and out of range. He’d mastered the knack of dodging arguments this way, timing it so that the train would cut her off her response to whatever bullshit he’d just announced and leaving her in furious limbo all day.
She’d thought getting fired was the argument he wanted to avoid, but next he said, “I think Sizhui is cutting class today—he was still hanging around the apartment this morning when I left.”
There’s the departure of a different train, not his, that drowns him out, and when she can hear him again he’s saying, “—cut loose, break some rules, rebel a little, it’s natural! You know I’d never get in the way of a little harmless playing hooky, so don’t ask me—goes against all my principles! Don’t—”
Wen Qing rolls her eyes. “He’s not cutting, Wei Wuxian. It’s spring break this week.”
“Oh.” He pouts. “Boo.”
Another train arrives, evidently not his, because he keeps talking. “Wait, but you’re working all week. That sucks.”
It does suck.
“Oh well, guess he’ll have to hang out with his friends, and not his boring old sister! Or, hey, if I get fired today I can hang out with him, I’ll have tons of time—”
“Please do not get fired.”
“I do not control the rate at which I lose employment.”
“Somebody has to.”
“The rat king, most likely.” There’s a shout in the background. “Hey, I gotta—” The line goes dead.
She didn’t think anything of it—train arriving, Wei Wuxian hanging up on her, TigerText growling at her from her phone. Just another morning.
~
Half an hour later she’s been assigned the new ED transfer and is cursing that asshole Mike for making her staff ‘unidentified adult male subway jumper, neurosurgery on their way,’ a patient who could not be more obviously destined for the neuro ICU post-op, when Mianmian comes crashing into the resident lounge.
“Hey, babe,” says one of the third years, letting Mianmian catch herself on his shoulder. “Thought your shift was ‘till nine today.”
“The John Trauma,” she says.
Even then, Wen Qing hadn’t thought anything of it. “I’m on my way,” she says, barely glancing at Mianmian. “If it’s Mike who sent you up here after me, tell him—”
“It’s not Mike.” Mianmain pushes off the resident and toward Wen Qing, who looks up at her in wary surprise.
“Then who?”
“It’s Wei Wuxian.”
“What about him?”
“The John Trauma. The subway admit. It’s Wei Wuxian.”
Very carefully, Wen Qing sits back down. She stares straight ahead, not really seeing anything, and thinks to herself, this must be how other people feel.
~
She has to go down to the ED anyway. They need someone to identify him, to give a patchworked medical history, allergies, anything she knows before they roll him into surgery. She follows Mianmian blindly down the maze of hallways that separate the emergency department from the rest of the hospital, trying to remember if Wei Wuxian’s supposed pediatric penicillin reaction involved any respiratory symptoms, or just hives. She can’t remember at all, but she has to. She’s all he’s got.
She is not, as it turns out, all he’s got.
In the twenty minutes since Mianmian came to find her Wei Wuxian has been taken for his CT, so he isn’t there when she arrives. Some enterprising EMT handed over Wei Wuxian’s wallet (duct-taped, only half-ironically), and his phone (even more smashed than it was this morning). There’s only a work ID in the wallet, and not a driver’s license, but it has a legal name, a photograph, and a birthdate. And with that came (thank god) his medical records, or at least some of them. (Pediatric reaction to penicillin: mild diarrhea. She breathes a sigh of relief.)
“Hey,” says Mianmian, like she’s looking for something to say that’s not: sorry your friend was hit by a train. “Did you know he was born at this hospital? You never mentioned it!”
Wen Qing turns a page, signs something. “I don’t think he even knows that.”
And that is when Wei Wuxian’s emergency contacts arrive.
~
He cuts through the chaos of the ED like he does through rush hour crowds on the subway platform, in his expensive suit, with his familiar frown, sharp and purposeful and furious. It’s only once he gets close that she sees the fear underneath the scowl. She’s never seen that look on his face before.
He stops outside the room, empty save for her and Mianmian. She watches him check the number once, then twice.
“Is this Wei Wuxian’s room?”
“Yes,” says Mianmian, when it’s clear Wen Qing won’t.
What are you doing here? Wen Qing doesn’t say.
“Who the fuck are you people supposed to be?”
Mianmian jumps up, pushing her forward angrily. “She’s his fiancée!”
He turns that frown on Wen Qing for the first time. “You?” His gaze drags up and down her, incredulously. “My brother isn’t marrying you.”
She finds her words. They come out cool and measured, almost as good as if she’d been prepared for this. “You haven’t seen your brother in eight years, Jiang Cheng. Things change.”
~
They make it through Wei Wuxian’s return from the CT and through the consenting process of neurosurgery and anesthesia without conflict or conversation. Mianmian melts away, back to her own patients, she supposes, and Wen Qing focuses on the task at hand with the tunnel vision born from crisis. She and the brother… Jiang Cheng, she reminds herself, work smoothly and silently, exchanging necessary information and filling out forms. They both, for lack of certainty of legal next of kin between the two of them, sign everything.
Wei Wuxian is wheeled briefly back into the room (somehow it’s worse to see him in street clothes in a hospital bed than it would be if he was in a gown), but the two of them stay focused on their forms. Neither of them watch his still body, test his reflexes, or count his breaths. They seem to have reached a silent consensus to just get through this first.
At one point his phone alarm goes off, and he silently shakes out a handful of pills from the pocket of his coat and swallows them dry. Politely, she doesn’t try to identify them, and he doesn’t speak to her about them. She thinks the longest sentence they exchange is when she adds tree nuts under Wei Wuxian’s allergies, and Jiang Cheng crosses it out. “He’s a liar,” he says, voice hoarse. “He just hates almonds.”
It helps to distract her at least.
More people keep arriving. There’s Wen Ning, of course—Wen Ning she can handle, even though he’s crying. He had caught the EMTs on their way out the door and gotten the full story. A couple of kids messing around on the platform, balancing on the edge less and less carefully until, inevitably, one fell on the tracks. Wei Wuxian leaping after him and lifting him up to the people above. The train coming too quickly, Wei Wuxian still down on the tracks, getting clipped as people tried to drag him out.
But there’s also the sister, Jiang Yanli, who turns out to be a beautiful and soft-spoken woman in a wheelchair. And the brother-in-law, whose name she doesn’t actually know. (Wei Wuxian had only ever called him the peacock). His main contribution to the situation is to assure them he will pay for treatment out-of-pocket if necessary, and then subsides into silence at his wife’s side.
Jiang Yanli holds her brother’s hand (carefully, around the IVs) and weeps openly in a way that makes Wen Qing deeply uncomfortable. She also keeps interrupting her own tearful reunion to try to make polite getting-to-know-you small talk with Wen Qing, like she thinks it would be rude not to, even in this situation.
Wen Ning has to share about Wei Wuxian’s heroism over and over, which makes Jiang Yanli cry even harder, face buried in the hospital blankets. It makes Wen Qing hold her pen very tightly as she forms words on the paper in front of her. Shaking someone and demanding they explain their stupid behavior is bad for people with traumatic brain injuries. She’s a doctor. She knows this.
Jiang Cheng keeps stepping into the hallway to take phone calls. Even if she was the sort of person who listened to other people’s phone calls, she would have a hard time following these. Despite the steadily increasing volume. They’re half in Mandarin and half in Cantonese, and she doesn’t speak any Cantonese. She can get the gist, though, from the way his shoulders winch a little tighter every time he finishes one and steps back into the room to shake his head at his sister.
It’s only once everything is done, once all there is to do is wait for someone to wheel Wei Wuxian into the OR and open up his skull, that things go bad.
~
She’s only surprised that it took so long to turn. The force of Jiang Cheng’s angry, unflattering grief is overwhelming. Left with nothing else to do, it fills the room like a rushing river current, a completely different flood from his sister’s quiet tears.
Wen Qing recognizes this kind of grief: the kind that makes everything it touches ugly. She herself has never been blessed with the ability to grieve gently or respectfully, so instead she doesn’t grieve at all. It’s almost tempting, seeing him throw his anger around the room, to imagine joining him.
“Who are you people anyway?” he snaps. “We don’t know them, a-jie. We don’t even know if they knew him!”
“A-Xian clearly trusted them.” Jiang Yanli’s voice is calm as still water in the face of her brother’s anger. “If he’s marrying—“
Jiang Cheng makes a derisive noise. It’s directed less at his sister and more at his brother’s body, lying between them. “Right. Because Wei Wuxian’s judgment has never been faulty.”
He approaches the bed, voice rising in anger. “Where have you been, huh? What the fuck did you get yourself into? What the fuck did you get us all into? Who are these people saying they know anything—”
It shouldn’t surprise her that it’s a-Ning who yells back, but it surprises her how angry he sounds. “Shut up! We know more than you think!”
He pushes past her to get up in Jiang Cheng’s face, to put himself between him and the bed. “We know he’s the reason you’re alive, and not dying slowly on a dialysis machine! Stop talking to him like that!”
There’s a frozen silence. “Yeah,” says Jiang Cheng. His jaw clenches and cracks like ice snapping. “Like I said. Bad judgment.”
He stalks out of the room.
~
“I’m so, so, sorry,” Jiang Yanli’s sweet face is crumpled with distress. Her silent husband is holding one of her hands, and the other is still clutching Wei Wuxian’s sheets. “Please don’t hold it against him. He’s only upset, you see, our parents called and—“
“You don’t have to give explanations for him,” says Wen Qing. “If I was in his place, I would have behaved far worse.” She gives a stiff bow of her head. “I, too, apologize for my little brother’s words. They were unkind and unfair.”
“Jiejie!” says Wen Ning, betrayed.
“Be quiet,” she says firmly. “You know Wei Wuxian wouldn’t appreciate you speaking to his family in that way.”
“Please don’t,” says Jiang Yanli. “I understand, really I do.” Her beautiful smile entirely paralyzes Wen Ning. “I’m glad to know that Wei Wuxian has found such good friends. Friends and fiancée, both. I’m so glad to meet you.”
Fiancée. Through the grief and the fear, Wen Qing finds some extra emotional space to be disgusted by herself.
She turns away from that smile, back to Wen Ning, “You should go home. Don’t argue with me, just do it. Someone needs to tell Sizhui. Someone should be with him, and this will take hours yet.”
Wen Ning subsides. “Yes, Jiejie.”
She gives one last apologetic look at Wei Wuxian, and then she lets herself out of the room to go find his little brother.
~
It doesn’t take her long to find him. There’s only so many places in the hospital a family member might go, and somehow she doubts the cafeteria or the chapel would have much appeal.
She comes to a halt just behind him and waits. She can tell from the way his shoulders are hunched that he knows she’s there, but he doesn’t turn. Together they stare at the slow circles of the fish in the rippling water.
“You probably think I’m a real asshole.”
She makes a noncommittal noise. “It’s not my place to judge.”
“You wouldn’t be wrong. I am.” His shoulders hunch even more, and she has a crazy impulse to put her hand between his shoulder blades and press, to smooth the misery away. His back, underneath his crisp dress shirt, is broad and well-muscled. Not the sort of back that needs her comfort.
“My brother, who I haven’t spoken to in years, is upstairs in that hospital bed. My brother, who gave me his kidney.”
He’s only stating facts. No response from her seems necessary.
“I can’t believe he told you about it.” Jiang Cheng shifts awkwardly, like he’s realized his words could cause offense again. “Not because of anything about you, just… he doesn’t tell people about it. If he had his way, I wouldn’t even know about it.”
“I don’t know the circumstances,” she offers. Although why she is letting herself disavow closeness with Wei Wuxian is anyone’s guess. She should be seizing every chance to prove herself true.
He snorts. “The circumstances are more fucked up than you could possibly imagine.”
“You might be surprised.”
He glances up at her. “Right, you’re a doctor.” She nods, even though she’s only a second year resident, and the title still doesn’t feel earned. “You’ve probably seen every fucked up circumstance under the sun.”
She allows herself a small smile. “Probably.”
He shifts over on the bench to make room for her, and she sits.
“The circumstances are that I was dying,” he says bluntly. “FSGS. Rapidly progressive. I was… sixteen?” He shrugs, like this part of the story is nothing. “So ages ago, now.”
“Steroids hadn’t done shit for me, I was already on dialysis. I needed a transplant and I needed one fast. They look to siblings, first, you know that. Jiejie would have been the first choice, but she’s got her own health baggage that would have made surgery risky. So then there was a-Xian.”
“I thought,” she says as delicately as she can, “that a-Xian was your foster brother.”
“He was. Son of a family friend.” He tosses a glance at her, wryly. “This is the fucked up part. Mom, Dad, both not matches. I was on a transplant list. I was waiting. But then for some reason Mom began insisting that Wei Wuxian get tested.”
The fucked up pieces of this story began to slot into place.
“Dad was against it, said there was no point, but Mom insisted, and Wei Wuxian agreed with her, so they did some tests and lo and behold,” he spreads his hands out before them, “perfect match! Foster brother not so much. Half-brother, yes.” He grimaces. “Mom… must have suspected, obviously, but she didn’t exactly take it well.”
“But—“ she hadn’t meant to interrupt, gotten caught up in the story, but he doesn’t seem to mind her questions. “But, a-Xian isn’t much older than you, isn’t he?”
“That would be the other fucked up part. He’s a little more than a year older than me. He and Mom did some research—only time they’ve ever managed to work together in this life—and found a sketchy transplant center with a lower age limit. And the day he turned eighteen he signed those papers and they had him on the operating table. I didn’t even know until it was done.”
She swallows hard. “Why are you telling me this?”
“You’re going to marry him, aren’t you?”
She nods, stiffly.
“Think of it as a warning, then. You’ve got to keep your eye on him all the time, all the fucking time, or he’ll pull something like this because he thinks it’s for your own good. Martyred piece of shit.” He glares out at the koi pond.
He’s right, of course. Wei Wuxian is martyring himself right now, with this marriage scheme. She’s just desperate enough to take him up on it.
“The fuck is this place anyway?”
“It’s the healing garden.”
“It kinda sucks. No offense.”
“Being among plants and animals is supposed to promote wellness.” She thinks of all the shifts she’s snuck out here for a minute of fresh air, all the muttered curses she’d directed at the placid fish in their sad little pool, surrounded by cylinder-block walls, and it’s with a wry twist to her mouth that she says, “Do you feel well?”
“I’ve been better.” He sits back, something that’s almost a smile (or maybe just something that’s not a frown) softening his face. “But it’s only been a few minutes. Maybe the fish need time.”
“The fish work in mysterious ways,” she says gravely.
His laughter takes her by surprise. There’s no pretending she isn’t smiling back at him.
“Okay,” he stands. “Want to go pick up some coffees or something, so when we go back we can pretend I wasn’t just crying at some fish for half an hour?”
~
They’re standing in the perpetual line at the coffee cart out front before he speaks again.
“I know you.”
Her back stiffens--after the panic and chaos of the morning, anything sounds like a threat. She doesn’t expect him to notice, but he does. The scowl doesn’t disappear, but it shifts into something more apologetic and pained.
“That’s not really true, I don’t really know you, and you probably don’t know me at all. I mean… I recognize you. I’ve seen you before. Sorry, I sound like a fucking stalker but, you take the F train, right?”
She nods. The awkward fumbling is unexpected. Everything about him, from his expensive suit to his severe haircut to the angry lines on his face, seems at odds with the idea that he’d noticed her at all.
“The F…” His face changes. The emotions that cross it would have been too fleeting to be sure of, if they weren’t so familiar to her. Loneliness. Grief. “Was he really that close, all this time?”
He turns away from her like he’s assessing the line, but she has an inkling that it’s more to hide his face. Like he knows that his scowl isn’t a very effective disguise for his softer feelings.
“How…” he pauses, then continues in a more neutral voice. “How did you guys meet?”
“It wasn’t all this time,” she says, then wonders if she should have politely pretended she didn’t hear that question. But he’s back to looking raw and wounded and directly at her, so it’s too late now.
“I met Wei Wuxian when I was still in medical school, down in North Carolina. We only… we only moved to the city when I started my residency. So it’s only been two years, really, that—“
“Right.” He cuts her off. “Thanks.”
If Wen Ning had been a stop or two away on the F train without her knowledge for two years she wouldn’t know how to keep walking around like a person. Even just thinking about it is like brushing up against a black hole: all of her guts sucked out.
But there’s no way she can say that. “We… we met when I was in medical school.”
“You said that.”
“I did.”
He steps up to order, and she stands next to him on the sidewalk feeling unequal to the situation. It’s not a new feeling in her life, but she’s pushed on through every other time it’s surfaced. She can do it again.
When he turns around with his coffees his scowl has shifted into something even angrier. “I’m being a dick. Again. Sorry.”
“What?”
“I’m sorry.” His face doesn’t soften when he apologizes. She can’t tell if he’s angry at her, or Wei Wuxian, or himself.
“He’s your…” His jaw clenches hard enough in frustration she thinks she can hear his teeth grind together. It’s a wonder he doesn’t spill the coffee. “You’re obviously having a hard time, too. I’m not trying to make it worse.”
“I know.” She does know that. She gets it.
“Really,” he says. She thinks he’s trying to soften his expression some. “Really, if you think about it, it’s not all that different from yesterday, for me. Wei Wuxian’s been gone for years, over here. You just lost him like, two hours ago.”
She feels a surge of panic. “Nobody’s losing him.”
“Of course not. Sorry.” He has his hands out as if he started to touch her and thought better of it, leaving them hanging in the air like he comes in peace. They stare at each other, and he waits while her breathing settles into some semblance of normal. “He’ll be fine.”
He scrubs a hand across his face. “Fuck, this would be so much easier if he were here.”
She smiles weakly. “I don’t know. It might not be.”
“He was always the one who was good at,” he gestures vaguely around him, “meeting people, and all that. What, are you trying to tell me he’s lost all his social graces in the last eight years?”
“No…” her smile is getting more real. She can do this. “Just that he’s not always interested in using those social graces to make things easier for anyone.”
“Ha, no, no he is not.” His smile isn’t much more convincing than hers, but he’s making the effort. “So, you met in medical school?”
“My brother met him first, actually. He was having a seizure in the library and Wei Wuxian was the only person around who was helpful at all. He talked people out of calling the cops, and he stayed with Wen Ning until it was over, and he got him cleaned up, and he rode home with him on the bus when he was still post-ictal. When I got out of clinic, he was sitting at my kitchen table, feeding my family mac and cheese, and everybody had fallen in love with him.”
What she doesn’t add is the part after, where she and Wei Wuxian walked around the corner to the local dive and gotten fucking wrecked. Drunk enough for her to tell him that she’d been busted for letting family stay with her in student housing. That she was staring down eviction notices. Disciplinary meetings. That she didn’t know where else to go.
“That’s easy,” Wei Wuxian had said, knocking back another shot. “They can move in with me.”
And he’d stuck to it, in the cold sober light of the morning. He’d moved three people into his one-bedroom apartment, and they’d never moved back out, and he never admitted to regretting it, not once.
“That’s my brother,” says Jiang Cheng. “Big fucking hero.” The words are dismissive, but there’s enough pride and affection in his voice to make her chest ache.
What had Wei Wuxian said about his didi? He’d painted a fond, nostalgic portrait of a grumpy little Eeyore of a boy who’d chased after him, stuck up for him, wrestled and shouted and played with him. This tall, handsome, unhappy man before her… He’s not what she’d been given to expect.
Of course all those stories would have happened years ago, now. Is it her or Wei Wuxian who aren’t seeing clearly?
Whoever he is now, Wei Wuxian had loved him fiercely.
“You always give your seat up on the train,” she says.
He stares at her, and she realizes she hadn’t yet said that she recognized him too. It’s too late to pretend she hadn’t been noticing him back, so she just shrugs and says, “It must run in the family.”
He scoffs, but it’s more bewildered than dismissive, like he can’t imagine why she would say something like that. “That’s nothing. That’s not… heroic.”
She thinks about the long shaking rides to and from the hospital, the thirteen hour days, the fifteen hour days, the twenty-six hour days, the night shifts, dead on her feet and swaying with the crowded train. The day she nodded off upright and spilled her coffee when the train jolted to a stop. The day she finally walked straight through the soles of her practical black sneakers and had to stand the whole hour home with only her socks between her and the ground. “It is to the person who sits in it.”
~
By the time they get back, Wei Wuxian is out of surgery and into the ICU, like she expected. She stands there listening with the small knot of people—Wei Wuxian’s people—in the hallway by the nurses’ station. First she listens to Dr. Hyde, the neurosurgeon, report on the evacuation of the hemorrhage and the complex remnants and the extra-ventricular drain placement and the ICU monitoring with q1 neurochecks, and then she listens to Jimmy, the anesthesiology resident, describe an easy airway and a difficult sedation with enough propofol to snow an elephant and the decision to remain intubated, and then she listens to Dr. Dennis, with acute care’s plan, and then she listens to Jiang Yanli’s tearful goodbyes, and then it’s silent again.
When she turns around, she sees he’s still standing there.
“Jiang Cheng?” she starts, tentatively.
“I don’t… I have no fucking… You know, after years of this shit, you start to assume you’ve picked some things up, right? Like, I really thought I was starting to get a handle on the jargon but that…” His frown pulls across his face, but his eyes are wide and panicked. “I have no fucking clue what any of that meant.”
She looks away, back through the glass doors of the room to Wei Wuxian on the bed. He looks very small. “It means we wait.”
There’s a huff of laughter next to her elbow. “Alright then. You’re not exactly warm and fuzzy, are you?”
She stiffens. It’s not like he could know that he’s echoing a dozen attendings and patients who have given her to understand that her bedside manner leaves something to be desired. But it’s still a dick move to criticize her here, at her workplace. “No,” she says frostily, “I’m not.”
“Hey—“ he ducks his head to catch her eye. “That’s not—I didn’t mean it like, in a bad way.”
She doesn’t think she needs to dignify that fumbling nonsense with a response.
His frown deepens. “Aside from how you obviously know what you’re doing, you’re clear, and direct, and I can trust you not to sugarcoat things. I appreciate that in a person. I bet you’ve got a lot of patients who appreciate that too.”
Oh. She tips her head back and meets his eyes, searching for the catch that must be lurking somewhere in their depths, but as far as she can see he’s sincere. He waits.
“You’re not exactly good at compliments, are you?”
Her well-practiced neutral expression can’t possibly be revealing how much his unskilled compliment had meant to her, but he looks relieved anyway, anxious frown softening into what’s almost a smile.
“So I’ve been told.” He rolls his head from side to side like his neck is aching. “You staying or heading out?”
She feels defensive, like she has to justify her reason not to spend the night when she won’t even be allowed to sleep in the room. “I have a kid at home.”
“I didn’t say shit about it.” He pushes off the wall, despite the exhaustion creeping in around his eyes, and begins walking with her to the elevators. “You don’t have to worry. I’ll be sticking around, I can text you if anything changes.”
“Oh. I already asked Lisa to keep me updated.”
“Or I can go fuck myself, I guess—”
“Jiang Cheng.” They draw up front of the elevators. Her hand has found its way to his sleeve, stopping whatever he was going to say. “Text me anyway. Please?”
“I…” he glances down at her hand on his arm. “Yeah. Of course.”
They stand there, heads bent together while she types her number into his phone, fingers clumsy with exhaustion. Nothing about today feels real.
~
She sits on the F train home, late enough for once that there’s a seat free, and stares out the window at the passing lights. She doesn’t bother to put her dead headphones in, but nobody talks to her tonight.
She’s not quite sure what it was about him that had caught her eye.
He was strikingly handsome, of course, but it wasn’t like she didn’t see handsome men every day. Maybe it was the way his angry expression and stiff back contrasted with how considerate he was, never hogging the pole, or leaving his bag on the seats, or manspreading. Maybe it was an instinctive appreciation for a good resting bitch face. Maybe it was just that she saw him so often that somehow it turned into looking for him.
She thinks about glimpsing him across the crowded subway car in his beautiful suits, pristine in the mornings and rumpled by evening, looking as tired as she felt. That fearsome scowl on his face. Watching him rising to his feet, offering his arm to little old ladies for balance as they eased into the seat in his place.
Every now and then she saw him with a child who must have been Jin Ling. They’d moved around each other with the easy familiarity of family, letting the kid lean on him when there wasn’t a seat available, holding his elbow instead of the too-high hand rail, nodding as the kid chattered away.
On the weeks she covered nights, and wouldn’t see him at all, she used to close her eyes and imagine him on the opposite track, running the other direction past her downtown. Imagine that one day they’d end up next to each other at rush hour, that it would be her he’d offer a seat to. Imagine that she might even accept.
She’d liked him so much before she’d known him at all.