Chapter Text
Jack – 2005.
Jack is still foggy when he comes to. There are monitors beeping steadily around him, a phantom pain shoots through a leg that is no longer there. He stretches his fingers down, confirming to himself that the space beneath the blanket is empty. That’s when he notices something that certainly wasn’t there before everything went to shit.
Gen is by his side, loosely holding onto his other hand, dozing lightly in the chair; she looks exhausted, making him feel guilty for something he has no control over whatsoever.
Blinking heavily, he brings his forearm closer to his face. It isn’t just a smudge of a mark left by a medic prior to surgery; when he tries to wipe it away, it doesn’t budge.
Jack tries to orient himself in the room, everything looks a little hazy, blurred around the edges. Sleep is clawing at the edges of his consciousness, and he knows he’ll be dragged back under soon, so he takes a moment to really concentrate, finally making out neatly looped handwriting that says three simple words: Are you okay?
If he wasn’t in so much pain, so out of it, he’d laugh at the irony of it all. Because no, he’s not okay. At this moment, he doesn’t know if he ever will be.
He glances at his right forearm, the one closest to his wife, where his original soulmark sits. The one that says “You’re staring,” from back when Gen Abbot was Genevieve Mitchell.
I have a soulmate, he thinks. I already have one, willing the mark away, eyes already forcing themselves closed. He hopes that when he wakes up again, the mark will be gone.
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Samira – 2019.
Samira drags herself into the bathroom, simultaneously wiped and practically vibrating with energy. Her first week on her ED rotation has lit a fire in her belly that she’s not felt for a long time. She likes so much of it - how busy it is, the different people she gets to meet, the feeling that on someone’s worst day, you can make the tiniest difference.
Don’t get her wrong - she’s enjoyed her other rotations too, but there’s something almost addictive about emergency medicine that makes her want to come back to it again and again. She feels a little naive even thinking about it, but she knows that this rotation will change her thinking, rewiring her brain little by little.
She tries not to think too much about Appa, but it’s inevitable; of course the place where he died is where she wants to make the biggest difference, too. If she can stop another little girl from going through what she did -
Samira’s thoughts come to a sudden stop as she drops her top to the ground, catching a flash of something in the mirror. She tries to contort herself to see it better, but the glass is already steaming up with the heat of the running water, and the words against her ribs are in an awkward place to see anyway.
She grabs her scrub trousers from where she’d kicked them into a pile on the floor, rooting through the pockets until she finds her phone, taking a picture and zooming in.
Across her ribs there are neat block capitals, all almost uniform in size: Are you always like this? They read, and she frowns.
She’s not exactly been waiting for a soulmark to show up. Far from it, in fact; she had been happy thinking that she was going to be one of those people who never got one, so as to save her from the sort of heartache she’d seen her mother go through and yet – there the words are.
“Are you always like this?” She mutters to herself.
She does not like the way that the words taste on her lips.
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Jack - July, 2024.
Jack’s on the roof when Robby finds him, ready to begin handover like normal.
The night shift had been fine. Nothing extraordinary or worthy of writing home about. Just a normal night in the Pitt and yet, he still brought himself up here to decompress for one reason or another.
Mostly, he likes how calm it is up here in the early hours of the morning, enjoying catching the tail end of the sunrise with a coffee in hand when he gets the chance to.
“Morning,” He nods to Robby. The man already looks wound up, tension sitting beneath his skin.
Robby doesn’t reply, just claps a hand onto Jack’s shoulder by way of greeting.
“Anything to report?” He asks, and Jack begins to run through the evening’s events like he always does. Start to finish, a familiar routine to it.
“Shen is going to handover to Collins, Ellis to Langdon, all wrapped up in a pretty bow for you,” He finishes with a weak smile, and Robby raises an eyebrow: as if anything is ever that simple.
“You met the new resident yet?” Robby asks, driving the conversation on swiftly, and Jack can already tell that his fellow attending is fishing for one thing or another.
“Mohan? I’ve heard about her, don’t think we’ve crossed paths yet, though.” He explains truthfully; he’s heard the name enough times, but not enough to form any sort of opinion on her. Besides, he’d rather do that himself by observing and teaching, choosing not to listen to gossip.
Robby lets out something that almost sounds like a slight hiss, which makes Jack pause. “Don’t get me wrong,” Robby starts, “She’s fine - lots of potential - but there’s a reason she’s being called Slo Mo already - as if Gloria wasn’t breathing down my neck enough,” he carries on for a moment or two, muttering about metrics and patient satisfaction scores.
Jack turns to look at him, head tilted slightly. “She’s been here, what - two weeks? I’m sure she just needs to find her footing,” he shrugs off, but Robby doesn’t look convinced.
“I’m not so sure,” he replies, “If you get a chance on your way out, see what you think.” His tone of voice isn’t great.
Jack gets on with Robby fine. He respects him. Trusts him in a crisis. Sometimes, he thinks he might be the closest thing the chief attending has to a friend -- or perhaps a therapist – but there are certain things about Robby he’s learned not to look at too closely. Robby can be too quick to judge, too easily pulled into whatever management is breathing down his neck about that week. Jack has always preferred to make his own assessments. People, like patients, tend to be more complicated than the first impression suggests.
Though, he gets it at the same time; Robby’s head will be first on the chopping block. Jack, at least, has a little more leeway for the time being.
“I’ll make time,” Jack agrees, following Robby and retreating back inside. He takes the elevator down, legs sore after spending so many hours on his feet for the sixth day in a row. God, is he glad that he’s got two days off as soon as he gets out of this place.
__
Sooner than he expects, Jack gets to meet Dr. Mohan. She’s got a chart in hand, trying to explain whatever is on it to Frank Langdon, who seems to be paying her very little regard.
Robby peers at him from where he is standing next to Dana, giving him a look that very clearly reads: see what I mean?
“No one thought to ask her about recent travel, but she flew long-haul three days ago, and I checked - there’s unilateral swelling of the calf,” she is saying, gesturing at the notes she’s written down.
Frustratingly, Jack finds that she isn’t being heard.
“Her heart rate is still 118, it hasn’t come down in four hours” She tells Langdon. Her posture is firm. She isn’t looking around her for support, as though she knows she isn’t likely to get it.
“She’s anxious,” he answers, unbothered.
“But her oxygen saturation - ,” she tries, but again, it’s shrugged off.
“She’d been crying. She’s at ninety-six now.”
Langdon turns and begins to walk away from her, not even seeing the conversation through. Mohan’s eyes are fixed on the chart, still reeling off information to his retreating back, “She keeps saying she can’t catch her breath…”
She trails off when she realises she’s been left alone, slipping back into the room where the patient is seated.
Jack, curious, grabs the clipboard from her hand as she passes.
He reads back through the information there, the notes she’s scribbled in the margins of the page, eyebrows raising a little higher as he reads each piece of rushed handwriting.
Robby sidles up to him, waiting for Jack’s assessment. Though what he’s not expecting is the sincerity Jack meets his eyes with, pen tapping a note that says pulmonary embolism?
“She’s right,” Jack muses, eyes looking for Langdon who is currently nowhere to be seen.
“About what?” Robby asks, so Jack passes him the chart, watching the other doctor’s expression change as he tracks through the same observations Jack just agreed with.
Robby shakes his head, a hand coming up to scratch at his beard. “Damn,” he says, padding over to the door that Mohan just slipped through. “Good catch, Mohan,” he praises quickly, before rattling off a set of orders for Dana to follow, tests that - no doubt - should have already been done.
The ease of it, the lack of apology or accountability from the other, more experienced staff, whose names he saw on that chart makes him pause for a moment; the resident that Robby so casually referred to as Slo Mo, like some kind of slick joke, not even twenty minutes earlier has most likely just caught something potentially life-threatening because she didn’t allow the first explanation to become the final explanation.
He pops his head into the patient’s room, gestures for Mohan to join him outside of the door. He doesn’t miss the gentle hand she lays on the young woman’s arm, the reassuring words she says to her, promising that she has been heard, finally. “We’re going to do a few more tests, okay? I don’t want to send you home just yet.” She explains softly, before leaving the room, clearly having already heard Robby’s barking.
When she stands before him, Jack can’t help but just take a moment to look at her. She doesn’t look triumphant, like she should, at catching something so important; instead she looks exhausted, drained. He wonders how long she’s looked like that for.
She narrows her eyes slightly at him, and he realises he hasn’t introduced himself. He’s just about to, when she asks him a familiar question. The same one that sits on his left forearm. “Are you okay?” She asks quietly. it isn’t said with the usual undertone he’s come to expect, just genuine curiosity and maybe a little confusion.
Jack barely even hears the words. He’s spent years looking at that same looped cursive he saw a messy version of on the chart, and he hasn’t even realised it yet. That this time, those three words are the three.
“Are you always like this?” He retaliates quickly, answering her question with his own. And he means it to be heard in a way that says you are fucking brilliant, but what he isn’t privy to is the way that she expects to receives it: Are you always so difficult? Are you always so stubborn? Do you always have to make everything harder?
Those interpretations don’t match the expression that sits on his face, and it doesn’t compute to Samira because those are her words, the ones that sit beneath her scrubs and yet –
They don’t mean what she thought they did. Not with how he just said them.
Absent-mindedly, she brushes her fingertips against the material of her scrub top.
There’s a thought forming in his head. He presses his lips together to stop himself from asking, thinks: No. Don’t be stupid. And yet, he can’t help but track her movements, noticing the way she shoves that same hand into her pocket when she catches him watching her.
“Is it on your ribs?” A voice that it takes him a moment to recognise as his own fills the gap between them. He mentally kicks himself, realising he still hasn’t introduced himself but is apparently perfectly okay with asking a question as loaded as that.
“What?”
“Nevermind.” He shakes his head. He had thought – but no. It wouldn’t be the first time he’s made the mistake. His words are generic after all. A slight movement doesn’t mean anything.
She opens her mouth, gaze fixed on him, hand gesturing out towards him. He realises she wants to know how to address him. “Jack,” he answers the unasked question.
“Jack.”
She’s fixing him with a look that dares him to ask again. He is all of a sudden very aware that they are standing still outside of a patient’s room as the rest of the ED moves around them.
He gestures to the stairwell off to one side and she follows him seamlessly.
The door clangs shut behind them, filling the space with nothing but the echo of that too-loud sound.
“Your mark,” He clarifies, quieter this time, “Is it on your ribs?”
Mohan goes very still in front of him, as though he is confirming the thoughts racing through her own head. “...Yeah.”
His eyes drop to the covered skin on his forearm.
Are you okay?
Her hand settles back onto her ribs almost unknowingly, mind flickering back to that zoomed in picture she took almost five years ago.
Are you always like this?
The whole world around them goes very quiet at the admission; for years they’ve been two sets of words belonging to strangers and now, here they are, standing three feet apart.