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It’s been almost thirty years now that Jack has dreamed of his soulmate, and three since she’d come into his life by finding a place working the same emergency department as him.
Growing up, he’d always been told that your soulmate would come to you in a dream… but he’d never thought it would be so literal. Prophetic, almost. Two soulmates in a pair have been known as twin dreamers for as long as he could remember—the dreams would start sometime around the age of twenty-one and manifested as your soulmate’s likeness in the moment you met them, regardless of when you could actually parse who they are.
That is to say, Jack Abbot, who is now fifty, has been dreaming of a twenty-eight year old Samira Mohan for the last thirty years. The dreams started off fragmented, only briefly revealing tiny parts of her at first. Her ears, her hair, her lips. Only once the years started to roll past did these parts begin to stitch themselves into a full tapestry of who she was and what she would look like, and he thinks the image finally completed sometime around his thirty-fifth birthday.
It didn’t bother him, going so long without coming across her in his daily life. Considering the fact he’d worked in the ED for so long and barely left himself any free time spare, he’d started wondering whether she would turn up as a patient. But one shift change his expectations had been absolutely shattered, when he’d heard an unfamiliar voice talking to Dr Shen and his curiosity had gotten the better of him, convincing him to peer around the lockers to see the new recruit—day shift, most likely.
There she was.
His twin dreamer. Right there, in the flesh. Somehow even more beautiful than his dreams had allowed him to see.
He’d stared for a moment, a little dumbfounded, until after a moment her warm brown eyes drifted just enough to notice him. “Ah, hi there! You must be Dr Abbot. I’m Dr Mohan, it’s my first week… day shift.” Of course. Robby never let him at the new recruits first.
Her eyes lit up when he stepped closer and she reached out to extend a hand for him to shake, her smile easily on the same level of the sun.
“Jesus, Abbot, loosen up a little,” Shen chuckled from behind her, and that was when he realised just how hard he was surveying her.
Jack cleared his throat. “Pleasure to make your acquaintance, Dr Mohan. I hope to see you working some nights so you can get a taste of which shift actually has more fun,” he remembers joking on his way out.
That was three years ago, and she hadn’t reacted a bit at the sight of him. He could only conclude that she doesn’t see as much as he saw. She hadn’t quite put the pieces together yet—which meant that, god willing she stayed here, he’d get to be there to watch the realisation happen.
They’re working a night shift together, Samira on a double, when he first hears her bring it up.
“How early did you figure it out?” She’s in the middle of charting, sitting side-by-side with Dr Ellis. Clearly exhausted, but her back is straight as a board like always. The sight usually makes Jack chuckle whenever he sees it.
“Mm, well,” Ellis starts, “I’ll be honest, I don’t really know just how useful my experience is gonna be, ‘cause… y’know, you take one look at Emery and tell me she isn’t totally one of a kind.” She nudges Samira and subtly gestures across the ED to where Dr Walsh is animatedly bickering with Jack. “But honestly, I think it was pretty early. Before the image filled out completely, anyways. So don’t lose hope, girl.”
Samira snorts. “Yep, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone so comfortable talking back to an attending as Dr Walsh. But… that might just be the kind of person Dr Abbot is. He’s… nice.”
“… Yeah?” Ellis raises a brow, not buying it for a second. “He’s not like that with everyone, that’s for sure. He’s definitely got some favourites.”
The notion makes Samira pause, blinking hard a few times. She tries to ignore it. “You said you figured it out early, right? Like… how much could you see?”
Ellis hums. “Maybe like… about a third of her face. Eyes, mouth for sure. But again, I know the shape of her mouth a little too well—”
“I know my twin dreamer is… a white guy.” Samira interrupts. Ellis pulls a face. “Hazel-ish eyes? Stubble,” she continues. “I don’t know, isn’t this kind of hard to tell? It would be so much easier if you could hear their voice or something too.”
Ellis laughs, mumbling a passive that’d be too easy and giving her a sturdy pat to the back as she rises to her feet, making her way to the board to pick up another patient. Samira stays where she is, idly chewing on the end of her pen. She stares into space whilst she tries to put the fragments together, trying to make a whole person in her mind out of the ‘some’.
Jack, the walking complete puzzle made from her mind’s pieces, had since sent Walsh on her way and is now working on paperwork himself—but he can’t help the way his gaze drifts over to Samira every so often. He can tell she’s trying to figure it out. Wonders just how close she’s going to get this time.
“How we gettin’ on, Dr Mohan?” he approaches her to ask, and Samira almost jumps out of her skin.
“O-oh god! Dr Abbot! Sorry, I was in a world of my own just then.” In that moment, she’d noticed something about her dreams: a faint mole beneath his right eye, right on the apple of his cheek. At least, she thinks she can make it out from the vague fragments she’s seeing anyway. “Actually, um, can I ask you a question about how the best way to summarise this procedure would be for charts?”
Jack pretends he doesn’t notice the way those gorgeous eyes he’s so intimately familiar with already dart over every inch of his face, not-so subtly studying his features to try and figure out if he might be the one. “Sure. Let’s take a look at that.”
He reaches out to slide the chart closer to himself, looking it over, then grabs the pen Samira was using and uses his teeth to pull the cap off. She flushes, not sure whether to tell him that she was also just chewing it—and that they’d technically now shared an indirect kiss. Before she can decide she gets distracted again, wondering: is it a bad idea to indirectly kiss someone who’s not your twin dreamer?
… Who’s to say he isn’t her twin dreamer?
“… You get all that?” His voice suddenly snaps her out of her thoughts, and her eyes nervously dart between his face and the papers. That’s when she notices it—his mole. In the exact same spot she’d seen.
“… Sure!”
Jack stares back at her, not even giving her a moment before calling her bluff. “You know what, let me just finish this one for you. I’ll find a quiet moment to talk it through with you again later.”
He gives her shoulder a reassuring pat before he stands up and heads off again, and all she can really do is sit in a daze. That… felt different, to how it felt when Ellis did it.
Very different.
Weeks pass by, and in between her fluctuating time spent working in and outside of night shifts, Samira finds herself fixating on that mole. So faint, barely there, almost like it’s teasing her for not being able to put the pieces together yet.
She’d started to see it as a challenge at a certain point—wanting to prove to herself that she could figure it out before her dreams could ‘reveal’ him to her. To widen the comparison pool, she’d even downloaded a dating app… or two. Just to see if she could piece things together.
The apps only made things more perplexing. The more she swiped, the less she saw. It was almost like the images in her dreams started to get fuzzier, the wider the pool became.
She deleted the apps after a matter of days, realising she wasn’t getting anywhere. Making the dreams fuzzy gave her more time to try and deduce, sure, but what good was more time when she couldn’t make the connections as confidently?
The day after she’d found herself on another night shift, staring into space again; except this time, the space she was staring through contained one Jack Abbot. He didn’t seem to notice her watching yet, far too busy with incoming patients and transfers to pick up on her eyes following him.
That night, she dreams again. Alongside those hazel eyes, that faint mole, the stubble… is grey-white hair, dotted here and there with the faintest strands of the last of his red still clinging on.
The picture gets a little clearer, and once again her mind strays back to him.
“What are the odds of it being someone you know, but just never realised for the longest time?” Samira asks Ellis the next time they’re charting together.
“Pretty high, I’d bet,” Ellis says. “Y’know what they say. Sometimes the thing you need the most is right in front of you. Hidden in plain sight and all that.”
Samira’s nose twitches. “Okay… and what are the odds that they already know, but aren’t saying anything?”
She’s met with a skeptical look. “Come on, Mohan.” Ellis laughs. “Like anyone could keep it quiet if their soulmate was someone as fine as you!”
The comment makes Samira groan a little, burying her face into her hands—but as she does so, her eyes meet Jack’s from across the room. Just for a second.
He smiles.
… She figures from the conversation it’s probably not him.
Over the next week she eases up on the doubles a little, spends most of her time working on day shifts. Jack is the first person to notice her absences, but he puts it down to the fact she’s probably trying to knuckle down and figure out what she wants to eventually pursue a fellowship in. However, he does still wonder if she notices the lack of his presence as much as he notices hers.
The next time he catches her on the same shift, he calls her aside. Lets her know he’d like to chat with her on the roof—his contemplation spot of choice—when she has a minute. Samira responds with that same sunny nod and smile she always does when she’s caught up in the high of a procedure, telling him she’ll be about twenty minutes.
Jack makes his way up there as soon as the conversation ends, needing some time to himself to think and figure out his next move. Would it be wise to even bring the topic up, knowing he was an attending; or would it be better to wait as long as it takes for the picture to gradually become more vivid in her mind?
He grunts. Maybe not. As patient of a man as Jack is, and as amusing as watching Samira try to figure it out was, the novelty definitely wears off. Regrets are starting to seep like inkblots into the painting of her inside his mind now, knowing that the longer he waits the more he’ll be missing out.
“You wanted to talk, Dr Abbot?” He’s interrupted by that sweet, familiar voice and turns around on his heels to face her.
“Oh, yeah. Not in trouble, Dr Mohan, I promise.” he starts. “I guess I was mostly just wondering how you were getting on, kid. Haven’t seen you around on nights are much lately, so haven’t had a chance to chat about fellowships. Anything take your fancy? Don’t tell me Robby is bribing you back to day shift with some offer you can’t refuse,” he jokes.
Samira comes to a stop and leans forward against the railing he’s standing against, a few stray curls blowing in the wind. “It’s… complicated. Well, fellowships are going great, actually. There’s one I was actually hoping to get a letter of recommendation from you for—”
“Consider it done.”
“Aren’t you gonna… ask what I’m looking into?”
“Eh, I trust you’ll choose the right thing. You’re the future of medicine, after all—I’ll just do whatever I can if it means you stay here with the nightcrawlers.” Jack grins.
Samira smiles back at him, looking sheepish for the first time he’d ever seen, and ducks her head a little. “Thanks. That… that makes me feel a lot more confident.” A few moments of comfortable silence pass before she speaks again. “Toxicology, by the way.”
“Oh yeah?” Jack hums. “You got a good track record. Any patient would be lucky to be treated by you, Samira.”
Samira. Not Dr Mohan. Samira. She imagines what kind of look he’d have on his face if instead of Dr Abbot, she called him Jack.
The image in her mind becomes a little clearer.
Samira finds in the end that no matter how close she gets, she’s no match for her own mind. At least, to an extent—she thinks she knew exactly who her twin dreamer was a while ago. His face had become so vivid in her mind, but she wasn’t sure just how to broach the subject. Whereas before she’d worried that indirectly kissing the man who turned out to be her soulmate could be an issue, now her main concern is the possibility that his mind might not be showing him the same.
He had picked up on this a bit: noticed her staring longer, picking up more doubles, making excuses to linger in his orbit. He knows she’s so close. All he has to do is let her know he’s ready whenever she is.
Sometime towards the end of their shift they end up on the roof again, using a free moment to watch the sunrise together. Sometimes they’ll chat, sometimes they won’t, quite happy to bask in each other’s company. But this time Samira is the one who breaks the silence first.
“I dreamed of you,” she confesses.
Jack smiles, taking a step closer. “Hey, you finally put the pieces together. I’ve waited years.”
Years. Samira lets out a breath she didn’t even realise she’d been holding, and almost stumbles into his arms. When Jack’s warmth envelops her body, she doesn’t think she’d ever felt anything quite so right.