Chapter Text
"There is a fine line between admirable and idiotic, Dr. Abbot, and you are standing on it. While donating blood."
— Dr. Samira Mohan, Exam Room 4, 03:52 AM
One year earlier.
Jack Abbot was fifty years old, a combat veteran, a widower, and currently donating blood while standing upright because there weren't enough chairs and he'd be damned if he was going to sit down while the nurses ran double-time around him.
The bag filled slowly. His left arm, the real one, had a good vein. The phlebotomist had found it on the first stick, which was more than he could say for most of the new hires. His prosthetic hung at his side, the sleeve of his scrub top pushed up past the socket, and he watched the chaos of the ER from his spot near the supply station and thought about how he was going to need to eat something soon or he was going to pass out like an idiot in front of his own department.
PittFest. Active shooter at an outdoor music festival. Forty-three gunshot victims in the first two hours alone, and they were still coming. Before that, a stage collapse at a smaller venue across town had dumped eleven crush injuries into their laps like an appetizer. The night shift had been running for nine hours and there was no end in sight.
He'd lost count of how many chest tubes he'd placed. How many units of O-neg he'd squeezed into people who were bleeding out faster than they could be filled. How many times he'd had to step over shell casings that had rolled out of patients' clothing because the cops hadn't had time to collect them as evidence. The sound of the trauma shears cutting through blood-soaked fabric was still echoing in his skull. He could smell gunpowder mixed with copper and antiseptic, and he knew from experience that smell would linger in his sinuses for days.
This was the job. He'd chosen it. Some nights, he just wondered why.
"Dr. Abbot."
He looked up. Mohan. Third-year resident, the one they called Slow-Mo because she took her time with patients in a department that didn't reward taking time. She was standing in front of him with a chart in her hands, her scrubs soaked dark across the stomach and down one thigh — someone else's blood, based on the spatter pattern. Her hair was strands, escaping from its ponytail in pieces that stuck to her temples with sweat.
She looked like she'd been through a war. Which, he supposed, she had. Mass casualty events like this were akin to a war zone. He'd know. She was day shift. SHould have gone home hours ago. Should have been kicked out hours ago. And yet—
"Mohan."
"You're donating standing up."
"Chair shortage."
"There's a chair right there." She pointed. There was, in fact, a chair six feet away. Unoccupied.
"Didn't see it."
"You're looking right at it."
"Must have appeared after I started."
She stared at him. He stared back. Her eyes were dark, almost black in the harsh hospital light, and there were circles under them so deep they looked like bruises. He'd seen her in Trauma 2 when the first wave of gunshot victims came through the door, her hands inside a nineteen-year-old's chest cavity, massaging his heart while Robby worked to clamp the bleeder. The kid had died anyway. She'd called the time and moved straight to the next stretcher without pausing, her face blank, her hands already reaching for new gloves.
That was three hours ago. She hadn't stopped moving since.
"That's very impressive," she said, her voice flat with exhaustion. "The standing blood donation. Very macho."
"Thank you."
"It wasn't a compliment."
"I'm choosing to take it as one."
Her mouth twitched. Not a smile, but the ghost of one, a thing that lived in the corner of her lips and didn't quite commit. He watched it happen and felt something flicker in his chest that he attributed to blood loss, or the fact that he was slowly going insane.
"You need something, Mohan?"
"Consult on a head lac. Peds patient, eleven years old. Came in with mom during the festival surge. She wasn't shot but she was in the crush when people ran. Lac's clean but deep, and she's not talking. I want to suture but I need to know if you think she needs imaging first."
"Not talking as in shock, or not talking as in neuro deficit?"
"Shock. She watched her older sister take a bullet to the chest. Sister didn't make it. Mom's a wreck. Dad's still unaccounted for." Mohan's voice stayed level but something moved behind her eyes, quick and buried. "She's terrified and she won't let anyone touch her. I've been working on building rapport for the last twenty minutes but I'm running out of time and patience and I could use a second set of eyes."
"Show me."
She led him to Exam 4, the bag of blood trailing behind him on its rolling stand, and he was aware of how ridiculous he looked and didn't care. The patient was a little girl with brown skin and dark curly hair, dried tear tracks on her cheeks, a pressure bandage taped to her forehead. Her mother sat in the corner, not next to her, staring at the wall with the vacant look Jack recognized from too many notification conversations. The mom wasn't present. Couldn't be. Her other daughter was in the morgue and her husband was somewhere in the chaos of the festival, maybe dead, maybe injured, maybe just lost in the sea of running bodies and police tape.
The little girl was alone with her fear.
"Maya, this is Dr. Abbot," Mohan said, crouching next to the bed, putting herself at eye level with the kid. Her voice was different now. Softer. Slower. Not slow in the way people meant when they called her Slow-Mo, but slow like honey, like something warm being poured, and Jack found himself slowly becoming addicted to it. "He's going to take a quick look at your head, okay? He's very good at looking. It's basically his whole job."
The girl didn't respond. Her eyes were fixed on a spot on the wall, her body rigid. Both her hands fisted in the thin hospital blanket.
"You don't have to talk," Mohan said. "You don't have to do anything you don't want to do. I'm just going to stay right here, okay? I'm not going anywhere."
Jack watched Mohan settle onto the floor next to the bed, cross-legged, her hand resting on the mattress near Maya's arm. Available but not pushing. He'd seen a lot of residents talk to traumatized kids and most of them did it wrong: too loud, too bright, too much forced cheer that children could see through instantly. The ones who survived what this girl had survived could smell bullshit from a mile away. They'd seen the worst thing. They knew what adults were capable of. You couldn't lie to them and you couldn't rush them and you couldn't fix it with a sticker and a lollipop.
Mohan didn't try to fix it. She just sat there, breathing slowly, her presence calm and undemanding, waiting for Maya to reach out first.
"I'm going to look at your cut now, Maya," Jack said, keeping his voice low. "I'll tell you everything I'm doing before I do it. If you want me to stop, just hold up your hand like this." He demonstrated. "I'll stop right away. You're in charge. Okay?"
Nothing. He looked at Mohan. She gave him a tiny nod.
He lifted the bandage slowly, narrating each movement. The lac was about four centimeters, clean edges, no debris, no visible bone. Probably caught the corner of a barrier or a speaker when the crowd surged. He checked her pupils, both reactive, and did a basic neuro assessment through observation: she was tracking movement, her facial muscles were symmetric, her breathing was even. She wasn't showing signs of TBI. She was just somewhere far away from this room, from this night, from everything that had happened.
"She's good," he said softly to Mohan. "No imaging needed. You can close it."
"Thank you." Mohan didn't move from her spot on the floor. Her eyes were still on Maya, patient.
"Maya," Mohan said after a moment, "I'm going to fix your cut now. It's going to take a little while, but it won't hurt. I'm going to put some cream on that makes your skin go to sleep, and you won't feel anything. You can close your eyes if you want. Or you can watch. Whatever feels right."
The girl's eyes shifted. For the first time, she looked at Mohan. Actually addressing her in the room.
"My sister's dead," Maya said. Her voice was small and hoarse, like she'd been screaming for hours. She probably had.
Mohan didn't flinch.
"I know," she said. "I'm so sorry."
"A man shot her. She was just standing next to me and then she fell down and there was blood and she wouldn't wake up." Maya's face crumpled, the tears starting again, silent. "She wouldn't wake up and I tried to make her wake up and she wouldn't."
"That wasn't your fault." Mohan's voice was steady. "There was nothing you could have done. The man who hurt her did a terrible, terrible thing, and none of it is your fault."
"I want my daddy."
"I know. People are looking for him right now. As soon as they find him, they'll bring him here."
"What if he's dead too?"
Mohan was quiet for a moment. Jack watched her face, waiting for the lie, the reassurance, the thing residents said when they didn't know what else to say. I'm sure he's fine. He's probably just lost. Don't worry, everything's going to be okay.
"I don't know," Mohan said instead. "I really hope he's not. But right now, I don't know. And I'm not going to lie to you and tell you something I'm not sure about. What I can tell you is that you're safe here. I'm going to take care of you. And I'm not going to leave until we know more. Okay?"
Maya looked at her for a long moment. Then she nodded, a tiny movement, and reached out and put her hand on top of Mohan's.
Jack felt something twist in his chest. He stepped back, giving them space, and Mohan glanced up at him.
"I've got it from here," she said.
"I know you do."
He turned to leave and made it three steps before he stopped. He was still attached to a blood bag and he needed to sit down and eat something before he passed out and made more work for everyone. But he turned back and watched Mohan prep the suture kit, her movements slow and deliberate, her voice a low murmur as she explained each step to Maya.
She looked up to say something to the girl and he saw her in profile. The line of her jaw. The shape of her lips, the fullness of the lower one. The quick flash of her tongue wetting them before she spoke.
Fuck. That mouth.
The thought arrived fully formed and completely unwelcome. He was fifty years old. She was what, twenty-eight? Twenty-nine? She was his resident. She was exhausted and covered in someone else's blood and she'd just talked a traumatized kid through the worst night of her life with more grace than he'd seen from attendings with twice her experience. And he was standing here with a bag draining out of his arm, thinking about her mouth.
He'd been alone for 2 years. Since Diane. He'd stopped noticing women in any way that mattered, had stopped thinking about mouths and bodies and what it might feel like to touch someone who wasn't a patient. He thought that part of himself had died when she did, and he'd been fine with that. Relieved, even. It was easier.
Now he was standing in a blood-soaked ER at four in the morning while people died down the hall from gunshot wounds, and his chest was doing something he refused to call fluttering because he was fifty fucking years old and his chest did not flutter.
"Dr. Abbot?" Dana's voice cut through. "You're looking a little grey. Sit your ass down before you hit the floor."
He sat down. He ate a granola bar. He finished donating blood and went back to work and didn't look at Exam 4 again.
But he thought about it. He thought about it for the rest of the shift.
He got home at seven in the morning. Eighteen-hour shift. Forty-three gunshot victims, eleven crush injuries. Nine confirmed dead in their department alone, more at the scene. The shooter had been killed by police. The news was already running the body count on a ticker at the bottom of the screen, the number climbing every time they updated.
His house was quiet. It was always quiet. He'd stopped noticing that the same way he'd stopped noticing the absence of another person's coffee cup in the sink, another person's jacket on the hook by the door. The silence used to hurt. Now it was just the texture of his life.
He stripped out of his scrubs in the laundry room. They'd need to be washed twice to get the blood out, and even then they might be ruined. He didn't care. He walked to the bathroom in his boxers, his prosthetic left on the counter where he always put it when he got home, and stood under the shower until the water ran cold.
His head was supposed to be empty. That's how this worked. Long shift, hot shower, sleep. Repeat. He'd been doing it for twenty-five years.
But his head wasn't empty.
He kept seeing her. The way she'd folded herself onto the floor beside that kid's bed, unhurried, patient. The way her voice had gone soft without going false. The way she'd told an eleven-year-old the truth when lying would have been easier, because she understood that kids who'd just watched their sister die didn't need comfortable lies. They needed someone who wasn't going to bullshit them.
And her mouth. That mouth, moving slowly, shaping words he couldn't hear from across the room. The fullness of her lower lip. The quick flash of her tongue.
His cock stirred against his thigh.
He turned off the water. Dried off. Pulled on sweatpants. He needed to eat. He needed to sleep. He had another shift in twelve hours.
He lay down on his bed and stared at the ceiling.
Don't. She's your resident. She's twenty years younger than you. She probably calls you "sir" in her head.
But his hand was already drifting down his stomach. His cock was already thickening, rising against the worn cotton, and the image wasn't going away.
Her mouth.
He shoved his sweatpants down and wrapped his hand around himself.
He tried to think about someone else. A woman with no face, no name, no connection to the hospital. That was fine. That was normal. He was fifty, not dead, and jerking off wasn't a crime.
But the woman in his head kept growing features. Dark hair escaping from a ponytail. Scrubs stained with someone else's blood. A voice that went soft and slow when she talked to frightened children.
Mohan.
"Fuck," he muttered to the ceiling, and gave up pretending.
He imagined her on her knees in front of him. Those dark eyes looking up, steady and unafraid, the same way she'd looked at Maya when the girl asked if her father was dead. That calm. That honesty. He imagined her reaching for him, her fingers wrapping around the base, her lips parting.
His hand moved faster. He was leaking, precome slicking his palm, and he used it, his grip tightening. In his head, she took him into her mouth. Slow. Patient. That same unhurried way she did everything, the thing people mocked her for, the thing that made her good at her job. She took her time with him. Let him feel every inch of her mouth, the wet press of her tongue against the underside.
"Mohan," he said out loud. To his empty bedroom. To the ceiling fan. To no one. His hips were thrusting up into his own grip like he was twenty-five instead of fifty and he could hear himself breathing too loud, too ragged, the sounds of a man who lived alone and didn't have to be quiet.
He imagined her pulling off to breathe, her lips shining, a string of spit connecting her mouth to the head of his cock. That almost-smile. That flicker in the corner of her lips that never quite committed.
You want me to keep going, Dr. Abbot?
"Yeah," he groaned, and his voice sounded wrecked in the silence of his own house, answering a woman who wasn't there. "Yeah, keep going, don't stop—"
He imagined her taking him deep again, her throat opening around him, her eyes watering but not pulling off, and his hand was moving fast now, slick, the sound of it obscene in the quiet bedroom. He was talking, saying things he'd never say to another human being: her name, what he wanted to do to her, what her mouth looked like in his head, "that fucking mouth, Mohan, Jesus Christ—"
He came with a groan that punched out of him, his cock pulsing in his fist, cum spilling over his knuckles and onto his stomach. His back bowed off the mattress and he stroked himself through it, his grip loosening, slowing, until his hand stilled and the last aftershock faded.
The silence pressed back in, somehow, it felt louder now.
He lay there for exactly four seconds. Then he got up, walked to the bathroom, and washed his hands at the sink. Ran a towel under warm water, cleaned himself off, dropped the towel in the hamper. He looked at himself in the mirror: fifty years old, bags under his eyes, cum drying on his stomach, his cock still half-hard because apparently his body hadn't gotten the message that this was pathetic.
You're a fucking pervert. She's your resident. She spent tonight talking a child through the worst trauma of her life, and you went home and jerked off to the sound of her name in your own mouth. You're old enough to be her father. She trusts you to teach her, to evaluate her, to write her goddamn letters of recommendation. And this is what you do.
He wiped the mirror with the dry end of a towel, like that would help. Pulled his sweatpants up. Went back to bed.
He didn't know her, not that well, to be this fucking obsessed with her. Didn't know anything about her except that she was good with scared patients and honest with grieving children and had a mouth that was going to haunt him every time he closed his eyes.
It was a crush. That's all. A stupid, inconvenient, middle-aged crush, and it would pass. He'd go back to work and treat her like any other resident and eventually his brain would latch onto something else and this whole thing would fade into the background noise of his life.
He closed his eyes, tried to think about literally anything. Robby. Dana, yelling at him. Some neighbor's dog. Fucking... anything. He dreamed about her anyway.