Chapter Text
When she gets the email with her fourth-year rotations, she puts her head in her hands and tries very hard to convince herself that she’s not pissed off her tutor, or one of the secretaries in the faculty office or, like, the god of medicine himself. She lifts her head up to check again, and yep, it’s still right there, under the medical school logo, in neatly typed black and white: PTMC - Emergency Medicine.
She’s going to force herself to love being back, she decides, after a chocolate bar and an appropriate period of feeling a bit sorry for herself. And she does love vast swathes of it; loves that everyone knows he name, that she’s barely through the door before she’s getting hugs from the nurses – and that unlike the other med students she’s already figured out which supply closets are best stocked and where the night shift hides the good coffee.
It’s always there though, a feeling that she can’t quite name crawling under her skin. She doesn’t like to admit, even to herself, how strung out she’d felt after Pittfest – how conflicted she’d felt after her first taste of truly emergency medicine; so much so that it had taken a dermatology rotation and a few weeks of therapy to feel like herself again. So yeah, there’s a knot in her stomach when she walks through the front doors that doesn’t ease until her first few shifts have passed without incident
She’s getting good at it too, is the kicker. Comfortable with the frantic, chaotic pace of every interaction. She stops jumping when gunshot victims come in and starts feeling useful, like the doctor she wants to be one day. The kind of person who joins in on beers with the nurses after shift and helps MacKay study for her upcoming exams in between patients.
Then its her last day, and nothing awful has happened, and Robby has her booked in for a chat about her future, which should feel ominous but is actually, almost exciting.
Almost, being the key word, because twenty minutes before her shift starts, two buses blow up in the middle of the downtown commuter rush, and everything goes to hell.
Fourteen hours later they’ve lost twenty one patients, and when she hears from one of the relief nurses that the entire cities public transport network is still down, she almost walks straight back into the locker room to scream. She’s standing in front of the nurse’s station, looking at her phone and contemplating either booking an Uber (hour and a half wait, surge pricing) or just crashing on the break room couch (Santos has probably beaten her too it) when Dr Abbot waves a hand in front of her face.
“Javadi?”
“Sorry,” she shakes herself, “What did you say?”
He’s slightly dead-eyed, but his mouth twitches in what might be an attempt at a smile, “I asked if you wanted a lift home – you usually get the bus right?”
“Oh. Yes please.” The relief floods her body so absolutely as she follows him out through the waiting room, that it takes her several minutes to realize she’s lined herself up for an undoubtedly extremely awkward car ride with the senior attending she’s most intimidated by.
Thankfully (given she’s already run out of inane small talk), by the time they round the corner into the staff parking lot, Mohan is leaning up against the driver’s side of Dr Abbots car. She’s wearing an oversized Steelers hoody, and tugs her headphone wire out of her ear when she sees them approaching, waving with her free hand.
“Javadi’s joining the carpool” Abbot half explains as they come to a stop in front of her
“Nice.” Mohan’s eyes flick towards her and she gets a small but genuine smile, before the other women returns her gaze to Abbot, looking him up and down.
Victoria gets the distinct impression that she’s assessing him like they’ve been taught to do with uncooperative patients – start visually, see if you can figure out what’s going on from there; only go into touch them if you have to.
He stands there and takes it without comment, fidgeting with his wedding ring. There’s a long silence, which isn’t awkward so much as its confusing – like they’re having a whole conversation Victoria isn’t privy to - before Mohan grins and sticks her hand out towards him, “Keys please.” Evidently, having won whatever discussion they weren’t having.
He rolls his eyes but tosses them her way without complaint. Probably a good call, Victoria thinks. Abbot had worked a full overnight before the casualties from the bus bombing had even started coming in; hours longer than her and Mohan, who’d come in with Day Shift. Still, she can’t imagine ever having enough confidence to order an attending around that casually.
“You better not crash my car.” he grouses, resting his hand on the bonnet to steady himself as he walks round to the passenger side door.
“Oh please. Which of the two of us has actually driven into an IED?”
Victoria chokes, but clearly Mohan and Dr Abbot must be friendlier than she thought, because he only barks out a laugh in response to her teasing – smiling (properly, she thinks) for the first time since she saw him black tag a thirteen-year-old girl a couple of hours back.
“You really need to stop talking to Walsh.”
“But she has all the best stories.”
They continue bickering as Victoria opens the door to the backseat – there’s a clear hierarchy here, she won’t be riding shotgun – and finds herself faced with a child’s car seat.
Her very tired brain does not know what to with that particular piece of information, so she just stares at it until Abbot, in the process of levering himself into the passenger seat, looks over and notices she hasn’t moved.
“While I’ve heard the label child prodigy applied to you, Javadi,” he calls, arching an eyebrow, “I think you might be a bit old for the safety seat.”
“Yep, sure” she blurts as her brain comes back online, scrambling round to the other side and belting herself in. Abbot apparently having a kid is so far down the list of weird and shocking things that have happened today that its basically forgotten as soon as she relaxes into the comfort of an actual seat.
They start the drive in comfortable silence. Abbot falls asleep almost as soon as they pull out of the car park – his breathing loud and even, forehead resting against the window frame. The sun has well and truly set, and the streets are eerily empty of traffic. Police cars and large unmarked SUVs speed past at not infrequent intervals and she shudders a little bit, pulling her cardigan tighter round herself, in an attempt to guard herself against the remains of the day.
Mohan must notice, because she catches her eye in the rear-view mirror and asks, with determined – if slightly manic- cheer,
“Drive through? If I have to cook something before I crash out tonight it might actually kill me.”
“Sounds good,” Victoria agrees, thinking longingly of burger grease and fries, but she still feels compelled to gesture to their sleeping attending, “if you don’t think he’ll mind?”
Mohan smirks, “I’ll buy him some chicken nuggets.”, and then, hesitating, “I just wanted to say you did well today. You could be really good at this, if you wanted to be.”
Victoria feels her cheeks heat slightly and she tries to give a grateful smile in response. She doesn’t think the other women is wrong; she could be cut out for this if she puts her mind to it. She’s just not yet sure if she’s okay being someone who gives their whole life up for the never-ending series of accidents, and abuses and assholes that are the emergency room’s main source of customers. Can’t decide if she’d be wasting her potential or living up to it, or some nebulous other thing she hasn’t got figured out yet. Maybe it’s all three.
She’s spared trying to explain this when the golden arches of McDonald's appear, and Mohan pulls up to the drive-through window. She asks Victoria what she wants and then orders for herself and Abbot with easy confidence, shaking her head as Victoria reaches for her wallet and paying for all three of them on her phone.
Abbot wakes up as they come forward over a speed bump to the service window. He jerks round, turning his head from side to side slightly wildly until his eyes settle on Mohan in the driver’s seat and he takes a deep shuddering breath.
Mohan reaches over reflexively and puts her hand on his knee, just for a second until he breathes in again, and then he’s twisting round in his seat and shooting Victoria a mumbled apology.
She shakes her head in a way that she hopes conveys that he shouldn’t worry about it. She wasn’t even in with the worst traumas and she’s already dreading whatever it is she’s going to see when she closes her own eyes later tonight.
They sit in slightly awkward silence after that, most of the day’s adrenaline is gone but they are all still tense. Like someone’s going to swing round the corner any second and they’ll have another patient to deal with.
Luckily the food is ready quickly. A greasy looking teenager at the service hatch passing bags and boxes to Mohan through the window. She lobs Victoria her burger, which she just about catches, and hands the rest of the food over to Abbot, who looks down at it slightly critically
“MacDonald’s for dinner, Samira?”
“What,” she says matter of fact and oddly fond, apparently entirely unphased by his use of her first name, “Like you were going to cook.”
He shrugs in apparent agreement, and then, eyeing the large coffee she’s kept hold of with unabashed judgement; “you’ll never sleep.”
“I have ascended to a plane above what caffeine can affect.”
He laughs, scrubbing sleep from his eyes, as she turns the key in the ignition, and they exit back onto the freeway.
Victoria was never allowed to eat in the car as a child, and now with Abbot’s awake again, she’s very much getting the vibe of, like, her parents driving her home from soccer practice, so she holds the bag containing her meal tightly in her lap and tries not to let her stomach grumble too loudly at the smell.
Thankfully, it’s only a short ride to her parents’ house, and they pull up on her street not five minutes later. Despite the fact that he’s clearly about two seconds away from falling asleep again, Abbot insists on walking her to her front door – and actually watches until she’s turned the key in the lock – shooting her a weary goodnight as she staggers into the house.
She kicks her shoes off in the hallway and takes her food into the lounge, collapsing onto the sofa in front of one of the big bay windows, watching Abbot make his way back down the path as she shoves a few fries into her mouth.
She’ll never mention it to anyone, because by the time she wakes up the next morning she can barely remember her own name, much less sort the fact from fiction of whatever happened the night before, but before the car pulls away, she swears she sees them kiss.