Work Text:
Frank used to wake up at 5:45 for work. A twenty minute commute gave him fifty-five minutes to get ready. Coffee, breakfast if he had to, a shower if he didn’t the night before. It was a nice routine.
Now he wakes up at 5:00. It’s nothing special, he tells himself. It’s not because that means he can get his routine done before Abby wakes up. He’s sure it’s just because he likes the extra time to himself, sitting outside work in his car. He gets in right after Robby now, shutting his car door as soon as the man steps inside. It’s nice. It’s great.
He’s so damn tired.
When he has too much time to think about it, Frank finds it inherently childish to avoid his wife. He’s a grown adult. He’s had two kids with her. He loved her, once, and he thinks he still does even after the lines have blurred. He has to love her. Rehab almost killed him, but he had Abby. That is a debt he can't repay, and can’t betray, but he still wakes up forty-five minutes early so he doesn't have to pretend to enjoy the time spent with her. She’ll grumble because it’s early and she’s never been a morning person. She’ll berate him for waking her up even though her alarm is still set just as early. There will be a tension in his shoulders that won’t go away until he’s out the door.
This is why he wakes up early. He knows it inherently, that there is no avoiding it, and he knows that he needs to do something about it sooner rather than later.
After Frank gets off work some days, he researches divorce lawyers. Custody agreements. Laws on marital abuse. He spends lunch breaks he didn’t used to take to call them, setting up meetings, making up excuses for her so she doesn’t get any more upset when he spends his few days off traveling the city.
He never made it to a meeting, but one of them agrees that it’s a tricky situation, over the phone. He tells him, without evidence, there’s no guarantee.
He almost admits it late one shift, when he’s an hour past going over, offering to fill a call-out for the night shift. Robby eyes him. “It’s almost like you don’t want to go home,” he mutters, teasing, Frank’s sure, but there’s a look in his eye. He wonders. Frank wants to say something he isn’t sure is even real.
He just shrugs, strips his gloves and moves to tell Abbot his decision. It’s no uncommon occurrence for him after rehab, still silently feeling the need to prove himself that isn’t there. “There’s a need here. It’s alright.”
Robby let it go, and even Abbot hadn’t particularly questioned it. A two hour nap in the on-call room, then he was up and running again. It felt good to be useful.
He texted Abby, then turned off his phone. When he arrives home at just past seven the next morning she tears him a new one, whispering, biting, and Frank has to keep himself from flinching back the whole time. Sharp nails dig into his arm. Blood draws when she lets go. It doesn't shock him like it used to, but there’s a very visceral sense of weakness and vulnerability that grips him just the same as it always has.
Without evidence echoes in the back of his mind. You need evidence. This is evidence. This is what he needs. But Frank freezes, waits for her to get it out of her system, and watches her leave for work.
When he should be walking himself and the kids into the ER to make an abuse report, he slips into bed beside Tanner and sleeps until excited babbling wakes him. The blood dries. The stinging recedes. Frank doesn’t let it phase him any more than it ever has.
========
The divorce lawyer calls in the middle of a shift that Frank already feels like he’s teetering on the edge of. One wrong move makes him certain he’ll be tumbling towards another trip to HR. He picks up the phone even when he’d rather let it ring, sits to chart, and hopes no one questions him. Frank’s never been all that lucky, though.
“Langdon, it’s not social hour,” Robby calls. “I need you on an incoming psych patient.”
The lawyer barely gets a greeting. “Sorry, I’m at work,” before hanging up.
Robby gloves up quickly, eyeing Frank as he does. “Do I need to send you the staff handbook so you can reread the part on personal devices?”
“No,” Frank concedes quickly, “Sorry. It won’t happen again.”
“Take a break when you need to make a phone call.”
“I will.”
It’s some version of the same silent fight they always have. Frank’s problem is nuanced, Robby’s solution is clear cut. No one’s right, no one’s wrong, but there’s context that’s never explained and determination set in Robby’s gaze that Frank doesn’t dare argue. Neither of them want to keep having it but the problems keep coming up and they can never be what they used to be, so the context is needed and can’t be provided anymore. Not in confidence. Not without the threat of a drug test or a trip upstairs hanging over both their heads.
Frank trails along behind their psych patient and feels more like a med student than a resident in that moment, but it’s been a long time since he’s felt like anything more than an accessory to be gawked at in this ED, so he handles it.
They get him out of the ambulance bay before the screaming starts. Flailing, too. Robby goes for the legs, Frank takes an arm, tries a comforting voice even though it won’t get through to him. While he’s plenty versed in emergency situations, thinking on his feet and dealing with problems with little notice, psych patients always seem to shake him in some way. So he doesn’t particularly think about what’s in his pockets until it’s too late.
Frank has been punched. He’s been beaten, strangled, and on an occasion he likes to tell rookies, drugged with the sedatives meant for a patient. Workplace brutality is nothing new to him.
He has not, however, been stabbed.
Really there was never a tally, an invisible checklist in his mind. There’s no bingo card counting his injuries. But if there was, he's sure he would have won by now, and he thinks it should be a damn good pot. It’s a much easier thing to contemplate at this moment than the scalpel sticking through his scrub top and sitting just above his liver. He belatedly hopes someone else is taking care of things now, because his executive functioning shut off as soon as the adrenaline reached his body, telling him to run, run, pull it out, go!
“Langdon—Frank.” His head shoots up, and for the first time in… seconds? Minutes? His awareness returns enough to catch sight of the room around him. His attacker, an angry, definitely psychotic, patient being dragged down the hall, and a few too many well meaning coworkers surrounding him. But they don’t catch his eye, and they aren’t the owner of the voice speaking to him. Robby has a gloved hand on his shoulder, another on his abdomen, touching Frank’s own. At least in his panic he’d known well enough to put pressure on the wound. “Right here, focus on me. Let’s get you laying down.”
He doesn’t lay down. The only thing on his mind at the moment is a sharp, “Shit.”
“Yeah, you could say that again.” Robby might have to drag him into a room, but his hand replaces Frank’s against the blade, and the pain finally hits him. “No, don’t move. It’s shallow and I don’t want to change that.”
Perlah is back. Wasn’t she handling their patient? “Need anything else?” she asks, setting down a tray he doesn’t get a chance to recognize, and his first thought is a little more drastic than needed. If he were in his right mind he wouldn’t laugh at his own joke, but he doesn’t have the foresight when he thinks, guess they’ll have to intubate. It jostles the blade and Frank freezes.
Robby presses down harder. “Just dispose of… this.” The blade is out. Frank knows there’s pain there, he sure feels it, but it’s gratefully a little foggy even as it hits him. Perlah takes the blade with a gloved hand.
“Eighteen,” he states, as if the sort of scalpel will help anyone now. “It was in my pocket.”
Perlah teases softly, “I think he figured that one out.”
“Yeah, you’re gonna get a serious lecture about carrying a blade on your person when you’re stable,” Robby tells him, lifting his scrub top enough to get a look at the incision. Frank shouldn’t look, logically, but curiosity kills the cat and adrenaline is a beast. If he didn’t know better Frank would think himself a patient.
Oh. “I’m a patient.”
“Yes you are.”
“That sucks.”
“Wait until you see my bedside manner first hand,” Robby mutters. That tray Perlah had brought had been for sutures, apparently, because the next words out of his mouth are, “Prick and some burning,” before an entirely different pain is shot into his abdomen.
“Give a guy some warning,” he says through gritted teeth.
“I warned you about bedside manners.”
“Do yours plummet with residents?”
“Absolutely. Feel this?”
“The knife in my abdomen, no, but the one in my back?”
This time he gets a laugh, and it makes the hazy, painful-but-numb sensation almost worth it. That morbid curiosity returns and he looks to the wound. He realizes that he can’t remember the last time he saw Robby do something as trivial as simple sutures. Not like this. It’s a teaching hospital for a reason, and there’s no reason he should have to do this. But as Frank watches, they’re done cleanly, precisely. Years of experience make sure his hands don’t shake in the slightest.
Anyone could have done it. But Robby stays. A lump forms in his throat that Frank doesn’t really care to stop when he feels this vulnerable.
Perlah drops a pair of scrubs on the bed beside him and they smell like that generic “unscented” soap the hospital uses. “No one needs to see your abs,” she teases, a comforting hand landing on his arm before she leaves.
When Robby moves from the hunched over position that would’ve killed Frank to accomplish, he states, “If you wanted a day off there were better ways than getting stabbed.”
He knows it’s a joke. He knows. From anyone else Frank would consider it better, but he doesn’t, and rambles, “I really didn’t think about it being in my pocket Robby, I swear—”
“Woah,” Robby cuts him off quickly. “I was kidding. We all miss things.” Robby strips himself of his dirtied gloves, gesturing to the scrubs. “You should change now before the rest of the ED has to witness this.”
Frank forces a steadying breath out, then gingerly strips himself of his old scrub top and the long sleeve underneath. Cold air hits the scratched up skin of his upper arms that he was supposed to forget. If blood wasn’t lingering on his long sleeve he would submit to the hole in his shirt, but he doesn’t need it sticking to him all shift.
But Abby touches him in that way. Her nails drag across his skin just like they did. It doesn’t bleed but it’s raw, red, angry in a way that perfectly mirrors the words Abby shot at the time. Those words weren’t enough for her rage. Her rage wasn’t enough for Frank to care.
Ever present, Robby catches sight of him just before toeing the door open. “Your arm.”
Frank answers before he has to ask. “Oh. He must have grabbed me,” shifting before he can question any further and swinging his legs over the edge of the bed. It’s a lame excuse. It’s a clear excuse. If a patient showed him a two day old injury and said he sustained it five minutes ago, Frank would laugh out loud.
Robby doesn’t. Robby lets his mouth form a straight line, and his brow creases just slightly. Enough. “Clock out, and take care of that. I mean it. We’ll see you back here when that’s healed enough.”
Distantly he knows his face can’t fall. He can’t admit to the fear that shoots through him at the idea, knowing that if he comes through the door at two PM and Abby gets a notification from their Ring doorbell that he’ll be torn a new one. The scrapes on his arms will get mirrored on the other side if he’s lucky, and he’ll be explaining away bruises if he isn’t. But Frank is at his heart of hearts a liar (or so his wife has said, as did his dad, so long ago). So he nods satiatingly, tries not to look Robby in the eye because he won’t be able to keep it up if he has to, and goes to stand.
It hurts, but you get used to pain in the same way you get used to anything; repetitively. So Frank stands, follows the flow of traffic to the time clock, then the lockers, and doesn’t falter until he’s in his car.
He has five hours to kill. The alternative is Abby, and that’s too shocking of a reality for him to handle in this state.
========
Abby is at the dining room table when he gets home. It’s a little earlier than normal, but he tells her easily that he got off in good time. It’s not a lie.
She asks plainly, typing at her laptop as she speaks, “Can you start the laundry?”
The last thing he wants to do is start the laundry. He wants to go to bed and not wake up until it’s time for work the next day, when Robby will berate him, try to get him to go home, and never manage to convince him. But he wordlessly grabs the kids’ laundry baskets from their rooms, looking over their sleeping forms and clicking the door shut again. When it doesn’t fill the barrel he takes the one from his and Abby’s bedroom, picks mostly her clothes out of it, and throws them in. It’s shockingly easy to cater to his fear of her.
When the laundry is running, he tells her he’ll take a shower. He has the instinct to ask. The last time he had to ask was when he lived with two roommates in college, and before that was at home, his father always reserving a sharp word for the youngest son, the son who disappointed him, who took a gap year to pay for college instead of going into blue collar work like his two brothers. He was never happier than when he got to leave that house for good.
It feels like he’s right back there, except now he falls asleep next to the object of his terror, kisses her goodnight, and waits for the other shoe to drop even though he daily convinces himself it’s not true.
========
When work greets him, Robby isn’t in yet, but he doesn’t wait this time. Frank steps inside thirty minutes early and greets Abbot with a handshake.
“Good to see you,” the older man says, leaning against the charge desk. “Handover will be a nightmare, gotta warn you now.”
“That bad?” Frank laments, taking a sip of his Redbull.
“Four concussion watches. All different events.”
“Geez, something was in the air last night.” Frank glances around, watches the night crew frantically wrap up their cases as the shift comes to a close.
It looks like the thought hits him suddenly, and Abbot turns just slightly. “Rumor mill says you got shanked yesterday.”
Frank forces a laugh. “Shanked is a little dramatic. I got a scalpel to the abdomen, it didn’t even break through the muscle.”
“Something like that requires a lot more than an afternoon to heal, brother.”
A shrug will have to do. Frank takes another sip to hide his anxiousness. “Consider it… involuntary outpatient surgery.”
Abbot chuckles good naturedly, taps the desk in front of him as he moves. “It’s your head.”
As if summoned, Robby’s voice can be heard from across the hall. He’s not talking to anyone that he recognizes, but Frank still tenses at the idea of being caught red handed, despite the inevitability. If you had told him he’d once be more afraid of his wife than Robby, though, he’d have thought you crazy. But it’s too true to ignore, and Frank stands his ground when the man catches sight for that very reason.
A raised eyebrow and a pinched tone greet him. “You need to be at home.”
Abbot gives him a satisfied snort, a pat on the shoulder, and a muttered, “Good luck, tiger.”
“Seriously, I’m alright,” Frank argues. “Stick me on desk work, I’ll do other people's charting if I have to.” He runs a hand through his hair, the other circling the top of his Redbull can just for something to ease the nerves of existing at all. “You know me. There’s no way I‘m sitting still any longer than I have.”
“You’re not healing a stab wound by working.”
“I’d get into worse trouble playing at home with my kids. They’d punch me in the stomach. I recently got a fist to the sternum from Penny.” It’d been from Abby, shoving him hard enough that he had to wait for his breath to catch up to him after. Penny is a much softer reality. “Please, Robby, you can have me restocking the suture cart for all I care.”
He would rarely consider Robby a gracious man. A good leader? Absolutely. Kind, selfless? Without a doubt. But gracious to his residents is a far cry. The pinched brow and a hint of disappointment isn’t new to Frank, but it hits him hard all the same. “If you tear those stitches you’re redoing them yourself.”
A sigh of relief, and Frank gives a clear, “Understood.”
If he were to listen to his body he would know that this is a bad idea. The pain in his abdomen is no longer the ache he had yesterday, lidocaine doing a good job of masking it, but shooting in a way he doesn’t remember a wound like this hurting. But work is work. He already knows he’d rather the pain here than in the tension of his home.
So he restocks the suture cart. Frank asks Dana for busywork. He helps in triage because it means he won’t be doing any traumas he shouldn’t be doing, and all this is enough to distract him.
He doesn’t rip a stitch by the end of the day. He sticks around just a few minutes longer anyway, maybe to test fate.
========
His second workday with a stab wound doesn’t go like the first. The place seems to collectively decide that his one day of stupidity was enough to justify him working, and he’s shoved into a trauma mere minutes after he clocks in. But it’s not enough to distract from that shooting pain that turned to burning overnight.
Of all people Frank is the one to know that a wound like this suddenly burning is a bad sign. It’s probably an infected one, actually. But the patient in front of him codes for the second time, and he has to stabilize him before sending him up to surgery, so the best he can do is lean against the hospital cot while he continues compressions in the hopes that it will ease some of the pain in his abdomen. By the time he finally thinks he can breathe, maybe take a look at the injury, Javadi is calling him into consult on one of her patients. His fake smile is well practiced. It’s easy enough.
When the pain gets bad enough, Frank decides his mandatory fifteen minute break might actually be mandatory today. He slips out relatively unnoticed to the bathrooms, lifts his scrub shirt, and sees exactly what he had prayed he wouldn’t.
It’s inflamed; the stitches hold, but he’s pretty sure they won’t for long if things continue going the way they are.
He can’t get antibiotics without another provider. He’s still barely allowed around the med dispenser on a good day. With a soft slap of his fist against the bathroom tile, Frank submits to the idea of asking for help.
Robby is his last choice. Robby, the one who’s never said I told you so but might start today. Robby, Frank’s attending, the man who kicked him out only a year ago and is still barely friendly after all this time, is the last person on earth he thinks he wants to treat this injury right now.
Want and need are two different things, though, and above his sheer anxiety is the idea of anyone else seeing him like this.
Robby steps out in front of him first when the bathroom door swings open. He very regretfully calls, “I need a hand,” to him in passing.
The man raises an eyebrow, but responds, “With what?”
“That, uh… Okay first, I didn’t rip my stitches, so you can’t say I told you so.” Frank very pointedly looks anywhere but in his eyes. “But it’s infected.”
A startled and unamused laugh rings out. “Of course. Come on, C-2 is open.”
It isn’t exactly a scowl that graces Robby’s expression, but what could be worry, or (far more likely) could be disappointment, lies there. A hand hovers over Frank’s shoulder but doesn’t touch. It goes away when the door clicks shut behind them, and he has to question if it was ever there at all by the way Robby is looking at him. “This is why you don’t work on an injury,” Robby says, voice low. “This is why you go home, spend time with your family, watch bad television and report back when you get the stitches out.”
“I know.” He can’t look the man in the eye. It’s been a long time since he’s been reduced to this.
Robby nods for him to sit on the edge of the cot. “You aren’t acting like it. Lay down.”
“Really, Robby I didn’t think it—”
“Lay down, Langdon.”
It’s not ‘Doctor Langdon,’ at least. He bites back a defense and does as he’s asked, fiddling with the hem of his shirt until Robby moves back, gloved up and looking worse for wear. Frank tugs the shirt up.
Robby lets out a small, “Shit,” before prodding the stitches. “At least it didn’t reopen.”
“It might, with the way things are going.”
“It won’t if you go home and rest.”
“I can’t.”
Robby shakes his head, frustrated, and moves to disinfect the wound. It bears a shocking similarity to being seventeen, a memory Frank knows well, when he got coaxed into a motorcycle ride with an unlicensed friend. He ended the afternoon with a gnarly road rash, one his father looked at with disappointment and the knowledge of the medical bill that would run them. He spent an hour getting the dirt out of it himself, patching it up, that disappointment lingering in ways Frank can’t forget. Most of it was spent silently. He never got a lecture, and later he thinks the pain and embarrassment of getting gravel picked out of your arm for an hour was punishment enough.
Robby works silently for long enough that the hospital room starts to feel like his childhood living room.
“Why not?”
It startles Frank enough that his breath hitches, and he feels Robby’s hand against his torso flinch away to avoid exacerbating the injury. It’s an instinct he’s built over years of finding out the hard way when someone’s going to jump. “What?”
“Why can’t you just take a little of the advice you, anyone, would give a patient? Why can’t you just go home and take a few days? Why make it worse?”
Robby doesn’t keep working until Frank’s stuttering breath slows. He feels stripped to the bone with this sort of vulnerability, an empty room and consciousness of his breath. All he can do is stare at the tiled ceiling and answer, “I don’t know.”
The antiseptic stings, but not like Robby’s words: “That’s not good enough.”
“It’s—” Frank scoffs, trying so hard not to let him feel this. Any of this. He runs a nervous hand through his hair. “It’s fine.”
“What’s fine? Because it’s clearly not you.” Robby moves back, deeming the disinfectant good enough. “Frank, why are you so afraid to go home?”
His hand slams against the mattress before he can stop it. He’s no better than Abby. “It’s not like that!” he says against a heaving breath. “There’s no proof. You have no proof of that.”
Nothing can be done without proof. There’s no guarantee. You need proof.
Robby, for all the ER has taught him to be quick on his feet, pauses. Nothing is said, nobody moves. He’s seventeen and his dad won’t take him to the ER. “I’m going to put in a script for antibiotics,” he says plainly. “You’re going to pick it up and go home. If you can’t stay at home, you call me.”
Until Frank sits up and nods, Robby doesn’t move. Until the agreement is made, he’s not going anywhere. So Frank says a short, “Yeah.”
The hospital pharmacist looks at his badge strangely when he picks up his own prescription, but they don’t comment. They don’t know him here and that’s a small comfort.
He sits in his car until the end of his shift, watches Robby leave, and watches him clock the dark SUV still parked in its normal spot. No matter how many times he tells himself he needs to go home, needs to see his kids, needs to hold them and make sure they’re safe even though he knows she wouldn’t lay a hand on them (but he knew she wouldn’t lay a hand on him, too), he doesn't manage to turn the engine over.
Robby lingers outside his car. Frank pretends not to watch him, but they both know and it’s up to one of them to make a move. Carefully, like approaching a spooked cat, his boss walks three parking spots down and steps into Frank’s passenger seat.
Neither of them speak. Frank still doesn’t turn over the engine; he doesn’t even know which pocket his keys are in.
“When I was a kid, I had a neighbor,” Robby says quietly. “He would invite me over for dinner, watched me walk to and from school. He always made sure I was safe. I didn’t realize why until I heard my mom talking to one of her friends about the abuse.” He leans back in his seat, crosses his arms. “Eventually I started knocking on his door after school so I didn’t have to risk coming into a fight.”
Swallowing thickly around a hoarse throat, Frank asks, “Why are you telling me this?”
“Because I know what it looks like when someone’s too afraid to ask for help. I know what abuse looks like. And I don’t know if I’d ever forgive myself for letting it go unchecked.”
There's something stuck in his lungs, he thinks. A stone, or a sentence he can't say. Maybe the last hit he took from Abby went to his chest. He manages to speak around it only when enough silence has gone by to numb the feeling. “I can't do anything yet.”
“You can,” Robby says quietly.
Frank shakes his head like it means anything. “I need proof. I need evidence to get a divorce and full custody. Until I show up with proof, it would be a losing battle.”
He knows exactly what it sounds like. It sounds like Frank Langdon is waiting for his wife to hit him. He's waiting for something to photograph, yes, but he's waiting and he's going to let it happen, just like he has half a dozen times before.
He told himself he'd go last time, but the scratches on his arms are healing over now. He said it to himself the time before that, too.
“Proof,” Robby repeats, voice breaking at the idea. “Proof. You need to wait for the abuse to continue.”
Frank runs a hand through his hair and keeps it there. He tugs on it just to feel grounded, but if he knows one thing he knows that pain won't help him. He knows he'll try it anyway. “It's my only option.”
“God,” Robby mutters, mirroring his own distress. It's subdued; small mercies, it seems. After too long, too much silence and too much time to worry, he states, “If you need anything you call me. I'm not exaggerating. I need to know that you're going to be safe about this.”
Waiting for my wife to assault me? He thinks ruefully. Sure. Frank nods anyway, because he's not sure he has another option. He doesn't want one. “I will.”
“You're going to be okay if I send you home?”
Frank nods. He has to be. “Yes.”
Neither of them believe it for a second, but neither of them can do anything about it. Robby leaves without ever making eye contact, a silence between them that won’t ever really be fixed, and a very clear idea of what is about to happen despite what either of them want.
========
He made his promise to Robby that he would be safe going home and didn't believe it for a second. But though he walks through the front door with tension in his shoulders and a firm belief in his failure, Abby greets him with a soft smile. She gives a quiet, “Hi sweetheart,” before kissing him quickly, not unkindly. The gesture feels so foreign even though it never used to be, not until a few months ago. It could be two months, it could be six, but Frank was never quite sure when it started. Maybe it was when he went into rehab, or when he got out. Maybe it was somewhere in between in those terrifying phone calls. It was in the murky spring weather that she first stepped too close, a hand too tight on his arm, when she shoved it away like it burned and stalked off to another room. It could have been February or May, but the rain was coming down.
It’s almost October and it’s raining again. Abby kisses him like she means it for the first time since there was snow on the ground.
“I made a pasta bake,” she tells him on her way to the laundry room, “There are leftovers if you want to heat them up.’
He hears her in there, dumping clothes into the barrel and can picture her kicking the door shut with a laundry basket on her hip. “Thanks,” he says only loud enough to carry over there. “Are the kids in bed?”
“Yeah, Penny’s asleep but I told Tanner you’d say goodnight.”
He swallows past that stone in his lungs. “Okay. Okay, yeah.”
Frank doesn’t call Robby that night. In fact, he texts to say he’s okay to take that day off. There’s a very tentative sense of peace in all this that makes him incredibly guilty. That stone turns to shame, and that shame is something he can’t speak around without it dripping into his words.
Robby asks if he’s sure. Frank agrees.
========
Monday morning he goes on an early walk instead of his usual run, because he’s trying to get back to work without worsening his infection. Tanner comes with him and tells him about the daycare, about the playground with two trees when the little-kid playground only has one. He gets whiny about being on his feet by the time they reach the halfway mark, so he lifts the boy onto his back in a maneuver that his physical therapist would be proud of.
Breakfast is cereal and orange juice and Frank’s coffee, the way he likes it, and tea, the way Abby does. They talk about the neighbors. He admits that he got injured at work, and he’s taking antibiotics, but instead of flinching back at an accusation Frank finds himself leaning into the comfort of her hand on his. “Oh, honey you should’ve told me,” she whispers.
He swallows around that thing again. It won’t leave him alone. “I didn’t want to worry you.”
“I’d rather worry.” Abby presses a kiss to his temple. “I have to head into work a little early, do you want me to do daycare dropoff?”
He shakes his head. “No, I’ll… I can take them today. No need.”
“I don’t want you to hurt yourself further.”
Frank finds himself smiling, a soft thing, in a way that makes tears prick at his eyes for ever thinking he didn’t love this woman. “I’ll be okay, honestly.”
I’m their dad, he thinks ruefully, I need to be their dad. Abby waves goodbye, kisses her kids on the head and her husband on his cheek, and the pit in Frank’s stomach drops. This is the Abby he knows. This is the woman he married, the one who doesn’t like romcoms but adores action movies, who went through the first ten hours of labor without realizing, both times, the one with crow’s feet around her eyes because of the amount of smiling she does.
Her birthday is next month, and he’d been planning to be gone before then. He wonders belatedly if he should think about getting her a gift, now. The best gift she could get is him staying, calling off the divorce lawyer and telling Robby it was all a misunderstanding. She’d never know the gift she got.
But Frank doesn’t reach for his phone. He’s seen too many victims of abuse walk through his work, insisting that they’re fine, they didn’t actually mean it, it was a one time thing. Nothing will come of it. They’re a good person, really.
They all come back a week, two weeks, months later. Some for the second, third, or fourth time before they admit anything at all.
Frank waits just a little longer.
========
Robby eyes him like he’s going to explode when he shows up to work the next day, but Frank just smiles, something soft and relieved and, if he were to admit it, ignorant. He knows it won’t last, he knows. Textbook manipulation is staring him in the face and he’s ignoring it because his wife smiled at him when she hasn’t in months.
Desperate is the word he’s looking for. Robby must see it. Frank drops his things in his locker and jogs to get the first case he can just to avoid his concern.
“You good?” he mutters anyway in a quiet moment.
Frank nods, grabbing a tablet. “Yeah. Had a quiet day.”
“Langdon—”
“Leave it,” he says firmly, but quietly. He gives what he hopes is a reassuring smile and adds, “It’s fine, Robby. I’ll let you know if anything’s wrong.”
Frank knows exactly what’s wrong; Robby must too. He’s been practicing medicine as long as Frank’s been alive, he knows abuse as well as he knows anything else in emergency medicine. And Frank won’t call it that, not really, but he thinks it on the quiet nights. He thinks it when his boss looks at him like that. He thinks it when part of him aches from being grabbed too hard, pushed, maneuvered. When he gets home late not only so she won’t yell, but so she’ll be asleep before she can suggest anything. He won’t touch her in bed just so she doesn’t wake, doesn’t reach for him. Doesn’t make him say no, not tonight. Please, Abs, I’m too tired, just to be cut off by a kiss. Hips straddling his. His consciousness retreating inside him so he won’t have to be present for his body betraying his fear of her.
But he’s not at home in his bed; he’s not looking Abby in her murky hazel eyes he used to love. Frank is waiting for a case to take up more space in his mind than the fear.
The cycle has been going on this long, he thinks it can go on a little longer still.
========
They meet between daycare drop offs and their respective shifts. Frank wakes up just a little bit later every day, now, and there will be times he’ll have no way to explain the fear he feels, or no way to properly understand why he feels the way he does, but he wakes up a little later because he needs to convince his body it’s safe.
It’s not safe. That’s been betrayed too many times. He should recognize this, he does, Frank swears he sees it. It’s almost more shameful to see and ignore it, now.
When things start plateauing, Frank worries. He used to call out to the family when he got home, but now Frank enters silently after his night shift and slips off his shoes. The house is quiet when it should be bustling with morning chaos.
“Abby?” he calls, the worry in his voice foreign. She doesn’t answer. “Tanner, baby?”
“Daddy!” an excited squeal comes from the kids’ bedroom, and Frank finds himself rushing over. His feet can’t carry himself fast enough for his concern, and when he opens the door to find his kids alone there, the child-cover on the inside doorknob, his heart drops.
Frank drops to his knees to catch Tanner’s excited hug, glancing up to find Penny whining in the crib. “Hey bub, where’s Mama?”
The boy shrugs, wiggling out of his grasp to rush over to his own bed. “Left.”
With the opportunity he grabs Penny out of the crib, clutching her to his chest like she’ll break if he lets go. She’s barely a year old to Tanner’s four. The pacifier clipped to her outfit is hanging down, so at her whimper he plucks it up to offer, which she takes eagerly. The house is quiet. Penny whines, Tanner babbles. There are tear tracks down Penny’s cheeks. Where worry sat in Frank’s chest, a deep seated rage grips him now. “When?”
“Forever ago.”
“How long, bubba?” he pushes. “A couple of minutes? What’d you do while she was gone?”
“A puzzle!” he shows off, “And read Penny, like—like ten books. She didn’t like them.”
He mutters a very soft swear before he can stop himself, the front door opening in the background. “Abby,” he calls, panic gripping him as he trots out, Penny still in his arms. He doesn’t think she’d let go if he tried to put her down.
She answers quickly, something like shock in her voice, “Frank? What’re you doing home?”
“It’s an hour past my shift.” He swallows back a lot of fear when he accuses, “You left our preschooler and toddler at home alone.”
She scoffs, “I went next door to Sheri’s for milk, I was gone for two minutes.”
Beyond the absurdity of it, she doesn’t have milk in her hands. He knew it to be a lie before she had tried to speak, but it confirms his suspicions and his deep seated fear. “And you couldn’t have taken them with you?”
“Stop acting like I’m a bad parent,” she spits, “It was two minutes.”
“You put the child lock on the bedroom door.”
“I didn’t want them getting into anything while I was gone, that’s arguably the best thing to do.”
“You weren’t gone for two minutes, Abby!” he shouts. “I will excuse aggression. I will excuse biting at me for no apparent reason. I will excuse shoving me into a wall because I forgot to run an errand. But I will not excuse you neglecting our children.”
Penny whimpers, dropping the pacifier again, and he remembers why they got those clips. He holds her closer for a moment, but regretfully ignores whatever his wife has to say to put the girl back in the bedroom. He asks Tanner, “Stay in here for a few minutes, okay buddy? Try another book or two with Penny,” then shuts the door most of the way.
“Fuck you,” Abby whisper-shouts. “You aren’t one to speak about endangering our children. I let you back into this house after you—you were high. High! You’re a drug addict, Frank, you don’t get to tell me I’m a bad parent.”
She inches closer. For some stupid, stupid reason, Frank lets her. “I was never high at home, and I went through the work to be their dad. I fought to be their dad. You can’t say that.”
Instead of another curse, a hand pushes right against his chest, shoving him back into the living room wall. An audible thud of his skull on the fake fireplace mantel greets him, followed by the pain, and more of Abby’s quiet shouts that he doesn’t understand. When he blinks his eyes open and they finally focus, she’s not there.
It’s wrong. His body knows it’s wrong, something is upturned, that this is different.
Even considering a change of environment has nausea churning in his gut. The distinct smell of acid tells him he’d done more than consider it, and his hand comes back sticky when he brings it up to his face.
Frank has to push himself off the wall to make it back to the kids’ bedroom. He has to. It’s the thought that drives him, the only thing that would encourage him enough. It could be minutes later when he finds the two kids exactly where he left them. Tanner looks at him with those big eyes he got from his mom, but not worried, not yet. Confused. Frank swallows back acid and blood, searching with his tongue to find where he bit the inside of his lip. It doesn’t speak to the blood pooling at the back of his skull, finding the collar of his scrubs, and melting into the black fabric.
He takes two breaths. One to steady his stinging head, one to steady his terrified heart. “Okay. Okay, Tanner, grab your frog, we’ve gotta go.”
He blinks and grabs the stuffed animal like it'll save him. “Go?”
There are no good words to explain it. “Yeah, we’ve gotta go somewhere else today.” The diaper bag has very little in it, but there’s a day or two worth of clothes for both kids. Frank slings it over his shoulder, takes Penny by her hand and slowly toddles into the living room with her and Tanner on their heels. He locks the front door. Abby’s keys are on their hook.
It’s when the nausea, pain, and dizziness take over that he realizes with a terrifying jolt that he’s not just walking out of here. Frank slides down against the wall, so close to freedom but so far from making it there. He can’t do it. His kids are waiting and he can’t do it.
His critical thinking skills barely serve him in this state, but sitting on the floor with a baby squirming in his lap and Tanner talking about his hunger, all Frank can do is pull out his phone.
“Frank?”
Robby’s voice is too far away. He puts speakerphone on. Though there are a dozen things he should say, but his body tells him to leave and his aching skull reminds him he can’t. “I need… I can’t drive. I have the kids but I can’t… I can’t leave.”
“Fuck.” He prays neither of the kids pick that one up. “I’m eight minutes away. Talk to me, tell me what I'm walking into.”
When he swallows back blood, he doesn’t fight anything in his chest. His fear goes willingly. Something tells him whatever he’s saying probably isn’t legible, isn’t really what Robby’s asking, but he has very little space to think while his head throbs. “Uh—head injury. I don’t know how bad. But the kids are safe, and she’s gone, so I… I just have to get out.”
“You’re getting out.” The sound of an engine breaks through, then Robby’s promise: “I’m coming. You and the kids will be just fine.”
“She hit me, Robby.”
A shuddering breath can be heard, and Frank isn’t sure who it comes from. “Yeah, I kind of figured.”
“I didn’t want to admit it.”
“No one ever does.”
“What if no one believes me?”
Robby gives a humorless laugh, followed by, “The concussion you’re suffering from will close the case. Don’t worry about that.”
Tanner looks at him strangely, and Penny babbles. Something that sounds like dada. If he were more conscious he’d hear it, really listen, but he can’t. The words over the phone are still blurring periodically, listening more than speaking as Robby tells him where he is on the highway, how close he is, how he’s going to get in when he gets to the apartment.
Frank has to guide his four year old through unlocking the deadbolt a minute before Robby hangs up, comes tromping up the apartment steps, and barging in.
He’s probably a sorry sight, his kid squirming and whining in his lap because he’s too afraid to let go of her, the littlest on his tip toes trying to reach the lock again, and Frank still in last night’s scrubs now stained with his own blood. It’s drying against his scalp and making the hair there stick uncomfortably to his collar. For a very short second, he sees Robby panic at the scene.
“Abby’s gone?” he questions, coming to kneel by Frank’s side. He nods, but it causes the room to sway and something like nausea to curl in his gut, so he stops. “Here’s what we’re gonna do, Frank.” It’s in that clear, comforting tone he gives to patients panicking over their treatment. “I’m going to make sure that injury doesn’t need an ambulance. We’re going to load up your kids, head into the Pitt, and get this all documented.”
“What if she comes home?”
“She’ll find out what happens when she abuses someone I love.” Robby pushes his head gently away from the wall, fingers prodding around the injury that still bleeds sluggishly. It’s all enough that he doesn’t have the consciousness to consider the declaration that any other day would have Frank reeling. “Do you have any other injuries?”
Frank should have been able to do this himself, but he hasn’t. He understands what the heat of a panicked moment really does to your brain, now. “No.”
“How’s your back?”
He hadn’t stopped to think about it, but answers after a long moment, “Fine. No worse than normal.”
It’s probably not a comforting answer, but it’s all he has. He should know what Robby’s doing, what he’s looking for, but all he cares about is keeping track of the kid at his feet playing with a toy he’d dredged up from under the couch. Frank would know, because he kicked it under there a week ago. Robby talks—something low, comforting. He doesn’t catch all of it right away but as he focuses on his breaths, the words come to him; he’s speaking to the kids. “We’re gonna get in your Dad’s car in just a minute. Tanner, can you find a pair of shoes please?”
The boy, usually stubborn to a fault, just stares straight ahead at Robby. With a soft, “Go for it,” from his dad, Tanner hops up to find shoes, which Frank assumes are going to be the red Crocs a size too big for him that he refuses to wait to wear. “Find Penny’s too,” Frank calls over to him.
“Did you lose consciousness?”
“Maybe.” Frank moves a hand up to the back of his head, feeling where Robby’s just was. When silence urges him on, he retracts it and admits, “I think so.”
It doesn’t do anything to help the worry in the air. “Nausea or vomiting?”
“Yeah.”
“Which?”
“Both.”
Robby winces on Frank’s behalf, but moves on quickly. “What’s the last thing you remember before losing consciousness?”
“Uh… Fighting. Fighting with Abby.”
“Come on, Frank, you know what I’m doing,” he prods. “Your GCS is great, because you’ve been conscious for ten minutes. I need a read on amnesia. It’s the only thing I can do to place this concussion.”
He lets out a sharp breath. “I… She came inside. She had put the child lock on the bedroom door and left the kids alone. After that, she… I remember her pushing me. That’s all.” Tanner’s feet come padding back over a second later clad in red Crocs, holding two matching pink shoes for his sister. He’ll take any deviation from this conversation he can get. “Great job, bud,” Frank says quietly, taking them from him and trying to wrangle the girl into her shoes. “Can you get your coat too? And Penny’s?”
If there’s one thing this kid loves, it’s a mission. He takes it in stride, and while he’s gone Robby concedes, “Let’s just get you up.” He holds out both hands, but not to brace Frank, rather to take the child out of his hands. It takes a moment of hesitation—of asking himself if he can trust anyone with the safety of his child now that their own mother couldn’t be trusted with it—but he does. It’s gentle. Robby shushes the girl, holding her on his hip while offering the other hand now to Frank.
It’s a herculean maneuver to stand on his own, head spinning and gut churning, but when Tanner comes back in an inside-out rain jacket that he’s not going to fix and a bright yellow one for his sister, it doesn’t matter.
He holds onto Tanner’s hand and braces himself on Robby’s shoulder, the side where Penny is. The girl looks at her dad with those same wide eyes, but they aren’t her mother’s this time. They’re bright blue, curious, fierce. Those are his. She looks at him like he hung the moon and wants to help next time. Frank isn’t sure how to tell her that there’s no such hope for him.
It isn't raining when they go outside but it's wet, and Tanner's socks are getting soaked through his shoes, but he doesn't care and Frank decides there are bigger problems. Problems like the boy’s familiar eyes and Frank’s fear and the diaper bag slung over Robby’s shoulder because his kids aren’t coming home for a long time. Maybe ever. Hopefully ever.
Tanner hops into the car himself like this is nothing new, fiddling with the seatbelt because he likes to take five whole minutes to do it himself, but Frank doesn’t care, bracing himself on the side of the car as Robby moves to the other side to strap in Penny. He moves like this is nothing new, muttering softly to her, explaining what he’s doing like it’ll make a difference in this situation. It’s a whispered prayer in the midst of a torrential storm to think words will make this easier.
Tanner clicks one buckle into place, then asks for help. Frank with shaking hands does so, and a second later is reaching across the back seat to tighten Penny’s straps himself despite watching Robby do it. He tugs at the cord with the weak hands of a terrified father.
Frank shouldn’t drive, but his instinct is the driver’s seat. Robby beats him to it and watches with a careful eye as he instead crosses over to the passenger seat. He isn’t sure the last time he’d been here. Their road trip to DC to visit Abby’s parents a couple years ago, maybe. When he’d driven for four hours and she took the last stretch, begging him to let her. She was pregnant at the time and uncomfortable on a good day. He’d been her knight in shining armor whenever and however he could, so letting her drive seemed to be a test of his pride.
Something very numb and angry says that he should’ve let her sooner. It’s worlds too late for that now.
The back of his skull hits the headrest before he can think to stop it, and pain radiates through his already excruciating headache. Robby says, “Careful,” like it’ll mean anything, quickly checking both kids in the mirror as if they would have unbuckled in fifteen seconds and shifts into gear. “Everyone’s safe now. Just a few minutes, Frank,” he consoles.
Belatedly he finds himself asking, “How’d you get out of work?”
“Jack offered to stay,” he explains quickly, “And Shen’s on call. He promised to take over if I wasn’t back in time.”
The road in front of him blurs into one moving mess, and he shuts his eyes to stop it. “Oh. Good.”
“Is there someone we can call to take the kids? You parents, a friend?”
Fear shoots through him at the idea. He knows it’s smart, knows that he can’t be the competent parent he needs to be when concussed, but letting his children out of arms reach feels like removing a part of himself. But he knows. He knows. “I can… call my mom.”
“Good. That’s good.”
Tanner says something in the backseat that Frank can’t decipher, muddled by the headache and the early morning. Penny whines. He knows they must be hungry. “They haven’t had breakfast, so… so when we get there, we should go to the caf.”
“I’ll have someone grab them food,” Robby assures him.
Frank wants to insist, because he has nothing but them. If he can’t provide, can’t step up in the ways basic to being a parent, then is he one at all? Was Abby always right? Is he the villain, will social services arrive and tell him that Abby’s been called to take them home? Will Kiara look him in the eye with no sympathy because he’s always been fated to this? Penny wouldn’t remember him, and Tanner only if he’s lucky. He wants to take Tanner to a baseball game because his dad never did, and he wants Penny to tell him everything about her interests even though she’s barely old enough to have a color preference. His presence in their lives used to be guaranteed and now it is threatened.
“—hear me? You’re safe.” A hand is holding his. He wishes it were Tanner’s or Penny’s. “You’re in the home stretch, Frank.”
“They can take them,” he chokes.
Robby removes his hand from his to put the car in park; the hospital looks like nothing more than his workplace. It’s just his workplace. A seatbelt clicks, then his own. “No. That’s not happening.”
“I’m a recovering addict, and—and Abby has a clean record—”
“Abby has been abusing her husband.” Robby grabs his attention. “You have one of those doorbell cameras, right? She left unharmed, you left concussed. There’s proof that she left her kids home.” Frank blinks; when did he mention that? “You’re getting out, all of you, together.” Robby opens the car door.
They step out together. Frank gets to hold his daughter this time, and Tanner clings to his leg.
========
The small mercy of a staff ID is that Robby slips them in through the ambulance bay. Frank will admit to his shock when Dana says sympathetically, quietly, “N-5 is ready, like you asked.”
Eyes are everywhere, and he knows that he’s a sorry sight in last night’s scrubs, hair tousled and sticking to his neck with blood, a kid on each arm. But something very childish in him asks pettily, “You prepared for this?”
Holding the exam room’s door open for them all, Robby agrees. “You called me clearly injured. I wasn’t taking any chances.”
“What if—”
“Frank,” he interrupts very clearly, something in his eyes that speaks not to his years as a clinician but the time he’s spent caring about his residents. “I’m going to say this as many times as I have to: you are safe. Your kids are safe. No one is taking them from you, we believe you, and there is proof. There is a higher likelihood of a mass casualty right now than there is social services deciding that what you did to protect your kids isn’t enough for you to have custody.”
Robby takes a seat, the one he always harps on his staff to use. He never once breaks eye contact. “Kiara’s going to be here in a few minutes to call your mom and to take care of these two while you get a CT.”
He doesn’t even have a panicked breath in him to use. “I can’t leave them.”
“You’re not.” Robby nods towards the door. “Dana is on a warpath for you. Ahmed isn’t letting anyone who resembles Abby in the slightest through those doors. We’re already in the process of filing an abuse report. You’re not leaving them, you’re going upstairs for a few minutes to make sure your brain isn’t leaking out of your ears, and Kiara’s going to make sure that you and the kids get breakfast.”
It seems like such a simple plan. If he were telling this to a patient he’d be the first to believe it. But there is such a visceral and instinctual fear that comes alongside everything he does now that Robby’s words are nowhere near a guarantee in his mind.
But he doesn’t get the luxury of disagreeing.
“Uh.. Tanner, baby,” he mutters, lifting the boy onto the bed beside him, still keeping Penny carefully cradled in his lap. He explains quietly, “My friend Miss Kiara’s gonna come soon, and she’ll take care of you while I’m gone. You’re gonna get some breakfast. Sounds good?”
“Where’re you going?” he says too loudly for Frank’s pounding head, not that he cares. He’s not worried, just curious, holding onto the stuffed frog his mom got him a year ago and has never left Tanner’s hands since.
He has to swallow back something that feels like emotion but churns like nausea. “You know how when people get a broken bone they use an X-Ray to take pictures of it?” The boy nods. “They’re gonna do that for my head.”
“You hurt your head?”
“Yeah, bub. That’s why we’re here.”
“Doctor Robby said—said we were goin’ to your work.”
The fact that he doesn’t remember that conversation either speaks to a worse concussion than he had hoped. “Uh… yeah. We’re at my work. Except instead of me helping people, my friends are gonna help me.” Frank lets himself stroke Penny’s hair in comfort, even though she seems indifferent to the whole ordeal.
Tanner squints. “That’s your work?”
A shocked laugh escapes him. Later he’ll find out what the kid thought he was doing at work. “Yep. I’m like Doctor Robby.”
“Weird.”
The two men share a look that in the midst of all this fear speaks to a little humor. Robby mouths, I’ll be back, before shutting the door with a click.
Tanner continues talking about how doctors give out stickers, and wondering what kind they’ll have, then getting sidetracked by his hunger before remembering the one time he got a lollipop from a doctor, and redirecting to that hope for today. Frank lets his sharp fear simmer down into something more like benign unease.
========
Apparently, breakfast was cold cereal, orange juice, and cut up fruit that’s way out of season. Tanner said they had the honey Cheerios (the ones Abby didn’t let in the house, for some reason he now lets himself call stupid), and that Penny made a mess, but Miss Kiara just chuckled.
No internal bleeding. No skull fracture. Officially a grade one or two concussion, but with no witnesses to his LOC, Frank decides in his own mind that he’ll consider it mild. Robby would rather not.
“You’re not even working,” Frank tries to argue when he takes the cognitive exam.
Robby raises an eyebrow, points to his scrubs and ID badge, and states, “I’m still clocked in, and dressed for the part.”
“I’m having sudden flashbacks to your poor patient satisfaction.”
Robby barks out a short laugh. “Yeah, well I don’t appreciate having you as my patient twice in as many weeks. You haven’t even healed that infection.”
“Be grateful I didn’t let myself bleed out.”
If his kids were here he would mumble something mild, maybe childishly stick out his tongue. But they’re in the hospital daycare now. Two floors up, Frank tells himself. Two sets of stairs, two stops on the elevator. Kiara promised to check in on them more often than is necessary.
With how close to throwing up he is at the moment, he decides he can take that risk.
“I’m incredibly grateful for that.”
When Robby’s teasing, it’s clear. When he’s upset, sarcastic, abrasive, Frank knows it clearly. But there’s a very soft edge to how he speaks that he hasn’t gotten the opportunity to hear in a very long time.
Robby clears his throat. “I’m… I’m gonna go talk with the police. They’ll be asking for your statement soon, if that’s alright.”
The pulse oximeter on his finger lets the whole room know when his heart rate goes up at the idea. Frank nods anyway. “Anytime.”
“I’ll be here for it if you want me to be.”
“I do.”
“Then I will be.”
If you want; I do. I will be.