Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Four months back at work and the entire hospital still occasionally takes on a surreal quality: lighting wrong, acoustics wrong, everything just a little bit off center until the waking part of his brain is entirely subdued and given way to animal panic. He’s not in rehab anymore, not with his clean piss tests and a cabal of HR vultures breathing down his neck—and Robby, of course, worse than everyone else put together—but somehow the material world finds a way to take on every feature of his detox nightmares, a workplace and a reason for living all at once gone sideways and slipping out of his grasp.

It’s better in the ambulance bay, at least. It’s nasty and muggy outside, with a sky threatening to rain but not getting any closer, but it’s easier to convince himself that the fresh air and sunlight are resetting his brain entirely. Even if the piece of shit sense memory asserts itself periodically to forcibly remind him otherwise.

Mel is wringing her hands in her anxious way that he’s positive she’s entirely unaware of doing, pacing back and forth while they wait for the ambulance to deliver their latest patient. It’s still only late June, but the man on his way to them has blown his hand clean off with a Roman candle—or clean off if he’s lucky, Frank supposes. There are gradations to this sort of thing.

“The sun isn’t even down yet,” Frank says. “And there’s still over a week until the Fourth. What’s even the point? Blowing your hand off just for shits and giggles?”

“Some people can’t resist a socially acceptable opportunity to make things explode,“ Mel says, gaze drifting upward as she thinks. “Or to make a lot of noise.”

Mel, who flinches whenever she hears someone’s voice come on the overhead speaker, clearly views herself as distinct from this phenomenon.

“Not a firework fan?” Frank says.

“The professional shows are nice.” She cocks her head like she’s really considering the question and her own stance on it. “But Becca always gets stressed when things go off in the neighborhood. One time she hid under the bed and we couldn’t get her out for hours. My dad had to take apart the footboard with an Allen wrench. I mean, the bed frame was from IKEA, so not that hard to do—it wasn’t that big of a deal, I mean—but, well, you know.”

When Frank was six years old, one of his neighbors let off a sparkler whose sparks had arced into the canopy of a nearby tree and set the whole thing ablaze. His own household had banned them as a matter of principle; his mother was distrustful enough of her three sons as it was. Fair in retrospect, but devastating at the time. He’d spent a lot of years hoping a neighbor would fuck up again, that he’d get to see another mess up close with his own two eyes.

It’s the type of childhood memory that might have been charming a year or two ago. These days it feels a little bit too close to a harbinger of things to come. “The local news must be salivating,” he says instead. The Fourth of July always brings a cavalcade of people to the ER, misery writ small in alcohol poisoning, heat stroke, and yes, firework injuries of every stripe.

“Do you think they’ll come here?” Mel says, stopping her pacing to look at him with alarm.

“Nah,” he says. “Too much work. They’ll just look at the police reports and come up with headlines from there.”

“Local man discovers perils of gunpowder,” she says.

As is so often the case, it registers slowly that she’s joking with him. “Human hands still flammable,” he says. “More at 11.”

“I like that one.”

“Yours was better. Ever consider a career change?”

“It probably pays even less than I’m making right now.” She freezes, clearly aware of coming off as ungrateful, though it’s hardly like Frank pays her salary. “Not that I’m complaining! Just that I don’t think most people read headlines anymore. And those who do are generally elderly. Not the target audience for this kind of messaging.”

“Bet you read them anyway.” He can picture her poring over a good old-fashioned newspaper every morning, cup of coffee in one hand while her index finger scans through the printed lines.

She pauses, like it’s only now occurring to her that this is an assumption a person might make about her. “I like knowing what’s happening in the local community,” she says, shifting back and forth where she stands. “Is that strange?”

Not strange at all, he means to tell her, to reassure her that it’s a tease borne out of familiarity, not contempt. But the sound of sirens forces the words back down his throat, and then the ambulance doors are opening and a man is screaming at the top of his lungs, waving his mangled arm in the air while the paramedics try to subdue him. Mel jumps forward, focused as she ever is while she runs a soothing hand down the patient’s intact arm, and after a moment Frank blinks the haze out of his eyes to join her.

Nobody is ever lucky, so the self-amputation is anything but clean. Mel’s brow furrows as she examines the jagged lines of what used to be the patient’s metacarpals; there’s disgust there, but fascination as well, the poke-a-bruise kind of impulse that leads a person to a career in emergency medicine in the first place.

Frank’s disgust has long since faded away: he’s nothing but the doctor as voyeur now, searching for adrenaline in every patient more interesting than the stomach flu. Better that than the alternative, the feeling he knows is lurking down beneath. It’s hard to find many ways to be superior these days, but the thoughts come unbidden in the back of his mind. He may be a fucking idiot, a selfish twit who had been ready to throw away a career and a life with both hands—but at least he’s never been so foolish as to blow one of those hands off.

It takes more than a few bags of blood, but eventually they bring the man up to surgery, where he disappears behind double doors and into the vicinity of doctors armed with bone saws. Frank watches as the doors swing on their hinges, back and forth until all the kinetic energy dissipates into nothingness. “That poor son of a bitch. I hope he doesn’t work with his hands.”

“Prosthetics have come a long way these days,” Mel says. She’s staring after the double doors too. If he knows her at all, she’s imagining what she would be feeling if she’d blown her hand off, how quickly the misery would settle in her stomach. “He’ll probably be able to live a mostly normal life.”

“Yeah,” Frank says, grinning in the ghoulish way he allows himself when no patients are around. And sometimes when patients are around. “But imagine if he’s a professional violinist. Or a watchmaker.”

He can feel her relax beside him. Such is the cycle of Dr. Mel King: stress and de-stress, anxiety and relief. It’s always attuned to the people she’s with. It should make him feel more responsible than it does.

“Underwater basket weaver,” she says. “Or maybe a surgeon.”

“It’d probably be a good thing that his career’s over if he’s surgeon,” Frank says. “That’s the kind of judgment you don’t need in a medical professional. I’m about as bad as you want to get.”

She must not know what to say to that. The silence between them stretches all the way to the closed double doors. “I should go update the family,” Mel says after a moment.

“Yeah,” he says, more as a reflexive response than any real registration of her words. He turns to actually look at her for the first time since the ambulance rolled in. “Hey, good job down there.”

“Really?” she says. It’s incredible how something so simple can make a smile bloom over her face. “I mean, thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” Frank says with a grin. She has a way of always being genuine in her pleasant surprise, like however many previous days of compliments in no way foretells any future occurrences. “Nice catch on that bleeder. You probably could have taken that case without me, you know.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” she says, hugging her arms around herself. “I’m glad you were there. I always have trouble thinking straight when they start screaming like that.”

It’s a testament to how few boosts his ego gets these days that her words make something feel warm in his chest, a reminder that he can, on occasion, provide value to another person beyond child support payments and diagnostic ability. “Go talk to the wife,” he says finally. “See if she has anyone who can pick up the kids while she waits, because it’s going to be awhile. And—”

She’s already started to walk away, obediently headed back to the elevators, but at this she turns back around. Expectant, guileless as always, just waiting to hear whatever his next words may be.

She’s messy from the trauma: long splashes of arterial blood cover her entire left side and have seeped through the protective gown and into her scrubs. Her braid’s gone askew, with bits of hair starting to poke out from her usually neat plait, and there’s blood on her neck and the side of her face, too. She’s utterly calm, but Frank knows how to look for that. He’s not so sure if anyone else can.

The idiot part of his brain wins out, as it so often does. Frank reaches out to run his thumb down her cheekbone. It smears a red line of blood down her face. He drops his hand abruptly, and Mel watches it fall down to his side. Her eyes stay fixed there.

“You look like an extra on a horror movie set,” he says. “And I think I just made it worse. Go wash up. Change your scrubs.” There’s blood on her glasses, too; it must be bothering her. He resists the urge to wipe them clean on the edge of his shirt for her. “Don’t let her yell at you, even if you feel like it’ll make her feel better. Page me if you need me to step in.”

She says nothing, just gives a small, sharp nod, and when she turns back to go to the elevators he lets her go alone.

It could be worse, all things considered. He’s still has a job, even if he’s on probation and his coworkers have to handle medication on his behalf. Robby’s face ages a thousand years every time he has to look Frank directly in the eyes, but in the end he hadn’t opposed Frank’s reinstatement when it mattered. And it's probably a good thing that he’s starting over his fourth year of residency from scratch. He’s not sure how much he learned during the first go around. There were some extenuating circumstances.

There’s the divorce, too. It’s harder to find a silver lining there; the best he can do is that it was inevitable, that Abby had already stopped liking him nearly as much as he had stopped liking her, and when push comes to shove it’s not that big of a deviation in the boys’ schedule to have him only around for supervised visitation, every other weekend like clockwork. He has an apartment now, one on the top floor of a repurposed row house. It has a balcony and a parking space; it has a full-sized dishwasher.

He goes the rest of the shift without seeing Mel, and maybe that’s just as well. It’s easy to play favorites when you don’t like most of the people around you and they don’t like you back. After so many years in the emergency department, he’s learned that the people there slot into more or less two archetypes, neither of which he particularly likes. On the one hand, you get the assholes like him, the hotshots and the adrenaline junkies who couldn’t give a shit about anyone but themselves; on the other, you get the meek and the timid, the people who got caught up in the academics of it all and suddenly found themselves face to face with other people. Two sides of one coin, flipping through the air over and over again to land right in his eye.

Only who is he to complain? He’s worse than the rest of them put together—and not just in a self-pitying, crying jag kind of way. Even McKay with her ankle monitor only got it for a fit of pique, a crime of passion that happened determinedly outside of these four walls. Frank’s a thief and a junkie, and that’s just objective fact. It takes some of the wind out of the sails when it comes to feeling superior to one’s colleagues. A lot of the wind.

It’s why he likes Mel. She doesn’t fit so neatly into either box. There’s no god complex there, but she’s not timid either. She’s gentle, she’s steely when she needs to be, but mostly she’s just—Mel. Off in her own world so much of the time, then laser-focused when the patient needs her. Always available for a kind word. She listens to him with rapturous attention.

He knows the worst thing is how much of a difference that last part makes to him. He never had much interest in teaching until he had a student that made it no effort at all. But that’s Frank Langdon, isn’t it? Always with an eye on the easy way out.

Some shifts are better than others. These days it takes a few weeks for a good one to pop up. He’s more awake this time, more alert, and not just because of the jumbo-sized cup of coffee he downs within the first five minutes to whittle away at the lining of his empty stomach.

He’s at the nurses’ station, appraising the board while he fiddles with his credential badge. It’s fitting that on a day he’s actually up for it that there’s nothing on the board of any particular interest. It’s probably time to call in somebody from the waiting room, but there lies nothing but sprained wrists and hypochondriacs. It’s enough to steal his focus, make him tap his foot on the ground to try to force some energy back into him.

It takes him a moment to realize that Collins is standing by his side. She’s appraising him just as surely as he’s appraising the board. It rankles, but that’s unfair. Collins has been better since his return than just about anyone. The first time she saw him back, she’d squeezed his shoulder. Then she squeezed his hand. Then she left it at that. Beautiful, really. A masterclass. Robby could learn a thing or two from her.

“Nothing to your liking?” she says. Collins is a professional in a way that Frank never was. He has no doubt that she’s as bored to tears by half of their cases as she is, but she has the dignity to keep it to herself and never let it show. Sometimes he wonders if there’s a way to absorb that dignity by osmosis, a contact high of better clinical judgment.

“Nope,” he says. “I need a more concentrated dose of human suffering to start my day.”

“Hm.” She doesn’t laugh, even though it was a joke. Though she was never one to laugh at his jokes. That was always Robby, and he keeps his laughs to himself these days. “Trauma three could probably use you if you don’t want to bring in anyone from chairs.”

He brings up the chart on his tablet. The patient is a twenty-two year old woman, dragged in by her college roommate for nausea, stomach pain, fatigue, and—jaundice. The lab results are already in: acetaminophen intoxication. Acute, with liver failure far past the event horizon.

“Seems pretty wrapped up to me,” Frank says. More compelling than some of the stuff they get in the ER, sure, but not exactly rubber-necking material. Just another patient waiting on a bed upstairs.

Collins doesn’t respond. He looks up from the chart with a frown and sees that she’s looking at trauma three, not him.

Resisting the urge to roll his eyes, he follows her gaze and finds himself immediately glad that he tamped down that particular petulant expression. Because there’s the acetaminophen patient through the blinds in trauma three, looking ghastly propped up on pillows, but there’s also Mel, sitting at the bedside with her hands twisting in her lap while her lips form words he cannot hear.

He hasn’t seen her in over a week. She’s been on night shift, as they all periodically are, and the overlap in scheduling is minimal. She looks tired; she should have been out of here over an hour ago. But instead she’s here with this young woman, struck by an expression of abject concern. Frank knows her well enough at this point to know what’s happening now.

It’s rude to walk away from Collins without saying anything, but he’s a rude person, and she’s forgiven him for worse than this. He pulls the door open gingerly, trying to convince himself there’s some way to avoid intruding, and catches the tail end of their conversation.

“—social worker, Kiara. She should be down soon. I’m not sure exactly when, I’m sorry. But she’ll be here before you go upstairs.” Mel’s eyes flick over to see him standing in the doorway. “Are you sure you don’t want me to call your mom and step-dad?”

The patient shakes her head, a wobbly motion that makes her look young and small. It makes Langdon think of his own kids waking up for the day back home. Their home. “Not yet,” she says, and Mel nods even as her frown grows more pronounced.

“I need to step out for a little bit,” she says. “Is there anything else I can do for you before I do?”

“Go home,” the girl says. “I know you stayed here late for me. It makes everything worse to know that I’m inconveniencing you.”

“I’m your doctor,” Mel says absently, but she nods and lifts her hand tentatively, like she’s not quite sure what to do with it. She reaches out and touches the girl’s forearm gently, just a palm on bare skin, before she stands up and brushes past Frank and out of the room, back toward the nurses’ station and the center of the room.

“Hey.” She abruptly stops walking when he speaks, and it’s everything he can do to avoid running into her. “Everything all right in there?”

He watches her square her shoulders before she turns to look at him. The neutral expression on her face is careful and practiced; he wonders if she means it to be a cheerful one and couldn’t help falling short. “Just a long shift,” she says. “Is everything okay? Did you need something?” Her expression perks up just a little bit as another thought occurs to her. “Do they have a bed for her ready?”

He shakes his head, and the way her face falls again feels sharper in his chest than it has any right to. “Just checking in,” he says. “Dr. Collins thought you might need some help in there.”

This is decidedly the wrong thing to say: Mel’s face falls even further. Frank wants to rub his hand over his face and wipe it from both of their minds. “Dr. Collins? Did she—notice something? Any gaps in my clinical care? Is there something I skipped on the overdose protocol?”

“Help on an interpersonal level,” Frank says quickly. He doesn’t allow himself to skirt anywhere near why Collins thought he would be better suited to that task than she herself was. He’s not stupid enough to take it as a compliment. “You, not the patient.”

Mel doesn’t believe him, but he can watch her set this anxiety to the side, something to chew on later once the panic’s gone from her throat. “Everything’s fine,” she says. “It’s just—”

She falls silent. Frank waits. There are people moving past them in the hall, people with loud footsteps and beeping monitors and things to shout at each other across the room. It stomps on every last piece of his nerves, but Mel doesn’t seem to process any of it at all. He’d be jealous of her if it didn’t look like she were on the verge of tears.

“She kept saying it was an accident,” Mel says, and her voice is so quiet that he has to lean in closer to hear her. “Only—it’s possible, of course, but not likely, not all that many in one day. Obviously. The packaging on acetaminophen is pretty clear, and she’s an environmental science major at Pitt, so I don’t think that she’d have trouble following the directions if she’d wanted to.” A pause. “Not that other majors would have more trouble. Unless—do you think so? Should I keep that in mind for the future?”

Sometimes Mel is like a car crash waiting to happen on the interstate, careening from lane to lane while she’s trying to get where she’s going. It’s ironic when Frank’s hands are the one steady one the wheels. “Maybe underwater basket weaving,” he says.

The joke sidesteps her entirely. She nods sharply, so sharply that it sends her glasses sliding down the bridge of her nose and she has to push them back up again. He can watch her file this information away for later. “She’s works full-time, too, at one of the bars near campus, so she’s working nights and not getting a lot of sleep. Eight am lab sections, you know, but the tips are good and it’s hard to say no to that. She’s sending money back to her mom. And she’s in the honors program, too, so, you know. Just a lot.”

She shakes her head, squeezing her eyes shut tightly like she can banish the thoughts with a movement. “I think it all just got to be a little too much. She said she wanted it to be bad enough that she couldn’t change her mind afterwards. Even if it took awhile to do it. Liver damage is hard to reverse, even with an acute intervention, and—well, you know.” There are no tears brimming in her eyes, but he can tell from the way that her breath catches that this is only as a result of significant effort. Mel’s a sensitive soul. “I just feel so sad for her.”

It’s hard not to imagine what might have happened if the roles had been swapped, if Frank had been the one to do intake on this patient. There’d be suspicions, of course, and probably a tossed off remark or two to a colleague before calling down for a psych consult. Frank would never find himself sitting at the bedside of some sad, overwhelmed college girl. He’d check things off his list and move on to the next patient. He’d hope the next one would be something a little more interesting.

But not Mel. Mel, whose shift ended an hour ago, and is now standing here in front of him piecing herself together after he asked her to take herself apart for his benefit. He’s hit by a wave of—something. Affection, probably. Something that sits unfamiliar on him and leaves him uncertain of what to do next.

Her hands are curled up against her chest in a defensive posture. Mel’s not touchy-feely; he’s seen the extent of her standing vertical leap when a patient tries to give her a grateful hug. But the look on her face is growing vacant, further and further away from where the two of them stand, where the hustle and bustle of a full ER echoes around her, and Frank’s ability to speak the language of Mel is limited even where it expands. He’s taking a leap of faith here. He’ll be lucky if she doesn’t scurry away.

She jumps when he places an open palm over her coiled fist, but she doesn’t walk away. Slowly, Frank pries her hand open until her hand’s as flat as his, resting perpendicular on top of his own. Her touch is icy cold; a thousand degrees outside but always Ice Station Zebra inside of the building.

He puts his free hand over hers and gives it a little pat. A little hand sandwich, bringing Mel King back to reality.

“Go home, Mel,” he says. “Cry it out. Eat some chocolate. Watch some Vanderpump Rules.” A ghost of a smile flickers over her face, just like he’d hoped it would. She’d been mortified the day he caught her watching Bravo on her lunch break, but maybe it feels familiar now. “I’ll keep an eye on your patient. Feel these hands right here? She’s right there, safe and sound.”

She’s different from so many others, but Mel’s a doctor, after all. He knows she likes feeling needed, likes seeing her action result in reaction result in change. She doesn’t relax, but she does nod again, and after a moment he feels her fingers squeeze around his hand. He squeezes hers back, and they stand there like that, just for a little while, until someone calls his name and back to work it is.

Life goes on. The weeks pass by in a stupor, but it’s the familiar stupor of ER life, with shifts that knock him on his ass and leave him with barely enough time to recover before the next one starts again. It would almost feel normal if it weren’t for the drug testing and the little notebook where he has to keep a detailed log of his emotions on a day to day basis. It’s supposed to help the counselor keep abreast of any chance for a relapse. It takes everything he has not to write angry each and every day, to circle the little frowny face in its spectrum of human emotion.

Mel’s back on the day shift, and Frank allows himself to entertain the possibility that he had missed her. If she’s not quite a friend, she’s the closest thing he has to it these days. At work or otherwise. He tries not to feel guilty about just how much it perks him up when he sees her across the room. It’s a lot to put on a person, even if she has no poker face herself and perks up right back at him.

She’s tapping away at a keyboard, trying to stay on top of the mounting pile of paperwork that threatens to derail all of them in time, and he’s being an asshole and doing his best to distract her. “I’ll take your word for it,” he says. “But I don’t think there’s a universe where I develop a newfound love of community theater.”

“Oh, but it’s not about the community theater part,” she says. Her eyes are far-off, reminiscing. He imagines her sitting in the front row of a dinky theater, beaming in the face of some half-assed set design. “I’d watch anyone perform Les Mis. Becca and I saw it at the Kennedy Center when we were still in DC, and I cried so much my glasses fogged up.”

“You make it sound like that’s a good thing,” Frank says. “I’ll stick with my Pirates games for now.”

“The only professional sport I like is basketball.” She’s not looking up from the screen, but she's shifted in her seat and her body is angled in his direction. “Is basketball very popular around here? Are most people Sixers fans?”

Frank snorts. “Don’t let Dana hear you say that.”

She’s so earnest in her confusion that it makes him laugh, which is probably why he doesn’t sense the presence that appears at his shoulder. “Hey, Dr. Langdon? Do you have a minute?”

Robby’s looming like some great bird of prey, doing his best to appear casual when it’s obvious he’s anything but that. Frank can feel the shot of adrenaline run through him, and it’s not the good kind. It’s the kind that makes him feel like he might throw up again, or else that he could really use a pill.

“Of course,” Frank says. He tries to ignore Mel’s eyes, searching as she looks up at the side of his face.

“Walk with me.”

He tries to ignore the many pairs of eyes that fix on both of them. It’s not Robby’s fault, not really. All things considered he’s been exceptionally cordial; he could have thrown Frank’s career into the gutter, and he chose not to. In his better moments, Frank can remember that act of kindness. He can remember that Robby could have forced a transfer, that he told as few people about Frank’s addiction as he possibly could. It’s just that it’s hard not to remember that once upon a time, Robby had been his friend, and now he decidedly isn’t. It’s not the kind of thing that just slips from a person’s mind.

They’re headed back towards the lockers, and Frank can feel his hands getting sweaty and his heart starting to beat faster in his chest. He hasn’t done anything wrong. He knows he’s clean, damn it, only with every passing step he’s starting to wonder if maybe he doesn’t know anything at all. He’s relapsed without knowing it, maybe, and already fried his brain so badly he doesn’t even remember what he did wrong. It’s not likely, not likely at all. But is it possible? Or worse, did the drug test show positive even when it shouldn’t have? Is there some food he doesn’t know about that gives you a false positive for benzodiazapines, like poppy seed bagels and heroin? That option feels so much worse. He’ll never convince Robby in a hundred years. Not in a thousand.

They stop at the far end of the row of lockers near the emergency exit. Robby takes one look at Frank’s face and grimaces. “Bad venue choice,” he says. “I wasn’t thinking. I’m sorry. I just wanted to go somewhere we wouldn’t be overheard.”

The panic’s making Frank feel vicious. Not exactly what happened last time, he wants to snap, but for once in his life his frontal cortex is calling the shots. “It’s fine,” he says. “What did you want to ask me about?”

It’s Robby’s turn to look uncomfortable now. Silence. Frank can still feel his heart beating in his chest while he waits for Robby to speak.

“This is in no way an accusation,” Robby says, stroking his beard with a thumb and a forefinger. He’s steeling himself for discomfort in a way that makes Frank want to turn heel and walk back out of this conversation entirely. “Consider it a fact-finding mission. No more, no less. Even if the answer is affirmative. But—is there anything I need to know about your relationship with Dr. King?”

Frank blinks, then blinks again. He takes a deep breath. It’s not that the insinuation surprises him, exactly. The possibility of rumors has always existed somewhere in the back of his mind, because this is the world they live in and he keeps his profound idiocy confined to other areas of his life.

And—if he’s honest with himself—the possibility of a possibility has lurked in the back of his mind, too. Just an idle thought here or there: imagining what might happen, what it might feel like if one day he pulled Mel onto his lap and unwound that long braid of hers, if he kissed her until her cheeks flushed and her glasses went crooked on her face. But ever since Abby left him there have been idle thoughts along those lines about plenty of women he knows, or women he’s seen in the checkout line at the grocery store or sitting in parallel cars in traffic. Horndog bullshit, asshole behavior, the kind of thing that you keep to yourself because you’ve developed your social skills past that of an eighth grader’s.

It’s an entirely selfish impulse, and one that’s even worse when it comes to Mel. These are the thoughts that only surface after she’s done something to make him feel better or cheer him up: when she flashes a tentative smile at him after he compliments her suture technique, when she looks to him for help when Garcia makes a joke she doesn’t understand, when she solemnly draws a butterfly on the cast of a seven-year-old’s broken arm. It’s yet another symptom of Frank Langdon at the center of the universe, treating the people around him like paper dolls playing bit parts in a story of his devising. It’s either the sobriety or the divorce, but no part of him wants to put Mel through that particular ringer. Some lines he’s capable of not crossing.

The creases in Robby’s face are growing deeper by the second. Frank knows that he needs to levy a response more articulate than what the fuck, of course not. “Mel’s easy to teach,” is all he manages to muster.

There’s a poster up in Tanner’s preschool classroom that says Shoot for the moon—even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars. He shot for the moon and didn’t even reach the stratosphere, just crash landed back to solid earth, two feet away from where he started and worse for wear to boot.

“She’s an excellent student,” Robby says. “And she’s learning a lot from you. Anyone can see that. Nobody’s denying that at all. It’s just—”

There was only so long Frank could stop the hackles from coming up. “Just what?”

Robby never used to be this exhausted. He’d get tired like the rest of them; he wasn’t a superhuman freak, not an Energizer bunny hopping around the ER. But the bone-tiredness never used to sit on the surface like this, ebbing and flowing but always there at the beginning of every shift. Frank doesn’t want to think about just how much of that exhaustion came from him.

“I know it doesn’t feel like it, but I do care about you, Frank. I never stopped caring about you.” Robby means it, and in the grand scheme of things, Frank knows that his is the proper take, the one in line with the values he’s supposed to cherish and share. He’s not there yet; whatever care he felt for Robby is still locked up away in some vault of his heart, cowering behind the instinct to remind Robby that he was fucking Collins when she was still an intern, so who is he to judge? Why should Frank listen to a single goddamn thing he has to say? “You’re not doing anything wrong. I just want to help you. I want to know what’s going on.”

“There’s nothing to worry about.” These are the words that should have been first out of his mouth, rearing their useless heads at last. “I know I haven’t given you a lot of reason to trust my judgment lately, but I promise you I’m not that stupid.”

A couple of voices are raised in the room behind them. Robby’s forcing himself not to crane his neck and look to see what’s going on, so Frank looks away for him.

“Okay,” Robby says at last. “Okay. Like I said. Just fact-finding. I appreciate you being honest with me.”

For once hangs unsaid in the air. “It’s a new thing I’m doing,” Frank says. “You’ll have to let me know how I’m doing.”

“I’m with you every step of the way.” Robby’s hand is companionable on his shoulder, as companionable as anything he’s done in months.

Frank wishes it felt better; he wishes he wasn’t still waiting for it to come as a comfort once again. “Are we done now?”

Robby nods, and Frank doesn’t look back as he heads back in the main room, away from Robby and away from it all.

Chapter Text

Not for the first time in his life, Frank is grateful for somebody else’s profound misfortune: some dumbass drove his minivan straight into a utility pole with his wife and kids along for the ride, and while nobody’s in any danger of imminent death, there are enough head wounds and mangled limbs to keep the whole ER staff occupied while the hours wind down on the rest of the day shift. Mel’s working on the driver with Collins and Whitaker, while Frank takes point on the reedy teenage son with a split lip and a collar bone broken in four places. Adjacent trauma bays, but mercifully no reason for cross-pollination. Just noise and misery and stitching back together a family fucked up by the father’s idiot mistake.

Frank knows his mood is bad enough to be palpable, but the emotional regulation just isn’t quite there. Javadi keeps looking askance from Frank to the instrument tray and back again, and it’s everything Frank can do not to snap at her. Benzos are quite famously downers, thank you very much; save your fears of a tweaked out scissor stab for whoever you suspect is the local resident meth head. If and when Frank ever relapses, those in his imminent vicinity are as likely as not to be happy about the change. He’ll be easier to deal with than he’s been in months.

Working on a patient isn’t as helpful as it used to be. It’s centering, sure. It’s more or less the only time that Frank feels like a sentient human being again, like he’s still the person who scored a 520 on his MCAT and managed to convince a beautiful woman to stand up in front of everyone and say “I do.” Working on a patient also to clear his head and lead the way to what felt like major epiphanies, but something in his brain keeps snagging and reverting him back to the beginning of the feedback loop, again and again until all the pathways are snarled together and he’s not sure where he started or where he’s trying to end.

What to say to Mel, if anything at all? He has no doubt that she’d want to know. Mel prefers to keep her head down. She’s anxious for acceptance; she likes to be part of the crowd. She wouldn’t want to be a part of anything that would jeopardize her standing in the workplace or make people gossip behind her back. She’ll be mortified when she hears about Robby’s concerns, and Frank is wholeheartedly selfish enough that he’s not ready to bear watching her face fall.

Or he can try to avoid the subject and wait things out until Robby turns this sliver of attention to other matters, but that way lies a journey just as perilous. If Robby goes all avuncular and tries to corner her next—if she finds out that Robby spoke to him first—well, she’ll be worse than embarrassed. She’ll be hurt and awkward, and all because of him.

Eventually there’s nothing left to do but paperwork.There’s a back-up of people in chairs still waiting to be treated, but they’ll have to be treated by somebody other than Frank Langdon. He’ll fill out what still needs to be written into his charts so the administration breathing down Robby’s neck doesn’t turn into Robby breathing down his neck, but then he’s out of here. He’ll go back to his cramped little apartment and fill the silence with Jeopardy reruns and whatever Netflix decides to autoplay; he’ll fall asleep on the couch and wake up wishing he didn’t. Normal Wednesday evening things. He’ll be at his baseline.

He doesn’t look up when Dana sidles up to him at the nurses’ station. He'd never been able to shake the gut-sure feeling that she liked him much, that she used to feign it well enough for the sake of general group cohesion, because Robby liked him and she’s always liked Robby best. She’s felt decidedly less obliged ever since he got back from rehab. She’s polite, sure, and superficially warm, but both of them know all too well that she was the one who had to comb through all his patient records and report on what he’d done. There’s not much a person can do to come back from that. Sometimes he’s surprised that she’ll still look him in the eye, that she offers him any smiles at all when they pass each other on shift.

“How’s your kid doing?” she says.

He almost blurts out which one, because he’s got two of them, you know, a couple of toddlers ambling around safe with Abby and far away from him—but of course that’s not what she’s talking about. She means his patient, the teenager with the open fracture around his neck. “Waiting for surgery now,” Frank says, blinking. “So much for varsity golf tryouts.”

“Tough break.”

“Quite literally.”

Once upon a time, that would have earned him a performative laugh. “He’s young,” she says instead. “Couple of months and he’ll be right back to normal. I’m thinking full ride scholarship. Kids are resilient.”

“Sure are,” Frank says. “Better to get your derailments out of the way before you’ve got a life to blow up.”

Her eyes narrow as she smiles at him. It’s her knowing smile, that I know what you are and don’t forget it smile. He’s not impressed. It’s not like he was being subtle.

“How’ve you been, Dr. Langdon?”

“Fine,” he says automatically, because that’s a reflex he’s been working on ever since he got back to work. She nods. She turns to walk away. Frank is gripped by an impulse that takes over his mouth before it takes over his brain. “Wait. Can I ask you something?”

She stops, looking at him obligingly with her arms crossed.

He inches closer to her. There’s nobody else in their immediate vicinity, but for all the noise it contains, sometimes it feels like the ER has ears. “Robby had a question for me earlier. Did he tell you about it?”

“Why would he?” The smile has dropped off her face, but she hasn’t abandoned the conversation entirely. That has to be something.

“Either he tells you everything or you just work it out on your own,” he says.

“I’ve been told I have secret powers.”

Frank wouldn’t be surprised if she did. “It doesn’t really matter,” he says, because it doesn’t. If Robby’s noticed something to the point he wanted to say something, there’s not a chance in the world that Dana hasn’t independently arrived to her own conclusion on the subject.

Only she’s taking that as a dismissal. Whatever ounce of good will he’s scrounged up is evaporating right before him. “Wait. I—okay. Do you think I’m inappropriate with coworkers? Female coworkers?”

The long look she gives him could melt his flesh off his bones; that result would probably be preferable. He doesn’t break eye contact, though he’d like to look around and see if anyone is encroaching on their conversation. He has a feeling he doesn’t want anyone overhearing what comes next.

“Female coworkers? Or one in particular?”

Frank’s not in good enough control of his life to stop the grimace that creases his face. “Robby just pulled me aside to ask me if I’m sleeping with Dr. King.”

Dana raises an eyebrow.

“With Mel. Jesus Christ. Is that what people really think is happening?”

“Is it?”

Something like cold dread grips his throat and squeezes down into his chest. “Of course not,” he says. He’s not even really looking at Dana anymore. “I’m not a complete fucking idiot.”

This is what it takes to break through the dam of Dana’s indifference and unleash the pity. She puts a companionable hand on his shoulder. “Hey,” she says. “I believe you. And I wouldn’t have thought anything otherwise. Really. I think Robby just wants to make sure you reintegrate well.”

“Yeah,” Frank says dully. “That’s what he said.”

She moves her hand from his shoulder to pat the side of his face. “If you ask me, it’s a good look on you,” she says. “We could all use a reminder that you can un-shrivel a cold, black heart.”

In her own way, she means it to be comforting.

A night of mulling it over doesn’t help. Frank returns to work less cranky, but more resigned. There’s peace in accepting your place in a lose-lose proposition.

Mel’s acting as she always does. There’s no reason for her to be aware of the anvil dangling over her head, or that Frank is seriously contemplating slicing the rope. When she bounds up to him, vibrating with excitement over the pulmonary embolism she’d caught in an entirely asymptomatic patient, he does his best to assume the countenance of a supportive friend. If she notices anything, it doesn’t show—and he doesn’t think she’s faking it like he is. Mel wears her heart on her sleeve; he can watch a hundred feelings flitter over her face in the space of a minute. She’ll wear her disappointment openly when Frank brings it to her.

And eventually, he does. There’s an ambulance on its way holding a young man with burns and shrapnel all down his left leg. He forgot his vape in his pocket with the battery on, apparently; he tried to take a nap lying on his side. It’ll be bloody and gory and intricate, and Frank has called dibs. Mel stands at attention somewhere in his peripheral vision. It’s the kind of case he knows she’d love, and moreover, the kind of case he know she’d be good at. She’s always kind with the foolish and the young.

“Hey, Mohan,” Frank says.

Mohan’s standing with Perlah, spelling out patient orders in a low, urgent voice, but when she hears him her head whips around to face him.

“Burnout versus vape pen,” he says. “The vape won. You in?”

She looks at Perlah, who nods, and that’s all it takes for her to follow along after him. He tries to ignore the way Mel ducks her head when he passes by her, the way she suddenly takes off her glasses to inspect for any sign of dirt.

They stabilize the kid and his fucked up leg; he gets IV antibiotics into a kidney infection and sews up a head wound on a toddler who ran straight into the corner of the coffee table. The toddler has light eyes like him, like Tanner and Jackson and Abby too, and when her tears dry and she reaches out an inquiring hand to touch the tip of his nose, somehow it makes him feel worse than anything else that’s come before.

When the shift is finally over, he doesn’t make his customary beeline to the parking structure. He wavers by the lockers for a little bit, but Mel must already be gone. An opening presents itself to him, and if Frank’s not superstitious, he’s certain it’s something like bad luck to forgo the opportunity to have this conversation outside of the four walls of the hospital.

She’s sitting at the bus shelter with those enormous over-the-ear headphones on, and for a second Frank pauses, trying to see from afar if her lips are moving. He knows she Facetimes with Becca more often than not; it’s not some sort of sacred ritual, just a regular check-in with someone she cares about, but he’s loathe to interrupt her if she’s doing something that brings her joy. Eventually he has to accept that she’s not talking, that she’s not looking at her phone at all. The one last potential excuse he could have had to avoid this whole thing has dissipated right in front of him.

She looks up when he sits down on the bench next to her. It’s uncomfortable, angled upwards in a bit of anti-homeless hostile architecture. It’s as fitting of a venue as any. She pops one of the earphones off her head, then slides the whole apparatus down to sit around her neck. “Dr. Langdon?” she says, like maybe she’s hallucinating his presence.

“The one and only.”

“You don’t take the bus.” Her eyes widen slightly beneath the glasses. It shouldn’t charm him so much whenever she says the first thing that comes to her mind.

“Hey, maybe I’m turning over a new leaf,” he says with a shrug. “I could be thinking about my carbon footprint, you know. Every little bit counts.”

“Okay,” she says slowly, then pauses. “Is that—are you? Because I have to say, I’d recommend basically anything else if that’s what you’re trying to do. Like, maybe you could eat plant-based once a week. Or buy a bicycle. Pittsburgh public transit is not for the faint of heart.”

“Who says I’m faint of heart?” he says with a grin. “But don’t worry. I’m kidding. I skipped past the whole idealism phase even back in college. I’m not starting any time soon.”

She nods, like that’s a totally reasonable thing for a person to say, and for the first time of what he’s sure will be many times over the course of this conversation, Frank feels guilty.

“So,” she says, fiddling with the strap of her backpack where it sits on her lap. “Did you…need something?”

“I did, actually,” he says. Theirs is a strictly work hours relationship; maybe he would have been better off having this conversation in a familiar venue, one with sights and sounds and shades of lighting that she’s come to associate with him. Another mistake to tally on for the day. “You know how Robby wanted to talk to me yesterday?”

She nods, silent and expectant.

There is no good way to say this at all. “He wanted to ask me about you. My relationship with you, specifically. Whether or not it’s something he needs to know about.”

“Why would he need to know about it?” Mel says, chewing her lip. But understanding catches up with her quickly; he watches the mortification spread over her face just like he knew it was going to. “Oh. He thinks—you and me?”

“He said he was just fact-finding.” He’s still not sure how much he believes that little soft ball. “I told him there was nothing to worry about. Obviously.”

“Obviously,” Mel echoes.

He can see her leg jittering, and she’s hugging her backpack tighter against herself. He wishes she’d look up, that she’d make eye contact and laugh it all off.

She picks her next words very carefully. “I hope I didn’t—if I’ve done anything, if I’ve been behaving inappropriately, or—I hope I haven’t made you feel uncomfortable.”

“You haven’t,” he says. “Not even for a second. I promise you.”

It’s a relief to see her shoulders relax.

“He hasn’t said anything to you?” he asks.

“Dr. Robby and I don’t really have a conversational kind of relationship,” Mel says, considering.

“That’s probably for the better.”

“Really?” She’s chewing her lip. “I know not to bother him too much with small talk.”

“That’s not it,” Frank says. He’s seen her attempts at conversation get the brush off from colleagues; he’s been the one to do it to her. There’s something painful about the way it makes her face fall. “Scratch the surface and Robby’s just another mother hen. You’re better off if you don’t get clucked at. That’s all this is.”

“This is…clucking?” Her eyebrows are raised further above her glasses than he’s ever seen them. “You’re going to have to explain your use of metaphor.”

“You know. Meddling. Micromanaging the personal stuff. All the things that he likes to pretend he hates doing.” He’s never heard so many persecuted sighs from a man who makes it his business to keep tabs on everyone’s lives outside of work. “Though I wouldn’t be so sure you’re out of the woods here. I’m pretty sure this stems from him deciding to be concerned about you.”

Her alarm is so unadulterated that it would make him laugh under any other circumstances. “Oh,” she says. “He really doesn’t need to do that.”

“It’s what happens when you befriend the recently divorced drug addict,” he says. He tries not to mention his profound personal failures very often, or at least tries to couch them in sly euphemism, because he knows it makes her awkward, makes her clam up and unsure of what she is and isn’t allowed to say. But if any situation merits all the cards out on the table, it’s this one. Or else it just feels good to dig his fingers into his own wound. “He’s probably worried I’m leading a very promising resident down a path of poor judgment.”

“I don’t have anyone to divorce even if I wanted to,” she says. “And I’ve never been one for substances.”

“See?” he says. “You’re lightyears ahead already. You’ve got an innate Frank Langdon immunity.”

“I don’t think those are the things that make you Dr. Langdon.”

“That’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me.” Something so simple shouldn’t make his heart swell so much; he shouldn’t let the way her cheeks go pink get to him at all.

It’s quiet between them for a long moment, and then for another moment more. Something else is bothering her. “I’m not a serving of vegetables,” she says finally, and he can see that this is something she’s been turning over in her head for awhile, long before this conversation or the impetus for it ever began. “Is that—is that really what people think of me?”

Whenever he thinks he’s figured her out once and for all, she finds a way to bring new surprises. “You’re going to have to explain your use of metaphor.”

“Nutritious. Unseasoned. Boring.”

“People think what they want to think,” he says. “It rarely has anything to do with you as a person.”

“Wouldn’t it be the same thing for you?”

“I sure hope so.”

For the first time, his thoughts of her entirely focused. It’s not some subconscious urge to touch her, an idle daydream about drawing her close and seeing what happens next. He’s never wanted to kiss her more than he does in this moment, to bite her lip and kiss at her jaw and tell her that she’s never been anything to him but the finest slice of chocolate cake. For a second he almost does it, feels his hand twitch like he might reach out and touch her face—but that wouldn’t solve anything. He’d be doing it for himself.

Things change, because of course they do. Robby struck him with the curse of self-awareness, and Frank has spread this curse right along to Mel; any sense of easy camaraderie has gone entirely out the window, and they’re both now too plugged into their surroundings, too conscious of the potential for a misheard word sending uncomfortable glances their way once more.

It’s all very cordial, of course, and sometimes things almost feel normal. They forget themselves, sometimes; Frank puts his hand up for a high-five, or Mel lets herself float off into dreamy rhapsody about the concert in the park she went to that weekend, where the visiting zydeco band made Becca clap herself into a standing ovation. It’s nothing but brief moments until each of them remembers to think too much, that professionalism is the name of the game and each of them, apparently, had been decisively found lacking.

The distance doesn’t help anything; as the weeks stretch on, Frank finds that it only manages to make things worse, that without a constant dose of interaction he takes to daydreaming about Mel when she’s not there. It used to require an impetus: he’d see her and his brain would react accordingly. Now it doesn’t even require that much. Any break in his thoughts and it’s back to her and her face and her hair and her wrists, back to how much he wants to catch those wrists in his hand and press kisses to the inside. He’s turned a jab from Robby into a self-inflicted wound; the hemorrhage is plain for the eyes to see but he doesn’t know how to stop it or turn back the clock to before it all began.

The strangest thing is that by every objective metric he really is doing better. As the months stretch on, the longer it’ll be since that fateful day that Robby packed him off to rehab with venom in both of their mouths. It’s been months since he’s taken a pill, and months since he’s thought about wanting one in any sort of actionable sense. In some vague, dissociative sort of way, he’s sure his body has recovered from the onslaught he hadn’t been able to stop himself from feeding it. The vague smear is gone from his mind, as is the incoherent rage he used to get when he couldn’t get it back. HR tells him his progress is good. He’s acting better with the patients; he can work a case with Santos and share a couple of jokes, can tell her she’s done a good job and even find himself meaning it.

Abby tells him she’s proud of him. It’s a Thursday evening in early fall. It’s not one of his days, but Tanner’s preschool is doing a Halloween parade and she’d wanted Frank to be there and see it happen. Tanner’s so cute in his bumblebee costume that it makes strange tears spring to Frank’s eyes. He takes a picture after Abby fixes the antennae headband over his ears. The traitorous self that’s buried deep within him would like to take it to work the next day and show Mel. He’d like to see the way her face lights up with a smile, to hear her coo over one of the only good things that Frank has ever done with his life and let him pretend it’s because of him.

“I’d be okay with amending the custody order, you know,” Abby says, and her smile is only a little bit sad. The door is firmly shut between them, but she was always a compassionate sort of person until Frank leeched it out of her bit by bit. It makes sense that in his absence she’d be able to muster up her reserves and offer it to him once again. “You could take the boys for overnights. I wouldn’t mind at all.”

Frank thinks of his apartment, the desultory second bedroom that he’d opted for out of a sense of optimism and since let languish into nothing but extra storage. He’ll need to get a couple of beds; he’ll need carseats for the Mazda and child locks for the oven door. It’s something he’s wanted so desperately for so long that he’s sure the passing reality of it is a shock to his system. He’ll access some wellspring of emotion when he gets to kiss his sons goodnight for the first time in nearly a year. It’s the only thing that explains the numbness that strikes as he looks at her.

“I’d like that,” he says, and knows it to be true. What else would it be?

Frank’s pinching the bridge of his nose, trying to stave off the headache that’s been threatening him for the last few hours, when Robby appears by his side and presses an egg salad sandwich into his hand.

“This is contraband,” Frank says as he peels open the plastic and cardboard shell. It’s slow that day. It’s the kind of thing nobody’s supposed to say out loud but impossible not to notice in the confines of his own mind. “If anyone accuses me of unleashing a stink bomb in here, I’m sending them to blame you.”

“Guilty as charged,” Robby says, putting his hands up in mock surrender. “But let it never be said that I don’t bring people exactly what they need.”

“A river to your people,” Frank says. “Smelling up the ER one pity sandwich at a time.”

He’s not foolish enough not to think that this is anything other than the opening salvo of a conversation that Robby would like to be having. Frank’s not planning on opening the door any wider than he already has. “I wanted to talk to you,” Robby says at last.

“I’m all ears,” Frank says.

“That you are.” Robby’s watching the half of the sandwich that’s disappearing into bites. “You’ve been doing great. Everyone agrees. I’m proud of you.”

“That’s what Abby said.”

The corners of Robby’s eyes crinkle up in a smile. “Is that right? I’m glad to hear that. That’s great news.”

The other shoe is going to drop eventually. He’d rather Robby just go for it instead of dangling it between the two of them while they exchange platitudes. Eventually Robby seems to come to the same conclusion. “How’s life, Frank?”

And so begins the clucking. It’s never fun when Robby’s latent therapist side comes out to play. Frank hadn’t liked that even in the before times, when it had merely felt paternalistic instead of professionally charged. “Is there a reason you’re asking?” he says.

Robby shrugs in his whole-body kind of way, equivocating. “I never used to see you keeping to yourself.”

A year ago, six months ago, two months ago, last week—he can’t find the exact delineation within him, but there was a time when Frank’s temper would have gotten the best of him here. There’s a certain level of audacity that Robby is wielding here, the shamelessness of a man who’d told Frank he was getting a little too close to others and now seems to think he’s not close enough. He’s transformed into the ER’s Goldilocks; the porridge Frank serves him was too hot, and now it’s too cold. You’ve lost the privileges to care about me, Frank wants to tell him, but of course that’s not true. Frank was the one who threw away the privilege of anybody else’s care. It’s not his call whether or not someone wants to claw it right back.

It’s something he knows in an objective sense, but not anything he feels right down to his bones. It’s not Robby’s fault, but it is the truth. What would he say, anyway? That he goes to work, he goes home, and that there’s nothing in-between? Maybe he’s lonely for a reason; maybe this is how things were always supposed to be, and all the years he’d spent feeling otherwise were just a deviation from the mean that was always meant to fall. He wonders what Robby would think of that much. He might change his opinion on things being just fine.

“It’s all a long adjustment,” is all he can say. “But it’s nothing I can’t handle.”

Robby studies his face for a long time. “You can always come find me if you need something. Will you promise me that you’ll take me up on that?”

“Sure,” Frank says. “I promise.”

Frank tries not to reflect too much on the things that make him happy. Today, that thing is the facial expression of the EMT who’s dealing with Mel King in a very bad mood.

He’s mid-twenties and relatively new; the shine hasn’t gone out of his eyes yet, and the adrenaline rush of saving lives still appears to be a novelty and not the brain’s basic expectation. He also likes Mel. That much is obvious and has been for awhile. Frank considers it to be a sign of personal moral fortitude that he’s restrained himself from being jealous, though the flirtations have been both public and relentless. If Mel’s aware of them, she hasn’t given the slightest indication that they’ve made their mark on her. She treats him with the same eager pleasantries she offers to everyone; to the untrained eye, she seems extremely receptive, and yet none of the EMT’s efforts have gotten him anywhere at all. Frank almost feels bad for the kid and his confusion. Almost.

Today, that affability has evaporated away. It’s a rare sight to see Mel cranky, but the ER’s been a nonstop cacophony today, screaming babies and wailing patients and a never-ending parade of beeping machines. He knows it grinds away at her; he can see her losing her patience bit by bit. Even so, she’s not hostile. It’s more like the EMT is an insect standing before her, and not an especially interesting one. His buzz in her ears is just another bit of the noise.

The EMT leans against the wall near the workstation where Mel is typing. “What time do you get off shift?” he says.

“Six pm,” she says, not looking up.

“Ever get up to anything fun after work?”

“Um, not really.”

“Aw, c’mon,” he says, and Frank hopes for his sake that somebody in his life tells him that whining is never a good look on a man. “Pittsburgh’s got great nightlife. You never go out to the bars?”

“I don’t like bars very much,” Mel says. She looks over her shoulder, like maybe she can manifest a reason to step away.

“Restaurants, then.”

“I don’t like those either,” she says, even though Frank knows that’s a flat out lie. She likes going out to eat; she likes Persian food, likes Hungarian and Nepalese.

“Maybe a picnic,” the EMT says. Nobody could ever say he’s not persistent. “A couple of sandwiches, a bottle of wine, the great outdoors. The fresh air could be nice after being cooped up in this damn hospital all day.”

“Um, what was that?” she says. “A picnic? I don’t—that’s not really me.” She stops, and finally looks up at the EMT standing before her. Frank watches a glimmer of hope come across his face and winces preemptively. “Where’s your partner? You don’t have any calls?”

“My shift is over,” the EMT says sheepishly. “I was hoping I might have a reason to stick around.”

Frank would love to hear what Mel has to say to that much, but she doesn’t have the chance. “Ambulance incoming,” Dana calls out. “Male, thirties, possible overdose. Wife found him unresponsive when she got home from daycare pickup.”

Robby’s eyes slide right over Frank as he assesses who’s available. “Mel, McKay, you’re on it,” he says. “Find me if you need me.” They both grab gowns and dutifully hurry outside to meet the rig. He watches Mel’s braid swing back and forth as she leaves.

There are things he could be doing. He doesn’t have to be standing around, though suddenly it feels as if the wind has been knocked out of him and he isn’t entirely sure why. “Perforated eardrum catch your fancy?” Dana says, and no, it really hasn’t, but Frank takes the chart and pulls on a fresh pair of gloves anyway.

He’s doing his best to focus, but the elderly man whose eardrum burst isn’t the best conversationalist, and it’s a pretty easy diagnosis. He sponges away the trickle of blood that’s run down the patient’s neck, slow and methodical, determined not to leave a drop. “You want me to take over?” Mateo asks, bemused.

“I’m fine here,” Frank says, and he is.

Mel’s still in the trauma bay with the OD. The man’s wife is there, standing outside the door with her hands over her mouth while her kids cling to her legs. She’s got a couple of daughters; they’re tow-headed, not dark, but he can see that they’re a familiar age. Not old enough to know what’s going on, to know where they are or why they’re here, but old enough to know that their mother is sobbing and that that’s scary, that it makes them want to wail their tiny little lungs out too.

Eventually the door opens. McKay pulls her mask out as she walks outside, and the expression lying beneath it is grim. Frank doesn’t need to listen to what comes next.

“I need to step out for a minute,” he tells Dana as he brushes past her. “I’ll be right back.”

The air in the ambulance bay is tinged gasoline-sharp from all the lingering exhaust fumes; Frank takes deep, gulping breaths anyway, and feels something like color starting to come back to his face. It’s something less than a panic attack, but he’ll be approximating one if he lets himself go any further with this. He presses the heels of his hands into his eyes, trying to force himself back to normalcy, to hurry the fuck up and go back and do his job. It doesn’t work that well.

It’s not the same, because of course it’s not the same: that man was still married. Frank has sons, not daughters. Frank is a thief, one who stole from the sick to avoid taking his chances with the whims of street dealers; the man inside almost certainly got a molecule or two of fentanyl too many and didn’t even realize that they were there. Frank is alive, and that man is dead. It’s a distinction without a difference, but even that much is a profoundly selfish thought. He’s sure the wife inside prefer one over the other.

He’s not sure how long he’s out there, only that he’s starting to get a crick in his neck but can’t bring himself to look up. When he pulls his hands away from his eyes, the vision will rush back in. It’ll still be daylight, it’ll still be his shift, and there will still be things to do. He’ll still be Frank Langdon, the same one as before and the same one he’ll always be, with all the lack of comfort that that knowledge entails.

“Oh,” a thick voice says next to him. “I didn’t mean to interrupt. I can go somewhere else.”

It’s Mel, and she’s already turning away to go back inside. “Don’t let me monopolize the ambulance bay,” he says, and is inordinately relieved to find that his voice sounds relatively normal. “There aren’t many good places to panic around here.”

She turns back around, slowly, and he can see that her eyes are red-rimmed and her fingers are plucking at the hairband that keeps her braid together. “I only need a minute,” she says.

“That’s what I said.”

He watches her pull off her glasses to rub at her eyes; he tries to reconcile what he wants to say with what’s fair to unleash on her. “Patient DOA?” he says.

Mel nods, pushing her glasses back up with a finger on the bridge. “He was probably there for a few hours before his wife found him,” she says. “She’d been there the other times, apparently. She keeps naloxone in her purse. She and his mom were trying to get him into treatment.”

He’s caught up in the vortex of his own bullshit, but Mel’s the sensitive one between the two of them. She takes things to heart and internalizes them while everybody else is still working out what happened. And it was her patient on the table in there. “You okay?” he asks.

“It’s just a bad day.” But she offers him a small smile, sad and tired and resigned but still a smile meant for Frank Langdon alone. “Are you? Okay, I mean.”

“Just indulging in a little bit of self-pity over someone else’s patient,” he says. “And trying to tell myself that at least I was never that guy.”

“You weren’t,” Mel says. Her voice is firm and decisive, like she’ll broker no argument. “You’re still here.”

He thinks his life falls into two delineated spaces: before and after. For along time he saw the demarcating line as getting caught, getting shipped off to rehab and having to watch Robby’s face through it all. He knows better now; the schism happened earlier than that, when he became the kind of person who took drugs and kept taking them, when he let other people suffer just to whittle away at some of his own. Sometimes it feels like all he’s managed to do in recovery is freeze things right at the moment of change. No steps forward and no steps back, just a fossilizing artifact watching his own slow decay.

“I really liked being friends with you, you know,” she says. Mel’s hands are still pulling at her hairband. If she’s not careful, she’s going to end up taking out the whole thing.

Frank sighs, long and low, pushing out all the air in his lungs like somehow if he extends the process he’ll work out what’s right to say. Is that what change is, that he wants to reach out his hands and steady hers? “I did, too,” he says. “I still do.”

“Men don’t usually like me,” she says. She’s staring at the expanse of concrete overhead. “Even platonically, I mean. I think they’re afraid that I’m going to start getting ideas.”

She says it so casually, but this is evidence of a festering wound. It makes his heart catch in his throat to think that he’s the one who gave it to her, that he let it sit there and rot without bothering to sew it up. “Mel,” he says, and he can feel his pulse beating under his skin. “I’m the one who was getting ideas. Who has been getting ideas. The ideas are still there. They haven’t gone away.”

It takes a second for her to start breathing again, and even longer for her to look at him, though she looks away once again. “Oh,” she says. Her hands finally fall away from her hair. “I—really?”

“I mean it,” he says. Her heart’s on her sleeve as it always is, but he doesn’t trust himself to read things right, to interpret what she might mean or not mean. It’s all too consequential; he’s not yet ready to leave the space where there’s a chance it could all work out. But the only way out is through. “I just didn’t want to put that on you. The pressure of—me. All of it. I don’t think you’re vegetables. But I think I might be bacon grease. Or something. Not good for the overall nutritional value.”

“You’re not bacon grease,” she says. She’s serious, contemplative; this is Mel trying to make herself understood and caught in fear that things will go otherwise. “If you’re anything, you’re like a nice olive oil. Healthy fats. You add to the flavor profile.” He can see the way she’s blushing. He wonders how warm her face would feel on his hand. “I like olive oil. I always have.”

“This metaphor is getting away from us.”

He’s never been so relieved to see her smile, to have her turn toward him with the whole angle of her body. “I think it always has been.”

He finally does what he’s been wanting to do for ages and pulls her hand into his with real intention; he lets himself run his thumb over her knuckles and trace the lines of her palm. “Are you sure?” he says. He has to hear it straight out; he needs to carve out an opportunity for her to flee. “I’m still me. None of that is going away any time soon.”

“I like you,” she says. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Was that—am I not being clear?”

She steps forward, and then it’s her hand on the side of his face, her lips pressing up against his own. She’s as gentle as she always is; she’s unsure, too, waiting to see how he’ll respond. He allows himself to put a hand to the small of her back, to kiss her back and enjoy the warmth of her body flush against his.

When they pull away, Frank catches the end of her braid in his hand. The strands are soft and smooth, just like he thought they’d be. “I always see you fiddling with your hair,” he says. “It’s made me want to see what the hype is about.”

“It’s just an anxiety thing,” she says. “It’s not that exciting, I don’t think.”

“Hey, speak for yourself. This is a big day for me on two different fronts.”

It’s good to make her laugh, and even better to stand there with her, to look down and see her standing right there in front of him. A year ago he would have been brainstorming ways to call out the rest of their shifts, ways to drag her home before she could change her mind. “We should probably go back inside,” he says. “Someone might come looking for us.”

“Or there could be a trauma.” She’s looking at the empty ambulance bay like she’s remembering exactly where they are and what they’re doing. “Maybe you should go back in first.”

“Maybe,” Frank says. The realities of work life are settling back in for him as well. “But I don’t mind walking back in together if you don’t.”

“Really?” There’s something still so tentative about her, so incredulous, like maybe everything’s been thrown up into the air and it’s all just waiting to come crashing back down. He knows it because it’s the way he feels too, all caught up in the terror of something new. He wonders how long it’ll take for him to make her think otherwise, how long it’ll take him to believe it himself. Somehow there’s hope there that hadn’t been present before. It feels like the indent of her glasses against his face.

“Maybe you should take your hands out of my hair first,” she adds, and touches her fingers to his.

He tugs at the braid for one last good measure, presses a kiss to the spot between her eyebrows, then lets his hands fall back down to his side.“I think I can make that compromise.”

It doesn’t take long to set the young man’s broken ankle, but the case has apparently lingered in Mel’s mind. She brings it up again over an hour later, when they’re on their way to check out a crabby woman with the flu.

“This was just a freak accident,” she says, pulling at either end of her stethoscope around her neck. “There are a lot of places where you can trip and fall. I think an escape room sounds fun and exciting.”

“Believe me when I say that they’re neither of those things.” His is a sample size of one experience, years ago as part of the saddest bachelor party he ever went to, but it’s a sample size one greater than Mel’s. “They’re claustrophobic and dingy. And usually something’s broken.”

“But when else do you get to pretend you’re in a murder mystery?” she says.

“There’s always Clue.”

Somehow, his pessimism leaves her entirely undeterred. “Or a bank heist. Or a haunted mansion. Or a casino. Or a haunted casino.”

“Big on the haunted theme, huh?”

“Becca loves spooky things. I don’t think she’d even mind the time limit if she got some ghosts or zombies to go along with it.”

She really doesn’t mean it as any form of manipulation; he knows her well enough now to know that she’s just putting her cards out on the table, letting him know how she feels as a default way of presenting herself to the world. It’s Frank who leads himself by the nose according to her whims. It’s so easy to make her so happy. It’s a relief to know that he wants to without being asked. “Text me Becca’s schedule for this weekend,” he says. “And I’ll see if I can make a reservation. You have to promise not to laugh if anything makes me jump.”

Her face brightens just as much as he’d hoped it would. “I promise,” she says solemnly. “But I can’t promise for Becca. Just keep that in mind when you’re picking the theme.”

It’s not until later, when he’s looking over the results of a head CT, that Robby decides to find him. “Busy?” Robby says, peering over his shoulder at the scans.

“Nope,” Frank says. “Just going to go get this woman’s neck brace taken off.”

“That’s a relief.”

“For the both of us. She’s been yelling at us for the last couple of hours about how perfectly fine she is. Guess she was right.”

Robby’s look is sidelong and not even remotely subtle. “Who’s on that case? You and Mel?”

“Me and Whitaker,” Frank says, raising an eyebrow. “I take it that was your attempt at a segue.”

“I appreciate you calling it an attempt,” Robby says. He sounds too cheery by half for what Frank is sure this conversation is about to be. “So. You and Mel?”

Frank closes his eyes. This was coming eventually, one way or another; it’s probably for the better than it’s happening relatively soon, before too much can build up and Robby can get severe about being left in the dark. It doesn’t make it any easier. “It’s barely anything yet,” he says, because that’s true. “It’s only been a couple of weeks. But yes. Me and Mel.”

Of all of the reactions he’d been expecting, Robby clapping him on the shoulders with both hands wasn’t one of them. “Hey,” Robby says, shaking him gently. “I’m glad to hear it.”

“That’s not what I was expecting you to say.”

Robby’s brow furrows. “Then at some point I have gravely misspoken,” he says. “I’m glad, Frank. I’m glad you told me. This life is too short and brutal to make our worlds any smaller than they need to be.”

Frank’s world has been shrinking for a long time, and him along with it, pieces just falling away until he found himself left with nothing but the skeleton of a human existence with the barest sheen of function draped on top. Mel’s not the whole world; she couldn’t be, because nobody could, and Frank knows better than to ask her to. He knows better than to make her the light at the end of his tunnel. Life is short and brutal, indeed. But she can be a door off to the side, a helping hand to put himself on a different path. He can see the sunlight floating through.

“I can agree with that,” Frank says, and means it. He means it all.