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“Put the needle down and step away from the patient,” Emery snaps as she slips on sterile gloves. “ Who the fuck taught you to close like that?”
“Attending,” Jack says, pointing to himself with the pick-ups he’s still holding. “Resident,” he adds, pointing to Emery.
“Surgeon,” Emery says, rolling her eyes and coming to peer judgmentally over his shoulder. “You’re practically a second class citizen.”
“Rude,” Jack protests as the soldier on the bed looks back and forth between them just a little anxiously. “Rude and disrespectful. I think I know how to do a simple running suture, thank you very much Dr. Walsh.”
“Running subcuticular would be better given the clean edges and minimal trauma to the skin. Leaves less of a scar too.”
“Scars are sexy.”
“To who?”
“Why are you even here? I didn’t call for a consult.”
“I sensed you were in need of a more capable set of hands.”
“You mean you were bored and decided to come heckle me instead of finding a better use of your time.”
“Jesus fucking Christ, would the two of you stop flirting with each other and finish taking care of that poor private,” interrupts Corporal Stone from where she’s checking a blood pressure two cots over.
“It’s okay kid,” Jack reassures the blushing eighteen-year-old, setting down instruments to swap places with Emery. “We’re married.”
“That’s not exactly what I was worried about, sir,” admits the kid. “D’you think one of you could finish stitching me up now?”
When Emery gets off shift later she goes straight to the mess, hungry enough to stomach the slop that passes for food around here. Jack is waiting for her just outside the tent, sits across from her after they’ve both filled their plates and starts a game of footsie that has her kicking him in the shin less than a minute later. He just grins, unbothered, and follows her back to her currently abandoned quarters to steal a little bit of alone time.
(She knows their colleagues have never quite understood the playful animosity that underpins their relationship, but what all of them are missing is this. When Emery first met Jack she was used to being alone, used to being biting to stop people from getting too close, used to people who couldn’t handle her particular brand of abrasiveness. Jack had taken it all as a challenge and weaseled his way through every single last one of her defenses before she realized what was happening, has never been afraid to give back as good as he gets. It’s part of the reason she fell in love with him, his inability to let her push him away.)
Jack goes to help with the supply run at the end of December. He comes to say goodbye between the handful of urgent if non-emergent cases running that morning, pecks her on the lips and promises to bring her back something edible from off base, turns back at the tent flap and winks when he catches her still looking. That afternoon, when they’re told about incoming wounded from a roadside IED, Emery does her best to ignore the shiver up her spine. She slips outside into the blowing sand as the soldiers start pouring off the first chopper, trying very hard not to think about anything but the medicine as she triages. And then she gets to the leg wound.
Emery is a fifth-year surgical resident and a damn good one at that; it takes about half a second to decide the limb is unsalvageable, for her to wave the stretcher towards their pre-op area. She’s already looking to the next patient when the face attached to the leg registers and time slows to a syrupy halt. Her stomach crawls its way up her throat and her hands falter for the first time in her career over the bandage on the abdominal wound she’s meant to be examining as she stares at her unconscious husband.
“Dr. Walsh?” asks the medic rattling off his report, in a tone of voice that suggests it’s not the first time.
“He can wait a little while for the OR, put him in obs for now,” Emery says after a quick peek under the gauze on the patient she’s meant to be examining. “Next please! Keep ‘em coming.”
Because Emery is a fifth-year surgical resident (and a damn good one at that), she knows how to compartmentalize. She turns off the part of her brain howling for Jack, ignores the terror sinking its claws in, and does her fucking job. If this were a civilian hospital, if they were back stateside and this was a car accident instead of an IED, Emery would probably be in a trauma room with him right now answering questions about heroic measures. Instead she finishes triaging the fifteen or so wounded remaining, then goes inside to scrub.
Ed is the one working on Jack. He tries to catch her eye as he holds the ultrasound probe behind Jack’s knee, trauma gown smeared with enough blood that the sight turns Emery’s usually steel stomach. She knew what the risks were when she chose this path for herself, knew the odds when she said yes to Jack’s proposal, has always been uncomfortably aware of how dangerous the version of this work she decided to take on can be. But somehow she always thought they would be the exception to the rule; somehow she thought they would come out of their service unscathed, because the rest of their story was improbable enough to have her believe luck might be on their side.
“We tried,” Ed is the one to tell her, once the dust has settled as much as it ever does, once Emery finishes with her own patients and finally has a moment to come apart. “The forefoot was amputated in the field. The rest of the bones were practically pulverized, and the distal tibia and fibula were shattered. We amputated below the knee and washed it all out as best we could, but there’s a high risk of infection. They might have to take more when he gets to Landstuhl.”
It’s what she expected, but that doesn’t make it any easier to hear. Emery squeezes her eyes shut, trying not to choke on the bitter taste of bile as it hits the back of her throat. Ed squeezes her shoulder, so gently it makes her teeth ache, the kind of gesture she can probably expect a lot of in the coming weeks.
“When’s transport?” she asks when she can speak again.
“Emery...”
“I’ll be on leave anyway, at least for a few days.”
“It’s scheduled for 1600. D’you want me to talk to the commander?”
“I can handle it myself,” she says, glancing down at her watch to find that it’s already 1530. “Thank you, Ed. Really. You did the right thing.”
“Make sure you tell that to Jack when he asks who the butcher was.”
Emery drudges up half a grin at that, no doubt Ed’s intention. At least one of them is confident that her (stupid, stubborn, hot-headed, breathtakingly kind) husband is going to make it through this. She stays where she is for another minute, until she’s sure she can keep her composure, and then she goes to find Commander Jones who gives her a week-long pass and his permission to hop the medical transport with very little fanfare.
She holds Jack’s hand the entire flight, so tight her muscles spasm and she has to pry herself free when they land, spends the following twelve hours glued to the uncomfortable chair next to his hospital bed watching like a hawk for signs of sepsis, so tired it feels like there’s ground glass on the inside of her eyelids, too worried that he won’t be there when she wakes up to fall asleep, afraid to take her eyes off him.
There’s still no sign of fever at thirty-six hours, so Emery lets one of the nurses talk her into showering in the staff locker room, changes into a clean t-shirt and uniform pants from the go-bag she managed to grab from her tent and racks out for a few hours in the temporary quarters one of the orderlies directs her to. When Jack finally wakes up another twelve hours later, Emery is there, leaning over the side of his hospital bed with tears in her eyes that she can’t seem to make go away. She’s cried more in the last two days than she has in the last twenty or so years put together, undone in a way she’s not used to being by worry over Jack.
“Em?” he groans, eyelids fluttering, that little worry wrinkle he gets between his brows forming as he takes her in.
“Hey,” she whispers through the thickness in her throat. “Hey, sweetheart, I’m here.”
“What’s the matter?” he croaks a minute later, after she’s helped him take a few sips of water. “Where are we?”
“In the hospital. In Landstuhl. Do you remember what happened?”
“No. Should I?” he asks, a little hazy from the morphine drip.
It’s like a switch going off, the way the light drains out of him when she says the words ‘below the knee amputation’ and ‘there was nothing else to do’. Emery stays for as long as she can at his bedside, in Germany, even though he won’t speak to her (or anyone else for that matter).
She asks the questions he doesn’t when the PT and prosthetist come to visit, speaks with his surgeon and critical care specialist, coordinates his transfer to Walter Reed, calls his sister Sheila to tell her the news and plans his eventual discharge home to Pittsburgh. She stays until her pass is up, and then she does the only thing she can do. She goes back to the desert without him.
“I’m sorry,” Emery says yet again, standing beside Jack’s bed in her full uniform the morning she leaves, hair pinned tightly back and posture straight, steady as she knows how to be. “You know I would be here every step of the way if I could.”
“It’s fine, I get it,” Jack says, not looking at her (hasn’t, or won’t, or can’t, since she sat there and tried to explain that there was no way to save both his leg and his life). “Go.”
“I love you,” she says, because she does, because she is acutely aware that this might be the last thing she ever gets to say to him, by his choice, or maybe the universe’s, but never hers. “I love you, no matter what.”
He doesn’t say it back.
She gets leave three months later. “It’ll only be for a week, but I’ll be able to come stateside,” Emery says when she finally manages to get a hold of him, apologetic as she always seems to be when they talk these days. “I’m working on a more permanent solution, I promise.”
“You don’t have to come if you have that little time,” Jack tells her. “It’s a long trip.”
Emery doesn’t know how to answer that, can’t gauge whether it’s what he wants or what he thinks she wants when they haven’t had a real conversation since just before the fucking IED went off. If she could just see his face, Emery thinks half hysterically, gripping the plastic receiver so hard she can feel it imprinting her palm. If she could just see his face, she would know exactly what to do.
“I don’t mind,” is what she settles on, hating how unsure she sounds. “I want to see how you’re doing for myself.”
“What, you don’t trust my updates?”
“Of course I do, I just meant--”
“It’s fine,” Jack cuts in, his favorite phrase lately. “Whatever makes you happy.”
What would make Emery happy is to lay eyes on her damn husband, no matter how much he doesn’t want to see her, so she puts in a transport request and stuffs a few changes of clothes in her pack and emails him to let him know her ETA. Transport falls through at the last minute; Emery can’t get any other flight that makes any sense, so she doesn’t. She calls Jack to let him know, tries her best to ignore the sting at how flatly he responds.
(Every conversation with Jack these days is a minefield Emery doesn’t have a map to. Every time they speak she’s afraid she’s going to misstep and lose him to radio silence again, like those first awful weeks after he was shipped home when the only news she could get was through Sheila, not a particularly reliable narrator at the best of times.)
It takes another three months before her discharge orders come through. The bags beneath her eyes become practically permanent and her scrub bottoms get loose enough that she has to start tying them up with a spare bootlace and every night she wakes up shouting from the same dream: Jack, bleeding out on the table in front of her and Emery frozen in place by the instrument tray, unable to reach him no matter how hard she tries.
She makes it through on the same well of resolve that saw her through medical school and the match and years of residency in and out of combat zones. She mainlines coffee and cat naps between cases, smiles often enough and cracks enough shitty jokes that even Ed stops asking her if she’s okay. She’s not, but Emery won’t admit it even to herself (not until she has the time to really truly fall to pieces, not when every phone call with Jack makes it more clear that there’s no one left to help her pick them all back up).
Emery finishes residency (is finally allowed to resign her commission) the second week in June, just in time to scramble into an open fellowship slot at the University of Pittsburgh (courtesy of the friend of an old classmate of Commander Jones’ who runs the trauma surgery program there). She hasn’t been in Pittsburgh in two, almost three years when she steps off the civilian flight on a sunny Saturday morning ten days after she says her goodbyes to their old base. The last time was the week after the wedding, when Jack brought her home to meet the handful of family members he still tolerates (back when he could still tolerate her).
Emery texts him that she’s on her way from the cab she picks up at the airport. He responds with a singular ‘k’, not that she’s expecting anything more verbose. The door is unlocked when she finally manages to lug herself and her kit bag up the stairs to his (third story) unit. Emery chooses to interpret this as a positive sign.
Up until the moment she backs over the threshold to find him on the couch, Emery has no idea what she’s going to say when she finally lays eyes on him. Even then, she doesn’t exactly stop to think. “Fancy meeting you here,” pops out of her mouth quite without her brain’s approval.
She catches the way his lips twitch, the glint in his eye as he looks at her, and lets herself believe for a moment that with the distance between them finally dissolved he might start to let her back in. She thinks for a moment he’s going to tease her back, before his expression flattens, unreadable in a way that hits like a punch to the gut.
“I live here,” he says, struggling to his feet. “The bedroom on the right is yours if you want it,” he adds, then limps towards the one on the left. “And welcome home, I guess. I’m glad one of us made it back in one piece.”
Her fellowship starts on the first of July. In the intervening five days she and Jack spend cohabitating, he speaks to her when necessary in the polite tone he usually reserves for acquaintances and stays carefully blank. Sometimes when she’s not looking she swears she can feel him sneaking glances the way he used to when they first started dating; she feels crazy for it every time she tries to catch him at it and finds him ignoring her again.
Emery does her best to treat him like she always has, still too afraid to push as hard as she thinks she should, not wanting to dig too deeply under his skin when she can’t read him clearly. That’s the worst part, the way she can’t look at him and know what he’s thinking anymore. Jack was always an open book with her before, right from the start, the perfect balance to Emery’s more reticent nature. Now the roles are reversed, and Emery has no idea how to get through his defenses when she’s never really had to try.
She copes by getting out of the apartment, goes for a couple long runs to get acquainted with the neighborhood, makes a trip to Giant Eagle to stock the depressingly empty fridge, spends an afternoon visiting with Sheila (only slightly less excruciating than the reenactment of the Cold War that Jack seems intent on perpetrating).
“My friend’s a real estate agent, if you’re thinking about getting your own place,” Sheila offers as Emery is leaving, not exactly a surprise when her sister-in-law has never been her biggest fan, so casually cruel it takes Emery’s breath away.
“I’ll keep that in mind,” says Emery, diplomatically as she can. If she has to step into the alley next door to Sheila’s building for a moment before she heads back to the two-bedroom dump Jack (and therefore Emery) is currently calling home, then that’s between her and the dumpster that plays witness to her ugly crying jag.
Work, when it starts, is a welcome distraction. Emery manages three duty hour violations in her first six weeks avoiding the demilitarized zone that is the apartment, pastes a smile on her face and promises the program director she won’t make a habit of it when he calls her into his office to remind her that the rules exist for a reason. It’s not just that Jack never seems to go out except for his appointments and still won’t speak to her beyond social niceties and the kind of meaningless small talk one might engage in with an unfamiliar roommate. It’s that her bed is too soft and the noises outside her window are too mundane and she still wakes up most nights from that same damned nightmare when she manages to fall asleep at all. The hospital is the only place she feels normal anymore, the OR the only place she can get a moment’s peace (the only anchor she has left in the topsy-turvy shitshow that’s become her day-to-day).
Emery finds out that Jack has been cleared for work at the beginning of October, although he is (of course) not the one to tell her. Instead HR does it for him when they call on one of her rare afternoons off to ask about him.
“We have a Dr. Abbot applying for an attending position in the emergency department,” says the woman on the phone, sounding frankly too chipper to be believable. “It looks like the two of you were posted to the same base around the same time. Did you happen to work with him at all?”
“I did,” says Emery. “Dr. Abbot is an excellent physician. PTMC would be lucky to have him.”
“Wonderful! Have a good rest of your day Dr. Walsh, and thank you for your time!”
“Nice of you to let me know you started looking for jobs,” Emery snaps when Jack gets home for physical therapy an hour later, nasty in a way she hasn’t let herself be (hurt more than she wants to be over the fact that he hadn’t told her something as important as this). “Really nice of you to let me know you were applying for a position at my hospital. You didn’t think they might call to ask me about you when we have such an obvious overlap on our resumes?”
“I didn’t think you’d care,” Jack shrugs.
“Of course I care! I could have given you a fucking reference, or asked around about positions at other hospitals. I could have helped, but you won’t fucking let me do anything for you anymore.”
“I don’t need your help getting a fucking job, thanks,” he retorts, so cold Emery can’t help but recoil. “Whatever else I am now, I’m still a fucking good doctor. I can find a position on my own merit without playing on anyone’s pity.”
“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”
For a minute Emery thinks she’s going to get an honest answer, that the unspoken tension between them is (finally) going to be addressed. And then her pager goes off. Jack rolls his eyes and disappears into his bedroom while Emery scrambles for the phone, cursing whatever idiot she’s about to have to operate on.
She may be hesitant to push the envelope when it comes to their marriage, is content to cling to the ghost of their relationship instead of facing the fact that Jack seems about ready to give up, but she still knows exactly where they stand when it comes to their professional relationship. When she and Jack would fight over patient care in the old days, their disagreements were underpinned by fondness and mutual respect and the undeniable thrill of pushing each others’ buttons. Now when she finds him pulling cowboy shit on her consults her tone is all sharp edges, although the respect is still there, the fondness impossible to eliminate completely. It’s nice to know that Jack’s utter disregard for standard operating procedure has persisted, even if little else has.
“And what the fuck do you think you’re doing,” she snaps his second week in the pit when she answers a page to find the patient draped for an emergent laparotomy in the trauma room, Jack standing over the poor soul on the gurney with a scalpel in hand.
“The kid has a bullet in his gut,” Jack snaps back with narrowed eyes.
“That’s what the fully prepped and sterile operating room upstairs is for,” Emery hisses.
“He wouldn’t make it upstairs.”
“That’s for a surgeon to decide, Dr. Abbot, don’t you think? That’s the kind of thing that you wait for the surgical consult to determine, instead of turning a trauma room into an impromptu theater for a procedure you’re not technically qualified to perform.”
His third week she gets paged for a foreign body in the eye and hauls herself downstairs only to find him in the midst of an extraction technique he clearly took straight from the pages of some obscure journal.
“I practice evidence-based medicine, not witchcraft,” she snarks when she catches him at it, crossing her arms over her chest for emphasis. “Your evidence is circumstantial at best and almost certainly anecdotal.”
“All the evidence I need is right here,” Jack shoots back, waving the metal shaving he’s pulled out of the patient’s orbit like a victory flag.
And so it goes. She comes downstairs to find him in the middle of an unsanctioned thoracotomy at the beginning of November, catches him ordering a diagnostic peritoneal lavage on a patient who would normally be sent straight to the surgical floor just after Thanksgiving. Jack had gone to Sheila’s for the holiday. Emery had worked straight through it despite his (unconvincingly sincere) offer for her to join them.
She’s not unaware of the reputation they’re earning (which is not so different from the one they’d had when they first got to that last posting), knows that the surgical support staff and at least half the ED have a betting pool going on the exact nature of the relationship between her and Jack; the odds are 50-50 on whether they want to murder each other or fuck each other, according to the circulating nurse Emery bribes for information in mid-December. Emery just wants her husband back, but that seems like less and less of a possibility the longer things fester between them. Jack is the one who needs to give here (he’s the one holding her at arms length, refusing to let her in). Jack is the limiting reagent in this particular chemical reaction and it’s driving Emery not so slowly insane.
It’s not that Jack doesn’t love her anymore. It’s that she had left, had run back to the desert and stayed there for months, offered to come home only after he was through the worst parts of his own (less than satisfactory) discharge. She had left Jack alone for those first godawful physical therapy sessions, for prosthetic fittings, stayed away while he learned to walk again and wasn’t there to help him through the transition from the person he was to who he could be in the wake of (identity destroying) disaster.
Yes, she’d called and emailed and asked how things were going. But every time he heard her voice so tinny and far away on the monitored phone line it was a reminder that she was doing the job he was no longer fit for, nowhere near him.
When she does show up in Pittsburgh, back stateside for good, she blows in through the door of his shitty apartment and tries to pretend that everything can go back to how it was. But she pulls her punches with him now, treats him like glass, is tentative with his feelings in a way she’s never been (even all the way back at the very beginning). As soon as her fellowship starts she all but disappears, working ‘eighty’ hour weeks regularly and keeping to herself when she is home.
“She knows I’m not the same person I was and she doesn’t want any piece of me,” Jack says during his therapy session at the end of August, fidgeting with his wedding band. “She’s never home and she won’t talk to me when she is, won’t even look at me sometimes.”
“Because you’ve made it so pleasant to be in that apartment,” therapist Jeff points out, raising an eyebrow. “You’re shutting her out just as much. One of you has to be the bigger person and really talk to the other. If she really didn’t want to be married anymore she would leave. Why can’t you take the next step and open up a dialog?”
They may stay locked in a standstill at home, but Emery certainly isn’t afraid to go toe-to-toe at work. Jack starts at PTMC at the end of September; by the end of October he’s going out of his way to schedule his shifts over hers, craving the spark she gets in her eye and that familiar twinkle she reserves just for the tirades directed at him. When they’re going at it over a trauma, Jack can forget the way she walks around eggshells around him in every other aspect, can forget the distance (she had put) between them, can almost believe she hadn’t wanted to walk away.
At the beginning of January, Ed Lawrence reaches out to ask if Jack wants to meet. Jack doesn’t harbor any ill will toward the guy, although it’s clear Ed thinks he might. He agrees easily enough, finds himself looking forward to hearing about what their old buddies have gotten up to. Emery never talks about those last months overseas (not that Jack has bothered to ask).
“Hey man,” Ed says, slapping Jack on the back in greeting when he arrives at the agreed upon coffee shop. “Glad to see you back on your feet. Sorry about having to chop one off.”
“The prosthetic is a decent enough replacement,” Jack jokes. “The surgeon at Walter Reed sends his compliments, by the way. Said it was the neatest stump he’s seen from the hackjobs overseas.”
“Emery’s not joining us?” Ed asks after they’ve grabbed drinks and a table inside.
“Nah,” Jack shrugs, ignoring the prickle of guilt over the fact that he hadn’t bothered to invite her. “She had a shift today. Fellowship and all that.”
“Right, I’m glad everything worked out with that. It was a little last minute trying to get a slot and I know Jones would have been happy to have her another year. She was pretty determined to get back here though.”
Something cracks in Jack’s chest at that (at the reminder of how quick she had been to leave, in the immediate aftermath, and how long she had stayed away). “She didn’t seem in too much of a rush to get home to me,” he mutters before he can stop himself.
Ed gives him an odd look at that, leaning back in his seat. “She was in Jones’ office at least once a week trying to see if there was a way she could be discharged before the end of her residency. The day she came back from Landstuhl she all but begged him to send her stateside on compassionate leave, but we were too short on physicians to spare her.”
Jack remembers the way Emery had looked at him that first day she came home, the hope in her eyes and the way it faded so quickly when he didn’t respond in kind (the way he’d assumed it was because of him, because he wasn’t quite whole any more, because she didn’t know how to love him when he couldn’t be the man she married). Jack has spent the last year and change trying to push Emery away because he assumed she’d left him first, trying not to need her when it seemed so clear she no longer needed him.
“Did you know she was on triage that day?” Ed asks, something like understanding flashing in his eyes. “Emery’s always been good at playing her cards close to her chest, but that wrecked her. Amy told me she woke up screaming more often than not after you shipped home, and any of us could tell she wasn’t sleeping. She would forget to eat unless someone put food in front of her, and even then she barely had an appetite. But you know all that, right? The two of you have talked about it.”
“Most of it,” Jack lies through a throat so narrow he can barely choke the words out. “I just didn’t realize how bad it actually got.”
“She probably didn’t want to worry you. I’m sure you’ve been through hell yourself this past year.”
“It wasn’t easy. Getting back to work is helping though.”
Ed accepts the change in topic easily enough, chatting about their old squad and his own family, Amy and the new baby on the way. Jack does his best to track the rest of the conversation, barely manages to nod in the right places, stomach churning and mind going a million miles a minute as he runs every interaction from the past five months through this sudden change in perspective. Emery didn’t want to leave him, wasn’t running away, loves him enough to make herself sick with worry over how he was doing without her. Jack has been so caught up in his own narrative of those first days after his injury that he hadn’t thought to look at things from her point of view. Emery has always hidden the worst of her emotions even from him, is excellent at putting on a stiff upper lip no matter how she feels. Jack is usually good at peeling back her layers, but he’d been so caught up in pitying himself that he’d just assumed she pitied him too.
It feels like a punch to the gut, realizing how completely he’s missed what she must be going through, how much she must be hurting (how much he’s been hurting her).
“Good to see you, man,” Ed says as they part ways on the sidewalk a little later. “Have a good shift. Tell Emery I’ll have to catch her the next time I’m in town.”
“I will,” Jack promises. “Good to see you too, man. And hey, no hard feelings about the leg. If you ever want me to return the favor, just let me know.”
Ed laughs, clapping him on the shoulder and loping off down the sidewalk in the direction of his hotel. Jack stands for a long moment, letting the early January cold soak into his bones, watching handfuls of snowflakes drift down from the heavens. He hopes it doesn’t pick up too much, or else he’ll be in for an interesting night.
Naturally, the universe decides to give Jack what he most likely deserves. The snow’s coming down an inch an hour by the time sign out is finished, and the traumas come pouring in. They slow down after rush hour, as people finish their evening commutes. The kid comes in around midnight, the result of bad luck and black ice.
He knows as soon as the leg is exposed that it’s toast, his own stump twinging in sympathy as he tells Princess to page whichever surgeon is on for trauma. He counts it as a personal victory that his hands stay steady and his breathing even as he runs the room, a little less than a year out from being the one on the table. He’s got the kid intubated and one of the PGY-2’s irrigating the leg wound when Emery breezes in, still in the process of pulling her left glove on. Jack glances up just in time to watch her freeze, face so blank it hurts to see.
“Send him up,” Emery says without taking another step, so flat Jack’s teeth ache with it. She lingers in the doorway for a second, then two, then turns and leaves without another word.
Jack stays in the room until the kid goes to the OR, hands steady and breathing even. Then he peels off his gloves and gown, pulse hammering in his throat and fingers trembling, and goes in search of his wife. He finds her just outside the ambulance bay doors, hunched over her knees, shaking and not (just) from the cold.
“Did you know Ed Lawrence was in town?” he asks, edging closer, careful not to crowd her. “I got coffee with him just before I came in. He told me you were on triage that day.”
Emery turns to look at him then, tear tracks drying down her cheeks, the most open he’s seen her since Germany.
“I’m sorry,” he says, the truest words he’s ever spoken. “I’m so fucking sorry, Em. I didn’t realize but I should have asked. I was too busy feeling sorry for myself and being mad at you for leaving and worrying about how it must mean you didn’t want some loser down a quarter of a limb to think about why you had to go or what you were going through. I love you, sweetheart. So fucking much. I’m sorry I couldn’t swallow my pride earlier.”
“Fuck,” Emery rasps. “Jesus fucking Christ, Jack. You spend a year trying to convince me to cut you out of my life and you think this is enough to make up for it?”
“Of course not,” Jack tells her, the most honest he’s been in a long time. “I fucked up. But I want to fix this, if you still want that too. I want to make this work. I meant those vows we took, Em. For better, for worse, in sickness and in health.”
“I forgot how much of a romantic you can be when you try,” she mutters, exhausted and exasperated and closer to the woman he fell in love with than she’s been in a long (long) time. “I love you too, you absolute idiot, but don’t think this means I forgive you quite yet.”
“Of course not,” Jack says, tucking his hands in his pockets to stop himself reaching for her, just a little disappointed even though he shouldn’t be.
“For fuck’s sake,” Emery sighs, hooking a finger in the waistband of his scrubs and tugging impatiently. “Do I have to do everything myself? C’mere for a second, would you?”
Jack goes. Emery melts into him as he wraps his arms around her shoulders. He takes her weight without complaint, his bones settling at the warmth of her; he swears his heartbeat slows to match hers where he can feel it against his ribs. They stand like that for long seconds that stretch into long minutes, breathing each other in, relearning the feel of each other. Eventually she slips her hands under his scrub top to press her freezing fingertips against his skin, snickering as he yelps. She squirms away as he returns the favor, laughing, darting carefully over the icy blacktop through the sliding doors to the ambulance bay as Jack follows more cautiously.
She’s waiting for him by the ambulatory entrance when he gets off shift later, takes his hand and leads him to the parking garage and waits until he climbs into the passenger seat of her shitty car, tells him about the bedside laparotomy she got pulled into for an abdominal compartment syndrome as they drive home. They stumble together over the threshold to the apartment, Jack’s hands tangled in Emery’s curls as she bites at his bottom lip, tumble into bed together as they finish getting reacquainted.
He sleeps better than he has since he left the desert, still tucked up against her in the tiny twin bed that came with the apartment, sheets tangled around their ankles and sweat drying tacky between them. He wakes up first, sometime around 1400, confused until he registers the soft gust of air against his collarbone and the familiar scent of citrus shampoo. In the afternoon light streaming through the curtains they forgot to close, Jack traces the knob of her spine and skims his fingertips over the ridges of her ribcage, drinking her in. She looks tired, skin so pale it’s almost translucent, cheekbones sharper than they should be.
It hits him then, in a way it hadn’t quite hearing the details secondhand from Ed, that this didn’t just happen to him. Emery may still have both her legs, but she’s been suffering in ways he can only imagine. The fact that she’s here with him, willing to let him back in at all when he’s been trying so hard to shut her out, suddenly seems nothing short of a miracle.
They get dinner when Emery finally wakes up, at the diner around the corner that neither of them have bothered to try yet. They talk, over burgers and fries, about all the things they’ve been trying to avoid. It’s a catharsis, painful and relieving all at once. Jack looks across the booth, takes in the light back in Emery’s eyes, the teasing tilt to the corners of her mouth. Jack looks across the booth at his wife and makes himself a promise, vows never to forget again what she means to him (what he means to her, Emery who has loved him since the very beginning and through this latest madness with a steadfastness and ferocity he probably doesn’t deserve).
There’s plenty of time to get to know each other again, so they don’t rush. Jack swaps shifts so his off days align with hers, more flexibility in his schedule while she finishes out her fellowship. Emery makes sure they eat at least one meal a day together even when she’s working twenty-fours, despite the gossip that their occasional cafeteria lunches spark.
Eventually he tells her about learning to walk again, about those endless physical therapy sessions when he first came back, explains how it felt to have solid ground (quite literally) yanked from beneath his feet, talks her through the anger and the frustration and the sense of loss. Emery tells him about the months alone in the desert in exchange, about how worried she was over what she might be coming home to, about the desperation and the frustration and the terror.
Jack keeps making it up to her, keeps proving that he trusts her, that he wants her (that he loves her) until Emery finally starts to believe him again. Jack puts in the work.
March ends with a nasty day of sleet. Jack comes on for the night shift at the tail end of Emery’s latest twenty-four hour call. He hasn’t seen her for more than a minute or two in almost five days, only knows she’s alive from the handful of texts she’s managed to respond to. She gives a tired shrug in response to his silent question as she steps out into the ambulance bay with the rest of the trauma team waiting for their latest Tier 1, the bags under her eyes the worst he’s seen them since intern year.
“Crush injury two minutes out,” Jack murmurs as she drifts over to stand beside him (which does not go unnoticed by the overly invested nursing staff). “Guy’s leg got pinned below the dashboard. Took the firefighters forty-five minutes for extraction.”
“Compartment syndrome?” Emery murmurs back, shifting her weight to her left foot so her elbow brushes against his. “Keep the cowboy antics to a minimum tonight, would you? I want a nice, simple, trauma so I can get outta here on time.”
“No promises.”
Jack smirks as Emery rolls her eyes. They wait a minute in comfortable silence until the ambulance comes roaring in and the usual (organized) chaos begins. Compartment syndrome is in fact the obvious diagnosis as soon as the primary survey is complete, making emergency fasciotomy the obvious management.
“I swear to god, Abbot,” Emery hisses as Perlah, too new to know any better, hands him a scalpel and pours betadine over the leg. “What did I say about cowboy shit?”
Jack looks her right in the eye as he makes the cut. He’s done at least as many of these as Emery has and she knows it, just like he knows he’s about to get a tongue lashing over stealing her procedure anyway. He can see exasperated fondness hiding behind the furious expression she adopts for the rest of the staff, more apparent than it’s been in a long time; Jack tastes victory, and not just because he’s saved the guy’s limb. He’s fucking missed being on the same team as his wife.
“And what, exactly, do you think you were doing in there?” Emery starts as soon as the patient is wheeled out, hands on hips and lips tugging up at the corners even as her eyebrows come down, clearly enjoying the show. “If you want to cut so bad you should have suffered through a surgical residency like the rest of, ‘cause the last time I checked your medical license says you’re boarded in a medical specialty.”
“Fasciotomies are perfectly within my scope of practice,” Jack deadpans, crossing his arms over his chest. “And why suffer through two extra years of training when I can do all the fun parts with only three and no stick up my ass?”
“We’ll finish this later,” Emery promises, jabbing a finger into his chest as she slips past him out of the trauma bay.
“So you’re admitting defeat?” Jack calls after her, just because he can.
“Never,” Emery shouts back.
She texts him twenty minutes later from the locker room to say she’s headed home. Jack likes the message and doesn’t give it a second thought, too caught up with the shift change rush to worry about a sleep-deprived Emery on the road during a storm that has already brought several different rush hour MVCs through their doors.
There’s a multiple car accident involving a phone pole and some power lines that comes over the radio around 20:30, gnarly in a way that Jack hasn’t seen since he started at PTMC. The first patient who comes rolling in is an electrocution, caught by the downed lines as they were getting out of their vehicle. The second patient is the driver of the car that hit the car that hit the telephone pole, according to the paramedic who gives report.
The last patient they receive from the scene comes in while Jack is stabilizing the third (electrical burns over a good 25% of surface area). His gut recognizes her before his brain quite catches up, hands freezing for a millisecond over attaching the bag valve mask to the ET tube he’s just placed. Nurse Jesse furrows his eyebrows at the slip, although he doesn’t say anything; Jack already has a reputation for being fast and good and not letting anything shake him.
“Dr. Spencer, I need you to go check on the patient they just brought in,” Jack barks at the green tinged intern hovering at the patient’s feet.
“Sure thing, Dr. Abbot,” she says, disappearing out the door without a backward glance.
“Bridget, would you see if there’s anyone else who can come take over?” Jack asks when the charge nurse pops her head in to check staffing, primary survey complete and fluids being bolused.
“Of course,” she agrees. “Everything ok?”
“Fine,” Jack lies, as good at compartmentalizing as the next physician, hands steady as they work.
“Laceration over the left eyebrow that needs suturing, possible concussion, dislocated left shoulder, concern for left patellar fracture,” Spencer rattles off from the doorway as Bridget leaves. “She’s going to CT right now.”
Jack mentally promotes the kid to new favorite intern for the fact that she doesn’t call Emery by name. “Do you want back in on this or do you want to do me a favor and go keep on eye on the scan?” he asks her just as surgery shows up to consult.
“I’ll let you know when she’s out,” Spencer tells him, not quite managing to hide her grimace as she watches him pour fresh saline over the wetted gauze covering the worst of the tissue damage.
Spencer passes Carpenter coming in on her way out, Jack’s fellow attending raising a bemused eyebrow in his direction as she comes to stand over his shoulder. “Everything alright? Not traumatizing the interns, are we?”
“‘Course not,” Jack says. “You got this? Fifty-year-old male with third degree electrical burns to the right leg and abdomen. Intubated him and started fluids, no signs of internal bleeding but almost certainly deep tissue damage. Plastics just got here but they’ll probably want to wait a couple hours before debriding.”
“Got it,” Carpenter says. “You good?”
Jack, already halfway to the door, doesn’t bother to answer. He books it for imaging as fast as he can, nearly overbalances around the corner and catches himself on the wall, pauses for a moment to suck in a few deep breaths, trying to take the edge off the panic. It doesn’t work; he’s moving again a second later, so fast he nearly steps out of his leg, desperate to see Emery for himself, to dispel the image of her pale and still the way he saw too many friends back in the desert burning behind his eyelids every time he blinks.
Emery is just being wheeled out of CT when Jack rounds the last corner, Spencer hovering behind the gurney, Robby to one side. There’s a bandage over her left eye, her left shoulder held in a sling. Most importantly she’s in one piece, a hint of color in her cheeks, gesturing with her right hand to illustrate whatever point she’s trying to make to Robby.
“Em,” Jack breathes, so relieved his knees almost give out, close enough now to see the pain straining her expression (well-hidden as it is).
“Aren’t you supposed to be with the electrical burns in two?” Robby asks even as Emery reaches for Jack with her good arm, grip tight enough to hurt as she takes his hand (tight enough to bleed off the worst of his panic).
“Carpenter’s covering,” Jack says, feeling slightly less like his chest is caving in as Emery strokes her thumb over his knuckles in quiet reassurance. “Anything on the scan?”
“It was clear!” Spencer offers, over-eager, watching them with wide (too knowing) eyes.
“Probably a mild concussion, but no bleed or significant swelling,” Robby clarifies. “No broken bones. Plenty of bruising though.”
“I’m fine,” Emery says, glaring at Robby before flashing Jack that half grin he loves.
“C’mere,” Emery insists a few minutes later, once she’s been parked in curtains and Robby has fucked off with one last calculating glance at the two of them.
Jack, who can feel the shakes coming on as the adrenaline slowly starts to dissipate, settles himself carefully next to her as she wiggles over to make room on the bed. Emery’s warm weight against his side heads off the worst of the tremors, a reminder that she really is alright.
“What happened?” he asks when he feels steady enough to ask (when he feels ready enough to hear whatever the answer might be).
“I saw the accident too late. Tried to brake, but I hit a slick patch and ended up skidding into the second car.”
“Fuck.”
“Yeah.”
“You could have-”
“I know.”
There’s a knock on the wall just outside the curtain then. Robby peeks around it a moment later, eyebrows rising nearly to his hairline when he sees the way they’re tucked together on the narrow mattress.
“I just came to ask if there was someone who could take you home,” he says to Emery. “But I think I just found the answer. Give me a second to call someone in to cover and then I’ll sign the discharge summary so the two of you can head out.”
Jack goes to get Emery the spare pair of scrub pants from her locker and the extra t-shirt he keeps in his while Robby finishes the paperwork, then helps her carefully out front to the waiting taxi once Robby finally lets them go. She dozes against his shoulder on the short ride back to the apartment, leans heavily against him as he helps her out of the car and into their building.
“I think I get it a little better now,” Jack murmurs later, in bed, Emery still sprawled across him (needing the contact as much as he does). “How hard it is to be the one on the sidelines.”
“It fucking sucks,” Emery mutters into his collarbone, loose from the painkiller Jack had convinced her to take.
“I’m sorry I didn’t realize sooner,” he adds.
“I know,” she tells him. “‘M glad we finally figured it out.”
“I love you so fucking much.”
“I know that too.”
Jack falls asleep warmed through and not just from the feel of her tucked against him where she belongs. Emery is going to be fine, and so are they; it feels like coming home should have all those months ago, knowing that Emery has really and truly forgiven him (that she trusts him again, that she trusts how he feels for her). He’s sorry he ever gave her reason to doubt.
“So you and Walsh,” Robby tries a week later when he and Jack next have a shift together.
Jack, well aware of the pool the staff have running and not inclined to give anything away for free, shrugs. “How much is the answer worth to you?”
Emery, on her last day of mandatory medical leave and a little stir crazy with it, is practicing one-handed ties with her right hand at the kitchen table like a real sociopath (read: surgeon) when Jack finally makes it home.
“Hi honey, how was work?” she asks without looking up from the trainer tucked between her knees (left arm still immobilized).
“I told Robby we’re sleeping together.”
“He offered to split the pool with you, didn’t he?”
In point of fact, they keep fooling everyone on the technicalities until the end of May when Emery starts receiving offers for attending positions from the handful of hospitals she’d interviewed with. Emery’s holding out for PTMC and they both know it, although she’s still pretending to entertain her other options; Jack finds out she’s being offered the coveted spot on a Tuesday afternoon when Amanda from HR comes down to the pit to talk to Adamson about the incoming PGY-1’s.
“Dr. Abbot!” Amanda greets him, as upsettingly chipper as ever. “Lovely to see you again. I just sent your wife her offer. She’ll make a wonderful permanent addition to our PTMC family!”
“She’s still weighing her options,” Jack says diplomatically. “But thank you.”
“You’re married?” Dana demands from behind him as Amanda practically skips off.
“Have been the whole time,” Jack tells her, not bothering to look up from the chart he’s reviewing.
“Does Dr. Walsh know that?”
Jack is saved from having to directly answer that particular question by the arrival of Emery herself.
“HR Mandy just sent over my offer package,” she informs him, grinning. “Looks like you and I are gonna be working together for a while longer after all.”
“Oh my god,” says Dana, who sounds a bit like she’s having a coronary as she appears next to Jack, gesturing back and forth between the two of them. “She’s the wife?!”
“What, you didn’t tell your co-workers?” Emery teases Jack as he rolls his eyes. “Are you ashamed of me or something?”
“And here I thought it was the other way around.”
The news is all over the department by the end of the day, of course. Jack doesn’t particularly mind, on account of the fifteen minutes he and Emery manage to steal in the mostly neglected supply closet near the locker rooms for a little celebration all their own.