Chapter Text
“Do you remember that Tumblr meme, about the two wolves inside you?” Mel asks, so seemingly out of nowhere Frank nearly cracks his neck turning to look down at her. He didn’t really need to do all that, but, he doesn’t know, it just kind of happens. He’d say it was so random it just kind of left his mouth hanging open, but Santos says that’s pretty much what he looks like all the time and anyway, she’s not here right now and if Mel thinks he’s an idiot she’s never made him feel like it, so he turns his head back at the speed a normal person would this time and returns to the ice cream cone he’d like to maul before there’s another trauma.
“Mel, I’ve never been on tumblr in my life,” he says frankly. It’s the sixth time he’s done anything frankly today. They’re on a kick. It’ll stop being funny by the end of the shift, or they’ll be so tired it sends them into hysterics, but neither has happened yet. “Different kind of nerd.”
He likes that anyone else he’d have to worry about if they were offended, or if he was being too offensive, or whatever the fuck people worried about when they talked to other people. But it’s Mel so, he’s enjoying his ice cream.
It’s not that her opinion doesn’t matter. Obviously it does. Her opinion is one of the most important things in the world. It’s just not an issue. She won’t purse her lips, raise her eyebrows, say hmm with that tone. So no, the separation wasn’t a surprise. Just being fine with it was.
“Okay, so,” she pauses and takes another small bite of her own cone--the exact reason Frank has been hands at ten and two, eyes on the prize, avoiding looking at her as much as possible for the past ten minutes. He settles in to learn about tumblr and memes and wolves. “I don’t know how it started, but the thing is ‘there’s two wolves inside of you’ and then usually it says what the two wolves are. And they’re opposites or something, right like, ‘inside of you are two wolves, and whoever wins-’”
“-is the one you feed, yeah. That’s not tumblr Mel,” He pauses and tries not to swallow ice cream and say her name at the same time. It would sound… it’s just better if he doesn’t, is all. “That’s like an actual proverb.”
“No, yeah,” she shakes her head a little, smiling (it’s an adage, probably, not a proverb, but they were pre-med, not humanities). “But the tumblr joke is that they’re supposed to be opposite things, but they’re just the same thing. Like, ‘one of you is gay, the other one of you is gay, you’re gay’. Or sometimes they’re two different wolves still, it kind of built up over time when everybody did it, you know. And I just remembered that part, now.”
“So what, inside of you are two wolves, one says ‘go do an emergency crike’ and the other says ‘hide in the break room and eat ice cream’?” He picks an unfortunate moment to look over at her, his tongue still dragging across the slowly melting cone. She’s got the whole top of hers inside her mouth, swirling it around with her tongue, paused right before she releases the pressure built up from sucking at it. He thinks of the internet dialing noise. Hopefully, that’s just inside his head and not something she can hear too.
She shakes her head, and there’s a small pop. Inside Frank Langdon are two wolves. One that wants to eat ice cream and one that wants to-
“Mine wasn’t going to be funny.” She sighs. “Like, at all.”
“Well, you’re not Captain Scurvy. And, quite frankly-” He grins at himself, and she’s shaking her head at him, and he forgets where he’s going with this- “I’m probably annoying you trying to be funny all the time.”
“No,” she shakes her head firmly, enthusiastically, so fervently his eyebrows raise. She’s not upset. And her intensity doesn’t bother him. He’s just curious. Desperately, addictingly, wants-to-get-up-from-his-seat-and-kneel-and-stare-into-her-eyes-and-fuck-up-his-back-just-to-know curious. “It helps.”
“Well, I like helping.” He shrugs. “You especially.”
They’ve been real friends just long enough she rolls her eyes instead of the usual blushing, smiling, nose scrunching, hands flexing thing she did when he first started what the Santos’ voice inside his head refers to as ‘kicked puppy dog yearning’. Being friends. Making an effort. Well, it's not effort to somehow remember everything she's ever said and want to make sure everything is exactly how she wants it to be all the time. It's better than benzos, he says, like a mantra. Dr. J would call it simping, but he’d have to describe his symptoms to her for a diagnosis. And the last thing he wants is the entire ED knowing that this isn’t some pure of heart codependent friendship, safe for work mentor/mentee bullshit. Plus Javadi would 1000% use it for Tik Toks. Absolutely not. He kind of misses the excited hand flapping. They’ve been friends just long enough he’s learning which of her stims mean what. Having a favorite stim is probably more wholesome platonic friendship behavior, right. His favorite being her flappy hands has absolutely nothing to do with her chosen method of stopping them being grabbing his arm in excitement.
“Why’d you think of the wolves anyway?” He asks, distracting himself from the fact that after their intubation this morning he’d actually flexed when she’d grabbed him, like it fucking mattered at all.
“Oh,” She does a series of Mel faces then, and he purses his lips. First she cocks her head to the side, then shakes it, then shoots him a tiny little look with a tiny little eyebrow furrow and a tiny little cheek bite, and then studies her ice cream like it’s the baby in South 7 she cured with just her mind the other day.
“Oh,” Frank tries to follow her eyes with his own, leaning into her personal space, chasing after her until their knees are bumping and his bangs are in his eyes. He doesn’t care. “Since when do you not tell me things?”
“I-I mean I can but it’s not…it’s not really a work…” She hasn’t started flapping her hands yet- he’s ready to take the cone before it goes flying when she does though- but she’s fluttery. She’s not making eye contact, and she’s suddenly squirmy. Frank knows referring to himself as a dog is right because in this moment he knows Robby himself could walk in and tell him to drop it and he wouldn’t, not until Mel tells him about these wolves. “It’s not really work appropriate, even, for starters.” And then she shoots him a look but not her usual one. Not the one where she’s looking at him because she wants to see him, with her wide eyes and her clear face and the spirit of goodness moving through her as she saves lives and somehow gets through entire traumas without her hair moving like, at all. This is a furtive, Penny seeing if she’s been caught not cleaning up her toys kind of look.
“Oh well then you have to,” he says, and before he can think about it he’s grabbed the side of the chair and pulled her towards him, one-handed.
This is the moment that breaks her- the feeling of moving through space outside of her own control, the bulge of his muscles and his veins popping as he does it one-handed. Like she’s effortless. Like he can do this all day. Like she’s just there to be picked up.
And of course she’s used to Langdon. Mel likes her own space. A personal bubble for controlled sensory experiences, less triggers. Langdon just also likes her space. She used to think of it as a force field- and sometimes in those ten months she could almost see it around her, for real, like a tangible thing. People avoid her, don’t notice her, don’t stay long. The bubble works. He just manages to float through it without breaking it. Like it doesn’t apply to him. Once, he was showing her a procedure and he had to stop himself from just coming up behind her and grabbing both her hands to show her how to do it- she knows this because he literally started to and then took a breath and shook his hair out of his face and said, somewhat nonsensically, “that’s not how they do it in med school.”
Which did make sense to say it just…couldn’t be comprehended by a mind still smelling her mentor’s cologne, his chest having nudged her shoulders for just a moment, one hand going to sweep her braid to one side.
Of course she can’t say anything right now. Inside of you are two wolves, and one is tired of being infantilized and belittled and assumed that you don’t have needs or wants or feelings or sensations that make you snap your legs together when your new best friend starts licking an ice cream cone in front of you. The other though- the other is a professional medical practitioner. One who can’t just tell the hot senior resident watching him eat ice cream is making him horny.
And besides- it’s not like they’ve talked about this, per se, but Langdon isn’t going to be surprised she’s a woman. He’s not the problem. It’s everybody else. And they’re not here. So she’s not even sure where the second wolf came from. Or what its problem is. Or why of all the times to start saying things out loud to herself it had to be this time.
She shoots Frank a look again. He’s got the same look of concentration he has when a patient is describing a symptom, one of the med students he likes is presenting, he’s heard his name in Tagalog. She’s going to have to say something. His knee is knocking into hers. She squares her shoulders and gently, so gently, holding her breath so hard she doesn’t notice he’s stopped breathing, places one instantly sweaty palm on his knee and stills it. Hyperhidrosis.
Maybe it’ll be okay. It’s not like the thought of lying doesn’t occur to her- she’s not going to pretend Becca was the only one who had a Twilight phase here. Lie, Edward Cullen says, only he’s kind of morphing into Langdon at the same time. It just… it’s Langdon. The real one, not the hallucination. Not a real hallucination, a--she was a tumblr girlie, whatever, the point is, well she’s not going to tell him the truth but maybe just a part of it. Or she’ll biff it and say she’s got PGAD. One of the two.
“I don’t think a lot of doctors here get me the way you do-” which is not at all what she meant to say but also not wrong at all. Actually, it might be the exact right thing.
He…well, he lights up. A real smile, slow and gentle and easy and not a hint of irony or cynicism. Just pure Dr. Langdon whimsy and joy, the kind that tries to run backwards to talk to her and slaps the door jams (and then starts slapping the side of them when he has Mel stand under a door and watches, eyes narrowed, hands around his stethoscope, measuring if she can actually reach the door or if they have to change the ritual). Then, he shuts his mouth, nods solemnly.
“I always knew I was the Chosen One.”
She waits. There’s a ritual in this too. He’s got a specific face when he’s making a joke he wants her to laugh at versus wants to be laughed at. He wants it to dawn on her he’s joking, wants her to be endeared by his ridiculousness.
“Not funny?” He asks after a minute, face twisting slightly but still hopeful. Not hurt, just curious. She shakes her head.
“You’re being-” there’s a firmness to her tone now, less soft but more certain. She’s comfortable with him. Because of the bad jokes, a little bit. “-referential. Not funny. There’s a difference.”
He nods again, only his eyebrows moving a little to show she’s said anything at all. “Inside me are two wolves. One is funny, one is res-”
She wants to throw her ice cream at him- realises she’s raised it in her hand like she’s going to. She turns to look at the cone like it’s doing it on his own. His eyes widen, and then he’s gleeful. That’s the problem with the bubble. She’s so comfy in there, and now that she’s comfy with him she’s going to go too far. Like throw ice cream into her gorgeous senior resident’s stupid handsome face, or tell him she wants to lick the ice cream out of his mouth.
“Oh, you almost did it,” He crows, and it looks like he’s trying to stop smiling and genuinely can’t. “You wanted to so bad-”
The door bursts open and Whitaker sighs, shoulders droopy, arms dropped, ice cream running down his shirt. Mel jumps. Frank nods once, goes back to his cone, taking a particularly vicious bite.
Yes, Mel wanted to. So bad.