Chapter Text
“Mel?”
It took monumental effort to lift her head, exhausted as she was after that nightmare of a day, but she did at the sound of a familiar voice saying her name.
Dr. Langdon stood a few paces away from where she sat on the bus stop’s bench. He was staring at her like she had caught him doing something he wasn’t supposed to be doing, which she thought was strange considering he’d seen her first.
“Oh, Dr. Langdon, hi,” she said, her voice weak even to her own ears. “What are you doing here?”
Langdon scratched the back of his head, his features twisting with discomfort. “I’m, ah… Well, I’m catching the bus.”
Her eyebrows furrowed. “I thought you drove to work.”
“I— yes. Well, no. Um.” He sighed before trudging over and sitting beside her. “I used to. But I, um. I kind of sold my car?”
His voice tilted up at the end of his sentence, like he was asking a question instead of stating a fact.
“Why?” she asked simply.
He glanced over at her, trepidation shining in his eyes. After scanning her face for a moment, he must’ve found an answer to some internal question he’d been asking himself, because he nodded a little to himself before saying, “to help pay for my divorce.”
Divorce.
Now, Mel knew she was exhausted. Sure, she was tired most days after a shift, but rarely did she feel how she felt now — beaten down, emotionally drained, nothing left to give. She knew her brain was far from operating at maximum capacity. And yet she could’ve sworn she’d seen the gleam of his wedding band on his finger earlier that same day as she’d followed its path through the air when he’d evaluated her for a concussion.
Her gaze drifted to where his hands clenched the straps of his backpack. Sure enough, there the ring loosely sat, reflecting the light of the street lamps in a way that seemed to mock her confusion.
Langdon’s eyes must’ve followed hers, because he reached over with his right hand and pulled the ring clean off, shoving it in his pocket. Mel almost laughed at how easily it had slid from around his finger.
“I didn’t want anyone to ask any questions.” He took a deep breath. “Any more questions than I was already going to get, anyways.”
Mel nodded. She got that, probably more than he knew. She had a tendency to overshare, she was well aware, but what she didn’t give away freely she did not appreciate having pried out of her.
“I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “About your family.”
Langdon didn’t reply, just nodded slightly as he stared out into the dark with eyes glazed over. A few cars meandered by, and Mel was content to listen to the constant hum of the city noise.
Eventually, though, Langdon asked, “so what about you? Got plans with Becca for the Fourth?”
Irritation smarted in Mel’s chest, leftover from earlier that day. She felt her cheeks flush slightly with it.
“No,” she answered curtly.
She could see him staring at her from the corner of her eye.
“I’m sorry if what happened today caused problems between you two,” he said carefully.
She huffed. “Not your fault my sister’s a liar.”
“Did she lie to you, though?”
Mel crossed her arms stubbornly. “Lying by omission is still lying.”
Langdon nodded. “That’s true.”
A couple moments of silence passed between them once again before Mel sighed. Her bones felt like they weighed a billion pounds.
“I’m not mad at her. Not really. I wish she wanted to tell me things, especially considering I tell her everything, but that’s her choice. I guess I’m just…” Her eyes fell to the ground, tracing the lines of an old cigarette butt. She nudged it with her foot. “I guess I’m more disappointed in myself than anything.”
“Yourself?” he asked, his tone a little incredulous.
She rubbed her eyes underneath her glasses, trying to alleviate the burning she knew wouldn’t leave until she cried. Or slept. Or both. “Yes, myself. Because my entire life since we were 18 years old has been about Becca, about figuring out how to take care of her, and where to live, and what kind of car to get, and how to make money to afford it all, and only eating foods she likes and going to places she wants to go to and only watching fucking Elf every movie night. Everything that I have done for the last ten years has been about her, and now she has a whole life separate from me, and I’m happy for her, I really am, I just—” She cut herself off, guilt and sadness tightening her throat. “I don’t think I know who I am outside of being Becca’s sister. I don’t know if I even am a person outside of her anymore.”
Silence met her confession, and she kept her fingers over her eyes in a feeble attempt to avoid it. Oversharing once again, to a coworker that she liked and respected and desperately wanted to see her as a capable doctor and maybe even a friend. She was about to start apologizing when his voice cut through her internal spiral.
“I know what you mean.”
She pulled her fingers from her eyes to risk a glance over at him, but he was facing forward again, lips pursed and brow furrowed.
“You do?” she asked hesitantly.
He blew out a breath. “Yeah. I really do. I mean, after I got back from rehab, I felt like a shell of a human being. Abby, she… She tried to stay. But we both knew it wasn’t working. She could barely look at me without glaring, and I couldn’t look at her with anything but guilt, and it just wasn’t good for the kids, and they were why we were trying in the first place. She left a little less than a month after I was home.
“So there I was, alone in this big ass house that I’d never even really wanted, and I realized I didn’t know what to do with myself. For years I’d only really done two things: work, and be Dad. And then I was taking the pills, and everything blended together and stopped mattering as much, and—“ He shook his head, his dark hair flopping across his forehead.
“And then I was just stuck in limbo. I couldn’t work, and Abby only let me see the kids on the weekends for a couple hours, and I definitely couldn’t take any pills.” He shrugged halfheartedly. “So, yeah. I’m still trying to figure out what I like to do.”
A small part of Mel knew that she was staring, but she couldn’t tear her eyes from Langdon’s face. His words bounced around her head at a million miles an hour, soothing the jagged edges of her self-loathing thoughts. If he was feeling the same way, maybe that meant she wasn’t terrible for thinking it. It also meant she wasn’t alone — not in this feeling of being lost in the whirlwind of her own life, anyways. The tension in her shoulders relaxed.
“Well, have you found anything?” She asked.
He snorted. “I watched a lot of daytime TV for a while. It’s all terrible. Started running again, I did that in high school. I still run in the mornings, but I wouldn’t exactly say I enjoy it. More of a habit than anything else. So, I guess my answer is no.”
Mel frowned. Anxiety began creeping up her spine, tightening her chest and making her eyes water again. If he hadn’t managed to find something to enjoy yet, how could she?
“Maybe we’re both hopeless,” she muttered.
Langdon barked out a laugh, and she felt a smile pulling at her own lips at the sound, and then they were both giggling, half-delirious and hopeless on the bus stop bench. To anyone walking by, they probably looked insane.
“Yeah,” he said after he’d managed to get his breathing under control again. “Yeah, maybe we are.”
Finally, the bus rounded the corner down the street and started ambling towards them. Langdon stood, stretching carefully. Mel watched his face contort while she pulled her backpack on.
“I meant what I said earlier,” she said suddenly. “I really am glad you’re back. It wasn’t the same without you.”
Langdon froze mid-stretch, twisting to look at her. Something like disbelief mixed with gratitude shone in his eyes as he smiled softly at her.
“I’m really glad to be back, too. And I’m glad you’re still here. I wondered if you would be, especially when I got my return date.”
She blinked a couple times, her brain recalibrating while the doors to the bus hissed open and he gestured for her to step on first. She hadn’t been expecting him to have thought about her at all since he’d been gone, and definitely not to the extent that he’d popped into her mind. She’d hoped he would, secretly, in a way she’d only admitted to herself once at 2am during a long night shift when a patient had come in with gravel for her to pick out of their road rash. She’d thought about the patient Langdon had given her, months ago at that point, and the conversation they’d had on the floor of the break room before that. She’d sat with that same pair of magnifying glasses on as she cleaned her patient’s wound and wondered if Langdon remembered what he’d said to her as vividly as she did, if it had mattered to him even half as much as it did to her.
Yes, she’d hoped. But hoping had never gotten her anywhere before now. She didn’t quite know what to do with that.
She picked a seat a little more than halfway back, sliding over next to the window. Langdon sat next to her, setting his backpack on his knees as he swiped through something on his phone.
An idea occurred to her, suddenly.
“Do you listen to music?” She asked.
He hummed, still looking at his phone. “Some. I go between music and audiobooks when I’m driving.” He pushed his phone back into the pocket of his jeans. “Well, when I drove.”
Mel quickly dug in her own backpack, pulling out her phone and wired earbuds (she would die on the hill that the sound quality was worth the aggravation of constantly tangled cords). She plugged the jack into the bottom of her phone and pushed the right earbud into her own ear before offering Langdon the left.
He eyed it suspiciously for a second before taking it and putting it into his ear.
Mel couldn’t help the smile working its way onto her face as she scrolled through her Spotify library. She didn’t listen to a lot of music, something she’d always meant to work on but never found the time for, but what she did listen to was good. She thought so, anyway. Her eyes zeroed in on a song, and she hit play.
Walking On A Dream by Empire of the Sun started buzzing through the tiny speakers in the earbuds.
Mel let her eyes drift shut as the synth and guitar and cymbals poured into her ear. Usually she saved this song for the mornings, but she figured they could both use a bit of cheering up.
After a minute, she pried open one eye to peek over at him. He had his head leaned back against the seat, his face more relaxed than she’d seen it all day. His knee bounced to the beat, and his fingers were drumming against his thighs. She smiled to herself and closed her eye again.
The song began to fade out, and she glanced over to see Langdon already looking at her.
“What?” She asked.
“Nothing.” He smiled a little, shaking his head. “That’s just exactly the kind of music I’d imagine you’d listen to.”
Her eyebrows furrowed. “What do you mean?”
“You know. Happy, warm, like sunshine.” He shrugged. “That’s you.”
She stared at the back of the seat in front of her, at a loss for words. Before she could come up with any, Langdon snatched her phone out of her hands. A smirk pulled at his mouth as he typed.
“Only fair that I show you a song, now, too,” he said.
It’s a blue world, without you… It’s a blue world alone…
The lyrics gave way to one of the strangest beats Mel had ever heard, but she couldn’t resist the almost instantaneous bobbing of her head to it. Langdon grinned when he saw, and joined her. He handed her phone back, and she saw the title displayed on her lock screen: Blue World by Mac Miller. She’d never listened to any of his music, but now she wanted to.
The city drifted by as the song played, and she peered out the window just in time to see fireworks begin exploding in the sky. She gasped, and felt Langdon turn at her reaction to watch as well. Shades of blue and red filled the night, reflecting off the buildings and illuminating the interior of the bus in quick flashes.
A pang of sadness echoed through her as she wondered what Becca was doing, if she was having fun with Adam, if she wished Mel was there. This was the first Fourth of July they’d spent apart since they were kids. Suddenly she felt unmoored, like a balloon with her string cut. But then she glanced over her shoulder at Langdon, and they shared a smile before she turned her attention back to the fireworks, and she thought to herself, maybe this isn’t so bad.
Before she knew it, 23 minutes and 7 songs later, they were at her stop. She almost regretted that the ride was over already. This was the most fun she’d had in a while, and judging by the expression on Langdon’s face as he stood to let her out, he was feeling the same way.
“Well,” she said as she stood in the aisle. Suddenly she felt awkward. “I, um. I guess I’ll see you at work.”
“Hey, wait,” Langdon said right as she started turning away. He’d reached out and hooked a finger through her backpack strap, tugging her back around to face him. “Maybe we could do this again. Sometime.”
“Ride the bus?” She asked.
“No,” he said with a laugh, scratching the back of his head. “I mean. I don’t know. Just, hang out, I guess. Maybe we could try and figure out what we like to do with our free time.”
Mel paused, considering. The idea of a journey of self discovery outside of her role as a caretaker still felt incredibly daunting if she thought about it for more than five seconds, but now she tried imagining not doing it alone for a change. She certainly wouldn’t be able to focus as much on her anxiety if Langdon was there — not with the way he bounced from thought to thought with no discernible pattern. Plus, even if he didn’t know what he liked to do, he still knew how to do a lot of things — a lot of things that she didn’t know. And suddenly, it all seemed a little less overwhelming.
“Okay,” she told him, and was rewarded with a genuine smile. Not the cocky smirk he wore so often during that first shift they worked together, and not the carefully polite one he’d worn most of today’s, but a real one that dimpled his cheeks and made his blue eyes sparkle and warmed something in her chest.
“Give me your phone again,” Langdon said, and she unlocked and handed it over wordlessly. He typed furiously, glancing up twice to meet the angry glare of the waiting bus driver with an apologetic grimace before handing it back to her. “When’s your next day off?”
“Um, Thursday,” Mel said.
“I have Thursday off too. Text me, and we’ll figure something out.” He smiled at her again.
“Okay.” She couldn’t help but return it.
“On or off, no in between!” The bus driver shouted from the driver’s seat.
Mel felt her face flush with embarrassment, and she turned quickly towards the doors. “Oh, um, goodnight, Dr. Langdon,” she managed to toss over her shoulder.
“Night, Mel.” And right before her foot left the last step, she was pretty sure she heard him say, “thank you.”
The doors hissed shut behind her, leaving her alone on the sidewalk of her neighborhood. She glanced down at her phone, still tightly clutched in her hand, and there sat a new contact in her messages where he’d texted himself.
Langdon 🦠
She laughed to herself at his emoji choice before locking her phone and holding it close. She felt more awake now than she had all day. The warmth in her chest grew, spurring her steps towards her apartment complex. She’d almost reached her front door before she realized what it was.
Hope.