Archive of Our Own

He’s pissing when it happens, of course. 

Frank’s always been a sweaty person, which means he also needs to drink a lot of water. Thanks to nature and human biology, he’s subsequently pretty familiar with the toilets in the ER. 

He’s spent more time there than most doctors. Certainly, this was true when he was sneaking off to take drugs behind the locked door of a cubicle. And then those drugs would inevitably make him more sweaty, so he’d drink more water, and then need to pee again. That’s the never-ending toilet cycle of addiction that they don’t tell you about.

But he spends less time there, now that he’s back from rehab, in recovery, and not sneaking off to take drugs anymore. 

This is one of the many benefits of recovery. Less time spent in the bathroom, more time on the floor, less sweaty, less skittish, too. He’s a better doctor overall. He knows it to be true because he can feel it, but it’s nice when he hears it from Robby, too, a few months after he first came back. Especially nice to hear, given that it was the first time his attending had said a civil word to him since his return.

There are, of course, downsides to recovery. The itch of a craving on bad days, the divorce, and almost-but-not-quite losing his kids. These are all bad things, objectively. But he can’t bring himself to wish he’d never recovered, because he feels whole again for the first time in years. Centred, anchored to Earth once more. Zen, even. 

He’s got himself a little apartment on the ground floor of a building in Shadyside with yard access, so he doesn’t feel so terrible about the dog being the only thing he won sole custody of in the divorce. Her name is Dr. Rosalind Franklin, Frank for short – but not in an egotistical way. More in a ‘haha, he’s got a dog with the same name as him,’ kind of way. It was meant to be funny, but Princess bullied him for weeks.

He spent three months filling his apartment with junk from Facebook Marketplace. An orange corduroy couch, cause why the hell not? A lot of watercolour paintings of obese pigs doing various activities like leaping off a diving board into a bath of wine, because he thinks they’re hilarious. A lot of plants, to fill the void in his chest that appeared once he stopped being able to see his kids every day.

He is doing well, all things considered. Robby says so, too, in the monthly mandatory HR meetings. They’ve had five of them, now. A total of fifteen months since Frank Langdon’s fragile life as a happily married emergency medicine doctor and father-of-two fell apart into little chunks of rehab, divorce, a suspended medical licence, and only seeing his kids on weekends.

Of course, the only person he can blame is himself. And he does, for a very long time. It’s hard to accept the consequences of his actions and also understand that he was very sick when he did those things. There’s some kind of cognitive dissonance there that’s hard for him to get over, but he knows that his addiction is not a moral failing. He was a man who had tried to carry too much all at once and, when that didn’t work, found unhealthy ways to cope.

He is working on that now. He goes to his NA meetings, he takes up jogging, and Mel hooks him up with her meditation app. They do it together one day, in the park after a particularly rough shift. It’s nice. There’s wind in his hair, sun on his face, and a warm body beside him. Just that simple warmth had meant a lot after he’d spent twenty minutes doing chest compressions on the cold chest of a long-dead eight-year-old. 

They were meant to be sitting and listening to the soothing sound of the ocean with their eyes closed, but Frank squeezed one of his open to take a peek at Mel. Her posture is perfect, obviously. His spine straightens just looking at her. 

“Close your eyes, Frank.”

It’s freaky how she can do that. Always, she seems to know what he’s thinking, what he’s doing, what he’s about to say. He wonders if she’s able to read minds. If he’s Bella Swan and she’s Edward Cullen…but in reverse because it seems she can only read his mind.

When he asks Yo-Yo about it, she laughs in his face and calls him a dumb, stupid idiot. Which, while probably true, he wasn’t sure he needed all three attacks on his intelligence. 

“You know, up in the OR, we call you guys Tweedledee and Tweedledum.”

“Let me guess. I’m Tweedledum.”

“Obviously, but also irrelevant to my point. You guys are just like two peas in a pod. Ever since her first day you two have just…clicked.”

And that’s true. He and Mel do just click. She’s probably his best friend in the whole world. 

But anyway. Where was he? Oh yeah, pissing. That’s what he’s doing when it happens.

There’s a bang, like a hard object being slammed against a hard surface, followed by a lot of yelling. Noises like that happen pretty frequently in the Pitt, but he still shakes off his dick and washes his hands with more urgency than usual. 

There’s a chance Dana’s just gotten into a fight with the printer, or Whittaker’s walked into a door. Both have happened before. But there’s an instinct in his gut that tells him something’s off as he pushes the door to the restroom open. The ER had gone deathly silent after the noises he’d heard. This does not bode well.

He cuts through Trauma One, which is empty, to get to the centre of the Pitt, near the nurses’ station and the ambulance bay. It is there that he sees Mel in a chokehold, which would be concerning all by itself. Her hands grip the guy’s overly hairy arm tightly, her knuckles and fingertips white with the pressure.

Worse than all of that, though, is the gun at her temple.

Frank’s not a gun guy by any means. He’s about as opposed to guns as a person can get, because he’s seen just about every way owning a gun can go wrong, thanks to working in the ER. So, he doesn’t know what kind of gun is pressed up against Mel’s temple, but it’s a fucking gun. 

It takes everything in him not to yell her name. He’s pretty sure the only thing that stops him is the frantic, desperate look Robby sends him. The attending is standing with both his hands flat and open in front of him. Frank can see the way they shake in the air, and that’s when the seriousness of the situation sets in for him. 

Robby’s just about the most steady guy Frank knows, but one of his residents, his best resident, is being held at gunpoint, and Robby is clearly scared out of his fucking mind.

Frank thinks he’s on his way to joining him.

The guy’s head had whipped over to Frank when he’d burst through the doors of Trauma One, and so Frank sticks his hands up in the air. Half his mind is screaming at him to stay right where he is, but the other half has already got his feet moving closer. Mel’s with that creep, and her jaw is clenched tight because she doesn’t like being touched sometimes and he’s touching her, and he has a gun. He needs to get to Mel.

Out of the corner of his eye, he can see most of the day shift in a loose semi-circle around the guy, but no one is moving. Why is he the only one moving?

“Stop!” The guy cries out, the barrel of the gun biting into the skin of Mel’s temple. “Don’t come any closer.”

“Okay, okay,” Frank says, and his eyes are locked on the guy’s face, but really where he wants to be looking is at Mel. “Can you tell me what’s going on?”

“My friend needs a doctor,” the guy rasps.

“Okay. We’ve got plenty of doctors here for you. Just bring your friend inside and let us have a look.”

“Too many,” the guy hisses, and his eyes dart around the ER at all the doctors and nurses standing frozen around them. “He’s not here. I need her to come with me.”

“Why her? She’s just a resident.” The words burn coming out of his throat because Mel is so much more than just a resident, but Frank’s willing to say just about anything right now to keep her safe. “She can’t do anything by herself.”

“I saw her name badge. She’s Dr. King. All the reviews online say Dr. King is the best doctor here.”

Fucking hell. There’s no way Mel’s being kidnapped on the basis of a couple fucking Google reviews that Gloria had to beg out of the few patients who didn’t mind the eight-hour wait and often-terse bedside manner of the staff here. Frank can see Robby close his eyes, and he knows the man is thinking the same thing.

“Dr. King is an excellent doctor,” Frank concedes, aware he needs to change tactics because he can see the way the guy’s hand is flexing against the trigger, and it suddenly becomes very important to him that this guy doesn’t think Mel is expendable. “But she’s still just one person. She needs a team to go with her to help.”

The guy blinks, and Frank can tell he’s thinking about it, so he takes a couple more steps forward, and now he’s past Robby and the closest to Mel in the room aside from the asshole. “I can go with her. I’m a senior resident. We work really well together.” He takes a deep breath and puts as much conviction into this next statement as he has left in his body. “We can help your friend.”

He keeps his voice calm by the grace of god, even though his hands shake in the air and he can feel the sweat gathering on his upper lip. 

He takes a second, just a second, to glance at Mel, and she is staring at him wide-eyed, half furious, half-hopeful. He wonders, distantly, if she will forgive him for this. 

The guy uses the hand holding the gun to push his hair away from his eyes, and if Frank were just a foot closer, he would have tried to lunge at him. Maybe grab the gun off him, definitely push Mel out of the way. But he’s not close enough to try that, and he doesn’t want to do something stupid that gets Mel shot, so he suppresses the full-body twitch of his muscles and plants his feet against the linoleum floor as the guy brings his hand down again and rests the gun back against Mel’s temple.

“Fuck. Yeah, ok.” The guy jerks his head towards the ambulance bay doors. “Walk that way, in front of me. If you try anything, I’ll blow her brains out.”

Frank nods, his pulse quick in his throat. He keeps his hands up in the air and takes slow, measured steps towards the ambulance bay doors. He meets Robby’s eyes as he goes and doesn’t want to think about the fear he sees there. Dana’s next to the attending, with her jaw clenched and fury painted clear as day across her face. 

Frank keeps his eyes on her because it’s easier to look at that anger and feel like it will all be okay than it is to look at anyone else right now.

He hears the guy follow behind him, and Mel lets out a strangled little noise. It takes everything in him not to turn around and check that she’s okay, but the whole ER hears the way his footsteps falter for a second. He feels like fucking Orpheus, trekking out of the underworld with Eurydice at his back.

He just hopes he’s better at listening to instructions than Orpheus was. 

There’s a beat-up Holden Commodore parked haphazardly in the ambulance bay, and Frank obeys when the guy tells him to walk up to it and open the trunk, but he doesn’t like where this is going. 

“Get in.” The guy’s voice is harsh and growing more desperate by the second. Frank can feel the frantic energy radiating off of him, so he gets in the trunk with as much dignity as he can muster. It’s not a lot, because he’s six feet tall and quite inflexible. At least one of his joints pops as he folds himself up in the small space. 

The guy finally, finally removes his arm from around Mel’s neck. Frank doesn’t even get to feel relieved about it for two seconds before the guy is shoving Mel into the trunk with him. Frank is just grateful to have her in his arms, relatively safe, before the guy slams the door shut and they’re suddenly trapped in a very small, dark space together. 

It’s quiet for a beat as they both listen to the guy get in the front seat and slam the door behind him. The engine thrums to life, and Frank can no longer hear Mel’s breath, but he can feel it against his neck. He wonders how long they have until they run out of oxygen. His own breath is sawing in and out of his chest, and he tries to match his inhalations to Mel’s, tries to remember what the lady on their meditation app says. 

“Are you okay?” Frank asks, which is a dumb question, because she’s just been held at gunpoint.

“I think so. I’ve never been kidnapped before." Her tone is almost conversational.

“Mel.” He’s affronted, panicky. There’s sweat on his brow, and he’s sure the whites of his eyes are all too visible in the dim light.

“It’s like we’re on Grey’s Anatomy!”

“Mel, the characters in that show went through hell. We don’t want to be on Grey’s Anatomy.”

“Speak for yourself.” 

She almost sounds giddy, and it clicks all of a sudden that she is probably experiencing an adrenaline high to end all adrenaline highs, and maybe a bit of shock to top it all off. She’ll come crashing down at some point, hopefully after all this is over. He’ll be there to catch her. 

People forget, when they watch the soft way Mel speaks to patients, that she’s just as much an adrenaline junkie as the rest of them. There’s a reason she chose emergency medicine, after all. He can see that hunger in her eyes after a close save, or when a particularly gruesome laceration comes through the ER. Yeah, she’s an adrenaline junkie through and through. Despite all the anxiety he knows she’s feeling–because he’s feeling it, too–she’s able to keep it under wraps if she plays up the excitement and the level-headedness.

“How did this even happen? I was pissing for the first half of it.”

“That guy, I think the name he gave Dana was Travis, came through the ambulance bay. Dana was all like, sir, you cannot enter through here, and then he was like, please, my friend needs help, is Dr. King here? And so obviously I went over to see if everything was okay, but I didn’t see the gun until he had me in a chokehold and the thing was pressed against my head.”

She says it all very calmly, like having a gun held against her head is something she’s experienced countless times. Meanwhile, Frank is freaking the fuck out. 

“Jesus, Mel.” He’s not sure what to say. “Fuck.” 

Yeah, that pretty much sums it up.

“It’s okay, Frank. All we have to do is save this guy’s friend while we wait for the cops to show up.”

“How will the cops know where to find us?” His legs are cramping from where they’re pressed against the side of the trunk, and Mel’s elbow is digging into his ribs. It’s very uncomfortable and quite distracting.

“Oh, he didn’t take my phone off me. I don’t want to risk calling them myself, but I’m assuming Samira is on Find My right now with the police.” 

“Christ on a bike, Mel. Bless you and Mohan’s co-dependent friendship.”

Frank had always thought it was strange that the two of them needed to know exactly where the other was at all times, but given that it was probably going to be their saving grace, he didn’t think he was in a position to judge. 

“Yes, I don’t think Travis is a very good kidnapper. Do you think it’s his first time?”

“Well, I hope it’s his first time. We don’t want to get to wherever he’s taking us and find a horde of other kidnapped people. I think that would put a lot more pressure on the situation.”

Mel just hums in agreement. In the dark of the trunk, he feels her fingers twine around his. He squeezes them tightly, just to let her know he’s there. It’s dumb because she’s obviously very aware of his presence, given they’re squished together in the trunk of some crazy dude’s car. 

“Frank,” she says, and her tone has sobered now.

“Mel,” he replies, just as serious.

“If this doesn’t end too well-”

He cuts her off right there, because he cannot bear to hear the end of that sentence. “It will end just fine, Mel. Like you said, we’ll get there and help this guy’s friend while we wait for the police to arrive.”

“But if it doesn’t,” she pushes on, the words tumbling out of her. “Can you tell Becca that I love her very much. And watch out for her? She wont have anyone else if I go, too.”

Frank breathes in through his nose and out through his mouth, slowly, so that he doesn’t go apeshit in the trunk of a Holden Commodore. 

“You can do all that yourself, Mel, because we’re both going to be fine. But if we aren’t, it’s because we’ve both gone down in a blaze of glory, so I won't be there to tell Becca anything anyway.”

It’s kind of a dick thing to say, but she laughs nonetheless. She has a surprising sense of humour like that. She giggles at all the things that slip out of his mouth without him thinking. The rude, asshole things that he regrets saying until her laugh wipes his mind totally clean and he forgets his own name for a bit. 

The drive is long. Longer than he would have hoped, both because his legs have passed the stage of numbness and are teetering on painful, and because the longer Travis’ friend has to wait for medical attention, the lower their chances of actually being able to help him are. Frank’s no expert on situations like these–all the drills they’d run had consisted of one of the staff being held hostage at the hospital–but even he can figure out what Travis will likely do to them if they can’t help his friend. 

Eventually, they feel the car slow down, and he can hear the crunch of gravel beneath the tyres. A door slams, followed by stomping footsteps, before the trunk swings open and Frank is blinking against the bright light of day.  

He squints and can make out Travis levelling the gun at him with one hand. With the other hand, he grabs Mel’s arm and tugs. She yelps in pain, and he makes a strange, strangled noise. It’s half a yell that gets bitten down and chewed up in the back of his throat, so Travis doesn’t lose his shit and kill one of them. 

Frank meant what he said to Mel in the trunk. Either both of them are making it out of this, or neither of them are. The idea of moving forward in a world without Mel is something he can’t stomach. He literally feels sick just thinking about it, or maybe that’s the way Travis has pressed the gun up against her temple again. 

“Get up. Hands in the air,” Travis grinds out.

Frank does as he’s told and unfolds from the trunk. His legs are shaky and numb. The pain as the blood returns to his limbs is enough to trip him up. His first few steps away from the Commodore are more the stumbles of a newborn giraffe than anything else. He hopes Mel’s eyes are closed so she doesn’t have to see him make a fool of himself like that. 

He can almost hear Yo-Yo’s voice in his ear, saying now, Ken, doesn’t it mean something that your only thoughts in a crisis situation are about her?

He knows if Yo-Yo were here in real life, he’d have a snarky return for her, but right now he can’t think of one. She’s right. All his thoughts are about Mel.

Instead, he tries to be useful and looks around as Travis frogmarches him down the gravel driveway. They’re in a very remote area that he wasn’t really aware existed so close to the bustling Pittsburgh city. The only building he can see is the barn-like one they’re walking towards. It looks like it used to be painted bright red, once upon a time, but now it’s faded to a rusty brown that reminds him of dried blood, which is so ominous he can’t look at it anymore.

Aside from the blood barn, there’s nothing. Just sweeps of yellowing grass and rolling hills on the horizon. It’s the type of landscape Whittaker probably has a painting of over his bed because it reminds him of home, or something dumb like that. 

Once they’re in through the doors of the barn, Frank starts to feel very nervous. The reality of their situation is that they are very much alone, very much in the middle of nowhere, praying that Mohan can remain level-headed enough to remember she has Mel’s location on Find My. It’s not a long shot, by any means, but it’s riskier than he’d like it to be, given that both his and Mel’s lives are on the line. 

Briefly, he thinks of his kids. He wonders if the fact that this is the first time he’s thought of them since this whole debacle started makes him a bad father. Should he have thought twice about volunteering to go with Mel, because he has two kids waiting for him at home? But then he remembers Mel’s terrified face, and he knows he wouldn’t have been able to make any choice other than the ones he already has. 

All he can do now is live with the consequences. Or die with them, he supposes. That grim thought is his cue to get out of his head, so he focuses on the inside of the barn. It smells wet and mildewy, which he hates. He associates that smell with the mould that crept through the flat he’d shared with three other people in the senior year of his undergrad. 

“Joshy!” Travis yells into the thick air of the barn. “Josh, I’ve got some doctors here. They’re gonna help you.”

There’s a noise from the far corner of the barn, and Travis steers them towards it. Frank sees a young man, whom he assumes is Josh, lying on a blanket on the ground. There’s a modest first aid kit next to him, and that’s the first time Frank really clocks that they’re going to have to treat this guy without all the bells and whistles that come with working in one of the top ERs in the country. In fact, all they have right now is a decidedly unsterile barn, their stethoscopes around their necks, and whatever’s in that first aid kit. It’s downright medieval.

Travis’ friend, Josh, seems to be in a bad way, but Frank can’t see anything that explains why Travis felt he had to kidnap two emergency doctors instead of just bringing Josh into the ER. He’s not sure how relevant that is to treating Josh, but he figures getting as much information as possible is always a good thing. Especially if he needs to give the police a statement at some point.

He kneels down next to Josh.

“Hello, sir. I’m Dr. Langdon, and this is Dr. King.” He gestures to Mel, who is busy tugging herself out of Travis’ arms to kneel on Josh’s other side. Briefly, he wishes she would kneel down next to him, but that’s a selfish and unhelpful thought. One on each side gives them better access to the patient, and Mel knows that.

Mel is already a better doctor than he is in so many ways, but he can see in the look she shoots him that she’s glad she doesn’t have to do this alone. 

“Can you describe your symptoms for us, Josh?” Mel asks. Her voice is gentle, and Josh turns his head towards her, responding to her soothing presence immediately. Frank can almost see the tension draining out of his body.

“It’s getting kind of hard to breathe,” he wheezes, and Jesus, Frank can hear that just by the panting heaves Josh is taking to get air into his lungs. “And my back hurts.”

“When did this star, Josht?” he asks, following Mel’s lead in calling the patient by his first name and not ‘sir’. He watches her pull her stethoscope from around her neck and tuck it into her ears while Josh finds the breath to respond. 

“Last night, when we were running from the cops after we robbed that bank.” 

Frank blinks. Surely he hadn’t just heard that? He’d gotten the impression that Travis was a novice kidnapper, but this duo is acting like it’s their first day on Earth. Well, at least now he knows why Travis didn’t want to bring Josh into the ER. 

Travis, at least, notices Josh’s blunder and waves his gun around behind Frank’s head to re-establish what they were actually there to do. “You’re not a fucking investigative journalist, Doc. Just fix him.”

“I need to ask these questions to establish a timeframe for his symptoms so that Dr. King and I can start on fixing him,” he responds calmly, hoping it's not the last thing he says. He wants his last words to be something cool, like a fun history fact or maybe something pretentious and Latin. 

Travis huffs, but keeps his finger away from the trigger of his gun.

“It got a lot harder to breathe this morning, though,” Josh interrupts, and his eyes are darting nervously between Travis and Frank. Maybe Josh doesn’t want Travis to shoot his doctors, either.

“Okay, and what about that back pain. Mild or severe? Sharp or dull? Does it get worse with movement?”

“Um, mild, I think. Really sharp, like on the right side of my spine. It hurts the same no matter if I lie here or try to move, but it gets harder to breathe if I get up.”

“Normal respiratory effort, but breath sounds decreased on the right side,” Mel chimes in, swinging her stethoscope back around her neck. She tests a few of his reflexes and then looks up at Frank. “No numbness, weakness, or swelling in extremities, though.”

“Are you a smoker, Josh?”

Josh grunts. “Used to do a pack a day. Trying to get it down since grandad got lung cancer. Still put down probably about ten a day, though.”

“I keep telling him he needs to quit,” Travis adds, like that’s in any way helpful right now. 

Mel’s rummaging through the first aid kit and grins when she finds a portable pulse ox and blood pressure cuff. She clips the pulse ox onto Josh’s finger and slips the BP cuff onto his arm. 

“One-twenty-two over seventy-two,” she reads out to him when it’s done squeezing. That systolic’s a little elevated but not overwhelmingly so. “And pulse ox is ninety-four.”

She shines a light in Josh’s eyes, and Frank watches his equally reactive pupils shrink and dilate in response. He presses against Josh’s abdomen, but finds it soft, nondistended and nontender. 

The issue is Josh’s right lung; he’s almost certain. He’s just not willing to cut corners with a gun pointed at him and Mel. 

“Differential, Dr. King?”

Even with a gun pointed at her, there’s a glimmer in her eye when she gets to do her thing. He’s not sure he’s ever met someone who loves practising medicine as much as Mel. 

“Musculoskeletal back pain is probably the most common cause of back pain during…exertion.” She doesn’t say a post-robbery getaway, which is probably wise of her but certainly less entertaining. “Pneumonia would explain decreased breath sounds and ox sat. Um, we always need to consider a pulmonary embolism with a decreased ox sat and dyspnea, same with a tension pneumothorax.”

He can feel her working towards the thing he’s already diagnosed in his doctor gut, but he lets her get there in her own time.

“My bet is a spontaneous pneumothorax, though. Common cause of back pain and dyspnea in young people.” He nods, proud despite the circumstances, or maybe because of the circumstances. How many residents could say they’d been able to successfully do a differential in a barn at gunpoint?

“How old are you, Josh?” Frank asks. 

“Twenty-four,” he pants. Frank nods. Definitely a young person, then. 

He casts his eyes around the barn. “Normally, Travis, we’d need to get Josh on oxygen and cart him up to radiography for a chest X-ray. I don’t suppose you’re hiding an X-ray machine under one of these piles of hay?”

He knows as soon as he says it that he shouldn’t have. Genuinely, in what world is it a good idea to smart-mouth the guy holding a gun? 

But Frank has never claimed to have good ideas, and so he accepts the pistol whip that Travis delivers to his cheekbone with a quiet grunt. 

Mel shrieks and rockets up to her feet. Frank’s heart lurches because Travis is jumpy, and the last thing anyone needs is that fucking gun going off anywhere near them. 

“Travis,” she says, and her voice has taken on an icy calm. “We are here, helping Josh, for you. It is unacceptable to hit the people who are helping you. Now, because of you, we have to delay Josh’s medical care to make sure Dr. Langdon is well enough to continue treating him.”

It’s fucking crazy of her. She stands there with hay stuck to the knees of her scrub pants, her mouth drawn into a thin line, and her eyes two icy shards of fury in her face. She looks like an avenging angel, all beautiful, righteous anger, backlit by the sun streaming through the square window. If it were anyone else, Frank is pretty sure Travis would have pulled the trigger.

But Mel has always bent the rules of the universe, so Travis just nods meekly and tucks his gun into the waistband of his jeans. 

Mel drags the first aid kit over to where he’s still crouched on the ground, and he tries to communicate with his eyes just how fucking crazy he thinks she is. There are two splotches of red high on her cheeks, and her breath is coming in short, angry pants, so he doesn’t think she cares what he thinks right now.

She checks for a concussion and tells him she thinks he’s all clear in that regard. 

“I trust you, sweetheart,” he murmurs, because he can see her confidence flagging and wants to bolster it. Also, because a part of him has been wanting to call her that for a really long time. 

“Just a cut on your cheekbone, then. Not even deep enough for stitches, so I’ll just clean it and put some steri-strips on it. You’ll have a hell of a bruise, though.”

“Battle scars,” he says, à la Jasper Cullen in Eclipse. He’s actually been thinking about Twilight a lot more than usual today, which is weird. But it’s a weird day as a whole, and the amount he’s thinking about Twilight isn’t at the top of his priorities right now.

Mel laughs, but it might just be out of pity. He’s not even sure she’s seen the Twilight movies, because so much of her time is spent watching Elf. Maybe, after this, he should invite her to his apartment so they can binge-watch the whole series and trauma bond about being kidnapped. Is that a cute first date idea? He’s been out of the game for too long.

Gently, she wipes the cut with betadine and applies four steri-strips, and he tries not to wince as the pressure exacerbates the dull throbbing of his cheekbone. 

Then, business-like, she turns back to Josh. “Sorry about the delay, Josh. Where were we?”

They dither around Josh for a little bit, but the fact of the matter is, there’s really not much they can do in a fucking barn in rural Pennsylvania, or wherever they are. They need a nonrebreathing mask and the tools to put in a twenty French chest tube, which they don’t have. Once they’ve done all that, they’d want to send him up for a chest CT, which they also don’t have. All of that is assuming, of course, that the chest X-ray–which they, again, do not have–shows a spontaneous pneumothorax that is too large to resolve on its own, which is what they suspect but cannot confirm.

This is what Mel is trying to explain to Travis, but he doesn’t seem to be getting it. 

“You’re doctors, why can’t you just fucking treat him?”

“Travis, without any of the tools we need, we’re basically just walking medical dictionaries. We need the equipment at the hospital to help him. If you let us take him to the hospital, it doesn’t have to be a big deal. We can do what we need to do, and no one will ask any questions. It’s our job to treat, not to judge.”

She almost has him, Frank swears. He can practically see the pros and cons running through Travis’ mind. Can see him teetering on the edge of a decision that would get them all out of here and into a safer place. They’re so close.

And then the cops burst through the door and stream into the barn. 

In an instant, Travis has Mel by the throat, his gun against her temple again. Frank scrambles up to his feet, but the only sounds coming out of him are garbled versions of Mel’s name.

It’s not like the last time Travis did this to her, back at the hospital. His arm is so tight around her throat that her face is already turning a purple-red colour that makes Frank feel sick. Her eyes are bulging, and her fingers are scrabbling at Travis’ arm, leaving bright red lines in his skin. 

“Freeze!” The cops shout, and the whole thing is like the fucking action movies he used to watch when he was in his twenties, crowded around a shitbox television with a beer and his roommates. They’re all dressed in black, with those SWAT velcro labels on the fronts and backs of their Kevlar vests. Hard, rounded helmets protect their precious heads. 

All he can think is that he and Mel could really do with some Kevlar right about now. Travis is using her as a fucking human shield.

It’s so bizarre to think that Frank woke up this morning at five, as usual. He went for a light jog on an empty stomach, even though he knows he’s supposed to eat before exercising. He had a shower to wash the sweat off and sat down at his kitchen bench to eat a bowl of cornflakes. The most mundane of mornings, and now his…his Mel had a gun to her head for the second time that day and was turning puce with the force that some lunatic was putting on her airway. 

He is going to vibrate out of his skin with the intensity of his anger. It’s pounding through his veins, vicious and raw. He can feel his pulse at his neck and in his battered cheekbone, a reminder that Travis has already hurt one of them. 

He tries and tries to catch Mel’s eyes, but they’re blown wide with panic and darting all over the place. He can tell from the pace of her breathing that she’s at her limit, seconds away from shutting down entirely. Maybe that would be for the best if she went away for a little while. 

He normally didn’t like it when she did that. When his Mel went from the kind but firm person he knew her to be, to a silent husk of herself. But he knows, too, that sometimes she needs a break from it all. He gets that, better than most. He still remembers reaching for little blue pills when it all got to be too much, and the desperate need to make it all disappear as the stuff dissolved on his tongue.

Maybe he should just be grateful Mel’s able to turn it all off without using drugs. 

Travis’ eyes are mirrors of Mel’s, just as panicked and wild. Frank doesn’t feel anything but fury. The strangest thing is, he knows Mel would chastise him for that if she were standing beside him right now. He knows she would have empathy for this guy, because at the end of the day, he was just a scared twenty-something-year-old trying to help his friend. 

But Frank is no saint, not like Mel. 

The cops move forward, a continuous rippling wall of black fabric and Kevlar. Some twerp with a velcro badge reading ‘hostage negotiator’ steps out of the crowd. 

Frank doesn’t care about any of it. The negotiator’s words are nothing more than vague sounds in his fuzzy ears. His eyes are on Mel, and Mel is fading. It’s not just that emotional shutdown he’d predicted, either. Travis has been squeezing her windpipe shut for too long, and she’s passing out from lack of oxygen. 

Frank is about to do something drastic, reckless, and poorly planned when Mel slumps in Travis’ arms, deadweight. What happens next is a series of individual flashes, to Frank. Travis starts, unprepared to hold up Mel’s full bodyweight. The gun moves away from her temple as she falls to the ground. Frank’s already on his way to her when Travis drops, too. Frank registers the blood soaking the guy’s right shoulder.

If Frank were a saint, or even if he were a good doctor, he’d go to Travis. The basic principles of emergency medicine dictate that the most serious injuries should be treated first. Despite it all, Frank can admit that a GSW should trump short-lived mechanical asphyxiation. If he were a better doctor, he would go to Travis.

But Frank is just a man, and so he runs to Mel. 

He crashes to his knees beside her, bits of straw poking into his skin. It makes him feel itchy, and he can’t tell if he’s suddenly developed an allergy to dried grass or if he’s just freaking the fuck out. Probably the second one. 

It takes a while for his doctor brain to switch on, and so for a moment he just kneels there, staring at Mel. Her eyes are closed, and he sees his own hands fluttering uselessly around her face, but he can’t feel them. It’s like his mind has severed itself from his body.

Then, her eyelids twitch and slide open, and his brain slams back into gear. 

“Mel?”

Her eyelids flicker, but she doesn’t respond. He can see the awareness in her eyes, though. 

“Okay, blink once for yes, twice for no, like normal.” This was one of their routines, by now, for when the world became too much for Mel. “Does your throat hurt?”

Yes. 

“Can you talk?”

Yes.

“But you don’t want to?

Yes.

He’d been right, then. Full system shut down. It makes him twitchy and anxious to know she’s suffering like that, but he can’t do anything about it right now. Focus on what you can control. 

His doctor brain finally loads, and then he’s running through a preliminary examination of her neck. There’s more than one red flag. The loss of consciousness itself is a concern, and the already purpling bruise pressed into the pale column of her throat makes him feel very violent. He can’t check for dysphonia because she can’t talk, but LOC, bruising, and associated swelling all mean she needs a CT anyway. She won't be happy to hear that, though.

He knows that when she shuts down like this, she likes to go home and curl up on her couch with her weighted blanket and some very loud, very explicit rap blasting through her headphones. She hopes he’ll let him come with her, because the idea of letting her out of his sight right now sounds unbearable.

Still, he’s satisfied she won't die on him right this second. He asks if he can hold her hand, and when she blinks a yes, he intertwines his fingers with hers. Reluctantly, he drags his eyes up to survey their surroundings. 

There’s a swarm of cops around Travis. One of them is pressing down on the gunshot wound in his shoulder, and the rest of them are holding down his thrashing limbs. The guy’s screaming, frothing at the mouth in a mix of rage, pain and desperation. There’s another cluster of uniforms around Josh, but Frank would recognise the blue of the paramedics’ shirts any day. He’s glad they’re helping Josh, because the kid didn’t really do anything wrong aside from choosing to rob a bank with a psycho. 

Which…yeah, robbing a bank is pretty bad. But Josh hasn’t personally wronged Frank or the people he cares about, so Frank has nothing against him, really. He deserves prompt and quality medical care.

Once Josh is loaded into the ambulance, the paramedics get started on Travis. The cops try to ask Frank questions, but he’s pretty sure he’s going into his own version of catatonia or shock or whatever, because all he can do is hold Mel’s hand and stare at a spot on the floor by her head. He tries not to think about the image of a gun biting into her delicate skin, tries not to run through all the ways it could have been so much worse, tries not to cry.

Frank has spent a lot of his life trying not to do certain things or say certain sentences because he’s scared of what will happen when he does. He’s spent the last five months trying not to freak Mel out with the way he gravitates towards her, or by being too tactile, or by saying something crazy like I think I’m in love with you.

He’s kept all that bottled up inside because he’s always thought he was content with the easy friendship he has with her. It was never worth putting that at risk because he always assumed they’d get there eventually, and then they’d be in love forever. Very rapidly, he had realised today that eventually was not guaranteed, and neither was forever. 

One day, the love of your life could be unexpectedly kidnapped by a truly amateurish idiot trying to help his friend. The world was a very weird and unpredictable place. Frank didn’t think he wanted to leave a future with Mel up to chance anymore. Focus on what you can control. 

It was nice to come to that conclusion, but Frank didn’t think he was going to tell her that just yet. He’s pretty sure that’s the kind of conversation she’d want to be able to speak for. That’s okay, though, because deciding he’s gonna tell his best friend that he’s in love with her and actually doing it are two very different mountains to climb. He needs some time to recalibrate in between.

Eventually, the paramedics come for Mel. They put her on a stretcher after checking out her neck. It’s a relief when they agree that she needs a CT as a precaution, but that she definitely won't be dying on them anytime soon. Briefly, he considers insisting they put her in a Philadelphia collar just to be safe, but he bites the words back. There’s nothing about her presentation that really suggests she’s got a cervical fracture, and a hard brace like that is risky with all the swelling, anyway. 

It’s an unnecessary precaution, but it’s less extreme than the part of him that wants to wrap her up in bubble wrap for the rest of her life so nothing bad can happen to her ever again. That being said, he doesn’t listen to either of those ideas because Mel would kill him for both. 

In the ambulance, the paramedics barrage him and Mel with questions. He tries to explain, over and over, that she’s not talking because she’s been kidnapped and held at gunpoint, not because there’s irreparable damage done to her vocal cords. He tells them, one blink means yes, two means no. But they still ask her questions that need something other than a yes or no answer, and get confused when she doesn’t really respond. He ends up having to translate while one of them prods at his cheekbone. 

He allows it for a bit, but shrugs them off eventually. He trusts Mel’s assessment that it doesn’t need stitches, and the paramedics agree enough to leave it alone. The whole way back to PTMC–and it is PTMC they’re going to, he made sure of it–he holds on tight to Mel’s hand. He doesn’t want her to feel like she’s alone.

The drive, which felt so long in the trunk of Travis’ car, is shorter than he thought it would be. Maybe they weren’t all that far from the city after all, and instead they’d experienced some weird form of trunk-induced time dilation, or perhaps psychosis. Totally possible, on a day like today.

When they pull up to PTMC and the doors open, there’s a crowd of their coworkers standing in the ambulance bay to greet them. They unload Mel first, and during that process, his hand is pulled from hers, and he makes a weird sound that’s almost her name. It’s high-pitched and a little hysterical. 

He reaches for her. There’s no world in which he’s not reaching for Mel.

Instead, Robby catches him, and Frank realises he’s stumbled out of the ambulance and is halfway to his knees. He can see Santos and Mohan with Mel, which is good; he knows they’ll treat her well, but still, she’s all he can think about, and his breath is coming faster and faster, and holy shit, he was kidnapped, that’s fucking crazy and-

“Langdon, hey, Langdon.”

Robby’s voice is a familiar tug in his gut, and he follows that tug all the way back to his body. The man’s hands are on his shoulders, and they’re both kneeling on the ground of the ambulance bay, and Frank’s mind flashes back to the last time it was just them out here. The sky had been dark, and Robby had looked at him like his heart was breaking a little, and Frank had said some of the worst things he’s ever said to anyone in his life. And then Robby had left, and Frank had stood there alone and so full of shame.

He’s crying a little because it’s all too much. 

“Langdon, you’re safe now. C’mon, man. You’re both safe.”

Then Robby’s pulling him into a hug, and the smell of his cologne reminds him of the days he slept on Robby’s couch during the COVID years. It’s comforting and horrible all at once, which is a pretty good summary of the way he feels about Robby. That man is his de facto father and also presents an implicit and automatic reminder of Frank’s lowest moments.

“Mel,” he says, and it's all he’s been saying since he stumbled out of the ambulance.

“She’s okay. Santos and Mohan have got her.”

“She needs a, uh, a neck CT.” He’s still panting, but it's more the after-effects of the hyperventilation than anything else at this point. 

“They’re on it. They’ve already taken her up. I’ll take you to wait in her room for when she gets back, if you want,” Dana says, and Frank jumps a little because he hadn’t known she was there.

His work mum and work dad are tag-teaming now, cool. 

“Yes, yeah. Let’s do that.”

Frank is nodding, and his head feels like it's full of helium. It just keeps bobbing back and forth on his neck, and he doesn’t know what else to do except keep nodding like he’s a fucking bobble-head.

Dana takes one of his elbows, and Robby takes the other, and they lift him up off the ground. He wriggles free of their grasp after that because he still has some dignity left, but they flank him all the way to Central Fourteen, where Mel will go once she gets back from the CT. 

 Robby tries to have a look at his cheek once they get into the room, but he pulls away. He’s had enough of people poking and prodding at it. It’s fine, Mel said it was fine, he’s fine. He is one hundred per cent doing okay with everything that’s happened. 

Dana and Robby sit with him, which he’s grateful for even though it makes him feel a little guilty. Robby’s the chief attending, and Dana is the charge nurse. They’re practically the ER in human form, and he’s taking them out of action with his emotional breakdown. 

“So, did you guys miss us?” His joke is weak and falls flat, but he laughs a little at himself anyway.

“Whole hospital went into lockdown, so it’s actually been a pretty boring few hours,” Dana says, and Frank doesn’t know why he’s surprised to hear that the hospital shut down. It makes some kind of sense, he supposes. 

“I think a lot of us wished it was busier, actually. Instead we just had to sit around while the cops tracked you guys on Mohan’s phone. Wasn’t much to do but worry,” Robby says, and his mouth does a weird half-frown.

“Aw,” Frank says, his tone dry. “You were worried about us?”

“You both were walked out of here at gunpoint, Frank.” Robby’s usually a joker, but it seems the events of the day have sucked all his humour out of him. 

Fair play, but Frank doesn’t have much to say in response to that, and so they just sit there.

Eventually, Mohan and Santos wheel Mel back in. She’s sitting upright against the gurney, looking more alert than she was on the ambulance ride over. He’s by her side in an instant. She’s twisting her hands together, and he knows that’s a way for her to soothe herself, so he doesn’t disrupt that process. Instead, he rests one of his hands on her leg. She relaxes a little at the contact.

“Her CT is all clear, thank god,” Mohan says, and Frank lets out a little breath of relief because he knows it means they can leave.

“Mel, do you want to go home?”

Yes.

He nods. “She can go home, right?” He’s been itching to get out of this place since they arrived, and he can tell from the energy buzzing beneath her skin that she feels the same.

Mohan hesitates, glancing at Robby for a second before nodding. “Normally I’d want to keep her here for observation to be safe, but I think she’d be more comfortable at home and I’m assuming she’ll be under the supervision of a doctor.” Mohan’s eyebrows are raised at him. Usually, he’d make a joke about her being a veritable basset hound for gossip, but right now, he just shrugs. 

It’s true. He’s not gonna let Mel go home alone like this.

He helps Mel off the bed, but after that she straightens and walks out of the Pitt under her own steam, if a little stiffly. 

In his car, he turns to her. “Is Becca sorted out for the night?”

Yes.

“Okay, okay, that’s good.” He doesn’t think Becca would respond well to the adventure that he and Mel had taken today, and he knows that Mel doesn’t like Becca to see her like this. 

“Are we going to yours or mine? Blink once for yours, twice for mine.”

Yours. And then Mel’s lips part, and she whispers, “I need a cuddle with a dog right now.”

The sound of her voice is like angels singing in his ears. It’s fucking crazy, the effect she has on his mood. Immediately, his face splits into a grin, and he chuckles.

“Frank would appreciate that, I think.” God, maybe he regrets giving his dog the same name as him. It really was funny at the time, but usually it just sounds like he’s talking in third person, which, well…only assholes do that.

Mel giggles, though, so maybe he doesn’t regret it at all and maybe every choice he’s made up until this moment has been the right one.

Get it together, Frank. Human Frank. Ugh. 

The drive to his apartment is mercifully swift. They don’t get a single red light, and he wonders if it's the universe desperately trying to make it up to them. Will they have incredible luck for the next fifty years? He looks over and sees Mel, eyes closed in his passenger seat, smiling lightly as she plays with his fingers in her lap. He might already have his incredible luck.

Frank (dog) is ecstatic when they get home. Mel kneels down on the floor and is immediately tackled by the mass of curly, blonde fur that makes up his goldendoodle. She’s giggling again, even though Frank (dog) has knocked her to the floor and is licking her face while her tail helicopters in the air. Seeing their unbridled joy makes a part of Frank (human) feel a little lighter. 

“My two best girls,” he murmurs fondly.

He scoots his way past them into the kitchen. The kettle gets turned on reflexively, but once he thinks about it, he reckons Mel would appreciate a cup of calming peppermint tea anyway. For himself, he digs a Red Bull out of the fridge, because the caffeine in those has always calmed his jittering nerves. It’s counterintuitive, he knows, but it's probably his rampant, undiagnosed ADHD that’s to blame for his batty neurological response to stimulants. 

When the water’s boiled, he brings her steaming mug to the couch. She and Frank (dog) had migrated there, and she gratefully reaches out for the tea when he offers it to her. She’s got the remote and is flicking through his Netflix, which is a good sign. She’s not so shut down that she’s not up for TV. 

There’s a hierarchy to Mel’s quiet time that he’s figured out over the months. The nonverbal thing starts quite early on, but if she’s still up for a movie, there is hope left in the world. After that, the next tier is her loud and startlingly explicit rap music that makes him feel impossibly ancient whenever she puts it on. He doesn’t know who any of the people singing are, and he doesn’t get any of the references, but it soothes Mel, which is all that really matters. The tier after that is the worst he’s seen so far. She goes into her bedroom with the lights off and covers most of her body with a weighted blanket in a manner that makes him worry she’ll suffocate. 

He’d only seen that one once, but it was heartbreaking. He had lain next to her and felt spectacularly useless all night long.

He’s glad she’s not on that level.

Mel picks The Hangover, which he thinks is probably the most perfect post-kidnapping pick-me-up possible. If there were a larger market for that kind of thing, they’d make a killing. She rests her head on his shoulder, and he slings his arm around her shoulders, which is such a ridiculously coupley thing to do that he wonders, briefly, who the hell has been letting them walk around acting like this without any consequences.

Bradley Cooper and his buddies are transferring Mike Tyson’s tiger out of their hotel room onscreen when Mel speaks.

“It’s been a pretty crazy day, Frank.” He still gets goosebumps when she calls him that. Every time she says it, it's like he’s hearing his name for the first time.

“A real doozy,” he adds helpfully.

“I know this is kind of awful, but I’m really glad you were there. Obviously, I didn’t want you to be kidnapped with me, but I’m glad it was you out of everyone in the ER. I’m sorry, that doesn’t really sound right-”

“No, it’s okay,” he cuts her off, because he doesn’t want her to spiral back into shutdown mode. “I get what you mean. I’m glad you weren’t alone, and I’m glad it was me who was with you.”

“Thank you for that. For pushing him to get another doctor, and for volunteering to be that doctor. I wasn’t scared for most of it and I think that’s mostly thanks to you.”

“You weren’t scared?” He blows a raspberry into the air. “You must have balls of steel. I was shitting myself the whole time. You were badass, though.”

“I was?”

“Oh, for sure. You told off a guy for pistol-whipping me even though he was holding a loaded gun. Still can’t believe I was pistol-whipped, by the way, but you were metal as hell.”

“I didn’t feel very metal. I just felt angry. I didn’t like it when he hurt you.” She reaches her hand out and rests it on his still-aching cheek.

“I didn’t like it when he hurt you, either.” He brings his hand up to hers, where it still sits on his face, and holds it in place as he turns his head and plants a kiss on her palm. 

“Do you think we’re gonna get a weird, co-dependent trauma bond out of this?”

“I think we’re already weirdly, co-dependently trauma bonded, honestly.”

Mel nods. “Very Grey’s Anatomy of us.” 

Her hand is still on his face, and he has the urge to kiss her–for real this time, not just a cop-out kiss on her palm–but he’s not sure if it’s a good idea so soon after they were both literally kidnapped. Still, because he is just a man, his gaze flicks to her lips.

Mel has always been very good at reading him, and vice versa. It’s part of the reason they get on so well. He’s not surprised when her lips touch his, because he watches in real time as she decides to do it. It’s a beautiful thing to know Mel so intimately like that and watch her thoughts flicker across her face in real time.

Their first kiss is a gentle brush of her lips on his, and he chases after her when she pulls back. He’s a greedy person, and he had told himself earlier that day he was going to pull his socks up and tell Mel how he felt. He just hadn’t planned on doing that today, given the kidnapping of it all. 

They don’t do much talking that night anyway, so he tells her the morning after that he’s in love with her. The sun is shining through a crack in his curtains, and she’s naked under his sheets. He can see her perfect outline beneath the fabric and the purple bruise on her throat. When he says those three words, she smiles at him, and it's fucking blinding. 

“This is also very Grey’s Anatomy of us,” she says, and he groans and rolls his eyes. 

She laughs, and it’s a little raspy because she’s just woken up and also was recently choked, but the sound of it makes him unreasonably horny. He rolls towards her and plants his mouth on hers, bringing his hand up so it spans her ribcage. His thumb brushes the soft underside of her breast.

She brings a hand to his chest to hold him back and pulls away. He’s sad for a second, until he meets her eyes, which are so warm and gentle. “Wait, I didn’t get to say it back.”

He pecks her lips. “So say it, then.” 

“I love you, too.”

“Perfect.” He’s fucking beaming. “Can we have sex now?”

“Yes, I think that’s a good idea.”