Work Text:
"they say 'what doesn't kill you makes you aware'
what happens if becomes who you are?"
- cassandra by taylor swift
You’ve heard rumblings about Langdon coming back for weeks, but you’re trying not to think about it. Nobody but you and Robby knows exactly what happened, but you’re not stupid. Everyone else working was also at the scene of the crime, and it isn’t that hard to discern that you were the one pulling the trigger.
R2 year is already kicking your ass, and his return looming over you has made it even harder to relax. Getting good sleep is like catching lightning in a bottle. Maybe prioritizing sneaking in hours at Yolanda’s over tending to your basic needs is exacerbating the problem, but she’s one of the only things you look forward to these days. You’re not about to start depriving yourself of that, too.
No one tells you that today’s the day. When you see him across the ED, your breath catches. Your mind drifts to the way he marred your first day on the job, your first day as a doctor, and you shudder. You scan the room, remembering the bodies and the adrenaline and the blood, god, the sheer amount of blood, that’s entwined itself with your last memories of Langdon. It had been a bad day for you before the Pittfest shooting victims had even started coming in.
This shift is hard, too. It seems like they’ve been harder and harder these days. It’s been getting bad again. The only way you know how to fix it is to keep pushing through. Robby’s replacement is already on your ass about charts, and now the golden boy is going to waltz back in and remind everyone in the ED why they hate you.
Langdon’s hovering on the edge of your periphery all day. You do your best to avoid him, which is easy with your workload. Your first patient of the day is a real doozy, a proper zebra diagnosis, and it fills you with enough adrenaline to power through the morning on a teetering wire.
Things happen, but you won’t let them rattle you. You know you’re a good doctor. Today’s just a hard day.
You also know you should give Langdon the benefit of the doubt, but you can’t relax when he’s in the room. You’re snarking back before you can even think, sharp words clinking in the air as your only armor. And, god, Dr. Al-Hashimi probably thinks you’re an incompetent loser, just like everyone else in the ED who sees you as a tattletale bitch who’s only good for holding a grudge.
You’ve given Yolanda your body (your heart) and she won’t even defend you. It shouldn’t hurt as much as it does. By now, you should know better.
You’ve almost made it through your shift before Langdon corners you, asking to talk. And, fuck, you try to let his half-assed apology lie and walk away, you really do. But the sheer injustice of it pounds against your rib cage. Your arms cross tightly to protect your heart.
“This is our secret, Trinity, okay? If you go around telling people, they might get the wrong idea. I could lose everything.”
You can’t help but scoff as Langdon whines about what he’s lost. You clench your toes in your shoes and feel phantom touches of the texture of the beam. When you adjust your hands, you half-expect them to be covered in chalk. You’ve been on your feet for ten hours and your knees and hips ache. But you can push through pain. You don’t have a choice. You’re tough. You have to be tough. Slipping up is not an option. If you lose your grip for one split second you’re falling and it’s over.
Men like Langdon make you see fucking red. He doesn’t get it. He gets to waltz back in here seeking forgiveness and he will get it. You get to be written off as the bitch of the ED and to bite back tears at your best friend’s gravestone during holiday visits home and to wake up flailing and screaming at ghosts.
You get this forever, and he gets what? A fucking blip on his record? He has troubles with his wife, sure, but at least he has a wife to come home to.
You know he’s not reformed because you can feel it. You can tell when he walks into a room because your hair stands on end, your back tenses, and if you talk to him for more than a few minutes, you have to bite the inside of your cheek to stop yourself from crying. And you know it because you were right. Shouldn’t that count for something? Shouldn’t that count for everything?
“These are some serious accusations, Trinity. You can’t lie about things like that.”
“Trust your gut,” Robby tells you, but what about when your gut is wrong? You’re still buzzing from the ITP case this morning. If you let your guard down even an inch, you can feel the way your heart beat tight and fast in your chest as you stood there taking in the scene. You know you’re getting a reputation of overreacting, of jumping to the worst conclusion, but you remember the bite in your patient’s father’s voice, his flushed face, the droplets of spit landing on yours.
A generous doctor would reason that you were seeing this man at his absolute worst, but you know better. You know men like him. You know the world is built around protecting them. You–your gut, or your paranoia, as the stupid fucking trauma counselor you went to once would love to tell you–know that if this is how he was acting in public, god knows what he’d be capable of in private.
You know you’re a good doctor. When everything…happened, you vowed that you would do everything in your power to make sure nothing would slip through the cracks on your watch ever again. You wanted to help people. As a teenager, medicine was the best path you could imagine for that. These days, you scoff at your childish naivety. You can remember everyone you should’ve helped more. You wish you didn’t. It haunts as much as everything else.
First, do no harm. First, harm was done to you.
The scars on your thigh itch underneath the material of your scrubs.
The first time you learned that sometimes people hurt themselves on purpose was in the gymnastics locker room. The level eight girls were coming in as your group was leaving, and, as Paige took off her shorts, you noticed a series of neat, horizontal cuts across her thigh. “Are you okay?” You asked.
“I’m fine,” she said sharply, definitively.
“But–”
“Trinity,” Lexy, your teammate and best friend hissed, “Let’s go.”
As you waited in the lobby for your parents to pick you up, Lexy told you that her older sister used to cut herself. “Why would you do that? Doesn’t it hurt?” you asked.
Lexy wasn’t sure. “She said it helps somehow. When things get loud.”
The conversation moved onto other things, but you kept turning the image around in your mind. Pain didn’t scare you, so much. When you sprained your wrist doing a back handspring that one time, tears sprung to your eyes but didn’t fall. You didn’t understand how the same wrist that supported you on bars and vault and through so many other back handsprings could just…fail. And later, heal.
A couple nights later, you were curled under the covers listening to the muffled sounds of your parents arguing downstairs. Finally, you made up your mind. You flung the blankets aside and made your way to your desk. You unfurled your scissors and swiped them across your thigh, watching in fascination as the sting spread and blood pooled. It hurt. It quieted.
It’s been a vice ever since.
On and off, of course. You were better for a while, only succumbing a handful of times through med school, but the last ten months have been testing your will. It’s not ideal, but it helps.
And it keeps you in check. You know you can sometimes be a little aggressive, but you would never dream of letting your own shit endanger a patient in the way Langdon’s did. Maybe that’s why it’s so egregious to you. If you were to reach deep down, deeper than you’re comfortable going, you would admit that it scares you.
Through protein bars and energy drinks and slicing open your own skin you’ve managed to wrestle the chaos of your life into a semblance of control. Everyone in this department has their demons. You don’t get the luxury of bringing them to work with you.
But you could, if things got dark enough. You can imagine where you might end up, and it’s not strutting back into the Pitt after ten months off, with your coworkers fawning over your return. So no, you don’t believe in second chances.
First, do no harm.