Chapter Text
The motorcycle was gone by seven forty-three.
Baran knew because she'd been watching the car park from the window of the attendings' office - not obviously, not with her forehead pressed to the glass like a child, but watching nonetheless, in the peripheral way she'd learned to watch things she wasn't supposed to be watching. The way you learned to do most things in Kabul. Eyes forward. Awareness everywhere else. A skill she'd developed so thoroughly over so many years that she could no longer reliably distinguish it from personality.
Robby had said goodbye to the department at seven thirty. It had been brief, characteristically awkward - too much feeling stuffed into too few words, the way men like him always did it, as though emotion had a weight limit and he'd been carefully monitoring his luggage.
You'll be fine, it's a good team, call me if - and then he'd stopped himself on the if, visibly recalibrated, said don't call me instead, and people had laughed because they understood what he meant. She had laughed too, though a half-beat behind everyone else, because she was still learning the frequencies of this particular room. What registered as warmth here. What passed for humour. The specific grammar of a department that had been run by the same person for long enough that his rhythms had become the building's rhythms, and she was going to have to learn them and then, quietly, begin replacing them with her own.
Three months. She had three months.
The bike had turned left out of the car park and disappeared between two delivery trucks, and Baran had watched it go with her arms folded and her face arranged into something that she hoped read as calm authority and suspected read as nothing at all, because she had been arranging her face into calm authority for so long that it had become, essentially, her face.
She turned away from the window.
Alright.
The board was hers.
She'd been a doctor for eleven years. She'd completed her residency at Johns Hopkins, which people always said with a particular reverence she'd found exhausting even then. She'd done a fellowship in emergency and trauma medicine that had taken her, by a series of decisions that had seemed reasonable at the time and in retrospect formed a pattern she still wasn't sure she understood, first to a field hospital in Helmand Province and then, later, to Kabul. She'd managed a maternity ward with seventeen staff members, intermittent electricity, and a supply chain that operated mostly on goodwill and the particular stubbornness of people who refused to accept that the situation was as bad as it was.
She had been at Dasht-e-Barchi on the twelfth of May, 2020.
She did not, as a rule, think about this before ten in the morning.
She'd come back to the States and taken the position at the VA, where she'd worked with Samira and Mel and a handful of others she'd genuinely respected, and where the particular texture of the patients - veterans, people carrying things in their bodies that had been put there by war - had felt like something she understood. Then this. Pittsburgh. The Pitt. Robby's department, which was now, as of seven forty-three on a Tuesday morning in August, hers.
She was not, by any reasonable measure, someone who needed to psych herself up to stand in front of a whiteboard.
She stood in front of the whiteboard anyway, for a moment, alone in the attendings' office with the door half open and the sounds of the department filtering through - monitors, voices, the specific percussion of a busy emergency room in its first hour - and let herself have thirty seconds of it. The weight of the thing. The fact of it. She had wanted this, had worked toward this with the kind of sustained, invisible effort that had characterised most of her ambitions, and now it was here, and the feeling of it was not triumph exactly. More like the moment at the top of a very long climb when you look out and realise the view is exactly what you expected and also somehow nothing like you imagined.
The board, at least, was honest.
By nine o'clock she had discharged two, admitted one, and was managing a waiting room that was doing the thing waiting rooms always did on quiet Tuesday mornings, which was fill up with people who had been holding onto their various ailments since the weekend and had finally run out of reasons not to come in.
A man with what was either a badly sprained wrist or a hairline fracture.
A woman in her seventies with dizziness that could be six different things and was probably two of them.
A teenager with an asthma exacerbation who should have come in on Saturday and whose mother's expression made clear she was aware of this.
The department staff were professional, which was not the same as warm, and she'd expected that. Robby had been here for years - long enough that his preferences had become policy, his habits had become procedure, and his particular brand of controlled chaos had become the department's operating system. She was not Robby. She was not trying to be Robby. But she understood that the department didn't fully know what she was yet, and that she would need to show them without appearing to be showing them, which was its own particular kind of performance.
She was very good at performance.
She noticed things. She noticed, for instance, that Perlah - the nurse who had been here longest, whose opinion the others watched without appearing to - had been assessing her since seven o'clock with the careful neutrality of someone who had seen attendings come and go and was not yet prepared to commit. She noticed that one of the night shift senior residents whose name was Ellis moved slightly faster when she felt observed and slightly more carefully when she didn't, which meant she was better than she appeared at baseline and could be trusted with more than she was currently being given. She noticed that the board had Robby's organisational logic baked into it - the colour coding, the particular shorthand - and that changing it immediately would be the wrong move and changing it eventually would be necessary.
She noticed all of this and updated none of it before nine thirty, because the first rule of inheriting someone else's department was that you watched before you moved, and the second rule was that you made sure people saw you watching, so they understood that the watching was the point.
Abbot arrived at twelve seventeen.
She knew who he was - she'd met him twice during the handover period, read his file, understood his reputation. She knew about the SWAT work, which Robby had mentioned with the particular mixture of pride and exasperation you reserved for people you loved who also drove you slightly mad. She knew he was night shift, primarily, which meant their paths hadn't crossed much during the overlap period, and she had formed her impression of him mostly from secondhand information and the two brief encounters that had told her the following things: that he was economical with words in a way that suggested he'd learned the cost of using too many, that he had the kind of stillness you only developed if you'd spent time in situations where stillness was the difference between outcomes, and that he wore his wedding ring on a hand that, according to what Samira had told her in an unguarded moment over bad takeout three weeks ago, had been without its other half for two years.
She had noted the ring, obviously. She noted most things.
She had noted the prosthetic eventually - the slightly altered gait, the specific way he stood, the barely perceptible adjustment he made to his weight distribution in certain stances. She'd noticed it the way she noticed everything she wasn't supposed to notice: completely, and without giving any indication that she'd done so. This was, she was aware, a skill that walked a very fine line between perceptiveness and surveillance, and she'd made her peace with that line years ago.
The second time she met him, he came through the ambulance bay doors in full tactical gear on the 4th July - body armour, radio, the whole architecture of a different kind of emergency - and it should have looked incongruous in a hospital and somehow didn't, because he moved through the space with the same matter-of-fact efficiency he'd have moved through any space, as though his presence in it was simply a fact that the environment was going to have to accommodate. He was already on his radio, finishing a conversation that had nothing to do with the Pitt, his eyes doing a quick sweep of the department as he walked in — not anxious, just automatic, the kind of spatial assessment that happened below the level of decision-making.
Behind him, two SWAT officers she didn't recognise were moving a gurney. One of their own - she registered this immediately, male, mid-thirties, left shoulder, the particular grey-white pallor of significant blood loss that had been partially addressed but not resolved. Alert. Talking, even, in the short clipped way of someone in pain who was refusing to let the pain be the loudest thing in the room.
"Hendricks," Abbot said, to no one in particular and apparently to everyone simultaneously, because two nurses broke off from what they were doing without needing to be asked twice. He was already running the handover as he walked, which was either impressive or presumptuous and she hadn't decided which yet. "Thirty-four, went through a plate glass window during a breach, shoulder's a mess but GCS is fifteen, he's been talking at me the whole ride over which I'm choosing to take as a good sign. BP was eighty-eight over sixty in the field, we got a line in, one litre of saline, it came up to ninety-six. Entry point posterior, high, didn't exit, I couldn't feel it on palpation so it's moved."
He glanced up from Hendricks and found her, and there was a brief recalibration - not surprise, more like confirmation of something he'd already assumed - and then he continued without breaking stride.
"Dr Al-Hashimi."
"Dr Abbot." She was already moving to the other side of the gurney, her hands finding Hendricks' wrist out of habit. Pulse rapid but present, stronger than the BP suggested. "Bay three's clear. Orthopaedics?"
"Called from the scene. ETA fifteen minutes."
"Imaging?"
"Portable's free," Perlah said, from behind her, which was the answer to a question she'd been about to ask and she made a note of that too - Perlah was paying attention, had been paying attention, and was starting, possibly, to decide something.
She looked at Abbot briefly - a look that was assessment rather than question, taking stock of what he'd already done and triangulating it against what she was seeing - and nodded. "Bay three."
They moved.
She ran the resus cleanly and without drama, which was the only way she knew how to run anything. Hendricks was stable within eight minutes, which was good work by any measure, and she was aware that the department was watching - not intrusively, not in a way that would have been visible to anyone not specifically looking for it, but watching nonetheless, taking notes, updating whatever internal ledger they were keeping on her.
Abbot had stayed. Not hovering, not in the way, just present in the room in the particular manner of someone who had made a decision to be present and didn't feel any need to justify it. He stood at the edge of bay three with his arms loosely folded, watching Hendricks with the focused attention of a man who would not leave until he'd confirmed with his own eyes that his colleague was going to be alright, and he was almost entirely still except for the slight movement of his jaw, which she eventually identified as him making sure his own breathing stayed level.
She recognised that. The deliberate regulation of the body's responses when the body wanted to do something else. She'd been doing it since she was nine years old.
When the orthopaedic registrar arrived and took over with the loud confidence of a man who expected rooms to reorganise around him, Baran stepped back and Abbot stepped back with her, and they stood side by side at the edge of bay three in a brief, companionable moment of no longer being the most necessary people in the room.
"Good team," Abbot said.
She looked at him sideways. "They are."
A beat of silence that didn't feel like silence so much as a pause with content in it.
"You're staying?" she said.
"Until he's upstairs."
She nodded. That was the right answer. She'd thought it would be.
"The board's yours," he said, and she processed this for a moment — the plainness of it, the absence of anything underneath it. Not good luck, not Robby always liked it done this way, not the particular kind of supportive statement that was actually a very small audit. Just a declaration of what was factually true, delivered without ceremony.
"I know," she said.
Something moved across his face. Not quite a smile. The suggestion of one, maybe, in the vicinity of his eyes. "Yeah," he said. "I figured."
He left at two fifty-one.
Didn't make a production of it - said something brief to Baran about a report he needed to file with the SWAT unit, received a single syllable from Perlah that managed to carry the weight of an entire affectionate paragraph, and then he was gone through the ambulance bay doors, back into whatever part of his life existed outside this building.
Baran stood at the board.
The department moved around her - the particular organised flow of a mid-morning ER, the rhythms she was already starting to read, the small adjustments she was already starting to make without announcing them. She'd redirected a consult that had been routed incorrectly. She'd asked Ellis to take the asthma case and watched her do it competently and carefully and with a gentleness that the chart notes hadn't suggested. She'd updated the board twice and resisted the urge to reorganise its colour coding, which she intended to do eventually and not yet.
She was doing alright.
She was doing, she thought, standing at the board at three twelve on a Tuesday morning in August, more than alright. She was doing what she had always done, which was function. Perform the job at the level the job required. Keep everything that was not the job in its designated compartment, sealed and managed and not currently her problem.
The seizures had been quiet for six days, which was good. Stress worsened the frequency - it always had, since she was five years old and had come out of three weeks of bacterial meningitis to discover that her brain had been permanently, quietly rearranged, that there were gaps in her consciousness now that hadn't been there before, brief absences that came and went like static, like a signal dropping out, and that she was going to have to build her entire life around managing them without anyone knowing she was managing them. She'd done it. She'd done it so thoroughly and for so long that the management had become invisible even to her - just the constant low-level vigilance, the awareness of the early signs, the careful positioning of herself in rooms so that a ten-second absence looked like thought rather than vacancy.
She had never told an employer. She had never told a colleague. She had told two people in her adult life - her neurologist, and a woman she had loved briefly and badly in her late twenties who had seen it happen once and asked, and to whom Baran had told the truth before she'd had time to decide not to. The relationship had ended six months later for unrelated reasons and Baran had filed this as data: the telling changed things. The telling always changed things, even when people meant well, even when they tried not to let it. You became, after the telling, slightly different to them. Slightly more fragile. Slightly more watched. And she had no interest in being watched.
Tuesday is a liar, Mel had said, and Baran had noted this and was noting it again now, because the morning had been quiet in the particular way that suggested the afternoon was preparing something, and she intended to be ready for whatever it was.
The board was hers.
Outside, the motorcycle was somewhere on the interstate, moving west.
Inside, the Pitt was hers, and she was going to be fine - was already fine, had always been fine, would continue to be fine - and the small bright fact of Abbot saying the board's yours like it was simply true, like he needed her to know he knew it, was something she noted and filed and did not, for now, examine too closely.
There would be time for that later.
There was always time, she had found, for the things you were avoiding.
Alright, she thought, for the third time that day.
She went back to work.