Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Part One

If Sisyphus Wept

When the images of earth cling too tightly to memory,

when the call of happiness becomes too insistent,

it happens that melancholy arises in man's heart:

this is the rock's victory, this is the rock itself.

The boundless grief is too heavy to bear.

These are our nights of Gethsemane.

-Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

BAM!

From the street below there’s a sound like a car backfiring, and Dr. Jack Abbot awakens with a jolt. 

Even with the window of his bedroom closed, it’s loud enough that he full-body tenses, hyper-alert as soon as he opens his eyes. The room is dark, only a thin sliver of sunlight peeking through the black-out curtains.

There’s a K-Bar under the bed, but he doesn’t reach for it, just waits; the ceiling fan circulates stale air and he counts, breath held, one…two…three. 

Just a car backfiring.  

Jack breathes out and sags back against his pillow. 

A mosquito circles somewhere in the room, humming. His armpits are damp and his neck prickles and he looks down his body to see that he’d fallen asleep in his scrubs again last night, good leg hanging off the edge of the bed, cutting off his circulation.

It takes him a second, ears strained and heart still racing, till he can pull himself together enough to push himself out of bed. 

::

The burnt coffee helps, but it’s the shower that works miracles. Steam forms and billows, and he sits slouched on the shower bench, situated at just the right angle to let the near-boiling water hit his back.

Fuck, he aches, scar tissue pinched and muscles trembling, but he can feel himself slowly give way to the heat, to the gentle pressure, phantom hands massaging his skin, and after a minute he’s finally shed some stiffness.

Spent the last two hours coding him. 

Above the noise of the water, the police scanner crackles in the next room.

::

Robby turns to him like he senses his presence, arms reaching out, relief stark in the lines on his face. 

“Brother, I am so fucking glad to see you.” There’s a tremor running through Robby’s body that Jack feels through his chest, in the arms wrapping around him. Robby is a fault line beginning to shift and slide. 

“Heard it on the police scanner,” Jack tells Robby, looking over his shoulder. He catalogues the tense figures scattering, squaring their shit away before the storm hits. Most of them wouldn’t have ever experienced something like this unless in the abstract. Just moving pictures on a screen, a diagram in a textbook, maybe. Green as grass. 

Doesn’t matter. He and Robby run a tight ship. Backup will be clocking in soon. 

Jack dives in. 

::

The needle under his skin tugs, a sweet sting that Jack can easily ignore under the current circumstances.

He has a protein bar and one packet of sweetened instant coffee crystals in his rucksack, and he’ll give his blood until he needs to consume them to stay upright, and then probably he’ll give some more, against what would be his own medical advice. 

It’s impressive how the new resident’s first impulse had been to bypass protocol and donate her own blood. It’s something Jack would have suggested, although if it had come from him, Jack has a hunch that Robby would’ve rejected the idea on principle. 

“Need some help with an airway!” a voice shouts from somewhere, tense and determined. It takes Jack a moment to place it from across the Pitt without looking up from his patient. 

He reaches Dr. Mohan’s gurney seconds after Robby does, taking position with a murmured word. 

The needle tugs at his skin again when Mohan turns her eyes down to ask him, surprised, “Are you donating?”  

Jack looks up distractedly. He has to force his brain to shift from the medicine to her words. “O neg, yeah,” he says, shrugging a little, pretending to brush it off like it's not big deal. Inwardly, he's pleased she noticed. No time to dwell on that, though. 

The wounded continue to pour through the doors.

Jack hits the maximum donation limit, downs the packet of bittersweet coffee crystals, downs a bottle of water from the nurse’s station for good measure, and powers through the wooziness to bleed out another unit. 

He’s rooting through his rucksack for his protein bar when he notices Robby struggling with an airway, peering down the fallen cop’s throat with his mouth a tight, frustrated line. Robby is taking too long for someone as experienced as he is. Too much blood to see shit, Jack knows immediately. 

The control cric kit is in Jack’s hands the next second, and that’s when a strange feelings starts up at the base of his spine, creeping up his back. 

He stares down at the plastic in his hands and carefully pulls it out of his rucksack. The corner snags a little on its way out. His vision doubles for a split second, and he can feel the hairs on his arm stand up.  

Two kits, two freckled hands.  

He screws his eyes shut. When he opens them again, everything is normal.

Thing is, he’s positive he’s done this before, and recently, too: pulled out the tactical airway and snagged it on the netting on its way out, tugging it just so to release it.

Funny. Jack hasn’t touched this kit since the day he packed it.

As quickly as it had come, the feeling passes. He turns his attention back to the present, and doesn’t think about it again for hours.  

Shouldn’t have given that last unit of blood. 

::

“What else you got in your go bag?” 

“Oh, just wait and see.” 

Princess catches Jack doing a double take, gives him a look. Jack’s still trying to shake off the after-effects of Mohan’s smile. He’s never seen Mohan grin like that, never seen the air around her spike this way with joy and excitement.  

Come to think of it, he’s never even seen her move like this. Mohan running in the ER? It’s a sight to behold.

So Jack just shrugs at Princess, smiles, and leaves for the next patient, and the next, and the next. 

As he’s leaving he hears a nearby cop say to Princess, “Cute. Know if she’s single?” It doesn’t really register.

By the time the next gurney almost runs his foot over, he’s forgotten about it completely.

:: 

It feels like every IO and intubation and incision make the time pass more quickly. They’re somehow staying afloat despite the neverending influx. His night shift duo are knocking it out of the park on triage, Mohan is turning out to be a steady and reliable presence at his and Langdon’s sides, and they’re turning over ORs upstairs like tables at Applebee’s. 

He’s hopeful, until he’s not.  

“Who’s Jake?” he hears someone ask in Pink. 

“He’s like Robby’s step-son,” McKay replies.  

The wave that had been receding from shore comes rushing back into view. He can’t help but watch helplessly as Robby disappears beneath the water. 

Maybe Jack will look back later and hate himself for taking the hard line. Robby most likely will, once he’s over the brain-freezing shock.  

For now, Jack forces himself to be the bad guy, because Jack has already stabilized two patients in the time it’s taken them to set up the girl’s plurevac, and the gurneys are still trickling in. Thank God someone seems to have lit a fire under Langdon’s ass—he’s one of the reasons they haven’t gone under yet, with half the day shift poached by Robby.  

Of course, Langdon would be even faster if he weren’t craning to look over his shoulder every five seconds to check on Robby’s progress.

The bay is starting to back up. Robby’s tearing through units of blood like he’s pretending the tear in her heart isn’t even there, flat-out ignoring Mohan when she asks if she can help. Robby’s tunnel vision is infecting the ER like a fast-spreading virus.  

Time warps again, stalling till it’s slow as syrup. It feels like days pass before Robby—shoulders slumped and eyes empty—finally calls it. A sigh seems to ripple through the ER, like a breeze through a field of wheat.

:: 

Jack changes his gown, changes his gloves, IO, airway, transfusion, changes his gloves. Move, move, move.

He ignores the commotion by the doors. He ignores the pain in his leg, the growing numbness in his lower back. 

They’ve gone through what feels like thousands of red patients, though Jack knows that realistically it’s been less than thirty. 

Gloves, airway, IO. Bullets through kidneys, lodged in sternums, in necks and groins.

The only break in the almost meditative routine is when the new intern in yellow somehow gets it into her head to perform a REBOA for the first time by herself, and by some miracle pulls it off almost perfectly. 

8:15 pm, body still a little weakened from blood loss, he can feel himself losing steam when they roll in the Navy Corpsman.

He’s not even on the case, but he overhears Robby giving Shen a quick debrief, and Jack moves without thinking, tapping in to take over from Shen. There’s still a knot in the pit of his stomach from the vet he’d lost only this morning, the words he’d put to paper for the vet’s family still rattling around in his head.  

Maybe this will make up for it, Jack selfishly thinks. Maybe this will loosen the knot. Maybe this time…  

That’s not how this works, man, his own mind tries to warn him. Jack tells himself to shut the fuck up, and that wakes him up, bringing him out of his millisecond of naval gazing, because he’s losing his patient and this is no time to be arguing with the voices in his head 

Mohan’s still going strong, alert and communicating clearly. Jack sends up a silent thanks to whichever God will hear him that he’s had her on his team today. It takes them almost too long to find the cause of the hypoxia, but he spots the vena cava abnormality the exact second Mohan mentions it to Walsh.

The symptoms all click into place after that. Walsh pushes back insistently, as is her way, but Jack is positive he’s seen this before. A guy running around after getting shot and ending up with an air bubble in the wrong place? Jack might as well be back in the field hospital, dressing down some trigger-happy E-2.   

An idea blooms in his mind. It’s simple, really. Time’s running out. There’s only one way to solve this. 

It’s possible they’ll never find themselves in a similar situation ever again. Teaching hospital, right? So it feels perfectly natural when Jack finds himself saying, “I’m not gonna do anything, you are.”

It’s kinda funny to see Mohan take a second to stare down at the body while digesting his words. He gives her the time she needs, despite the shortage of it, the discordant alarms going off around them.  

Mohan takes the time she needs, and then she takes in a deep breath and gives him a nod.

“Okay,” she says, breathing out in a rush, and there’s a light in her eyes that he doesn’t know how to interpret, but he knows it’s a positive, and that’s all that matters. 

::

Jack was right to trust her. Mohan stays focused, and it gets messy, yeah, it gets tense, the line of Mohan’s shoulders tightening and flexing with every interruption.

Walsh is fully prepared for them to fail, and even Jack holds his breath, but then Mohan pulls and there’s air with the blood and the stats improve, and he can’t stop looking at Mohan, can’t tear his eyes away.  

She’d pulled off a fucking miracle, hair in her face and bags under her eyes but with unshaking hands and a determined press to her mouth. Jack watches a line of sweat make its way down the side of her neck and thinks, There she is. 

He masks his relief, sparring a little with Walsh just for the fun of it, just to pull that amusing annoyance out of her. He’ll make it up to her, like he always does. Walsh makes a big show of glaring at him before leaving, but Jack knows that tomorrow she’ll be the one giving him shit, and he’ll be the one glaring. So it all evens out. No hard feelings.   

Mohan ducks her head when he compliments her. She brushes his Solid work off with a shake of her head that doesn’t read as false humility so much as genuine self-deprecation.

She doesn’t understand yet what she’s pulled off, still seems a little like she’s in shock. Jack follows the line of her gaze down, watching her eyelashes flutter, before he remembers himself and looks away.  

:: 

The strange feeling crawls up his spine again later.

Jack stops by Dana’s desk to get an update on Robby, unobtrusively giving her shiner a once-over. In front of them, like some Shakespearean comedy of errors, two cops approach McKay, smug and superior, like they don’t see the smears of blood on the floor, smell the copper and shit and nervous sweat in the air. Like they haven’t all got better things to do with their time.

And that’s when he feels it.

Suddenly, Jack’s seeing double: he hears himself yell, “Whoa,” and feels his arm outstretch, like Moses to the Red Sea, straining to fight something inevitable.

Then he comes back to himself with a gasp, blood rushing in his ears, still stood unmoving in the Hub. 

“What the fuck?” Jack says, shaken. 

“Abbot, you alright?” 

“Put your hands behind your head,” says the cop to McKay, annoyed, and starts to arrest her, because of course this day couldn’t get any fucking worse.

Instinct pushes Jack to do exactly what he’d just hallucinated himself doing: he strides out, arm outstretched, trying to stop them. 

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, hang on a second,” Jack says, and then he’s experiencing that same sort of deja vu: he’s done this a hundred times before. No, thousands. His head swims, one way then the other.

The cops ignore him.   

His vision doubles again. Can’t just be the blood loss, Jack thinks, desperate and a little worried.

He helplessly watches the cops snap the handcuffs onto McKay’s delicate wrists. He resists the urge to steady himself on a nearby surface. Too many things happening at once. 

They’re hauling his resident off to God knows where, and here he is, seeing visions.

His mind immediately jumps to brain tumor. He brushes the thought away, annoyed. 

Later, Jack thinks, adding it to the pile. There’s always tomorrow. He’ll talk to Dr. Johnson about it their next session, make sure he isn’t going nuts. 

Maybe Shen had spiked his water bottle.

Tomorrow. 

He shakes it off.  

:: 

Jack hasn't checked his watch in a while. Things are calming down, though, so he can technically get the hell out of Dodge without feeling too guilty about it.  

But he’s just hitting his stride, alert and limber despite the weight of the day and the blood he donated, so Jack slides in to stabilise the Code Tan with Robby instead.

It might also be a way to try to gauge Robby’s mental state, but that’s between Jack and his possible brain tumor. Jack sends Shen and Parker on their way to get caught up, smiling inwardly.  

Robby looks surprisingly okay, considering… well. They move together like they always have, reading each other’s minds, knowing instinctively which step the other will take next. It’s not till they’ve wrapped up and Jack’s headed back to the Hub to waste a half hour on paperwork that Dana leans in and, in a lowered voice, tells him about Robby taking his patient into Pedes. Jack nearly flips his shit, so mad for a second that his vision whites out (Possible Brain Tumor unrelated) before the anger gives way to a bone-deep concern. 

He watches Robby carefully when Robby re-emerges, filing away the tight inward pull of his shoulderblades, the defensive way he rubs his neck. It’s bad. He should’ve realized how bad, should’ve seen past Robby In The Zone and seen the broken Mike underneath. Robby looks vacant, almost a little lost, when they have to revisit the Code Tan and Jack turns to him for confirmation on his preperitoneal packing call. It’s bad, and he should’ve seen it. That’s on him.  

Not the time to address it properly, though. Maybe he’ll find time to catch Robby before he goes home. Or day after tomorrow, during hand-off. Hell, he could make a pittstop at Robby’s messy bachelor pad tomorrow, invade his personal space, get a rise out of him, get him to talk. It’s worked for him before. All Jack has to do is talk his ear off and poke around a little, bait Robby into taking a swing at him. 

When your best friend from work refuses to see a therapist, you have to get a little creative. 

Tomorrow, he decides, cataloguing the blank way Robby stares off into nothing. 

::

Jack does get a rise out of Robby after all, less than an hour later. It takes all the strength he has left in him to hold himself back from pulling Robby into a hug. Not what Robby needs, Jack knows. And it pays off, later, when Jack offers Robby his therapist’s number and catches a look in Robby’s eye that might even be gratitude.  

The night air fills him, energizing him. Always has. But, like a reminder of his own mortality, Jack’s scar is rubbing up against a particular fold in the prosthetic that gives him grief sometimes, and even removing it doesn’t really relieve the deep, lingering ache. He should get some sleep, he knows. Even though he wants to dive back in, keep his hands dirty.  

Just when he’s started to relax and clear his head, his spines tingles, and he somehow Knows that when he turns his head, he’ll see Mohan approaching the bench with Mateo and the new kid in tow. 

Hilarious, Jack scowls, and deliberately does not look over to his left. The strange feeling grows until it’s almost unbearable, and a thousand Jacks take a thousand sips of beer all at once, and a tired voice echoes in his skull: Is this where all the cool kids— 

“Is this where all the cool kids hang out?” Mohan calls out. 

Jack chokes on his beer.

::

Changing mechanically from his scrubs into his soft sleep shirt and his old PT shorts, Jack stumbles into bed. His pyjamas feel almost too-soft, clinging strangely to the exposed skin of his hips when he rolls over onto his side. Something about his state of mind, he knows. Years of civilian life haven’t shaken this one last thing from him, the way his body braces for an uncomfortable cot in the corner of a med tent after a long, tiring, day.  

But the beer helps, as does the knowledge that he’s gonna be awake again before the sun rises. With a sigh, Jack sets his alarm for a solid five hours of shuteye, and without too much effort he finds himself drifting off to sleep. 

::

BAM!

From the street below there’s a sound like a car backfiring, and Jack wakes up with a jolt. 

“Fuckin’ lunatics,” he mutters to himself, heart beating fast in his chest. He stares up at the ceiling fan, annoyed. Two days in a row. Whoever it is driving around with dirty air filters is gonna regret losing their mechanic’s number when Jack gets ahold of them— 

His train of thought derails. Jack half-rises from bed, resting on his elbows, and stares at the blackout curtains.  

There’s a sliver of daylight shining in from around the edges.  

Oh, hell.  

Jack checks his alarm clock, puzzled at himself. He never oversleeps. Most of the time he doesn’t even need an alarm to wake up. Today, though, when he was so eager to dive back in, for some reason, he slept until…. 

He holds the clock up closer to his face in disbelief. 

Three PM? 

“For the love of God,” Jack bursts out, and then attempts to hop out of bed and nearly falls out of it. 

He looks down, confused. Somehow, in his sleep, he’d not only managed to maneuver the lower half of his body off the side of the bed, but also swapped his sleep clothes with his scrubs from two nights ago.  

Tumor? his brain suggests helpfully. 

“Fuck off,” Jack snarls out loud. 

The police scanner is a comforting low buzz in the background. Jack dries off from his shower and gets dressed, still frowning in confusion at the dirty scrubs in the laundry hamper. There’s something he can’t put a finger on, something that’s been nagging at him since yesterday, but he still hasn’t had any coffee, and his brain is a little fuzzy. Can’t really remember. Doesn’t matter. He’s already half a day late for his self-assigned extra shift.  

The police scanner murmurs something about a 10-56 in Regent Square. Jack gently turns it off, resting a hand momentarily on the top for whoever the poor soul may have been, and heads out the door. 

::

There’s a low buzz of activity in the Emergency Department, but nothing unusual, so maybe they’ve managed to get back on top of things. Jack blows out a breath, slinging his rucksack higher onto his shoulder, and has just reached the Hub when Robby almost knocks him over, sprinting past Jack towards the shouts from the ambulance bay entrance. 

“Don’t touch me! I’m fine," Jack hears Dana's voice.

Blood pours down Dana’s upturned face. Jack stops in his tracks and stares as the ED all converge from behind him, parting around him like running water, upset and horrified and eager to do whatever they can.  

Jack stares, a shiver starting at the base of his spine.  

Dana has a bloody nose. Dana does not have the shiner from yesterday. Something isn't adding up. 

“Jack?” Robby peers at him from around Dana’s body, his hands still cradling Dana’s face. “The hell are you doing here?” 

“Could say the same to you,” Jack says, staring at Dana. “15 hour shift and an MCI not enough to make you take a day off, huh?” 

“What?” Robby says.

“Just got punched,” Dana is saying to Perlah.  

Jack scrubs at his face, vision starting to double again.  

“What day is it?” he asks Robby. 

"Who punched you?" 

“Just an unhappy patient.” 

“Robby, what day is it?” Jack repeats, but Robby is focused too hard on Dana, of course he is, how could he not, no one’s listening, no one’s mentioned Dana being punched only a day before, their shock is like a fresh wound, this hasn't ever happened except that, yeah it fucking has, why is no one reacting.  

Feeling feverish, Jack stumbles to the nearest portal, logs in, and braces himself against the table. 

The date stares back up at him from the screen. 

“That doesn't make any sense,” Jack mutters. Nobody hears him.

::

He stays on, though it gets him a few questioning looks. He gets a hurried debrief from Dr. Collins. She's the only one who doesn't seem to be wondering what the fuck he's doing here on his day off.  

Jack doesn’t know how to handle the information in his head, doesn’t even know if he can trust it. Things like Dana's phone will ring with the news soon, and Collins is going to leave, and won't come back for the MCI, and Jake is at Pittfest with his girlfriend, and she catches a bullet that tears her heart, and she dies. 

The shiver up his spine is there permanently, now. When he looks up at the board he sees the names of his coworkers, everyone who’d worked through the MCI with him, most of whom should technically be off today; his gut churns because he knows why they’re here but it shouldn’t be possible. 

He catches a look at Dana later. The reddened skin around her eye is blooming into the shiner he remembers from yesterday. Nothing makes sense.  

Jack realises that he has a choice to make: accept that somehow he’s lived through this day before, or check himself into the psych ward. 

When the call eventually comes, and Robby gathers them all together, Jack makes his decision.

::

Patients he vividly remembers treating yesterday flow in through the doors. Red, Pink, Black, a sea of red.  

Conversations repeat themselves; he hears the words echo in his head milliseconds before they’re said out loud. 

He’s got a wound on both sides, he’s gonna need two chest tubes. Need a hand?  

Golden ticket, directly to surgery.  

Need some help with an airway. 

Are you donating?

Mohan looks at him like he’s lost his mind when she says this, brow furrowed and tone disbelieving. Just like yesterday, she is the only one who notices the bag strapped to his leg, not that it matters. Jack tucks that away, though, appreciating Mohan’s attention to detail. It’s one of the reasons he’s always pleased when she’s scheduled to work nights: he knows he won’t have to double check her work.

He finds himself stealing looks at her over the next hour. There’s an energy buzzing around her that he hasn’t seen before. Even during the wildest night shifts, when feces would fly over curtains and headshot unsuspecting nurses and fights would break out between one blink and another, Mohan had always been the eye of the storm.

He’d watch her calmly and methodically draw out a complete history from an intoxicated man slurring his words so badly that he could barely speak English, and just shake his head with a smile. Mohan likes to take her time, take no risks. He respects that methodology, even if he doesn't share it. Wishes he had more chances to encourage it.  

Tomorrow, he thinks. Tomorrow he'll talk to her, praise her. She's more than earned it. 

Jack glances across the crowded pit again. Mohan whips her head over her shoulder to talk to Princess, and yet another tendril of hair escapes from her claw clip and drops into her face.

::

If against all odds Jack is right about all of this, Leah will be rolled in soon, Jake right behind her, bloodied and wretched and completely in denial. Robby will try to save her. He will fail, wasting time and valuable resources in the process. He will not listen to reason, Jack knows now. No amount of tactful intervention will stop Robby from his one goal, to save the girl who went to Pittfest in his place.  

Maybe this is why it’s happening, this strange deja vu. They get a chance to do the day over. They can save her. Jack can save her.  

He’s filled with renewed determination. Yes, he decides. This is why it’s happening. What other reason could there be?

Leah is finally rolled in, and he ignores every other patient to stay at Robby’s side, despite the sidelong looks from the others, the grumbling at their hypocrisy. They pour pints of blood into her body that drain out immediately, they lose her pulse and gain it back and lose it again, and still, just like yesterday, she doesn’t come back.  

Jack works through the rest of the day in a daze, instinctively repeating what he’d done yesterday. He and Mohan stabilise the corpsman, and he distractedly jokes that he would’ve done the pigtail catheter procedure himself if it hadn’t been too risky. He doesn’t get to relish her blank reaction.

His mind is already on tomorrow. 

::

When Jack gets home, the apartment is a mess. He groans when he changes out of his scrubs, muscles aching and scar throbbing.  

His bed is made, but the covers are crooked from his haste to get out the door earlier in the day. Jack stops in the doorway to stare at it. It takes him 5 minutes like that, frozen in the bedroom entrance, turning the day’s events over in his head, before he musters the courage to swing himself onto it.  

Carefully, he sets his alarm. If this all turns out to be some fucked up trauma dream, he’ll wake up in five hours and head back to work to assist in the aftermath. The ORs will still be full, nevermind the ICU. CT backed up, equipment in short supply, staff exhausted. There’d been a patient admitted towards the end there with measles; that’s gonna be a whole thing. 

If it doesn’t… 

When he finally closes his eyes, he sees Leah’s deathly white face behind his eyelids, Robby’s reddened eyes, Mohan’s smile.  

If it doesn’t, it means he gets another chance. 

That’s all they need to save her. Just one more day.

BAM!

A car backfires on the street, and Jack Abbot opens his eyes. 

::

BAM!

BAM!

BAM!

::

‘Just one more day’ becomes his new mantra. He’s already embraced his new fate, this strange loop of what’s turning into a milestone Worst Day in a life full of milestone Worst Days. He clings to the idea that it all revolves around Leah. It has to, doesn’t it? Why else?  

He’s alone in the loop, of course. Every day he comes in to Dana getting punched. No one stops to say, "Hey, this has happened before." He's alone in his insanity.   

He joins up with Robby as soon as Leah comes through the doors on day three, and the look in Robby’s eyes is just as haunted as what Jack is now calling the First Yesterday.  

Jack can’t even warn Robby. He knows that he and Dana try every time to reach Jake as soon as the news comes in, but the kid never checks his phone. So the only thing to do is try and try and try to save her, ignoring the other patients, ignoring his own instinct and powering through the guilt. 

By day 6, they exhaust all limited MCI means of trying to save her. The tear is too drastic, the bloodloss too extreme. There’s something to be said for the nature of denial, how easy it is to keep hitting that button because maybe—come on, has to be—maybe the next push will get you the jackpot.

::

On day 7, Jack keeps Trauma 2 available, ECMO at the ready, and directs Leah’s gurney straight there.  

No bueno.  

Robby collapses in defeat after an hour. 

“I killed her,” Robby whispers to him, breaking away from the usual script when they’re alone for a moment, staring down at Leah’s unmoving body.  

Jacks jerks in surprise. Robby is crying. Robby isn’t supposed to cry until he finds him up on the roof.  

“We did everything we could,” Jack says helplessly. 

“Not everything.” Robby sobs, throwing his arms over his face, full-on gasping for air, now. He’s turned his body away from Jack in that way he has, both hiding and shielding himself, ashamed of the emotion he’s failing to hide. “Jesus Christ, there has to have been– we should’ve found a way.” 

“Well,” Jacks says, and then stops, because Robby is right. There’s one last thing they haven’t tried.

::

On the tenth Yesterday, they manage it. 

Jacks just throws his hands up, fuck it, and as soon as Leah rolls in, he goes to bully Walsh into freeing up an OR to squeeze Leah in for an emergency thoracotamy. 

Walsh balks, of course, like he knew she would. They’ve danced this tango twice, now. Each time with different steps, leading to the same result: the harder Jack pushes, the harder she pushes back, hissing and spitting like an angry cat.

“And who the fuck do you think you are?” Walsh shouts into his ear, and he ignores her, yelling into the phone at the cardiac lead instead, threatening and then pleading and then desperately trying to bribe. 

"No can do," replies the surgeon on the other end, sounding bored. "You’re ex-military, aren’t you? What’s that quote— ‘You want logistics, join the Army; Marines make do’? So make do." 

Jack hates when they reach that line. It had been annoying enough the first time. It also means he’s failed in his mission yet again. “I was Army,” Jack replies with a defeated sigh.  

The surgeon laughs. "Yeah, well. Good luck with that."  

The line goes dead. 

“Jackass,” Walsh snarls, and stalks off, but not before sending him a smirk of triumph. 

After that, Jack truly throws all fucks to the wind. He sprints out to Leah’s gurney, kicking the brakes off the wheels to a chorus of "Hey"s and "Whoa"s, Robby just staring at him blankly like he’s looking through him till Jack barks at him to follow. 

Doesn’t matter. Jack has to move, nothing matters, fuck the consequences. Hauling the gurney into the newly-cleaned Trauma 2, he doesn’t hesitate, just changes into sterile gear. As soon as Leah is prepped and hooked to the monitors by a wary Kim, he opens Leah’s chest up with a scalpel and a deft hand, deaf to the murmurs of shock from the nurses and residents around him.  

“Emergency left anterolateral thoracotamy,” Jack says, raising his voice over the alarms, trying not to let his voice shake. “Let’s go, vatos, let’s move. Kim, I need that retractor yesterday.”

Robby, alert now, holds eye contact with Jack, phone already in hand, and dials surgery.  

They get their OR pretty quick after that. 

::

“You’ve both lost your goddamn minds,” Dana tells him quietly, after.  

“Yeah. I know.” 

She hugs him, tears streaming down her face.

::

With the both of them having been tied up with Leah, Jack doesn’t want to think about the patients they’d probably lost. He’ll deal with it tomorrow. Everything will go back to normal, hopefully. That’s all that matters. He’ll deal with whatever punishment rolls downhill, fuck, he’ll lose his job and hold his head high if that’s what comes of this. He’ll live with the guilt, the faces of the patients he let down.  

The image of Robby’s grateful expression, the way Robby had grasped his shoulder tight enough to bruise, is all Jack needs.  

Best of all, maybe he can stop waking up to that fucking car backfiring.  

Jack holds the alarm clock in his hands and stares down at it. He’s actually changed into his pyjamas this time, after a week of falling into bed without bothering, knowing he’d wake up in old scrubs anyway.  

“Please,” he murmurs, and leans back into his pillow. Please work.

A car backfires and—

“Goddammit!”

::

His first attempt at his new goal doesn’t go very well.

The sound of laughter and friends calling out to each other across the parking lot greet him when he hauls himself awkwardly out of his car. The midday sun warms his sore neck, and the smell of sweat and beer lingering in the air like a thin mist. Pittfest has grown in popularity over the years: it started off as a small festival with a single stage for local bands to crank out a dozen tunes to a drunken crowd, but it’s snowballed into this—a raucous mish-mash of families, headlining brass funk bands, jugglers, and teenagers in crop tops sneaking keys in the shadows of billowing tent canopies. 

Jack hasn’t been to a music festival in years; when he had, on those rare days off, he hadn't ever been alone. There are memories carefully tucked away in his mind that begin to leak through as he weaves his way through the dense crowd, memories of a soft hand in his, tugging him from stage to stage. He unconsciously spins his wedding band in place, triggered by the scent of fried dough that lingers in the air, fills his lungs.  

“Comin’ through!,” yells a clown in full getup, appearing out of nowhere.

The clown almost barrels into Jack but changes trajectory just in time, his oversized shoes kicking up a small cloud of dust as he skids and leaps out of Jack’s way, and Jack has to do a quick reset when his prosthetic threatens to slide out from under him. Unwelcome detour into the past rerouted, Jack stops to regain his balance and hears the familiar crackle of radio static from behind him.  

His gut contracts at the sound. He checks his watch: 17:18. Too early yet. He breathes out slowly. There’s still time, not a lot, just enough for him to hopefully fulfill his objective, which is simple: if saving Leah in the hospital won’t stop the day from resetting, then he needs to go to the source, right? It's the only thing that makes sense. This is what he needs to do. 

The radio is attached to the shoulder holster of a bored looking security guard leaning up against a covered booth. The guard is chatting with his partner, one hand absentmindedly fiddling with a card laid out on a booth display. Static and the low hum of chatter grows louder as Jack approaches, trying to look at the Pokemon cards like he’s the kind of guy who would spend thousands of dollars on a meaningless collectible. 

Jack has listened to the recordings of the exchanges over the radio. He knows now that officer 169ME hears shots fired at 17:26, and calls in the 415A to Control, who issues the Code Red to all radios at 17:27, confirming an active shooter inside the fairgrounds. 

The officer’s radio crackles. “Control, 159SE. One subject is complaining of neck injuries. Could we get medical on the way? Subject says medical tent is empty.” 

Jack is halfway across the fairgrounds to the med tent before the booth manager catches up to him, red-faced and panting, to ask for the Sprigatito back, which Jack doesn’t understand until he snatches back the forgotten Pokemon card in Jack’s hand. 

“Dude, what the fuck. I was about to call the cops on you,” the booth manager pants, “but I guess if you were trying to steal it, you wouldn’t have just been carrying it in your hand like that.” 

“Sorry, man,” Jack says, hands up and genuinely apologetic. “Listen, if I were you, I’d pack my booth up and get the hell out of here. Shit’s about to go down, and you don’t want to get caught in the crossfire.”  

“Uh,” the guy says, watching him warily. “Bro, are you okay?” 

“I’m gonna be,” Jack says, already turning.

“Drink some water!” the guy calls after him. 

Jack doesn’t realise the enormity of his mistake until he’s being pinned down by five fuming cops.  

“I’m fucking unarmed!” Jack yells through a mouthful of dirt. Gunshots ring out in the distance, and he feels each and every one of them resonate through his entire body. “That guy’s still out there, stop wasting time on me—” 

“A staff member reported that you knew it was gonna happen, you piece of shit,” one of the officers spits in his face, his voice nearly drowned out by the screams around them. “You’re gonna pay for this.” 

Distant gunfire pierces the screams yet again. There’s a moment where the distraction causes the arms holding him down to slacken. Jack takes advantage, rolling out from under the slack-jawed cop who starts to sputter and reach for his gun. 

“Get back here!” the cop yells.  

“Where the hell do you think you’re going—“

“Somebody stop him—“ 

Jack springs to his feet and runs, eyes on a nearby booth, kicking up mud in his wake, but he isn’t fast enough. There’s the sound of a standard issue gun firing, and a quick burning sensation at the base of Jack’s skull, and then—

A car backfires on the street, and Jack wakes up in his bed with a start, chest heaving and adrenaline high. He scrambles to a sitting position, hands finding the back of his head where the bullet had surely pierced skin and bone. His palms come away clean. He’d felt it. He can still feel it: the echo of a knee in his back, mud in his mouth, the smell of sweat and horror and candy corn and dust in the air, the burn like an electric shock in the back of his skull.  

He closes his eyes and still sees a faint glow, the ghostly aftermath of the bright, blinding light that had stolen his vision during his last seconds alive. 

That is the first time Jack learns what it feels like to die.

::

When he does finally reach Leah, he grabs her arm, begging her to come with him. Jakes sics the cops on him. Failure. Reset.

He finds Leah, tries to convince her that she has a family emergency, and she needs to come with him, right now. Jake sics the cops on him. Failure. Reset.

He finds Leah, waits until the gunshots ring out, and then flings himself on top of her, pulling her to the ground with him. Jake falls down next to them, blood spurting from a wound in his neck. Jake scrabbles at Jack's shirt, terror in his young eyes and sobs bubbling from his mouth, and then grows limp in Jack's arms. 

Failure.

He sits in his bed, staring at hands that should be bloody, sick with the weight of his failure.

::

His goal has shifted. Stop the shooter. Stop the MCI.

Jack goes back to the grounds again the next loop, retracing his steps from the parking lot to the main stage, narrowly avoiding the sprinting clown. Even though he knows they won’t recognize him, he automatically lowers his head and speeds up his gait when he spots the pimply cop that had pinned him to the ground yesterday. The cop remains glued to his phone, and when Jack passes by, he doesn’t even look up. 

The medical tent is a sad little affair, and when Jack lifts the flap higher to enter without ducking, it’s empty except for a teenager with bright pink hair slurping on a juice box. 

Jack checks his watch. Time is running out, and he still doesn’t have a concrete plan for finding the shooter, and even if he did, he has no idea if he’ll even be able to disarm him. He ducks out of the tent and back into the weakening sunlight, squinting out over the bustling fairgrounds. He just needs to see what the shooter looks like, know his exact position at 17:26, and carry that knowledge into the next loop. Easy. This time, it'll work.

Jack begins to prowl.

::

Gunfire sounds like firecrackers. Always has, even in theatre. IEDs go off like fireworks, shrapnel catches the light like confetti. The parallels have always made him feel a little sick. He’d worked with kids who dissociated hard after their first firefight, deluded themselves into cheering for air strikes like at a Fourth of July parade. 

Jack’s worked with the other kind of soldier, too. The ones that mowed down civilians and laughed. He doesn’t like to think about those ones, most days. 

When the first shot rings out, the people near him turn with half-smiles on their faces, scanning the skies in confusion, looking for the source of the sound in the entirely wrong place. He’s the only one who ducks on instinct, pulling the nearest bodies down with him, shouting, “Take cover!” and going unheard until it’s too late. He forces himself towards the sound of the rifle fire, body shaking with adrenaline. 

He’s helping an injured woman hide behind a pile of equipment when the loop suddenly restarts with a violent crack and a blooming pain in his chest. Jack’s vision folds inwards, and the next moment he’s in bed, clutching the phantom bullet hole, body covered in a sheen of sweat.  

::

The song bellowing from the speakers swells into its chorus. 

Jack breathes through his nose and stands still, letting the crowd shift around him in waves, bodies pressing and parting. The bass line from the main stage thrums through his sternum like a second heartbeat. Counting down the precious minutes, he forcibly grounds himself, blocks out the noise and laughter and children crying out for their mothers. Instead, he reaches roots down into the dirt, sharpening his focus.  

Just need to look, Jack thinks, angling himself towards a slightly raised patch of ground near one of the lighting rigs. Just need to see.  

The people in the crowd below the main stage are happy and loose, swaying with the music and bopping their heads,. Their arms are around each other or holding up phones, relaxed. Jack scans each body, not lingering for more than a second. Trying to spot a hidden weapon is futile, he won’t even waste his time. 

He finds what he’s looking for in a man standing just off the main thoroughfare, half-shadowed by a vendor tent, hands in his pockets and ball cap lowered. The man is completely still, just like Jack, watching the crowd with his body turned away from the main stage.  

Jack’s pulse spikes. Got you.  

He starts forward immediately, pushing through the crowd, pulling his eyes away from the man to find the nearest security guard, find a way around so he can pull up behind the man without giving away his intentions. A glance at his watch warns him that he has four minutes left, cutting it too close, fuck, he’s not going to make it, he’s stumbling through panic now, shoes slipping through the mud, heart hammering in his chest.  

By the time he reaches the cop standing bored a few meters away from the stage, the man has slipped away. 

“Gun,” Jack pants, grabbing onto the cop’s arm to get his attention. 

The cop starts, and then glares at him in annoyance, wrenching his arm away. “Sir, remove your hand—” 

“That guy’s carrying a semi-automatic. Right over there. Pittfest cap, brown jacket, mid-thirties, caucasian male.”  

The annoyance disappears from the cop’s face, replaced with a deep, worried frown. “Are you sure?” 

“Positive.” 

“A semi-automatic rifle?” The cop looks doubtful. “You’re sure it wasn’t something else, an umbrella, a cane—” 

“Swear on my life.” 

The cop searches his face and his expression grows grim. He reaches for his radio. “Control, this is One Six Nine Mary Easy, I just received a report of—”

A buzz in Jack's backpocket: the alarm he’d set in the car. One minute left.  

A firecracker pops nearby. Then again, and again. 

Screams ripple outward like a shockwave. 

“Control, 169ME, we’ve got shots fired.” 

Jack’s head snaps toward the sound just in time to see a body drop to the ground—a man clutching his neck, red blooming between his fingers. Moving on sheer instinct, Jack breaks into a run, sprinting towards the injured man, but the crowd surges the opposite direction, a panicked mass slamming into him, driving him back.  

His prosthetic slips half a fraction. He stumbles, catches himself, forces himself to stay on the move. His eyes are on the dark shadow slipping away behind the stage. 

By the time he breaks through into the clearing near the secondary stage, Jack has almost caught up to the shooter. He catches a glimpse of a dark jacket disappearing behind a row of portable toilets.  

He rounds the corner, hard—

—and runs straight into the barrel of a gun.

“Don’t,” Jack says, hands coming up slowly. “You don’t want to do this.” 

The man’s eyes flick over him, wide and wild. 

“Too late,” the man says, his voice shaking so badly that the words barely form.

BAM!

Jack jerks upright in bed, a strangled scream about to tear itself out of his throat.  

“Okay,” he says aloud, once he’s caught his breath. “Okay. Again.”

::

The shooter is standing just off the main thoroughfare, half-shadowed by a vendor tent, hands in his pockets and ball cap lowered.  

Jack closes the distance cautiously. The man’s hands are folded in his jacket. Now that Jack is closer, he can see the way his eyes move restlessly over the crowd, at odds with the abnormal stillness of his body. 

“Hey, man,” Jack calls out, stopping next to him, shoulder to shoulder. He looks out at the crowd, too, mirroring his stance. 

The man’s gaze snaps to Jack’s face. Recognition doesn’t flicker there—of course it doesn’t—but there’s a sharpness to it, an awareness. 

A moment of hesitation; Jack genuinely didn’t think he’d make it this far. He doesn’t allow himself to overthink it, though, just steps in closer, invading his space.  

“I know what you’re about to do.” Jack says, voice low and as calm as he can make it. 

The man jerks. “Yeah?” he says shakily. “And what’s that?”

Before he even forms the decision to do it, Jack moves. He grabs the shooter’s wrist and yanks it hard, catching the man off-balance. The man reacts instantly, faster than Jack expects. He twists and drives an elbow into Jack’s ribs, right where the phantom bruise from three loops ago still psychosomatically lingers, and Jack’s grip falters just enough as the wind gets knocked out of him. 

“Fuck you,” the shooter spits.  

“That’s my line,” Jack grits out.

The shooter dives to the ground, rolling away from Jack and reaching under the booth—

A woman nearby screams. “Gun!” someone shouts. 

The crowd ignites into panic before the first shot even fires, the shrieking surge from behind him knocking him sideways. His leg gives, twists wrong, and he goes down hard, a foot catching his ribs, weight piling on, pressing the air from his lungs. 

Can’t… breathe…  

The sky above him is a thin, shrinking strip between bodies and flailing limbs. 

Stupid way to die, Jack thinks, before he abruptly loses consciousness.

::

The MCI protocol is activated no matter what he does.  

Leah gets wheeled into the hospital, bullet through the heart, bullet through the lung, crushed under the crowd. No matter what he does—catching the shooter by surprise, talking to him, sicing the cops on him, and in one desperate attempt even shooting the man point black—Leah ends up in pedes by the end of the shift, and the loop restarts. 

The loop hasn’t accounted for one thing, though: Jack is a stubborn bastard. Call it luck or sheer force of will, whatever, he does manage to gain the upper hand after a few gruesome loops that end in failure. He learns how to subdue the shooter alone, the steps he needs to take. He kicks the weapon away before the man can dive for it, stomps on his hand and shatters his finger bones so he can’t get away and grab it. He learns to start off the tackle with a calculated fist straight into the man’s trachea, just to knock the fight out of him first. Work hard, not smart. 

There’s always someone that screams, though, someone that spots them. He can't figure out how to avoid the stampede that inevitably follows.  

In later loops, Jack shifts his approach. He recruits the security guard, and they take the shooter out in a two-pronged ambush. Those are the Yesterdays where he feels the closest to hope, feels the tingle in his spine grow strong, like it’s threatened, like it knows he’s close. 

Still, something always goes wrong. He learns, after so many loops that his body has memorized the steps he has to take like a choreographed dance, that taking the shooter out only triggers another disaster. Sometimes, someone in the crowd sees the weapon anyways, yells “Gun,” or sometimes just “RUN!”, and then what were once people turn into terrified animals whose only goal is escape, no matter who gets in their way. 

During one attempt, he tackles the shooter, knocking him unconscious and pinning him up against the lighting rig, and no one notices. He almost slumps in relief, close to tears, god he’s done maybe he’s done, but then the sound of whining metal drowns out the music, and the entire rig topples into the crowd, taking half the stage with it.  

31 injured, 4 dead. 

The loop never lets him win, or so it seems until one day, for no reason at all, twenty-one loops later—by some miracle—everything aligns.  

He and Officer 169ME thwart the shooter without anyone at PittFest noticing. The festival goes on without a hitch. No disaster follows, no one else gets hurt. Jack spends five hours in the police station being questioned, and they let him go with a warning that they’ll be contacting him within the coming week. And then...that’s it. He’s done.   

He walks through the hospital doors like he’s disconnected from his body.  

“Dr. Abbot?” Mohan says, looking up from her paperwork in surprise.  

“In the flesh.” 

Mohan smiles up at him tiredly, but the expression feels empty. 

“Everything okay here?” Jack glances around, shoulders hunched, prepared to see Robby standing in the middle of the Pitt, slap-bands in hand. “Any…incidents? I should know about?” 

Any Mass Casualty Protocols…?

“As okay as it ever gets,” Mohan replies with a quick little shake of her head, voice unconvincingly chirpy. “Just finishing up a few charts and I’m out of here.” 

The edge of her clawclip catches the neon lights. Jack takes a second to let her presence ground him, feels his mind fall back into sync with his body. No longer unmoored in time.  

Mohan eyes him and adds, like she’s just realised, “Are you okay? It’s a little early to be coming in for your shift.” Jack blinks back. 

Today is the 31st Yesterday.  

Today is the first Yesterday that the MCI protocol hasn’t been activated. 

Today, Jack is still alive, and as far as he can tell… so is Leah. 

“It’s actually my day off,” Jack says, folding his arms over the Hub and letting his head hang between them, just letting the realisation wash over him, the weight of the past month in the loop dropping off him all at once.  

Mohan smells like antiseptic and coriander. Jack breathes it in, grounding himself in it. He's spent so many resets in the loop at PittFest that he'd forgotten how good that smell was, familiar and comfortable. She's a fucking sight for sore eyes. Jack smiles to himself, then directs it back up at her. “Was in the area, thought I’d stop by.”

Mohan’s smile grows warmer in response to his, losing the false edge it had held. She gives him another once-over. “Were you on a run? You’re a little dusty,” she says, going back briefly to typing. Then her hands still abruptly, and she turns back to him, eyes widening a little. “Not that… I’m saying you’re dirty.” 

Jack lets himself laugh. It comes out shaky, a small sound that only reaches Mohan. If she notices, she doesn’t show it. 

“You’re very clean,” Mohan assures him, looking embarrassed. “...Usually.” 

“Nah, you’re right, I’m a little dusty,” he agrees. The tingle starts up below his spine; he ignores it. “Sweaty as hell, too. Stopped by PittFest.” 

The words leave his mouth before he can think twice.  

Mohan’s brow furrows. Her eyes glaze over, lost in thought. “PittFest,” she repeats. 

Jack stares. “Yeah,” he says. “PittFest. The music festival.” 

Mohan looks lost. 

“Right,” she murmurs. “The music festival. Sorry—" She shakes her head as though to clear it—"for some reason I thought that was yesterday.” 

“Started today, lasts three days,” Jack says. He looks at her closely. There’s something off about the way she says it: she’s struggling, face twisting in frustration. “Have you ever been?” 

Mohan’s dark eyes lose their sheen. When refocuses on him, the warm smile is gone. She just looks confused. “I don’t think so, but it feels so...” 

 A beat.  

“So?” Jack prompts gently. Mohan doesn’t seem to realize it, but she’s rocking back and forth slightly in her chair, expression blank.

Then, without warning, Mohan bursts into tears.  

Jack pulls her into an empty room. Mohan stops sobbing after a while, in an impressive show of compartmentalisation, but her breathing is still abnormally fast, and her skin feels clammy. 

“Talk to me, Mohan” Jack says, heart thudding wildly in his chest, leading her to sit. “What’s going on?”  

“I’m fine,” Mohan insists. She clutches her chest, her other hand going down to grip the sheets. “It’s nothing, I’m fine. Sorry, I don’t know what the fuck just happened.” 

“Bullshit,” Jack says. Despite her insistence, he takes her pulse, and then straps on a blood pressure cuff. “Your body was reacting to something.” 

“It was nothing,” Mohan snaps, then closes her eyes. “God. Sorry.” 

“Stop apologizing,” Jack says quietly. 

It takes a minute for her breathing to slow. “It was like…” Mohan trails off, staring out past Jack’s shoulder. “My head felt like it was about to explode. I was trying to remember and then...” She lets out a frustrated groan. “...and then my head started throbbing, and then I couldn't even remember my own name. Fuck, I don’t know. It’s been a really long day.” 

As he releases the pressure of the cuff and studies the results, Jack realises belatedly that he’s brushing a slow circle into her arm where his thumb is resting against her skin. It’s warmed up, losing the clammy feel, and soft as silk. He withdraws his hand, swallowing hard.  

Mohan doesn’t notice. She just buries her face in her hands.  

“I get it,” Jack says, and he does, in multiple ways. Grief had felt like that, in its earliest form, fighting through memories that threatened to disable his executive function, stop him in his tracks even while doing the most mundane tasks. He’d felt something similar in theatre, as well, pushing down his empathy in order to do his job. And then again, later, much later, staring down at nothing where his foot used to be. 

Even now, with every Yesterday that he wakes up to, the Yesterdays that are starting to blend together, but still never quite feel like today.  

“I get it,” Jack repeats, because he does, and he doesn’t know what demons Mohan is battling, but he’s worked with her long enough to know that he shouldn’t underestimate it. “And I think you’re overdue for a break.” 

“What, sending me home?” Mohan says bitterly. “I’m not a med student, Abbot, I can work through a headache. I can do my job.”

Jack steps back, a little surprised at her forceful tone. He just watches her take off the cuff, movements sharp and exaggerated from frustration.  

“I may be slow,” Mohan continues, not meeting his gaze. She stands up, a little wobbly on her feet, and Jack holds himself back from rushing in to support her, “but that doesn’t mean I’m useless.” 

“Didn’t say you were,” Jack says. “Never have. Where's this coming from?” 

Her reply is so quiet he almost doesn’t catch it, almost as though Mohan were talking to herself. “Just because you’ve never said it to my face doesn’t mean you’re not thinking it.” 

Before he can correct her, she slips through the door and disappears into the bathroom. 

The delight and relief at finally achieving his mission feel tainted. Jack walks slowly out of the room, looking down at the dried mud flaking off of the backs of his hands. He’ll have to follow up with her. Jack owes Mohan that much, because he knows—he hates that he knows—no one else will. No one else will even notice. Well, McKay might, but of course, that’s McKay for you. She has her own shit to deal with, though. It feels like months have passed, but Jack remembers all too well that her ankle monitor had malfunctioned Yesterday. McKay hasn't talked about it to anyone, but he’s picked up enough to know that her situation at home is messy as all hell. 

So, yeah. Tomorrow, he'll put some time aside to talk to Mohan. 

It’s strange to look forward to a Tomorrow that doesn’t promise mud and screaming and eventual death (usually his). Jack wonders what it’ll feel like to clock into a normal night shift, experience a normal handoff again. He can't fucking wait.

He’ll still have some work to do—even without the death of Leah, Robby’s still having a bad fucking day, his trauma coming to a head all at once—but he’s ready, now. He feels like he could face anything. 

Head light and gait steady, Jack heads home.

::

A car backfires.

His heart sinks, and he knows before he’s even opened his eyes. 

When he does, he stares up at the ceiling fan for so long his eyes begin to water. 

::

It must’ve been a fluke. The reprieve from chaos and death and eventual MCI doesn’t happen again, no matter how many times he returns, how many times he disarms or disables the shooter. 

His failure weighs heavily on him. After a few dozen more failed attempts, there comes a day where Jack doesn’t return to PittFest, just stays in bed, staring at nothing.  

Not after the last time. Not when he’d managed to fucking fix it, and still woke up in this goddamn loop. 

Lying around all day is worse, though. The guilt is so heavy his stomach roils with it, despite his inner voice reminding him that his efforts would be wasted, anyways.  

So Jack shifts his routine back to the original one, the one that had started this whole thing. He waits in his armchair, hands folded and elbows resting on his knees, scrubs on and boots laced, for 17:26. He only gets up when the now-familiar voice of 169ME crackles through the police scanner. Then, go-bag in hand—now a few pounds heavier than with its usual load—he walks purposefully to his car, and drives to work.

Robby turns to hug him. Dana send him a weak smile, black eye blooming. Mohan asks him what else is in his go-bag.

Jack gets through the PittFest shooting aftermath, sometimes leaving Robby to work on Leah, sometimes jumping in to save the day.

He grabs a beer in the park (actually catches it this time), mentally predicts the conversation that follows, every beat, every smile. Then he goes home, only to do it all over again. 

It gets harder to sleep, because it isn’t really sleep, is it? He’s gone over a month with just that split second between closing his eyes and the violent sound startling him awake, doesn’t dream, doesn’t get up in the middle of the night to piss, nothing. Never thought he’d miss it so much, when he’s gone his whole life losing sleep in favor of work or fucking or even just enjoying a good book a little too much.

The only thing he craves more than the feeling of drifting off into a good long REM cycle is a conversation that he hasn’t already had a hundred times. Before the loop, the last thing he’d have called working in a hospital would have been predictable. Now it’s like there’s a script to follow, and everyone but him has memorised their lines, refusing to deviate. Maddening, if he thinks about it too hard.

Jack may be stubborn, and a positive motherfucker to boot, but he’s still human at the end of the day. 

The question shifts from How do I get out to What do I do now?

:

The answer, he decides on loops fourty-one to fifty-three, is simply to change his approach. 

Jack is the first person in the history of the universe (not trying to brag, man, it’s just the facts) who’s lived this…this fissure in time, this metaphysical limbo. He’s not exactly a man of science, but even on days where he’s tossing standard of care off the roof and following his gut instinct, he’s still a slave to the laws that make up their reality. That should still be the case, even in this new form of Purgatory. He just has to figure out which laws can now be bent, and which ones will stay firm. To do that, he has to get his hands a little dirty. 

He’s already crossed off a few possible changes to the script that might affect the outcome of the day and reset the loop. Leah dying or living makes no difference, except maybe for Robby’s sanity, or whatever’s left of it. Scratch that off the list, although if Jack’s going forward on faith that the loop will eventually reset, from here on out he’ll always choose the second option: saving her life.

He can’t save her at the festival. Leah dies, or Jake dies. At least she makes it to PTMC, buying them time to save her. 

Stopping the PittFest shooter simply leads to other disasters that would trigger an MCI protocol at PTMC. That one seems inescapable. The best case scenario would be a disaster that results in fewer red bands, less of an overload to PTMC’s systems, but losing precious time going all the way to PittFest and then coming back means less time working on the patients. He learned that the hard way far too many times. Too many preventable casualties. 

And so, from the fourty-first Yesterday onward, the loops become a study in methodology. He approaches it like a problem set, like a field exercise with clearly defined objectives and measurable outcomes. Each new Yesterday is a controlled variable. He adjusts one thing at a time—an earlier intervention here, a redirected gurney there—and catalogues results with the same meticulous care he’d once applied to surgical after-action reviews in theatre. The same care he’s always shown his cases, PTMC or otherwise, of course, just minimising his empathy, enough to close himself off if his mind starts to fragment.  

Jack still refuses to explore what might happen if he gets everything right but still doesn't escape the loop. He isn’t ready to open that particular door, not yet. So Jack just clocks in, gets his bear hug, and lets Robby lead, mostly: feeds him lines he knows will land, creates the openings Robby needs to do his best work.

Easy. Gets easier every Yesterday. 

::

The residents and nurses cycle through their scripts. He could quote their dialogue in his sleep, by now, and does so when the insomnia gets bad, filling the dark hours with their words like a playwright drilling lines into an empty theatre. It gets old pretty fucking fast.

Mohan still manages to surprise him sometimes, though. It’s a strange feeling every time it happens, breaks him out of his trance. Everyone will be hitting their marks, and he’ll turn and she’ll be gone, and later it’ll turn out that she’d been off drilling another IO into some lucky bastard’s skull. Or Jack will be in the middle of a conversation he’s had a hundred times with Princess, and Mohan will come in out of nowhere and make an off-handed comment that makes him stare after her slack-jawed and delighted.  

Might it’s the universe throwing him a bone. Could be a glitch. Jack doesn’t question it, doesn’t want to push his luck. He accepts those occasional deviations like little gifts, looking forward to seeing every new Yesterday whether she’ll go off-script. Jack files the deviations away with everything else, pushing down the hope that dares to bloom for a split second in his chest, the wondrous possibility that he might not be alone anymore. 

::

That’s around the time when the loops begin to blur.  

Jack has kept up with the Yesterdays till now, half-hearted but with a ticker in the back of his mind, for the most part. But then there’s a stretch where every loop is so rote, so identical, that he turns off his brain, and the ticker count is the first thing that fades away. 

The second thing to fade is the sense of urgency. Some mornings he wakes to That Fucking Car but just lies there, long past when he should be up and moving, staring at the thin strip of light between the curtains, immune to the murmur of the scanner in the next room.  

He knows, with absolute certainty, that the day will unspool the same way regardless. Robby will have his breakdown, go up to the roof, steal Jack’s spot and dangle over the edge, so close but too frightened to do anything, and Jack will talk him down. Dana will bleed. Mohan will burst from her chrysalis with new, damp wings clutching her sides from years of neglect, and slowly over the course of the evening they will unfold, one of the only things that will never get old to watch. 

It's tedious, though. All of it.

Yeah, he goes in anyway. Muscle memory and something that isn’t quite duty anymore, something older and more stubborn drags his body down the same old path every day in spite of himself.  

And then, one day, he doesn’t. 

::

He just can’t fucking do it anymore. He wakes up, sits on the edge of the bed, gets as far as putting off his scrubs and tossing them in with the dirty laundry before he just…stops. Sits there with his hands on his knees in the artificial dark, listening to the scanner murmur about a fender-bender on Penn and a missing dog in Point Breeze, and decides that today he won’t go in. Today, he’ll sit here, and it’ll all happen without him, and nothing will fucking change. So fuck it. 

He makes coffee (burnt). He drinks it on the fire escape, watching the city meander by below. There are pigeons on the building opposite, and he watches them for a long time. One has a mangled half-foot, crooked and twisted. Jack thinks about that—whether it feels the lack of it, the wrongness of it; he wonders if it’s aware that it’s broken and just keeps flying anyway.  

He goes back inside and sleeps his way to the next loop. When the car backfires a split second after he closes his eyes and drifts of to sleep, he doesn’t wake up cursing, just thinks about that fucking pigeon. He drags himself back into work, like an apology for succumbing, for being weak. He puts his back into it, saves Leah, saves Robby. Mohan smiles at him like he’s offered her the world. He ends the day on the bench, smiling back at her, and when Robby leaves he offers her a seat next to him. They deviate from their respective scripts, just chatting about cases and patients for what feels like hours.  

Despite this reprieve, he slides back into weakness, and the days off keep happening. 

::

The dark period—and he’ll call it that later, when he’s willing to call it anything at all—creeps up on him without him really realising what’s happening.  

A day off here, another there. What’s the difference. It’ll reset. Fuck it. They can go a day without me. The days all blend together, he can’t tell yesterday from yesterday from Yesterday. Fuck it. The darkness seeps in the way cold does, slow and insidious, finding its way through the gaps in his insulation. No comfort here. Different this time.  

He starts doing things he wouldn’t normally do, small things, violations of his routine that don’t stand out at first. When he does haul himself into work, out of guilt or shame or whatever the fuck else, he takes a longer route to work; just sits in the parking lot for fourty minutes, engine running, watching the ambulances come and go. He'll order a second beer at the pub after work instead of joining Robby on the bench, and then a third, then goes home and passes out with his shoes on.  

He stops making his bed. 

The small violations stack, one at a time, till one day he doesn’t go in till the phone rings in the late afternoon and it’s Dana on the line, telling him there’s been a shooting, they’re activating protocols, can he come in early— 

“Dana, listen… it’s my leg. I can’t come in.”

There’s a long silence. Jack can hear the noises in the background, Robby’s commanding voice. His whole body feels numb. 

“Of course,” Dana says, finally, a hard bite to her tone. “Of course, Jack. You take care of yourself, now.” 

That day he leaves the house and wanders, up and down streets he’s grown to call home, recognising nothing, smelling death in the air where there should be the scent of flowering bushes by the roadside, of car exhaust. He goes to a movie and sits in the dark with popcorn he doesn’t taste while onscreen people fall in love and break apart and find each other again, and he thinks: must be nice.  

He reaches a hand out, lets it sit palm up on the seat rest. If he closes his eyes and concentrates, he can imagine Tina’s small, warm hand sliding into his, the cool metal of her ring resting against his own. 

The small violations stack till they meld and grow and mutate.  

They lead to the big ones, eventually. 

::

Jack starts testing the boundaries of what the loop can contain, what it will hold, what it will forgive. He tests the restraints of the thousand Yesterdays yet to come the way you test a bruise, pressing into it despite knowing the pain it’ll bring.  

He’s been shot countless times now: in the face, the back, the head, the heart. He’s been smothered and trampled and crushed and choked. He’s tried not to think about it, but with each new reset he can’t seem to focus on anything else. Death is yet another thing that, horribly, impossibly, has become commonplace, but never death that he has inflicted upon himself. That’s still a rule he’s never violated. That’s a bruise he still hasn’t pressed. 

So Jack starts pressing. Gently, at first. 

He catches himself staring down at a scalpel in his hand for a second too long, or eyeing the gun in Ahmad‘s hip holster. Every Yesterday he resets and heads to work, and sometimes he pauses when he reaches the crossroads in front of the hospital, considering his choices: turn left to go inside, turn right for Pittfest and the gunman lying there in wait. Soon the long looks at the scalpel turn into a deep, intentional slices across his forearm; instead of waiting for the speeding taxi to pass before crossing the road to work, he'll deliberately choose not to break his stride.  

One loop it’s his good foot hard on the accelerator despite an upcoming red light, eyes trained on the road, and the horrible shock of a sixteen-wheeler barrelling into the side of his car before he wakes up in his bed, shaking and puking over the edge onto the carpet. 

It gets to a point where he can barely speak, the bleak feeling of hopelessness closing like a noose around his vocal chords. The next time he’s on the roof with Robby, Jack joins him on the other side of the railing, doesn’t say a word. Robby looks at him side-long, shoulders trembling with withheld sobs.

“You gonna do it?” Jack asks, staring down at the lights below them. Trees sway in the park. They’ve sat under those trees a hundred times now, laughing and joking. Feels light-years away.  

“What are you talking about,” Robby starts to say, but Jack just gives him a look.  

“You’re in or you’re out,” Jack says. Robby won’t remember, but still, he thinks: I’m sorry. “Time to choose, Robby.” 

Robby starts to hyperventilate. “Thought you were–gonna–try to–talk me out of it,” he says, forcing out the words, hysterical. 

Jack shrugs, numbness leaking out to his extremities. “Done talking.” 

“Fuck,” Robby says, wiping snot from his nose with his arm. “Jack, if this is some kind of reverse psychology bullshit–” 

“Haven’t tried it before,” Jack muses, ignoring him. He eyes the pavement far below them. He doesn’t get to see it like this too often. It’s nice. Soothing, really, the way the lights cast a glow over the streets. “Thought about it, yeah. How many fucking times now? I don’t know. Might break the loop, might not. Might end up dead forever.” Jack shrugs. “Probably for the best.” 

Robby stares. 

The words rush out of Jack before he can stop himself. “I can’t do it, man. It’s gotta end somehow. Don’t even know if it’s Leah’s death that triggered it, maybe the shooting, maybe—” Jack starts to laugh, losing control of all inhibition—“maybe it was Mohan finally believing in herself, shocked the universe into repeating itself, who the fuck knows. God, I’ll miss her. But I’m done.” 

Mohan’s face rises to the forefront of his mind. He holds it there, suddenly wistful. She’s been the highlight of the recent Yesterdays, the only bright spot in a vast dark numbness. Her smile, the bright “Can’t wait to see what else is in your go-bag!”, the odd little deviations that he can never predict.  

So many ways he could’ve watched her grow, man. So many more medical miracles they could’ve performed together. 

She won’t even notice when he’s gone.

“You’re scaring the shit out of me right now,” Robby blurts, a hysterical laugh cutting through the panic attack.  

“Yeah, I know,” Jack says. He takes off his prosthetic, hauls it carefully over the railing and steadies the leg against it, right next to Robby’s stethoscope. He removes his ring, twisting it one last time into his palm, looks down at its grooves and dulled curves for a moment before setting it down as well. “Turn around, Robby.” 

“Wait—” 

Jack grabs the side of Robby’s face, a harsh grip he knows would bruise. He leans in, no wavering, and kisses him roughly, mouth sliding over Robby’s hard and fast. 

“Love you, brother,” Jack breathes into him. “See you in the next life.”

On the way down, the air tastes like home and feels like nothing at all. 

::

The loop is not a morality system. There is no punishment for Jack here, just like there is no reward. Whatever he’s done or will do will dissolve like smoke when the day resets. The car will never stop backfiring, the mosquito will never stop circling his room.

Jack will never die. 

He’s tested the boundaries as far as he can stretch them, and he knows without a doubt, now. No matter the catalyst, for whoever is caught in the loop, death will always lead back to life. His vision will go black, but without fail, he will reset to Yesterday, 15:00 hours. 

In the loop, the egg doesn’t predate the chicken, and the chicken will never create life, because it’s never given the chance to hatch.  

Yesterday refuses to become Tomorrow. 

You can’t die if there is no Tomorrow. 

::

He skips out on a few days after that, sitting in his apartment and going through old photos. The ring burns on his finger. It had reappeared like nothing happened, like he hadn’t abandoned it on the roof along with Robby, along with the mental fortitude that’s kept him going so far, the stubborn will to live despite the ever-present desperate desire to die. 

“I’m sorry,” he says, stroking Tina’s face. She’s smiling, the most beautiful he’d ever seen her, the bridal veil caught by a breeze and immortalised in the photo in his hands. Its creases are worn from how many times it’s been pulled out and caressed and kissed.  

Tina smiles up at him, frozen in time. Just like he is. 

::

Jack is adrift for too long, until he finally decides he needs to find dry land. It takes time, swimming through identical days that all meld together into one long, strange, uneventful week, but he finally gathers up the courage to restart his routine, mostly because he doesn’t really know what else to do with a life that only last 12 hours at a time.  

He gets out the door early in the afternoon, just 15 minutes after waking up (he throws his pillow at the window, hoping it’ll glitch through and hit the driver of the backfiring car in the head), but he has to sit on the stairwell outside the ED for an hour before going in anyway. The air is soup, lukewarm and thick. Moving his limbs takes extra care, extra strength he doesn’t have left in him. Even just sitting down on the warmed concrete takes more effort than he would’ve liked to spare. 

He shares the step with Jesse for his quick smoke break, and then the neighborhood stray cat who is so fat that her belly ripples when she rolls over and purrs at him. Perlah should stop feeding her, but no one in their right mind would dare to suggest it out loud.  

Jack gives the cat a few pets. A little extra dopamine couldn’t hurt. 

When he finally stumbles through the door, he nearly collides with Mohan. 

She says, “Oh, hi, Doctor Abbot,” tone bright despite the bags under her eyes. Mohan steadies them both with one hand briefly against his arm.  

“My bad,” Jack says. He looks down into her face. He’s skipped work for so many loops that the sight of her big brown eyes hits him like a jolt, like a spike of caffeine hitting his bloodstream. The subtle scent of coriander hits his nostrils, spicy and clean. He can’t help but smile for the first time in days. The air grows less thick, his limbs loosening. He shakes himself out, suddenly able to breathe.  

Mohan gives him the quick once-over that he’s grown used to in the time he’s known her, an involuntary glance of a professional, cataloguing without meaning to. Then she says, “Are you alright?” 

And Jack thinks, standing there in the fluorescent corridor light with the sound of the ED buzzing beyond them, with Mohan’s dark eyes doing their quiet inventory of his face, that he is approximately as far from alright as he has ever been in his life.  

“Getting there,” he says.  

Mohan nods. Her eyes are sad, like she hears the true meaning in it. They just look at each other for a beat.  

“Coffee’s fresh,” she offers finally. “Coming?” 

Jack watches her curls dance out of the claw clip’s grip and feels something reset inside of him, something far from the loop’s reach.  

The boulder feels lighter. He keeps pushing.  

“Yeah,” Jack says, “I’m coming.”

::

His new goal is ambitious and a little absurd, but hell, he’s stuck here for eternity anyways. Why the hell shouldn’t he try to save every damn patient that comes through the doors?  

“I can think of a few reasons why not,” Robby says, a big fake smile plastered on his face, when Jack offhandedly mentions it, knowing Robby won't fucking understand but not really caring. “But you have a savior complex, and massive ego to go with it, so I doubt it’ll change your mind.” 

“Sure we’re talking about Abbot here?” Garcia gets in her jab and sashays away, no doubt to go find a med student to belittle Langdon in front of. 

Rehash of an old script. Not quite a deviation, but he’ll take what he can get. 

::

“What else you got in your go bag?” 

“Oh, just wait and see.” 

Jack snaps the gloves off his hands, eyes already on his next target, smiling to himself at the familiar words.  

“Cute,” says a nearby cop, swaggering over like he’s the one who performed the cric rather than stand around for a half hour with his dick in his hand. He cranes his neck to look after Mohan, who’s left a trail of excited energy in her wake.  

“Know if she’s single?” the cop asks Princess, hands on his flack jacket and a shit-eating grin on his face.  

Princess flicks a look over at Jack. He raises his eyebrows back at her, but catches the ball she’s tossed to him anyway. “What I do know is that Dr. Mohan is busy,” Jack says pleasantly to the cop, whose self-preservation instincts seem to be intact, because he lifts his hands in surrender at the look in Jack’s eye and backs away. 

“Fucking vultures,” Jack says under his breath.  

Princess just smiles at him in what he thinks might be approval. “I’m sure Samira will love to hear that she has a new knight in shining armour.” 

“Funny.”  

Princess doesn’t stop smiling at him. “I heard what you said to Doctor Collins the other day,” she says slyly. “I think Samira is the smartest one here, too.” 

There’s deviations from the script, and then outright mutiny. Jack feels the blush run up his body and flood his face, which is ridiculous, but he bears the burden of being born white and Irish to the bone with the tattered remnants of his pride, and boldly stares Princess down.  

“Glad you agree,” Jack tells her. “You gonna help me convince her?” 

"Oh, noooo," Princess says. "That's your job, Dr. Abbot." She winks at him, and saunters away giggling to herself, shuffling through a puddle of blood. 

::

Jack already knows the medicine, has known it, has the gurneys memorised by now, knows what trauma rooms will fill and in what order. He knows it like a conductor knows an orchestra he’s led a thousand times.

There are the things that remain constant: Shen’s iced coffee. The specific quality of light in the stairwell by the viewing room. The way Parker says “Jeeesus,” in superstitious horror out in the ambulance bay, which Jack overhears one day and loves so much that he adds the detour into his routine. Jack could set a watch by these constants, these inflexible milestones in the day. Then there are the strange unpredictabilities, like Samira’s deviations. Yeah, he's still keeping track. They remain the only things that really put a smile on his face. 

He feels more alive than he has in what feels like years, though. The hypervigilance that lives in his spine, the trip-wire awareness he’d come home with and then carried with him through the loops at PittFest, then lost for a spell when he almost drowned in the darkness—it has a use, again, finally. He won’t waste it on car backfires and loud rooms, or crowded spaces. He’s successfully redirected his focus.  

He is, however, lonelier than he has ever been. After that fateful Yesterday on the roof, the ring stays glued to his left hand. Black band, warn smooth where it catches against his fingers, or when he turns it on his finger without noticing he’s doing it. All those years ago, Jack had moved it to his right hand after the one-year mark because a friend—well-meaning, terrible at it—had said that some people found it helpful. He’d discovered that she was right and hated that she was right, so he’d moved it back to its rightful spot. Never really felt the same after that, though. 

It's not that he thinks about Tina constantly. He’d stopped that somewhere in those first few years of grief, that horrible period where he’d had to decide between going under or staying afloat, and had—painfully, agonisingly—chosen the latter. 

But in the endless loop, these identical hours and long, brutal Yesterdays, sometimes things will catch him sideways. Like the neon lights. Tina had always hated them. She’d said it made everyone look like ghosts and fucked with their colours. Jack had suspected at the time that she only said it to make him laugh, because she did so love it when he laughed at her jokes, the sillier the better. Or the smell of burnt coffee in the break room. He still drinks his coffee burnt at home, because Tina never drank it—she preferred matcha, or the Queen of Leaves as she liked to call it—but she'd bought him a massive coffee maker anyways, too big for one person by far, and a matching one for the hospital, just because.  

It’s still there in the break room, that old thing, and the coffee it makes tastes terrible, far worse than his one at him. No one can bear to replace it, least of all him. Most of the new kids don't know, just the old timers, the ones that got to know her.  

He’s learned not to let the memories linger for too long. He knows that’s where madness lies, and he won’t go back down that path, not here, where he’s already so much more vulnerable. He just lets this attention catch on those things the way he’d notice a familiar landmark from a moving vehicle. Then he just keeps driving. 

::

Jack has guided Mohan through the Corpsman’s case countless time by now. He could do it in his sleep by now, has done it in a kind of waking autopsy, the pathophysiology of the many complications catalogued, cross-referenced, and filed in his subconscious, burned in there like a brand. The case itself barely registers anymore. The only thing that registers to him is Mohan.  

With every new Yesterday, she mutates. He likes to try a new approach every time, keep things fresh, see how she'll react. Jack will gives her an opening, a little push, watches her pick up the gauntlet. He gives her a harder opening, testing her, not even pushing, and she eventually gives a little shake of her head, or bites down hard on her lip, staring down at the dying patient, and then works for it.  

When he doesn’t give her an opening, she'll create one, asks the right questions, follows the thread. It is, he thinks, the most consistent thing in the entire loop. More consistent than the gurneys, or Robby’s grief, or the gunman. Mohan, given enough space and time, will eventually find the answer.  

He remains passive one loop, deliberately hanging back, wanting to see how far she’ll go without him. She identifies the vena cava abnormality, and somehow doesn’t cave to Walsh’s bullying. Jack watches her with his arms folded over his chest, goosebumps rising on his arms. He can’t help but think, That’s my girl, doesn’t even wonder at the thought till after it’s all over. 

“This isn’t the standard of care,” Walsh sneers at Abbot. “Put your resident on a leash, old man.” 

“Fuck standard of care,” Mohan suddenly bursts out, looking stunned at herself after she’s said it.

Hearing his own words come out of her mouth feels a punch to the jaw; Jack didn’t ever think he would feel shocked again, not after all this time. But he feels his mouth drop open, breath hitching in his chest. 

Walsh looks just as shocked. Angry, too, of course. But Jack sends her a quelling look, and after a moment Walsh just throws her hands in the air.  

“Thought you were better than this, Mohan,” Walsh says tightly. “Too much time on the night shift, roleplaying M.A.S.H. in the break room?” 

“That’s enough,” Jack growls.

Walsh eventually retreats to sulk in the corner of the room. 

Mohan takes it slowly, surely, hands steady but jaw tightening every time a new alarm sounds. “You got this,” Jack says, can’t keep himself quiet. “You’re doing great. Just pull. Slowly.” It takes her a little longer than when he’s fully in the lead, jaw tightening against the doubt, but she gets there, in the end. Like she always does. 

Jack goes home that night and thinks about that jaw. The sharp edge of it. Her cheekbones, stretching the skin and reflecting the harsh light. The way she argued herself back from the edge of her own hesitation.

All she needs is a little push, that’s all she’s ever needed. Someone to back her up, watch her six. 

He can be that for her, Jack decides, staring up at the ceiling fan. If all his other endeavours fail, he can at least do that. 

::

Their interactions are what now drive his days. Even more so than the new goal he’s set for himself, which he’d probably have already achieved if he hadn’t found this new distraction. Time is something he'll never run out of, so Jack doesn't feel too guilty about it. This is, he tells himself, purely an intellectual pleasure. The loop is a desert of repetition, and Mohan is the only thing in it that reliably surprises him. Of course he looks forward to her. She’s interesting, and god, he needs interesting now like he needs air to breathe, something to break up the monotony, the back-breaking push of the boulder up the hill. The little deviations never repeat, and with every reset there’s something new. Jack finds himself actively exploring ways to get her to start up a new thread of conversation. There’s always more to find, and he has the time to dig.  

He take notes of things, eager to remember. He learns that Mohan likes to make dark jokes when she’s under pressure, though she's quiet enough that only the person standing next to her would be able to pick up on it. He starts positioning himself to be the person standing next to her, even though it takes him five loops before he figures out that the only way to do this is just to make sure she’s by his side for every single one of his patients, no excuses. Mohan never complains, although Robby shoots him a look every time, despite being the one to assign her to Jack in the first place.  

Mohan has solid opinions about things, for the most part, but when it comes to personal matters she's quick to clam up. She definitely doesn’t volunteer unless asked. He learns to ask, indirectly, in ways that don’t spook her—he learns that, unless she’s deeply upset, the only people she’ll actually give up private information to are McKay and Collins. Jack has a feeling that’s because they’re the only ones Mohan is confident are actually listening to her. 

She refuses to accept credit for any of her work. She will, however, unflinchingly accept criticism, like she thinks it’s the only thing she deserves. 

Jack learns that she like to read on her breaks. Not, you know, during the MCI, but during normal shifts, like when there’s a lull on night shift and they’re all caught up on their paperwork.

Mohan likes to read case reports, but sometimes she’ll mention a book offhand during a loop, and Jack jumps on it every time. After a few fascinating answers, he makes a habit of asking what she’s been reading lately, because somehow the answer is different with every reset: fiction, nonfiction, genres he's never even heard of. (This feels like it should be impossible, but Jack is far beyond questioning it) Turns out she is a voracious reader. Her face lights up and her cheek dimples, and sometimes he won’t even hear her words, just likes watching her speak about everything from monsters to Ancient Greece to a young Afghan boy running through the war-torn streets of Kabul.  

Jack wonders, sometimes, if Tina would have liked her. 

Then he sets that thought down carefully, like setting down something fragile, and walks away from it like a coward.

::

There is a loop (maybe loop five hundred, maybe more, he’s not counting anymore) where something unusual happens.

He’s standing at the Hub after it’s all over, rolling his neck and watching the board fill back up while Mohan finishes up charting three feet away. She’s been at it for twenty minutes, typing without pause, and he’s noticed that she does this thing when she’s deep in concentration where she goes almost preternaturally still, like she’s sealed a perimeter around the task at hand.

He says, just to fill the silence, “Long day.”

And Mohan says, without looking up, “Is it ever not.”

Jack hums. Pretty standard Mohan answer, but he’s gotten four separate massive deviations this loop, so he’s not gonna complain. 

Then she adds, still typing, “You know what I keep thinking about?”  

Jack perks up. Here we go, he thinks. Incredible run. If she’s going off-script again—and at this point, with her, there’s barely a script left—she’ll set a new personal record.

“The corpsman,” Mohan says. “The one from a few weeks ago.” She pauses. “I keep thinking about what would’ve happened if we hadn’t caught the vena cava abnormality when we did. How close did we get to losing him? Like, you know, what if Doctor Walsh had stalled us for another 5 minutes?” 

Jack freezes. 

“A few weeks ago?” he repeats carefully. 

“The pigtail catheter procedure,” Mohan says, finally glancing up. “The Navy corpsman with the air embolism, remember?” 

Jack stares at her. “I remember,” he says slowly. “Do you?” 

She frowns at him. “Of course. It was—” she starts to say, and then her expression shifts. Something flickers behind her eyes, fast and then gone, like a fish turning in deep water. “I remember it clearly,” she finishes, but the words come out robotically, her eyes far away again. 

Jack says nothing. He just watches her. Her fingers are still resting on the keys, unmoving. 

“Do you remember what our last case was together? A couple hours ago?” Jack asks finally, barely stopping his voice from trembling. “What did I say to you, when we finished?”

“Of course,” Mohan says. She frowns. “You told me to take the win.” 

“What win?” Jack presses. 

She sighs. “Hilarious,” she says, and goes back to typing, but she’s slower now, and twice she makes a small error and deletes it, which he’s never seen her do. Her brow is furrowed, and there’s that look on her face that he sees sometimes when she deviates.  

Can’t put his finger on it, but the closest he can come to describing it is lost. 

::

The conversations in the loop are like trails on a map. He knows every conversation that has ever happened on the first Yesterday by heart. He could chart them, predict even the pauses, the breaths, down to the tiniest unmarked trails.

In the loops that follow their conversation, Mohan goes completely off-map.

He sees it in the small margins, in the silences after a question, in the tiny recalibrations of her expression between one thing and the next. The way she’d confused the pigtail catheter procedure for something they’d done a week before Yesterday haunts him daily, weighing on his mind. Mohan could’ve just been tired, sure. She always gets a little manic towards the end of the shift, but he’s usually occupied with the night shift handoff, and doesn’t spend as much time with her. 

Could just be another glitch. 

Could be more. He hopes—

No, fuck that. He doesn’t hope. Can’t afford that anymore. Still, he doesn’t know if it actually means something, or if he’s just watching her more carefully than he watches anyone else, which is its own kind of answer, he knows.

He begins to catalogue the surprises in his mind a little more purposefully. The jokes he can't predict, the moments where she holds his gaze a beat longer than the script calls for. The way she responds to his rare deflections, on those occasional off-days, with a particular look that says she’s clocked it and will leave it alone, for now, which is a more sophisticated read than most people manage.

The most unsettling deviation is the one he still can’t decode. Jack’s just told her to do the pigtail catheter procedure (I’m not going to do anything. You are) and after the case, when the stats are improving and Walsh is leaving with that annoyed glare that he always finds quietly satisfying, Mohan looks at him.

“What?” Jack asks, throwing her a smile. “Still scared, Doctor Mohan?”

He doesn’t always tease her, but he’ll allow himself the pleasure every once in a while, just to see the little O shape her mouth makes. 

She isn’t making it now, though. Right now, she’s looking at him searchingly, an edge of frustration lingering underneath.

“Mohan?” Jack says gently. “C’mon, we’ve got work to do.”

“Have you always done that?” Mohan asks him. 

“Done what?”

“Pushed. Like that.” She’s not looking away. “How do you judge a person’s limits?”

“That a criticism?” Jack asks lightly. In any other circumstance he’d apologise, ask if she’s uncomfortable with him pushing, but the gleam in her eye tells him that wouldn’t be the right reply.

“No,” she says, and tilts her head. “I’m just trying to figure out if it just happens with me, with this particular case. Or, you know, if that’s just… an Abbot thing.”

Jack opens his mouth and closes it again. First time in a long time he doesn't know what to say.

“Both,” he says finally. “But you’re special, so mainly just with you. I wanted you to do it because I knew that you could.” 

Mohan nods once, slowly, like she’s filing the information away. Then she refocuses on the gurney like nothing happened, sliding back into her usual motions of prepping the patient for the trip up to the OR, and he spends the rest of the loop wondering why the hell she’d asked.

::

That night, the last minutes before the car backfires, he turns the ring on his finger and looks at the ceiling.

He thinks about what it means to look at someone and feel like you’ve been somewhere with them that neither of you can quite place. Like you’ve shared a thousand meaningful moments.. How it so closely mirrors the way he himself catches himself looking at her, sometimes. Wondering if he’d known her in another lifetime. Wondering if that’s why he’s so drawn to her, if that’s what’s making her stand out from the mundane background like a spotlight is on her, a 4D projection in a 2D landscape. 

He thinks about how he’s spent one thousand and fuckever-many Yesterdays learning the whole landscape of this day. How the one thing in it that he is still learning about, that still brings him joy, is her.

This is when he stops lying to himself about what he’s feeling and lets himself sink fully into it. 

“Samira Mohan,” Jack whispers, his voice enveloped instantly by the dark, tasting her in his mouth.

Then,

“I think I’m falling in love with you.”

Saying it out loud doesn’t change anything. He’s known for a long time, and now he’s admitted it to himself and the mosquito that’s no doubt laying eggs that will never hatch in his bathroom sink. Jack waits for some kind of transformation—a tingle in his spine, the loop imploding on itself, suddenly transforming into a cockroach, fucking anything—but he’s still just Jack, lying in bed, in love with Samira like he’s been for, let's face it, months by the this point.

Next Yesterday she won’t remember any of it. The conversations, the quiet moments over coffee, the deviating quips, the look she’d given him today before turning away, they'll all fade, obviously. Next Yesterday, which should be Tomorrow but never is, she’ll greet him the way she always greets him: with the warm-professional tone she uses for colleagues she respects, with a touch of careful distance she keeps around herself like a moat. Some days there’s a glimmer in her eye, and the moat retracts; rare, though. Jack’s still not sure if it’s just his imagination.

Whatever the reason, the next time the loop resets, it will be the First Yesterday for her, same as always.

Jack Abbot loving Samira Mohan will not change that.

The thought keeps him awake until the clock turns to 3:00. He blinks, and suddenly daylight is streaming through the gap in the curtains again. 

::

A lifetime passes. The face in the mirror remains the same. Sometimes Jack checks for new wrinkles, smoothing a hand down the scratchy beginnings of the beard on his jaw in search of something, anything different. Probably what vampires feel like, he thinks one loop, and spends the whole day speaking like Count Dracula just for the hell of it. 

The loop is still his prison, but in its unforgiving walls miraculously he has found a crack. 

Every night he goes home to a house that smells like burned coffee with the K-Bar under the bed and the scanner crackling in the dark. Every night he lies on his back and turns the ring on his finger in the quiet. 

Every morning the car backfires, the mosquito hums, and he gets up in musty, wrinkled scrubs; Robby tells Samira that she’s paired up with Jack, and when she turns, Jack is always waiting for her with a smile—patiently, silently loving her.

::

Jack shoulders his way into Trauma. 

“Tapping in,” he says like he always does, and Shen slaps him on the shoulder, perfectly on script. 

“Thanks, brother.” 

Jack sighs. He’s just… So Tired, recently. It’s been a few loops now where he’s taken a little extra time getting out of bed, getting in the shower. Warning tingles crawl up his spine for no reason. Even the drive over, he’d taken slowly, lingered in the parking lot, mind blank and shoulders heavy. 

His mood seems to be particularly infectious. Mohan has been deviating strangely. Her energy is lackluster, mirroring his. He hasn’t seen her run in three, four loops now.  

Last Yesterday, she hadn’t even asked him what else was in his go-bag. She'd just quietly watched him use the control-cric kit and then walked away, ignoring the flirtatious cop that’s always trying to catch her eye. Walsh’s inside joke of “Nipples to navel is no man’s land” hadn't even sparked Mohan’s usual reaction. 

The sight had made his bad mood even worse. If he loses Samira's deviations, hell, even if he loses her fucking script to the void, he doesn't know what he'll do. Jack has been good. All work and no play has made Jack a dull boy. He doesn't deserve to be fucked with like this.  

Mohan is standing in her usual spot, now. She hadn’t turned when he’d walked in.  

“E-fast normal, no abdominal hemorrhage, no tamponade,” she rattles off to him in greeting. 

So. Tired. 

“I need a central line kit and a five French pigtail catheter.” Jack interrupts her, addressing Jesse.  

Jack can’t bring himself to look at Mohan right now, not after last night, when he’d spent an hour in the dark just staring at nothing, twirling the ring around his finger, picturing how her face had always lit up in delight with every successful control cric. Thinking about how he may never see it again. Mourning what he didn’t think he’d ever lose. 

He knows that he’s being rude right now. He’s just not in the fucking mood, man. He can't wait for this day to reset.  

Jesse frowns at him, but then nods and doesn’t question it, just narrows his eyes and ducks out of the room. Jack knows he won’t be so lucky with Mohan, and braces himself for the inevitable onslaught of questions. Every Yesterday is still her first, after all. She’ll be wondering why he’s skipped the diagnosis and barreled straight to the cure. 

Mohan isn’t saying anything. 

He doesn’t have a collapsed lung, Jack recites to himself, prompting her, eyes still on the Corpsman’s face. Waiting. What’s causing his oxygen levels to tank?  

So what are you gonna… do? 

When he finally turns to her, puzzled by her lack of reaction, Mohan is watching him mutely.  

“Mohan?”

The pupils of her brown eyes are blown, her gaze abstract. Her eyes move over his face, down to his hands, over to the monitor and then back to his face again, searching.  

“Samira,” Jack coaxes gently, impatience and self-pity forgotten. She’s chosen a hell of a time to deviate.   

Come on, he thinks, staring back at her.   

With a small shake and a deep inhale through her nose, Mohan appears to come back to herself. “You’re not going to do anything,” she says, voice flat like she’s reading out loud. “I am.” 

Jack’s heart leaps into his throat. “What?” he croaks. 

“You’re not going to do anything,” Mohan repeats. She smiles at him, a crazy smile with zero humor or warmth, an expression he’s never seen before in a thousand Yesterdays. Tears begin to roll down her cheeks, and she looks up at the ceiling and laughs in disbelief. “I am.” 

It can’t be.

“Doctor Mohan—” he starts.

“Doctor Abbot,” Mohan says, still laughing, tears still streaming. “You’re gonna think I’m crazy.”

“I’m not,” Jack says, spine tingling, heart still in his throat and pumping furiously, choking him. “Tell me.”

“Intracardiac air embolism.” A manic expression is on her face. He’s seen it before but never in here, never like this. “We need to remove the bubble. I know what to do. You tell me how to do it. You’ve talked me through it three times.”

“Three times,” Jack breathes. 

The ground beneath him is shaking, roiling like in an earthquake. He can feel it giving way beneath his foot. Except that it’s not, it’s just his knees abruptly giving out, all the strength seeping from his body at once. He steadies himself on the gurney, muscles straining to keep himself upright. 

“You know.” Mohan stares at him in shock, voice going high and borderline hysterical. “Oh my God, you know.” 

“I’ve known for years.”

Jack can feel the sob forming in his throat, buries it deep, pushes it down, holding her gaze. I've loved you for a lifetime, Samira.

The nurses are bustling around them in preparation for the procedure, shooting them curious looks. Without another word, Jack hands her the guidewire. She stares at it like he’s just handed her a live snake.  

“Go on,” Jack tells her, his heart pounding. “Show me how we win this.” 

She slowly reaches out and takes it from him. Her fingers brush his lightly.  

Taking a deep breath, Samira gives him one, quick nod.  

“Okay,” she says.