Chapter Text
There are worse things than a crush, Samira tells herself. Ischemic heart disease. Aquagenic urticaria. Hemiplegic migraines. Still—crushes are up there.
Realizing she had a crush wasn’t even a dramatic event. There was no lightning strike, no single moment she could point to and say, there. It simply presented as a chronic incessant awareness in her chest that became acutely hard to ignore.
Handoff is supposed to be the clean break in Samira’s day, when patients are presented in neat summaries. Day shift bleeding into night. She tries to keep her focus where it belongs: on her patients and her charting. On literally anything else. But he’s always there.
Dr. Jack Abbot. Night shift attending. Problem.
There’s no origin story to this pesky crush. There’s no inciting incident Samira could trace back to. One day he was just another attending, and then eventually he wasn’t. This crush would have been fine. Possibly manageable. Entirely ignorable, even… if it weren’t such a bad idea. Senior resident and attending—lines exist for a reason; crossing them would be highly frowned upon at best and subject to termination at worst. She knows all of this the same way that she knows dosing protocols must be clear, definitive, and without room for interpretation.
Samira knows better: Don’t get attached to things that can’t go anywhere. Don’t read into behavior that isn’t yours alone. And most importantly, don’t—under any circumstances—start building narratives out of scraps.
Dr. Abbot flirts, and when he flirts, no one is immune and no one is singled out. A passing comment here, a look there, just enough charm to keep the room tilted in his direction. What makes Dr. Samira Mohan special?
He treats you differently, the thought is unwelcome and immediate when it lands. Samira tries to shake it off. She’s not that far gone…but she’s not blind, either. There are moments, small ones. They are easy to dismiss if she tries hard enough.
Fourth of July was chaos, heat, noise, a DKA patient who decided running was a better idea than treatment, annoying calls from her amma, a panic attack thrown back in her face by her attending. Samira had been excited to show Orlando Diaz the bag of diabetic home care supplies; instead, she parts the curtains to a shirtless Abbot. They weren’t even on the same wavelengths then—she was fully focused on her patient while Abbot with his bullet-grazed back existed adjacent to that.
And then voice low, rough around the edges, he had said, “I’ll pay for it.”
It wasn’t a big thing to him. He didn’t even make eye contact, and Jack Abbot loves eye contact. His offer came so easily to him that Samira couldn’t help but wonder what other soft surprises he is capable of.
Maybe that was the start? It’s hard to say, because this crush doesn’t feel new. It feels like it had been there all along, waiting for her to catch up.
She thinks of the pigtail catheter procedure—her hands steadied by his trust in her. His instruction stubbornly overrode the sharp protests of Dr. Walsh, who was armed with defibrillator paddles against his back.
It does something to Samira, his confidence in her skills as a doctor. Abbot freely lent his support, which was different from Dr. Robby who talks metrics and movement, and measures success in time saved and beds cleared. He might as well give Gloria a run for her money. Robby never even bothered to stop the insulting “Slow-Mo” nickname. But Abbot… He lets her take her time. He lets her dig. She is free to connect with patients.
“Slow is smooth; smooth is fast,” he murmured once next to her ear as she white-knuckled a laryngoscope and worked through a difficult airway that refused to cooperate.
He emails her case reports, research articles, longitudinal studies, things he thinks she’ll find interesting. Sometimes he prints them and leaves notes in the margins, then sticks the folded papers in her locker. During slow night shifts, they discuss the papers wherever they happen to cross paths—the break room, trauma bay, the hub despite the nurses’ smirks and side-eyes.
It would be easy to misread Dr. Abbot’s attention, if she hasn’t seen him with everyone else. She notices the extra Dunkin’ he grabbed for Shen and the way he leans into Ellis’s outrageous jokes. He meets the med students, interns, residents, nurses, and support staff at eye level like they’re peers, not separated by years and titles.
Jack Abbot is nice to everyone. Everyone likes Dr. Abbot.
And Samira—
Samira has a crush on him.
Henderson asks to switch shifts for a week, and Samira agrees before Crus has even finished explaining why. It’s an easy yes. Robby barely pushes back when she tells him. People cover for each other all the time; that’s how this place works. It absolutely has nothing to do with the fact that night shifts would put her on the same schedule as Dr. Abbot. It doesn’t even occur to her. Not consciously, nope.
“Nightcrawlers,” Shen calls them. As a temporary addition, Samira gets first pick of the “weirdest and the wildest” cases. She thinks with a flicker of amusement that Trinity Santos would happily trade her right ear for the same opportunity.
The patients are different at night. A little less predictable and a little more unraveled. The pace evens out somewhat—something the day shift doesn’t allow. Samira appreciates the space between the chaos. It affords her time to finish charting without interruption, to read through the articles Abbot sends her, and to follow a line of questioning with a patient without someone hovering nearby, reminding her to keep things moving.
No Robby, no metrics breathing down her neck.
Just after one AM on her second night, a gurney bursts through the ED doors. Lena directs them to Trauma 1.
“Doctor Mohan, with me,” Abbot calls.
Samira is already moving before the words fully register, chart abandoned mid-sentence, nitrile gloves snapped on as she falls into step behind him. The gurney barrels past them toward the trauma bay, the patient’s wail cutting through the ED in wet, uneven sounds.
The EMT talks as they move. “Lawrence Bridger. Thirty-nine-year-old male, MVC—”
“On my count,” Abbot says, already positioning himself next to the head of the bed as they transfer. Samira grabs hold next to the EMT. “One, two, three.” The patient cries out weakly.
“Restrained driver, front-end collision, approximately forty miles per hour,” the EMT continues. “Primary injury is left-sided facial degloving. Airway’s patent but getting messy.”
Samira steps in close, reaching for the patient’s hand before he can claw at his face. “Mr. Bridger, can you hear me? Squeeze my hand.” It’s faint and delayed, but it’s there, a response she can work with. Degloving might be too strong a description, but there sure is a lot of blood and tissue hanging off the patient’s face.
“GCS twelve,” Lumen, a night nurse, calls from the other side of the bed.
“BP one-forty-eight over ninety-two, heart rate one-twenty-two,” the EMT adds.
“Sat?” Samira asks. Abbot stays in the periphery, calmly assessing the situation.
“Ninety-six on non-rebreather. Two large-bore IVs in both ACs. We gave a hundred of fentanyl about eight minutes ago—minimal effect.”
On cue, the patient lets out another broken sound, hand twitching upward. Lumen intercepts it smoothly and guides it back down as blood slips past his lips. Not that it made a difference when the left side of his face resembled a peeled plum.
The team moves in practiced sequence—meds are drawn, monitors adjusted, the room tightening into focus. Etomidate. Rocuronium. The patient’s movements stutter, then still, the noise cutting off mid-breath as the drugs take hold. Saline-soaked gauze is applied to the mangled cheek.
Samira positions herself at the head of the bed, laryngoscope in hand. Her hands are steady as the world narrows to anatomy and angles and muscle memory. She works through the swelling and the blood, while out of the corner of her vision, she’s aware of Abbot. He doesn’t hover or interfere as she works. He’s just rocking slightly on his heels, hands clasped behind his back like he has all the time in the world. “I have cords,” she says. “Passing tube.”
His gaze should make her self-conscious, but it doesn’t. If anything, it settles something in her. The absence of interruption and correction is frankly flattering, especially when she barely gets support or patience from Robby. Abbot’s assumption that she’ll get it right chills her to the bone.
“Tube’s in,” she announces with a heavy exhale.
“Bilateral breath sounds,” Lumen confirms a beat later. “Sat’s climbing.”
When the tension in the room eases, Samira steps back. She pulls off her gloves and turns toward Abbot for the next step, anticipating his direction or orders. Instead, he just tilts his head slightly, one eyebrow lifting in a silent prompt.
Go on, Dr. Mohan.
She doesn’t hesitate. “No avulsion that I can see. Tissue is still connected, but displaced. I think Dr. Walsh is still in-house—can someone page her? And plastics?” she says, already moving on. “We’ll need a CT head and max-face as soon as he’s stable.”
“Plastics is going to love this,” Lumen mutters under her breath.
“They always do,” Abbot replies dryly. “Job security.”
“Scanner’s open,” Toomarian calls from the doorway.
Abbot steps back just enough to give Samira space again in that same deliberate non-interference. “Anything else?” he asks, like he’s asking for her plan, not testing it.
Samira considers for half a second, running through the checklist. “Monitor for airway swelling despite the tube. Suction as needed. Keep him sedated—we don’t want him bucking and making this worse.”
“Agreed.”
Another beat. Then, quieter, just for her—“Nice tube.”
It’s casual, almost offhand. The butterflies in her stomach shouldn’t flutter the way they do. Samira nods once, like it doesn’t matter because orotracheal intubation is ultimately not a big deal in an ED. A nurse could do it. And it’s not like he said it with the same intensity as the “Solid work” after the pigtail catheter… Right?