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Bleary-eyed and already nursing a mild headache just above her temples, Trinity Santos walks into the ER, swatting away Whitaker as he fails badly, to justify spending the whole weekend at their former patient's wife’s farm, only managing to greet her with a half-arsed excuse.
Dr. Dennis Whitaker, aka “Huckleberry,” as she had decided to call him early on and refused to let go of, is the son of Demeter. It had taken him longer than most to come into the knowledge of what he is. He had been claimed by his godly mother late, in his final year of high school, when it could no longer be ignored or explained away.
His parents had not taken it well. Not the revelation of a goddess, nor the implication of infidelity on his father's part, but him, what he is and what that meant for their own beliefs. In their eyes, his differences had always been the problem and the truth was better ignored than faced.
He doesn’t speak to them anymore, Whitaker had mentioned early on, during one of their first nights as roommates over pot ramen that barely counted as dinner. The conversation drifted and Trinity found herself admitting she didn’t speak to her parents either, something she hadn't told anyone and not for being the daughter of a god, but for being gay.
Trinity Santos, daughter of Ares, had never found anything remarkable in the knowledge that she was sacred offspring. There was no thunderous revelation, no grand moment of divine spectacle. It simply was, like her tendency to argue with authority figures who deserved it, or her inability to let a bad decision slide just because it came from someone with more seniority.
Ares did not speak to her the way Athena speaks to her beloved daughter Victoria “Crash” Javadi, or how Apollo tries and fails with his son, Dr Jack Abbott who avoids him like a vampire does the sun. There were no conversations, no structured guidance, no spiritual instruction.
If anything, the only acknowledgment of her holy ancestral lineage showed up in the parts of her she had always assumed were just personality, her refusal to back down when she knew she was right, the way she got annoyed when someone talked down to her, the sharp humour she used like a scalpel when things got too real.
People called her rude, competitive and difficult. They weren’t wrong. She hated being wrong more than she hated being disliked, and in an environment like The Pitt that tended to make things complicated.
Especially when Dr. Frank Langdon was involved.
Him being in the ER was enough to tighten something unpleasant in her chest whenever she saw him. Wearing scrubs that are slightly too neat for someone who had just come out of rehab, she thought. Posture just a fraction too relaxed for a man who had already proven he should not be trusted.
There was no version of events in which Santos was ever going to forget what he had done. He had been good, in the way dangerous people were often good at their jobs right up until the moment they weren’t.
And trusted by people who should have known better. Which, unfortunately, was still the general consensus among most of the department.
Chief of Emergency Medicine, Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch was calm under pressure and unshakable in a way that made other people either relax or spiral, depending on how well they understood what standing too close to him meant.
He was also, whether anyone said it out loud or not, something else entirely. A son of Hades. One of the Big Three.
Not that Robby ever introduced himself that way. He didn’t need to. The staff around the hospital already bent around him in ways it didn’t bend around anyone else, decisions that felt final when they left his mouth. And he trusted Langdon.
Then he had stolen medication from the very system that relied on him to safeguard it.
And Santos had to be the one to expose it.
Robby did not trust easily and yet with Langdon, he did. It wasn’t spoken as approval. It was quieter than that. A steady expectation that Langdon would do his job, that he would show up when it mattered, that whatever had happened before had not permanently invalidated what he was capable of in the present.
Trinity hated that almost more than she hated Langdon himself.
Dr Frank Langdon was, whether she liked it or not, technically her brother. When they met, there was recognition between them, the kind that passes between people who seem carved from the same impulse.
It was in the way they spoke over each other when they disagreed. In the way neither of them ever truly backed down first. In this way both of them could look at a situation and decide, independently and instantly, what needed to happen, even if they reached completely different conclusions about how to get there.
“Two cardiac arrests en route,” Dana called from the bay doors, voice sharp enough to cut through everything else. “Ambulance is coming in hot. Adult couple, collapse at home, simultaneous onset. No pulses on scene, CPR in progress.”
Trinity was already moving before she consciously decided to. Her hands were gloving, her feet taking her toward trauma bay two without waiting for permission. Beside her, she saw Langdon fall into step.
“Two arrests, same time?” He said, not questioning the information so much as noting it.
“Likely a shared trigger,” Trinity quipped, already tired of Langdon being there. “Tox, environmental, or cardiac event in one setting-”
“Or coincidence,” he cut in.
She shot him a look. “There’s no such thing as coincidence in a double arrest.”
“Statistically-”
“Don’t,” she said sharply, and he didn’t finish. A beat of silence passed between them, then Robby’s voice cut through it.
“Enough.”
He stood at the centre of the room that had organised itself around him. His eyes were already on the monitors being wheeled in. “Santos-”
“I know,” she said immediately, already moving toward trauma bay one.
“Langdon,” Robby added.
There was a fraction of a pause. Not hesitation but assessment, then:
“You’re with her.”
Trinity almost stopped walking. She didn’t turn around, but she felt it anyway, that familiar tightening in her chest that had nothing to do with the incoming patients and everything to do with the fact that Robby had just placed Langdon beside her like it was the most obvious decision in the world.
The first stretcher burst through the doors.
Adult male. Cyanotic. Chest compressions ongoing.
Second stretcher right behind it.
Adult female. Same condition. Same timing. Same silence.
Two arrests. One cause that is still unknown.
Trinity took position at the head of the first bed without asking, taking over CPR.
“VFib,” he said.
“I see it,” Trinity snapped back.
“Then shock’s indicated.”
“I didn’t say it wasn’t.”
There was another beat of silence. The kind of silence that never meant agreement, only temporary truce.
“Charging,” nurse Perlah said.
Robby was behind them now, not intervening, just present.
“Clear.”
The shock hit. The patient jerked once violently, then silence followed and the monitor flickered.
“Resuming compressions” Trinity said immediately, no hesitation.
“Again,” Langdon announced.
“Charging,” Perlah repeated.
Langdon glanced at Trinity then. Just enough to register the fact that she had not looked away from the patient once.
“Clear.”
Nothing. “Two shocks without change,” he stated.
“Then we’re not dealing with a simple rhythm problem,” she shot back. “Keep going.”
“Or we’re missing the cause,” he replied.
Trinity’s jaw tightened. “We’re always missing the cause at the start-”
Before she could continue her retort, Robby stepped in closer “Treat what’s in front of you,” he said.
Langdon looked back to the monitor. Trinity did too.
The patient’s chest rose under compressions that were now being cycled by a new set of hands. The rhythm is still chaotic. Still wrong. Still not responding.
“Again,” she said, lacking the same bite as before.
And somewhere behind her, in the other bay, the second patient was being treated on a different kind of urgency, less argument, more controlled scramble.
Whitaker was already there.
Airway’s patent,” he called out, hands steady despite the speed of it. “No obvious trauma. Compressions ongoing.”
The female patient lay pale and still under the fluorescent lights, monitor screaming the same pattern they were seeing in the other room, unsustained, refusing to stabilise no matter how many times the team tried to impose order on it.
Dr. Melissa “Mel” King stood slightly off-centre from the bed, eyes tracking everything at once.
Daughter of Iris, goddess of the rainbow and divine messenger between realms, she had always been predisposed to patterns others missed. Not messages in the mythic sense Trinity liked to imagine, but signals, shifts in tone, timing, behaviour, physiology. The things that carried meaning when everything else became noise.
And in a place like the ER, where everything demanded to be noticed at once, Mel’s mind did not fracture under pressure the way people assumed it should.
So when she spoke, it wasn’t guesswork. It was recognition.
Her gaze flicked again to the rhythm strip, then the patient’s collapse timeline, then the notes Whitaker had already started dictating in shorthand.
“…they’re linked,” she said finally.
Whitaker frowned. “Obviously they’re linked, it’s a couple-”
“No,” Mel interrupted softly. “Not like that.”
Her gaze flicked to the rhythm strip.
Whitaker glanced at her. “Are you seeing something I’m not?”
Mel didn’t answer immediately. She rarely did when she was processing.
Instead, she tilted her head slightly, as if listening to something no one else could hear properly.
She stepped closer to the monitor, eyes narrowing just slightly as another spike of irregularity rolled across the screen.
“It’s the same physiological sequence,” she said. “Male collapse first. Female secondary sympathetic surge. Acute stress response on an already unstable cardiac baseline.”
Whitaker blinked. “You’re saying one of them triggered the other?”
“Yes,” Mel said. “It's an exertional collapse in the male. Acute cardiac event during high-intensity physical activity. The female patient went into immediate catecholamine-driven VFib from witnessed collapse.”
Silence hit both bays at once. Even the machines seemed to feel it.
With his patient stabilising and being moved to cardiology, Langdon shifted his attention to the second bay and Mel. “…repeat that.”
Whitaker didn’t look up from the monitor, but his tone shifted slightly. “She’s saying primary exertional arrest.”
“And secondary stress-induced arrhythmia,” Mel confirmed.
Langdon let out a low, disbelieving sound from the second bay. “You’re telling me-”
Mel didn’t hesitate.
“Yes.” A pause.
Then, almost clinically detached:
“They were having sex.”
…
Time blurred the way it always did in The Pitt.
Trinity Santos existed somewhere inside that current of time and chaos, wading from patient to patient with the kind of controlled exhaustion that only came from refusing to let anything slow her down long enough to feel it.
By the time she noticed she needed five uninterrupted minutes of silence to ward off a full blown migraine, it was already too much of a luxury she was unlikely to receive.
She slipped into the bathroom without thinking much of it. The lights too bright. The quiet too loud. The contrast to the rest of the department is almost disorienting.
For a second, she just stood there. Then she heard the sink running and Dr Garcia was there.
Trauma surgery fellow. Precise pretty hands. Sharper instincts. She looked up through the mirror first, not turning immediately.
“You look like hell,” Yolanda said mildly.
Trinity snorted under her breath. “That’s generous.”
Yolanda finally turned off the tap and leaned back against the sink, studying her. “Busy shift?”
“Two arrests, a coding septic, and Whitaker trying to explain cow births to an attending,” Trinity replied.
That earned her a faint smile.
Yolanda stepped closer, just enough that the space between them shifted from professional proximity into something more deliberate.
“You’re still thinking about Langdon,” she said. It wasn’t a question.
Trinity’s jaw tightened slightly. “No.”
Yolanda tilted her head. “That was a lie.”
Trinity exhaled through her nose. “It’s not him I’m thinking about.”
“Mm,” Yolanda hummed, unconvinced.
There was a pause where neither of them moved away. Trinity caught her stare and noticed the easy confidence. The calm. The absence of noise.
Artemis, she thought, unhelpfully.
It wasn’t fair, really.
Ares never spoke to her like that. Never guided, never steadied, never arrived in any way that felt reassuring.
Artemis, from everything Trinity had seen through Yolanda and the way she moved through a trauma bay, felt different. She was controlled and sure of herself.
Calm and confident in a way Trinity could only respect from a distance.
Jealousy wasn’t the right word but it also wasn’t not that.
Yolanda’s voice cut through it harshly. “You’re doing that thing again,” she said.
“What thing?”
“Thinking too loud.”
Trinity huffed a short laugh despite herself. “That’s not a thing.”
“It is when you do it,” Yolanda said. Her voice lingered between them for a moment longer than it should have.
Then Trinity stepped back first. She didn’t have a godly parent backing her the way Yolanda did.
“Yeah,” she said flatly. “Well. Try working in this place.”
Then she pushed past her and back into the corridor before the conversation could settle into anything softer than she was willing to tolerate right now.
…
The Pitt never stayed quiet for long.
“Room six,” Dana’s voice cut through. “Louie Carter is back. Found unresponsive in the community. Possible overdose, severe alcohol intoxication.”
Trinity exhaled through her nose. “Of course he is.”
Room six was already in motion by the time Trinity stepped in.
Louie Carter lay slumped on the bed, skin flushed and damp, the sharp, unmistakable smell of alcohol cutting through the antiseptic air. Not unconscious, not fully conscious either. Hovering somewhere unpleasantly in between.
“Vitals?” Trinity asked, already at the bedside.
“BP’s soft. Tachy at one-thirty,” Princess answered. You’d know she was Aphrodite’s kid just by looking at her.
“Of course it is,” Trinity muttered under her breath.
She reached for his wrist, checking for herself. Fast. Thready.
“Let’s get IV access, fluids running, thiamine before glucose-”
“Already done.”
She paused.
Langdon was standing in the doorway, not looking at her but walking in and adjusting the drip rate like he’d been there the whole time.
Of course he had.
Trinity exhaled sharply through her nose. “Good.”
Louie stirred weakly, a groaning sound catching in his throat. His hand twitched like he was trying to push something away that wasn’t there.
“Easy,” Langdon said, voice lower now, steadier. Louie didn’t respond. His head rolled slightly to the side, eyes unfocused.
“Chronic alcohol use. Multiple prior visits. Withdrawal complications. No documented seizures, but he's at high risk.” Langdon said to no one in particular, as if reminding himself.
“You know him well,” Trinity said, softer than she intended. The weight of knowledge that Louie was the one Langdon stole from, the fallout, the temporary exile from The Pitt sat heavy in the room.
“Yeah,” Langdon replied simply. Just a fact. It settled between them, that brief moment of alignment. Almost easy.
It shouldn’t have been. Louie’s monitor flickered again, rate climbing, rhythm uneven.
“See that?” Trinity said.
“Yeah,” Langdon answered, already leaning in. “Could tip into arrhythmia if we don’t get ahead of it.”
“Electrolyte imbalance,” she said.
“Likely.”
“Magnesium?”
“Already ordered.”
She glanced at him again.
There it was. That same rhythm they’d had earlier. Not agreement, exactly. But… coherence. It made something in her chest tighten in a way she didn’t have time to examine.
Then Louie let out a strained, broken sound, somewhere between a groan and a sob.
“Hey,” Langdon said, quieter now. “Louie, you’re back again.”
Trinity watched him for half a second too long. The way he said it. The way he didn’t rush it.
That irritated her more than anything else had all day. “You don’t get to do that,” she said suddenly.
Langdon glanced up. “Do what?”
“That,” she repeated. “Like you didn’t-” She cut herself off, jaw tightening. “Like you didn’t exploit him when he was in this condition to get high.”
Langdon didn’t react immediately. Just adjusted the IV line, checked the monitor again, like she hadn’t said anything at all. Then, “You think I don’t know what this looks like?”
“I think you know exactly what it looks like,” Trinity shot back. “That’s the problem.”
Langdon’s voice, when he spoke, was quieter.
“I didn’t do it to hurt him.”
“That’s not the point.”
“No,” he agreed. “It’s not.”
Trinity blinked, thrown off for half a second by the lack of pushback. He straightened slightly, finally looking at her properly.
“I know what this turns into,” he said looking back at their patient. “If no one steps in early enough.”
“And now you’re the one stepping in?” she asked. “That’s convenient.”
“It’s necessary.”
She let out a short, sharp laugh. “You don’t get to act like it didn’t happen.”
“I’m not acting like anything.”
“Then what are you doing?”
Langdon held her gaze, letting the question hang in the air. Trinity’s eyes narrowed slightly. “You don’t get to talk about remission like you’ve achieved it.”
His expression didn’t change. “I get it.”
“No, you don’t.”
“I do,” he repeated, still calm.
“You went to rehab,” she snapped. “That’s not the same as-”
“No,” he said. “It isn’t.”
Louie’s monitor beeped steadily between them, the only thing in the room that felt predictable.
Langdon’s gaze flicked back to the patient, then, almost absently he spoke, “I had help.”
Trinity frowned. “Yeah. That’s kind of the point.”
Another pause.
“Not from the program.”
Something in his tone shifted. Small. Almost imperceptible but Trinity caught it. Her eyes snapped back to him. “What does that mean?”
Langdon didn’t answer immediately. His focus lingered on Louie, like he was deciding something. Then, quieter “It means I wasn’t alone.”
“That’s not an answer.”
He exhaled once, like he hadn’t meant to get this far.
“He came to see me.”
The words didn’t land all at once. They just… existed.
Trinity blinked. “Who.”
Langdon didn’t look at her and that was the answer. It hit a second later.
Hard.
Fast.
Wrong.
“…no,” she said, the word automatic, instinctive.
Langdon’s jaw tightened slightly.
“You’re not-”
“I didn’t say anything,” he cut in defensively.
“You did,” she shot back, stepping closer without realising it. “You just did.”
A pulse of something sharp and ugly twisted in her chest.
“You’re lying.”
“I’m not.”
“Why would he-” she stopped, breath catching in a way she couldn’t control. “Why would he talk to you?”
Langdon didn’t respond to that. Didn’t defend or justify it. Which somehow made it worse.
Trinity laughed again, but it came out louder this time. “That’s. No. That’s not how that works.”
“Forget it,” Langdon said finally, regretting it now. “It doesn’t matter.”
“It matters,” Trinity quickly snapped. Her voice had changed to something out of control.
“He doesn’t-” She stopped again, jaw tightening hard. “He doesn’t talk to anyone.”
Langdon’s expression flickered, just briefly. “That’s not true.”
“For me it is.”
Langdon didn’t have an answer for that one.
“You don’t get to have that,” she said, blaring hot and angry. “You don’t get to have him.”
Langdon didn’t rise to it. Didn’t argue. Just looked back at her with something that wasn’t victory and wasn’t even satisfaction.
“Yeah,” he said softly. “I didn’t think I did either.”
That was worse. Much worse.
Then she turned away and was gone before he could say anything else. Before she could hear it again.
…
Her charts didn’t get finished. They flickered on the computer screen, half-dictated, half-abandoned, like everything else she’d started that shift and couldn’t quite carry through to completion.
Across the bay, Langdon was talking to Robby. She couldn’t hear it properly, which was worse. It meant her brain had room to invent meaning.
“Louie is stable and fit enough for discharge,” Princess said behind her.
She nodded without turning around.
“Yeah,” she said. “I’ll finish the write-up later.”
She didn’t wait for a response.
The roof wasn’t a secret. Everyone knew about it. A place rarely visited until you needed somewhere the walls didn’t feel like they were pressing in.
Below her, The Pitt kept moving like nothing had happened. Somewhere down there Langdon was still finishing notes she’d walked away from.
And she was up here. Not off shift. Not finished.
Just… unable to breathe in the same air anymore.
Her hands were still faintly shaking. She looked down at them like they belonged to someone else.
It wasn’t exhaustion because she knew exhaustion.
She swallowed hard, once. Then, quieter than anything she’d said all day.
“Ares.”
Nothing changed. The wind didn’t shift. The city didn’t pause.
No answer.
Of course not.
She laughed once under her breath, but it didn’t have humour in it.
Just disbelief that her body was still functioning like everything was normal when it clearly wasn’t.
She leaned back against the low railing at the roof’s edge, palms pressing into cold metal. The city stretched out beyond the hospital in dull, indifferent lights.
And she thought, briefly, absurdly, that gods were supposed to feel closer than this. Not farther.
She exhaled slowly, and the tears finally broke through.
Like he mattered. Like it ever had before.
And then-
She heard him speak.