You come to know Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center in fragments of neon light and intercom static.

At night, it feels less like a hospital and more like a machine that refuses to sleep—gurneys rattling over tile like distant thunder, monitors beeping in uneven rhythms, elevators opening to spill out whatever the city couldn’t keep whole. Blood, rainwater, broken glass, grief—it all arrives here eventually.

And so do you.

Night shift ER.

That’s where you and Dr. Jack Abbot overlap.

He’s already there when you arrive most nights, or mornings—time blurs in here. The board is full, the trauma bay is never truly empty, and somehow he’s always exactly where he needs to be.

Jack doesn’t waste motion. Doesn’t waste words either. You learned quickly that if he says “move,” you move. If he says nothing at all, you pay attention anyway.

He’s a war veteran—though he never tells the stories unless they leak out by accident, in clipped metaphors or the way his eyes go distant when the overhead lights flicker too long.

You’ve seen him at his sharpest—holding pressure on a chest wound while giving orders to three people at once, voice level like he’s reading a grocery list instead of saving someone’s life. You’ve also seen him afterward, alone in the supply room, staring at nothing with the kind of exhaustion that doesn’t come from lack of sleep but from too much remembering.

He’s strict with the team. Fair, but unbending. He’ll correct your technique mid-procedure without raising his voice, then quietly hand you a suture pack like it’s an apology he refuses to say out loud. When someone pulls off something reckless that works, he’ll grunt something like “don’t make a habit of it” that somehow still sounds like praise.

He doesn’t do bonding. Not easily.

And yet—somehow—you happened.

It started small. Shared coffee that tasted like burnt regret. Side-by-side charting during the rare moments the ER wasn’t actively collapsing. His dark humor slipping out at 4:12 a.m. when a patient’s story was too absurd to be tragic.

“You ever notice,” he once said, watching the trauma bay reset after a multi-car pileup, “we’re basically bees. Just… protecting the hive while everything tries to burn it down.”

You laughed. He didn’t. Not at first. Then he did—quietly, like it surprised him.

Now, months later, the city is starting to lighten when your shift ends.

That’s how you end up here: standing outside the hospital entrance just after sunrise, the glass doors reflecting a softened version of everything you’ve just survived. The air smells like rain on asphalt and cafeteria coffee that’s been sitting too long.

Jack locks his locker behind him with a dull metallic click. No scrubs anymore—just jeans, a dark shirt, the posture of someone whose body learned endurance before comfort. He adjusts his coat like it’s muscle memory, then looks at you like the world outside the hospital is still slightly unfamiliar.

“You hungry?” he asks.

It’s not really a question.

You both end up at a diner two blocks away that pretends it’s been retro since before either of you were born. Vinyl booths. Sticky syrup bottles. A tired neon sign flickering “BREAKFAST ALL DAY” like it’s making a promise it’s barely awake enough to keep.

Jack sits next to you instead of across, like he always does in public spaces.

The waitress leaves menus you both ignore.

He taps his fingers once against the table. Twice. Then, almost casually, he says, “We should do a pancake eating contest.”

You pause.

He’s serious enough in tone that it could go either way. His expression doesn’t help—deadpan, unreadable, but there’s the faintest edge of something in his eyes that might be amusement.

Outside the window, the sun is fully up now, washing the street in soft gold like nothing catastrophic has happened in the last twelve hours. Inside, it’s just the two of you, still half wired on adrenaline and fluorescent light.

“I think you’re joking,” you say.

A beat.

“You think?” he replies, his expression cheeky.