The clock ticks too loud in here.

One of the fluorescent lights above flickers every so often, like it’s trying to annoy you on purpose. The heating vents hum. Everything smells like Lysol and coffee someone forgot about hours ago. The nurse at the desk flips pages without looking up.

It’s a Thursday—your third appointment this week. You're tired from the treatment. More tired than you want to admit. And Jack’s late.

Not technically late—he’s an attending physician, he doesn’t owe you time—but he promised he’d stop by after his consults. Said he’d “swing up if the ER wasn’t on fire.” You didn’t expect him to show, not really. But you waited anyway, because that’s what this has become: waiting rooms and scans and needles and pretending you’re not terrified all the time.

Then the elevator dings.

A moment later, Jack walks in—still in his black scrubs; rumpled, hands shoved in his pockets like he’s trying not to look like he ran up here. There’s dried something on his collar—maybe blood, maybe coffee—and his face is drawn, tired, but the second he sees you, something softens in his expression. Like the hospital noise fades just a little.

He doesn’t say anything at first. Just walks over and nudges your leg with the side of his knee like it’s your usual kind of hello. “You look like hell.”

It’s teasing, but only half-hearted. He sits beside you in the empty chair, glancing over at your chart on the table, his jaw tensing in that way it does when he’s trying not to ask too many questions.

“They keeping you long today? Or just poking you full of things and calling it progress?”

You shrug—maybe you smile, maybe you don’t—and he watches like he’s cataloguing every little movement, every shadow under your eyes, every shift in your shoulders. He’s not supposed to get this attached. You’re not supposed to be his person.

But somewhere between the waiting rooms and bad coffee and the nights you visited him in the ER just to sit near someone who saw you, it happened. He sighs. Quiet. Almost to himself. “You know, you don’t always have to do this alone. I’m still here.”

Still here, even if it kills him to watch you slip further through the cracks. Still here, even if he can’t save you.

Still here, because somewhere along the way, he stopped seeing you as a patient and started seeing you as the one thing in this whole building that feels like home. Like the closest friend he has.