Chapter Text
Frank Langdon has a list.
Top five worst days of his life. He goes over the list meticulously from time-to-time, revising. He hasn’t done so since Elizabeth was born but this fucking night — this wretched, fucking shift — makes him rethink of the list. Here it is, in no particular order:
- The day his father died. He was thirteen and he had a heart attack right in front of his eyes. The medics were too late. Even at that age — when he didn’t have a tenth of the medical jargon he knows now — he knew that his father wasn’t going to survive this. Later, in med school, he learned that he had been having symptoms of unstable angina prior. If he had been a doctor back then, he’d be able to catch it. He wasn’t. His dad died of acute MI on a crisp early-spring evening. In front of his eyes.
- The day he got acute otitis when he was twenty and missed a whole week of class and was convinced that he’d lose his hearing and his medical career would be down the drain.
- The day he had to drop off his mother at rehab when he was twenty-two and she cried him a river saying that she wasn’t an addict she just had a bit too much to drink is all.
- The day he found out his mother had OD’d in rehab (it was her third time in rehab) and they called him apologetically. There was nothing we could do, they said like their facility wasn’t specifically designed to avoid shit like this from happening.
- The day the first patient died under his care. He was a young man in his thirties with a wife and a young daughter. The woman pounded on his chest as she screamed and asked him why the fuck he couldn’t save her husband. He asked the same question from himself over and over again but he never got an answer.
Now, he probably has to dump the otitis one from his list for the sake of today: the day Robby threw him out of ED and his life ended.
—
Well, that’s a bit dramatic but Frank Langdon has never claimed to be a low-key, go with the flow kind of man, so… Dramatic is warranted. Especially since he is now locked in a fucking rehab center like a complete fucking cliche. No visitors for the first two weeks. Something about “isolating and helping the recovery”. Total bullshit, in his professional opinion. The latest research in the NHS shows that having a support system in the first months of recovery is essential. But what does he know? It’s not like he’s a freakin’ doctor!
In this fucking house from hell, he isn’t. They strip them of everything — how very Foucault of them, if he says so himself. Their titles, their job, their education, their families. None of it matters. They are their addiction — his roommate is heroin, he is benzodiazepine. The teenager at the end of the hall is methamphetamine and the girl who has spent half her life in hospitals is, take a wild guess, morphine.
If they had any sense, they’d see how fucking wrong this is. How he needs his phone — or his pc — to go through some research at least; to keep his brain sharp. How he needs to see his children and his fucking wife and his… friends. If he has any of them left. If they had any sense, they’d remember that he’s a fucking doctor — a great one, at that.
But his mentor couldn’t even remember that shit so why the fuck would they?
—
He needs to crawl out of his own skin. His needs to do fucking something other than sitting in fucking therapy session with someone way less skilled than the doctors he actually knows in real life and rehash shit that even in hindsight don’t matter.
Why did you want to be a doctor? Because being a doctor makes you rich and privileged and I was smart enough to be one. Not everyone can be a doctor and I wasn’t just a competent doctor — I am a great one.
Why the emergency department? That hardly makes the big bucks, Frank. He barely resists the urge to snarl at Frank. He’s Dr. Langdon to you, thank you very much. Because I am an adrenaline junkie. Well. Just a junkie now, apparently.
Don’t you think it has something to do with your father's—
Fuck. You.
That was twenty years ago. He barely remembers what his father looked like — he barely remembers the way he spoke, his tone, the color of his eyes. Everyone says that he resembles his father — the high cheekbones and the tight jaw and those blue eyes that contrast his dark hair. He is his mother through and through, though.
After all, he ended up in a fucking rehab center.
—
By the second week, he’s practically begging for human contact. Someone who knows him outside of this.
He’s practically begging for pills.
He can’t sleep — his back is killing him and his skin is on fire and he wants to bend over himself and throw his intestines up simply to empty out his own stomach. He knows, logically and faintly and distantly, somewhere in the back of his mind where he used to be a doctor, that it’s withdrawal symptoms. He’s seen the same thing in patients that come to ER with chronic pain just to get a hit of morphine when they are running low.
He needs to talk to someone — someone who doesn’t pity him. The workers there look at him with that look, Poor man. He used to have a life. He was someone. Now, he’s… this. This mess of sweat and pain and intangible thoughts and messed-up neurotransmitters.
“Just let me call Tanner and Elizabeth,” he asks the nurse who watches him drenched in sweat. He needs to hear his son’s voice. And there is that fucking look.
“I’m sorry,” he replies.
Well. Not sorry enough, apparently.
—
He knows the textbook on this shit. The phases. He knows he’s past the first level. Seven days in — the acute withdrawal. Your body still remembers the taste of the pill and you’re convinced that you won’t miss them. He knows that by the time the second week is over, that’s when the worst of it hits.
Knowing doesn’t make it easier.
He can’t sleep. His skin is on fire, his brain too big for his skull that he’s half-convinced he needs to drill a hole in his brain — trephination, he’s still familiar with the fucking jargon — just so he avoids cerebral edema and brain death. He is practically tachycardic, his heart beating outside of his chest. He can’t eat, he can’t keep down anything but water and even that is not fucking cold enough.
At least they have the mercy not to make him sit through fucking therapy now. It’s protocol, though. They wait for the withdrawal to creep on you (Frank lasted seven days before he went completely mental and buckled over himself) and then they leave you to your own devices to deal with it and when you have sweated out the drug, BAM! You’re back in the chair.
He still hasn’t gotten there and thank god for the small mercies. Or a cruel delay.
It’s hard to tell anymore.
—
Frank Langdon has a list.
Top five best days of his life. In his lonely hole in this fucking big room — Heroin moved out two days ago. He said it was triggering to be in a room with someone in the beginning of recovery. Frank agreed. Who the fuck thought to put him with someone addicted to heroin? He’s a civilised man, for fuck’s sake — he goes through that list, hoping that he’ll cling to something there. Something that reminds him that he’s real. Here it is, in no particular order:
- The day Tanner was born. Everyone said that Abby and him were too young for kids. She got pregnant when he was newly an intern and no one but them believed that they could pull it off. The day he held Tanner for the first time, though… he knew.
- The day Elizabeth was born. Same old shit, a few years later. Rainbows and butterflies and what not. Plus he made more money by then (he has just started out his residency) and there were less concerns knowing that they had done this once before.
- The day they got married. Abby was… everything that day. Abby who hasn’t called. Abby who hasn’t torn down the walls of the facility to see her disgraced husband. Rightfully so. This is no place for a lady like her.
- The day he got into med school. No, actually, the day he started out in the Pitt. Everything was just… right. Everyone else — everyone he’s seen, really — struggle with their footing. With their confidence, with their need to get into the rhythm. For Frank, it was magic. It was where he belonged. He knew there and then.
He can’t think of number five. There aren’t good enough days, apparently.
—
“You have a package,” the nurse — the same one that declined him the right to call his kids — says, standing in the doorframe. The sweat has dried out motley by now but the thoughts still remain all over the place. At least he only has a couple of days to go until Abby and kids can come up for a visit and he’s determined to sort himself out. Obviously the fucking white walls are not helping.
He doesn’t have the energy to tell him anything. He feels too raw — like he’s been cracked open and his insides are on display. It doesn’t matter how many nights pass and what the fucking guildeline says about his addiction. It doesn’t get better — it’s a chant in his ears. One that he can’t shake — one that can’t be drowned out even by the soft voice of Tanner singing in his ears.
“We obviously had to check it,” the nurse continues, taking one tentative step into his room like he might bite. If he had the will, he’d scoff at that. He’d roar and accuse them of not respecting his privacy. Maybe ut’s Abby sending him a little something to get him through this fucking nightmare, maybe it’s one of Tanner and Elizabeth’s paintings.
“Who is it from?” he asks, not raising from his bed. Not even lifting his forearm from his forehead. He doesn’t want to show the desperation that now resides him like a parasite — the maddening need for something to remind him that there is a world outside of this fucking facility. One where he is not utterly broken and discarded.
“Um, Dr. Melissa King,” the nurse says, reading the label. “It’s a book — and a letter for you.”
Melissa King.
Not Abby Langdon. Not Tanner. Not even Robby, like some twisted, broken part of him had desperately hoped.
Dr. Melissa King — Mel — who he had known for only fifteen hours (less if you don’t count the hours he technically wasn’t on the shift. Because. You know.) has sent him a package.
He sits up in his bed, so quick that his back makes pain shoot up his body and all the composure in the world wouldn’t have been able to hide it from the eyes of the nurse. He feels the hot flare of rage circling through his veins. The desperate dragon that roars and sets fire to everything. “NSAIDs can help the inflammation,” he says, trying to keep his voice neutral. “And the pain. NSAIDs aren’t Benzo.”
“I’ll put it here,” he says, not unkindly, as he puts the package down and backtracks, closing the door. Frank doesn’t realize that he’s pressing his teeth together — grinding — in a painful movement until the only pain in his body isn’t from his back. Who the hell is he kidding? Pain’s an old friend at this point.
It takes a while until he can concentrate enough to move to the package and open it.
Tintinalli’s Emergency Medicine: A Comprehensive Study Guide.
That’s the book. An Emergency Medicine Guideline. One that he has read before — in his second year when he was sure that EM was the way to go. Melissa King. There’s the letter — it’s more a fucking note. The nurse went on about it being a letter, Frank expected eighteen pages. Front and back. It’s a quick scribble — Nope. Calligraphed because Mel’s handwriting is precise when she’s not in a hurry, jotting down orders on the paper — that’s no longer than a couple sentences.
Dear Dr. Langdon,
I hope everything is going well for you at the center. I hope you don’t mind, I got your address from Dana. Rest assured I haven’t disclosed your location to anyone and I’m pretty sure she only gave me your address because I told her I wanted to send you a book. It’s not like she’s going around blabbing about the fact that you’re where you are. Anyway. I just wanted to send you something I’ve been reading. I know we don’t know each other very well but you really got me through that first shift and…
I just think — no actually, hope — that I can do the same to you. This is the latest edition. I’ve been reading it myself (you might find my words in between the lines. I’m a note taker when I study) and I just wanted to give you a souvenir from the emergency department to keep you sharp. Not that you aren’t. I think you are one of the best doctors I know. And the Pitt needs you when you get back.
I need you. I think. I’m just trying to tell you the words that meant so much to me that night, hoping they’ll mean something to you, too. Hope you have a speedy recovery.
Mel. (Melissa King, actually. Dr. Melissa King. I just started as an R2 the last time you were… you know, I just hope you remember me)
Frank has to read it three times to finally manage to get some words through his head, to comprehend what they mean.
Melissa King — and of fucking course he remember who she is. She was the best part of his shift from the depth of hell, written and foretold by Satan himself. She was a breath of fresh air — young blood. And not only that, she was so… bright. Frank had thought that day that it almost hurt to look at Mel King. The optimism, the care, the humane acts that Langdon had almost forgotten.
She was real — tangible. She was a shot of espresso when you are sleepy, she was a ray of sun when you have just gotten soaked under the rain. He had thought — against his better judgement and certainly against his usual stance on new residents that don’t last a rota let alone their entire residency in EM — that she was special.
He reads the letter about ten times more — nine too many times considering he has a photographic memory and he now knows the entire content of Mel’s letter — before moving onto the book (not before tucking the letter neatly in between the pages). He opens the toxicology section.
- Narcan. Heroin. Opioids. Blah blah blah.
He still remembers it word by word like something etched into his DNA.
The irony.
—
It’s a week later — and when he’s finally forced to seat against a therapist once again, looking a little bit worse for the wear but at least he’s seen Tanner and Elizabeth and he’s managed to put a quasi, semi-convincing smile on for his family — when another letter from Mel arrives. This time with a research paper mailed to him.
This is the latest paper on managing trauma patients and triage. I know you are more of an in-field hands-on doctor, Dr. Langdon, but I thought it provided some interesting insights into the everchanging landscape of EM. It was an interesting read. Even Dr. Abbot said that he enjoyed it very much when we were talking about it last night. I don’t think they allow you to use your digital devices yet so I printed out the article. Hope you enjoy it.
Melissa King.
He does. It’s a very interesting piece of evidential research presented with a humanitarian undertone that indeed makes it an enjoyable read. He reads it three times before breaking and asking for a pen to leave some notes in the margins — some knowledge gaps that shine through and some ideas for further research and some interesting talking points. Just in case.
He asks the staff to send a ‘thank you note’ to Dr. King and since he doesn’t know where she lives, he just puts the ED as the receiving address.
Dr. King,
Thank you for this. And for the book. And you don’t have to keep signing your full name. You are the only one who sends me care packages.
He doesn’t have the heart to tell her that he might not come back. That he doesn’t know what life holds for him outside of this fucking building. That he isn’t too eager to jump back into EM what with all the fucking Benzo that is all around them.
So he just finishes the notes with:
Thank you again. If it’s not too much trouble, could you please send me an article about trauma management in natural disasters? I need a refresher on on-the-field work. If not, anything else will suffice. Thank you.
Frank Langdon.
—
She sends him an article about trauma management in natural disasters. The publish date is a month ago. Fresh off the rack.
Brilliant, too.
—
By the time the one-month mark comes and goes, he’s seen Tanner and Elizabeth three times, Abby twice (once, Abby’s brother dropped the kids off saying that she had some business to take care of) and he’s received four letters from Mel King. He’s sat across the Fucking Therapist (as he’s started calling him) eleven times, each time just pushing short answers through gritted teeth and he’s listened to people bitch and moan about their addictions more than fifteen times in ‘healing circles’. (Frank wants to petition to change the name to ‘migraine circle’. It’s much more suiting considering that he gets a piercing headache every time they are done sympathising with someone who forewent their child’s well-being for a hit of some drug or another.)
Now, he’s sitting in for the weekly Blood Drawl Ceremony. Aside from the regular pee in the cup routine that they do every day (though if he was using Halcion, he might’ve avoided getting detected if he timed his doses accordingly. Not that he does. He just could), they draw blood weekly to look for traces of… well, basically anything. Alcohol, pills, hard drugs, perhaps the last shreds of his dignity and happiness, too.
Except that the nurse seems to be interested in drawing muscle tissue instead of fucking blood with the way she’s poking around in his arm like it’s a playground.
He swears she’s enjoying it. There’s a particular kind of sadism that comes with being on this side of the needle. Frank knows it. He’s seen it a thousand times — the nurse who presses too hard, the doctor who lets the vein roll under the skin and says, “Oh, it’s just a small pinch.” It isn’t. It’s a declaration of war.
“You planning to open a tunnel through my brachial artery?” he asks, watching the needle twist like she’s mining for gold.
She smiles — that tight, professional, slightly nervous smile young nurses usually have. She can’t be any older than twenty-five. “You’re a tough stick, Dr. Langdon.”
“Most people here call me Frank,” he tips his head back, flinching when the needle definitely catches on a nerve. “Fucking hell. You can call me whatever the fuck you want just draw the blood.”
The nurse lets out a shaky laugh that sounds more like an apology. “Almost there,” she murmurs, and Frank watches her arm tremble slightly as she adjusts the needle again. He wants to tell her to stop — wants to grab the damn syringe and do it himself — but instead he clenches his jaw and stares at the ceiling. He isn’t a teacher here. Anyhow, it was always his least favorite part of the job. He liked saving people, not helping others be painfully mediocre at their jobs.
Except for Mel King. She really was his least problematic trainee. And brilliant, too.
Frank always thought that he was impressed by men like Abbot and Robby — veterans that knew what they were doing. Gentle but tough. Smart and self-assured. Mel King — a girl with eyes that filled with tears way too easily and a chin that wobbled before giving the answer (the right answer, at that, too!) — should’ve been the last person on earth to impress him. But she had.
He wasn’t lying or tooting her horn when he said he needed her. He did.
He needed her to keep him straight through that fucking shift. Just like she had with the patients, he needed a little light. Like a sunflower to the sun sort of shit.
He lets his eyes bore into the fluorescent light above them, humming slightly. The nurse makes one more wrong move before the needle finally breaks through the muscular, mucosal layers of a vein and the syringe fills with his blood — thick and dark. “There,” she says brightly, like she hasn’t just committed a massacre on his arm and left a thousand and one bruises behind. “Wasn’t that bad, was it?” she asks.
He glances at his arm, purple marks already peeking through. He sighs, allowing his head to tip backward. “Not at all,” he lies through his teeth and nods when the nurse tells him to put pressure on it when she pulls out the needle.
It’s not like he knew all this before. Not like he was a doctor.
—
He is a doctor. That’s what Mel keeps telling him in his letters. His therapist doesn’t seem to quite agree with the sentiment. “You’ve given yourself an unshakable identity,” he says in one of their sessions, “you have to see yourself outside of that.” Ha. easy for him to say. He’s never had to put a tube into a person who has been crushed by their car nor has he ever had to perform CPR on someone until you could no longer feel your arms and there was no one to switch with you because the shift was too hectic.
So he fuck all the way off, actually.
“Frank, when did you first realize you wanted to be a doctor?”
When he was thirteen, sitting in a sterile hallway outside of the room they were trying to resuscitate his father in. His mother was back in Philly, visiting her sister (Aunt Julia who sends him birthday cards and whom he has seen perhaps four times in his entire life) and he was the one sitting on the cold floor, waiting for someone to tell him that it was a bad nightmare. That’s when he realized he wanted to be in the room. To know what goes on behind the closed doors.
Of course, he doesn’t say that to Fucking Therapist. “I don’t know,” he shrugs. “It was a long time ago, you know.”
Granted, he doesn’t seem to believe him.
—
Addiction has a genetic component. According to the article Mel has sent him — a not so subtle gesture to remind Frank that he’s human. Except that Frank Langdon isn’t stupid and Mel King isn’t as slick as she thinks she is — genetics play a big role and the article debated whether we ought to take close family medical history when we are faced with an OD patient in the emergency department.
The simple answer should be, ‘no’. You just put some chemicals inside of their veins and hope for the best. The article seems to argue that ‘yes, there is time to waste when faced with an OD patient’. Still, instead of biting Mel’s head off for sending him utter nonsense and scolding her for feeding into these sort of papers, he jots down,
In Emergency Medicine, we have to be fast, Dr. King. The interrogation is a social worker’s work. We aim to keep the patient alive until someone else can deal with them. That being said, I do agree that EM doctors could benefit from being like you. To care about people as you do.
Frank Langdon.
The article might have a point after all. His mother was an addict. Good looks come from daddy, bad habits come from mommy.
Perfect.
—
His back is killing him. He can’t sleep. He keeps shuffling and staring at the ceiling, alternating between sleeping on his left or right side and never quite getting it right. He gives up at two in the morning, sitting on the uncomfortable bed that does very little to soothe the pain. He could ask for some painkillers. They won’t kill him, really and there are plenty of mild ones. He doubts a couple milligrams of Naproxen is going to leave much damage in its wake.
Still, he doesn’t ask for it. It’s late. He can wait until the morning.
Instead, he stares at the wall and reads through a random section of the book, brilliantly talking about different kinds of sutures. Meanwhile, his brain pulls out the list of his good days. Four so far.
5. The day he met Mel King.
—
He’s allowed to leave the seventh circle of hell three months, four days and thirteen house since he was admitted into rehab. It feels like three hundred years, to be honest. He leaves with a sponsor who’s always available, no ‘solved’ traumas and weekly visits to a trusted therapist’s office that has already received his files. Did he mention the NA — narcotics anonymous — meeting that he’s been hooked up with? Yes. He’s particularly looking forward to that one.
In other words, he’ll kill himself sooner rather than later.
—
Mel’s letters stop coming. He wonders if she knows that he’s out. If she’s heard it from Dana (who has reached out to him ever since he’s been out of rehab and informs him that they are desperately trying to advocate for him and work out the arrangement for him to come back) or Robby (from whom he hasn’t heard in however many months he’s been away). Or if she’s sent a package that’s been sent back to her on the grounds that Frank Langdon doesn’t live there anymore.
He wonders if he could text her. If her packages over — and subsequently, his very limited notes that makes the staff scoff every he handed them to be passed off — the course of the past couple of months were enough to warrant a call or a text (he just assumes she isn’t the biggest fan of calling, so his mind mostly gets stuck on texting her) to simply thank her for keeping him company at his worst.
He doesn’t have her number but he’s pretty sure he can find ways to get it. Dr. Mohan or Dr. Collins — both of whom have sent him messages that he has missed due to not having had his phone at rehab — must certainly have her contact info. If push comes to shove, he could even ask Dana or Robby for her phone number.
Frank Langdon of six months ago wouldn’t have hesitated. He would’ve called her and leaned back against the wall and smirked as she tried to stumble her way through a full sentence on the other side of the line, entirely too pleased with how little Dr. King liked phone calls. Frank Langdon of today is a little worse for the wear, though. Well aware that even his family — did the promise ‘in sickness and in health’ mean so little to Abby that now she’s avoiding him like the plague? — aren’t his biggest advocates right now, he refuses to be disappointed by the pointed, mechanical politeness of Dr. King. He believes it’d very nearly kill him if she texted back something as mundane as ‘good to have you back’.
So he stashes her letters neatly at the back of the closet next to his trophies from when he was younger.
It’s better to keep the memories untainted, he thinks. He has so many good memories of Mel King. What would the point of ruining them be?
—
He moves out of the house he bought — they bought, technically — when he was twenty-eight on a sad, inconsequential day. I just think this is neither the time nor the place for you to work on our marriage, Frank, Abby had said one day, her green eyes drowning in sorrow like she was mourning the loss of a family member. She might as well have. You have to focus on yourself and I have to focus on kids and between all that…
He knew that it was coming. Even before he ever set foot into that wretched shift from hell, he knew that it was most certainly over. Maybe that was why he got the dog — to keep him company after he inevitably moved into a much smaller apartment (rented, of course) — or maybe the dog was the last straw. Or maybe the fact that he’s a fucking criminal that used to steal pills from a hospital the thing that’s putting Abby a little off.
Frank figured he could’ve thrashed and fought and fell to his knees and begged Abby not to leave him. For the sake of the kids, at least, he had thought bitterly. But they couldn’t possibly go on being unhappy with each other for the sake of kids — he couldn’t go on with this rage bubbling in his veins every time he looked at the person he thought was the love of his life and claim that he’s only swallowing it down because of the kids.
Okay, he had said eventually, I want 50/50 custody, Abby, he had added a few moments later, his heart pounding with uncertainty and fear as he looked at her. She could very easily deny him. He’d doubt any courtroom would support a recovering drug addict in this particular argument.
We can work out the details later, Frank, she promised.
Later almost always means no. Still, he doesn’t argue. By the end of the week, he’s in his new apartment, walls closing in on him.
The kids don’t take it hard or think it’s strange that Daddy is not home at night. They have gotten used to it these past three months, after all.
—
Every morning, like clockwork, he gets up at six. He goes for a run around his new neighborhood which always leaves his back a little worse. He takes a shower and he shows up to his house — his former house — to make breakfast for the family, pretending like this is a normal thing to do and not something he hasn’t been able to for the last four years (when he was an intern, he made an effort to at least cook half the week. With Tanner barely out of his toddler years and Elizabeth just being born, he wanted to give Abby as much grace as he could. When the first year of residency was over and Elizabeth was finally sleeping through the night, he stopped doing it. Now, with no job prospects and no idea what to do with the rest of his life, and certainly moved out of his house, he makes fucking breakfast like that means anything).
Then, he drops the kids off at school and goes back to his own empty apartment, calculating how much he can spend on need-to-have furniture and still have enough money to afford a mid-tier divorce lawyer. Abby always insists that he stay for lunch but he never does.
She, too, seems to be off her kilter. Abby Langdon, the girl that put her life on hold while Frank went through med school, the woman that gave him the best days of his life, the beautiful creature that he so certainly thought was the love of his life, now wanders through life like some part of her has been ripped out of her chest. Like there’s an empty hole in her heart where Frank used to be just as it is in his.
He knows that she’s looking for a job to get out of the house more. Now that Lizzie — that’s what Elizabeth is insisting they call her since she read a condensed version of Pride and Prejudice in pre-school. At three! That girl is a freakin’ genius! — and Tanner are out of their ‘need-constant-attention’ years, and Frank’s not in the picture, Abby seems to have gotten restless.
Before all this — before Frank and the kids and the shotgun wedding they had when they realized that Abby was pregnant — she wanted to be an editor. She wanted to live in the books when she was young. She saw a sort of beauty in them that Frank had never been able to see anywhere but in his references. Abby put that behind, though, when they realized that they were going to have Tanner and with Frank an intern, they couldn’t both have full-time jobs.
Naturally, Abby was the one who had to give up his career (Frank wonders if they would survive this if she hadn’t sacrificed so much for him already. He wonders what a gut punch it must’ve been to put all that on hold — permanent hiatus — only to have the man you did all that for turn out to be a criminal).
Now, though, he desperately hopes she gets to have the life she wants — the life Frank wasn’t capable of giving her. Because despite everything, he suspects he’ll always love Abby a little bit. That girl gave him… well, everything.
—
The PHP agreement is burning a hole on his desk.
When he was first offered the option of not having his license revoked and instead going on probation, he jumped on it. He nodded and listened as HR explained the rules to him with Robby stiffly standing next to him, his arms crossed on his chest. Back then, it felt like a life-line. Make the best out of a bad situation and all that.
Right now, he can’t remember why he ever agreed to it in the first place. Why the fuck would he want to go back to the place that chewed him, took everything from him and then spat him out? The place that made him take the—
Right. He’s at that stage in. The not-taking accountability phase that he thought he had grown out of. Turns out, having his life fall apart — and let’s see what the Fucking Therapist has to say about the fact that his first order of action right out of rehab was to separate from his wife (well on its way to a divorce if Abby has anything to say about it, really) — makes you slip back into old habits.
If he wants to quit — if he is content having his MD and then fucking off to another state and trying to set up a family medicine practice there or something or just throw out his lisence and starting a new as a… mechanic maybe? — now’s the time. He needs to give notice to PHP and to the HR that he’s not coming back. That he no longer wishes to be a doctor.
He could do it, too. He could walk away from all of it, really. What’s the worst thing that can happen? For one thing, he wouldn’t have to work side-by-side with people who probably have no respect for him at the very worst and despise him at the very best. He wouldn’t be subject to gossiping and to the jabs that Garcia and Santos have no doubt been jotting down to throw his way the moment he walks through that ER.
His skin crawls as his eyes burn a hole through the unmoving paper. Any moment now, he expects the words will come to life and perhaps yell at him. The disgraced Frank Langdon, ladies and gentlemen.
His fingers are twitching, a faint throbbing — an uncanny, unmoving reminder of the reason this mess started in the first place — splattered all over his nerves. This — this — is what he has to live with. The pain, the constant reminder. The urge.
He walks to the medicine cabinet. The one that Abby set up for him. Cold suppressant, some cough syrup because Langdon has always been prone to catch colds quickly for some reason (Abby’s grandma, the sweet lady that she was, always blamed the fact that he didn’t eat enough of her food. Granted, she had atrocious taste in food. But still. He’ll miss that), some NSAIDs (because she thinks Aspirin can come in handy if he ever follows down the path of Langdon men and has an MI in an untimely manner) and some other OTCs that no one would think twice about.
Except that Frank is thinking twice about them. He’s a doctor. He knows the logistics. He knows that Naproxen doesn’t work on a reward-punishment system. That his neurotransmitters will be intact and for a few short moments, he’ll perhaps find relief from the pain that won’t leave him alone. Technically, since he hasn’t given out his notice, he’s still a doctor and it’s well within his rights to take advantage of the knowledge he has so carefully gathered over the past, what, fifteen years?
But self-medication — the arrogance of knowledge and the assurance that he has it under fucking control — has led him here, hasn’t it?
In this cold apartment that feels so far from home with nothing better to do but itch and twitch.
He can take a pill. And then another. The worst he can risk is Kidney Failure in the long term and peptic ulcer in the short term. He can live with that.
Except that he doesn’t want NSAIDs. He wants…
He wants.
He wants to run away and never come back. He wants to go somewhere that no one knows him — that he’s a doctor and that he’s an addict and that he’s failed as a husband and as a father and everything else, too — and leave behind Frank Langdon. He wants to not feel this apprehension at the sight of a harmless pill. He wants to be like every other person — with no genetic component and no tragic past and no problem pressing against his trachea until he can’t breathe.
If he could pocket Tanner and Lizzie and run away and make them forget everything he’s put them through, he would do it.
He would lie to himself that he wants them and not just another hit — another relief of pain that he used to get some months prior.
It would be so easy to get his hands on some pills. He thinks. He hasn’t actually had to do it outside of the hospital but there are thousands of drug addicts in Pittsburg. Certainly he can find someone that has something on hand. He can.
Just one more time. Just to remember that there used to be a life without this… pain.
His jaw sets as he closes the cabinet and turns to look at the empty room, save for the ugly, old couch Abby’s got him in a sale and the table on which the paperwork sits. He can fill them out and be reinstated in three months after careful observation. Or he can tear them up, block Robby and go to the nearest junkyard and—
His phone chimes before he can finish that thought.
It’s from a number he doesn’t have saved.
Dr. Langdon, hope you don’t mind that I’m texting you.
I heard from Dana that you’ve been released from the center.
And that you are coming back in a couple of months!
Congratulations.
This is Mel, by the way.
Melissa King.
Dr. King. You know. From work.
Though I think you know that.
I got your number from Dana, by the way. I just wanted to say that we are all looking forward to having you in ED again.
That’s it.
Hope you have a nice day, Dr. Langdon.
Melissa fucking King.
He can go get some drugs — he’s sure he can figure it out somehow.
Instead, he drives to an NA meeting.
—
The thing is, he now can text Mel. He has her number saved and he still has left her texts unanswered save for a thumbs up reaction that feels painfully inadequate and knowing Mel — does he, really? — has her spiralling over whether it was appropriate that she texted him or not. He thinks about the string of texts all throughout the week as he signs the PHP papers and faxes them to the HR just so he can avoid dripping by the hospital any sooner than necessary. He thinks about the text messages as he makes breakfast for Abby and the kids. He thinks about the messages even as he lies in the darkness, staring at the ceiling.
Melissa fucking King.
He revises and rewrites the messages he might send her over and over in his head. Messages that will not be read by someone else — they did that in rehab because they were worried he might ask for some benzos next time in form of a packet of noodles or something, fucking psychos (he might have) — and will instead land directly in Mel King’s hands.
Frank Langdon of a year ago wouldn’t wait this long to type back. He’d punch in a ‘thank you, Dr. King’ and call it a day. But Dr. King — Mel — isn’t just anyone. She’s the girl who remembered him when he was sure everyone else had forgotten. She… made a great first impression, is the thing.
Because Frank Langdon of a year ago hadn’t spent hours and days and weeks cooped up in his room, reading and re-reading Mel King’s letters and trying very hard to remember the exact tone of her voice when she was talking about how she didn’t think patients liked to see their doctors cry. If it’s you, King, he had thought that day, I wouldn’t mind anything.
Frank wasn’t just lying when he said he needed her. He wasn’t just high and careless and fucked and lonely. When he looked at her with patients, it felt like magic. When he watched her talk to that autistic kid all those months ago, he felt like there was a little part of the earth that was all good. For a second — albeit very short one — he was sure that he’d never need anything else because Mel King’s little pout and the tear-filled eyes and the scrunched up nose that meant she was fighting tears would be enough to keep him balanced.
He had needed her just not in the way she knew.
He looks at the text thread, the lonely grey bubbles that stare back at him, accusing him of being utterly unfeeling and ungrateful. He doesn’t know why it’s so hard to write back when he would so easily do so just a couple weeks ago, albeit via notes.
He starts again.
Thank you Dr. King. You have no idea what that means to me. And you don’t have to keep introducing yourself. I know who you are.
Too dry.
Mel. Thank you for reaching out. I don’t mind at all that you texted me. In fact, I think this has been the best part of the week so far. You might not believe this but I think that your texts might’ve inclined me to sign the paperwork to come back. I know it’s… strange. But you have gotten me through these last couple of months and—
Just what the fuck is he saying?
He deletes the message and groans. It hasn’t been this hard to text a girl since he was twenty-three and that was almost a decade ago. He stares at the screen until it almost goes white and the only thing he can see is her name. Melissa King. He stares at it until his eyes ache and he’s forced to tip his head back against the couch and close his eyes.
The room feels small again. He can hear the fridge hum. He can hear the upstairs neighbors’ footsteps. He can hear his own pulse in his ears.
He picks the phone back up. Opens the thread again. His thumb hovers.
Just text her something normal, he thinks. Something harmless. Something that doesn’t scream, Frank Langdon, drug addict.
Mel, thanks for reaching out again. Hope you’re doing well.
You fucking Shmuck, he hisses at himself, deleting that, too.
He tosses the phone across the room this time. It lands somewhere behind the couch with a dull thud.
—
He dreams that night — or maybe he just hallucinates halfway between sleep and wakefulness — that he’s back in the trauma bay. The monitors are beeping, the air thick with disinfectant and blood, and someone’s calling for Ativan, stat. He turns to the cabinet, hand outstretched, and all the labels blur. Every vial looks the same. Then the cabinet door swings shut and his reflection is there instead — gaunt, pale, eyes glassy.
“You can’t help anyone,” his reflection tells him, calm and surgical. “You can’t even help yourself.”
He wakes up gasping, the sheets tangled around his legs, sweat pooling under his back. It takes him a full minute to realize he’s not at the hospital. He’s in his apartment. Alone. The fridge hum is still there.
He gets up and splashes water on his face. Cold enough to sting. His hands are trembling. He grips the sink until the shaking subsides.
The phone buzzes again — a single notification. For a second, his heart leaps. Mel. But when he picks it up, it’s just a reminder from his PHP case manager. Check-in tomorrow, 9 a.m.
He almost laughs.
—
By morning, he’s halfway to convincing himself he imagined the whole text. Maybe she sent it by accident. Maybe Dana put her up to it. Maybe she felt sorry for him — a charity text for the department screw-up. He’s built a whole defense mechanism out of maybe. He knows Mel King — knows that she doesn’t do a thing she doesn’t want to. Doesn’t pity people. Knows that she’s so kind that it would be pitiful if she wasn’t equally smart. In the short time Frank spent in her company, he was well aware that she was an extraordinary person.
Still, it doesn’t make him doubt his sense any less. He half-hopes, half-dreads that the texts were just an ill-advised hallucination. A pipe dream, if you will. That would rid him from the awkward, in vain struggle of texting back. The jumbled words. It would very nearly kill him if he opens the messages and sees that there were never any texts to begin with.
But when he opens his phone, the messages are there.
Hope you have a nice day, Dr. Langdon.
He glances at the clock. Seven sharp. She might’ve just started her shift or might’ve just gotten off the shift. Either way, she’d be somewhere near the hospital. Or maybe it’s her day off. Maybe she’s at home — perhaps with her sister from what little Frank knows — and she’s fast asleep. Maybe she, too, checks her phone with a frown, lingering on their text chain, wondering what Frank hasn’t written back just yet.
He replies to that message only.
You, too, Dr. King. And… Thanks. Really.
He hits send before his brain catches up with his thumb.
For a second, it feels almost good. Human. Like the static quiets.
He sets the phone down carefully, like it might detonate if he looks at it too long.
—
She replies to his text seven hours, thirty-eight minutes later. He still can’t figure out her shift scheduling.
You’re welcome, Dr. Langdon. Do you know when your first shift back will be?
As a matter of fact, he does. The man that swung by his house for pee-in-the-cup and draw-your-blood time, informed him that if he’s clean and if he keeps up with attending his NA meetings regularly, he can be reinstated as a fourth-year resident two months later.
A couple of months. Give or take, he replies and he can’t help sending a second message, How so?
If you could give me an exact date, I could coordinate our shifts, she writes back and Frank finds the phone freezing in his hand. He can’t stop staring at the massage — at those beautiful, lovely words. Coordinate our shifts. Like she’d make that kind of space in her life for him. Like he deserves to occupy that place in her brain.
I just think we worked pretty well together the first time around, the second text comes three minutes later. Three minutes that Frank has spent staring at the message.
He hesitates. Then, before he can talk himself out of it, he adds:
I’ve missed talking to you.
And working with you.
But mostly, sitting on the floor of the doctor’s lounge really. You rarely find places that comfortable to share with a friend.
He sends them.
And for the first time in months, he doesn’t immediately regret something he’s done.
He sets the phone down, goes to make coffee, pretends not to glance at the screen every few seconds.
When it finally lights up again, his pulse spikes.
I’ve missed you too, Dr. Langdon.
And our floor-sitting arrangement, too.
Though I don't think that would be very good for you back.
We'll figure something out.
He can’t help but chuckle — like he doesn’t have a care in the world. Like this is perfectly normal. Like he’s allowed a conversation with Mel King. There’s a pause in his chest that feels dangerously like hope.