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Langdon’s first day back is almost as eventful as Mel’s first day here.
She knows this, because she’s hyper-aware of where he is nearly at all times, ever since she looked up as he walked through the doors and their eyes met. It’s not that she’s worried about him—he’s been preparing for this. He’s done the necessary rehab, and scheduled therapy appointments, and signed all the paperwork needed to return. It’s just that she knows he’s worried. And, well.
They’re friends, she thinks. Or at least she hopes they are. She visited him during his initial treatment, drove him to a couple of NA meetings every now and then, and spent time with him outside of his recovery whenever he felt comfortable enough to allow it. So, they’re friends. She wants his first day back to go well.
That’s why she watches him. And it’s how she knows he’s having a hell of a first day back.
It had started with the fourteen year old with the broken arm, metabolizing the propofol too quickly then aspirating when they hit him with another dose, and after the kid was stabilized, there was the code stroke that was damn near impossible to diagnose. She thinks there was the patient with nec fasc in the shin after that, though it’s hard to remember because they were whisked away to surgery pretty quickly and she thinks Langdon might have been pulled into that. They worked together on the elderly dementia patient who’d ripped his foley out during rounds at the SNF, and he’d smiled at her gratefully when she directed questions to him because she knew he was most worried about people treating him differently.
Mel had stuck with him for a bit after that—during which they debrided a dog bite, coded a patient for an hour, and stabilized a GSW before sending them to surgery, too. She’d been following him to get started on an MVC vic when Robby had called her over to help with a psych patient the police had brought in.
She had looked at Langdon, a little unwilling to leave his side, but he had smiled at her sweetly again in that way that never failed to give her butterflies, and told her, “Go. I’ll survive without you, though it may be difficult.”
“Pull me if you need me,” she had said with all seriousness, and he had laughed in a way that told her he didn’t quite believe she meant it.
The day reaches peak insanity when a rig brings in a seizing patient, unresponsive to Dilantin and Keppra. Santos and Mel hold the patient on her side and time her most recent seizure while Dr. Robby and Dr. Collins prep a dose of pheno and talk about potential causes.
“I think it’s slowing,” Mel says quickly, when the patient’s movements become less aggressive, and Dr. Collins pauses from where she’d been poised with the syringe. Sure enough, after a few more seconds, the patient’s seizure activity finally stops, and she sags limply against Santos and Mel’s arms.
“Santos, what are we on the lookout for with postictal patients?” Dr. Robby asks, helping as they reposition the patient safely on her back now that the seizure is done.
Santos rattles off complications, and Mel listens distractedly as she connects a fresh yankauer to suction and methodically cleans any remaining secretions from the patient’s mouth. The patient is unconscious, unsurprisingly, and vaguely Mel hears Dr. Robby tells Jesse to call for an EEG.
“I can go get a history from the family,” Mel offers, and Dr. Robby gives her an encouraging smile and tips his head to the door to tell her to go.
It’s fairly easy to find the patient’s husband, a tall man pacing back and forth in front of the nurses’ station, and his face is pale when she approaches him.
“Is Sabrina okay?” he demands, before Mel can even speak.
Mel blinks slowly, taken aback slightly by his harsh tone. “She had another seizure while we were in the room with her, but it’s ended now,” Mel says, and the guy swears loudly and runs both his hands through his hair. “Does she have a history of seizures?”
“No!” the guy says loudly. He’s looking over her shoulder, back at the room that Mel just came from, she’s sure. “She’s never—this has never happened before.”
“Has she had any kind of accident recently?” Mel asks, careful to keep her voice calm. “Did she hit her head on something, or maybe change her diet recently?”
He shakes his head. “No. I mean, I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
Mel nods. “These next questions are just protocol to identify potential causes of seizure activity. Is she on any medication, prescription or recreationally? Or any excessive alcohol intake?”
The guy’s hands drop slowly from his head as his eyes drift back towards her. “You think she’s an addict?” he asks incredulously.
“I didn’t say that,” Mel tries to tell him.
“You just did! You just asked me if she’s a, a junkie, or a drunk! She’s twenty-three, for god’s sake. We’re about to get married! You saw her, does she look like the kind of idiot to get addicted to pills? She's in veterinary school, I mean, she’s not—she’s not some fucking addict!”
Mel raises her hands, attempting to be placating. Her heart rate is jumping, and she can feel multiple people’s eyes on her now. The sensation makes her skin crawl. “Sir, I never meant to imply, it’s just protocol to find out how this could have happened—”
“You should know better,” the guy shouts, and there’s a heart stopping moment where he grabs her biceps with both of his hands.
Time seems to slow, for a second, when he grabs her, and Mel’s body freezes in a panic at the unwanted touch. It was less than a year ago that a patient punched Dana. Emergency room violence is on the rise every day. Everything’s frozen, so Mel has a moment to hysterically realize that this guy could be about to harm her, and she can’t do anything about it.
Except—
“Hey!” someone snarls near her ear, and she flinches back and squeezes her eyes closed and time goes back to normal when she feels the guy’s hands let go of her arms.
There are gasps ringing out around them, and Dana’s calm voice saying, “Let’s get a gurney for our new friend, shall we?”, and someone breathing heavily next to her.
She blinks her eyes open and is startled to see the guy on the floor, holding his eye and groaning as Mateo and Perlah help him back to his feet.
Langdon is standing next to her, cradling his left fist with his free hand. It takes a moment but everything finally clicks—this man was threatening her, and Langdon was there to stop him. He punched someone that was going to hurt her.
“Your hand,” she says, mind working overtime to try and catch up from the moment everything slowed down.
Langdon seems unbothered by the fact that his knuckles are split. “Are you okay?” he asks her, voice soft. His eyes search her face for something, but she’s not sure what he’s looking for.
“What the hell happened out here?” Dr. Collins asks, and Dr. Robby isn’t far behind her, hurrying over to Langdon and Mel. He takes one glance at the family member (patient, now, Mel thinks faintly) and at Langdon’s hand, and at Mel standing between them, and his expression goes somber.
“Hell of a first day back, kid,” Robby says to Langdon. Langdon almost laughs. “Was he threatening our staff?”
Langdon, Dana, Mateo, and Whitaker all answer, “Yes,” which makes Langdon’s face sag a little in relief. It dawns on Mel that he wasn’t sure if anyone would back him up.
Dr. Robby sighs. “What else is new?” he says with a tight smile. “Dr. Langdon, that lac looks like it might need stitches. You trust Dr. King here to stitch you up?”
“Of course,” Langdon says easily, and Mel is almost embarrassed at the way it makes her heart skip a beat.
“Great. Mel, take him down the hall and stitch him up. If you guys have time before the next rush hits, we’re gonna want an incident report for this.”
Mel starts nodding before Dr. Robby is finished giving her instructions, placing a hand on Langdon’s arm to lead him to an empty spot at the nurses’ station in South. He follows her easily, smiling at her like he’s delighted to see her work and unaware of the fact that she’ll be working on him. While he sits, she grabs a suture kit, lido, and some Tylenol after a moment of hesitation.
She sits down across from him and ignores his eyes on her face. “What’s with the long face?” he asks her. Mel gives him an unimpressed look.
“You didn’t need to do that, you know,” she tells him. She gloves up and draws up the lidocaine, sparing him a glance. “He wasn’t actually going to hurt me. He was just scared.”
Langdon frowns as she carefully takes his hand, injecting the lidocaine carefully. “But you were scared,” he tells her. “And he grabbed you. He could have really hurt you, Mel.”
“You split your hand open,” she reminds him. He hisses a little as she cleans the wound with betadine. “Sorry. I’m just saying, you didn’t have to hurt yourself because you thought—because he was—I was fine. I just, I know you were already nervous about today, and now this has happened, and I just. I don’t want you to get in trouble for me. It’s not worth it.”
“Mel,” Langdon says, voice more serious than she’s ever heard it. “Of course it was worth it. I wasn’t going to stand by and let someone hurt you.”
There’s a warmth that spreads down her spine and into her toes. She’s not… oblivious to the fact that attention from Dr. Langdon gives her a thrill. It’s stupid, she tells herself. They’re friends.
“Still,” she continues. She turns all of her focus onto the laceration, stitching carefully. “You’re a doctor. You need your hand.”
She can feel his grin more than she can see it. From her peripheral vision, she can see him wiggle the fingers of his right hand. “Don’t worry. I used my non-dominant hand.”
Mel can’t help the small laugh that bursts out of her. She shakes her head. The lac isn’t too bad, only requiring a few stitches, which she finishes quickly and ties off with ease. She holds his hand carefully in hers as she examines her work, and his fingers twitch against hers.
“How’s the pain?” she asks. Langdon shakes his head. “I brought you Tylenol. If you want it.”
“I don’t feel it,” he promises her. He dips his head until his face is in her line of sight, forcing her to look at him, and she can’t help but smile back at him when he grins at her. “You did a great job, Dr. King. But tell me. Will I ever play the piano again?”
She huffs out a laugh. “That was a joke, right?” she asks. She’s getting better at recognizing his tones. He nods, still smiling, and Mel thinks she’ll be feeling these butterflies for days. “Well, even if it wasn’t, you should barely notice any loss of function. You could… perform a sonata after your shift, if you wanted to.”
“Only if you come to the performance,” he tells her seriously. And it’s almost miniscule, the way his face pulls a little when he raises his hand and flexes it, but Mel’s been watching him all day and she’s been studying his facial expression for months, so she catches it. The small wince of pain he tries to hide.
“Take the Tylenol, Frank,” she pleads. “At the very least, it’ll keep you comfortable. We still have four hours left of our shift.”
But Langdon shakes his head. “I don’t need it,” he promises. And Mel gets it—he hasn’t so much as touched an aspirin since getting out of inpatient treatment. She just… worries.
“Still,” she says. “If you change your mind, I’ll have it, okay?”
Langdon chuckles softly. “Okay.”
Mel touches her fingers to his palm one last time, studying the stitches again. She feels lucky, for a moment, that he’s letting her touch him like this. It feels special. His own fingers curl against hers, and a thought crosses Mel’s mind. Something stupid, she thinks a bit crazily, but something she’s done with Becca before any time her sister has had a small injury. They’re friends, Mel thinks. And he’s never said anything bad about her quirks before. He always encourages her to be herself.
So she only hesitates for a moment before she raises his stitched knuckles to her mouth and presses a faint kiss to the side of the cut. Langdon’s breath hitches, but he doesn’t say anything. Mel swallows and lowers his hand slowly. She feels a little nervous to look at him, but she meets his gaze and is relieved to see he doesn’t look angry. Instead he looks… awestruck. The tips of his cheeks are pink.
“Um,” she murmurs. Half embarrassed. She pulls her hand away and turns her focus to cleaning up the used supplies. “Sorry. I’m–sorry.”
He puts a hand on her forearm. And it’s so vastly different, she thinks, from moments ago when she’d been grabbed by someone else. It’s so different from the times anyone has ever touched her. It doesn’t make her anxious, or jumpy. It calms her down. He calms her down. She’s still not quite sure what to make of that.
“Don’t be,” he tells her. “Took the rest of my pain away.”
Mel laughs, a little awkwardly, and she hopes desperately that her face isn’t as flushed as it feels. She stands up to toss the needle into the sharps and the rest of the kit into the garbage. “Good,” she says, voice shaking a little. She feels off-kiltered, nervous for a reason she can’t quite identify. “Well, um. If the pain… comes back. Or, or gets worse. Come find me.”
Langdon’s good hand twitches as though he wants to reach for her again. Mel’s shocked to realize that she wants him to. “You know, for good measure, you could just spend the rest of your shift with me,” he says, and he’s grinning at her again in that way that Mel can’t help but smile out. “For the sake of keeping me pain free, of course.”
“I’m gonna put bacitracin on your sutures,” she murmurs.
“So no more hand kisses,” Langdon muses. Mel feels a little shock at the fact that he sounds almost disappointed.
It makes her bold, then. Brave. So when she says, “We’ll see how the shift plays out,” Langdon laughs and beams at her and stares with hopeful eyes, and Mel feels warm inside and out with it.
“Looking forward to it,” he promises. They have one more moment of looking at each other, soft and sweet, before Dr. Collins calls Mel to take over on a patient with an AKI.
And amazingly, when she looks back at Langdon to see if he’s tagging along, he follows behind her like there’s no place he’d rather be.