Chapter Text
Trinity would like to say that she is extremely self-aware. She knows that sometimes, she can be mean, off-putting, and a little too arrogant for her own good. She also knows that said qualities of being mean, off-putting, and a little too arrogant for her own good stems from her distrusting nature, born from what she likes to call her trauma cocktail from hell—which brings her to another point: she knows she uses humor as a shield to ignore how her breath grows ragged and her hands begin to tremble when she dwells too long on the fact that she went through too much in too little time while she was too alone and too young and too afraid to ask for any help. Trinity knows—and she hopes that the coworkers she begrudgingly has started to consider as some sort of family know as well—that she isn’t just mean for the sake of being mean; it’s just that it was her only fool-proof method of pushing people away when she was younger. Of pushing potential threats away from her so that they couldn’t hurt her or look at her with those vile eyes or tell her that they loved her with that disgusting tone of voice or put their hands on her.
But she also knows that she’s trying to get better—and to be better, for that matter. Like, actually—she’s starting to hear her voice dip into something unfamiliarly genuine when she tells family back home that she’s doing good, and is trying to sit with the fact that she isn’t deflecting nor avoiding the topic of her own well-being entirely like she used to. “I’m doing good,” isn’t the empty statement she used to dole out like candies to placate the worried and aggravatingly sympathetic looks people shot her in the hallway anymore. She tries to say it when she actually means it, when she’s actually smiling about something or other. It certainly helps that her coworkers aren’t afraid to call her out on her bullshit when she attempts to lie in front of their faces.
The last time Trinity tried to lie in front of McKay and say that she was fine after a particularly hard case where a teenager had been brought in by an abusive step-father and an infuriatingly ignorant mother, McKay had just shaken her head. By the end of the day Trinity had ended up with the phone number to a therapist that McKay had forced her to at least write down in her notes app.
It’s with the new therapist and the persisting sense of guilt that has been crawling up her throat ever since she witnessed Dr. Langdon be thrown out of the Pitt by a furious looking Dr. Robby that Trinity realizes that she’s also way too hypervigilant for her own good—another gift from her aforementioned trauma cocktail from hell. But unlike how she’s slowly getting rid of her unwarranted meanness and her nasty habit of pushing people away harshly like a wounded dog, she just can’t seem to shake off her hypervigilance. Its eyes have completely snagged onto her skin, burrowing so deep into the sinew of her muscles and growing into a cancerous tumor no one can dig out.
Sometimes, she really wishes that it could be the one trauma response she could get rid of as easily as it was to treat small lacerations—just sewn up cleanly and covered up with new skin by two week’s time. It’s fucking exhausting to always be so aware of everything, and to have to look over her shoulder two or three or sixteen times to make sure that she’s only imagining the threats that set off alarm bells in her mind, and to always be sore from all the tension she holds in the hard musculature of her shoulders and her back. She’s always expecting something or someone to come out of left field to launch her into the deep end again, leaving her to fend for herself as the unforgiving waves crash over her head, dragging her down down down until she’s scraping at the bottom of the sea and fighting to breathe.
But the thing is that her hyper-awareness has become something that helps her in the Pitt and makes her a little more useful than she feels. She’s often the first person to detect a certified asshole in the waiting room because she notices their eyes tracing the outline of her body as she walks around. She recognizes cases where she knows Kiara should be brought in even before she’s checked the patient’s charts, just because she’s alert enough to catch that achingly familiar look floating in their half-dazed eyes. And even though the guilt from it all still makes her nauseous, Robby always makes a point of telling Trinity that she did the right thing of reporting Langdon to him about the irregularity of benzos. Trinity knows there’s also guilt laced in his perpetually tired voice whenever he talks about Langdon; probably something about first-day intern Trinity Santos finding out about his best resident’s addiction that otherwise went completely unnoticed by him or any of Langdon’s other longtime coworkers.
Or whatever.
Trinity also knows that she’s better than anyone at knowing when she’s going to have a bad day. She wakes up on a random day in June and just knows that the day is just going to be ruined somehow. It’s not really a matter of things going wrong before she clocks in for her shift. The funny thing is that her morning before said shift is genuinely lovely: she wakes up at the first ring of her alarm, goes on a jog, and makes it back just in time for a sitcom-esque breakfast spread courtesy of Huckleberry. She teases Dennis about still looking like a twig despite living under her roof for nearly nine months as she sips her coffee and shovels french toast into her mouth. She belts ABBA songs in the car as they drive towards PTMC, short hair fluttering about in the air because it’s finally warm enough to roll down the windows on their morning drives. She’s oddly smiley, especially when Princess and Perlah pounce on her at the lockers, already jabbering about hot patients and whatnot. And her shift is surprisingly uneventful, save for a GSW around lunchtime and a MVC that results in Trinity’s face getting bloodied in the frenzy of the trauma bay. Logically, she knows that everything should culminate into being a generally good day in her books, but Trinity just can’t seem to shake the lingering sense of dread that buzzes through her skin, warning her as if she’s walking straight into a thunderstorm.
And here’s the thing: Trinity’s days are now usually ruined by something that happens at her job. Whether it be the certified asshole from the waiting room or a tough cause she couldn’t crack or a procedure she nearly messed up or the brutal loss of a patient, she’s equipped to expect it. It helps her efforts in compartmentalization; she can at least attempt to leave all that shit in her locker as she clocks out.
She expects the worst of her day to arise from patient rooms and ambulance bays.
And never from a DM request on the Instagram account she barely touches these days.
She’s waiting for Dennis to finish up with his last patient of the day with her back pressed to her locker when she receives the request, her phone vibrating erratically in her hand. After jolting at the alert, she fixes her eyes on the tiny text of the notification banner, groaning when it disappears off her screen in a split second.
Against her better judgment, she opens Instagram and surrenders herself to the panic that shoots through her body as she recognizes the name.
Trinity doesn’t have anything against Beatrice Flores. Even when the girl was Trinity’s largest rival back in her competitive gymnast days, she was hard to hate. She was one of the few Filipino athletes in the area (which Trinity only knew because their moms knew each other), and was one of those girls who held herself with a sort of confidence that came only from knowing that she was damn pretty. And even then, she was painfully humble and deeply empathetic—almost being on par with Samira, who Trinity had grown closer to after the first shift sent from the pits of hell. Trinity is sure that she could’ve had a serious crush on Beatrice back in their high school years if she hadn’t been so fixated on simply observing the impressive height of her tumbling passes or the graceful arc of her turns on beams during meets. The strict line of competition their coaches set between them formed a rift between their relationship before there was even a relationship to speak of, and even as Trinity noted the glossy sheen of her black hair or the toned muscle of her tanned thighs, Beatrice had never been anything more than competition. A rival.
The panic isn’t a fault of Beatrice herself—she was genuinely one of the sweetest girls she had ever competed against, always hugging her tightly once they got off the podium, the cold medals swinging around their necks clinking together lightly as Trinity let the girl wrap her arms around her.
It’s not Beatrice’s fault that she belongs to one of the darkest times of Trinity’s life.
Fuck it.
She accepts the DM request. Ignoring how her hands are shaking. Ignoring how the background of the Pitt’s locker room falls away from her completely. All she can see is the glaring white of her Instagram DMs.
beatrice: Hey, Trinity! Hope you’re doing well and sorry for messaging out of the blue!!
beatrice: Just wanted to ask if you’re still in Pittsburgh :)
When Trinity moved for med school, she had cleaved her life into two pieces: the before med school and after med school, taking a sledgehammer to any of the connections she had from the before. She still kept the Instagram account, because it was the only account she had where she was still mutuals with Harper, but other than that, all the ties that led back to her life in Seattle had been cut. Friends faded into fond memory, acquaintances forgotten completely, and all people knew about her now was that she was in Pittsburgh to become a doctor.
Beatrice had been one of the not-quite friends Trinity had bidden herself to forget. Trinity wonders how exactly the girl found her new account, and how the girl has found a reason to dance back into her life.
trinity: hey bea long time no talk hope you’re doing okay as well
trinity: i’m still in pittsburgh why do you ask
beatrice: I’m doing lovely, thanks for asking!
beatrice: Nice to know that you’re still in Pittsburgh! I was actually wondering if I could ask you for a small favor
trinity: ?
beatrice: I actually relocated to the area a few years ago! I’m the head program advisor at a gymnastics facility here and an instructor for some private lessons I’m running is out of commission for a few weeks due to a bad ligament injury
beatrice: And I remember you mentioned that you taught classes back at Club Zenith and was wondering if you would be able to step in? It would just be for two hours every Sunday for the next five weeks or so!
Trinity bites the inside of her cheek. She really wishes that Dennis could’ve wrapped up by now, so that she would have an adequate reason to exit this conversation. She also kind of wishes that she still held some love for the sport that defined who she was for such a long time. While tangible relationships were easy enough to let go of, the sport that had found its permanent place within the marrow of her own being was a different story entirely. Moving to Pittsburgh was her attempt at scraping away at her bones in a fruitless attempt of cleaning herself from the sport. But what didn’t become feigned ignorance simply became bitter hate or bad habits. She wanted so desperately to be the Trinity Santos that wasn’t stained with all the shit that came from being a competitive athlete for so much of her youth. The problem was that she wasn’t even sure if that version of Trinity had ever existed.
trinity: sorry not to be mean but why are you asking me specifically
trinity: if it’s privates you could easily ask a club girl to help out or smth can’t you
beatrice: The parents who sign their kids up for privates aren’t usually too jazzed by the fact that teenagers are teaching their kids, unfortunately :(
beatrice: And I might’ve already told them that I had a standby coach who trained at an elite club back in Seattle…
She inhales so sharply that Nurse Jesse shoots her a look as he tugs on his faded hoodie. Trinity would’ve thrown her phone across the locker room if it hadn’t been a new phone she bought two months ago. No matter how hard she tries, Club Zenith will always drag Trinity back into its orbit, leaving her to watch in defeat as her closed scars rip open again, the skin tearing to expose the raw muscle underneath. It stings with every move she makes, with every breath that shudders through her body. And all she can ever do is watch as she’s sucked back in. It hurt to leave Seattle behind; she’s never going to deny that. It hurt to leave her own students behind, the little girls that looked up at her with so much confused hurt in their eyes when the older athletes broke the news that their Coach was gone. It hurt to leave friendly rivals like Beatrice behind. It hurt to leave her home behind—it had been dysfunctional and was always actively burning down around her, but it was still home to Trinity. There were so many things that tried to pull Trinity back.
But it hurt too much to stay.
Dennis finally steps into the locker room, his stethoscope looped around his hands and his scrubs surprisingly untouched. Trinity locks her phone and shoves it into the pocket of her zip-up jacket. She tries to make a joke about how they should celebrate the fact that Dennis didn’t get shat on, but her heart’s not in it.
“Took you long enough,” she grumbles instead.
Dennis just shrugs, saying nothing about the bite in her tone. All he does is suggest getting takeout from their favorite Chinese restaurant, ordering extra helpings of the fried rice that Trinity likes so much when they just do that. He lets Trinity pick the movie and doesn’t complain when it’s Mamma Mia! for the sixteenth time. He doesn’t poke or prod on why she’s suddenly prickly all over again. They just eat their Chinese takeout, humming along to ABBA songs, and otherwise silently existing in each other’s company.
Just before Trinity flees to her room to take a shower, Dennis catches her in the hallway.
“Are you—”
She cuts him off, not unkindly. Trinity swears she’s getting better at that whole not being unkind thing. Really. “Feeling better, thanks.”
Dennis gives her an earnest thumbs up and skitters back into his room like a little mouse returning to its hole in the wall. She’s not lying when she says that she’s feeling better, and she knows that Dennis knows as well.
When she’s sitting in bed, her phone screen the only thing illuminating the otherwise pitch black room, Trinity tries not to groan at herself. Yolanda was fucking right—Trinity is getting soft. When their chief complaints of being gymnasts were mainly just of their strict training regimens and of being too sore to properly walk, Trinity’s best friend, Harper, used to tell her in a sing-song voice that, “We should just enjoy it if we can’t avoid it.”
Of course, that sentiment became useless when their complaints became actual problems.
Trinity’s fingers hover over her keyboard. She takes a long inhale through her nose until it feels like her lungs are going to burst, exhaling as she curls in on herself, forehead pressing into her blankets until she can smell the lemon-scented detergent. The phone glows against her chest and Trinity thinks about the melodic trill of Harper’s advice.
She sits back up again, texts Beatrice back, throws her phone at the foot of her bed, swears loudly when it crashes against the floor, and falls back against her mattress, defeated and tired and so ready to let sleep consume her.
trinity: just send me the schedule
She doesn’t really know why she says yes. Maybe it’s the fact that she just can’t see herself saying no to Beatrice, who was always so incredibly sweet to her during meets. Or maybe it’s the fact that by some fucking miracle, she actually has consecutive Sundays off for the next five weeks and that she knows she would have nothing better to do on those days. And also, maybe it’s to spite McKay who keeps telling her that binge watching shitty medical dramas on her days off doesn’t count as a hobby and that she really needs to go touch some grass—“Am I using that right? I swear every teenager I see in triage says something wild to me as if a 42-year-old would know what the hell they’re trying to say to me.” Or maybe—just maybe—it’s because the hurt teenage self in Trinity that refuses to leave wants her to be a coach again, to have the opportunity to see genuine excitement in little gymnasts’ eyes instead of plain soul-crushing hurt . Maybe a return to coaching would let her breathe a little easier anytime someone mentioned her past career. It would be a nice change, to have to think about lesson plans and spotting kids on the tumbling track, instead of having to think of large hands riding up the sides of her waist or the way she was pulled by her ponytail after she lost podium at a meet.
Enjoy it if you can’t avoid it, right?
And that is how Trinity Santos manages to get herself here, pulling into the parking lot in front of a gymnastics facility for the first time in what seems like a decade. Willingly . It takes her an embarrassingly long time to get out of her car. She’s sure that she spends at least five minutes resting her forehead against her steering wheel, hands placed above her head at 12 0’clock.
Her phone buzzes with Beatrice asking if she’s on her way.
trinity: On my way!
trinity: jesus
trinity: omw i just parked
Harper’s voice is like a mantra in her head.
Enjoy it if she can’t avoid it.
Sounds simple enough.
When Trinity finally leaves her car, she can see Beatrice propping the door open with a smile, one ankle crossed over the other. As Trinity steps closer, she feels herself being pulled in closer for a hug, one of those hugs that feels like returning to a place you left long ago. Like returning to a home that you can never quite abandon. She feels like she’s teetering on the threshold she placed herself, one foot firmly placed in her present while the other foot is hovering over her past. Despite herself, Trinity feels herself smiling into the hug.
“Bea,” she breathes, using the nickname everyone used to use for the athlete. “Long time no see.”
“Trin!” Bea exclaims in kind when she peels away from their hug, two hands planted firmly on either of Trinity’s shoulders as her wide brown eyes sweep over her face. “It’s so nice to see you again after all these years!”
As the pair walk into the gym, Bea continues to speak animatedly on how she ended up all the way in Pennsylvania (long-term boyfriend is completing his PhD at UPitt) while Trinity is surveying the space. As she expected, it’s massive as most gymnastics facilities are, but the juxtaposition of the cramped emergency room with the lowest of low ceilings she spends most of her waking days running around in contrast to the sheer scale of the facility—complete with the kind of domed ceilings you only see at impressive indoor stadiums and fancy museums—doesn’t fail to make her feel like she’s being completely dwarfed. She wonders if this was how the rats from her first shift felt when they were set loose in the Pitt.
Trinity finds it in herself to be a little amused by the fact that all gymnastics facilities are still virtually identical to one another, down to the same bass-boosted music that echoes through the open space and the underlying scent of sweat that never seems to go away. Trinity’s eyes sweep over where the different apparatuses are clustered together, pursing her lips into a conflicted smile when she realizes that her personal favorite—the uneven bars—is placed exactly where it used to be placed at Club Zenith. She swipes her sweating palms against her athletic shorts and half expects the black shorts to be stained by chalk, the lovely substance she had ruined so many clothes with back in high school.
There’s a small group of older girls eyeing her from the main floor mats, lithe bodies all contorted into various degrees of stretches. Before Bea tugs her in the direction of her small office, Trinity catches the eye of a redheaded girl who is staring straight at her with wide and unblinking eyes that glint emerald green under the fluorescent lights. She swears she sees the girl flush as she realizes that Trinity is staring right back.
The door to Bea’s office closes with a nearly silent click . Bea sits on top of her desk, legs swinging in the air. Trinity just shifts awkwardly from foot to foot, stealing glances at the door behind them.
Locked doors make her uneasy.
She doesn’t think that’s going to change anytime soon.
“Hey, can I…” Trinity gestures awkwardly at the door.
Something in Bea’s face crumples, as if all of the memories come flooding back to her at once. Club Zenith girls were the only athletes that had been included in those news articles and lawsuits, but stories and memories like those had always been shared across the small circle of elite female athletes in Seattle; it was the shared and painfully accepted knowledge that if it hadn’t happened to them, it could’ve easily happened to anyone else.
“Oh, shit. Trinity, I’m sorry, I didn’t even think about that. The girls just love to eavesdrop, so I thought…”
“It’s fine,” she lies. Bea smiles because she doesn’t know Trinity well enough to know that she's lying through her teeth. Trinity opens the door. Even when the bass-boosted music takes her by the shoulders and violently shakes away any remnants of sleep she has left in her mind, she finds that she can breathe easier.
She promises Harper, wherever she’s watching from, that she’s going to fight to enjoy it here if it’s the last thing she does.
Bea’s voice is softer now, “You know, after Harper… We were really scared that we were going to lose you too, Trin. I’m just— I’m really glad you’re here.”
She gives Bea a lopsided smile, shifting her weight onto one foot so that she can peer at the group of girls once again. They’re all laughing about something and Trinity wonders when she started to believe that laughter didn’t belong in a gymnastics facility. Maybe it was when recreation became competition. Maybe it was when their female coaches left for different cities and were replaced by men that leered more than they coached. Or maybe it was when beration and hair-pulling and slaps across the face became routine, just as sure as the rhythmic 8-counts that governed their bodies for years.
“Want to introduce me to the girls that were staring me down earlier?”
And at this, Bea grins wholeheartedly. Trinity is usually not one to grin, but she returns it—it surprises her that it comes so easily.
Two of the four girls who had been on the mat earlier—including the redhead—have disappeared into some corner of the gym with their own coaches, leaving the two that are currently staring up at Trinity with curiosity and excitement twinkling behind their eyes. They remind her of Princess and Perlah in the sense that she knows that they’re the archivists of this gym, the ones that file all the rumors and the secrets into their immaculately organized mental libraries. She’s equally excited and terrified to be added to said mental library.
“Hi, Coach Bea,” they reply in unified sing-song.
Bea just sighs and rolls her eyes lightheartedly. “Hello, girls,” she sings back. “Remember when I told you about our new temporary coach?”
“Ooh!” one of the girls claps her hands together, jumping from her sitting position to stand up on her shins. “Is she the one replacing Coach Liv?”
“Trinity Santos,” Trinity says with a sharp nod, not knowing who the hell Coach Liv is. She almost slips in that she’s an intern but stops herself.
“Ruby Baker!” one chimes in. Her hair is dyed a bright, ruby red, and she has one of the cleanest eyeliner jobs Trinity’s seen in years. Trinity spots an eyebrow and septum piercing and wonders if she was even half this cool when she was 18. “Sick tattoos.”
“Maya Yamaguchi,” the other girl smiles pleasantly.
With a pang of sentimentality, Trinity realizes that they remind her of her and Harper. She remembers the last few months before everything started going downhill, laying down in the grass in front of Harper’s house and trying to ignore the world burning down around them.
“These two are some of my favorite problem children. Excellent athletes and instructors but diabolical gossips. Tell them nothing if you care about your reputation in Pittsburgh,” Bea teases.
“Hey! We’re not that bad, Coach Bea.”
“Everyone just makes it so easy .”
Bea presses her side to Trinity’s and whispers, “They managed to find my boyfriend’s Instagram after their first session with me and would not let it go that he can’t take pictures for the life of him. They keep telling me to dump him and find someone who’s getting a PhD in photography or something instead, which is ludicrous.”
As she said: menaces.
“Coach Bea, you are quite literally the most gorgeous woman in the world. You want a man who knows how to capture that,” Maya sounds so genuine that Trinity feels inclined to agree. If she was being completely honest, she would’ve just said that most men didn’t deserve most women, especially not someone like Bea, but that seemed a little too mean to say to someone who had relocated to Pittsburgh because their boyfriend was getting a PhD.
“He’s literally just some man, Coach,” Ruby whines.
“Woah, look at the time, girls!” Bea echoes after a beat of silence, staring at a wristwatch that doesn’t exist. “I gotta give Coach Trinity a tour of the facility.”
The easy banter between the girls and Bea bounces around in her head for a long time, so much so that she almost eats shit after her foot catches on those ridiculously low beams that little kids use during their practices. It feels increasingly silly to Trinity, because she’s a full-grown adult who quit competitive gymnastics a decade ago, but something about how easily Ruby and Maya had been able to laugh with Bea feels consolatory. Their laughter is like a set of open arms, coaxing the bitter and withering teenage-self Trinity has been fostering in the space between her beating heart and her ribs to fall towards them—as if telling her that it should’ve never been that way for her. That she should’ve been able to laugh and do dumb shit with her friends at practice. When is it that Trinity will be able to stop mourning a past she tried so hard to bury? She wants it gone but she wants it so dearly. She wants it gone so that all the memories and the defense mechanisms and flashbacks will cease to exist as well, but she wants it back so that she can at least have a chance at a do-over.
Her ribs ache from anticipating the fantasized beauty of a youth that never was and will never be. But no one needs to know that.
“They’re funny,” she says. “The girls.”
They’re funny and bright and probably whip-smart and genuinely great at what they do—Trinity can tell from the way they’re continuing to bicker with each other in their oversplits—and above all, they’re teenagers. She can’t imagine ever wanting to hurt girls like them. Can’t even fathom why someone would want to claw through someone’s youth like that, gathering everything that glows from a girl just to leave her hollowed self behind.
She’ll be going back to being a full-time ER doctor in a few weeks time, but something about the way Ruby and Maya’s laughter persists in her mind makes her want to make the most out of the time she has as an honorary coach. If not for the girls and her private students, but for her—for Trinity and Harper and all the other girls from Club Zenith that were left hollowed out by a sport that promised lifelong bonds and friendships and carefree laughter.
“So,” Bea says, interrupting Trinity’s train of thought, “your first private should start in half an hour or so. Super sweet 7-year-old that started a few months ago. You usually just have to push her to try out new skills because she lacks confidence a lot of the time. Her name’s Victoria.”
Trinity smiles to herself, trying to imagine a 7-year-old Victoria Javadi attempting to do a cartwheel.
Bea continues, “And then there’s Izzy. Well, technically Isabella, but her parents just call her Izzy. 3-years-old, literally just started as well, so it’s not really gymnastics as much as it is playtime for her. Would be careful with her, though. She’s going through a tough time and sometimes she gets really frustrated with herself and just starts crying.”
“Tough time?”
“Parents got divorced really recently, so I think it’s just her having trouble adjusting.”
Trinity clicks her tongue against her teeth.
“You have any lesson plans for me?”
When she’s finished with her first private—7-year-old Victoria exactly how she expected 20-year-old Victoria to have been like as a kid—Trinity ambles over to the water fountain, her empty water bottle thunking gently against the side of her thigh. While Trinity is waiting for her water bottle to be filled, Ruby and Maya suddenly appear behind her, both of the girls bouncing from foot to foot with barely contained energy.
“Hey, Coach Trinity, how old are you?”
Trinity screws on the lid to her water bottle as she whirls around to face the two girls. She is only mildly concerned by the mischief glinting in their bright eyes.
“I’m 27, why do you ask?”
They start to giggle, sharing conspiratorial glances between each other.
“Oh my god, spit it out you two,” Trinity deadpans, taking a long sip of her water. It’s cold and crisp in the way that it feels like it's burning a path down her throat, and she winces as she feels a brain freeze start to come on.
“Would you kill us if we tried to set you up with a really hot parent? Like, recently divorced. Probably your age? Hot as hell. Kinda moody, if you’re into that.”
“Oh my god, Coach Trinity, he’s like a proper DILF,” Ruby all but screams, sounding far too excited to be telling Trinity this.
They’re like if Princess and Perlah made a wish to become a pair of 18-year-old gymnasts who also happen to be absolute menaces, and Trinity finds herself doubling over to cackle so loudly that Bea shoots her a concerned look from her office. The two probably also run an underground betting pool with the older athletes at the gym, Trinity muses.
“Okay,” she starts telling the girls as she straightens herself out, still laughing so hard that her ribs are starting to feel sore, “first of all, I feel like I’m obligated to tell you that you can’t be telling me that you think parents are DILFs—or MILFs, for that matter. That probably crosses some sort of professional boundary, and I don’t want you to get me in trouble.” The girls nod in faux solemnity, but from the gleeful look in their eyes, Trinity can tell that they’re going to be having this conversation a few more times before she relinquishes her coach title. “And second, I think I should be offended that you two thought I was straight.”
Ruby immediately brightens at this and full on shoves Maya to the side. “See! I was right! Pay up, Maya.”
Maya groans as she rummages through the tote bag swinging off her shoulder, fishing out a crisp $20 bill from her wallet before passing it to Ruby. Of course they were running an underground betting pool about her. Trinity just loves being right.
“Okay, whose dad is it, though. Now I’m curious.
As Ruby stuffs the bill into her bag, the two start giggling again. “We don’t know his name. He’s the dad of your 2pm private, though. Izzy? Usually the mom comes to drop off and pick up, but the dad came last week when Izzy was at a group lesson, and damn!”
“Sorry, Coach Trinity,” Ruby says, looking slyly at her friend, “this one has a thing for jawlines.”
Maya swats at her friend’s arm. “Hey, don’t go exposing me like that!”
Trinity rolls her eyes. “Well besides, I already happen to be dating someone anyways.”
That makes the girls start screaming again, immediately demanding her to show them a photo and tell them her girlfriend’s entire life story. Trinity snorts. Professionalism be damned. She’s most likely not going to be seeing these girls again, so she spends the next thirty minutes before Izzy’s private telling the girls about Yolanda and the absolute mess that is working at the Pitt.
She leaves out the part of dropping a scalpel on her foot, because that is the one thing she doesn’t want the rest of Pittsburgh to know.
“Oh shit,” one of the girls echoes when shown a picture of the two out on a date. “Coach Trinity, your girlfriend is really fucking hot.”
“Language, girls! Ruby and Maya, stop bothering Trinity and go home.” The girls pout and bat their eyelashes at Bea as if they’re little puppies. “That’s not going to work on me. Shoo!”
The two stand and wait until Ruby and Maya push their way out of the gym, bags swinging over their shoulders as they laugh about hallway crushes and hot people they’re hoping to find in college.
“Although, I will agree.” Bea squints at one of the photos on Trinity’s phone. This one is of Yolanda in the kitchen of Trinity’s apartment, leaning over the stove as she nurses a pot of boiling pasta. Her curly hair hangs around her shoulders, but Trinity had tucked strands behind her ear so that she could see her side profile better from where she was sitting on the counter. She had been wearing a ratty t-shirt with the hospital’s logo printed onto the back and one of Trinity’s old shorts sits loosely around her waist. If Bea squints hard enough, she would be able to see Dennis absolutely knocked out on the couch, completely oblivious to the world around him. “Your girlfriend is really fucking attractive.”
Trinity can’t help herself from flushing red.
Bea is about to pull out her phone to show her photos of her own boyfriend when the door opens again. She half expects it to be Maya and Ruby again, probably hunting down for the phone charger one of the girls left in Bea’s office, but it’s just a woman and her kid.
“Izzy!” Bea gleams, shutting her phone off. “How’s my favorite 3-year-old doing today?”
Trinity doesn’t hate a lot about working at the Pitt, but she can say with full certainty that she hates pediatric cases. It’s not that she doesn’t like kids—quite the contrary, honestly, judging by the fact that she used to be a coach in high school. It’s more about the fact that the kids look so small when they get rolled in on gurneys. She would much prefer to see kids like this: smiling, breathing, and in sparkly leotards where the sequins all end up on the bottom of someone’s car by the end of the day. Izzy is adorable, like most kids her age. She’s wearing a blue leotard under a pair of grey pants plastered with sparkly stickers that are half peeled off. Unruly light brown hair frames her face, swoopy bangs hanging over her bright blue eyes.
“I’m good!” Izzy smiles. “Mommy got me a new bathing suit!”
The mom laughs, shaking her head. “Izzy-Bee, it’s a leotard. Not a bathing suit.”
“She seems to be in a good mood today,” Bea seems to ask cautiously.
“This one’s quite excited to be seeing her dad tonight,” the woman says with a pinched smile. “Isn’t that right, Izzy?”
Izzy nods enthusiastically. She pauses before pointing straight up at Trinity. “Who’s that?”
“Oh! And this is the coach I told you about over the phone, Ms—”
“Please, call me Abby.”
Abby is tall, blonde, and a little terrifying. She’s immaculately put together, save for a few strands of golden dog hairs clinging onto her black pants. There’s something sharp about her. Maybe it’s the blue eyes, maybe it’s the way she stands so straight like someone is holding her up from behind, or maybe it’s the way she holds herself—like she doesn’t take bullshit from anyone.
“Trinity Santos, pleasure to meet you—”
Abby’s brows lift, and Trinity can almost feel her gaze become tangible as she stares her down.
“Trinity?”
Her voice is lofty, tone heightened by something akin to judgment and recognition. It feels like she’s asking for confirmation on whether her name is actually Trinity.
She purses her lips. Nods. “Yea, um, it’s a pretty uncommon name, isn't it?”
Abby seems dissatisfied by this answer and Trinity can’t help but spiral into her thoughts. Maybe she had been a patient from a while ago? Or perhaps a family member of a patient? Or maybe she just knew of a different Trinity that had, to her detriment, been an asshole to Abby.
“Well, I should get going.” While staring straight at her, Abby adds, “My ex-husband will be picking Izzy up after her lesson today.”
Trinity just blinks owlishly at her. “Okay, sounds good?”
Abby lets out a sigh, tells Izzy to be good, and leaves.
Bea turns to her, looking as confused as Trinity feels. “Well, Izzy,” she shrugs, “are you ready to have fun with Coach Trinity?”
They have a lot of fun, actually. Izzy is a sweet girl, and from what Trinity can see, a bit of a prodigy. At the end of the lesson, when Izzy is jabbering away about how her dad is a doctor who helps to fix people, Trinity makes a mental note to tell said dad that she thinks gymnastics would be a great fit for Izzy going forward. There’s a little doubt that she shelves alongside that mental doubt; her mind nags insistently that that was how Trinity turned out to be like this. They heralded her a prodigy four weeks into her preschool gymnastics class and was left to the controls of elite coaches and accelerated growth programs. Two hands that weren’t hers had always pushed her into different directions, and Trinity, because she had been four , was only able to follow.
But Bea isn’t like that kind of coach. She knows, because she knows Bea—knows that their shared pain from Seattle molded her into someone softer, kinder. And because she saw those girls who had been so unafraid to laugh and joke with their coach.
Trinity is shaken awake from her thoughts as the door to the gym opens.
“Daddy!” Izzy jumps up, immediately running over to where her dad stands. Trinity decides that she really needs to get new contacts when she can barely make out the fuzzy figure that Izzy fully barrels into at full speed. All she can see is Izzy tugging the man towards Trinity, a blur of purple glitter against a more muted outfit of grey sweatpants and a faded navy hoodie. “Daddy, this is Coach Trinity! You need to say hi to her, right now!”
She stares fondly at the little girl, her gaze tracking her as she is lifted off the ground and into her dad’s arms. Trinity plasters on the practiced smile she used to use for parents in her old assistant coaching days, the very same smile she uses with her patients nowadays.
Green eyes lock onto blue.
Wait.
It takes a few excruciatingly long moments for Trinity to register the person who has scooped up the preschooler in his arms as Frank Langdon. As in: the senior resident that publicly humiliated her on her first day. The very same Frank Langdon that she reported for stealing drugs from patients. The beloved asshole of the Pitt whose life she ruined.
What the fuck.
The polite smile she has plastered on her face slips for a second, and she swears she can feel the corner of her eye twitching. Langdon, who had also been pleasantly smiling beforehand, is now staring at her with his mouth hung open, a thousand conflicting emotions running behind his frustratingly bright blue eyes.
Seriously , she thinks, someone needs to get him some brown contacts .
Izzy stares up at her dad, her little eyebrows furrowing as silence lapses between Trinity and Langdon. She takes a hold of the sleeve of Langdon’s shirt and tugs, almost whining as she scolds her dad. “Dad! You’re supposed to say hi when you meet someone new!”
Langdon extends a hand towards Trinity who does everything in her power not to take a step back. He purses his lip, sighs, and eventually says, “Trinity." He pauses. “My name is Frank. Frank Langdon.”
The situation is so bizarre that Trinity is trying not to let out a horrified laugh. This has to be some sort of fever dream. She should’ve listened to Yolanda when she spent a solid 20 minutes out of their dinner date chastising Trinity about her concerning affinity towards replacing genuine sleep with an endless supply of energy drinks and how it was going to catch up to her sooner or later. She’s either dead or dreaming. Those are the only reasonable conclusions she can come to right now. Because this simply can’t be a real situation.
It’s the first time she’s seen Langdon since her first day in the Pitt. She doesn’t really have a point of reference to base her observation off of, since this also happens to be the second time she’s seen the man ever, but he looks different. More subdued, maybe. There’s a lack of that frenzied energy Trinity noticed on her first day. And he definitely looks more tired. His hair looks a little disheveled, and his undereyes are dark in the way an early stage of a black eye is. And she also notes that he’s not wearing a wedding ring either.
“Trinity Santos,” she says in a clipped voice, awkwardly returning the handshake. “Nice to meet you.”
Langdon sets Izzy down on the floor, the little girl looking quite pleased that her dad and her new favorite coach have now met. Little strands of brown hair fall in front of her face as Langdon reaches down to ruffle her hair, and something about her high-pitched giggles and complaints of “Dad! Coach Trinity tied my hair! Don’t ruin it!” makes Trinity’s stomach twist.
Realistically, she knows that Langdon’s absence from the Pitt and his divorce isn’t her fault. But does her brain know that? Of course not!
“Okay, Izzy-Bee, why don’t you go get your bag for me?” Langdon asks, voice crushingly gentle in a way Trinity had never heard before. “I’m going to talk to Coach Trinity for a second, okay?”
Trinity stares at Langdon, hoping to communicate The fuck you mean we’re going to talk for a second through her furrowing brows. But Langdon is only watching Izzy run away to where the kids store all of their bags, her pigtails becoming more and more undone with every bounding leap she takes across the mats. Trinity momentarily prays that Izzy just grabs her bag and dashes back so that she can be spared from whatever clusterfuck of a conversation Langdon wants to have with her, but Izzy instead decides to strike up a conversation with a 7-year-old girl in a glittery leotard. Trinity mourns Izzy’s lack of shyness.
“Internship didn’t work out for you then?”
She snaps back into attention, an offended scoff stuck halfway up her throat. If she hadn’t spent the last few months feeling guilty about ruining Frank Langdon’s life, Trinity would’ve taken this moment to punch him in the face.
“And why the fuck would you think that?” Trinity hisses under her breath, scanning around them to make sure that none of the kids are listening in on their conversation.
Langdon just shrugs, seemingly oblivious to the murderous glint in Trinity’s eyes. “There is no sane reason as to why a doctor working 12-hour shifts would willingly give up an off-day to coach tiny children in gymnastics.”
He has a point. But she also hates the implication of “There is no sane reason as to why a doctor like you would be doing something nice for once” that seems to have barbed his words.
“Well, Dr. Langdon,” she drawls, noting how Langdon’s jaw flexes when she uses the title, “judging off your screaming on my first day, I would’ve hoped that you already knew that I wasn’t sane, but I guess not. And if you must know, I am still having the time of my life at PTMC. I actually present cases to my senior residents and according to Samira and Ellis, I actually have decent bedside manners now. Does that make you happy?” She didn’t ask for this and she just wants desperately to go home to watch Grey’s with Huckleberry or back to Yolanda’s apartment where the water pressure is actually strong enough to drown out her racing thoughts. “Or would it make you happier if I wasn’t a fucking doctor anymore and actually a gymnastics coach? Is that what this is?”
“Jesus, Santos,” Langdon swipes a hand across his face. “I was just trying to joke.”
Trinity snaps, “You’re practically a stranger to me. You don’t get to crack jokes with me like we’re friends. I wouldn’t even call us coworkers.” He doesn’t get to waltz back into her life, acting as if he hadn’t yelled at her in front of all of their coworkers as if she was a nobody. Acting as if Santos hadn’t spent a solid fifteen minutes after to simply collect herself and separate Langdon’s words from the face of her old coach. His words had been so similar to what she had heard during practices and on the sidelines of gymnastics meets that it had taken everything in her to not cry right then and there in the trauma room. It’s been months, and Trinity swears she can still taste the metallic blood that trailed into her mouth as a result of her clamping down on the insides of her cheeks with her teeth.
Harper’s mantra of enjoying life as it came had been replaced with Trinity’s own: don’t let them see you cry.
He looks genuinely pained at the fact she’s not listening to him, and it honestly pisses Trinity off that he’s trying so hard to get her to do so. “Santos, I just wanted to—”
“Jesus fuck , Langdon,” Trinity starts saying, her voice crawling up a few octaves as her frustration continues to mount. She just wants to leave. “I don’t want to hear it. I’m here as a coach, and you’re here as one of my student’s parents. Let’s just keep it that way for both of our sakes, shall we?”
She cheers internally when Izzy returns, completely oblivious to the two glaring daggers at each other. Well, no—actually, it’s just Trinity staring daggers. Langdon is just looking at her with this pained expression, like he’s caught between anger and an odd sort of regret.
“Can we get pizza?” Izzy asks, looking up at her dad with expectant eyes.
Langdon looks to Trinity, defeated. “I’ll be dropping off and picking her up next week as well, Coach Trinity. See you then.”
“Of course,” she replies, her voice clipped.
She forces herself to smile until Langdon and Izzy have turned their backs to her. Izzy is giggling as Langdon says something or other about pizza.
Pizza sounds great.
While she’s driving back home, a mortifying moment of clarity makes her realize that the DILF Ruby and Maya were trying to set her up with earlier was definitely Langdon.
Actually, she concedes to herself, a few shots of tequila sounds fucking lovely as well.
Notes:
the only social media presence i have is a private twt account with 7 followers but if anyone mentions this fic on there just know i will be cheering you on in spirit <3
also new competitor in the guess langdon's second child's name competition ? izzy-bee is a nickname one of my white belts had way back when and i just thought it was cute :)
Chapter 2
Notes:
ap lit exam on the 7th ,, it is currently the 3rd and i wrote this monstrosity of a chapter in one afternoon when i could've been reviewing but fuck it we ball ,,
updated the chapter count !! this was supposed to be a two-parter but my ideas ran away from me and became an elaborate multi-chapter thing in my google drive soooo i guess we have this now
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Much to her chagrin, Trinity does not end up getting her much-needed shots of tequila. What she does end up doing is drive home in complete silence, her hands gripping at the wheel like she’s trying to choke someone out. It’s the kind of drive where pure muscle memory takes over as her mind crawls into itself, where she wakes up to the world again as the car’s engine shudders off and she’s left to wonder how exactly it is that she got home. It’s painfully familiar to how she got through her last competitive season of gymnastics—her mind untethering itself from her body as the routines embedded in the very cells of her muscles carried her through the chaos of those nightmarish meets.
It’s days like these that make Trinity miss her undergrad days, when post-exam mental breakdowns and rough days at her shitty part-time job and the overwhelming weight of responsibility from her family could all just be washed away with cheap shots under the dark lights of the campus bar. But now Trinity has more to worry about than trivial lectures and droning profs and her mother yelling at her to do better; she has patients that need her and she is expected to be alert and aware and definitely not hungover by the time she clocks in to be able to do her job. And so, even though every bone in her body is craving for something that will allow her mind to slip away into a pleasantly alcohol-induced haze-state, she parks her car in front of her apartment and goes home.
At least home has become a bearable space now.
Dennis jumps up when she slams the door behind her. He turns from where he’s sitting at the dining table to glare at her, because she usually slams doors just for the fun of seeing how startled he can get, but immediately softens when his perpetually sad Victorian lad gaze sweeps over her. When Trinity got into the car, she refused to let herself cry—but that probably meant she was wearing that pinched expression of hers, where she just looked like an emotionally constipated teenager who never learned how to appropriately manage their emotions. Her therapist tells her constantly that she doesn’t need to justify or downplay her vulnerability but if there’s one thing most people know about Trinity, it’s the fact that she’s not one to follow rules.
Langdon wasn’t even really being a dick. Trinity herself would’ve probably made those jokes to someone if the situation arose—if she saw Victoria out of the hospital she would’ve probably made a shitty joke about her running away from medicine to flaunt her child prodigy status and earn her living through TED talks and pretentious lectures to anxious Ivy-bound high schoolers or something. She knows that if it had been anyone else joking about her many fuck-ups throughout the course of her internship, she would shoot back a response with a lack of bite and a hint of mirth on her lips.
But Langdon isn’t anyone else.
He’s the reason that Trinity is still so unsure on whether her coworkers genuinely think of her as a competent doctor. It doesn’t matter that Samira tells her that she’s something of a natural or that Ellis claps her on the back with her megawatt smile after a trauma case gone well or that Abbot shoots her those awkward double thumbs-up whenever she presents a case; all that praise and proof of competency is still stained by what Langdon screamed at her nine months ago. Sometimes, after a rough shift where nothing seemed to go her way, she rolls Langdon’s words over in her mind, considering the possibility that really is just some arrogant, good-for-nothing doctor running on nothing but pure hubris coupled with stupidity. It’s not true—she knows that—but that doesn’t stop Trinity from doubting herself.
In that way, Langdon is also the reminder of a coach whose presence never left Trinity’s side. She still remembers the sting of a national competition from eons ago; Trinity walking away with trophies in her name, and still, like always, being yelled at for her supposed failures, being called every name under the sun until she cracked open and shattered in the parking lot. The memory of the trauma room in the Pitt from nine months ago is sharper, still preserved in startling vividness; Trinity taking the blame to take the brunt of Langdon’s anger, being called stupid and arrogant like always. She remembers freezing as Langdon’s face began to morph into the one of her coach, bright blue eyes becoming muddled brown, and brown hair becoming a grey-streaked black. Staring right into the stomach-churning visage of her past, Trinity lifted her chin in defiance, biting her lip so hard that she drew blood and ordered herself not to cry. She didn’t want to give her coach the satisfaction of reducing her to tears once again.
Everything that went down with Langdon is also the culmination of all the trauma that has dutifully followed at Trinity’s heels. The entire reason Trinity was able to see through Langdon was because she saw him. She saw the frenzied, almost manic, look in his eyes she often saw eye to eye in the pain clinic. She saw the irregularities of the benzodiazepines from a hypervigilance born from the overdose of her best friend. The way she responds to Langdon—with anger and defensiveness, like she’s a rabid kitten hissing at anyone or anything that crosses into her territory—is also born from the fear Trinity has lived with since she learned that some people in power could just fuck her up if they chose to.
Trinity is headstrong, but that doesn’t mean she isn’t almost always scared.
She laughs at herself in pity when she feels tears trailing down her cheeks and laughs some more when Dennis looks at her with that ‘oh no what the fuck did I do’ face. It’s stupid, but living with Dennis has given her so many more reasons to just laugh—not out of polite awkwardness but rather from pure amusement. Roughly, she wipes at her face with the heel of her palm, trying to calm her fluttering heart. She sees Dennis open and close his mouth several times, looking like a conflicted little guppy.
“If you ask me if I’m okay, I swear I’m going to staple your mouth,” she says with a lack of bite. She’s just tired. So tired.
“Well,” he gulps, “am I allowed to ask you what happened or would that also result in my mouth getting stapled?”
Trinity huffs a laugh. “Fine, what the hell! Guess who I saw while coaching today?”
Dennis’ eyebrows furrow. “Old patient that got mad at you?”
“Hah, which one? A patient gets mad at me every two business days. But no,” she stops dramatically. “It was Langdon. Turns out my super adorable 3-year-old private is his daughter.”
“Like Langdon, as in, Doctor Langdon? From our first day?”
Rolling her eyes, she replies, “Do you know any other Langdons? Yea, of course it was him.”
“Huh.”
She clicks her tongue. “Whatever. It’s whatever.”
It’s not whatever, but whatever . Trinity has more to worry about than the fact that one of her students’ dad is her ex-coworker that she reported on her first day as working as an actual doctor. She has more pertinent worries, like getting to sleep so that she’s not completely dead on her feet during her shift tomorrow. Maybe she’ll get to do another chest tube tomorrow. Maybe not,
“Heard that you had a surprise encounter over the weekend,” McKay says in lieu of a greeting on Monday. They stand side by side, Trinity fighting to wrangle her short hair up into a claw clip while McKay is fighting the sleeve of her corduroy jacket.
Trinity snorts, closing her locker with a slam after she gives up trying to secure the loose strands of hair that lay at the back of her neck. She leans against the cool metal and crosses her arms over her chest to watch McKay bring her coppery hair up into a ponytail. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Oh, please,” McKay rolls her eyes. “You know what I’m talking about, Trinity. Izzy is a sweetheart, isn’t she?”
It’s no surprise that McKay knows. Trinity purses her lips, rocking back and forth on her heels as she eyes the vinyl of the floor. Let it be known that Trinity actually enjoys working with kids. She practically lived on the floor of a gymnastics facility for her youth, which meant that if she wasn’t training, she was coaching tiny children how to get their first cartwheels or handstands and whatnot. Kids were annoying, sure, but there was only a slim chance of them being actual assholes—and most of the time, they were more direct and honest than most adults Trinity had known in her life, which she always appreciated. Even now, she’s pretty good with dealing with the kids that come into the emergency room.
And Izzy was really a sweetheart.
“How do you even know this?”
“Frank and I are friends,” McKay shrugs. “We talk.”
She frowns. “So he probably told you about how much of a bitch I was to him on Sunday, then?”
McKay returns her frown, tilting her head to shoot her that probing gaze she knows far too well. “ Were you a bitch to him, Trinity? Because all he said was that Izzy wouldn’t shut up about how much she loved Coach Trinity and how excited she was for next Sunday so she could see you again.”
The image crosses her mind. An excited and overly energetic Izzy Langdon bouncing up and down on her carseat on the ride back home, babbling on and on about her new coach and how cool she is. She imagines Langdon’s half-smile, agreeing and nodding along to his daughter’s statements like he believes them to be true.
Huh.
She has nothing to say, so she just gives a short noncommittal shrug.
“We should join the others for rounds,” McKay says with a tone of finality.
Trinity dutifully follows her out into the lull of chaos that the Pitt always seems to be existing within. Rounds go by quickly and Trinity earns a few smiles from the night crew as they clock out. Lately, Trinity’s been increasingly tempted to make the switch to the night shifts, but there’s still something that tethers her to days. Something like loyalty, and maybe something like unfinished business.
Victoria cashes in a favor with Trinity that lands her with doing sutures for patients from the waiting room, which results in her working alongside McKay in chairs for a long stretch of her shift. The general simplicity and routine-like quality of it all makes her feel a little jittery, but she takes it in stride when McKay promises to release her if an interesting trauma case comes rolling through the sliding doors of the ambulance bay.
She and McKay walk briskly into a room, and for some unknown reason, McKay stops in her tracks and Trinity almost makes both of them stumble forward as she walks into her back. McKay doesn’t apologize and continues to stand in silence.
Trinity sidesteps.
Ah. That’s why.
“Abby,” McKay smiles, her voice soft. “And Tanner! Long time no see, do you remember me, buddy?”
While Tanner’s tear-filled eyes immediately look up to McKay as he nods, Abby’s tired gaze latches onto Trinity with steely precision. Trinity can’t help but look away, instead looking at Tanner, who is sitting on top of the examination bed in a muddied soccer uniform.
“Okay, and this is Dr. Santos. She’s going to help me fix you up, does that sound alright?”
Tanner sniffs and nods again, one of his hands anxiously playing at the thin friendship bracelet on his wrist.
Abby sighs, her voice barely above a whisper as she speaks, fatigue and worry laced into every word. “Soccer game. Got kicked pretty hard in the ankle by another kid’s cleat and he took a pretty bad fall on his wrist.”
“Did he hit his head when he fell, Abby?” McKay asks gently as she moves towards Tanner, eyes sweeping over the young boy.
“I don’t— I don’t know. I wasn’t watching and then the next thing he was on the ground and—” Abby cuts herself off as her voice starts getting wobbly. “Sorry, I don’t know why I’m getting so emotional. Today’s just been a bad day, I think.”
McKay shakes her head. “Never apologize for having a bad day, it happens to the best of us.”
Tanner turns out to have a minor wrist and ankle sprain with no signs of a concussion, and as Trinity relays this information with the best neutral tone she can muster, the tension in Abby’s shoulders seem to bleed out a little bit.
“We’re going to give him an ice pack, and we can wait for the swelling to go down before we discharge him. Does that sound alright to you, Abby?”
Abby nods, the rest of her body frozen in place like someone is holding her in place with taut strings like a marionette doll. “Thanks as always, Cassie.”
“Of course.”
McKay sends Trinity back to the room a half hour later to process the discharge, and Trinity steels herself before she walks in. Abby, who was previously slouched over in her chair, straightens up as she enters and eyes Trinity warily. Tanner, with a melted ice pack limply hanging over his ankle, is completely asleep on the examination bed. After Trinity explains all the discharge papers and rattles off care instructions she turns to leave, wanting to escape the suffocating room, but Abby stops her as she begins to talk.
“You know,” Abby starts slowly, staring straight at the wall in front of her, glacial blue eyes pinned onto some poster about proper hand washing protocols, “I resented you for a long time.”
Trinity stops, letting the door to the room close with a small click behind her. She ignores her shaking hands, the closed door, the flurry of thought racing in her mind. She ignores the little Trinity in her brain that tells her to run, to leave.
“God, I blamed you for—” Abby’s breath shudders, “for ruining the white-picket fence life I thought I had. I was so damn desperate to hang onto some semblance of this perceived perfection that I hated you for telling Robby and for seeing through Frank. When everything fell apart I wanted to be angry at someone else other than me because the guilt of it all was eating away at me and you were just the most convenient person.”
“What changed?” Trinity finds herself asking.
Abby looks up at her and Trinity feels like she’s truly seeing her for the first time. If Trinity falls apart when she’s going through a shitty time, then Abby seems to be the opposite. She can see the seams start to come undone, but Trinity can see how Abby is desperately trying to hold onto a facade of perfection. She sees the beauty that she saw the last time, but she also sees the way that it’s perfected to an almost manufactured degree. There’s the silky blonde hair and the rosy blush and the lipstick color that is just the right swatch for her skin tone. She looks like the cool soccer mom that no one can rip their eyes away from. But Trinity is also no stranger to covering up her messes. Because under the mask, she sees the red-rimmed eyes and the hands that grip too tightly at her pants, the whitening knuckles and the way she holds in her breaths like she’s trying not to explode. And then there’s the look of suppressed anger and frustration that Trinity is so accustomed to seeing in the mirror.
Abby’s hands have moved from gripping at the loose fabric of her jeans to curling around the edge of the plastic chair she’s sitting on. “I guess I just came to my senses. My life, our life, wasn’t even half the diorama I pretended it was. I always thought that if I did everything right, nothing could go wrong. I married someone I was in love with who also happened to be a doctor, had two beautiful children I would do everything for, and worked in a profession I was passionate about.”
Trinity learned the hard way that life, being the absolute little shit it was, could erratically veer off its path and devolve into utter chaos even if someone did everything “right.”
“And then— I don’t know what changed, and I don’t even know when it changed. I just opened my eyes and I was so unhappy, and I could tell that he wasn’t happy either. Frank was barely at home and still taking on longer hours even when the kids were getting older and then he brought the dog home and—”
She takes in a sharp breath, straightening her back again.
“I ignored it because I thought everything would be fixed if I waited long enough. I just kept telling myself, ‘a few more years and Frank will be an attending so he’ll be able to be more flexible with his hours’ or ‘a few more years and the kids will be in school so I’ll have more time to myself’ and ignored all the cracks. I put so much effort into putting up this front that I refused to acknowledge all the cracks. I refused to acknowledge the fucking foundation of my entire life crumbling under my goddamn feet that I didn’t even notice that my husband needed help.”
She hadn’t wanted to notice it, at first. She had just filed the irregularities away in a folder in her brain and promised herself she would do something with it once she had concrete evidence, not wanting to be that one female intern who cried wolf during her first shift ever. But then, Robby had told her that she had a responsibility to tell and everything had spiraled from there. It was the right thing to do. But it still sat heavy in her chest, a weight that refused to budge.
“He needed help and I didn’t even know but you, Dr. Santos, you knew. Not even a full shift of working with him and you saw right through him. You got him the help that he needed. And how could I resent someone who did that for him?” Abby is looking up at her now, and her tone is so genuine that Trinity can’t help but hold her breath.
“He probably still resents me,” she mutters under her breath.
“He doesn’t, Dr. Santos. And I’m confident when I say that.” Abby looks at her—like, really looks at her with a degree of sincerity that Trinity doesn’t think she deserves. “You helped him more than you seem to give yourself credit for, and I know— I know that Frank will forever be grateful to you for that.”
Tanner and Abby leave—but not before all of the staff ruffle Tanner’s hair and wish him for a speedy recovery—hand in hand, and Trinity still can’t figure out if the weight has been lifted from her chest or not. The interaction with Abby only just makes her think more of what would’ve happened if she hadn’t reported Langdon. Maybe he would’ve just flown under the radar, maybe he could’ve harmed a patient, or maybe someone else would’ve taken notice. And that thought spirals downwards until it has latched onto her past memories, the pesky little things always lurking in the dark alcoves of her mind.
She wonders what could’ve become of her life if she had known to save her friends as well. She wonders what could’ve happened to Harper and some of her other friends that sought after pills and drugs like escape routes, if she had known what to do. Trinity will never not be mad that she wasn’t able to save her friends all those years ago. And Trinity supposes she’ll never not be conflicted about inadvertently helping Langdon.
But that’s what being a doctor means, isn’t it? You don’t get a choice on who you help, but you find yourself helping them regardless. You can only save the ones that come to you, whether that be in the form of an actual patient wheeled in by the EMTS or in the form of an ER doctor you realize as a potential addict. But for as long as she lives, there will always be that sinking sensation of guilt in Trinity’s stomach. For not trying harder to save the hypothetical patients—the ones that never came to her and the ones that could not come to her anymore.
Elbows pressed against the smooth countertop of the nurse’s station, Trinity stares up at the board, trying to ignore Dana eyeing her suspiciously. She knows that Dana has a sticky note to keep track of her cherry-picking and can also see the pen twirling in her hand.
Trinity considers humoring Dana by asking her to pick for her instead, but Dana beats her to it.
“Before I send you to the leg lac in South 7, mind if I ask you something?” Dana looks at her through the glasses perched on the tip of her nose.
“Sure?”
“How’s Izzy doing?”
Trinity scrunches her nose up, trying to mask her surprise. “Is everyone just stalking me now? Is that what it is?”
“Oh, honey, you know nurses like to talk,” Dana shrugs. Behind her Princess and Perlah grin, saying something in Tagalog that Trinity doesn’t catch.
“I think I know the sentiment far too well,” Trinity trails off, staring directly at a smiling Princess and Perlah as she pushes off the nurse’s station. “But Izzy’s doing well, I think. She’s a sweet kid. Can do a perfect front roll.”
“Heard she’s a big fan of you,” Dana muses, successfully blocking Trinity’s escape attempt. “Kids love nice coaches. My girls used to do gymnastics back in the day, before I knew it was basically a breeding ground for concussions and whatnot. But they loved it in the meantime, had a lovely coach that doted on them.”
“Yea, it’s always nice to have a good coach,” Trinity echoes.
She would make a shitty joke about how she could only dream about having a nice coach, but Dana smiles at her and Trinity successfully peels herself away, letting tired legs carry her towards the leg lac patient instead.
But the thing about shitty coaches is that Trinity has all the more reason to be the best damned coach she can be. She arrives early on Sunday in good spirits, her water bottle already filled with cold water and a blue Gatorade hanging out in the bottom of her bag. Ruby and Maya pounce on her as soon as she walks in, and she entertains them for a while, giving corrections as they run through their floor routine. She somehow ends up getting roped into the girls’ handstand competition—”What are we, five?”—and beats Maya by half a second.
Muscle memory somehow still allows her to do back walkovers with ease, and everything in the gym just feels so damn familiar that it takes her breath away. And it’s not in the shitty way where Trinity is fighting to reclaim in, box-breathing through a panic attack and all. It’s the type of breathlessness you get out of relief. She feels stupid as she challenges a bunch of 17 and 18-year-old to handstand and cartwheel competitions when she’s here on a coaching job, but it’s the fun type of stupid. The type of stupid she reveled in with her friends before everything started going downhill.
She really had loved her sport. Loved that it combined pure power and athleticism with elements of performance and grace. Loved that it initially brought together a group of girls, making them inseparable throughout the cycle of meets and practices and weight training sessions and meets and practices. After all, it was equal parts love and fear that had cemented the years of gymnastics into her muscle memory. It was odd, learning to love something she hated for so long.
Or maybe it was just odd to rediscover a love that never truly left.
Victoria—the 7-year-old one, although Trinity does find the thought of teaching the 20-year-old how to do handstands hilarious—is an angel and successfully does her first backbend and back walkover on her own, which makes Trinity beam. She doesn’t hesitate to give Trinity a hug before she leaves, tiny arms wrapping around her torso as she kneels down to match her level.
She watches some of the older girls stick their dismounts and cheers for them. She tells Ruby, “Not bad. Maybe if you stick it at a competition you’ll be as good as I was,” and watches as Ruby laughs, loud and real and genuine.
Trinity’s in such a good mood that Langdon’s arrival doesn’t bother her at all that much. They just exchange curt nods before Izzy comes barreling over in her direction, all smiles and a whirl of blue leotard and fluttering brown hair. They’re just coach and parent, after all—a practically nonexistent relationship, judging off of the fact that Trinity’s own parents never even knew her coach’s name until it started to make headlines.
Unlike Victoria’s mom, who had smiled and left the girl in her care for an hour and a half, Langdon sits on a nearby bench and watches intently. It freaks Trinity out a little bit, but she brushes it off.
Instead she focuses on Izzy, helping her work on her front and back rolls like last week. Twenty minutes later, Izzy starts chanting, “I wanna do handstands!” and who is Trinity to say no to that? Trinity looks out of the corner of the eye, sees Langdon staring.
Whatever.
She doesn’t care about what Langdon thinks of her, but Izzy very clearly does. Everytime the girl gets scared about kicking her legs over her head, she just stands still for a few seconds, looking over her shoulder and looking to her dad for reassurance. When her heels fail to connect with the mat Trinity had set in front of her for the sixth time, Langdon stands up, arms crossed over his chest as he leans closer to watch the two of them intently. Trinity knows that he’s just being a worried parent, but she also knows that worry can come off as disappointment to little kids.
It’s when Langdon gives a little shout of, “One more time, Izzy” that Izzy properly startles, her shoulders locking when she’s finally going up into the handstand position. Trinity can pinpoint the exact second the girl’s nerves hit her, making her wrists give out under her shaking body. Thankfully, she’s quick to react, and Trinity scoops the girl up in her hand before she tumbles towards the floor headfirst.
“I don’t wanna do this anymore,” Izzy whispers into Trinity’s ear after she pulls her gaze away from her dad.
“Hey, that’s totally okay,” Trinity says, hoping that she comes off as comforting as she pats Izzy’s head. “How about you take a bathroom break and go get some water? We can try again after.”
She watches as Izzy pushes past her dad, leaving his question of, “Was it too scary?” hanging in the air like an open wound. And then they’re left to stare at each other. Blue against green.
Fuck it.
Before she knows it, they’re standing face to face again, close enough that Trinity can’t look away without looking like a coward. She rocks back and forth on her heels, awkwardly figuring out what to say. “Okay, look, parents are totally allowed to watch or whatever, but you’re hovering like a helicopter parent and it’s freaking Izzy out. So stop.”
Langdon shoots her an unconvinced look, placing his hands on his hips. “She’s not freaking out. I’m her dad, she loves when I watch.”
She feels her eyes begin to twitch. Personal shit aside, she truly hates when parents get like this.
“Well, yea, usually. But not when she’s learning a new skill. She told me that people watching her makes her nervous, makes her mess up.”
“So you’re telling me I’m not allowed to watch my own daughter?” Langdon tilts his head, those stupid flyaway strands of his falling in front of his face.
Trinity scoffs. Unkindly. So fucking unkindly. “Jesus! I’m not telling you how to live your life, Langdon. I’m simply telling you that you’re hovering and it’s impacting your kid’s lesson. You’re paying for this shit, if you forgot. Don’t you want her to get the most out of it? Besides, I know what I’m doing so if you’re worried about—”
She doesn’t know when both of them adopted both of their harsher voices again—with their words polished into points meant to hurt—but it’s making her head spin and she just wants to scream.
“Do you? Because last time I heard from Beatrice, you quit gymnastics over a decade ago.”
She swears she sees red.
“Holy shit, Langdon,” she cries out, throwing her hands up into some aborted motion meant to capture her frustration. “Izzy is three . Honestly, even a teenager who isn’t a competitive gymnast could teach her lessons if they wanted to. I’m teaching her how to roll and do handstands, not do the fucking Biles or the wolfspins on beam.” He blinks at her because he’s not a gymnast and would have no fucking clue what the Biles or a wolfspin is. She bets that he can’t even name the difference between men’s and women’s gymnastics. “And look, I was a gymnast for longer than you and I were doctors. I promise you I know what I’m doing.”
She hates that they always seem to end up here. Facing each other, eyebrows set, lips pursed—and so damn combative. Words barbed with venom. The trauma room all over again. Why can’t they just be civil? Why can’t she just be normal?
“Well, can I worry about you potentially having an outburst on Izzy like you do on your patients or is that too big of a hit on your ego as well?”
She sees so much red that she swears she’s back in one of the trauma rooms at the Pitt. She looks down and half-expects to see blood splattered across the mats.
“What?” Trinity whirls on Langdon, her tone murderous with disbelief. She takes a quick scan around the gym—empty, thank the heavens—before she steps toward Langdon, getting up in his face. She wants to make him uncomfortable, to make him feel threatened. She wants to see him squirm . Does that make her a shitty person? Probably. But she doesn’t care. “Do you really think I’m going to yell at and be a fucking asshole to your 3-year-old daughter? Is that really how lowly you think of me? Look, you can say that I’m an unfit doctor who knows nothing all you want because I don’t fucking care , but I swear to God, if you even insinuate in the slightest bit that you think I’m going to take my anger out on a literal toddler—” Trinity can’t help but let out a breathless laugh when her voice breaks. “You know, my old coach was the type of shitty coach you’re worried about. Mean. Always angry. Abusive. Verbal abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse. Name it, and he did all of that shit. To a bunch of teenage girls. He put all of the girls in my club through that fucking shit. I promised to myself that if for some reason I ever became a coach that I would kill myself if I even suspected a hint of his behavior in my teaching style. So no, Langdon, you don’t have to be worried about any potential outbursts. You have no right to talk to me like that if you even think for a second that I would subject these children who might enter into one of the most toxic and sporting environments in the world to unjustified hate and vitriol and abuse. ”
A beat. Langdon is obviously taken aback. He blinks hard and now there’s a sympathetic look set in those excruciatingly blue eyes of his.
Trinity looks up at him, voice shaking and barely above a whisper. “You have no fucking idea what I went through.
It takes a few moments for them to realize that Izzy is walking over to them and they immediately soften their faces, take a few steps back. Langdon takes a deep breath and looks away awkwardly as Trinity wipes away roughly at her tear streaked cheeks.
“Daddy, why’d you make Coach Trinity cry?” Izzy asks upon arrival, blinking up at Langdon with a knot in the space between her brows.
“Oh, Izzy-Bee—”
“Allergies!” Trinity practically yells at the same time, before turning to look at Langdon. “I’ll go get Beatrice to finish this lesson if you’re so worried about outbursts.” She smiles saccharine sweet.
“Trinity—”
“It’s fine .” It is most decidedly not. “Hey, Izzy, I’m feeling a little sick, so I’m going to get Coach Bea to finish up your lesson. You know her, right?”
Izzy all but pouts. “I want Coach Trinity! And my daddy’s a doctor, he can make you not sick anymore and then you can teach me!”
“I don’t think this is something your dad can fix. I’m sorry, sweetheart.”
She tries to block out Izzy’s protests and Langdon’s gentle consolations as she barges into Bea’s office, completely unperturbed by the confused look her friend shoots her over her desktop computer.
“Bea, cover for me.”
Bea’s brows knit into a look of concern and Trinity knows that she can probably see right through her. “Trin—”
She pushes out of the gym, bag thrown across her shoulder, and walks back to her car. Hands at 12 o’ clock. Harper is back in her head again. She wonders why she’s always dealt the most awful cards in the fucked up game that is her life. It’s desperate, the way she wants good things in her life to hold; she leaves claw marks on everything that crosses paths with her, and gymnastics was never an exception. She wants to love it again, to have it take up that tender space in her heart until she’s old and stiff and inflexible as a board.
Trinity doesn’t understand why everything is stopping her from doing so.
She drives home. Opens the door, realizes she forgot her water bottle.
“Fuck!” she screams. Dennis is on the night shift. There’s no one to ask if she’s okay, and even though she hates that question, she just wishes there was someone here . “Fuck,” she says again. Bitter and defeated and so so tired.
She loves that stupid water bottle and that stupid sport so much that it breaks her apart every single time she touches it.
Notes:
i fear trinity is just going to continue to go through it question mark ? langdon and santos will manage to have a civil conversation sooner or later trust
comments and kudos are always appreciated <33
Chapter 3
Notes:
ap lit teacher : good job on writing the ap lit exam !! make sure to go home and get some well-deserved rest
me : SAY NO LESS [opens laptop and proceeds to spend more time writing this after i wrote 3 essays in 2 hours on my computer]
also me : ahah why do my eyes hurt
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
July 4th: Dr. Frank Langdon returns without much fanfare, and if Trinity tries hard enough, she can let herself believe that he never left in the first place. In complete honesty, Trinity barely notices him during the shift other than when Robby casually—or as casually as he can manage—announces his return during rounds at the beginning of their shift, but that might just be because he chose to return on July 4th, a day in which Trinity learns the true extent of human stupidity.
It’s an entirely different chaos than the one that enveloped the PittFest MCI. Then, the stress and carnage had been condensed into an excruciating two hours, whereas the chaos of July 4th stretches throughout the entirety of a 12-hour turned 15-hour shift; the constant stream of patients is amplified tenfold, and it’s just a constant stream of hit after hit after hit of overwhelming trauma cases, of burns and falls and car crashes and far too many incidents involving fireworks. It’s so exhausting that she’s dead on her feet by the end of the shift and only focused on the task of safely driving her and Dennis back home and making sure that both of them eat some semblance of dinner before collapsing into their respective beds. That is to say that she genuinely doesn’t notice Langdon eyeing her anxiously across the floor on multiple occasions.
What she does notice, though, is the unfamiliar tension that settles over the ER, a string pulled taut between everyone and Langdon as people are trying to navigate his return. To most, he has become an unfamiliar familiarity that they treat with some degree of awkward and stilted formality. Whispers and the remnants of rumors still hang in the air, unacknowledged and festering like untreated wounds. Far too little jabs between him and Yolanda whenever she pushes into trauma rooms for consults, no more of the “my best resident” dynamic between him and Robby, no more of that energetic boyish energy Dana always seemed to poke fun at during the first few weeks of his absence. Trinity, Mel, and McKay are the only people that treat him normally during his first shift back, but Trinity knows that she’s a clear outlier in the spectrum of “normal” treatment.
Mel buzzes with an almost infectious enthusiasm from the moment she sees Langdon step in through the ER’s doors, a hand awkwardly rubbing at the back of his neck. McKay treats him like he’s her new little annoying brother, and Trinity catches three separate instances throughout the 15-hour shift where McKay lectures him like an equally disappointed and worried older sister, arms crossed over chest and all. And then there’s Trinity, who slips back into the all-too-familiar animosity they exchanged during Trinity’s first shift. When they’re not actively avoiding each other, they’re hiding strongly worded statements behind their blazing gazes or shoving past each other as they walk to opposite ends of the ER. Their argument from Izzy’s last lesson is yet another string that runs between them, pulled taut and to its limit, the frayed threads breaking under the weight of every second that passes on their shift.
Logically, Trinity knows that they just need to have a normal, adult conversation, but her brain refuses to slow down to even entertain the idea of having to converse with Frank Langdon. He knows too much now—too much of her hurt strings together their uncertain dynamic, and she hates the thought of having to talk to him, knowing that Langdon knows her to that extent.
They do end up sharing a few civil words in the fourteenth hour of the hellish July 4th shift, when they’re working on a burn patient alongside Ellis, but it’s nothing more than two doctors spitting out vitals and dosages of medications and further treatment plans. There’s no venom or questioning suspicion in their back and forth remarks, but there’s that excruciating awkwardness that makes Trinity want to pull her hair out. She’s never been good at the whole social interaction shtick, but she wants nothing more than to be—at the very least— civil with Langdon. It would make the whole coworkers situation a lot easier, in her humble opinion.
When Langdon ambles away from the room, leaving just Ellis and Trinity to finish up with the patient, she pins with that questioning gaze, and asks with slight amusement, “You two finally worked through your beef?”
She snorts, pushing past the senior resident and back into the chaotic frenzy of the ER, before she adds over her shoulder, “Quite the contrary, actually.”
Ellis doesn’t push, which Trinity is eternally grateful for. Perlah and Princess do push, but it’s only with comically raised eyebrows, so she lets it pass.
The scheduling gods allow her to have a Langdon-less shift for the rest of the week, and because she misses one of Izzy’s lessons covering one of Mel’s shifts on the immediate Sunday after the 4th, she doesn’t see even a glimpse of him until the next Friday. And even then, she doesn’t meet face to face with him until after her shift.
Somehow, Langdon always manages to be the person that catches Trinity is at her lowest—practically an open wound that has miraculously gained the ability to walk. The shift wasn’t the worst shift she’s gone through—not even by a long shot—but it was the kind of shift that compounded from all her previous shifts of the week, all her exhaustion and anxiety and hypervigilance tumbling into one overwhelming moment that had her crying in a bathroom stall.
July evening air is sticky sweet on her skin, and the sun is still clinging onto the horizon, painting the city below in a beautiful wash of oranges and reds. She’s leaning on the railing, looking up at the sky instead of down at the pavement below, where people skitter across the sidewalk like ants. Trinity doesn’t turn when she hears the door to the rooftop open.
“I’m not going to jump, if that’s what you’re about,” Trinity mutters as a pair of footsteps stop beside her.
“Wasn’t really worried about that, Santos,” Langdon says stiffly. “You like this job far too much.”
Trinity continues to look out into the sky, chewing on the inside of her cheek. There’s a snarky comment hidden somewhere, maybe stuffed in the space between her tongue and the bottom of her mouth, but she clamps down on it when she senses the buzz of anxiety and impending sincerity emanating off of Langdon.
A few more moments pass between them before Langdon ventures carefully. “Can we talk?”
“Is that not what we’re doing right now?”
Langdon, to his credit, doesn’t try to retort. “No, like—actually talk. I wanted to say something to you.”
She turns to look at Langdon. His hair is all over the place and the collar of his white undershirt is stained through with blood, and there’s such a pleading look glazed over in his blue eyes that Trinity relents, nodding swiftly before she turns away again. She knows that look. Is far too familiar with it. It’s a begging to be believed, a begging to be heard after she’s said something wrong and knows it. Trinity has always been ambitious and has always wanted so much—and lately, she’s just been wanting opportunities to explain herself, to fold her hurt into understandable origamis that don’t tear into everyone that tries to help her. Maybe Langdon is like her in that regard. The both of them are all just jagged edges polished to be smooth, with a few shards still jutting out of them at odd angles that catch at people at unexpected intervals.
“Well,” she sighs, “go ahead before I change my mind.”
The sun continues to set. She’s been stopping to look at the sunsets a lot these days, actually. He takes the spot next to her on the railing, leaning back with his elbows propped up behind him.
“I’m sorry for last Sunday. I didn’t mean to say all that shit to you. You didn’t deserve any of that. I was just— I guess I just really wanted to be there for Izzy to show that I’m trying to be a good dad, and that made me act like a massive dick. I didn’t even think about what I was implying, and that was a really fucked up thing for me to do.”
Trinity snorts. “Yea, you were kinda a massive dick.”
He promptly ignores her, “And for what it’s worth, I also want to apologize for how I acted towards you on your first day. I know that this is the last thing you want to hear from me, but you really reminded me of myself when I was just starting off my residency. Brash, arrogant”—when Trinity whirled to look at him with incredulity, Langdon just put out a placating hand, as if to say “trust me on this”—“but also so ambitious and so eager to jump right into the action because of the skill and confidence you had to back it up. In my head, I knew that you were going to shape up to be a good doctor, but I guess the other more fucked up part of my brain hated to admit that. And when I saw that you were onto me, I just wanted you gone. I thought you were going to ruin me and that made me so angry.”
She remembers. The memories of her first day are always a constant buzz in her mind. The details are still clear-cut and vivid, no matter how many times she shifts the angle. The librium. The excessive dosing with the seizure patient. The surgical glue on the Lorazepam. The yelling. All of it.
“And I never really stopped being angry until Cassie chewed the fuck out of me, actually,” Langdon says with a hint of mirth. “Told me that if it weren’t for you, no one would’ve noticed until I actually killed a patient or something. She really made me realize that if it weren’t for you, Santos, I would’ve actually lost everything. My medical license, my kids, my—” his voice catches. “My life, probably. It was fucked up for me to hate someone who ended up getting the help I actually needed.”
Trinity shrugs, “If it makes you feel better, I hated myself for what I did, too. Like sure, you got your help, but fuck— The guilt of basically firing a beloved asshole senior resident was fucking crazy, I’ll tell you that much.”
“Well, don’t. Don’t hate yourself for that. You can hate yourself for dating one of my closest friends from med school and subjecting me to endless stories about Trinity this and Trinity that, but don’t hate yourself for actually doing your job. You did good that day, Santos. You really did.” Blue sets upon green and Trinity thinks this is the first time there hasn’t been charged hostility shared between them. “And I was wrong that day. Cassie and Heather and Mel talk about you a lot. They think you’re a good doctor, and I think you know that as well. And I am … begrudgingly warming up to that fact as well. And I do know for certainty that you’re a good coach.”
There’s a certain weight that’s lifted off her chest as he says that. It’s like confirmation that she’s not as fucked up as people think of her to be. Still leaning against the railing, she raises her brows, the question of Really? dancing in her amused eyes.
Langdon gives her a light scoff at this. “Seriously, Izzy won’t shut up about you. It drives me absolutely insane.”
A weak smile tugs at the corner of her lips.
“You know, your kids are lucky to have you as their dad. You’re a good one, from what I can tell.”
A light glints in his eyes at the mention of his kids and Trinity’s stomach clenches in the way that it does whenever she sees something that she used to want. She’s decided that she’s too old to want for her parents to have been nicer to her, but it still stirs something in her to see parents that genuinely care about their children.
“You think I’m a good dad?” The question is so sincere that Trinity fights the urge to laugh. It’s like he never even considered the possibility of being viewed as such, even though it’s so damn apparent to Trinity that his children love him for a reason. He still wears matching friendship bracelets with his kids, for crying out loud.
She nods, hoping to sound as sincere as she means her words to be. “Not a lot of parents are that involved in their kids’ extracurriculars. Like, you may have gotten too involved that time around, but it shows that you actually care. And I think you chose to get better for them.” She looks down at the colourful beads and strings hanging around his wrist. Looks back up. “Not a lot of kids are lucky enough to have parents like that.”
Langdon’s eyes crinkle just slightly, as if he understands that there’s another story there, resting under the surface of her words. She pushes on.
“You want some advice though, from coach to parent?”
“Shit, yea. Go ahead.”
“I’ve seen so many kids as a coach that I couldn’t count them even if I tried. I’ve seen hundreds of shitty athletes, but I’ve seen thousands of shittier parents. Parents who don’t care and don’t listen and push their kids too far until they shatter and break on the damned competition floor. I would hate for you to become someone like that for Izzy. You have to know that you should be there for her as a parent who knows that they nothing about gymnastics, and not as a parent who tells their kids what they should be doing despite knowing jackshit about the sport. Just—” she takes a deep breath in, trying to actually look at Langdon. “Be there for practices. Be there for her meets. Hold her hand when she’s nervous. Learn how to secure her hair so it doesn’t get in her eyes. Find her tells for when she’s too nervous before an event and find the time to tell her that it’s okay to stumble. Don’t tell her how to jump or how to turn or how to present to the judges because that’s my job—a coach’s job. Look, I’m not lying to you when I say that I see actual potential in Izzy. She could easily become a good club gymnast if she wants to. But the last thing I would want is for that potential to become a set expectation that makes her scared of ever messing up. You’re a good dad, but I think you’re too scared of them making mistakes. And it shows. Them doing less than great isn’t evidence of you failing as a dad or something. It’s just evidence of them being kids. Like, come on. They’re not doctors, Langdon. They’re not like you or me. A mistake isn’t going to cost them a life. It might cost them a medal, but come on, who the fuck cares about medals. Izzy’s three.”
She’s out of breath by the time she’s finished talking, and she can feel the incessant pitter-patter of her heart underneath her skin. But it feels … good.
Trinity never had caring parents that went to every gymnastics meet or cared enough to ask about how her practices went. All she had to work with was ambivalence and the constant disappointment that came with being a competitive athlete in a pool of equally skilled athletes. The losses and the wins came in and out like the tide, and her parents never seemed to grasp why Trinity couldn’t win every single damn time. Even before all the shit with her coach went down, Trinity’s love for gymnastics had been slipping—her parents had convinced her that the sport was only worth it if she was the best, and most of the time, she wasn’t. The only things that patched up the hairline fractures of her career—both literal and metaphorical—were her friends, the friends that eventually slipped past her fingers, leaving her alone. So fucking alone.
For a while, her friends—and only her friends—had made gymnastics enjoyable. The girls in their club tried to build a makeshift home upon a rickety foundation, even though they knew it would inevitably topple over them, trapping them under the weight of a system that never cared about girls like them. And for that short while, that makeshift home was all that mattered to Trinity.
She wants Izzy to love gymnastics as she had loved it. She wants the kid to experience the thrill of standing up on the podium in first place, to know what it feels like to master frustrating skills, and to have the support that you can only get from a group of teammates in the same sport. But she wants Izzy to experience all that without all the in-between shit Trinity had to face.
Langdon nods, quiet and serious. “That was surprisingly heartfelt, Santos.”
She just rolls her eyes. “Anything to help the future career of my student.”
Silence stretches between the two of them. But for once, it’s the kind of silence that Trinity can breathe easily in. It’d be a lie to say that it isn’t still awkward, but it isn’t hostile, which seems like a good start to Trinity
“I’m not going to ask if we can be friends because I think the both of us know we’re not there yet, but”—Langdon, not exactly sure what to do with his hands, settles on asking for the most awkward of fist bumps, his bracelet-clad hand floating in between them in anxious anticipation—“you think we could try to be coworkers for now? Civil coworkers.”
“Sure.” Trinity bumps her fist against his, trying to stifle her laugh. “Civil coworkers.”
It’s a start.
“Well,” she drawls, “that’s enough being nice for me today. Are you going to get more mushy with me or can I leave so that I can actually clock out and get some sleep?”
“Yea! Um, yea. Totally. Go home, Santos. I won’t keep you anymore.”
Trinity smiles lightly. “Sweet.”
When she turns to leave, the sun finally dips out of the sky. She remembers something one of her gymnastics friends used to say after their practices, when they stalked back to their cars, exhaustion settled into the marrow of their bones, long after the sky had turned a deep navy and only cast the light of the moon and flickering street lights down onto them. Sunsets aren’t just the end. They bring forth new days and new opportunities.
It’s a nice thought. It’s the kind of thought that Trinity can savour now, keeping it in the space between her ribs and heart. A constant reminder that her life didn’t end back when her gymnastics career ended, that she’s still here, very much alive and trying to become better—to become better at what she does and who she is.
The awful shift leaves with the setting sun, leaves with every step she takes to find her way back into the Pitt.
Trinity finds McKay by the lockers. The older resident is dragging her fingers through her hair, a fruitless endeavour in trying to tame the mess that are McKay’s bangs at the end of a gruelling 12-hour shift.
“You two finally talk it out?” she asks, giving up on taming her hair and slapping some old baseball cap onto her head.
Throwing her bag over one shoulder, she shrugs. “Somethin’ like that.”
McKay smiles like a proud mom and gives a light punch to Trinity’s shoulder. “Attagirl. See you next shift?”
“See you next shift, McKay,” Trinity echoes.
Just before she decides to leave, with music already blasting in her airpods and her car keys swinging around in her hands, Langdon catches her one last time, and Trinity decides to stare at him with a quizzical look until he pulls something out from his bag.
It’s her water bottle, the one she left behind at the gymnastics facility. It’s banged up and dented to hell and back from the hundreds of times she’s dropped it that she knows she should just let it go, but Trinity has always been more sentimental than she lets on to be.
She narrows her eyes at him. “Oh, so you were the one who stole it.”
“Woah,” he says with a breathless laugh, “I was just safekeeping.”
“Yea, whatever. Thanks,” she says as she takes the bottle from him
Her fingers run over the faded stickers. She threw out everything that reminded her of her athletic career, whether it be pictures or medals or trophies—all of it, save for a few pictures of her and Harper—were collecting dust in a storage unit all the way in Seattle. The water bottle was one of the last things she had left, the stickers being from old competitions and intensive training camps or from countries her teammates visited over vacation. She lets it thump against the side of her thigh as she walks out.
Over her shoulder, she calls out, “See you around, old man.”
Langdon whirls on her, “Hey! I’m not that much older than you.”
“Oh please, you have two kids,” Trinity scoffs. “In my eyes that means that I can call you an old man all I want.”
Trinity no longer feels that sinking feeling of dread when she sees Langdon around during her shifts, but that doesn’t mean that she is getting any used to just how much he tries to talk with her. And usually it’s not even about cases or patients or the silly bets that basically carry all the doctors and nurses through their shifts. He asks her about weekend plans and random sports games from the night before and her favorite movies. Never personal enough to breach past that title of coworkers that hangs between them like a massive red STOP sign, but friendly enough that Trinity can deem it casual small talk that doesn’t actually make her want to rip her hair out. So, when Langdon rolls over on a wheely chair while Trinity is charting at her station a week after their rooftop conversation, she just knows that he has something to say but stays put at her station.
He taps his fingers against the surface of her station desk, looking at Trinity with wide, expectant eyes. It’s a little unnerving, if she does say so herself. “Izzy was asking if Coach Trinity was going to be at her invitational this weekend.”
“Hm…” she trails off, trying not to lose her train of thought as she finishes off charting for a patient.
“She’d love to have you there.”
Trinity signs off on her computer with a flourish and swings around in her own chair to level Langdon with a raised brow. “How do you even know if I have that day off or not?”
“Asked Dana about your schedule.”
Trinity flicks her eyes over to Dana, who simply shrugs and stalks away from the nurse’s station without a word.
She turns back to Langdon. “Creep.”
No one needs to know that she already begged Mel to cover her shift the day of the competition.
“Well, I can make it. It’s next Saturday, right?”
“I’ll drive you,” Langdon offers up with a shrug.
“You don’t have to. It’s not far.”
It is far, but Trinity genuinely doesn’t mind long drives. Back when she wasn’t working insane 12-hour shifts, she used to take herself off on long aimless drives, blasting music as she belted along to her heart’s content. When she’s not screaming at dumb people on the road, she wholeheartedly enjoys the act of driving. She grimaces at the thought of having to park at the venue of a gymnastics competition, though. If there’s anything she learned from being tossed through the competition circuit since she could spell, it’s that parking is virtually impossible to get, no matter how early you get to the venue. It does sound slightly tempting to make Langdon have to go through the horrors of finding a parking spot.
“Let me drive you, Santos. It’s the least I can do. And also having you in the car would save me from Izzy asking me if you’re still coming a million times before we even get to the competition venue.”
“Sure, whatever.” Her eyes flick up to the board with finality, but there’s a smile playing at the edge of her lips.
And so, that’s how Trinity ends up here: riding shotgun in Langdon’s car as they drive to a gymnastics competition on a random Saturday morning. It’s seven in the morning when Langdon picks her up from her apartment, and while Trinity expects Izzy to still be fully asleep, she seems to be the most awake out of all three of them, squealing excitedly as she ducks into the car.
She talks through the entire drive and Trinity finds herself developing a deep respect for parents of toddlers. The only experience she’s had with raising toddlers was through the Sims 4, and even that was overwhelming enough for her—she can’t imagine actually having to be responsible for a toddler in real life.
When they finally manage to park in front of the competition venue, Izzy almost immediately wriggles out of her booster seat and is thumping at the glass with her hands to tell her dad that she wants out. Trinity hears the click of the child locks disengaging, and Izzy becomes a blur of pink and purple and blonde hair in the corner of her eye. There’s a distant image of herself that flickers in the distance, just barely out of reach. A 5-year-old Trinity, before her parents decided that she wasn’t a kid anymore, before she got shitty coaches, and before life as she knew it was flipped on its axis. Green eyes twinkling in the early morning sunlight as she hopped out of her parents’ car, the sequins of her new leotard catching the light as she tugged at her mom’s hand.
Izzy clasps onto Langdon’s hand as soon as he leaves the car and comes around to her side, and Trinity can’t help but look down at the little girl and smile. She finds herself in so many of her patients, and now, she finds herself in Izzy.
Trinity pauses when they stop in front of the doors to the venue. Squinting against the rising sun, she tries to ignore that every gymnastics competition venue looks the damn same. The hands gripping at the strap of her tote bag are shaking, but she refuses to acknowledge it. Memories flash behind her eyes at full force and it feels like she’s having the air knocked out of her, her chest tightening and her ribcage suddenly feeling too big for her own chest. It’s the same kind of uneasy feeling she used to get during more technically advanced routines, where each skill felt more like a guessing game rather than a string of moves that was carved into her bones. She’s not competing today, and isn’t even here as a formal coach, but her body doesn’t seem to be cognizant of that as she stares at the all-too familiar venue.
Izzy is tugging at Langdon’s hand, but he only turns to narrow his eyes at her—searching. “You okay?”
She nods, pushing past him and Izzy so that she can get through the doors. If she doesn’t now, then she knows she’ll never be able to. “I will be.”
Inside, it’s loud and overwhelming and hot in the way that Trinity doesn’t like. It feels like her hair is sticking to the back of her neck and her shirt is sticking to her back and something about the high-pitched squealing of a bunch of little kids hurts her ears in a way that she knows she’s going to get a headache later. She squeezes her eyes tightly until she sees white stars pulsing against the dark, takes a deep breath, and walks over to where Bea is waving her over.
“Trin! I knew that you were going to make it!” Bea smiles. “You feeling alright?”
“As alright as I can be at a gymnastics competition.”
Bea’s smile softens. “If you need out, just let me know, okay? I’ll make sure to film your kids’ routines if you don’t catch them.”
“They’re not my kids.”
“Oh please, Trinity. You’ve grown soft. Admit it.”
“Yea yea, whatever.” She waves Bea off with a groan, even though it fills her with some sense of warmth to know that in some capacity, she’s still a coach. “I’m gonna go find a seat before a kid’s entire extended family decides to claim an entire row.”
She spots Langdon sitting on one of the bleachers and goes to join him. His eyes are locked onto a girl that looks similar to Izzy. The little girl is jumping up and down in front of both of her parents, and as she jumps into her dad’s arms, the dad immediately wraps his hands around her torso and spins her around in the air. Trinity tries not to see the way his hand is rubbing at a spot on his lower back and how his lips are set into a tight, lopsided frown.
“Mind if I sit next to you?”
She clambers into the bleachers before Langdon can even answer.
“How aren’t you more freaked out about this?”
Trinity tilts her head. “About what?”
“All the potential injuries?” Langdon huffs, as if he was expecting Trinity to have read his mind. He gestures at groups of kids warming up on the floor with a knot forming in his brows. “I feel like they should have ER docs on standby or something.”
“Well, we’re here.”
Rolling his eyes, he says, “You know what I mean.”
“Yea, well … Kinda hard to get freaked when you spent so much time seeing people brush off crazy injuries like they were nothing. It all seems pretty tame once you see the level some athletes push themselves to compete at despite being severely injured. They turn out relatively fine. Usually.”
She turned out fine. Relatively so.
Langdon just stares straight at her, looking unamused. “Relatively.”
Trinity shrugs, “Well, the ER resident in me is freaked out, but the gymnast in me also knows that I competed on way too many sprained ankles to care, so…”
“On sprained ankles?”
“Sprained ankles, tendonitis, muscle strains. Probably had a concussion one time, but my coach never let me confirm because we were a few days out from competition.”
The ER resident shudders at the thought now, but 16-year-old Trinity had been more scared of the prospect of not competing than of having a concussion, so she had pushed through the dizziness and the pounding headaches and the blurry vision. Sometimes she wondered how she was still alive.
“Why would they do that?”
“Club could be liable if I had a concussion on file and got myself injured during a competition. Better for it to just have been my clumsiness or something,” she shrugs. It's shitty but it happens.
Langdon stares at her, slack jawed in shock. “Jesus fuck, and I’m getting my daughter into this sport?”
“It only gets that bad if you let it get that bad,” she hums. “Just keep an eye on Izzy.”
As she brings up a palm to cup her cheek as she watches kids flipping up into the air like it’s nothing, she wonders if her parents ever noticed the concussion. Probably not.
“Noted.”
And then Izzy, in a whirlwind of sequined leotards and intricately braided hair, comes running over to the two of them, lips pressed into a little pout. As she climbs into her dad’s lap, she announces that she’s nervous and wants to call her mom, to which Trinity slips away and goes to find Bea again.
She’s talking with Ruby and Maya and a few of their friends, laughing amicably in their group as if they’re just one giant friend group. There’s another group of girls a few feet behind them and something about them ticks Trinity off. It’s like she’s being sucked into the Pitt again, eyes narrowing at patients in chairs that she always takes a mental note to keep an eye out on. They seem like a set of perfectly manufactured dolls, all their hair slicked back into clean buns as they stand in one precise line as their coach circles them like a predator sniffing out its next target. The harsh set to their shoulders—like they’re the taut strings of a bow waiting for an arrow to be released—makes Trinity purse her lips together.
Trinity loves being right. Now, she doesn’t want to be.
But of course, she is.
She’s always right when it comes to things like this.
Her body moves on its own before she can even process what she’s seeing. All she sees is a hand gripping on a blonde ponytail and the terrified expression screwed onto a girl’s face as she stumbles backwards with the force—but that is more than enough to make Trinity move, her limbs cutting through the tense air of the competition floor even though it feels like she’s being weighed down by lead. Trinity flies more than she fights, but she knows she can’t fly now. The girl doesn’t know who she is, but at one point, she was Trinity; and the Trinity back then needed someone.
She shoves the man off the girl, sneering at the bright coach lanyard swinging around his neck. At least he has the decency to look a little taken aback.
“What do the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
The line of girls break apart as the coach looks at Trinity in open-mouthed fury, swarming around the blonde girl who has dissolved into tears. It’s all so so fucking familiar that Trinity wants to scream. A decade since she left the sport and so many things are still the fucking same. She wants to rip the coach lanyard off his neck, or maybe use it to strangle it until he stops breathing. She hasn’t quite decided.
The coach, a middle-aged man that looks to be in his 40s snarls back at her, “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
“Who taught you that it’s okay to treat your athletes that way, huh?” she shoots back angrily. “You’re a joke of a coach if you think that’s—”
Without warning, the coach surges towards her, hand clenched into a fist. It’s a lousy attempt of a punch, because Trinity has him on the ground in the blink of an eye. But her heart is still racing loud enough that it’s the only thing she hears in her ears. She barely hears the sound of security running towards her or of the coach screaming obscenities at her, his voice loud enough that parents start covering their kids’ ears. There’s no feeling of triumph as security tells her to back off.
She realizes, with some sort of abject horror, that she’s fucking scared.
Trauma never goes away—she knows that. But knowledge isn’t acceptance, and the only thing Trinity can think about as she runs out, is that she just wishes she could forget everything. Her mind is reeling a mile a minute, and she can feel the acidic tang of bile crawling up her throat. The girls give her tight, teary-eyed nods. There’s so many things in their eyes that Trinity could decipher, but she picks out the one thing that makes her chest feel at least a little lighter.
Thank you .
She nods back.
And then she runs.
“I’m getting called into an emergency surgery right now, but I can come get you right after. Was literally so close to getting off shift and got called in at the last second, as always. Should only take three hours or so?”
Trinity nods along to Yolanda’s voice through her phone, trying not to make it obvious that she’s been hyperventilating in the parking lot for 15 minutes.
She feels stupid.
“Actually, it’s fine,” Trinity says, trying to clamp down on the sobs that threaten to claw through her chest. She keeps flashing back to Trinity from a decade ago, and she half-expects to sound like her teenage self as she talks. “I forgot you were on-call for nights this week. Ignore this. You should just go home and rest after. I’m doing fine here. I’m sorry for calling and—”
“Trinity Santos.”
Her voice cracks. “Yea?”
“Give me the address.” There’s a rustling at the other end of the call, and Trinity hears the telltale jangle of Yolanda reaching for her car keys. “Trin, listen to me. I'm going to pass the surgery over to another resident who’s on call with me, it’s really no big deal. I’m technically an hour over my shift anyways.”
“You would never pass up a chance to cut,” Trinity laughs quietly, the sound bordering on desperate and wheezy. She doesn’t want Yolanda to come and see her undone like this, but that doesn’t stop her from pressing the phone closer to her ear, as if the contact with her burning screen will make it feel like Yolanda is next to her with sturdy hands cupping the side of her cheeks. “Forget that I called. Really.”
“Baby, I would give up the chance to cut a million times over if it meant that I could make sure that you’re okay. And if it makes you feel any better, it’s an emergency thoracotomy. I’m not really itching to do a procedure I could do in my sleep.” There’s more rustling. Footsteps against the cold tile of a hospital hallway. Rushed whispers that Trinity doesn’t hear. “I’ll be right there, Trinity. And don’t you dare apologize.”
The word sorry slips off and away from her tongue, slotting itself somewhere between all her hurt for later usage. “I won’t.”
She can hear Yolanda’s soft smile. “Good girl. See you soon.”
The call disconnects and Trinity drops down to the ground, knees tucked to her chest as her back slides against the exterior wall of the venue. After she ran out—fast enough that Bea or Langdon couldn’t chase after her—she found herself hiding at the back of the venue, trying her best to ignore the confused glances people were shooting at her as they parked. She tucks her head between her knees and prays to a god she doesn’t believe in.
Make the world slip away. Just for a fucking second so that I can catch a goddamn break.
“Santos.”
She bristles at the voice even though she knows it belongs to Langdon.
“Leave me the fuck alone,” Trinity grits out, blunt nails digging into the side of her arms. Her heart hasn’t stopped racing and her ribs feel like they’re turning inside out every time she tries to take a deep breath. Everything hurts and the last person she wants to talk to is Langdon.
“Yea, um, I don’t think I can do that. I need to make sure you’re safe.”
“I am. No one’s going to try to punch me out here.” Her voice is muffled by the fact that her head is still in between her knees, with her arms crossed over her body like she’s trying to protect herself and make herself smaller at the same time.
“Well, safe and doing okay. And you’re— You’re having a panic attack.”
“Good to know that you haven’t lost your ability to see yet, old man.”
She thinks it’s a funny joke, all things considered. He doesn’t laugh.
“I’m gonna, uh, sit,” Langdon announces.
Trinity sniffs and lifts her head, placing her cheek on one knee and facing away from Langdon, who has awkwardly situated himself next to her on the pavement.
“What’d they do to the guy?” Trinity hates how small and defeated she sounds.
“Security took him away. The blonde girl’s parents were here, actually. Chewed the hell out of the guy. Dad was close to punching him.”
“He should’ve. Fucker deserves it,” she mumbles.
A second passes. Two. Three. Then—
“People like me and Bea and all the other girls from my nightmare of a club who went on to coaching fight so fucking hard to give these kids a good experience, and then there’s— there’s fuckers like him that are fighting so damn hard to continue to make this sport a nightmare for athletes. It’s so damn unfair. They can just do that bullshit and it’s like nothing I did ever mattered. The abuse continues and all I can do is watch like a pathetic—”
“Santos,” Langdon cuts her off. “You’re not pathetic. And you didn’t just watch. Or did you already forget that you basically threw a grown man twice your size to the ground less than thirty minutes ago?”
“I just wish I could do more.”
“You’re starting to sound like a medical student, Santos.”
She doesn’t even have any energy left to retort. “What is that supposed to mean?”
“The whole ‘I wish I could’ve done more’ speech that med students always give after they lose their first patient in the ER? Ring any bells?”
Her mind flashes to Dennis on their first day together and his sad little eyes.
“My point is that you can’t let yourself spiral like a med student. There are going to be patients that you lose, no matter how much help you’re giving them. Sometimes all you can do is to give the help needed when you can, right? There are going to be girls that you can’t save entirely, but that doesn’t take away from you helping them.”
“I guess. It just feels like I’m failing all those girls who are still stuck in this shitty environment.”
“You’re not, Santos. You’re not failing anyone.”
“And you’re also surprisingly heartfelt.”
“Well, I am an old man with two kids after all.” He grumbles a little bit about his back as he stands up. “I’m going to go back to Izzy. You want me to bring back something for you? Water bottle?”
“Water bottle would be great.”
She moves to balancing herself on one of the parking stops in front of the venue’s automatic sliding doors, fidgeting with her phone. Yolanda texted her that she’s fifteen minutes out—Trinity wonders how many speeding limits she’s going to violate on her way here.
Five minutes later, she looks behind her at the sound of sliding doors, fully expecting to see Langdon holding out her water bottle. Who she sees isn’t Langdon. Well, scratch that—she doesn’t even have time to process who she’s looking at before she hears the snarl curling up into the air, sharp enough that it cuts through her like the person wants to see her bleed.
“Hope you’re happy that you just cost one of my athletes a fucking medal.”
A forceful hand grips at her ponytail. She blinks and the world tilts as her body is thrown to the ground.
Her head connects with concrete.
Notes:
just because they finally held a civil conversation doesn’t mean that trinity is going to stop going through it !!
Chapter 4
Notes:
last chapter !! thank you everyone for sticking around :] i don’t know how concussions work but let’s just pretend that the medical inaccuracies are in fact medically accurate for the sake of character development
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Contrary to popular belief, Trinity’s fight or flight response is almost always wired to flight. Actually no—it’d be more accurate to say that her body chooses to freeze. It’s almost automatic, the way her body shuts down and has her paralyzed in a fear she can never seem to shake. And like any other part of Trinity, the freezing is a trauma response, something she used to do in the face of her parents or her coach or her coach’s damn family. Realistically, she knows that freezing is the worst thing someone could do in a dangerous situation, but the teenage version of Trinity that still lives on inside of her latches onto the fact that it worked for her.
She learned early on that blinking owlishly in front of her coaches in attempts to fight back tears was the best way to take their scathing criticisms and constant insults. Flight wasn’t an option because she was still a national-level athlete with a training schedule she couldn’t avoid, and fighting surely was never an option because, once again, she was at too high a level of gymnastics to fight her coaches. They knew better (or that’s just what she used to make herself believe) so she just let herself freeze in front of them. She learned even earlier on that standing in front of her mom in complete silence, with her hands folded behind her back and her eyes fixed onto the hardwood floors of their suffocating house was the easiest way to placate her; flight only resulted on a hand curling around her forearm to tug her back into the argument, and fighting … Well, she’d rather not think about that.
She hates that her mind doesn’t immediately latch onto the notion of fighting back, hates that it’s still so easy for her to slip into that state of separation where her mind wanders somewhere else, slipping past the encasings of her body as a means of ignoring the world around her. And it’s even more infuriating because she really tried to change the way she responded to things like this. She thought the way she threw that pathetic excuse of a coach to the ground earlier was indicative of some sort of change, a shift of flight or freeze into the fight she always tried to convince she had more of, but here she is, her head connecting against concrete. On impact, the metallic tang of blood fills her mouth.
Head ringing and heartbeat pounding in her eardrums, Trinity pushes herself up off the ground with her shaking arms. All she can do is let out an incredulous laugh as she swipes the heel of her palm across her lip, her hand coming away with little specks of blood. The coach’s shadow still looms over her frame as he continues to scream. He’s saying that this is all her fault and Trinity squeezes her eyes tight at the admonishment. It’s not the first time she’s heard it, and definitely not the worst thing she’s heard in her life by a long shot, but that doesn’t stop the words from stinging as they pierce straight through her.
Her coach’s wife called her an attention-seeking whore for speaking up against his abuse. The boy’s gymnastics team that her club shared training facilities called her a whiny bitch who should’ve just spoken up before it got bad—“He was our coach too, Trinity, and he never did stuff like that to us. You could’ve just done this before our season started.” Her mom told her that she ruined herself and the family and that she had just brought it upon herself. And now this pathetic excuse of a coach is faulting her for an athlete’s loss.
“You fucked with their focus!” he yells, waving his hands around in the air. He continues to scream that she broke their mental states and how none of them will be able to perform at the level they’re capable of, growing more agitated by the second.
Trinity can’t help but scoff. Bullshit, she thinks to herself. It’s all bullshit. She knows gymnasts. Knows the good athletes with good coaches, but knows the good athletes with terrible, abusive coaches. They’re wired differently. They perform best under unhealthy amounts of pressure, procure up new personal records and championship titles after they’re yelled at for not being good enough, smile the widest in front of judges when it’s time to present after being threatened to tears by coaches twice their size. She knows that those girls will probably come out on top in this competition; she knew from the moment she saw their posture and the precision of their line and their matching tracksuits.
He’s their so-called coach, but he doesn’t seem to know anything about his own athletes. And at that, a little anger curls through her fear, nestling in the place all of her other bottled emotions do: the little spaces between the rungs of her ribs, tugging at each fragile thing until her ribs constrict inwards into her lungs, making it hard for her to breathe.
“ You fucked with their focus the moment you pulled that girl by your hair,” she seethes, trying to push herself off the ground. Trying to ignore her shaking voice, she adds, “You’ve probably been the only reason your athletes have ever lost. I don’t need to know you to know that you’re a shit coach.”
And here’s the thing: Trinity, as much as she presents herself as headstrong and brazen and confident, often spends more time locked up in the fear she’s lived with since she was a kid. Fear and hypervigilance still holds her together, knitting through the very sinew of her muscles to make sure that she’s still standing by the end of the day. It’s why so much of her mind scrambles away from all the logic she’s garnered over the years as soon as the man steps closer towards her with a vicious look set into his dark eyes. She knows that it’s probably idiotic to provoke him. She knows that the better idea is to create distance before trying to get up, but her mind—her damn mind—doesn’t know that now. All those years of training herself to push people away slip past her with every agonizing second. The Brazilian Jiu Jitsu classes she put herself through so that she could give back herself a semblance of security. The way she easily threw that man to the ground earlier. The ways in which she knows how to get out from under people. The ways in which she knows how to save herself.
Gone. All gone.
And all she can feel is the fear and the unrelenting anger that is twisting through her gut.
It’s why she barely registers the man’s foot swinging towards her right wrist, sending her catapulting back onto the concrete as her wrist hyperextends over itself. There’s a sickening crunch that is quickly covered up by the strangled cry of pain that rips itself out of Trinity’s throat. She manages to catch herself on her left forearm and just stares at the ground for a second, trying not to break down into tears again. She needs to run, she needs to stand up, she needs to—
And then she feels the man’s rough hands on her, his fingers digging into her scalp as he lifts her head up by her hair. The heel of his palm is painfully digging into the center of her forehead, but the sharp memory that cuts through her in an instant is enough to override the pain she feels.
The memory is still so fucking vivid. So much so that Trinity feels herself slip back into the person she was over a decade ago, still a teenager living back in Seattle, still living under the roof of her critical parents while she trained five times a week under an even more critical and watchful coach.
She’s not in the middle of Pittsburgh anymore, not a full-fledged adult who works as an ER doctor. Now, she’s with her coach in his office. His face hovering over her as she hears the door lock behind her. A hand gripping her hair and tugging until it hurts, a vicious look in his eyes that speaks quietly. Tell anyone and I’ll kill you. The dark walls close in on her. Her eyes are screwed shut. She can’t breathe and a cold sweat makes her shudder with every touch.
The intrusive thoughts make her feel like she’s being stabbed through the gut over and over again. She can’t move. It’s terrifying how she can never get herself to move. It’s usually the worst when she’s in a closed space. But who knew being outside could still make her feel like she was trapped in a room? It feels like the literal air is compressing around her and it doesn’t help with the fact that her ribs are already hurting from being kicked while her lungs are raw from trying to fight for her ability to breathe again.
She vowed herself to kill the next person who would make her feel like this, but here she is. Paralyzed.
While she’s wracking her mind for an exit strategy, Trinity continues to catalogue her injuries. A concussion, probably. Bruises and a broken wrist, definitely. Maybe a facial fracture or some whiplash. Her muscles are screaming out to protest that Trinity should just stand up and swing at him. She would definitely take getting punched a few times in the face over being held like this like she’s a fucking doll at the mercy of its owner. A broken nose and a black eye would be brutal, but at least it’d give her back an ounce of the control she’d been trying to have to her own name for the past decade.
Distant. Doors slide open. The distinct clang of a metal water bottle hitting the ground.
“Trinity?”
Panic and confusion and a first name, all twisted around Langdon’s voice. It’s weird when it’s him. It’s even weirder that Trinity feels relief flooding her senses. The Trinity from 10 months ago would’ve reeled back at the thought of him calling her by her first name and the entire notion of her being relieved in any capacity from his presence. But she’s grown from that point—isn’t that all that matters? Trinity and Langdon may not be friends, but he’s still someone that Trinity finds herself trusting to some extent.
Trinity realizes as Langdon rips the man off of her that she’s never seen him deal with aggressive patients. Something to do with his back problems, as she’s heard through the grapevine. The grapevine being Princess and Perlah. But he does it quickly and efficiently enough, much to the man’s angry protests on how he wasn’t fucking finished. Trinity watches, still shaken, as Langdon manages to land a punch on the man’s face with absurdly atrocious technique. The man lets out a pained grunt as the blood starts to flow from his nose. He stumbles back with his hands clutched over his nose, his steps unsteady. Doors start to open.
People screaming. Kids crying from behind their parents’ legs. The panicked voices of people clamoring on whether they should call an ambulance or not. Trinity’s head is pounding with all the noise but at least the man isn’t hovering over her anymore. The air around her stops feeling like a solid brick on top of her chest, and she risks taking a deep, shaky breath as she shuts her eyes again. A flicker of her coach lingers behind her eyelids.
She opens her eyes again to see Langdon crouching down to her level, concern twisted through his expression.
“Santos. You’re good, you’re okay.”
She’s not okay, she wants to spit out. Her head hurts and her wrist burns and she can’t stop imagining her coach’s face hovering over her and can’t stop replaying the sound of a lock clicking behind her in her mind. She can’t get rid of the sensation of her body being tugged back by her hair, can’t help but let today’s experience slot itself between the memories of a competition she thought was long forgotten. And she really wishes that she could’ve been the one throwing the punch.
Her eyes wander away from Langdon and settle onto the chaos unfurling behind him. The man is struggling against the arms of a parent, blood still pouring out from his nose and down his face. There’s little dots of blood painting the concrete under his feet. Kids are still crying, but most of them are shuttled back into the venue as the man is hauled off somewhere. There’s a gentle lull of a voice calling for the police somewhere in the distance. The persistent buzzing in her head hasn’t let up, and she’d really like it if it did, actually.
Langdon’s soft voice—the one he reserves for his kids and patients that aren’t assholes—makes her eyes flicker over to him again. He clicks his tongue as he looks over Trinity’s very much broken wrist and places his hands on his knees, as if he’s bracing to stand again. “Okay, we should get you to the ER to get that wrist checked out.”
Trinity gives a little jerk of her head to protest, suddenly feeling a petulant little kid. “Stay with your kid, Langdon. I called— Yolanda said she’s on her way. Driving. I called her earlier.”
He raises his brows in slight surprise. “You sure you called her?”
And who is Trinity Santos if she isn’t talking back to Frank Langdon? She’s appreciative of him in this moment in some oddly twisted way—she can pretend that this is all normal. She can pretend they’re just back in the Pitt, squabbling over a patient or over the last Red Bull left in the staff fridge. Right now, Langdon’s commitment to annoying Trinity is … comforting, weirdly enough. She wonders what that says about her.
“I called her before I got concussed you asshole,” she bites back. “It’s barely even a concussion. Probably.”
“Nice to know that your attitude is still intact, Santos,” Langdon responds smoothly. “Follow my finger?”
“I already know I’m concussed, you don’t need to do the stupid diagnostic—”
“Humor me, Santos,” he deadpans, still holding up his finger in front of Trinity’s face.
She relents, slowly trailing her eyes along the path of his finger. Up and down. Left and right. Concussion protocol she’s done a thousand and one times already. Protocol she’s done so many times that she knows that she’s not doing so hot; it feels like her brain has been dunked under murky water, and it feels like she can never quite catch up to Langdon’s movements even though he’s being infuriatingly slow.
“Definitely a concussion. But again, your stellar attitude is intact, so I am glad to report that it only seems mild.” His eyes flick up to someone behind Trinity. “Oh, and there’s the star of the show.”
Yolanda practically jogs up to the two of them. Stray curls are pressed to her cheeks with sweat, and she’s still wearing her scrubs. Appreciation and guilt swells in Trinity’s chest as Yolanda squats down to inspect her. Something about seeing Yolanda out of work always makes Trinity want to curl into herself, making herself smaller so that she can fit between her warm embrace. But her mind reels back, making her flinch away as Yolanda reaches out towards her. Trinity takes in a shuddering breath, leaving Yolanda’s steady hands to float in the air between them.
Her hands land in her lap instead. “Trinity— baby, hey. What happened?” Yolanda’s tone sharpens as she sets her gaze on Langdon, something like suspicion dancing in her deep brown eyes. If this had been any other day, Trinity would’ve outright laughed at how much Langdon and Yolanda resembled a guilty preschooler getting into trouble by their babysitter. “Frank?”
Langdon looks oddly guilty as he sighs, “Some coach gave her a concussion and a broken wrist.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Yolanda seethes, flicking her eyes down to Trinity’s wrist—still broken. “And you didn’t bother to call the police? Where is this guy, even?” There’s a murderous glint in her eyes and Trinity is half-convinced that Yolanda would genuinely go and hunt the man down if given the chance—she always keeps extra scalpels in her scrubs, just in case of emergencies.
“Some parents hauled him back in. Someone called police earlier, but I’m sure Santos can talk to them after she gets herself checked out.”
Trinity shares a look with Langdon, giving him a short nod. The last thing she wants to do right now is talk to the police. And the last thing she wants to imagine is Izzy at her first ever competition without her dad by her side.
“Langdon, Izzy’s probably looking for you. You should go.”
Langdon just continues to stare at her, looking uncertain and surprisingly conflicted. She can’t fathom why this is proving to be such a hard decision for him. Not even a few months ago, Trinity wasn’t even sure that the man she inadvertently played a part in firing could return with his medical license intact. Langdon told her himself that he still harbored resentment for what she had done on her first day long after he was out of rehab. Even now, their relationship is nothing more than that of the barest bones of a bond—if you can even call it that—between coworkers. That and the fact that she’s his daughter’s coach, and she’s sure that matters even less than their status of civil coworkers. She just doesn’t understand why he’s choosing to care so much.
“Just go and be a good dad, Langdon.”
She wants to go and be a good coach so badly too, to watch Izzy do her silly twirls in her favorite leotard and to watch a wide smile forming on her face as she bounds back to Langdon with a little ribbon in her hand.
Trinity seriously considers pushing him back into the venue as he hesitates for another half second, looking at Yolanda with that concerned look she still can’t bring herself to understand. “Yoyo, you got her?”
Yolanda nods and Langdon— finally —stands up to leave. Before he slips through the sliding doors and into the roaring venue, he looks over his shoulder. Trinity feels his gaze linger on her, but for once, it doesn’t make Trinity hold her breath. She just lets it rattle out of her, and it finally feels like she can breathe a little easier.
“Help me up?” Trinity asks, her voice barely above a whisper. She extends her arm out like a silent offering and Yolanda takes the opportunity to wrap her slender fingers across the width of her forearm. The cool sensation runs down her skin—it’s not enough to scrub herself clean of the sensation of the coach's harsh hands on her body, but it’s enough for now.
“Of course.”
Yolanda parks close enough to the ambulance bay that Dana and McKay, who are lingering in the bay on a cigarette break, perk up with alarm. There’s no mundane reason as to why a surgeon who only makes her way down to the Pitt on a consult or with the goal of chasing away flirtatious senior residents—Ellis, namely—from Trinity would willingly drive into the ambulance bay after her shift is over, and what initially is confusion becomes sharp concern once they see that Trinity’s in the passenger seat.
Dana breaks off into a jog back into the Pitt with Yolanda at her heels, shouting over the chaos for a wheelchair with that no-nonsense voice of hers. And out of the corner of Trinity’s eye she can see McKay running over to her side of the car. Her hands hover over the handle for a beat too long and she almost tumbles out of the car as McKay tears the door open, palpable concern running through the tired lines of her face. Her coppery bangs are flying in seven different directions like always and the scent of cigarette smoke and her lavender shampoo clings onto her and it’s just so— so McKay that Trinity just starts shaking, tears pricking at the corner of her eyes. She would never admit to it aloud, but she regards McKay as the mom she never really had.
The fear and anger in Trinity's chest dislodges as she finally accepts that she’s safe. The safety is a comfort that squeezes at her chest, but it’s not enough to shove the memories of what happened back into the archives of her mind; if anything, the images flicker back in increasing vividness and Trinity can feel the beginning of a sob start to twist between her lungs.
“Oh, baby,” McKay coos softly, hands gently settling on her cheeks as she examines Trinity with a sweeping gaze. Her thumbs brush gently over flushed skin. “We’ll get you fixed up, don’t you worry.”
McKay doesn’t say that she’s going to be okay or ask what happened to her because she just knows. The older woman prides herself on being somewhat of an open book—her drilling through her ankle monitor in the middle of the entire Yellow Zone during the PittFest MCI would be indicative of that—to the staff at the Pitt, but Trinity admits that she still doesn’t know much about her. Trinity’s been shown enough glimpses into her life through the stories she shares with patients or through the sharp jokes she makes to Javadi—who, poor thing, just blinks back at McKay with those perpetually confused eyes of hers—to know that there’s some shared pain that they cradle close to their chests, a shared tether between them that no other person in PTMC can truly understand. Their hurt comes from different men at different ages from different sides of the country, but the familiarity of that hurt is easy enough to recognize. A cracked sort of pain flickers through McKay's eyes as realization dawns on her.
Dana returns to the bay, wheelchair in tow, and Trinity is loaded onto the chair before she can even blink. An embarrassing whimper slips past her lips as the chaos and brightness of the Pitt crash down on her in an unrelenting wave when she’s wheeled through the automatic doors, but the familiarity of it all—that damn antiseptic that clings in the air, the neverending murmur of gossip from the nurse’s station, and the constant footfalls against the smooth tile—takes the edge off. It’s like coming back to a home she actually enjoys being in; at least she knows she’s safe here. The emergency department at PTMC, as she has learned for the last ten months of her internship, is so abundantly full of the care that she’s always ached to have for herself
It’s ironic, Trinity manages to think, that she can find so much solace and tenderness in a place like the Pitt, where the constant onslaught of brutal cases and organized chaos makes her head spin on a daily basis. But she guesses that it makes sense for someone like her, who always manages to find relationships that stitch her up and hold her together in places of chaos. She finds it in people like McKay, like Yolanda, like Dana. She used to find it within the friends she had at Club Zenith.
Everyone in the Pitt seems to snap alive at the return of an off-shift trauma surgeon and an intern in a wheelchair and through her now blurry vision, Trinity can see what looks like a dozen bodies floating in her vision like a bunch of slightly fucked-up looking guardian angels.
“Okay, everyone out of the way!” Dana shouts over the clamoring, swatting people out of her path as she wheels Trinity into an empty room. “We’re all concerned but the last thing Santos wants is people swarming around her.”
A few heads still float in front of the observation room, attempting to sneak in, but McKay just sighs and pushes them out with her tablet. Even Samira, with her wide brown eyes that no one can fathom saying no to, is pushed away by McKay
Turns out, Trinity’s self-diagnosis was pretty accurate, although she doesn’t know how content she should be at the fact that she has a Grade 2 concussion, mild whiplash, and a broken wrist. McKay tells her all of this in stride before Dana puts it into Trinity with the fear of god that if she even as so makes an appearance in the Pitt before she fully recovers that she is going to be barred from working in the emergency department ever again.
Trinity shoots a pleading look at Robby, who has somehow managed to snake his way into the observation room, but all he does is shrug. As much as the chief attending is helpless at taking his own advice, Trinity knows that all Robby is going to say is to listen to Dana and to take care of herself before coming back to work.
“Robby, you will convince this young lady that she will not be welcome in the Pitt until she is cleared to work or so help me god—”
“Listen to Dana!” is all he says before skittering away. McKay just laughs and shakes her head.
Sometimes, Trinity is more scared of Dana than she is of Robby.
“Kid, I’m going to make sure that no one bothers you until you’ve gotten some decent rest in you. But if you need anything , anything at all, just let anyone know, okay?” Dana turns to stare down Yolanda. “You want Garcia to step out for a bit?
She feels the ghost of Yolanda’s touch graze against the hand that’s resting at her side and tries not to blush in front of the charge nurse. “Garcia can stay,” Trinity whispers.
Dana’s eyes soften, and her hand lingers on Yolanda’s shoulder before giving it a little pat. It reminds Trinity of the day that Dana found out about the two of them and secured the cross-departmental betting pool’s pot of $830. She had just barked out a short laugh after finding them in an otherwise empty break room, goodnaturedly rolling her eyes as Trinity tried to come up with stupid excuses as if she had been caught by her mom. Dana had just given Yolanda a little pat on the shoulder before she left, telling her to “take good care of that little spitfire you have there.”
“Alright then, that works out for us.”
“Thanks for your guys’ help,” Yolanda says, nodding at Dana and McKay. Like this, it feels like Trinity’s an actual patient being cared for, especially as Yolanda is being stripped of that hardness she reserves for the staff down in the Pitt.
“Anything for one of our own.” Dana smiles kindly. And the thought that Trinity has somehow cemented herself as one of the Pitt’s own makes her smile in kind. “Rest up, kid!”
As McKay and Dana push out of the room, Trinity turns to gaze listlessly at her broken wrist. She competed with a hairline fracture to her wrist once, at a meet that her coaches kept screaming at her because there would be college recruiters in attendance. She’s always been used to pushing through injuries like they were nothing, and the impending notion of inactivity and sentence of house arrest makes her more than a little uneasy. Trinity’s never allowed herself to take a break—not during high school, never during her gymnastics career, and certainly not during her undergrad and med school days. It occurs to her that she doesn’t even know what she’s going to do once she gets home.
She sinks back into the hard mattress of the hospital bed, gnawing at her lip as she realizes that she can’t even go back to coaching to fill her days as her wrist heals. Maybe this is how Dana feels when she leaves a shift murmuring a threat about quitting and never coming back again, all to show up thirty minutes early to her next shift, that half-smile of hers affixed to her face as she tries to figure out just how she’s going to manage her circus again for 12 hours. Trinity thought she effectively scrubbed herself clean of gymnastics and she also thought she had made peace with that fact. But here she is, laying in a hospital bed with a broken wrist from a gymnastics competition that was not even her own, wanting to get back on the floor.
And maybe it’s because gymnastics had started off as something that genuinely brought something akin to family into her life. When her parents allowed her to continue the sport well into her childhood, she gladly took the brutal training schedules because it became an escape from her house; a few hours of training and laughing with her friends was always enough to forget the sounds of screaming or crying or shattering glasses. For a while, gymnastics had been about friendships and perseverance and the unbreakable bonds that came from shared struggles—of middle splits that never really reached the floor, of back handsprings that veered off course, and of floor music being turned off mid-routine and teammates counting in place of it. She still wasn’t sure how much of it she had retained before her gymnastics life started to parallel the turbulent home life she was constantly trying to outrun. Quickly enough, gymnastics familiarized herself to the loss of friendships and the dangers of unchecked perseverance and the all-consuming trauma that swallowed young girls whole.
The bad had overridden the good so quickly and Trinity forgot—and actively chose to forget—why she had loved the damn sport so much when she first started. By the end of her career, she was more than eager to pack her athletic career away into a few disheartened Common App essays while she turned away recruitment offers from prestigious schools. She never looked back once at the sport she hated to love and hate—until now. Until Izzy and her sweet smile and the way she giggled after calling her leotard a bathing suit.
Trinity looks through cracks in the curtain that McKay tugged around her bed, catching glimpses of her coworkers running around the hub, charting tablets in hand. She thinks that working at the Pitt has something to do with her slow acceptance into letting herself love a sport that became somewhat of a catalyst for so much of her pain.
She came to the Pitt to be a doctor, never to be reminded of the athletic career she put aside when she shoved her trophies and medals and team jackets into a storage unit back in Seattle. But here she was. She didn’t want to admit it, but she had really grown to love being an intern down here in the Pitt. Trinity finally learned how to make friends outside of the sphere of competitive rivalries, finally learned how to slow down before she worked herself into burn out, finally learned to let herself be gentle instead of fiercely defensive in the face of people who genuinely cared about. Despite all the chaos and exhaustion and blood that ended up being added to Trinity’s baggage by the end of every shift, the Pitt has allowed her to enjoy a sense of the safety she’d fought so long to find.
“What’s going on in that brain of yours?” Yolanda asks, curling slender fingers through Trinity’s short hair and effectively cutting off her racing thoughts.
“Just thoughts,” she hums. The world around them feels all fuzzy, but it’s nice like this—just the two of them in their little bubble. The blanket thrown around her legs, the dim lighting, and Yolanda’s hand running through her hair … she can feel her eyes begin to close.
After competitions, Trinity used to have nightmares that would make her wake up in a cold sweat. Now, she finds that sleep comes easily. Now, she doesn’t even dream. Just feels Yolanda’s hand idly carding through her hair until she’s enveloped in plush darkness.
Dana shakes her awake after a few hours, a hand resting on one of her shins that has tangled under the blankets Yolanda threw on her earlier. “Hon,” she starts, waiting for Trinity to wake up. “Langdon has been hovering like an anxious puppy for the past hour and has been insisting to see you, but I thought I’d ask first.”
She shifts on the bed and sees that the chair beside her bed is empty now, save for one of Yolanda’s jackets thrown over one of the arms. “Where’s—”
“Your surgeon went to go get some coffee for herself. She’ll be back.”
A little anxiety and guilt curls through her chest at that, because Yolanda really should just be sleeping after her night shift instead of sitting in a cold emergency room at her side.
The noise from the hub seeps in through the open door, the constant noise of beeping machines and the shuffle of hurried footsteps and of patients grumbling about long wait times, and Trinity’s head feels clear enough now, enough that she can still pick out that voice she knows too damn well from all the background noise.
“Dana—”
Trinity watches with amusement as Dana just heaves a short sigh and turns on her heel to stare down Langdon, who is standing outside of her room like a lost little kid.
“Frank, kid, I swear—”
Trinity, despite herself, laughs. “I can talk to him.”
Now, Dana turns to her, looking equally pleased and surprised at her words. It seems like everyone else has just accepted that Trinity and Langdon are on good terms now, but that doesn’t stop the nurses from keeping a little sticky note at their stations, marking the number of days it’s been since the two started arguing with each other during their shift. “You sure?”
Trinity shrugs. “Not really, but I think if I didn’t he would do something drastic, and that’s the last thing I want for the otherwise lovely people working in this department.”
“Hah!” Dana snorts. “Oh, kid, I always forget how funny you can be. Just kick him out if he gets too annoying.”
Trinity starts counting ceiling tiles as Langdon shuffles in. She notices that he’s alone and wonders if Izzy’s just waiting in the staff lounge or if she just went home with Abby.
“How are you feeling?”
She peers down at him, trying not to laugh at how jarring it feels like to see Langdon in the Pitt in civilian clothes. “As good as someone with a broken wrist and a concussion can feel. Oh, whiplash too.”
“Ouch,” is all he says in response.
“Ouch indeed, Dr. Langdon.”
Trinity starts counting ceiling tiles again as they fall into awkward silence.
“I— I feel like I should apologize.”
At this, Trinity furrows her brows and tears her eyes away from one of the tiles that has a chipped corner. “What for?”
Langdon just tilts his head in response, looking at her as if it’s so obvious as to why he’s apologizing. “Leaving you out there by yourself. I knew that man was angry with you, and it was stupid of me to just leave you there when I knew full well that he would’ve tried to do something.”
She lets out a short huff of air through her nose, sending a few strands of hair flying around her face. “That’s stupid.”
“What is? The guy?”
“Him, yes.” Trinity purses her lips at the image of the guy, but it flickers away in less than a second that she forces herself not to dwell on it. She tucks her knees into her chest after she inches closer to where Langdon is standing in front of her bed. “But you’re stupid too.”
“Wow, Santos,” Langdon deadpans.
“You’re stupid for thinking that any of that bullshit was your fault. You were being a good person. And that— that man is the only person at fault here. Not you for leaving me alone, not me for bruising that man’s ego. It’s his damn fault. Besides, you punched him. It was arguably some atrocious technique that you pulled off, but you still punched him.”
Langdon gives her a small half-smile. “Why does talking to you always feel like I’m being complimented and insulted at the same time?”
“What can I say? I am a woman of many talents,” Trinity shrugs again. “No, but really, appreciate that you punched him when I couldn’t. Even if it was with shitty technique that probably hurt your back.
“Thank you?” He hesitates, staring at her—she’s still trying to figure out why all of the men in this department have such staring problems—as if he’s trying to figure out her reactions. “But … you’re okay?”
Trinity hugs her knees closer to her chest, propping her chin on top and tilting her head just so. “I’d rather not think about it, to be honest. How’d Izzy do?”
And at this, Langdon beams. “You think Yoyo would kill me if I took her chair?”
“Probably, but you could just be quick,” Trinity whispers, tilting her head so that one of her cheeks is resting on top of her knees. Langdon sits down in the chair and inches closer to the bed as he opens his phone, playing a shaky video of Izzy competing in one of her events. She looks so tiny in the video, a little speck of a girl in her sparkly leotard, but there’s so much excitement and joy radiating off of her that Trinity finds herself smiling. Bea might be her actual coach, but Trinity can’t help but take some credit for the moves that Izzy manages to pull out during her routine. There’s a little bit of herself in the girl—not the hurt version that hated the notion of going to gymnastics, but the little preschooler version that wanted to live in the massive training facilities—and she finds that she can’t rip her eyes away from the video.
The friendship bracelets around Langdon’s wrist clink against each other as he swipes through his camera roll, showing Trinity photos of Izzy beaming up at Langdon, bright-colored ribbons gripped in her tiny three-year-old hands.
“You think she’ll keep doing gymnastics?” she finds herself asking.
“Yea,” he says, breathing out. “I think it’d do her some good.”
She nods, smiling. “Yea. I think so too.”
The two barely notice Yolanda standing over them, her shoulder propped up onto the door frame as she watches on with a small smile.
Trinity is off for eight weeks so that she can recover from her wrist fracture, and by week five, she feels like she’s going absolutely insane. She spends most of her days cooped in her living room, crushed into a corner of her coach as she binge watches any decent sitcom on streaming or shitty romcom movies on Netflix. There’s a restless energy she can’t quite get rid of from her bones, and usually that manifests in her cooking the most extravagant meals for her and Dennis. It gets to a point that she starts meal-prepping for both of them. Sometimes, she’ll let Javadi sleep over when she’s quarrelling with her parents, or she’ll drag herself over to Yolanda’s apartment to share expensive wine over disgustingly cheap takeout pizza.
Some part of her brain is always nagging that she’s being useless and that she should at least be doing something productive, but the other part of her brain tells her that somehow, she is being productive by finally taking care of herself after spending her entire life constantly running. Running towards Olympic golds that never happened, running away from family and coaches, running away from grief. The broken wrist is annoying at best and excruciating at worst, but at least it’s given Trinity a chance to slow down.
She’s rewatching Abbott Elementary when she hears someone knocking on the door, two short little raps like how Dennis usually knocks when he’s forgotten his key and is too lazy to pull out his phone to text Trinity. Pausing the TV, Trinity peels herself off of the coach and yells out into the hallway.
“I know you took your key today, Huckleberry! If you’d just look in your bag”—she opens the door without bothering to look through the peephole because she knows that it’s Huckleberry and comes face to face with someone who is … decidedly not Dennis—“The fuck?”
It’s dark outside, but the porch lights illuminate the undoubtable face of Frank Langdon. He’s peering off to the side and rocking anxiously back and forth on his heels, something gripped in his hands.
“Oh. It’s you.” She blinks. “Mel already came by to check up on me, if you haven’t heard. I’m, uh, still alive. As you can see.” She hopes that her confused look is enough to convey the question, Why the hell are you at my house and how do you have my address?
“I’m not here to see if you’re still alive and breathing, Santos. Your personal butler you have is already good enough for that. Dana has enlisted him on Official Santos Updates duty, by the way.”
Trinity snorts. She already knows, because Dennis always whines at the fact that people keep cornering him in the middle of the hub for updates on her recovery, but it’s still a delight to be reminded of her friend’s new job title anyways.
“Eh, he’s more if an anxious hamster got stuffed into the spirit and body of a chronically terrified little brother figure. But that’s … Okay, whatever. Why are you here then?” She leans her hip against the doorframe, one ankle looped over the other.
“I thought I would”—he presses the slightly crumpled piece of paper into Trinity’s hands—“drop off a little get-well card.”
Trinity looks down at the card and bites back the grin tugging at her lips. She honestly can’t make out the scribbles, but she thinks she sees “Get well soon Coach Trinity!” in the harsh lines of black crayon. Izzy drew an entire landscape, complete with a smiling yellow sun and a giant apple tree in the middle of the card. She’s drawn her and Izzy to be holding hands, their smiles comically wide. Trinity thinks it might be one of the best cards she’s ever received.
Langdon takes in a breath, scratching at the back of his neck. “And also, I guess this is my way of asking if you’re going to come back to coaching? Don’t let this get to your head, but I don’t think I could ask for a better coach for Izzy. Like, don't get me wrong, she loves Beatrice, but something about you just makes her so incredibly excited to go to her lessons, and it just— it's just what Abby and I wanted for her when we put her into lessons. But considering everything that’s happened with...”
He trails off. And for once, the shitty memories of her past career aren’t the first memories that cut through her mind. It’s the photos of Izzy with her ribbons, the shaky video of her beaming after she remembered to present to the judges before starting her routine, and the little card that jumps forward instead. She thinks of her ongoing text conversations with Bea, who sends her regards along with her pleas towards Trinity to just swing by so that she can convince some of the older girls that she didn’t disappear off the face of the earth.
“I think I’ll stick around for a bit when I can. It’s been … fun. Honestly. Coaching was always more fun for me anyways, even back when I was an actual gymnast and all that jazz.” She surprises herself a little bit with how genuine the words feel. For once, it doesn’t feel like her teeth are dragging through lies as she talks about gymnastics.
“Really?”
She nods. “Yea, really.”
“Huh,” Langdon says softly. “I guess I’ll be seeing you around then, Coach Trinity.”
“If you use my first name again I swear I’ll punch you,” Trinity jokes, something like a smile at the corner of her lips.
He’s teasing her, but Trinity doesn’t feel like retorting back cruelly in response—for once. “But I thought we were doing all that coach and parent relation stuff. Don’t all parents call you by your first name?”
“God, you’re so annoying. We’re coworkers, Doctor Langdon. Just act like it.” She crosses her arms over her chest, scrunching her nose up a little bit. “Besides, I don’t want to call you Frank. I keep thinking of Franklin the cartoon turtle.”
“Oh, it’ll come soon enough.”
“Sure,” she says, rolling her eyes.
“Goodnight, Doctor Santos.”
“Yea yea, whatever. Say hi to Tanner and Izzy for me?”
“Will do.” Langdon is halfway down the steps when he turns to look over his shoulder. “And Santos?”
“Oh my god,” she huffs out, exasperated laughter spilling from her mouth. “What.”
“Jeez, and here I was trying to tell you that I was looking forward to you coming back. Shift’s just not the same without your endless sarcasm and complaints about your energy drinks in the staff fridge that you technically have absolutely no ownership over.”
“Well, just you wait. I’ll be back soon enough to take rightful ownership of my precious Red Bulls.”
“You’re my worst trainee, by the way,” he says. Months ago, the joke would’ve been enough for Trinity to curse him out, but this time, it lands, and she just gives a short laugh.
“I know! Goodnight .”
“Goodnight, Santos.”
She closes the door after he reaches the last step. Her broken wrist and inability to return to work is still getting on her last nerves, but she supposes the rest of her life isn’t all that bad. Trinity’s content with taking care of herself for once in her life, and it doesn’t feel like a knife is making its way out from her body every time she remembers something about gymnastics, and people actually care enough about her to bombard her poor roommate every shift for intel.
As she settles back onto her couch, she thinks back to her friend’s mantra, Harper’s sweet voice a salve for all of the other unpleasant thoughts and memories that always rest underneath the surface of her consciousness. Enjoy it if you can’t avoid it. For all it’s worth, it seems like pretty sound advice to Trinity.
Notes:
kudos and comments are always appreciated !! and on another totally not fic-related note ,, how do we feel about fencer garcia ,,,
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shrinkthisviolet on Chapter 1 Thu 28 Aug 2025 06:55AM UTC
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