Work Text:
Mel is keenly aware of the fact she has problems. Sometimes on a bad day she can see herself making mistakes in real time, grimaces when Santos lobs a joke she can't parry as soon as Santos walks away. She can hear the empty air where Langdon is supposed to step in and help. Becca's voice in the back of her head asking when she'll finally come pick her up (two more hours) and how her quest for a boyfriend is coming (poorly). She categorizes the problems with the only allegory she's been able to grasp in therapy – a handful of silken scarves, the kind she would try and fail to juggle with. Some silken scarves could afford to be dropped and float down, down below her feet, maybe even to the core of the earth, while she kept floundering with the ones that had to be sustained in the air.
Today's problems she actually had to care about: Calling Becca's occupational therapist again at exactly 1:30pm when she knew they got off their lunch break, making sure Dr. Robinavitch didn't blow up at her, putting in two loads of laundry when she got home so that the rattling of the dryer wouldn't make her think the apartment was exploding at 11pm. Today's problems she could let drift away from her mind: steeling herself for her dentist appointment in four days, wondering where Dr. Langdon was, and considering her gender. That last one had fallen down a lot more lately, and yet, she kept having to remind herself to drop it. People kept picking it up, shoving it in her hands: the transgender child who came in and the med student focused on the fact they were on puberty blockers more than the fact they had broken their arm; one of the Russian interpreters being called down from somewhere else in the building and looking at her with a deep, dark, knowing stare when she grimaced at being called her full name; her pink socks.
She's staring a hole into her pink socks as she waits for the OT's office to pick up. Her voicemail is clipped, veering on unkind, and the rush of anger feels sour. She tries to justify it with the knowledge that Becca's OT has been dodging her calls for a week. Mel sees the staff office door move out of the corner of her eye and jolts, crossing her leg over her calf rather than the ankle. It's just Whitaker, who looks like he's actually been sleeping lately, and he nods at her silently before digging through the fridge.
"How's today?" He asks, setting down a plastic bag and digging through it. His lunch leaves something to be desired, Mel thinks: a pink Monster, some sort of cheese and baloney sandwich, and a fruit cup. Whitaker slurps down the fruit cup unceremoniously.
"Today is… fine. I was distracted." And she knows Whitaker won't care, won't look at her weird if she just says what she means, and continues: "I wonder how posture came to be. How did we figure out what was good for our bones, how to communicate with it."
Whitaker shrugs and pops open the Monster, taking a swig before replying. "I had to take a gender studies class in undergrad, which was weird, because it was a Catholic school. But anyway, apparently gender is just performance. I'm sure posture is part of that. Like uh – some of it is involuntary. Can say a lot about how we're feeling, or what's broken. But if you strip that down, a lot of it is just us saying, hey world! I'm a big strong man!" He half-laughs. "Or woman," he says, gesturing at Mel. That silken scarf is shoved in her hands again.
Mel's internet search history betrays her. She knows she should probably not use Google and not do it on the work WiFi, lest there's some cybercriminal lurking among them getting their bones reset or blood drawn. She ignores it. She's getting really good at ignoring.
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And yes, she got distracted, who can blame her, but all the tabs lay waiting in her phone for when she does get her bubble tea after her shift at the ice cream spot equidistant to here and Becca.
Becca ends up drinking all of Mel's bubble tea once she tries it and Mel is left with Becca's plain milk tea. ("Maybe next we can try potato ice cream!" Becca laughs, while Mel reads off the taxonomy of Taro on Wikipedia). Becca asks when they can go again while they sit and watch Netflix (it's not Elf again, thank god , but it is something Mel has seen a million times so she's able to check out a little bit). Becca hitting Mel's foot with her own takes her out of her reverie and she turns to look at her.
"Did you find any boys to kiss today?" Becca asks, which she does with decreasing frequency lately. Mel had almost been able to dodge the question for an entire week. She shakes her head.
"Nope, no boys," Mel says, but smiles. "I did get to work on a very interesting case, though. We even got out the portable x-ray machine for it."
This is enough to distract Becca from her line of questioning, and Mel recounts a HIPPA-compliant tale of the mud wrestlers that came in and were sent home after multiple sponge baths and Whitaker realizing they had been exposed to way too many pesticides.
"Cool!" is all Becca says. "I'm tired now. Can we finish Finding Nemo tomorrow?" Mel glances over at the clock. Yeah, 8pm is bedtime now. To anyone else, the way Becca talks to her might look rude, but Mel has grown to appreciate how direct Becca is in comparison to everyone she works with. Dr. Mohan kept giving her a weird sad glance when she was adamant about staying with the child on puberty blockers even after she and Dr. Mohan both chewed out the med student. She wishes more people would use her words like Becca did.
Becca falls asleep easily which is a godsend and source of jealousy for Mel. It's not even ten minutes to when Mel shut off the light to her bedroom, only leaving the faint lamplight on, that Mel can hear her softly snoring from where she's putting the last of the dishes away. Mel knows her own bedtime routine will be ten times as drawn out. Journaling, white noise machine, tossing and turning for twenty minutes, wondering if self-pleasure actually does help with insomnia, freaking out when she actually touches her own skin, tossing and turning for another hour. Some days she was lucky to cut it down by not even bothering to try and wonder if the cure to insomnia is within her reach without a prescription.
Tonight the concept of sleeping pills takes her to consider Dr. Langdon. She finally knows why, from Whitaker's careful glances and stuttering supplemented by Javadi cutting in when he was at a loss, why Langdon was gone. She knew he might come back if he did follow through with rehab. She had an inkling that even if he did, he wouldn't come back to PTMC. What was it they said? No man steps into the same river twice?
Mel flips over to her stomach, posture be damned. There's posture again, and there's Langdon, and there's the small flame of jealousy that in her sleepless state grows – the way Langdon was able to stride across a room, felt so sure in his body. Would Mel feel the same if Langdon was a woman? She considers Dana, how her black eye didn't detract from how she commanded respect and how she talked dotingly about being a mother. Maybe Mel just needed self-confidence. That had to be it. She just had to get more confident, and then she would be able to bear… all of this.
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Mel feels… something. She's never been able to identify the feeling in your body as so many other people seem to do. She just knows she's hitting a wall and the emotion it's making her feel is some sort of intensity.
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She checks "bad" first, but none of the words jump out to her, more connected to feelings of sadness than the depth of "bad" she feels. She skips over to "angry" on the wheel and avoids the urge to bite at her nails. "Jealous" is a big one, but not right now. All the words under "disgusted" seem to do the trick, though. Embarrassed. She's doing this again on a public WiFi network.
Dana calls her over to the desk, one eyebrow cocked in curiosity. "You look like you're reading something you never want to see again," she comments, and sets one hand out on the counter for Mel to take if she's so inclined. It never felt like pity from Dana, the way she let Mel decide if she was ok holding her hand or bumping her shoulder or practicing jokes. It was a needed contrast from how Mel felt trying to constantly catch up to Trinity's jokes or the way Dr. Abbot seemed to trust her immediately, almost a scary amount of freedom.
"You could say that," she says, and it's not a lie but it's not the truth, but it's enough to divulge. She tries again to not bite at her nails. Dana nods surely.
"Well, once you're ready to jump back in there, I need you with McKay on this weird upper respiratory mystery. You've been knocking those out of the park lately."
Mel smiles, almost preening with glee as she nods. Maybe the confidence is… maybe it's when she gets to be a doctor, just the job part of her job, not Melissa. She considers asking Dana when McKay whisks her away.
As the solar solstice approaches Mel becomes familiar with both the signs of heat exhaustion and her coworkers. Everyone around her has seemed to be able to successfully blur that line between coworker and friend, and the running gags only get more and more elaborate the more she tries to untangle them, contextualize them, at least get to be on the outside looking in.
(Weird, how that hot shame of rejection doesn't change as you get older, it just gets bigger , swallows everything whole).
Whitaker seems to be, out of the three students, the one that's more forthcoming about what it means when Santos says in for a fish out for a fry or how Javadi sometimes keels over laughing just by glancing at the nurses. He lets Mel eat her lunch in silence, lets her guide the conversation if she so chooses to talk.
Mel is sadly stabbing at half a poke bowl she got with Becca last night as Whitaker unwraps another plastic bag.
"Protein bar today," Mel comments, and Whitaker nods. He covers his mouth as he talks through an overzealous bite.
"Santos kicked me out last night and didn't bother to tell me we were out of bread, so uh… making do. I guess girls night involves eating all my good bread from the farmers market," he half-laughs, immediately going red as he realizes he divulged girls night .
She doesn't bother schooling her face into something calm and scowls as she continues to eat her poke bowl. Where Becca's was full of fried shrimp and sweet sauce, Mel opted for lean fish cuts and what Becca had called a frivolous amount of seaweed salad. Mel wondered not for the first time if Becca was having an easier time than her making friends.
"I mean like, it wasn't even all the girls – women! – here, like, it was definitely Javadi so I think it was just like a thing where technically you outrank her-"
"No biggie," she ends up saying, and stabs into her rice. "Hey, you're from Nebraska, right?"
Whitaker blinks slowly but nods. "Yeah, why?"
"Are there a lot of fairs in the summer? Becca and I would cross state lines to go to the one in Minnesota. Well, cross state lines makes it sound like a crime. It was very legal. Becca loves fried food, it's cause –" Mel tried to thread the needle of her thoughts from Becca eating fried shrimp to fried food to asking Whitaker what Nebraska was like in comparison to Wisconsin. He just kept looking at her, like she was deflecting or something from girls night.
Dana is the one to interrupt their lunch this time, and they spend the rest of the afternoon trying to pick up their conversation between giving kids popsicles and Mel starting over at Santos in some twisted way she couldn't pinpoint that maybe Langdon somehow could have. But Langdon wasn't here, and he hadn't had the chance to tell Mel how to pinpoint why her stomach kept churning at the weirdest things.
Some days Mel can't tell if it gets easier or if she's just built up a resistance. There are days where she's still able to leave with a relative pep in her step, when it's still just about to be night just yet that make her feel like she has an evening ahead of her and the sense of satisfaction from helping people. The days where she gets to show off her eye for detail, arranging bone fragments or making stitches or walking from room to room holding specific chains of numbers in her mind to report them with ease. The days with peaceful, meaningful deaths, where the gravity of the situation is felt by everyone so if she freaks out a little no one looks at her sideways. On those days she's sure it's easier.
It all comes crashing down when her routine is disrupted by someone calling in sick, a domino effect that leads to her picking up a day shift a day after an evening shift. Her stress dreams about missing her alarm and lack of an actual breakfast were nothing new but something kept breaking every time she tried to turn around and ask Langdon for something. She had only known the guy for a day and he had been gone for weeks and even still she was looking for an anchor point. Instead, she turns to Robby who thought communicating in facial gestures was enough for her to understand he was waiting for a response.
"Patient came in with sharp migrating abdominal pain, sleepiness, no fever but her temp is on the higher side, blood pressure is within a healthy range for a family history of high BP. She said she hasn't been eating as much due to feeling bloated. She's on Depo, so no last regular menstrual cycle. I want to run blood cultures and do an ultrasound?" She said, the words tumbling out as Robby's eyebrows go back to their resting spot on his face and nodded.
"What are you thinking it is?" Robby asked.
"Something digestive if we're lucky, but if the ultrasound doesn't show much I'll start ruling out endometriosis, ovarian cysts, any internal organ damage."
Robby nods, and that is all Mel needs to turn back to the patient to explain the litany of tests she was about to put her through. Mel hears Robby say something close enough to "get to it" before being dragged away.
In the end it was appendicitis, and they had caught it early enough that her patient – named Melanie, so close to Melissa – would be fine.
"Thank you Dr. King," Melanie says, her hands trying to fix the creases in her paper gown. "Us girls gotta stick together, you know?"
Mel smiles. She smiles the way she had learned to smile so people knew she was happy even when she wasn't, because communicating emotions with her face was important , she needed Melanie to feel safe and heard. She feels the muscles arrange themselves into that perfect smile. Not too forced, just sweet enough. Doting. Nurturing.
Something about us girls stays in her stomach for the entire shift. She had thought it was out of her system after all this time. Patients telling her she was going to be an excellent wife or mother one day or how lucky Becca was to have such a funny or kind or assertive or understanding sister. It was those comments, how lucky she was to be such a woman , the ones she hadn't heard in months. Even the lava lamp wasn't working. Even Megan Thee Fucking Stallion!
Dr. Robby ends up finding her outside as she looks out into the annoyingly cloudless sky with one headphone in.
"That case wasn't too bad. Are you…"
Mel shakes her head. She could lie. She could say she knew someone, or maybe Becca had appendicitis, hell, maybe she did! Maybe she was septic and nearly died! None of it would be true. It wasn't the case that bothered her. She couldn't find a single lie that would convey the itching in her skin. The stupid stupid feeling she got when she couldn't buck up and just accept she was a woman.
"Just tired. I worked evening two nights ago, so uh."
"Oh, I've been there. You not a big coffee person?" He asks, gesturing at his coffee. His voice is.. Different. He isn't barking an order. He isn't testing Mel's knowledge, or using that sad slow voice he does when a patient dies. It's something upbeat, exuding a lets be friends energy Mel can't place. She turns and looks around his eyes, never at them, and he continues. "Most people become one here, even if they aren't. Comes with the job."
"I don't… I haven't really found anything I like. Maybe I'll ask Whitaker for a Monster," she says, knowing full well she would rather drink whatever was in the carafe in the break room than Whitaker's bright pink battery acid.
Robby just nods and takes a sip. "Well, I expect to see you in there in another minute. We're about seven minutes out from a helicoptered patient, something about a bear." He morphed back to being Doctor Robinavitch before Mel's eyes as she untenses her shoulders, happy that at least one darn thing was the same. Doctor Robinavitch, my boss. Not my friend. And that's okay! Boundaries are important. No one has to know why that upset me.
In an afterthought, Mel hopes her music wasn't too loud, lest Dr. Robby got an earful.
On a Friday evening in July, Whitaker texts Mel. His contact name is still his full name – Dennis Whitaker PTMH Day Shift . Most of her coworker's names are, with most texts being hey can you trade me? (Sure) and hey we're all getting drinks (Which Mel usually declines both because she can just feel the pity and also because she will never understand how people can drink and work the next day). Becca looks over from where they're both lounging in different spots in the living room as Mel gasps.
Dennis Whitaker PTMH Day Shift:
santos has exiled me :(
Mel King: For shame?
Dennis Whitaker, PTMH Day Shift : Sorry, hit enter early
Dennis Whitaker: PTMH Day Shift: This is short notice, but would i be able to stick it out at your place with Becca? I checked and i saw u don't work tomorrow. I just don't know when ill be allowed back honestly lol sorry
Dennis Whitaker: PTMH Day Shift: I know you dont really like disruptions to your routine sorry
Dennis Whitaker: PTMH Day Shift: usually its like 2 hours but shes REAL adamant i do not return until she says so. so no more than 5
"Did someone die?" Becca asks, which they both immediately realize is a stupid question and wince.
"One of my coworkers has been exiled from his room due to his roommate's activities," she says, quoting Whitaker. "He wanted to hang out with us. He mentioned you."
Becca beamed, realizing this was another person she could either subject to Elf or one of her special interests, and nodded, immediately getting up to rearrange her pillow pile.
"If he knows the great Becca King, twenty minutes older than the also great Mel King, then he is privy to our domicile!" She laughed, trying her best to sound Shakespearean. Mel just hoped they had taught that at his weird Bible school.
Mel felt like she was walking through slime. In an hour, Whitaker would go from not only being her coworker to maybe her friend. She tried not to let the tremor of anxiety crawl over her skin to no avail as she made sure they had clean cups and plates before preparing the popcorn machine that she knew Becca would switch on as soon as Whitaker walked in.
"We will test his worth with his accent selection," Becca declared, grabbing her plush bee so Whitaker didn't get any ideas. "The noble, uh,"
"Dennis," Mel chimed in, making her way back to her room.
"Dennis," Becca repeated, trying not to laugh, "Will have to show his autistic allyship through this challenge and those that follow."
Mel threw on a baggier hoodie than the one she previously had on and spent a passing glance looking in the mirror. She felt like her deep eye bags were probably permanent but secretly loved the way they made shadows on her face. Her hair was somehow even longer than when she had started, skirting around her waist in a braid she had learned to do like clockwork. She imagined herself with short hair, around her shoulders like when she started at the VA. She imagined it shorter. Maybe it would only tickle the nape of her neck, like Jesse, or brush her forehead like Whitaker. Maybe she should stop thinking about that. Yes, she should stop thinking about that and just continue to smile and nod when Princess and Perlah ask how she was able to get it so long and soft.
-
The imagining seems to get out of hand after the day Whitaker comes over (and eventually sleeps on their couch because Santos never texts him back that the coast is clear). Becca had made them watch two different productions of A Midsummers Night Dream and to her joy Whitaker did know enough about Shakespeare to not only understand Becca's infodumping but comment along with it. Whitaker as a friend had become commonplace. Whitaker tells them stories about his brothers, how much he misses having a sibling, the kinship he feels knowing the King twins are also from the Midwest. Other people seem to notice that Mel has finally let her guard down and she knows they're placing bets and there again is the idea of Mel as a girl. Sure, if she and Whitaker were closer in age and not coworkers Mel would consider it. But being Whitaker's girlfriend? Something about it made Mel remember patient Melissa, the way Melissa just went by what she saw but how Mel wanted to say what she saw was wrong.
So she was friends with Whitaker, who had admitted during their second collective viewing of Hamlet he was gay. It made their friendship all the stronger, both of them now knowing they were in it because they wanted to be around each other for the sake of it. And the imagining, almost in stride.
It began as a purely scientific inquiry. She had had a patient come in dealing with complications from facial feminization surgery and realized that she was woefully unaware of gender affirming procedures. Although some of the patients she saw at the VA were transgender, that part of them was never bigger than their identity as a veteran or parent or child. She blamed it on all the googling she did, the way she'd clear her history after each time, that one time she had thought about what it would mean for her muscle mass and facial fat distribution to shift. For the shadows on her face to become more prominent. If the King twins had been born one girl and one boy.
That last question nags at her and she looks over at Becca making a plastic lanyard upside down on the armchair when she asks. It escapes her almost, and the air is still for a millisecond before Becca just goes, That would be cool! I wonder what Mom would name you . Mel breathes like she's hungry for air, like she had been underwater, and that was the thing. Becca had known her longer than anyone else in her life. Of course she would understand this. Know this.
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Mel accidentally tells Whitaker on National Coming Out day, which she had not been thinking about, thank you very much. Becca had won tickets for some museum exhibit at bingo for four at the care facility, and in Becca fashion, gave the organizer back the fourth ticket on the spot and let her know I already have my guest list.
That is how Mel and Whitaker get stuck staring at some kind of metal amalgamation in the middle of a room while Becca wanders behind them staring at an abstract painting in the corner of the empty exhibit room. Sheets of rain hit the roof and the sound echoes unevenly across the space.
"I don't get it," Whitaker says, walking around a sculpture in the middle of the room. "This is why I wouldn't have been a good priest, I don't get abstractions. And the uh." He wrings his hands nervously and takes a step back to try and get another view of the sculpture.
Mel stares at the fixture, polished aluminum fused together into a shape that reminds her of a tree if she were to squint and be 50 feet away. "Yeah, the uh. I have heard tales of the uh being punishable by various gruesome means."
Whitaker suppresses a laugh, covering his mouth as his face reddens. "Dude, they don't get how fucking funny you are. I mean, uh, girl?"
"Dude is fine, I think," Mel says, looking at Becca who flashes her an exaggeratedly large thumbs up as she eavesdrops. "Yeah, its fine. I'm. Do I prefer it? I am one. Probably. I'm kind of really busy all the time," she offers. "Well, how about lunch?"
That's the extent of their conversation, but as Mel drives Whitaker home, he says as meekly as he was on his first day, "I won't tell anyone, by the way. But it's cool to have a guy friend." He wobbles his hand. "Or whatever you are, or will be," he adds, before Becca interrupts their sweet moment to turn up the car radio so that she doesn't have to see Mel cry.
-
In a Pitt record, day shift has somehow only stayed half an hour past what their usual time to leave was. Mel jogs up behind Dr. Robinavitch in an attempt to express urgency but not desperation, and is pretty sure she only expressed the latter.
"Dr. Robby, do you have a moment?" Mel says, and her voice squeaks. Robby doesn't seem to mind, and begins to change his stride to walk with her.
"I got a couple of those, yeah," is all Robby says, taking out an earpod as he helps them walk against the flow of hospital traffic.
"Um." Mel swallows. She's keenly aware that their little group hasn't thinned out yet, with only Javadi and Santos walking far enough ahead to not hear her question. "Where fewer people can hear me speak?"
Robby chuckles. "If you need time off, just ask Dana. She knows enough about scheduling to do it in her sleep."
Mel furrows her brow. She'll have to ask what that's about some other time. She has to do this before she chickens out though. Or her Google history is somehow revealed to all her coworkers.
"No, it's not that, I understand the procedures for requesting time off. This is about an administrative procedure, sure, but –"
" – Got it," Robby interrupts, and directs them to the fire stairs. He takes out his second earpod and Mel can hear the click of the case echo and bounce across the walls. She thinks her hands are clammy. She can't check right now. She looks at the fire exit door, then her feet. Her pink socks she knows she's wearing underneath her scrubs.
"What is the procedure if I choose to change my gender marker?" She asks, still staring at her feet. "I understand Doctor isn't a gendered title, but do you need proof of it being on my passport? I was reading, and most workplaces require a birth certificate –"
Robby lays a hand on Mel's shoulder and she jolts, looking up at Robby. He looks… mad? She didn't really consider that Dr. Robinavitch would be transphobic. This is a wrench, a huge wrench, quite possibly the biggest wrench ever invented thrown into her plan. She feels her body suddenly go hot, then cold, then hot again, and the silence draws out between them.
"Who put you up to this, Dr. King? It surely wasn't my department, so who was it?" Mel sets her jaw. She can't tell what the fuck he means but she's sure she shouldn't ask to clarify.
"Are… um… nobody told me to be transgender, if that's what you mean. I mean, a lot of people usually come out way earlier in life but I've been a bit busy, and uh, repression," she says, half a chuckle, and Robby's glare leaves his eyes, so maybe she's on the right path. "So I uh, I'm seeing if it's feasible. If its not I can, uh, keep being Melissa?"
Robby shakes his head, and removes his hand from Mel's shoulder to draw it across his face, slowly, like he does when he's trying his best to not panic. Mel can't understand why he'd panic. First he was mad Mel might be trans, now he's scared? Mel tries to remember if the trans panic defense is still legal here, but god, she's been so many places she can't remember what she can do where. Most of her legal knowledge in her mind is relegated to supporting Becca.
"Dr. King," Robby finally says, and Mel looks up at him again, tries to look into his eyes, knows how important that is in these moments. "You're welcome to change your gender marker yourself. I don't need any documentation. Just what your new name is going to be."
Mel nods slowly. "Okay. I'll uh… Name… uh…"
Robby laughs again, and this time it's a joke laugh, not exasperation, and Mel half-laughs in turn. "I get it, kid. Took me months and I picked Michael anyway. Petty milquetoast".
The hot and cold feeling in her body returns, this time with an anxious thrum, the feeling she gets when she's about to get on a plane. "You…"
"Yeah. I am. You might be too, by the sound of it. Don't ever look back. Don't ever say I can just be Melissa, " he says, the same way he tells her it's okay when she gets choked up at work. Mel nods rapidly as Robby continues. "And maybe one day, when you're not picking Becca up after work, we can… talk about it. But it stays between us."
Mel stares at him, dumbfounded as she connects the dots. "Oh my god, you probably thought I was – um — an asshole".
Robby laughs. "More like put to the task by an asshole, Dr. King. You just tell me when you're ready to uh… I don't know, put the new name to work."
"You have an Adam's apple," Mel blurts out. She covers her mouth, shocked it even came out of her mouth, and Robby is laughing more during this minutes-long conversation than she's ever seen him laugh.
Robby's hand returns to her shoulder as he guides them out of the stairwell "The wonders of surgery," is all he says, and they're back in the real world, where she's Melissa and he's Robby-but-once-not-Robby.
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