Work Text:
The wind catches Mel’s hair like a dozen little hands, tugging her forward ever so sweetly.
She flexes her grip on the support cable as she stares into the dark water of the Allegheny far below her. The night has soaked into the river, turning it black except where it’s lit by steady street lights around the edges.
Mel’s not near the edges.
She’d walked out far enough over the bridge to feel the wind pick up insistently before climbing up onto the railing. The water below her looks calm, almost featureless. Only the slight splash against the bridge supports gives any indication of movement. The railing feels strange under the worn sole of her shoes, a little too narrow to be comfortable.
It’s not a place someone is meant to stand. It’s a transition. This or that, here or there. On one side safety, her own bed, her life - on the other is silence, the kind that cuts off the world that will swallow her whole if she climbs down again. Mel’s chest feels like ice as the freezing air burrows into her chest with each breath. The water looks cold below her.
She’s already cold.
Maybe she won’t feel it.
- - -
Mel has these…moments sometimes.
When she was twenty and her mom was given two months to live, the question of ‘what happens next?’ had been haunting. Like the sky was falling down and she wasn’t allowed to react. Becca needed someone and all of the bills still needed to be handled and no one else could pick up the slack so she just needed to find a way to do it.
Every day her mom got sicker and Becca leaned on her a little more and a pressure crowded its way into her chest, filling up all the space her grief carved out.
The night her mom died, Mel stood on the roof of her dorm for an hour.
She didn’t- couldn’t do it. When she got down she’d been disgusted with herself, with having almost been so selfish. For thinking that her feelings had been more important than taking care of Becca. Mel had sworn she’d never do it again.
Three months later, she’d found herself on another roof after their accountant told her she needed to sell their childhood home to cover the funeral costs and Becca’s home aide.
She’d never been afraid of heights as a kid. She would climb higher, even after the other kids had called it quits, just to see that she could. She tucked herself into the highest branches she could find, stomach swooping every time the breeze ruffled the leaves around her. It was just her up there. Her and wherever she put her feet.
She lost those trees when they sold the house, but the urge never disappeared. She just found a new place to put it.
It had become a kind of (ironically grounding) pattern in Mel’s darker moments, to find somewhere high enough to give her that feeling again.
Tonight wasn’t part of the usual pattern though. There were no funeral preparations or piles of overdue bills screaming at her from the counter. No lecture at work about whether or not she could keep up with the load.
Nothing had happened.
So what if Becca asked for more nights at the center or that Trinity skips over her as she collects people to go out after a shift. What does it matter that Robby’s praise never seems to connect or that nurses still walk away from her giving each other looks.
None of it matters. Nothing happened. Mel had lived through much harder things than a little loneliness, no matter how creepingly complete. But her mind can’t seem to remember it, staring at the river as the wind cuts through her thin scrub jacket.
Mel takes a deep breath, feeling it chill her from the inside out. Her feet ache, a reminder that she’s lingering far past her welcome. She still doesn’t know where she’ll put them next.
Breathe in.
The water lays glassy soft and patient below her.
Breathe out.
Becca asked Mel to get more of those granola bars she loves so she could share them with some of her new friends. They’re only available at a grocery store forty minutes out of the way.
Breathe in.
Mel’s eyes burn, chin wobbling slightly.
Breathe out.
Trinity had shrugged off Mel’s question about a joke she made at the charge desk. It was a ‘trivia group thing, had to be there, you know-’
She was never asked if she wanted to be.
Breathe-
“Mel?”
Mel’s mind stutters as a jolt races down her spine, sharp and disbelieving. It’s not… there’s no way- her hand clenches around the support beam as she turns around to find Frank, just a few short feet away staring up at her with wide eyes.
Mel can’t believe it, half-expecting him to waver and disappear when she blinks. He doesn’t, still standing there like he stepped out of one of her most indulgent daydreams.
She hadn’t heard anything about him in six months. Nothing about where he was or why he’d left. If he was even still in Pittsburgh. He was just gone, without another word. It became a taboo to bring him up, to ask any of the questions endlessly bouncing around Mel’s head. She’d earned herself more than a few cold shoulders from Robby before she learned to drop it. If it wasn’t for the awkward gaps in stories where he used to be, Mel might have convinced herself she’d made him up.
Mel takes him in with wide eyes, drinking in every forbidden detail. He looks different from the last time she saw him - thinner, more tired, with something heavier resting in his eyes - but it’s him and that fact is enough to shake her to her core. Her disbelief makes way for a cloying uncertainty as she comes back to herself enough to realize that he’s been looking at her just as carefully.
“Mel,” Frank forces out after a long moment, eyes running over her desperately. “What are you doing?”
“I don’t know.” Mel says quietly. No one’s ever found her on one of these nights before, she doesn’t know what to say. Her stomach clenches uncomfortably as she wonders what Frank would think of her if he knew how little it took to push her up here.
“Can you come down for me?” Frank asks, inching forward tentatively, sneakers scuffing on the pavement.
Mel shakes her head, biting her lip hard to force down the wave of tears that want to fall. Even with Frank here, getting down feels impossible. It had never been like this before. Not since that first night after her mom died. Reality always crept in, told her to get back down.
Reality feels quieter than normal tonight.
Frank seems to read some of the mess running through her mind, frowning as he slips a little closer. “What happened?”
What happened? Why would you get up there? Mel almost laughs at Frank giving voice to her own question, bitterness coating her throat coldly.
“Nothing.” Mel says, voice crackling as she looks back at the water to avoid seeing disappointment steal over Frank’s face. Nothing happened, absolutely nothing. And Mel’s shaking to pieces anyway. “Things are good. I’m just- overreacting.”
It’s good to remind herself. Sometimes she thinks all her little problems actually matter.
She cries on the bus after long shifts, straddling the line between trying to stop and trying to get it out so that she doesn’t ruin Becca’s night. She watches her coworkers pair up happily, full of inside jokes, and knows there’s no one waiting to catch up with her. And she gets up on bridges to see if she’ll actually do something about any of it.
Sill, silly, silly.
The city twists in front of her, distorting, as the lights run long into streets and buildings until they smear together hazily. Mel frowns, reaching up to rub her eyes, blinking when her hand comes away wet.
Oh. She’s crying.
The long-waiting tears finally slip down her cheeks, carrying something deep and aching. Mel’s breathing stutters, breaking on a half-sob as it forces its way out of her. It’s like something outside of her has been holding back a wall of grief - and a single question was enough to chip through the wall completely. The wind dances with her hair as it falls out of her braid, coaxing her forward insistently. Mel feels herself wobble, watching the water.
A searing hand wraps around her ankle, dragging her back down into her own skin. Mel stares down at Frank, suddenly next to her, as he holds her with a white-knuckle grip, dark scared eyes watching her every move like she might disappear if he looks away.
Mel thinks she might. He feels like the only thing holding her together.
“Mel, sweetheart- why are you up here?” Frank asks her again, begging for something she’s not sure she can give him. Every syllable is gentle like it was cradled over vocal cords and sharp teeth to press into her insistently. Something about its softness is more devastating than anything he could have said.
Mel opens her mouth helplessly and the truth slips out as she looks for something better. “Because I’m selfish.”
She’s selfish. Mel knows it. She’s up here because instead of taking care of Becca and doing her job and keeping everything together for everyone else, Mel wants to break. She wants to break into a thousand little pieces that are too small for anyone to ever ask her to be in charge again. She wants to give up - and she wants someone to forgive her for quitting.
“Selfish?” Frank repeats incredulously like she’s telling some sort of joke. His hand flexes over her ankle a little tighter. “I wish you were selfish. I wish you told the rest of us assholes ‘no’ a thousand times a day.”
“You don’t know me enough to say that,” Mel argues, shaking her head. “You can’t say that-”
“I can. I do.” Frank says, low and forceful, refusing to give her any ground. His thumb slips back and forth over her ankle like he’s trying to rub some warmth back into some small corner of her body. “I do. I saw you, Mel. I know exactly what kind of person you are.”
Mel’s breath catches in her lungs as Frank finds her eyes and holds them, recapturing them when she tries to move.
“I saw how much you tried on every case we got hit with. And I saw you offer your heart to anyone who needed it. I know the ER. I know how it rolls over people, how it uses them up. It will take anything you’re willing to give it and then some.” Frank shakes his head like he’s trying to physically rid himself of the thought. “I didn’t- don’t want that for you.”
Mel hiccups, tears wobbling down her cheeks. His words dig themselves inside of her, forcing that aching greyness in her chest to loosen its hold. “Is that what happened to you?” Mel’s not sure if she’s allowed to ask where he went, but she thinks Frank might let her anyway. “I-I thought it might have been my fault at first. I thought I held on to you too tight.”
Frank lets out an involuntary whine as his expression cracks, pain stealing over his face. “No, sweetheart. It wasn’t your fault. It was me, it was all me.”
“Where did you go?” Mel asks again, needing him to tell her. He said he knew how hard the ER is. How could he leave when he knew it would take and take and she needed someone.
“I thought everyone would know by now.” Frank dodges, hand tensing as his eyes cut away for a second before jumping back to her, unwilling to look away for too long.
Mel shrugs simply. “People have to talk to you for that.”
Frank’s eyes catch a nearby streetlight, flashing a tempered blue for a second before falling back into shadow. He stares at her, searching her face for something. Mel isn’t sure what he’s looking for, let alone how to fake it so she simply waits, watching him in return.
Somehow she’s still good enough.
“I was in rehab. I got out of treatment three weeks ago.” Frank tells her softly.
“Oh.” Mel whispers. A small part of her chest lights up terribly. He hadn’t lied, it wasn’t about her holding on too tight or-or that he hadn’t felt what she had. He didn’t want to leave, he’d been sick.
Frank’s hand squeezes around her ankle again, pulling her back to him. His face is open, exposed like he’s stepping over the edge of something and he’s not sure there’s ground beneath him. “Ask me what I was taking.”
“What were you taking?” Mel asks him barely loud enough to be heard, stomach clenching.
“Benzodiazepines.” Frank confesses, staring up at her pleadingly. “From our patients. Because I’m fucking selfish. Which is how I know that you aren’t.”
It should be earth-shattering.
Rehab, and pills, and stealing. It feels like she’s supposed to blink and see a different man in Frank’s place. Someone untrustworthy, thrilled by his own lies. That’s what TV always looks like.
But she doesn’t.
He’s still just Frank. Standing out in the cold, clutching her ankle like he’s strong enough to keep them both grounded. She didn’t know a perfect man for fifteen hours. He wasn’t nice to everyone, words cutting with patients he didn’t like and sarcastic enough to spin circles around her at times.
But he slowed down when she needed it, without a word about keeping up or ER load. He sent her on a break and then came to get her again with a case that couldn’t have been anything less than hand-picked. He reassured her with what always seemed to be the right words. Because Frank Langdon is not a nice man, but he is a kind one. And the difference between the two is massive. He was kind then, and he’s kind now. It’s not something that washes out, even if he got lost. Especially because he got lost.
“That’s not the same.” Mel wobbles, trying to find the words to tell him that she knows him too. That she can handle the soft parts of him gently too. “You-you were sick.”
“I was.” Frank agrees, shoulders loosening at her words as a sheen builds in his eyes. He leans into her unconsciously, like he doesn’t even realize he’s doing it. “But I chose to keep going. Even when I knew it could hurt people. Even when it did hurt people.”
Mel recognized the vulnerability in his words, just like everything else he’d shared with her. Vulnerability pointed right at the softest thing in his chest, like he’ll let her use it against him if she ever wanted to.
“I-I don’t know how much I believed in medicine when you showed up.” Frank tells her. “I knew we helped people. Get a broken bone, fix a broken bone, but medicine? I used to believe it, but over time I just- I didn’t realize how much of myself I’d let the ER carve out, how much I was willing to trade for performance reviews and- and bullshit. And then you showed up.”
Frank says it like it was a turning point. Like everything orbited around that one moment. Mel’s never been so central to someone else before.
“You were happy to be there. And you smiled at patients and answered stupid questions genuinely. It-” Frank stumbles, searching for the right words. “You woke me up. You reminded me what we do.”
“You…you can’t mean that.” Mel tells him, even as the small thing in her chest lifts with a weary hope. “It was a day.”
Frank just shakes his head gently, unmovable. “You’re easy to love, Mel.”
Mel can't stop herself from whining, knuckling her own sternum hard as tears drip down her cheeks, trying to push back on the pain in her chest. Mel’s never been easy to understand or befriend, never been enough to keep people around. It’s always been something about her, something wrong that everyone else could see.
You’re easy to love.
Frank’s never struggled. Since their first hour together he understood her better than anyone else. Because he thinks she’s easy to love. Because he thinks that she isn’t the problem. And somehow after months apart, he found her again just in time to pull her back down to earth when she needed it most.
“Let me prove it, Mel.” Frank begs. “Let me take care of you.”
Mel wants to believe him, she wants to lean on someone and know that they can hold her weight. That they won’t drop her. She wants someone to know how selfish and scared and tired she is - and she wants them to stick around anyway. Mel wants it to be Frank who finally catches her. Mel nods, swallowing thickly. “I- please.”
The words barely pass her lips before Frank’s arm is wrapping around her waist, pulling her back into him, away from the edge. The weightlessness lasts for only one heart-pounding second before Frank catches her in his arms without hesitation. Mel’s stomach swoops familiarly, sending her back to those trees in her childhood. Massive and embracing, never letting her slip even when she climbed far past the point she should have. She’s not sure what it means to feel like that as Frank wraps her in his arms, warm and secure for the first time in what feels like years.
Not-quite-sobs still shake her chest, the whole night drifting past her like a blur she's not really sure happened. Frank doesn’t flinch as she shakes apart, just tucking her closer to him with a pressure that borders on too much as he whispers something that sounds like 'thank you' over and over again. No one had ever fought so hard to take care of Mel. To take something off of her and onto their own shoulders. No one had ever wanted to before.
Mel knows Frank has to have other responsibilities, his own life to get back to, coming from rehab. Mel can't help herself from asking one last time. “Are you sure?”
“I’m sure, Mel. I’ve got you.” Frank murmurs low and honest, completely at odds with his arms tucking her tighter against him. “I’m not letting go.”
The pressure of his arms is the promise that finally lets Mel relax. Her head drops into his shoulder, arms closing around him just as tightly. There's no room between them, no gasp of air that isn't pressed out of existence as they hold each other ever closer. Warm and close and seen.
Mel lets her eyes close.
She knows Frank won't let her fall.