Chapter Text
I lost my heart
Under the bridge
To that little girl
So much to me
And now I moan
And now I holler
She'll never know
Just what I found
The thing about a thirty-hour shift was that your energy deteriorated exponentially. At hour twelve, you were sharp, running on adrenaline and spite and the specific competitive energy that had gotten Trinity Santos through medical school faster than most people got through the first two years. Come hour twenty, you were running on something older and less identifiable. By hour thirty, you were running on nothing at all, just the hollow mechanical motion of a body that had forgotten it was allowed to stop.
Trinity Santos did not stop.
She had charts to finish.
Or else you repeat your R2 year, Dr. Al-Hashimi’s clipped voice supplied unhelpfully in her mind.
Trinity sat at the nurses' station with her laptop open and the ward quieting around her, staring at the blinking cursor in the notes field for patient 4-Bravo, and thinking about how much she hated charting with a specific, consuming passion she usually reserved for people who misidentified a tension pneumo. It was endless. It was tedious. It required her to sit still and produce linear written thought in sequence, which was — the cursor blinked — which was something she was going to do. Right now. She was going to do that.
The cursor blinked.
Trinity had been told, once, by a very tired psychiatrist at a summer camp for troubled kids when she was fourteen, that she exhibited clear traits of dyslexia and ADHD. She had thought, shit, that explains literally everything, and then not thought about it for six years. She managed. She had systems. She had spite, which was better than methylphenidate and didn't require a prescription.
The cursor blinked.
"Santos."
She looked up. Robby was leaning on the other side of the station, hands stuffed in his hoodie pockets, bag over his shoulder, looking at her with a furrowed brow.
"Go home," he said.
"I'm in the middle of charting."
"You've been staring at that screen for twenty minutes."
"I'm uh… thinking."
"Right… or dissociating."
"Well, those aren’t mutually exclusive." She sighed, staring back at the screen. "Go home, Robby. Have a midlife crisis or something."
"Been there, done that." The attending didn't move. "Seriously, kid. Night shift’s got the floor. You can—"
"I have to finish these," she said, and the tone was final enough that he went, though she heard him say something to Huckleberry on his way past that was almost certainly about her, and she elected not to acknowledge it.
She typed three words in the notes field.
Deleted two of them.
Typed them again.
She finally finished her batch of charts at 2:47 am, and the ward was quiet. She closed the laptop and sat for a moment with her hands flat on the desk, and her eyes closed.
She thought about Baby Jane Doe. Bloodwork came back fine, other than the rhinovirus. Found in Chairs, bundled in a jacket that wasn't hers, clean and fed and otherwise physically fine in a way that was somehow almost worse. No one had come forward yet. No one was looking, or if they were, they hadn't called the right places.
Trinity had not been assigned to her. Trinity had been walking past the room at hour nineteen on her way to the coffee machine and had heard her through the door, that specific thin wail that meant a baby was past the peak of crying and into the exhausted, hopeless phase of it, and she had stopped.
She had gone in because it was the right clinical decision. An unsettled infant post-intake needed monitoring and comfort,t and the nurse on that end of the floor was managing two other patients. It was a resource allocation decision. It was completely logical.
She had picked the baby up because — because she was there, because the wailing had that particular quality to it, because —
She had held her for forty minutes. Stood by the window that looked out over the parking structure and rocked her, this small stranger in a hospital blanket who had been left in a stairwell by someone, and the baby had settled by degrees — had fussed and squirmed and eventually gone quiet and heavy against Trinity's shoulder, one tiny fist curled into the fabric of her scrubs.
Trinity had stood very still for a long time after that.
She did not think of herself as domestic. She did not think of herself as soft. She had built a very specific and functional identity around being the person in the room who did not need comfort and did not provide it sentimentally, who was there for the medicine and the problem-solving and the adrenaline of something going wrong and being fixed. Softness was — it was a resource she didn't have, or had decided not to have, or had had taken from her early enough that she didn't know the difference anymore.
Standing by that window with someone else's baby asleep on her shoulder, she had felt something crack open in her chest that she didn't have a name for and didn't want one.
It felt like weakness. The particular kind of weakness that was worse than crying, worse than breaking, because it was tender, because it was want — some stupid buried want she'd thought she'd gotten rid of years ago.
The problem wasn't that she'd felt it. The problem was that she recognized it. That old soft thing, that open-handed, open-hearted thing that people had loved her for when she was small and hadn't known better. So sweet. They'd said it like a compliment. So kind. So considerate. Like it was something to be proud of, being that permeable, that easy to move. She had eventually learned what it cost. She had learned that softness was just another word for available, for hurtable, for here, take whatever you need from her, she won't even flinch.
She had spent years cutting it out of herself. Careful work. Methodical. The way she'd learned to do everything that mattered — without ceremony, without looking away. Every time she'd felt that pull, that stupid animal warmth, she'd found the edge of it and pressed until it went numb. It had worked. It had worked. She had been so sure.
And then a five-pound stranger had gone boneless against her collarbone, and here it was again. The tenderness. The want. Some sick, surviving piece of her that she hadn't managed to reach, curled up somewhere beneath the sternum, still breathing. Still wanting things. A life she'd already decided she didn't get to want.
She hated it. She wanted to crack her own chest open and find it and tear it out by the root, the way you had to with certain things — not just cut, but eviscerate, get all of it, leave nothing behind that could grow back.
She didn't know what was worse: that it was still there, or that for one unguarded moment, holding that baby in the blue-dark quiet, it hadn't felt like a wound.
It had felt like a door.
She had shut it.
She picked up her bag.
She passed the supply cabinet on her way to the exit.
She stopped.
Stood in front of it with her hand on the cabinet door and thought about what she was doing, clearly and without self-deception, which she was capable of when she chose to be. She thought: This is not a thing you do. You have a line about this. You have always had a line about this.
She thought about the baby's weight against her shoulder. The crack in her chest. The nurse coming back and Trinity handing her over like — like a returned library book, like something that was never hers to begin with, which it wasn't, which was the whole point, nothing was—
She took the scalpel.
Dropped it in her bag and walked briskly to her car without looking back.
The drive home was twenty minutes, and she spent most of it trying not to think, which meant she thought about everything. She thought about the track-and-field kids dropping to 71. She thought about Baby Jane Doe's fist in her scrubs. She thought about Garcia, who was somewhere in this hospital still, probably, or had been — Garcia who had been on a thirty-six-hour surgical rotation and who had texted her two and a half hours ago and who Trinity had been thinking about, against her will and better judgment, for approximately four months.
She picked up her phone at a red light.
She opened Whitaker.
How's the farm sex?
She sent it before she could think about it being 3 am. He'd see it in the morning. That was fine. That was what she wanted — just to have sent something, to have the thread open, the small, specific comfort of his name on her screen.
Her phone buzzed twenty seconds later.
why are you texting me at 3 am?
santos
Something in her chest loosened, just slightly.
I'm aware of the time, Huckleberry. I live in the same time zone. Answer the question!!
im not having sex?? im helping out. it's nice.
Just nice? Wheres ur SAT vocab
peaceful? there's a lot of sky
Yea ofc u would describe a location as having "lots of sky."
and you would text someone at 3 am to critique their vocabulary
What can I say, Huck? I contain multitudes. Is there wifi at least
barely. had to stand in the yard to send these
So you're standing in a field in the dark to text me
yes
That's insane
i know. are you okay
She stared at that. The light turned green. She put the phone down.
Next light.
Im always okay. Go back to your field.
bad shift?
She thought about Dr. Al-Hashimi’s threat. She thought about the baby. She thought about standing by that window for forty minutes, feeling like something she didn't want to be.
Nothing I couldn't handle.
trinity
that's not what I asked
Whatever. Goodnight loser.
goodnight
text me when you're home
She rolled her eyes at the windshield and felt the specific warmth of him from three hours away, this man (friend?) standing in a dark field with bad wifi just to send her bad texts, and how he was such a huckleberry that it almost hurt.
When Trinity padded into the modest apartment she shared with Dennis, she didn't turn on the main lights. Just the lamp in the kitchen. The apartment was how she'd left it — functional, tidy, everything in its designated place. She had never been someone who left things out. She had learned young that things left out got noticed.
She poured two fingers of whiskey. Downed them both standing up, still in her coat. Poured another.
That was when she saw Garcia's notification from two hours and forty minutes ago.
out of surgery finally. free if you are, no pressure x
She stared at the screen for a long time.
Garcia had been in surgery. Of course. Garcia was always in surgery, just out of surgery, or heading back into one, because Garcia was a trauma-surgery fellow who, by every metric Trinity had ever used to evaluate anything, was exceptional in an almost annoying way. Not exceptional, the way Trinity was exceptional — Trinity was exceptional the way a live wire was, loud and dangerous and something you didn't touch unless you knew what you were doing. Garcia was exceptional in the way a very good instrument is. Precise. Purposeful. She walked into trauma bays and just knew things. She had four years at Trinity and existed in a stratum of this hospital that Trinity could see clearly but had not yet reached — ORs that weren't open to her yet, skills she was still building toward, an authority that came from being that good for that long.
And Garcia, for reasons Trinity had turned over until the edges were worn smooth, sometimes texted her. Looked at her across the scrub sinks. Was warm and funny and saw her, in that way that —in the way that—
No pressure. Of course, Garcia said that. Garcia was kind. Garcia was considerate. Garcia said exactly the things you say to someone you were doing a favour for, someone you found entertaining, someone who was… well.
Trinity was very aware of what she was. She had a lot of time to think about it in the gaps.
She was an R2. She was brash and confident. She was occasionally witty and usually difficult and had something that Garcia apparently found interesting, the way you found a particularly aggressive puzzle interesting, and she showed up when Garcia texted because she was—because she wanted—
She thought about the baby's fist in her scrubs. About the crack in her chest.
About being fourteen in a gymnasium that smelled like chalk and floor wax. About Him saying you're special, you're built for this, you have something the others don't, and the way she had glowed at it. She had been so hungry for it. Had not understood what the hunger was being used for until it was too late to unsend the images that were never to check in on her progress at all, too late to take back the trust she had handed over like a gift, too late to unlearn what his hands felt like. Because it hadn't felt like cruelty, and that was the thing that haunted her most. He had barely been an adult himself, still soft at the edges, still vulnerable in ways she hadn't had the language for then. The lines had been blurred by design. That’s literally what grooming is, she reminded herself. It doesn’t announce itself. It wears the face of tenderness. I can be your mentor. I can take care of you, he had said, and she had believed him, had let herself be held by it, because she was fourteen and hungry and he had looked at her like she was worth something. Trinity had tried to be strong for him too, sensing even then the fragility underneath, which was perhaps exactly what he had counted on.
The body, she had learned before she was old enough to have language for it, was not always yours. It could be taken. Could be moved and shaped and used while you were still in it, while you were still saying thank you, while you were still feeling chosen and lucky and seen.
She had been so grateful. That was the part that didn't go away. The gratitude.
She slammed the phone face down on the counter and took the whiskey and her bag to the bathroom.
The cold tile was immediate. That was why she sat on it — the shock of it, something physical and definite to push against. She sat with her back against the bathtub and the scalpel in her hand, and she was calm, the shutter coming down, everything going quiet and manageable and terrible.
Trinity turned the scalpel over in her fingers. Thought about the supply cabinet. The line she'd crossed. She noted it the way she noted things she was going to think about later,r and then didn't.
She pushed her sleeve up.
This was the thing that nobody who looked at her would ever understand, she thought. The doctors who knew the literature. Robby with his face. Whitaker, standing in a field. The thing that was almost impossible to explain, that she had tried to explain once to the tired psychiatrist at nineteen and had not had the words for:
It was about choosing.
He had taken that from her before she even knew it was something that could be taken. The right to decide what happened to her own body, what it felt, who touched it, and what it was used for. He had taken it so carefully, so incrementally, that by the time she understood the taking, she was already three years in and the damage was architectural. It lived in the foundations.
At fifteen, she had found that she could take it back. Not undo it — nothing undid it — but she could choose. Her own hand. Her own terms. Her own pain on her own timeline, calibrated exactly to what she could manage. The body responds to her instead of to someone else's hands. She knew the mechanism. She could write a review of the clinical literature on the mechanism. That didn't change what it did for her, which was give her back, briefly and completely, the thing that had been taken.
It was not healthy. She had known that for fourteen years. It had never once stopped being the only thing that worked.
She pressed the blade to her thigh — lateral, away from anything that mattered, where she knew the anatomy the way she knew it in the OR. She had always been precise. She found the same scar tissue, the ugly tan mess of old decisions, and made the cut parallel to the last one, clean through the skin, the sting blooming outward in a wave that she breathed into slowly.
She sat with it.
Watched the line of red appear and darken. And then — because she was who she was, because she could not help it — she looked. Really looked. The way she looked in the OR when the first incision opened and the subcutaneous fat separated, pale and yellow and almost pretty in its neutrality, the way she would pause sometimes just to observe it, clinical and calm, already thinking about the layers beneath. She pressed the edges apart slightly with her thumb and watched the tissue and felt, shamefully, the same small pull of interest she felt under the lights.
She inhaled. Braced. Swiped again, shallower than she'd go in surgery, but enough — enough to see it. The white gleam of superficial fascia. Clean and fibrous and real.
Is that sick in the head?
Probably.
Trinity wanted—or maybe needed—to go deeper. It didn’t matter what she thought, though. The resident knew she wouldn’t. She knew the difference between wanting and doing, had always known it; that was the whole point. But she wanted to see muscle. She wanted to see the thing underneath the thing, the structure that held everything together. In surgery, it made sense. In the Pitt, wanting to see what was underneath was called curiosity, drive, and persistence, and people thanked her for it.
Here it was just her, on the bathroom floor, bleeding on purpose, curious about her own tissue.
She pressed a piece of gauze to her thigh and watched it bloom red through the cotton and breathed.
She thought about Baby Jane Doe asleep on her shoulder, that impossible weight, and felt something move through her that was grief and shame and something she couldn't name, and she pressed her free hand flat against the tile floor and breathed.
She thought about Garcia's text. No pressure. She thought about what she probably was to Garcia — interesting, a little different, something to text when surgery was over and the evening was free. She thought about how she showed up every time, without fail, lit up as a fourteen-year-old at a gym meet, some part of her still wired to equate attention with worth, still running on the programming He had installed before she had the capacity to refuse it.
She thought about the baby again. About how soft she'd felt. About the wanting.
You don't get to want things, she thought, not for the first time. People like you don't get to want things. You know what you are.
A failure. That was the word. Not the surgery — never the surgery, the surgery was the one place she was not a failure, the one place her hands did exactly what she asked them to, and the outcome made sense, and the variables were manageable. Everything else. Every soft human thing she had ever tried to do. She was so tired of being competent in one room and catastrophic in every other.
She pressed the gauze tighter and breathed, slowly, in through the nose, out through the mouth, the way she taught patients to do it, the way she was objectively quite good at telling other people to do it.
Trinity Santos was so very tired.
The bathroom tile beneath her was so very cold.