Chapter Text
Whenever someone asks about his job, he already knows the answer they’re expecting, so he gives it to them. He talks about how surreal it feels to fly above the clouds, how the city shrinks into something small and almost manageable from that high up. He describes the rush of takeoff, the half‑second where his lungs lock every single time, like his body still hasn’t accepted that he’s actually allowed to do this for a living.
And sometimes—if they’re really listening—he lets them in on the ritual. Two taps on the control panel. One quick kiss to his Nonno’s ring. No relaxing until the skids touch down and the rotors stop spinning.
People eat that up. Just enough superstition to make him seem charming instead of mildly unhinged.
He never tells them about the paperwork, or the hours that stretch too long between calls, or the patients they don’t reach in time. Those parts—those parts are just for his therapist.
#
The call comes in just past ten—two hours after end of shift, when he should be home, knee‑deep in dirt, planting tulip bulbs instead of knee‑deep in flight logs and proficiency checks. He shuts his laptop with the kind of finality that suggests he’s done for the night, slips off his glasses, and pinches the bridge of his nose until stars spark behind his eyelids. His phone buzzes, skitters across the desk like it’s trying to escape, the screen lighting up with a number he doesn’t recognize.
For a beat, he considers letting it go to voicemail. He’s earned that right. But something—instinct, guilt, superstition, who knows—nudges his hand forward. He reaches for the phone, thumb dragging across the answer button before he can talk himself out of it.
“Kinard.”
“Thomas Kinard?”
He stiffens, brow pulling tight, the kind of furrow that feels carved rather than formed, like his face has been waiting all night for an excuse to do exactly this.
He swallows. “Yeah?”
“Mr. Kinard, I’m calling from Los Angeles General—”
Everything in him goes still.
There are a hundred calls he’s trained to take without hesitation. This isn’t one of them.
“I’m calling about your grandmother, Marie—”
His chair scrapes back hard against the concrete floor. “What happened?”
There’s a pause—too short to soothe, too long to ignore.
“She had a fall outside her home. EMS brought her in about an hour ago. She’s stable—”
Stable. The word hits, but it doesn’t ease anything inside him; it just hangs there, thin and insufficient.
“I’m on my way,” he says, already moving.
He doesn’t remember grabbing his jacket from behind the door, or shrugging into it, or crossing the room. One moment he’s at his desk, the next he’s yanking open a drawer, fingers closing around his keys—
—and stopping.
There’s a photo sitting there, half tucked beneath a stack of paperwork like he tried to hide it and didn’t quite commit. A strip of four booth shots, edges soft from handling. Santa Monica Pier. Him and Evan shoulder to shoulder in a cramped photo booth, sunburnt and laughing at something neither of them can remember now. In the third frame, Buck leans in too close. In the fourth, he isn’t pulling away.
They look— Happy.
He shuts the drawer harder than he means to. He’s out the door a second later.
#
Los Angeles General doesn’t look like much from the outside—just another block of concrete and glass—but inside, it’s a different kind of storm.
It hits him the second the doors slide open.
The smell, first: stale coffee, industrial cleaner, something faintly metallic beneath it all. And under that—something harder to name. Sick people. Fear. The kind of air that never fully clears, no matter how aggressively the ventilation system tries.
He barely breaks stride.
The ER waiting room is packed, every seat filled, people lining the walls with crossed arms and bowed heads, conversations held low and tight like they might snap if they get too loud. A kid somewhere to his left is crying—thin, exhausted, the kind of sound that’s been going on far too long. Across the room, an older woman coughs into her mask, shoulders trembling with the effort.
A TV in the corner does its best impression of being helpful, blasting game‑show enthusiasm into a room that couldn’t care less.
“—come on down!”
A woman in the front row watches it like it’s a lifeline, like if she looks away for even a second, something worse might happen.
The vending machines hum along the far wall, their fluorescent glow casting a washed‑out sheen over everything nearby, as if even the snacks have given up. Someone smacks the side of one—hard enough to rattle the glass, soft enough to suggest this is a familiar ritual—like attitude alone might convince the machine to surrender whatever it’s stubbornly withholding. The sound reverberates for a moment before dissolving into the low, constant murmur of the room.
Posters crowd the walls in a dense, almost frantic collage of directives and warnings: WASH YOUR HANDS. STOP THE SPREAD OF INFECTION. MASKS REQUIRED BEYOND THIS POINT. Bright cartoon diagrams demonstrate proper sanitizing techniques, each one accompanied by a smiling illustrated nurse whose relentless cheer feels wildly out of place. The colors are too saturated, the fonts too eager, the whole display pitched at a level of optimism no one in this building has the emotional bandwidth to meet.
He barely registers any of it. His eyes skim past the posters, past the vending machines, past the exhausted faces around him. His body is already moving, pulled forward by a mix of momentum and dread, straight toward the front desk.
The receptionist doesn’t look up at first. He’s hunched over his phone, scrolling with the slow, practiced rhythm of someone who has perfected the art of appearing busy while doing absolutely nothing. His hair is jet‑black in a way that would be convincing if not for the thick dark‑brown brows sitting above a pair of emerald‑green eyes currently squinting at whatever’s on his screen. A scatter of freckles dusts the bridge of his nose, standing out against the harsh overhead lighting. His dark‑blue scrubs are wrinkled in the places that suggest he’s been here too long, and his work badge is flipped backward, barely visible beneath the fold of fabric.
A half‑empty cup of coffee sits by his elbow, the surface film turning it into something tragic and beyond saving. Beside it, an open bag of Cool Ranch Doritos slumps in defeat, a few crumbs clinging to the lip like they’re trying to escape.
Tommy stops in front of the desk and clears his throat. “Hi, I’m looking for—”
The receptionist finally glances up, just long enough to take him in. His gaze flicks down, catches on the flight suit. The boots. The patch on the shoulder.
The uniform.
His expression doesn’t change, but something in his posture shifts—an automatic, almost muscle‑memory adjustment, like his spine snaps to attention before his brain can catch up. He jerks his chin toward the door beside him.
“Through there.”
Tommy blinks, thrown by the ease of it. “I—”
But the kid’s already dropped his gaze back to his phone, thumb resuming its lazy orbit.
A soft mechanical click breaks the moment. The door beside the desk slides open on its own, smooth and obedient. He hesitates for half a second, startled by how little resistance the world is offering him tonight, and then steps through.
Inside, the air changes. It sharpens, cools, carries the faint sterile bite of antiseptic layered over something heavier—urgency, maybe, or the residue of too many long nights. The noise shifts too, losing the unfocused buzz of the waiting room and settling into something more deliberate. Monitors beep in steady, unyielding patterns. Voices call out vitals with clipped precision. Footsteps move with purpose, weaving around one another in a choreography built on necessity rather than grace.
A security guard sits just past the entrance. Or—technically sits. He’s leaned so far back in his chair it’s a miracle the laws of physics haven’t staged an intervention. A crumpled In‑N‑Out bag droops from one hand, a half‑finished burger in the other. Grease stains the wrapper; a few fries have escaped onto the desk like deserters. He doesn’t even glance up as the uniform walks by.
He slows, just slightly, waiting for the inevitable—some version of Sir, you can’t be back here—but the words never come. The guard doesn’t even twitch.
He keeps walking.
It takes him a moment longer than it should to understand why.
Then it lands.
He glances down at himself: the flight suit, the boots, the patch. The whole package.
Uniform.
His former captain’s voice drifts through his head, smug in the way only retired authority figures can manage.
No one questions a guy in uniform.
He exhales—something caught between disbelief and resignation—and pushes forward.
The hallway stretches ahead, long and bright and relentlessly clinical. Triage rooms line both sides, curtains half‑drawn, doors opening and closing in a rhythm that feels almost mechanical. Snippets of conversations spill out as he passes, fragments of urgency that don’t belong to him but still snag on something inside him.
“—blood pressure’s dropping—”
“—how long has the pain been—”
“—we need another line—”
It’s familiar.
Too familiar.
He knows this world from the other side. Knows the pace, the pressure, the way everything narrows to the single most important thing and refuses to widen again until the crisis is over. Usually, he’s the one bringing people in. Not the one walking in after them.
He scans the room numbers as he moves, eyes flicking from placard to placard, each one passing in a blur that feels both too slow and too fast.
314.
315.
316—
There.
Marie Anzalone.
Her name sits neatly on a temporary placard clipped slightly crooked to the door, the kind of crooked that suggests someone tried to straighten it and got pulled away mid‑gesture, leaving the imperfection behind like a fingerprint.
He slows just before the threshold, the momentum draining out of him all at once. For a moment he stands there, suspended in the narrow space between dread and duty, letting himself take one breath—one real, deliberate inhale that tastes faintly of antiseptic and recycled air—before he reaches for the door.
Then he pushes it open.
“Nonna?”
The room is small—barely enough space for the bed, a single chair, and a sink wedged into the corner. A TV is mounted on the wall opposite her, tuned to HGTV, one of her favorites. The walls are the beigiest shade of beige imaginable, the kind that tries for warmth and lands somewhere closer to resignation. The tile floor is scuffed and dulled by time, the kind of wear that tells you how many people have passed through here before her.
And in the middle of all of it—his Nonna.
She looks impossibly small in the bed, swallowed by the ugly hospital gown, her tiny frame—barely five feet tall, maybe a hundred pounds on a good day—dwarfed by the rails and the machinery around her. Long silvery hair spills over the pillow in soft, unruly waves, like she’s been fighting sleep and the pillows have been fighting back. Her sharp blue eyes track toward him, bright even under the fluorescent lights, and for a moment he sees his mother—what she might have looked like at eighty‑four, lines at the corners of her eyes, a few wrinkles here and there, but still carrying that stubborn, youthful glow that refuses to dim.
When she sees him—
“Tommy.”
Relief hits him so fast it nearly knocks the air out of him.
“You scared me,” he says, voice rougher than he means, scraped thin by the last ten minutes.
She huffs, faint but familiar. “I tripped, not died.”
“Yeah, well,” he mutters, stepping closer, “you don’t exactly do anything halfway.” That earns him the ghost of a smile. He reaches for her hand, careful with the movement, grounding himself in the warmth of her skin. She squeezes back—weak, yes, but present, and that’s enough to calm him.
“You’re okay?” he asks.
“I’ve been better,” she says. “But I’ve been worse.”
Before he can answer, a knock sounds against the doorframe.
A doctor steps in—late forties, composed in that unshakeable way that comes from delivering hard news so often the cadence becomes part of his bloodstream. He’s a few inches shorter than Tommy, but he carries himself with a quiet authority that fills the small triage room without crowding it.
Dark brown skin, white hair cropped close, dark eyes that take everything in with a single sweep. Light‑blue scrubs cling to a frame that’s clearly in shape, the fabric stretching slightly over broad shoulders. There’s no undershirt beneath the V‑neck, and a dusting of dark chest hair is visible in the gap. His arms—muscular, furred, capable—shift as he adjusts the stethoscope hanging around his neck. A wedding ring glints on his left hand when he reaches for the chart.
Tommy tries not to stare too hard. He mostly fails.
“Mr. Kinard? I’m Dr. Patel.”
Tommy nods once. “How bad is it?”
No preamble. No cushioning. Dr. Patel meets his gaze head‑on.
“A fracture to the tibia. Clean break, but significant enough that she’ll need to stay off it completely while it heals.”
Tommy’s grip tightens around his grandmother’s hand.
“How long?”
“At least six months.”
The number drops into the room with weight—more than time, more than inconvenience. Six months is seasons changing, holidays passing, routines disrupted. Six months is his Nonna—who doesn’t sit still, who feeds half the neighborhood like it’s her calling—being told to stay put.
“That’s not going to be easy for her,” Tommy says, the understatement dry on his tongue.
“No,” Dr. Patel agrees. “It won’t. Which is why she’ll need support.”
Tommy doesn’t hesitate. “I’ll take care of it.”
The doctor studies him for a moment, then nods. “We’ll go over discharge instructions tomorrow.”
When he leaves, the room feels smaller, quieter, the HGTV hosts chirping about backsplash options in the background like they’re broadcasting from another universe.
Tommy exhales slowly, scrubbing a hand over his face before looking back at her. “I’m going to be here more,” he says. “Whatever you need. I’ll make it work.”
“You work too much already,” she murmurs.
“I’ll figure it out.”
“Tommy—”
“I mean it,” he says, softer but firm. “You’re not doing this alone.”
She watches him for a long moment, something knowing flickering behind her tired eyes.
“I’m not alone,” she says finally.
He frowns. “Nonna—”
“I have—” Her eyes slip shut mid‑sentence, the exhaustion pulling her under without warning.
“Hey.” He leans in slightly. “You have what?”
But she’s already drifting, breath evening out, the fight leaving her all at once.
Tommy stills, then sighs quietly. “Yeah,” he mutters. “We’ll come back to that.”
He settles into the chair beside her bed, not letting go of her hand.
Six months.
He can make that work.
He has to.