Work Text:
It starts early Wednesday morning, when Frank notices Mel stifle a yawn during the morning briefing.
He raises an eyebrow, trying to catch her eye so he can throw her a questioning look but her focus is zeroed in on Robby.
He bounces restlessly on his feet, absently taking in the introductions for the new med students, trying to not let his gaze drift over to Mel again, who is now rubbing her eyes— what is going on?
He shakes his head, forcing his attention away. He lands on Santos, who is also watching Mel with narrowed eyes.
At least he’s not alone.
The morning starts off as it usually does, picking up the mess from the night before, small talk, hushed voices because no one’s really awake until 8 AM. In the before times, Langdon was a known morning menace, his energy that bordered on erratic would usually earn a glare from Perlah or Collins.
Post rehab, Frank follows a pretty regimented schedule. Working out, black coffee before work, trying not to fall into a pit of despair while sitting in his car and waiting for the shift to start. He listens to his coworkers. Some days he forgoes the pomade in his hair. Growth.
The one thing that has not changed from the before times (really, the one day before it all fell apart) is his predisposition to seek Dr. Melissa King out during the day. In the chaos of a shift they find each other like magnets. They’ve long past the point where he could teach her anything, though he suspects, if he stuck around after that day she would have started lapping him in no time.
One could argue it’s the only thing that gets him out of bed, some days.
Today moves differently. Dr. King is the picture of emergency medicine care, she is attentive and prompt, every patient she sees is charmed—how could they not be? But she forgoes the small talk over bandaging, little comments on the weather or the evening before are forgotten. She keeps her head low throughout the day.
By 11 AM, Frank is just about ready to climb out of his own skin. He’s resolved to unpack this feeling another day—today he’s dying to know where the hell Mel King is at.
He ends up in a room with Mel and Santos, wrapping up with a patient ready for discharge. Mel yanks her blue gloves off.
“Jesus, King, what happened there,” she gestures towards Mel’s hands. Tiny red gashes line her fingers.
Mel shoulders square as she looks down, flexing her fingers once before tucking them in her pocket.
“This?” she says. “Happened yesterday, difficult patient, it was a whole thing. But I’m fine.”
Santos says nothing. She just stares. Mel stares back, her ears turn red.
“I think Robby is calling me,” Mel says, with an urgency that makes them flinch. “You’re all set here, right?”
She doesn’t wait for a response before she exits.
Santos watches her walk away, her jaw set tight. Her gaze falls to Frank.
“What’s up, Eyebrows?”
Frank considers his next actions carefully.
His return, post-rehab, to working with Trinity Santos was difficult, to say the least. He did the adult thing and had a conversation with her, the details of which are lost in a humiliation-induced haze. The only thing he really remembers is her saying, “Don’t mention it. Christ, if I knew you would get all emotional I would have just looked the other way.”
Still, since then they maintain a cordial working relationship. Robby wants him to work on it. He says a lot of things like, “you guys might be more similar than you realize” and other equally irritating nuggets of wisdom that Frank usually ignores.
Still, it’s a testament to how far they’ve come that he feels comfortable saying—
“I was in yesterday, she didn’t have those scars.”
He doesn’t want to elaborate, to admit the reason he knows this for certain is that he remembers walking out of the hospital at the end of their shifts the night before. He remembers the way she pushed the loose strands of hair away from her face, smiling brightly at him as she bade him goodnight.
So yeah, he would have noticed. When it comes to Mel King, he would have noticed.
He feels cold all over, like someone dropped an ice cube down his back. As close as they may be, he doesn’t know her home life, not really. He knows that Becca is at the care facility during the week, Mel picks her up on Fridays. He doesn’t know if there’s anyone else.
He feels very, very cold.
“It could be nothing,” he says hollowly, the words useless in his own ears. “But then why lie?”
Santos crosses her arms across her chest. He wants her to say he’s crazy.
“Yeah,” all the usual humour from her face is gone. He never thought he’d miss it. “We should figure out what happened.”
“Yeah.”
And that is how Frank finds himself, finally, on common ground with Dr. Santos.
If Mel is hip to their ensuing plans, she’s careful not to give it away. She does, however, put on a masterclass in avoiding the two, flitting from room to room like a fairy doctor.
The early afternoon gets thrown into chaos when several victims of a multi-car pileup hit their doors and it’s all hands on deck, everyone’s interpersonal drama forgotten.
It’s not until around 3 that Frank and Santos can catch a break. They seek out Mel taking her lunch in the stairwell, cellphone pressed against her ear. A protein bar crushed between her fingers.
“Thank you, officer,” she mutters into the receiver, so faint that Frank isn’t sure he heard correctly. Santos shares a look with him that confirms his worst fear. “No, that was all.”
She hangs up as they approach.
“Break time?” she asks cheerfully, using a voice Frank now recognizes as one she reserves for her patients at the end of the day, when she’s so tired she might keel over. “I’m just about to head back out there.”
Before either of them can respond, she bounces away from the stairwell, seemingly unaware that her two colleagues are about to come out of their skin with worry.
Santos finds him in chairs, sometimes in the early evening.
“I figured it out,” she hisses into his ear. “About our mystery.”
Frank doesn’t mean to dismiss the patient he was just done talking to (older gentleman having a panic attack that he thinks is a heart attack, he had been in a few times before), but he’s grateful for the escape.
“What is it?”
“Her house got broken into,” Santos says. “I heard her telling Dana— Dana was all, you look tired, hon, and Mel just told her. Then they started talking about, like, smart cameras, and shit.”
Frank’s eyes dart between Santos and the doors leading back to where Mel should be. His brain tries to process the information and somehow fails, caught somewhere between relief and worry.
“Fuck,” he says eventually. “I can’t believe she just told Dana.”
“I know! Like, you asked and she didn’t say anything, right?”
“Yeah—” Frank pauses. “Well, no.”
“Jesus, Eyebrows,” Santos throws her head back in frustration. “Isn’t that like your whole thing? ‘Are you okay, Dr. King? Is that patient bothering you, Mel, should I kill him for you?’”
“That’s not—I don’t—“ Frank shakes his head. “That’s not the point.”
He didn’t really offer to kill that patient. He just implied it.
“We know what’s wrong,” he continues. “Her home got broken into. She’s rattled.”
Santos nods. The glint in her eyes fades. “I have an idea.”
It doesn’t occur to him as a bad idea until an hour past their shift ends, and he’s standing outside Mel’s apartment with Santos. She’s holding a Home Depot canvas bag and he’s got a plastic bag full of treats.
Not for the first time, Frank wonders how he ended up here.
“Are you just going to stand there, making eyes at the door, or are you going to knock?” Santos eventually asks.
“Just—I hope this is a good idea,” he wonders aloud. “I don’t want to catch her off guard.”
“Pretty sure the robbers already did that.”
Did they ever figure out if there were multiple robbers? They really should have asked more questions. They should have asked at least one.
Before they can come to a consensus on who will knock, the door flies open in front of them.
Mel stands under the doorframe, her blonde hair in loose waves around her shoulders. She’s wearing an oversized white sweater and sweatpants, a pair of brown glasses Frank hasn’t seen before perched on her nose, slightly crooked along her brows.
Against every instinct, he smiles.
“I could hear you guys bickering for five minutes,” she says in greeting. She eyes the bags in their hands warily. “What’s going on?”
“Hi,” Frank says. He’s still smiling. He wipes it away, looking at Santos to run the introduction, since this whole thing was her bright idea.
Santos throws him a look from the corner of her eye.
“We heard what happened,” she says. “From Dana—about the break-in. And we wanted to help.”
“What is this,” Mel gestures between the two of them. “Are you, like, friends now?”
Frank and Santos look at each other and grimace.
“Look,” Santos lets herself into the apartment, opting to ignore the question. “Why don’t you walk us through what happened.”
Mel’s hands clasp in front of her stomach, fingers twisting as they often do when she’s nervous.
“It’s really not that big of a deal,” she says, gesturing for Frank to come inside (Frank was not raised in the wild like Santos, and can wait to be invited, he should note). “It happened while I was at work.”
He’s been inside Mel’s apartment a few times by now, for the occasional game nights and one winter storm that left him snowed in after a night shift. She generally keeps an organized home, her messiest habit is her need to let the junk mail pile up because she’s convinced she could use it for a craft project.
Today, the living room is a mess. The coffee table is crooked, like it was knocked over and put back in place hastily. The drawers under her tv unit are half open. A broken mirror leans against the wall outside Mel’s room. The whole room looks windswept.
“What did they take?” Santos asks.
“Nothing much, some cash I kept for emergencies. My TV and laptop are too old to be valuable. Some of my mother’s jewelry—“
Mel’s voice breaks. She blinks towards the ceiling with a tight smile. Frank’s chest aches.
“Mel…”
He inches towards her, arms half outstretched—
“It’s fine,” she steps away, looking around the apartment. “Um, other than the stuff they left a real mess. I was too tired to clean any of it up last night. They knocked the vanity over when they went for the jewelry. There was broken glass everywhere. I wasn’t thinking when I tried to pick it up, and…”
She holds her hands up sheepishly. The angry red scars make sense now.
“That wasn’t smart. I know that. I guess I was shaken up.”
“Did you call the police?” Frank asks.
Mel nods. “That was unpleasant. And unhelpful. It’s hard for cops to talk to someone like me.”
She shrugs, like this is unavoidable. Like it doesn’t make her fucking furious, like it does him.
“There’s insurance, too, but I’ll call them tomorrow on my break,” she warily pushes glasses up by the side. “So that’s about everything. Um, as you can see, I’m fine. I appreciate you guys coming by to check on me.”
“Well, we also came with reinforcements,” Santos says hastily, sensing the dismissal. “We got you a smart lock, and a camera. Langdon’s offered to install everything.”
Mel’s eyebrows crease together.
“That is… very kind,” she says diplomatically, “But it’s not necessary. I really don’t like smart home stuff, and the idea of cameras in the house really makes me uncomfortable.”
Frank tries not to deflate. He had a nagging feeling this would be a bad idea, he really did.
“Okay,” he tries, feeling uncomfortably like he does when a patient doesn’t want a treatment. “You need something, a security system? New locks on the doors—“
“Again,” Mel’s jaw tightens, giving way to her waning patience, “I appreciate it, but I don’t want to make these big changes to the house, especially without looking into everything and I want to wait for Becca to get home—“
“Mel, this is something serious that happened,” he tries to argue.
“I understand,” she says coldly.
He knows he’s needling her, he can see it from when she crosses her arms tight around herself, her lips drawn together in a tight line.
Maybe he’s an asshole after all, but the words come out and they just don't stop, and he can’t stop picturing every gruesome image and worst case scenario. Really, with where they work, how could he not?
“No, Mel, I don’t think you do. What if you had been home? What if Becca was with you?”
“You think I don’t know that?” she explodes. Her cheeks grow red. Her voice is shaky. “I have been on my own for a very long time, I am an adult, and-and contrary to popular belief I can take care of myself. I don’t need—“
She breaks off, averting her gaze when her eyes grow misty.
Beside him, Santos takes an almost imperceptible step back, as if to say this conversation was now out of her pay grade.
Frank thought the day Robby shoved his clothes into his arms and shoved him towards the door, the night he had to go home with his tail between his legs, he would never feel so small again.
He was wrong.
Watching Mel now, shaking like a leaf in the wind, the tip of her nose turning red, he wonders if there’s an award for self-righteous asshole, because he’s surely in the running for it now.
He considers his next words carefully. “Mel…”
She wipes at her face, exhaling slowly.
“I am not crying because I’m upset, I am just angry right now,” she says slowly, frustration in her voice, the palms of her hands pressed against her eyes. “I need to lie down. Stay, leave, do whatever you want.”
She spins on her heels, closing the door behind her shut with an uncharacteristic effort.
Frank and Santos deflate. In silent agreement, they fall back against her couch.
“We made Mel King cry,” Santos says, picking at the threading of the sofa cushion. “I’m pretty sure there’s a special direct flight to hell for doing that.”
“I was probably on my way there as it is,” Frank scrubs at his eyes. Behind his lids, he sees Mel’s angry expression again and his stomach turns.
“Yeah, you probably were.”
Frank lowers his fingers to throw a glare her way. Santos shrugs as if to say, force of habit.
“What do we do now?” she asks. “This whole thing was your idea.”
“It was, at best, a joint effort,” Frank retorts. “And I honestly have no idea. I feel like shit.”
How smart they felt earlier, hatching their little scheme, and cornering the one person in the world they knew would hate this kind of surprise.
“Me too,” Santos says, “Should we go?”
She doesn’t sound like she wants to get up.
“If we had any shame we’d leave and hope she’s forgiven us by tomorrow.”
“She would, too,” Santos replies. “That would be the worst part.”
“Yeah,” Frank sighs heavily. He chews on the inside of his cheek. “I have one last idea, though…”
Mel comes out of her room a couple of hours later. Her eyes are small with sleep, her right cheek reddened with marks from where she must have rested her head.
“You guys are still here?” she asks. It would sound accusatory if not for the barest smile tugging at the corner of her lips.
Frank rubs his hands together nervously as she walks around the apartment, like he’s up for an inspection.
The mess from earlier is gone. The furniture has been straightened, the broken vanity has been tossed to the dumpster outside her apartment. Survivor is playing on the TV while Santos arranges meal prep containers along the kitchen counter. The home smells like tomato sauce.
“We’re really sorry about earlier,” he says, “Forget everything we said. We cleaned up a little, nothing crazy, everything’s where it was. All that crap is being returned tomorrow. We’ve handled your lunches for the rest of the week.”
“I’m like, crazy-good at Italian,” Santos chimes in, “Little known fact.”
“If you want,” Frank continues, “We can help you do all the unpleasant stuff—calling the insurance company, dealing with your police report, whatever you need. If you want us to fuck off, we can do that too.”
Mel is quiet for a beat— a terrifying moment where Frank worries he’s made it worse, especially when her eyes get glassy.
“That would be nice,” she says hoarsely. “That would be very nice.”
Frank and Santos share triumphant grins. He almost high fives her, but they might need to build to that.
“About earlier,” Mel’s hands twist together, and Frank knows that an apology is forming. He shakes his head, taking a step forward. He reaches out and pauses, his hand hovering at her elbow.
”Mel, you said before that you’ve been on your own for a long time. But you’re not alone anymore. You have people who care about you.”
I care about you. The words are right there, he forced them away. That would be a dangerous thread to follow.
Mel’s expression is impossibly soft, her cheeks pink, peering up at him through her glasses. Frank wonders how he ever wandered this earth without her.
She swallows hard as she nods.
“Thank you,” she whispers, so faintly he can only see her mouth form the words.
Santos looks between them, an eyebrow raised and one of her annoyingly knowing expressions.
“Well, I have an early workout class in the morning,” she says. “Langdon, here has volunteered to help you find a new mirror on Facebook Marketplace, he loves a bargain.”
Frank turns to give her a withering expression, but Santos is already out the door, leaving the two of them alone in the apartment.
The air turns thick when he turns back to Mel, as it often does whenever he finds himself alone with her.
“You don’t have to do that,” Mel says, “You’ve done more than enough. You must be tired, too.”
Truth be told, he should be exhausted. It was a rough day and by the time he gets home and tries to unwind he’s going to be dead on his feet. But seeing her smile has his skin buzzing again, like the feeling of finally figuring out a difficult case or making someone’s day.
“Are you going to sleep?” he asks instead.
She shakes her head.
“The nap has me wired,” she admits. “Last night, I didn’t really—it was just kinda hard to sleep well. I was waking up to every little noise.”
She purses her lips.
“I didn’t want to admit that in front of Trinity because she’d try to teach me self-defence again.”
“Yeah, I can see how she’d be a pain-in-the-ass teacher,” Frank remarks.
“Well, she didn’t appreciate that I dropped her on the tailbone last time,” Mel says lightly, looking to the ceiling innocently.
Frank grins.
“How about this,” he says instead. “I still have the bag of snacks. There’s another half hour left in this episode, I can stick around until you feel tired again.”
Mel looks thoughtful.
“Did you get Twizzlers?” she asks hopefully.
He tsks. “Do you think I’m new here? Of course I did.”
“Deal,” she says.
They settle together on her tiny loveseat. Mel throws a pilling blanket over her legs and curls up on her side. When Survivor ends and The Amazing Race starts, she starts walking him through her extensive opinions on the teams, and they start throwing around ideas as to which of their coworkers would succeed on each show.
Frank stays until her voice gets slower, her eyelids heavy. He stays until her breathing steadies and a rough, tired snore escapes.
His throat feels tight as he watches her sleep. He knows he’s stalled long enough, that the boundary from helpful coworker/friend was crossed long ago, and his own empty apartment is waiting for him.
He tips his head back on the couch, watching the rise and fall of her chest, his vision blurs. What is five more minutes, he wonders, if he’s already beyond hope.