Chapter Text
I lose a bit of myself
Laying out eggshells
I've been yours for so long
We come right back to it.
“I’m fine.”
“Ma’am, you have to stay on the gurney,” the paramedic reminded her firmly, his hands heavy on her shoulders, keeping her pinned there. “We’re almost to the hospital.”
“I’m fine,” Jules muttered again, though she gave up fighting physically. “My pulse is a little high but steady. My breath sounds are clear despite a break to the sixth, seventh, and,” she paused, feeling her own side and hissing after applying pressure. “Eighth rib.”
“Yes, but–”
“And there was no head trauma. No blurry or double vision. My legs are fine. I walked out of the car. I was t-boned at an intersection, not thrown from a window. I triaged the other guy! There’s no reason for me to have to lay here like I’m an emergent case.”
“Ma’am, you know there are rules and procedures,” he sighed, growing slightly agitated.
“He’s the one you should worry about. Fractured tibia. Compound fibula fracture. Not to mention clearly intoxicated,” she retorted, crossing her arms, though that hurt her side and she quickly dropped them.
Thankfully, the ambulance stopped and the back doors opened again. Before the paramedic could do anything, she stood, despite the pain shooting through her, that knocked the air out of her lungs, and she helped herself down from the rig.
This was why she shouldn’t have left Seattle. The East Coast was a place she fled, and here she was, stupid enough to think a new job was enticing enough to consider it again. She hadn’t even unpacked all of her boxes yet, and she was at the hospital. There was too much bad luck here, too much she couldn’t escape.
Jules clenched her jaw and stood up straighter. She knew better than to cross the Mississippi. What was there left for her here?
Fuck Boston , she snorted to herself.
“Ma’am, you–”
She was already halfway inside the ER as he trailed behind her. He stopped her only long enough to direct her to sit on a bed behind a curtain amidst the normal chaos of the hospital.
It had been a very long day.
“I’m fine,” she said again. “I need some sutures and an attending to write a script for pain killers. I’ll sign your paperwork myself.”
The paramedic stood there for a moment, debating his options before tossing up his hands and disappearing into the sea of people that was every emergency room, no matter what coast it was on or what time it could be.
Finally alone, Jules used her phone as a mirror, checking the cut on her forehead that kept dripping into her eye when she moved the bandage. It wasn’t deep, but a piece of glass had definitely caught her when she wiggled out of the back of the cab to check on the other car.
“Stupid,” she muttered to herself, closing her phone and standing again beside the bed.
Carefully, she pulled up her blouse and tried to look at the bruising that was inevitable on the side of her body from the impact of the car skidding through a stop light and into her body in the backseat of a taxi.
Stupid. This whole thing was stupid. She had a good job back in Seattle. She was a top cardio surgeon and was finally getting research funding. Why did she bother to look elsewhere? Why did it matter that she wouldn’t be Chief of Cardio? That was just a title. She didn’t get hit by cars in Seattle.
Stupid and dumb. As if Harvard Medical’s partnership with the Klausman Institute was worth it, worth all of this. Who cared about groundbreaking cardiothoracic surgery?
The truth of the matter was, unfortunately, that Jules Millin did, and even though she felt infinitely annoyed and frustrated and just plain defeated at the moment at this whole shitty city with its ice and snow and ‘east coasters,’ she desperately wanted a job in a place like that. Boston was the worse place on the face of the Earth, and Millin knew that. She knew it in her bones and now she was stuck in an ER, waiting to be discharged. And yet, when she sat across the table from Cristina Yang and spoke about her eagerness to work on the technical side of her studies… She forgot how much she hated Boston and the entire eastern seaboard.
Gingerly she ran her fingers over her skin on her side before closing her eyes and holding her palm there. It wasn’t even close to killing her, so it was only going to somehow make her stronger. It’d been a while since something hurt this badly, and she just had to remember the ache of it.
“I heard we had a surly patient with a MD in he–” the voice stopped as soon as the curtain was tugged and their eyes met.
Jules reconsidered her strong pulse statement from the ambulance, because she was pretty sure her heart stopped the moment she found herself staring back at Mika Yasuda, alive and in the flesh. Her heart, in fact, skipped at least a dozen or so beats before restarting with a thunderous chorus in her ears.
Mika stared back for a long, long breath before her eyes ventured down to Jules’ exposed stomach and bruising ribs. Jules watched her eyes soften, watched them furrow, just like they had when she read something she had to think about, as if it’d been yesterday in the research room. When Mika looked back up and met her eyes, her face was stuck somewhere between gutted concern and caught-red-handed fear.
“Suture kit,” an intern murmured, quickly following and setting up the tray beside the bed.
Only then did Jules lower her shirt and remember what the last thing that hurt her as much as getting hit by a car. Mika.
Five years. Five whole years. That was the rest of residency and an entire fellowship worth of time between them. Now she would have to restart the timer on how long it’d been since Mika Yasuda walked out of her life.
“What are you doing here, Jules?” Mika finally asked.
“I was just trying to figure that out.”
Mika nodded, as if she was coming to her senses. All at once, the kindness and recognizing was gone and a doctor was in front of her. A doctor Jules didn’t know existed because the last time she’d seen Mika she was quitting the program, quitting her career, quitting… her.
There were approximately a thousand questions she wanted the answers to, but knew she couldn’t ask, so she sat down on the bed again, as if all the air had been knocked out other lungs for the second or third or sixth time that night. She’d lost count.
Fuck. Boston .
“You stabilized the other driver after climbing out of the back window of your taxi,” Mika read from the chart. There was a small smile playing at her lips as she skimmed. “And were combative with paramedics on the scene as well as on the ride over.”
“Combative? How is stating facts combative? I’m fine,” Jules insisted, earning another amused, hidden smile as Mika nodded, flipping through the cart.
“Can I run your vitals at least?”
“Why? Are you going to call me combative if I don’t agree?”
“I wouldn’t dream of calling you combative,” Mika promised, putting down her chart and moving the stethoscope around her neck. “Stubborn. Bossy, for sure. A little rigid and stri–”
“Don’t,” Jules muttered, her teeth clenched. “You don’t get to call me anything.”
Mika swallowed and nodded, the familiarity deteriorating.
As soon as hands touched her, Jules felt the adrenaline of the accident wear off. She felt the safety and protection of five solid years of actively forgetting Mika Yasuda crumble. Her eyes betrayed her as they seemed to well, though she blinked it away, swallowing any noise as Mika listened to her lungs.
Jules looked away as Mika took her pulse. Her eyes couldn’t find anywhere to look as a small flashlight surveyed the cut on her forehead.
“You need stitches,” Mika managed, her voice low. “And I’d like to order a x-ray for your ribs.”
“They’re broken. I’m fine.” Thankfully, Mika turned around to type into the chart and Jules wiped at her cheeks, composing herself again.
She didn’t cry. She didn’t cry about Mika. She didn’t care about any of it.
Mika seemed to debate the best course of action while the intern shifted nervously from the inactivity. Jules didn’t watch whatever silent conversation the doctors had. Instead, she checked her phone and sighed. She began to type out a text to the conference coordinator that she wasn’t going to make the evening drinks.
Mika pulled up the stool and started to open the suture kit as the intern left and just the pair of former somethings were left in the small area. For as long as she could, Jules avoided looking at Mika. She didn’t need to see her, or how kind five years might have been to her. She didn’t want to see the way her heart would betray her.
But it was a losing battle.
As Mika began to clean the cut on her head, Jules clutched her phone in her lap. Neither spoke though. The seconds just ticked by, the longest they could be, stretched to the outer most limits of time.
Jules did a mental checklist, to keep her mind busy. She knew:
- Five years ago, the woman currently about to stitch her face, walked out on her after suffering immense loss.
- The same woman quit medicine.
- Jules was decidedly over this woman and didn’t think about her. She built a huge career. She did good work. She had strangers in bars and even picked up yoga and occasionally finished a book she rented from the library.
Yes, this was a good list.
She hissed at the contact of the needle despite the numbing ointment. This truly was the longest day.
“I know,” Mika whispered. “I’m sorry.”
Jules couldn’t help but snort and clench her jaw. If she noticed, Mika didn’t say anything, just continued with her work.
“I thought you hated the East Coast,” Mika finally managed, her voice small, though Jules heard it perfectly.
“I do.”
“Then why aren’t you in Seattle?”
“You’re allowed to leave, but I can’t?” Jules retorted. Mika’s mouth thinned as she pressed her lips together tighter. Her hands moved swiftly, deftly.
Her phone vibrated in her hands, but Jules didn’t look. She didn’t want to move. She didn’t want to have to explain more. She craved, very suddenly, the precise, safe place of her lab and her operating rooms. Sterile places didn’t have as much Mika.
“I tried to… I started so many letters–”
“Please don’t.”
“I didn’t think I’d ever see you again,” Mika managed.
“Yeah, me neither.”
She put her tools down as she finished and applied a bandage. Jules remembered the feeling of her hands, something she’d forgotten years ago.
“Are you living here now?”
“I could ask you the same thing.”
“Dammit, Jules,” Mika sighed, snapping off her gloves. “I know I don’t deserve anything from you, but these are just basic questions.”
Jules shrugged. She didn’t care. She had to tell herself that she didn’t care. Her side hurt and she knew she’d have a massive headache in the morning.
“You walked out on me, Mika.”
“I didn’t have a choice, and you know that.”
“I know,” she swallowed before standing, holding her side. “But that doesn’t change the final product, does it?”
Mika didn’t say anything, but Jules could feel her eyes. The only simple mercy she could give herself was not to look back. There were a few biblical stories warning against that exact thing, and though she never could be accused of having any religious zeal, Jules did know well enough how to prioritize her self-preservation.
“Thanks for the stitches.”
A hand grabbed her wrist to stop her from making a fully clean escape, and Jules hated that it actually stopped her exit.
“Can we talk, please?” Mika asked. “Please, Jules. I– I never could– I wanted to– I’ll figure out how to use real words, I just–”
“I should go.”
With that, Jules detached herself, though there wasn’t any resistance. Maybe that hurt her for some reason, that Mika didn’t clutch her, hold her tight, not let her leave. She seemed to already know what any conversation would look like.
Two weeks in Boston, and she was regressing.
Without a prescription for painkillers, without signing any paperwork, without a look back, Jules walked out of the hospital. She walked a few blocks and got on a subway where she sat in a daze before taking the train as close to her place as she could. A block from her apartment, she felt the warmth of tears streaming down her face. She let herself feel all of it as she climbed the steps, unlocked her door, kicked off her shoes, and moved through her space in the dark until she gingerly collapsed onto her frameless bed in a sea of boxes.