"Wind and Rain"

Chapter Four: Elsewhere

Authors' Notes: With a year of thanks to Charli for her timed writing exercises, Parliament Lights and Prozac.

We're working through writing, timing, life difficulties, but thank you all for your continued interest and patience.

----

You say there's not a lot of me left anymore.
Just leave it alone.
- Tori Amos, Amber Waves

----

Things start breaking: fingernails, coffee mugs, buildings, skylines, promises, hearts, moments, relationships, lives.

She's learned most things in life are made to be broken.

"Cutting class?"

Abby lifts her head at the voice, smiling slightly as she passes the figure of Susan, who stands behind the admit desk giving her a knowing gaze. "I'm sneaking a cigarette behind the bike shed, care to join me?"

She shakes her head and calls out, "Enjoy your early death!"

"I'm trying to, thank you!"

Things start breaking and she knows that they can't be fixed, are irreplaceable, that most things just continue to go on being broken.

She figures if things are going to break, what's the point in fighting it? What's the point in giving up a cigarette here or there? What's the point in super gluing all the pieces back together when everything is designed to fall apart anyway?

The packet is already out in her hand by the time she steps outside, her fingers trying at the wrapping, her other hand reaching for her lighter.

Carter was in the process of telling Pratt what the "D" in his particular MD stood for and she'd decided that that meant it was time for her to make her escape. He doesn't like to see her smoke and she can't enjoy being able to smoke in front of him, feeling his sad brown eyes watch her like that. He's taken it upon himself to protect her and hates realizing that not even he can save her from herself most of the time.

He doesn't believe in entirely broken things, believes in the magical healing powers of superglue and medicine and kisses in the dark, believes that super glued things can be all the stronger for their cracks and breaks, all the more beautiful.

She puts the lit cigarette to her mouth and inhales.

----

And once you've seen things start to break, it's hard not to start seeing the cracks in everything.

It started snowing in the night, ice being laid into heavy layers along the streets. It's March but winter refuses to sleep.

They're walking at arm's length from each other, stepping carefully along the pavement, waiting for the salt to start thawing through. He wants to keep her warm but he's never been sure what that means.

"How about something to eat then?"

"I'm not hungry."

His tone remains light, "You haven't been hungry for the past week."

"And I have work in half an hour."

He watches her, her breath coming out as thick as cigarette smoke. "Okay then, later."

She almost slips and he reaches out a hand for her, but she finds her balance again before she falls. "Uh, don't you have the night shift?"

"After that."

"Is there such thing as 'after a night shift'?" She turns to him, her eyes a dark contrast to the snow, and they both come to a stop. "Look, I need to get to work; I've had too much time off as it is." She gives a shrug. "I'll see you -- later, okay?"

He doesn't move and watches her footprints in the snow as she continues walking, the world freezing up behind her.

"Who do you think will play us in the TV movie?" His own breath as heavy and cynical as smoke.

She keeps her back to him, shakes her head and he can hear her sigh. "Carter, I don't need this."

"Then tell me what you need."

She sees mother's holding their sick children and asking her why. She's run out of reasons, excuses and now settles on saying nothing.

The truth is that things keep breaking and sometimes they can't be fixed, that sometimes things are made only so that they can be broken.

"What I don't need is to see you standing everywhere I go watching me as though I'm about to fall apart," She turns to him accusingly, "or like I already have. You can't change what happened, you can't change me. You can't – you can't fix me."

The ice has been laid into layers in the night, fastened into layers of mass, into moments so mountainous they can seem almost weightless.

"I know." He bites at his lip, sounding older than he'll ever look, "Only you can."

"I'm not," tired shake of head, "I'm not broken."

How can she be, when she can't even remember the fall? Or what it was like to be un-shattered to begin with?

----
A deep drag goes down wrong and suddenly she's suffocating because it tastes too dry and too stale, it smells wrong and feels wrong and everything that it was supposed to be isn't anymore.

And she's too afraid to cough.

She holds the cigarette, watching her hand tremble as the fire crawls downward, smoke sucked away by the wind, ashes building and falling until she drops it on the sidewalk and watches as it burns itself out.

She hears the footsteps crunching through the snow behind her and so doesn't jump when she hears his voice. "Did you know that smoking is the leading cause of statistics?"

Luka's hands are plugged deeply into his lab coat pockets and he's looking at her with that easy smile she doesn't get to see very often. She wonders if it's because he's in a good mood – and she hasn't checked the planet alignments recently but she's pretty sure he wasn't due another smile for at least another Pluto year or so, or if it's that he knows something about what's happened and is smiling because he doesn't know what else to do.

"Really?" She grins wryly, meeting his eyes.

"I'm thinking you're the leading cause of those statistics."

She wraps her arms around herself, the winter chill getting to her, "They can't prove that."

He moves to stand closer to her, looking out expectantly at the ambulance bay for an oncoming trauma she presumes. A silence settles over them and she can feel him stealing glances at her. She's about to ask about the trauma if only to get the attention away from herself when he speaks-

----

"Abby..."

She hates how he keeps saying her name like that, so broken in his voice. He might as well be smashing ancient china vases at her feet.

"I wanted to be there for you..." The hurt in his eyes, and she has to look away.

"I'm sorry." And she is. She's sorry for everything that's happened between them and for not being all the things she knows he needs.

"I don't blame you for any of this."

Maybe she did jump; maybe it is her fault that they've fallen so far for so long, maybe it is her fault that things keep breaking, maybe it is her fault that when she fell he fell with her.

"And I really wish it hadn't happened... that it could have been something. You know that, right?"

Breath. "I know."

----

"How are you doing, Abby?"

So much for deflecting attention away from herself.

She shakes her head, refusing to meet his probing gaze. She wants to laugh at his question. "I'm fine, Luka."

"You were away a few days ago-"

She nods quickly, "I had a stomach... bug thing. It's gone."

He nods with her. "Oh."

Oh. Exactly.

She takes a step back thinking up an excuse about a patient whose stats she really must check up on, an imaginary patient with end stage liver disease and possibly some metastised brain cancer, a family who are out of town too busy to see him; but he hasn't noticed her discomfort, or seems intent on increasing it. "He was worried about you."

She doesn't look at him. "Who?"

"Who," he repeats with a grin. She looks up, opening her mouth to dismiss or explain it all – "When you were sick the past few days, he was really worried. He kept making excuses to call you."

She looks down at her feet, his feet, their footprints in the snow together, the burnt out cigarette. Her hand hovers above her stomach, "I know."

----

The snow crunches beneath his boots as he walks towards her, his voice so gentle it almost hurts. "Why are you so afraid to talk about it?"

"Talk about what?"

"How you're feeling..."

She smiles. "I'm fine."

"...the miscarriage, being pregnant..."

It doesn't take her a second to say, "One in five pregnancies end in miscarriage."

"Abby..."

She moves around, avoiding his eyes, "Stop! Stop saying my name like that. You don't have to deal with this – I do."

He refuses to let this hurt him. "And you don't have to go through it alone."

"It's a little late for that..."

Her eyes are red, full, but she doesn't cry.

"I'm sorry, it's just...it's over. It's done. And I don't wan... and you don't need to worry about me."

----

She turns to look out across the empty ambulance bay, "What's the trauma?"

"A car swerved on the ice and hit two people on the hard shoulder," he sighs and then seems to go on a tangent, "You know, if your car were to break down... in the middle of the night, you didn't have any insurance or whatever and you called someone asking them to pick you up there in the middle of nowhere, and then they did, you'd know you had a friend."

She raises an eyebrow, "Even if they called needing bail money?"

He laughs; a sound that always prompts a smile from her whenever she's been the one to give him something to laugh about.

He ducks his head further down so that she meets his eyes again. "So everything is okay?"

There's the sound of an approaching siren, which breaks their conversation, and she takes a few steps back towards the entrance, leaving him to his emergency. He's still watching her and so she smiles, "Everything is okay."

She stuffs her hands down into her jacket, getting ready to enter the ER vortex and finish her shift.

"I consider you a friend."

She turns to face him again. There's a moment's pause, a moment where everything seems to be on hold before life resumes, the silence between two heartbeats, the moment before the ambulance doors open and the split seconds before the paramedics start delivering the stats at twice the speed of sound.

"I consider you a friend, too."

Turning around she walks back inside, the sound of him telling the patient that everything was going to be okay being muffled as the doors fell shut behind her.

----

He holds her to his chest, shutting his eyes tightly as he tries to keep them together. "You're not."

"I think there should be a law. I think it should be illegal for completely screwed up people to be in relationships."

"Then we'd both be alone," he whispers.

She hiccups a laugh into his chest, a relief to him, and he wraps his arms more tightly around her. He knows that if he lets go now he would lose her, lose them. Permanently. And they were both lost enough as it was.

He kisses her hair, combing his fingers through it gently. He shakes his head, keeping his voice level, "I don't know how to fix this..."

She inhales him deeply, her voice sore, "I feel fixed when I'm with you."

They stand like this for a long time, fastened into this embrace, as though trying to infuse a sense of themselves back into each other. Almost frightened to let go and be forced to stand there facing one another, the distance between them measured in all the things they needed to say, all those heavy fragile things they had never said. But the words are exhausted in their throats, too raw to speak. They both know that words are the first to break.

Snow has fallen in the night and the ground beneath them is nothing but layers of thin ice.

----

Like the tide, the lounge door continues to open and close bringing sounds of life to wash into the room just when silence seems destined to remain forever.

She doesn't expect to remain alone – today is a day of bombardment.

"Tonight. You and me. Dinner and that movie with the guy you like, the accent one, Russell Crowe?"

She turns from her locker to see Susan pouring coffee for two, hair neatly up in a clip despite her scrubs indicating at least one encounter with bodily fluids – all of her held together by invisible strings and pillars.

Abby smiles slightly, "I didn't think you were a fan."

"It takes place on water. He'll be wet." She brings over the coffee, holds one out. "Cream, no sugar."

She hesitates, waves it away awkwardly, "Uh, trying to quit, but thanks – "

"No problem. Coffee here's awful anyway." She returns to the counter and starts rummaging through cabinets. "I think we've tea someplace."

The human species as a whole was fairly adaptive, despite the limited existence they had compared to most others. They endured in a variety of climate locations, in a variety of situations and circumstances, through physical and emotional trauma...

As she watches Susan, she wonders if the failure of one within a species spelled doom for all in the long run.

Susan waves tea packets triumphantly. "Orange Spice or Jasmine?"

"Jasmine? You don't have to – "

"There's going back to crazy and then there's today's version of chaos." She motions to the door, shaking her head. "I'm dusting the lounge next."

She fills Abby's silence with ease.

"There was this woman today, came in with a case of food poisoning only to discover she had a malignant tumor. There used to be days when I considered that a blessing." She sighs, continues, "Then I get the little boy who made it through the car crash that killed his abusive dad. I don't even think there's a category for that."

Sometimes she wishes there were no categories. "Alive?"

Susan looks at her, eyes bright but unreadable. "Yeah," she says softly. She hands over the tea. "Okay. Tonight. I need company, and I'll pay for dinner," she bribes. "Jeans, no make-up and if you dare do anything to your hair, I'll make a commotion in the restaurant."

They leave the lounge together, washed back into the mess of the outside world.

"Don't you need some private time for yourself?"

Susan laughs. "I do, but I've booked the second Thursday of every month."

"It's almost selfish how introverted you are."

Susan gathers her stack of charts and begins to continue on with her patient journey, "6:30 good?"

Abby shakes her head. "I can't," she explains vaguely. "Not tonight."

There are errands and chores and duties and things she is sure she is supposed to do tonight, or maybe tomorrow – the things that she should spend her time thinking about, that would give her something to do.

She is very busy when she puts her mind to it.

Susan raises an eyebrow, holds out for a different answer. "We can make it later..."

Later is for dessert and dancing and sleeping and things she has long lost touch with – the things that she spends her time thinking about wanting.

Abby smiles apologetically. "Next time."

----

Luka raises an eyebrow at him as he enters the lounge and Carter gives a nod in response.

It ranks up there as one of the best greetings they've had.

"Long day, huh?"

Carter's stethoscope feels heavy around his neck and it's a relief to pull it off. "When isn't it?"

Luka shrugs and smiles faintly over his cup of coffee. He guesses he had him there. "The eight year old girl didn't make it?"

Carter's locker's open and he's pulling his scrub top over his head. "No. But the guy who shot her did." Green material obscures his vision until the world comes through again and he drops it to the floor, almost smiles with his newfound cynicism while grabbing a sweater. "And they always do. Life's fair like that."

"When isn't it?" He turns to see Luka smiling back at him, shrugging before taking another sip, "Trying to make sense of random things is human nature."

Carter rolls his eyes with another humourless smirk, "So's revenge, war and hate."

Luka's eyes are dark, they always are, and they hold his. "But we watch people make it through that, don't we?"

Carter looks away, at his empty hands and his feet, "Sometimes, I guess. On good days. But not everything that's broken can be fixed."

His bag's over his shoulder and he slams his locker door shut – on bad days he wishes it had the same effect on the world as a slammed door does on parents. That it told the world in no uncertain terms how and where to fuck itself. The world gives the reaction his parents would have; it barely notices he's done anything at all.

"Being a doctor means all we're left to do is pick up the pieces. Even if sometimes it feels as though maybe that's all we're ever doing." Their eyes meet again and Luka went on, "We just have to keep picking up the pieces the best way we know how."

He didn't move, but his eyes began to take Luka in.

"What if there isn't anything left to pick up anymore?"

He knows he was in the war, he knows he had a family – past tense, he believes he knows why Abby was drawn to him, possibly for the same reasons he himself has been drawn to her, but beyond that he's never really known much about Luka. Never really looked at him and seen anything, not really. Now he almost does.

He doesn't say anything in response and so Carter continues walking-

"She's a friend."

He stops, turns slightly, "I know."

"And I don't like to see her get hurt."

He doesn't say anything.

He knows.

"She needs you."

He raises his eyes again. Luka's eyes offer nothing but kindness inside their darkness; he means this and Carter doesn't know what he's supposed to say.

He doesn't know how to stop her from hurting anymore. He doesn't know if all he's doing at the moment is hurting her.

So he doesn't say anything and lets the locker room door fall shut behind him.

----

He's been sober for six months, one week, four days, and if his watch was ticking solidly with Greenwich Mean Time, fifty-one minutes. His wife would have been proud. Annie always believed in the small accomplishments in life.

Under the glare of the community center's florescent lights, he sits with the others, starkly revealed in their scattered numbers, holding to their belief in the healing power of solidarity though they remain in isolation.

He finds solitude in the back, a silent and anonymous addition to the handful that had found their way to this midnight meeting – the insomniacs, the ones with hangovers, and the nobodies who never came to the same meeting twice because, like him, they always worked too early, too long and too late.

Her arrival coincides with a speaker's introduction, the chorus of hellos drowning out the sound of her footsteps. Though blonde to Annie's brunette, and short and thin to Annie's rounder 5'7" frame, as if to satisfy the theory of opposites attracting, he finds himself staring at her.

Making her quiet way toward the back, she chooses a seat in an island of empty chairs across from him. Committed fully to the unwinding of her scarf, her gaze only flickers around the room – their eyes meeting so briefly he doesn't have time to smile.

He notes that she saves the seat next to her with her jacket, but minutes march their way around the clock and she is left unaccompanied. During the next speaker switchover, he makes his way to the other empty seat beside her. With a small nod, he settles down and focuses his attention on the front of the room.

She's startled, but makes no comment.

More minutes pass in silence between them until he turns slightly. "I'm Tom."

"Abby."

"Nice to meet you."

"Is it?"

There is weariness and pain in her eyes that he hadn't noticed before, a story of disaster told in the dark circles. He shrugs, "I suppose."

Another speaker stands to share.

She turns away, staring at the posters that line the wall, advertisements for pregnancy clinics too often catching her eye.

He watches her read the notices, and wonders what she thinks about... why he finds himself drawn to her...

"Why?" she asks, interrupting his thoughts.

"What?"

"Why are you here?"

It's a good question, and he thinks about all the times and meetings before. "Safety, I guess."

He hits a nerve because she looks at him sharply, for the first time really seeing him.

"Better in here than anywhere else," he offers after a moment.

"Blind leading the blind?"

"I prefer to think we'll successfully navigate the odds."

"And then?"

He doesn't know what she's driving at. "And then... we're okay."

She's silent, thinking through something that turns her attention inward, and he notices that the meeting is winding down. After a moment she reaches for her coat, and then sets it on her lap as she looks at him. "What did you come over here for?" she asks softly.

He isn't sure, but is satisfied with what makes sense. "No one should sit alone."

----

It is just light enough along the sidewalk to make out the wispy shapes of moths and other nightlife as they wing their way into awaiting streetlamps with a brief flicker and sizzled pop. There is no saving those with an instinctual desire for an early demise.

Her stairwell is quiet, almost as dark as the inside of her apartment where the curtains are tightly shut and only the stove shines dully in the light he leaks from the door. When shut, the darkness spreads before him in waves of distorted shadows, like funhouse mirrors lined up to continuously reflect the never-ending abyss of black.

He has come home to himself.

The room is empty, forlorn, cold from her refusal to use the heat. Opening her shades, the city below comes to life in squares of apartment windows that light the stars twinkling above. He tries to remember his plan for sleep.

Night after night he's committed himself to her side - not out of pity, and not because he thought he'd be able to help anymore. He wonders if the sun has ever felt burdened, forced to carry the weight of the Earth.

It is the first time he feels like a stranger, an unwanted guest. Alone in her apartment he sits on the couch stiffly, as though it were newly bought and the protective plastic covering still not removed.

He misses her presence, sitting beside him or not. She might be the essence of chaos, of denial, or the inevitable rise of pessimism, but like the calm within every storm, even her self-destruction is plagued with hope. Or it used to be.

He knows where she is, in a general sort of way, knows she doesn't need him, and cradling a pack of cigarettes that has been pulled from the pocket of his jacket, helps himself to the view of Chicago.

He had turned into the store having convinced himself to buy coffee or a newspaper... or maybe milk, she had almost been out of milk... when he walked out with only a pack of cigarettes, not feeling ashamed because he hadn't looked up at the store's mirrors to see his reflection condemning him.

Sleep is forgotten. Or, insomnia unavoidable.

He plays with the unopened pack, twirling it between his fingers, watching for the reliable glint of plastic as it returns the hazy white light of the moon.

----