Work Text:
Here’s how it begins, officially:
Frank Langdon has been sober for twelve months and two days when he corners his boss and estranged former mentor five minutes before their shift technically starts to tell him that he and Melissa King are in a relationship and it’s serious and they want to file the relevant paperwork with HR.
Robby sighs and frowns into his shitty breakroom coffee, then sighs again. He sighs twice because he has two reasons.
The first is that he hates paperwork, and also HR. Everyone in that department is not okay. There’s Tim, who smells funny (which is really saying something, considering decades in the ER have left Robby pretty desensitized to bad smells) and never shuts up about his pet ducks; Cheryl, who loves drama so much that she once nearly caused a civil war amongst the ENTs by pursuing a complaint against one resident on behalf of another resident who had not, in fact, actually made a complaint; and then someone named Diane who Robby had seen CC’d on emails for years but had never encountered in person; Robby feels quite certain she’s no longer at PMTC, if she was ever here at all.
And then of course there’s Gloria (no comment).
The second reason he sighs is that Heather won the pool, again. (Robby put his money on six months after the divorce was finalized, a milestone still several weeks away. She’s going to be so smug about this.)
Langdon clears his throat and Robby realizes he’s been staring into the middle distance without actually giving any verbal response. So he sighs once more for good measure and says, “okay.”
“That’s it?” Langdon asks. “Okay?”
Robby sighs again, because he’s on a roll now. “What else would you like me to say, Frank? Congratulations? You’re a freshly divorced addict with two kids under the age of 6 attempting to rebuild your life from shambles and she’s one of the best residents this department has ever had. I have concerns , but I also realize I’m probably the last person—”
“Good morning, Dr. Robby!”
Mel has many remarkable skills, but a sense of timing is not generally regarded as one of them; Robby is quite certain this interruption was pre-planned. Her innocent smile is just a bit too guileless to be the genuine article as she hands Langdon a sugar-free Red Bull, but it still has the desired effect: Robby finds himself entirely disarmed and deflated, because telling off Mel feels like kicking a puppy who also has higher patient satisfaction scores than 95% of the department. For the first time, Robby realizes that Melissa King has a manipulative streak. (Spoiler alert: it will not be the last time.)
“Morning, Dr. King,” Robby says, because there’s nothing else to say. He keeps his tone mild and even, but he knows his eyebrows are probably doing something judgmental. They have a mind of their own, and he’s made peace with that.
He decides he will break the good news to Heather and give his coffee a few more minutes to kick in before typing up an email to break the bad news to Gloria. It is 6:58am on a Monday and he already knows it’s going to be a long week.
(For those curious: it began, unofficially, about three months earlier, as Langdon watched Mel bop around her kitchen to some rap song he’s never heard before, off key but remarkably on beat, this great unspoken thing threatening to burst from his chest, less butterflies at that point than the creature from Alien if it was made out of happiness and warmth and longing — which made no sense, really, but he would never be a poet and that’s fine.
Mel caught him staring and worried, is there something on my face? And he just blurted out, I really want to kiss you, to which she responded, you should do that. In her head she added finally! but kept that part to herself. Langdon stood so fast he knocked his chair over, and neither of them noticed until they both nearly tripped on it a few minutes later.)
Langdon and Mel dating changes nothing about life in the Pitt. Literally nothing, except for the bright red Prada bag Collins buys with her winnings. She found a killer deal at an estate sale, and over 80 people had placed bets. Ahmad had had to make an Excel spreadsheet just to keep track of everything. (Not quite a Birkin, she joked to Langdon. He didn’t laugh. It was hard, being surrounded by people with no taste all the time, but Heather was a survivor. And also, crucially, absolutely fucking hilarious.)
The only other minor development besides Collins upping her accessories game is that people now sometimes refer to them collectively as “Kingdon” (or, if you’re Santos, “Kingdork”). Langdon pretends to hate it, but doesn’t really. Not even Santos’s version.
The thing is, everybody had already been treating them like they were an item for months. Most of the ER staff started to suspect the pair were sleeping together around the time Langdon stopped wearing his wedding ring and they started carpooling (developments which happened days apart, a few weeks after he started back at the PTMC). The greater hospital community came to the general assumption that “ER Barbie and Ken” were together together after an incident several weeks ago when a trauma patient pulled out a concealed weapon and Donnie yelled, “gun!” And everyone hit the floor except for Langdon, who threw himself over Mel like some kind of human shield. It was 30 seconds of terror until Olsen managed to disarm the patient and discovered that the weapon wasn’t loaded and, more importantly, a prop gun.
It took about 30 more seconds for news of Langdon’s “Captain America moment” to spread through the entire hospital. And all of half an hour for the incident to go minorly viral online thanks to the 19-year-old with appendicitis in Central 8 who caught the whole thing on video and uploaded it to TikTok with the caption omg greys anatomy is real you guys 😍
(Langdon still gets recognized sometimes, which he found far more irritating before he realized it was an excellent excuse to get out of covering Chairs.)
So yes, life goes on, largely uninterrupted. The HR conversations are as painful as anticipated, but everyone survives. It’s a close call for Robby—he sits through no less than six anecdotes about a Crested duck named Afro, complete with pictures (“he’s just such a character”)—but he pulls through in the end, even though the damage is irreversible. He now has to go through the rest of his life knowing what a Crested duck is, and mourns the loss of innocence.
The betting also continues. Small potatoes stuff for a minute, because Ahmad isn’t an accountant for a reason, and there’s only so much Excel he can handle in his life. How many sandwiches Earl will eat on Tuesday (9, Perlah wins). Whether the guy who accompanies a woman with a badly sprained wrist is her boyfriend or dad (he tells Princess he’s her brother and nobody wins, but everybody agrees the vibe is off, like that one Folger’s commercial).
Eventually Ahmad recovers and is ready to face a spreadsheet again. Everyone agrees the next jackpot is, naturally, when Langdon will propose. Everyone is similarly in agreement that it’s a “when” not an “if” because, to quote Garcia—who hadn’t been invited to the conversation but showed up regardless, on her way to steal some of the pizza she heard was in the ER break room—“he’s already more of a wife guy now than he was when he was married.”
Everyone knows it’s going to be a long-term kind of bet — but not too long, they figure, because Frank Langdon is, to put it mildly, a rather impulsive person. With this in mind, though, it probably should not be all too surprising that Langdon ultimately manages to fuck up the Pitt’s largest ever bet entirely.
And yet, it still is.
The beginning of the end comes ten months later, on a previously unsuspecting evening in mid-July.
Well, that’s not exactly true. It’s a full moon and Mercury is also in retrograde, so it’s an evening that, for anyone who believes in omens of any kind, could not be more suspect if it tried.
But Trinity Santos, despite her mother’s best efforts, is not an especially superstitious person, so she does not feel particularly concerned as she enters the doors of the Pitt at exactly 7 PM. Showing up late is unprofessional, but showing up early reeks of desperation, so as far as she’s concerned, surgically precise timing is the only viable option. (Pun absolutely not intended—puns also reek of desperation.)
If anything, she’s feeling a bit more optimistic than usual, considering the new intern who grew up in SoCal and keeps a collection of crystals in her locker (for “good energy”) paid Trinity $200 to take the shift off her hands. Besides, it’s a good group working tonight—her boy Huckleberry, her girl Mel, and the snark trifecta of Shen, Ellis, and Walsh.
Trinity’s supposed to be relieving Samira, but she’s currently getting the life story of a patient in North 7 who looks like Santa Claus if Santa had read Timothy Leary at an impressionable age and decided to turn on, tune in, and drop out instead. She gets close enough to overhear “Woodstock” and decides to make a detour to the staff lounge first, because that’s not wrapping up any time soon. And also, maybe there might be something worth stealing in the fridge.
Mel’s already there, because she’s the sort of person who always shows up early (even to parties—they’re working on it), looking down at a cup of break room coffee like it just said something rude about her mother.
Trinity pours herself some also even though she’s really more of a Celsius or matcha kind of gal because she hates feeling left out.
“Does the coffee taste… weird to you?” Mel asks.
“It always tastes weird,” says Trinity. It’s bargain basement bulk order sadness that comes from the same supplier they use for tongue depressors and industrial-sized vats of hand sanitizer. It tastes like mop water that has a dream of becoming coffee someday.
“Different weird,” Mel says, taking another sip and then grimacing. “ Like rotten?”
“Maybe you’re pregnant.”
The suggestion is a joke, because of course it is, because Trinity likes nothing more than making jokes, especially when they’re inappropriate or otherwise likely to make others uncomfortable. Besides, she actually likes Mel despite her terrible taste in men (she wouldn’t have any straight friends left if she couldn’t overlook this), and would not wish that fate upon Mel in a million years.
Mel’s wearing a very familiar expression that says, Trinity that’s not funny , and then opens her mouth to say, “Trinity—”
Only the rest of the very familiar sentence doesn’t come, so Trinity looks up from retying her brand-new On Clouds (thank you, SoCal crystal intern) and sees Mel zeroed in on her phone, weird coffee abandoned, with the kind of laser-like intensity usually reserved for a difficult intubation.
“Fuck!” Mel swears.
Whitaker, standing in the doorway with his characteristically unfortunate timing, promptly drops his Diet Coke in shock. (He hadn’t gotten around to opening it yet, though, so for once his scrubs are spared.)
One of the many fascinating paradoxes of Mel King is that she listens to some of the most explicit rap music ever recorded, but none of her colleagues have ever heard her use language stronger than “damn” or the occasional “crap”.
Until now.
Trinity and Whitaker stare at Mel with identical slack-jawed expressions, providing excellent evidence to support the theory that people who live together do, in fact, start resembling each other over time.
Mel generally hates being the center of attention with an intensity she reserves for few things on earth (namely: anti-vaxxers, termites, and Isabelle Novak from high school; not necessarily in that order), but on this specific occasion is too busy trying to quash the panic attack rising in her sternum to even notice.
Only then the sense of building pressure shifts and Mel realizes that’s not a panic attack. She scrambles out of her chair just in time to heave up the weird coffee and everything else she’s ingested over the past day or so into the trash. Like anyone with an omnibus’s worth of “crazy night” stories, Trinity instinctively rushes to Mel’s side to hold back her hair, even though that role has already been filled by her signature braid, so all she has to offer is some feeble back pats and a supportive arm squeeze.
Oh shit, Trinity thinks.
Because this is the ED, and Trinity maybe kind of sort of perhaps tempted fate with the whole “laughing in the face of the full moon Mercury in retrograde” thing, it’s precisely at this moment that word of an incoming MCI hits—a collapsed balcony at a house party; at least a dozen casualties.
Her shift began precisely 5 minutes ago.
“Oh shit,” Whitaker says, his attention successfully diverted from whatever it was he walked in on. He turns on his heel and scrambles back out to the floor, where everyone not actively helping a patient has begun to congregate in the general vicinity of the ambulance bay, awaiting marching orders from Dr. Abbot.
(He similarly forgets about his Diet Coke; the dented can will remain, abandoned, where it rolled under a cabinet, until the next time Celestina—the most thorough of the janitorial staff—cleans the residents’ lounge about a week later.)
Mel gargles a mouthful of tap water and pops several Altoids and avoids Trinity’s interrogating gaze like a rich kid dodging a draft as they follow Whitaker into the fray. Trinity decides to let Mel keep her secrets for the time being — better to lull her into a false sense of security and catch her by surprise later.
Only, there is no later. There is no time for later during The Shift From Hell 2.0. Over the following two hours, 28 victims of the balcony collapse pass through their doors. Three don’t make it; nine require major surgery. And there’s not so much as a moment to catch a breath before there’s word of a twelve-car pileup on the freeway.
After that, there’s a man who calmly walks up to reception with a very large knife still lodged deep in his back. Then a four-year-old who swallowed a battery, a karaoke incident in which the patient fell off stage face first and broke his jaw in two places, and a repulsive excuse of a man who ran over his girlfriend with his car when she finally tried to leave him. A witness who saw the whole thing swerved her own car in front of his to stop him from fleeing the scene and got T-boned for her effort, so all three end up at the Pitt in a parade of ambulances. Then a STEMI, a kid who got smacked in the face with a flaming marshmallow, three ODs (one makes it, two don’t), and a shower sex accident resulting in a lot of broken glass in a lot of really unfortunate places that gets even messier when the patients’ spouses show up. Ellis captures the whole thing on video up to the point where security finally steps in as punches start flying.
By 3AM, Trinity’s new shoes are stained with at least four different kinds of bodily fluids and she’s forgotten about Mel’s situation entirely. She doesn’t think of it again until hours after the hellshift ends, sprawled on her couch watching Netflix’s latest overly convoluted dating show, utterly depleted but still too wired to go to bed.
She considers confronting Mel via text, but then imagines a scenario where Langdon finds out because he sees the notification pop up on Mel’s phone or something. She and Langdon have only recently reached a stage where their dynamic could be called “playfully adversarial” as opposed to “work nemeses” and blowing up his life a second time feels like a surefire way to undo all that progress. So Trinity reluctantly decides to finally try “being patient,” as so many people who she no longer speaks to had tried to suggest. (She hates it already.)
So here’s what happened:
Not quite two months ago, Mel got bitten by a patient later discovered to be an unmedicated schizophrenic. The bite broke the skin, which meant Mel got a whole fun array of booster shots and a small pharmacy’s worth of preventative medications, including a thorough course of antibiotics.
The following weekend, she and Frank took Tanner camping, because he was going through a Bear Grylls phase (no one is quite certain how this happened), and had been begging to go camping for months. If Abby was faced with a choice between sleeping outdoors and a firing squad, she would probably say she’s had a good run and maybe it’s her time, so what she said to Tanner was, you know, I’m sure your dad would love to take you camping.
Frank — and Tanner, who had inherited his father’s eyes and uncanny puppy dog impression — had asked Mel to join them. Becca was away on a week long trip with a group from her center, so Mel had no excuse, and also when Frank said please in that one particular way of his he might as well be have hypnotic powers as far as her will was concerned, even though her general feelings about camping weren’t too far away from Abby’s.
They reserved a campsite near a lake that looked incredibly pretty and serene in pictures, and was also incredibly pretty in person, but the pictures had failed to capture the demonic swarms of mosquitoes haunting the place, which left something to be desired as far as serenity was concerned. Mel, whose universal donor status apparently extended to insects, spent the following 24 hours wearing several layers of DEET even though she found the sticky feeling on her skin deeply unpleasant. She still ended up with enough bites that she gave up on keeping count—especially since the multitude around her ankles swelled together into a giant, indistinguishable blob of itchiness—and spent the following week on a steady regimen of Benadryl and topical hydrocortisone. (Frank got bitten like twice.)
With Mel still finishing up her antibiotics, they had been diligent about using condoms. And Mel had never noticed any sign of one breaking. But also, the woods were very dark and Mel’s level of certainty in her recollections is diminishing by the minute. (Princess’s recurrent odes to the wonders of outdoor sex had left her curious, okay?)
But to get to the point: while there hadn’t been a bet on them procreating (yet), there is the matter of the absolutely massive jackpot regarding them getting engaged, and in light of Trinity’s probable discovery during the shift that will forevermore be known within the Pitt community as “the Full Moon Friday Retrogeddon,” Trinity is like 96% sure Yolanda has won. Because Yolanda had put her money on “shotgun.”
(Damn Garcia , Ahmad said with a chuckle when he filed away her fresh-from-the-ATM $50 bills in the lockbox he now kept in the bottom drawer of the security desk for extracurricular activities. Thought y’all were friends.
Yolanda shrugged. When it came to personal questions it was her policy to neither confirm nor deny; it was more fun keeping people in suspense. Langdon’s a clown and it’d be funny, she said. She figured he’d probably have a heart attack or something and she’d get to laugh her ass off while saving his dumb life—mostly for Mel’s sake, of course—which she could then hold over him forever.)
It’s important for Trinity to know if Yolanda won the bet, not just because she’s been diagnosed by several licensed medical professionals as a nosy bitch, but more importantly because if Yolanda has won, she’s pretty sure she’ll use some of the winnings to take her out to that fancy new Ethiopian restaurant that just opened up downtown, and she’s getting seriously jealous seeing all her rich friends post about it on Insta.
But “later” has become “five days later” and Mel is still carefully avoiding getting caught alone with Trinity like it’s her job, and the nature of Trinity’s interest starts to morph from just a selfish but did I win though type to a wait should I be genuinely worried about this as a friend concern.
Mel is a beautiful genius but a genuinely atrocious liar, and she and Langdon typically have this unsettling mind meld thing going on where they communicate without speaking to an extent that is at times downright creepy. Trinity doubts Mel has ever kept something secret from Langdon for this long before — except, of course, the time where they both pretended like they weren’t in love for the better part of a year, but even that was really more about them lying to themselves than each other, really.
By the time day six rolls around, Trinity revises her estimate to 99.9% certainty about Mel’s condition, and she’s 100% certain Langdon still doesn’t know. Because that man has no chill, and he’s watching Mel handle a rather aggressive psych patient from afar with a slightly glazed over look in his eye that would make Trinity suspicious about his sobriety if she hadn’t seen his competence kink on display before. He even bites his lip at one point, and Trinity feels her granola bar threaten to make a reappearance. Gross.
Like, she fundamentally gets it; Mel is a badass and it is hot. But that would mean acknowledging she has anything in common with Langdon, which she refuses to do on principle, and the idea of having something in common with him sexually threatens to turn her off sex entirely, which would be too devastating a loss to bear. So the train of thought must be derailed before it does irreparable damage, thus: gross.
But regardless, this is besides the point, the point is that when it comes to Mel, Langdon is very protective—not in the abusive, “I’m trying to control you” way, but in this hypothetical other way that is apparently not toxic and even seen as a good thing(?). Trinity isn’t convinced, but Mel keeps saying things like she’s happy, really happy, actually, biting back a dopey little smile as if the tomato blush spreading rash-like across her face doesn’t give her away.
Samira and even sometimes McKay discuss Langdon’s hovering in wistful tones, too, so Trinity stopped half-jokingly slipping Mel domestic abuse hotline pens at every opportunity. (She only does it biweekly now.)
Anyway, for a man who has no chill, Langdon is shockingly unconcerned about his pregnant girlfriend attending to a clearly unstable psych patient approximately twice her size. Which is all the proof Trinity needs to be certain that he has no idea about the “pregnant” part.
Trinity decides she will give the situation one more day to resolve before taking more drastic action. Because friends don’t let friends struggle in silence. And also she really needs Mel to tell Langdon so that everyone else at the Pitt will know, so that Trinity can finally tell everyone that she’s known for a whole week and managed to keep it to her damn self even though it’s been so fucking hard and she deserves a goddamn prize. Also, she just bought a new jumpsuit that makes her ass look incredible and needs a good occasion to debut it, like a fancy dinner that is not currently in her budget.
And like a reward from the universe for good behavior, the following day, God or fate or dumb luck or whatever that higher power is finally intervenes.
It’s a hectic day—not the kind of shift that will live in infamy for years to come, just an even-busier-than-average one; the kind of day where Mel realizes halfway through she hasn’t even refilled her water bottle, nevermind eaten anything, although it’s hard to say specifically what’s kept her so busy.
Trinity tries to pawn a granola bar off on her around noon, but just the thought of chewing through what basically comes down to peanut-buttery cardboard makes Mel’s slightly unsettled stomach burble threateningly. Mel accepts the snack with a thank you, because Trinity is like a dog with a bone and the more she protests the more likely she is to end up getting force fed by the R2 like a goose destined for foie gras. She later offloads the granola bar in a drawer when she’s certain Trinity’s focus is elsewhere.
It’s a choice Mel comes to regret not two hours later, as she finishes giving discharge instructions to a frazzled young mother named Gemma, whose 6-year-old daughter Nina smacked her hand against a hot stove.
Mel stands up. Mel falls down. She’s only out for a second, but it’s long enough for poor Nina to think that the very nice lady doctor just keeled over dead and she lets out a blood curdling shriek straight out of a slasher movie.
Everyone comes running. Security. Doctors. Nurses. A patient still waiting on an MRI who happens to be an off-duty cop. There are so many eyes on her Mel feels stage fright. No Frank, since he just snuck up to the roof for a smoke break a few minutes ago; the one small mercy the universe saw fit to provide her.
“Oh gosh—see, Nina, I’m okay—Gemma I am so sorry—Dr. Robby, it was just orthostatic hypotension, I didn’t drink enough water today, I’m fine, really—”
The crowd quickly dissipates as they realize there’s genuinely nothing to see, not so much as a single drop of blood spilled. Except for Robby, that is, who herds Mel into the just-vacated Central 7, deaf to her protests.
“Be that as it may, we’ve still gotta do a full workup before I can clear you to go back, hospital policy for workplace incidents,” he insists, calling over Jesse to check her vitals.
Mel feels like this isn’t true. Even if it is true, Robby’s enforcement track record is spotty at best. Just a few weeks ago, Kiara’s niece Amanda had been shadowing her for the day, prepping for a documentary she’s making about the PTMC’s street team, and Whitaker had been so starstruck he walked straight into a “Caution: Wet Floor” sign, tripped over it, and ended up flat on his back in a puddle of mop water that was still 5% patient vomit. Robby had actually witnessed that fall, and his only response — as soon as Whitaker got back to his feet with no sign of injury beyond his pride — had been a scoff and a bemused, “you good?” (Whitaker’s mortified thumbs up was treated as a satisfactory response.)
However, Mel has worked with Robby long enough to know that resistance is futile, so when Jesse hands her a small plastic-wrapped cup to collect the urine sample that will seal her fate, she takes it without protest.
Not 10 minutes later, Robby scrolls through her lab results until he sees something that makes his eyebrows shoot up so fast Mel imagines them flying off his face like in a cartoon.
“So,” he says.
“Yeah,” says Mel, equally eloquent.
“So you are aware.”
“Yes.”
“Does Frank know?”
Mel shakes her head. “I needed a minute to, um, process.”
Robby looks constipated for a moment until something out in the corridor catches his attention. Mel is quite certain what (or more accurately, who) it is, but denial is all she has going for her right now so she chooses not to follow his gaze. “Well, no time like the present!”
There’s a vaguely manic gleam in his eye that Mel really doesn’t like. “Please, Dr. Robby, could we—”
“Nope!”
“Pretty please?”
He just gives her a look over the rim of his glasses as if to say, what are you, five?
“Mel! I just heard—what happened!?” Speak of the devil.
Robby somehow defies the laws of physics to slip past Frank even though he’s blocking the entire doorway.
“Mazel tov!”
Robby throws it over his shoulder like a grenade as he makes a beeline for something less stressful, like a STEMI or a GSW.
Mel can practically hear Frank’s thoughts in real time as he runs a differential diagnosis on Robby’s parting words. For the first time ever, she curses Frank’s ability to read her like a book. Robby’s congratulations are enough of a hint that he’s going to figure it out; she can even see it in his eyes, the moment he puts the pieces together.
“Mel, are you—”
She just nods, shifting her gaze down to her hands, clasped together to try to hide how they’re shaking, too anxious to meet his gaze any more, for fear of what she might see there. She notices a hangnail on her left index finger and thinks about how she should really get into using hand cream more, just to have something else to think about.
Frank makes a wheezing, almost strangled sort of sound, like he was just on the receiving end of a physical gut punch, and sinks into the chair Robby recently vacated. For one of the first times in his life, he’s speechless, but he reaches over and grabs her hands in his, squeezing them tightly in the way he knows she finds calming.
So Mel finds her courage and looks back up and sees Frank’s gaze filled with concern for her (and yes, definitely a fair bit of panic too). It strikes her, suddenly yet with a rare degree of certitude for her inherently anxious nature, that she’s going to be okay. And Frank’s going to be okay. And they are going to be okay.
She still has no idea what they’re going to do about the current situation, and they’re not going to figure it out now, because they still have four hours left in their shift. But eventually they will go home, and then they will talk and figure it out together, because it’s not Mel King vs. the world any more. And that’s just so incredible she forgets, sometimes.
Mel could cry at the relief of it, but she’s quite certain that if she starts crying Frank will freak out, and the last thing she wants to do is to send him spiraling when he just somehow managed to convey everything she needed to hear without even saying anything at all. She doesn’t have the right words to verbalize the tangled swell of feelings in her chest, either, so instead she says aloud the one thought she does have words for, which is:
“I think it was the camping trip.”
Frank just gapes at her for a moment. And then he laughs, looking about as shocked by his own response as she feels. There’s a manic edge to this particular laugh – it sounds a little absurd, actually, which makes Mel start giggling, too. She thinks about how absolutely insane they must sound to anyone in earshot (Trinity and half the nursing staff, eavesdropping from various strategic positions outside), and the thought only makes her laugh harder.
Even though no official announcement is made, they are in a building full of medical professionals with a thirst for gossip that would put a high school lunchroom to shame; the news spreads faster than measles.
About an hour after Mel’s fainting incident, Trinity texts Yolanda have you heard, to which she almost instantaneously receives a response that’s just a wall of flying money emojis.
As a paragon of patience, Trinity manages to wait two whole days before asking Mel about Langdon making an honest woman out of her, finally having caught her alone in the break room.
“I’m not sure what you mean?” Mel says.
“You know, put a ring on it.” Trinity does a few beats of “Single Ladies” choreo for emphasis that she hadn’t even realized she remembered.
Mel’s brow furrows in deeper confusion for a second. Trinity’s heard of so-called “baby brain” before, but if it’s hit Mel so hard so fast she is, in a word, concerned. But then, finally, a lightbulb goes off. And then Mel says:
“Oh! Yeah, we kept it quiet, but—”
She pulls on a chain from where it’s been hiding under her scrubs, and sure enough, there it is, dangling around her neck. Like the One Ring en route to Mordor, which Trinity finds fitting, considering the source.
“What the actual fuck, four eyes?!” Trinity shrieks, feeling her dreams of beyaynetu and doro wat made from Bresse chickens (imported from France!!) slipping through her fingers. “When did that happen?!”
“About a month ago?” Mel says. “We were watching Survivor with Becca and—”
“You cannot be serious.” There’s the thought equivalent of a 16-car-pileup happening in Trinity’s brain. “Mellencamp you are not about to tell me Dr. Dipshit proposed to you while watching a prehistoric reality show.”
Mel is saved from having to answer Trinity’s non-question by a shocked gasp.
“Dr. Melissa King! Is that an engagement ring?!” Samira’s in the doorway, Dennis paused a few steps behind her, unclear if this is a fight or flight situation.
“Um,” says Mel, realizing she’s made a terrible mistake. “Surprise? We weren’t trying to keep it secret, really, I just get worried I might damage it or lose it or something wearing it on shift.”
Samira’s excited squeal is so shrill that on a sidewalk approximately 50 yards away, a French bulldog named Prestley shudders and starts whimpering, and nobody knows why.
“Put it on, put it on, put it on!” Samira insists, and Mel complies. Samira squeals again and Mel flinches, but she’s also smiling so widely Trinity’s concerned she might pull something. Dennis managed to disappear in the meantime.
Traitor, Trinity thinks, brainstorming ways she might get him back later.
“Mel, that is gorgeous,” Samira gushes, before shooting a pointed look at Trinity behind Mel’s back.
“It looks… antique,” Trinity finally says, realizing she’s supposed to contribute to the girl talk but unable to manage congratulations under the circumstances. And it’s true; the ring is sapphire and diamond, subtle enough to suit Mel’s taste but intricately filigreed, the gold so richly yellow it just inherently feels like a product of a bygone era.
“It was Frank’s great-great-grandmother’s,” Mel says. “His mom said it survived the Titanic.”
Samira coos, her eyes glistening like she might actually cry.
“Wow,” Trinity says, because wow.
The door opens once more; Collins and McKay, this time—it’s break time for everybody, apparently. Their conversation also dies as soon as they catch sight of the sparkling gems newly adorning Mel’s finger.
“Congratulations, Dr. King,” Collins says warmly. McKay’s wearing a smile that’s more like a smirk.
She totally knew already, Trinity thinks.
Meanwhile, out on the floor, it could be described as a particular word that must remain unsaid beginning with a Q that ironically rhymes with “riot.” Partly because of a nearly miraculous lull in patients; mostly because Robby doesn’t know where the fuck all his doctors went.
And here, at last, is how Langdon fucked up the bet: absolutely no one guessed “random Wednesday night, watching reality TV.” Every holiday and anniversary was accounted for, every milestone. “During sex” and “after sex” and “romantic picnic” and even “following near death experience” were accounted for, but no one had accurately predicted the particular flavor of impulsivity that was Frank Langdon.
But things quickly get more complicated than your standard no-winner situation.
When the news of the Kingdon engagement circulates, the immediate excitement quickly gives way to chaos as everyone tries to figure out what the development means for the massive jackpot that has been building for so long half the participants can’t even remember what guess they put down.
Ahmad gets so many questions he moves “look into setting up automated text blast system” to the top of his to-do list, second only to “laundry” but above even “call ma back” (he loves his mother, but there’s no such thing as a quick check-in; he will get life updates on everyone in their immediate and extended family, the neighbors, and her book club — it is a marathon sport not to be taken lightly; active listening is required and there will be a quiz afterward.)
Garcia, after momentarily succumbing to despair, remembers that she’s no quitter and puts her thinking cap on. She did debate competitively all through high school and college; the display case at her parents’ house still has all the trophies to prove it. After doing some initial recon to check that no one else had a stronger claim (they didn’t), she began building her case. With Trinity’s assistance, they locked in the timeline for the engagement as 4-6 weeks prior.
The timeline for the pregnancy is trickier to ascertain. While Mel is quite forward when it comes to sharing details of her sex life, she would definitely get suspicious if Garcia or Santos questioned her directly. Langdon is far less forthcoming when it comes to talking about such things, at least when sober. Alcohol seemed to have a similar effect on him as sodium pentothal; plied with a few bourbons he would do a full 180 to compulsive oversharing, a quirk that amused Garcia to no end and one that she had made great use of in their decade of knowing each other. But Langdon went sober post-rehab, so that option is out.
Still, using some inductive reasoning and basic math, Garcia knows she has a case. Like most great debates, the matter boils down to terms and definitions. Namely, does the essence of “shotgun” reside in intention or outcome? Because while it is evident that neither Langdon nor Mel knew she was pregnant when they got engaged, there was most likely an embryo or at the very least a blastocyst technically present for the engagement. (“Be so fuckin for real right now,” Donnie says after hearing her opening argument, appointing himself leader of the opposition.)
There is about a week of tense negotiation, primarily via group chat, and in the end the majority concedes to awarding Garcia 50% of the prize pot. (A win is a win, so she deems this acceptable.) The other half of the money is donated to the nonprofit affiliated with Becca’s center and presented to Langdon and Mel as a gift on behalf of the wider Pitt community.
Mel gets teary-eyed as she reads the card presented to them during one of Robby’s signature start-of-shift team huddles, signed by basically their entire team plus scores of colleagues from the greater hospital community, many of whom she doesn’t even know very well. Langdon narrows his eyes suspiciously.
Mel is most nervous about telling Frank, for obvious reasons. Frank is most nervous about telling Abby, considering they’ve only just got to a place where holding a civil conversation doesn’t feel like a Herculean effort.
But he’s not stupid enough to put it off and risk Abby hearing about it through the grapevine, so less than 24 hours after Mel decides that yes, even though the timing is far from ideal, she does want to keep the pregnancy, he finds himself sitting on Mel’s couch, staring at Abby’s contact on his phone and trying to psych himself out into pressing the button.
He jokingly asks Mel if she’d like to place any bets because he’s stalling.
“I think our coworkers do enough of that already,” Mel responds from where she’s steam-cleaning the rug. She has already run through all her usual stress cleaning chores in the past several days and is starting to get creative.
Frank finally bites the bullet and dials his ex-wife. As it rings, he kind of hopes it goes to voicemail. Could he tell her in a voicemail? It’s either one of the smartest ideas he’s ever had or the stupidest, but ultimately it doesn’t really matter because Abby picks up. They exchange pleasantries that are still just a smidge too sharp-edged to feel any bit pleasant.
“I’ve been meaning to call you, actually,” Abby says. “I have some news.”
Oh jesus what does that mean, Frank thinks, ignoring the voice of his conscience telling him he’s being a hypocrite.
“Yeah, Same here—it’s actually why I called.”
“Well, spit it out then,” Abby says. Here goes.
“Mel’s pregnant.”
There’s a beat of silence and then a snort of laughter.
“Good one, Frank. Shall I go now? I’m seeing a woman.”
Frank massages his temple and sighs. “I’m not joking, Abby.”
“Neither am I,” she shoots back. “Her name’s Charlotte. We met at spin class. I want to introduce her to the kids.”
“Huh,” Frank says, eventually. He had run through dozens of scenarios in his head for how Abby might react, from warmly supportive (very highly unlikely, but not theoretically impossible) to DEFCON 1 (also unlikely, considering that would require a lot of energy and Abby had been very clear about how she thought he was a waste of energy, but slightly less unlikely). “Launches new girlfriend” had not occurred to him.
Did he know Abby was bi? His nearly two years of sobriety have involved far more self-reflection than the prior 31 years of his existence combined, so he’s well aware of the multifold and layered ways he failed as a husband and a partner and a co-parent, including the fact that he could be at times, especially when otherwise distracted, a solid D- listener. So he’s well aware it’s fully possible she told him and he had not been listening, or had heard and not retained. (Although he’s pretty sure he would have retained this, if he had known.) “Um, okay. Yeah. I would like to meet her also, if she’s going to be around the kids.”
“Obviously,” Abby scoffs, in that way of hers that he found inexplicably charming in its brattiness back when they were in college and absolutely batshit crazymaking by the final years of their marriage.
“And I’d like to break the news to them. My news, that is,” he clarifies, because somehow this has become a conversation where that requires clarification.
“Obviously,” Abby repeats. Frank takes a deep breath in through his nose and then out through his mouth.
“Okay. Well. Good talk,” he says, and then realizes Abby’s already hung up. She’s always had a knack for getting the last word.
“What did Abby say?” Mel asks. She thinks she’ll steam clean the curtains next. There’s something very soothing about steam.
So Frank tells her.
“Huh,” Mel says.
Once burned, twice shy, the Pitt crew turn their betting focus elsewhere for a while. They don’t even put stakes on the wedding. Partly because everybody knows it’s going to be a courthouse situation—not because of the baby, but because it’s common knowledge that Mel would rather gouge out her own eye with a scalpel than host a giant, expensive party so that a crowd of people can stare at her wearing an uncomfortable dress and painful shoes. Mostly because after how the engagement played out everyone is also convinced the courthouse trip will take place on some random day with no deeper significance to speak of, which is way less fun.
So they seek fun elsewhere. Like in how many alcohol poisoning cases will come in during UPitt’s fall semester Rush Week—17, not including the 19-year-old who broke his ankle flipping off a table at a Delta Chi party and did so stone sober.
“I like to keep a clear head,” the kid says.
Thankfully he’s talking to Mel, the only person on staff who’s capable of telling him he made a wise decision while keeping a straight face. (Princess takes home the pot, for the third semester in a row.)
Sometimes, days are slow. They bet on when the flickering light outside the security office will finally go. Shen wins, Tuesday, 11pm. “It came to me in a dream,” he says, giving an acceptance speech like he’s just won an Oscar when Ahmad hands him the cash.
How long it will take maintenance to actually replace the aforementioned light: 5 days, Donnie takes home the pot.
How many patients would come in wearing pink on a random Wednesday: 32 to 33, depending on who you ask. A 72-year-old grandma who fell while gardening comes in wearing a cardigan in a coralish color that nearly starts a civil war regarding whether or not it’s sufficiently pink or if it’s “more orange than the fucking president, are you blind?!” Everyone gets flashbacks to 2015 and The Dress, except for one med student who just shrugs and says, “that happened when I was, like, ten,” which makes everybody else feel prehistoric.
Ahmad attempts a blind vote, but neither side is able to reach a two-thirds majority. Eventually they just end up agreeing to disagree, with Mateo and Perlah splitting the winnings. It is after this that everyone agrees to allocating a 3% cut of all future betting pools to Ahmad as an “administration and moderating fee,” which he graciously accepts. A moratorium is placed on color-related wagers indefinitely.
But then there’s a phase where Mel craves apples. Like, so many apples. And it’s just like, right there. Of course they bet on it. For the better part of a month, every time Mel’s on shift, putting stakes on how many apples she’ll eat becomes part of the daily routine — drive to work, park car, hand Ahmad a fiver with your guess for the day on the way in.
Eventually Mel catches on, and after that whenever she gets asked about her apple intake she responds with a random number like 37 or 105, successfully quashing the betting streak.
“Come onnnnn, Melancholia,” Trinity whines. “You’re no fun!”
“This is fun for me, actually.” Mel’s never been one for gambling; even when she wins, she doesn’t like the feeling of taking other people’s money. Also, in her limited experience, Lady Luck does not favor her in these kinds of situations. (Becca, on the other hand, has downright eerie luck when it comes to stuff like bets and lotteries and random drawings. Considering Becca has been Mel’s closest companion since birth, she learned her lesson about making bets with Becca, and just gambling more broadly, quite early in life.)
“I guess you’ll just have to find something else to bet on.” Which is just about as close Mel King gets to saying tough shit, but the message is still clearly received.
And indeed they do. (None of this constitutes a gambling problem, thank you; they are all very much enjoying it.)
Mel goes into labor two and a half weeks early.
She is on shift, putting off maternity leave as long as humanly possible because 1) she would rather spend as much of that time off as possible with her baby after they are actually born and 2) sitting at home with nothing to do on the precipice of a massively life-changing development regarded as one of the greatest and/or worst things that can ever be experienced sounds way more stressful than the bountiful distractions provided by the ED, thank you very much.
It happens just like in the movies, the way it usually doesn’t in real life, which Mel finds incredibly annoying for reasons she can’t properly articulate.
She’s in the middle of picking glass shards from the shoulder of a 15-year-old named Tyler Avery (vasovagal response to dissection day in his AP Bio lab; he fainted directly into a rack of glassware) when the baby gives a particularly sharp kick, which is hardly unusual, followed by a gush of fluids that is definitely new. Prelabor rupture of membranes, her brain supplies helpfully.
“Oh!” Mel drops her forceps in shock and then stares at them pitifully. She hates leaving messes for others to clean up, but the floor is a foreign country she can no longer visit.
Tyler’s mother lets out a horrified gasp, literally clutching her pearls, while the teen takes one glance at the puddle of fluid around Mel’s feet and faints. Again.
Thankfully he doesn’t have far to go this time and it’s a much softer landing.
Mel assures Mrs. Avery that her son is physically fine, he’s just got the constitution of a Victorian waif and Mel understands now the existence of fainting couches—without, of course, actually saying so because she prides herself on her bedside manner. Her actual words are more along the lines of something something psychosomatic something something and then I am going to get a colleague to finish Tyler’s stitches, please sit tight for a moment, thank you. Still, she ducks out of the room just knowing that this one is really going to drag her patient satisfaction score average way down.
She makes her way over to Dana and very quietly tells her that she needs to hand over the suture case in South 18 and all her other patients immediately, grateful that there’s actually no one else close enough to overhear her, or Dana’s soft gasp in response.
“It’s time?” she asks, quiet enough to be discrete but an excited gleam in her eye.
Mel nods. “Well, kind of. PROM, I think. I’m pretty sure. Do you know of any cases where a fetus ruptured the amniotic sac by kicking it?” She’s running through everything she’s read in the various pregnancy and parenting books she’s voraciously consumed over the past several months and the OB rotation she did as an MS4, trying to appropriately calibrate her level of concern.
“I’m not sure, hon, but that does sound like something Langdon’s kid would do. My sister did have term PROM with her second, though. Contractions started several hours later, minimal complications, mom and baby both totally fine. Kid is nine now and a menace, but the picture of health. You’re gonna do great, mama.” Dana takes her hand—she hovers for a second first, giving Mel a chance to pull away, which Mel appreciates greatly—and gives it a reassuring squeeze.
“Oh my god, I’m going to be someone’s mom.” It clicks differently in Mel’s brain, hearing Dana refer to her in such terms in the current moment. Suddenly, it feels real; or perhaps more accurately realer. Too real, even, like the one time she tried shrooms in college and it made everything around her look like she was viewing it in Ultra HD and 1960s Technicolor.
Dana just chuckles. “Want me to page Frank for you?”
Mel shakes her head. “No, I’ll get him, I’m just going to change out of these scrubs first.”
“Alright, well, let me know if you need help talking him down.”
Mel frowns. “Why would Frank freak out? He’s done this twice before.”
Dana just shoots her a look that says, oh honey.
In the war against anxiety, Mel’s weapon of choice is intensive planning. So by the time she’s changed into the spare scrubs from her locker (she hates the powdery feeling left behind by whatever detergent they used to clean the ones in the hospital machine), she’s got everything planned out:
She’s going to tell Frank, and then they are going to tell Robby that they need to start leave early. Then Frank will drive them home; she’ll call Becca on the way to tell her about the new developments and arrange for Becca to spend the night at the center. Back at her townhouse, they’ll tell Tina, Frank’s mother, who came out from Connecticut to stay with them and help with the baby, which Mel genuinely finds more comforting than she can put into words. (She’s pretty sure if she hadn’t fallen in love with Frank long before she met his mom, she would have loved him for Tina—which is, she’s gathered, very different from Abby’s experience and yes, she does feel rather smug about that,not that she’d ever admit it.) And then she will take a shower and wash off all the smells of hospital, they will call her OB, and then most likely end up returning to the hospital in short order.
It’s a solid plan, Mel thinks, and it’s already bringing her comfort as she waits for Frank to step out of a patient consultation to speak with him.
Dana is totally right; Frank freaks out and jumps straight to heading up to Labor & Delivery immediately, which is absolutely not the plan. Mel has to use his full government name to stun him silent before walking him through her step-by-step plan for what they are actually going to do. He interrupts a few times, but is quickly made to see reason.
They follow Mel’s plan, with no modifications.
Back at the Pitt, Jesse ends up taking home the money for the lucky guess of “37w+4” with a characteristically modest it was one of the only reasonable options left. To be entirely accurate, he takes home most of the money, with 10% skimmed off the top to Trinity, who correctly anticipated “at work” and reacts to her win with a decidedly less modest, “pay up, bitches!”
Langdon and Mel name their daughter Fia.
There’s a whole story behind this, of course, but the relevant part is that the idea comes from Mel’s best friend from undergrad and no one in the PTMC betting pool gets it right. The executive decision is made to award the record-breaking jackpot to Dana anyway, since she put money on “Sofia,” which was by far the closest guess.
Dana uses the money to finally get that dent in her passenger side door fixed so it doesn’t make a popping sound like a shotgun every time it’s opened, but that’s only like 10% of the money so she uses the rest to book herself an all-inclusive 7-day cruise. She strategically books it during March Madness so her husband won’t miss her too much, but leaves a casserole in the freezer and cold cuts for sandwiches in the fridge just in case.
Somewhere in the Caribbean, her phone blessedly on silent, Dana finally cracks open a bodice ripper she’s been meaning to read since 2019.
Fia really is a pretty name, she thinks as she flags down a waiter to order another frozen Miami Vice from the comfort of a poolside lounge chair.