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The first thing she does is file for a leave of absence. Two months—long enough that they'll at least consider finding a replacement. It'll be necessary eventually, and they'll already have the list written. Trinity submits it right before a weekend off, and by the third day she hopes Robby has forgotten about it.
He doesn't. “What're you doing for two months?” he asks blankly, throwing his backpack in his locker before starting the day.
Trinity drags her nails across her skin for a moment longer, preparing to answer the question. “Family shit.” She pointedly walks towards the charge desk, trying to avoid this conversation as long as possible. “It might be longer.”
He hears Robby’s nonchalance switch quickly into the problem solving resolve he gets on a case; she might even be stupid enough to call it worry. “Alright,” he concedes, “Keep me posted. If you need anything, professional or otherwise, call me.”
She won't be calling anyone. That's sort of the point. “Thanks.”
There's a finality, now. And instead of dragging her down, the knowledge that two weeks from now she'll be gone has the weight in her chest lifting. It's been so long since she's felt this that the promise of it makes her high. When she goes home tonight she won’t have to cut open her thighs, because the joy of dying, of leaving all this behind, of the decision that she’s finally made is the only stimulation she needs. There’s no punishment—this is her punishment. And she won’t be here long enough to do anything about it.
Trinity works with precision because she loves her job, and because this is her retribution, her lot in life, the reason she didn’t just say fuck it all and do a swan dive off the building a week ago. Patients smile at her and she smiles back. Her coworkers ask for help, she helps. When they furrow their brows in confusion over her attitude, she jokes about new meds even though she stopped taking hers months ago.
The days tick down. Friday night she’ll be free of work. Friday night she’ll have seen Whitaker off for the weekend spent with Amy. Friday night she’ll write the only letters she has to, set out a copy of the very small will she has, and tidy her apartment. She’ll take a walk to the CVS two blocks down with her hands in her pockets and not a single care to getting jumped or mugged because what would she care anyway? She’ll get melatonin gummies and take a few too many, not wanting to risk complications of sleeping pills, pop four of them before she gets home so they kick in in time.
It’s planned out perfectly. She’s gone over it in her head too many times.
Friday morning, Trinity wears her favorite scrubs even though she might destroy them by the end of the shift. A few minutes before they all clock in, she finds Samira. “Mohan!” she calls, jogging over with a little velvet pouch in her hand. “I have a gift for you.”
The woman furrows her brow, but a satisfied smile slips onto her face. “Really?”
“Yeah, I know you really loved those gold earrings.” Trinity hands the bag over. “I haven’t been wearing them, so I thought you should have them.”
Samira blinks back shock, taking the bag in her hands like it’s fragile. “Oh Trinity, you didn’t have to!”
“I wanted to. Enjoy them, seriously.” Trinity gives another brief smile, then rushes off for their shift. She sees Samira at their morning debrief, and the little leaf-shaped earrings are already on. It makes her heart constrict, but settles when she says, someone will wear them after you’re gone.
No one’s asked about her sabbatical, no one but Robby. So when Dana asks in a slow moment, “What’re you doing on your time off?” she’s admittedly caught off guard.
Trinity makes up the first excuse she can think of. “Oh, some of my college friends and I are taking a trip.”
Dana smiles good naturedly, but there’s something behind it. Emptiness. Recognition. “Alright. You enjoy yourself, hun, we’ll be waiting for you.”
A trauma is called; their conversation is forgotten. Trinity jumps into it with the adrenaline she’s been living off all week, but she doesn’t see the way Dana looks at her the rest of the day.
========
“Why’s Santos going away?”
Dana crosses her arms across her chest protectively. She dragged him across the room as soon as there was a moment to breathe, and if Robby was a younger man he’d have been upset, but not when she looks at him like that. “Family shit, in her words.”
Her eyes go wide. “She told me she’s going on a trip with college friends.”
Damn it. “She’s lying.” Robby runs a nervous hand through his hair. “Okay. Okay, I’ll catch her after her shift.”
“Keep that girl safe, we need her,” Dana makes him promise before they’re dragged right back in. Robby’s suddenly afraid that he won’t be able to.
========
“Thanks for your help.”
Beside her, Langdon freezes. “What?”
Trinity shrugs, realizing her mistake in saying anything at all. “I’m just thanking you, geez. Don’t get used to it.”
“Wasn’t planning on it.” Langdon turns, strips his gloves off and looks her in the eye. “What’s up with you? You’ve been on, like, cloud nine all day. Well, for you. You’ve been slightly less disgruntled than normal, and now you’re thanking me.”
“I have time off after this, I’m just ready to be out of this hellhole,” she excuses.
When she turns away from him, she could swear she sees worry in his gaze, but it can’t be. He doesn’t worry about her. No one does.
Trinity pulls herself away from the thought and towards the PDS to find oxycodone for one of her patients. She has an hour left in her shift, and she pulls fentanyl too, just in case.
========
Grace slit her wrists. Her college roommate (at least that she heard) stole her dad’s gun. There was an article in last week’s newspaper that stated a guy jumped off a roof with a bottle of whiskey in his hand like some sort of poet. Trinity slips a triple dose of fentanyl in her scrub pocket before her shift ends. No one will find out until tomorrow, and by that point no one will blame her. Some part of her believes they’ll thank her.
Finally out of my ER, Robby would say. Frank would claim, she had it coming. Trinity thinks it's the natural course of her sanity dwindling and nature’s idea of an easy out. She doesn’t really care how they remember her.
“Where are you really going?”
Robby’s voice startles her as she steps out from the ED. She takes a deep breath of the polluted air, stiff with Dana’s cigarettes. “It’s a personal leave,” she tells him. “You know that.”
“You told me it was family. You told Dana friends. Which is it?”
His voice inches closer and she tips her head the other direction so she doesn’t have to look at him. “It doesn’t matter.”
Though she walks towards her car at the end of the lot, Robby follows. “I need an answer.”
“That’s my answer.”
He sighs, something rough and rumbling. Still stepping in stride with her, he asks, “Is Whitaker at home?”
“With Amy this weekend. He left before my shift.”
“Amy.”
Trinity shoulders her slipping backpack. “It’s good for him, I don’t really care.”
“The apartment must get lonely without him.”
“What are you getting at, Robby?” she bites, letting the anger take over, because she no longer has a job to care about. “What, you think I can’t handle myself alone? Think I’m going to snap if you let me leave tonight? Well it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t fucking matter. If you can take your demons on a vacation across the country, you’d be a hypocrite to force it out of me.” Her keys shake in her hands, but she unlocks her car. “Deal with it.”
“Trinity—”
“Don’t call me that.”
She slams the car door, shoving her keys in the ignition, and the headlights flick on immediately. He stands in front of the car now, and in a moment of rage she lays on the horn just to get him to move. She needs to get out of here and yeah, she’s set on killing herself, but she didn’t plan on taking her boss with her.
He steps out of the way. If she takes the highway a little too fast, then so be it.
========
She misses a call from Dana, and doesn't read the texts from Dennis. In fact as soon as she's home, Trinity shuts off her phone. She doesn't want it; doesn't need it.
The first dose of fentanyl goes in easy, like sweet alcohol in her veins, numbing her mind to anything wrong. It leads into the second, that weighs her down. She lays out her notes on her desk, unlocks the door so when they find her no one will break it down, and lays down in bed with the needle beside her.
It took two years before sleeping didn't involve the feeling of wandering hands on her thighs. It stopped because she began slitting them open to prevent it, and it worked. So when she lays in bed and the mind numbing, sweet syrup in her veins drags those hands back, Trinity reaches for her bedside table where the blade she hid there last year just in case has been becoming more and more handy over the past weeks. She cuts the hands off her in long strokes, parallel, horizontal, vertical, it doesn't matter. It doesn't sting quite like it does usually, but it's hazy, so she doesn't care.
When she lets a third dose into her arm, her heart rate picks up and her hands shake. Some instinct in her grabs her phone.
There was this thing she'd heard ages ago, that your body fights to live. That if you jump in the ocean it'll fight to breathe no matter how badly you want to stop. Trinity hadn't really believed it until her hazy mind was begging her phone to restart faster. The black screen greets her, she shoves the power button down as hard as her weak hands will let her, begging, pleading for it to go faster. Her mind helpfully supplies that she did this to herself, that this is just an embarrassment, she can't fail now because she's too deep in. She tries to drop the phone. Her hands won't let go.
It chimes to announce its awakening and Trinity scrambles to dial. His voice is already upset. “Please tell me you didn't lock yourself out.”
“Huck.” She rubs her eyes. There are tear tracks there that she hadn't noticed before, had thought to consider.
“Uh… yeah?”
“Dennis.”
“In the flesh.”
Her flesh is clammy. She grips the edge of the bed with her free hand, it shakes, it tries to pull her under. Her lips move, she knows they do, but nothing intelligible comes out. She doesn't know where she was getting her words from before but they aren't coming, and her heart beats rhythmically in her chest, enough so that she's afraid it'll beat right out.
“What's going on?” There's more muttering. Her phone screen blurs in front of her, and the peace she was supposed to feel is nowhere to be found. “Trinity, answer me.” She takes a sharp exhale that doesn't do enough. “Santos!”
“Yeah.” Her words rumble in her throat. Her phone screen is no longer in front of her. It’s dark—there isn’t a lot in her line of sight, but her phone doesn’t seem to greet her even though Dennis’ voice does.
“Shit, Amy, I need your phone—” Her body lurches, and something sticky is in her mouth. It burns like alcohol. Vomit. She's vomiting. “Keep talking!”
Nothing comes out of her mouth but bile. The kitchen light is on, but it's the last part of her consciousness she has.
A minute later she hears her door slam even though she knows she unlocked it.
========
Ten PM after Robby's shift shouldn't have him pacing his kitchen. It should have him sleeping. But when his phone rings and Dennis Whitaker lights up on his screen, Robby answers it on the first ring.
He doesn't get a greeting in. “I called 911, Robby, I don't know if she made it, I need you to go back to PTMC—”
“Whitaker,” he bites, but he knows well enough to listen. He's already returning to his front door. “Who?”
“Trinity, she called me, and—and she couldn't answer, Robby, I think I heard her vomit. I… God, I don't know what she did.”
“Shit. Fuck, okay. I'm heading there now, where are you?”
“Forty minutes away, call me when you find anything.”
If she's dead, Robby decides he'll happily wait until he gets here. It doesn't stop him from speeding the entire way to the hospital.
========
When he arrives, Abbot's intubating. “Not responding fast enough,” he calls, only glancing up long enough to see Robby and look right back down at his work. “Push more naloxone. Robby!” he calls over, again only making eye contact as long as he has to, “What would she have taken?”
He has to rack his brain and it isn't enough. “I don't know, whatever she had access to.”
“Find out.”
It's a task. He can do this if he has a task. The first thing he goes to check is her locker, but when it doesn't yield anything more than a gum wrapper, he goes for the med dispenser.
His hands shake when he examines each and every container he finds. Fentanyl is tampered with; the glue on the cap isn't even dry. Immediately he shouts across the ER, “Fent!”
For all his training, the next thirty minutes pass in a blur. No one allows him to help so he's stuck watching her, watching her chest rise and fall barely of her own volition, watching them monitor every aspect of her body while it struggles to cooperate. Watches her blue tinged lips turn a shade lighter.
Robby calls Whitaker from the charge desk, and plugs in his now-dead phone. “She's alive. Fentanyl overdose.”
A sob escapes over the phone that they'll both pretend not to hear. “I'm five minutes out.”
“She'll make it. Her airway’s clear for now, she's responding to naloxone.” It's not a guarantee and they both know it. “Just get here.”
Five minutes is only four when Dennis runs in with hair askew and pajamas on. He looks about as awful as Robby feels. “She—she promised. She promised me she was fine.”
Robby’s gaze snaps up. “What?”
“Before I left, she… I asked her if she was okay, you know, she's struggled with her mental health, and I know she'd kill me for talking about it but I don't care—I made her promise. When I got back she'd still be in one piece, that we…” a sob rips through him. “Shit. It was never this bad. I didn't see it.”
He should say something like, no one ever sees it, but the words don't come. All either of them can do is watch Abbot hover over her body, watch a nurse tend to the bandages covering her thighs, and beg her to recover.
Robby knows they aren't gods, they don't control fate, but if there was ever a time to believe it he needs to now.
========
Hour two, she’s out of the worst of it. She’s been transferred to the ICU, and even though it’s past midnight and they both are technically scheduled tomorrow, Robby and Dennis sit bedside to Trinity. Hour four she’s out of the woods with a positive prognosis of continued progression and a normal life after.
Neither of them can think about this when Trinity Santos, strong, smart, hotheaded Trinity, lays in the ICU at an unholy hour of the morning after she overdosed.
Dennis whispers that it was on purpose. Robby doesn’t believe it, won’t. Can’t. The gouges on her thighs speak to self hatred, and she’d never once looked sideways at the med dispenser, so the overdose can’t even be considered an overuse of a recreational addiction. But Robby doesn’t believe it yet because until he sees Santos open her eyes, they walk a tightrope teetering between death and life, even if he knows she’s out of the woods. Until she’s awake, she might as well be gone. Until she’s awake, it’s an accident.
He texts Dana because there’s no need to wake her. Two men sit bedside vigil, and when asked about her emergency contact, Dennis admits that it’s him. No one else. So they sit vigil.
========
Her first thought is of her discomfort. Her second is of her shame. Trinity can’t open her eyes because she hears the squeaking of wheels on linoleum and knows it’s a hospital. Silently she prays it isn’t PTMC, but she knows the closest to her apartment isn’t Presby.
There’s a hand in hers. It’s calloused. That stupid instinct that kept her alive squeezes it.
“Trinity.” The voice is rough, maybe with sleep. Maybe with tears. “You with us?”
She doesn’t answer, but her aching body shifts and she swallows around a dry mouth. Someone lifts a straw to her lips that she takes, water feeling like the only thing keeping her afloat for a moment before it’s pulled away, that same voice stating, “I don’t want you drinking too much on an empty stomach. No using poking a nauseous bear.”
If she were to think about it, Trinity would have to admit to the unsettled feeling in her gut. But she’s barely conscious enough to do so. She doesn’t.
“You can sleep,” a different voice says, gravelly with exhaustion, and she knows it’s Dennis by the rasp he gets when he hasn’t taken his allergy meds in a few days. She hates that she knows him. “We’ll be here. You’re safe.” She could never hate loving him, though.
Distantly, she doesn't want to be safe. Her heart thumps too loudly in her chest at that, but her hand is squeezed again and exhaustion pulls her under.
========
The next time she wakes up she doesn't open her eyes either. She sits with herself for a long time.
They all know the procedure here. 72 hour hold. Suicide watch. Mandatory inpatient treatment and therapy and meds and being seen. For the first time since all of this started, the last thing she wants is for anyone to notice her.
A tear slips down her cheek and her breath shudders, alerting the room to her wakefulness. She doesn't squeeze the hand in hers this time, but it squeezes hers, its body whispers something gentle. I'm here, Trin. I've got you.
Her untouched hand comes up to her mouth in a gesture that attempts to muffle a sob, but fails. “This wasn't supposed to happen,” she says in a fit of her tears, uncaring of the people around her because she has nothing left to lose and her body is too exhausted to care. “Fuck. Fuck.”
When the hand leaves hers, her eyes shoot open, searching for it. Instead of some nameless, faceless comfort she can call her own, his name is Dennis Whitaker and his expression is droopy, upset. Scared.
“You're supposed to be at Amy’s,” Trinity whispers when the tears give way to shudders.
He shakes his head, coming up to brush hair out of her face. He knows her too well. “I'm supposed to be here,” he corrects, “Where I'm needed.”
All her body knows how to do is compensate for itself; Trinity hiccups, “You can go.”
If there weren’t tears in his eyes she knows there are now. Whitaker gives her that smile, the one that’s thin and barely real and only real for her. It’s only real because he loves her and he doesn’t know how. He shakes his head. “No.”
“Did you just say no to me, Huckleberry?”
He laughs, it’s soft. It’s full of tears. “Absolutely I did.”
Trinity lets him hold her, two hands cupping her face, a knee braced on the hospital bed to lean over and place a kiss to her forehead. It’s chaste like when she kissed her little sister after a late night full of tears. When he pulls back, his previously firm gaze falters. “And… and you’re right. This wasn’t supposed to happen, just… surviving. But I’m so fucking glad it did.” Finally the tears slip down his face. “I can’t do this without you, Trin. I can’t. And that’s—I don’t blame you for struggling, I really don't, just… God, I thought I lost you.”
You should’ve. You would’ve forgiven me. You would’ve been happier, I promise. Trinity firmly shakes the thoughts away because she’s looking at the opposite. She’s looking at the fear she’s only ever seen in grieving family members. “You didn’t.” She chokes on her words; she isn’t even sure they’re there at all. “You didn’t.”
“Thank God.” His head drops on her chest. Trinity smells his store-brand shampoo, sees how his hair is unkempt from the amount he fiddled with it, how he must have run a hand through it until it got frizzy, and thinks to herself that she hadn’t considered it when she was so set on death. She hadn’t felt the strength he uses to hold her like she’ll slip away if given the chance, or seen how he really smiled in the photos of them on their mantle.
Trinity resigns herself to that 72 hour hold, suddenly, if only so she gets to inspect those frames later and realize how true he always was.