fic: the one you love, luka/abby (er)
Title: The One You Love
Author: Ellyrianna
Fandom: ER
Pairing(s): Luka/Abby
Word Count: 2,309
Summary: A gapfiller for season 13 episode 14, "Murmurs of the Heart." Abby's job is not to think about the what ifs; it's to take care of Luka.
They ride in the back of the police car to the station, where Luka has to give a statement regarding everything that had happened that night. He has to speak it, sign it, swear it, and even though Ames is dead and there’s no confusion about how he got that way, somehow they are there for over two hours. Abby is in the waiting room, her leg jiggling anxiously as she waits for Luka to emerge, finally, from the complex labyrinth inside.
“We should be at the hospital right now,” she tells the clerk every twenty minutes or so, when she asks for an update. The sergeant at the desk is uninterested in her anxiety. It’s midnight when a cop finally escorts Luka out to where Abby is sitting.
He’s got an icepack on his mangled hand and the entire right side of his face is a collection of purpling bruises. Abby’s heart catches in her throat seeing him like this. He’s always been her protector, her defender, a tall, swaggering figure who could intimidate and even kill if necessary. Seeing him like this -- injured, exhausted - pains her. It reminds her of when he came back from the Congo. Watching him lying weak and feverish on a gurney had been almost unbearable; knowing she couldn’t be the one to help him get better had destroyed her.
She immediately leaps up to take his good hand in hers. “Officer, we need to get to County General,” she says to the cop standing with him.
“We can call you a cab,” the sergeant at the desk says, the first time he’s deigned to speak to her all night. His affect is flat.
“No, we’ll be riding with Officer Perkins here,” Abby says, glancing quickly at the nametag pinned to the dark uniform. Perkins sighs and gestures for them to follow him. They once again slide into his vinyl backseat, the webbed grating between them serving as the most privacy they’ve had in twenty-four hours.
They don’t speak as the car bumps across potholes toward County. Abby watches as Luka fights sleep on the way over, his head falling forward and snapping up a few times as he catches himself. Abby’s gut twists. She thinks of how, after this is all over, she will gently strip off his clothing, kiss his lips, and fold him into their bed. Clean sheets will welcome his tired body, and she will rub circles on his back until he dozes off.
The cop lets them out in the ambulance bay. It seems like an easy night, with triage mostly empty, and there are gasps when Abby buzzes them in. Sam and Chuny rush forward, with Morris on their heels, ditching patients they’re working up in a most unprofessional manner. They’d all been watching the news. They’d seen the helicopter hovering over the building, the SWAT team rushing in. They’d seen Luka escorted out, pale and bloody, and Abby rushing to embrace him.
“That’s gonna be the money shot on all the morning shows,” Frank calls from the desk as their friends bombard them with questions and sympathy. Luka is answering as best he can, but his mouth is tight, his eyes bloodshot. The melting icepack on his hand drips onto the linoleum.
“Enough,” Abby finally has to say, as firmly and nicely as she can. Immediately Morris snaps back into business, pulling Luka into Curtain One and getting him stretched out on the bed, his long legs dangling off the end. Hope hurries over and gets his arm laid out and begins to examine the breaks, bruises, and swelling in his hand.
“We’re gonna need a hand series. Get Orthopedics on the phone,” Morris says to Sam, who nods and starts dialing. Morris probes the cuts and bruises on his Luka’s face. Abby stands at the foot of the bed, a protective hand on Luka’s ankle. Luka’s eyes flutter as Morris’s gloved fingers assess his injuries; Abby realizes that it’s only the pain from the ministrations he’s receiving that’s keeping him awake.
“Hey, how about some painkillers? Morphine?” she says. Morris gently shakes Luka’s shoulder. His eyes reluctantly open again.
“What do you think, man? Vicodin? Morphine? Whatever you want, we’ll hook you up.”
“Ah, I’m not sure,” Luka murmurs. Hope manipulates his crushed hand and he hisses loudly, then clenches his teeth.
“Morphine,” Abby insists, meeting Morris’s eyes. Morris nods and gives the order to Sam, who disappears to grab the drugs.
“After the x-rays are done we’ll push it. Still have to get you upstairs first.”
They are in the hospital until close to four in the morning. There are x-rays, bindings, castings, a few stitches on Luka’s cheek. He gets lidocaine in his face and morphine in his arm, and he drowses through most of the care he receives back in the ER once he’s done with imaging.
Somehow Abby is electrically awake, her whole body wired. At some point Sam brings coffee, which probably helps, but she is sure that even without it she’d be fantastically alert. She spends the night on a stool next to Luka as he is ministered to, occasionally chiming in with questions or concerns about what Hope and Morris are doing. She talks on the phone to the nanny, who blearily agrees to keep Joe at her apartment until sometime in the afternoon. Abby knows the other patients in the ER right now are not being given the best care, and it upsets her a little to realize she does not mind at all.
Finally, finally, they are cleared to leave. Morris offers to drive them home, but Abby elects to have Frank call them a cab. Morris still has two left hours on his shift, and what if there’s a surprise MVA, a four-car pileup at four in the morning? He helps her get Luka into the cab, though. Luka’s unsteady on his feet from the drugs and the exhaustion; he sways his way through the waiting room, Abby clutching one arm, Morris steadying the other. He slurs a thank you as Morris gets him situated in the backseat. As Abby slides in next to him, Morris slips a rattling prescription bottle into her hands.
“For him or for me?” she asks, managing the ghost of a half-smile. Morris just pats her shoulder and tells them to call if they need anything.
Sitting in the backseat of the cab on the silent ride back to their apartment, Abby finally feels a wave of tiredness wash over her. Luka’s head is tipped back, his eyes closed. His casted hand lies limply in his lap, a stark visual reminder of all he’s been through tonight. She feels the back of her throat burn hot as she thinks, again, of all of the ways things could have gone worse than they did.
She’s been pushing those truths out of her mind throughout all of this, and even as they creep back into her consciousness now, she pushes them away again. She cannot afford to be lost to emotion right now, because Luka needs her. She reaches over to him and gently brushes some of his dark hair out of his eyes.
The cab stops with a squeak at their curb. She fumbles some money out of her wallet and then begins the arduous task of getting Luka upstairs. Gently she shakes his shoulder; his head falls forward, which wakens him. He blinks at her foggily.
“Što?” he mumbles, a word she recognizes from his phone calls with his family. She tugs on his arm, urging him out of the cab.
“Come on. We’re going to go upstairs, and then you can sleep in bed. I guarantee it’ll be much more comfortable than here in this cab.”
He nods, reaches up with his bad hand to rub his eyes, stops, groans. Abby tugs at his arm again and he reluctantly eases out of the car. She slams the door behind him and slowly they make their way into the building. In the elevator he leans against the wall, forehead pressed to the grimy metal. She has to coax him out and into the apartment, which is still in disarray, marked by the presence of Ames and the police. Abby catches sight of the bottle of bourbon she poured him and shudders, makes a mental note to pour it down the sink later.
Like the intrusive thoughts about What Might Have Been, Abby chooses to push aside the mess in the living room and instead direct her energy into getting Luka upstairs. It isn’t easy: he staggers on the steps, instinctively trying to lean into his right hand and then finding he cannot because of the cast and the pain. At last they reach the landing and Abby guides him to the edge of the bed. He sits down heavily, burdened by all his weight, all his pain, all his exhaustion.
Abby unbuttons his coat. She slides the unscathed arm out of its sleeve easily, and then works carefully on the other, until she can toss it aside. It smells like wood shavings and blood. She imagines she’ll be throwing that away in the light of day, too. When she reaches for the hem of his turtleneck she discovers he’s mumbling something. At first she thinks it’s more Croatian, but then, listening closer, she realizes she understands.
“Why didn’t I run?” he’s asking himself, over and over, his words thick around his tiredness and his accent more pronounced than usual. “Why didn’t I run?”
Abby kneels in front of him and touches a hand to his face, to the side that isn’t covered in marks and stitches. His eyes attempt to focus on hers. Softly, she says to him, “What are you talking about? You had no choice.”
“He was older than me. He was weak. One arm…” He shakes his head. “I could have run. Why didn’t I run?”
“He had a gun, Luka,” Abby says, grasping his knee. She wants to penetrate the morphine haze that he’s in. “You didn’t have a choice.”
“I’m a coward,” he whispers. “I let him do this.”
She feels the tears again, burning in her throat and in her eyes this time. “You tried everything! You told the police, you told me. When he was here threatening me and Joe, you took him away with you, at the risk of your own life. That doesn’t sound very cowardly to me.”
She strokes his cheek softly with her thumb. He’s no longer meeting her eyes, and she wonders if he’s dozed off again. After a long moment, he says, “He could have done anything to you. To you and Joe. I wasn’t here to stop him.”
Abby feels the tears escape her, slipping down her cheeks, despite her best efforts. “But he didn’t,” she says fiercely, gripping his knee, holding his face. “He didn’t, Luka. We’re okay. And you’re going to be okay, too.” She moves her hand beneath his chin and forces him to meet her eyes. She doesn’t know if he’s registering anything she says. She leans forward and kisses his bruised cheek, then his lips, and then she presses her forehead against his. They stay like that for some time.
After a while, she pulls back and resumes the job of undressing him. She slides his shirt over his head, undoes his belt, the buttons on his jeans. In normal circumstances, when she’s doing this it’s because they’re about to have sex. He’s going to touch her with his big hands and she’s going to melt under his attention. When she unbuttons his jeans in normal circumstances, she always makes a disparaging comment to him about his button fly, deriding it as “so European.” This early morning, she uses the back of her hand to roughly wipe a tear off her cheek as she works the stiff denim with her shaking fingers. With some careful maneuvering she wriggles the jeans down his hips and to the floor. Shoes off, socks off, and then he’s just in his black boxer briefs, sitting dazedly on the edge of the bed, somewhere between awake and asleep.
Abby pulls the blankets down and gets Luka to stand so that she can lay him down properly on his pillows. She remembers her fantasy from hours earlier of doing exactly this, thinking it would somehow make everything better, erase the terrible night they lived through. Of course it doesn’t, and can’t.
She strips off her own clothes and finds one of Luka’s t-shirts on the floor to slip on. Then she climbs into the bed next to him. She prods him so that he rolls onto his side, his bad hand flopped onto the sheets, and she curls up behind him, wrapping her arms around his broad chest, breathing into the nape of his neck. He’s snoring within seconds, soft sounds that usually bother her but which this morning are a veritable symphony to her ears.
By now she feels the exhaustion, too, penetrating deep into her bones. She wants to sleep more than anything. Instead, she stays awake, as the light outside the windows grows and brightens the room. She monitors Luka’s breathing, his pulse, makes sure he never rolls over onto his hand. When he half-wakes at seven in the morning muttering the Croatian word for bathroom she helps him stagger to the toilet and back to bed. When he starts to thrash with a nightmare she holds his head against her chest and whispers nonsense to him until he calms. When the pain from his hand really awakens him at nine, she feeds him two Vicodin and a glass of water and lies down with him again.
He sleeps and sleeps, and at some point she finally does, too.
Author: Ellyrianna
Fandom: ER
Pairing(s): Luka/Abby
Word Count: 2,309
Summary: A gapfiller for season 13 episode 14, "Murmurs of the Heart." Abby's job is not to think about the what ifs; it's to take care of Luka.
They ride in the back of the police car to the station, where Luka has to give a statement regarding everything that had happened that night. He has to speak it, sign it, swear it, and even though Ames is dead and there’s no confusion about how he got that way, somehow they are there for over two hours. Abby is in the waiting room, her leg jiggling anxiously as she waits for Luka to emerge, finally, from the complex labyrinth inside.
“We should be at the hospital right now,” she tells the clerk every twenty minutes or so, when she asks for an update. The sergeant at the desk is uninterested in her anxiety. It’s midnight when a cop finally escorts Luka out to where Abby is sitting.
He’s got an icepack on his mangled hand and the entire right side of his face is a collection of purpling bruises. Abby’s heart catches in her throat seeing him like this. He’s always been her protector, her defender, a tall, swaggering figure who could intimidate and even kill if necessary. Seeing him like this -- injured, exhausted - pains her. It reminds her of when he came back from the Congo. Watching him lying weak and feverish on a gurney had been almost unbearable; knowing she couldn’t be the one to help him get better had destroyed her.
She immediately leaps up to take his good hand in hers. “Officer, we need to get to County General,” she says to the cop standing with him.
“We can call you a cab,” the sergeant at the desk says, the first time he’s deigned to speak to her all night. His affect is flat.
“No, we’ll be riding with Officer Perkins here,” Abby says, glancing quickly at the nametag pinned to the dark uniform. Perkins sighs and gestures for them to follow him. They once again slide into his vinyl backseat, the webbed grating between them serving as the most privacy they’ve had in twenty-four hours.
They don’t speak as the car bumps across potholes toward County. Abby watches as Luka fights sleep on the way over, his head falling forward and snapping up a few times as he catches himself. Abby’s gut twists. She thinks of how, after this is all over, she will gently strip off his clothing, kiss his lips, and fold him into their bed. Clean sheets will welcome his tired body, and she will rub circles on his back until he dozes off.
The cop lets them out in the ambulance bay. It seems like an easy night, with triage mostly empty, and there are gasps when Abby buzzes them in. Sam and Chuny rush forward, with Morris on their heels, ditching patients they’re working up in a most unprofessional manner. They’d all been watching the news. They’d seen the helicopter hovering over the building, the SWAT team rushing in. They’d seen Luka escorted out, pale and bloody, and Abby rushing to embrace him.
“That’s gonna be the money shot on all the morning shows,” Frank calls from the desk as their friends bombard them with questions and sympathy. Luka is answering as best he can, but his mouth is tight, his eyes bloodshot. The melting icepack on his hand drips onto the linoleum.
“Enough,” Abby finally has to say, as firmly and nicely as she can. Immediately Morris snaps back into business, pulling Luka into Curtain One and getting him stretched out on the bed, his long legs dangling off the end. Hope hurries over and gets his arm laid out and begins to examine the breaks, bruises, and swelling in his hand.
“We’re gonna need a hand series. Get Orthopedics on the phone,” Morris says to Sam, who nods and starts dialing. Morris probes the cuts and bruises on his Luka’s face. Abby stands at the foot of the bed, a protective hand on Luka’s ankle. Luka’s eyes flutter as Morris’s gloved fingers assess his injuries; Abby realizes that it’s only the pain from the ministrations he’s receiving that’s keeping him awake.
“Hey, how about some painkillers? Morphine?” she says. Morris gently shakes Luka’s shoulder. His eyes reluctantly open again.
“What do you think, man? Vicodin? Morphine? Whatever you want, we’ll hook you up.”
“Ah, I’m not sure,” Luka murmurs. Hope manipulates his crushed hand and he hisses loudly, then clenches his teeth.
“Morphine,” Abby insists, meeting Morris’s eyes. Morris nods and gives the order to Sam, who disappears to grab the drugs.
“After the x-rays are done we’ll push it. Still have to get you upstairs first.”
They are in the hospital until close to four in the morning. There are x-rays, bindings, castings, a few stitches on Luka’s cheek. He gets lidocaine in his face and morphine in his arm, and he drowses through most of the care he receives back in the ER once he’s done with imaging.
Somehow Abby is electrically awake, her whole body wired. At some point Sam brings coffee, which probably helps, but she is sure that even without it she’d be fantastically alert. She spends the night on a stool next to Luka as he is ministered to, occasionally chiming in with questions or concerns about what Hope and Morris are doing. She talks on the phone to the nanny, who blearily agrees to keep Joe at her apartment until sometime in the afternoon. Abby knows the other patients in the ER right now are not being given the best care, and it upsets her a little to realize she does not mind at all.
Finally, finally, they are cleared to leave. Morris offers to drive them home, but Abby elects to have Frank call them a cab. Morris still has two left hours on his shift, and what if there’s a surprise MVA, a four-car pileup at four in the morning? He helps her get Luka into the cab, though. Luka’s unsteady on his feet from the drugs and the exhaustion; he sways his way through the waiting room, Abby clutching one arm, Morris steadying the other. He slurs a thank you as Morris gets him situated in the backseat. As Abby slides in next to him, Morris slips a rattling prescription bottle into her hands.
“For him or for me?” she asks, managing the ghost of a half-smile. Morris just pats her shoulder and tells them to call if they need anything.
Sitting in the backseat of the cab on the silent ride back to their apartment, Abby finally feels a wave of tiredness wash over her. Luka’s head is tipped back, his eyes closed. His casted hand lies limply in his lap, a stark visual reminder of all he’s been through tonight. She feels the back of her throat burn hot as she thinks, again, of all of the ways things could have gone worse than they did.
She’s been pushing those truths out of her mind throughout all of this, and even as they creep back into her consciousness now, she pushes them away again. She cannot afford to be lost to emotion right now, because Luka needs her. She reaches over to him and gently brushes some of his dark hair out of his eyes.
The cab stops with a squeak at their curb. She fumbles some money out of her wallet and then begins the arduous task of getting Luka upstairs. Gently she shakes his shoulder; his head falls forward, which wakens him. He blinks at her foggily.
“Što?” he mumbles, a word she recognizes from his phone calls with his family. She tugs on his arm, urging him out of the cab.
“Come on. We’re going to go upstairs, and then you can sleep in bed. I guarantee it’ll be much more comfortable than here in this cab.”
He nods, reaches up with his bad hand to rub his eyes, stops, groans. Abby tugs at his arm again and he reluctantly eases out of the car. She slams the door behind him and slowly they make their way into the building. In the elevator he leans against the wall, forehead pressed to the grimy metal. She has to coax him out and into the apartment, which is still in disarray, marked by the presence of Ames and the police. Abby catches sight of the bottle of bourbon she poured him and shudders, makes a mental note to pour it down the sink later.
Like the intrusive thoughts about What Might Have Been, Abby chooses to push aside the mess in the living room and instead direct her energy into getting Luka upstairs. It isn’t easy: he staggers on the steps, instinctively trying to lean into his right hand and then finding he cannot because of the cast and the pain. At last they reach the landing and Abby guides him to the edge of the bed. He sits down heavily, burdened by all his weight, all his pain, all his exhaustion.
Abby unbuttons his coat. She slides the unscathed arm out of its sleeve easily, and then works carefully on the other, until she can toss it aside. It smells like wood shavings and blood. She imagines she’ll be throwing that away in the light of day, too. When she reaches for the hem of his turtleneck she discovers he’s mumbling something. At first she thinks it’s more Croatian, but then, listening closer, she realizes she understands.
“Why didn’t I run?” he’s asking himself, over and over, his words thick around his tiredness and his accent more pronounced than usual. “Why didn’t I run?”
Abby kneels in front of him and touches a hand to his face, to the side that isn’t covered in marks and stitches. His eyes attempt to focus on hers. Softly, she says to him, “What are you talking about? You had no choice.”
“He was older than me. He was weak. One arm…” He shakes his head. “I could have run. Why didn’t I run?”
“He had a gun, Luka,” Abby says, grasping his knee. She wants to penetrate the morphine haze that he’s in. “You didn’t have a choice.”
“I’m a coward,” he whispers. “I let him do this.”
She feels the tears again, burning in her throat and in her eyes this time. “You tried everything! You told the police, you told me. When he was here threatening me and Joe, you took him away with you, at the risk of your own life. That doesn’t sound very cowardly to me.”
She strokes his cheek softly with her thumb. He’s no longer meeting her eyes, and she wonders if he’s dozed off again. After a long moment, he says, “He could have done anything to you. To you and Joe. I wasn’t here to stop him.”
Abby feels the tears escape her, slipping down her cheeks, despite her best efforts. “But he didn’t,” she says fiercely, gripping his knee, holding his face. “He didn’t, Luka. We’re okay. And you’re going to be okay, too.” She moves her hand beneath his chin and forces him to meet her eyes. She doesn’t know if he’s registering anything she says. She leans forward and kisses his bruised cheek, then his lips, and then she presses her forehead against his. They stay like that for some time.
After a while, she pulls back and resumes the job of undressing him. She slides his shirt over his head, undoes his belt, the buttons on his jeans. In normal circumstances, when she’s doing this it’s because they’re about to have sex. He’s going to touch her with his big hands and she’s going to melt under his attention. When she unbuttons his jeans in normal circumstances, she always makes a disparaging comment to him about his button fly, deriding it as “so European.” This early morning, she uses the back of her hand to roughly wipe a tear off her cheek as she works the stiff denim with her shaking fingers. With some careful maneuvering she wriggles the jeans down his hips and to the floor. Shoes off, socks off, and then he’s just in his black boxer briefs, sitting dazedly on the edge of the bed, somewhere between awake and asleep.
Abby pulls the blankets down and gets Luka to stand so that she can lay him down properly on his pillows. She remembers her fantasy from hours earlier of doing exactly this, thinking it would somehow make everything better, erase the terrible night they lived through. Of course it doesn’t, and can’t.
She strips off her own clothes and finds one of Luka’s t-shirts on the floor to slip on. Then she climbs into the bed next to him. She prods him so that he rolls onto his side, his bad hand flopped onto the sheets, and she curls up behind him, wrapping her arms around his broad chest, breathing into the nape of his neck. He’s snoring within seconds, soft sounds that usually bother her but which this morning are a veritable symphony to her ears.
By now she feels the exhaustion, too, penetrating deep into her bones. She wants to sleep more than anything. Instead, she stays awake, as the light outside the windows grows and brightens the room. She monitors Luka’s breathing, his pulse, makes sure he never rolls over onto his hand. When he half-wakes at seven in the morning muttering the Croatian word for bathroom she helps him stagger to the toilet and back to bed. When he starts to thrash with a nightmare she holds his head against her chest and whispers nonsense to him until he calms. When the pain from his hand really awakens him at nine, she feeds him two Vicodin and a glass of water and lies down with him again.
He sleeps and sleeps, and at some point she finally does, too.