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pascalmybeloved · 2 months ago

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CHAPTER 4: MAGIC HANDS

Previous Chapter | Next Chapter | Masterpost | Read on AO3

Pairing: Jackson!Joel Miller x F!Doctor OC | Enemies to Lovers

Word Count: 3.7k

WARNINGS: 18+ MINORS DNI - infected attack, parental death/grief, use of weapons, medical trauma, PTSD symptoms and flashbacks, alcohol use

A/N: WE LOVE A FORCED PROXIMITY MOMENT!!!!!! Also, I know I'm not a big account on here and am just getting into writing on this account, but thank you to everyone for the positive feedback on this story so far:,) I'm so excited for how it's panning out and I hope y'all enjoy ♡

Ages 13-17, Firefly Safehouse, Midwest Outpost

The power was out again. Ris lit the burner stove by hand, the flare of flame reflecting in the smeared window above the sink. The safehouse was quiet except for the soft rattle of wind against the boarded glass. Annie sat cross-legged on the counter, chin tucked into her hoodie, watching her sister stir a pot of canned peaches and rice like it was a gourmet meal.

“Why do you always eat those?” Annie asked, nose scrunched. “They’re mushy.”

Ris didn’t look up. “They’re sweet.”

“So?”

“So everything else tastes like metal or regret.”

Annie giggled. Ris allowed herself the smallest smile.

“You’re weird,” Annie muttered.

“You’re alive,” Ris said back. “That’s all I care about.”

Later that night, Ris found Annie curled in her cot, whispering to herself—one of the old lullabies their mom used to hum when she still remembered the words. The same melody, over and over.

Ris stood in the doorway a moment. Then crept in, slow and careful, and lay down beside her. Annie shifted, head resting against her shoulder.

“I don’t wanna grow up,” Annie mumbled. “People die when they grow up.”

Ris didn’t know how to answer that. So she didn’t.

She just pulled the blanket higher and hummed the tune back, matching her sister's breath.

It wasn’t long after that night that Ris saw her first infected up close.

She and her father had gone on a routine perimeter check—something to stretch their legs and break up the sameness of safehouse quarantine. He’d handed her a hunting knife and said, “It’s like carving through gristle, not like in the books. You freeze, you die.”

She’d nodded like she understood.

But when the thing stumbled out of the tree line—half-collapsed jaw, wild eyes, skin ballooned with fungus—her legs locked.

It moved faster than she expected. All teeth and blood and muscle memory.

Her dad tackled it before it reached her, driving a blade into its neck with one quick, practiced jerk. It screamed wetly. Collapsed in a heap of twitching limbs.

Ris stood frozen. Staring.

He wiped his blade clean on its shirt and looked back at her.

“You don’t get second chances out here, Ris,” he said. “Not with them. You wanna live? You learn to strike first.”

She never forgot the smell. Wet rot and adrenaline. The sound of it gargling through the last of its air.

That night, she practiced stabbing into sandbags until her arms ached.

When her father died in a raid two months later, it was Dr. Anderson who found her in the medical tent—bloody, pale, hands clenched too tight around a syringe she’d never had to use alone before.

He didn’t take the tools from her. Just sat beside her and waited for her to breathe again.

Later, he showed her how to make a tourniquet from a belt and the plastic tubing from a broken IV bag. How to identify a collapsed lung by the color of blood. How to think faster than fear.

“You’ve got magic hands,” he said once after she sutured a split sternum in under three minutes. “Best I’ve ever seen. You keep that up, you’ll outwork every man in this damn camp by the time you’re twenty.”

She’d flushed at the praise. But part of her had burned too. Because that’s what it was like—being the girl who knew too much. Every mistake was magnified. Every success explained away. Magic hands or not, they always looked twice at her work and half as long at anyone else’s.

Dr. Anderson was different. At least, she’d thought so.

Back then.

Age 25 — Jackson, WY, Winter — One Month in Jackson

The third one moved too fast.

Joel’s rifle was already raised, braced against his shoulder, eyes locked on the treeline where two infected had already fallen—but this last one came from the blindside. It peeled itself out from behind a rusting generator, bone-white fingers curled like hooks, mouth split wide and weeping rot. The sound it made was somewhere between a growl and a sob—wet and feral and too close.

Joel pivoted just in time to see it fly at him.

He fired.

Click.

The chamber was empty.

“Fuck—”

The weight of it cracked his spine into the earth, knocked the wind clean from his lungs. Boots kicked uselessly against the ice, his knife already swallowed by the snow. His rifle skittered out of reach.

Then teeth—grinding down on the thick fabric of his coat as he threw his arm up, felt them scrape the surface just inches from skin. The stench was unbearable. Decay and heat and copper.

He saw something move behind the creature’s shoulder. A flicker.

THWACK.

The infected jerked once, spasmed. Then crumpled on top of him like wet sandbags. The pry bar was still lodged in its skull.

Joel shoved it off with a grunt, sucked in a breath so sharp it singed his throat. He blinked through the blood mist. Through the haze of panic.

She was standing over him.

Ris. Still and trembling, breath heaving in clouds, knuckles white around the metal she’d just used to kill a man-shaped monster. Her face was ash-pale. Blood flecked her cheek. But her eyes—God, her eyes were steady.

The bar slipped from her fingers and hit the snow with a thud that sounded louder than it should have. Joel sat up, slow and shaking, palms smeared red.

They looked at each other like people do after something irreversible.

She said nothing. Just turned and started walking.

She was limping—left leg dragging slightly, a fresh tear down her jeans—but she didn’t slow down. Didn’t glance back. Joel dragged himself up and followed. Boots heavy. Throat raw. Hands shaking more than he wanted them to.

Neither of them said a word as they re-saddled their horses.

The snow climbed higher the deeper they went, folding quiet over their footsteps like the world was trying to erase them. The horses trailed behind, heads low, steam rising from their backs.

Joel thought they’d be sleeping under branches. Thought maybe this would be the night frost claimed them. But Ris raised a trembling hand and pointed.

“Cabin,” she rasped.

It was half-buried in drifts. Just a dark silhouette between two collapsed pines. Crooked, sagging—but standing.

Joel didn’t hesitate. He surged forward, kicked the door in hard enough to shake loose snow from the frame, rifle raised.

Empty.

Shelter.

They pulled the horses under the broken overhang, tied them off with fast fingers and silent prayers, then stumbled inside. Joel slammed the door shut behind her, dropped the bolt with a metallic clunk that echoed too loud.

The whole place creaked like it remembered being lived in.

The air inside was sharp with mildew and ash. But it was still air. Still walls. Still something.

Joel leaned against the door, letting himself feel the weight of breath. Ris stood near the warped window, her silhouette framed in shattered glass and dusk light. She was still watching the forest like it owed her something.

He turned to her.

“...Thanks,” he said.

His voice was rough. Gravel dragged over gravel.

Ris didn’t look up. Just yanked the scarf from her neck and flung it toward a chair that didn’t catch it.

“Don’t flatter yourself,” she said, wiping a streak of blood from her jaw with the back of her hand. “I just didn’t feel like dragging your corpse home.”

Joel didn’t answer. He couldn’t.

She shed her coat like it had betrayed her, hung it on a nail with too much force, then crouched beside the hearth. It was filled with ash and time. But there was wood. Enough to try.

Joel hovered behind her—not close. But close enough to feel the shape of her in the room. The weight of her presence. The pull of it.

He watched her hands. The way they moved—precise, practiced, trembling beneath it all.

A match struck. A flicker of gold in the dark. The fire cracked to life slow and stubborn. A reluctant glow.

They didn’t speak. They both stared at it. Not for warmth.

For something to look at that wasn’t each other.

The fire crackled, but it hadn’t cut the chill.

Ris peeled off the outermost layer of her shirt—bloodied, stiff with dried sweat and the violence of survival—and tossed it into a corner. Beneath it, a long-sleeved thermal clung damp to her skin. She crouched again, rolling up one sleeve with careful fingers to inspect the scrape that carved down her arm like a warning.

Across from her, Joel sat near the fire, his rifle laid across one knee. He was silent, jaw tight, reloading with the practiced ease of someone who had done it a thousand times over. The clink of metal and the quiet shift of firelight on his hands were the only sounds between them. But his eyes kept drifting.

To her. To the blood she hadn’t wiped away yet. To the memory of what she’d done.

She dabbed the wound with gauze, hissing softly through her teeth.

Joel reached into his pack and pulled out a flask. Held it out without a word.

She didn’t move.

“You want it or not?” he said flatly.

She took it. Unscrewed the cap. Sniffed.

Vodka. Harsh and cheap. The kind that burned all the way down.

She poured a splash onto the gauze and pressed it to the cut. Joel didn’t look away.

“Something on your mind?” she asked without looking up.

“Nope.”

“You’re staring.”

“You’re in my line of sight.”

She scoffed. “Must be exhausting, being this charming.”

He didn’t flinch. “Must be exhausting always looking for a fight.”

Her gaze flicked to his, one brow raised. “Funny. I’ve seen you shoot at fungus-heads with more warmth.”

There wasn’t a smile on his face, not really—but the corner of his mouth twitched, like it was remembering how.

She wrapped the cut quickly, efficiently. Her hands didn’t tremble.

Joel tossed another log onto the fire. Sparks lifted into the dark like memories trying to escape. He leaned back against the wall and let the quiet stretch. Shadows climbed the cabin walls like they had nowhere better to be.

Ris shifted, drew her knees to her chest, arms curled tight around them. She watched the flames, but felt his gaze again.

Still watching. Still studying her like she was something unsolvable.

She turned her head, caught him mid-glance.

His jaw flexed. He looked away too fast.

“See something you like?” she murmured.

“No,” Joel said. “Just trying to figure out what the hell you are, firefly.”

She blinked once, slow.

“Good luck with that.”

The fire burned lower. Its glow stretched over the warped wood floor, over the dust that danced like ash in the wind sneaking through cracks in the wall. The whole place felt like it was holding its breath.

Ris’s eyes were half-lidded, her body slumped just enough to say exhaustion had finally started to catch her.

Then Joel’s voice—cutting through the silence like a knife dulled by time.

“You ever think about how many people died because of you?”

She didn’t move. Didn’t even blink. But her voice was sharp enough to draw blood.

“Funny. I was just about to ask you the same thing.”

Joel leaned forward. Elbows on his knees, hands clasped like he was holding something in.

“You were one of them. Back then.”

Her eyes didn’t leave the fire. “And you were what—some kind of savior?”

He snorted. “No. I was honest about what I was.”

“No,” she said, finally turning to face him. “You were violent. You were selfish. You murdered everyone in that hospital to save one girl, and now you get to sit here and pretend your hands are cleaner than mine?”

His mouth tightened. “I didn’t pretend a damn thing.”

“You’re pretending right now,” she hissed, the words tearing loose. “Like I’m the monster. Like I strapped that girl down. Like I didn’t try to stop it.”

Joel stood. Slow. Like anger was something he didn’t let rise fast anymore.

“You were there.”

“I was thrown out before the surgery started.”

“But you were there,” he repeated, lower now. Like it was some kind of curse.

“I tried,” Ris snapped. “I screamed until my throat bled. They knocked me out. I wasn’t enough.”

He stepped closer. Ris rose to meet him.

Now they were standing—shoulders tense, breath sharp, the fire painting their shadows together across the wall like it couldn’t tell them apart.

“You think you’re the only one who’s buried people?” Her voice cracked on the edge. “I still hear mine screaming.”

Joel’s jaw clenched. “You think that makes you special, firefly?”

“I think it makes me haunted. Just like you.”

The silence that followed wasn’t empty. It was everything.

He stared at her. She stared right back.

And then, softer. Weaker.

“You don’t get to judge me. Not when you’re still trying to convince yourself that saving one life was worth taking two dozen.”

Joel flinched.

Didn’t argue. Didn’t lash out.

He just turned, walked to the far corner of the cabin, and sat—back to her, back to the fire, shoulders pulled tight like he was holding every scream inside.

Ris stayed standing for a full minute more, heart punching her ribs.

Then she dropped down beside the hearth again, closer to the embers than before, staring into the flame like it might explain any of it.

Neither of them spoke again.

But the air between them—hot and bitter and heavy—refused to settle.

—

The snow had stopped sometime in the night.

When Ris pushed open the cabin door, the air was sharp with frostbite and stillness. Pale light filtered through the trees like it was afraid to touch anything. She stepped outside and squinted eastward—gray horizon, brittle wind, silence.

Joel was already saddled.

He didn’t look at her when she joined him. Didn’t offer a word. Just jerked his chin toward the old fire road cutting through the pines.

They started the ride in silence again, the horses crunching through snow like glass underfoot.

The sun didn’t warm anything.

The horses moved slow, hooves crunching through the top crust of snow like it might shatter beneath them. Every breath she took stung. The sky above was paper gray. Nothing warm. Nothing alive.

The shed off Route 14 looked smaller than it had in her memory—like time had shrunk it. Or maybe guilt had grown her.

Corrugated siding sagged under the weight of years. The rusted fence lay in a heap, buried in drifts. The Firefly emblem—once proud, once painted in belief—was little more than a whisper now. A smudge beneath layers of soot and rot. A ghost pretending not to be.

She hadn’t known where they were going when she dragged them into the dark last night. Not really.

But now?

Now her feet felt full of stone.

The shed still looked like it had all those years ago. Before the collapse. Before the fire. Before the dead girl and the man who killed everyone to save her.

You were here, her mind whispered. Not this shed. But close.

Too close.

She pushed the thought down.

Joel dismounted and moved to the edge of the clearing, scanning with the scope of his rifle. "Ten minutes," he said. “Then we’re out.”

She nodded. Didn’t trust herself to speak.

Inside, the air was colder than it should’ve been—metallic, sterile in the way that made skin crawl. Like blood that had dried too clean. Like ghosts had scrubbed the walls with silence.

Rows of shelving loomed in crooked angles, each one groaning with the weight of time. Boxes collapsed under themselves. A clipboard leaned in the corner like it had been dropped in a hurry, half a lifetime ago.

But the supplies were there. Labeled. Sealed. Still waiting.

She moved automatically—like muscle memory was all that kept her upright.

Gloves, surgical (latex).Autoclave kit (damaged).Sutures, dissolvable.Morphine ampules.

Ris worked with mechanical efficiency, gloves creaking as she sorted through items, double-checked expiry dates, packed them into a worn duffel. But something in her movements frayed at the edges. Slower with each crate. More careful with each label.

Her hands slowed the moment she saw it.

A tray of surgical tools sat near the back—untouched. Stainless steel catching what little light the room offered. Scalpels. Field med kits. Bone saws dulled with age. Her hand hovered over the instruments, fingers twitching like they remembered every stitch, every incision, every promise broken beneath them.

Her fingers brushed the cold steel of a scalpel. The same kind she’d used to suture kids in the field. The same kind that had been meant for Ellie.

Her breath hitched. She blinked—too fast, too hard.

A memory broke through like a match to dry paper:

Marlene’s voice. You don’t need her name, Ris.

Anderson’s silence as she screamed. The way her own voice cracked when she asked, If it were Abby, would you do it?

She opened a metal cabinet and nearly recoiled. Cauterization tools. Rib spreaders. Skull clamps.

Her hand hovered over the tray. Not touching. Just remembering.

“Hold still,” her mother used to say. “You cut better when your hands aren’t afraid.”

The breath that left her lungs felt thin. She turned sharply, grabbing a pack of syringes just to feel something solid. The plastic crinkled in her grip like it might shatter.

That’s when she saw it.

A clipboard. Yellowed. Corners curled. The handwriting—slanted and precise. Anderson’s.

She didn’t need to read it.

Her vision blurred. She swiped at her face hard, the back of her coat sleeve scraping across her skin. Nothing fell. But her eyes were red. Her chest hollowed out.

Behind her, Joel shifted in the doorway.

She didn’t turn. But she felt him—like gravity. Like guilt.

He didn’t speak. Didn’t move closer. Just stood there, rifle cradled in the crook of his arm like he wasn’t sure whether to guard the door or the girl.

By the time they stepped back outside, the sun had lost its fight. The wind was meaner now. Sharper.

Neither of them said a word.

They rode home in silence—hooves sinking deep in snow that didn’t crunch anymore, just gave way like it had nothing left to resist.

Jackson emerged slowly from the dusk.

Warm windows. Thin curls of chimney smoke. Life, pretending nothing had changed.

Joel walked ahead.

Duffel over one shoulder, his gait steady. Ris trailed behind, boots dragging like she hadn’t noticed.

At the clinic, she handed off the supplies. The nurse smiled. Ris didn’t.

She didn’t wait for thanks.

She didn’t say goodbye.

By the time she made it back to her cabin, dusk had already folded itself into night. The door stuck. Her fingers fumbled the key.

Inside, everything smelled like wood smoke and something faintly floral. She didn’t stop to light the lamp. Didn’t take off her boots. Just leaned against the door until it latched behind her and stared at the dark for a while.

The ghosts were quieter here.

But they weren’t gone.

She slipped off her coat. Hung it. Toed off her boots. Her whole body felt too stiff, her mind too loud.

She needed a drink.

The Tipsy Bison breathed louder than usual that night.

Music pulsed low from the battered speakers above the mantle, just shy of off-key, like it remembered the melody but not the words. The hearth was roaring—amber flames licking soot-stained stone—casting gold across weathered floorboards and glassy, half-drunk eyes.

Laughter swelled. Boots scuffed. The scent of charred meat, pine-smoke, and old bourbon wove through the air like a memory that wouldn’t leave. It clung to Ris’s jacket as she stepped inside, already tugging off her gloves.

The heat hit first. Then the eyes.

Curious. Calculating. Some admiring, some unsure. One voice muttered something in the corner—something clipped and low—and another snorted like it was a joke at her expense. Ris didn’t bother looking.

She moved like she always did: with purpose. Like she had something to prove, but would rather die than admit it.

Joel was already there. Back turned. Shoulders hunched over a glass. He didn’t see her come in.

He was already at the bar, shoulders curved protectively over a glass—elbows braced, jaw set. One hand cradled the drink like it had secrets. His back was to her, but she would’ve known that shape anywhere. The way he leaned. The way he always faced the door, even when he pretended not to care who walked through it.

But she saw him.

A few younger guys—newer to Jackson, maybe—sat nearby, drinks in hand, laughter spilling too easy. One of them glanced up, did a double take.

“That’s her, right?” he asked, half-whisper.

“The Firefly doc?” his friend replied, leaning closer. “Yeah. Heard she stitched that Harper kid up so fast he didn’t even blink.”

“Pretty, too.”

Joel’s fingers tightened on the glass.

He took a slow sip, jaw ticking.

Then, almost to himself: “The Firefly doctor everyone’s fawning over? Figures.”

Ris’s voice cracked the air behind him—clean and cool as winter water.

“Don’t worry, old man,” she said, sidling up beside him at the bar, “I’m not looking to stitch you back together anytime soon.”

He froze. Didn’t turn right away.

Just angled his head—just enough to catch a glimpse of her in the edge of his vision. She looked like wind and wildfire. Hair wind-tossed, cheeks flushed, coat half-open like she was still shaking off the cold.

“You following me now?” he asked, low.

Ris raised two fingers to the bartender without looking at him. “Nope. I go where the bourbon is.”

She flashed him a dry, sideways grin.

“You’re just the unfortunate decoration.”

A shot slid across the bar. She caught it in one hand, knocked it back without flinching. The burn didn’t bother her. Not anymore.

Joel didn’t answer. Not with words.

But he looked. Really looked.

Like she’d walked in with smoke in her lungs and his name still clinging to her skin. Like he hadn’t slept in days and didn’t want to admit it. Like he’d spent the whole week pretending he wasn’t waiting for her.

The space between them vibrated with the kind of quiet that doesn’t mean silence. It meant heat.

It meant still here.

All around them, the bar hummed—boots stomping near the stove, laughter echoing off the beams, someone plucking chords on a guitar that had seen too many winters. But where they stood?

It was something else entirely.

A silence that watched itself.

Sharp. Taut. And burning.

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pascalmybeloved · 2 months ago

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"eat the rich" i'm trYING

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pascalmybeloved · 2 months ago

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CHAPTER 3: FIRST, DO NO HARM

Previous Chapter | Next Chapter | Masterpost | Read on AO3

Pairing: Jackson!Joel Miller x F!Doctor OC | Enemies to Lovers

Word Count: 2.2k words

WARNINGS: 18+ MINORS DNI - Graphic medical and surgical discussion, medical non-consent, physical assault, head trauma, PTSD symptoms, mild body horror, mentions and use of firearms

Age 24 — Salt Lake City, Day of the Surgery

It was late when Marlene came to her.

Past midnight. The halls of the hospital were quiet—too quiet—buzzing with the low, fluorescent hum of half-dead lights. Blood had dried in streaks on the stairwell. The walls still smelled like gunpowder and iodine.

Ris sat curled in a plastic chair outside the makeshift lab, half-reading a medical journal with her feet tucked beneath her, pen tapping nervously against the spine.

Marlene stepped into the light like she had always belonged there.

“You’re up,” she said casually, like they weren’t both sleepless and worn down to their bones.

Ris sat up, wary. “Couldn’t sleep.”

Marlene sat across from her, arms folded over her knees.

“We found her,” she said.

Ris blinked. “Found who?”

“The girl. The immune one.” A pause. “We ran tests. It’s real.”

A beat passed. Ris’s pen stilled.

“And?” she asked.

“We think we can extract the cordyceps growth. It’s mutated—localized to the brain. If we remove it, isolate the site... we might reverse-engineer immunity.”

Ris frowned. “Where in the brain?”

“Midbrain. Possibly brain stem.”

Her stomach turned. “You’ll never get that out clean.”

“You could,” Marlene replied. “You’re a surgeon.”

Ris gave a dry laugh. “I’m a trauma surgeon. You want a miracle, not me.”

Marlene leaned in. “I’m asking you to help save the world.”

Ris looked at her—really looked.

“At what cost?”

The silence was louder than anything Marlene could have said.

Ris’s voice dropped. “You’re talking about brain stem resection. That’s… breathing. Heartbeat. Autonomic function. You cut there, you kill the patient.”

��We don’t know that for sure.”

“I do,” Ris snapped. “You’d need a neurosurgical team, an MRI suite, robotics, tools we don’t have. Hell, even if we did, it’s still an execution dressed up in a lab coat.”

Marlene’s jaw locked. “We’re out of time. This is our shot.”

“Does the patient know what you’re planning?”

A pause.

“She’s under sedation. For safety.”

Ris stared at her. “She didn’t consent.”

Marlene’s eyes hardened. “You don’t need her name, Ris. You need her immunity.”

And that—that’s what cracked something.

—

Ris didn’t sleep. Didn’t eat. She locked herself in the storage wing with her notebook and a flickering lantern, her fingers ink-stained and frantic.

Page after page: Cross-sections of the brain.

Medulla → controls respiration.

Pons → relays signals to the cerebellum.

Hippocampus → memory storage.

Brain stem = DEATH if disrupted.

No anesthesia. No consent. No viable survival.

"Hippocampal resection = memory loss."

She circled the same word again and again until the page bled ink:

“THIS ISN’T MEDICINE.”

And then she heard it. Voices. From the OR staging wing. Familiar ones.

—

The hallway to the OR was too bright. Too still. Every step Ris took echoed like a warning. She pushed through the double doors into the prep corridor, notebook still clenched in her hand.

Marlene was there. So was Dr. Anderson. And a few others—faces Ris didn’t care to remember.

“You can’t do this,” Ris said, voice sharp.

They turned.

“You know this will kill her,” she went on. “You don’t even have sterile fields. You’re using a busted trauma suite with cracked scalpels and rusted equipment. This isn’t science. It’s slaughter.”

Dr. Anderson stepped forward, calm. “It’s our only option.”

“She’s a child,” Ris snapped. “Does she even know?”

Marlene’s voice came flat. “She’s unconscious.”

“You sedated her without consent.”

Anderson’s mouth tightened. “She’s the only viable source of immunity we’ve ever seen. We’re making the call.”

Ris felt her pulse spike. “You’re killing her.”

Marlene didn’t blink. “We’re saving everyone else.”

Ris turned to Anderson—her mentor, the man who taught her battlefield triage at sixteen. Who called her “magic hands.” Who told her she was meant for more.

“You have a daughter,” she said, voice cracking. “Abby. She’s barely older than this girl. If it were her on that table… would you do it?”

The question hung in the air like a noose.

And he didn’t answer.

Not with words.

Just looked away.

“LOOK AT ME! Would you do it?!” Ris shouted through a constricted throat, fist slamming against the surgical tray. Tears pricking behind her eyes.

Marlene’s nod was small. Almost imperceptible.

But the guards stepped forward anyway.

“Get her out,” someone said.

Ris turned to run.

She didn’t make it two steps before the butt of a rifle caught her skull.

The last thing she saw was the edge of her notebook hitting the tile. Pages fluttering like wings. Like something desperate trying to fly.

Age 25 — Jackson, WY, Winter — One Month in Jackson

Ris woke with her jaw clenched and her fists tangled in the hem of her shirt.

The sheets were damp. Her skin too—sweat cooling across her collarbone like meltwater after a storm. She sat up slowly, heart still sprinting, as if she’d run for miles inside her head.

The room was quiet, but not still. The radiator hissed unevenly. Her medical journal lay open on the dresser where she’d left it—pages fanned like a mouth mid-scream. The old pine floor creaked beneath her heels when she stood.

She crossed to the sink, bare feet numb against the boards. Turned the faucet. Cold, slow water dripped into her cupped palms, and she splashed it over her face.

Her reflection in the cracked mirror looked pale. Hollow. A ghost pretending to be alive.

She traced the edge of her temple. No bruise anymore. Just the memory of impact.

You did everything you could.

But it hadn’t been enough.

She toweled off, threw on a sweater, and braided her hair quickly, fingers catching on a snarl she didn’t bother to fix. The sky outside the window was overcast, the kind of dull that promised more snow but never delivered. She grabbed her coat, tucked her scalpel into the inside pocket, and stepped out into the street before she could talk herself out of it.

—

The clinic was half-empty, the kind of lull that always felt more dangerous than busy. Ris moved through the back storage shelves with a quiet rhythm—checking expiration dates, repackaging gauze, organizing iodine in straight rows like it mattered.

She’d always liked doing things with her hands. Hands were honest. They didn’t hesitate the way voices did.

Outside the thin partition curtain, footsteps paused.

Then voices.

Two of them. Men. Not whispering—but not quite loud either. That middle volume people used when they wanted to be overheard but needed deniability.

“…just saying, you let one in, others follow.”

A shuffle of boots. The sound of a flask opening.

“She’s been quiet, but quiet ain’t innocent. Firefly’s a Firefly.”

Ris froze, hand resting on a bottle of antiseptic. Her heart didn’t race. It just… slowed. Like it was listening too.

“You think Joel knows?”

A short laugh. “Joel always knows.”

Another beat.

“I heard she was one of the medics from Salt Lake. The ones who—”

“Hey,” the second man cut in, quick. “That’s not confirmed.”

“Still. You’d think Tommy would’ve run background.”

“Think Tommy wants to believe people can change.”

A snort.

Ris didn’t move. Didn’t blink. Didn’t breathe until their voices drifted down the hall and out the front door with the bell chime.

Then—slowly—she stepped out from behind the curtain.

The light in the clinic had turned cold. Gray.

She looked down at her hands. Still steady.

But her stomach felt like it was sitting in a puddle of battery acid.

You’re not one of them.

You’re not one of us either.

She turned off the overhead light, grabbed her satchel, and left through the back entrance.

—

Ris learned quickly that the community hall always smelled like old wood, canned food, and too many people pretending to get along. She stood near the supply ledger table, arms folded, coat still damp with the melt of the morning frost.

Maria was pacing behind the desk, a clipboard in one hand, the other pinching the bridge of her nose like a headache had set up permanent residence there.

“Clinic’s low on antibiotics. Supplies are locked up in a storage shed off Route 14, past the water tower.”

Ris waited.

Maria didn’t look up right away.

Then she said it. Flat. Tired.

“You’ll be going with Joel.”

Ris blinked once. “I’m sorry?”

Maria finally met her eyes. “He knows the roads. The shed’s old Firefly territory—we don’t send people out there solo. You know what we need, what it looks like. And no one else is available.”

“You’re sending me with the man who threatened to kill me in the library?”

Maria’s jaw twitched. “He didn’t threaten you.”

“He took his gun off safety.”

“He does that for everyone,” Maria said.

Ris raised an eyebrow. “Reassuring.”

Maria exhaled through her nose. “I don’t like it either. But this isn’t about feelings. It’s medicine. It’s logistics. And unless you want a kid to lose a limb over an infected scrape—”

“I’ll go,” Ris said.

Maria blinked. “That easy?”

“No,” Ris muttered. “Not easy. Just necessary.”

She grabbed the supply list off the table and turned for the door. Maria’s voice caught her just before she left.

“You two don’t have to talk.”

Ris gave her a dry smile over her shoulder. “Oh, don’t worry. I’m counting on it.”

—

They didn’t speak when they met at the gate.

Joel stood already saddled, one hand on the reins of a thick-coated bay mare, the other in his jacket pocket. He didn’t look at Ris when she approached. Didn’t offer a greeting. Just handed her the list Maria had already given her.

“I already have it,” she said, tucking it into her coat.

He said nothing.

The ride started in silence. The wind whistled between snow-heavy pines, branches bowed like they were holding their breath. Ris’s mare kicked up a small spray of powder with each step, and the leather of her saddle creaked under her thighs.

For the first mile, there was only the sound of hooves and breathing.

Then Joel said, flat and low, “You really think anyone cares if you’re good at medicine?”

Ris didn’t look at him. She didn’t even blink.

“No,” she said. “But they’ll care if you bleed out one day and I’m the only one left.”

The corner of Joel’s jaw twitched. Not a smirk. Not a smile. Just an acknowledgment.

They kept riding.

Eventually, the woods grew denser. Less traveled. The sun fell behind a bank of thick gray cloud and the light turned sickly, shadowed. A rusted-out truck lay half-swallowed in the snow beside a frozen ditch, its hood peeled back like a torn ribcage.

They crossed the river at a shallow bend, hooves sloshing through half-frozen water. Joel didn’t offer to help her dismount. Not that Ris would’ve taken it.

He stayed a pace ahead. Not quite leading—just always in front. Like he didn’t trust her behind him.

After another quarter-mile, Ris cleared her throat. “You always this chatty on runs, or am I just lucky?”

Joel didn’t glance back. “Don’t talk when there’s nothin’ worth sayin’.”

“Huh,” Ris said. “Then I guess you’ve had a really quiet life.”

He didn’t rise to it. Of course he didn’t.

They rode on, branches cracking overhead. Ris could feel his silence like a second rider beside her—watchful, rigid, like a guard dog someone forgot to muzzle.

Eventually, he muttered, “You always gotta run your mouth, firefly?”

He meant for the name to hurt. Ris knew that. So she didn’t let it.

“Only when I’m around people who think grunting counts as conversation.”

That earned her a look. Brief. Like a flick of a match.

She met it. Didn’t blink.

Joel turned back toward the path, and for a moment—just a moment—his grip on the reins tightened like he’d wanted to say something else but didn’t trust himself to do it.

They hit a narrow bend where the snow climbed higher on either side. Joel’s horse stumbled a little on the incline, and Ris instinctively leaned forward to assess his footing.

Joel caught her watching.

She looked away first.

But not fast enough.

“You got somethin’ to say?” he asked.

Ris forced a breath through her nose. “No. Just wondering how someone so emotionally constipated manages to function in a leadership role.”

Joel let that hang there.

Then: “Fine by me if we ride the rest of the way in silence.”

“Finally,” Ris snapped. “Something we agree on.”

But the silence that followed wasn’t peaceful. It was coiled. Hot beneath the frost.

Every few minutes, one of them would steal a glance at the other—just long enough to register the set of a jaw, the flex of a gloved hand, the weight of breath hanging in cold air. And every time, they’d look away too quickly.

Like being caught staring would be some kind of surrender.

They didn’t speak again until the sound hit them—low and sick and not human.

Joel held up a fist. Ris’s horse stopped with barely a command.

A moan. Wet. Wrong.

Joel drew his rifle with practiced ease, scanning the treeline. Ris leaned forward in her saddle, heart thumping in her throat.

“What is it?” she whispered.

Joel’s jaw worked. “Clicker,” he muttered.

Another sound joined the first. Closer.

“Make that two.”

A third shuffle. Barely a silhouette in the snow.

“Three,” Ris said, breath shallow.

Joel didn’t answer.

He just stepped down from his horse, slow and quiet.

The rifle came up. Safety clicked off.

And just like that, the disdain between them was replaced by something colder.

35 notes · View notes

pascalmybeloved · 2 months ago

Text

CHAPTER 2: PHANTOM PRESSURE

Previous Chapter | Next Chapter | Masterpost | Read on AO3

Pairing: Jackson!Joel Miller x F!Doctor OC | Enemies to Lovers

Word Count: 3.2k words

WARNINGS: 18+ MINORS DNI - medical trauma, graphic medical content, parentification, emotional neglect, PTSD symptoms, implied physical violence, violent confrontation, themes of grief, survivor's guilt, and identify crisis, guns, power dynamics, mistrust

Age 9 — Firefly Tunnels, makeshift clinic

The first thing her mother ever taught her was how to sterilize.

Boil the tools. Pour the alcohol. Burn off anything you can’t name. Pain meant nothing if the infection came after.

“Gloves?” Ris had asked, holding up her tiny hands in confusion the first time they stitched a man’s shoulder back together.

“Waste of supplies,” her mother said, already threading the needle. “Just don’t be stupid.”

Ris remembered how bright the bulb above the table had looked that day—how it buzzed and flickered like it was one breath from going out. The tunnels always smelled like damp metal and rubbing alcohol, a sterile rot that clung to her clothes for days. That day, the patient was a man in his twenties, a bullet through his thigh. She could still remember his belt—looped around his mouth so he wouldn’t scream.

Her mother handed her the forceps and nodded toward the sutures.

“Get to it. You’ve seen me do it enough.”

Ris hesitated. She was nine. Her fingers shook.

Her mother’s voice came sharp and immediate.

“Surgeons kill people with hands that tremble.”

She said it like it was gospel. Like it was science.

Ris swallowed hard and tried to mimic what she’d seen—forceps in the left, needle driver in the right, just like her mother. The skin puckered under the pull. Her stitch was uneven.

“You want to save lives?” her mother said flatly. “Then be still. Or find another line of work.”

The man groaned under his breath. Ris tried not to look at his blood. Just the wound. Just the steps. Needle in. Pull. Tie. Again.

Her breathing went shallow. Her vision tunneled. But she finished it. Fifteen stitches. Crooked, but clean.

Later, after the man was bandaged and carried out, Ris sat on the floor outside the exam tent, hands in her lap, staring at the dried blood under her nails. Her stomach turned. She didn’t cry. She just sat there—rigid, cold, trying to find something inside her that felt proud.

Nothing came.

When she finally asked her mother, in the quietest voice possible, “Did I do okay?”—her mother didn’t look up from her medical journal.

She just said:

“You didn’t kill him. That’s a start.”

That night, Ris dreamed of thread slipping through skin. Over and over and over again. Pull. Tie. Pull. Tie. Blood on her fingers. Her mother’s voice echoing like a scalpel in the dark.

Be still. Or find another line of work.

Age 25 — Jackson, WY, Winter — Two Weeks in Jackson

The house was quiet except for the groan of old wood bracing against the cold. A low wind moved around the corners of the windows like it was looking for a way in. Ris sat at the kitchen table, sleeves rolled to her elbows, her medical journal cracked open beneath the wavering light of a gas lantern.

It was an old spiral-bound thing, the edges curled, the pages worn soft. Her handwriting—once careful, almost elegant—had turned tight, cramped, clinical. Angry.

Page after page: Cross-sections of the brain.

Medulla → controls respiration.

Pons → relays signals to the cerebellum.

Hippocampus → memory storage.

Brain stem = DEATH if disrupted.

No anesthesia. No consent. No viable survival.

She circled the same word again and again until the page bled ink:

“THIS ISN’T MEDICINE.”

She exhaled through her nose, jaw tight. Her breath fogged slightly in the cold air.

They hadn’t listened.

They never listened.

To them, the girl wasn’t a person. She didn’t even have a name.

Just the patient. The subject.

“You don’t need her name, Ris,” Marlene had said. “You need her immunity.”

But Ris had looked at that girl and seen someone else. A child, barely into adolescence. Hands too small for the IV lines taped to her skin. Dirt under her fingernails. A bruise on her temple. And when she breathed—Ris remembered—her lips parted in her sleep like she was dreaming of something soft.

If it were Annie.

That was all Ris could think.

If it were Annie strapped to that table. If it were Annie under those lights, with strangers in surgical masks planning to cut into her skull.

She would’ve burned the whole building to the ground.

She should’ve done it anyway.

She’d tried, hadn’t she? Stood in the hallway outside the OR with her fists clenched, voice shaking, saying this won’t work, this isn’t safe, you’ll kill her.

Marlene hadn’t blinked.

“We’re saving everyone else.”

You’ll have killed her, Ris had wanted to scream. And it won’t even matter.

She turned to another page—one she hadn’t read since Salt Lake. In the margin, circled three times:

"Hippocampal resection = memory loss."

Would the girl have woken up—if she’d lived at all—and remembered nothing? Lost the people she loved? Lost herself?

And for what?

A guess. A gamble. A gut feeling that maybe, maybe, something in her brain might hold the answer.

Ris stared down at the page, vision blurring for a moment. The lines wavered. The ink bled.

She knew better.

She had known better. Every fiber of her training screamed it wouldn’t work. Not with what they had. Not with the tools. Not without consent. Not with a child.

Annie had been eighteen when Ris last saw her.

This girl—Ellie, she learned later—couldn’t have been much older.

And so Ris did what she had to do.

She spoke up. She said no. And the guards knocked her unconscious, shoving her away in a closet as if she were a dead body they were trying to hide.

The sound of it—the clunk of a gun against her temple—still echoed in her bones.

She reached for her journal’s cover but didn’t close it yet. Her fingers hovered over the ink she had written in anger, in fear, in desperation.

You don’t need her name.

She did, though.

Maybe not then. But now? Now it haunted her. Now she knew the name. Knew the laugh. The sharpness. The weight of what was almost lost.

Ellie.

Ris shut the journal, hard.

She sat back in the chair and pressed her palms to her face, breathing deep. The lantern beside her hissed faintly. Outside, the wind rattled the eaves like something restless trying to wake her.

The fire in the hearth had long since guttered out, but Ris still sat in the silence, hands cupped around a chipped tin mug of lukewarm tea. Bitter. Over-steeped. She hadn’t meant to leave the bag in that long, but her thoughts had drifted too far from the kitchen.

Outside, snow crackled faintly under the wind’s edge. The windows glowed faint orange from the flickering streetlights in town. Ris stared at the distant shapes moving past them—shadows of people who belonged somewhere.

She didn’t go to bed. She hadn’t gone to bed early since arriving. Every time she tried, she dreamed. Of Salt Lake. Of scalpels. Of Annie.

Her hand drifted unconsciously toward the dresser drawer. The one where the Firefly pendant still sat, tucked beneath a sweatshirt. She didn’t open it.

Instead, she said aloud—soft and bitter, “I did everything I could.”

But doing everything wasn’t always enough.

—

The morning was gray and wet, the kind that soaked into the bones even when the snow had stopped falling. Joel stood near the greenhouse, arms folded tight, watching the town shuffle through the early routine. Somewhere nearby, chickens squawked. A gate creaked. Someone coughed.

The boy’s leg trembled as Ris cleaned around the wound. His eyes darted everywhere but at the needle.

“Am I gonna need stitches?” he asked, voice small.

“You might,” Ris said gently. “But you’ll be okay. What’s your name?”

“Caleb.”

“Okay, Caleb. I’m Ris. And I’m not gonna lie to you—this might sting a little.”

He bit his lip. “Like, how bad?”

Ris paused. She could lie. Or she could give him what she never had: truth, spoken gently.

“Like a bee sting. But I’ll be quick.”

He nodded, stiff. “Will it leave a scar?”

She smiled. “Promise it’ll be a cool one.”

Caleb smiled too.

She stitched in silence after that—fast, clean, methodical, unaware of Joel’s eyes on her.

He was supposed to be collecting spare hinges from the shed. Instead, he was watching her.

Ris.

Kneeling beside a kid on a cracked plastic crate, sleeves rolled, gloved hands cradling a gashed leg. The wound wasn’t gory—just long, clean, a nasty slice from a glass shard. But it was the way she worked that made his stomach turn. Calm. Efficient. Too practiced.

Joel didn’t like how steady she looked.

Didn’t like the ease. The control. Didn’t like that the kid looked at her like she was some kind of savior.

Tommy came up beside him, crunching over the gravel, sipping from a mug.

“She’s good,” he said, voice low. “You can’t deny that.”

Joel didn’t answer.

Tommy shifted his weight. “Took the kid two minutes to stop crying. She kept talkin’ to him the whole time, real soft. Had the leg stitched in less than ten. Clean as hell. I wouldn’t trust most of Jackson to close a pillowcase that fast.”

Joel’s jaw clenched. “How long you known?”

Tommy blinked. “Known what?”

Joel nodded toward Ris, voice iron-flat. “That she was a Firefly.”

The silence that followed was a beat too long.

Then Tommy’s breath left him slow. “Shit.”

Joel turned to look at him full-on, gaze hard and steady.

Tommy rubbed at his jaw. “I figured you might’ve seen the patch. It’s gone now, but…”

“You brought a Firefly into Jackson,” Joel said. His voice was even. But his fists were curled so tight the veins in his arms had started to rise. “You didn’t think that was worth mentioning?”

“She’s not—she left them, Joel. Long time ago.”

“How do you know that?”

Tommy hesitated. “Because she’s here. Because she’s trying to do good. Because she hasn’t picked up a rifle since I found her.”

“That’s not an answer.”

Tommy stepped forward. “Look, I don’t know her full story. She doesn’t talk much about her past. But she’s not some militia fanatic, Joel. She was a kid when it all started. She was born into it.”

Joel’s voice dropped low. “You think that makes it better?”

Tommy’s mouth pressed into a tight line. “I think it makes it complicated.”

Joel stared back out at the field. Ris was still crouched by the kid, wiping away dried blood with a torn washcloth. Her posture didn’t waver. Her face gave nothing away.

“Was she there?” he asked. “Salt Lake. Was she there?”

Tommy swallowed. “I don’t know.”

“You think she was?”

“I don’t want to think she was.”

That did it.

Joel stepped away from him like something had just cracked open underfoot. “You hoped,” he said, voice rough. “You fucking hoped she wasn’t there, and you still brought her here?”

“She’s a doctor, Joel. You want to know how many of those are left? You want to throw one out in the snow just because of where she came from?”

Joel spun around. “She came from them, Tommy. From the people who would’ve cut Ellie open and called it mercy.”

Tommy’s voice sharpened. “And you killed every last one of them to stop it.”

The words hung in the cold air like smoke.

Neither of them spoke.

Tommy’s expression softened just slightly. “You don’t know who she is now.”

Joel looked back at Ris.

She was standing now. Pulling off her gloves. Her face unreadable in the pale light.

“No,” he said quietly. “But I’m about to find out.”

And then he walked away.

—

Joel slammed the door to his house so hard the coat hook rattled loose.

He didn’t mean to. But it felt like something had snapped.

He stood in the dark, chest heaving. A log sat half-split in the hearth, cold. He didn’t move to light it.

Ris. Firefly. She was here. In Jackson.

Ris.

Firefly.

He dropped into a chair, elbows on his knees, hands locked tight like he might keep himself from falling apart with sheer grip strength.

She had that look about her—the kind he’d seen before. Firefly doctors wore different armor than soldiers. But they were the same underneath: conviction dressed in gloves.

“She knew,” Joel muttered to the empty room. “She was there. I feel it.”

He rubbed his hand down his face.

She was there.

—

The library still smelled like old paper and mouse piss, no matter how many candles they burned. Ris sat at a folding table shoved between two half-collapsed shelves, cataloging a crate of expired antibiotics. The table wobbled every time she leaned on it, and the pen in her hand had begun to skip from cold.

Amoxicillin. Ciprofloxacin. Doxy. She moved with methodical ease, sorting bottles into two piles—salvageable, and too-far-gone.

It was the closest she got to silence without ghosts in it.

“You’ve got a weird way of relaxing,” came a voice from the doorway.

Ris didn’t need to look up. She knew it.

Ellie.

“You always this fun?” Ellie asked, arms folded across her chest like a challenge.

“Only when I’m working,” Ris muttered, eyes still on the labels. She tilted a bottle toward the candlelight, trying to make out a faded expiration date.

“Try not to drop anything,” she added. “Some of these are glass.”

Ellie stepped further in, boots crunching over a carpet of crumbling paper. She circled the table like she was inspecting something—maybe the meds. Maybe Ris herself.

There was a pause. Not a long one. But deliberate.

“You ever been to Salt Lake?” Ellie asked.

Ris’s hand stilled over a bottle half-full with pink sediment. Her fingers clenched so tightly her knuckles whitened around the plastic.

She didn’t look up.

“Why?”

Ellie shrugged. “Just wondering.”

Ris set the bottle down slowly. “I’ve been a lot of places. Doesn’t mean I remember them.”

It was almost the truth. And still—too much of a lie.

Ellie tilted her head, watching her with a look that was part suspicion, part something more raw. “You remember me?”

That landed like a blow.

Ris looked at her—really looked at her—and the memory rose like blood in the throat.

A hallway. A blue surgical gown. A child on a gurney. Not yet dead, but dying. A voice saying, We don't need her name.

And yet—Ris had remembered her. The tilt of her chin. The scar along her brow. The fight in her even when sedated. The way she seemed to sense what no one told her.

Ris’s voice came quiet. Guarded.

“Should I?”

Ellie didn’t smile. Didn’t blink.

For a moment, they were two people in the same room, both pretending it wasn’t on fire.

The door slammed open behind them, the sound sharp and final.

Joel.

He didn’t just enter—he stormed in. Boots dragging gravel into the doorway, shoulders squared like someone walking into a room full of bodies. Ellie turned at the sound, but he didn’t look at her. Not yet.

His eyes were already locked on Ris.

The pressure in the room dropped. The kind of silence that screams right before thunder cracks.

“Ellie,” he said. Low. Controlled. Lethal in its calm.

She didn’t move right away. Then—“Yeah,” she muttered, and brushed past Ris with a glance like static.

Joel’s gaze didn’t follow her. It stayed fixed on Ris, sharpened like flint.

The door clicked shut behind Ellie. The room shrank.

“You stay away from her,” Joel said.

Ris turned to face him fully. Her stance didn’t shift. Her voice stayed dry and even, a match held just far enough from flame.

“She came to me.”

“Don’t matter.”

He stepped forward—slow, deliberate. Not enough to be threatening. Just enough to make it clear he could be.

And then—click.

The sound was quiet. But unmistakable.

Joel had flipped the safety off his sidearm.

He hadn’t drawn it. Hadn’t lifted it. But he didn’t need to.

The implication was enough to send a chill through the room—more final than any shout. Ris clocked it instantly. The way his fingers curled too close to the grip. The way his weight shifted just enough to brace.

She held her ground.

“I don’t care if you sew gold into bullet wounds,” Joel growled. “Firefly’s a Firefly.”

Ris’s jaw clenched.

“You think you’re the first person to spit that in my face?”

Joel’s voice didn’t raise, but it hardened.

“You so much as breathe in her direction wrong—”

“You gonna kill me?” she cut in.

That made him pause. Just half a second.

She pressed.

“That what you do, Joel? Tie up loose ends? Start seeing ghosts and reach for the nearest weapon?”

“If I have to.”

“Of course you would,” she snapped. “You already decided what kind of monster I am.”

“You don’t know the first thing about—”

“And you don’t know a goddamn thing about me,” Ris said, stepping toward him now. “But you’ve already made up your mind. You see the Firefly and not the person. You see a threat because it’s easier than asking who you’d be if you’d lost differently.”

Joel’s jaw flexed so tight she thought it might crack.

“I’ve met your kind before,” he said.

“And I’ve buried mine,” Ris shot back.

They stood like that, only a few feet apart. Breathing like they were still mid-battle. And maybe they were. Not with each other. Not just with themselves.

With what they couldn’t undo.

Joel’s voice dropped again. Quieter now. But darker.

“Were you there?”

Ris’s throat tightened.

“Does it matter?”

“Answer the question.”

She stared back at him, eyes sharp but rimmed in exhaustion.

“No. You don’t want the truth. You want someone to aim your grief at.”

Joel didn’t respond. Didn’t move.

But something in him pulled taut, like a string stretched past its limit.

Finally, she looked down. Her gloves were still stained from the morning—dried blood flaking across her palms.

“It’s fair,” she said. “I don’t know what I am either.”

Joel stayed another heartbeat. Silent. Watching her like he was waiting for her to become the worst thing in the room.

Then—he reached up.

Clicked the safety back on.

Turned.

And walked out.

No parting shot. No closing slam. Just the weight of every unspoken accusation dragging behind him like chains.

Ris exhaled.

Only then did she realize her hands were shaking.

Not from fear. Not from guilt.

From being known.

By someone who hated what they recognized.

It was the weight of being seen—really seen—and not knowing what someone was going to do with what they found.

—

Jackson was quiet that afternoon, but the kind of quiet that prickled with watchful eyes. Ris’s boots left shallow prints in the slush-crusted street as she moved between buildings.

She passed a group of women sorting laundry. One of them stopped folding mid-motion and stared.

She didn’t wave. Ris didn’t either.

A man outside the mechanics nodded at her. A second one looked away. Children playing near the stockyard quieted when she got too close.

“She could save ten lives here and still be the ghost in the room,” she thought.

And then she saw them.

Joel and Ellie. Mid-conversation, or something like it. Ellie animated, hands moving, voice sharp even at a distance.

Joel looked past her.

Right at Ris.

The moment their eyes locked, Ellie’s mouth stopped moving.

Ris didn’t break stride.

31 notes · View notes

pascalmybeloved · 2 months ago

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CHAPTER 1: THE GIRL IN THE SNOW

Next Chapter | Masterpost | Read on AO3

Pairing: Jackson!Joel Miller x F!Doctor OC | Enemies to Lovers

Word Count: 3.5k words

Summary: After the massacre at St. Mary’s Hospital, Joel Miller is haunted by guilt and fury—especially when a young ex-Firefly doctor arrives in Jackson.

WARNINGS: 18+ MINORS DNI - descriptions of suicide, grief and trauma response, parental mental illness and cognitive decline, medical imagery, emotional abuse and domestic instability, PTSD symptoms and flashbacks, references to hunger, exposure, and near-death from cold, themes of abandonment and loneliness

Age 17 — Grand Lake, CO, Winter — 7 years before

She only left for twenty minutes.

The antiseptic was nearly gone. She knew where to find more—two apartment blocks over, under a collapsed stairwell where she'd stashed emergency supplies weeks earlier. It wasn’t far. She ran the whole way. Didn’t stop to check her breath. Didn’t hesitate.

When she got back, the door was cracked.

And the world had ended again.

There was no scream. No thrashing. No scolding from the back room asking where she’d been. Just stillness. A kind of quiet that never belonged in that apartment.

The blood was already drying by the time she stepped inside.

Her mother was on the floor beside the radiator, knees curled in, eyes open. The scissors Ris used for cutting gauze lay by her feet, slick with red. And there, near her open hand, was a piece of paper—torn from the corner of Annie’s old sketchpad.

“I’m sorry. I can’t remember why he’s gone. And it hurts too much to forget.”

Ris didn’t move at first. Couldn’t.

Then a sound broke through—raw, jagged, high and animal.

Annie.

Screaming from the hallway, curled into herself like her ribs were splintering apart. Ris dropped to her knees, pulled her sister close, tried to cover her ears.

But there was no way to cover the truth.

Their mother was dead.

And it was Ris’s fault.

She was the one who left. She was the one who’d promised to be back before anything happened. She was the one who couldn’t hold it all together.

She could still feel Annie’s fingernails digging into her arms, could still hear the guttural sobs echoing down the stairwell. After that day, Annie barely spoke for weeks.

Ris didn’t sleep again. Not really.

Something inside her cracked that day. Not with the sound of grief—but the absence of it. A strange stillness in her chest. Not numbness. Just... blankness. Like the world had gone cold, and her body forgot how to warm.

She sat with her mother’s body until night fell. Until the shadows started asking questions she couldn’t answer.

That was the day she stopped believing in rescue.

That was the day she started running for real.

Age 25 — Jackson, WY, Winter — Present Day

It was snowing the day they found her.

The sky hung low, a slab of bruised iron pressed against the mountains, and the air had the bite of a blade dipped in ice. Snow drifted in slow, aimless spirals, soft and heavy as ash. It blanketed everything in muffled silence, the kind that made you forget your own name if you stood in it too long.

Tommy spotted her first: a smear of shadow collapsed against a rock, limbs tangled like broken branches, half-submerged in drift and stillness. Her coat—what was left of it—hung shredded around her frame, the torn shoulder darkened with old blood that looked more like rust.

For a long beat, he thought she was dead.

"Got something," he muttered to the others, but his voice felt too loud against the hush of the storm.

He dismounted. The crunch of his boots in the snow sounded like a crack through glass.

She didn’t move, not until he was crouched beside her. That’s when he saw it—the almost imperceptible rise and fall of her ribs. The tremble of life. Barely.

Then she opened her eyes.

It wasn’t fear in them. Not hope either. Just a distant, vacant kind of dullness—like whatever spark had once lived behind them had long since gone quiet.

Tommy had seen that look before. On soldiers too shell-shocked to speak. On kids who'd lost everything and knew better than to ask for it back.

"Hey there," he said gently, voice low and even. "Can you hear me?"

She blinked. Snow clung to her lashes like salt.

"We’re gonna get you warm, alright? Got a horse not far. Can you stand?"

Her lips parted. Nothing came out. Then, after a pause long enough to make his heart clench—

"Don’t take me back."

Her voice was hoarse. Splintered. Like it hadn’t been used in days.

Tommy frowned. "Back where?"

She didn’t answer.

Didn’t fight when they lifted her, didn’t speak when they wrapped the old military blanket around her shoulders. She let herself be carried, like her limbs weren’t hers anymore. Like she’d handed her body over to the snow and it just hadn’t finished the job.

Her name, when she finally gave it, came out like an apology.

Ris.

—

They rode slow, careful. The trail to Jackson was slick and narrowing under the weight of the storm. Every breath turned to mist. Every hoofbeat sounded swallowed by the cold.

Tommy kept glancing back. She was still upright, somehow. Still clinging to the saddle horn with bone-white fingers.

The wind picked up near the last bend, howling like a mourning dog across the peaks. When the town gates finally came into view, Tommy exhaled a breath he hadn’t known he’d been holding.

The gates groaned open on heavy hinges, and warm light spilled out in slants. It hit the snow like gold spilled over bone.

Ris blinked at it, but her expression didn’t change.

Maria was waiting on the porch of the lodge, arms tucked into her sides. The look in her eyes shifted when she saw what Tommy was carrying.

"Jesus."

They got her inside. The wood floor was warm from the stove, and the scent of cedar and something sweet lingered faintly in the air.

But Ris didn’t shiver. Didn’t blink. Just stood there, skin pale and split at the knuckles, eyes too quiet.

"We’ll put her in the south hall," Maria said softly. "It’s warmer."

Outside, the wind screamed.

Inside, Ris said nothing at all.

—

The first time Ris woke up in Jackson, she thought she was hallucinating.

The room was too clean. The sheets were scratchy but dry. Her arms didn’t ache from holding a weapon. Her ears weren’t tuned for gunfire.

Her brain started listing facts: Your left foot has frostbite. The wound on your side isn’t infected yet. You need protein. Hydration. Shelter.

And then another voice.

You're safe.

That one she didn’t trust.

—

That night, she dreamed of Annie.

The apartment had smelled like antiseptic and old laundry. Their mother’s pills sat in a plastic organizer by the window, but half the time she forgot what they were for.

"Where’s your father?" she’d ask, over and over again.

"He’s gone," Ris would say, soft and steady.

"Gone where?"

And when Ris didn’t answer fast enough, the episodes came like thunderclaps. Crashing anger. Screaming. Sometimes confusion so thick it curled into violence.

Annie would hide in the closet when it happened. Fourteen years old, knees pulled to her chest, sobbing into her coat sleeve.

Ris was eighteen, barely. She’d lock the bathroom door and crouch behind it, whispering through the wood: "Annie, it's okay. It's okay. She's just sick. It's not her."

But Annie didn’t believe her. Not really. And Ris stopped believing it too.

She remembered trying to make soup with shaking hands, trying to hold their mother’s wrists down while she screamed about the war, about the blood, about how her husband would never leave her.

"He wouldn't leave me. Not unless he was dead. Not unless he hated me."

"He doesn't hate you," Ris would whisper. "He loved you so much."

"Then where is he?!"

One night, Ris returned from a twenty-minute run to scavenge a bottle of antiseptic from a nearby apartment. Twenty minutes.

The blood hadn’t dried when she got back. Her mother was curled on the hardwood floor, the blood pooling to a halt just before the doorframe. The note was written in jagged, barely legible loops:

"I'm sorry. I can't remember why he's gone. And it hurts too much to forget."

Annie had seen it. Had screamed until her throat went raw.

Ris hadn’t slept since.

—

She woke up sweating.

The window was still frosted over. Her fingers clutched the scissors she kept under the pillow, white-knuckled.

Her chest ached with the weight of memory. It took ten full minutes before she could breathe again.

She squeezed her eyes shut. Tried to call her mind somewhere safer. Somewhere still intact.

Annie.

She pictured her there in the warmth of the old kitchen, apron too big, stirring beans into a chipped pot, humming off-key. Flour dusted across her nose. Always smiling with her whole face—especially when she caught Ris watching her.

She remembered the way Annie crouched down to play with the youngest kids in their community—how gentle she’d been, even when everything around them was loud and broken.

That memory softened something.

Then another anchor took hold.

Medicine.

Clean sutures. White gauze. The calm steadiness of antiseptic and purpose. The way her hands stopped shaking when she worked. The way pain could be undone if you just knew where to stitch.

Annie. And medicine.

That’s what steadied her.

That’s what kept her alive.

—

As a thank-you for coming on board at the clinic, Tommy and Maria gifted Ris with an old house just shy of a mile from the clinic. It was the kind of offer people didn't make anymore—generous, quiet, undeserved. Ris tried to refuse it. Tommy refused harder.

The first time she stepped inside, it already felt like home.

That was the worst part.

The guilt settled fast—low and familiar, like a fever setting in behind her ribs. Guilt that she’d lived to see another home. Another door to open. Another night to survive.

Her family hadn’t. Why should she?

The house smelled faintly of pine and something sharper beneath it—like bleach dried into the bones of the floorboards, like the ghosts of scrubbing hands still trying to keep rot from seeping in. Her boots echoed too loud across the wood, every step answering with a hollow sound that made her feel like she was walking through someone else’s memory.

The silence wasn’t peaceful. It was expectant. It listened.

She left one light on as she unpacked. Not because she needed it, but because her mother always did. Said it helped her remember what room she was in. Said the dark made the walls breathe.

Ris didn’t believe in things like that. But the light stayed on anyway.

She opened her bags with stiff hands—saddlebags stretched and battered from the ride, canvas worn thin in the places where she’d clutched too tightly. Inside: clothes that no longer fit quite right, a stitched kit of surgical tools wrapped in flannel, a few scattered photographs she hadn’t looked at in months, and something worse—air heavy with memory.

Each shirt she unfolded carried a ghost. This one—she wore when her mother couldn’t remember her name. This one—when she held Annie’s hand through gunfire. This one—when they told her to leave and not come back.

A tear slipped down her cheek and landed on the collar of an old, oversized T-shirt. She cursed, voice too loud in the quiet, and wiped her eyes with the back of her wrist. The shirt still smelled like a day that didn’t exist anymore—like sunscreen, and diesel, and the echo of someone humming a song she no longer remembered the words to.

A wave of hunger struck her. Sudden. Animal.

She tried to remember the last thing she’d eaten and came up short.

Tommy had told her to come by town hall for food if she needed it.

She hadn’t gotten groceries. She hadn’t thought about groceries. “Fucking—fine,” she muttered.

She shoved on her coat, boots, gloves that didn’t match. The cold caught her the second she stepped outside—bit her cheeks until they bloomed pink, scraped her throat with dry air that tasted like frost and pine bark. The snow was soft beneath her boots, but the ground beneath that? Hard. Frozen. Like the world was just pretending to be soft.

She walked with her head down. The path was lit by weak strings of electric lights that blinked every so often—Jackson’s charm, a little frayed at the edges.

The walk was too long. Too quiet.

Her thoughts crept up beside her like wolves.

When she reached the town hall, her fingers were stiff and her shoulders ached from holding herself too tightly. She pushed open the doors and stepped into the warm clamor of conversation and the smell of something cooking—potatoes, maybe, or canned stew, thick with salt and familiarity.

The room buzzed with life.

Townspeople lined up with trays, voices overlapping, laughter spilling out like smoke. It smelled like belonging. Like comfort. Like the kind of life Ris had only ever seen from a distance, through the window of something she wasn’t allowed to touch.

She froze in the doorway.

There were too many bodies. Too much ease. Too many people who knew where to sit, who to sit beside, what to say. People with history between them. People with roots.

She was none of those things.

Ris walked past an empty table and took a seat in a quiet corner. Her tray clattered faintly against the wood, drawing no attention, and she was grateful for it. She watched them instead—the way they touched without fear. Elbows knocking. Inside jokes. Conversations picked up mid-sentence like they’d never ended.

She didn’t envy it. She didn’t want it. Not really.

But God, it made her ache.

A child ran past her table—grinning, wild—and threw their arms around a woman’s waist. “Mama!”

Ris turned her head so fast her neck cracked. Her eyes burned. Her chest didn’t.

Not yet.

—

Maria stopped her on the third day. "You sure you’re up to working in the clinic?"

Ris just looked at her—steady, unsmiling, clinical.

Maria raised her hands, stepping back with a half-grin. “Alright, alright. Message received.”

She turned, but paused halfway through the doorframe. “If you need sutures, gauze, morphine… you come to me. Not Joel.”

That got Ris to still. Joel?

Her voice was quiet, clipped. “Why would I go to Joel?”

Maria’s gaze flicked to her, unreadable. Then she shook her head, more to herself than to Ris.

“You wouldn’t,” she said. “And that’s good.”

—

Ris stitched her first patient on the fifth day.

It was a clean laceration—a gash across the thigh from a broken fence post. The man on the exam table was in his forties. Flannel rolled to the elbows, one pant leg cut away to reveal a fresh gash across the thigh—deep but clean. The blood had slowed. The wound waited.

Someone outside muttered that it would take a real doctor.

“Lucky me,” Ris murmured, already gloving up.

She didn’t flinch at the sight of torn skin. Her hands moved in crisp, clinical sequence—saline rinse, gauze press, needle threaded with practiced grace.

Her fingers didn’t tremble. Not once.

And for the first time since arriving in Jackson, she wasn’t wondering who was watching her. Or when the other shoe would drop. Or if anyone recognized the face behind her eyes.

Here, in this small room heavy with antiseptic and shallow breath, she wasn’t a stranger. She wasn’t a Firefly. She wasn’t even Ris.

She was a doctor. That was all.

“You from around here?” the man asked, his voice tight as she started the first suture.

Ris didn’t look up. “East. Few towns over.”

A lie. Smooth as gauze. Already practiced.

“Well,” he hissed, breath hitching, “you’ve got good hands.”

Her needle paused. Just for a fraction of a second.

She winced, but covered it fast. A memory unspooled in her chest like thread gone too tight.

Her mother’s voice, sharp as cold steel: “Surgeons kill people with hands that tremble. You want to save lives? Then be still. Or find another line of work.”

Ris blinked hard, refocused on the stitch. The thread pulled clean. The skin drew together. The bleeding slowed.

“Thanks,” she said tightly.

When it was over, she peeled off her gloves and dropped them into the waste bin. Her hands, now bare again, looked more like tools than flesh.

The basin water turned pink as she scrubbed. Red swirling in rings, vanishing down the drain.

When the door closed behind her patient, Ris stood still in the center of the room. Her hands hovered over the edge of her kit.

She ran her fingers along the cold steel of her needle driver. The curved mouth of her hemostat. The surgical scissors tucked into cloth, dulled with age but still sharp where it counted.

In another world, she would’ve been in an OR. In this one, she sutured lacerations in makeshift clinics, rationed morphine, and tried to undo death where it lingered too long.

She opened a drawer for gauze and found something else instead—a bloodstained rag, rolled tight from some long-forgotten field dressing.

The kind they used in the camps.

Her stomach flipped.

She was back, for just a breath, in that bombed-out supply tent. Her calf split open from shrapnel. No voices. No footsteps. Just her, a flickering lantern, and the brutal quiet of being left behind. She’d stitched herself up with one hand and a piece of mirror, teeth gritted, thread tugged taut and knotted by instinct.

No one came.

Ris slammed the drawer shut.

—

She caught sight of him that evening near the stock barn.

The sky was gray and falling into shadow. The snow had slowed to a dusting, just enough to make the air feel bruised and cold.

Joel Miller stood with his back to the light, hands on his hips, jaw sharp as stone. Every line of his posture spoke one thing: tension. Not the kind that comes from pain—but the kind that comes from knowing pain could be close.

There was a girl beside him. Teenager. Loud, lively, swearing under her breath and waving her hands like someone trying to stir the air. Ris didn’t know her name yet—but the voice struck her. A little too familiar. A little too unafraid.

Joel wasn’t listening. His eyes were on Ris. Not narrowed. Not angry.

Just fixed—like he was trying to place her face in a half-forgotten memory.

She froze mid-step, one boot half-raised off the ground.

He didn’t blink. Didn’t speak. Didn’t scowl.

Just watched.

The girl kept rambling. Joel nodded absently, but his gaze never broke.

Ris forced herself to walk. One foot in front of the other, casual, like she hadn’t noticed him at all.

But she had. And he had noticed her.

She could still feel it—his stare pressing between her shoulder blades, dissecting her, as if waiting for her to flinch or lie.

He sees something. He knows something. He’s waiting for me to slip.

Then came the quieter voice. The one she'd trained herself to trust.

No. He doesn’t know a goddamn thing.

—

The sun came late the next morning, gray and half-hearted through the frost-crusted windows. Ris was restocking gauze when the clinic door creaked open behind her.

“You the new doc?”

The voice hit her like a skipped heartbeat—familiar, teenage, cocky in the way only people who’ve never been scared long enough can be.

Ris turned. There she was.

The girl from last night—smaller than her voice had sounded. Arms crossed like armor. Eyes bright with defiance. Sharp and soft at the same time.

Ris knew that voice. Had heard it echoing down a hospital corridor. Nervous but brave. Unknowing.

Recognition burned in her chest like a struck match. She buried it.

“Depends,” Ris said, tearing open a foil packet with calm hands. “You planning on bleeding?”

The girl smirked. “Only if dinner sucks again.”

Ris allowed the smallest smile. “Then chew slow.”

The girl wandered further into the room. She examined the instruments, not touching, just watching.

“I’m Ellie,” she said.

“I know,” Ris replied—too fast, too certain.

Ellie raised a brow.

Ris cleared her throat. “Tommy mentioned you.”

“Huh.” Ellie didn’t press. Just nodded like she didn’t believe her, then turned toward the door.

“See you around, Doc.”

When the door closed, Ris exhaled. Her knees felt hollow.

Her hands were still steady.

Her heart wasn’t.

The house was quiet again come nightfall. The pine-bleach scent still clung to the walls like memory.

—

Ris sat on the edge of the bed, holding her old canvas bag in her lap. In one hand, a scalpel. In the other, the seam near the bottom corner—torn just enough to show the ghost of a symbol.

The Firefly emblem. Frayed and faded.

She hadn’t looked at it in months. She didn’t hesitate.

The scalpel slid beneath the threads, clean and silent. She worked slowly, methodically—like she was removing a tumor from her own body.

Thread by thread, the past came loose.

She dropped the patch into the trash without ceremony.

That night, Ris dreamed of a drawing.

A cat with wings—Annie’s drawing, taped crookedly to the inside wall of their old bunker. Its face was round and soft, eyes too big. Hearts drawn on the ears in purple crayon. The wings were messy, one longer than the other.

In the dream, the feathers started to fall.

One by one, they drifted down to the floor.

The cat looked at her. It didn’t understand.

It couldn’t fly.

Ris woke with her pillow damp beneath her cheek, her fists clenched tight in the blankets.

The sun hadn’t risen yet.

Neither had she.

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