Prompt 316: What were you doing ten years ago?/ Theatrical Muse

It was late, Joe had been in bed for hours and while Abby hadn't been there long, he suspected she was probably asleep as well, so, why wasn't he? The had only been back from Croatia for a few days and already he was finding himself missing it, and the feeling was bringing up ones he hadn't thought about in years. When had he last felt like this?

Chicago, that was it. Almost ten years earlier, his life had been one of instability then, one of constant motion, and while he might have told himself he was happy with the choices he was making at the time, looking back on things now, he could see that he hadn't been.

He was living on his boat when he first started working at County, the work he was doing nothing more than a call to fill in on a shift here, or a shift there at whatever hospital needed him. He'd tried to pretend it didn't bother him that when he was at County only Carol made any attempt to see him as more than the temporary he was, but, in truth he would have liked to have been seen as more.

Life wasn't easy for him then, he knew no one, he still struggled with the language, and even the very medicine that he was dedicating his life to, was still new to him. Chicago turned out to be the place where his life changed, the place where he finally stopped running from the ghosts of his past, the place where he discovered that his life ultimately held a future.

"Luka, are you coming to bed?" When Abby's quiet voice called to him from the stairs Luka downed the beer he held before turning to her.

"Yeah, go ahead and go on up, I'll be right there." While he wouldn't know it in those early years, Chicago would be the place where he would again discover he was capable of once more learning to love, and over time that he would again become a husband and father. Despite all of it's ups and downs, his decision to put down roots in Chicago had saved him, but, it was here, now, in Boston, that they would fully take root and flourish, of that he was sure. Setting the bottle on the table he rose, Abby was waiting.