Archive of Our Own

“Like a swallow or a crane I clamor,

I moan like a dove. 

My eyes are weary with looking upward.”

- Isaiah 38:14 (NRSV)

Whitaker honestly thought the interrogation would be worse. 

Javadi, first blood, came out of it drenched in sweat and refused to talk to anyone who wasn’t a patient for the rest of the day. McKay came in from hers looking significantly more pissed off than usual. Santos has been keeping her mouth shut to “preserve the mystery”. Dennis started to think it was all a big prank until Mohan came back from hers and started yelling at patients. Mel was teary-eyed all day after hers. Even Collins had to do it. Even Collins! 

He arrives for his shift thirty minutes early, as Dr. Robby had requested (the calendar invite simply said “meeting”.) Once every couple weeks he does nights, when they need an extra hand. Robby gives him a slim smile and beckons him outside, down the block. To his surprise, the interrogation seems to have been booked at Taco Bell. 

“I’m buying,” Robby says once they’re through the door. “What do you want?”

Dennis, off-balance, heart rate a little erratic, scans the menu for something that isn’t spicy. (Santos likes to call him “turbo-white”, which he understands to be an adequate description. She’s one to talk— she puts sugar in her spaghetti sauce.) Mortified at his own digestive inadequacies, he orders a single cheese quesadilla, which he instantly regrets. Dr. Robby asks for a black coffee. Stolid. Classy. Intimidating. I am so fucked. 

Dr. Robby’s first words after they sit down are, “By the way, this is not an interrogation.”

Dennis is still staring at his limp quesadilla. It’s making him look insane. It’s for five-year-olds. He’s eating this at a meeting with his boss. “Oh. Okay. …What is it?”

“Just… a talk. I might try and make it a more regular thing. I’m doing it with everyone, just trying to see how we’re all getting on.” What a bizarrely vague thing to say. “Still settling in?” 

“Uh huh.” He takes a bite of the quesadilla, which— just his luck— is painfully hot. “It’s great,” he says around the burning cheese, like an idiot. “I’m really liking it. Everyone’s been… so great.” 

Robby sits back. “How long have you been in Pittsburgh?”

He finally swallows. “A few months in the city proper. I had that rotation upstairs before, and I’m gonna try and extend this one, I think. And that should take me to graduation.”

“Good to hear. You’ve been a real help.” He clears his throat. “I’m told you’ve been living with Santos. How’s that?”

“Um, it’s good?”

“I don’t want to pretend to be HR, and you’re not technically an employee, but I do have some advice about, um, relationships in the workplace—”

“No,” Dennis splutters, “oh, god, definitely not. Sorry. Just roommates. She’s great. But. No.” It’s mortifying— Robby, believing that. Surely he’s not that dense?

Dr. Robby holds up his hands. “Alright, I’m sorry. Just wanted to check some boxes. You’d better tell Princess and Perlah that, though. The nurses have been taking bets.”

Dennis is still shaking his head. “Seriously. No. Never.”

Robby looks at him and takes a long pause. He scratches his beard like he’s searching for something to say. Dennis takes the opportunity to finish his quesadilla so he doesn’t have to keep looking at it. “Whitaker, can I ask you a question?”

Mouth full at the wrong time once more, he manages a labored “Mm-hm.” Okay, he gets why the others cracked. He feels like he’s being set up to embarrass himself. Maybe that’s the point. Maybe it’s hazing. Maybe he made Santos eat Swedish food or something.

Dr. Robby leans in. “How does a guy with a theology degree who can quote a full page of scripture not recognize the Sh’ma?”

Not the question he was expecting. “Ah.” He’s committed every word of their conversation in Pedes to memory, but he didn’t think Robby would recall that part. “I think you’re getting it confused. You’re thinking of Religious Studies, not Theology.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Well,” Dennis says slowly, had to get to it at some point, “you might take a Religious Studies class at a regular university. And that would cover world religions. Not to say that, uh, other religions are foreign, or lesser, or anything—”

“What do you mean, ‘regular university’?”

“I, uh. I got my BA at a seminary school?” he squeaks out, bracing for impact. “St. Anselm’s Presbyterian College? In Omaha?”

“Oh. Wow.” Robby frowns. “Huh.”

“I wanted to be a pastor.” He knows full well how impossible that is to explain. “Even when I was a kid, that’s always what I thought I would do. I don’t know. It probably seems silly now.”

Robby leans back. Studies him. “That’s… honestly, Whitaker, that’s pretty wild. I mean— sorry, genuinely interested— what exactly do you study at a seminary?”

“Scripture. Uh, liturgy. Christian history— pre-modern, medieval, reformation. Philosophy. A lot of stuff.”

“I don’t mean to pry, but how…?”

“...Did I get into med school?” That’s always the question. “Took my pre-recs at a community college. I got on my knees and begged on my application form. It all came kind of easy when I got down to it. Even the MCAT. We didn’t have a TV in our house when I was little, so I mostly read encyclopedias?”

Robby raises an eyebrow. “I guess the better question is why.”

“Why did I read encyclopedias?”

“No, why do you want to be a doctor? Seriously.” He swigs the last dregs of his coffee. “It’s a big swing. How does someone switch from priesthood to medicine?”

Dennis swallows. “I don’t see them as very different in practice, sir.” Robby frowns, and motions for him to go on, but he doesn’t know how to put it into words. He stumbles forward anyway. “I guess I… I always wanted to save people. Right? Who doesn’t? I wanted to be good. And I thought, I should be saving souls. If I can, then I’m obligated. But at St. Anselm’s, y’know, I had a lot of time. I thought about… Christ… a lot.” He looks down at his lap. Robby doesn’t want to hear about Christ. “His works. His grace. I thought about what I loved most about him. You know, he’s a healer. First and foremost, that’s his job, it’s what he does. At the same time I started wondering whether… well, whether anybody was really coming back to save us.” He’s not sure he’s ever said that out loud to anybody. “And so I figured, I couldn’t fill baskets of bread, I couldn’t give anybody real salvation, I didn’t know what to say to lift up anybody’s soul in a, uh, material way. But I could heal the sick. I could save them that way. Well, I could try.” He takes a tiny sip of water. “So I tried.”

“And here you are.”

“And here I am.” Dennis looks up. Robby has an unreadable expression on his face. “Uh. That’s it.”

“That’s very admirable. You know that, right?”

“Oh,” says Dennis. “Thanks, I guess?” It didn’t feel admirable at the time. It felt like running away. An excuse to ignore his growing flickers of doubt. “Um, Dr. Robby? Why did everyone else get so messed up after their meetings? Because you’re being really nice.”

“Well,” Robby says archly, “not everybody approaches this job with religious devotion.”

“You’re really just doing this to get to know us?”

He smiles that tiny smile again. “I’m doing this because I want you to have a platform to talk to me if anything’s wrong. Maybe you’re burnt out. Or you have… doubts. Maybe you’ve got grievances with me. Or a resident. Maybe you’ve got,” he sighs, “problems at home. Maybe you just need to vent to someone about something. That’s the point. I don’t know. I don’t usually get the chance. Whatever it is. I want you to know you can trust me, and we can talk about it.”

“Right,” says Dennis, strangely moved. “Well, thanks. I guess.”

Robby gets out of the booth and stretches out his open palm. Dennis grabs it. “Good news is, you seem to be doing pretty damn well on your own.”

He can’t be sure, but Robby’s expression seems… almost proud. What, of him? He crushes his hand as he shuffles out of the booth and tries to fix on an anxious grin.

When he recounts the meeting to a departing Santos later by the lockers, she snickers under her breath. “You’re such a teacher’s pet.”

“Why, what did he ask you?”

“Oh,” she shrugs, “it doesn’t matter. I fed him a complex entanglement of lies. It was pretty fun, actually.”

“You what?”

She eyes him coolly. “You know it’s because of Langdon, right? The wellness check-ins? The personal chats? You see how carefully he talks to all of us? He doesn’t want it to happen again, that’s all. And he thinks maybe this time he can, like, foresee it, if he puts in the effort.”

Dennis ruminates on this. Not for the first time, he feels a pang of pity for Dr. Robby. Losing trust in someone that close to him. He thinks he can understand his newfound desperation for control. “So he’s psychoanalyzing us. Looking for weaknesses.”

“Bingo. And I’m not giving him any material.” She scratches her nose. “Maybe I should drop some hints that I’m developing messianic delusions. Really freak him out.”

“That’s not very nice,” he protests, and then realizes he really is a teacher’s pet, and as Santos starts pointing and laughing he covers his face with his gloved hands and groans and heads off to check in with a patient. Any patient. Just anywhere but here. 

“Hey. Dweeb. What the fuck is this?”

Dennis is barely able to look up from his book before Santos yanks it out of his hands and snorts, actually snorts, at him. “Hey!”

She turns it over dubiously. “Augustine? Seriously?”

“I was,” he says, knowing he’s already lost the battle, “in the middle of a page.” Sitting in a patch of late sun on the couch, actually taking a minute to relax for once. For once. They have got to stop scheduling the same days off. 

She gives him an amused look and drops Confessions on the dusty carpet before settling down right next to him even though the couch is too small and creaks ominously with their shared weight. She takes a deep and exaggerated breath. An ominous portent. “Whitaker, we’re gonna need to have a little roommate chat.”

“Do I want to be having this conversation right now?” He stretches his arm out in vain. Confessions remains an inch out of reach.

“Look, I think it’s important we be frank about some uncomfortable topics. If your tiny little tender ears are okay with that.”

“I’m twenty-seven years old.”

“It’s Dyke Night,” she huffs. And then looks at him expectantly.

He blinks. “Okay?”

“At the Roxy.”

“What… does that have to do with me? Exactly?”

She raises her eyebrows. “Just, y’know, depending on how the evening goes, I want you to be… prepared.”

“…For what?”

“For the inevitable developments of Dyke Night?”

He stares at her. 

Her nostrils flare. “If the bedframe’s-a-rockin’…”

“Oh,” he says, knowing full well neither of them own a bedframe. “I see. Um, yeah. I’ll probably be asleep by then, so… Yeah. That’s fine.”

She exhales gratefully. “You wanna come with?”

“To…”

“To Dyke Night.”

“Um,” he says. “But I’m not. A, uh.”

She ruffles his hair. “Aww, you’re like an honorary dyke, we won’t mind. We’re very inclusive.”

“No, I’m good—”

Still ruffling. “My squeegee. My little field mouse. You’re nothing but a bundle of non-threatening farmspawn.”

“Please just go back to Huckleberry.”

“No problemo.” She flashes a toothy grin, much like a shark’s. “And look, hey, if you ever come back here with anyone…” She trails off. “Well, I promise I’ll be normal about it.”

“Right.”

“We can have a policy of total honesty. No worries. If you need me out of here, or anything—“

“Yep.” He finally scooches back and picks up his book. “Thanks. Okay. See you.”

He flips through and gets back to where he left off, chewing on the inside of his cheek. It’s difficult to concentrate on the words. You were radiant and resplendent, you put to flight my blindness. You were fragrant, and I drew in my breath and now pant after you. I tasted you, and I feel but hunger and thirst for you. You touched me, and I am set on fire to attain the peace which is yours…

“Whitaker,” she says, quietly, after a blissful moment of silence. “Can I ask you a question?”

Lot of that going around. He sighs and earmarks his page. “Yeah.”

“Do you fuck?”

“Excuse me?”

“Are you, at present, sexually active.”

“Trin.”

She snaps her fingers at him. “Don’t call me that. Answer the question.”

“Ummm.” He tries to scrape together something better than um. It doesn’t come to him. Obviously.

“I’m sorry, it’s just, you never…” She raises an eyebrow. “No offense, or anything.”

“Well,” he says, shrugging, feeling insane that they’re even talking about this, “I’m a busy guy.”

“We’re all busy guys.” Santos hauls herself off the couch, ostensibly to make a speech. (Dennis looks at her full-body joggers, thinks: you’re going out in that? Then again, maybe he doesn’t fully understand the mechanics of Dyke Night.) “Okay. Look. I get it. You’re all cooped up in here. You’re still getting used to the city. It’s fine! You just gotta put yourself out there! Lots of fish in the sea. You’re almost a doctor, you’re a total catch. Hey, I can set you up if you want.” Her eyes narrow. “You’re straight, right?”

He wants to ask, what the fuck is that supposed to mean?

What comes out of his mouth is, instead, “Uhh.” Which is, classically, the wrong thing to say in this sort of situation.

Her face goes bone white. “Holy shit, you’re— not? And you didn’t tell me?”

“No, I’m not. Gay. Not gay,” he stammers. “Jesus.”

She sits down backwards on a chair and studies him very closely. Like an asshole. “Oh my god,” she whispers, revelatory. “You’re a virgin.”

Dennis wants to hit her. He wants to check himself into the Pitt as a victim of psychological terrorism. Total honesty, he thinks desperately. “Well. Okay. Look.”

“No way.”

“I went to seminary college. I was— I was celibate, for a really long time. It’s kind of part of the whole deal. Which is why talking about this out loud is extremely weird for me.”

“I was raised Catholic, I know how it works.” She steeples her fingers together. “So. Okay. Are you. Still celibate?”

He knows if he lies she’ll be able to tell. His voice will go squeaky and his words will get tangled up and he’ll get all red in the face. Easy diagnosis, no cure, at least not from her. “Um,” he says, fidgeting, looking down at his hole-y socks, “technically?”

Her expression turns, humiliatingly, to concern. “Oh, crap, I’m not naming-and-shaming. There’s nothing wrong with… I mean, seriously, no worries, if it’s not something you want.”

“Celibacy,” he blurts out, “doesn’t mean not wanting it.”

It’s probably the first thing that has ever shocked Santos to complete silence.

(Dennis’ hand starts, without permission, to shake.)

“Um,” Santos eventually starts, “so, what the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

He rockets off the couch and pulls a hoodie on before she can do any further cross-examining of his tortured psyche and virginal purity. He ignores his telltale tremble. “Y’know, actually, I am gonna go now, I think.”

“Whitaker!”

“Get some steps in. I think I’ll go to the gym. Leave the apartment free for you tonight. Probably better anyways.”

“C’mon, come back, can we please please please unpack that—”

He shuts the door without looking back and bolts down the stairs. He’s halfway down the street before he stops and takes a few shallow gulping breaths and lets himself think about the conversation he’s just had. A totally normal, not weird, not crazy conversation between roommates. Not that he’d know what that’s like. 

He hasn’t given himself the opportunity to actually think about— about that, about wanting. There was no time; for years he moved like a ghost, an unnamed bystander, he slipped through crowds and nobody asked. Nobody offered. Opportunity? What opportunity? He lived in a hospital bed for two months, hopped shelters for a minute before that— what would he have said? How would he have explained that to anyone? He was pretty fucking occupied with surviving. He wasn’t so prideful as to consider dragging anybody else into his mess.

And before that… well, before that, it was med school, he was completely wiped all the time, he lived an hour from campus in some horrible basement without windows or a stove or a bed, slipping on his meager rent payments to try and stop the farm from falling deeper into debt, suffering from honest-to-god black mold exposure, he had bigger things on his mind, and before that he was at St. Anselm’s, where obviously sex was not to be thought of, not ever— a promising boy, probably born in a literal manger, filling his days cross-referencing dusty pages and Calvin’s proclamations and stories of sin and redemption, spending his nights kneeling by his bed and trying to touch the grace of God and sliding into waking dreams of alcoves, and blue veins, and the slaughterhouse, and before that he was home, and everything he did was wrong, and he didn’t have desires, he wasn’t supposed to, he was just a kid, he did his job and kept his tongue and slept like a stone. 

Never a good time. No space to take a breath. But now…

He wanders over to the YMCA a few blocks down and stares through the window at the treadmills and rowing machines, the line of guys soaked with sweat doing pull-ups, and he shivers and turns around, pulling his hoodie tighter. Well, what does he like? What does he want? He feels like if someone— anyone— touched him, even lightly, he would take off running like a wild hare. He can’t even summon the courage to go to the gym. What if someone saw him, his skin pallid under the fluorescents? What if they really looked? Worse, what if someone wanted him, whatever he was? What if he found himself in a… situation? He’s had no experience, he has no way of knowing what he likes, and now he’s so old, so far into his adult life, it’s too late, it’s all curdled— he knows he has the capacity to desire things and in some sense he does have desires but he can’t access that part of him, it’s alien, so far removed it may as well not exist. It’s like there’s a vague blurry shape waiting behind a wall of plexiglass, obscured and pacing, and he’s supposed to just get in there with it, like it’s not a beast, like it won’t swallow him. And maybe it’s beautiful. Maybe it’s terrible, and cruel, and frightening. But he can’t know. He still can’t get through. 

He finds a park and shivers on a bench as the sun sets behind the skyline, a mild milky pink. He should have brought his book. Get his mind off this whole thing. At St. Anselm’s he always sat radiant and fascinated when the lecturers spoke about total control of the body, the shaping of frivolous desires into armour, the necessity of pain, of suffering, starving oneself along with Christ, feeling all his frightful passions, and yet still going on. Discipline. Lack. Denial. He never had any trouble with that. He liked the structure, the rules of it. It was whenever he denied himself that he felt the most free. How could that make sense? He wonders: can it still be true? After all this time he still can’t convince himself it’s not cruel to feel good. To want something and then pursue it. That’s funny. He left the church entirely, switched his focus to really helping people, really saving them, not just the vague enterprise of their souls. But he can’t deny it— suffering does make him a better doctor. Total clarity. Rules and consequences. Blinding faith in the strength of his hands and the myriad clockwork systems of life. What’s the difference? He’s still denying himself to better the lives of others. He still can’t get enough sleep, can’t get full, doesn’t get breaks, doesn’t get paid. And he likes it. It fulfills him. What kind of person is he that misery fulfills him? 

Of course there’s something wrong with him. Of course he’s like this, his insides all twisted up. How could he be any different? What did he expect? 

(His thoughts turn reflexively back to Augustine: no one knows what he himself is made of, except his own spirit within him, yet there is still some part of him which remains hidden even from his own spirit.)

Dennis wanders the streets for hours, all his old haunts; Union Station, Mon Wharf Landing with its daunting huddles of tents, the shaded spot under Liberty Bridge where he slept on his first night off the Greyhound. By the time he pads back into the apartment it’s well past one. He holds back a snort when he sees a sock on Santos’ doorknob and an unfamiliar flannel in a pile on the floor. He reminds himself to make breakfast for three. 

After washing his face thoroughly and locking his bedroom door he collapses onto his mattress and, somewhat shyly, sticks his hand down his briefs. Just testing it out. Throat tight, he looks around furtively, as if someone’s standing over his shoulder. It’s not like it doesn’t give him pleasure, he just doesn’t have the need much. What should he even think about? Most of the genitals he sees now are in some kind of medical distress, it’s enough to put anyone off. Boobs just make him think, breast cancer. Hormonal conditions. Piercing infections. It’s a reflex. Maybe he could try a scenario? But what’s sexy to him? He sits very still and imagines a naked woman in a white bed and all he can think of are cells and threads of muscles, the best ways to cut her open, the arrangement of her organs, the miasma of bile in her blood. Okay, so he’s touching her, slowly, a soft finger trailing around her arteries, feeling for a pulse, but the woman in his head is lifeless now, deoxygenated, ready for a timely rescue, and he kisses breath into her and he pumps at her chest but it’s worthless, even in the fantasy he’s still breaking her ribs, and she can’t reward him because her vitals plunge and she doesn’t wake up. Can’t manage to save someone in his most private fantasies. He’s such a lump of nothing. He gives himself a few sorry dry strokes and flops hopelessly back onto his pillow, which makes a suspicious crinkling noise. 

He frowns and reaches back under it and tugs out a pamphlet, one of the ones they hand out at the hospital for common diseases. It’s been scribbled all over with black Sharpie. 

SO, YOU’VE BEEN DIAGNOSED WITH GONORRHEA SEXUAL REPRESSION

Relax! Gonorrhea is common and treatable. Gonorrhea is a sexually transmitted bacterial infection that can happen in your penis, rectum, throat, or vagina. It’s caused by a bacteria called Neisseria gonorrhoeae.

• How is it diagnosed? A medical practitioner can diagnose gonorrhea by swabbing your throat, rectum, or vagina. Some practitioners allow you to do your own swabs. ask a few penetrating and disrespectful questions :(
• What are the symptoms? Symptoms can include: painful or itchy urination, discharge from the penis or vagina, a dry or sore throat, soreness, anal bleeding, swollen scrotum or testicles, and vaginal bleeding between periods. low self-esteem, constant confusion, overreliance on own hand
• How is it treated? If you don’t treat it, it can get worse. We can treat gonorrhea with antibiotics. Internal exploration, self-acceptance, therapy, dating apps (??), going outside (????)
• What should I do after treatment? Talk about your diagnosis with sexual partners and ensure they are also tested. Remember to repeat testing regularly and wear protection during sexual contact. idk, get married or whatever?

Didn’t mean to freak you out earlier. You’re gonna be ok, Huckleberry XO

He bleats out a laugh despite himself. He sticks it in the drawer of his bedside table. Sexy thoughts, he muses to himself as he starts to drift off. Dream of sexy things. 

His dreams reply: kid, don’t push your luck. 

Another week, another interrogation. This time it’s scheduled before a day shift, which means a breakfast menu, which means McDonalds. Finally, a food he understands. Simple. Flavorless. Easy to digest. Mostly white pulp. 

He’s not paying, so he goes all out on his order without blinking. Pancakes, double hashbrowns, a breakfast sandwich, a steaming coffee. Robby gets… nothing. And smirks at him. Yeah, it’s definitely a humiliation ritual. 

They launch right into it once they sit down. “How’s the family back home doing? In, uh…”

“Broken Bow.”

“Broken Bow. Right.”

“Good,” Dennis says, eyes flitting away, searching for something else to look at other than Robby’s gaze boring directly into his soul. “Yeah. Fine.”

“Sorry, did I touch a nerve?” 

Dennis finds his faux-innocent inquiries totally infuriating now that he knows they’re a calculated effort to find cracks in his composure. “No. Just haven’t seen them in a while.”

“Why’s that?”

“School. Work. Life.” Nope. You’re not getting anything else from me today.

Robby nods unconvincingly. “It’s hard being far away from that kind of support. Have you got, I don’t know, community? Maybe a church?”

“Um, nothing regular right now.” How is he supposed to tell his boss that the only places he hears God anymore are empty rooms? That his capacity for grace has calcified, that he’s scared any of His help will hurt? “You know the interfaith chapel up on the second floor? I go there sometimes if I need it. It’s nice. Quiet.” He tilts his head. “Why? Do you have a synagogue?”

Robby, surprisingly, barks out a laugh. “God, no. I’m not practicing or anything. I guess I’m on your side. Private. Shul was always for High Holidays only. I didn’t even Bar Mitzvah. Well, my grandmother almost got me to…”

“What happened?”

A grim smile. “School. Life. Maybe I felt like an imposter? I had my portion assigned and everything. Started taking classes with the rabbi. It was like trying to learn a monologue in gibberish.”

Dennis has, admittedly, been doing a little more reading about the practices of other faiths. “What was the portion?”

“Actually, it was David and Goliath. A good one. Meaty. I always liked that story. I guess you must have studied it?”

Dennis doesn’t respond. He stares at the linoleum table. Somewhere, in the back of his mind, a memory sparks. He’s back on the floor of his house in Nebraska, eight or nine. A children’s book of Bible stories, lovingly rendered in inks and colors, is propped up in a patch of light. It’s open to a full page spread of young David, illuminated by the desert sun, standing tall and lithe and beautiful before the shadowed hulking mass of Goliath, who is keeling back, a single stone passing clean through his skull. He had stared at the image for— maybe hours. It was like a taunt. The taut muscles and the sling. Gilded rays, like a crown. He had wanted, burned, to be that strong, that lethal. He was still small, he had no idea. The boy in the drawing was like an angel. Bloodless and pure. Everything he couldn’t be.

“Whitaker?”

He flinches like he’s been shot. He feels quite suddenly that the lights are too bright, the colors overwhelming. “Yeah. Uh. It’s a good one, you got lucky.” He attempts a wobbly smile and digs his nails into his thigh, hard. He realizes belatedly that his breakfast has been sitting untouched. 

And that his pants are tight.

What?

“Uh, bathroom,” he mumbles, and tears out of the booth like a bat out of hell. As soon as he’s locked himself in a cubicle in the back he’s fisting his cock, biting down on his cheeks, nearly soundless, thinking— madly— about toppling Goliaths, the clean flex of anteriors and obliques, supple, carved of marble, and calloused fingers on taut leather, and David trapped in Saul’s palace like a trophy, and stone slapping into skin, and bright white, a blinding thud, and just as soon as it started it’s over, he’s been knocked down into the mud, and he’s leaning against the door and panting, cleaning himself up, already scrubbing the incident out of his mind, a momentary lapse, a fable. 

The rest of the interrogation passes smoothly. Robby compliments his growing expertise in diagnosing the consumption of various toxic substances. Whitaker thanks him in his typical mild and profuse manner. 

It’s a long shift. 

At the end of the day as they head off towards their bus stop, Santos claps him on the back. “Farm boy. C’mere. Can we talk?”

Things have been delicate between them, but certainly not hostile. And it’s a welcome distraction from… everything else. “You’re talking right now.”

“I’m sorry about the other night,” she says, stopping him in the middle of the sidewalk. “That wasn’t cool. I overstepped, it was way too much.”

“Ah,” Dennis stammers, his shoulders tightening, “seriously, it’s fine. I wasn’t really mad.”

“Nuh-uh. You’re not gonna avoid this conversation again. I’m trying to apologize, dude.”

“I got it. Uh, thanks.”

Her voice drops. “Listen, Whitaker. I’ve been there, too, okay? I had a lot of, um, issues, that it took me a really long time to get over. In terms of… intimacy. With other human beings.” He tries to interrupt but she holds up a hand. “I just wanted to say, I’m, like, extremely non-judgemental about this topic in particular. And if you don’t want to talk about it, that’s totally fine, but if you do need somebody—”

Dennis’ jaw unclenches. She looks so earnest. “Alright, Santos, I know.”

“Good. Okay. That’s all.” She turns to keep walking. 

“Um, look, I still don’t know what I want,” he admits, stopping her in her tracks. She spins, expectant. “But it’s fine. I mean, it’s not really fine, but. You’re right. I can’t just ignore it forever.” Especially not now. “Uh. Thank you. For the pamphlet. And the offer.”

Her eyes brim with excitement, but her voice is as flat and cool as ever. “So… does that mean I get to keep helping?”

He groans. “Yeah. Fuck it. Why not?”

Santos grins like a drawing of the Devil and gives him—honest-to-god— a noogie. He squirms for a minute before giving up and just leaning into it. “Brother, we are gonna get you laid.” 

Whitaker does not get laid. What really happens is he starts spending quite a lot of time in bed watching porn. 

Studiously. 

If Santos thinks he’s repressed, thinks he needs to open his mind to everything that’s out there, then fine. Watch him. He goes category by category. He takes thorough mental notes on what works and what doesn’t. He goes out of his way to google every unfamiliar term. He briefly considers ranking them in a spreadsheet until he realizes that none of them are doing much to capture his attention. Maybe it’s the artificiality of it, the broadness, or maybe it’s just that everyone is soaked in fake tan and plumped with filler and none of it seems real. Straight porn feels miserable and disrespectful, and even when he works up the nerve to switch, just to see, gay porn makes his stomach hurt. Isn’t it unsanitary? Nobody looks like they’re happy, and he can’t imagine himself actually doing any of this stuff. 

(Also, he’s not gay. He doesn’t have a problem with it, obviously, it’s not like it would be bad if he was— well, maybe it would fray things a little further with his family— but if he was, surely he’d have realized it by now?)

The thing in the bathroom, he decides, was a fluke. He was having a stressful conversation, he wound himself up, it happens. He’s spent so many years pent up and ignorant. It has nothing to do with his actual, real desires, which are… yet to be determined. 

But it’s like a dam has broken. Random things will set him off— not so bad he has to run to a cubicle to take care of it, but enough he gets a full-body twinge and wants to fall off the face of the earth. On a night shift Dr. Abbott snaps at him, pulls him by his scrubs out of the room to give him a good dressing down about the proper treatment of rabies cases. Then a patient quite a bit older than him doesn’t realize he’s just a student and won’t stop calling him sir while Dennis is holding him steady to administer anaesthesia. Then it happens after a rough shift when he’s taking a moment of beleaguered silence in the interfaith chapel, soothing his tremors, utterly alone— feeling the heavy breath of God move like a verdict down his neck.

Some of his search terms start to repeat. 

Tied up. Straight guy turned. Priest. He goes down a strange rabbit hole of Mormon stuff, once. (Never ‘Doctor’, though; he’s not a psychopath.) Professor-student. Masochism. Public. Submission. 

The tickle of humiliation in his gut starts to get addictive. He knows it’s wrong, so why won’t he stop? Guilt chokes him in a vice grip but it just makes it worse, because he finds that the guilt is the most important part of it, the uncontrollability of it, the spectre of secrets and consequences, a desire so overpowering it destroys all shame, every conceivable boundary, it needs to be all-consuming or nothing. But no, he’s just exploring, and it doesn’t actually mean anything if he can’t get it up for girls, of course his body is responding to what he’s seeing, that’s what bodies do, he’s just stuck in a loop, and if he jacks off thinking about strong hands digging painfully into his back that doesn’t mean anything either, and if it’s him pushing someone down and clamping his hand over their mouth and fucking them into a mattress, it’s all just another fantasy, insubstantial, a demon mumbling lazily in his ear, and soon enough he’ll be forgiven, he just has to get on his knees and beg for it, and the filth will be removed from him, neatly expelled, and it will never, ever happen again.

The girl is already well into her death throes when he’s plugging the IV into her cannula and connecting the bag of O-neg— sixteen and screaming, her face red and round, stabbed seven times in the stomach by a kid in her youth group, some kind of incel revenge thing— and within a couple helpless minutes Collins calls it, stone-faced, stripping her gloves off, motioning them all to step back. 

It’s their fifth death of the day. Two separate heart attacks, a brain bleed and a pulmonary embolism. But this one… Dr. Robby, out on the floor, looks through the glass in concern; Collins shakes her head. McKay hits the wall and then leans her forehead against it. Whitaker stares at the girl. He’s always been told the dead are peaceful. And in his experience, usually, they are— pumped with painkillers, veering out of consciousness. But there wasn’t time, here. Her face is still screwed up in agony, her limbs contorted, her guts visible through the incisions. Her best friend brought her in; her parents don’t even know yet. Someone’s probably calling them, he thinks, and then he looks around and realizes nobody’s moving, the nurses are occupied with unplugging her, and he swallows and moves to the phone and just bucks up and does it. Someone’s got to. Collins puts a steady hand on his shoulder as he says the words, keeping his mind blank, a quiet white space. He trains his eyes on the girl, and he wants to reach out her hand to her, to give her some kind of grace, but of course he can’t, and she stays dead on her slab, frozen, restless and stained.

The day doesn’t get better. A little kid gets diagnosed with major brain damage after a car accident, and his brother has to get his leg amputated, and nobody knows how to tell them their parents coded in the ambulance. Mohan gets slapped so bad by a basket case in Chairs she gives up and goes home. Whitaker feels utterly useless with all his patients. Some of them start arguments with him about their treatment plans and he can barely muster the strength to fight back. Worse, he keeps failing in front of his supervisors. Collins gives no quarter, she always seems frustrated these days now that she’s the only senior resident, and whenever Robby asks him for a quick diagnosis he trips over his words and flails for answers that Javadi steps in to helpfully provide. He completely fucks up an intubation that should be business as usual for him. He had to miss the last Street Team planning meeting to handle some problem with his bank and now Kiara keeps looking at him balefully and he’s too scared to ask her for anything, even though he’s pretty sure his patient with a head wound needs at-home supervision and the lady with a broken leg keeps protesting that she doesn’t have insurance and can’t afford any treatment and needs to leave immediately before they put the splint on her bill. 

He’s ten hours in and dead on his feet when Dr. Robby swoops in and all but lifts him by the scruff of his neck out to an empty hallway to size him up. 

He mumbles a protest and turns back to return to the patients waiting for him but Robby body-checks him to block his way. “Woah, there.”

“I’m fine.” 

“No, you’re not.” 

Dennis opens his mouth to argue but he suddenly feels a wave of exhaustion crash over him and he sways, idiotically, like a stalk of grass. Robby quickly grabs his arms to stop him from stumbling, and holds them, and keeps holding him, tight and steady, like if he lets go he’s going to shatter on the floor. 

He swallows thickly. He feels out of his body. Robby’s hands are very calloused and very warm. “Dr. Robby?”

“Whitaker,” he says in a low voice, “do you know that you’re trembling?”

“What?” He extricates his hand and, sure enough, it’s that old tremor again, but more forceful now. Now that he’s standing still he can feel it rippling in shockwaves through his body. “Oh.” He gingerly sits down on a bench. It all hits him at once; his stomach flips. He feels strapped down by gravity. 

Robby crouches beside him, frowning. “You know, I’ve seen you shaking like that on shifts before. Jesus, kid. You’ve got to be more careful. You can’t be treating patients like that in an ER. What if they need precision work?”

“I— I’m sorry, Dr. Robby, I didn’t realize.”

“If there’s something wrong,” Robby says, scarily still, “you need to tell me.”

Dennis reels. It’s all Langdon, he realizes. Shaking. Probably sweating like crazy. He thinks it’s withdrawal. “No,” he protests, “no, sir, I promise, this happens all the time. I’m just tired.” Well, he reasons, he has been staying up later than usual over the past few weeks. 

Robby ignores him. “Because if anything is inhibiting your ability to work, it's your duty to inform me, as your attending. And frankly, I expect more from you.” Why does he sound so tense? It isn’t as if he’s never been burnt out at the end of a day. Remember? I was there. I saw it.

“It’s not— medical, seriously,” he manages. Jesus, just his luck, now his boss is seeing a ghost in him. “It’s, um, I think I’m just hungry? And anxious? I got a little worked up about everything. It happens sometimes. Especially when people, uh, don’t make it? It’ll go away on its own. Promise.”

Robby’s expression softens minutely, though his words are still stern. “You should have said something. If you don’t respect yourself, your work will suffer. You need to take more breaks or you’re gonna explode.”

“Okay. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t apologize. Just do better next time.” He checks his watch. “Not long now. I want you to head out early. I’ll take your last patients. Get some rest. Seriously. I expect you refreshed and ready to work for your next shift. I’m gonna let Dr. King know to keep an eye out for you. She’s big on her wellness breaks.”

“Okay. Thank you, doctor.” A balance has shifted, he thinks, but he doesn’t know what, or how. He hopes his broken leg case hasn’t made a daring escape in his absence.

Robby turns to get back to the ward. “Oh,” he says, without looking back, “and get yourself a fucking sandwich.”

Strangely, on his way home, Whitaker does so. He even splurges a little, goes to the nice deli, gets the fancy kind of turkey sub with cranberries in it that he never thought he could afford. He takes his time with it, tastes every bite. And then he orders a second one and scarfs that down on the bus. When he gets back to the apartment he makes himself a large bowl of pasta (Santos’ apparently “culturally significant” penchant for sugar in the sauce is admittedly growing on him) and eats that, too. 

And for the first time in a long time as he drifts off to sleep he feels impossibly, guiltlessly, full. 

The breaks with Mel are nice. He loves Mel. Everyone does. There’s no expectation of small talk, no pretending. Just sitting quietly staring at nothing. Sometimes she tells him about breathing techniques or visualization exercises or whatever book she’s reading. Sometimes, if she’s having a tough time, she’ll mutely grab for his wrist, and he’ll take her palm and squeeze right back. 

And things do get a little easier, he has to admit. He’s sleeping better, trying to eat more heartily, he even does stretches in the morning. And he’s a better doctor because of it. Robby was right about taking care of himself. He stops freaking out about his whole sex thing and just focuses on the job— to Santos’ chagrin, but he really needs it. 

Because saving people is a godly act, to him. Maybe the most godly act. He’d never talk about it out loud, but it’s spiritual, seeing life sputter back into someone’s throat, soothing pain with the press of a button, guiding a patient back upright into the world. No matter how broken down or burned out he gets, saving a life never, ever gets old. There are moments, on the good days, where he thinks he’s never felt closer to Christ. He feels light, strong, falls asleep proud of himself, and wakes up determined to do better. So maybe he has no social life, maybe he’s too nervous to be seen at the gym, maybe he never calls home, and sure, he still twitches when anyone touches him, he still hoards things in his room in a go-bag in case it all falls apart, but somehow, at some point, a good life has been assembled around him. 

It’s an otherwise mundane shift on an otherwise mundane day when he ducks into North 3 to tell Robby he’s discharged his encephalitis case and falters midway through a word. Robby is sitting patiently next to a strung-out, scuffed-up elderly woman layered in three stained jackets who looks extremely familiar. 

And immediately he recognizes that he looks familiar to her, too.

“Huh? Is that really you?” she croaks, fixing him with her unmistakable piercing gaze, though worryingly, she’s smiling. Which is frightening, considering she only has, like, five teeth. “Dennis?” She turns to Robby. “Doctor, am I hallucinating?”

Dennis’ feet are rooted to the ground. He opens his mouth and then closes it, like a fish. 

And then he realizes he is so completely fucked.

“I’m sorry,” Robby chuckles, “do you two know each other?”

She giggles, then hacks up a cough. What’s she on? Ket? Could he say it’s the meds talking? “Of course! Little Dennis! He’s a real sweetheart, that one. He gave me his gloves.”

Dennis laughs nervously along with her. Maybe she won’t say anything incriminating. Maybe he can think of some excuse. “Uh, Dr. Robby? What’s the diagnosis here?”

He raises an eyebrow. “No, now I want to hear the glove story. Was it a Street Team thing?” But when Mohan listens to anecdotes, it’s a problem…

“That’s the whole story,” he says, teeth gritted. “It’s kind of self-explanatory. Um, will you excuse me?”

“Suit yourself. Just an infected needle. We’ll get you out of here in no time, Lilian. Unless you want to tell the story.”

He can’t move. He can’t even breathe. He knows the woman— Lilian— well enough to know exactly what’s going to happen next. 

She shrugs. “He had the bed next to mine at Bethlehem Haven for a week. Couldn’t ask for a better neighbour. Just the sweetest fuckin’ thing. All spooked like a rabbit. Come to think of it— haven’t seen him around in months.” She peers curiously at Dennis. “What’s a kid like you doing in a place like this?”

He doesn’t say anything. He can’t say anything. Robby swivels and stares back at him with alarm. His palms begin to sweat. He desperately scrabbles for purchase.

Then he turns on his foot and bolts out of the room. 

Dana gives him a questioning head-shake when he passes her but he flees without explanation— thanking every god imaginable that most of the others are occupied in Trauma 2 with a particularly nasty snakebite—and doesn’t stop until he reaches an empty stairwell where he proceeds to gasp for breath and then groan into his arm. He’s fucked. It’s over. He’s done here. He can’t see a path out of this. There’s that shame again, twisting through his guts. He feels like he’s going to throw up. All that time in Bethlehem shivering under some army surplus rag, curled over his backpack, box-cutter hidden under his pillow. He didn’t think it would follow him here, didn’t think he’d be found out. Not now, not after he dug himself out of that hellhole, now he’s stable, has a roof over his head and a room of his own, months from his doctorate and a real salary, not now that he’s actually happy. 

It was fine with Santos. He might not even mind if one of the other newbies had found out, he’d trust most of them with a secret like that. They’re on the level— honestly, they’re probably pretty broke, too. He knows their pay isn’t enough to have made a dent in their student loans yet. But a superior is different. 

Robby is different.

He tries one of Mel’s breathing exercises but his mind is moving way too fast for it to help. He begins to feel mildly faint. He used to collapse all the time as a kid, burning with heatstroke, wandering the fields in a made-up labyrinth in a daze. Chest tight, eyes brimming and hot, he hits the wall with his fist, like one of his brothers might do, but it doesn’t calm him down, it just bruises his knuckles and sends him reeling to the floor, where he huddles in a tight ball. He’ll look irresponsible and pitiful and he won’t get a recommendation and he won’t be able to stay in Pittsburgh like he wants, with the only person who won’t charge him for rent while his interest rates climb higher and higher— god, he might have to go back to Nebraska. To his parents. He’s got no plan. How do you plan for something like this? How fucking stupid has he been, that he thought this would never catch up to him?

When the door creaks open he jumps half out of his skin.

“Whitaker?” He’s at the bottom of the stairs, and Dennis is just out of his cone of view. Maybe if he stays frozen he could hide here forever. “I know you’re up there.” There is a long pause where neither of them speaks. “We need to discuss this.”

Robby walks up to the landing where Whitaker is curled up on the floor against the wall. He lifts his head from his knees. “What is there to say?” 

“Was this happening while you were working here?”

“Yes. No.” He struggles to speak past the lump in his throat. “Some of it.”

“Why didn’t you just say something?”

“Why do you think?”

“We have programs. We have lots of ways we could have supported you.”

“Programs,” Dennis can’t help but scoff, his voice rough with effort. “You love your programs. But you don't actually know what it’s like.”

Robby’s expression is so serious it hurts to look at him. “We would have tried.”

“And if I was still homeless now?” he can’t help but snap. “Oh, sorry, unhoused?”

“Well, it’s not a crime, Whitaker. Jesus. We would have helped you.” His voice drops. “Did you think we would judge you?”

“Of course you would judge me,” Dennis says, and he can’t stop himself now, because he’s being so nice, this is not how it’s supposed to go, why can’t he just leave him like he deserves? Why isn’t he fired? Why isn’t he dead? He struggles onto his feet and looks Robby dead in the eyes. His heart is pounding in his throat. Through it all, he’s always felt drawn to confession. “Fuck it. If you want to know, then you should know all of it. I was living in an empty ward. One of the inpatient rooms upstairs. Happy now?”

Robby steps back. There is a minuscule part of his expression that almost looks betrayed. “An empty ward? Here?” He drags his hand down his face. “Fuck me.” 

Dennis feels like he’s stepped on a live wire. It just keeps pouring out. “Eighth floor. They’re still not using it. So yes, I fucked up, I— I overreached,” he’s stammering now, “and you should judge me, it was bad, really bad, and if it wasn’t for Santos I’d still be there, like a parasite, because… because I’m prideful, and stupid, and I couldn’t just accept my place—”

“Your place?” Robby grabs his forearm and pulls him in closer. “Your place is back on my fucking floor.”

Dennis shivers, fuck, he’s trembling again, and all he can say is, “Yes, sir,” in a rattling gasp.

Robby lets go of him, his lip curled. “Yes, you were prideful. You refused to ask for help. You have a duty to report any serious workplace issues to your attending, which is me. It’s not about where you lived. You weren’t transparent. What if Santos hadn’t been able to give you a room, and it escalated? What if your ward got populated, and you had to go back to the streets?” His voice gets colder and colder. “Food and housing insecurity inhibits your mental capacity, which directly affects your ability to help our patients, which affects my ER. And why? Because you’re ashamed? I don’t like my students keeping secrets from me. Suffering in silence is not a trait I respect.”

A pitiful protest burbles in Whitaker’s throat— okay, asshole, what do you want from me, I was literally homeless— but what he says instead, in a low tone that doesn’t sound like him at all, is, “You want to talk about suffering in silence?"

Robby is completely, frighteningly blank. “What did you just say?”

But it’s like he’s possessed. Devil’s tongue, his pastor used to say about gossiping and hearsay. But this isn’t hearsay, he knows it, he was there. “Remember? Pittfest? That’s not a serious workplace issue?”

Robby shakes his head mutely. 

“You’re not asking for help with that, either,” Dennis murmurs, not unkindly, “are you?”

No response.

“Didn’t think so.”

And Dr. Robby shoves him.

His shoulder blade hits the wall. Cornered in, he screws his eyes shut. He can feel Robby’s shaky breath on his ear. “Don’t do that. Don’t.”

He lies very still under the press of Robby’s arm and opens his eyes. There is something in his expression that is indescribable. It’s the look of a pig up next for slaughter. The whites of the eyes roiling. It’s frightened. It’s terrifying. And Dennis realizes, his blood frozen solid, that Robby really does need help. Desperately. Whatever he thought, it’s so much worse. He’s drowning. He’s lost, and he can’t say it.

He lets go, and Dennis falls against the wall and clutches his diaphragm, coughing up stale air. 

“You’re shaking again,” Robby says icily. “Never mind Lilian, I don’t need any assistance with her. Now get some fucking air and get back to my floor.”

The emergency door slams shut behind him.

And as Dennis feels his teeth start to chatter he gathers up all his courage and brushes off his scrubs and, head tall and face blank, grabs Mel from the snakebite crowd to take a break and lets her guide him through some box breathing, and he gets on with it, and he does his job, and when he gets home that night he gets in the shower and turns it to its hottest setting and rubs himself raw, chewing his lip until it bursts, pressing his face into the tiled wall, blinking back tears like an angry child.

The week passes in a deadening haze. Dr. Robby doesn’t bring it up again, and neither does Whitaker, and everything goes on just fine. Never happened. No one can tell. Except Whitaker is distracted, irascible, he’s laser-focused on his patients to the detriment of everything else, he snaps at everybody, he paces up and down the floor whenever he isn’t occupied. His face is constantly red with effort. He sets a Pitt med student record for patients seen per hour. Dana keeps asking if he’s sick and he shoulders her off. Well, he can’t sleep, is all, because he can’t stop thinking about— about him, the horrific closeness of his mouth, the feeling of his back bruising against the concrete. 

It’s like his lifetime of self-imposed blue balls is finally boiling over. It’s chronic. He can’t stop himself, it’s embarrassing, he feels like a thirteen year old who’s just discovered the Playboys under his dad’s mattress. He’s just so… angry, angry he let himself lose control like that, angry at Robby for what was clearly a huge overreach, for being such an aggravating hypocrite, for never taking care of himself the way he demands of others, and angry at his own sick desires, the way he crumbled in his grip like a flower. Sometimes Robby is so horribly calm and kind at work he wants to strangle him. Then he goes home and thinks about it, about really strangling him, and jerks off until he feels like he’s going to immolate, biting back his groans so Santos doesn’t hear him through the walls. 

Slowly he realizes it’s the only thing he can come to— thoughts of Robby. Jesus, of Robby! Nothing else works, not even the hardcore stuff, the thoughts are intrusive, they won’t let up. The more he tries to stop them the more depraved they become. Robby bending him roughly over a gurney. Robby choking his length down. Robby, intubated, muffled, unable to tell him to stop. It’s a compulsion— he can’t get clean. He starts avoiding Robby like the plague, terrified to even bump against him, he reports everything to Collins now, tucks his gaze down to the floor whenever they’re both in a room. Fuck, he even gets approached by Kiara to see if there’s something wrong. No, it’s fine, I just can’t stop thinking about fucking my boss and I think I’m psychologically damaged and I’m gonna burn in hell! Totally normal workplace behavior! Once I came thinking about breaking his fucking jaw!

One day there’s a piece of paper on his desk tucked under his mousepad. It’s a photocopy of a page of the New Testament with a section highlighted. He doesn’t even need to look up the verse: 1 Corinthians 4.

To the present hour we are hungry and thirsty, we are poorly clothed and beaten and homeless, and we grow weary from the work of our own hands. When reviled, we bless; when persecuted, we endure; when slandered, we speak kindly. 

An apology?

It’s not signed, but then, it doesn’t need to be.

It’s a blissful day off. Him and Santos are on the floor in front of the TV watching Jaws. She was horrified to learn he wasn’t allowed to watch any movies that weren’t VeggieTales until he was sixteen, and the gaps in his film knowledge are outrageously swollen. When tested, he can’t remember the difference between Tom Hanks and Tom Cruise, they’re both just names he’s heard people say a lot. So she’s got him on a strict curriculum of pop culture behemoths— no child left behind.

But obviously he can’t concentrate. He’s not an idiot, he knows what’s going to happen. Swallowing thickly, he reaches for the remote and clicks pause. 

She looks aghast. “Please do not disrespect Steve by interrupting his work.”

“Trinity? Can I ask you something?”

She leans back, eyes him warily. “What’s wrong?”

“Do you know,” he asks, timid, “if Dr. Robby is okay?”

“…Okay?”

“Like. Mentally well.” He bites his lip. “Have you seen him do anything strange, I mean.”

“Strange? Not more than usual. Maybe he’s got a bit of a thousand-yard-stare. Pittfest wasn’t that long ago, we’re all still kinda messed up. Why?”

He fidgets with the buttons on his shirt. If there’s anyone he can trust, it’s her— right? “There’s been a couple times where I’ve caught him, um, really freaking out.”

Now she looks concerned. “Freaking out how?”

“You can’t tell.”

“Please. My lips are sealed.”

“Like, uh— panic attacks? Really bad ones? Like, he closed himself off in an empty room and didn’t want anybody to see? Not even just heavy breathing. He was on the floor. He broke, Trin. It was fucked. Like, maybe he’s really not— doing good?”

“Fuck, that’s scary.”

“You think? Should we be worried about him?” Please, can I be allowed to worry about him?

“Shit. Javadi told me something,” she murmurs, gaze distant. “I didn’t think anything by it, not really. God, I think I laughed at it.”

“What did she say?”

Santos holds her voice steady, but Dennis knows her well enough that he can tell something’s wrong. “She saw him one day, after a shift— she just wanted to ask him something, and she followed him onto the roof. Um, she said he was standing in front of… in front of the barriers?”

His breath catches. “What?”

“You can’t repeat that. Don’t say I told you that. Fuck, I didn’t think he was, like, struggling, I told her he was probably getting some air and didn’t want anybody bothering him. I was mostly shocked that admin cares enough about our mental health to even have barriers.”

Dennis gets up off the carpet, holding his head in his hands. All put together, it’s a bad look. He tries to put it in perspective. Robby pushed a student. Physically. Knocked him into a concrete wall. There’s bruising. It was just luck that he pushed the one person totally unwilling to report it. Isn’t that totally insane? Who would do that if they weren’t actively self-destructive? He feels very odd when he realizes what a trump card he has. If he went over his head he could easily get him fired. And knowing Robby, he’d probably own right up to it. “That... doesn’t sound great.”

“This is bad. This is really bad.” Santos starts to pace around the living room. “No shot a guy like Robby goes to therapy, right? Fuck, I guess it makes sense. Tragically dead mentor, Pittfest flashbacks, Langdon fucked him, stepkid hates him, run ragged with no budget and one less senior resident, hospital probably getting sold…”

“Should we, I don’t know, help him?”

“How the fuck would we do that? Hold an intervention for our boss?” She shakes her head grimly. “No. We don’t know him. We can’t approach him. We tell Dana, or Collins, or Abbott, say we’re concerned, ask them to talk to him.”

“...Okay, all we actually know is he had a couple rough moments and he likes standing ominously on the roof. That’s what they’ll say. Maybe he’s fine.” Of course, only he knows about the physical altercation, which is maybe the most worrying part. 

“You don’t believe that, though.”

“No,” he says. “I don’t.” He ruminates for a moment. “I should talk to him.”

“Are you out of your mind?”

“I was the one who saw him panic. He knows I know, about that, at least. I think,” he says, “maybe I can figure out a way to get through to him?” 

She blinks. “That is a horrible fucking idea.”

But god, it’s that old childish urge— he wants to save his soul. 

“Why don’t we just monitor, then,” he relents. “Keep our eyes peeled. He’s an adult, he knows his limits, and we’ll know to be careful with him if it gets… tense.”

She sighs. “Yeah. You’re right. I just… don’t want anything to go wrong if we can stop it.”

Yet some part of him, buried deep beneath his ribs, whispers, wouldn’t that be better, though? If he was broken, and you were there?

They continue the movie in discomfited silence. He grips the armrests tighter as the music swells. But when the shark surfaces, he doesn’t scream. He doesn’t even flinch. He leans forward, and keeps his eyes open wide. 

It’s never great when Gloria gathers them all up at the start of the shift to give some big speech, but somehow it’s worse that this time she’s legitimately being nice to them.

“We are incredibly lucky to be hosting an Emergency Response Appreciation Gala tonight in our conference space, organized by the victims and victims’ families’ of the Pittfest tragedy. You should already know this, but as a reminder, it’s beginning sharply at seven— night shift will be arriving early to give you all the opportunity to attend. We at the administration would like to see as many staff as possible there.”

The invitations went out weeks ago, but Dennis has barely thought about it. All those people. And the constant presence of the ones they couldn’t save. He expects it’s the same with the others; nobody wants to remember Pittfest, let alone marinate in those memories for several hours. Numbly he realizes he forgot to bring any nice clothes. 

“Thank you, Gloria,” says Dr. Robby, clearly a little uncomfortable himself. 

She fixes him with a look. It’s not not patronizing. “Not only do you all deserve to be properly commended— and rewarded— for your fearless work and perseverance, it is also a vital opportunity for this hospital. Our stakeholders will be present. You’re all reminded to put your best foot forward.” Does she even realize how she sounds?

Mel leans over to Dennis. “Dr. Robby’s going to be given a medal,” she whispers in his ear. “I overheard Dana talking to him about it.”

That explains why he looks like he’s about to melt out of his skin. “Poor guy,” he mutters back. 

“I think it’s nice.” Her face scrunches up. “Just… it’s gonna be a lot of people. And feelings.”

“We can ditch if you want.” He wouldn’t mind that. Though Santos, even on her day off, is committed to showing up, and he doesn’t want to leave her alone in a crowd of very sensitive people. 

She shakes her head mournfully. “Don’t you think it’s a duty?”

Gloria finishes talking about patient satisfaction and public relations initiatives. Robby flicks her away. He smiles grimly, but he’s gotten somewhat pale. “Alright. We can all motivate ourselves with the promise of free food after this. Let’s go heal some people.”

But it’s not an easy day, not for anyone. Robby is unusually demanding, breathing down their necks, admonishing them for not retrieving him for every little thing even though they all know he can’t be in two places at once. Javadi pronounces periosteum wrong and he looks like he’s going to snap her in half. Usually he’d take the edge off trading quips with Dana— or Langdon— but neither of them are there and everybody else is too scared or too pissed to go up to bat. 

It’s a comedy of errors. Whitaker gets projectile vomited on, then spat on, then scratched to hell by a therapy cat that is definitely not medically sanctioned. Then knocks over a blood-filled mop bucket. Then drops a urine sample all over his shoe. The cases are extra ludicrous— a woman crushed by a fallen vending machine, a kid who put hot sauce into a water gun and sprayed it into his sister’s eyes, a guy who turns out to still be taking ivermectin on a daily basis in 2025. But the shittiness of the shift only forges their camaraderie. When Robby glowers at them Mohan and Javadi are sent into a fit of giggles. The nurses flock like a Greek chorus and mutter conspiratorially about the upcoming award ceremony going to his head. Mel, in a rare moment of genuine annoyance, says he looks like Sam the Eagle behind his back, maybe the meanest thing she’s ever said about anybody, which causes all the students and residents to collapse. (Even Collins. Especially Collins.)

Whitaker is just about to go rummage for whatever’s been left in the back of the breakroom fridge when paramedics slam through the loading bay with a twitching body on a gurney. “Seventeen, male, PBI from gunshot wound to the skull, he was in a 7-11 with his girlfriend while it was being stuck up, she says his name’s Christian Purnell.”

Robby is flying over and pulling on his gloves. “Trauma One. With me. Someone get Garcia. Hi, Christian. We’re gonna get you fixed up.”

But his eyes dart wildly. His feet are unsteady. The girlfriend rushes in after them, sobbing, with bits of brain on her pale blue jacket. Whitaker knows full well the kid won’t make it. Not with a wound like that carving a deep groove into his cerebral cortex. It’s only a matter of how long it’ll take him to code. 

“He saved me,” she whimpers. “You have to save him.”

Whitaker sees something in Robby snap in two.

“We will,” Robby says, breaking his own rule about not overpromising to the patients— really, Dennis thinks, rushing to stopper the bleeding, the problem is he’s overpromising to himself. He’s supposed to be the hardy one, the realist, the rock, but at the kid’s side he looks like a child, too. 

Christian Purnell lasts a substantial eleven minutes. He makes no final statement. He doesn’t move at all. Robby stammers orders, keeps pumping away, increasing the sats on the ventilator, demanding new tricks, maybe some way to simulate a craniectomy with no neurosurgeon present, but there’s no way to stop the brain bleed and the hemorrhaging, and Garcia refuses to operate on someone with a GCS of 4, because there’s no point, and Robby grabs her by the front of her shirt and growls as he orders her to try, and she drops her scalpel into the tray and flat out leaves. Robby breathes heavily, rips off his gloves, wrings his hands. His eyes are flinty and red. Mohan has to call it. The girlfriend wails outside the door and hammers at the walls. 

Robby shakes his head, gaze clouded. He stares at his clean hands. Then he stumbles out of the room and walks right past her and out into the crowd. 

They all stand dumbfounded, watching him. 

“The fuck?” Mohan says. 

“Pittfest, remember?” McKay reminds her, not unkindly. “The kid and his date.” She goes out to the girlfriend and gently leads her away, presumably to Kiara.

“Moment of silence?” Mel suggests.

Dennis shakes his head. "Hold on." He heads out to the floor, swallowing his growing fear. But Robby is gone. No one knows exactly where. 

Shit, he thinks, surely it can’t be the roof?

But he doesn’t need to get that far. In the dark damp east stairwell he sees Robby sitting leaned against the wall, head between his knees, shaking, every part of him shaking, not saying anything, wheezing with no breath. There’s something red in his fist as he rocks back and forth.

As quiet, as placid and meek as he can, Dennis takes careful steps towards him and crouches down in front of him. Finger by finger, he opens Robby’s hand. He’s holding the scalpel Garcia abandoned earlier; it’s made a few shallow cuts in the flesh of his hand. Dennis reaches for his belt, where he keeps a small roll of gauze, and wraps it very gently around his palm. All the while Robby is gasping, feverish, seemingly unable to see or hear or feel a thing.

And in his throes of panic Robby looks up to him. In weakness. In humility. Perhaps in prayer. 

Whitaker remembers when he was fifteen and helped birth a two-headed goat. Its mother died in the effort, and the kid flailed on the floor, both throats desperate for breath, nearly soundless. His father had it crated, set apart to be euthanized in the morning, but in the middle of the night Dennis snuck out to the barn and hand-fed the kid for hours until the sun rose and it began, again, to bleat. It was an ugly, tiny thing, still covered in blood and bits of placenta, one head bulging massively, the other shrivelled. The way it twitched in his hand was indescribable, like holding a beating heart. It lived for twenty-seven hours before its organs failed. It was pure white, a snow coat. Its four eyes had looked up at him just like that.

“Please,” Robby whispers.

He moves without thinking, without speaking, lifts Robby’s heft up and has him lean on his shoulder. He takes the long way around the back and hauls him into the elevator unseen. All the way up to the eighth floor. A familiar room in the back corner, still empty, smelling of sanitizer and plastic. He finds the strength to guide Robby to a seat on the bed, palm nestled in the small of his back. Robby is still gasping for breath, glazed over. Dennis sits down at his bedside, like protocol demands, and just watches, steady, as his aspiration slows and normalizes.

Robby flinches as he raises his eyes; it is as if he had forgotten there was someone else there. He grips the edge of the mattress; he shakes his head, still shuddering. Dennis doesn’t say anything. He walks to the sink and fills him a glass of water. Robby takes it gratefully, but his hand is shaking as he swallows. 

“You should lie down,” Dennis says softly. Like a miracle, Robby mutely complies. They sit together in silence for a few minutes; they synchronize their breaths. In through the nose, out through the mouth. That’s all. 

It feels like it’s been an eternity by the time Robby weakly clears his throat. His voice is small and hoarse. “Kid?”

“Yes?”

“What are you doing here?”

“Staying with you.”

Robby is staring resolutely at the wall. “I mean, why did you do this. Bring me up here.”

“You were in pain.” 

“They need me back down on the floor, you know.”

“I need you here,” he says, and a long-settled weight leaves his chest. It’s not an admission. He means it in the purest sense. “You’re my patient, Dr. Robby. You’ll need to stay down for a while.”

A weak chuckle. “How do you know what I need?”

Dennis takes a deep, steadying breath. His head is light; somehow he wants to smile. “I know you’re not well. I know you can’t work like this. I know you don’t take care of yourself like you should. I know sometimes you go up to the roof and past the barriers and just stand there.”

Robby stifles a groan. “How did you find out about that?” 

“I pay attention.” He sees Robby open his mouth but he thunders past him. “I know you haven’t been okay since long before I ever got here. And you’re slipping. You— you think you’re so strong, and you’re not. I know if things keep up this way you’ll drown.”

“And then you’re fucked.”

“I don’t care what happens to me,” Dennis counters, face flushing. “There’s someone sick in front of me who needs my help. That’s what I know. That’s all that matters.”

Robby is stunned into silence for a long moment.

“I was never going to kill myself, you know,” he rasps finally. 

“Okay.”

“I’m not— sick. I just lost control.” With some effort he props himself back to a seated position and turns to face him. “That’s all it ever is, Whitaker.”

His muscles tense, but he doesn’t crack. Don't do this. “Control.”

“Right.”

“Is that something you have a lot of problems with, Dr. Robby?” he asks, low and quiet. He pulls his chair in closer. “Control?”

Robby doesn’t move. “Is this a confessional? Are you my student, or my priest?”

“I don’t know, is there something you want to confess?”

“Not to you.”

Dennis impulsively grabs his wrist. Feels the pulse in it. Still a little elevated. Robby twists away from his fingers, confused, eyebrows furrowing. He looks so small on the bed, hunched over, his forearm so pale, sweat still beading by his temple. 

“You need to settle down,” he murmurs. The words surprise him. His mind is moving sluggishly, lagging behind his mouth.  

Robby does not respond. 

“You don’t know what you need, not at all. You have no idea what to do. How to fix it. Do you?”

“No,” Robby says. Nearly imperceptible. Impossible to read. His head bows— just enough. “I don’t.”

“I might know a way to help,” Dennis begins, giving in to whatever desperate whim has possessed him. He can feel his blood thrumming. No time. No doubts. “How many times in your life have you felt totally helpless? Totally out of control?”

“I don’t know. Maybe never?”

“Maybe that’s what you need, then. To give it up willingly. All of it. Everything.” 

Robby is speechless. 

“It’s something my pastor told me once a long time ago.” Where is this coming from? “I was having trouble praying. I didn't think anyone was listening, and I was angry. He told me it’s an illusion if you think you have power over things. Your will means nothing to the universe. You have to let yourself be helpless, and— and naked.” He swallows dryly. Leans in a little closer. “That’s how you transcend it. You get on your knees. Submit to it utterly.” He stops himself from saying, submit to your God. 

“Submit how?” Robby asks hoarsely. “To what?”

He’s balancing on a razor’s edge now. “To whom,” Dennis corrects him, soft, stern.

And then, in the corner of his eye, he can see the crotch of Robby’s jeans twitch. 

And Dennis Whitaker makes a snap decision. 

(It’s a necessary skill to have when working with animals. To not think. His reflex for immediate action developed over the long years he spent catching escaped chickens and avoiding getting kicked in the face by their horse. It has turned out to be extremely helpful in a medical context. To let the hands move before the brain knows why. To trust your gut and your God.)

He doesn’t give himself time to think about it until he’s already pushed Robby down and straddled him on the bed and tied the medical restraints over his wrists. He doesn’t think about the ease of it, handling him, doesn’t think about how he’s never actually touched someone like this, not ever in his life. 

He doesn’t think about why Robby lets him. 

Just keeps looking into his eyes and pressing his palm down into his sternum. 

“Do you feel out of control right now?” he whispers. 

“Wh—” 

“Tell me.”

And Robby’s eyes just glass over. “Uh huh.”

“Good,” says Whitaker. “Good.”

When he kisses him he doesn’t think about anything at all except the abstract push and pull of it, the musky skin scent of him, crashing into Robby’s nose, and Robby kissing him back after a moment, and the blood flowing free and wild through his body. Like a madness. Violent and needy and new.

He stops and pulls back to breathe as it all begins to hit him at once, and it’s so wet, and the feeling of someone else’s tongue is not what he thought it would be— Jesus Christ, he thinks with a distant horror, is this really my first kiss? 

“Oh my fucking god,” Robby groans beneath him. “What.” He’s tenting good and proper now. “The fuck.”

“Quiet,” Dennis interrupts on pure instinct, “don’t think. You need to stop thinking.”

“Okay,” Robby says, dazed.

“Don’t talk. I’m in control now, okay?” Somehow he maintains his composure. “Nod if you understand.”

And Robby nods. 

“Don’t talk,” he repeats, leaning in close, tipping up his chin with a finger. “Don’t say anything.”

His hand moves to Robby’s zipper. Not breaking his stare, he blindly fumbles his way through the fly and takes hold of him through his boxers. Robby whimpers— whimpers. He almost bursts just touching it, the unfamiliar weight of it, it’s so alien and frightening and warm, he wants to vomit, he wants to strangle something small, he wants to be right here with Robby at his mercy forever. 

He didn’t know any of it would feel like this. 

He begins to stroke. That’s simple, he reasons, it’s the same as anything, just find a rhythm and tug. But he didn’t expect how much Robby would move, straining against his wrist ties, gasping girlishly when his finger runs over the tip. But he doesn’t speak. Not a word. Good boy, he thinks, the last remnants of his brain completely out of reach now. 

Then he begins to slow. Robby whines under him but he doesn’t stop, drags his hand achingly up and down, still clamped over the dampening fabric. 

“Wet for me, huh?” Dennis hears himself say. His own cock is straining in his pants now as he tumbles further and further away from whatever meager boundaries he has set for himself. “You want some more?”

Robby nods furiously. 

He slides in past the boxers, really touches him now. But he keeps the same melting, methodical pace. It’s just like calming an animal. Blinking slowly, moving with care. Anything rough now would spook him. That’s no way to break a horse. He just keeps on slicking his hand down his length.

Beneath him Robby moans. Dennis realizes he has never actually seen him ecstatic before. His cheeks ruddy, glowing, a sheen across his forehead, no longer crinkled in thought. There is a tiny globule of saliva gathering in his beard at the edge of his mouth. He bucks up in the restraints.

“Easy,” Whitaker whispers. His other hand is finally sneaking down to rub his own cock, and for a few moments they rock together in unison, panting and crying out, and finally he gets lost in his own pleasure and speeds up, casting his eyes to the ceiling as Robby goes, “god, god, god,” and cums with a strangled yell in Dennis’ fingers, and Dennis follows not long after, silent as he feels himself slipping, taking his dripping free hand and pressing it into Robby’s larynx, feeling his atoms split violently into other atoms until his vision goes white and he collapses into his chest, thrumming with heat, spent and sorry and saved.

Their pulses communicate through their rib cages and slow each other down. Their sweat mingles. Robby’s wrists flex, rubbed raw and red.

In time, Dennis rises. He carefully extricates himself from the bed. Robby tries to lean into him but he pulls away. He re-zips his pants and straightens his scrubs. With a certain trepidation he removes the wrist restraints. Robby doesn’t move, though, just watches him, once again unreadable. Dennis walks to the sink and washes his hands thoroughly. He wipes the sweat off his face with a paper towel. He reapplies hand sanitizer from the bottle clipped to his belt. 

He escapes the room on soft feet and is not followed. He makes it to the elevator and back down to the Pitt with no obstructions. He crashes right into Mel and when she asks him where he’s been he says he was eating a sandwich in the lounge and stopped in Chairs to check in on who was waiting and she accepts this without question and even gives him a smile. No one else seems to notice that he was ever gone. Since the coding they haven’t had anything urgent; somehow it’s only been twenty minutes. Several people ask if he’s seen Robby, and each time he says no. He stares at his hand and doesn’t believe it belongs to him. 

His stomach roils. 

Unwittingly he finds himself ruminating over the best way to procure the materials necessary for him to kill himself quickly and painlessly. Midazolam, propofol and rocuronium. Maybe DDMA? Could he convince a nurse to dispense that in a high enough concentration? He’d have to find somewhere to hide in the process, anyway, otherwise his coworkers would flood him clean and pump him back alive again. Would still take about an hour until it was over. Shit, there’s always shocking himself with a defibrillator. Why not just run out in front of a speeding ambulance while he’s at it? Peggy at the front desk asks him something but he can’t hear her, everything is swimmy, and he realizes he’s been standing unmoving in the middle of the floor of the ER for several minutes now and people are starting to stare. 

“Are you okay?” Peggy repeats, disgruntled. McKay pokes her head out of North 10 and frowns at him. Kiara has stepped out of her office. 

“Family emergency,” he blurts out, “I’m sorry, I have to—” and his voice fails and he turns and runs like hell. 

Perlah shouts something after him but he’s already crashing through the doors and past the waiting room into the open air. He shakes mercilessly at the bus stop. He focuses on counting out his heartbeat until he finds a seat. When he gets off he thunders up the stairs of their apartment building. The adrenaline makes it so he can’t even form thoughts, which is exactly what he wants, it’s the only thing keeping him moving. 

Heaving, he forces open the door only to be greeted by Santos in a bra and boxers perched like a bat atop the couch and painting her toenails purple. For somebody who does surgical incisions on a regular basis she isn’t very good at it. Her eyes go wide with alarm. “Dude, what the fuck, I’m watching Grey’s.” At the sound of the door slamming behind him she flinches. “Dude.”

He barely hears her, shedding his jacket and backpack, his blood is still pounding in his ears and nose and throat, “I’m fucked, I am so, so actually fucked—”

She untangles her limbs and gets down off the couch, Sandra Oh breaking down in tears in the background. She’s already running to him, instinctively checking his pulse— Jesus, she thinks he’s having a heart attack. “What the hell happened? Why aren’t you at work?”

“I d-did something really bad,” he forces himself to say, as she helps him sit down and very kindly holds his hand. “Fuck, really, so bad— I’m gonna get kicked out and fired and it’s gonna go on my record and I’m— I’m not gonna be able to graduate—”

She snorts, which makes him wheeze out a terrified laugh, which makes him angrily tremble and tear up even more. “What could it possibly be. You’re like a baby deer. Hey.” She snaps her fingers in front of his face. “Hey. Whitaker. Whatever the fuck this is, it’s not your fault. Unless you killed a guy again.”

He genuinely, at that moment, starts to dryly sob. 

“Jesus fuck, Whitaker, I didn’t mean it.” She pats his back like an awkward dad pats his son after a bad baseball game. An intimately familiar feeling. 

He can’t even look at her. “It’s so bad, Trin.”

“…You didn’t actually kill somebody, right?”

“Worse,” he whispers. “Uh.” Everything’s gone blank. “I had, uh.”

Can he tell her this?

“Whitaker. Holy fuck. SPIT IT OUT.”

He manages to slow his breathing a tiny bit. Enough to have his entire doomed future roll credits in his brain. How can he admit this? How can he say it out loud? To an actual not-fucked-up living breathing human being? 

He squeezes his eyes shut. “You’re not going to believe me.”

She groans. “Whatever the fuck it is, I promise not to judge you.”

“You can’t say anything.”

“I swear.”

“I mean it,” he warns shakily. “To anybody.” He’s gonna fucking puke. 

With some effort, she nudges his pinky out from his clenched fist and interlinks it with hers. “My word is bond, amigo.” 

So— fuck it, fuck it, he just goes for it, all at once.

“I had, uh. Sexual contact. With a coworker.” 

Santos stares. 

“On shift.”

Santos stares. 

“Um.” He wraps his hands around his knees in a tight ball and fights past the returning blockage in his throat. His voice drops down to his tiniest murmur. “With Dr. Robby.”

Santos stares.

In the background Meredith Grey is having a very loud affair. Dennis lurches for the remote and turns it off. 

There is a very, very long stretch of silence. 

She opens her mouth, several times, and then closes it again. Dennis returns her unending gaze, unable to add anything that could make it any less bad.

“You,” she finally says, deathly still, “slept with Dr. Robby?”

He nods mutely. Then he reconsiders and shakes his head. 

“Did you or didn’t you.”

He goes beet red. “I didn’t— um— sleep with him, exactly.” The fact that they are actually having this conversation in real life is sending him to the fucking moon. 

Her face is still totally blank. “What does that mean.”

“I’m not giving you details,” he splutters. 

“Holy shit. You sucked him off.”

“That is not true.”

“Whitaker.” Santos stops. She has grown very pale. “You’re still a student. And he’s.” She falters. “That’s really bad.”

Dennis just nods. 

“Oh, fuck,” she says, “he didn’t, uh. Coerce you? You need to tell me if he did.”

He shakes his head vigorously. “I think I. Coerced… him…?”

Again Santos stares. 

“I mean,” he stammers, “I, I got consent, and everything— sort of—?”

She’s looking at him like he has just turned into a wild animal. “Hold up. Hold. This is all true.”

“Why would I lie about any of this?”

“Jesus.” She flops back against the couch. “Oh yeah. You’re fucked. This is fucked. Holy shit!”

“Garcia,” he tries, now in the bargaining stage. 

“I never fucked Garcia.”

He squirms. “Does it really matter?”

“Yes, dumbass! This actually happened! In real life!”

He slumps. “Fuck. I’m so fucked.”

“I can’t believe Dr. Robby’s gay.”

“I don’t think he even is gay,” he says, getting even redder. 

She chokes. “Huh?”

“I don’t even know if I’m—”

“You initiated the sucking off of a man.”

“I didn’t suck him off,” he maintains. 

She raises her eyebrows expectantly. 

“It was just…” he mumbles, “hand… stuff…?”

“Oh,” she cries, aghast, standing up now, “just hand stuff, that’s fine, no worries— ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR MIND?”

She stomps over to the kitchen. He hears glasses clinking. “I know,” he says, the adrenaline in his veins being replaced with an icy dread. “I know.” 

She comes back with a glass of an unknown liquid and starts chugging. She does not pause for breath until it’s empty. She offers Whitaker nothing. 

“What the fuck do I do,” he pleads. 

She steeples her hands together. “I mean.” She stifles a burp. “Did he… like… it…?”

“I guess so? I don’t know, I’ve never— never done this before.” He cringes. 

Her mouth falls open. “This is crazy,” she says. Her voice is already starting to warble. “Oh my fucking god, Whitaker.”

“Trin. Help me.” She completely ignores him. “Come on.” She goes back to the kitchen and returns with a half-empty bottle of tequila and another glass for him. In silence she fills both glasses and proceeds to drain another one. 

She slams it, gasping, and finally says, “Please don’t tell me the first person who ever touched your dick was Dr. Robby.”

“Um.” He coughs. 

“Oh my god I’m gonna fucking die.”

“I was the only one doing any. Touching. I can’t believe I’m saying this.” 

“How did it even… happen?”

“He was, um, distracted?” he tries to explain. He sips the tequila and spits it back into the glass. “With the memorial? He wasn’t in a good place?”

Santos shrieks. “So you jacked him off?”

He reconsiders the tequila and begins against his will to chug it. 

She starts to laugh at him. Harder and louder than he’s ever heard her do so. Then she slumps on the floor, shaking her head in wonderment, and leans against his lap. “Aw, buddy. You’re shaking a bit.”

“Yeah, you think?”

She pats his knee. “We’ll figure something out. There’s got to be a way.”

“Does there?”

“Always is, if you’re smart. You really think a tribunal would lay the blame on a student over his attending?”

Whitaker does not like thinking that way. That he might actually have all the cards. That if there’s a power imbalance here, he’s the one with the advantage. “He could say anything.”

“But would he?”

“That’s awful. I can’t believe you’d suggest that.”

“I’m just saying he doesn’t necessarily have anything to hold over you. So he’s not gonna tell.”

“He doesn’t have to tell to fuck up my life.”

Just then, his phone buzzes.

They both scream and jump back. Dennis leaps off of the couch and tosses it out of his pocket and onto the floor like it’s burning. It buzzes once more and then it’s silent. 

“Oh, fuck,” he says.

“Do you think…”

“Yeah.”

They stare at the phone a little longer. 

Santos says, “We need to.”

“Uh huh.”

“At some point.”

“Yep.” 

They keep staring. 

Dennis chews the inside of his cheek. Slowly he bends to his knees and reaches across the floor to pick it up. Then as soon as he sees the notification and subject line he drops it again. 

“It’s from Robby,” he croaks. “An email.” 

“Fuuuuck.” A beat. “Why do you have push notifications on for emails? Are you elderly?”

He’s not breathing again. “Trin, could you— read it to me? Please?”

She bends over and takes the phone gingerly.

With some trepidation, she reads: “‘Thank you for helping out earlier,” and her tone quickly shifts to bafflement. “You’re a very acute study. We’ll miss you at the gala. Hope everything goes well with your family and that we’ll see you back in tomorrow.” She pauses. “Sent from my iPhone.’”

His eyes go very wide. 

“What,” says Santos, not for the first time tonight and certainly not the last, “the fuck.” 

Well, what else is there to say?

They skip the gala. There’s no appropriate reaction to any of this other than to hole up in their apartment and quietly process the current state of events while the TV blinks on mute in front of them, listening to loud music and ordering a gigantic amount of UberEats and eating ice cream from the carton and other such horrible indulgences. 

And Dennis Whitaker learns to love tequila. 

He and Robby should get Nobel prizes in advancing the field of Pretending Something Never Happened. Whitaker almost dies of stress on his first day back after The Event (as Santos has been calling it) but then he realizes there isn’t actually a giant light-up sign saying “JERKED OFF HIS BOSS” attached to his forehead, and Robby has obviously stayed silent about it too. Actually, he treats Dennis completely normally. Not even a lick of tension or trepidation, just go help McKay stitch up that laceration, Whitaker or get the nurses to prep me an ice bath stat, Whitaker or good work on that ingrown toenail, Whitaker. And Dennis is his usual subservient nervy self, happy to once again be taking orders rather than giving them. It’s Santos that’s really jumpy, can’t stop staring at Robby while he talks, seems to analyze his every movement. 

At the end of the shift, when they’re all drenched in sweat and saline and most of them are heading out to a new bar that’s opened up down the street, Robby scratches his beard and says, “Whitaker, can you stay behind for a quick chat?”

He sees Santos visibly straining to stop her eyes bugging out of her skull. He gives her a quick silencing glance. 

“Uh huh,” he says, smiling placidly, as Santos is pulled away by the throng of departing day shifters. He gets her telepathically transmitted mind beams: tell me everything!

They step into a freshly emptied room and Robby pulls the curtain shut. 

“So,” he says.

Dennis fidgets with his pockets. “So.”

“Never on shift again.”

What?

“Again,” he repeats, mouth dry. 

Robby’s eyes bore into him. “Yes. If you want that.”

He looks at his shoes. “I do.”

“Okay,” says Robby, impossibly calm. “Then I’ll let you know.”

And that’s exactly how it happens. It repeats, once, twice, then becomes something of a regular habit. When they’re closing out a shift Robby will give Dennis a look, and he’ll know it’s coming. Not every shift— not even exclusively the bad ones. And never at Dennis’ own request. Something about that, about being of service, gives him a horrible thrill. They split off, leave the grounds like normal, then double back once they’re sure nobody’s seen them. They meet in Whitaker’s old room on the eighth floor. 

And they do it again. 

Mostly it does tend to be hand stuff and frotting against each other— it’s simpler that way, quick and easy and technically not having sex. Dennis will enter, and Robby will be sitting on the bed, and Dennis will tell him to do things. That’s how it goes. Touch me. Touch yourself. Slower. Slower. Now stop. Not tonight, you don’t get it tonight. Still. No, don’t speak, stay still god damn it. They never get fully naked, and they don’t use the wrist restraints every time, mostly Robby just controls himself, he’s gotten very good at following instructions now, and maybe it’s really helping him, and this is how they convince themselves it’s not that bad, it’s just easy, it’s casual, it doesn’t mean a thing. 

There are times that they meet up, because Robby asks, but Dennis doesn’t really have the urge that night. Exposure to infectious bodily fluids will do that to a guy. But of course he submits in his own stubborn way and still goes. Sometimes he just orders Robby around for a while, not even particularly sexual orders, like sitting on his knees staring at the wall and not talking, or lying incredibly still getting more and more worked up while Dennis walks in circles around him, refusing to give him anything at all. Like baiting a dog. These don’t necessarily get Dennis in the mood, but there is something extremely entertaining about them, and Robby seems to enjoy it anyway, no matter the request. Sometimes he’ll ask Robby to strip, or beat off in front of him, and he’ll just stare while he does it, unmoving, filing the image away for later. Sometimes not getting Robby off is just as beguiling as the alternative, leaving him curled and drooling on the linoleum floor. 

It’s not always that strict. Sometimes there’s none of that dynamic at all. Sometimes Robby is just hungry. As soon as he walks in the door he gets slammed into a wall and they’re making out, just sort of bashing against each other, hands running down each other’s chests, both falling in concentric spirals out of control, spilling into their scrubs. In and out in five minutes. When they’re loud, Dennis gets paranoid; someone has to do maintenance up here at some point, even just a cursory dusting, right? Then again the thought of getting caught makes it all that much more intense, and he gives into his moans; he bites back.

The one thing that remains the same each time is that they never talk about it. They never ask each other what they want and they never discuss the logistics and they absolutely do not address their dynamic in any way. There are no check-ins, no negotiations. Dennis knows he’s fine, personally— he gets to decide the parameters, after all— and Robby is a grown adult, he’ll bring it up if he won’t do something, but so far nothing has really phased him, he always comes into work looking no different, maybe a little extra redness in his cheeks. McKay comments once on the new pep she’s seen in his step and Dennis wants to evaporate off the face of the earth. 

Dennis has some knowledge of what they’re doing, and that it’s an established thing— he’s a dom, or the top, or whatever the fuck it’s called, even though the idea of ever calling himself that is unthinkable. But this isn’t roleplay; he finds the idea of that totally vulgar. He knows there are documents and books and guides out there about doing it properly, about how it all works, he could learn more about it if he wanted, but he’s certain any attempt at a more comprehensive examination of their actions would ruin the entire thing. The point is not to think. He wants to help Robby, and it makes him feel good. That’s all the psychoanalysis he can tolerate. 

Because fundamentally he still finds it kind of embarrassing, deep in his core. If he ever stops to think, he’ll ask himself what the hell he’s doing and he’ll bolt. Surely it is wrong, it is unacceptable, or it would be if they said it out loud. He doesn’t know the right terminology, there are lots of words he can’t say because he knows they’ll make him sound like a twelve year old. Especially when he’s saying them to his boss. Does anyone sound attractive saying “suck my dick”? Or referring in any way to balls? “Come” is fine, but “cum”, as a noun, is unthinkable. “Daddy”, “bad boy”, “stroke it”; all uniquely bad and lame and mortifying. He ends up having to speak in very oblique, very vague ways, which does have its own charm. Usually it devolves to grunts and pointing regardless. That's better. He doesn't have to say he wants anything. It’s pure, unmuddled. Instinct. Surely it can stay that way forever. Cain didn’t know it was wrong to kill his brother; no one ever told him. Did he even know that Abel wasn’t going to wake up? Was it really his fault, then?

“Hurt me,” Robby says to him once, very quietly, and Whitaker goes still. 

He has no idea how to do that. Sure, he’s had fantasies, but he can’t actually commit physical violence, that would be repulsive, it would violate the core of his very being. Wouldn’t it? “Do no harm,” he can’t help but blurt out, shaking his head. “Don’t ask that.”

Again— no check-ins, no negotiations. Robby concedes, and suddenly he looks so fragile and needy all the blood rushes to Whitaker’s head and he unzips his pants.

“I want to fuck your mouth,” he says without thinking.

Robby drops to his knees and complies. And it probably does hurt, he’s clearly never done it before, he chokes it down unpracticed and spluttering, and Whitaker keeps his hand pressing down on the back of his head, coming so fast he doesn’t have time to cry out, his mouth feels so foreign and warm, and it’s not just the sensation of it, it’s the whole sordid picture— ruining something beautiful. 

(Every so often, afterwards, Robby will cry into his chest in rickety gasping sobs. He’ll play with his hair, then, mind numb, stroke the sweat from his temples, until he shudders and calms.)

Of course, Santos gets zero details about any of this, and likes it that way. After the first few times she realizes it’s a thing and stops asking questions about it. Mostly.

“Home late again,” she always says acerbically when he comes in, lying spreadeagled on the couch with a bowl of popcorn in her face. He usually grabs a handful and crawls in next to her. With the amount of Real Housewives she watches while he’s out, he starts worrying she’s going to pick up their mannerisms. He’s starting to pick them up himself. 

One night she asks, “How the fuck do you not absolutely crumble into a ball when you interact with him?”

“Do you really want me to answer that question?”

“I have another interrogation with him tomorrow. I need tips. I think he figured out I was spinning a yarn.”

“Well. Handling Robby is like…” He hums. “It’s like redirecting a bull by the horns. You just have to grab him and stand your ground.” He lowers his voice. “Maybe you should try being a little forceful. Is all I’m saying.”

She spills her popcorn all over the carpet and mimes vomiting. “Jesus, fuck. Gay Sex Whitaker is scary. I’m scared.”

He still feels the urge to say, I’m not gay, in fact I’ve never had gay sex, whatever I’m engaged in is so weird and complex that ‘gay sex’ would not begin to describe it. 

Santos does help out. Apparently she’s very good at rattling off excuses to the others as to why he so rarely joins their little outings. She covertly processes a couple of labs and hands them to Whitaker; they all come back clean. She was the one who demanded he get tested in the first place, which he never would have thought to do on his own. He certainly wouldn't ask Robby for his history.

And things… are fine! He gets to renew his rotation at the Pitt for another couple months by swearing to his advisor that emergency medicine is his life’s only passion (he wouldn’t mind a relaxing family doctor stint in a quiet Midwestern suburb at some point in the future, but she doesn’t need to know that) and that his economic circumstances demand he remain in Pittsburgh. He gets a lot less nervous around patients, pays attention, learns all he can. He throws himself into Street Team work. (He finds Lilian again, apologizes for bolting, buys her a coffee and an apple fritter and listens to her talk about her dead daughter.) Mohan tips him off to a good YouTube pilates instructor and he starts following along with the videos on the carpet in his bedroom. He’s told a lot of patients about the value of exercise and only just now starts to actually believe it. It’s hard, and he’s sure he looks ridiculous all twisted up, but it fulfills the need he’s been ignoring, his beloved self-punishment, the conviction that he has to suffer to grow strong. His arms tone, his core tightens. Santos ladles him extra portions when they collaborate on meal prep; he fills out a little bit, looks less paunched. People at work stop calling him a Victorian orphan.

And if he privately wonders whether his well-being might be predicated on the fact that he’s having an unethical sexual relationship with his boss, he tries his very best not to acknowledge it. 

It’s a public holiday, and the first hot day of the year, not that any of them get to enjoy it. Lots of sports injuries, kids with broken ankles, people fainting from dehydration, that kind of thing. 

But his otherwise jovial fainting patient, a man in his forties who collapsed on the sidewalk, doesn’t respond when he looks back from the computer to ask for his number and address. Whitaker rushes over. His sats are dropping, he’s not responding to pain— I checked the skull, no tenderness, he didn’t fall on it, IV fluid should have been enough.

By the time Robby arrives with a couple of nurses on his heels he’s already figured out where he went wrong— it wasn’t just dehydration that downed him, it was a stroke, and he’d missed it somehow.

After they reduce the pressure in the man’s brain and load the IV with TPA and get him stable again the room is quiet. 

“He had no motor symptoms,” Whitaker babbles, “he just said he was dizzy, I had no idea…”

Robby narrows his eyes. “Dizziness and vertigo do not rule out stroke.”

“He didn’t say he fell on his head.”

“Falling may have been a symptom of the stroke, not a cause. You should have given a CT even without motor symptoms.”

“I thought…” he says, panicked. “I’m sorry. I fucked up.”

“You’ll know for next time.”

“Really. I’m so sorry. I feel awful.”

Robby looks annoyed now. “We can take him from here, he’s next to go up to Neuro. Go help Mel with the baseball skull fracture.”

Whitaker is listless for the rest of the shift, though. He triple-checks every diagnosis and runs through every possibility and even Mohan tells him to get a move on. Collins tries to give him a pep talk about how he’s still a student and even residents make diagnostic mistakes, but it has no effect, he can’t stop thinking about the man, how every second counts when it comes to the brain, he might be screwed up for life. Santos has to grab him by the cheeks and shake him at one point to get him to pay attention to their salmonella guy. And Robby gives him the customary look near the end of the shift, but it’s different this time— flippant, sour. 

When he steps into the room on the eighth floor he finds himself slammed against the wall. Alright, he thinks, one of those days, already getting stiff, but after a long moment Robby still isn’t touching him or kissing him or anything, just holding his shoulders in a vice grip, breathing down his neck.

“Settle down,” Robby tells him, orders him, and he freezes. 

“Dr. Robby—”

“Dr. Robby, Dr. Robby, Dr. Robby. Just shut the fuck up. You’re so—” He leans in, their noses touching, “—self-effacing, Jesus, and too fucking arrogant to let it go.”

Dennis is spellbound. 

“I think you need to know what your fucking place is, here,” Robby grunts. Roughly, he turns Dennis around so his forehead is pressed into the wall. He zips Dennis’ wrists together tight with some kind of— what— portable medical restraint? “You need to control yourself, too. Don’t you, kiddo?”

“Uh huh,” he says into the wall. He wonders if he’s ever been this hard. 

There’s a rustling. Robby pulls away for a minute. Dennis whines, tries to push back into the empty space. Then he realizes what the rustling is and he chokes out a moan.

In the corner of his eye he sees Robby open a container of medical-grade lubricant. Oh, fuck. 

He thinks: is this happening? Really happening? He thinks this as Robby starts fingering him open. He thinks this as the pain and the stretch of it cloud his mind and get him panting for air like a dog. He thinks this as, Jesus Christ, he starts pushing in, angry but still methodical and slow, clearly savoring this, his wide hand firmly grasping Dennis’ clavicle to hold him still. He didn’t know it would feel like this— he didn’t know what he thought it would feel like. He’s nothing, a peon, an atom, a servant to something bigger than himself, just a vessel. When Robby bottoms out and brushes against his prostate he doesn’t see God. He’s never felt more human, more rooted to the earth and all its ruins. When he woke up this morning he certainly didn’t predict this. He didn’t predict he’d be coming completely untouched while being rammed into the wall, with Robby in his ear saying, “Stupid kid, you fucking stupid kid, you’re nothing.” He didn’t predict that Robby would leave him shuddering in a pile on the floor and depart wordlessly, dumping the condom into the biohazard bin on his way out. 

(He can’t even get the restraint off his wrists. He realizes with horror that it’s not medical at all, it’s just a plain old zip tie, where the hell did he get that? He can’t put both his hands in one pocket, and he can’t cut it off himself. He tries to chew it off, which goes as well as anyone would expect. He ends up wrapping his hoodie around his fists. He nearly gets away with it, too, but he realizes he can’t turn the doorknob to get into the apartment. Santos’ face upon opening the door is one of the great humiliations of his life.)

After their next shift Dennis fucks Robby into the mattress with a ferocity he did not know he had. 

It goes on like that. Switching. They don’t even really talk about it, it’s organic, one of them will make a needy sound, or else grab the other roughly, and they’ll fall into their patterns. The push and pull of it becomes a dynamic in itself, the transgression of punishing the other being punished by further transgressions, each time a little closer to balance and a little farther from reality. 

So maybe they’re both crazy. Maybe they’re trapped in this labyrinth for good, inching towards the centre, where presumably they will reach Nirvana or else get turned to salt. They start to stretch what they’re comfortable with. Neither of them can or will back down from a challenge. Dennis lets himself get slapped around a bit. He likes that. He knows Robby probably would too, but he still can’t make himself physically hurt him, so mostly it’s pain via neglect or overstimulation— it’s embarrassing how riled up he gets when Robby starts to beg. Dennis himself never begs, even when it hurts, even when he’s desperate; the thrill is in his own endurance, the lengths to which he is willing to suffer for another, satisfied when he takes the blows in grateful silence. Just another part of his long spiritual lineage; would it be so different living in a monastery, wearing shirts made of hair?

There’s a day shift where Robby is particularly exhausted (they’d gone on longer than usual the night before, and it was Robby who got the worst of it, he didn’t even get to come in the end); he’s scattered, distracted, hopping between cases even more frequently than usual. 

They’re suturing a nasty wound to the upper thigh that hit an artery and Robby is pacing behind them. As Mel does her patient, tidy stitches, he looms over her. She cringes, obviously spooked.

“Careful there,” he snaps, “careful,” though the stitches look perfectly normal to Dennis and Mel has done this a billion times. 

“Sorry, Dr. Robby, I’m trying—”

“I think you should go slower.” He’s tapping his fingers on the edge of the bed distractingly. 

“I’m going as slow as I can, sir.”

“Robby,” Whitaker says, in a low voice. 

His head snaps up. 

“You need to get some air,” he continues, infusing his words with force. “Drop it and come back in fifteen.”

Robby, in a daze, steps back. And without a word he bows his head just slightly and leaves the room. 

Mel shakes her head minutely as if she thinks reality has glitched. She ties off the end of the suture. 

“Whitaker,” Mohan asks in the ensuing silence, “what was that?”

“He was getting in her way.”

“No, but how…”

Whitaker shrugs and goes back to work. He ignores everyone’s wide-eyed stares. Probably shouldn’t have done that publically. But Robby returns a little while later, refreshed, totally normal again. His expression is even a little apologetic. Good. Good. 

On the bus ride home (mercifully for his back, there was no illicit meetup tonight) his phone beeps. 

DR. SANTOS [17:33]: mohan told me what happened on shift btw

DR. SANTOS [17:34]: You are a twink drunk on power

FARMSPAWN [17:36]: Everyone should forget that ever happened. Especially you

DR. SANTOS [17:37]: only if you come with me to the roxy tonite and fuck someone who isnt your boss!!!!

FARMSPAWN [17:42]: Please delete

FARMSPAWN [17:42]: I really can’t have a paper trail for this

[MESSAGE DELETED]

DR. SANTOS [17:45]: fine club tmrw then. Pls x

FARMSPAWN [17:52]: I’ll probably hate it but fine

DR. SANTOS [17:55]: i am going to get you to have normal sex if its the last thing i do

FARMSPAWN [17:57]: I’m starting to think roommates don’t actually talk about this sort of thing

DR. SANTOS [17:58]: that’s because im your friend

DR. SANTOS [17:58]: dumbass

The Roxy is intimidating. Why the fuck did he agree to this? Whitaker has no idea what he’s meant to wear to a club, let alone a gay club. Then again he doesn’t really own enough clothes to have more than a couple of options. Jeans and a button-up flannel, why not. 

When he leaves his room he sees that Santos is also wearing jeans and a button-up flannel. “Uh, Trin?”

She turns and snorts. “No. No way. Turn around and change.”

“Why don’t you change?”

“I’m supposed to be wearing this. You look like a lumberjack.”

“Maybe they… like… lumberjacks?”

“You look like a homunculus that a lumberjack has grown in his backyard and forgotten to feed. More skin, Hucklefuck! You need to look slutty and fun!”

“I am not doing that.”

“You don’t understand the spirit of the Roxy.”

“Just tell me what to wear.”

She rips the flannel off to reveal the plain white t-shirt he’s got on underneath. “Even that’s better.”

“Seriously?”

“What, do you want me to paint your nails or something?”

“No.”

“I’m guessing you don’t own daisy dukes.”

“No.”

“Leather?”

“No.”

“Fine,” she drawls. “Then Mr. Clean will have to do.” 

They get tequila shots when they arrive, because of course they do. Whitaker chats for a while with Trinity’s fellow regulars, who are very sweet even though he is visibly sweating and this is his first time here. His first time at any club. It’s so loud— how do they handle it? Once the dancing really starts he tries his best to get lost in it. He sort of likes it, just moving, leaving no room for the intruding thoughts of his everyday life. Santos disappears in the throng of people. He marinates in the heat and sweat and movement, but he’s still so aware of himself, his every little flinch, the fact that he’s not sure he should be here or that he even counts as one of these people. They all seem to know exactly what they’re doing, they know every word to every song (cut to Whitaker furiously googling Kylie Minogue in the bathroom and trying to ignore the gargling noises in the next stall), they know how to talk to each other and touch and trade stares in just the right way. 

Not that he does badly. A guy sidles up to him and just straight up asks if he wants to make out. He shakes his head, bewildered, though the man is certainly— attractive, he’s able to recognize. But would any of these people really understand what he wants? The slow crash, the wordlessness, the punishing feeling of doing something unforgivable? Should he linger by the urinals looking desperate? What would it take? 

(And does he actually want that with someone he doesn’t know and trust?)

In the end both he and Santos strike out. They clink glasses of water at the kitchen table and swallow their aspirins. And Whitaker thinks, collapsing on his mattress, it wasn’t scary. He probably will go back, at some point. Get out of the house and the fucking hospital for a while. (There’s a tiny niggling in the back of his brain— what would his brothers say? Who does he think he is, showing himself off like that?)

There’s a knock on his bedroom door. Before he can answer, Santos opens it and leans in. “Hey.”

“What’s up.”

“You have fun?”

“Yeah. I guess so.”

She chews her lip and sits down on his mattress next to him.

“Is it just Robby?” she asks suddenly. 

“What?”

“Like. With him. Is it. A relationship? A real one?”

“No.” He frowns. “Uh. Like, are we exclusive? No. I’m not, like…” Does she think he’s in love with him? “It’s not that.”

“Do you even know what it is?”

He lies back. Stares at the ceiling. “It’s not emotional, if that’s what you mean.” Apart from the ways that it is. 

“But it’s all you have.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“And it’s going to keep happening.”

“It’ll stop when it stops.”

“Alright.” She sighs. “Do you know what you’re doing, with him? Are you getting what you want out of it?”

“Aren’t I allowed to not know?” He feels a little empty. “What it is, where it ends?”

“You’re in a weird BDSM relationship with your boss. I know it works for you. And that's fine. But shouldn’t you know the boundaries of that?”

It seems devastatingly stupid and ridiculous put plain like that. He sits up. “Trin, it’s fine. Seriously.”

“Have you thought about just asking him?”

He hunches over his knees. “Not really.”

She pats his leg fondly. “You’re allowed to have a say in that, you know.”

But then he would have to talk about it. Out loud, into the open air. “I know.”

“If you need to walk through it with somebody…”

“Yep. Got it.”

“Anything at all.”

“Uh huh.”

She turns the light off for him and he groans and pulls the comforter over his eyes and sleeps for thirteen hours.

The next time they fuck neither of them flees afterward. They lie in the hospital bed in a weird haze. Dennis is thinking about what Santos said, about what the hell he’s doing here. He tries to disentangle his feelings from the pleasure still thrumming in his body and ends up knotting them even further. 

So when Robby quietly asks him if he wants to come home with him, he says yes. 

They’re silent on the car ride over. It feels so much weirder that they’re outside, they’re not trapped in that little room anymore, they can just go wherever they want and still do the same thing. A small part of him is terrified by that. Somebody could see them like this and draw their own conclusions from the hand Robby has placed in the small of his back as they ascend the stairs to his townhouse. 

It’s fairly modest, but still nice. Messy but clean. Tasteful. Roomy. He runs his hand over the velvety couch and wonders if Robby takes other people here, even now. Surely he dates. He’s got exes. Surely he’s still trying, and Whitaker is just a momentary distraction, a speed bump. 

“Want a drink?”

“No, thank you.” 

He sits down gingerly. Robby sits beside him. They were just inside each other, but they can’t brush arms, that would be too much. Robby’s hand ghosts across his shoulder and he tries not to flinch. Slowly, like one being, they end up on their sides, Robby’s arms tucked around him, tickling his ribs. 

“Is this okay?” Robby murmurs. “Does it feel okay?”

It’s very warm. “Uh huh.” No one has ever done this with him, he realizes numbly. He’s never had this. Not fucking, just touching, holding, enmeshed and safe. Both of them smell like sweat and medical sanitizer. They lie there for a while, breathing. In and out, listening to the hum of the air conditioning, Robby’s beard brushing against the back of his neck. 

“Dr. Robby?” he starts in a whisper. 

“Yeah?”

“What is this?”

There’s a long silence. “You can call me Michael, you know.”

“Well, you could call me Dennis.”

“Probably not.”

“Ha. Yeah, probably not.” He swallows. “What is this for you, I mean?”

Another silence. Finally Robby says, “It’s wrong, isn’t it.”

“I mean. Technically. But I’m an adult. I started this. It doesn’t feel like…” He trails off. Because he knows it’s the wrongness of it that he likes. And for the first time he realizes how unfair that is. 

“I still feel guilty,” Robby says. “You’re my student. Of course I feel guilty. I’m downright terrified.” His voice cracks, just a little. “Sometimes I’m so ashamed of what you do to me I can’t get out of bed in the morning.”

Dennis curls tighter, grateful that in this position they can’t look at each other. “Sometimes I get so afraid of what I want I can’t sleep.”

Despite himself Robby laughs a little. “We’re shitty doctors.”

“I’m not a doctor.”

“Right.” Robby’s hand snakes up to stroke his cheek. Dennis screws his eyes shut, suddenly overwhelmed with emotion.

“I’m not in love with you,” he blurts out. 

Robby’s hand stops, feather-light. “I know.” An exhale. “I’m not in love with you.”

“Good,” he says, face hot with— something. “So that’s that, then.”

Robby shifts around him. “Do you wish I was?”

Dennis almost chews through his cheek. “No. Did you— think I was?”

“I think you wanted to save my soul.”

“And you let me try.”

“And it helps. Make things clearer, sometimes.” A pause. “Do you want to stop?”

“What do you want?”

“I… don’t think I know what the hell I want, kid.”

“Neither do I.”

“But I do need you,” Robby murmurs, mouthing at his neck now. “And you need me.”

“Yeah,” he admits, his throat dry with want. “At least for now.”

“Yeah. For now.”

They don’t fuck. They keep lying there in each other’s arms, wordless and strange, everything even more uncanny and mixed up than before. When Whitaker wakes up he flinches at the unfamiliar surroundings, alone on the couch, light pouring down from the skylight, smelling what is undeniably turkey bacon wafting from the kitchen, and checks his phone to twelve missed calls from Santos. 

When Robby puts the breakfast plate on the coffee table he finds that Dennis is already long gone. 

A week later at an all-hands meeting Gloria steps up with an announcement. 

“I know you’ve all been waiting to hear this,” she says with a self-satisfied smirk. “Our budget requests have been approved by our board. We’re finally opening up new inpatient and ICU beds.”

“With enough nurses to staff them?” Dana calls out. 

Gloria grins. “That’s in the budget as well. As well as increased staffing in administration and environmental services to handle the increased patient load.” The staff start whispering among themselves. 

“Security too?” one of the guards asks. 

“Security too.”

Dennis has never seen Robby more genuinely happy to be hearing Gloria talk. 

“More details will be coming out as we roll out these changes in the coming weeks,” she continues. “The empty wards on Floor 8 will be the first to be populated as an extension of the Oncology department.”

She continues her speech, but Dennis tunes her out, rooted to the floor, suddenly bereft. He doesn’t dare see if Robby has a reaction. When he goes on shift he forgets about it totally, throws himself back to work. He asks each patient for a story, something to keep his mind busy. 

That night he speeds up to his old room to make sure it’s clean and free of any signs of inhabitance or use and finds that he’s been beaten to the punch. It smells completely sterile. The bed is stripped and sparkling. The bins have been emptied. Even the tiny hole in the wall where he once hung a calendar to keep track of his shift schedules has been spackled over. The sanitizer container by the sink has been refilled. 

He doesn’t wait in there any longer than he needs to. He goes home. He gets up the next day and works again. And then again. And then again. He does not go up the elevator. He focuses on where he’s needed, what he can do, who he can save. He learns to make chicken adobo. He goes to the Roxy and gets fucked up and sticks his tongue down a guy’s throat in an Uber to his place and feels nothing. The wards on Floor 8 reopen. It’s their chemo centre now. Maybe somebody’s dying in his old bed, or maybe they’re getting well. He interacts with Robby normally and calmly and professionally. He does very well on his student doctor evaluations. He finally bucks up and calls his parents and kindly but firmly tells them he won’t pay their debts anymore, he won’t be beholden to them, he’ll visit next Christmas. He gets on the apps and has good sex a couple of times and mediocre sex many, many times, and finds that he’s fine with it, and if he doesn’t have time for real relationships that’s okay, he’s still young, he has time. His whole life, really. 

When the days go bad and he holds the dying in his hands he no longer trembles. He bows his head and under his breath says a prayer. Nothing long or fancy, no scripture, just whatever words come to mind, a little blessing, all the love in his heart he can spare them.

He and Robby never meet alone again. 

One night Whitaker sees an envelope on his desk. Inside is a piece of paper folded neatly. Another verse. Psalms, the many songs of King David. 

My mouth praises you with singing lips
when I think of you on my bed,
and meditate on you in the watches of the night;
for you have been my help,
and in the shadows of your wings I sing for joy. 

The following lines have been omitted, but he knows them well enough. My soul clings to you. Your right hand upholds me. He doesn't wonder why they've been left off. He tucks the page into his shirt pocket.

After the night shift is over, he wanders the streets uptown blearily in the early orange sun. He stops after a time in front of a church. It’s small, a boxy white wooden A-frame, and when he enters, it’s completely empty. The ceiling has been freshly painted. He sits on a bench in the back and clasps his hands together. He thinks about the blood, the sound of it moving. He thinks about bodies and spirits colliding. He thinks about healing, about reaching out a hand, the Magdalene in the garden clutching for Christ. About the beginning, and the breath. About lying prostrate under the expansive chest of God.

He closes his eyes, and for a moment, he imagines he can still hear David singing.