Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

The first week of August brings with it a string of shifts that are each worse than the last.

Monday they are short-staffed by two doctors, and Dennis stays four hours late trying to help the nightshift catch up with the day’s overrun board. On Tuesday, there is a bus accident within their jurisdiction, which wouldn’t have been so catastrophic if it hadn’t happened concurrently with a carbon monoxide emergency in an old apartment building that brings in dozens of affected patients. They are overrun in a matter of minutes, the department having to be set up in a way reminiscent of Pittfest. Abbot’s presence during the daylight is enough of a hallmark of the day’s critical status.

On Wednesday, running on six hours of sleep in the last fifty hours, there is a complaint filed against him. A family member, furious about a wait time that wasn’t his fault, wants a name and his is the one on the chart. Dennis stands through several minutes of a man’s raised voice in the hallway before Dana swoops in with her teeth bared, pointing a stiff finger at the man. The rest of Wednesday is a blur, and he sleeps for a few hours in the call room that night instead of going home because his next shift starts in four hours and it’d be a waste of time to go home.

Thursday he is blinking dry, stinging eyes at the computer screen. It’s a day that should feel like a relief by how fast it passes, but he thinks it only does because he may have been asleep on his feet at some point.

Friday he assists with a code that does not go well. A forty-year-old man with two children who had just become cancer free six weeks prior after a long and arduous battle, brought in by his wife for indigestion that ends up being a massive myocardial infarction. He doesn’t even make it to the cath lab. Dennis spends an hour after his shift ends with Mel, who was primary for the arrest. They don’t talk, just sit together on the steps outside the department and reflect on how unfair the world can be.

Or at least, that’s what he does.

He thinks that must be why it hits so hard when he gets home, a compilation of the shitty week taking its toll. Dennis is so exhausted his body borderline hurts, skin tight, and yet at midnight he finds himself sitting in the dark on the couch in their living room, staring at nothing.

He hasn’t felt this way since his first month of residency.

Back then, the exhaustion was from being constantly overwhelmed, always learning, always just shy of where he wanted to be. It was a feeling of being untethered while simultaneously feeling beat down. He would come home with Robby’s voice still in his head, correcting him, but occasionally telling him he had done well.

His phone sits face down on the coffee table now. Dennis looks at it a long time before reaching forward and picking it up. Robby’s thread has been silent for weeks, the last communication something inconsequential about the mail. His thumb hovers over the contact.

He could call. Robby would probably answer. Dennis has figured out that by evening time Robby is usually off the road for the night, at a diner for dinner or a motel. It’s late enough Robby is probably already settled in for the evening.

Now he just needs a better justification than the tangle of emotions churning under the surface.

He tries to construct a reason, something mundane about the house. Or, maybe, something administrative related at the hospital. He thinks about telling him about the code and immediately dismisses it. Robby went on sabbatical to get away from that.

He’s stared long enough that the screen dims, and in the dark of the living room he has to blink a few times to readjust to the low light. He sighs through his nose and lays the phone facedown without waking it on the couch beside his leg.

Ultimately, there is no immediate threat requiring intervention from Dr. Robby, just a bad week. He wonders, miserably, what it would be like to call without needing a reason beyond just wanting to hear from him.

There is no answer in the hush of the living room.

Mel is the third person he ever tells that Michael Robinavitch is his soulmate.

It goes much better than he expects, even if she does stare into space for several minutes.

“Earth to Mel,” Trinity says from the other end of the couch after the third minute of silence. “Come in, Melissa.”

The three of them sit in his and Trin’s living room, sharing a large pizza with the television muted. The decision to tell Mel was not spontaneous. While telling Trinity had been a moment of necessity, a desperate attempt on Dennis’s part to take some control back over the rapidly spiraling situation, telling Mel was simply because she was one of his best friends.

That, and the fact Trinity was getting increasingly less subtle.

He watches Mel blink now, mouth parted as she processes. The soft noise she makes before she speaks is a mix of disbelief and amazement. Finally, her eyebrows draw together, scrunching her face in a way that leaves her top teeth exposed. “The whole time?”

Dennis exhales, settling back into the couch. He doesn’t know why he expected a Trinity-level blowup from Mel of all people. “The whole time,” he confirms, taking a bite out of his pizza slice that’d been cooling on a paper plate in his lap.

“Oh,” Mel says in a rush. “That’s why—” Her mouth closes and she gives a decisive nod.

Trinity gives her a questioning look. “Feel free to clue the rest of the class in on that big brain of yours.”

Mel swings her attention to Trinity, eyebrows pulled up as she tilts her head. Some of her hair slips forward over a shoulder, out of its customary braid. Her legs are crossed where she sits on the floor in front of the coffee table. She looks back at Dennis. “I think he’s always been a little different with you.”

Dennis tries not to still, focusing on mechanically chewing. A tiny kernel of warm hope takes root beneath his ribs.

Mel has seen it. Someone else has seen the moments Dennis has been trying not to look too closely at for months. Trinity has too, but she views them through a similar lens as Dennis.

“Yeah,” Mel says happily, sounding certain. “You’re his favorite resident.”

The warm feeling vanishes.

“Actually,” Trinity pipes up immediately, “he told Huckleberry here that I’m his fav—”

Trinity is silenced by a pillow Dennis throws directly into her face.

“You must be like his prodigy,” Mel continues without missing a beat.

Dennis swallows the mouthful, feeling the skin around his eyes tighten. “His prodigy?” he hears himself ask.

Mel launches into a ready answer, about trust and reliability, but Dennis isn’t listening. He’s too tied up by the sudden onslaught of wrongness he feels, turning over the word.

Prodigy.

Is that what he is?

Dennis looks down at the grease on his plate and tries to find fault with what Mel has said. Robby does trust him. He teaches him, gives Dennis opportunities because Dennis is good, or because Robby wants him to become good. There is nothing in any of that that requires a soulmark to explain.

Dennis is a resident in the emergency medicine program, Robby is its chief attending. Dennis has seen Robby’s hand on Mel’s shoulder while he speaks to her, has seen him flick a glove playfully at Trinity. Robby maintains a relationship with and watches out for all of the residents, not just Dennis.

Even the more personal things can be reduced if he presses hard enough. The after effects of Hayden, maybe Robby would have done what he did with any resident in the same situation as Dennis. Robby needed a house sitter, Dennis was available. The helmet encounter could be explained by Dennis being frightened, and Robby promising him something because Robby is kind when it matters. For all Dennis knows, Robby chucked the thing over a bridge on his way out of Pittsburgh. He likes to tell himself Robby is wearing it.

Dennis cannot think of a single thing he could offer as proof of something more. Trying to explain a certain look that lasts maybe a few seconds too long just sounds like him wanting it to be proof.

Suddenly, Dennis does not even feel like a favorite resident.

Like she can read his thoughts, Trinity speaks.

“Okay, but,” he hears her say slowly when he tunes back in, Trinity’s gaze shifting between Mel and him. “Dr. Robby does all of that stuff with us, too.”

Mel opens her mouth maybe to supply an argument, but after a second, closes it. Her hands smooth over the pillow in her lap as she considers that. “Uh, okay,” she says quietly. “I guess that’s…also true.”

Her mouth presses together and she looks at Dennis, like he could supply an answer to the question she doesn’t know if she should ask. He doesn’t know what he wants less: to hear the question or to answer it.

“I just wanted you to know, Mel,” he says instead. “That’s all.”

Mel looks like she might say something, but Trin beats her to it.

“Huckle—”

He shoots her a withering look.

Trinity’s mouth closes. She lowers her slice of pizza to her plate.

“Let’s just drop it,” he says, and forces himself to take another large, pointed bite. He juts his chin to the television and speaks around the bite. “The show’s about to start.”

Mel looks between him and Trinity. Trinity’s mouth is set in a thin line, pizza ignored, and a look passes between them. Clarity seems to smooth Mel’s brow.

She grimaces and says softly, “Oh.”

He looks away from them both, swallowing down the mouthful of pizza that has suddenly turned to ash in his mouth.

They don’t talk about soulmarks again that night.

It’s a smaller crew than usual at the park that night, the shift too long for most to find interest in spending another hour with their coworkers, even with the promise of a cold beer.

The sun has long set, the park shared only with evening joggers and dog-owners out for the last walk. Their group has claimed a patch near the path in an area with little tree coverage to see the few stars bright enough to peak through Pittsburgh smog. Donnie brought a blanket, but Mateo and Javadi have commandeered it while he sits cross-legged in the grass beside Dennis and Jesse.

Nobody is trying very hard to keep the conversation going, too worn out. It wanders through hospital gossip, Jesse’s latest concert and a story Mateo tells about a patient who repeatedly tried to tip him with an unscratched lottery ticket. When the conversation lulls, Dennis leans back on his hand in the grass and takes the last sip of his beer. Mateo bumps Javadi’s shoulder with his own, and she laughs quietly at something he’s said.

Dennis has just started debating whether or not he wants another beer or his bed when Donnie asks, “Anyone head from Robby lately?”

Dennis looks up. There are a few hums in the group of negation, thrown easily without much weight. He rubs a thumb over the label of his beer and wonders if he should speak up. Javadi decides for him.

“Whitaker has, right?” she asks. “Aren’t you watching his house?”

Four pairs of eyes look at him with mixed amounts of interest. He doesn’t wonder how Javadi knows that. Trinity’s subtlety will never earn her any awards.

“Uh, yeah.” He lowers the bottle to the grass. He thinks he will have another. “But I haven’t really uh, talked to him all that much. Just a handful of times over the last few months.”

He punctuates it with a small shrug and hopes it doesn’t sound as defensive as he feels even though no one has accused him of anything. A handful of times is technically true. If he leaves out how precisely he remembers every single one of them, well. No one’s business but his own.

“He seem like he’s doing alright?” Donnie asks.

Dennis turns toward him, surprised. There is an underlying sincerity to the question he hadn’t expected. Donnie watches him with a steadiness that feels like he’s genuinely asking about Robby’s wellbeing and it causes Dennis to try and find something a little more substantial than what he might have originally said.

“He hasn’t given me a reason to think otherwise,” he says honestly.

At that, Donnie gives a small nod. Across the blanket, Mateo shifts his beer from one hand to the other. Dennis doesn’t think he imagines the look that passes between them. It’s gone before he can decide what it means.

“Well,” Mateo says, suddenly flippant. “I’m out of the running. I bet only a week.”

The change in subject is abrupt enough that Dennis nearly misses what he means. Then Jesse groans, tipping his head back toward the sky overhead.

“I think we all are, it’s been over three months.”

“Nah, nu uh, I bet ‘never comes back’,” Donnie says.

Javadi straightens, looking between all of them. “For real? You guys bet on our attending’s sabbatical length?”

“Haven’t you seen the board?” Dennis asks her at the same time Matteo asks Donnie, “How are we supposed to quantify that? You just never get a pay out?”

“Ahmad said he’d cap it at a year,” Donnie says.

“That’s because he bet a year.”

A ripple of laughter goes through the group. Even Javadi laughs after a second, shaking her head. Dennis smiles because everyone else does, but Never comes back settles uncomfortably in his gut.

“You really think he won’t come back?” he asks before he can think better of it, looking at Donnie.

He honestly expects some kind of dismissive response. Something about the department finally driving Robby into early retirement, or the motorcycle carrying him all the way to Canada just to get away from Gloria. He thinks there’s room for a joke there, somewhere.

So he’s surprised when Donnie instead looks thoughtfully down at his beer.

“Not sure,” he starts slowly, finger picking at the label. “You get some time away from the noise of everyone else’s emergency though…might start to not want to go back.”

The laughter fades gradually, attention shifting. 

Jesse leans into his elbows on his knees. “Speaking from experience?”

Donnie’s mouth lifts at the corner. “Paternity leave was hard to come back from,” he admits, looking at all of them. “Slow mornings, regular meals, uninterrupted sleep. Well—” his smile grows into a full on grin. “What interrupted me was my baby girl, not a pager or overnight shift. Made it more manageable somehow.”

His smile lingers for another second, softer than Dennis is used to seeing on him. Then Donnie gives a big exhale and settles back on one hand, beer label worried at one edge.

“Let’s just say I wouldn’t be surprised if he ends up liking the distance from all this,” he says finally, gesturing vaguely with the bottle. “He’s been in it a long time.”

No one has a follow-up for a long moment, and the park’s life continues around them. A dog barks near the path, a jogger’s heavy footfalls approach them. There’s a low murmur from a group a short distance away, scattered laughs reaching.

Dennis runs his thumb over the neck of his own bottle. He thinks of Robby somewhere far enough away that the hospital can no longer reach him. No trauma alerts overhead or tracker filling faster than it can be cleared. No one waiting outside his office or calling his name across the department. Mornings that belong just to him, meals eaten sitting down. Sleep that ends because he has had enough of it, rested.

He tries to decide whether Robby would like that kind of life. If the attending and man he knows would thrive in an environment without chaos.

Not for the first time, Dennis considers that Robby coming back won’t be the inevitable conclusion to his leaving. Realizing that others have similar thoughts somehow makes it a more plausible outcome though, and he swallows down the rising trepidation, unwilling to turn it over.

Dennis goes to take another drink, but the bottle is empty.

Across from him, Mateo leans his shoulder into Javadi’s again. Jesse plucks at a blade of grass. Donnie goes back to working at the corner of the label, no longer looking at anyone.

The conversation never really picks up again.

“Thank you so much, Dr. Whitaker. I really cannot thank you enough.”

“It’s no trouble at all, Mrs. Risch,” he says, smiling politely while he hands over the discharge paperwork. “Your nephew will be very taken care of with this outpatient pediatrician. I did a rotation with her back in med school. She’s very thorough, and Ehlers-Danlos is one of her specialties.”

The woman gives another relieved sigh, taking the stack and contact information. She drops a hand to the shoulder of the boy at her elbow, giving a reassuring squeeze. “Say goodbye to the nice doctor, Jordan.”

Dennis flashes a smile down at Jordan which he returns shyly, a roll of stickers clutched in one hand, the other arm secured in a sling. He gives a quiet thank you, body tucked halfway behind his aunt’s hip.

“You’re welcome,” Dennis says. “Try to keep that shoulder where it belongs until your appointment, alright?”

Jordan nods solemnly. Dennis directs them toward the unit’s exit, handing them off to Donnie. He picks up Donnie’s, Rad sling, little dude, an easy smile on his face and a gesture to follow him.

It is nearing the end of August, and the shift has been mercifully run-of-the-mill thus far. Jordan had come in for another dislocated shoulder, one of several joints his aunt reported having to bring him to an emergency department or urgent care to have reduced over the last few years. Until now, the injuries had been written off as the consequences of a wild preteen boy, but something about the frequency and ease of the dislocations had made Dennis suspect a diagnosis beyond clumsiness and roughhousing.

The pediatrician he recommended would be able to give them more answers and, hopefully, point them toward the appropriate testing. Noelle Hastings with case management helped him ensure their insurance was in network with an appropriate referral.

Dennis hums thoughtfully and makes his way back to the hub, eyes flicking up at the board when he arrives to pick out his next patient, putting off charting in favor of staying on his feet. He slept poorly the night before, and if he drinks any more coffee he’s fairly certain he’ll enter some kind of arrhythmia.

“I cannot believe that’s the couch you want,” Javadi’s voice says behind him.

“It’s a futon,” Mel counters. “Both practical and functional.”

Dennis turns in time to catch the look of disgust on Javadi’s face.

Trinity appears at his elbow, her bag still hanging from one shoulder. She has either just arrived or has spent the first several minutes of her swing shift avoiding the hub.

“You guys still haven’t pulled the trigger on a couch?” she asks, frowning. “What have you been doing for the last two weeks, sitting on the floor?”

“No,” Javadi says quickly, at the same time Mel chirps, “Yes!”

With Javadi’s start of residency, and the paycheck that comes with it, she had finally taken the leap of moving out of her parents’ house. Mel, looking for a roommate so she could move closer to the hospital after Becca expressed a desire for space, had seemed to offer the perfect opportunity.

So far, however, they have agreed on exactly three pieces of furniture.

“I’m moving back in with my parents,” Javadi mutters, kneading her fingers into her temples.

“You can’t,” Mel says, the sarcasm going over her head. “You signed a lease.”

Javadi groans.

Trinity drops her bag beneath the workstation and nudges it under with her foot. She leans over Mel’s phone where a photograph of the disputed futon is displayed. Trinity sucks her teeth, expression not leaving much doubt on her opinion.

“Yikes.”

Mel pulls the phone protectively toward her chest. “What does that mean?”

“I think you know what it means.”

Dennis leans around Mel, curious now. She brings it away from her chest to show him, eyes on Trinity. “It’s not ugly!”

Dennis has to disagree.

The futon is green, and not the kind of forest green one might be able to dress up with warm browns or a throw blanket. It’s a split-pea soup green, or mushed baby food green. The color might have grown on him if it weren’t for the fact he can see the outline of the frame beneath the thin cushions. His back hurts just looking at it. Mel looks up at him with so much hope though that he keeps the grimace off his face, smile strained.

She beams. “See?” she says, swinging her attention back to Javadi and Trinity. “Dennis likes it.”

Trinity meets his gaze over Mel’s shoulder in disbelief and he gives a minute shake of his head, mouth thin.

“That futon looks like it’s already been through six divorces,” Javadi says, not the least bit impressed.

“Hey, that was almost funny,” Trinity remarks, smirking. Javadi rolls her eyes.

“It folds out into a bed,” Mel argues, gesturing toward the screen. “People can stay over.”

“People you hate?” Trinity says.

Javadi points at her. “Thank you.”

Mel looks betrayed. “You haven’t even sat on it.”

Javadi takes the phone from Mel and scrolls to another listing. “Look, here is a perfectly good couch. It has a chaise.”

“It takes up half the living room,” Mel counters, then follows it up with a quieter, “Because you insisted on putting your desk out there.”

“You know the bedroom doesn’t have enough natural light for my videos.”

The girls dissolve into what is clearly already an age-old argument, and Dennis huffs a quiet breath through his nose, shaking his head as he listens. He slots Jordan’s chart back into the dock, glancing back at the board and picks up another for North four, an abdominal pain.

“Not gonna put a dog in this fight, huh?” Trinity asks, saddling up beside him. She’s scheduled for the swing shift today, neither day nor night shift, just twelve hours carved into the busiest part of the day.

“I have zero furniture to my name,” he replies, eyes scanning over the chart in his hand. “Hardly think I have any authority over this stuff.”

Trinity hums. “That’s true. You own, like, one chair.”

“Pretty sure that came with the apartment, too.”

She snorts. “Anything interesting going on?”

“Not especially.” He glances at the clock. “Working the swing with Dr. Abbot?”

“Yeah, it’s as close to the dayshift as Dr. Al-Hashimi can get him,” Trinity answers absently, leaning a hip against the counter as she crosses her arms. “You know, without there being some kind of mass casualty event.”

“I heard that.”

Speak of the devil. They turn simultaneously, Dr. Abbot approaching with his bag slung over one shoulder, still in cargo pants from the street.

“She thinks these swing shifts will get me into meetings before noon,” he says, coming to a stop at the workstation across from them, his eyes already moving up to the board.

“Does it work?” Trinity asks with a smirk, knowing the answer.

Dr. Abbot’s hawk-like gaze drops to her, his chin still tipped up. “Funny.”

The dry delivery, the long-suffering look down his nose, is so reminiscent of another attending that Dennis’s heart gives a small, unpleasant pang.

Trinity raises a hand in salute.

“Welcome to the pseudo-dayshift, sir.”

.

Trinity is pulled away by Javadi a moment later, drafted into either viewing another couch or for actual patient care, Dennis isn’t sure. He turns back to the chart in his hand, aware of Dr. Abbot, who has returned after changing into scrubs. Dr. Abbot leans over the keyboard of the workstation across from him. He’s just about to go finally see North four when Abbot’s voice stops him.

“How are things, Dr. Whitaker?” he asks quietly from where he clicks through the patient tracker, not looking at him.

Dennis inhales slowly, resisting the urge to sigh.

It has been like this for months. Every other week or so, Abbot finds him at the edge of the hub or in the brief lull after a case and asks the same question in nearly the same tone. Just a quick check-in that Dennis knows without being told is done so out of some weird loyalty to an absent attending. He doubts Robby asked Abbot to do this.

The first time, he’d answered honestly enough to say he was adjusting. The second time, he’d said things were fine and asked for the story regarding the cactus. The third time, Abbot’s gaze was a little too assessing for comfort, and he worried how much, if any, gets back to Robby. So every time since then, Dennis has found slightly different ways to give away nothing.

This time he decides to just feign ignorance.

“Well,” Dennis starts cheerily, glancing around the department. “Uh, both trauma bays are empty right now, a promising start to your shift if you ask me. I’m about to go see North four, an abdominal pain, but labs so far look fine. Elevated white blood cell count but negative lactate.” He shrugs, before remembering. “Oh, sent someone to Dr. Kathy McDaniel, you remember her? I think I remember her saying she’d done her ER rotation here in the Pitt years ago. She’s a pediatrician now.”

Dr. Abbot doesn’t give any kind of response at first, still clicking through the computer. He then glances up at Dennis. “Can’t say I do. Get a lot of students through here.”

Dennis nods. “Right, yeah,” he says, not having really expected him to. “Of course.” He rocks back, sucking his teeth and tapping a finger on the chart before taking a step back, hooking a thumb over his shoulder. “Well, I’m just gonna—”

He’s interrupted by a snort. Dr. Abbot finally straightens from his lean, leveling a look at Dennis that tells him he knows exactly what Dennis is doing, a glitter of amusement in his eyes though he doesn’t smile.

“I meant,” Abbot says slowly, humoring him, “how are you doing?”

The way Abbot tilts his head, mouth twisted slightly to the side as he evaluates him is enough to make Dennis want to shift his weight between his feet. He has to consciously keep from doing it.

“I’m fine, good, great,” Dennis insists, glancing towards where the girls are still staring down at Mel’s phone with concentration. He lowers his voice anyway. “You don’t have to keep asking.”

“I know.”

The immediate agreement catches Dennis off guard. He looks back at him, but Dr. Abbot has already returned his attention to the tracker, leaned over again to click onto one of the names.

Dennis expected an excuse, or a brush-off. Something about keeping an eye on the residents while Robby is gone, or a claim that he asks everyone these questions.

“Then why do you?” Dennis asks.

“Because,” Dr. Abbot starts, mouse covered by his hand as he moves it, “every time I ask, you answer like that.”

Dennis frowns. “Like what?”

“Fine. Good.” Dr. Abbot’s gaze flicks to him. “Great.” He lifts a shoulder, mouth curving slightly before he continues. “Usually all three, in the same sentence.”

A snort leaves him despite himself. “Well,” Dennis says lightly, “that just sounds like I’m efficient.”

Abbot hums, and it reminds him again of Robby.

Dennis thinks that Robby’s absence has made all of the similar quirks between him and Abbot more noticeable. Or maybe Dennis is just at a point where he’s seeing him everywhere. He has the sudden desire to ask if Abbot asks Robby how he is as often as he asks Dennis, and can almost imagine the response Robby gives, dry and probably useless.

This is the opportunity Dennis could use to leave. North four is waiting, Abbot has turned back to the computer. The conversation feels to have reached a natural enough ending that Dennis could walk away without it seeming like an escape. But he finds himself hesitating, mind on other things now, debating with a question he can’t seem to make himself ask but equally can’t seem to let go unsaid.

He thinks he must give himself away because Abbot looks over and stares, that same too-assessing gaze on his face. Dennis flattens his mouth and tries to smooth his expression into something he hopes is neutral.  

There’s a quiet huff. “You’re more like him than I used to think.”

Dennis feels surprise flicker across his face before he can temper it. He blinks quickly, looking away, and doesn’t need to ask who him is.

“Why’s that?” Dennis wonders out loud.

“I get similar bullshit responses from him.”

Dennis can’t help it. A sharp laugh bubbles up and out of him, loud enough that Mel and Javadi look over briefly. He clears his throat, dropping his gaze to the counter.

When they are occupied again, Abbot continues. “The last time I asked him how he was, he gave me an unnecessarily detailed description of a pie he got in Iowa.”

Dennis grins despite himself, looking across the department as he shakes his head. It is remarkably easy to imagine, Robby offering up details with enough specificity to disguise the fact he hadn’t answered the question at all. He’d been doing the same to him in a roundabout way whenever Dennis had scraped together enough bravery to ask similar questions.

“Priorities,” Dennis says lowly, smile lingering.

Abbot looks at him sharply, surprised.

The expression is gone quickly though, and before Dennis can ask, Abbot’s face smooths over and his eyes are back on the tracker. “That is about as much information as I manage to get out of him,” Abbot says instead. There is a faint smile on his face, and he crosses his arms. “You tell me about empty trauma bays, he tells me about pie. Between the two of you, I know very little of actual value.”

Dennis exhales softly through his nose, feeling almost chastised. He looks down at his hands where they rest against the edge of the counter and wonders if Robby feels similarly when Abbot calls him out like this.

When he looks back up, Dr. Abbot is looking at him. “So?”

Dennis blinks. “So…what?”

“How are you?”

Dennis lets out an incredulous breath that is almost a laugh. He looks away toward the department again, buying himself a few more seconds.

A little ways away, Mel and Javadi have seemingly moved on to coffee tables. Trinity stands between them like a mediator, arms crossed. A nurse rolls by with a patient in a wheelchair, followed by a family member carrying two plastic bags of belongings. Somewhere out of sight, a monitor starts alarming and is silenced almost immediately.

The department keeps moving around him. There is nothing particularly wrong with it right now, just a constant hum of need to be done tasks. The day already feels too long, and his shift is only half of the way over.

“I’m tired,” he says finally, honestly, hoping it’s not too much to admit right then.

Dr. Abbot studies him for another moment, then nods once, weight shifting as he tilts his head back and looks down at him. “That, I believe,” he says. “You look terrible.”

Dennis gives him a dry look.

Abbot’s mouth lifts at the corner.

But he doesn’t press. Dr. Abbot offers no reassurance, or advice, or make an attempt to coax anything more from Dennis. He simply turns back to the department. The quiet that follows feels different from the one before it, less expectant.

Dennis hesitates but then pushes away from the counter and turns for North four, feeling the conversation has come to an end.

“One last thing.”

He’d had made it two steps before stopping, half-turning back.

Dr. Abbot looks at him plainly. “That was a much better answer.”

Dennis rolls his eyes, but there’s no real irritation behind it. He gives an amused exhale through his nose, then turns away again, going to see North four.

Trinity spends the rest of the week complaining about swing shifts. She does it while signing into a computer. She does it while Dennis tries to give her handoff on his patients. When Dana hands her another chart. When he points out that she volunteered for the new schedule he gets a flat look for his trouble.

“I hate them,” she says.

“You said they would be the best of both worlds,” he reminds. “Late mornings, management leaves at five—”

“I was a young, naïve provider back then.” Trinity sighs. “Now I’m an old jaded dog.”

“It’s been four days.”

“Four too many,” she says seriously. “When this week ends, I will never do it again.”

He snorts and she wanders off to harass Mel about South sixteen’s imaging, undoubtedly to bully her way into stealing Mel’s procedure. The shoulder dislocation and conscious sedation Dennis has in Central eight apparently isn’t the least bit of interest to her.

Abbot, also working the swing shift that week, oversees the procedure from the foot of the bed with his arms crossed, leaving Dennis to run it. The whole thing is almost boringly straightforward. Timeout, propofol, a brief dip in oxygen saturation corrected by lifting the patient’s chin, then the dull shift of the humeral head sliding back into place beneath Dennis’s hands.

The patient blinks back into awareness and asks him when they’ll start, slurring. With an amused smile, Dennis reassures him that they’re already finished. Abbot gives the post-reduction film a once over with a thumbs up before disappearing, and Dennis patiently helps the guy into a sling, promising he’ll prescribe a muscle relaxer at discharge.

The day, unfortunately, does not stay mundane.

.

By the time the sun starts to set, Dennis has less than an hour of his shift left, and the department has calmed somewhat into the unremarkable churn of a weeknight.

Trinity and Mel discuss Mel’s capstone project, the benefits of prehospital ultrasound machines while he finishes his charting. Around them at the hub, Dana moves between her computer and silencing a monitor, wrapping up the last bit of work before Lena arrives. Mark, the HUC, prints forms with the phone in between his ear and shoulder. A small fan hums in front of him on the counter, providing some respite from the summer heat stagnating the crowded ER. The ambulance bay doors stayed open too long that day for the unit’s AC to keep up fully.

“Prehospital providers having access to handheld ultrasound machines would decrease the instances of missed ROSC when a pulse is too faint to feel with fingers.”

“Not to mention how difficult it already is in the back of a moving box.”

He’s only half-listening, more interested in finishing his discharge summaries so he can get out of there at a decent hour. There’s a container of leftover tuna helper with his name on it in their fridge, and he knows he won’t have to share with Trinity, who remains stuck on the swing shift and thus won’t be home until the wee hours of the night.

“The equipment is expensive,” Mel counters, looking thoughtful.

“Grants?” Trinity says, arms crossed as she leans against the hub’s counter.

“Necessary for continuing education, too.”

Dennis signs the last note and glances over it for anything glaring. It has taken him seven minutes to write the discharge summary of a patient with constipation, which feels reasonable considering the patient spent twenty of his explaining why he does not believe in stool softeners. Or fiber. He clicks out of the chart and leans back far enough for the chair to give a worrisome squeak.

The phone at the charge desk rings. Dana’s a few steps away, glasses halfway down her nose with a clipboard in her hands. Mark leans over and answers it, the line dedicated to EMS traffic.

“PTMC med comm,” he says, grabbing a pen and flattening a sheet of paper. Dennis bounces his knee in the chair.

“Could also use it for lung slide,” Trinity continues. “Detecting pneumos?”

Mel makes a face. “Not sure the handhelds have enough sensitivity for something like that.”

“How long?” Mark says suddenly.

His tone causes their discussion to fall off abruptly. When they shift their attention, Mark’s expression has changed from bored to sharpened concentration as he listens, writing furiously. Dana notices immediately, dropping the board to the counter and pushing up her glasses.

She catches his attention and he covers the mouthpiece. “Motorcycle crash. Traumatic amputation. They lost pulses on scene.”

The tuna helper leaves Dennis’s mind. Mel and Trinity start to move toward the trauma bays to gown up. Dennis pushes to his feet but he lingers to hear the rest of what EMS tells Mark.

“Got ROSC after one round,” Mark says, repeating what he hears as he writes. “Unable to intubate. They’re bagging. Two tourniquets up on the leg.”

“How far out?” Dana asks.

Mark listens, then holds up two fingers.

She sucks her teeth. “I’ll grab an attending. Call respiratory and a trauma alert.”

Mark nods and Dennis turns to head for the trauma bays as well. Dana sends Jesse with him and goes to get either Abbot or Shen, whoever she finds first. Perlah is already in the trauma bay when he arrives, shoving his arms through a trauma gown he grabbed and tying the back. Mel wheels the ultrasound machine to the side of the bed, Perlah rolls the Belmont from the wall. Around him, cabinets are being opened in preparation for the oncoming trauma.

Dana appears, Abbot behind her.

“Santos, airway. Whitaker, FAST,” Abbot commands without pleasantries, time pressing in on them, “Mel, do what you can for that leg. Make sure we’re not dumping what we put into him out onto the floor from there.”

They all have their assignments, and not a moment too soon, because lights appear across the department from the bay, bouncing off the walls in an uneven kaleidoscope. The tail end of a siren rises as the bay doors open, engine still running.

The stretcher comes through fast, pushed by two medics with another jogging by its side, squeezing a bag every few seconds. The first thing Dennis notices is the blood. The patient on the cot is drenched in it, soaked through his clothing and the sheet beneath him, dripping from the stretcher in multiple places. His leg ends right below the knee in a mass of saturated fabric and gauze, two tourniquets cinched above what remains. The motorcyclist’s jacket is a familiar looking brown leather.

And for one, awful, heart stopping second he looks—

He looks like Robby.

He’s tall, with a similar build. Short, dark hair is matted with blood, and a beard keeps the mask from sealing fully as the medic fights to bag him adequately. Agonal, belly breaths pull against the BVM, catching wetly somewhere beneath it and it causes nausea to suddenly lurch through Dennis, stunned.

There is a similar stillness across from him that mirrors his own, unnatural in the moving room. Abbot has stopped abruptly with one hand against the rail. When he flicks his eyes up and meets his over the patient, Dennis sees the same thought reflected back at him.

“It’s not,” Abbot says sharply. The words seem to escape on their own, and are followed by a shake of his head, mouth twisted, before he is back in motion, sooner than Dennis.

Dennis blinks hard, and the body on the table is no longer Robby, similarities ending. The beard is thinner, build stockier. There is no gray at the temples, soft salt through pepper. He shoves every thought out of his head that isn’t trauma resuscitation and picks up the ultrasound probe while a tech cuts clothing away and the medic gives report.

It’s not him, he tells himself, forcing his heart rate to stabilize as he moves, too, gel on the probe. Abbot’s voice is in his head, It’s not.

“BP’s dropping again—”
“First cooler’s here—”

“Start massive transfusion protocol,” Abbot tells the room, but Perlah has already primed the Belmont, one step ahead. Tubing snakes from the machine into the IV catheter in his arm.

“Airway, Santos?”

Trinity is at the head of the bed, suction catheter in one hand and her fingers moving the patient’s jaw to get a good look. Her eyebrows are pulled together harshly under her eyewear, shaking her head absently as she works. She runs the Yankauer into the mouth, thick globules of clotted blood pulling away.

“It’s crap,” she says eloquently, not looking up. “RSI? We don’t have a reliable sat.”

The pulse oximeter searches without finding anything, its waveform breaking apart each time it begins to form, too little perfusion at the fingers. Abbot’s eyes flick once to the monitor, the downtrending pressure and frantic rate of a desperately compensating heart. His mouth thins.

“Don’t push RSI meds, he’s already circling,” he says, stepping aside as Perlah works around him to get the rest of the clothing off. “We’ll put him in the drain. Gag intact still?”

Trinity checks, sweeping suction into the back of the mouth. She shakes her head as she taps his forehead. “No gag, no corneal reflex.”

“Intubate without meds.”

Dennis is on the FAST, moving over the chest, the belly, with the ultrasound. Gel and blood mix beneath the probe, making it slide too easily under his hand. There is so much black on the screen it’s difficult to ascertain where one bleed stops and the other starts. The image jumps with every movement of the stretcher. It’s not reliable, but somewhere beneath the distortion is fluid where it should not be. “It’s positive.”

“Trauma surgery’s paged—”

Mark’s voice carries in from the doorway about the patient’s identity and next of kin. Behind him, another nurse arrives with supplies and has to turn sideways to get past the blood bank runner leaving the bay. The room has filled, double doors opened to make room.

Mel lifts the mangled end of the patient’s leg high enough to inspect the tourniquets, and blood runs from the sheet to the floor in a bright, thin stream. The monitor alerts, flashing in warning as the next blood pressure cycles.

There is an exhale across from him and Dennis looks up.

“He’s going to arrest,” Abbot says into the room calmly.

Several pairs of eyes cut to him.

“Prepare for bilateral thoracostomies.”

Dennis drops the ultrasound probe onto the patient’s hip as a tech spins on their heel towards the trauma cart behind them. Plastic packaging hits the floor as trays are pulled free and shoved onto either side.

“Your side, Whitaker,” Abbot tells him, stepping in close to the stretcher.

“BP is—”

Perlah helps the tech with opening the chest tube trays, blue drapes haphazardly thrown over the patient’s front. One slides almost immediately to the floor and he catches it by the corner to lift it back up. Across from him, Abbot already has a scalpel, fingers kneading into ribs.

Dennis finds hard rib with gloved fingers, iodine wiped quickly over skin before Perlah hands him his own scalpel. He counts spaces between ribs through skin and blood, fingers slipping.

“Just a finger, Whit,” Abbot guides, not looking up.

“I’ve got it.”

The blade slices easily, an incision wider than he’d usually make for a more controlled chest tube. Blood wells along the incision, joining what is already covering the patient. He drops the blade into the tray and takes the Kelly Perlah puts into his hand, pushing bluntly over rib and through resistant muscle and tissue until it gives. His finger follows immediately into the pleural space.

Blood washes from the incision over his gloved hand, over the edge of the bed and onto the floor. Much blood, but not the release of pressure he was hoping for, not enough to explain a chest full of compressive physiology or reverse what is happening on the monitor, which has gone suspiciously monotone.

His eyebrows pull together. He sweeps a finger through the chest cavity, feeling the underside of hard rib and the slick tissue of pleura. Nothing changes the patient in front of them. He glances up at Abbot, who wears a similar expression with his mouth twisted flatly. His incision is smaller, more practiced, but returns no more blood than Dennis’s side.

Abbot’s mouth pulls into a frown.

“I don’t have a pulse,” Mel says, finger at the groin.

“Start compressions.”

Jesse is there before Abbot has finished the last syllable, and the stretcher shudders beneath the force of it. Dennis leans back far enough to clear Jesse’s elbow. His eyes catch Trinity’s, who braces the tube she placed with one hand while respiratory works with the vent behind her. He can tell she is grimacing even from behind the mask.

“We’re opening.”

Dennis snaps his attention back to Abbot, but Abbot isn’t looking at him. His eyes stay on the patient, fixed somewhere beneath Jesse’s moving hands.

“Set up for thoracotomy, Perlah.”

After the shortest second of hesitation, Perlah turns for the thoracotomy tray, the retractor. Jesse continues compressions while the tech tears open another pack of drapes. Someone pulls the Belmont further from the bed to make space. Dennis steps into the position Abbot leaves for him without needing to be told, his bloody hand held away from his body.

And then they open him up.

.

In the end, none of it matters.

There was no bulging sac or trapped blood waiting for them in the pericardium. The tissue was pale and intact, fitted around the shape of the flat organ, not a single meaningful drop of blood inside the heart. It sat boggy and empty within Dennis’s hands and refused to fill, even with enough transfused units to reach double digits. They continue until there was nothing left to do and Abbot finally, finally calls it.

Perlah silences the alarming Belmont and Jesse turns off the monitor. The quiet that follows is deafening, broken intermittently by someone shifting, a crinkle of gown. The group leans backward, and no one’s eyes linger over the body on the stretcher, fat slabs of coagulated blood in every crease, retractor still in place.

Dennis’s ears are ringing.

The open cavity stares back at him.

There is a fine tremor in his hands as he releases the rib spreader, the cage relaxing immediately. He sets the device carefully on a tray beside the bed, flexing his fingers when it’s out of his hands, hoping to forget the feeling of it.

When he steps back, Dana pulls a sheet over the body. The room itself seems to exhale as she does. Abbot stares at the head of the sheet like he can still see through it, his expression unreadable. Dennis looks away.

His gaze falls back onto the sheet covered body on the bed, the linen already bleeding through in places but it’s still better than Abbot’s face so he fixes his gaze on the linen there and thinks about cotton, and how cotton is harvested and cleaned, combed into fibers, spun into thread and woven into the white sheet now saturated, and there are machines for each step and factories. Factories that put farms out of business, farms like his parents’ farm and he hasn’t thought about them in weeks and it’s summertime so he wonders if his brothers have done the yearly harvest celebration with the town yet and if his father is taking his blood pressure medication.

Dana pulls another clean sheet over the man, covering what has already soaked through from the chest upward, and Dennis is glad.

.

Somehow, Dennis makes it home, though he barely remembers how.

His knees hit the tile of the bathroom floor right before he turns over his stomach into the porcelain. Acid burns his throat as he splutters and coughs, tears pricked at the corners of his eyes. He heaves until he is empty and afterward he presses his forehead into the chilled skin of his arm, catching his breath, and tries not to think about anything. Tries not to think about a ribcage, the pliancy of the bone, opened by the spreaders with the crunch of marrow. A cavity, bloody and wet and warm.

He jerks his head, eyes squeezed shut.

He’s cleaned animals before, after hunting, dressed them before processing the meat. Torn through tissue and bowel and dragged it from the animal, leaving it in glistening piles on dry leaves for scavengers. He’s held hearts before, still things in his hands, the muscle always denser than he expects, as though the fragility of such an organ might be reflected in its composition. He thinks of the heart from earlier in his hands, blanched parenchyma and exposed ribs.

He has never felt quite so much like a butcher. So far from a doctor.

Another wave of nausea hits him, but there is nothing left in his stomach to expunge. He dry heaves until his body accepts that, and only after another minute on the bathroom floor is he finally able to pull himself to his feet. The water from the sink is cool over his face and rinsed through his mouth. He avoids his reflection in the mirror.

Dennis showers mechanically, standing under the stream of too hot water for as long as he can bear it. He scrubs his skin nearly raw, washes his hair twice, but feels like he can still smell the metallic tang of blood, the acrid stench of exposed meat. He gags and dunks his head under the spray, hands pressed to his face and tries to breathe in the smell of shampoo and pipe water until it overwhelms everything else.

When he is clean and dry in a towel, he roots through his closet and pulls out the clothing from Robby’s house all those months ago.

They no longer smell like Robby, the scent of his detergent and the thing distinctly Robby long gone, but there is a sense of intimacy regardless by wearing the clothing of a man that Dennis is currently trying not to imagine flayed and broken on a stretcher in Trauma one. The sweatpants are long but tie, the shirt fits. He pulls his own sweatshirt overtop it and stands in his room with his fingers curled in the neckline and tells himself that Robby is fine, somewhere across the country in Wyoming or Idaho or California, eating a pie in a diner he will describe in detail to Abbot or reading a book in an outdated motel room, glasses halfway down his nose.

Not in some rural hospital’s emergency room under a white sheet.

The image is there still, in his head. Dennis groans and rubs both hands down his face, heart giving an uncomfortable stutter as it kicks, tattooing a piece to the underside of his sternum. He rubs his hands together like he can massage out the tremor.

He needs to get a grip. Maybe he should eat something. When was the last time he ate something?

Dennis can’t remember, which is all the information he needs to make his way to the kitchen. He isn’t sure what his stomach can handle, but he needs to get something on it, something full of carbs and easy that’ll right the world, right him. He stands in his kitchen and considers his options before one seems appealing enough to scrounge together, though it does punch out an amused huff through his nose.

Dennis makes himself a grilled cheese.

.

An empty plate sits beside him on the balcony of his and Trin’s apartment, the distant sound of cars punctuating the late night. Above, the moon is high and bright, illuminating what isn’t covered by city lights in a pale wash.

The cherry of a cigarette burns brighter as he inhales, watching the cars below.

Dennis doesn’t smoke anymore, not since he left Nebraska. Mainly because they are expensive in the city and he doesn’t like to spend the money on them even now. The ones he smokes tonight are from a communal supply, the box labeled For Emergencies in Trinity’s nearly illegible script, and live in the back of one of their junk drawers. He hasn’t wanted or needed one since after Hayden’s death.

He takes another shaky inhale of his second and wishes, not for the first time, he could turn off his brain. The smoke does a good job of blocking out any phantom smells, so he lights a third when the second nears filter, but try as he might, Dennis can’t settle. The shower, sandwich, and cigarette all help, a balm over too raw of nerves, but he’s running out of things to quiet the buzz in his head when all he really needs is—

His phone sits heavily in his back pocket.

He takes another long inhale from the cigarette, chest burning. Dennis tells himself he’s checking the time when he reaches for his phone and unlocks it, but before he makes the conscious decision to do it, he finds the contact and hits call. He stares at a cobweb on the banister while he listens to it ring, heart hammering.

“Whitaker,” Robby greets when the call connects.

Dennis’s eyes slip shut, fingers curled over the railing of the balcony as his head bows. Alive, alive, alive, his mind chants. The horrible tightness in his chest sags beneath the sound of Robby’s voice, loosening its unbearable chokehold on him. He exhales slowly through his nose in a long sigh and can’t find it within himself to feel regret over his impulsivity.

“Sorry, it was an accident,” he lies, eyes still closed. “I didn’t mean to call.”

There’s a noise on the other end of the line, like Robby is shifting the phone from one ear to the other. “Is that so?”

Dennis hums the affirmative and opens his eyes. He leans into his elbows on the bannister and brings the cigarette to his mouth, taking a drag, the phone to his ear as he looks out over the balcony.

“You’re the second person to accidentally call me tonight,” Robby tells him.

Dennis pauses with the cigarette halfway from his mouth, confused for a moment until it clicks.

Abbot.

The other attending’s face flickers in his mind’s eye, expression distant. He thinks about the decision to do a thoracotomy on a blunt trauma patient with a single digit success rate and knows why Abbot made the choice he did, even if the futility of it was well-known before the first incision was ever made. He thinks about Dana next, chain smoking out in the bay with an expression he can only describe as haunted.

Do you know how loved you are? he wants to ask.

“I may not be the last,” is what he manages to say instead, throat tight.

He must give himself away this time because there’s a weighted pause.

“Are you alright?” Robby asks.

His mouth presses into a tight line, swallowing down the croak he thinks he would have made in lieu of an answer. The corner of the phone is pressed roughly into his temple and he squeezes his eyes shut against the burn there in them, heart in his throat, and the parallel reminds him of the organ in his hands, still and wet. No, no I’m not, I’m not. He feels like a poor excuse of a doctor, something more macabre and brutal than that. He doesn’t know how to admit that though without breaching some kind of unspoken rule not to talk about the hospital with Robby on his sabbatical, or if he can explain that what’s haunting him right now is that the patient looked like him, brown leather jacket cut apart into pieces on their bay floor, and for a split second, his hands were in Robby’s chest and—

“Just tell me something, anything,” Dennis says abruptly, desperate for Robby to just keep talking, his voice on the other end a life raft right then. The skin over his palms and knuckles prickles, too tight, and he tries to flex them without dropping the phone or cigarette.

“Where are you?” Robby asks suddenly.

The question throws him enough to bring him back a few steps from the edge he’s begun to toe. “What?”

“Are you home?”

“Oh,” he says. “Yeah, I’m home.”

“Is Santos there?”

“No.” Dennis sighs. He brings the cigarette up again. “She’s working the swing shift.”

 “…The what?”

“The swing—” Dennis starts, then remembers. “Oh, right. You wouldn’t know. Al-Hashimi wanted two attendings on at a time, but we don’t have the staffing for it yet, so she came up with swing shifts. They’re basically middle shifts. Extra coverage during the busiest part of the day. The residents are doing it, too.”

“When did that start?”

Dennis shifts to balance the phone between his ear and shoulder, swapping the cigarette between hands. “Uh, I think a few weeks ago? Not very long,” he answers. He brings the cigarette to his lips and speaks around it dryly. “Long enough for Trinity to complain about them, though.”

“I bet Jack loves them, too.”

A smile tugs at the corner of mouth. “You know he hates them,” he remarks.

“I don’t doubt it,” Robby says, and Dennis can hear the smile in his voice at the expense of his friend.

“It’s basically Al-Hashimi trying to get him in during business hours, when all the meetings are.”

“You’d think she’d know by now he thrives in the dark.”

Dennis snorts softly, lowering his hand. “Anyway,” he continues, flicking ash. The buzz beneath his skin has receded some. “That’s where Trin is.”

Robby hums.

Robby isn’t an idiot. If he’s talked to Abbot already, Robby knows why people are calling him. But Robby doesn’t ask about the dead motorcyclist in their bay and Dennis doesn’t share. A horn honks from below and his attention shifts to it on reflex. He leans a hip against the railing, crossing an ankle over the other. Over the receiver there’s a rush of air or wind.

“Where are you?” he asks.

“Oregon,” Robby answers immediately.

The other side of the country. Not a morgue.

“I’ve never been,” Dennis admits. “What’s it like?”

Robby makes a thoughtful noise. “I’m close enough to the coast right now that the air smells like salt.”

“Pretty?”

“Very.”

Dennis takes another drag and watches the smoke waft upward and dissipate in the night air.

“Any more issues with the air conditioning?” Robby asks.

His mind slips sideways for a second to the night he stayed in Robby’s guest room, and he clears his throat, shifting. “None.”

They talk for a while, about everything and nothing at all.

The conversation is peppered with photos Robby sends of things he’s seen when Dennis asks. Robby is reluctant at first, Dennis having to coax the first two out of him, but then he’s sending them before he’s even finished describing what they show. Dennis drinks in every one, grinning at the jumble of scenery, roadside signs, and oddities Robby deemed worthy of stopping for. He tries to picture him standing along the highway with his phone held up, wonders what caught his attention and what he was thinking when it did. Looking through them though, Dennis finds he rarely has to wonder for long.

“These are really good,” Dennis says, impressed.

“You sound surprised,” Robby remarks dryly. “I can use a camera.”

Dennis sniffs. “I think your subjects were just pretty.”

Dennis brings up the cactus, about getting stuck once when he tried to inspect a patch of brown he hadn’t noticed before, the cactus seeming to bristle without warning, leaving several spines embedded in his palm. He swears the thing is sentient and Robby can’t disagree, having suffered his own injuries courtesy of the thing. Dennis sends a few photos of the arid vegetation in different parts of the day.

“It’s definitely taller.”

“I thought so, too!”

Robby listens to him complain about the show Trinity is watching and how the grocer up the street started selling avocados only by the bag now. Robby makes an empathetic noise at his outraged, How am I supposed to choose avocados by ripeness now?, and doesn’t interrupt him when he explains how he buys avocados of varying ripeness so he has a perfect one every day of the week.

When he finishes a story featuring Mel’s particular penchant for uncomfortable or ugly furniture, he hesitates for only a moment.

“Mel knows about us now, too,” he tells Robby, holding himself carefully. He immediately winces, hearing the us resonate too intimately, nearly out of place for what they are.

But all Robby says is, “I see.”

Dennis exhales a soft breath, the anxiety over Robby’s reaction going with it even though he’s never given Dennis a reason to be anxious. Dennis almost blurts, She thinks I’m your prodigy, but it halts in his mouth, worried Robby might deny it. Or worse: confirm it. He says nothing further about it and instead pivots into the pros and cons of Trinity wanting a pet turtle and then whether or not their apartment building is haunted. Robby asks him about Amy’s farm.

They don’t talk about helmets or patients.

“I stopped in Nebraska,” Robby tells him after sharing he had gotten a flat tire within the first two hundred miles of his trip.

Dennis stills, a field of corn and the sound of cattle in his mind suddenly. “Yeah?” he hears himself say.

“Pretty boring, honestly.”

And Dennis laughs, a sharp, surprised bark. Boring, he’d said.

“Saw a place for runza,” Robby continues. There’s a grazed sound over the line, like he’s scratching his beard.

“Did you try it?”

After a brief pause, Robby admits, “Yes.”

Dennis grins. “And?” he prompts.

“Not as greasy as I expected.”

Dennis leans back in the chair on the balcony he’d settled in earlier, right around the time they discussed time zones, his feet propped up on the short end table. He tilts his head, beaming. “God, I miss those,” he says with a laugh.

Eventually, the conversation trails off comfortably. There is still an intermittent quiet wind moving over Robby’s receiver. A half-smoked cigarette sits in a bowl on the table, long gone out and forgotten, along with the chaotic energy underneath Dennis’s skin. His chest no longer feels cinched around his lungs. He rubs at his eyes and glances down at his watch out of habit, half-surprised by the time.

It’s later than he thought. The realization that he doesn’t want to hang up though is a heavy one, and he wonders if he could find something else to say or talk about. He thinks Robby would probably let him. Dennis thinks he might stay on the balcony until morning if Robby kept answering.

But Trinity will be home soon, and this wasn’t supposed to be anything but a check-in. The fact that that logic wouldn’t fool anyone isn’t lost on him.

“Thank you,” he says at last.

“Better?” Robby asks softly.

A swell of affection balloons outward and he bites the inside of his cheek to keep himself from saying something incriminating. Instead, he uncrosses his ankles and lowers his feet to the ground, pressing the phone to his ear and wishes, not for the first time but with his whole heart, Robby would come back soon. He wants to ask him now more than ever when will he come home, if it will be soon, if it will be at all. He misses him so much it hurts, the questions crowding up and over one another. Dennis swallows them all down.

“Yeah,” he answers just as quietly. “Better.”

For another moment, neither of them say anything. Dennis lets himself pretend for a second that it won’t be weeks or months before he hears his voice again.

“Get some rest, Dennis.”

Dennis’s eyes slip closed. His heart gives a noticeable leap at the sound of his name, spoken gently enough to feel deliberate.

It makes him brave.

“Goodnight, Michael.”

When the call ends, Dennis sits in the quiet for another moment on the balcony, listening to the city below. The front door opens somewhere inside, signaling Trinity’s arrival, and so he draws in a deep breath and stands, gathering the plate and forgotten cigarettes.

The next day, Dennis is standing by the hub after getting handoff from the overnight resident when Mel bumps into him, fingers curling around his arm briefly before she drops them.

He looks past her, half-expecting some kind of entity to be chasing her with the force in which she collided with him. When he sees nothing, he looks down at her to ask, but she beats him to it.

“Have you heard?” she asks, barely contained excitement vibrating through her.

“Heard what?” he asks, confused.

Her eyebrows lift, eyes glittering behind her glasses. “Dr. Robby is coming back.”

He is not expecting it, so the words move through him faster than he can prepare for, a drop in his belly and a kick of his heart hard enough that it nearly rocks him.

“What?”

“Dr. Al-Hashimi told Dana this morning,” she says in a rush, grinning, hands coming together in front of her.

Dennis looks toward the charge desk on reflex. Dana stands only a few feet away with her attention on a clipboard.

“Did he say when?” Dennis asks, not caring how he sounds. He knows she is listening.

“Sometime before Monday, apparently,” Dana answers, not looking up. When she does, she pushes her glasses onto her head. “He’s already back on the schedule Tuesday.”

Dennis nods mechanically and is all too aware of Mel staring at him.

“Tuesday,” he repeats. Less than a week away.

Mind whirling, he gives Mel a distracted smile and thinks he murmurs some excuse, picking up the chart closest to him. He extricates himself as casually as he can manage. The department suddenly feels several degrees warmer than it did just a moment ago. His palms are damp. He discreetly rubs one against the side of his scrub shirt and is painfully aware of how quickly his heart is beating, his eyes scanning the chart without absorbing anything while he walks.

Bright, wholesomely uncomplicated joy is flushing through him, an unadulterated happiness that blankets everything else and has him grinning stupidly down at the tablet. Robby is coming back, back to Pittsburgh, back to the Pitt, back home and all of Dennis’s worries over the last few months dissipate, the ones that told him Robby would never return, never come back, one way or the other. He breathes around the relief for another moment, before he wonders why Robby didn’t tell him last night.

He slows, stepping out of the way of a nurse. He taps a finger against the chart.

It must be a coincidence.

Robby was always going to come back eventually. He’d probably already made the decision before Dennis called. He might have even told Abbot when they spoke, or Al-Hashimi days ago. Maybe he hadn’t told Dennis last night because there hadn’t been an opportunity, or because Robby hadn’t wanted to bring up the hospital. Sabbaticals required paperwork and schedules and administrative conversations Dennis wouldn’t be privy to. At no point had Robby indicated that their conversation had swayed any decision he was making. It would be presumptuous to think otherwise.

Dennis’s fingers find the shape of his phone in his scrub pocket, and for a split second, he thinks about asking. His hand closes around it through the fabric before he catches himself, embarrassed by the idiocy of even thinking so.

With a sharp shake of his head at his own expense, he drops his hand and lifts the chart back up.

.

By the time the shift rolls into early afternoon, the news of Robby’s return has already completed a circuit in the department.

“Better luck next time, chump,” Ahmad says, clapping Tony on the shoulder with an open hand, waving a fold of bills in the other.

Tony shrugs off the hand, sucking his teeth. “You didn’t win either.”

A debate immediately breaks out over whether the date of Robby’s arrival or his first scheduled shift counts as his official return. Dennis does not pay any attention to the discussion, sitting next to Trinity and Mel at the hub. He is, or perhaps more aptly, the department is, lucky that the day is slow. He’s distracted enough that he is only just now starting his first note.

Trinity sits beside him working on her own charting, discreetly slipping a cracker into her mouth every time she confirms Dana is looking elsewhere.

“Alright,” Dana’s voice cuts out through the argument. “Anyone planning on working today?”

The group quiets, chastised, and immediately begins to disperse beneath her pointed stare.

“Thought so,” she says, returning to the paperwork in her hands.

Noelle stands on the other side of the hub with a folder tucked under her hand, watching the retreat with open amusement. “Oh, I’m sure they’re just excited for their chief to return.”

Trinity pauses mid-chew. “Sorry, who?”

Dana gives her a flat look, gaze dropping pointedly to the crackers.

Trinity swallows the mouthful, sliding the sleeve to the side out of sight beside the computer wordlessly.

Dana’s eyebrow arches, but she lets it go. She turns back to Noelle. “Maybe they are. You sure seem to be, though.” She taps a stack of paperwork against the counter, a question there.

Noelle’s smile becomes a touch more secretive. “Well, can’t blame a girl,” she starts, shrugging one shoulder in a delicate motion. “It just so happens the man owes me dinner.”

Dana’s eyebrows rise. She leans back, head tilted. “Well, well,” she draws out. “Is that so? Good for him.”

Noelle’s smile grows, slightly incredulous. “Not good for me?”

Dana tips her head to the side, lowering her glasses over her nose. “Eh, it’s Robinavitch.”

Noelle laughs.

There is a developing pain in Dennis’s forearm.

He peels his eyes from the screen slowly and finds Trinity’s hand on it, fingers digging into skin. Her hands are dry, as all of theirs are after several hours of repeated washing and hand sanitizer. His own are likely just as dry, and sometimes in the winter she complains of splitting at her knuckles, stinging. He’d seen beeswax lotion at the farmer’s market, he should remember to get her some before the weather starts to get cooler, though he knows she doesn’t like floral scents so it would have to be something more herbal—

“So, Noelle,” he hears Trinity ask when he tunes back in. Her fingers are still buried in his arm. “Is that gonna be like a work meeting with appetizers or…?”

From somewhere behind him, Mel adds, “Yeah, yeah, like, uh, chief attending slash social work meeting? That makes sense. Been gone awhile, probably lots to catch up on.”

Noelle makes an amused noise. “Definitely not,” she answers, leaning back from the counter as she steps away, lowering the stack of folders. “I’m going to wear lipstick and make him turn off his pager this time.”

This time.

Not the extension of an invitation, then. A continued thing.

The cursor blinks on his screen. Dennis carefully, carefully, does not imagine Robby and Noelle in the candlelight, enjoying a secluded dinner across from one another, a dinner already promised or perhaps to replace one interrupted before Robby left, with private jokes and laughter. His mind recoils from the image of lipstick stains over skin and he blinks it away quickly.

Noelle says something about a patient in South, but he doesn’t catch it exactly, only registering the retreat of her heels against linoleum and the distant sound of an alarming monitor, the department’s familiar cacophony rushing back in over the quiet ringing in his ears. The fingers in his arm remain but he doesn’t look at Trinity. A weighted pause gathers behind him and he can picture the look passing between Mel and Trinity without turning around.

“Oi,” Dana’s voice cuts through the haze. “Breakroom with the crackers, slick.”

Trinity hesitates for only a moment but doesn’t argue, her grip loosening before falling away from his arm. She gathers the crackers and rises. There is a trail of a hand on his shoulder that he ignores.

Mel takes up Trinity’s spot beside him at the workstation, but mercifully doesn’t say anything immediately. Dana moves on, and they work on their respective notes in silence.

Eventually, there’s a tap at his wrist and he looks over.

The other half of an earbud pair is offered to him.

Dennis’s mouth presses thin as he swallows, meeting Mel’s eyes behind her glasses. She gives him a weak smile as he takes the earbud from her fingers, bringing it up without a word.

Dennis lets himself into Robby’s house, the key sticking briefly like it has every other time.

The foyer is quiet, and he toes his shoes off by the front door before moving further into the home. He sets his bag down by the breakfast bar by one of the stools and gets to work with opening the windows there, and then in the living room.

The house isn’t stagnant by any means, he’s been doing this every so often during his visits, but this time he takes deliberate measures to shake out each couch cushion, the throw blanket that’s sat folded in the same spot for almost four months. Dust lifts into the afternoon light and Dennis sneezes, turning his face into his shoulder.

He drapes the blanket over the chair instead and leaves the windows open while he moves through the rest of the downstairs, the study. There’s a framed photo of Robby and Dr. Abbot he carefully passes the duster over, less lines on each of the attendings’ faces. He takes a rag over the bookshelf and desk, the window sill.

There isn’t much to do, Robby left the place very clean, but the months have gathered dust in places untouched in his absence, and so Dennis takes an hour to remove the evidence. If it were him coming home, he wouldn’t want it to be to a dusty house.

Coming home. Robby is coming home.

The thought sends the same little jolt through him it has every time he’s allowed himself to think it the last few days. He ignores it, and wipes down the counters in the kitchen instead, but even the monotony of the tasks he’s given himself isn’t enough to halt all of the thoughts.

Upstairs, he fluffs the pillows in the guest room even though no one has stayed in it since Dennis. When he moves into Robby’s bedroom to check on the cactus, he has a brief idea to wash the sheets there but immediately discards it, finding it too intimate. Robby can wash his own sheets if he wants.

The cactus looks the same as last week, as happy as an enormous arid foliage in Pittsburgh could be, and he waters it one last time even though the soil is just shy of dry. Who knows when Robby will water it again.

“You’re welcome,” he tells it.

He’ll inform Robby the watering schedule Dennis used but he lets the cactus know not to expect the regular waterings anymore. The cactus does not answer, but Dennis likes to imagine it maybe looks at least a little grateful. He thinks he might miss it, which is an oddity considering he’s pulled out more spines from his hand than he can count. With a final look back at it, he flicks off the light and leaves Robby’s bedroom.

Back downstairs, he checks the refrigerator for anything rotten but there is nothing and soon Dennis is standing in the kitchen with nothing else to do except close the windows and bury the key in the pot of dirt on the porch after he locks up.

Then he remembers the clothes.

They’ve been sitting folded at the bottom of his bag since this morning, and before that in a corner of his closet. The sweatpants and shirt that belong to Robby, lent to him all those months ago while he was actively being pieced back together after Hayden. Immediately following those events, they had stayed washed and folded on his dresser while he debated what to do with them. There was no universe in which Dennis could see himself walking into the Pitt carrying a neatly folded bundle of Robby’s clothing and handing them over at work without dying of mortification. A week became a month and then Robby had left for sabbatical, so they stayed in Dennis’s closet. If he wore them occasionally after particularly hard shifts, well. That was no one’s business but his own, and he doesn’t think it’s dramatic to say he’d take that information with him to his grave.

Now though, they’ve made it back to their owner’s home, and all that’s left is leaving them here.

He pulls them out of his bag and stands there holding them for several seconds before setting them on the counter. When he steps back and looks at them, something about the counter seems wrong, too exposed. He picks them back up.

He thinks about leaving them in the guestroom, but when he imagines laying them on the bed his face flushes immediately and he discards it. Maybe Robby’s dresser? That seems more presumptuous than the guestroom somehow. Throw them in the washer drum? Robby might think he hadn’t bothered washing them after returning them though. The couch in the living room seems silly, out of place.

Dennis looks around the kitchen and eventually settles on the stool beside his bag, lying the folded bundle of clothes carefully on the seat. He resists the urge to fuss with them and steps back again.

They still seem out of place in some way. They are Robby’s clothes inside Robby’s house, and yet somehow he cannot figure out where he is allowed to put them. He frowns at them.

“Where the hell do you belong?”

The question slips out without thought, and goes unanswered in the silence of the kitchen. He is surprised to feel a burn starting behind his eyes, and so he blinks it back quickly, swallowing. The parallel hits him about as subtly as a blow.

Where the hell do I belong?

The thought is insidious, sneaking up on him in a whisper that his mind doesn’t block in time.

Dennis knows where he belongs at the Pitt. He knows where he belongs in a trauma resuscitation, in the trauma bay. He knows where he belongs with Trinity and Mel, easy as breathing. He even knows where he belongs within himself, most days.

With Robby though, it’s never been anything so clear.

Dennis looks around the kitchen, at the clean counters and faucet. He thinks about the contents of the drawers, familiar now with where things are placed. He’s spent every week in this house for the last four months, has become familiar with how it sounds, all while missing the man that owns it, his absence the missing piece.

Robby is coming home, and Dennis should be happy. He is happy. The knowledge has been sitting with him for days, bright and giddy, restless to see him again and take stock for himself how he is. And he is so, so excited.

Dennis exhales, and steps around the breakfast bar to the island’s counter, pressing his hands into the cool granite.

But what, exactly, is he so excited for?

Robby will come home. He will return to the Pitt, put his scrubs back on and step into the department with the air of a twenty year attending, capable. He will correct Dennis where needed and praise him when earned, everything continuing exactly where it left off. Exactly as it was.

Robby will take Noelle on the date he owes her, and Dennis will pretend he does not care. Robby will touch him when he forgets not to, and Dennis will carry the memory of it home, turning over every interaction. They will have more conversations that come within inches of becoming something tangible before Robby retreats, and they will both act like the space between them is comfortable. The pattern suddenly feels unbearable.

Dennis draws in a slow breath again through his nose and lets it out, fingers curling against the counter’s surface. His gaze drifts again over the room, into the living room, and recognizes that somewhere along the way, the house had become something else while he wasn’t paying attention. A physical place Dennis could rest his hopes, a place he could rest everything he wants.

So for one single moment, Dennis lets himself imagine what it could have been. The What if.

It feels like another lifetime now, remembering the night all that time ago, back in Robby’s office in his first month of residency. When he took a leap of faith and reached for something taboo.

He lets himself imagine Robby reaching back.

I feel it, too.

Dennis closes his eyes.

There have been so many opportunities since then, any one of them could have changed things. The stairwell, on the roof, in his office, in a dark parking lot.

Dennis imagines hearing the motorcycle pull up in the driveway outside, a key sticking in a lock and the door opening. He pictures Robby appearing in the threshold of the foyer in the kitchen, duffel bag in one hand and the helmet in the other, wind burnt but smiling, at Dennis. And Dennis would be here, of course, waiting for Robby to return because it wouldn’t be just Robby’s home, it would be their home and Dennis can see him so clearly that there is pain twisting beneath his sternum.

Robby’s bag drops somewhere at his feet when he sees him and Dennis would smile back and then Robby would cross the distance and gather Dennis into his arms, without hesitation because this is a fantasy and there is no careful distance. His hands would rise to Dennis’s face and hold him there, drinking him in after so long away.

Dennis’s own hands follow the image, cupping his cheeks, palms against skin already damp beneath his eyes. He remembers what Robby’s hands feel like there and so he uses that, spreading fingers over his jaw, alarmingly gentle in his memory.

And in Dennis’s imagination, Robby kisses him softly, nothing desperate or declaring, because it wouldn’t be the first time he’s done it. Just a sweet kiss hello after a long time away, and there is nothing wrong with wanting it, because this is a fantasy.

Dennis imagines music, and laughter in a kitchen while dinner is made, evenings with the television on, lamps low while Robby reads with Dennis at his side, in a sweatshirt that is not his. Promises, and dreams and late nights and early mornings and grocery shopping and walks and dates and discussions that go late into the evening about everything and nothing at all and there is no question of where Dennis belongs and it is a fantasy.

The first sob against his hands chokes him, and he presses them into his eyes to slow the descent but it is too late and one tear becomes many, a flood through a dam, and then he is doubling over. A terrible, gasping thing escapes him before he can swallow it back and Dennis’s heart is breaking within his ribcage, beating itself to death in time with his pulse.

There is absolutely nothing dignified about it. He seems to choke on air itself, nose running, shoulders hitched high to his ears and he has to take a hand away from his face to wrap an arm around his middle in a desperate attempt to keep himself from splitting apart while everything he has kept tightly contained for so long tears apart at once.

And Dennis cries. Cries for a version of himself and for a life that he doesn’t have and never will. He cries for a stupid, ordinary life that hurts worse than any grand fantasy because Dennis can imagine every detail of it here in this house. He feels like a voyeur, like standing outside a window and looking in to another person’s life and wanting it so badly he had convinced himself that someday he might be invited inside.

Only, Dennis is already inside. He is standing in Robby’s kitchen and has never felt more like a stranger.

A part of him wonders if it’s karma for not wanting to meet him for so long, and now he has and he wants him, he wants him and yet, Robby doesn’t want him and it hurts, it hurts. Dennis has taken every fragment that he’s been given and carefully stored it away, telling himself he wasn’t waiting for anything.

But he has been waiting for everything.

It is awful, the understanding, and he sobs against a hand until he is hoarse.

The grief, like all grief, eventually exhausts itself.

Dennis unwraps the arm from around himself carefully, straightening as he sniffs. He presses both of his hands to his face and breathes deeply, before wiping at his face. He knows without seeing it that it is blotched ugly, swollen, and he swallows thickly. He runs the back of his hands under his eyes.

The house watches it all, unaffected.

Dennis uses a paper towel from the roll behind him to dab at his face, catching his breath. He feels lighter somehow. The grief is still there, but the pressure that once built up and outward against his skin has lessened, and he knows with certainty that he needed this.

Crushing the paper towel remnant in a fist, he leans against the counter and stares at a spot of color in the granite.

Dennis also knows with certainty Robby cares about him. Whatever else Dennis may be, he’s not blind, or an idiot. Perhaps most damningly, there is evidence that Robby cares deeply about him. There might even be some form of love, for the other part of his soul, a part of Robby that holds him with a tenderness the man would probably recoil from if he’d but take a moment to notice it.

He knows it has to mean something, and it does. Dennis closes his eyes briefly.

It just might not be enough anymore.

That thought has his face twisting, hurting him so much more sharply than what he’d been prepared for. This thing between them that has never managed to become anything at all. Too much to call a friendship, too little to call anything else. Robby loves him in Robby’s way, and once upon a time Dennis thinks he told himself he could live there.

He opens his eyes. His gaze settles on the folded clothes on the stool, and he realizes that without him noticing, he’d allowed the very thing he had been so afraid of to happen. He’d fallen in love with his soulmate and been rearranged.

He can see it with awful clarity, years in the future. Dennis will remain at PTMC, and he will still be orbiting Robby, because any future he pictures has Robby in it. He will be accepting of whatever crumbs Robby gives him, because there may be nothing else to be had. He will live between a hand on his shoulder and a quiet Dennis, surviving between instances where there is an occasional crack and Dennis will build an entire life out of almost.

The weight of that knowledge presses down so suddenly that Dennis nearly folds forward again into the counter, hand braced on the counter as he squeezes his eyes shut. And this grief is different, because it is not for Robby or a life he’s never had. It is grief only for himself.

Dennis lifts a hand and presses fingers into his eyes.

How long has he been doing this? Waiting without admitting he was waiting. Thinking about Robby’s reasons lessens the brunt of that weight, but understanding why someone cannot choose you does not make being unchosen hurt any less. And he knows it is the truth, that Robby is not going to choose this, choose him.

He swallows and takes another uneven breath before opening his eyes again, and he finds that he is not angry. He is just tired.

Robby is coming home.

But he is not coming home to Dennis.

The curtains in the living room billow gently with the outside wind. He watches them settle, and finds he has no more tears. He passes the bunched paper towel over his eyes again and exhales deeply before leaning away from the counter. He tosses the crumbled ball into the trash and clears his throat, using a corner of his shirt sleeve to do a final pass, dragged down his face. He looks around the house again and moves into the living room to close the windows.

Afterward, he steps back toward the kitchen and sees the folded clothes on the stool. Passing them, he leans over and picks up his bag, shouldering it. He stands there for another moment.

The clothes look fine where they are now. They’re Robby’s, he can decide what to do with them. Dennis returned them and his job is done.

When the door is locked, he buries the key in the pot of dirt on the porch.

“Are you nervous?”

The windshield wipers work furiously to clear rain from Trinity’s visual field, and for a moment the only sound in the car is them and the torrential pour of rain pounding on the roof as they sit at a redlight on the way to work together. He had missed riding with her to work, schedules now aligned again ever since Trinity finished her swing shift stretch. He just wishes she wouldn’t ask difficult questions.

“No,” he lies, looking out of the passenger window with his hands in his lap. He kneads the meat of his opposite palm absently.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

The light turns green. Trinity moves with the rest of Pittsburgh traffic, the car rolling forward. Dennis watches a block go by in silence, knee bouncing.

“You look kind of nervous,” she says.

“Well, I’m not.”

“Mm.”

Ahead of them, traffic begins to slow for another stoplight. The rain has not thinned the morning rush. If anything, there is more congestion, the workforce that usually bikes or walks taking vehicles instead, clogging up already busy streets.

Trinity sniffs. “So, the green around your gills right now is just because of bad sushi last night—”

“Trin.” He sighs, leaning his head back against the rest. He doesn’t close his eyes, it makes the nausea worse. “I’m fine.”

She hums, unconvinced, but says, “Alright.”

Trinity leans over, turning up the heat in the car slightly. They’d had to run through the apartment’s parking lot to get to the car, and both are slightly damp and chilled. The silence is punctuated by the rain and an intermittent car horn outside for another several minutes, the longest by far, until Trinity suddenly speaks into it again.

“I’m just saying—”

“Oh my God,” Dennis finally says exasperated, hands coming up. “Fine, yes. Yes, I’m nervous, alright? My palms are prickling and itchy, my stomach hurts, I feel constantly like I’m going to throw up, but I am more excited to go to work than I have been in weeks and, yes. Yes, Trin. It’s because Robby got back this week, it’s our first shift together, I haven’t seen him in months, I can’t wait to see him, but I am equally terrified I’ll throw up—God, on his shoes or something, fuck—”

Dennis exhales deeply, dragging both hands down his face and holding them there. He breathes into his palms, willing the racing state of his heart to stabilize, feeling no small amount of irritation with himself. He’d made the decision to move on, right? He wishes not for the first time that morning that his heart would get with the program.

After a moment, he feels moderately calmer and lowers his hands back into his lap. Some of the chaotic energy beneath his fingers has dissipated, and he feels marginally more put together.

Throughout his tantrum, Trinity had said nothing. Now, she side glances at him with an arched eyebrow.

“Feel better?”

The windshield wipers continue their rhythmic cycle, the light turning green.

“…Yeah,” he mumbles, looking away.

Trinity smiles, pulling forward.

“Yeah.”

.

The rain follows them all the way to PTMC and into the ED, dripping from the ends of Trinity’s hair and darkening the fabric at his shoulders. They’re uncomfortable enough to not waste any pleasantries by the hub, though they both glance at the board on their way to their respective locker rooms. At a distance, it looks mercifully light, but he’s learned not to trust the morning lull. The board could double in the time it takes him to change into scrubs.

He discreetly scans the department as he walks, fingers tight around the strap of his bag, hoping to catch sight of Robby from farther away. A glimpse across the hub, maybe, or the back of his head through a room curtain. Something that will give Dennis time to acclimate himself to the fact that Robby is here before he has to—

The locker room door swings open, and Dennis stops short.

For one disorienting second, he has the profound sense that this has happened before. Robby is suddenly standing in front of him in the doorway, both of them caught in the same too-small space, near enough that Dennis would have walked straight into him if he’d taken one more step.

He thinks he might backpedal, he isn’t sure. His mind blanks so completely that even that movement is lost to him, because Robby is here, standing right in front of him after four months away, and something swoops low in Dennis’s belly, sudden enough to steal the breath he might have used to say hello.

Someone comes up behind Dennis and stops. There’s movement on Robby’s side of the door too, the locker room crowded with the shift changing over, and they’re blocking the only way through. Robby registers it at the same moment he does. Instead of retreating into the locker room though, he steps forward.

The small space between them shrinks even more, enough so that the front of Dennis’s wet jacket brushes Robby’s scrub top, and Dennis catches the scent of him, devastatingly familiar, but has no business hitting him this hard. Robby’s hand closes around his shoulder before he can react, guiding him out of the doorway. Dennis goes where he’s directed, managing one step sideways before his back meets the wall by the door.

Robby moves with him to let the others pass.

They end up standing too close, much too close, Dennis’s chin tilted up to look at Robby, and he’d somehow forgotten how tall he is. Robby’s hand is still on his shoulder, his thumb resting near the dip in his throat, and Dennis holds his breath because he doesn’t know what else to do with it and they haven’t said one word to one another but here he is already, heart hammering so hard he worries Robby can hear it. People file between them and the open door in a blur of scrubs and their own world, but Robby’s attention stays fixed on him.

“Hey,” Robby says.

And God help him, because Robby is smiling.

Robby is slightly tanner, sun kissed. It’s the first thing Dennis notices after the smile, a healthy wash of color across his face and forearms. He’s leaner, too, though that might be emphasized by the tapered scrub top he’s wearing instead of the jacket Dennis has preserved him in across four months of memory. He looks—

He looks good, well-rested. Happy, even, like he’s lost a little of the heaviness weighing him down. The familiar creases at each corner of his eyes is crinkled by his smile.

Dennis swallows against a suddenly dry mouth, and try as he might, he can’t smooth down what he imagines must be a stupid grin. He’s thought of this moment enough times that he should have had something eloquent prepared, but instead, a near breathless echo is all he’s able to manage.

“Hey,” he says back.

Robby’s gaze moves over him, eyes dropping to his shoulders, his chest, before returning to Dennis’s face, seemingly taking stock. He does it with enough care that Dennis has to fight the urge to shift his weight or straighten beneath the hand Robby still has on him, like Robby’s forgotten it’s there. Or maybe he knows, and just doesn’t want to let go yet.

And maybe that’s only wishful thinking.

A moment passes.

And then another.

The locker room door swings open and shut beside them again, and Dennis realizes slowly that maybe they’ve been standing there smiling silently at one another for a touch too long so he scrapes through his empty brain for something meaningful to say, becoming aware of the first creeping edges of awkwardness gathering around them.

“House survived, I noticed,” Robby says for them, sparing him.

Dennis’s smile widens in relief. “So did the cactus.”

It should relax the air between them, the familiar territory, the same dry back and forth they’ve managed over the phone. Instead, silence gathers again, and Dennis becomes acutely aware that Robby’s hand is still on his shoulder.

Robby seems to realize it then, too. His fingers flex once and loosen, but instead of lifting his hand like Dennis expects, he lets it slip from Dennis’s shoulder to his upper arm, clasping there again. Dennis can feel the heat of his palm through the damp layers. Robby’s attention drops to his hand, like it’s not quite a part of him, before he finally lets go slowly. He crosses his arms over his chest and clears his throat.

Dennis wonders distantly why this feels so tense. Maybe he is imagining it, the way something weaves through this interaction that he can’t smoothly place. Four months is a long time, he supposes. Maybe they’re just a little out of sync. Except Robby looks nearly as uncomfortable as Dennis feels, unusually uncertain. Dennis blinks, at a loss.

“Well—”
“Have you—”

They both stop short.

The universe decides to take mercy on Dennis, because at that moment, the EMS phone at the hub rings, its distinct tone snagging both their attention. It’s followed shortly by Dana’s voice drifting over, asking if anyone has seen Robby yet this morning.

Robby exhales quietly through his nose and meets his gaze. Dennis is surprised by the small smile on his face.

“Duty calls,” he says, almost fondly.

It pulls one corner of Dennis’s mouth up. “Yeah.”

The interruption seems to have returned both of them to themselves. Robby gestures for Dennis to go ahead. Dennis steps away from the wall and out of Robby’s space, then turns into the locker room to change.

.

The shift is painfully normal.

It ebbs and flows, picking up around lunch and settling again sometime before evening. Between the Welcome back’s, Robby has to learn the names of all the new students and interns, and he mourns the loss of Mohan and Ellis. He even asks how Frank is faring in his new position, at Presby’s ED.

There are no further tense moments between them, spent too closely in a small space. Robby moves around him the same as always, though Dennis admittedly doesn’t see much of him. There are interns and students that need his guidance more than Dennis does.

At some point, Dennis catches sight of Robby and Noelle speaking over a patient in North. He wonders if she’ll remind Robby that he owes her dinner. Then he wonders if Robby doesn’t need reminding at all, if he’s already asked. Dennis doesn’t hang around to find out.

By the end of the shift, he’s once again unsure what he expected Robby’s return to look like. Robby stepped back into the Pitt like he never left, with the only noticeable difference being his bandwidth. He smiles more readily, doesn’t seem as strained. The sabbatical really was what the doctor ordered, per se. He doesn’t even grimace when Gloria comes looking for him.

Dennis walks out to the parking lot with Trinity, listening to her chatter about dinner options. If she watches him closely, he pretends he doesn’t notice.

It all ends up being disgustingly normal, and Dennis isn’t sure if he’s relieved or disappointed.  

But one thing he knows for certain is the normal he might once have settled for is no longer enough.