Chapter Text
The last box of suppressants Robby had ever purchased sat half-empty in the back of his medicine cabinet at home, buried behind a bottle of advil and a tube of hydrocortisone cream. He hadn't opened the box in, what, ten months? Twelve? He'd stopped counting. Stopped caring. Fifty-two years old, eighteen months without so much of a whiff of pre-heat, and his OB had shrugged over a video call and said, "Well, Michael, it looks like your body's made the decision for you."
Thank Christ for that.
He'd spent the better part of thirty-five years and a small fortune keeping his biology on a leash. Suppressants every twelve hours like clockwork, scent-neutralising patches on his neck, the whole miserable pharmaceutical circus that every omega in healthcare had to perform just to do their goddamn jobs without some rut-addled alpha trying to nuzzle their throat instead of describing their chest pain.
The day he'd gone through that last heat (a pitiful, lukewarm thing that barely lasted twenty-four hours and felt more like a bad flu than anything resembling the real deal) he'd thought: good riddance.
No more suppressants. No more patches. No more of any of it.
He was free.
Or, more accurately, he was old. But he'd take it.
The morning had started the way most mornings at the Pitt started: badly. Three ambulances before seven, a code blue in the hallway, and Dana already giving him that look over the nurses' station, the one that said I've been here since six AM and if you don't bring me a coffee I will end you. He'd brought her coffee from the break room. He wasn't stupid.
"Looking chipper today, Dr Sunshine," Dana said, accepting the cup without breaking eye contact with her monitor. "Sleep well?"
"Like a baby. Woke up every two hours screaming."
"Cute."
He hadn't slept well. He hadn't slept well in weeks, actually, a low-grade restlessness kept pulling him out of dreams he couldn't remember. He blamed the Pittsburgh weather, or the construction outside his house, or the neighbours' dog, or whatever excuse felt most plausible at three in the morning when he was staring at the ceiling for the fourth time. It didn't matter. He'd functioned on worse.
The residents filtered in around seven-thirty, and Robby stationed himself by the board with his second coffee of the day, running through the overnight holds and incoming transfers. Mohan arrived first, punctual as ever, already reviewing charts, her scent patch neatly in place behind her left ear. Mel wasn't far behind her. Santos trailed in with McKay, the two of them mid-argument about something Robby had zero interest in parsing. Javadi came next, looking like a startled baby deer.
And then Whitaker.
Dennis rounded the corner at seven-twenty-nine, cutting it close enough to make a point but not close enough to actually be late. He had a paper bag from a bakery a few streets away tucked under one arm and two coffees balanced in his other hand, one of which he passed to Santos without breaking stride.
"You're a king amongst men," Trinity said.
Dennis smirked at her. "I know."
Robby tracked the movement without meaning to. Whitaker had filled out since his first day at the Pitt, though the kid had always been solid in the way farm boys tended to be. The change was more in the way he carried himself now. He was less apologetic. That hunted-rabbit look had faded from his eyes, replaced by something steadier.
He wore a scent patch like almost everyone. Robby could see the small adhesive square just below the hinge of his jaw, the skin around it faintly pink the way it got on people with fair complexions. It was doing its job, mostly. Dennis's scent was muted, dampened to the polite social frequency that workplace decorum required.
Technically.
The problem, and Robby wouldn't have called it a problem, exactly, more of an observation, was that Dennis Whitaker was twenty-eight years old and at the absolute zenith of his hormonal output, and no adhesive patch the size of a postage stamp was going to fully contain that. His pheromones bled through the patch like ink through wet paper. Warm and grassy. Something Robby's hindbrain catalogued without his permission every single time the kid walked past. Like cut hay drying in late summer sun, the dark smell of turned earth after rain, and beneath it all a floral sweetness that reminded him of lying in a field somewhere far, far away from here.
It was fine. Robby noticed plenty of scents throughout his shift. He worked in an emergency room. The place was a symphony of pheromones, blood, antiseptic, and human misery. You learnt to filter it out.
"Whitaker."
Dennis straightened, the bakery bag crinkling in his hands. "Yeah—yes?"
"You're with me today. Santos, you're with Mohan in the south wing. Javadi, McKay, I want you in fast-track, and if either of you pages me for something you could've handled with a Google search, I will reassign you to chairs for a month."
Victoria's mouth opened, then closed with a click.
"Smart choice," Robby said pointing at her.
He turned back to the board and caught, at the edge of his awareness, the slight displacement of air as Dennis stepped up beside him. He wasn’t quite inappropriately close, the kid was looking at the board, but close enough that Robby's next breath came in threaded through with that green, sun-baked scent that the patch couldn't quite catch.
Robby's fingers twitched.
He took a deliberate step to the left, angling his body toward bed two’s file. "Fifty-six-year-old male, came in overnight with abdominal pain. CT's pending. You're going to take the history, and I want it done properly, not the speed-round version Santos would give me."
"I always do it properly," Dennis said, with just enough quiet firmness to land somewhere between deference and a challenge.
Robby glanced at him. Dennis held his gaze. He wasn’t being aggressive or posturing, he was just... firm. A calm alpha certainty that had nothing to do with arrogance and everything to do with the fact that Whitaker, despite all his fumbling early days, had apparently found the backbone he'd been so desperately in need of.
Something warm flickered inside Robby's chest cavity. He dismissed it as the effects of too much caffeine in too short a time-frame.
"Then prove it," Robby said. "Bed two. Go."
Dennis went. Robby watched him push through the curtain, and realised he'd unconsciously leant forward in the half-second before the kid moved away. Like his body had been reluctant to let the proximity end.
He straightened and rolled his shoulders. Took a long pull of coffee that had gone lukewarm and tasted like nothing.
Get it together Robinavitch.
The morning progressed in the usual controlled chaos. Robby moved between beds and bays with the efficiency of a man who'd been doing this for longer than some of his residents had been alive, barking orders, checking vitals, making the kind of split-second calls that separated competent doctors from the rest of the mediocre rabble. He was good at this. He'd always been good at this. It was the one arena where his brain worked exactly the way it was supposed to.
Dennis, to his credit, kept pace.
The kid's history on the abdominal case was thorough, almost annoyingly so. He'd caught a detail about recent travel that the overnight team had missed, flagged a potential medication issue, and presented it all with the careful precision of someone who'd long ago learnt that Dr. Robinavitch didn't give second chances on sloppy work.
"Not bad," Robby said, scanning the notes on the tablet.
Dennis's mouth twitched. He knew Robby well enough by now to recognise that not bad was high praise.
They worked bed seven together next, a teenager with a laceration deep enough to need suturing, and Robby let Dennis take the lead while he supervised. The kid's hands were steady. He had good hands, strong and careful, the kind of hands that had probably spent years doing hard work on the farm, mending fences, handling animals, whatever it was people did in Broken Bow, Nebraska, that produced young men who were simultaneously gentle and built like they could throw a hay bale across a barn.
Robby was standing close enough to supervise the sutures.
If he breathed in a little deeper than strictly necessary, that was just the recycled hospital air. It was stuffy. He'd been meaning to complain to facilities about the ventilation.
"Take smaller bites," he said, leaning in over Dennis's shoulder. "You're not sewing a quilt."
"Ugh—sorry." Dennis adjusted, his neck flexed, and the movement sent a fresh wave of scent rolling off the skin above his patch. Hay and earth and something almost honeyed, right there at the curve where his jaw met his throat, and Robby's mouth went inexplicably dry.
He stepped back and crossed his arms.
"Better," he said, though he'd stopped looking at the sutures.
By eleven, Robby's skin felt oddly sensitive. He wasn’t in any pain, nothing so dramatic. Just... very aware. The collar of his scrub top rubbed against his nape in a way he didn't usually notice. The strap of his watch sat heavier on his wrist. He chalked it up to the weather, barometric pressure did strange things in Pittsburgh, everybody knew that, and pushed through it the way he pushed through everything.
He was in the break room pouring his third coffee of the day when Dennis appeared in the doorway, tablet in hand, scent preceding him like a royal herald.
"Mr. O’Keefe in Bed 2. His CT results came back. No obstruction, but there's—"
"Show me," he replied instantly.
Dennis crossed the small room and held the tablet out, standing beside Robby at the counter. Their arms were almost touching. Robby could feel the warmth radiating off the kid. Alphas always ran hot, and his scent was stronger in the close quarters of the break room, richer and more layered. Robby found himself cataloguing it without trying. The top note of sweet dried grass, the middle of dark warm earth, and something underneath that was just Dennis, some essential Whitaker-ness that smelt comfortable in a way Robby refused to examine.
He realised he'd been staring at the same CT slice for too long.
"Fine," he said, scrolling to the next image. "Walk me through what you're thinking."
Dennis talked and Robby listened. Or tried to. His attention kept snagging on irrelevant details like the way Dennis's forearm looked pale and bare below his scrub sleeves, the timbre of his voice when he was working through a problem, the barely-there movement of him shifting his weight that made his scent eddy and curl between them in the confined space.
"—so I think we should consult gastro and keep him for observation, but that's your call."
"It's the right call." Robby set the tablet down. His hand was warm. His whole body felt warm, actually, he attributed it to three coffees on an empty stomach. "Put the consult in. And eat something—you look like you're about to keel over."
Dennis blinked. "I'm fine."
"I didn't ask if you were fine. I told you to eat something."
There was a flicker behind Dennis's eyes, the one that surfaced when his alpha instincts bumped up against being ordered around. His jaw tightened fractionally, his chin lifting, and for a split second Robby caught the edge of something sharp beneath the sweet-natured farm boy exterior. A quiet, reflexive don't tell me what to do that Dennis was too well-mannered to actually voice but couldn't quite keep off his face.
Robby's pulse did something unexpected. It skipped a beat, like a record catching on a scratch.
"I'll eat when I've finished the consult," Dennis said.
Robby held his gaze. The break room suddenly felt very small.
"Fine," Robby said, and something in the base of his spine tingled as Dennis held the stare a beat longer than necessary before turning and walking out, his scent lingering in the doorway for half a second.
Robby exhaled slowly. Pressed the heel of his hand against his sternum, where that warm flicker had taken up residence and showed no signs of leaving.
Probably the coffee. He was drinking too much coffee.
He poured himself another cup.
By noon the irritating warmth had settled into his bones like a low-grade fever he couldn't shake. Robby pressed the back of his wrist against his forehead in the supply closet, found a normal skin temperature, and decided he was being ridiculous. He grabbed a fresh pair of gloves and went back to work.
The ER had hit its midday stride, the lull between morning chaos and the afternoon surge that would inevitably bring a fresh wave of walk-ins who'd spent the morning debating whether their symptoms warranted a visit. The board was manageable. The residents were behaving. Robby should have felt settled.
Instead, his lower back ached with a dull, persistent throb that sat right above his tailbone and radiated outward when he twisted. He'd been on his feet for five hours. That was nothing. He'd done sixteen-hour shifts and walked out fine. But the ache sat there, warm and insistent, and every time he forgot about it for a few minutes, it pulsed back into awareness like a second heartbeat.
He found himself in the break room again around twelve-thirty because Trinity and Dennis were already in there, and some nosy part of his brain had apparently decided that was where he needed to be.
Trinity was perched on the counter with her feet swinging, eating the communal peanut butter straight from a jar with a spoon, which was disgusting and also exactly the kind of thing Trinity liked to do. Dennis sat at the small table, working through a sandwich. The scent patch on his jaw was starting to curl at one edge, losing adhesion the way they did after hours of wear.
His smell hit Robby before he'd fully crossed the threshold. His lungs expanded before he could stop them, pulling in a deep, involuntary breath that he disguised as a sigh.
"Scintillating lunch options as always," he said, moving to the coffee machine. His fourth. Fifth? He'd lost count.
"Dennis brought pastries this morning and didn't save me one," Trinity said, pointing the peanut butter spoon at Whitaker accusatorially. "So this is his fault."
"I brought four pastries, it’s not my fault you were too slow to grab one. And you eat like a raccoon, that's not my problem."
"Wow. Wow. Do you hear this?" Trinity looked at Robby with theatrical betrayal. "Do you hear how he speaks to me? In my own place of work?"
Robby snorted. He leant against the counter to wait for the coffee machine, which was taking its time, and the position put him about four feet from Dennis. His scent curled around him, and this time he let it, too tired to perform the mental gymnastics of pretending he wasn't aware of it. It was just a scent. Everyone had one. Dennis's just happened to be particularly... pleasant.
His skin prickled, a cascade of tiny goosebumps that started at his nape rolled down his arms beneath his scrub sleeves, there and gone before he could examine it.
"Dr. Robby." Trinity had that look on her face, the one that preceded either a genuinely insightful clinical question or something that would make him want to throw his coffee at the wall. "Hypothetically—"
"No."
"You don't even know what I was going to ask."
"If it starts with 'hypothetically,' I already regret being in this room." He took his coffee from the machine and wrapped both hands around it, savouring the heat against his palms. His fingers felt cold. Which was strange, given that the rest of him was running warm.
"She wants to know if she can put a hammock in the on-call room," Dennis said, not looking up from his sandwich.
"Traitor!" Trinity threw a wadded napkin at his head. Dennis caught it without flinching and set it on the table beside his plate, tidy as you please.
"No hammocks," Robby said. "No beanbags. No fairy lights. The on-call room is for sleeping, not for recreating your college dorm."
"Our apartment looks like that too," Dennis said mildly. "I found a lava lamp in the bathroom last week."
"It's for ambiance."
"It's a fire hazard, Trin."
Robby watched them volley back and forth, something loosening in his chest. This was the thing about this particular cohort of residents. They'd come through PittFest together, come through the kind of shift that either bonded people for life or broke them apart, and these two had landed firmly in the former camp. Dennis and Trinity lived together, bickered like siblings, and had each other's backs with the unthinking loyalty of people who'd seen each other at their worst and chosen to stay anyway.
It reminded him of something. Someone. A version of himself, decades ago, who'd had that kind of easy closeness with people, before he'd learnt that closeness was just a down payment on future grief.
He took a sip of coffee and let the bitterness scour the thought away.
"Both of you, finish eating. Santos, you've got a new admit in bed eleven, abdominal pain, looks straightforward but don't get lazy. Whitaker—" He paused. Dennis looked up, and their eyes met, and Robby's train of thought derailed for a full two seconds for absolutely no reason. "You're still with me. Bed nine needs a follow-up."
Dennis nodded, already standing and thoughtfully gathering up his trash. He passed close to Robby on his way to the trashcan, close enough that the loose edge of his scent patch fluttered, and the full unfiltered wave of his scent rolled over Robby like a physical thing, sweet and dark and grounding. Robby's eyelids dipped, just a fraction. Just for a heartbeat. A heaviness pulling at them, the way you felt when you sank into a warm bath after a brutal day, your whole body going yes, yes, this, stay here.
He opened his eyes and took a deliberate step back, bumping his hip against the counter.
"You alright?" Dennis asked, pausing by the door.
"Fine. Go."
Dennis went. Robby stood in the break room and pressed his thumb into the ache above his tailbone and told himself it was probably a pinched nerve.
The afternoon brought in a steady stream of people. A toddler with a bead in her ear canal. A construction worker with a nail through his boot. A woman in her seventies who'd fallen in the shower and fractured her wrist, stoic and furious about it in equal measure. Robby moved through the cases with practiced efficiency, but his body kept distracting him with its small betrayals. The scrub top rough against his collarbones. The elastic of his waistband rubbing irritatingly on his hips. A faint, restless energy in his legs that made standing still feel like torture.
He was reviewing a chart at the nurses' station when Javadi appeared, looking mildly frazzled.
"Dr. Robby, bed six is asking to speak to someone else."
He didn't look up. "About?"
Victoria hesitated. That was enough to make him look up.
"He wants to see a different doctor. He said—" She pressed her lips together. "He asked if there was an alpha in charge."
Robby set the chart down. The familiar weariness of this particular interaction settled over him like an old, uncomfortable coat. Javadi was an omega too, she would have to get used to situations like this sooner or later, but he could handle it for her today.
He'd had this conversation a hundred times over thirty years. A thousand, more likely. The specific flavour varied and the wording shifted, but the core of it was always the same: you're an omega, therefore you are less, therefore I don't trust you with my body or my life.
"What's he in for?" he asked.
"A dislocated finger. Mel reduced it already; he's just waiting on discharge paperwork."
"And he wants an alpha to hand him his papers. Fantastic." Robby picked up the chart and tucked it under his arm. "I'll handle it."
"I can—"
"Javadi. I said I'll handle it."
He walked to bed six with the bone-deep composure of a man who had stopped being wounded by this kind of thing years ago and now only found it tedious. The curtain was half-open. The patient was a broad man in his forties, sitting on the edge of the bed with his freshly splinted finger held aloft like a sceptre. His scent hit Robby three steps out, alpha, sharp and acrid, the sour undertone of someone who was in pain and irritated about it.
"Mr. Garrett." Robby pulled the curtain the rest of the way open and stepped in, tablet in hand. "I'm Dr. Robinavitch, the attending on duty. I hear you have some concerns."
Garrett looked him up and down. The assessment was obvious. The way his nostrils flared, reading Robby's scent, the slight curl of his lip when he processed what he found.
"Yeah, my concern is that I want to talk to whoever's actually running this place." Garrett shifted on the bed, his good hand gripping the mattress edge. "No offense, doc, but I got a buddy who works over at West Penn and he says the attending is supposed to be—you know."
"Supposed to be what?"
Garrett's jaw worked. He wasn't stupid enough to say it plainly, which was almost worse than if he had. Robby hated the cowardice of implication. "Look, my finger's all messed up, and I want someone who's going to take it seriously, not some—"
"Your finger was dislocated. It's been reduced and splinted by Dr. King, who did an excellent job, and you'll follow up with your primary care physician in a week. There's nothing left to take seriously. You're done."
"I want to talk to—"
"There is no one else. I am the attending. This is my ER. Your discharge paperwork is right here." Robby held out the tablet. His voice was flat and professional, the voice of a man who'd been doing this too long to give a stranger the satisfaction of a reaction. "Sign, and you're free to go."
Garrett's chin came up in a show of alpha posturing. His pheromones deepened in a deliberate dominance display that was childish and predictable and, against all reason, made the fine hair on Robby's forearms stand on end. His omega hindbrain registered the challenge and wanted, absurdly, to bare his throat. Robby mentally cursed the ancient binary that no amount of medical training could fully override.
"I'm not signing anything until I talk to a real—"
"Is there a problem?"
Dennis's voice came from the gap in the curtain. His tone sat in a register Robby hadn't heard from him before, somewhere below his usual careful politeness.
He stepped into the bay. He wasn't puffing up or squaring off. He wasn't doing any of the theatrical alpha nonsense that Robby had watched a thousand young men perform in bars and boardrooms alike. He was just standing there, hands loose at his sides, shoulders back but not braced, looking at Garrett with an expression that was almost pleasant. Almost.
His scent had changed too.
Robby registered it instantly. The hay-and-earth warmth was still there, but beneath it something had sharpened. Something territorial and bright, like ozone before a storm. The patch on his jaw might as well have been tissue paper. Dennis's pheromones filled the space, and they said, with a clarity that bypassed language entirely: I would be very careful, if I were you.
Garrett's nostrils flared. His posture shifted, a recalculation happened behind his eyes. Dennis was younger, but he was strong and fit, and whatever his scent was communicating right now was speaking a dialect that Garrett's hindbrain understood perfectly.
"Dr. Robinavitch is the attending physician," Dennis said. His voice hadn't risen. If anything, it had dropped further. "He's the most qualified person in this building to oversee your care. You're in good hands. The best hands, actually."
There was a beat of tense silence.
"I was just asking a question," Garrett muttered, the fight leaking out of him like air from a punctured tire. His eyes dropped and his shoulders rounded out.
"Great," Dennis said, still pleasant and almost smiling. "Then you can sign your discharge paperwork and be on your way. Right?"
Garrett signed. Garrett left. The curtain swayed in his wake, and the bay fell silent except for the ambient hum of monitors and the distant clatter of the ER continuing its endless rotation.
Robby stood very still.
His pulse was doing something it had no business doing. His heart was thudding, heavy and slow. The ache in his lower back had migrated, spreading in a warm band across his hips, and his skin felt like it was humming at a frequency only he could hear. Dennis's scent hung in the enclosed space, and Robby's body was leaning into it, reaching for it, every cell oriented toward the source like iron filings drawn towards a magnet.
A sound tried to build in his throat. Something soft and involuntary. He hastily swallowed it.
"You didn't need to do that," he said. Thankfully his voice came out steadier than he felt.
Dennis turned to him, and the sharpness faded from his expression as quickly as it had appeared, replaced by something almost sheepish. The sharp ozone note in his scent was already receding and folding back into the warmer base, and an embarrassed flush was climbing his neck.
"I know. I'm sorry. I don't—" He rubbed the back of his head, looking genuinely confused by his own behaviour. "I'm not sure what came over me. I just heard what he was saying and I..."
"I've been handling alphas like that since before you were born, Whitaker."
"I know," Dennis said again, more quietly. "I know you can look after yourself. I'm sorry."
He meant it. That was the thing about Dennis. Every apology was real. He stood there looking faintly bewildered by his own alpha instincts, this gentle boy from Nebraska who'd somehow gone all territorial over a rude patient and couldn't explain why.
Robby looked at him. At the flush on his throat, the uncertain set of his mouth, the way his hands had curled and uncurled at his sides like they were still deciding whether to make fists. At the patch peeling from below his jaw, exposing a strip of warm skin that Robby could smell from four feet away, hay and cut grass and the sweet dark undertow of something that made his hindbrain purr.
His stomach clenched. A hot, liquid flex low in his abdomen that he hadn't felt in over a year and a half. Gone before he could fully register it, leaving behind a phantom warmth that pooled and sat heavy between his hips.
He took a breath and blinked. Filed the anomaly under ‘muscle spasm’ and moved on, because that was what Robby did. That was what Robby had always done.
"Don't apologise," he said, brushing past Dennis toward the curtain. His shoulder grazed Dennis's chest on the way, and the contact sent a ripple of sensation through him that was entirely disproportionate to the physics actually involved. "Just don't make a habit of it. I don't need a guard dog."
"Wouldn't dream of it," Dennis said, and there was something in his voice, something warm and rough around the edges that hadn't been there this morning.
Robby didn't look back. He walked to the nurses' station and sat down and pulled up a chart and stared at it without reading a single word for forty-five seconds while his body did things he refused to acknowledge. The ache in his back. The warmth in his belly. The faint, treacherous dampness that he attributed to sweat, because the ER was always too warm, the ventilation in this building was a disgrace, and he was fifty-two years old and past all of this.
Past it.
Done.
Dana materialised beside him with a stack of files and a look that missed nothing.
"You're all flushed, Cap’."
"It's hot in here."
"It's sixty-eight degrees."
"Then the thermostat's wrong." He took the files from her without meeting her eyes. "What've we got?"
Dana held his gaze for a moment longer than comfortable, her own senses no doubt cataloguing whatever was being broadcast off him. But Dana had known Robby for nearly thirty years, she knew him well enough to know when to push and when to leave it.
She left it. For now.
"Bed three needs a central line. Bed eight is waiting on labs. And your shadow just walked past the station three times in the last two minutes looking like a golden retriever who got yelled at to get off the couch."
Robby glanced up. Dennis was at the far end of the corridor, making a show of checking something on a wall-mounted screen, but his trajectory had definitely curved past the nurses' station more times than any reasonable task required. His body language was all wrong for a man reviewing test results. Oriented, even from twenty feet away, towards Robby.
"He's fine," Robby said. "He just went all alpha on a patient and feels bad about it."
"Whitaker?" Dana's eyebrows rose. "That boy couldn’t go alpha on a stale sandwich."
"Well, he did today."
Dana looked at Dennis. Looked at Robby. Something moved behind her eyes, quick and assessing, and Robby felt suddenly, irrationally exposed, as though she could see through his skin to the warm, restless thing coiling beneath it.
"Interesting," she said.
"It's not interesting." He stood and his back twinged as he straightened. "Right, bed three. Central line. Let's go."
He threw himself back into the work, the way he always did, the way work had always been the answer to every question his body or mind tried to ask him. He placed the central line with steady hands and didn't think about the way Dennis's scent still clung to his scrub top from where their shoulders had touched. He reviewed labs and didn't think about the slow, pulsing heat building in his lower abdomen like embers being breathed back to life. He drank more coffee and didn't think about the fact that his sense of smell had sharpened to an almost painful degree over the last few hours, every scent in the ER amplified and layered, but none of them as loud, as insistent, as present as the one that belonged to a twenty-eight-year-old farm boy who kept finding reasons to be in whatever space Robby was in.
He didn't think about any of it.
Jack Abbot arrived at ten past six, forty minutes before his shift officially started, because Jack Abbot had never been on time for anything in his life. He was either early or catastrophically late, and the catastrophic lateness was usually reserved for administrative meetings he had no intention of attending anyway.
He came through the ambulance bay doors with a takeaway cup and a slightly bowlegged gait. He'd told Robby once that the stump of his injured leg ached more in humid weather, something about the socket of his prosthetic and the Pittsburgh damp, and Robby had told him to file a complaint with God and handed him an ibuprofen.
"Captain on deck," Abbot announced to nobody in particular, dropping into the empty chair beside Dana at the nurses' station. He stretched his legs out and took a long sip of his coffee with the air of a man who had nowhere to be and all the time in the world. "What'd I miss?"
"A dislocated finger that turned into a civil rights issue, two walk-outs, and I heard Santos ate peanut butter for lunch again," Dana said without looking up.
Abbot chuckled. "That girl's gonna get worms."
"That's not how worms work," Robby said from three feet away, where he was updating the board with discharge statuses. "You're a doctor, Jack. Act like one."
Abbot grinned and tipped his coffee cup in salute. Then his grin faltered, just slightly. His head tilted to the side quizzically. "You look like hell, brother."
"You say the nicest things."
"I mean it. You're sweating."
Robby shrugged. "It's June."
"It's air-conditioned in here," countered Jack.
Robby dragged the back of his hand across his forehead and found it damp. He looked at the moisture on his skin with mild irritation. His body had been staging small rebellions all afternoon. The cramps had migrated from his lower back to his abdomen, a deep rhythmic clenching that came in waves every fifteen or twenty minutes, and the warmth had spread from his core outward until his face felt permanently flushed. He'd sweated through his undershirt an hour ago.
He was getting sick. Obviously. Some low-grade virus making the rounds, the kind that brewed slowly and hit hard around hour ten of a shift. He'd go home, take something and sleep it off.
"I'm fine," he said, turning back to the board. "Don't you have someone else to bother? Go sit somewhere else."
"I'm comfortable." Abbot leant back in the chair, but his eyes stayed on Robby with intense focused attention. His nostrils flared, a subtle movement that was barely there. Reading the air the way alphas did.
Robby felt the assessment and ignored it.
"Dana, where are we on bed twelve?" he asked.
"Waiting on an ICU bed to take them upstairs. Should be twenty minutes."
Robby quirked an eyebrow. "Should be or will be?"
"Should be. This is the Pitt, not the Ritz."
Robby snorted. Another cramp rolled through his abdomen, stronger than the last, and he braced his hand on the edge of the nurses' station counter. He breathed through it the way he'd breathed through a thousand minor discomforts over the years, and when it passed he straightened and found Abbot still watching him.
"What?" asked Robby, more waspishly than he intended.
Abbot's brow creased. "Are you wearing a patch today?"
"No. I don't need one anymore."
"Since when?"
"Since my reproductive system finally had the decency to retire." Robby pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed before continuing. "I'm post-menopausal, Jack. I have been for over a year now. The patches were just burning through money I could spend on whiskey instead."
Abbot's eyebrows rose. He opened his mouth, then closed it, then took a long sip of coffee as if buying himself time. His nostrils flared again, that reflexive alpha scenting instinct, and his expression shifted into something Robby couldn't quite read.
"Huh," Abbot said.
"A riveting contribution."
"You just smell different, that's all."
"I smell like twelve hours of ER and no shower. You're welcome." Robby pushed away from the station. "I need to check on McKay's discharge in bed—"
"Dr. Robby?"
Dennis's voice came from behind him, slightly to the left and close by.
Robby turned, and the movement put them almost face to face. Dennis had his tablet out, a consult note on the screen, but he wasn't looking at the tablet. He was looking at Robby. His eyes were slightly too wide, his pupils fractionally too large. The scent patch beneath his jaw was barely hanging on, and his scent was pouring off him in waves that Robby felt against his skin like a deluge of warm water.
"Bed two. Mr. O’Keefe." Dennis's voice came out rougher than usual. He cleared his throat. "Gastro came back and they want to admit him. I've got the paperwork started but I need your sign-off on the transfer orders."
"Let me see."
Dennis handed him the tablet. Their fingers brushed. It was barely two-seconds of contact, knuckle against knuckle, and Robby's entire nervous system lit up like an ignited fuse. Heat spiked from the point of contact up through his wrist, his forearm, pooling in his chest and cascading downward into his belly, where it sat and throbbed in time with his pulse. His breath hitched and an involuntary sound escaped his throat, barely audible, a soft, bitten-off grunt that he turned into a cough.
Dennis went completely still and his nostrils flared. His hand, still half-extended from passing the tablet, hung in the air between them, and something crossed his face that looked like ravenous hunger and confusion in equal measure.
"Are you okay?" Dennis asked. His voice had dropped again, into that low register, the one that vibrated somewhere in Robby's sternum.
"I'm fine." The words came out thin. Robby took a step back, clutching the tablet against his chest like a shield. "I'll review it and sign. Go check on your other patients."
Dennis didn't move immediately. He stood there for a beat too long, his body angled toward Robby, that stormy sharpness threading through his scent again, and Robby watched his hands flex at his sides, opening and closing, before he seemed to physically shake himself.
"Right. Yeah. Okay."
He walked away, and Robby watched him go, and his body ached in his wake like one giant pulled muscle. The air where Dennis had been standing was still thick with him, warm and grassy and sweet, and Robby breathed it in before he could stop himself, a deep, trembling lungful that made his eyelids flutter.
He became aware, distantly, that he was being observed.
He turned. Abbot was still in the chair, coffee cup frozen halfway to his mouth, staring at Robby with an expression that had completed whatever calculation it had been running all evening. Dana was looking at her screen, but her fingers had stopped moving on the keyboard, and Robby knew her well enough to know she was listening to everything.
Abbot set his coffee down.
"Robby."
"What?"
"Come with me for a second."
"I'm busy."
"Michael." Abbot stood, and there was something in his tone that bypassed their usual dynamic of mutual needling and landed squarely in the territory of genuine concern. He jerked his head toward the corridor. "One minute. C’mon in the stairwell."
"Jack, I don't have time—"
"One minute."
Abbot was already moving, his gait unhurried and trusting that Robby would follow. And Robby, against every instinct that told him to stay at his station and finish his shift and not have whatever conversation was about to happen, followed.
The stairwell was empty. The door swung shut behind them, cutting the ambient noise of the ER to a muffled hum, and the sudden quiet felt intimate in a way that made Robby's overheated skin prickle. The fluorescent light overhead buzzed. The air was cool. It felt good against his face and he hated that it felt good because it shouldn't matter.
"What the hell is this about?" Robby turned on Abbot, his arms crossed, every line of his body daring Jack to waste his time. "If you've dragged me in here to ask me about my sleep schedule again—"
Abbot stepped forward, leant in and took a long, deliberate sniff of the side of Robby's neck, his nose hovering two inches from the skin below Robby's ear, where a scent gland sat nestled against his pulse point.
Robby's mouth fell open in shock.
He stood there, arms dropping to his sides, too stunned to move. The sheer audacity of it short-circuited his brain. You didn't scent other people without permission. It was intimate and invasive, the kind of thing that could get you slapped or fired or both. Jack Abbot had known Robby for years, had stood beside him through the worst night of their professional lives, and had never once done anything like this.
Abbot pulled back and his face was grim.
"Robby," he said, quiet and steady and unbearably kind. "Do you know you're going into heat?"
"What?" Robby's voice cracked. He took a step back, his shoulder blades hitting the cinder block wall. "No. No, I'm not. That's—Jack, remember I told you, I'm past all that."
"I know what you told me." Abbot held his ground, his hands up with palms open, the universal gesture of I'm not a threat, but I'm not letting you run away from this either. "And I'm telling you what I'm smelling. You're pumping out heat pheromones. I've never caught them on you before because you were always patched and suppressed to hell and back, but I know what they smell like, Robby. I'm not wrong about this."
"You are wrong." Robby's hand went to his own neck, pressing against the scent gland as if he could physically hold in whatever was leaking out of it. "I'm fifty-two. My OB confirmed I was menopausal. I haven't had a cycle in—"
"Sometimes it can come back." Abbot's voice was careful and measured, the voice of a man delivering a diagnosis to a patient who didn't want to hear it. "You know the research as well as I do. Prolonged exposure to a compatible alpha with strong fertility markers can kickstart the cycle again. It's rare, but it happens. Especially if the omega's off suppressants and in close physical proximity to—"
He stopped and let the silence finish his sentence for him.
Robby stared at him. His heart was hammering, hard and fast, and the cramp that rolled through his abdomen this time was not something he could file under muscle spasm or a virus or bad coffee. It was deep and clenching and unmistakably, horrifyingly familiar, a sensation he'd spent thirty years managing and eighteen months believing he'd never feel again.
His hand was still tight on his own neck. His skin was on fire.
"Compatible," he repeated, the word tasting like ash.
"You've been working with Whitaker all day," Abbot said, his voice was non-accusatory and calmly stating facts. "I watched you two just now. He's—Robby, that kid's scent spiked and went all possessive just because you made a noise. That's not normal alpha behaviour around a colleague. That's a response… a specific one."
Robby pressed his back harder against the wall and felt the cold of the cinder block seep through his clothes and it wasn't enough. Nothing was enough. The heat was inside him, building with the slow inevitability of something that had been waiting, patient and dormant, for exactly the right trigger to pull it screaming back to life.
Dennis Whitaker. Twenty-eight years old. Sweet and gentle Dennis with his peeling scent patch and his hay-and-earth smell and his quiet alpha steadiness that Robby's hindbrain had been reaching for all day like a vine toward sunlight.
Oh no.
"Oh, no," he said out loud.
Abbot's expression softened. "Yeah."
Robby slid down the wall until he was sitting on the concrete step, his knees drawn up, his head in his hands. The position pressed his thighs together and he became acutely aware of the warmth between them, the faint slickness that he had been attributing to sweat for hours because the alternative was unthinkable.
"This isn't happening."
"It's happening."
"I'm fifty-two, Jack."
"Biology doesn't check your ID for this shit."
Robby pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes until he saw sparks. His body pulsed and his skin sang. Every cell was oriented, even now, towards the warm green scent of the man who had done this to him without either of them realising what was happening until it was too late.