Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

I. Spring, 1997

It’s the Spring of ‘97 when Michael Robinavitch is dragged into a gay bar, darker than the night that surrounds it, for the very first time. It happens the way most things happen amongst grad students at the tail-end of the semester: a crazy idea proposed over one too many drinks, taken seriously at the bottom of the next round. Pittsburgh’s the only city he’s ever called home, but Robby’s never seen inside the four walls of The Playback until tonight; a few hours ago, in fact, he might’ve bet good money he never would. Now here he stands, washed over by the staccato thud of the speakers, Janet Jackson’s voice over a steady baseline. It doesn't take long for his eyes to adjust to the lights panning over the dancing crowd in alternating hues, strobe flashes catching the sweat on strangers’ faces, slick in the dark.

For a moment, Robby’s struck by the realization that anybody could catch a glimpse of him in the fleeting light. For a moment, he envisions his grandmother wringing her hands, eyes like those of a wounded bird. Inhaling around the dull ache in his chest, he wonders what he’s doing here. He wonders what it says about him that his friends thought to bring him along with them in the first place.

Charlie, Pratt, and Rhonda are good people, Robby reminds himself. The fact that they took to each other so quickly in an otherwise cut-throat program is no small feat and that’s due, in part, because he never treated them any differently than the rest of their peers. Sure, their medical program was never going to be rampant with homophobia — Charlie and Pratt hit it off, after all, because they both volunteered for the Pitt Men’s Study, alive and well at their school after thirteen years and counting. But that doesn’t mean they have it easy, either, and Robby knows that, too.

Maybe that’s why they invited him — because he offered his friendship so easily, because he carries himself with the quiet understanding of someone who knows what it’s like to have been dealt a rough hand. Maybe that’s why they trusted he wouldn’t take offense to the invitation, why they might’ve guessed, in fact, that he’d take them up on it. Even if he’s never said anything. Even if he’s tried so carefully never to show anything.

But there’s another, more complicated possibility settled just underneath that one — a truth that, even for a young man of twenty-six years old, feels too tender for Robby touch, so he keeps it carefully out of reach.

He hears Rhonda before he sees her. “You good, man?” she says, clapping a warm hand to his shoulder. “You look like you’re fixin’ for the nearest exit.”

“All good,” Robby says, perhaps a little too quickly. “Just fixing for a drink.”

Rhonda leans back, giving him a once-over. Her voice stays easy. “Uh-huh. Well, pace yourself, Mikey. Bartenders here pour like they’re trying to send you out on a gurney.”

“Perfect. More clinical hours for us to look forward to.”

“More clinical hours for you, maybe,” she corrects. “As far as I’m concerned, my weekend’s started. I’m leaving on the gurney.” At that, Robby laughs, soft and brief, but doesn’t move. Rhonda nudges her chin toward the bar. “You want company, or you flying solo?”

He hesitates, eyes flicking to the sea of bodies between them, the long, crowded stretch of the bar, and then back to her. “Company sounds good.”

She nods. “Cool. Let’s get you something that won’t knock you sideways on the first sip.”

The crowd turns out to be too dense for them to weave through, so they play the long game, talking over the music as they inch their way closer to the bar one song at a time. It gives Robby the chance to take a proper look around. He’s not sure he’s ever seen a crowd like this before. It makes sense that one of the only gay clubs in town would cast a wide net, attracting people of all ages, all races, all walks of life. But it’s a different thing entirely to see it up close: the buzzcuts, the makeup, the joyous touching, the hungry glances.

As one song eases into another, so, too, does the tension ease out of Robby’s shoulders. This isn’t totally unfamiliar territory, after all -- gay or not, bars are just a lot of people talking and drinking. Before he knows it, the only thing he’s focused on is learning where Rhonda got matched to do her residency. It’s safer here, Robby realizes, than he thought any place could be. Safer than his high school locker rooms, safer still than his childhood in the suburbs, waiting for his mom to come back home. Here, in this windowless room with its sticky floor and trembling speakers, no one is looking at him with accusatory eyes. They’re too consumed in the moment to bother – laughing, dancing, drifting close and then closer. Except — Except —

“Don’t look now,” Rhonda tells him. “But you’ve got a fan at eight o’clock.”

Robby blinks. He angles his head just enough to follow her line of sight. Across the bar, half-lit by the amber glow of a neon sign, a pair of dark eyes lock onto his. The person looking back at him can’t be any older than Robby himself – maybe younger, in fact, by a year or two. His hair, a dark suggestion of curls, gives him a boyish quality that offset the sharp slope of his cheekbones; when he catches Robby’s gaze, he smiles.

Rhonda snorts. “Jesus, Mike. I said don’t look.”

“Is that what you said? I misheard you.” Turning to his friend, he gestures towards the bar. “There’s an opening at the bar if you’re still good on ordering us drinks.”

“And what are you gonna do? Just hang back and waste that look?”

He shrugs. “That look’s wasted on me either way.”

“And why’s that?”

Robby gives her a look. “You know why.”

“Look, I know a free drink when I see one. You like free drinks, don’t you?” She smiles, turning back to the crowd. “I’m gonna see where Charlie and Pratt ran off to. Vodka soda with lime. I’ll pay you back.”

Robby tries to call after to her, tries to remind his friend that offering to keep him company ought to have been more than a ten minute deal, but the crowd shifts, the opening at the bar threatening to close, and Robby thinks he sees Rhonda walking in the direction of a girl who looks suspiciously like her ex-girlfriend. It’s a lost cause.

He’s waiting to catch the bartender’s attention when Robby feels somebody’s gaze on him. To his left, those curls again, those dark eyes — that guy who offered him a smile, only an inch or two shorter than Robby now that he’s close.

They both spot the same narrow opening at the bar — a brief, golden chance. Robby half-gestures toward it, polite, letting the guy go first. The guy does the same, mirroring him with a slight grin. Neither of them moves. In the space of their stand-off, someone else slips in, wedging between them and claiming the spot instead.

They glance at each other and laugh. Robby says, “guess chivalry’s dead.”

“You snooze, you lose.” The guy leans in a little, still smiling. “Haven’t I seen you here before?”

Robby scans his face, half-heartedly looking for a spark of recognition that he knows he won’t find. This close, Robby can take a good look at the freckles that wash across the other man’s cheeks and nose, giving his boyish face the easy air of someone who spends his days in the sun. “I don’t think so,” he says at last. “This is my first time stopping in.”

The stranger nods, taking it in stride. “Cool, man. Welcome.” Then, with a little shift of his stance, he offers a hand. “I’m Jack, by the way.”

Robby takes it. What should he offer – his first name, his nickname, nothing at all? He settles on what his teammates called him in high school basketball, the name he might one day offer to his patients. “Robby.”

Jack’s grip is steady, warm in Robby’s hand before contact breaks. “You havin’ fun, Robby?”

Robby is taken back by the question, its simplicity. “Yeah. I am, actually.” He lets the words settle, then says it again, meaning it more the second time. “Yeah.”

“Glad to hear it,” he says. “Look’s like the bartender’s coming back round. Can I get you a drink?”

“I’m good. I’m actually grabbing one for me and my friend,” Robby explains, gesturing back towards Rhonda before the look on Jack’s face reminds him that nothing about Rhonda would explain why a man is buying her a drink in the first place. “Thanks for the offer. Seriously. I just don’t want to give you the wrong idea.”

“And what idea’s that?”

Robby hesitates. “I’m, um — I’m not gay.”

“Oh, good. Neither am I,” Jack says, his voice rounded and warm, like he’s just told a joke. “Look, what’s there to get? This place is just good music and strong drinks. It doesn’t have to mean anything.”

Robby hears what he leaves unsaid: it doesn’t have to mean anything about you. “Do you come here often?”

Jack does laugh at that. “And here I was thinking I’m the one with the awful pick up lines.”

Robby feels his face warm, laughing, too, despite himself. “It wasn’t a line! I’m genuinely asking.”

“Yeah, on occasion. It’s a good crowd here. Not very judgmental. Just trying to have a nice time. The bartenders are great so long as you don’t get on their bad side, so half of ‘em are pretty awful to me,” Jack smiles. “There’s one thing about this place that drives me absolutely crazy, though.”

“You’re not going to say it’s me, are you?”

Jack groans. “Christ, no. Telling that that’s the first place your mind went though, man.”

“You’re the one with the bad game.” Robby pauses, looking out across the club. “No fire exits.”

Jack looks surprised at that. “You must be my kind of crazy.”

“The paranoid kind?”

“I like to call it forward-thinking,” Jack says. "If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that you always need an exit strategy, Robby.” He says his name lightly, like they’ve known each other for years. Then his eyes flick past Robby’s shoulder. “And speaking of, I think I see yours.”

Robby turns just as Rhonda comes into view, weaving towards him with Charlie and Pratt trailing behind her. When he glances back, Jack is already stepping away — easy, unbothered, just a half-smile left behind. “Go get your drink,” he says over his shoulder. “I’ll see you around.”

And just like that, he’s gone — swallowed by the crowd, as if the whole conversation had been a brief detour in a longer night. The music throbs through the floorboards, some synth-heavy remix that blurs into the pulse of the room. Robby gets pulled toward the bar, then the dance floor, then somewhere in between. After a round of drinks, it all gets incrementally easier, more loose-limbed and fun, but some small part of him never quite settles.

Every now and then, through the blur of lights and music, his eyes catch on Jack. He spots him dancing with other men, fluid and easy, that same effortless charm on display. He watches Jack lean in to say something right into another guy’s ear, the kind of close that requires familiarity or confidence or both. The guy beams up at him, eyes wide and wanting, and Robby feels something strange twist low in his chest.

He’s got a nice laugh, Robby thinks, surprised by the observation. He watches the way Jack’s nose crinkles when he grins, the way his teeth flash in a charmingly imperfect line. He’s not even sure how long he’s been watching until Jack disappears again, swallowed by bodies, by motion, by the night itself.

Robby blinks, glances around. Pratt and Charlie are gone. Rhonda’s in the back, some blonde’s arms looped lazily around her neck. The music shifts again, and Robby’s left standing alone in the press of the crowd, scanning faces, suddenly and acutely aware that he doesn’t know what he’s looking for until he realizes he can’t find it.

Knowing nobody will go looking for him, Robby makes for the exit — to do what exactly, he isn’t sure. He’ll cross that bridge when he gets to it. On his way out, he spots the guy Jack had been talking to, already draped over someone else. Robby doesn’t know why that pleases him, but it does — quiet and certain, like the door shutting behind him as he enters into the open night.

The first thing Robby notices is the air: crisp, metallic cold in his lungs. It’s misting now — not quite rain, just a fine sheen in the air that turns everything glossy and soft.

And there, halfway down the alley, stands Jack.

He’s hunched slightly under the lip of a fire escape, one hand cupped around a cigarette, the other flicking a lighter that won’t catch. Jack mutters something under his breath, shakes the lighter, tries again.

Robby watches for a beat. There’s something strangely tender about the sight of him this way – this guy who seemed so effortless inside The Playback, suddenly a little more human, a little frustrated, shoulders curled in against the mist.

“Need a hand?” Robby calls, stepping forward.

Jack glances up, eyes narrowing like he’s trying to place him before recognition softens his face. He leans back against the wall with a tired grin, still holding the useless lighter. “You again.”

“Figured I’d check for fire hazards out back.”

Jack huffs a laugh. “You and me both.” The lighter clicks healthily at last, flame catching orange at the end of the marlboro in his hand. “You smoke?”

“Not if I can help it,” Robby says, coming closer, drawn in despite himself. “But I’m a big fan of dramatic exits.”

Jack tilts his head, amused. “Wasn’t trying to be dramatic.”

“You really don’t think this," Robby says, gesturing towards Jack's whole deal, "is a little Rebel Without A Cause?”

Jack lets out a low chuckle. “Fair point.”

They stand together in easy silence, mist collecting in their hair, both of them listening to the muffled bass behind the wall. When he's sure he won't get caught, Robby carefully glances over, studying the slope of Jack’s profile, the way he flicks ash from his cigarette with ease. “You always disappear like that?” he asks eventually.

Jack takes another drag before answering. “Only when I think someone might come looking.”

Robby doesn’t know what to say to that. I wasn’t looking for you, he almost says, but he stops himself. It’ll sound untrue, he knows, even to his own ears.

“So, you don’t smoke,” Jack says, moving on, offering a smile as easy as anything. “And you don’t go to bars. What do you do for fun?”

“I never said I don’t go to bars. I just haven’t been to this one.” It’s a half-truth, of course. You don’t climb to the top of your class by having a rich personal life, but this guy doesn’t need to know that. “I don’t have a lot of time for fun.” When Jack looks at him with a question in his eyes, Robby adds: “I’m in school.”

“You’re a little tall for high school.”

“Med school,” Robby supplies.

Jack whistles. “A doctor. Most guys would’ve led with that, y’know.”

Robby lets out a laugh. “Not a doctor yet. Not till I’m walking across that stage with the diploma in hand.”

Jack shrugs, not unkindly, as if to say close enough. “There but for the grace of God go I.”

“You, too?” Robby asks. “You don’t go to Pitt. I’ve never seen you.”

“I got one of those faces you’d remember?” Jack asks. Robby rolls his eyes at that, thinking lamely again of James Dean, thinking that this is the kind of thing you see people fall for in movies: a handsome guy in an alleyway, sharing glances with him in the dark. It all should feel embarrassingly cliché, but goddamn if Jack doesn’t know how to sell it. “Nah, that makes sense,” Jack adds. “You’re finishing, I’m looking to start.”

“Where’d you apply?”

Jack gives him a look – not a mean one, not one of offense exactly, but there’s something there in his expression that suggests a kind of delicacy, like Robby unknowingly pressed against something tender and raw. “In an office on McKnight and Houston Road.”

Robby tries to keep a neutral face. There’s a recruitment station there. “You thinking about enlisting?”

“Not just thinking,” Jack replies. “I’m headed out to Georgia next month.”

Robby nods. Ships in the night, he thinks. Come June, Jack will be in Fort Benning. Come July, Robby will be in New Orleans. “So, you’re interested in combat medicine?”

“Interested enough. My dad’s a vet,” Jack tells him. “And med school’s expensive. Where are you doing your residency?”

“NOLA,” Robby answers. “New Orleans Charity Hospital.”

Jack laughs — laughs enough that he almost chokes on it, coughing around the smoke. It’s almost unfair. On anyone else, it’d ruin the charm – but instead Robby thinks, there’s that laugh again, that crinkle in his nose. “Oh, fuck you,” Jack says, around another bout of laughter.

Robby feels his face flare up spectacularly with warmth, knows himself well enough to count that it shows. “What?” he asks, voice pitched with embarrassed laughter of his own. “What’d I say? What’s so funny?”

“You,” he says, gesturing to him with the cigarette. “Jesus fuckin’ Christ, man. Tall, dark, and handsome wasn’t enough – had to be a doctor and a saint on top of that.”

“I’m no saint." 

“Not from where I’m standing.”

Why does Robby do what he does next? Is it the alcohol in his belly that emboldens him, the tepid high of being sleep-deprived and tipsy at 2AM? Or is it the way Jack looks at Robby just then, the way the nearest streetlight casts its pale glow on the muscles of his neck? Whatever the reason, if there is one at all, Robby reaches across the space between them and takes Jack’s cigarette away from him, lifting it instead to his own lips.

He inhales, enjoying the bitterness of the taste all the more because he tastes it under the gravity of Jack’s gaze. He watches as the other man watches him, Jack’s eyes flicking down towards his lips — too fleetingly to be intentional, too hungrily to be anything but. For better or worse, Robby knows the effect he has on women. He's been praised for his looks since he was a boy. But, between men, he knows the impossibility of shared glances, the importance of being invisible in order to be safe.

“You really think I’m handsome?” Robby asks.

Jack takes the cigarette back from Robby, the pad of his thumb brushing again the flesh of his bottom lip, before taking a drag from the cigarette himself. “Is that what you heard?”

“That’s what you said.”

“Fuck you,” Jack says again, with a laugh, and Robby thinks – terrifyingly, the words almost spill out of his mouth – wish you would. But maybe it doesn’t have to be said or maybe, just maybe, he says it aloud after all. Later, when Robby replays this moment over in his mind so many times that it starts to blur at the edges, he won’t remember who moved first, or whether Jack touched his face before or after their mouths met. Only that one second they were talking, and the next, Jack stepped into his space, crowding him, and Robby didn’t stop him.

The kiss comes sweet, unhesitating — beer and tobacco on Jack’s breath, a sudden heat in the cold air, the scrape of brick against Robby’s spine grounding him in the moment, affirming that this is real. At first, Robby can’t quite stop his thoughts from unspooling. He thinks of his father the winter before left, his oppressive silences at dinner. Of his mother’s tight smile, never quite reaching her eyes. Of the way his hands used to tremble whenever he was in trouble at school or at home, until he learned to tuck the shaking away somewhere nobody else could see.

Robby could end this now. He could step back, push Jack off of him, disappear into the story he’s spent his whole life memorizing: the perfect Jewish son, the golden boy, the good doctor. A man shaped entirely by what other people want from him. But then, he thinks, he wouldn’t have this: the warmth of Jack’s lips against his own, the cigarette discarded between their feet, the softness of his hair in Robby's hands — how easily it gives way to carding fingers, how well-made it seems for tugging. 

So instead, Robby stays. Instead, he kisses Jack back, deep and wanting and heavy, and it feels like loosening something clenched so long he forgot it was a fist, like confessing a truth without having to speak it.

Chapter Text

For a moment, neither of them know what to do once they step through the threshold of Robby’s apartment. For a moment, Robby just looks to him, flush-faced and rabbit-hearted, and wishes that Jack would push him back up against a wall again, return to what they’d done in the alleyway behind The Playback, bodies emboldened in the dark; instead, something seems to have shifted now that they’re in the domesticity of this small apartment, far away from the pounding bassline, out from under the spill of the streetlights.

Up close, Robby realizes the eyes looking back at him are hazel after all. Brown at a distance, yes, dark in the dim bar where they met, but green, too, as they catch the warm glow of the light. Wet moss on stone. He wants to say something – knows, distantly, that he should – but feels dumbly at a loss for words.

When the silence between them stretches a beat too long, Robby braces himself for a joke, or some line Jack might’ve murmured into the ears of countless other strangers, or perhaps even a snide remark. He wouldn’t be wrong to accuse Robby of cold feet, to ask him to kindly make up his mind. You could’ve told me, perhaps, you were a closet case before we trekked fifteen minutes through the rain.

Instead, Jack’s gaze drops to their feet, hand soothing absently at the nape of his neck before he clears his throat and looks Robby in the eyes again. “You sure you’re cool with this?” he asks, in a voice that is neither suave, not judgmental, nor charming. He sounds nervous in the same way Robby feels.

Robby reaches out, fingers skimming the line of his jaw, his thumb catching a bead of water as it rolls down Jack’s cheek. “I want this. I want it if you do,” he says. Then, without exactly knowing why, he confessed: “I don’t usually do this.”

“With guys?”

Robby’s laugh is more breath than sound. “With anyone.”

His absence of reaction is a relief. Instead of prying, Jack only nods, some thought passing over his face that Robby cannot read. Whatever he’s thinking, he seems to come to some decision. He shifts and his movement gives Robby permission to move, too, until the space between them closes. At first, it happens slowly: Robby angling his head until his lips find the little space behind Jack’s ear, Jack’s hands feather-light as they anchor on Robby’s hips. The intentionality of their movements reminds him of how one might approach a stray dog. Between their first kiss and the next, Robby realizes, with something like a shiver, that he doesn’t really know which one of them is the one being coaxed, which one might spook if the other moves too quickly.

But, then, with enough time, they find their footing.

They kiss as they both kick off their shoes, smiling into each other’s mouths through the awkward fumbling. They kiss as Robby pushes Jack’s jacket off from his shoulders and they kiss as Jack’s hands slip under the hem of Robby’s t-shirt. “When’s the last time someone made you come?” he asks, fingers spread across the stretch of skin between Robby’s navel and his jeans.

“I don’t know,” he answers honestly.

“Would you let me?” Jack asks, thumb soothing over the trail of dark hair dusting Robby’s skin. “Wanna see what you’d look like. Wanna hear you.”

Robby exhales, like he’s been holding his breath since the moment they stepped inside. In the rush that follows, there’s a kind of answer — not in words, but in the way they touch each other, stumbling their way through the kitchen, both of them hasting towards what happens next. In the end, they don’t even try to make it to the bedroom. Robby’s couch is so much closer.

Robby’s back hits the cushions with a dull thud, half a laugh caught in his throat before Jack is on him, perched over him on hands and knees. He kisses the way he touches: like a starving man. Hands skimming over Robby’s chest, then his stomach, then the growing need between his legs, like Jack can’t decide what he wants to touch first. Robby responds in kind, tugging him closer by his belt loops, breath catching when Jack’s knee slots between his thighs.

The coach is too narrow, the angle awkward, but neither of them slow; they shift and twist, mouths parting just long enough to breathe before meeting again. They kiss until their kisses turn sharp at the edges, all teeth and want, until Robby gasps, one hand bracing on the couch arm like he’s trying to stay afloat, the other gripping Jack’s hip to pull him closer.

Despite his limited experience with other men, Robby knows what sex between them would entail. He knows that they’ve found themselves painfully short: too many layers of clothing between them, lube and protection buried in some bedroom drawer, far from reach. As if reading his mind, Jack pulls back just enough to sit up, fingers working hastily at his belt, tugging it free from the loops with a metallic scrape. He looks wrecked — nothing like the cool, composed man Robby first spotted at the bar. His dark hair is a tousled mess from the work of Robby’s hands, his lips swollen, slick from kissing.

“I’ve got a condom in my wallet,” Jack says, voice roughened with want. “It’s in my jacket —”

But before he can twist away, Robby grabs a fistful of his t-shirt and pulls him back down, swallowing whatever else he might have said. He exhales sharply, breath stolen by the way Jack fits himself between his thighs, thrusting intuitively against where they part. The friction is sharp and hot, even through their clothing, and Robby arches up to meet him, breath catching in his throat as the couch creaks beneath them with the graceless rhythm of their movements.

“Don't stop,” he rasps, grounding himself in the press of the other man’s body, the roll of his hips, the heat blooming low in his belly. “Please, God, I’ll do anything you want. Don’t stop.”

Jack ducks his head into Robby’s throat, mouthing along his pulse. “Jesus Christ, Robby.”

“Michael,” he says, voice catching on a breath that’s half a moan. “That’s my name — oh fuck. Fuck. Call me Michael.”

Jack stills for just a second, then kisses the corner of his jaw, hard. “Michael,” he repeats, and the way he says it makes Robby ache. “Fuck. Okay, yeah. Michael. C’mon. You’re doing so good for me, baby, c’mon.”

Something in Robby breaks at the sound of it — his name in Jack’s mouth, the softness of it wrapped around all that wanting. They keep moving together, harder now, messier, until Robby’s gasping, swearing, begging into Jack’s neck, clutching at him like he might disappear unless he grips hard enough. He shudders apart first, unraveling under the weight of it all — the friction, the closeness, the name – only for Jack to finish a beat later, chest heaving as he comes.

Neither of them speaks for a while. Too wrung out to move, Robby feels Jack’s sweat cooling where their skin touches, his own pulse stammering before he shifts more comfortably under Jack’s weight.

Jack groans into the crook of Robby’s shoulder. “Jesus. That was . . . intense.”

Robby laughs. “I told you it’d been a while.”

“That you did,” he replies. “So, your name’s Michael?”

“Michael Robinavitch,” he says. “There are two other Michaels in my program, so my friends call me Robby.”

Jack braces himself up on his arms. “Does that make us friends?”

“What, you and me?” Robby asks. He hums, considering it. “Not sure. Court’s still out on that one.”

Jack makes a low noise of disapproval, shifting slightly—but before he can say anything else, his stomach lets out a deep, guttural noise. It cuts through the moment like a record scratch.

Robby blinks, then breaks into a grin. “Was that – was that you?”

Jack shakes his head, pressing his face deeper into Robby’s shoulder. “Don’t look at me. I haven’t eaten since, like, lunch.”

“That wasn’t hunger,” Robby says, laughing now. “I think you might be dying.”

Jack lifts his head, feigning offense. “You’re the one who put me to work, y’know. Hell, I probably would’ve gotten something to eat a lot earlier but then you walked in, looking like that, and I had to make a game-time decision.”

Robby sits up a little, stretching his back. “Come on. I’ll make you something. I’ve got eggs, bread, maybe cheese. Nothing fancy.”

Jack glances down at himself: shirt damp and rumpled, jeans halfway off, one of his feet bare and missing a sock. “You mind if I clean up first? I’m not sure your eggs deserve to be in the same room as me right now.”

“Bathroom’s down the hall,” Robby says, already standing. “First door on the left. I’ll find you something dry to wear.”

Once Jack disappears into the bathroom with a bundle of borrowed clothes, Robby slips into the bedroom and strips out of his own. He tries not to dwell on the ruined state of his jeans and his underwear, or the shameful little thrill that pulses through him from the evidence of what they did, rutting against each other like teenagers in the backseat of some shitty car. He yanks on a well-worn T-shirt, soft and loose over his skin, and a pair of boxers, and catches his own eye in the mirror. His hair’s a wreck. Wonder of wonders in that Jack had wanted to touch him at all, looking like this. He grimaces, runs a hand through the mess, and exhales, shaking himself loose of it.

By the time Jack steps out, their clothes are in the washer and Robby’s already at the stove, spatula in hand, turning the frying pan to and fro so that the butter, sliding lazily and golden across the non-stick surface, doesn’t burn. But rather than heading towards him, Jack slows near the living room. His attention is drawn to the tall bookcase standing against the wall: shelves stacked with novels, textbooks, manila envelopes, and notebooks from semesters past. He runs a finger along the spines: some cracked and bent with use, others pristinely untouched. A post-it note sticks out from one of the pages with a scribbled reminder in smudged ink: don’t forget the marrow, not just the bone.

From the kitchen, Robby glances over his shoulder. “You know you can sit down, right? I don’t charge a museum fee.”

“Be there in a sec. I’m just trying to find my belt,” Jack replies, and it’s an obvious lie, sure — his belt is still lying somewhere on the floor, nowhere near the bookshelf – but it’s harmless. The truth is Robby doesn’t much mind his interest; he feels almost flattered by it, in fact, stuck somewhere between feeling sheepish about the state of his apartment and curious about how he must seem through the eyes of a stranger. Jack lingers over the framed photos tucked between the books: Robby standing in a cap and gown next to a woman who looks like she could be his mother, a blurry photo of him in scrubs, a much older photograph – yellowed at the corners – of an older woman carrying a small, dark-haired boy in front of a synagogue. The smiles they offer to the camera are identical, the same dark eyes squinting from the sunlight.

Robby doesn't look up when Jack enters the kitchen, just gestures vaguely with the spatula as he plates two servings of scrambled eggs. “There’s beer and orange juice in the fridge. That’s about the extent of your options, I’m afraid.”

Jack gets himself a cup of water and leans against the counter. “No more beer for me. Not unless you want to scrape me off the floor tomorrow.”

Robby arches a brow. “You planning to still be here in the morning?”

“I could walk home like this if you’d really like,” he says, gesturing to what he’s wearing. “But then you probably won't get your clothes back.” “No can do. I can’t have you making off with my favorite shirt.”

“I guess that settles it then.” Jack takes a bite of his food before looking down at himself, inspecting the grey shirt that fits nicely over his chest. “Pitt Panthers. This really your favorite shirt?”

Robby lets out a soft breath, half a laugh. “Nope.”

Neither of them realize how hungry they are until they’ve started eating, knees touching underneath the kitchen table. For a while, it’s quiet except for the scrape of forks and the hum of the refrigerator. Then Robby says, without looking up, “The woman in the old photo — the one with the big hair — that’s my grandmother.”

Jack looks up, gives a quiet nod to show he’s listening.

“She came over from Odessa on her own. Early twenties. She never talked about it much.” Robby’s smile tilts a little, wry and fond. “She was tiny. You can kinda see it in that photo, but she was tough as nails. Sharp, too – not book-smart, she didn’t get the chance, but man, she would've been a force if she had.”

“Is she where you get it from, you think? Your smarts?” Jack asks. When Robby shakes his head, more reflex than conviction, he stops him. “Accept the compliment, man. You’re in med school.”

“Well, yeah. I mean — maybe.” Robby pushes his fork through the scrambled eggs. “She’s the reason I got into medicine, at least. When I was a kid, she used to take me with her to all her appointments, had me help sort her meds, explain things the doctors said. Especially towards the end.”

“Tale as old as time,” Jack says, from a place of real understanding. “Sick family, too many questions, not enough answers.”

“That your story, too?”

Jack hesitates. Not out of reluctance exactly, more like he’s sorting through a drawer that hasn’t been opened in a while. “My dad started dialysis when I was a sophomore in high school,” he says eventually. “I mean, the damage was basically already done. Liver was fucked. Heart wasn’t far behind. But it was the kidneys that made him go to a doctor.”

Robby stretches his leg beneath the table until his foot finds Jack’s leg. He grazes his toe along the warm flesh there, a feather-light touch against the muscles of the other man’s calf — not asking anything more of him, just present and listening.

“Vietnam screwed him up. Didn’t come back right, or so I’m told.” Jack shrugs, like it doesn’t matter, but something about the shape of his mouth says otherwise. “Old man’s still with us, if you’ll believe it, but, shit. Dialysis. Have you ever sat through it with someone? That’s a lot of hours spent at the hospital.”

“I’m sorry,” Robby tells him.

“Yeah. Me too,” he says, tapping his fingers against the kitchen table. Then, after a beat, he adds: “They’re not all bad, though. Hospitals. Good place to figure out what you wanna do when you grow up. Great place to meet handsome Jewish doctors, or so I’ve been told.”

“They tell you that, huh?”

“It’s all they ever talk about,” Jack smiles. “Doctor Michael Robinavitch. The hair, the height, the bedside manner! He’ll even whip you up some eggs at 2AM!”

“Oh, that’s not true,” Robby says, gathering their plates. “You only get eggs if I like you.”

Jack helps him straight out the kitchen without being asked: passing him the cups and the silverware, returning the ketchup back to its rightful place in the fridge. It’s easy, mindless work and, when their arms brush as they do it, neither of them pulls away. Talking easily together about ordinary things, they drift from the kitchen down the hallway, shoulders bumping, steps slowing the closer they get to the bedroom.

The sheets are cool when they slip beneath them and the last thing Robby remembers before succumbing to sleep is that it all feels so inexplicably easy. It’s the ease, perhaps, which is the remarkable thing — more than the small miracle of finding a stranger in a crowded bar who wants to kiss you, more than the strange courage it takes to allow yourself to kiss him back. It’s easy, the way Jack somehow intuits to take the left side of the bed. It’s easy, the way their legs entangle. It’s easy, the way they talk to one another in the dark until they’re asleep – neither of them knowing in the morning who fell first.

Morning arrives golden, day seeping through the thin curtains in a hazy wash of light. Robby wakes to the weight of Jack curled beside him, one arm slung across his middle, the broad line of his thigh hooked over his own. For a long time, Robby doesn’t move. He allows himself to drift in and out of sleep under the furnace-heat of the other man’s skin, soothed by the faint stir of his exhales against his shoulder.

It feels like forever since he last let himself sleep in past 7AM. It feels longer still since he allowed himself this indulgence with someone curled beside him — a high school girlfriend he broke up with after his first year of med school, an older girl in the cohort two years ahead of his own last Fall. Robby lets his fingers drift along Jack’s back, mapping out the shape of his body beneath his hand: shoulder blades, spine, the parallel dimples at the base of his back.

When Jack stirs, it’s only to shift closer from behind him, a nice sound catching in his throat. If that small motion is an invitation, it’s one Robby meets with an answer, pushing back into him, pressing their bodies closer until they’re both alert, attentive, awake. They maneuver towards one another until they’re kissing and from there it builds quickly — mouths deepening, hips shifting, Jack’s hands slipping beneath the waistband of Robby’s boxers.

Robby curses at the first touch of Jack’s hand on his cock — a deep, almost wounded sound rattling out of him as he fills in his hand. He shudders against the attention, Jack thumbing over the leaking head, enough pressure to set fire in his blood, not nearly enough for anything beyond the ache that brings. He wants to grab back, get his hands on Jack’s hair, on his skin, on anything at all if it means suppressing the whine in his throat.

“How do you like it?” Jack asks, voice heady with sleep and want. “Want me on top of you? Want me to take you instead?”

In lieu of an answer, Robby pulls down his underwear. "Go through that drawer on your side,” he says, around a rattling breath. “And fuck me.”

After making quick work of taking off his clothes, Jack does. Slickening his fingers with the lube he finds in the nightstand, Jack eases into Robby so gently, so patiently, that when he pushes back onto his hand, the stretch doesn’t hurt beyond the pleasure. Behind him, Jack buries his face in the sweat-damp hair at the base of Robby’s neck. “That good?”

“Perfect,” Robby goes, breath catching as one finger becomes two, two become three. “Yeah, just — fuck, please —”

If Jack were to ask him what he’s begging for, Robby wouldn’t know what to say. More haste? More pressure? More of the strange, incredible sensation of being filled? It feels good to him just as it is now, almost impossibly so, and it’s difficult in the haze of his pleasure for Robby to conceptualize feeling better. He’s never done this exactly. Never gone this far with a man, because hands and rutting and mouths have — until this point – been enough. He hopes it doesn’t show. He hopes, if Jack would like it, that it does.

“You ready?” Jack asks, smoothing his free hand up Robby’s back. “Say it for me, baby. Let me know.”

“Baby,” Robby repeats back, laughter catching in his throat and turning into something more breathless. “I’m older than you.”

“Say it anyway.”

“Fuck me,” Robby says, for the second time; neither pleading nor instruction, somehow both. “C’mon, Jack — I’m ready. I’m good. Please.”

Robby buries his head in the crook of his elbow when Jack pushes in. A moment’s pause allows him enough time to ease himself to the intrusion, breathing steadily through the melting tension, before Jack braces his hands on either side of him; he withdraws only slightly, almost imperceptibly, before rocking back into Robby and that soft motion – easy as morning waters on the shore – knocks the breath out of both of them. They go slowly like that for a while, inch by inch, until each successive shift eases more smoothly into the next.

“Jesus,” Robby groans into the mattress, pushing his hips back into Jack’s own.

He doesn’t oblige when Jack tries to keep them slow and steady, rutting impatiently in an attempt to set the frenzied pace he’d prefer. Robby doesn’t even know what he’s rushing for – only knows that this feels too good to have gone so long without it, even though he can’t have it both ways no matter how badly he’d like to, hasting towards the finish line without finishing too soon.

Jack mouths against the back of Robby’s neck – kissing there until a particularly well-angled thrust rocks his lips off the sweat-salted skin, kissing there again until a groan wrenches its way out from his throat and necessitates another interruption. They roll, they shift, moving so that Robby finds himself on his stomach instead of his side, hips canted so he can feel the full breadth of Jack’s thrusts. In the end, that’s all it takes: a simple, but seismic shift in position that allows them both new leverage and depth. At this angle, Jack can hit him where his body sings electric. He can even reach down between Robby’s legs to jerk him off in heavy strokes, forearm flexing against the furnace-hot muscle of Robby’s thighs. From there, it cascades towards its natural end. When he comes, Robby does so gracelessly, Jack’s name on his tongue while he coaxes him through it, spilling over his fingers and onto the sheets beneath them.

Robby collapses into the bed, allowing his arms to rest from the overwork of having kept himself braced through the fucking, but when Jack slows, almost stills, Robby shakes his head no. Then, with a voice hoarse even to his own ears, he says: “Don’t stop.”

“You sure?”

“It feels good,” Robby affirms. “I want — ah, fuck, I want you to finish. C’mon.”

It isn’t long before Jack reaches his own completion, but those seconds – those minutes, perhaps, whatever they are Robby cannot tell – of Jack taking, of Robby submitting, are their own pleasure. When Jack comes, Robby closes his eyes through it, listening to the pretty sound Jack makes above him, imagining distantly what it might’ve been like to feel his release inside of him. Jack shudders limp against Robby’s back afterwards, a weight on the right side of heavy, before he’s up and off of him too soon.

When Jack emerges from the bathroom, having taken care of the condom and wiped himself down, he moves with the boneless gait of someone freshly wrung out. Robby blinks up at him from where he lies, still catching his breath, and openly watches Jack cross the room — god, he thinks, there isn’t an inch of him that isn’t covered in freckles. In his hand, Jack carries a damp washcloth, taken from the collection Robby always keeps neatly folded on the bathroom shelving; when he climbs back into bed and touches the little towel to the mess on Robby’s stomach, the cool fabric is soothing in more ways than one.

“Thanks,” Robby murmurs, voice scraped low.

Jack doesn’t answer right away, just finishes cleaning him off, then drops the cloth onto the nightstand with a gentle toss. He doesn’t move to get dressed, or even shift away. He just stays there beside him, warm and close, their bodies barely touching except for where Jack’s fingers find Robby’s necklace – a golden Star of David – on his chest.

Robby leans into the touch, watching Jack watching him, wondering what it is he finds in his study. “Good?” he asks, trying his best to keep a neutral tone – not nervous, not hopeful, just even-keeled.

Jack’s lips twitch. “Good?” he repeats, like it’s the understatement of the year. “You’re like something out of a fucking dream, Robby. If this is you rusty, I don’t think I could survive you at your best.”

That pulls a real smile out of Robby, even as he rolls his eyes. “You don’t have to flatter me. I’ve already let you fuck me.”

“What, you don’t wanna go again?”

“I thought you said you wouldn’t survive it.”

“And I thought you said you were a doctor,” he replies. “If I go, you’ll just have to bring me back.”

Robby swats him on the chest half-mindedly, before lingering on his words. Why do you have to go in the first place, when I’ve only just found you? The thought comes unbidden, spontaneous and mortifying and completely out of Robby’s control. He forces it out, shaking his head, but not before asking a question. “Do you think you’ll ever come back to Pittsburgh?”

The question visibly takes Jack by surprise. He takes a moment to consider his answer, eyes trained again on Robby's necklace. “I dunno. I haven’t decided. I don’t really have much to return to.”

Robby thinks to ask him about his family — his father, his mother, the two sisters he mentioned in passing, before they fell asleep – but he decides against it, wondering what good it would do. He wonders where this impulse to offer Jack an anchor even comes from.

“What about you?” Jack asks. “Do you see yourself coming back after your residency’s over?”

Robby exhales, head tipping back against the pillows. “Yeah,” he says after a beat. “I think so. This city’s a lot, but it’s home. And I don’t know – I feel like I’ve still got roots here. Things to figure out. I wanna come back.”

Jack hums, thoughtful as he drops his hand to trace a lazy shape against Robby’s collarbone. Robby closes his eyes under the attention and listens to the hum of the city coming to life outside his window — the distant clatter of a garbage truck, the sound of people hustling about now that the sun has risen higher into the morning sky. He could stay here, just like this, for hours.

And then it hits him.

“Shit,” Robby mutters, suddenly going tense beneath Jack’s hand.

Jack looks at him, brow furrowed. “What?”

“I never moved our clothes to the dryer.” Robby exhales through his nose, annoyed at himself. “They’ve been sitting in the washer since last night.”

Jack lets out a low, amused noise. “I could go home in wet clothes. Or, I could treat you to breakfast. What do you think?”

“Just so you know, I have no food to offer you unless you want more egg scramble. I think there’s a lemon in the fridge. Maybe some mustard.”

“Oh, I know. I saw your fridge last night,” Jack responds. “Lend me some pants. I’ll wear your favorite shirt, and we’ll go out. My treat.”

Robby eyes him, amused. “Trying to impress me?”

Jack grins. “Is it working?”

Robby doesn’t offer an answer before he’s sitting up, raking a hand through his hair and reaching blindly for wherever he threw his boxers. It takes a few failed attempts to get dressed; Robby’s jeans end up being too long for Jack’s frame and, after they ultimately decide to wait for their clothes to run through a new dry-cycle, one thing leads to another and Jack’s on his knees, Robby’s hands in his hair.

They never quite name what’s happening, even after they’re both showered and dressed and the excuse they’d both relied on to go out for breakfast – now lunch – has been wordlessly tossed to the wayside; they go out to eat together anyway and then it’s late afternoon and they’re still together. At some point, they take to walking until they no longer know where they’re headed. At another, Robby finds himself laughing at something stupid Jack says over a round of drinks, wondering when he last let a whole day pass this easily.

They return to Robby’s apartment just after nine, just on the right side of tipsy. Jack carries the box from the corner pizza spot while Robby fumbles for his keys. There’s a rhythm between them that neither of them have to think about, like they’ve been doing this sort of thing longer than twenty-four hours.

Robby’s mainline rings the second they step inside. “Shit,” he mutters, reading the caller ID. “It’s Rhonda.”

Jack sets the pizza out on the kitchen counter. “Your friend at the bar? The one with the braids?”

“That’s the one.” Robby lifts the phone to his ear. “Hey. Sorry I missed your calls. I was out.”

“Oh thank god,” Rhonda says, relief audible from the other end of the line. “I was two seconds away from filing a missing person’s report. Pratt told me he didn’t see you at the student clinic this morning and none of us saw you leave last night. It’s like you vanished off the face of the earth, man. What happened?”

“Nothing happened. I’ve, um – I’ve been around,” Robby says. “You know I don’t really need any more volunteer hours, so I just decided to sleep in. Take it easy.”

“You’re taking it easy? Wait, I’m sorry – did I call the wrong number? Are you sick?”

Robby rolls his eyes, chuckling despite himself. Jack, having finally figured out where Robby keeps the plates, gives him a look from the kitchen like what’s so funny?

“No, I’m not sick,” he says, trying to keep his voice neutral — casual, like Jack isn’t standing five feet away. “You’re always hounding me about taking breaks, so I thought I’d finally give it a try. I didn’t mean to freak you out, but I’m fine.”

A pause. Then, with suspicious precision, Rhonda asks, “Are you alone right now?”

“Yes.”

“No, say it back to me in a full sentence. Say: ‘Yes, Rhonda, I’m alone right now’”.

Robby hesitates just a fraction too long. She cackles in his ear. “Oh my God. You’re not alone.”

“Goodnight, Rhonda,” Robby says, placing the phone back into the receiver like he hopes the floor will crack open beneath him and swallow him whole. He’ll have to answer to that on Monday.

Robby’s face is flushed when he returns to the kitchen, but Jack just hands him a plate with a small, amused smile. “That sounded fun.”

“She’s a menace,” Robby replies. He bites into the cheese slice, grateful for an excuse to say nothing for a moment. Then he glances up at Jack. “You, uh . . . you don’t have to rush out tonight, you know. After you’re done eating, I mean.”

Jack pauses with his slice halfway to his mouth. “No?”

Robby shakes his head. “Was thinking – if you want to hang around a little longer or stay the night . . .” He tries to keep his tone casual, unbothered, but the dryness in his mouth reminds him how badly he needs a glass of water. “I haven’t run out of clothes I can lend you, I mean.”

Jack’s expression softens. “You sure you’re not sick of me?”

“Not yet,” Robby says, a little too quickly. “Figured I’d let you wear out your welcome properly.”

Jack laughs — a warm sound that fills the kitchen like music. “I’ll do my best,” he says, and when he sets his plate down to close the space between them, there’s no hesitation at all.

Sunday morning comes too soon. The light in Robby’s bedroom is soft and forgiving, not quite strong enough to spill beyond a gentle glow. Jack is already up and moving — half-dressed, pulling his pants on with an efficiency that reminds Robby that he’s done this before. That they both have, in fact, even if something about this — this moment, this morning – feels like traversing unmapped waters.

Robby stays where he is, sheets pulled to his waist as he watches. He tries to take in all of it: the spray of freckles across Jack’s shoulders, the muscles of his back, the sound of his belt sliding through loops, his zipper tugging close. He watches openly and closely, as if he can save it all for posterity if he only tries hard enough.

“When do you leave?” Robby asks, clearing his throat. Distantly, he thinks, his mouth still tastes of him. Madly, some secret, shameful part of him wishes he could save that, too.

Jack glances up at him. “You mean to Georgia? About a week and a half, give or take.”

Robby nods. “Cutting it close.”

“Guess so.” Jack hesitates as he reaches for his shirt. “And you?”

“July,” Robby says. “Gotta head down there early enough to sort out my housing situation, but that won’t be for a while yet.” He doesn’t add anything after that, swallowing against the wild urge to say I’ll miss this or the even wilder urge to say I’ll miss you.

Jack pulls his shirt over his head and smooths it down his chest. “Oh, July’ll be here before you know it,” he says, almost smiling.

“Yeah,” Robby replies. “Guess we’re both on borrowed time.”

There’s a long pause then. The kind of silence that’s heavy with the obvious truth that neither of them are saying what they’re really thinking. It’s like a staring contest or a game of chicken: each of them waiting to see who will blink first, who will resign to their fear and duck out of harm’s way. Jack sits at the edge of the bed to put on his socks, and Robby watches the way his shoulders shift with each movement. When he straightens again, Robby is already on his feet, walking him slowly toward the door.

“You don’t have to,” Jack starts, but Robby waves him off.

“I know,” he says. “I just . . . the lock’s tricky. Always trips people up.”

They don’t talk much on the short walk across the apartment — when he fails to find something to say, Robby counts to the sound of their soft footsteps on the hardwood. One, two, three, four, five, ten, fifteen, twenty. At the threshold, Robby leans against the frame, watching as Jack turns, coughing lightly like he’s trying to swallow around something unsaid. There it is, Robby thinks to himself, tenderly. He blinked.

“Thank you,” Jack says. “For letting me stay. For everything.”

“Wasn’t hard,” Robby shrugs, the gesture too small to hide how much he means it. “You’re easy to be around.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. You’re good company.”

Jack smiles at him, something soft and searching in it. “Be good to yourself once you start that residency, Robby. Live a little. Get fucked up in the French Quarter or something. A weekend with a stranger shouldn’t be the only time you get to rest.”

Robby lets out a quiet, breathy laugh around the feeling of something unraveling in his chest. His eyes flick away, then back again, and he feels open in a way he rarely likes himself be. “That’s funny. You sound just like a friend of mine,” he says, and there’s no guard in it. “That's the weird thing, though. I don’t think of you as a stranger.”

Jack steps in just close enough to brush his knuckles lightly against Robby’s arm. “No?”

Robby shakes his head. Then adds, “Don’t let the army chew you up too bad, alright?”

“No promises.” Jack huffs a laugh, but it doesn’t quite reach his eyes -- not in quite the same way it does afterward, when all he's doing is looking up at him. “Take care, Robby.”

“You too, Jack.”

He steps in close and kisses Robby once more, slow, steady, lingering. When they part, he hesitates for a second, like he might say something else. But then Jack nods, almost to himself, and pulls the door open.

What can Robby do, if not let him go?

For all the ways his thoughts had wandered to old Hollywood the night they met — the alley, the cigarette smoke, the stumble toward something unexpected — this isn’t a movie. In the old black-and-white films Robby would watch with his grandmother, fate itself conspired to keep people together. A train would slow just in time for a wayward lover to catch it. Rain would break just in time for an impassioned kiss. Of all the gin joints in the world, Ingrid Berman would wander into the precisely right one. As a boy, he’d rolled his eyes at the convenience of those neatly-tied narratives, but, nearly two decades later, he knows the tender wish-fulfillment it provides.

Life so seldom imitates art.

So Robby stays in place, standing at the door a moment longer than he needs to after it’s shut, and the floor is cold beneath his feet, the echo of Jack’s touch still faint on his left cheek.

Chapter Text

III. 2006

The first explosion cracks through the silence like a sunshower — a terrible roll of thunder and then a punishing storm. The force of it slams Jack’s head hard against the interior of the Humvee and, for a single spinning moment, all he can register is the ringing in his ears before the rest of the world comes crashing back in.

Rounds rip around them. Bullets tear through cinder-block and sunbaked brick, the sky gone white with kicked-up dust. Their own guns open up in response, deafening and wild.

The second vehicle in the packet, an old Land Rover, takes the worst of it. From where he’s hidden, slumped as far down in his seat as he can manage, Jack can hear, rather than see, the rounds pinging fast across the hood, ricocheting off its surface.

“Watch it!” someone shouts, raw and panicked. “That’s a school!”

Jack ducks back down, heart hammering, and then pops up again just long enough to confirm it: a crumbling stone building half-shielded behind a wall, the flicker of movement behind its shattered windows.

His gut twists. Everything in him braces.

And then the second blast hits.

What nobody told Jack about Afghanistan was that it was beautiful. That it could be beautiful, despite the immense suffering. Years later, it would be the beauty of Sharana that civilians struggled most to understand whenever Jack spoke of it back home; the slopes of red sand and moon dust. The poppy fields in bloom. The small creeks and rivers that bent across fields of emerald greenery. The brilliance of the sun, alchemizing those clear waters into diamonds with its light.

Jack had learned early on that to speak too openly about the beauty of this place, or the decency of its people, made folks — some beside him, some back home — uncomfortable. There was an instinct to flatten things, to stick to the narrative they’d been given about the work they had been sent to do; work, of course, that Jack never imagined he’d find himself doing when he enlisted in ’97.

He hadn’t been lied to, exactly. But what he’d been given, what they’d all been given, was partial. A version of the truth that had been bent so far to fit the task at hand that it was, to be generous, a half-fiction.

And that, he was learning, could be its own kind of burden.

His first deployment had been to Kosovo. There, he’d begun to understand how service, even in a war zone, could take a form untouched by combat; it was there that he found himself in the doorway of a factory-turned-clinic one day, his gloved hands sticky with blood that wasn’t his; he blinked against the sting in his eyes, watching as a team from MSF moved around him, setting up tarps and folding tables, seating women and children in plastic chairs, prepping delicate arms for the prick of a needle. Medics of all ages, nationalities, and creeds – drawn from every corner of the world to serve. No guns. No kevlar. Just white fabric vests and medical supplies in their wind-chapped hands.

They were doing the same work he was, in theory. But they hadn’t come with orders. They weren’t sanctioned by a military campaign. And when they left to evade the March airstrikes, Jack found himself thinking of them often, with a strange kind of yearning. He believed in the purpose of what he was doing. He had to. But he sometimes wondered what it felt like to tend to strangers simply because they were suffering, to not have them flinch when they caught sight of a firearm on his person, to be a healer without having also been a witness to harm.

Afghanistan was beautiful, like Kosovo before it, and Iraq after.

Jack knew he wasn’t the only one questioning what they were doing in Afghanistan. The doubt lived between words, in long silences after missions, in the way they lingered too long staring at the fires. It was there in their faces when they spoke of the quiet beauty: the sunsets, the hot food they got from civilians in exchange for American dollars, the white-capped mountains in Bagram.

“Would anyone back home believe us?” one of Jack's brothers asked him once, pulling tight the corners of his bedroll. “Snow in Afghanistan. Back home, they think this place is nothing but blood and sand.”

There was endless sand. There was so much blood. But what Jack couldn’t get over (and what some of them were starting to say out loud, if only to each other) was how easily some people, including some of their own, talked about the bloodshed like it was native to the terrain. As if violence was just part of the climate, like dust storms and drought. As if this place had never been and could never be anything else.

It hadn’t taken Jack long to understand why the beauty of this place became its own kind of taboo. Why some of his superiors bristled at the hospitable elders, the good humor of their translators, or the sound of children laughing as they played ball in the streets. To acknowledge the beauty was to pay attention to the myriad ways it ceased around them. To acknowledge it was to awe at how Afghanistan and her people endured in spite of everything that had been done, by both sides of this war, to destroy it.

Jack still believed in the mission. Most of them did, or wanted to. The Taliban’s cruelty wasn’t a rumor — they’d seen enough to know that. But that belief didn’t make it easier to look at what they were leaving behind: villages half-razed by accident or miscommunication, boys threatened over vague suspicions, families scattered like debris.

They were there to protect. That was the line, and Jack tried to hold onto it. They all did. But some days, it felt more like a myth than a truth: something repeated not because it was still believed, but because the alternative was too hard to face.

By the early 2000's, Jack wasn’t sure what he believed in anymore.

He wasn’t unpatriotic, exactly. But he’d also never been the kind of man to wear it loud: never felt moved by an anthem or stirred by a waving flag. And having watched his father nearly drink himself to death because of Vietnam, he’d long-known that war was no glorious thing. Still, he had spent years of his life now trying to convince himself that what he and his brothers were doing in the Middle East wasn’t the same – that this wasn’t Hanoi, or Saigon, or the Mekong Delta. Unlike his father’s war, this one felt, at least in the beginning, like it had a clearer moral axis. Jack told himself there was an objective need here, a people to liberate, a cause that might justify the wreckage.

It wasn’t much, but it was something to hold on to.

And then that, too, failed to keep him afloat.

By the time Jack got wind of his upcoming deployment to Iraq, the story had simply worn too thin. The search for weapons of mass destruction felt increasingly hollow, less like a mission and more like a script no one believed in but had to keep reciting anyway. Jack didn’t know a single man in his unit who truly believed the WMDs were there. And yet, they went out anyway, convoy after convoy, because orders were orders and some fictions were too powerful to challenge out loud.

He tried to stay focused on his role — which was, at least on paper, keeping men alive. As a combat medic, his primary duty wasn’t to win ground but to stop the bleeding, to make sure someone’s son or daughter made it back home with a pulse. Sometimes, that included enemy combatants. That clarity had steadied him in the early days. But even that grew harder to hold onto, once he realized how often the wounds came from miscommunication, from being in the wrong place at the wrong time, from the terrible decisions men make when they’re trained to see every stranger as a threat.

So, he stopped telling himself he was fighting for a cause or an administration. He was fighting, instead, for the men beside him.

If nothing else, he believed in them. He believed in their goodness the way some people believed in god, because the absence of this belief made his difficult life unbearable. And it was that belief that kept him alive — Luis Guzmán and his daughters waiting at home, Omar Moore with his loud, contagious laughter and love for Japanese cartoons, and Sam Costa, whose quiet presence steadied him more than it should have, whose secret felt easier to carry than most.

What he couldn’t say, what he never said until a therapist coaxed it out of him years later, was how much harder that kind of belief came when it went at odds with the parts of himself he kept in hiding.

What most civilians didn’t know about DADT was that it had a third directive: Don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t pursue. It was that last part Jack found most absurd. As if suspicion ever settled quietly. As if a man, once he started to wonder, wouldn’t go digging for proof. The whole thing felt like a farce, a policy built on fantasy. As if a body, once alerted to something unfamiliar, wouldn’t rally every defense it had to isolate and destroy it — Jack, for more reasons than one, knew better than that.

He knew how to go along when his brothers spoke about women. He even knew what to do when they joked about faggots. Besides, his interest in women wasn’t a lie, it just wasn’t the whole truth. Back in Pittsburgh, Jack frequented gay bars just as much as he did straight ones. When he’d told his ex-girlfriend that he loved her, he’d meant it. Still, it was easier to play the part than risk what it might mean if he didn’t.

Even still, he loved his brothers. Maybe more fiercely because he couldn’t say so outright. Maybe especially because the truth of who he was had to be reshaped into loyalty and sacrifice, into the quiet promise that he would do whatever it took to bring them home alive.

And for those who shared his silence, Jack liked to think their secrets were held in a kind of truce — tethered by the unspoken threat of mutually-assured destruction.

In hindsight, that, too, was a kind of fiction.

It had been a late night in Fallujah, the rest of the barracks quieted by the shallow hush that came before night turned to dawn. Sam had signaled for Jack to follow, a slight nod toward the rear of the building, like he had done countless times before. Jack trailed behind him wordlessly, their boots barely scuffing the gravel as they slipped behind the structure, into the half-shadow of a service shed or a concrete alcove, wherever there was just enough privacy for them to vanish for a while.

They didn’t speak. They never did. They collapsed into each other like men running out of time, their hands already searching, bodies moving with practiced haste.

It was utilitarian, in a way. Like scratching an itch neither of them could reach on their own. The way Jack finished him off with his hand but didn’t bother too much to kiss him. The way Sam hid his face in the crook of Jack’s neck, breathing hard, shaking his head — whether in disapproval or overwhelm, Jack could never tell. Maybe Sam didn’t know either.

And then, just there, with his mouth pressed to the hollow between Jack’s throat and shoulder, Sam spoke a name. The name of the girl who was waiting for him back home. The name of a girl who loved him, who, Jack suspected, Sam couldn’t love back in quite the same way.

Jack said nothing. Just kept his eyes fixed on the wall behind Sam’s head, kept breathing even and slow, let the moment pass like he hadn’t heard.

But of course he had.

He never understood that impulse — that need to conjure someone else in the heat of closeness, to reach across the world for a name that didn’t belong to the body you were touching. Jack didn’t have that in him. Couldn’t imagine whispering Robby or Michael or Mike into anyone’s skin, no matter how often his mind wandered back to that guy he met on his last week in Pittsburgh.

He thought of him, still. The way sunlight touched Robby’s collarbone, the pink flush that crept down his chest after Jack fucked him, the sound of his laughter when Jack said something just off-kilter enough to draw it out. It was a little ridiculous to still think of him. It was a little too precious. Even so, it was the truth.

Jack didn’t say Robby’s name. Didn’t even let it pass his lips when he was alone. It felt too vulnerable to do that, like baring his stomach to fate’s boot and asking to be kicked. Instead, he kept it folded tight and buried deep, not because he’d forgotten, but because saying it aloud would make the fact that he was still thinking about him nearly six years later feel real in a way Jack couldn’t afford.

He never called Sam anything but Costa.

It feels like the world itself has fallen off its axis when the humvee is thrown on its side. Jack’s skull slams into the roof, now the wall, and someone is groaning beside him, maybe Guzmán in the backseat. He’s not sure. White-hot pain flickers somewhere behind his eyes.

He doesn’t wait for orders or clarity. Al, the man who’d been driving them to the medical tent where they were needed, is almost unrecognizable under all that red. Jack takes his pulse anyway, finds nothing, and then he’s hauling Guzmán up through the now-skyward door, his shoulder tearing with the effort. The air is rancid with the smell of burning chemicals and kerosene as he scrambles out first, boots hitting sand and gravel.

They’re barely on their feet before they have to take running. Gunfire kicks up again through the dust, a bullet missing Jack’s temple just close enough to remind him that he hasn’t yet lost his helmet. He crouches low, heart jackhammering in his chest. Find cover. Regroup. Move. Even like this, half-disoriented from what might be a concussion, his training hums through him like a pulse.

The nearest shelter is a battered two-story building just past the old school-house they’d marked earlier on the map. He’ll have to go through one before he can get to the other. The school stands quiet now, its windows blown in, and when he crosses the threshold, Jack finds desks and chairs reduced to a scatter of wooden scraps.

He moves fast and low, praying he doesn’t see what he most dreads when he gets there – small bodies, the unbearable stillness of a child's hand. The building is empty. Sunlight filters in through holes in the roof. The stench of blood and scorched concrete clings to the air.

Then, impossibly, a sound breaks through the chorus of gunfire: a soft, hiccupping cry.

Jack freezes.

It’s coming from a side room, the door cracked open, a dim shape inside. He doesn’t think, he just moves, stopping across the threshold, scanning low.

“I’m a medic,” he calls gently. He tries to say it again, this time in Arabic, hoping it lands. “It’s okay. I got you. I’m a medic, I —”

He doesn’t register the blast before it hits him — a deafening white flash, then dirt, air, and the vague sensation of falling. He slams into the floor hard, vision gone black at the edges, breath knocked clean from his lungs and then he’s face down. Mouth full of grit. His ears are ringing again, deafening this time, a sharp, endless scream.

How long is he lying there, breathless from the shock, before he manages to open his eyes again? Seconds? Five minutes? Ten?

The boy. He still has to find the little boy. Jack tries to push up, fails, and tries again — it’s the futility of his efforts that alerts him to what’s wrong before the pain does, even before he sees it.

His right leg is shredded. Torn open below the knee. Blood pools fast, already darkening the dirt beneath him. The boot is gone. New boots, he thinks, uselessly, unsure why his mind goes there. I’d just gotten them last week. What a stupid thing to think about as he stares dumbly at the bone, his bone, gleaming palely through the gore, tendon fluttering like ribbon.

He stares. For one breath. Two. Then instinct takes over.

He grabs his belt. Cinches it high above the wound. Pulls tighter. Tighter. The noise that comes out of him isn’t a scream or a groan — it’s something more animalistic, more guttural and strange. His fingers fumble for the CAT tourniquet in his vest, but the ground seems to lift up from under him. Slammed by the sudden sense that he’s floating, Jack can no longer feel or coordinate his hands. Everything is too loud. Too far away.

Medic down. He’s supposed to shout that, he has to, even if there’s no one left around to hear it. His mouth makes the motions, but no sound comes out. He tries again. “Medic,” he wheezes, before mustering every last ounce of strength inside him to try again. One last time. Shout it, he thinks dumbly, or you’re done.

Medic down, he rasps, or shouts, or only thinks to say. He tries to breathe. He tastes smoke. And then, from somewhere deeper in the haze: A voice.

Someone is running. Calling his name.

Jack drags in one more breath, his vision narrowing, the pain beginning to blot out the world. In the distance, a child keeps crying. Thank God, he thinks, or maybe says aloud, in a slur. If you’re crying, you’re still breathing.

And then it all goes dark.

The hospital smells like antiseptic and gauze, like everything’s been scrubbed too clean to feel real. The fluorescent lights hum dully overhead and machines whir steadily, tracking vitals with the same routine watchfulness as the medics making their rounds. Unable to sleep, Jack shifts his weight on the stiff mattress where he sits. His right leg, what’s left of it, aches in a way that doesn’t feel entirely physical. Phantom pain, he was taught to call it, when he was on the other side of the hospital bed. Sharp and grating and endless, curling like smoke through the space where his limb used to be.

It’s been five days, but he still can’t quite wrap his head around how this kind of pain is possible — how absence can make itself known just as sharply as presence. The morphine helps, but not enough. It dulls the edges but doesn’t change the fact that his body can’t work out what’s happened to it anymore than his mind can.

Sergeant Darnell stands at the end of the bed. He doesn’t sit. He’s got that look on his face that Jack’s come to associate with bad news softened by formality. “You’ll be discharged by Monday,” Darnell says. “VA transport’s arranged. You’ll be back stateside before you know it.”

Jack nods. It’s the most he can offer. Monday, he thinks. That means it’ll be four more days.

After a moment, Darnell asks, “Has anyone been to see you?”

Jack knows Darnell isn’t asking for a roll call. This is just the lead-up to something else, something they’re both pretending to circle by necessity. Still, out of exhaustion more than courtesy, Jack lets the conversation unfold. “Most of the unit,” he answers. “Moore stayed half the night. Once Guzmán got discharged, he came back and visited twice. You just missed him. ”

Darnell nods, fingers drumming once on the edge of the chart at the foot of the bed. “That’s great to hear, Abbot,” he says, in a tone one might use to talk about the weather. “Great to hear. You’ve got some good men looking out for you.”

A pause. Longer this time. Finally, Darnell asks: “What about Costa?”

Jack keeps his expression neutral. “What about him?”

The captain gives him a leveling look. Jack knows he’s supposed to be more mindful of how he speaks to his superiors, but he can’t quite access the part of him that cares. It’s dulled, perhaps, by the morphine.

“It’s a fair question,” he says. “Given the circumstances, he might’ve stopped by.”

The words hang in the sterile air, coated in something unsaid. Jack sits a little straighter, forcing himself to swallow down the sharp blast of pain that brings. “Are you checking on me, or checking on him?”

“Mind your tone,” he replies, in a low, calm warning. “You’re in a world of pain. I understand that. But that’s no license to forget who you’re talking to.”

Jack finally meets his eyes. “I haven’t seen him, sir.”

Darnell’s shoulders lower at that, almost imperceptibly. He’s thinking something, Jack can see it plain on his face, but whatever it is, he doesn’t say. Just smooths a hand over his short hair, exhaling through his nose like he’s tired, too.

“If he didn’t show,” Darnell says, carefully, “maybe that’s for the best. Keeps things clean for him before the transfer sends him north.”

Jack lets out a quiet breath – not quite a laugh. Sure, he thinks. Clean.

Darnell clears his throat and looks back down at the clipboard like it owes him something. “I know you were hoping to go to Texas. So, you’re being transferred to Brooke Medical after you land,” he says. “The paperwork’s almost done. They’ll take good care of you there.”

Jack doesn’t say anything. He just stares at the window, though there’s nothing to see but his own dim reflection in the dark glass. The desert’s on the other side of that wall: sand, and silence, and the full white moon. It’s beautiful, he thinks to himself, in spite of it all.

“Anyway,” Darnell continues, “Lotta brass upstairs. They’re saying we’re lucky it wasn’t worse. That you pulled Guzmán out yourself.”

Jack swallows against the tightness in his throat. Lucky. He almost smiles, but the expression doesn’t quite come. “Is that it then, sir? It’s over? Or will I have explaining to do in San Antonio, too?”

“As far as anyone official is concerned, there’s nothing left to talk about.”

Jack gives him a long, skeptical look.

Darnell exhales. “Sometimes circumstances change the conversation.” He hesitates, then adds, “You got blown apart saving lives. That kind of thing — it makes people think twice before dragging a man through the mud.”

Jack knows what that means. Knows what it doesn’t say. The conversations that must’ve happened behind closed doors while he was unconscious. He knows how these things go, how timing can be everything. How a wound, if visible and grievous enough, can become a kind of shield.

Jack looks back at him, something bitter curling in his throat. “Lucky me." 

Darnell’s face flickers with guilt, or maybe discomfort. He shifts his weight, like he might take a step closer and thinks better of it.“You earned your rest, son,” Darnell says finally. “It’s absolutely no consolation for what you’ve lost. But now, you can go home with your record intact. Six years of service. No red on your ledger. A clean exit.”

He pauses again, voice quieter now. “And for what it’s worth, I don’t care who you love. Our hands were tied, but none of us did.”

Jack doesn’t reply. He doesn’t have the energy to tell Darnell that love had very little to do with it. That sometimes, connection was just survival by another name. And anyway, what could he even say about Sam now? What would he have said to him, if he’d come? That he’s a coward — like Sam doesn’t already know that? That if their positions had been reversed, Jack would’ve swallowed a bullet before he gave up his name in some pathetic effort to save his own ass — like Sam doesn’t already know that, too?

Instead, Jack sinks back into the thin hospital pillow and lets his eyes drift shut. He listens, rather than watches, Darnell taps the edge of the chart again, once.

“I’ll check in before you ship out,” he hears him say, then turns to leave.

The morning he’s set to be discharged, Jack wakes before the sun. The ward is still relatively quiet, and, through his window, he can see outside the world as it begins to warm, the horizon line cast in gold as it cushions the rising sun.

He shifts upright, wincing at the dull, omnipresent ache pulsing just below his knee. He tries not to fight it, allowing the pain to run its course and subside in its own time. Frankly, he has no other choice. He reaches for the notepad that fell somewhere to the wayside when he was sleeping and finds it jammed between the mattress and the arm of the hospital bed. It’s government-issued, like the bedsheets, and the painkillers, and the plastic pitcher of water on the little table beside him.

He’s filled half of it already, mostly with letters he won’t send. He doesn’t know when the habit started, but he’s gone through enough notebooks and note-pads to trace most of his stops across Afghanistan and Iraq by the quality of their covers, the stains on their pages.

Usually, he just writes. Folds the page. Tucks it away. On occasion, what makes it on the page is mild enough that Jack stuffs the paper into an envelope and writes his family’s home address on the front before he talks himself out of it. There’s so much his mother already has to worry about. There’s so much more he’d rather his sisters focus on, if they’re going to go as far as he knows they can.

It’s taken years of practice, but, for the most part, he’s learned not to hesitate much with his pen. Today, however, feels like a strange and glaring exception; unsure of how to even address him, Jack holds the pen on its point against the paper, letting the ink pool slightly in a smudge of black ink.

Michael, he begins, and then starts again. Dear Mi— no, that isn’t right either. He lets the moment stretch out. His breath slows. The pain hums beneath the silence. Robby, he writes, plain and simple. This isn’t the first time I’ve tried to write to you, but I think it might be the last.

In the past, the letters he’d written to Robby were on a league of their own, different from what he sent to his family, or his old friends, or his exes. In the letters he sent to his father, Jack oscillated between forgiving and begrudging him. In what he sent to old flames, he mostly wanted to know if he’d done right by them: if Cathy ever got the 2.5 kids and the picket-fence, if Joel liked it better in New York City after all.

What was it about writing letters to Robby – perhaps especially because he knew he’d never send them – that gave Jack permission to tell the truth?

Not just the soft, sentimental truths, but the terrifying ones. Like how he used to wonder what kind of doctor Robby had become, whether he’d ended up in emergency medicine like he once talked about, or if he’d chased something cleaner, less punishing. Other times, he’d joke about how good the sex had been that weekend. How he still remembered the way Robby flushed when Jack made him laugh mid-kiss, how he would crawl on his hands and knees through the desert if it meant having him come in his mouth again.

There were ugly ones, too.

One where admitted he shouldn’t have signed up for combat medicine in the first place and promptly destroyed, half-finished. Another one where he’d told himself, told Robby, that he’d balance the scales later, in some gleaming hospital back home, where he’d trade tourniquets for scalpels, triage tents for surgical wards. The one he wrote afterward, where he admitted that no matter how many lives he might’ve saved, it would never outpace the killing. Not really. The math didn’t work that way, and somewhere inside, Jack had always known it.

He’d thrown away every letter, after tearing them apart. Never even read them twice. But somehow, writing to Robby gave him a shape to pour his thoughts into. A name to pin his truth to.

Now, for the first time, he writes one he’ll send.

He doesn’t reread it. Doesn’t try to say everything. He gives up on coherence somewhere between the second and third paragraph, resigned to the fact that the pieces of himself he’s putting down may never line up in a way anyone else can understand.

But maybe that’s not the point.

Two days after they’d gone their separate ways all those years ago, he’d walked back to Robby’s apartment complex and scribbled down the address from the row of mailboxes out front. He hadn’t had the nerve to climb the three flights of stairs leading back to his apartment. Didn’t know how to knock on the door and face him.

He hadn’t known how to swallow his youthful pride, how to admit that he regretted not asking for a phone number, an email, anything before walking out. That he hadn’t wanted to seem too attached. That he’d known, even then, that he was.

The notion that Robby still lives in that old apartment complex isn’t just a longshot — it’s nearly an impossibility. Even if he did move back to Pittsburgh after his residency like he once said he might, would he really have returned to that same shitty building? Was it even still standing, after all this time?

Later, Jack slips the letter into his jacket pocket and has Guzmán wheel him down to the unit post office before anyone can think to stop them. The corridor buzzes with the noise of distant phones and a low, droning radio; somewhere down the hall, a nurse laughs too loudly. The wheels of the chair squeak as they turn the final corner.

When they reach the mail window, Jack hesitates. He can’t quite reach the slot from where he’s sitting. Instead, he presses the envelope into Guzmán’s hand. “Here,” he says simply.

Guzmán takes it without a word. He’s too smart, too loyal, to ask about a name Jack’s never mentioned before. He just slips it through the slot and offers Jack a soft clap on the shoulder when it’s done.

They pause outside a few minutes longer, Guzmán kneeling to eye level now. “You good?”

Jack nods. “As good as I can be, brother.”

Guzmán hesitates, then clears his throat. “Listen, before you go. I never said it right, man. What you did for me . . .” He trails off, shaking his head. “No, c'mon, man. You gotta let me thank you. I owe you my life.”

Jack reaches out and grips his forearm. “Stop it.”

“I mean it.”

“I know. But I’d do it again. A hundred times.” He holds his gaze. “You don’t owe me anything. That’s not what I did it for.”

Guzmán’s eyes go glassy for a second, but he blinks it away and squeezes Jack’s shoulder. “You’ll be okay once you’re back home.”

“Yeah,” Jack says, swallowing around the knot in his throat. “I’ll see you soon, you hear? We’ll meet in El Paso. You’ll introduce me to Katrina and the kids. Show me what real food tastes like.”

They clasp hands, briefly but firmly, and Jack watches Guzmán disappear down the hallway. Then he waits alone, seated in his wheelchair, for the orderlies to come and wheel him out to the transport van. By sundown, he’ll be airborne — en route to San Antonio, bound for American soil for the first time in nearly two years. A little worse for wear, he thinks with a flicker of bitterness, but alive. Still breathing. Still here.

It’s only once the plane lifts into the air that Jack lets his eyes fall shut and permits himself the quiet, impossible image of Michael Robinavitch holding the letter in his hands. Is his hair still long, the way it was when they met? Is he still fresh-faced? Does he still keep that gold chain of his hidden beneath his clothing?

If they passed on the street now, would they even recognize each other?

There’s no great relief in the act of sending the letter — not really. But something in Jack loosens, as if a pressure valve has given way. Like he’s sealed a message in a bottle and cast it out to sea, knowing full well it may never reach a shore. He doesn’t expect a reply. He doesn’t need one. He just needs to move on.

Chapter Text

IV. 2018

After the last of the dishes are cleared from the table, Jack Abbot and Luis Guzmán slip out back, claiming a quiet corner beneath the patio lights. The breeze kicks up a little, dry and soft, lifting the scent of mesquite and summer dust, and their chairs creak each time they reach into the cooler between them. They’ve sat out here like this a hundred times before — after Jack’s shifts at the hospital, after whatever odd jobs Luis has picked up for the season — but the silence carries a different weight today, heavy with the sense that they’re at the end of a good thing.

Out here, Jack can only faintly make out the commotion inside: Luis’s teenage daughter yelling after her younger sister in half-feigned annoyance, their laughter rising and falling through the cracked patio door, their grandmother chiding them in Spanish.

Luis passes Jack a Modelo without asking. They sit like that for a while, in the easy hush between old friends, before he breaks the silence, saying what Jack suspects he’s been meaning to ask for a long time now.

“You sure about this?” Luis asks. “Going back to Pittsburgh?”

Jack sits back. “Hell of a time to ask, brother. The U-Haul’s already loaded.”

“I know,” Luis says. “Just — it’s been a minute, hasn’t it? Since you’ve gone back. Never got the impression you liked it up there very much.”

Jack hears what Luis isn’t saying, knows that this impression didn’t come from nowhere.

In the years following his discharge, when everything still felt raw and half-formed, his trips home were tense. What had always been a complicated relationship with his family only grew more strained after he returned from Iraq, worse for wear. They meant well. He knew that. But he bristled under the weight of his sisters’ tender glances, felt suffocated by the enormity of his mother’s grief. They were careful with him in a way that made Jack feel brittle — too quick to help him out of a chair, too visibly stricken when he winced or limped, too stubborn to let him do anything for himself.

His father, by contrast, did what he’d always done with difficult things: he ignored it. In different circumstances, perhaps, Jack might’ve appreciated that his father treated him no differently when he had one leg than he’d done when he had two. But it didn’t take very long for Jack to realize that indifference, too, brought its own misery — that it was impossible for his old man to look past his bad leg without looking past Jack entirely. After his death, Jack would come to recognize this as his father’s own backwards kind of grief; that his refusal to acknowledge how his son had changed was likely borne, if Jack had to guess, from some sense of guilt or inaction on his part.

Before Jack reached that understanding, though, all his father did was make him angry.

Somehow, without knowing exactly why, Jack bristled equally at his mother’s tenderness and his father’s coldness. He was, it seemed, committed to being miserable. And after enough time in vet groups, he’d become self-aware enough to recognize that giving his family no way to win didn’t make for a fair fight. Better then, he thought, to remove himself from the equation as best he can.

At first, Jack let the demands of returning to medical school serve as an excuse — too much studying, then too many hours spent on rotation, and all of it, too, as a man who was often older than his peers. Of course, he made an effort for the occasions that couldn’t be missed. He was there for his sisters’ weddings, his father’s funeral, the birth of his nephews and nieces. But each time he returned to El Paso, he did so more eagerly than he did the last.

After a while, Pittsburgh and all that waited for him there felt more like a shadow than a city, a thing he sometimes caught trailing behind him, but could never quite reach out and touch.

At present, though, Jack shrugs. “I used to think I hated it,” he explains to Luis, “but I think I just needed something to push against. I was a real pain in the ass as a kid – always mouthing off, getting myself in trouble. Hating home was easier than figuring out what I actually wanted from it.”

“And you’ve got that figured out now? What it is you want out of it?”

“Sure. I got some interviews lined up. Decent ones. And my family’s still there.” He glances away. “It’s been a long time, Guz.”

Luis nods, thumb tracing the neck of his bottle. “Feels fast, is all.”

“It’s been a year,” Jack says, and this time his voice is rougher.

“Yeah,” Luis says. “I know.”

Jack stares out across the yard, overcome by the quiet, impossible fact of it all — not just that his wife is gone, but that her absence has split something open in him he can’t quite seem to close.

Until recently, Jack thought of his life as one long and winding lesson in detachment. In his twenties, he chased it deliberately and with failing success, in bars and in the arms of strangers who offered him the thrill of being wanted without the compromises of being known. When med school slipped out of reach, he folded the dream away quietly, burning with the silent embarrassment of trying something on that he knew he couldn’t afford.

Overseas, in Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq, detachment was a matter of survival. And then, after the blast and after the long sterile months of recovery, detachment became a kind of discipline. The life he’d lived wasn’t the one he wanted, but it was the one he had. He could no more will his leg back into existence than he could’ve stopped his father’s drinking or unsee the blood he saw spilled. It was only by letting go that he could begin accepting, and then build something new from the wreckage.

But this grief defies the rules he made. It clings, and slips, and stains. Just yesterday night, when he packed the last box of clothing, he found a strand of her hair caught in the knit of one of his sweaters — long and dark, lighting flaring off the curls. He turned it between his fingers reverently and stared and stared and stared, as if it were some holy relic, pulled from the sediment of a vanished world.

Which, in some way, it was.

Jack clears his throat. “I just . . . I need something different. Everything here’s got her fingerprints on it.”

Luis tips his head back, eyes scanning the setting sun. When he turns to face Jack, his expression doesn’t shift much, but something behind his eyes softens. “I get it. And I’m happy if you’re happy. I know Sof would’ve wanted you to land somewhere good.”

Jack nods, jaw tight. “Yeah.”

Luis holds his gaze a second longer, then looks back out across the yard. “And you will,” he says. “Wherever you go, you always find a way to pull people outta the fire.”

“Cost me an arm and a leg, though,” Jack quips, going for the easy shot.

Luis snorts. “You’ve still got both arms, pendejo.”

“Give it time.”

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” he mutters, shaking his head like he regrets encouraging him. But there’s affection in his voice, the kind that only comes from years of shared history, from bleeding beside each other and living to tell the tale.

Jack leans back in his chair and twists his wedding band absently. “I’ll miss this,” he says at last, voice low. “You and the family. You helped me build a good life out here, man.”

The words aren’t enough for the enormity of what Jack feels, but they’re the only ones he can offer. And Luis, who’s known him longer than just about anyone, hears what he’s really saying in the spaces between them.

Luis had come back from Iraq shortly after Jack, both of them torn up in different ways. It was Luis who had been beside him in the sand that day, yelling through the smoke while Jack bled on the dirt. And later, when everything was quieter but no easier, it was Luis who dragged him to a support group. Who introduced him to his sister, Sofia. Who stood beside him as best man and who grieved with him when the accident took her away.

But it wasn’t one-sided, either. Jack had carried Luis through his own share of troubles and though there were still things they never spoke about, regrets they never admitted aloud, they’d kept each other afloat if only because they knew their nightmares were similarly shaped. 

Luis hums back an affirmative, a simple sound that communicates he’ll miss Jack, too. “You’ll be back. Holidays, at least. Alana’s got her graduation in June. And hell, if the Pirates ever make the playoffs, I’ll come to you.”

Jack huffs. “So never, then.”

They both laugh, soft and brief. Then Luis reaches over, claps a hand on Jack’s shoulder. “Go do what you do best, brother. Wherever you land, you'll find what it is you’re looking for. Just don’t forget you got a home here, too.”

Jack meets his eyes. “I won’t,” he says. “You know I love you, right?”

“Course I do. Love you too, man.”

They pull each other into a hug that says more than the words could. It’s not long, neither of them is built for lingering, but it’s firm and real and rooted in everything they’ve lived through.

Later, when Jack says goodbye to Luis’ daughters at the door, he’s not quite as composed. The girls throw their arms around him, their small faces pressed into his chest, tears dampening the front of his shirt. He crouches to their height, murmurs promises to visit, to call, to send pictures of the snow. When he stands, Luis’ wife hugs him too, soft and steady, like she’s done many times before.

When he pulls away from the curb, the sun is a thin sliver on the horizon, casting the sky in amber and indigo. The desert wind has picked up again, curling dust along the street and brushing against the side of his truck. Behind him, El Paso stretches out into the haze — familiar streets and sunbaked rooftops fading into distance. Jack doesn’t look back, but he keeps the window down for miles.

The office is neater than Jack expects for a man who runs an emergency department. The shelves behind Doctor Montgomery Adamson are full but organized, lined up with the kind of precision that suggests intentionality, not disuse, on his part. On the corkboard by the window, newspaper clippings nestle between photos of graduations, award ceremonies, and colleagues from years past.

Adamson sits behind a desk, fingers laced loosely in front of him. His voice is soft and thoughtful, with the kind of cadence Jack recognizes from old-school clinicians — the kind of man who listens just as keenly as he speaks.

“Of course, I’ve reviewed your history,” Adamson says. “And I’ve spoken with Doctor Kim at Las Palmas. You come highly recommended.” He pauses, then adds, “Not the most traditional path to emergency medicine, but in my experience, those tend to produce a unique caliber of doctors.”

Jack shifts in his chair. He’s not good at this bit – selling himself to potential employers, trying to convince them of credentials he’d rather let speak for themselves. “You could say I took the scenic route,” he offers. “I did things a little backwards, but I think my experiences in and out of the country inform my work for the better.”

“It certainly takes commitment,” Adamson says. “Service first, school after, then the usual hoops through residency. A lot of people burn out before they make it half as far.”

“Nothing keeps you humble like going to school with people half your age.”

“How’d you manage it?”

“Well, I didn’t sleep for the better part of a decade,” Jack says, with a smile. “I was playing a young man’s game, no doubt. But working under pressure — that part felt familiar.”

“And that’s the part they can’t teach,” Adamson replies. “As it happens, working under pressure is the name of the game here at PTMC. We’re looking for someone who’s open to working nights, at least to start. It’s a smaller team, and a bit understaffed right now, which I won’t sugarcoat.” He leans back in his chair, one hand folding loosely over the other. “And I’ll be honest with you, you’ll likely be making about the same as you did in El Paso to start, which I’m sure you know won’t stretch quite as far up here.”

“Well, if I was in it for the money alone, I’d be selling supplements on the internet.”

Adamson chuckles. “Or working in plastic.”

“God forbid,” Jack says. “I don’t have the jawline for it.”

That earns a proper laugh. Adamson closes the folder, and sets Jack’s resume face-down on the desk. “Still,” he says, more gently now, “give the salary some thought. We’d be glad to have you, but it’s worth seeing what HR puts on the table when you get your formal offer. Our hospital’s in a bit of a transitional phase, but what we lack in administrative power, we make up for in staff. We have an exceptional team here and we look out for each other to maintain it. Especially the younger ones — residents, med students. Mentoring is something we take seriously here.”

Jack nods, his attention sharpening. “That’s part of the appeal, honestly. Las Palmas was my first teaching hospital. I didn’t know how I’d like it, but working with residents pushed me to stay on top of my game, rethink how I approached things. It made me a better doctor.”

Adamson’s smile turns knowing. “You never really know something until you’ve taught it to someone else.”

There’s a soft knock at the door, followed by a pause, just long enough to signal hesitation. A nurse leans in, clipboard in one hand, the other resting on the doorframe. She’s young, with warm skin and a hijab the color of marigolds, bright against her navy scrubs.

“Sorry, Doctor A,” she says, catching sight of Jack and glancing between them. “Didn’t realize you were in a meeting.”

Adamson waves her in with an easy smile, his voice warm. “You’re fine, Perlah. What do you need?”

Jack watches the tension ease from her shoulders, the way she straightens a little under the reassurance. It’s a small gesture, but Jack knows well that how a doctor treats his nurses says a lot about him. And Adamson, it seems, sets his nurses at ease.

“There’s a swap request for Thursday night,” Perlah says, stepping forward. “Doctor Robby said he’d take it if you sign off.”

For a moment, Jack thinks he’s misheard. The name lands with a strange weight, and his mind scrambles to fill in other possibilities — Bobby, even Ruby — but none of them fit once Adamson repeats the name back to her.

“If it’s fine by Robby, it’s fine by me,” Adamson says after a glance. “Just have him confirm with Soldano that it won’t create any scheduling issues down the line, just to be safe.”

“Will do.” The nurse casts a glance at Jack, furrowing her brows at the way he must be staring, before she slips back out, the door clicking softly behind her.

Jack draws a slow, deliberate breath. He’d known this was a possibility. If he were being honest with himself, he’d admit that part of him had tried to account for it. That in deciding to return to this city, he’d allowed, if only fleetingly, for the chance that their paths might cross again. But, he didn’t think it’d go like this: not so soon and not at the second hospital he was interviewing with.

Adamson, perhaps sensing the shift in his focus, clears his throat lightly. “The night crew’s solid,” he says. “You’ll get a chance to meet most of them if and when you start. We like our new hires to begin on a day that’s well-staffed, so they have an easier time finding their footing.”

Jack nods, voice steady. “I’d like that.”

The rest of the interview passes in easy rhythm: less formal questioning, more conversation. Adamson strikes him as the kind of man who keeps his cards close to chest, but Jack catches flickers of approval: a quiet smile, a small exchange about the music scene in Memphis, a funny anecdote from his early years in trauma. It’s enough to tell Jack that he’s made a good impression and, more importantly, it’s enough to tell him that Adamson would be a tremendous man to work alongside of.

But beneath the surface, Jack never quite shakes off the sense that he’s been playing on the back foot from the moment that nurse entered the room.

Jack lets himself into the apartment and locks the door behind him. It’s a temporary rental, but the evening light filtering through the blinds softens the edges and the mess on the kitchen counter makes it feel more like a home. He sets his keys down, shrugs off his jacket, and exhales like he’s been holding his breath since he left Adamson’s office.

At the kitchen table, he sits and reaches down to unbuckle his prosthesis. It’s a practiced sequence of actions he could do drunk, with his eyes closed: the press of the release, suction breaking as the socket loosens, the sudden relief from pressure he stopped feeling hours ago. He slides it off and sets it gently on the floor, massaging the muscle just above the scarred edge of his leg. The ache there is familiar and bearable. Today isn't a bad day. He rolls the compression sleeve down his calf and lets himself be still for a moment, one socked foot flat on the floor, the other leg drawn extended outward, soothed by the cool air.

Eventually, Jack reaches for his laptop. He’s not looking for anything in particular: perhaps he’ll read through some more job postings, skim a few housing listings closer to the heart of the city. Maybe.

But his fingers hesitate over the keyboard and whatever it is he settles on, he doesn’t look at it with any real intent.

Eventually, he types: Michael Robinavitch MD PTMC.

Thank God for that last name of his. Jack finds him faster than he expects.

There’s a hospital profile. A digital paper-trail of conferences he participated in across the East Coast. A few co-authored publications, mostly from the early aughts. A link to seven patient stories about their experiences at the hospital, only of which mentions Robby in any detail. First doctor to really listen, it reads. He changed my life when he . . .

And then there’s the photo: Robby in dark scrubs, a white coat slung over the wide breadth of his shoulders. He keeps his hair shorter now. His face is fuller, but it looks like age has treated him kindly. He’s grown into features that were pretty when he was in his 20’s and decidedly handsome now that he’s twice that age. His eyes haven’t changed — still just as big and brown as Jack remembers them.

Jack doesn’t realize how long he’s been lingering over the image until the screen dims.

He moves the cursor and closes the tab.

The next day, he interviews at a hospital on the opposite side of town, sleeker, and better funded, equipped with all the bells and whistles. The attending physician is flanked by two other hospital employees – whatever their job descriptions, they’re definitely not doctors – and between the three of them, they say the phrase ‘state-of-the-art’ more times than Jack cares to count.

It’s everything Jack’s supposed to want. Bigger teams, greater benefits, a more comfortable salary after his first two years on the job. Everything looks perfect on paper.

But when Jack imagines himself there, pacing that polished hallway, sitting in that break room with muted beige walls, there’s no pull. No real sense that this is the place he can spend so much of his life in or that it’ll help him make some meaning of whatever is left of the life he once had. Adamson’s hospital lingers instead. Older, but bustling with life; worn in places, but not entirely worn out. It won’t all be roses at PHMC, Jack knows that, but it’s a teaching hospital, and it’s scrappy, and it’s a place where the need is tangible.

Jack presses the button on the side of his phone, closing his eyes tightly against the sharp contrast of how bright his phone screen had been against the otherwise perfect darkness of his bedroom.

He has to make a decision. He has to find a permanent place to stay. He has to sleep.

Instead, he listens to the fan hum overhead and tries not to picture Robby’s face – but it’s there anyway, caught somewhere between memory and pixels, and this time, he isn’t an abstraction or a fantasy or a place-holder to write his worst fears to.

This time, for the first time in nearly twenty years, he’s real.

Jack arrives ten minutes early, a habit he never bothered breaking. The main entrance of PHMC glows duly – it’s still daylight out, even as the foot traffic around the hospital has thinned to the last remnants of the evening rush hour. Inside, the ER is humming: a lot happening at once, but it’s a rhythm Jack would much prefer over the strange, static moments of calm before the storm.

He checks in with the charge nurse, Lena, who points him toward the back. “Doctor Adamson’s waiting for you near the trauma bays. Straight down and to your right. You can’t miss him.”

Jack heads down the hallway and finds Adamson exactly where she said: standing near a monitor, reading a chart with his brows knit, the corners of his mouth pulled tight with focus. He smiles when he sees him: “Doctor Abbot. You’re early.”

They shake hands, meeting now as colleagues for the first time, and Adamson motions for him to follow behind him as he walks. “We handed off the day shift a while ago, but we’re short, so I figured I’d stick around to make sure you get situated.” He gestures toward a woman approaching from the far end of the hallway. “Doctor Walsh, tell me I’ve caught you between patients.”

Walsh slows, already catching on. “Depends,” she says. “Am I being volunteered for something?”

“Would you mind showing Doctor Abbot around? Just a quick pass through should be enough. I’d do it myself, but I'm still tying up loose ends from earlier.”

“Didn’t your shift end an hour ago?” she asks. “One of these days, you’ll need someone to personally walk you out of this place.”

“Thank you, Emery,” Adamson says, dodging her point with a smile. Then, to Jack: “Doctor Walsh is one of our chief residents. You’re in good hands.”

Walsh is a beautiful woman with dark hair swept neatly into a bun, and when she looks at Jack, she studies him closely but doesn’t smile. “You picked a hell of a night to start,” she says, offering her hand. “Two of our doctors called out sick with a stomach bug.”

“All good,” he replies, shaking it. “I like a little chaos."

“Great. You’ll fit right in.”

She glances down at his ID badge then, reading the details to herself – if she’s surprised to learn he’s the new attending, she hides it well. “Huh. You’re the one with the military background.”

“That’s me,” he says evenly, curious as to how she knows that. “Figure once you’ve worked one battlefield, you’ve worked ‘em all.”

Walsh gives a faint, noncommittal hum. “Fair enough.”

They move through the ward quickly, Jack keeping pace as Emery points out triage bays, trauma rooms, stairwells, and supply closets like she’s checking them off a list. Her tone is brisk and she offers little in the way of small talk. That means the warmth she showed to Adamson, Jack thinks, is something not freely given, but earned.

Not long into their rounds, Jack stutters, pausing mid-step. There, across the bay, is a man in dark scrubs, talking amicably to a patient. Jack can’t make out a word of it, but the sound of Robby’s voice strikes him if only because it’s precisely then when Jack realizes he’d forgotten it.

Jesus fucking Christ, he thinks, dumbly. He didn’t have that beard in the photo.

Jack’s eyes stay fixed, his mind slow to catch up, when someone brushes past his shoulder, fast. A nurse with a tray of supplies offers his quick apologies without stopping, and Jack instinctively shifts out of the way. When he looks back, Robby’s already walking off to slip behind a curtain, maybe, or into another room.

The moment’s over just as quickly as it began.

Jack exhales sharply through his nose, frustrated with himself. He’d spent a week debating whether to reach out to him before starting this job. In the end, he’d decided against it – what could he really say to him that was worth writing, to his professional email no less? It had been years since they last saw each other. Maybe Robby wouldn’t even remember him. Maybe he would, and wouldn’t want to.

Emery pauses a few paces ahead. “You good?”

He straightens. “Golden.”

“If you say so, Pony Boy,” she says, already walking again. “How do you feel about ripping off the band-aid?”

“You mean literally? This is the place to do it.”

She sucks her teeth. Bad joke. “I mean, we’ve got company up ahead,” she says, signaling to double doors that lead to, Jack intuits, ambulance bay. “Let’s warm you up. Sink or swim.”

“Shouldn’t I check with Adamson first?”

“Where’s the fun in that?” Walsh asks, flashing him a brief smile at that. There’s an edge to it that Jack recognizes as a challenge. “Besides, don't the patients come first?”

They’re nearly at the doors when the stretcher rolls in from EMS, the hallway shifting like a tide. A young man is wheeled through, blood pouring down his face from a cut across his temple and gravel ground into his cheek and shoulder.

“Thirty-four-year-old male, Phillip McKinney,” the medic calls out. “Motorcycle wreck. Good thing he wore a helmet. GCS is eleven, blood pressure was stable en route but he started getting combative five minutes out.”

“Gotta love a donor-cycle,” Walsh says, already pulling on gloves.

“You know it,” the medic replies. “No obvious deformities, but he’s guarding his right side.”

With a nurse’s help, Jack finds a pair of shears and cuts away the bloodied clothing while Walsh shines a penlight into the patient’s eyes. To their left, another clinician begins taking vitals and asks: “Can someone clear the blood so we can see what we’re dealing with?”

That Jack can do easily enough. He wets gauze with saline and carefully wipes the man's face, sweeping away whatever grit and gravel gives away easiest. Then he moves lower, inspecting the bruising and abrasions across his chest before palpating along the rib cage.

“Left pupil’s sluggish,” Walsh says. “Give neuro a heads up and prep for a head CT after we stabilize.”

Jack frowns at the way the patient flinches away from his touch. “Chest is moving paradoxically,” he says, before catching Walsh’s eyes and signaling towards the man’s abdomen. “He’s asymmetric on exhalation. Tenderness at the lower right ribs: here, here, and here. Possible flail segment, but I don’t think we’re going to like the sound of his breathing, either.”

“Look at you, coming in hot,” Walsh says. She presses her stethoscope to the man’s chest, listening. After a moment, she nods. “Let’s have that CT check for pulmonary contusion, too.”

The curtain behind them sways open, and Adamson appears, sleeves rolled up, and sets off to help them. “Well,” he says, quickly surveying the scene, “I didn’t think you’d dive in so fast, Abbot.”

Jack steps back just enough to let Adamson edge in. “Figured I’d rip off the band-aid.”

Walsh glances over, brows raised in something halfway between surprise and amusement. “Huh,” she says. “Guess I’ll stop holding your hand, then.”

Adamson huffs a laugh. “Welcome to the night shift.”

Before Jack can respond, another voice cuts in from the next bay over: “Can I get some hands over here?” It’s a nurse — Lena, Jack remembers, the redhead he’d spoken to before. Adamson gestures toward the call.

“I’ve got this,” he says to Jack and Walsh. “Walsh, hang back a second and catch me up to speed. Abbot, go.”

They peel off in different directions, Jack moving quickly down the corridor toward the next curtained room. Inside, a young woman lies on a gurney, pale and clammy, eyes clamped shut. Beside her stands an older woman, gripping her hand tightly. Jack is halfway to the vitals monitor when someone else steps in from the opposite side of the room.

And it’s him. Of course it is.

Robby stops short. His brows pull together as he blinks, as if, for the briefest second, he can’t quite believe what he’s seeing. Jack’s pulse kicks up, the rest of the room falling away for one tight second. That look – it has to be recognition. Jack feels it like a jolt down his spine.

Walsh slips into the room behind him. “Uh, hello?” she says, eyes flicking between the two of them. “Look alive, people.”

The moment breaks. All three move at once.

Jack takes the girl’s wrist and finds a pulse, fast but present beneath his thumb. Across from him, Robby crosses to the far side of the bed and places a hand on the girl’s shoulder. “Hey there,” he says, voice low and reassuring. “I’m Doctor Robby. You’re in the ER, but we’re gonna take good care of you, alright? Can you open your eyes for me? Now can you tell me your name?”

The girl can do neither well — her eyelids flutter but do not open and whatever she tries to say comes out in an unintelligible mumble. They move quickly. Jack checks her vitals and does a light abdominal exam while Robby listens to her breathing and Walsh makes an order for fluids. Their hands move fast, their focus shared, and whatever had passed between Jack and Robby seconds before is gone now, buried beneath the immediacy of their work.

After a while, the girl’s color improves, her heart-rate evens, and the panic leaves her mother’s face. They won’t know their next steps until the test results Robby ordered come back, but, even if the worst isn’t behind them, they at least have a moment’s peace. The girl’s mother exhales like she’s been holding her breath for years. “Thank you,” she says, blinking hard. “All of you. Doctor Robby and . . ?”

Robby straightens slightly, gestures to his right. “This is Doctor Walsh, and —”

He pauses, blinking as he turns toward Jack.

“Abbot,” Jack supplies, to both of them. “I’m Doctor Abbot.”

The mother smiles, pressing a hand over her chest. “Thank you, too, Doctor Walsh. Doctor Abbot. I don’t know what would’ve happened if it weren’t for you all.”

They offer whatever small reassurances they can, Robby promising to circle back with them soon, and then they all three step out into the hallway, the door closing behind them with a click. The emergency room is humming with its usual frenzy, but somehow the silence between them is loud.

Walsh glances between the two men. “So, what was that?”

“What was what?” Robby replies, rubbing a hand over his jaw, posture slightly slouched as if the question alone has exhausted him.

“How do you two know each other?”

“Who says we know each other?” Jack asks.

“Are you saying you don’t?” Walsh counters.

Jack and Robby catch each other’s eyes, as if they might anticipate how the other will respond through look alone. The hesitation is brief, blink and you miss it, but Walsh doesn’t blink.

Her mouth curls up into a smile. “Right,” she says, drawing her gloves off. “Well, that answers that question. I’m gonna go be a surgeon now – unless you’d prefer I stick around for the awkward silence?”

“Good luck upstairs, Walsh,” Robby answers.

Walsh grins, already walking away. “Good luck downstairs, Robinavitch.”

Jack and Robby watch her leave, as if the back of her scrubs might offer them a way forward. From his periphery, Jack sees Robby rub the back of his neck, hears the soft hitch of his deep, quiet inhale.

“You’re gonna laugh at me,” Robby says at last, his voice low, “but I never actually knew your last name.”

“Fair enough,” Jack says. “Did you remember my first?”

“Well, it’s on your badge,” Robby says, gesturing to Jack’s ID before cracking a smile. Then, shaking his head, almost incredulously, he adds: “Of all the ER’s in all the towns in all the world, Jack.”

“Medicine’s a small world,” Jack answers, with a smile he knows reaches his eyes. He can hear it in his own voice as he speaks. “Good to see you made it, though.”

“Looks like you did, too.”

“Eventually," Jack replies. "I took the long way around.”

Robby’s voice softens, but his smile lingers. “Got there at the end in one piece, though. That’s what counts.”

Jack looks ahead to avoid looking at Robby directly for this next part, casting a cursory glance out towards the hustle and bustle that surrounds them. “Still not too late for me to back out,” he says. He doesn’t mean it, or at least he doesn’t think he does, but it doesn’t quite sound like a joke, even to his own ears. “I could say I was scared off by my first day.”

“What, and leave me alone with Walsh?” Robby replies. Then, earnestly and very quietly he adds: “Look, we’re both adults and that was — God, before I even finished med school, I think? If you’re good, I’m good.”

“I’m good,” Jack answers.

“Well – uh, good. That settles it,” Robby says. “Besides, as I’m sure you’ve put together by now, we’ve criminally low on staff. If I told you to split, Adamson would kill me.”

"Can't have that," Jack replies, unwilling to call the feeling in his chest relief. For want of something to do, he pulls his gloves off one at a time. “I guess that means I’ll stick it out.”

Robby’s gaze flicks down, and Jack catches the brief moment his eyes land on the wedding band. It’s only a second, barely even a pause before Robby looks back up, his expression unreadable. A non-reaction, were it not for the moment's delay. 

“I should be heading out,” he says, already shifting back a step. “Me and Adamson got stuck past our shift. If I don’t wrangle him out of here, he’ll never leave.”

“So I’m learning,” Jack replies. “The work will still be here when you come back. I promise I won't burn it all down on my first day.”

"Well, don't do that until my Thursday shift. I could use the long weekend." 

"Wouldn't dream of it," Jack tells him and, god, this is easy. Thank god this thing between them, he thinks, can be easy. 

Robby looks like he might say something else, but instead just nods once. “Welcome to the team,” he says, voice tender like he really means it, and then turns down the hall.

Jack lingers, unsure whether to feel lighter or more unsteady as Robby disappears around the corner. He wonders, not for the first time in his life, how such a strange and inexplicable thing could have happened to him -- how they found each other again after all these years. How Robby could recognize him, even now, when Jack no longer feels, or walks, or looks like the young man he was when they first met. He didn’t just come back older, or a little rougher around the edges, or half-mended in some places and still bleeding in others; he came back as someone wholly changed, cracked wide open, reshaped into a man he might not have even recognized as himself.

And yet Robby has, somehow. 

Robby, too, is his own astonishment: the gravel in his voice that wasn’t there when they were young. The creases that fan from his eyes, the furrow that rests between his brows. The tattoo on his wrist, new since the last time Jack kissed it, all those years ago. 

But Jack also knows that this man is, in many ways, a stranger. That the person he once met for a single weekend is likely gone, or at least buried deep beneath the weight of many years and everything those years likely demanded of him. Whatever he recognizes in Jack, it likely comes from some place old and long unspoken. A place for which there can be, in truth, no real going back, even if there is no ring on Robby's finger to counter his own.

Jack takes his next breath deeply, steeling himself and turning back towards the ward.  In doing so, he lets it all go, tucking whatever strange amalgamation of emotions he’s feeling away for later, when he isn’t needed, when the work is done. 

His shift, after all, is far from over.

Chapter Text

After nearly three decades in emergency medicine, Michael Robinavitch knows there are some things in his line of work that cannot be accounted for. He has worked through the long, bleak hours where one failed resuscitation is succeeded by two others. He has seen the drunk driver spared, and the child gone too soon. He has seen hearts restart against all odds, and breath return to lungs that have stilled.

Medicine is a science but, like all things, it can only go so far before fate, fortune, or sheer dumb luck commandeers the rest. No matter how many variables Robby tries to account for, the world has an inexhaustible ability to have its way, slipping through his fingers like running waters, charting its own course, allowing itself only to be felt.

It is an impossible thing to accept, but Robby has been told this time and time again: all he can do is control what he can, bear witness to what he can’t, and try to keep afloat otherwise.

He knows this, or thinks he does, and yet the reappearance of Jack Abbot hits him like a riptide all the same.

Even now that Jack has been working in PTMC long enough to have learned all the names and layouts, Robby still feels a bit taken aback when he sees his last name on the board monitor above them or when he hears Jack laughing with Dana before shift change. He is struck not only by the fact that their paths have crossed again after so many years, but by what feels somehow like the greater impossibility: that they’ve done so as colleagues in the same hospital, bound by the same strange, relentless rhythm of the ER.

It has been, of course, a long, long time. In school, Robby once learned that memory was more pernicious than most people account for – that what one conjures up when they remember something is not the experience itself, but the last recollection of it. Perhaps unsurprisingly then, his memory of the weekend they shared all those years ago has worn with time, like an old photograph left out too long in the light: its edges frayed, its details slightly blurred. But the feeling it once invoked remains, even if the vibrancy of its colors have not.

Robby remembers Jack was a smoker. He wonders if he still is, though he does not smell like it.

Robby remembers Jack borrowing his college t-shirt. He wonders whatever happened to it, if it vanished in the wake of his next messy breakup or in the move out of Louisiana after Katrina.

Robby remembers that Jack had already enlisted when they’d met. He remembers knowing, albeit only vaguely then, that the promises the military made to young men without means were often traps disguised as ladders. And though he cannot remember either of them ever saying so outright, Robby remembers that Jack spoke of enlisting with a kind of brittle nonchalance that suggested he knew it, too.

For years after, when Jack resurfaced in memory — as he sometimes did, unbidden and often spontaneously, like the lingering scent of smoke after a long-extinguished fire — Robby would wonder where that road had taken him. Whether he’d made it out like the veterans who Robby saw at the hospital or the ones who rested beneath memorial grounds.

So to see him now: not only whole, but here. Not only back, but a doctor. A doctor.

For Jack to have not only survived, but to have clawed his way into medicine and through it, with a handful of papers that residents now cited with reverence, and an easy air that was already making him a quick favorite amongst the med students — it suggests a force of will that refused to let the world have the last word.

He’s thinking about that — or maybe not quite thinking, perhaps nothing so tangible and bold-faced as that, just feeling the echo of it tugging sharply in his chest — when the ambulance bay doors burst open and one of the nurses calls incoming.

Robby is barely inside, coffee still in hand, when he turns instinctively toward the commotion. Behind Perlah, a medic is already shouting the pertinent details: a fall from scaffolding, twenty-five feet, BP crashing, GCS dropping en route.

He doesn’t break stride.

By the time Robby steps into Trauma Two, the room is already a rush of motion: doctors pulling on gowns, techs wheeling in the ultrasound cart, the scent of blood filling the air with a distinct, almost metallic sharpness. In the middle of it all is Jack.

“We need two large-bore IVs and O-neg on standby,” he says, his voice cutting clean through all the noise. “Let's page surgery and tell radiology we need a STAT pelvic and chest.”

The stretcher barrels in. The patient is pale, construction vest and shirt already sheared away to reveal a nasty splatter of abrasions across his chest. It’s his left leg, however, that catches Robby’s attention: angled grotesquely outward, splayed further out than it should.

Jack steps forward without missing a beat. “Let’s start with a midline FAST,” he says. Then, to the younger residents and students standing nearby: “If he’s bleeding in the abdomen, we need to know now. Everything else waits.”

One of the R-1s, wide-eyed but steady, pipes up: “Do you want us to prep for central access?”

“Not yet,” Jack replies. “Let’s see what the scan shows.”

Robby steps into place beside him then, tugging on gloves. “Let me run it,” he says, voice low and even.

“You only just got here,” Jack replies. “And you’ve been at this all night.”

Jack deflates a little at that, a flash of relief in his eyes before he nods.

The probe is in Robby’s hand almost immediately and the image that flares to life on the screen is a grim one: ink-dark fluid pooling precisely where it shouldn’t. “Positive in Morrison’s pouch and the splenorenal recess,” Robby confirms. “He’s bleeding fast.”

“Then we move faster,” Jack replies. “OR’s not prepped yet?”

“Trauma’s still tied up from those GSW's,” one of their residents answers. “ETA ten minutes.”

“We don’t have ten minutes,” Robby says, glancing over to find Jack already opening a kit with the kind of swift efficiency that comes from muscle memory. “You’re setting up a REBOA?”

Jack looks up at him. “He won’t make it without occlusion. If we slow the bleed, we buy time.”

For a breath, Robby hesitates — not because he disagrees, but because this is the kind of procedure that comes with such significant risks that it demands a second thought every time. If they had but world enough and time, he’d ask for Adamson’s opinion, if only for the added security of his approval. But Jack’s hands don’t shake and his focus doesn’t waver, even as he looks to Robby now with a question in his eyes.

“All right,” Robby says. He positions the ultrasound again, clean and direct. “I’ve got eyes on the femoral. We’re following your lead, Doctor Abbot.”

Nearby, a med student’s voice slips out, barely audible but clear enough to catch: “Dude, I’ve only ever since this done on Youtube.”

Jack’s eyes flicker towards the whisper and Robby watches the student tense at the attention, like a child caught saying a bad word. It’s a moment that offers a flash of relief, a little huff of laughter between all of them to break the mounting tension, and then Jack and Robby are moving in tandem. Jack palpates the groin, locates the common femoral artery under ultrasound, and punctures the skin with steady hands. Some of the students and R-1’s come closer to watch him thread the catheter over the guidewire, advancing it gently, while Robby tracks the balloon’s progression on the screen, adjusting the angle just slightly as they align.

They work like they’ve done so for years: not in sync so much as they both move instinctively, each filling the space the other leaves behind.

There’s no real rhyme or reason for how they could find such easy footing with one another, how it’s only taken a few brief weeks together for them to develop a kind of shorthand, a way of understanding each other in gestures and glances before resorting to words. The rest of the room falls back into place behind them, dulled to little more than noise.

When the balloon inflates, it’s like a pressure valve releasing. The bleeding slows. BP ticks upward. It’s not perfect, but it’s all they need as they wait for the OR to give them the signal they’re waiting for. Once that happens, there’s a subtle shift in the room, like a held breath has finally been released. The students are murmuring again, which is always a good sign.

Jack steps back, peeling off his gloves. Robby watches him for a moment, then turns to the students with a faint, wry smile. “Hell of a way to start the day, huh?”

They don’t answer, not directly, but the wide-eyed excitement, the nervous energy of their eager nodding, is answer enough.

Later, once the patient has been wheeled off to surgery, Robby finds Jack leaning back against the central desk, rubbing his hands over his face. It sounds, Robby thinks, like he’s failing to suppress a yawn.

Robby glances at the clock. “You should’ve been out of here half an hour ago, my friend.”

“Don’t I know it,” Jack says. “But I wasn’t about to leave you mid-code.”

He watches Jack for a moment longer than he has to, taking in the sharp lines of his face which have now gentled, his chest rising and falling softer now that his breath has begun to even out. Robby thinks again about the confidence with which he’d called that procedure and followed through: not reckless, not showboating, just right.

And yet, in that brief, suspended second before he acted, Jack had looked to him. Not for permission exactly, Robby’s sure of that. In different circumstances, Jack would’ve made that call on his own. He just didn’t want to.

“That was a good call back there,” Robby says, quieter now. He tips his head toward the end of the hallway, where a small cluster of med students speak in hushed, urgent tones, hands moving as they replay the REBOA for those who missed it. “They’ll be talking about that one all day.”

Jack follows his gaze, then gives a small shrug. “They’re green. Easily impressed.”

“I dunno, Jack. One more flashy procedure like that and that fan club of yours is going to start handing out t-shirts.”

“What, with our faces on it and everything?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Robby replies. “Just yours.”

That gets a proper laugh out of Jack – a genuine, surprised laugh that makes his nose crinkle in that old, familiar way of his. It’s a small thing, but it lights his expression and lingers there, softening the edges of his face. Then, without much ceremony, Jack reaches out and squeezes Robby’s shoulder. A warm, solid pressure that lingers only for a breath before releasing. “That wasn’t all me,” he says. “Couldn’t have done it without you backing the call, man.”

And Robby had, hadn’t he? He’d trusted Jack in the thick of it, with little more than a moment’s pause; he had, without knowing why in a way he could explain, trusted him in a way he rarely did with anyone new.

Jack steps away then, saying something about finishing charting so he can head home and Robby — Robby turns back toward the bay, hands buried in his pockets so they don’t betray him by reaching out, by offering help he knows isn’t needed.

But part of his mind lingers: not, he realizes with a slight pang of guilt, on the patient they might’ve just saved, but on the man who refused to leave until the work was done. On the brief, steady weight of Jack’s hand on his shoulder, there for a moment and gone again, leaving Robby with some yawning and indescribable feeling in its wake.

May folds into June, and June bleeds into a cruel and airless July, the kind of summer that’s blistering and a little unbearable. In those summer months, when the crew is spread thinner by vacation requests and summer holidays, Robby does not see much of Jack beyond their brief hand-offs between shifts. This isn’t to say, however, that Robby hears just as little.

Hospitals have their own ecosystems of information, exchanged quickly over swigs of coffee and half-eaten sandwiches in the rare and precious lulls between patients. The nurses, after all, are bloodhounds for gossip and Jack Abbot, even in his reticence, has a kind of gravity to him.

Robby learns things, not directly, but ambiently. He seeks none of it out. It finds him anyway.

He learns that the night shift runs smoother when Jack is on. He learns that the students and younger residents love trailing after him with questions about combat medicine. And that, perhaps especially because Jack so rarely indulges them, they take special delight in the moments when he does. Perlah tells Robby about a particularly slow night in mid-June when one of the third-years asked Jack what it was like to triage under fire. Jack, without looking up from his notes, said evenly: “Triage doesn’t change just because someone’s trying to shoot at you while you do it.” Then, after a pause, added: “But you do get a hell of a lot faster.”

He knows, of course, that Jack married. Robby’s eyes had landed on the band on Jack’s left hand that first day when he started. It was, he hoped, a cursory glance and one that revealed nothing because, really, there was nothing Robby had to reveal. It didn’t matter. It wasn’t his business. Jack was married, he assumed, and tucked the knowledge away without ceremony, like one might pocket a receipt they never intend to look at again.

He learns, later and by accident, that this marriage is part of a former life.

“Jesus, I wish the ground had swallowed me up right then and there,” Dana tells him as she folds her arms across her chest. “I mean, it’s not like I asked him outright. We were talking about ordering lunch. Princess was on this whole spiel about how there’s no decent Mexican food outside of California, and I said something like, ‘Well, Abbot, you’d know, you and your wife just moved here from El Paso, right? What's she think about it?”

“Right,” Robby nods, dumbly. He’s not sure why he’s standing here, indulging this. He only knows that he is.

Dana exhales sharply. “So, he says, real easy, ‘It’s just me who moved.’ And maybe if I’d had more than four hours of sleep that day, I would’ve taken the hint. Instead, God help me, I ask him what she’s still doing in Texas.”

Robby winces before she even finishes. “Dana.”

She gives him this look, annoyed with herself, as if to silently say I know. Her voice drops a little, softer now so none of the other nurses can overhear. “And that’s when he tells me she passed a little while ago. I didn’t ask for details, of course, but it sounded unexpected. Anyways, before I can even manage an apology, he just shrugs and says she used to love visiting Pittsburgh.”

Dana shakes her head, a dry, rueful laugh catching in her throat. “And then, I don’t know if Princess was trying to throw me a lifeline or what, but before I know it, we’re somehow back to the topic of quesadillas.”

Robby is quiet for a moment, absorbing it. “He doesn’t give much away, does he?”

“No, I don’t think he does,” Dana says. She rubs the side of her neck, then glances up at him. “Did you already know? I thought I heard somewhere that you two already knew each other.”

Robby gives her a look. “Walsh tell you that?”

“Who said anything about Walsh?” Dana asks, before a tug in her smile gives her away. “I never reveal my sources, Robinavitch.”

“Well, I hate to disappoint your sources,” Robby replies, “but we barely did. And it was a long time ago.”

Dana nods. If she picks anything up in his tone, in his subsequent silence, she chooses not to press. “Still,” she says, softer now. “Figured I’d tell you, so you don’t go making the same mistake I did.”

Robby doesn’t respond right away. He just nods, a little too slowly, eyes fixed somewhere out past the edge of the nurses’ station. He thinks about the way Jack moves through the hospital the same way he works: precise and steady and sure. He thinks about how much space a man can fill, even in absence.

It’s sometime later, in the privacy of his office, that Doctor Adamson pulls Robby aside. Their required staff meeting with administration had just ended early. They’re apparently hiring a new medical officer, a woman named Gloria Underwood, who they promise will help usher PTMC into what they describe as an ‘exciting new chapter’ for the hospital.

Adamson says, not without fondness: “It’s been a few months now. How do you think Doctor Abbot’s holding up?”

Robby blinks. “With the night shift?”

“Well, yes,” Adamson says. “But also —” He waves a hand, gesturing broadly as if to the entirety of The Pitt itself. “With all of it. The patients. The culture. Us.”

Robby leans back slightly in his seat, measuring his words. “Well, the students are practically obsessed with him. He listens, asks good questions, doesn’t pull rank just to pull it — that goes a long way with the nurses and senior residents, even when he’s pushing them. They all seem to like him.”

Adamson hums, not quite satisfied. “That’s how they feel about him. What about you?”

It’s only then Robby realizes he’s been dodging the heart of the question. “I like him, too,” he says after a beat. “He’s quick on his feet and improvs like nobody I’ve ever seen."

"That's par the course, given his history." 

"Well, its made him a godsend," Robby says. "Honestly, I think we need five more of him.”

Adamson smiles faintly. “Oh, I don’t know about that. I think just the two of you are enough.”

“Enough for what?” Robby asks, before the full shape of what Adamson is saying clicks into place. “Jesus, Mont. You’re leaving.”

Adamson shifts in his chair, drumming his fingers once against the table. “Not yet,” he says, which sounds too much to Robby like ‘soon’. “I’m just thinking about what comes next, that’s all.”

Robby doesn’t say anything at first, but whatever Adamson sees in his expression must betray him because Adamson visibly softens. “I’m not walking out tomorrow, Robby. I’m just . . . I’m tired. You know what this job demands. I’ve been at this for over forty years.”

“How long before you go?”

“I’ve got another year in me,” he replies. “Maybe two. I want to give you all enough time to find your footing with the new administration, at least.”

“And you’d be okay leaving it to us?” Robby asks, which isn’t just to say the emergency center itself, or Adamson’s role as the chief attending doctor, but something more, something greater. As if it’s Adamson’s legacy, too, that’s on the line.

“I would,” Adamson says. “You make him sharper. He keeps you grounded. If these first months are anything to go by, and I suspect they are, I could rest easy with the two of you running the place in my stead.”

There’s a tightness in Robby’s chest that he doesn’t know how to name — pride, yes, but something heavier and more quieting. The enormity of what this means settles over him before he can make sense of it: not just Adamson’s vote of confidence, but the inevitability of his departure. When Robby looks at him now, he sees it all at once: the silver in his hair, the smile lines, the sunspots along his temples, and it leaves Robby feeling tender.

Logically, he’s known, of course, that his retirement would come eventually, but knowing something is coming and being ready to face it are two different beasts. And being, in some way, at the precipice of it — a year or two feels so brief to Robby now, not nearly enough time to be ready — leaves Robby feeling smaller, younger, greener than he rationally has any right to feel.

The idea of stepping into Adamson’s place humbles him so completely he doesn’t know how to hold it.

Adamson leans back just slightly, a glint of sympathy in his eyes. “You think you’re up for it?”

Robby exhales through his nose, glancing briefly at the floor, then back at his mentor. “I don’t think I’ll know for sure until I get there,” he admits. “But I’ll give it everything I’ve got.”

It has to be serious, Robby thinks, when he steps away from a patient, pulls out his cellphone, and sees three missed calls from Janey.

Given how badly their last conversation ended, how fresh the jabs they’d traded still are, Robby figures that she must’ve first tried her sister, her parents, maybe even her neighbor before finally resorting to him.

Robby figures, in other words, that whatever she’s calling him about involves Jake.

“Jake wasn’t supposed to be outside,” Janey explains, when he finally finds a minute to return her calls. Panic threads through her voice as she speaks to him, brittle and sharp. “I told him not to play in this heat, but his friends must’ve talked him into going to the courts. He passed out, Robby. I’m scared he might’ve hit his head. One of his friends called me while the other called the ambulance.”

After exhausting all other options, Robby makes the call to Jack in the hospital stairwell, hand gripping the rail as he dials his number and listens to the phone ring. When Jack picks up, his voice comes through low and a little incredulous, with the unmistakable raspiness of someone who’s just been abruptly awakened: “Robby?”

Robby winces. “Shit. Were you sleeping?”

On the other end of the line, he can make out muffled rustling and the image of him sitting up in bed comes to Robby’s mind, brief and unbidden. “Yeah,” Jack admits. “What’s going on?”

“I’m having a bit of a personal emergency,” Robby says. He pauses, searching for the best way to explain this. “My — my friend’s kid passed out on a basketball court. His friend called 911 when he collapsed. EMTs might be with him already, but his mom’s on the opposite side of town.”

Jack is silent for half a breath, just long enough to let Robby know that, knowing him, he’s probably already calculating his next move. “What do you need me to do?”

“I need someone to cover some of my shift,” Robby says, guilt already pooling under his ribs. “But jesus, fuck, you’ve been on since last night and you were sleeping. I'll try and call Adamson again.”

“No,” Jack cuts in, firm but not unkind. “If Adamson’s not picking up, it’s probably for a reason. I’ve got you.”

“But you —”

“I’ve got you,” Jack repeats, with a tone that brokers no argument. “Tell Dana I’ll be there in fifteen.”

Robby lets out a slow breath, and for a second he doesn’t quite know what to say. In that brief and loaded silence, he can make out the faint, familiar noise of the hospital carrying on without him: the distant rattle of a gurney being wheeled down some hall, someone calling out for a consult, the world spinning steady on its axis, even as something in him is faltering.

“I’ll come back as quickly as I can,” Robby says at last. “With any luck, it won’t be any more than an hour, tops.”

“I’ll stay on till we hand over to the night shift. Take all the time you need with the kid. I’ll handle the rest.”

Robby finds himself nodding reflexively before realizing Jack can’t see it. “Okay,” he says, quieter now. “Okay. Thank you.”

He’s just about to say goodbye, just about to pull the phone from his ear and end the call when Jack’s voice comes through again, softer this time.

“Wait, Robby,” he says, and god, his voice, his voice — the sound of Robby’s name in Jack’s voice, still rasped with sleep, carves through him like a knife. Robby closes his eyes, as if that might dull the sharpness of it. “You okay? You alright to go out there and find him on your own?”

“Yeah,” Robby manages, though he realizes his hand is shaking when he uses it to push open the stairwell door. “Yeah, man. I’m good. I think so. I’ll just feel a whole lot better when I see Jake for myself.”

“Keep me posted, yeah?” Jack says. Though they both know better than to ever promise outcomes, he offers Robby a small tether: “He’ll be alright.”

“I know,” Robby says. “And I will.”

When Robby walks out of the hospital, he understands immediately why Pitt has been slammed with case after case of heat strokes and fainting spells. The air outside is nothing short of punishing: thick as molasses with humidity, the sun searing the tops of cars and gravel pavements until they shimmer like open stovetops. By the time he reaches his car, Robby’s scrubs are sticking to his back, and he feels wrung out not just from the shift, or the panic, but from the heat.

When Robby reaches the basketball court, he parks behind the ambulance. A paramedic waves him over, eyes scanning over his scrubs with silent recognition, and walks him through the situation: heat exhaustion, borderline dehydration, but vitals are stable now. Jake hadn’t, it turns out, hit his head, thanks to a stranger catching him on the way down.

“Scared his friends more than anything,” the EMT says, offering Robby a sympathetic smile. She wipes her forehead with the back of hand, her hairline wet at the temples. “I think he’ll be okay, but it’s your call if you want us to take him to the hospital. Ours or yours.”

Robby nods, distracted already, eyes settling on the boy sitting on the back bumper of the ambulance, a bottle of Gatorade loose in one hand. Jake’s face is flushed, freckles standing out stark against sunburned cheeks, but he’s upright, attentive, and alert, watching Robby like he doesn’t quite believe he’s real.

“You okay?” Robby asks as he comes up beside him, scanning him quickly. His eyes are tracking, and his pulse under Robby’s thumb feels even and strong.

Jake shrugs, but he doesn’t look away. “Yeah. I’m fine. They already said I’m fine.”

“I needed to hear it for myself,” Robby says, too tired, too relieved, to take umbrage with how he pulls his wrist away from him. “You scared your mom. You scared me.”

Jake frowns at that, eyes falling to the gravel. “It wasn’t a big deal. I just got dizzy. I didn’t even fall that hard.”

“You passed out. That’s a pretty big deal,” Robby says gently. “Heat waves like these are no joke. Trust me, I’ve been dealing with the damage all day at the hospital.”

Jake’s brows furrow at that. “Do people really die just from being hot?”

Robby huffs a laugh at his skepticism. “Yeah, man. All the time.”

Jake doesn’t respond right away. He nods once, barely perceptible, then stands when Robby does. Together, they walk to the car, Jake moving a little slower than usual, and when he slides into the passenger seat, the door shuts with a thunk that seals the heat inside with them.

“I didn’t think you’d come,” Jake says, glancing out the window.

Robby starts the engine. The air conditioning sputters to life, blowing on high, but he reaches for the vents anyway, pointing them all towards the boy. “Your mom told me you needed help.”

Jake shrugs. “I guess.”

Robby doesn’t look over. Instead, he keeps his eyes on the road and hands steady on the wheel, the road, grateful for a good reason to gather his thoughts together. The sound of the radio helps to soften the stretching silence.

Jake shifts in his seat. From his periphery, Robby can see him tip the bottle of yellow gatorade in his hands back and forth, back and forth, a little nervous. “Can we stop for pizza?”

Robby thinks of Jack’s voice telling him not to rush, the weight of the day finally easing off his shoulders. And, though he feels a pang of guilt about it — about the ER, about Jack covering for him — staying a little longer might just give him a chance to smooth over whatever tension’s hanging between him and Jake.

“Yeah,” Robby says, glancing over. “We can stop.”

Robby watches the road for a while, letting the hum settle in his chest. Then, carefully, he speaks. “I know things are a little weird right now with me and your mom,” he says, quiet but steady. “Things might keep changing and that might feel a little confusing. But I just want you to know, if you want me around, I’ll be around. You can still call me. I’ll still show up.”

Jake doesn’t answer right away. He looks out the window, then down at his shoes. For a second, Robby thinks maybe he pushed too hard. “For, like, emergencies?” he asks at last.

“For anything,” he answers. “If that’s alright with your mom, would that be alright with you?”

“Yeah,” Jake says, almost too soft to hear. “That’d be nice.”

And Robby, who has so often seen people break apart in front of him in grief and fear and suffering, feels the relief of something closing between them, not like a cage but like a sutured wound that promises to heal with enough time.

It’s unbelievable, Robby thinks, how much Jake has come to mean to him.

For so much of his life, the prospect of fatherhood seemed like a wide, insurmountable question: no clear yes, no pointed no, just a slow and gnawing sense that maybe, as he increasingly approached his middle age, it simply wouldn’t happen.

For years now, Robby had seen the kind of desperation parenthood brought out in other people: the aching faces of parents in the ER, the quiet grief of friends who tried and couldn’t have them, the tremendous joy of those who did. And while Robby appreciated children, he never did quite believe Dana’s praises that he had a knack for handling them — despite the fact that, given the impressive state of her own kids, she probably knew best.

And yet Jake had slipped into his life like a quiet shift in the weather, like a spell of sunshine that goes unnoticed until it’s already warmed the skin. Jake was not his child, not even necessarily his responsibility, and Janey had been very careful to explain the boundaries and stakes of introducing them to one another. It’d taken five months of dating her, in fact, before the prospect of meeting Jake even became a conversation.

And yet somewhere along the way, Robby found himself looking out for him without thinking about it — grabbing the right snacks at the store, memorizing his middle school basketball schedule, packing an extra umbrella in the backseat of his car just in case.

In Jake, Robby could recognize the all-too-familiar pain of being raised without a father. But while Robby had learned quickly to bury that tenderness, for fear of upsetting his grandmother, for fear of being mocked, for fear of admitting how deeply it hurt him, Jake wore it plain as a skinned knee. And isn’t responding to that kind of thing Robby’s entire thing — hasn’t it always been? Not just his job, but his instinct: seeing where it hurts, setting the bone, applying the balm.

It’s a good thing, he thinks, that Jake wears his heart so openly. It’s a rare thing, he thinks, that nobody has yet taught this boy to hide it. He hopes, desperately, that Jake never learns.

They pull into the parking lot of a pizza place, low-lit and half-empty in the late afternoon sun and Jake’s already unclipping his seatbelt.

“Pepperoni, right?” Robby asks.

“Yeah,” Jake says, voice lighter now. Then he pauses, a little embarrassed. “Um, I didn’t eat lunch.”

Robby smiles. “You want two slices. I know.”

They head inside together, the door closing behind them with a soft, final click, the heat left behind them, at least for a little while.

In the end, he’d spent just two hours with Jake: enough time to get pizza, check him over once more in the living room, and be there when Janey comes home. Enough time for Jake to nod off halfway through the second slice, propped against the couch cushions like he hadn’t just scared the hell out of everyone.

The sun loses some of its bite by the time Robby pulls back into the hospital lot.

He’s not expected, that part’s clear, but nobody questions him as he signs in again, tugging on fresh gloves. At most, Robby catches a worried look from Dana and Jack, which he quickly remedies by catching them up to speed on Jake, and a shrug from Princess and Perlah, who only knew that whatever Robby ran off to do was personal and didn’t end in tragedy.

There’s not much left of the shift now: just one final hour before the night-crew comes to relieve them of their stations. It’s almost silly, Dana tells him, for Robby to have returned, but he’s back because it didn’t sit right, leaving Jack to carry it alone.

After the night-shift arrives, Robby goes to the staff room, if only to nab a bottle of water for the brief drive home. He falters when he finds Jack there, alone in the otherwise empty room, shoulders hunched, the right leg of his cargo pants rolled up past the knee.

He doesn’t look up at Robby immediately, though he tensed from the surprise of the staff door opening up so suddenly. Instead, he adjusts the socket of a prosthetic leg — the liner rolled down, his skin damp with sweat and flushed with a painful-looking pink that’s spread up to his knee. At a glance, it doesn’t look bad enough to be infected, Robby thinks, immediately and without quite meaning to except that’s simply where his mind goes immediately. Maybe swollen. Definitely sore.

Despite himself, Robby goes completely still. Not out of discomfort or spectacle, but because he hadn’t known; of everything people say to him about Jack, of all the things he knows, and of all the things some secret, terrible part of him still wants to learn, Jack’s body never featured explicitly amongst them; he’d heard some of the younger residents fawn over his arms, sure, but his physicality wasn’t exactly something he’d talk about with Dana. It was something, in truth, he seldom let himself think about it all, because to do so felt something like reaching out into the maw of a thing with teeth and offering his arm to be bitten.

The room feels warmer all of a sudden. Maybe that’s just the heat clinging to everything like it has all week, thick and unrelenting. Robby, for his part, closes the door behind him, leaning his back softly against it so, if anyone follows after him, they’ll at least know it. Jack, for his own part, watches him closely, following Robby’s movement, his face otherwise unreadable.

“Heatwave’s been a bitch,” he says, running a towel down his shin. “Sweating through the liner makes the whole damn thing feel like trying to get out of a wetsuit that’s fused into your skin.”

“Looks like it hurts,” Robby replies, for lack of anything better, and when Jack laughs a bit, a little wearily, that’s answer enough. “You didn’t have to come in tonight. I wouldn’t have asked, if I’d known.”

It is, he realizes then, the wrong thing to say.

Jack tenses, almost imperceptibly if it weren’t for how closely Robby is watching, how trained he is now to notice his small, implicit changes. When Jack speaks next, his voice is clipped in a way it so rarely ever is: “What, that I’m missing half a leg?”

“That you were in pain,” Robby corrects, gently.

Jack lets out a low huff. “Wasn’t gonna let Adamson come in on his first day off in two weeks. And you sounded . . .” He stops short of finishing that sentence. Shrugs instead. “I wouldn’t have offered if I couldn’t do it.”

Robby watches him work the socket back into place, careful, methodical. The easy movement of practiced effort, the click of alignment, the small wrinkle in Jack’s brow that betrays what must be a sharp bite of pain. Robby lets the silence stretch a second longer, then offers, quiet but steady: “I took my car into work today. Let me drive you home.”

Jack looks up, a little surprised. “You don’t have to.”

“I know,” Robby says. “But I’ve got you. Like you’ve got me.”

It is, he suspects, the better thing to say. Jack’s mouth curves slightly, not quite a smile, but the tension seems to dissipate in his shoulders, as if by magic.

By the time they out together into the lot, the humidity has broken into a soft, but necessary pour. Rain begins to fall in long, warm sheets, hitting the pavement in thick, steady drops that mist upward with every splash and, though neither of them say as much, it is a nice confirmation that the carpool was a good idea after all.

“I didn’t say earlier,” Robby starts, plugging Jack’s address into his phone’s GPS, “but when I left to go check on Jake, we thought he might’ve hit his head on the way down. Turns out one of his friends broke the fall, but, if I hadn’t been there to see him myself, I would’ve just been a mess. Probably checking my phone for the hundredth time while trying to put in somebody’s IV.”

Jack nods to the implicit gratitude in what Robby’s telling him. “That’d be a terrible example to set for the baby docs.”

“I know. Remember when we had to sit Yoder down so she'd stop taking selfies with the patients?”

Jack chuckles. “I’ve been on her shit list ever since.” Then, he pauses and there’s something in his face that betrays him — not guilt exactly, but maybe something adjacent to it. “Sorry I was short with you earlier. I was being an asshole.”

Robby waves it off. “You weren’t.”

“I’m not hiding it. I told Adamson when I started. Evans knows, too. I usually don’t bring it up until it’s relevant or obvious and up until now, with you, it never was.” Then, after a beat, Jack adds: “I mean, you told me I’m quick on my feet once, but I figured that wasn’t the time to correct you.”

Robby laughs, his face warming a bit. “A prosthetic foot still counts as a foot, doesn’t it?”

“You’d think so, yeah, but — hotly debated,” Jack concedes. Then, after a beat, he adds: “You probably have questions.”

Robby shifts his hands on the wheel, keeps his gaze on the stretch of road ahead. It’s mostly empty at this hour, the rain easing to a mist that slicks the pavement. “If I do, they’re not really mine to ask.”

That earns a look from Jack. Robby can feel it, even if he can't turn to meet it.

“I was raised by my grandmother. I don’t know if you remember,” Robby says, after a pause. The hum Jack gives him now suggests that he does. “For a couple of years towards the end, she was in a wheelchair. She was still pretty young, all things considered, but it was Lou Gehrig's so it all happened pretty fast. It was crazy. The way people spoke to her, the way they felt they could put their hands on her and the chair.”

He exhales slowly, tapping one thumb once against the wheel. A memory surfaces, sharper than he expects given the fact that he hasn’t thought about it in years. “There was this home aide once. She said something like, ‘God, I couldn’t live like that,’ as if she wasn’t sitting right there in the room with us. Like the only thing worth living for is being able to walk to the grocery store unassisted.”

Jack doesn’t say anything right away, but the stillness in him changes. “Yeah,” he says finally. “I know that one.”

Robby pulls the car into park just outside Jack’s building. It’s a nice one, from the looks of it: modern and clean, with wide glass windows that catch the rain as it begins to fall harder. In the dim light, the lobby’s glass shimmers, the reflections on it warping and rippling, as if the whole place has been cast underwater.

“It took a long time to afford the prosthetic,” Jack continues. “And it took a hell of a lot longer to get used to needing it. Most days I’ve made peace with it. Others…” He trails off, shakes his head once. “Some days I feel it more. When it’s hot like this, especially. Or when I’m just… confronted by it.”

Jack exhales before he continues. “Back in Texas, I used to go to a group for disabled vets. They were big on us learning to accept our limitations. Tried to encourage us to ask for help. I don’t always handle that part gracefully.”

“I get that,” Robby replies. “Asking for help can feel like you're not doing your job right.”

Jack shakes his head at that, at himself, at how Robby’s made the right assessment. “Sometimes I think the work we do doesn’t make it any easier,” Jack tells him, a little cautiously, almost like he’s thinking it out as he says it. “Not the physical part. I’ve got workarounds for that. I mean the other stuff. The expectations.” He pauses, then adds, “We’re supposed to lead, right? Keep the chaos in check. But when you’re the one everyone looks to for the call, you can’t really admit you don’t always have it. That you’re just hedging your bets, same as anyone else.”

Robby nods. He knows what he’s about to disclose before he knows why he even wants to disclose it in the first place. Maybe, he thinks, it’s because Jack offered him something tender. Maybe, he thinks, it’s because he wants to do the same in return.

“The person who called me,” Robby begins, and it comes out quieter than he means it to, almost like a confession. “Jake’s mom. We’d been together for a couple of years. It was the longest relationship I’ve ever been in, but it’s — well, it’s pretty much over. She always used to tell me I don’t ask for help until everything’s already on fire.”

Jack turns toward him slightly. He doesn’t speak, he doesn’t press, but he’s listening. It’s the first time either of them has broached this particular subject between them.

“It used to just —” Robby snaps his fingers, his voice dipping. “It’d make me so angry, every time. But, maybe she was right. I guess I thought not asking for help was just being self-sufficient. Like it was normal, or something. But half the time it was probably just pride. Or fear.”

Jack doesn’t ask about Janey. He doesn’t ask how a four-year relationship could be the longest one Robby’s ever had or what, exactly, it is that he’s so afraid of. Instead, he says, very softly: “I don’t know, brother. You didn’t do too bad a job of it over the phone.”

The glow of passing headlights paints the rainwater silver on the car windows. Robby watches the light of it catch in Jack’s hair, where a few droplets still cling and glint in the dark. He looks at him, looks, and keeps looking, and though Jack is looking back, Robby can’t begin to guess what it is he sees. He only knows there’s a pull in his chest at the green in Jack’s eyes. He only knows that space between them feels impossibly vast and that, with a realization that feels almost like a miserable and painful ache, he wants very badly to cross it.

“Yeah,” Robby says instead, voice a little rough. “I guess I didn’t.”

Jack doesn’t say anything to that. What is there, really, to say? Instead, he just holds Robby’s gaze for a moment longer – something flickering there, something thoughtful and unreadable – before unbuckling his seatbelt and opening the door.

Rain rushes in for a moment, cool and clean, the scent of it cutting through the thick August heat. Jack steps out with a last thank you, and they exchange something about their schedules, words Robby forgets almost immediately by the time Jack has pulled up his food and headed towards the lobby doors.

Robby watches him go, eyes tracing the slight shift in Jack’s gait, the slightly off-kilter rhythm of it, as he disappears into the building.

Robby doesn’t take the car out of park immediately. Instead, he just sits there for a while, hands loose on the wheel, listening to the soft percussion of rain against the windshield, watching the space where Jack once stood, but no longer fills.

Chapter Text

The chapel is warm despite the cool bite of October and the afternoon sun slips into the room through stained-glass windows, casting fractured waves of iridescent color — cardinal, cobalt, and gold — across pew after pew of funeral mourners. If nothing else, Robby thinks to himself, the Catholics at least have a knack for the aesthetics. It’s almost impressive how they made time for something as delicate and time-consuming as stained-glass windows, between all those centuries of sieges, crusades, and expulsions.

He sits near the back, a program folded once and held loosely in his hand. To his side, sitting so closely that Robby can trace the scent of his cologne whenever he leans over to whisper, sits Jack. He doesn’t recognize what scent it is he’s wearing, has no nose for scent profiles besides knowing that it’s deep and musky, that it’s the kind of smell that invites rather than repels, perhaps especially because Jack wearing cologne is itself a novelty. He also knows that it fits Jack entirely, like so many things do — like the well-fitted suit he’s wearing, like how the deep black of his blazer contrasts with the grey in his hair, like how the diffused glow of the sun through the windows catches in the green of his eyes.

They hadn’t come together, but they’d arrived at the same time, falling into step at the door to the church and remaining that way since.

Neither of them knew Ms. Udinese well, but they’d both treated her more than once. She’d come into the ER with abdominal pain when Jack first started and returned two weeks later with enough Italian cookies to feed all the nurses. She’d thanked Robby personally, because, as she put it, he made her feel heard in a way few doctors had done. They’d seen her again a few times after that: a brief episode as a side-effect of her medication, a persistent issue with her sciatic nerve, a nasty bout of dehydration during the summer heatwave.

In one of life’s bitter ironies, the last time Robby and Jack saw Mrs. Udinese, they did not tend to her chronic back pain or her endometritis, but to her rapid bleeding, her collapsing lungs. Sitting in the pews ahead, Robby recognizes his other patient by the cast on her arm; the girl who’d been rushed into the emergency room behind her teacher, clipped by the same driver at the school crosswalk but spared the worst of the blow.

“I think half of the people in this room are her students,” Jack murmurs beside him, voice low as one speaker shuffles out for another. He shifts, hands clasped loosely on his lap. “Kinda impressive that all these teenagers showed up for this.”

Robby watches the girl in the front pew dab her eyes with a tissue that’s already soaked through. “She must’ve been a special one,” he says quietly. Then, glancing back down at the program in his hand, he adds, “She’d just turned forty in December.”

Jack doesn’t respond right away. His eyes stay forward, unmoving, but there’s a heaviness to his posture that Robby notices more acutely now, a kind of tiredness that slips into his voice when he speaks. “You know what they say,” he tells him, “only the good die young.”

Given the ever-turning tide of staffing shortages at the hospital, Robby’s rarely had the luxury of attending the funerals he’s been invited to. Now, standing in the stillness left behind by prayer and mourning, he feels a flash of uncertainty about what to do next. For the most part, at the hospital, he knows how to meet death head-on. For the most part, he knows how to comfort grieving strangers. He knows there’s no right thing to say in the stunned hush that follows a flatline, but he also knows what words ought to be avoided. His is a profession not only of medicine, mentorship, and wrangling med students — it’s a profession of meeting grief in its most immediate, rawest form over and over and over again and it is work Robby does sincerely, and often intuitively, but that isn’t to say there aren’t strategies.

Funerals are a different ballgame. To Robby, this quiet ritualization of loss, this small pew-bound ache, is less familiar, less neatly-contained by the bounds of work. So, being here necessitates a series of guesses: what to say and to whom, when to slip out without seeming unfeeling. And not just that — how to present himself, how to strike the right balance of warmth and respect without bristling under the well-meaning attention that tends to follow once people realize he’s a doctor. The praise, the gratitude, and sometimes even the wary glances that question whether he and Jack were factors of the loss instead of witnesses to it. It’s all a part of the choreography, and while Jack seems to navigate it with relative ease, it’s a dance Robby’s never quite mastered.

After they’ve both made a few rounds of quiet conversation, and Robby has well and truly reached his threshold, Jack straightens beside him, gives a knowing tilt of his head toward the doors, and, with an inward burst of relief, that’s all the permission Robby needs to follow him out. Outside the chapel doors, the late afternoon light is less golden now, edged with the beginning of dusk.

“Dr. Robinavitch?” a voice says behind him. “Dr. Abbot?”

Robby turns to find a woman who must be in her early forties: familiar eyes, hair as chestnut as Ms. Udinese’ was. She’s manicured, but she wears her grief like a veil, coloring the way her hands twist at the strap of her handbag, the way her eyes look weary from crying.

“I just wanted to say thank you for coming,” she says, after introducing herself as Maura. “This would’ve meant a lot to my sister. She thought the world of you and your hospital.”

Robby shifts, uneasy in the face of thanks he doesn’t feel he’s entirely earned, given the circumstances. “She was a good woman,” he says, meaning it. “It was an honor to treat her.”

The woman nods, swallowing visibly. “She said she felt safe there. Even when she was scared and she often was, you know. In hospitals.”

“Carolyn, scared? ,” Jack says, a smile tugging at the edge of his mouth. “The woman we knew was tough as nails. Probably had to be, to deal with all those kids in there.”

“Oh, they gave her hell,” Maura laughs, tenderly. “She used to tell me that she could still feel her ears ringing hours after dismissal. But they were her kids.” She tilts her head, a quiet curiosity in her eyes. “Do you have any of your own?”

“Only one,” Robby says, which is true in its own way. “I can’t imagine managing a roomful of them. We owe the world to our teachers.”

“And to our medical workers,” she adds.

“I wish we could’ve done more for her,” he says gently, not sure whether he’s saying it for her or for himself. “I’m sorry we couldn’t.”

“Thank you,” she says, which strikes him as a better answer than it’s okay. “There’s nothing to be sorry for, I just — I wanted to thank you both for showing up. In my experience, most doctors can’t even be bothered to respond to an invitation.”

The words land with some bitterness, and Robby feels the sting of them — because she’s right. Because the work they do is brutal enough and Robby can’t spite anyone in his profession for not having the emotional real estate to take on any more of it. If he’s honest, Jack had been the one to convince Robby to come out to this in the first place. Had tilted his head, given him that look — that one that was quickly proving that Jack had a knack for seeing right through the heart of Robby’s excuses — and said “You’ll feel better if you go.”

And Robby hadn’t really argued after that. Once he knew Jack would also be in attendance, he found he didn’t want to half as much.

Jack steps in before the moment can stretch, his tone calm but steady. “More of us would come if we could,” he says. “It’s not always easy, with the way staffing works, but believe me when I say more of us wanted to be here. You probably know, she helped us set up that partnership with the lower school, so we could send staff over for flu shots. With any luck, we’ll have on-site vaccinations by next year.”

This is something, Robby notes, that Jack does at work and does well. Whenever pain hits that terrible intersection of unbearable and unfixable, he offers something tangible to hold onto.

The woman exhales, her expression softening. “She was proud of that,” she says. “Said it made her feel useful — like she was part of something bigger.” She reaches out and touches Robby’s arm gently. “Again, I’m grateful you’re here. I know she would’ve been, too. You have my number, if you ever need it.”

Robby offers a small smile, but as he glances over at Jack, he catches the way his eyes fall briefly to the woman’s hand. Like the warmth of her touch on his forearm, it’s a look that’s over as quickly as it begins, but something about it tugs at Robby, makes him feel something like relief when she excuses herself to greet someone else.

For a few seconds, neither of them speaks. Then, quietly, he says, “If I’d known it meant so much to her, I would’ve told her she had you to thank. I wouldn’t have come if it weren’t for you.”

Jack’s gaze lingers ahead, somewhere past the crowds, in the direction where Maura slipped away to. It makes sense, Robby thinks. She was beautiful. “Nah,” Jack says. “You would’ve. You need a little shove now and then, but you usually make the right call at the end.”

“Usually?” Robby asks, aiming for lightness. “Not always?”

“Let’s not push it,” Jack tells him. “You remember that kid with abdominal pain last week? The one we went back and forth on for an hour?”

“The one you were convinced had appendicitis on the wrong side?”

“Did have appendicitis on the wrong side,” Jack corrects. “Whole damn anatomy flipped. You argued me into the ground when you could’ve just trusted my gut and saved the poor kid some grief.”

“You were talking about something that affects less than 1% of the population. I was being thorough.”

“That’s not what I would’ve called it.”

Robby shrugs. The truth is he was being stubborn — can often be that way, in fact, if in a bad enough mood already — and that’s precisely why he’s not going to admit it. “Aren’t you still on probation?” he says instead. “You’ve got to wait for job security before you can start mouthing off to your superiors.”

“Oh, is that what you are? My superior?” Jack asks, his smile sharp and teasing. Then, as if the thought just drifts in, he adds: “You ever become much of a smoker? After I first met you?”

“I was a smoker when you met me,” Robby admits, a little bashfully. “I probably didn’t say as much then. I was still telling myself it didn’t count if I only smoked around exams.”

“Hell of a lot of exams in med school.”

“Which made for a hell of a lot of smoking. Kicked the habit a couple of years back.”

Jack hums, duly impressed. “How do you feel about picking it up again, for old time’s sake?”

They end up under the trees beside the chapel lot, the pavement cold underfoot. Jack lights both cigarettes after two tired attempts from his old lighter and passes one to Robby, who accepts it wordlessly. The breeze picks up a little, threading through the dry leaves overhead.

“I didn’t think you still did this,” Robby says eventually.

“I don’t, really,” Jack replies, exhaling slow and steady. “Got a few loosies off Dana, for bad days.” He pauses, then adds, “Speaking of, if she finds out I knocked you off the wagon, she’ll kick my ass six ways from Sunday.”

“I won’t tell if you won’t,” Robby says. They lapse into silence again, smoke curling up between them, faint and fragile in the cold air. For a while, all Robby does is breathe it in and watch Jack out of the corner of his eye, trying to measure his words. The loss of a patient is not something either of them take lightly, but he’s seen him look a lot better through a lot worse.

“This an especially bad day for you, Jack?” Robby asks, finally.

Jack looks at him, and the expression that passes over his face is something unguarded, like he’s been discovered in the middle of something he thought he’d otherwise kept neatly concealed. He smiles tiredly, then brings his hand to his face, palm scraping over his jaw as if he’s trying to decide whether to resist or lean in.

“My wife was hit by a drunk driver,” he answers, without preamble. “Pretty similar MO to what happened with Ms. Udinese, actually. I didn’t really think about it until we’d already lost her. She was stopped at a crosswalk. He was going forty over, didn’t even try to brake.”

Robby doesn’t respond at first. He just watches the way Jack’s jaw tenses, the way the smoke trails from the corner of his mouth, before his eyes flick briefly to the dark band still resting on Jack’s wedding finger. “How long ago did it happen?”

“September marked two years,” Jack says, and Robby exhales at that, almost wincing. He didn’t know. Jack had never told him. He only requested a few days off that month and returned to work a little quieter for the wear.

“You know I made it through three tours?” Jack goes on. “Couple of IEDs. Took a bad shot to the side once that tore right under the ribs. Even crawled my way out of a half-blown Humvee,” he adds, kicking his right foot a little, a dry, almost ironic gesture that says the rest. “And then she just . . . dies a mile from home on a Tuesday night.”

“I’m sorry,” Robby says. He hates how small it sounds, how little words have to offer when one needs them to convey the most. “I know what that woman said in there, but if you’d wanted to skip out on this, none of us would’ve blamed you. Least of all me.”

“Nah. It meant something to be here,” Jack says. “And I figured you’d get it, even if I don’t — well, I know don’t talk about any of it much.”

“I get it,” he says, meaning it. He knows guilt all too well. “You don’t have to if you don’t want to.”

“Yeah, I think that’s the problem, though,” Jack tells him. He must read the little flicker of curiosity on Robby’s face, because he takes a drag of his cigarette, measuring his words. “I want to talk about her all the goddamn time. Something’ll happen at work or at the gym, wherever, and I’ll remember something she said, or some dumb story, but bringing her up turns into this whole production.”

Jack exhales, brows furrowed around some problem he’s working out in real time. “I left because everything back home reminded me of her,” he continues. “Thought it’d help and it did, but now I’m here, and no one knows her. So, it’s like I have to keep introducing her to people, over and over again, or not at all. Feels like I left her behind, which makes no fucking sense, because she’s not there either.”

“That makes plenty of sense,” Robby tells him. “Look, this isn’t a solution. And I don’t know if this even means anything, but if — well, if you wanted to, you could tell me about her. I’d listen.”

Jack gives him a look. “Nobody wants to hear about some guy’s dead wife, Robby. I mean, Christ, that’s what this whole fucking rant’s been about — nobody wants to hear it.”

“I do,” Robby tells him, earnestly. “She was your partner. You’re my — ”

“Subordinate?” Jack offers.

“My friend, you clown,” Robby chides, though he can’t help but catch Jack’s smile, inwardly relieved to see it. “I mean it, man. I mean it. If you’ve got it in you to make one more introduction, I’m game.”

Jack gives a soft, huffing laugh, almost like it surprises him. “I don’t think you know what you’re asking for,” he says, his smile crooked and a little tender at the edges. “I’ve got stories. If you think I’m crazy, she was worse. Had to be, I think, to marry me in the first place.”

He doesn’t look at Robby as he speaks, gaze fixed on a distant point in the parking lot, like her memory’s still hovering out there somewhere, just out of reach. Robby follows the line of Jack’s stare toward the edge of the lot where the sun’s beginning to dip behind the low trees, the sky all smeared color and lengthening shadow now. It’s setting so much earlier now, he thinks, a little wistfully. It’ll be dark by the time either of them get home and what a tender thing this is indeed for Jack to carry with him into the darkness.

“You’re off for the rest of the day, right?” Robby asks then. “Wanna grab a drink?”

Jack turns, glancing over at him with a flicker of dry amusement. “It’s not even five o’clock.”

“It’s a bad day. I figure we can get away with it. Get started on those crazy stories.”

There’s a pause. Jack studies him a second longer than necessary, and smiles that familiar smile of his — cool, and easy, and a little fond. “You asking me out, Robinavitch?”

“Don’t get excited,” Robby tells him. “You haven’t seen the state of this bar.”

It’s a dive, like Robby promised it’d be, but it takes very little time to get there. Narrow and dim, with decor that looks like it hasn’t been updated in decades and a playlist that favors Springsteen and Dylan. They slide into a booth near the back, out of range from the regulars and the early round of fledgling couples, preening through their first dates.

It takes a little coaxing over their first round of beers, but Jack makes good on his promise to tell Robby some stories. After that, the conversation comes companionable and light, and they move from his wife’s stubborn loyalty to a cross-border dentist to Robby’s lifelong aversion to them, from the stray dog she once tried to smuggle home after an appointment to the old, to half-blind shih tzu Robby’s grandmother adopted on a whim and Jack’s own childhood mutt.

It’s an easy exchange, one anecdote leading smoothly into another, until afternoon turns to evening and they settle on ordering food. Jack leans back against the booth, one arm slung along the top of the seat, watching the muted flicker of the TV above the bar until he speaks again.

“You think that woman at the funeral was into you?” Jack asks, apropos to nothing.

Robby blinks. “What?”

“The sister,” Jack says, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “She touched your arm. Looked at you like you solved world hunger.”

Robby lets out a short, surprised laugh. “You think? At her sister’s funeral?”

“She wouldn’t be the first,” Jack says, and he takes a drink from his glass, eyes still fixed on the television screen. Then, he sets it down and tells him, “You must not go to a lot of funerals. Grief does weird things to people, man.”

“Then she’s got enough on her plate already,” Robby replies. “Besides, she’s not very fond of asshole doctors who have to be dragged to their patients' funerals.”

“Lucky for her, that isn’t you.”

“You don’t think so?”

“Not usually,” Jack says, jokingly. He pauses, messing with the edge of his coaster before speaking again. “I’m gonna ask you something.”

“Sure. Ought to be good if you have to announce it.”

“If you tell me it’s off the table, then, brother, it’s off the table.”

“Sure,” Robby repeats, for emphasis. “Let’s hear it.”

“I wouldn’t want to jeopardize my standing with a superior and all.”

Robby huffs a laugh. “Should I just go get the food myself, give you some more time to stall?”

Jack levels a look at him, mildly affronted, and it gives Robby a little flash of satisfaction. No wonder Walsh is always trying to get a rise out of him. “You’ve told me about Janey,” he says at last. “There was that thing after with, uh – the runner — Brenna. And Dana keeps threatening to set you up with her friend from ortho.”

“Yeah, I’m starting to get the feeling she’s not joking.”

“That’s because she’s not,” Jack deadpans. Then, more carefully: “Here’s the question. Is that all you go for these days? Brennas and Janeys?”

Robby knows what Jack’s asking immediately and though he shouldn't feel anything at the implication, he does — a small, dangerous thrum of something at the thought that this is something that ever crossed Jack’s mind in the first place.

“Yeah, for the most part,” Robby answers. “What, are you trying to set me up with someone, too?”

“I could think of a couple of guys who’d jump at the chance, yeah,” Jack throws back at him, easily. His voice lowers, not exactly serious, but there’s an undercurrent of something earnest there, just beneath the surface. “It’s not like I expect you to go around waving a flag. You just never say anything about it. That’s all.”

“Neither do you,” Robby says, throwing it right back at him.

Jack meets his eyes, steady. “You never asked.”

“I didn’t think I could,” he answers. “I mean, we work together. And I’m not your boss but, when Adamson retires . . .” He hears how thin it sounds as he says it, so he ends on something true: “And for a while there, I thought — well, I thought you were still married.”

That admission hangs in the air for a moment too long, like something that might lead them to uncharted waters if either of them would only wade in a little deeper. The waitress arrives then, setting down their food with practiced efficiency, and neither of them speaks until she’s gone except to thank her.

“Well, now you’ve got your out,” Jack says lightly, tipping the edge of his glass toward the television screen before finishing it off.

It’s unclear if Jack means the game, or the conversation, but somehow, to Robby, it feels like neither, like both. He follows Jack’s gesture, but absorbs none of what he sees on screen, fiddling instead with the label of his beer, peeling the edge back his fingernail.

He knows what Jack is doing. He can see the artifice in how aptly he’s watching the game now – the Pens aren’t that interesting – perhaps because he’s become better at reading him, perhaps also because Robby is putting on the same performance. Then, carefully, like it’s nothing: “Do you, still?”

Robby doesn’t even know what exactly it is that he’s asking — Do you still fuck men? Do you love them? Do you ever? – but Jack doesn’t even blink before he answers.

“Yeah,” he says, easy as anything.

“Did your wife know?” Robby asks, before he can think better of why he wants to know in the first place. “I don’t usually . . . I’ve not told most of the women I’ve dated.”

“I think she put it together,” Jack says. “I wasn’t hiding it, but I didn’t really think it mattered. I guess I figured there wouldn’t ever be anyone else besides her.”

Before Robby can reply, before he can even fully process the answer, a roar erupts from the TV above the bar as Johnson blows a two-on-one break. Jack whistles low, unimpressed.

“Jesus Christ,” he mutters, shaking his head. “You’d think they’re paying him to fuck us over.”

Robby huffs a laugh, a little too quickly. He’s grateful for the shift only a fraction less than he’s disappointed by it. “You say that about half the team.”

“Doesn’t mean I’m wrong,” Jack tosses back, reaching for the basket of fries between them.

And just like that, they’re talking about the game, about goalies and trades and who’s getting too old for the ice, as if either of them could manage half the shit even the worst of the team can do on an off day. But the air feels different now, Robby thinks, and he suspects Jack feels it, too, even if neither of them stops to say it.

What starts that night becomes a quiet routine: beers shared with the team in the park behind the hospital whenever they’re both done working the day-shift. Later, a couple of scuffed-up bars with decent food and better liquor. Eventually, nights that end back at one apartment or the other, the TV playing low, shoes kicked off at the door.

Robby is and has always been a man slow to trust and perhaps that is why he slips into this partnership — this thing he has with Jack the way one might slip into cold waters: a sharp edge at first, all painful anticipation before the body adjusts, discovering it feels warmer, more pleasant, once fully submerged.

He, of course, has other friends. Old friends from college, from other hospitals, from his brief life in New Orleans and and his much longer life here in Pittsburgh. He is friends with Dana and her husband, and he would call Adamson a friend if he wasn’t such an idol. In recent months, he has even salvaged something like a friendship with Janey.

But what he has with Jack is different.

It is not just a matter of how they work together. It’s not just the natural consequence of their forced proximity at the hospital, or their parallel roles as Adamson’s favorites. It’s how Jack understands him, isn’t afraid to check him, and takes as good as he gives. It’s how he sees Robby, clearly and cleanly, and somehow knows what to do with what he finds.

And maybe it’s because of that — because this friendship they’ve forged is so easy, so unearned in its comfort — that Robby has been careful not to touch the edges. To want more would be to risk something that already feels like grace, like Esau forfeiting his birthright to Jacob for a bowl of food, famished and short-sighted, unable to see past the ache of all his wanting.

Because the problem isn’t just Jack’s loss, two years old and still spring-tender, or Robby’s recent breakup with Janey, or the short-lived flings that he slipped in and out of through the months that followed.

It’s that Robby is no longer the man he was when Jack last kissed him: earnest, unbruised, and still hopeful about his capacity to become a better man. Time and time again, he has learned the hard way that he cannot allow anyone close without also keeping them at arm’s length. That the relationships he’s had last more than a few brief months tend to curdle into something unsalvageable in the end, until whatever care was there at the start goes up in smoke completely. He has loved, often very badly, and had less and less of himself to offer to the next person every time.

The other problem, of course, is that Jack is an incorrigible flirt.

He does it indiscriminately, almost artfully, with the surgeons, with patients, with Dana and the nurses — not just Princess but Jesse, too — and all of it wrapped in that easy air of his, that disarming grin. And then, Robby thinks, there’s whatever the fuck he’s got going on with Walsh.

So when Jack throws those same sparks Robby's way, it’s hard to think they mean anything at all. Because, in all likelihood, Robby’s just one more recipient of Jack’s casual charm: harmless, habitual, fun precisely because it is empty of any real intent.

But then there was that night at the bar. The question Jack asked, carefully and curiously, about whether or not Robby was still interested in men. The question itself shouldn’t have meant much, and yet there was something strange about the asking. Something in the way Jack had looked at him, like he already knew the answer and just wanted to see how Robby would shape the truth.

They’re on Jack’s couch when Robby finally works up the nerve to ask him about it. The TV murmurs in the background, the Pens game set at low volume, and Jack’s laptop sits open on the coffee table next to his drink, cycling through muted CME videos he doesn’t need to watch closely. Every few minutes, he absently reaches forward to click through to the next module, his attention mostly elsewhere.

Robby shifts, pressing the can of beer in his hand lightly against his knee before glancing over. “After that funeral we went to, back in October,” he begins, easing into it. “Why’d you ask whether or not I still sleep with men?”

Jack lifts his brows. “I don’t think that’s what I asked you.”

“It’s what you meant.”

Jack leans back, stretching out his leg a little, the laptop screen casting a faint glow on his knee. “I don’t really remember why,” he says. “It was a weird day. I was in a weird mood.”

“You already knew the answer. I mean, I’d think it was obvious, given how we met.”

“Sure, but things change,” Jack tells him. Then, somewhere between a joke and a confession, he admits: “For a second there, I thought you were going to tell me I scared you off men forever.”

“You think a weekend with you could do that, huh?”

“I think a weekend with me can do a lot of things,” he says, in that tone he always uses when he’s bragging.

Robby laughs. “Like what, conversion therapy? Turning me straight?”

“Well, when you put it that way, no. Maybe not that,” Jack says, sharing his laughter. Then he adds, a little more offhand: “I just used to wonder about you, after we met. Couldn’t tell if I was the first guy, or one of many.” Jack catches Robby’s expression and shakes his head, mock-offended. “Jesus. You drag me into this whole heart-to-heart and then you laugh at me? I’ve got CME's to finish, you asshole.”

“You were ignoring those with or without me,” Robby says. “Besides, I’m just trying to picture it. You in bootcamp, doing drills, wondering if I spent all of med school on my back.”

“I hate to disappoint you, but it’s not all Saving Private Ryan, all the time. The mind wanders.”

Robby hums. “So it wandered my way?”

“On occasion,” Jack tells him, and there’s something there, Robby can hear it in the tone of his voice, the drop of his eyes, but he moves on quickly, easily. “You were the last normal experience I had for a few years then. I wondered about you.”

Robby lets Jack’s words settle between them. What exactly was it, the full shape of what Jack was wondering about? If Robby was just as closeted as he always felt he seemed? If he’d forgotten Jack the moment the door closed behind him? Whatever the case, he doesn’t know whether or not to tell him the full truth of those answers, doesn't know how to say there’d been men, but none like him, and Robby never quite figured out why that was.

Instead, Robby says: “You weren’t a fluke, if that’s what you were wondering. There were a few guys before you. A few after. But I’d never . . . whenever I’ve had anything serious, it’s always been with women.”

Jack doesn’t respond right away. He draws in a breath, slow and thoughtful, and his lips press together like he’s holding something back before he turns the TV off, reaches for his beer on the coffee table, and takes a drink. Robby watches the movement, feels a flicker of guilt rise in his chest, a strange urge to explain himself. What he’s said is the truth — but it lands with a strange, inward sting. It never felt like a deliberate choice, but rather the unplanned sum of small avoidances, a pattern that solidified before he could name it. It wasn’t what he meant to do, but it’s where he’s landed, all the same.

Jack sets his glass down. He leans in slightly, just enough to close some of the space between them, and asks: “Do you know how nervous I was the first time I saw you?”

Robby lets out a quiet laugh. “Bullshit. You weren’t nervous. You had — you had all these lines.”

“Bad ones,” Jack replies. “I don’t remember a damn thing I said, which is probably for the better, but I remember you were just — you looked like something out of a magazine, man. And then we got back to your place, and it was a nice fucking place for a student, and you had all these books everywhere. Real ones, not How to Win Friends and Influence People bullshit. And I remember thinking: any minute now, this guy’s gonna figure me out and send me packing.”

“You make it sound as if I brought you home out of charity or something,” Robby says, a little baffled. “I didn’t let you leave my place for three days. What’d you think that was all about?”

“Well, I’ve always thought of myself as a great conversationalist.”

Robby snorts. “We weren’t having that much conversation. And what’s with this, you playing humble? Did you not own a mirror?”

“I did. And I was a lot rounder then, around the face.”

“You were young,” Robby says, softer now. “We both were.”

“I still am,” Jack replies.

“What I mean is it takes a while for anyone to grow into their face,” Robby tells him. “And you’ve got nothing to complain about. Not then, but certainly not now.”

Jack tilts his head, and there’s something flickering behind his eyes as he says, “Yeah? You think so?”

And the way Jack says it, quiet, half-smiling, and certain, lands in Robby’s ears like so you’ve been looking. And he has, of course he has, and he doesn’t have it in him to care about why he ever pretended otherwise.

He doesn’t even register the moment he reaches out until his hand comes to rest on Jack’s thigh. It is cold in this room but Jack runs hot, Robby’s palm landing warm against warm, and he can feel the quick tension of muscle beneath his fingertips, the sudden breath held in Jack’s body. He almost pulls away, but then Jack relaxes, and he doesn’t know if this is permission or a trap but perhaps it’s all sunken-costs anyway; he’s already here, too deliberate to pretend any of this is an accident, and so he moves his hand instead, thumb dipping lower to the inside of Jack’s thigh, soothing back and forth, back and forth, where the skin is warmer, more intimate.

Jack catches Robby’s hand. For a brief and terrible moment, Robby thinks he means to rebuff him, but then he slides his thumb up the soft flesh of Robby’s wrist, the pad of his thumb resting against his pulse there, as if to feel the pace of it, the thrill it reveals.

“What’re you doing?” Jack asks him and damn him, he knows. Robby knows he knows. He just wants to make him say it.

”Whatever you want,” Robby tells him. He means it — god, he means it. Whatever, anything, even the scraps.

There’s a breath between them and then something like inertia pulling their foreheads close: a nudge of noses, the accidental brush of Robby’s mouth against Jack’s cheek as he leans in. This close up, Robby can feel the soft ghost of Jack's breathing, could just twist his face at the right angle and catch the brief swipe of Jack's tongue as he wets his lips. 

The kiss, when it comes, lands quiet and deliberate. Jack makes a sound at it, faint and involuntary, a little hum as if amused or wounded. It’s enough that Robby kisses him again just to savor it more the second time around: first, the noise Jack makes, then the scratch of his stubble, then the faint taste of beer on his tongue.

The next kiss is faster, less careful. Then another, and another: no rhythm at first, just readjustments until they set a heady pace, breath caught between teeth and something loosening within them with each turn.

Robby shifts closer without thinking, scrambling so far over Jack that he might as well climb onto his lap — one hand braced on the couch for balance, the other finding purchase on the back of Jack’s neck and pulling duly there, bringing him closer. Jack hadn’t just changed into comfortable clothing before Robby had gotten here. He’d also showered, he realizes now: he can smell his shampoo when he threads his fingers in the salt-and-pepper of Jack’s curls, and if he were only to break away from kissing him and nuzzle into the freckled skin of neck, he could get a better smell of it, almost taste it.

Let me have this, Robby thinks — to himself, to god, to whatever might be listening — as Jack breaks away long enough to rattle out his name, breathless and half-shaken. Let me have this, who cares for how long, he thinks again as Jack’s hands slip under his t-shirt, palms warm against his stomach.

Robby could go on kissing him like this for hours and, if he got nothing else to show for it, he'd perhaps walk away satiated. But, he wants more. He kisses his mouth, then up along the line of Jack's jaw, all the way to the spot behind his ear that makes Jack's shoulder hitch when he does it, and he wants more. Jack touches him, hand sliding between Robby's legs and cupping him through his jeans, and Robby presses into his palm, chasing the contact, the pressure, the heat. He wants more. It might very well be the thing that ruins him, but he wants more. 

He doesn’t think about it, because thinking would only slow him down. Robby just moves, slipping off the couch and settling between Jack’s knees, the coffee table skirting noisily as Robby pushes it behind him. His hands find anchor on Jack’s thighs, steadying them both, and when he looks up, Jack is watching him in a stunned sort of stillness, eyes dark, lips parted, like he can’t quite keep pace with what’s happening.

Robby sees it then — the press of Jack’s arousal against the fabric of his pants — and breathes easier. It steadies him, to know there’s something Jack needs that Robby can give him, something that might place them on even ground, if only for a little while.

“Did you ever think of me?” Jack asks him. “After I left you?”

“Of course I did,” Robby says, like it’s obvious, because surely — surely it has to be. He reaches for the waistband of Jack’s pants, hands a little too eager. “You know I did.”

But Jack pulls back slightly, enough to make him pause. “Say it anyway,” he says. “Maybe I want to hear it.”

It sounds too much like a plea to feel like a command, but it’s there — the hint of it, the possibility that, if Robby can ever get away with doing this again, Jack might boss him around next time.

Robby leans back, studies Jack’s face, trying to intuit what he wants to hear. “I thought about you every day for a month afterward,” he says at last, settling on the truth. “I thought about you through two break ups. I let a stranger fuck me once, just because he had your name.”

“Jesus,” Jack says, a little dazed. “What’d you let him do to you, when you thought of me?”

Robby hears, rather than feels, his breath hitch a little on the exhale. “That what you want, Jack?”

“Go on,” he answers, spreading his legs a little, inviting him forward. “Tell me.”

Robby nods, his throat suddenly dry. He swallows and reaches forward, hands steady despite the pulse thrumming hard beneath his skin, unfastening Jack’s pants for him, feeling rather than seeing the weight and heat of his gaze all the while. He draws the fabric down over the thick solidity of Jack’s thighs, leaving them bunched at his knees, ample enough space for what he needs right now.

Then he pauses, settling back on his heels, giving himself a moment to look.

Jack is stretched out in front of him, thighs solid and spread, a smattering of dark hair over the subtle dips and hills of musculature. He lets his gaze linger over all that strength, the quiet confidence in the way Jack sits there, watching Robby watching him. And then Robby’s gaze lowers, open and shameless — the shape of his cock, a thick and straining suggestion against the dark material of his boxer briefs. In front of him again after all this time, separated not by miles, oceans, or years, but only this thin, inconsequential barrier of fabric.

Robby leans in before he even thinks to stop himself, burying his face in Jack’s lap, breathing him in like he needs it to survive. Something clean, like soap and skin and the faint edge of sweat. He reaches for Jack’s waistband and groans when he hears him hum no. “Fuck,” Robby murmurs, breath hitching. “Don’t make me fucking beg for it.”

Robby puts his mouth over the shape of him, the flat of his tongue dampening the cotton, and Jack groans, a low sound that catches in his throat. His hand finds Robby’s hair, threading in deep and steady. “Keep talking then,” Jack tells him, voice low. “You haven’t finished.”

Right. Robby blinks, slow and dazed. He’d already forgotten. “I let him use my mouth,” he continues. “We snuck into a bathroom and locked the door behind us. I sucked him off and I closed my eyes and imagined it was you.”

Jack’s free hand, the one that isn’t still buried in Robby’s hair, moves to his face. His thumb grazes Robby’s cheek, then his beard, then lingers at the edge of his lips. “Did you like it?” he asks. “Did it get you off?”

“Yeah,” Robby answers. “Yeah, but it wasn’t good enough. I never got — I never got to do that to you, back then. I wanted to know what you’d taste like, if I had. I swallowed him down, let him finish in my mouth, and imagined it.”

Jack makes a sound that’s nearly a groan. “Jesus fucking Christ, Robby.”

“It wasn’t enough,” Robby tells him. “He wasn’t you — god, Jack, I let him fuck me there, held myself up over the sink like a goddamned idiot just to make it work, and in the mirror, it wasn’t you. I kept saying your name, but it wasn’t you.”

Jack’s thumb presses into his mouth and Robby parts his lips around it without hesitation, almost embarrassed by how far this small gesture takes him. He closes his mouth around the intrusion, feels Jack’s thumb press against the flat of his tongue, then sucks. It’s nothing. It’s everything. A precursor to the real thing. More than he thought he’d get from him. Not enough.

Robby reaches for the band of Jack’s briefs, tugging gently, asking silently. Jack slips his hand back so he can answer with motion, lifting his hips just enough to help, and Robby slides both his underwear and pants down in one slow, careful motion. He peels them off completely, until Jack is bare in front of him — except, regrettably, for the soft cling of his T-shirt. He doesn’t remember what Jack’s cock looked like twenty years ago, but it doesn’t matter — it’s here now, exposed and lewd and standing at attention, and it’s better than anything he could’ve remembered anyway. He leans forward, eager to taste him, but then Jack’s hand tightens slightly in his hair – not painful, not rough, just enough to halt him.

“Easy,” he says, voice rough. “We don't have to hurry.”

For a second, Robby almost wants to laugh — because, don't they? Hasn’t there been so much time wasted already, and no promise of any more time left? In a few weeks, or days, or hours, Jack could regret this. With enough recklessness, Robby could give him reason to. He doesn’t know what to say that won’t betray this, so he says nothing at all, only reaches up to put his palm to Jack’s mouth and watch him recognize what it is he's asking for, spitting into his hand in response.

Robby takes what he’s given and strokes him slowly, indulgently, eyes pulling away from Jack’s face so he can watch what his hands are doing. He can only vaguely remember the last time he did this to another man, and he knows he didn't feel half this intense — knows he didn’t feel, with a kind of nervous bewilderment he hasn’t felt since his youth, like he could get off just on touching him alone.

“Look at you,” Robby says in a hush, and there’s a roughness to his voice that sounds foreign even to his own ears — eager from all his wanting, matched only by the energy of Jack buckling once, almost unintentionally, into the yawning movements of his hand.

“This is what you do to me,” Jack answers. “After all this time.”

Robby jerks him off in heavy, rhythmic motions. He takes his time — partly to make Jack regret asking for it this way, partly because Robby wants to watch every second of it, record it all for safe-keeping somehow, so he can go back to this and feed himself on the memory for the rest of his life. He wants to stare and stare, at the pink flush of Jack’s shaft in his hand, and the gleam of moisture at the head of his cock, and the sweat at the base of Jack’s neck, catching on the light of his living room. Jack’s eyes are closed tight, brows furrowed, so perhaps it comes as a surprise to him when Robby’s lips close over his cock, earning a deep, punched-out gasp from somewhere deep in Jack’s core.

It’s unbelievable. It’s heavy, and hot, and Robby’s never really cared all that much about size, but he likes the weight of Jack on his tongue, the comfortable stretch of him between his lips. He sucks him down a few inches, licking messily up the underside, getting him as wet as he can. Some of this is a matter of instinct, of practice, no matter how rusty. Some of it is what Robby knows he likes done to himself: the vibration of a hum while he has his mouth on him, the hollowing of his cheeks, the slick mess. The rest of it is the spontaneity of all his own wanting. He doesn’t know how hard he’s gripping onto Jack’s left thigh until he lets go of him, taking the base of his shaft in hand, fingers dipping to give his balls careful attention. He wants to touch all of him, run his tongue everywhere, would dip even lower and eat him out if he’d had the luxury of asking first.

Robby can’t remember the last time he did this. He can’t remember the last time he found himself on his knees like this in front of another man, but everything here and now is its own pleasure: not just the taste of him, but the wide splay of his legs between Robby’s broad shoulders. Not just the rush of satisfaction when Jack intuitively hooks a leg over one of Robby’s shoulders, but the fact that Jack’s thigh is tense, almost trembling, when he does it. Not just Jack’s hands in his hair, or the scratch of his nails on Robby’s scalp, but the sound of his roughened voice, saying his name — Robby, Robby, oh, fuck, Robby, and once Mike.

He thinks Jack called him baby once, when they were younger. At least, it was something he’d fantasized about a few times afterward, when Robby would touch himself and think of him — based, he thinks, in memory. Jack pulls at his hair in warning, groaning when Robby pointedly ignores it, letting Jack thrust up into his mouth, hit his soft palette, allowing him to come down his throat, and finally, finally, tasting him.

Yeah, he thinks absently, wiping at his mouth and his beard afterward. He’s almost certain Jack called him a baby once. And the word alone holds no real heat for Robby, but it’s the sweetness it reveals, the intimacy of a name only spoken when other words fail. Robby scrambles up from his knees, stumbling forward a bit by the force with which Jack pulls at the front of his shirt, and he wonders what it’d take for Jack to call him that again.

Robby wishes, afterward, that he’d let Jack come inside him.

He lays there on his back, catching his breath, and he wonders why it is he didn’t ask him to. The world isn’t what it used to be. This thing they’ve done, this thing they’ve returned to after all these years, doesn’t feel like a death sentence anymore. It doesn’t feel like holding a pistol to your temple and praying it misfires. It feels like the opposite. In Jack’s bed, beneath the low whir of the cooling system and the soft rhythm of their breathing, Robby has never felt more aware of being alive.

It’s good practice, of course, to use condoms. At the very least, Robby thinks, they had the wherewithal, between that hurried blowjob in the living room and the slower, more deliberate fuck in Jack's bedroom, to follow what they preach. But, some small part of him wonders what it might’ve felt like to forgo it, to feel so thoroughly taken and used by Jack, to feel the evidence of his pleasure pulse and fill such an intimate place inside of him, and know all the while that he made Jack do it. Maybe next time, if there’s a next time.

Jack is half-curled beside him, one arm tossed over his eyes, chest rising and falling in the slow drag of recovery. With the kind of courage Robby can only afford because he isn’t looking, he watches him carefully now. He studies the slope of Jack’s bare shoulders and the quiet part of his lips. His gaze lingers on the broad plane of his chest, littered with freckles and scars, until it settles on the silvered notch near his left ribs: a shallow dip in the skin, scar-silver, where Jack had once mentioned taking a bullet. Then, his focus drops to his thighs: one leading down to scarred skin, the other tapering to a foot that, absurdly, is just as beautiful as the rest of him. Even resting, he looks sculpted.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Robby had blurted out, when Jack finally pulled off his sweat-damp shirt and revealed himself fully before they moved to his bed. “This is — you’re insane. When do you even find time?”

“I make time,” Jack tells him, easy as anything.

“How? Bench-pressing between intubations?”

“Imagine what that’d do for our satisfaction scores,” he replies good-humoredly, because he’s so obviously pleased with how Robby is gawking. “I like the gym. I like turning my brain off.”

“You look like a Greek statue,” Robby responded, laughing in disbelief. “And I look — god, should we turn off the lights?”

Jack just looked at him like he was crazy, like he’d just asked Jack to commit some egregious, reprehensible crime. And then he undressed him with slow, deliberate care, his gaze hot and unflinching, and made Robby forget about the lights entirely. 

Now, with Jack half-dozing beside him, Robby reaches out without thinking. His skin is still damp with sweat, and Robby can feel the faint, steadying thrum of his heartbeat from where his fingers rest over his sternum. Jack doesn’t stir, but Robby watches the slight tightening around his eyes — a tension that flickers across his face before it smooths away again.

“I’ve got the morning shift. I should probably head out soon,” Robby tells him.

Jack opens his eyes at that, slow and heavy-lidded. He blinks a few times and breathes in deep, farther gone into sleep than Robby expected. There’s no obvious judgment in his eyes, moss-green and otherwise unreadable, but there’s some quiet thought there, behind his gaze.

“I just need to get cleaned up for tomorrow,” he adds, voice softer now. “I’m not disappearing.”

“Sure. I’ll see you at work,” Jack answers.

“Not like that,” Robby tells him. “I mean that — that we can keep doing this, if you want to.”

Jack hums low in his throat. “Is that right?” he asks, not unkindly, though the edge of skepticism is hard to miss.

Robby doesn’t answer right away. Instead, there’s a silence, warm and a little revealing. It’s strange, he thinks, how Jack can still manage to feel a little exposed now, while they’re both literally naked in his bed.

Jack breaks it first. “This doesn’t have to be complicated,” he says, voice rough with something like sleep. “If it’s easier that way.”

Robby nods once. “Yeah,” he says. “Easy’s good.”

He leans in before he can talk himself out of it, cupping the side of Jack’s face and kissing him; however tired he may have seemed, Jack kisses him back without hesitation, lips parting, hand sliding down to the dip of Robby’s back. He doesn’t go any further and a small, unreasonable part of Robby feels disappointed by that; it’d be so easy to let Jack slip two, three fingers back into him, like he’d done only half an hour before. His body would give way to him so easily — after what they've just finished doing, it wouldn’t take any work at all. It deepens quickly, tilts towards hungry, and then Jack breaks it, pulling back just enough to rest his forehead against Robby’s.

“If you don’t leave now,” he says, voice low and frayed, “you’re not going home.”

Robby closes his eyes at that, breathing hard. “Okay,” he says, after a moment. “Okay.”

And when he pulls back, it’s slow, and reluctant, but he does it.

They don't really talk about it. They don’t delineate neat rules or expectations. Instead, they make out the parameters of their arrangement through trial and error, like groping one’s way through an unfamiliar room in the dark.

If it’s late enough, they stay over at each other’s places. Robby leaves some clean clothes at Jack’s apartment, so he doesn’t have to walk back to his place in the early morning hours. In turn, Robby buys a shower seat for his bathroom and keeps Jack’s spare crutches in his hallway closet.

They don’t talk about it to anyone at work. They agree to this easily, because they’re both like-minded about maintaining some privacy at work. The job already demands so much from them. It’s nice to have something to withhold for a change.

They also take breaks — sometimes weeks at a time.

The first time it happens, Robby doesn’t ask for it outright. He just texts Jack casually, via text: “I’m taking Dana up on that friend of hers in ortho.” Jack’s response comes a minute later, a bit anticlimactic: a thumbs-up reaction to Robby’s message. In the end, it’s no great sacrifice for either of them. He sees Taylor only three times. It’s over when, after a mild, fourth attempt at dinner with her, Robby goes back to Jack’s apartment and fucks him face-first into the mattress.

The last time Robby dates someone, he doesn’t even bother telling Jack. He doesn’t even save her name on his phone. She’s a beautiful woman, and accomplished, and there’s nothing wrong with her — but then again, there was nothing exactly wrong with Taylor or the other woman he dated after her, either.

Jack keeps his ring on. He flirts at work like always, and for a while there’s a short-lived rumor among the younger residents that a firefighter asked for his number. Robby can’t make heads or tails of the conflicting stories he overhears from the baby docs, and Dana has nothing useful to offer when he asks. Whatever actually happened, Robby suspects that it sparks something in Jack because, for a few brief weeks that follow, Jack starts using condoms with him again — even though, by then, Robby has stopped seeing other people. Robby doesn’t ask who Jack’s sleeping with when it isn’t him. Jack, to his credit, never brings it up. Maybe, Robby thinks with bitterness he knows he has no right to feel, he doesn’t feel he needs to.

And yet there can be such tenderness. Enough, somehow, to leave Robby vaguely and regularly stunned. It’s in the way Jack stocks his fridge with the beer Robby drinks, and how easily they exchange keys to each other’s apartment. It’s there during the hellish stretch of overtime on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, the first time Robby peels off his scrubs on Jack’s bedroom floor and climbs under the blankets with him without a word. He tells himself, as he drifts off, that he’ll offer some kind of explanation: Jack’s place is closer to the hospital, his feet were killing him, it was practical.

But in the morning, Jack doesn’t ask and Robby keeps his excuses to himself, flimsy as they suddenly feel in the soft weight of daylight.

There’s the sex, of course. There’s the way Jack touches him there’s still something left of Robby for him to commit to memory, despite how quickly he learns what Robby likes. It doesn’t make a ton of sense — it’s Jack’s body that’s extraordinary — but Jack touches him like that all the same, as if there’s something about Robby still worth turning over in his hands and inspecting slowly, like a precious stone held up to light.

There’s the way Jack understands Robby's occasional need for respite from the long, taxing work of having to command and control every goddamn thing at the hospital: angry patients, nervous residents, well-intentioned students. There's the way Jack enjoys it, has the strength to put handle Robby and put him right where he wants him when Robby goads him to. Jack is good at reading him, of knowing when it is Robby just wants to let it all down after a long day and simply be led.

There’s the way, too, Robby treats him in turn — something Robby thought completely unremarkable, almost obvious, because who could put their hands on Jack Abbot and treat him otherwise? But, apparently, it seems to Jack like something novel.

They’re fresh out of the shower when Jack talks to him about it, sitting on the bed while Robby’s still toweling off. “You know,” he says, applying CBD lotion to his calves in smooth, circular motions, “people get really fucking weird about the leg.”

“You mean at work?” Robby asks him, tussling any lingering moisture out of his hair with his hand. “Weird how?”

“No, everyone’s fine at work. I mean with things like this,” Jack clarifies, motioning between them. “Either they pretend not to notice, or they make it their whole thing, like it’s something to get off on. It’s worse on the apps — people say the weirdest shit.”

Robby shoots him a look. “You’re on apps? That’s what the world’s come to? You’re too good for hooking up the old fashioned way?”

Jack rolls his eyes, but there’s the edge of a grin tugging at his mouth. “Get with the times, old man. You can do that on your phone now. Besides, I’m talking past tense.”

“Oh, so you’re back to the bars and alleyways?”

“Brother, I’m still recovering from the last time I went home with a shady character loitering by the bar dumpsters,” Jack says, watching Robby head to the dresser.

Robby opens the drawer Jack cleared for him weeks ago and pulls out a fresh change of clothes: boxers, a ratty t-shirt, a favorite precisely because it’s softened from familiar use. Before he pulls his boxers on or even discards his towel, Jack goes, “C’mere for a second. Before you get dressed.”

Robby does, and Jack looks pleased by it, wiping any residual lotion off his hands before resting them on Robby’s hips, hooking one of his thumbs between the towel, knotted at his waist, and Robby’s skin.

“Anyway,” Jack says, voice quieter now, “I appreciate how you’ve handled it. You didn’t look away, but you didn’t treat it like some . . . I don’t know, some fucking tragedy either.” There’s a pause, and then Jack adds, with a look that’s steadier than his voice, “You’re the only one who’s known me both ways. Before and after.”

Robby understands this more than he can explain. The literal truth is that he hasn’t changed quite so drastically: he’s gotten a little softer with age, and grayer, and he has tattoos he didn’t have in his twenties. It's not the same as losing a limb. But, he feels similarly divided by a before and after, who he was when Jack first met him and who he is now. He doesn’t know how to say this, feels some discomfort about the comparison, so he says nothing at all, wiping the droplet of water from Jack’s forehead, letting him tug at the towel until it goes undone.

Sometimes, it feels to Robby that there’s a shadow at the edge of what they’re doing.

A quiet, lingering reminder that this will end sooner or later, because things like this always do. Robby tells himself it’s fine, that he can keep it easy because they both agreed they would. It’s the only way, he thinks, to keep himself from blowing everything they’re building together into a million pieces. There are so few conditions to what they’re doing, he thinks, except perhaps the implicit, mutual assurance that this will end. When it does, Robby will at least have known it was coming.

The new year gives way to an especially punishing last chapter of winter, sleet sweeping in off the Monongahela River, bringing in a chill the city can’t seem to shake. And Robby and Jack keep going like that, drifting closer and further apart like buoys on the same current, never straying far enough to break away entirely.

The days have yet to grow longer. The news starts to turn strange. By late January, there are stories about a virus in China. But Robby isn’t paying attention. Not yet.

Chapter Text

VII. 2020

By April, the world has settled into a strange, suspended rhythm. It is too soon to glimpse the end, too late to pretend the virus burning through the city will pass quickly, and in the muted glow of Robby’s bedroom, Jack has stopped pretending to read the medical article on his phone. His mind is elsewhere, circling its questions. He wonders, for instance, how long before the worst of this is over, and how long before there are vaccines, and how long they can keep running like this — ever-expanding shifts, dwindling supplies, thinning morale — before running out of breath. He wonders what compelled Robby to text come over before he fell asleep, and why Jack listened: walking to his place after turning over for the dayshift, stripping at the door, showering, and finally climbing into Robby’s bed to surrender to a brief, unguarded sleep.

Except, no — Jack knows why he listened, why he came over, why he always comes when Robby calls. Even if it’s something he keeps circling, still stalling to name, like lingering on the edge before plunging into ice-cold waters. The water isn’t getting any warmer. The truth isn’t getting any easier. Run as much as you can, Jack recalls once thinking to himself, but you’ve never been much of a runner.

Looking at Robby now, watching him lick his thumb before turning the page of the biography he’s reading, Jack wonders now what it might mean to navigate the dark months ahead with Robby, and how long they will keep collapsing into each other at the end of nearly every shift instead of returning to otherwise empty apartments.

It’s been a few months now since Jack and Robby began hooking up. That it might have been, in a certain light, a predictable turn in their relationship is not lost on him. They have their history, of course, but the truth is Jack isn’t in the habit of sleeping with colleagues. Still, there’s a certain ease that comes from the fact that they work together. Robby doesn’t keep the same hours he does, but he doesn’t question them either — doesn’t mind, as so many of his past partners had done, Jack’s absences on weekends and holidays, or the bone-deep exhaustion that clings to him, because Robby feels it, too.

The problem is that convenience doesn’t feel like enough anymore.

Two months ago, when the pandemic began, he and Robby were still circling the edges of what they wanted from each other. On again, off again. Robby going cold whenever one of his tentative attempts at dating looked like it might stick; Jack pulling back when the ache for his wife, or for Robby, or both, rose too close to the surface. Both of them drifting off in search of solace or distraction in others, only to find themselves back where they started. He can’t help thinking that maybe this — whatever this is — needs a conversation, if only to name what they’ve been avoiding.

You’ve never been much of a runner, Jack thinks to himself again, as Robby’s palm settles on his thigh. It’s one of Robby’s rare days off – rarer now, with the hospital devouring their hours – and they have done this before — stayed in bed until midday, stayed in bed at all without first tangling together in heat and urgency.

But Jack had come in so wrung out from his shift that he barely remembered stripping down, barely remembered stepping under the shower. By the time he emerged, Robby was still dead asleep, his face turned toward the morning light creeping in through the blinds, the steady rise and fall of his chest untouched by the fact that it was nearly 8AM then.

Jack could not — still cannot — remember the last time they’d all been worked so thin.

But Robby touches him now, first absently, and then with more intention, his touch an invitation if Jack were only to lean and accept it — his thumb sometimes soothing closer to the sensitive skin of Jack’s inner thigh as he keeps soothing his hand back and forth, back and forth. At last, Jack sets his phone aside, letting the world slip out of reach, and Robby glances up from his book, smiling at him with that open, unguarded look that always lands like a blow. The morning light spilling in from the windows catches the lenses of his glasses, but not enough to hide his eyes, warm and certain as the midday sun outside. Jack feels it then, that familiar pull — his chest tightening, the weight of Robby’s hand searing through him — and it feels though he is still running somehow, even as Robby anchors him in place.

Like everyone around him — every nurse, every tech, every physician — Jack learns to par his life down to the bone. His trips to the gym stop well before it shudders its doors to the public. Tuesday nights with his men’s group vanish until they move online. Even his visits to his sisters dwindle, one by one, until they stop entirely. These are sacrifices, but they feel like luxuries much compared to the sacrifices he and his team continually make at the hospital: the endless shifts, the shortage of beds and ventilators, the quiet, steady knowledge that they are always behind, always fighting uphill with too few tools and too little time and too many patients in need of care.

Jack navigates the chaos at work as best he can, and, given the circumstances, he does it well. He has always had a talent for this, for rising to meet disaster head-on, for finding a strange clarity in crisis and crossfire. He knows how to plant his feet and hold through the storm, to make do with what feel tools he’s given, to keep moving even as the ground tilts and buckles beneath him.

What takes longer to adjust to — and what he fumbles to explain to his therapist these days – is not the chaos or the trauma of the ED, but the silence that follows. The hours when he’s not on call, when there’s no storm to brace against, leave him restless. Like everyone around him, Jack shrinks his circles of potential exposure down as much as he can. The risk is too high otherwise, he knows, and the margin of error too thin. But, unlike Dana or Adamson or most of the people they work with, neither he nor Robby have families to look after, no children or spouses demanding attention or offering support.It is, he knows, a privilege to have no one waiting at home whom he might endanger. It is, he feels, also something like a curse, though he cannot, will not, linger on this.

The rest of his life has narrowed to a thread.

What remains is the work, and Robby. It is the work that holds him together, the rhythm of long shifts and bruising nights, the only place where he feels both useful and alive. And Robby, in his own way, is a tether — something, someone, who reminds Jack of the kind of life he’d like to have one day, the kind of life they’re all fighting to return to. Somehow, it never occurs to Jack that Robby’s company, too, is a luxury until the day he decides it isn’t safe anymore. Until the day Robby tells him they can’t keep this up, not without masks, not without distance, not when they’ve both seen what happens to the ones who let their guard down.

“We both wear N95s. We get tested every week,” Jack tells him, tone even and coaxing. “We’re talking about a 1-1 bubble here, man. The risks are a hell of a lot smaller for us than they are for most people.”

Robby sits back on the couch, runs a hand across his face, trying to gather his words. “And what if one of us gets the other sick?” he asks. “What then? You know what happens when we’re out at the same time, even on a good day. We don’t have enough coverage as it is.”

Jack shakes his head. “I know. I know all that. But that’s not what I’m saying.”

“Then what are you saying?”

“I’m saying we’re already in the trenches and I don’t think we get through them by stripping away the last good thing we’ve got,” Jack says. “We’re gonna spend months fighting this thing — months at least. Having one person in your corner to keep you tethered and sane and — and close enough to notice when you’re slipping under, that’s not a luxury. It’s how we hold the goddamn line.”

Robby’s frown deepens, but he doesn’t interrupt, so Jack presses on, gentler now. “We don’t get any awards for making an impossible situation harder,” he explains. “And if what’s holding you back is us — well, fuck, I’m not asking you to run down to City Hall with me, Robby. I’m just asking you not to go at this thing alone.”

Robby lets out a breath, presses a hand to the back of his neck. “It’s not that I don’t want to,” he admits, voice quieter now. “But if we both go down, the ED practically goes down with us. I can't do that to the team. To Adamson. He’s seventy. He could’ve retired. I can’t ask him to hold up the weight of this place without us.”

“Even Adamson’s not doing this alone, though. He’s got a wife and kids — people to go home to. You really think he wants you burning yourself out, trying to carry the load for everyone else?”

“I think he wants me to do my job,” Robby says. “The less risk I take on, the more I can do that, even when other people can’t. Especially when they can’t. That’s the whole damn point.”

“And what if it’s all for nothing?” Jack counters. “What if we keep our distance, play it safer than everyone around us, and get sick anyway? What’ll we have to show for it then? You really think we’ll be glad we spent these months alone?”

“And what if it actually makes all the difference?” Robby asks, giving it right back to him. “What if, when it’s all said and done, we know we could have given more, and we just chose not to? How do we live with that, Jack?”

The silence that follows stretches a beat too long, heavy in the space between them. Jack feels the weight of it settle in his chest — the truth in Robby’s words, as sharp as the truth in his own. There’s no winning this argument, no clear right or wrong, when they are both hedging their bets against the unknown, both trying to hold back the tide, each clinging to what little control they have. The futility of it all tastes bitter on his tongue, and he hates that Robby isn’t wrong, just as much as hates the thought of giving in.

“Look, I’m not asking you to do this my way,” Robby says eventually, voice low. There’s a calm finality to his tone, one that Jack knows well enough by now — it means Robby’s made up his mind. “I’m just trying to do what I need to do to stay steady, that’s all. If you need someone else around to keep you grounded, that’s your call. I know you know what you’re doing.”

“That’s not — you’re moving the damn goalpost, brother,” Jack tells him. He exhales sharply, frustration flickering beneath the ache in his voice. “And fuck you for saying that, man. If I do this with anyone, it’s you or nobody.”

Robby reacts to that. His expression flickers, with something like tenderness or remorse, like he’s sorry for something Jack hasn’t asked him to apologize for. “Then don’t say it like that,” he says. “Don’t do something if you’re just going to turn around and hold it against me later. You wanna talk about making things harder than they have to be —”

“I’m not trying to make anything harder,” Jack says, cutting in. “I’m just trying not to lose you.”

“You won’t,” Robby replies. It’s a response that should infuriate Jack, because they both know he can’t promise that, but he says it so earnestly that it takes some of the fight out of the air when he says it. “I know you think it’s the wrong call,” Robby goes on. “If it is, and I can’t manage it, I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it.”

“Sure, if you don’t burn it down first.”

Robby exhales but doesn’t bite back. “I’m asking you to try and back me on this anyway,” he says. “I can’t take you hating me on the other side of this, Jack. You’re my friend. The best one I’ve got.”

Jack doesn’t answer right away. He’s frustrated in a way that only Robby could pull out of him: frustrated that this is what Robby thinks he needs to do, frustrated that he can’t stop him. Because Jack also knows that a man has to survive however he can, that there’s dignity in choosing your own way through, and that, a few years ago, Jack never would’ve imagined being in this situation in the first place. He could not imagine, with any real conviction, that he’d see Robby again, hear his voice, sit across from him like this and get into some useless fight where nobody was entirely in the wrong. And now here Robby is, not asking for his approval, not even for any real sacrifice on Jack’s part — just for his trust. Just for him to stay on his side.

Jack shakes his head once, then rubs at his face with the heel of his hand. “I hate that you do this to yourself,” Jack says, and he sounds exhausted, even to his own ears. “But Jesus Christ, Robby, I couldn’t hate you if I tried.”

And he means it—though conceding is no easy thing, though it means walking back out of Robby’s apartment in the morning, like he’d done all those years ago, with nothing but the faint scent of Robby’s soap on his skin and the ghost of what going through the next months together might’ve meant for them, if only Robby weren’t so hellbent on carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders.

The disappointment sits heavy at first, sharpening the edges of what Jack feels is an already small life, but he lets it pass. He learns to live within the new boundaries of what their friendship looks like, because beyond the pleasure of kissing him, beneath than the warmth of his bed or his touches, Robby is his friend.

Somehow, it can almost be that simple. Somehow, it can almost be enough. Somehow, it still surprises him, the lengths he’ll go if Robby needs him to — the quiet, unspoken ways he’d give more of himself than he thought he was still capable of offering to anyone, and never resent Robby for the taking.

There is a Vietnamese place on the way to Robby’s apartment that still only offers curbside and takeout, which suits Jack just fine. He waits for two orders of pho, thinking absently about the dull ache in his knees, and through the clear glass of the storefront window, a handwritten sign reads: thank you for helping us stay safe. The woman who carries out his order smiles at him, eyes crinkling above her mask, and when she hands over the bag, their hands brush: Jack’s fingertips, cold from the walk, against the latex touch of her own, warm through her gloves.

It’s nothing, barely a graze. He tips her almost as much as the meal costs.

On the short walk to Robby’s, Jack thinks about how often it’s reversed: his hands gloved, theirs bare. His fingers warm, theirs not. Out of courtesy, or a flicker of sentimentality, or both, he waits until he’s turned the block before he sanitizes his hands.

It’s autumn now, roughly seven months since the hospitals first filled past capacity and everything familiar buckled under the weight of what they could no longer contain. When Jack finished his shift today, there were no cheering onlookers, no strangers banging pots and pans from their balconies and stoops. He doesn’t begrudge it — no one’s doing this work for applause anyway — and it’s natural, he thinks, the way the novelty around frontline workers fades. Still, the ease with which the city let down its guard through the summer had made the waning weeks of August a nightmare. No one wants to say it out loud yet, not even Gloria — who’s had no easy go of it, beginning her tenure at the hospital during COVID — but September looms heavy on all their minds, with schools reopening and another surge already on the horizon.

Jack gets it. The exhaustion. The ache for normalcy. But he also knows how dangerous a false calm can be in a war. He knows that the quiet can become something like bait if you let it, that it’s precisely when you stop looking over your shoulder that you’re most likely offering your back for a punishing blow. But that’s a truth that’s hard to translate to people who don’t have to stand in the crossfire, handle the bodies, listen to laboring breaths.

By the time he reaches Robby’s building, daylight is beginning to wane. He bypasses the main entrance and lets himself in through the side gate they both know the code to. Upstairs, on the rooftop, Robby is already waiting, unfolding two chairs and dragging them apart just enough to maintain a safe distance. He looks up when Jack approaches, giving him a small, tired smile that lands like a balm. There’s something about how he looks when he’s drowsy and they’re alone together — a little more open than usual, a little easier to read — that always hits Jack square in the chest.

“Aren’t you a sight for sore eyes,” Jack says, setting the takeout down between them.

“You feelin’ sore?” Robby replies, a flicker of humor behind the rasp of his voice.

“No more than usual.”

“You could’ve let me handle the food. I offered,” Robby reminds him, and his tone is light, but there is, Jack knows, some real concern behind the comment. He can see it in the way Robby’s eyeing him, like he wants to ask about his leg, about the familiar ache in his knee that’s gotten worse since their shifts started stretching long again.

“Yeah, and I ignored you. As I do,” Jack tells him. “Y’know, leave it to you to laser in on the wrong part of the equation, man.”

Robby smiles at him. “Oh, did I do that?”

“You couldn’t take a compliment if it killed you.”

“That’s not true,” Robby says, lying. “Run it back for me from the top. Lemme try again.”

“No, fuck you. The moment’s passed.”

Robby laughs. “Well, you didn’t specify. Good sight or bad?”

“Terrible,” Jack deadpans, but his smile gives him away.

He looks at Robby then, really considers him. He’s in a hoodie, sleeves rolled to the elbows, the collar of the white t-shirt underneath it loose around his neck. His hair’s soft and a little undone, like he didn’t have the time to dry it properly before Jack arrived. Robby had been in the shower when Jack called to ask if he could come over after his shift. He could hear the sound of water pattering against tile through the phone, stood there by his locker with his phone nestled between his shoulder and his ear and could imagine Robby clearly: water catching on the hair of Robby’s forearm as he reached past the curtain to put Jack on speaker. His skin flushed, because he likes his showers unreasonably hot.

Watching him now in the cool hush of twilight, Jack thinks that if he could only close the space between them and touch him, Robby’s hair might still be cool and damp between his fingers.

In want of something safer to do with his hands, Jack peels back the plastic lid of his pho. The steam rises warm and fragrant into the air, the scent of lemongrass and cilantro curling around his face, and across the distance between their chairs, Robby is already squeezing lime into his soup.

“How was it today?” Robby asks lightly, the way they’ve both learned to ask by now.

“Nothing to write home about. Freed up some beds that got filled immediately. Gloria’s still wrangling to get us more PPE before the end of the week, but the odds aren’t looking good,” Jack answers, cracking his wooden chopsticks apart. “Walsh nearly bit my head off during rounds.”

Robby smiles — whether it’s at the taste of his first spoonful or the thought of Walsh putting him in his place, it’s hard to say. “So, the usual.”

Jack splits his wooden chopsticks apart, rubbing them against each other to catch any splinters. “She would’ve done numbers if she’d enlisted. They’d have fast-tracked her to interrogations. PsyOps, maybe.”

“She’s a trauma surgeon. They’ve all got big personalities.”

“No, Shamsi has a big personality. Walsh has a bloodlust.”

Robby lets out a low whistle, duly impressed. “Those are fighting words, my friend. You’re lucky she’s not around to hear you. What happened this time?”

Jack narrows his eyes at the way Robby says it — a mock note of exhaustion, like he’s heard this one a hundred times before — but the moment’s already softened into something familiar between them. Like he so often does with Robby, he talks openly, and easily, and freely. He tells him everything. “The problem is she always wants to win,” Jack concludes eventually, after a bite of noodles. “It’s like every tricky case we get is some kind of personal showdown. Half the time, it’s not even about the patient — she just wants to see me cave.”

“Brother, at this point, I think she wants to see you buried in a shallow grave.”

Jack snorts. “You and Dana must’ve been talking. She said the same thing.”

“Well, what did you do?” Robby asks. “Emery doesn’t just go around hating people. She treats me just fine.”

Jack straightens, mildly affronted. “Why do you assume I’m the problem?”

“Because you’re the common denominator. Anytime she’s on one, you’re always at the scene of the crime.”

Jack points at him with his chopsticks. “You have no imagination. She cuts into people for a living. Half the time, while they’re unconscious. That kind of crazy can’t be trusted.”

“You cut into people plenty yourself,” Robby says, before Jack’s face suggests he’s missing the point entirely. “Alright, fuck it, I’ll play ball. What did she do?”

“You know what she did.”

“Brother, I really don’t. Nobody does, not even the nurses. I’d ask her myself, but she already thinks I’m on your side.”

Jack considers this. “That’s true. It ain’t thin, but you’re on ice.”

“Guilty by association,” Robby says, leaning back. “Look, she plays it by the book and she’s a little territorial, sure, but the same could be said for half of us. And, to be fair, you didn’t do yourself any favors by flirting with that pharmacist she’s been eyeing since May.”

Jack tilts his head. The trouble is there’s more than one pharmacist. “The tall one?”

“Mm,” Robby nods. “All that charm wasted on someone who couldn’t intubate a mannequin.”

“What, you would’ve preferred I batted my eyes at someone who can?”

“Who said anything about me? This is about you and Walsh.” Robby’s voice is easy, but there’s something in the glance he throws Jack — just a flicker, just enough.

Jack gives him a look. “Uh-huh.”

“Seriously. I don’t care if you flirt with pharmacists.”

“Yeah? And why is that?”

“Well, for one, they’re not your type,” Robby tells him. “At least, Emery’s wasn’t.”

“And you’re the expert on the subject, are you?”

“I never said that,” Robby tells him, “but I’m not a stranger to it, either.”

Jack laughs, enjoying the rare flash of confidence. It looks good on him. “You’re not wrong, big guy.”

Robby shrugs, his cheeks flushing pink, a self-satisfied curve to his lips even as his focus returns to his last spoonfuls of soup. Jack would chalk the faint color in his face to the brisk air, but he knows better — knows that, despite Robby’s general disposition, it doesn’t take all that much to make him blush.

He watches Robby for a moment longer than he has to, warmth unfurling in his chest. A thought creeps in, as it sometimes does, sharp and soft at once. He wonders, not for the first time, where they might’ve been now, if the world hadn’t splintered under the weight of this new virus. If it hadn’t pulled them apart, what might they have built together instead? Would Jack have kept running, had he known then what he knows now, or would he have stopped, named this thing, drawn lines in the sand around the parts of this life with Robby that he did not — does not — want to go on sharing with strangers? Would Robby have begrudged him the request for something more, if only because Jack still wore his wedding band all the while?

Jack exhales slowly, the sound carrying more ache than laughter. It hangs in the air, too thick, like smoke that won’t clear. “We really don’t catch a break, do we?”

Robby tilts his head. “What, you and me?”

“You and me,” he echoes. “First time we meet, I get sent halfway across the world. This time it’s a goddamn plague. We just can’t be in the same room for too long.”

“There’s that optimistic streak of yours that drives me nuts,” Robby says, caught between something like a laugh and a sigh. “We had the summer. Give it a few weeks. Maybe if cases dip again, we can try our luck again.”

Jack nods. Those brief weeks in June when the caseload dipped passed like stolen time. For a little while, Robby had quietly and cautiously begun letting some of his precautions slip. After-shift beers with the team stayed distanced and catch ups with Jake remained outdoors, but with Jack, something gave.

He still remembers how Robby looked the first time they went back to his apartment. How Robby paused once he stepped inside, mask tugged under his chin, his bag slung over a tense shoulder, like he wasn’t sure if this was a good idea after all. Standing there beside him, Jack hadn’t said much at first. He just reached out and touched him, laid his hand on the back of Robby’s neck and lightly squeezed. It was the kind of thing that could be read as a gesture between old friends, easily forgotten and more easily rebuffed. But he felt the shift before he saw it. The way Robby leaned into his touch and looked at him, like it hurt to have gone so long without it, made something twist in Jack’s chest.

After so many months of distance, falling into bed together again felt almost too much at first: charged, edged with uncertainty where there used to be ease. But it settled between them, softened into warmth and then into new familiarity. It was not like stepping back into the same waters – Jack knew better than to think they hadn’t both changed. At best, taking Robby to bed again felt like Jack had found himself on a familiar shoreline, reshaped by tide and time. The currents were different now, but some things, Jack suspected, might still hold.

“You think we really could’ve managed it?” Robby asks now, shaking Jack back into the present. “Just us, holed up together for weeks? I mean, we’d still have our own places, but only ever seeing each other. No one else in or out of the bubble.”

“I think you overestimate how often we’d keep the same hours,” Jack replies. He leans back a little, gives it some more thought. “I think we’d do a lot of sleeping, and almost never at the same time. I’d’ve cooked, though. You’d spend less on takeout, with me around.”

Robby tilts his head, amused. “That’s your pitch? You’re the fiscally responsible option?”

“My other strengths speak for themselves,” Jack says. He pauses, weighing the truth in his mind like its a heavy thing, trying to guess how much of it Robby can bear. The vulnerability is a gamble, but the risk feels small now, in the silence between them

“We probably would’ve driven each other crazy. Gotten cabin fever in two apartments instead of one, maybe, and a little sick of each other to boot,” Jack decides to say. “But you might’ve liked the company more than you think.”

Robby doesn’t tense, or go cold, or take to running for the proverbial hills. He just nods, almost imperceptivity, as if only to himself, and looks out to the skyline ahead of them. Jack imagines him turning his words over in his mind, giving them a taste, seeing if they’re to his liking. Ultimately, he doesn’t really say.

When Robby’s eyes find him away, Jack is met with that fond and tired smile of his, the one that reaches right up to his eyes. “Next time the world nearly ends, let’s do things differently.”

In the end, Jack thinks that perhaps they’d been right not to isolate together.

When he gets sick in September, it comes on quiet: a dull sense of fatigue that’s almost indistinguishable from his usual exhaustion, until the low-grade fever makes it clear where this is headed. He’s lucky. Jack is spared the worst of it – he doesn’t need oxygen, doesn’t land himself in a bed, bounces back quickly – but his lungs haven’t worked quite right since Iraq, and every cough, though hollow and unproductive, aches in his chest like a pulled muscle.

He does what he has to do: goes home, keeps an eye on his O2, waits it out. Robby calls him daily, during brief breaks or his scattered shifts off, and in the time it takes for the worst of the virus to move through Jack’s body, Adamson’s numbers plummet.

Jack isn’t there when Robby has to make the call, though Dana phones him the very hour she decides to sit Robby down and have that conversation. Fourteen days on ECMO and still no change — Adamson is alive in the most technical sense, but there’s no rise in oxygenation, no sign that his lungs can do what they need to without the help of the machine. There’s a child who could use the help in his place, whose chances of recovery are more promising on paper, and Dana is right to say it’s what Adamson would’ve wanted. But they lose the girl, too, which makes the indiscriminate loss all the more bitter and senseless.

By the time Jack is in the clear to come back to work, Adamson is gone and Robby is changed.

Robby shows up for shifts, still answers his phone, still completes every chart efficiently. It’s precisely his stubborn impulse to carry on as usual that becomes the problem. By October, everyone is picking up extra shifts — but none more than Robby. In a way Jack didn’t think was still possible, Robby throws himself into the work completely, or at the very least, seems hellbent on letting it swallow him whole.

Their opposing schedules mean it’s not unusual for a few weeks to pass without seeing each other at the hospital. But Robby’s absence begins to stretch outside of it, too. There are fewer rooftop conversations. Fewer chances to cross paths and reset over a drink, a meal, or an afternoon. No real sign, to Jack’s eye, that Robby’s eating three meals a day, with or without him. Jack stops seeing his name pop up in missed calls or late-night texts.

Jack starts checking his phone more often than he’d like to admit, scanning for texts that don’t come, missed calls that never show. It’s not just the absence that unnerves him, and it’s not entirely a matter of just missing him, but something greater: the slow, creeping sense that Robby is pulling away from everyone, including himself. That he sealed something off within the day he stepped into pedes and Dana told him it was time.

In the months that follow Adamson’s death, the hospital feels off-kilter — the pace and atmosphere of the ED still fissured from his absence, everyone in it thrown a little out of step. That Robby takes on the role of acting chief of the department in Adamson’s stead is only natural. The eventual permanency of his position feels even inevitable, but these aren’t the circumstances anyone would’ve wanted for him. For months now, Robby has been holding the line with both hands, white-knuckled and unrelenting, as though sheer willpower alone could keep the department from splintering further — but the weight of it all takes its toll on him, and makes itself known quickly and well.

Of the many people who approached Jack to talk about Robby, it’s only Gloria Underwood who comes as a surprise.

She catches him just as he’s signing in for his shift, the purple of her blazer a brilliant flash of color under the usual hum of the fluorescent lights. Usually, by this hour, she’s halfway out the door but she approaches Jack like she’s been waiting for him. “Got a minute?” she asks.

Jack straightens. “Sure. I even got two if you need ‘em.”

They round the corner near supply, her voice low but steady. “I told Robby he can’t pick up any more extra shifts until he agrees to take two full days off a week,” she says. “At least for a little while.”

“Two days without him puts the rest of us in a tight spot,” he replies, not with resistance, but some surprise. “That must’ve been a tough call to make.”

“It was. We need him, but not like this. He’s burning out. That’s why I’m putting my foot down.”

There’s a quality in the way she’s looking at him now that he’s seen on Dana’s face before — like she knows he knows and is hoping for something from him in the way of more answers. But what is there, really, to say? They’ve all seen him working himself to the bone; they’ve all watched the bags under his eyes darken, his posture worsen, his temper shorten to a brittle fuse.

“You don’t think it’ll work,” Jack tells her. It’s more of an observation than a question.

She gives him a level look. “Do you?”

“I think, the minute we need him badly enough, it’ll be impossible to turn him away, and he knows that.”

“There you have it. I may not know him well, but I know him well enough.”

“Give the shifts to me before he gets the chance to snatch them up, then.”

“That’s just patching over the problem. It won’t solve it. I need him to understand that pushing himself like this doesn’t help anyone. Not the nurses, not the residents, and certainly not the patients.”

The trouble is Gloria isn’t wrong, but this isn’t a message — and she isn’t the messenger — that Robby will take kindly. “That’s gonna be a tough sell,” he says. Then, with an attempt at levity, “Are you sure you’re ready to have this conversation?”

“Absolutely not,” Gloria says, with the faintest flicker of a smile in her voice. “That’s why I’m asking you to do it.”

Jack blinks. “You’re his boss,” he replies, not unkindly.

“Yes,” she says. “But when it comes to something like this, he might actually listen to you.”

There’s no edge in her voice, no resentment — just the plain truth, inconvenient as she might find it to be. Jack glances at her, and for a beat, there’s nothing but quiet understanding between them. He respects her: the way she runs the place like a ship and keeps the chaos from sinking them all. She expects the best, and, while that’s already earned her a few enemies, Jack has never minded being held to that standard.

“Don’t look so surprised,” Gloria adds, pinching her mask against the bridge of her noise. “We’ve all got our roles to play, Doctor Abbot.”

“Yeah?” Jack lifts an eyebrow. “And what’s mine — Robby’s wrangler?”

That earns him a real smile. “To whom much is given, much is required.”

Jack laughs, shaking his head. “Don’t I know it, boss.”

The next day, Jack comes in early enough that he has to walk a few laps around the ambulance bay just to kill time before Robby’s shift ends. The ER is humming with chaos when he spots him — gloved up, halfway through a central line, eyes hollow with focus and sleeplessness.

Jack waits until he’s finished charting, then intercepts him with a quiet gesture away from the nurse’s bay. Robby gives him a curious look, brows furrowed, but follows him into the employee lounge anyway. Thanks to a little collaboration from Dana, Jack finds it empty, filled only with the faint scent of old coffee and the humming of the vending machine.

He shuts the door behind them. “Relax,” he tells Robby, reading the immediate tension in the air. “I’ve just got something I wanna talk to you about, big guy. Shouldn’t take long.”

Robby exhales, heavy, like he already knows what’s coming. “If this is about my hours, Gloria already gave me the lecture.”

“I know,” Jack says. “This isn’t that.”

Robby leans back against the counter opposite of him, arms folded. “Then what is it?”

“You want to reconsider that thing we said, about not seeing each other again until the cases die down again?”

Robby stiffens, eyes flashing towards the door, even though Jack is leaning his back against it. “Is this really the place to be having this conversation?”

“I wouldn’t call it ideal, but I haven’t exactly seen a whole lot of you elsewhere.”

Robby’s mouth thins to a tight line. “I’ve been busy, Jack.”

“I know you have.”

“It’s not like I’ve been sitting around picking roses.”

“I know,” Jack repeats, a little apologetically, because it feels like he’s already on the back foot. “You’re running the department now. You’ve got a hell of a lot on your plate, man. I get it. That’s why it might be good for you to have something to look forward to on your off-days.”

“I’m fine,” Robby replies. The words come out too fast, too sharp. Jack lets it slide — pushing now will only drive him off, hitch that tension in his shoulders a little higher.

Instead, Jack says, “I’d kill to see you doing better than fine.”

Robby snorts, dry and a little self-deprecating. “Yeah? You wanna tell me what that even looks like these days?”

Jack doesn’t take the bait; the question isn’t really meant to be answered, and he knows it. “Look, if not me, you could sort something out with Janey. Jake’s still going to school remotely, isn’t he? She’s working from home. No big risks there on either side.”

“No, Janey’s got her parents to worry about, and anyways, I wouldn’t want —” he hesitates, almost like he wants to say something else, then shakes his head. “It's not the same.”

Jack’s brows lift. “Not the same as what?”

“Just not the same,” Robby tells him. “And, anyways, I don’t need a babysitter.”

“Great, ‘cause I’m not offering to babysit,” Jack says evenly. “I’m offering you somebody to talk to without picking up your phone. Someone to share a meal with. A trip out of the city, maybe, if our schedules line up and we have a few days free. Gloria’s forcing you to take some time off. I’m offering you a way to take advantage of it.”

Robby hesitates. It’s hard to read his expression behind his mask, but Jack thinks he sees the faintest crack around his eyes, a hint of give. When Robby finally speaks, it sounds less like a refusal and more like he’s trying to talk himself out of saying yes, convincing himself as much as he’s trying to convince Jack.

“You don’t get it,” he says. “My place is a mess, I barely keep food in the fridge. And at your place, I’d just—” He breaks off, draws a breath that rattles in his chest. “In case you haven’t noticed, Jack, I’m not exactly great company these days.”

“So you can’t pull out all the bells and whistles right now — who cares?” Jack replies. “I’m not asking you to entertain me, man. I don’t need a tight ten. You’re my friend. I just wanna be around you.”

Robby shifts his weight like he’s bracing himself, shoulders hunched as though he’s trying to fold in on his own height. He looks worn thin, shadows under his eyes pooling like bruises, and up thus close, Jack notices the length of his hair — longer, he knows, than Robby likes to keep it. In the sterile brightness of the lounge, with the hum of fluorescent lights and the weight of silence pressing in, Jack feels the ache of it all: how difficult it is for Robby to be carrying around this much grief, how unfair it feels to watch him try to bear it alone.

“I don’t know if you know what you’re asking for,” Robby says, voice rough, he’s forcing it through his teeth. “I’m — I’m barely treading water here.” He drags a hand over his face, and for a second Jack thinks he’s about to lose it, that whatever’s been holding him together is about to crack. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I’ve never been more tired, but I can’t sleep. I try to and I keep waking up —” He breaks off, breath shuddering. “Can’t make it through a single night without thinking about . . . fuck, man, you don’t wanna know how bad it gets.”

“Sure I do,” Jack says, softer now. When Robby shakes his head, he continues: “What, you think I don’t get it? I’ve been here with you every step of the way. Every time we get hit with another wave, I’m right there taking the blow with you.”

Robby’s gaze flickers up at that, something raw passing over his face — like he wants to believe him, like the words land somewhere that’s bruised and tender.

“Whatever it is you’re wrestling with, I’m right here with you,” Jack continues, his voice steady. “Put me in the ring, partner. I’ll bring my own folding chair and everything.”

Robby lets out a wet laugh despite himself, scrubbing at the corner of his eye. “This thing you’re angling for here, Jack — if you want it, don’t bring WWE into this.”

“What’s wrong with WWE? You got something against the performing arts?” Jack says with a crooked grin. Then, more earnestly, he adds: “Look, I’m not exactly being a martyr here, either. I could use you around. I told you about therapy. I’m still going, and I like Andy just fine, but he’s a civilian, he can’t — there’s no one else who really gets what we're dealing with here, except us.”

Jack hesitates, the name heavier than he thought it would be, but he doesn’t step back. “There’s no one else we can talk to about Adamson.”

Robby’s eyes flicker, glossing over. “I’m not the guy to help you with that.”

“Why not?”

“Talking about him isn’t going to fix anything.”

“Who said anything about fixing?” Jack counters, his voice soft but insistent. “There's no fixing this shit, Robby. It’s fucked. It’s fucked that we lost him. It’s fucked that you were the one to do it, that I wasn’t there to see him — but there’s no going back now. There’s just figuring out some way to live with it.”

Robby glances away, eyes wet but guarded, his body language tense with words he won’t say.

Jack waits, then gently presses on. “Why do you think I go to groups?” he asks. “It isn’t to fix anything. It’s to feel like I’m not crazy. You think you’re completely alone in the hell you’ve been through and then you hear somebody tell the story of your life right back at you, like they read your mind, and it changes shit, Robby. It helps.”

Robby shakes his head. “That might work for you, but not me.”

“Then don’t talk,” Jack concedes. “Just come around sometime. Watch a shitty movie with me, fall asleep on my sofa. Hell, take the bed if you want it. You wouldn’t have to do anything. You’d just have to show up.”

For a moment, Robby says nothing. He runs a hand through his hair, pressing hard against his scalp like he could squeeze the thoughts out of his head. When he speaks, it’s almost too quiet to catch: “I’m so fucking tired, Jack.”

Jack holds his gaze, steady and patient. “Come here,” he tells him, easy as anything.

Robby hesitates, caught not only by the risk of breaking the safe distance between them, but by the novelty of the request — of Jack asking this here, in the hospital, of all places.

This has never been something they’ve done here; this has never been something they’ve allowed themselves to bring inside these walls. Whatever exists between them has always been kept apart, sealed away from the fluorescent light and endless noise of the ED. But Jack has his back to the door, and he cannot think about the possibility of anyone opening it behind him or what it says about him that, in this moment, he couldn’t care less if someone caught them; he can only think that his friend needs him, that he wants to hold him, that it feels good to have something to offer Robby which he might need.

The space between them narrows quietly, carefully. All Jack has to do is reach for him, a hand out asking for nothing more than to touch him, and Robby folds into the hug with quiet concession. Any last thread of hesitation dissolves beneath the steady warmth of Jack’s palm against the broad plane of Robby’s back, the comfortable weight of Robby’s face tucked into the space between Jack’s neck and his shoulder.

They stay like that — still and breathing — until the weight between them lightens, until Robby lets go.

In a perfect world, that embrace might have been enough: the start of some new chapter, a quiet gesture to signal that, now that they have made up their minds to weather the pandemic together, they might somehow move through it more easily.

In the weeks that follow their agreement to stop isolating from each other, widening their circles just enough to make room for one another, Jack and Robby settle into a rhythm. There are moments of real joy: shared dinners, wandering conversations, rare mornings or nights when neither has to rush out the door, and bundled walks through the bitter cold, if only for the small pleasure of being outside. For a while, it helps. They help each other. Just as Jack knew they would.

But the long, yawning winter that follows Adamson’s death proves to be the hardest stretch yet. As cases surge and shifts expand, their schedules increasingly misalign. And when they do, in the bleakest stretch of winter, they’re too tired to cross the city, too drained to do more than sleep once they make it back to each other’s apartments, both more temperamental, more raw. Adamson’s absence casts a long shadow, in more ways than one. With one less attending on the floor and surge after surge flooding the ED, every shift feels like an uphill battle fought with empty hands.

For better or worse, Jack has always known how to bury his bullshit. He learned it as a young man, got better at it as a soldier. He knows how to compartmentalize, how to shove every distraction aside until the crisis passes. If he can just grit his teeth and push through the misery, he knows there will be time to inspect his wounds on the other side of it, and set the sore parts back into place. But Jack’s not so young anymore, and maybe not as strong. Not now, with wave after wave of cases flooding the ED, no end in sight. Somewhere, between the exhaustion, the pain of losing Adamson, and the rolling tide of senseless loss, Jack feels his grip slipping, his control unraveling, a little more of the grief spilling out from the corner he used to shove it into.

In all of that noise, Jack doesn’t realize how close Robby is to the edge himself until a new guy on the night shift talks to him about it.

“Yeah, no, I heard it from Batey on the day shift,” John Shen tells him, lowering his voice as they wait by the coffee machine. “He said Dr. Robby went off on Harper this morning. Like, full-on dressing her down, in front of half the floor.”

Jack frowns. “Harper? What the hell did Harper do?”

“She made the wrong call with a patient — forgot to run some labs, or something. All I know is that Robby went off. Apparently, it got bad enough that Dana got involved.”

Shen pauses, pouring himself coffee into a disposable cup. “Y’know, no offense, but I didn’t think he rocked like that,” he adds. “I mean, I guess I don’t know him much, but I never got that vibe from him.”

“That’s because he doesn’t. That’s not like him,” Jack says, a little too quickly. He catches himself, aware of how much he’s bristling on Robby’s behalf, so he tempers it, his tone leveling out. “Love it or hate it, if Robby came down hard on Harper, I’m sure he had a reason.”

Shen blinks, sensing the shift. “Yeah, I mean, I guess it just sounded a little harsh.”

“Not disagreeing with you,” Jack replies. “This job’ll grind you down if you let it.That’s why you have a team — to check each other before it becomes a habit. I’ll make sure he’s good.” He pauses, tone softening just a touch. “Just cut him some slack, yeah?”

Shen nods, still curious but backing off. “Sure thing, boss.”

Jack offers a quick half-smile before leaving Shen alone to drink his coffee. But even once they’ve both returned to the fray and are working through the rest of their shift, their conversation lingers in the back of his mind. Because what he told Shen wasn’t exactly the truth — It’s true that Robby is usually the more personable mentor between them, the one who smooths out tensions rather than flares them. But he also knows that lately Robby’s fuse has been a little too short for his own good.

The next time they’re together outside of work, moving around Robby’s kitchen in the quiet rhythm of cleaning after dinner, Jack tries to nudge the conversation there — casually, broadly, giving Robby every chance to bring it up on his own. But Robby deflects, sidestepping the invitation like there’s nothing to discuss.

Now they’re standing across from each other at the sink and counter, the last of the dishes drying in the rack, the smell of garlic still faint in the air. Jack watches Robby as he dries a glass with a dish towel, turns it in slow circles in his hands before setting it down.

Tired of waiting, Jack finally asks: “You ever going to tell me what happened with Harper?”

Robby wipes his hands on the dishtowel, and leans back against the counter. “That’s already passed,” he says, and he’s right, it’s been a few days now, but that’s not the point. “Anyways, there’s nothing worth retelling.”

“I heard you laid into her in front of half the unit.”

“Did Dana tell you that?” he asks. When Jack doesn’t answer, he tacks on: “It wasn’t that bad.”

“It was bad enough that it’s all my crew were talking about,” Jack says. He sets down the dish towel in his hands. “Fill me in, man. What happened?”

Robby dries a glass with a little too much force. “Young guy came in three days post-fall — scraped up, bruised, swollen ankle. Harper clocked the avulsion and tunnel-visioned. Basically tried to send him home with some painkillers and a pat on the back.”

Jack frowns. “And?”

“And I caught the chart on a pass-by,” Robby continues. “His leg didn’t look right. I mean, it was bruised, but it wasn’t tracking right. He reported a few days of sharp, searing pain, and then nothing. He said it just stopped. I asked if she'd run any labs, and she hadn’t, so I had to have ‘em sent myself and when they come back, it’s red flags across the board. Elevated CK, dropping hgb, glucose was through the roof —”

Jack’s already thinking it. “Nec-fac?”

He nods. “We got him to the OR within the hour. If I hadn’t caught it, she would’ve discharged him.”

“Jesus,” Jack says, grimacing. “Okay, yeah. That’s a hell of a miss. But, she’s still learning —”

“She’s a senior resident, Jack,” Robby cuts in. “She should know better. We’ve talked about this. I’ve talked about this. You don’t skip out on labs. You don’t walk past it because someone’s young and ambulatory and seems fine. You check your bias and you cover your goddamn bases.”

Jack leans against the counter, his tone gentler now. “I get it. I’m with you there, man. I’m not saying she didn’t mess up. I just think there’s a difference between correcting someone and humiliating them.”

Robby scrubs a hand over his face. “I didn’t humiliate her.”

“Whatever you wanna call it, then. You know tear-downs don’t teach. They just make people afraid of screwing up, and less likely to ask for help, and that’s when small mistakes get worse.”

“Except it wasn’t a small mistake,” Robby replies, sharper now. “It could've cost us the patient and it cost me time I didn’t have to correct. We don’t have the margins right now for residents to fuck up on the basics because I’m not hounding behind them each step of the way.”

“And we don’t have the numbers for you to scare off our residents, either. She hasn’t shown up for work since.”

“And who do you think has to deal with that?” Robby fires back. “Not anyone on your side, Jack. Fixing the schedules around her bullshit fell on me.”

Which alright — fair, Jack thinks, even if he doesn’t exactly love the way he’s said it.

Robby takes a breath, exhaling slowly. “Half the nurses are burning out or going part-time, you’re running night shifts with barely enough coverage, and, everywhere I go, I’m getting pulled into three places at once. If a resident can’t keep up, that’s on them.”

“Well, what’s the end game here? We leave her behind? She’s probably just scared now, man. Not any smarter, and not any help to anyone, hiding away at home.”

“You know, I’d think you of all people would understand where I’m coming from here,” he replies. “We’re always talking about accountability — and these kids, it’s like they go into anaphylactic shock the second you try to hold them to it. Like it’s a crime to expect them to own up to their mistakes.”

“Like you’re doing now?” Jack asks, before he can think better of it.

Robby’s brows raise. “Wow,” he replies, a little disbelieving. “Let me get this straight: I caught her mistake. I fixed it, saved the guy’s life in the process, but I’m the problem because you don’t like the way I did it?”

“I’m not saying that,” Jack says, frustrated now, pushing past the sting in Robby’s voice. “I’m always telling you to ask for help. And if you’re stretched thin enough that you’re laying into a third-year in front of the team, in earshot of the patients, then you need to ask for help.”

Robby huffs out something between a breath and a scoff. “And what would help, Jack? You want me to hold hands with Gloria and talk about my feelings? Get a fuckin’ BetterHelp subscription? Spill my guts to some underpaid grad student over Zoom?”

Jack’s spine stiffens. The words hit harder than perhaps they should — too close to home, given how long it’s been since he’s been able to join any of his group meetings. “Yeah, well, It couldn’t be any worse than what you’re doing now.”

Robby’s brow furrows. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I’m saying maybe this — whatever we’ve been doing, it can’t be the place where you run from your shit.”

Robby blinks at him, confusion flickering across his face. “Jack, you asked for this,” he says, slowly, his voice edged with defensiveness. “This was your idea.”

“I asked you to let me be there for you. To let me help. I’m the other attending here, remember? If you’re taking on too much, share the load with me. If a resident’s driving you crazy, switch her to nights. I can’t help if you don’t let me.”

There’s a beat of silence and Jack’s heart stumbles in his chest as he realizes what he’s about to say. “I know we’re not putting a label on this, whatever this is,” he continues, “but I thought we were in it together.”

Robby’s expression softens, a slight tension creeping into his features. His gaze drops to the floor, and when it returns to Jack’s, there’s an undercurrent of conflict in his expression. “We are in this together,” he says, but his voice isn’t as sure as before.

“Are we?” He doesn’t want to ask it, but the question spills out anyway. “You’re still keeping those walls up, man. Still carrying it all alone, like you think you have to. Like I’m not right here, asking you to let me in.”

“I am letting you in. Do you think I’d do this with just anyone?”

“What, isolating together? I told you, you could’ve done this with Janey if you wanted to —”

“No, I didn’t want to do this with Janey,” Robby cuts in quickly, voice tight. “And that’s not what I’m saying, Jack. I’m not talking about that.”

Jack’s brow furrows, still trying to piece it together. “Then what?”

Robby falters, his lips pressing together as he works his way around whatever it is he cannot say. “All of this,” he says finally, voice quieter now, like he’s testing the waters. “The way we work together, come home together. Everything we’ve been doing, all this time.”

“So, you mean sleeping together?” Jack asks, the words sharp. “I don’t know if you get any medals for that if it’s your shortcut around actually dealing with your shit.”

The silence that follows doesn’t flare, doesn’t spark into some big, roaring fight: it sinks, a low and weighted thing. Robby blinks. “That’s what you think I’m doing? Fucking you so I don’t have a panic attack or something?”

Jack hesitates. The answer is no. He wants to say no, that isn’t what’s happening here, but he doesn’t know what else he’s allowed to call this.

Robby just stares at him, disbelief softening into something worse. He breaks the silence first, his voice low, quieter than before. “Jesus fucking Christ, Jack.”

“I didn’t mean it that way,” Jack says, trying to regain control. “I just don’t know what this is. I don’t know what we’re doing, or what it means, if it means anything at all.”

“Of course it means something,” Robby replies, the words tumbling out like he’s devastated he even has to say it. “I know I’ve been shit at this. I know I shut down sometimes, but don’t stand there and act like this doesn’t matter to me. You’re my friend.”

It’s a simple thing, that phrase, but it carries so much weight now.

You’re my friend, Jack had told him, when he confided to Robby about his wife, his nightmares, the chronic pain in his knee. You’re my friend, he’d said, when he asked Robby to take no small risk in re-integrating Jack into his life, knowing that Jack’s exposure to this virus would compromise his own. You’re my friend, Robby is saying now, repeating it back to him, and what has always felt like some kind of secret code, some kind of time-out card between them, instead feels muddied now, creating more questions than answers.

“And you’re mine,” Jack answers, his voice steady, but there’s a weight to the words that feels heavier than usual. “But is that what this is? We’re friends, but we work together. We’re co-workers, but we’re fucking. We’re fucking, except when it’s convenient to fuck someone else. Once all this mess is over, once it’s safe again, is that what we’re going back to?”

The silence that follows is Robby’s making, and Jack can’t hold it against him. What hangs between them now is the thing they’ve been circling around for months — the wide expanse between their actions and the things they’ve both left unspoken.

“I thought —” Robby starts, his words tripping over themselves. He falters, then tries again, his voice quieter now, uncertain. “You said you wanted this to be easy. I thought that’s what we were doing. Is that not what you wanted?”

Jack almost says yes, almost says no — he did say that, it’s true, but —

“I was wrong,” Jack says, realizing the truth of his words as he says it. “I meant it when I said it. I thought — maybe I should’ve known better, because it was you, but I thought it wouldn’t be complicated with you. You knew where I was with Sofia, and you’d just come out of your thing with Janey. I figured you didn’t want anything serious, and I thought I didn’t, either.”

Robby looks at him with something like sadness in his eyes. “I didn’t realize you were hoping for something else.”

“I wasn’t,” Jack admits, his gaze drifting to the ground for a moment before he looks back up at Robby. “You weren’t the first person I slept with after Sofia. Hell, you weren’t the second or the third, and with them, I never wanted anything else. I didn’t have it in me. But with you… I don’t know. I think I could, if it was you.”

Robby nods, swallowing hard. There’s something flickering in his eyes, a mix of confusion and sadness that Jack can’t quite read, but knows it’s anything but easy. “How long have you felt this way?”

“Almost from the start,” he answers. He might as well tell the truth.

Robby frowns. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

Jack hesitates. He considers the questions. The words feel stuck, lodged somewhere between his heart and throat. “I thought we had more time. I didn’t think we’d end up here, in the middle of a damn epidemic, and then, the longer this went on, the more I didn’t think I could. You won’t even talk to me about work, Robby. How was I supposed to tell you?”

Robby doesn’t answer right away. He just stands there, nodding slightly, rubbing the bridge of his nose, eyes closed as though he’s trying to block out the weight of Jack’s words.

After a beat, Jack finally speaks again. “What I said earlier . . . I didn’t mean it. I don’t think us sleeping together is some sort of fucked up coping mechanism on your part or mine. I shouldn’t have said that.”

Robby takes a slow breath, his voice soft but steady. “Maybe not. But I think you meant some of it.”

Jack doesn’t argue. He can’t, not without making things worse.

The fight doesn’t exactly blow over in the hour that follows. Instead, it hovers through the space like smoke, lingering in the air between them but weaker now that the tension has gotten some time to disperse.

It’s actually Robby’s cellphone that gives them the excuse they need to separate for a little while. It’s work — they both know it is, well before Jack spots the caller ID — and there’s nothing work-related that Robby has to keep from him, but he steps out onto his balcony to take the call anyway. Maybe, Jack thinks, he just needs the space, the cold air, a moment to breathe.

He stays out there even after the phone call ends, arms folded over the railing.

Jack gives Robby as much space as he can bear. He puts away the last of Robby’s dishes, so that there won’t be any work waiting for him in the kitchen, when he comes back in. Then he moves into the bedroom, collects only some of his things, his bag slowly filling with the items he’s gathered; He retrieves a fleece zip-up from Robby’s closet, taking it with him as he finally steps outside.

Robby turns to look at him as the door opens, his gaze a little guarded, but missing any of its earlier sharpness. He doesn’t speak, but he doesn’t bristle, either.

Jack clears his throat, holding out the sweater. “I thought you might be cold.”

The gesture is small, simple, and Jack hopes Robby understands it for what it could be — the start of some apology, or perhaps even a chance for them to to start over. But even if he doesn’t, Jack hopes Robby takes it anyway; it’s too cold now for him to keep standing out here in a long-sleeved shirt.

Robby hesitates just a moment, his gaze briefly flicking from Jack to the sweater, then back to Jack’s eyes, but then he takes it, the fabric warm in his hands. “There goes your chance to give me frostbite,” he says after tugging it on, half-joking, the lightness in his tone not quite masking the tinge of weariness.

“Oh, I couldn’t do that,” Jack replies, returning Robby’s small smile with his own, softening the tension. “Dana would never forgive me.”

Robby snorts. “I wouldn’t be so sure about that. You didn’t hear the way I snapped at her for telling me to take it easy on Harper."

“Sure, but she let you live to tell the tale. I’d say she cut you some slack.” Jack’s smile fades just a little. After a moment, his voice turns quieter, a bit more vulnerable. “For what it’s worth, Robby, I’m sorry.”

Robby shakes his head. “You’re not the one who should be apologizing.”

“Sure I am. I shouldn’t have let it escalate like that, shouldn’t have let it turn into something personal when it shouldn’t have been. I —" He stops, almost reluctant to say it, but knowing it’s the only thing that feels right. "I’m sorry for how ugly that got. For how I made it about us.”

“No, that’s — that’s always been our problem, Jack. Even before COVID, those lines were blurry. We don’t have an ounce of work-life balance between us.”

Jack chuckles, but it’s tired. “One day, the work will love me back.”

“Not today, but maybe tomorrow,” Robby responds, his smile faint. His focus drifts away for a moment, as he settles on the right words to say next. “I really fucked up the other day. I could’ve handled it differently — could’ve stepped away, could've handled it privately, but instead, I just exploded. Made an ass of myself with the nurses. Blew up at Harper when I knew it wouldn’t do any good. Blew up at you, too, for checking me about it. I’m so sorry.”

Jack nods. “Yeah. It’s alright, Robby. I know.”

Something in the space between them eases with their apologies, but there’s still something Robby isn’t saying. He stares out into the night, his expression distant, shoulders heavy. “What did you mean back there,” he begins, his tone cautious, “when we were talking about us, and you said you should’ve known better?”

Jack takes a moment to measure his words.

“I dunno, Robby. I just think, sometimes, that it was a little naive of me to think I could be casual about you,” he tells him. “I thought about you for so long after I met you. I’d make up stories in my head about what my life would’ve been if I hadn’t run off to the army. Some of ‘em included you. And then I met you and you weren’t the person I made you to be in my head. You were better.”

Whatever Robby thought he was going to say, it wasn’t that. Jack can see it clearly in the way Robby’s expression falters, the way his words seem to have caught him off guard.

Robby’s voice is small when he speaks, barely audible against the quiet night air. “I didn’t think that’s how you meant it,” he tells him. “Lately, it feels like you’ve seen the worst of me. It’s all I’ve had to show you. And I keep thinking — I mean, compared to who I was when you first met me, god, what a fucking let down.”

Jack doesn’t ask what Robby means—whether he’s talking about when Jack joined PTMC, or back in their twenties, when their lives had yet to intertwine in the way they do now. In a way, it doesn’t matter.

“You’re one of the best men I’ve ever known, Jack,” Robby tells him. His words break again, heavier this time. “But I don’t know if I can give you what you need right now.”

The confession hangs there, quiet but immense. Robby swallows hard, looking away briefly as if the weight of what he’s saying is too much. “I’m trying,” he continues. “I really am. But I think I’m too far under. I know how to be your friend. I can keep up with that. I can do better by you at work. But I don’t know how to be more than that without fucking it up entirely.”

Jack nods. He swallows around the ache in his throat. None of it comes as a surprise, but disappointment nips at him anyway.

“Then let’s call it,” Jack says, even though it stings to say it. “Not everything. Just the part that’s confusing the rest. If we know how to be friends, then we go back to only being friends. If the work is getting messy, we focus on straightening that out first. And then, maybe one day, we can figure out the rest.”

Robby’s eyes flicker with something Jack can’t quite place: disappointment, perhaps, giving way to resigned acceptance. He doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t argue. He just nods slowly, his shoulders tense. Almost inexplicably, Jack can feel that he’s still holding something back, like there’s something he wants to say but isn’t ready to voice.

Jack inhales deeply, letting the cold air settle in his lungs. He hesitates for a moment, unsure whether to fill the silence or leave it to hang between them. Instead, he steps closer and places his hand gently over Robby’s, which is resting on the railing. Robby’s hand is cold to touch, when Jack squeezes it, offering what little warmth he can.

“I don’t think I should stay over if —” Jack begins, his voice low, measured. “I think it might be better if that’s off the table, for a while.”

“Yeah, that’s probably for the best,” Robby agrees. “Do you think you’d still want to come over? From time to time?”

“Of course,” Jack tells him, smiling, trying to break the tension. “Brother, you’re not getting rid of me that easily.”

Robby gives a small, resigned laugh. “Good. I didn’t think so,” he says, his voice softening, carrying more weight than before. “I don’t want to lose you.”

The words are simple, but they land heavy between them, encapsulating everything — the fear that’s divided them and has also, somehow, been their common ground, the steady foundation beneath every other unsteady, crumbling thing. Not just their attempt at a relationship, if either of them could even call it that, but everything else, everything much bigger than them. All the loss, and the work, and the stress, and the chaos.

Jack swallows around a feeling he doesn’t want to name. “You won’t.”

It’s true, he knows it is and he hopes the man beside him knows it, too. But the fuller truth, the one Jack can’t say, is this: he could never touch Robby again for the rest of his life and still want nothing more than to be near him. He could love him, care for him exactly like this — as partners, as brothers, as friends — and it would be enough.

Chapter Text

VIII. Summer, 2024

Jack feels the wave of relief move through the night crew the second the call comes through from upstairs: the OR is ready. One of the nurses announces it aloud to the room, and for a brief moment, Jack’s eyes meet Parker Ellis’s across the trauma bay and then John Shen’s. Her brows lift, the corner of her mouth tugging upward in something like a smile, and John lets out an audible sigh of relief, or exhaustion, or both.

Thank fuck, Jack thinks, for Emery H. Walsh.

The patient, a kid in his twenties, had taken a bullet to the shoulder and another to the thigh. Before the sedation set in, he tried to explain what happened, his speech slurred from blood loss and liquor. Jack caught fragments of it: something about a halal truck, an ex-girlfriend, and Instagram Live. He hadn’t followed the thread of it, but once the patient was out cold, John let out a low, sympathetic whistle.

The kid got lucky. The shot to his thigh narrowly missed his femoral; had the bullet erred any closer to that artery, he’d have bled out on the asphalt before the ambulance even arrived. And when the patient’s luck ran out, when his bleeding surged and his pressure tanked, he survived that, too, because the night crew knew what they’re doing, and tonight they’d done their jobs damn well.

Now, with the patient gone and the room slowly exhaling around them, Jack lets himself look at his team.

Halfway through his residency now, John Shen brings the exact kind of energy the night crew’s been missing for a while now. He’s a character, like most nocturnists are, but John's strange brand of blasé has its advantages. He’d kept his cool tonight, his hands steady even as blood bloomed through the patient’s gauze; in fact, he rambled right through the worst of it, going on and on about xenotransfusions (“did you know the first human-to-sheep blood transfusion worked too well?”), but his focus never wavered.

Parker Ellis, a second-year resident, is something else entirely.

From the beginning, Jack liked her: there’s a steadiness to Parker, an understated confidence to her, that is rare in someone so early in the game. She was good on the dayshift, teamed with Robby and Dana, but nights bring something electric out of her. She doesn’t rattle. She doesn’t rush or stall. Tonight, she moved with precision: ran the FAST scan while John held pressure, called out findings with clean confidence. When she palpated the patient’s pelvis and found instability there, she tightened the binder herself, checked the tension, checked again at Jack’s suggestion without pushing back or taking umbrage with the instruction.

Jack hadn’t needed to say much. He offered a few questions, mostly out of habit, and they’d answered him quickly and easily. Watching them move in sync, he’d had the rare pleasure of doing what any good attending hopes to do with a skilled team: very little.

In the four years since the start of the pandemic, silver linings have been few and far between.

First, they lost Adamson. Then, in the years that followed, the hospital staff thinned — some lost to the virus, others to burnout. The ED runs on so many new faces now that, for a while, coming into work felt like walking into a house where all the furniture had been replaced without Jack’s knowing; everything was in its proper place, but nothing was quite how he remembered it. It took him months to adjust — not just to match new names to unfamiliar faces, but to get used to walking past Adamson’s office and finding it empty, to seeing his smile only when Jack looked up at his photograph on the memorial wall.

And then there’s Robby.

Jack still bristles at the idea of calling what they attempted a relationship, much to his therapist’s chagrin — what would it cost him, Robert asked him once during a session, to admit that’s what it was, imperfect as it might’ve been? Whatever answer Jack gave at the time was half-hearted and placating. He can’t even remember it now.

It’s easier to call it what it wasn’t.

It wasn’t what Jack would’ve liked it to have been. It wasn’t honest, because neither of them had mustered up enough courage for that. It wasn’t exclusive, despite the fact that, at least for Jack, his interest in fucking other people was something he eventually found himself ingenuously putting on, like an ill-fitting suit, like something one does only because the situation seems to call for it and it probably won’t hurt anyone to give it try.

But, every now and then, a thought slips past Jack’s carefully laid defenses: they came close. Closer, maybe, than he ever thought they’d get.

In that fragile intermission between a patient’s funeral and Adamson’s own, there were moments of real happiness; there was an ease to carving out a space in his life for Robby to fill. There was a pleasure in the small banalities of loving him — his habit of leaving shoes at the doorstep, the socks Jack had lost to Robby’s washing machine, the familiar way Robby hummed into a particularly good kiss, like it was something to savor and enjoy.

In hindsight, they might’ve been stumbling their way towards something real — if not yet love, then at least something that might’ve become it. Something they could have built a life out of, if only their circumstances had been different.

In the two years since then, their friendship has, despite some growing pains, held strong. That, Jack thinks, is one of the few things for which he can still feel neatly grateful.

For a few uncertain months after they agreed to pull back and keep things simple, Jack worried the damage was already done. He worried that they had stretched their friendship too thin, pulled it so far beyond its limits that it was poised to snap. Instead, it proved itself elastic. With enough time, they found their way back to each other; back to casual phone calls and shared meals and re-learning how to touch one another — a squeeze of the shoulder, a pat on the back, a tight hug at the end of a particularly grueling shift — without kicking up all the ways that they couldn’t.

They are still partners in the ED, still friends outside of it, still something like family. In a time when bright spots have been few, this is one of them: that their companionship endured. That Robby, still scarred from those brutal fourteen months of the early pandemic, has slowly come back to himself in small, but tangible ways.

And then there are their residents, their interns, their students — bright, and surprising, and, in recent years especially, a rare bunch.

Jack has always been careful not to play favorites, but even he can admit that doctors like these don’t come around often; He knows Robby’s taken a shine to Frank Langdon – sharp and charismatic and eagerly trailing after him like a puppy. And Jack has his own team on nights: Lena and the nurses, the familiar push-pull with Emery, and his own mentees which include, of course, Parker and John.

And that is its own comfort — even when a patient unknowingly asks after Adamson, or his widow sends the ED flowers, or when Robby smiles in that particular way of his that still makes Jack ache, like Robby’s unknowingly placed a hand right over a nearly-vanished bruise.

When everything else wavers, there’s still the work. That’s Jack’s throughline: the patients, the need, the rarity of being part of a team of people who share a singleness of focus, a common good. And, of course, perhaps the greatest silver lining of all: that Jack still enjoys teaching, still gets to do it, still gets the quiet satisfaction of watching the next generation of doctors rise to the occasion, of knowing he helped shape how they got there in some way.

Now the three of them, Jack, Parker, and John, stand in the stretching silence, hearts settling back down to a normal rhythm. They tug off their gloves, peeling away their compromised gowns and throwing them in the nearest bin. Jack rolls his neck, and watches John glance down at his feet.

He groans. “Aw, shit. My shoes.”

John lifts one foot slightly, tilting it outward to show a dark, irregular spray pattern across the toe. The blood’s already drying at the edges, rust-colored and crusting into the cream-colored mesh.

Parker’s lips flatten to a line. “You wore mesh sneakers to work? Rookie move, my guy.”

“They’re running shoes,” John says, half-defensive, half-wounded. “They’re ergonomic.”

“They’re porous,” she corrects. “Hope your toes enjoy sepsis.”

John bends to inspect the damage to his shoe more closely, expression vaguely mournful. “I think some of the staining’s iodine. Think hydrogen peroxide will get it out?”

“On white shoes? Not a chance,” Jack tells him, snorting when John sucks his teeth. “The only thing you can do now is start wearing non-permeables and darker colors.”

Parker points a thumb at Jack. “See? Rookie mistake,” she says, as if translating what Jack’s said into what, in truth, he’s basically thinking. “Listen to your elders.”

“Well, hold on,” Jack counters. “It’ll be a long, long time before I’m anybody’s elder.”

When they step out of the trauma bay, the air feels cooler and the floor seems quiet. Jack glances at his watch — it’s a quarter past three, so they very well might be in for the usual dip in their shift before the morning rushhour brings in a fresh wave of patients; together, they find Lena perched in her usual spot at the nurses’ station, typing up notes on the computer with a paper plate by her keyboard, a bit of white frosting lingering on her fork, half-forgotten.

John motions to her plate. “What’s that?”

“Cake,” Lena replies, brows furrowed as she finishes typing. She doesn't look up right away, just reaches for her fork and takes another bite. “And the last plate in the cupboard, I’m afraid. Marie’s out looking for more.”

“What’s the occasion?” Parker asks. “You naming us MVPs of the night shift?”

“If only, darlin’. God knows you deserve it,” Lena says with a smile. “The morning crew brought it in for Doctor Robby. He hit twenty years at PTMC today.”

John straightens. “No kidding? How’s this the first I’ve heard of it?”

“Because if he had his way, no one would’ve heard about it. The man’s allergic to attention,” Jack answers.

Lena lets out a scoff. “Oh, if he’d known it was happening, he would’ve called out sick or called in a bomb threat — whatever works.” Then, to Jack, she says: “I don’t know how you and Dana pulled it off. I heard he had no idea it was happening. That's a first." 

“Turns out you can get a lot past him if you get him started on what he’s reading,” Jack tells her, smiling. “Really, Dana did the hard work. I was just the honeypot.”

“Thank you for your service,” she tells him, reverently. 

He gestures toward Lena’s plate. “Got enough left to share with the class?”

“Plenty,” she says, already pointing the way with her fork. “The rest’s in the staff fridge. The coast looks clear out here, too, if ya'll can be quick about it. Knock yourselves out.”

Jack straightens, gives a quick glance toward Parker and John, who are waiting with feigned disinterest; He glances up at the board, checks the clock, measures the relative calm on the floor. When Jack nods, giving them the greenlight, Parker pumps a fist, and John grins. 

In the break room, Jack thinks the sheet cake looks comically huge.

Jack hadn’t seen it until now — he’d only helped Dana split the costs for it, then kept Robby distracted so Dana could sneak it into work. Robby had taken the bait happily, launching into a tangent about some book on the state of English football in the 80’s and Jack had let him talk, finishing his charts at an easy pace while Dana slipped in through the hospital bay and stashed the cake in the mini-fridge in Gloria’s office upstairs.

Congratulations Robby! is piped in lopsided cursive, the lettering now half-obscured by crumbs and uneven slices where the dayshift had gotten to it first, and Jack can’t help but laugh under his breath at the sight of it. Of course Dana went overboard. It isn’t hard to picture the way Robby must’ve winced at the sight of it, equal parts touched and horrified. And actually, she’d promised a video — he’d have to remind her to send it.

Given the circumstances, they’d never gotten the chance to properly celebrate Robby’s promotion to chief attending. But, even if the circumstances had been different, the truth is Robby has never been one for birthdays, or accolades, or anything that put him at the center of the spotlight. The truth is, too, that Jack’s probably proud enough for the two of them. For Robby to have given so much of his life to this hospital, to have made it through the worst years imaginable here and come out of it on the other side — it means something, even if Robby pretends it doesn’t.

John must either forget that someone’s out fetching plates or have lost his patience because, after rummaging through the cupboard, he returns to Jack and Parker both and presents plastic cups. Then, with zero ceremony, he presses the rim of the cup straight into the cake and scoops out a perfect chunk, frosting and all. Parker follows suit.

Jack leans against the counter, watching them with something like fond exasperation as they prep cups for the rest of the staff and custodians. While they’re busy, he pulls out his phone and snaps a photo: Parker tensed as her cup nearly topples back onto the cake, John grinning wide, one hand holding dessert, the other flashing a rock-on sign. The cake itself looks wrecked, cratered and smeared under the breakroom fluorescents.

He attaches the photo to a message, types in Robby’s name, and hits send. He figures he won’t see it until morning — Robby should be out cold by now — but he’ll reply in the morning, like he usually does. A thumbs up emoji or a monosyllabic reply, because he’s a miserable texter. It’ll be something nice for Robby to wake up, he thinks.

“Sending that to Robby?” Parker asks, her spoon halfway to her mouth.

“If not, you should,” John says, already mid-bite. “The boss man’s gotta know how the better half lives.”

Before Jack can decide whether to confirm or deny, his phone buzzes in his hand.

Robby’s message reads: What are you letting them do to the cake?

A second message arrives almost immediately. They’re mutilating it.

Jack huffs a quiet laugh and types back: What’s it to you?

After a moment, he adds: And what are you doing up?

The typing bubble flashes, then disappears. Jack is just about to lock the screen when Robby’s reply finally comes through: Talking to you. And it's my cake, no thanks to you.

“Tell him we said congrats,” Parker says, her tone light but knowing. It’s a little worrisome, he thinks, the way she doesn’t need any encouragement to know her intuition is right.

He clears his throat. “Sure,” he says, typing out the quick text, their regards folded neatly into it. A moment later, he pockets his phone. “He’ll hate that.”

“I can’t believe the guy’s made it twenty years here and didn’t think anybody would notice,” Parker says, mostly to John.

“Yeah, well,” John says around a mouthful of cake, “some people notice plenty.”

Jack looks up at that, the words landing with a vague weight he can’t quite place. Parker’s shoulders tense slightly, her fork stalling halfway to her mouth before she takes a slow bite. She doesn’t meet his eyes. Instead, she flicks a sharp look at John, like she’s telling him to shut up without saying so.

“What?” John asks, looking back and forth between Jack and Parker, clueless. “I mean, it’s not exactly a secret.”

“That’s not —” Parker starts, frustration edging in as she tries to cut him off.

Finally, Jack interrupts with a question. “What’re we talking about?”

Some of Parker’s hesitation catches John at last. He chews, swallows, then finally says, “I just mean — y’know, Heather. She’s got that starry-eyed thing going on. Always trailing behind Doctor Robby, always asking him questions.”

“It’s normal for a resident to have questions,” Jack says, a little protectively. 

“I mean, yeah, but the questions she asks —” John starts, then stops. “You can tell she’s just trying to catch him on ‘em. Like, it’s pretty obviously not about the answers.”

“He’s been here since some of the interns were in diapers,” Parker ammends, trying for something dismissive. She gestures towards the cake. “I mean, literally twenty years. She admires him. That’s normal.”

“No, yeah, I get that,” John says, shrugging. “And like, to be clear, I’m not knocking it. It’s cute. It’s like a schoolyard crush, just, y’know, with people old enough to lecture me about cholesterol.”

“You’re literally insane if you think Heather’s that old,” Parker counters, and then the two of them are off to the races, bantering back and forth at their usual break-neck pace.

Jack only half-listens through the rest of it, expression neutral as he lifts another bite of cake to his mouth.

It’s not unusual for residents to set their sights on attendings; in fact, Jack’s had a fair share of harmless crushes aimed his way over the years. But Robby’s always had a soft spot for the bright ones, the ones who look at him like he hung the moon, and Jack knows exactly how Robby’s attention can land. How easy it is to fall even harder for him under the warmth of his approval, how easy it is to chase after it.

So, Heather might’ve noticed it, too. That’s fine. That’s nothing.

Jack finishes the last bite, then tosses the empty cup into the trash. “Alright. Lena’s probably due for some help. Let’s get back to it.”

Parker and John walk through the door he opens for them, still talking softly amongst themselves as they gather cups of cake to bring out to some of the staff who didn’t get any yet. Jack lingers just a second longer behind, glancing once toward his phone before turning away.

It’s workplace gossip, he reminds himself. And even if it’s true, it’s nothing. It doesn’t matter.

It just catches somewhere in his chest, that’s all.

Robby doesn’t realize how far he’s wadded into a connection with Heather until he’s already up to his neck, in too deep.

The first time they end up in bed together, it’s after a post-shift trip to the bar, the crowd thinning until it’s only the two of them left. They’re clear-headed enough to know exactly what they’re doing, but the faint hum of alcohol offers a convenient excuse — it’s easy enough to chalk it to impulse, scratching an itch, nothing worth examining because it won’t happen again.

The second time, however, there’s no such cover, and the third even less. By then, they’ve stopped pretending it’s an accident at all.

Heather Collins is a brilliant woman — but not in the way brilliance usually announces itself among residents. She’s learned, yes, but there’s a breadth to her intelligence that can’t be taught, a kind of perceptiveness that isn’t born from books. She can walk into a room and quickly intuit the energy inside of it, even the shape of its silences. Heather listens with kind intention and, until she and Robby become more familiar with one another, speaks only when it seems she’s decided she has something worth saying. And when she does, it’s with a calm so rare that it makes Robby want to lean in to hear her.

She doesn’t talk much about herself, at first — they come to know one another in fragments, little tidbits exchanged between patients and across accumulating shifts. A brother in Atlanta. A love for 90’s sitcoms and a morning ritual of running half-marathons on the morning of New Year's Day.

She watched Night of the Living Dead too young, she told him once, half-laughing into her beautiful hands. She was terrified of cemeteries as a child, but she shared her mother’s lifelong adoration for Duane Jones. And then, with a soft, sympathetic flicker in her eyes, she told him about how she tried to rewatch it last October, six months after her mother had passed, and how she couldn’t make it thirty minutes in without crying.

If Robby were to explain why he crossed the line with Heather, he would perhaps point to this — that they share grief in common, tender as the first sprout of green from thawing winter soil. A recognition, soft and mutual, of what it means to lose someone foundational and keep moving forward through their absence. A mother for her. A near father for him.

But then there’s also this: Heather had a good life before she came to PTMC. She had stability, and status, and a lucrative career in finance, and she walked away from all of it. She chose medicine instead, chose residency, with all its sleepless nights and thankless hours, at an age when most people have already accepted the shape of their lives as fixed.

When Heather arrived, she was doing what he had not: she had taken stock of her life, and found it lacking, and torn it down to build something greater, more true.

Maybe that’s part of the reason he let the lines between them blur — lines that should have stayed sharp between an attending and a first-year, supervisor and subordinate, mentor and mentee.

Perhaps he needed to see that kind of courage up close — the rare audacity to walk away from comfort and certainty, to follow a trickle of happiness to its wellspring, despite its abundant risks. Because he, who had spent the past four years entombed in his own fear, hadn’t done what she’d done: chased after what he wanted, risked it all. Not with Jack. Even before the pandemic, he had kept some part of himself shuttered away from him, had made the same tired mistake that had ended every other relationship he’d had before. And though he had been more open with Jack than he’d been with anyone else, it hadn’t been enough.

When it came time to tell him what he really wanted from their relationship, Robby had kept silent. When the scaffolding of something lasting had begun to set between them, he let it fall. After Adamson died, grief settled over Robby like layers of soil, like stone. He let himself sink beneath it, let fear and sorrow dig the trench deeper, until Jack could no longer reach him. Until the only thing left were Jack’s outstretched hands and all the ways Robby failed to grab hold of them.

“Does this kind of thing happen often?” Heather asks him eventually.

She’s lying on her back, the sheet drawn loosely over her chest, and her eyes are fixed above her, as if the ceiling might yield the answer Robby hasn’t yet offered.

Robby props himself on an elbow, studying her profile in the half-light. “You mean in general?” he asks. “It happens, sure, but it’s — well, I guess it’s like any job where there’s a —”. He stalls over what to call it: a power imbalance? That’s what it is, he supposes, but it feels gauche to say it aloud. Instead, he says: “It’s not exactly encouraged.”

Heather sits up. She’s more guarded right now than he might have expected, brows drawn tight as she looks at him. “I mean you, specifically,” she says. “Sleeping with someone from work.”

Robby tenses before he’s even aware of it. “No,” he says, and it’s the truth. “Not often.”

“That isn’t never,” she says, and it lands too squarely for him to brush off.

“I don’t make a habit of getting involved with people I work with, if that’s what you’re asking.” Robby drags a hand over his jaw, considering his words before he adds, “This only ever happened once before.”

Her mouth flattens to a thin line. “Was she your resident, too?”

Oh. So that’s it. The question lands heavily, and in the beat that follows he can see it — the stiffness in her shoulders, the guarded look in her eyes, how this is what she’s been circling around from the start. This is what’s really needling her.

“Heather,” he says, voice sharper than he means it to be, “I don’t do this with residents.”

“You’re doing this with me.”

“Yeah, but you’re the exception.”

Her mouth quirks like she’s about to laugh. “Really? I’m the exception?”

“Is that so hard to believe?”

Heather gives him a leveling look. It sounds like a line and he knows it.

“I’m being serious,” he adds, feeling the trap of his own defensiveness. “I mean, jesus, most of the residents are practically kids. They’re half my age. I don’t—” he exhales, shaking his head. “I don’t make a habit of this. The only other person was —”

Robby cuts himself off, suddenly aware of how close he’s skirting to something else. It’s a moment’s pause, it doesn’t last much more than a second, but he feels it all the same. It’d be so easy to dodge telling her the truth. He can feel the words pressing at the back of his teeth, knows how easy it would be to swallow them, like he’s done so many times before.

He doesn’t know why he doesn’t.

He doesn’t know whether it’s courage, or apathy, or some grim sense of sunken cost. Like if she already thinks he goes around fucking all his interns, maybe there’s no point in keeping the truth to himself. How much worse, really, could it get?

“The last time I saw someone from work, he wasn’t a resident,” Robby says at last. “He was another doctor.”

Heather’s expression flickers — not with shock, but with the same composed, even look she wears at work when she’s processing something new. “Huh,” she says, almost to herself. “I didn’t know that about you. Does that mean — are you bisexual?”

Robby nods.

“Alright,” she replies, easy as anything. “Okay, so he was a doctor. You don't have a thing for the residents. That's good to know." 

That’s it. No flicker of shock, no awkward shift away, no hint of judgment.

His voice, when it comes, is quieter than before, careful. “Does that change anything?”

Heather blinks, then lets out the smallest huff of air — almost a laugh, not because she’s making light of it, but because she can’t quite believe he’d think it might. “Of course not,” she tells him. “If anything, it’s the only part of this whole situation that’s easy.”

Her tone is light, but there’s no teasing in her eyes, no falsity, only an ease that makes him feel both exposed and oddly steadied.

It throws him. He’d been bracing for discomfort, for the quick change of subject, for the small, polite recoil he’s come to expect. He’s felt it before, from both women and men —an edge slipping into their voice, a suspicion in their eyes, the quiet conviction that he was lying to them (or, perhaps worse, himself), or greedy, or untrustworthy. Each time it had left the same ache in him, like being measured and found lacking against some story they’d already decided was true.

Jack had understood, perhaps because he shared something like Robby’s experience. In all things, Robby remembers now with a quiet ache, Jack saw right into him and never really flinched. And now, Heather — well, she stays exactly where she is, close enough that he can feel the slow warmth of her arm against his, her ease as unshaken as if he’d told her the sky was blue.

Still, some part of what Robby's thinking must betray him. She must read something in his expression, because her face softens, like she’s intuited that she’s bumping up against something tender. “Could I ask what happened?”

“Nothing really happened,” Robby tells her, a half-lie, after the briefest hesitation. “It just didn’t work out.”

“So it’s done?” she asks, studying him. “You’re not . . . still with him?”

“No,” he says, and it’s the truth but it catches in his throat. “No, it — it's over.”

He doesn’t add that it’s been two years since he and Jack decided to scale things back, or that he never circled back with Jack about his lingering feelings, never found the right moment, never worked up the nerve. By the time Robby had begun to feel like himself again, Jack was already changed — steadier, healthier, like he’d found some way to soften the sharp edges that used to cut him. Less anger in his voice when he’s dealing with difficult patients, more patience for the hard talks, even about things that once made him bristle: their mending friendship, his chronic pain, his mother growing frail and forgetful.

Robby saw it, all that quiet progress, and some part of him knew it wasn't an accident, but hard-won. Knew that to reach for Jack again would be to risk dragging him backward.

His gaze drops to the sheet between them, fingers absently folding and unfolding its edge, just to give his hands something to do.

Heather watches him quietly, her gaze searching in a way that reveals nothing of what she’s trying to find. “Is this just a rebound, then?” she asks him. “‘The best way to get over someone is to get under someone else’, that sort of thing?”

Robby practically winces. “Jesus, Heather. First, I’m chasing interns, now I’m just using you — you sure you like me?”

“I do, I really do,” she laughs, a little apologetically. “I’m sorry if that was a little blunt.”

“A little?”

“I just want to be sure this isn’t you working someone else out of your system.”

Robby nods, because — okay, that’s fair. He can’t begrudge her the question, even if it lands like a sharp pang in his chest. He knows what it must look like from the outside. But that isn’t what this is. He tells himself that again, firmer this time. That isn’t what’s happening here.

He does think well of her — more than well. Heather is sharp, compassionate, the kind of person who makes the room steadier just by being in it. It matters to him that she deserves someone who treats her right. What he had with Jack was a rare and unrepeatable thing, like lightning striking where it had no business landing. With Heather, it feels different. Something even-keeled and steady, more familiar to the rhythm of relationships he’s known before.

And maybe because of that, this could be good for both of them.

“I can’t promise anything long-term right now,” he admits. “It’s not off the table, I just — I think I need to take this a step at a time. But I do admire you, Heather. I like being with you. And look, I don’t know where this goes, but I wouldn’t be here if I couldn’t picture it going somewhere.”

Her mouth curves, a small smile.

“Alright,” she says after a beat. “So, we play it by ear. But if it ever does turn into something serious, I want to know what I’m walking into. I’m putting a lot on the line here, Robby. I don’t want to risk my career on a relationship — especially not one where I’m a consolation prize.”

He nods, rubbing at his jaw. “I get that. And for what it’s worth, I don’t want to put you in that spot, either. If this ever starts getting in your way, you say the word and I’ll step back. No questions asked.”

He means it — of course he does. Still, there’s an undercurrent of guilt just beneath the words, the quiet recognition that when things like this fall apart, they rarely do so softly. They go out with a bang, with fallout, with damage hard to contain.

And yet, sitting here with her now, he wants to believe it can be different. Wants her to see that whatever brought them together at first doesn’t have to define what follows.

So, maybe what he offers her isn’t a declaration, and it isn’t a promise, but it is, he hopes, an understanding. As if to confirm it, as if to seal it in some bodily way, the space between them softens and narrows; her arm warm against his, the faint scent of his soap clinging to her skin in the half-light.

He listens to her breathing even out, steady and calm, while his thoughts drift in loose, unanchored circles until she gives them a reason to stop.

The truth is that, when Jack finally says something about the situation with Heather, it doesn’t exactly come as a surprise.

The ED is small, and the staff have always been prone to gossip, and whatever rumors were circulating amongst the nurses and the other residents were bound to reach him sooner or later.

That the conversation is inevitable doesn’t, however, make it any easier to have.

It’s a rare Saturday off for the two of them — August warm, the kind of heat that lingers so long past sunset that even the night feels sticky. Jack’s the one who suggests meeting up to watch the game, but when Robby picks the spot, he does his homework. The new sports bar is close enough to Jack’s apartment to keep the walk short — a small consideration, but one he always makes, knowing how the humid weight of summer can make things harder with Jack’s prosthetic.

They’ve claimed a table near the back, far enough from the bar that they don’t have to shout over the crowd, which suits them just fine. The game plays on the flatscreen above the shelves of liquor, the volume low enough that the dull hum of conversation fills in the space between plays.

It’s easy between them again, easy like being together used to be.

They laugh, and they talk, and they eat together, and it’s effortless, borne from years now of knowing each other’s rhythms. It’s a curious thing, Robby thinks, how something so good can feel, for the most part, so effortless. How the brief and sterile months after their breakup — if he can really call it that — necessitated a distance between them that felt unnatural even as it helped them, like learning how to walk again after a long-borne injury, like the crawling itch beneath the cast that sets the broken bone.

It is easy. It is going well. And then Robby’s phone buzzes on the table.

Facing up on the table as it is, Heather’s name lights the screen.

Jack’s eyes catch on it before Robby reaches over and pockets his phone, careful to keep his pace casual and his face neutral but, of course, it’s already too late. Jack saw what he saw. Robby, unnerved, tried to bury it.

Something shifts in the air between them.

Jack leans back in his seat, gaze angled back toward the TV, but Robby knows him too well to be convinced of the apparent disinterest. He knows Jack’s about to say something; he can read it in the set of his shoulders, his fingers tapping a rhythm against the side of his glass, the way his jaw sets around some subtle tension.

“I heard something the other day,” Jack says finally, not looking at him. “About you and Collins.”

“That right?” Robby asks him, careful to keep his tone neutral, in spite of the knot in his stomach, the way he feels caught out, uncomfortable.

“Yeah,” Jack tells him, nodding before taking a slow sip of his beer. “Apparently, there’s something going on between the two of you.”

Robby swallows thickly. “That right? And who told you that?”

“Nobody specific. I just heard it through the grapevine,” Jack shrugs. "Either way, it didn’t sound like you. Figured if it was true, I’d have heard it from you first.”

“I didn’t know we were doing that again,” Robby says. “Talking to each other about who we’re sleeping with.”

Jack's mouth twists into a frown. “Maybe not, but if it’s crossing into work, don’t you think it’s worth talking about?”

“Well, if it weren’t for the gossip, it wouldn’t be crossing into work.”

It’s basically an admission, and judging by the subtle shift in Jack’s expression, it’s clear it registers as one. In that brief and loaded moment of silence, Robby braces for the sharp edge of Jack’s disapproval, or perhaps an admonition. You should know better, perhaps, because Robby does or at least he ought to. What would Adamson say?, perhaps, and really hit Robby where it hurts. 

But it doesn’t come.

Jack just looks at him, silent, throat flickering as he swallows down whatever it is he chooses not to say. He’s studying him, Robby realizes — trying to read his expression for some kind of tell: a flicker of happiness, maybe, or guilt, or perhaps some other sign that would tell him this is just a fling, nothing to worry about.

Whatever he’s searching for, Jack doesn’t find it. He frowns. Then, very carefully, he asks: “You sure you know what you’re doing?”

“Wouldn’t be doing it if I wasn’t,” Robby tells him. Then, when Jack makes a face, he adds: “It’s not like I’m hooking up with some intern who doesn’t know her ass from her elbow. Heather’s thirty-eight, she’s smart, she knows what she’s doing. We’ve both been around long enough to understand the risks.”

“She’s also a resident,” Jack reminds him. “And you’re her attending.”

Robby doesn’t respond to that right away. Because Jack’s right, of course, but admitting that would feel like conceding more than he’s willing to. The ethics of it are already a stone on his chest, heavier for the quiet thought of what Adamson would have made of it, if only he was alive to see it. He takes a slow drink from his beer, letting the bitterness sit on his tongue a while.

“I know the optics aren’t great,” Robby admits. “We’ve talked about it: what we want, what the boundaries are. She knows to say something if it stops feeling right.”

“And you really think she’ll do that?”

“I do,” Robby tells him, with conviction. “She’s not afraid to speak up for herself, Jack. And, yeah, I know this isn't ideal, but it’s not exactly unheard of either.”

Jack gives a small nod, though his expression doesn’t soften much. “Sure, it happens. But you’ve got a real good thing going at work, Robby. Twenty years without any red on your ledger, and now you’re running the department. There’s a lot to lose here if it goes south. For both of you." 

There it is again, recognizable as the notes to an old song: it’s the same steady concern Jack used when Robby was barely sleeping during the worst of the pandemic.

Maybe that should feel reassuring, but it doesn’t.

Because some secret part of him that he’d never own up, petty and juvenile and maybe even cruel, wants Jack to react differently. Wants the edge, the flash of jealousy, something that would tell him this is more than just professional worry.

Instead, Jack is even-keeled in a way that feels too careful to be honest.

“I know Heather’s got more to lose in this situation than I do,” Robby says, swallowing down against the tension in his chest. “She’s at the start of what’ll be a good career. A long one, I think. I’m not getting in the way of that, not if I can help it.”

Jack watches him for a beat, something unreadable flickering in his expression before he asks something Robby didn’t expect him to: “Does anyone else know?”

Robby blinks. “Just Dana. Heather told her.”

"And what’s she think about it?”

“She warned us both,” Robby admits. “She told us to watch ourselves, keep it clean at work, be smart about it. But she said she trusts I know what I’m doing.” He tilts his head, eyes on Jack. “I can see you thinking, man. Whatever it is, just say it.”

“You want my honest opinion?” Jack asks. He seems a little unconvinced, even after Robby nods yes, but then he admits: “Professionally, I think it’s a bad call. I think residents are a no-go, no exceptions, and you’re putting more on the line than I’d be comfortable with.” He pauses, then adds, a touch lighter, “But hey, it’s not a crime.”

"What a stamp of approval," Robby says, trying for levity if only to keep from cringing. 

“Brother, you asked for it,” he reminds him.

“I did,” Robby admits. He hesitates before the next question, turning it over in his mind like a stone. “Alright, so that’s your opinion as a doctor. What about as my friend?”

Jack exhales, a faint, humorless sound. Almost a laugh, but not quite.

“I mean, what is there to say?” he asks. “I wish she wasn’t your resident. I wish she wasn’t fresh out of medical school, I —” Jack breaks off, brow furrowing, teeth catching briefly on his lip as if weighing whether or not to keep going. Whatever he decides against stays unsaid. “Look, if you're good for each other, and you’re happy, and you’re careful, then what does it really matter what I think?”

Robby almost protests. He almost tells Jack that no other opinion matters more to him right now than his, wants makes him say whatever it is he isn’t saying, just to know if it’s jealousy hiding behind his words or something more sterile.

But the pause between them stretches too long, and Jack’s eyes have already slid back to the condensation running down his glass, and somewhere across the bar, a cheer goes up over a desperately needed play, the noise pulling their focus out and away from each other.

They let the moment pass. Conversation shifts; the thread of tension loosens. Jack’s voice finds its easy rhythm again, his smile returning in fits and starts, enough that anyone else would think nothing had happened. But for Robby, something faint and unnamable lingers, like a note held just beyond hearing.

So maybe it’s for the better that he doesn’t push Jack for the full shape of the truth. Because if it’s the answer he’s afraid of, that Jack doesn’t really care who he’s with anymore, it’ll sting, even though he has no right to claim the hurt. And if it’s the one he secretly wants, and feels like a real asshole for wanting, he doesn’t know what the hell he’d do with it anyway.

When they step outside an hour later, the street is quieter than it should be for a Saturday night: a couple of cars idling at the light, the echo of laughter from somewhere blocks away. They’ve both eased since earlier, a few more drinks sanding down the rough edges of their conversation. Jack looks, to Robby’s eyes, like himself again: the tension gone from his shoulders, his smile sitting a little easier in the dim glow of the streetlamps.

They hug goodbye, as they always do. It’s a brief thing — a pull close, a couple of pats on the back — but Robby catches the faint scent of his cologne, sharper in the night air, and the heat of his body under the thin cotton of his shirt. It’s nothing, and it’s everything, a wordless reminder that all has not been lost, despite Heather and despite the conversation they’d just had.

Robby steps back, eyes set toward the other corner of the crosswalk that’ll take him to his apartment, in the opposite direction of Jack’s own. But, before he goes, he glances once over his shoulder, catching sight of Jack checking the traffic light, the wind lifting a few strands of hair at his temple.

Then it hits him — sudden, like a thread he almost forgot to pull.

“Hang on,” Robby says, reaching into his jacket. He pulls the worn paperback free and holds it out. “I almost forgot to give you this.”

Jack takes the book, eyebrows lifting as he looks down at the title. “Among the Thugs,” he reads, the words turning into a half-laugh. “You shouldn’t have.”

Robby blinks, unsure why Jack seems caught off guard. “It’s the book I told you about,” he explains. “You seemed so interested the other day, I figured you should have my copy.”

“Oh,” Jack says, putting it together now. “Right. No, yeah, of course. Thanks.”

He looks down at the book with new eyes, a slow smile blooming into something openly fond. It’s a look that Jack only ever seems to reserve for children and the gullible, like he feels too endeared to laugh. It’s disarming, but it also makes Robby suspect he’s just been had.

It clicks into place just then. The way Dana had been mysteriously late to her shift that morning and how she and the nurses later appeared with a cake that Robby never saw in the breakroom fridge. The sheer amount of questions Jack had about the book, despite the fact that his interest in soccer began and ended with the World Cup. 

“You didn’t really care about the book, did you?” Robby asks.

Jack doesn’t even have to respond. He’s about to, he opens his mouth to speak, but there’s this look on his face that feels a little sheepish, like he’s been caught out, and that’s as good a confirmation as any.

“I should’ve known,” Robby says, heat creeping into his cheeks. “You took so long to sign out, too. You were just covering for Dana. I mean, since when do you give a fuck about soccer?”

“I like soccer plenty,” Jack says, failing to hide the amusement in his voice.

“Oh, fuck you,” Robby tells him. “Give me my book back.”

Jack tucks it under his arm before Robby can grab it. “Not a chance,” he tells him. “I’ll give it back to you when I’m done.”

Robby rolls his eyes. “Whatever. Don’t dog-ear the pages.”

That earns him a low, unhurried laugh. “C’mon, Robby. I’m not an animal.”

Jack steps in, close enough that Robby catches the faint trace of his cologne again, and claps a hand on his shoulder as Jack offers him a thank you and some promise to bring the book back soon. His palm lingers just long enough to give the muscle there a slow, familiar squeeze. Then he’s already turning away, the book still tucked against his side.

It’s nothing more than a friendly parting, brief and unremarkable to anyone passing by, but it lingers. The night feels softer in his absence, quieter somehow, the hum of the city a step removed. Robby walks on, hands in his pockets. Inwardly, he smothers the urge to glance over his shoulder. He keeps his eyes forward, even after some part of him is certain that Jack is already gone.

Some hours later, Jack finds himself staring at a message on his phone more than he’s reading it, his gaze slipping over the same lines without quite taking them in.

The stranger on the other end has sent a picture, a handsome face with a body to match, and beneath it, a question about what it is he’s looking for at one in the morning. And though this should be the start of something exciting, Jack feels himself caught out, suspended, like turning into a dead end without having first seen it coming.

What are you looking for?

Jack tries, for a moment, to summon an answer.

He sets the phone face down on the bathroom sink instead.

The prosthetic comes off easily, muscle memory carrying him through the familiar sequence of movements even as the soft buzz of his last drink lingers pleasantly in his limbs. He sets it down within easy reach for later, and steps into the shower with care. Lowering himself onto the bench, he bows his head to the spray of the water, the heat of it soothing against the knots in his shoulders, running in rivulets down the lines of his back, pooling in the hollow of his throat before spilling lower. He tips his head forward, lets the water soak into his hair, and waits for it to ease away what remains of his tension.

It doesn’t. The conversation he’d had with Robby lingers on his mind like steam on glass.

Robby’s gaze had been steady for the most part, his voice even, as if admitting to something so obviously questionable didn’t warrant much of a reaction. Jack knows what he’s doing with Collins isn’t wise. He’s certain of that much. But it’s harder to separate that conviction from the feeling simmering underneath it, one he isn’t particularly proud of.

It’s almost convenient, in a way, to have something tangible to brace against — a frustration with edges Jack can trace, a name he can give it, a disappointment that lets him stand on the clean ground of principle.

He can’t do quite the same with outright jealousy.

The truth, of course, is that whatever Robby does with someone else isn’t really Jack’s business anymore. It hasn’t been for nearly two years. And, on the whole, Jack has moved on in his own right. Once the world settled back into something resembling safety, he carried on: first back to his support groups, then to therapy, then to dating — in that order. There’s been enough people after Robby, enough faces, and names, and bodies, enough time for Jack to refamiliarize himself with how to put his hands on someone without immediately measuring them against either of the two people he used to know by heart.

So, he doesn’t begrudge Robby for dating. That was always going to happen — was probably already happening, in fact. But it’s difficult to understand why it has to be Collins. Not because there is anything particularly objectionable about her — there isn’t. But she’s someone Jack whose voice will carry from down the hall during shift changes, whose name Jack’ll read on charts, whose presence will brush up against his own in the small and ordinary ways.

Jack presses his palms to his face, lets the heat of the water run over him, but none of the frustration dissolves. He doesn’t know what to do with it. He doesn’t know where to aim it that isn’t Collins, for setting her sights on Robby, or Robby, for letting her. Better, perhaps, to aim inward, to inspect the inward places he thought had healed and see how much they give under pressure. The pain is old, but it flares as if fresh, something in his chest twisted just far enough to remind him that the past hasn’t entirely passed after all.

By the time Jack shuts off the water, it’s begun to run cold.

He dries off carefully, places the prosthetic back on if only for the brief work of readying for sleep. In bed, he doesn’t open the book Robby carried close to chest and later pressed into his hands. He leaves it on the bedside table instead, close enough to touch, his gaze lingering on the worn spine until his eyes drift shut.

3 A.M. is the pivot point. On most nights, it’s the hour where the bulk of the chaos burns itself out, where the ED eases into a manageable rhythm — never exactly quiet, never exactly boring, but steady enough for the nocturnists to catch their breaths.

Some nights, however, refuse to let up. Tonight is one of them.

A residential fire on the South Side Slopes has already sent four smoke-inhalation patients their way, with more expected, because PTMC is the closest hospital with hyperbaric chambers. Those cases can’t easily be diverted anywhere else, so they’ve been squeezing them in wherever they can.

Jack and the team have to work shoulder-to-shoulder to keep pace: John and Parker hold their own with the rest of the residents, the nurses are firing on all cylinders, and Lena holds the center as always, keeping the whole floor coordinated.

He’s grateful for them, every one of them, but the truth is they’re stretched too thin. Beds are full. Two transfers are stalled because of paperwork. The waiting room is a restless churn of patients, and every time he thinks he’s bought himself five minutes, EMS is rolling right back through their doors with someone new.

And then the call comes in from dispatch: a multi-vehicle pile-up on the Parkway East.

Jack knows they’ll handle it — they always do, they have no other choice — but as he glances at the clock and scans the board already straining at capacity, he knows how much worse their shift has just become.

Lena finds him by the trauma bays. “Bed one’s burns are getting worse and we’re concerned about her airway,” she tells him. “I’ve paged Gladden, but they won’t move the kid upstairs without ICU sign-off.” She hesitates just a fraction. “And those transfers we’ve been waiting on are still stalled.”

Jack knows what’s coming before she says another word.

“They won’t budge without the chief’s override,” she tells him anyway.

“It’s three-thirty in the morning,” Jack says, pushing back. “Can’t we stall until Robby’s in for the morning shift?”

“He has the day off, actually,” she tells him, mouth thinning into a frown as Jack grimaces. “We’ve been trying to work around the issue with beds for a while now, and I know you can handle the airway, but you can’t open ICU space, Jack.” She hesitates, then adds, quieter: “I don’t want to bother him either, but he told me to call him in situations exactly like these.”

He takes a breath, trying to level out his frustration.

“Let me at least see how much he can do over the phone,” she tells him.

Jack doesn’t like it. Robby already gives more of himself to this place than he has to spare, and calling him now — or worse, handing him an excuse to come into work when he should be sleeping — feels like the last thing Jack ought to allow. But Lena’s right, and they both know it. The call isn’t hers alone to make, but it isn’t his to stop either.

The call goes out, but Jack isn’t around to hear it. There’s no time to dwell. The department surges on, wave after wave crashing against them like the dark waters of a storm, and Jack has, admittedly, no sense of how much time passes as he waits for the swell to break.

And then, in the blur of it all, Robby arrives. Lena peels off to meet him with a quick rundown, and Robby listens, nodding attentively, before cutting straight for the stalled cases that have had them tied up all night.

For a brief moment, hardly a few seconds, Jack watches from across the bay.

He recognizes the t-shirt under Robby’s scrubs: one of the old ones he used to sleep in, soft with age, the collar slightly stretched. It catches Jack off guard for a moment, a flash of familiarity over something he didn’t think he could still notice. Robby must’ve tugged it on quickly, he thinks — decided against one of the usual undershirts he reserves for work in the interest of saving time.

It’s an absurd observation, and it comes with a flash of guilt he doesn’t have the emotional real estate or the time to indulge in. He pockets it, buries it, keeps moving.

For the next half hour, Jack catches Robby only in brief glances and when they speak, they don’t waste time with pleasantries — they talk about work, in that hurried and sparse shorthand the entire team falls into in moments such as these. It isn’t until they both slow by the charting station, mid-stride, that Jack catches his eye long enough to speak beyond the immediate.

“Once the transfers are through, you should head out,” he tells him. The words come out rougher than he means, more guilt than gratitude.

Robby’s eyebrows rise. “Throwing me out already?”

“Yes,” Jack tells him. “You should be in bed, not working on — what, three hours of sleep?”

Robby makes a face like he’s been caught out. Evidence, perhaps, that he still hasn’t quite kicked his habit of going to sleep late ahead of a day off. Jack never did understand how such a chronically exhausted person could be so resistant to rest.

“I’ll sleep when I’m dead,” Robby shoots back once he recovers, and though he tries for levity, it falls flat between them. He gestures toward the crowded bays. “C’mon, Jack. You’re barely treading water. When things ease up, I’ll go.”

“No, you won’t. I know you. You’ll find some excuse to stick around until shift change.” He fixes him with a look. “I’m serious, Robby. Go home.”

Robby exhales, a sound halfway between a laugh and a sigh. “You think I came all the way in here to give a couple signatures and run home? Let me take some of the weight for a while.” His mouth curves, tired but certain. “You’d do the same for me.”

Jack doesn’t answer right away, because of course he would.

“That isn’t the point,” he says, blandly. Some of the fight is gone from his voice — he can hear it himself as he speaks.

“Brother, that’s exactly the point,” Robby says, and smiles beatifically.

And so they move on, no more room or time left for argument. They fall into the rhythm of the department, shoulders brushing in passing, trading clipped instructions, filling gaps before they open. The pile-up patients flood in, and the night dissolves into a blur.

Somewhere in the middle of it all, the burn patient in bed one, one of the kids pulled out of that residential fire, arrests.

Jack is there, doing compressions, eyes flicking between the monitors, watching the numbers refuse to change. He’s been here before, seen people survive from worse than this, but when it’s over, the stillness in the room hits him in a way he hadn’t braced for.

Jack steps back from the patient once it’s called, chest heaving like he’s just run a mile. The room clears around him: the nurses resetting quietly, the residents filing out the room with the steely expressions. He should be moving with them, falling back into stride and announcing that they’ll need to debrief on this before the night is through, but his legs carry him only as far as the door. He halts there. He stills.

He doesn’t know why it strikes him so sharply.

Losing a patient is never easy, least of all a child, but the cruel truth is that children die all the time. He’s seen it before, more times than he can count — on battlefields, in field hospitals, in trauma bays like this one. He’s been the one to call it, to walk out steady for the sake of everyone else, and that isn’t a novelty either.

That’s where Robby finds him: in the empty trauma bay after everyone has already cleared it. He must’ve heard about what happened already, because he doesn’t ask what happened. He just closes the door behind him and says: “Go take a break."

Jack shakes his head. “The residents were just in here. They watched a kid die. I need to talk to them about it —”

“And you will,” Robby says, stepping closer, his voice low but steady. “But if you have that conversation with them like this, you’re not helping anyone. Take a few minutes, clear your head, then talk to them.”

Jack exhales, rough, shaking his head again. “I just need to keep moving.”

Robby’s hand settles on his arm: light and steady and deliberate enough to make him pause. “You can do that when you come back, too. I’ll cover for you in the meantime.” His gaze holds him in place. “And I won’t be alone out here, either. Lena got another nurse to come in on a favor. We can hold the line while you catch your breath.”

Jack searches his face, wanting to argue, but the words don’t come. Robby’s right. There’s just no way around it. Finally, he nods, conceding. “Five minutes.”

“Ten,” Robby counters. And then, before Jack can counter, he adds: “Please.”

Jack all but groans aloud — because fuck him, honestly, for his tone of voice, the look on his eyes, all of it tuned perfectly to the exact note Jack has always had a hard time resisting and he knows it.

Robby gives the smallest smile, a flicker of relief. “Ten minutes. That’s all I’m asking.”

Jack doesn’t trust himself to respond to that. He doesn’t know what there is, really, to say. So, he mumbles something, which Robby dismisses with some self-satisfaction, and then slips out, cutting across the corridor and down toward the elevators.

His plan is simple: grab something from the vending machines downstairs, remedy the fact that he hasn’t eaten since the early afternoon, and stand there chewing until he feels steady again.

But when the elevator doors open, it’s already headed up.

For some reason, Jack doesn’t correct it. He just steps inside and lets it climb.

The car hums its way to the top floor, and when the doors slide open, Jack finds himself staring at an empty and darkened floor, one of the few corners of the hospital that has gone to relative disuse since the pandemic. He steps out without thinking and then, scrunching his nose at the stale air, he turns for the stairs, climbing the last flight — up, up, up, until the night air hits him.

It’s almost peaceful on the rooftop.

Pittsburgh stretches out below him, the dark river cutting through the city, windows and headlights glowing like droplets of gold. And though it is not silent, the usual roar of the city has dulled to a murmur and it is here, for some reason, that Jack feels acutely aware of how easily, how unflinchingly, the world moves on.

He doesn’t think about the vending machines anymore. He doesn’t think about what he’ll say to the residents, or the patients still waiting for care. For a few brief minutes, he just lets the weight settle where it may, and looks out at a city that doesn’t know what it’s lost tonight.

He thinks about the child, and what it means to live in a world where children die daily.

It reminds him, distantly, of a family trip to Delaware when he was young: he and his sisters at the edge of Rehoboth Beach, scooping up handfuls of saltwater, racing to carry it back to shore before it slipped through their fingers. He thinks about the childish futility of that game, of trying to outpace something so enormous, of trying to carry the ocean in the scant space between two hands.

He thinks about Robby, about the t-shirt soft with age, about what it felt like to strip it from him in the dark. He thinks about Heather, young and bright and beautiful, and how she must now share his knowledge of the shirts Robby wears to bed, and his propensity for talking in his sleep, and the constellation of birthmarks on the soft flesh of his right hip.

And he thinks about his wife, about Sofia, about the weight of the ring still circling his finger, and about the kind of love that grief cannot dissolve.

And in that thinking, on that rooftop, Jack feels as though he has finally seen the shape of it whole. Perhaps this is just what it’ll be with Robby for as long as they’ll know each other: never quite immune to him, never quite exactly where he most wants to be but grateful, at least, for the proximity, the next best thing.

Perhaps some small recess of the heart never fully hardens against the ones you’ve really loved, no matter the time, the distance, the loss. And perhaps it is just as futile to think he can know Robby in all the ways he does without also loving him. Perhaps, in fact, that’s the price of admission.

What would it be like to stop resisting this?

How much easier might it be to accept this — that he will go on loving him, even if it never amounts to more than this, even if the shape of it has shifted into something quieter, something mundanely constant, as if it is possible to love someone as unconsciously and unremarkably as taking one breath after another?

Better to accept it, perhaps. Better to accept that loving Robby now means wanting his happiness, even if it lies with someone else. The parts of him that Robby used to reserve for Jack alone might slip through his fingers, perhaps, but not all of it. And what stays behind, he thinks, is still enough to carry.

By the time dawn begins to seep through the windows of the ED, the worst of it is over. The pile-up patients are stabilized, the fire victims are either upstairs or discharged, and the waiting room is — well, it’s still the usual brand of chaos, but it’s manageable, the kind they’re all used to wading through by now.

At the end of it, Jack trades weary nods goodbye with John and Parker, watching Lena quietly pack some of the things from her desk so that Dana can prepare their shared station the way she likes. There’s no speech besides the debrief he gave the residents after his breather on the rooftop, no ceremony, just the collective exhale at the end of a shift they’ll talk about for a few days to come.

Robby stays for the duration of the shift, of course, just as Jack knew he would.

By the time they make it back to the lockers, neither of them are moving quickly, just pulling bags free in a slow and shared silence, fishing phones out of scrubs, rummaging through the usual scatter of what stays at work and what goes home. Jack’s body aches with the kind of bone-deep fatigue, and yet, to his own exasperation, there’s a restless spark still running through him.

He must be giving it away somehow, because Robby, somehow, intuits it.

“How awake are you, really?” he asks, shutting his locker with a soft clang and glancing over at Jack.

Jack frowns, thinking it over. “A lot more than I’d like to be.”

“Caught a second wind?”

“Yeah,” Jack tells him. “I feel like I’ve run a marathon, but I know the second I lie down, I’ll just stare at the ceiling for a few hours.”

Robby’s mouth pulls into a smile, like that’s exactly what he expected. “Then don’t bother yet. Let’s grab breakfast — or dinner, for you, I guess.”

Jack huffs a laugh, slinging his bag over his shoulder. “Man, don’t you have the day off?”

The question seems to surprise Robby, his brows lifting. “Yeah. So?”

“So, shouldn’t you be winding down yourself? Actually using your time off?”

“That’s what I’m trying to do,” Robby replies, like he’s stating the obvious. “Look, I’m not planning on doing compressions at the diner, if that’s what you’re worried about. I’ll eat now, I’ll rest later, just like you.” He frowns at Jack’s obvious skepticism. “Is that a no on breakfast?”

Jack shakes his head, his mouth pulling into a small, sincere smile. “Breakfast is fine.”

If they’re going to do this, though, the last thing Jack wants to talk about is work. It reminds him, then, about what he’s been meaning to tell Robby for a few days now.

“I gotta tell you, man,” Jack begins, “this book of yours makes Eagles fans look like boy scouts. I’m at the part where Buford goes to Italy for the Man U match.”

Robby blinks, processing the chance of subject, and then looking to him with genuine surprise. “You’re that far in already? I lent you that book on Saturday.”

Jack hums. “See what you can accomplish when you actually use your time off?”

They’re almost to the doors when Heather steps into the locker room, fleece jacket folded over her arm and a coffee cup in hand.

“Good morning, Dr. Robinavitch. Dr. Abbot,” she says warmly, nodding as they return the greeting. Then her gaze shifts to Jack. “How was the night shift? I thought I heard Ellis talking about it on her way out.”

Jack snorts, slinging his bag higher on his shoulder. “All good things, I’m sure.”

“I wouldn’t say that exactly,” she replies. “I heard something about a guy who got into a fight with a truck driver and re-opened his stitches?”

“You don’t want to know,” Robby tells her, dry enough to make Jack huff a laugh.

Heather’s brows crease, her attention swinging back to him. “Y’know, I thought — aren’t you scheduled for tomorrow?”

“I am,” Robby replies, “but Jack dragged me out of bed to help him,”

Jack shoots him a look, incredulous. “I absolutely did not do that, you asshole.”

“That’s not how I remember it, brother.”

“Yeah? How many times did I tell you to go home?”

“I wasn’t counting,” Robby says. His voice softens, the joking edge gone as he glances at Heather. “The truth is, Lena called me about some stalled transfers, then I stuck around, lost track of the time. It was a crazy night and I wasn’t about to leave him to carry the load on his own.”

Jack’s eyes catch on him, held there a beat too long. “Well, as much as I gave you hell for it — thank you,” he says, the word coming rough, awkward around the sincerity and Heather standing there to hear it. “It made a huge difference, having you around. We would’ve been worse for wear without you.”

The praise makes Robby shift and his shoulders round, like he wants to inch away from Jack’s words. He’s always been like that: praise sliding off him like water, never letting it stick. He shrugs, brushing it off as if it’s nothing, and it's exasperating, but it’s Robby — it’s how he’s always been and how, Jack imagines, he’ll always be.

When Jack looks back to her, Heather’s gaze is on him. Her expression is composed, casual even, but the line in her brow betrays something. She’s thinking, he can see that much, but what, exactly, is impossible to know. She takes a slow sip of her coffee, and the look vanishes, gone as quickly as it came.

Robby’s voice draws him back. “You’ll be with Dr. Shamsi today,” he tells Heather, steady and kind. “She likes things done by the book, so be ready to walk her through your decisions. Doesn’t matter how obvious it seems — She’ll want to hear your reasoning.”

Heather nods, the smile she gives him quick but a little searching, and then she steps aside to let them through.

Moving forward, Jack falls into stride with Robby, Heather’s look still tugging faintly at him, like a question left half-asked. The hospital doors part and the morning presses in at once — the electric blue of the morning sky, the stutter of traffic already restless, air carrying a crisp edge of chill that’ll melt under the noon sun. He blinks against it, too worn out to linger on what any of it means. Together they push forward into the day, and whatever he might have caught in her gaze slips loose, dissolving behind them.

Chapter Text

IX. Late Autumn, 2024

By the river, the air bites sharp enough to make Robby wish he’d worn another layer. The wind comes off the Monongahela in thin, needling bursts, and the chill catches in his lungs each time he inhales. Just ahead of him, Jake runs sure-footed: hoodie up, an earbud in, sneakers striking the pavement in easy, metronomic rhythm. At sixteen, he’s all energy and momentum; Robby, chasing that same pace, feels every year between them.

They haven’t done this together in a long time — have neither shared a run nor a Saturday morning in what feels like months. Rarer now are the afternoons when Jake would stop by PTMC after school, sitting at the nurses’ station, spinning in his chair, until his mom arrived to take him home.

Dana, in her calm, knowing way, told him this might happen. It’s just what they do at that age, she’d said, having already shepherded one of her own through her teenage years. Everything’s changing, so they have to test what’s still solid — see how far away they can push you just to make sure you won’t budge. You just can’t chase after them too hard; they need space to figure themselves out, find their way back to you. You’ve got to trust them enough to give it.

She’s right, Robby knows. Jake’s a junior now, busy with friends and basketball and the thousand small preoccupations that fill a young life so easily. Still, it feels strange to see less of him lately. When things first ended with Janey — God, that was years ago now, he thinks — Robby had tried to brace for this sort of distance. In fact, he’d expected it: a polite and steady drift until the orbit that once held the three of them together loosened and let him go. But it never quite did.

He and Janey were friends before they dated, and friends again once the sting of their breakup had dulled. In all that time, he never called himself Jake’s stepfather. That was a line they drew early: partly for Jake’s sake, whose father still drifted back into the picture every now and then, and partly, Robby suspects, for their own — as if naming things too soon had a way of testing their permanence, of tempting the very ending they were, in the end, right to anticipate.

Even so, his bond with Jake had come to mean something that defied Robby’s reluctance to name it; he couldn’t call it fatherhood, not exactly, but it was the closest thing he’d ever known to it — the closest he suspects he ever will.

So when Jake texted yesterday to ask if he wanted to run Furnace Trail in the morning, Robby said yes without thinking. It didn’t matter that he doesn’t make a habit of running or that he can think of better, lazier ways to spend his day off. It was enough just to be asked. Enough that Jake was the one doing the asking.

The first mile slips by in relative silence. Robby keeps waiting for Jake to start talking — to offer more than a mild comment about the cold, to do more than joke about how slow Robby’s gotten – but nothing really comes. The quiet presses in, louder with each stretch of pavement. Robby reminds himself again it might just be Jake’s age again, that same distance Dana warned him about, but the thought doesn’t hold.

No, he thinks, with that quiet, undefinable hunch he usually reserves for medicine. This doesn’t feel like Jake at all.

They round a bend where the river curves east, the wind sharpening as it meets them head-on. Robby falls a few steps behind, his breath coming harder now. When the trail tilts upward, he slows, pressing a hand to his side. “Hang on,” he calls, more to catch his breath than anything else. Jake stops ahead of him, turning back, the hood slipping from his head.

“You all right?” Jake asks.

“Yeah,” Robby says, straightening, letting the air steady in his lungs. “Just old.”

Jake’s mouth twitches, a flicker of worry there and gone, replaced by a smile that almost reaches his eyes. Robby nods towards the railing by the water. “Let’s take a breather,” he says. “Gimmie five minutes.”

Jake nods. “Five minutes,” he echoes, like it’s a deal.

The wind off the river hits colder now, carrying the smell of iron and wet earth. For a while, they stand side by side and catch their breath, watching the ripples of water move like quicksilver beneath the overcast of morning light.

After a moment, Robby says quietly, “All right. Wanna tell me what’s going on?”

Jake doesn’t answer right away, but he looks caught out. “Nothing’s going on.”

Robby huffs, not unkindly. “If you need a little more time to make that sound convincing, I think I’ve got another mile in me. But the further we push it, the more likely it is you’ll have to carry me back.”

That earns a small smile from Jake, faint but genuine. “Alright, it’s just — well, mom’s mad at me. I’m, um… kinda grounded.”

Robby raises his brows. That’s a first, he thinks, but doesn’t say. “Wanna tell me what happened?” he asks instead, gentle now, the edge of teasing gone from his voice.

Jake exhales, a sharp cloud of breath. He’s grown so much: he’s taller now, his voice a little deeper than it was a year ago, his boyish features shifting only slightly, as adolescence works its slow alchemy. But when he lifts his eyes to Robby’s, all that newness slips away. For a second, he’s small again, the boy who used to run circles around the nurses’ station and wring the hem of his shirt whenever he’d get into trouble.

“I’ve been skipping SAT prep,” Jake finally admits.

“Alright,” Robby tells him. The relief he feels is tangible, like breath returning to his lungs. For a moment there, he’d worried it was something bigger, more serious. “Okay, that happens. What —two, three times?”

Jake grimaces. “Um, not exactly. I, uh… missed October.”

Robby blinks. “How many times in October?” he starts, but Jake’s expression gives him away before he can finish. Robby stares at him for a beat, then laughs, half disbelieving. “You didn’t — the whole month?”

“I messed up, okay?” Jake says, a little defensively, even as something in him visibly eases at Robby’s reaction. “I told Mom I’m sorry, like, a hundred times already. But she’s still pissed. She’s barely even talking to me right now.”

“Yeah, if she’s still ignoring you, she’s pissed.”

“I know! She literally hates me.”

Robby hums, a faint smile tugging at his mouth. “She doesn’t hate you. She’s just upset. I know you know those classes aren’t free.”

“I feel really guilty about that,” Jake says, “But it’s just — none of my friends are even doing this stuff yet. They’re not worrying about college, and I don’t get why I have to. Mom keeps saying I should be ready for applications, should be thinking about the future and stuff, but I’m only a sophomore. I’ve got time.”

“You do,” Robby says. “But it doesn’t hurt to be prepared, does it? Even if it’s a little early?”

He pauses, brows furrowed as he works through what he wants to say. “Sure, it’s just… every time I think about college, about choosing a major or a career or whatever, it feels like — like I’m supposed to have all these answers. Mom keeps saying that college is where you find what you love, but what if I don’t find it? Or what if I pick wrong? Like, I don’t even know who I’m gonna be in ten years. How do you make a decision for a person that doesn't even exist yet?”

“You don’t,” Robby tells him.

“I don’t?”

“Nope,” Robby says. “You just do the best you can with who you are now. And then, when you get older, you keep doing the best you can with whoever you’ve become.”

Jake frowns, thinking it over. “But what if, when I’m older, I’m like — miserable? You know, what if I don’t like what I picked? Who I’ve become?”

“Then you change course. Happens all the time. You figure out how to live with it, or how to let it go.”

Jake huffs out a breath. “That doesn’t sound easy.”

“It isn’t,” Robby concedes. “But, nine times out of ten, it’s worth it. And it takes a hell of a lot of the pressure off of you right now if you remember that, no matter where you’re headed, you can always change course.”

Jake nods slowly, eyes following the current. “Yeah,” he says. “I guess it does.” A few seconds pass before he looks over. “So, when did you figure out you wanted to be a doctor?”

Robby hesitates, dragging a thumb along the railing. “After my grandmother died.”

Jake frowns, thinking. “Didn’t she pass when you were, like, my age?”

“Well, yeah, but —”

Jake groans, throwing his head back. “Then what do you know about changing course, man?”

Robby laughs when Jake does, feeling a little caught out. “Hold on a second — I just gave you all this sage wisdom. Don’t go and ruin it.”

He reaches out to Jake just then, squeezes his shoulder, until the levity fades, leaving something softer behind.

“Look, the truth is,” Robby goes on to tell him, “knowing I wanted to do medicine was the only thing I had figured out back then.” He pauses, the corner of his mouth tugging faintly, more at the memory than the words. “The personal stuff, the stuff that matters — that came a lot later. At your age, I didn’t trust myself to get any of that stuff right, and for a long time, I didn’t. Hell, in the end, some of my personal stuff just slipped through the cracks entirely.”

Jake really looks at him then: a flash of curiosity, a kind of sympathy, in his expression. “Really?”

Robby gives a small shrug, like he’s shaking something off. “Yeah. But, I turned out halfway decent, didn’t I? Gainfully employed. Smart enough to get through med school. Fit enough to keep up with you.”

Jake snorts. “Two outta three’s not bad.”

Robby smiles. “You still wanna go for another mile?”

“Would you be down for lunch instead?” Jake asks, much to Robby’s private relief. “I dunno if you have the time, but Mom gave me some money. I can help pay.”

“For you, I’ve got all the time in the world,” Robby answers. “But you’re not paying for a damn thing. Gainfully employed, remember?”

Jake rolls his eyes, but there’s a smile tucked at the corner of his mouth that only widens when Robby nudges his shoulder again.

As they leave the trail and return once more to city streets, their strides match without effort. Conversation drifts easily between them, picking up in fits and starts: basketball practice, the Sixers, Jake possibly getting a junior lifeguard job next summer.

Robby listens, content just to hear him talk, to feel that familiar ease return between them, unbroken after all. He’s got the whole day off — the hospital schedule cleared him today without him asking. He doesn’t plan much on this day anymore, just lets the anniversary of Adamson’s death pass how it wants to. He thinks, not for the first time, that there are few better ways to spend his time.

Together, they cut through one street onto the next, both eager to get out of the cold. Jake’s still talking — says something about the girl who told him about the lifeguard program — but Robby slows as they turn the corner, distracted.

His gaze catches on a boarded-up building down the road.

The sign above its door is sun-bleached, painted letters half gone. The last time Robby saw this place, it was a yoga studio and before that, a bookstore, a vinyl shop, a restaurant.

But years ago, he remembers, it had been a bar.

Now it’s nothing at all. The windows are dark, the door chained shut, a bright developer’s notice taped to the glass. In a few months, like so many of the old buildings in this part of town, the place will be torn down, likely only to be replaced by yet another stretch of over-priced condos.

Robby slows. The air feels stiller here, the wind broken by the line of old buildings. He draws closer, veers a little to the right, glances down the alleyway where, under the light of a streetlamp some twenty years ago, he spoke to a handsome stranger in the dark.

He takes out his phone and, without quite stopping to think why, he snaps a photo of it. He opens the message app, muscle memory tugging at the thought of sending it to Jack — unsure, again, as to where this impulse comes from, except that this place was the first of so many things that they would share together, like the hospital, and beds, and nights he still thinks about now and then.

“Hey,” Jake calls, turning back. “You alright?”

Robby jumps a little, startled back into attention. He shoves his phone in his pocket, forgoes the message. Better perhaps to send it later, if at all. “Yeah,” he calls ahead to Jake. “Just catching my breath.”

The city noise gathers around them again: the rumble of a bus, the last beats of a crosswalk signal, the bustle of a bagel shop opening for the day. Robby glances back at the old, shuttered building —the place his college friends once dragged him to, The Throwback or something like it, where some essential part of his life began.

He looks back to it only once.

There’s a kind of finality in seeing it closed for good, in knowing that it will soon be stripped down to its studs, torn down brick-by-brick, rebuilt into something unrecognizable. People will walk past this block with no sense of what once stood there; they will perhaps buy coffee there, or pay exuberant rents, or hail cabs at the corner without ever knowing that this was a place where people gathered, and danced, and kissed one another in the dark.

The thought is strange, almost tender, and Robby thinks about this for the rest of the day: how easily the world forgets what he cannot.

Samira Mohan is brilliant, and intuitive, and lamentably slow-paced.

Robby tells himself, as he watches her work, that patience is a virtue — an increasingly uncommon one, perhaps, among residents her age. He tells himself that slow is careful, and careful is safe, and safety is the name of the game when you’re working with second-year residents. This steadies him, mostly. But watching her now, leaning over a patient’s neck beneath the sterile hospital light, he feels each second as it passes.

The ultrasound hums beside them as Cassie McKay shifts to Robby’s left and lowers the overhead lamp for a better angle. The metal arm whines as it's moved, light spilling wide across the patient’s collarbone.

“Better?” McKay asks.

“Perfect,” Robby answers.

He and Mohan are both bent close to the sterile field, shoulders nearly touching, the faint scent of antiseptic between them. At this proximity, he can hear her take a slow, bracing inhale. She’s nervous, he realizes. Despite her best attempts to the contrary, she’s already given herself away.

He’s reminded of their conversation last week, when she’d pulled him aside at the end of a shift and asked him, in a tone that suggested she already knew his answer, if he’d let her take another shot at a central line. Three failed attempts, she’d admitted, each one ending the same way: losing the needle angle no matter how much she tried to stabilize the patient, or feeling the wire catch and refuse to thread. She’d wanted to try an angiocath on the last one, but a senior resident shut it down before she could even reach for it. I know I can do this, she’d told him. I just need someone to give me another shot.

And then today, when Robby told her he was giving her the case she needed, he caught the split-second of surprise on her face, the pause before she agreed — like she’d never really believed him when he agreed to help her.

So he guides her now, watching her press the head of the needle carefully, carefully, into the patient’s neck, her attention darting between the man in front of her and the image on the screen before them. Her hand falters once and only barely, then finds its anchor.

“Good. Now draw back. Just a few milliliters.” he says. Then, to test her, he asks: “Say we don’t have that ultrasound to count on, how do we know we’re in the internal jugular vein?”

“We look at color,” Mohan replies. “If the blood’s bright red, or if it's pulsatile when it fills the syringe, we start over.”

Robby hums. The syringe fills slowly, a few cubic centimeters of blood easing into the barrel, dark, almost purple in this sterile light. The right color, the right vessel, but Mohan’s hand begins to stray.

“Don’t lift,” he tells her. “If either you or the patient move, we’ll lose the tip in the vessel. Overhand grip and then make a bridge, just like you’re playing pool—”

“Oh, I — I don’t know anything about pool,” Mohan says, a little self-conscious, the good humor in her voice thin with nerves.

“Just keep your hand locked to the patient. Use the heel of your palm to stabilize. Firm grip.”

She steadies, adjusts, exhales a little. The room is alive around them: the low whirr of the ultrasound, the metronomic rhythm of machines, the faint bustle of McKay moving to get a better look at their work, so that she might be ready when her own turn comes some day.

“Now start feeding that wire,” he says. Then, to McKay, he adds: “Cassie, come in closer. Let’s pick up the pace.”

The patient moves just then, chest shifting under sedation. Samira startles, the guidewire trembling between her fingers, nearly lost if not for Robby’s gloved hand closing over hers, catching it before it slips free.

“You’re fine,” he says, his tone steady, not sharp. “Steady hands now. If you feel resistance, don’t force it; you’ll just deform the wire. Unless we lost the vessel, it should go in smoothly.”

Mohan nods quickly, shoulders taut with apology and focus. Then, steadying her palm the way he taught her, she advances the wire again. It moves with surprising ease this time, gliding forward, silver in the light. With it, something in her changes: a slight raise of her brows, the hint of a smile bracketed beneath her mask.

“Any resistance?” he asks, already knowing the answer.

“None,” she says, equal parts relieved and excited. Her grip settles, confidence catching up to her hands as the wire slips forward, clean and uninterrupted, disappearing into the patient’s neck.

“Perfect. Thread it through.”

McKay doesn’t need to be prompted for what comes next: she passes Mohan a scalpel and Robby talks Mohan through the motions – a small incision, just to widen the entry, and then a bloom of blood, trailing after the clean run of Mohan’s blade.

McKay adjusts the ultrasound probe, eyes fixed on the grayscale image on the screen. “Still in, Samira,” she confirms. Her tone is measured, professional, but there’s a faint lift in her voice — a note of pride for the clean placement, or for Mohan herself. Knowing Cassie, most likely both.

“So far so good, Doctor Mohan,” Robby tells her. “Let’s finish up.”

For a moment, the three of them move in perfect rhythm: Mohan threading the catheter, McKay flushing the ports, the monitors ticking steady time. Robby straightens, and when McKay steps closer to reposition the overhead lamp, he rises too quickly, the back of his head colliding hard with the metal rim.

The sound is a dull, percussive crack — almost crisp in the astonishment of the room.

For a moment, Robby feels nothing at all, only the vibration of it, the flare of white behind his eyes.

Then the delayed warmth, wet and spreading down the nape of his neck. He reaches up without thinking. His gloved hand comes away red.

“Oh my god,” Mohan gasps.

McKay catches the metal lamp still rocking above him, pushes it away. “Jesus, Robby, that’s — that’s a lot of blood.”

Robby exhales once, slow, rattling. “It’s fine,” he says, his voice steadier than he feels. “It’s fine. Samira, you’re not done yet.”

“But you’re —” Mohan starts.

“It’s fine,” he repeats, insistent, even as McKay presses gauze into his hand.

Mohan’s brows crease. He can see her thinking — she can either finish what she’s started or turn toward him, but she can’t do both. So she steadies, reorients, her doubt folding itself away just enough for the work to take its place. It’s a good choice. The only one, really, Robby would’ve condoned; he steps back, blinking hard, his shoe nearly slipping on something slick — his blood, he realizes distantly. He presses the wad of gauze to the back of his head with one hand, the other braced on the counter behind him.

“You’ve still got the wire,” he reminds her. “Advance the dilator — two, maybe three centimeters, then back out. McKay, get some help and another set of eyes on her.”

That’s all the direction they need. McKay leaves the room, and Mohan moves, and the room seems to rearrange itself around her focus. It fills quickly after that: the rush of shoes, the murmur of new voices, someone stepping in to talk Mohan through the final steps, another to handle the blood on the floor.

In the midst of it Dana appears, snapping on gloves as she moves toward him. Her hand finds his elbow, cool through the nitrile, and she guides him towards the nearest open bay with the quiet, hurried pace she keeps for the half-conscious, the stubborn, the young.

“What the hell happened?” she asks, once he’s seated on the exam table.

“Overhead lamp,” Robby says. “Stood up fast and rammed right into it like an idiot.”

“Again? When was the last time —’18?”

He squints, trying to think, a pulse of pain beating behind his eyes. “I don’t remember,” he admits. “That’s not part of your concussion screen, is it?”

“Could be,” Dana tells him.

“Then it was definitely ‘18, yeah.”

“Don’t be cute,” she says. She reaches for his shoulder, steadying him where he sits and giving him time to brace himself before she peels away the blood-soaked gauze. The padded white comes away heavy, red to the edges. “These always bleed like a son of a bitch,” she mutters, parting his matted hair to inspect the gash. “How’s your vision?”

“Fine,” he says, a beat too fast.

Dana gives him a look. He can see suspicion pass across her face like the brief tightening of a stitch. “Any dizziness?”

“None.”

She raises a hand into his line of sight and moves her slowly across the space between them. He follows the horizon sweep — left to right, right to left. It’s strange, being on the wrong side of the examination table. It’s stranger still to see her mind working, all those calm calculations directed at him for a change.

He tracks her well enough that she moves on. “Any nausea? Pressure behind the eyes?”

“Nope and nope.”

She hums, not entirely convinced it seems, but no longer braced for the worst. She returns to the wound, parting his blood-heavy hair with careful hands. He can feel her trace the length of the wound, hum again at some mental calculation. “Well, Cap,” she says, “looks like you’re due for a few staples.”

“Again?”

“Again,” she says, sympathetic. “I’m thinking you’ll need four, maybe five before we send you home.”

Robby exhales, closing his eyes for a beat. His hand drifts to his forehead, fingers pressing into the line between his brows. He’d fight back, perhaps, if only the sting at the back of his skull would stop flaring each time he breathes too deeply. Beyond the curtain, the hospital hums: stretchers rolling, monitors beeping, Langdon somewhere calling out for medication. The usual chorus of chaos, steady and familiar, running at its usual, punishing pace with or without him.

The day shift will feel thinner without him there to help. Without Heather, too, who’s been out for three days now — an unusual bout of absences, coupled by an even stranger refusal to talk to Robby about what’s causing them — but perhaps that’s not the way to think of it anymore, Robby reminds himself. Not after the last conversation they had.

Dana does quick work of the stapling: three, four, five metallic clicks, a couple of jolts from his end, borne more from reflex than from pain, and it’s done. By the time he’s discharged, she’s already ordered him an Uber and Donnie’s handed him his bag.

On the short ride home, Robby thinks of Mohan, finishing the work without him. The patient had stabilized quickly, Dana told him, and all things considered, she’d done a good job of it, really. He thinks of Langdon, who helps her through the rest. He thinks of Heather, and her absences. He thinks of her silence, the pregnant pause they shared over the phone when he asked her what was wrong and she faltered, before offering him a non-answer.

He digs his phone from out of his pocket, he expects a message from Dana, maybe Gloria about paperwork. What he finds instead is one from Jack.

Dana told me what happened, it reads.

Whatever happened to doctor-patient confidentiality? Robby writes back.

Jack gives his message a thumbs down. She told me what happened confidentially.

Not how that works.

Not the point, Jack counters. How’re you feeling?

Robby stares at the screen for a moment, thumb hovering over the keyboard. He starts to type, stops, types again. He knows no amount of reassurance will matter, knows that if the tables were turned, he’d be doing the same: asking for symptoms, reading between the lines, refusing to take “fine” for an answer. He types back fine anyway, then adds just tired, if only to respond more honestly.

Outside the cab windows, the city drifts past in soft, blurred color — windows lit as the daylight fades, earlier now than it did in the first months of autumn.The driver’s radio murmurs something low and unfamiliar, a song sung in language he neither recognizes nor speaks.

Robby leans gingerly back against the headrest, the ache in his scalp pulsing in time with his heartbeat, and wonders, not without a tired smile, how long he’ll have at home before Jack shows up at his door.

Twenty-five minutes.

The soft rattle of the front-door lock pulls Robby from the edge of sleep. He doesn’t startle, doesn’t bother to check who it is at the door — he knows the cadence of those footsteps, the scrape of metal followed by the dull thud of a backpack left at the door. It's as familiar as the sound of his voice.

They’d traded spare keys years ago, back when they were still spending the night at each other’s places. Neither of them had ever bothered to take theirs back. It was convenient, after all, to have each other’s backs in this way — to be able to run back to each other’s apartment for a forgotten wallet, a phone, that one sweltering afternoon in the high summer of June, when Jack stood locked outside his own apartment until Robby showed up to let him in.

“Didn’t even make it to bed,” Jack says now, his voice easy, wry.

Robby sits up on the couch, the ache in his head reminding him that the bed might’ve indeed been the better option. “What, and not be here to greet you when you come in?”

Jack’s footsteps are dull when he comes closer, his foot padded by his sock. He’s in his scrubs, already dressed for the start of his shift in the evening, and the faint scene of the outside clings to him, cold, almost metallic, like an inhale of evening air.

“I can’t believe a lamp did you in again,” Jack says.

Robby shrugs. “Well, you know, the last time I only walked away with three staples.”

“You do love a challenge,” Jack smiles. Then his tone shifts, still calm, but sharper now, almost clinical. “How’s your vision? Any nausea?”

Robby’s mouth lifts slightly. “Dana already ran me through the checklist.”

“Humor me.”

“What, you don’t trust her?” he teases. “Came all this way just to double-check her work?”

“It’s not Dana I don’t trust,” Jack tells him. “It’s you. Now answer the questions.”

“No nausea. Vision’s fine. I’m perfect.”

“Uh-huh. Any reason you’re lying here in the dark?”

“I’m tired,” Robby says. The truth of it feels heavier once he says it aloud. “I would’ve been sleeping, y’know, were it not for your little wellness check.”

“So you’re not having any sensitivity to light? None whatsoever?”

“None,” he says. Close enough to the truth.

Jack exhales in that tired-of-your-bullshit way of his. “Robby.”

“Jack,” Robby answers, parroting his tone.

Jack sucks his teeth, expression unreadable for a moment, caught somewhere between irritation and fondness, pulled taut between the two. He reaches into his pocket, pulls out a penlight, and flicks it on — a small flare of pale light in the near-darkness. “Look at me,” he says.

It’s an almost silly thing to say, Robby thinks. Jack already has his eyes — has had them from the moment he stepped through the door.

The light illuminates both of them for a moment, catching along the curve of Jack’s cheek, the faint sheen of his temple; his eyes are green in this light, Robby notices. Green in the way they only ever look in certain lights, up close. The light passes between them in slow, deliberate intervals: first one eye, then the other. Robby squints against it.

“Pupils equal and reactive,” Jack murmurs, more out of habit than anything else. “Looking good, brother.”

“I hate to say I told you so.”

Jack snorts. “With you, I can never be too sure,” he says, before motioning for Robby to come closer. “Lemme get a good look at you.”

Again, Robby listens. He bends his head to him, offering himself to be inspected. Jack comes closer — close enough that Robby can feel the cool trace of air his movement stirs, the faint scent of detergent clinging to his uniform. With the penlight steady in one hand, Jack’s other moves through Robby’s hair, parting dark strands carefully, tenderly, to inspect the neat run of staples beneath. His hands are cold, Robby realizes, lamely, as if this were something he could fix, but knows he cannot.

“When you took the bandage off — any bleeding?” Jack asks quietly.

“No,” Robby says. “You know Dana. Put a stapler in her hands, she’ll put the rest of us to shame.”

“You’re telling me,” Jack tells him, angling the light closer. At this point, he’s probably just admiring her work. “Turn your head for me.”

Robby obeys, but imperfectly. Jack’s hand finds his jaw, guiding him until he’s angled just so. It’s a small correction, gentle enough to feel impersonal, but only in theory. He can feel the steadiness in Jack’s touch, the quiet patience of it. The light presses against his eyelid, thin and insistent, so he lets his eyes fall shut. For a breath, all he can focus on is Jack’s hand, the faint, steady pull of it, and he thinks, quietly, take your time.

It’s over too quickly. The hand in his hair withdraws; the light vanishes with a soft click.

“Try to take it easy tonight,” Jack tells him. “I’ll swing by in the morning, check for any swelling or drainage.”

“No, if you have to check and if I have to let you, you can do it at work, before handoff.”

Jack gives him a look. “You’re not coming in tomorrow.”

“I am,” Robby says, and adds, when Jack groans, “We’ll probably be short again on the day shift. You know how it gets when we’re short and I’m not there; everything bottlenecks and you and your crew spend half the shift fixing it. You know that.”

Jack’s frown deepens. “You’ll probably be short? What, Heather’s not back yet?”

Robby hesitates. “I don’t think so.”

“You don’t know?”

“We’re not exactly on speaking terms,” he says, grimacing at how it sounds, even as he says it. “I mean, we are, but she’s not exactly — she’s not volunteering information. I know she’s out, I don’t know why, so I’m just going off what Dana’s telling me. She told me Heather was going to be back today, and then she told me this morning that her availability changed and she’ll be back on Friday.”

Something shifts across Jack’s face at that. Nothing dramatic, nothing legible, just a quiet question in his expression, even as he chooses not to voice it.

“We called it quits last week,” Robby says, answering it anyway.

Jack looks at him for a moment, blinks, face perfectly neutral. He clears his throat, places his penlight on the nearby coffee table, and nods once, a noncommittal little gesture that doesn’t fool Robby for a second.

Robby tilts his head. “That your attempt at being subtle?”

“I’m not doing anything,” Jack says.

“On purpose,” Robby replies. “You’re not doing anything on purpose.” The moment hangs between them, bright and obvious, and Robby laughs, despite himself. “Jesus fucking christ, Jack. You’re beaming.”

“I’m not beaming,” Jack counters. “I’m processing, I’m —”

“I knew you were bullshitting me. You never liked her.”

Jack moves to the armchair opposite him and takes a seat. “I like her just fine,” he says eventually. “I hated that you were sleeping with her.”

Robby huffs. “Okay. Sure. Go ahead then. Just —” he flicks his hand upward, the gesture loose, half-resigned, “let it out.”

Jack gives him a long look. “Let what out.”

“Whatever it is you’re not saying,” Robby says. “You didn’t like it. I know that. I knew. Now tell me why.”

“I think you know why.”

“Maybe, but I think you want to tell me anyway,” Robby counters, and the look on Jack’s face proves him right again.

Jack rubs at his jaw, gaze dropping to the floor as if he’s choosing his footing. “Okay, sure. I didn’t like it.” He lifts his eyes again, and there’s something steady and unyielding there. “And if we’re doing honesty—”

“We are.”

“Then I think it was beneath you.”

Robby blinks. “What, you mean Heather?” Robby asks. A real, protective edge slips into his voice. “That isn’t fair, Jack.”

“Not her,” Jack clarifies, quickly. “Not her. The relationship. I think it was — look, if you really want to know what I think, I think it was a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

Robby’s brow creases. “What do you mean?”

“It proved you’re not Adamson,” Jack tells him. “Brother, the second you learned you were taking his position, you’d already convinced yourself you were going to fail — that you’d let everyone down, that the ED would fall apart and his legacy with it, all because you weren’t him. And almost as if to prove it, you went ahead and did the one thing he never would’ve done: you slept with your resident.”

Robby reacts before he can hide it — a small shift in his features, the brief, unguarded sting of embarrassment he doesn’t manage to tuck away in time. But of course Jack sees it; he always does. He inhales, as if wounded, as if punched right in the chest. “Jesus fucking Christ, Jack.”

“You asked me to be honest,” Jack reminds him, the timbre of his voice softened around the edges.

“Maybe I shouldn’t have.”

“Maybe not,” Jack admits. “But you did.”

Robby presses his hands over his eyes, rubbing once, twice, then drags them back along his face until his palms come to rest at the nape of his neck. “Is that really what you think?” he asks eventually. “That I used her? That I didn’t think about her at all?”

“Of course not,” Jack says. “I don’t think you thought about it in those terms. Who does? I think — I don’t know, Robby, I think maybe you were lonely, and she was interested, and she’s older than the others, and maybe it felt like that lessened the stakes. But, it wasn’t like you to muddy those lines.”

A silence opens between them: sliver-thin at first, then yawning wide, as if waiting for either of them to cross it. Jack’s eyes fall to his hands and then back to Robby, and something softens, a subtle collapse behind his expression.

“Tell me I’m wrong,” Jack says, eventually. An olive branch, in his own way. Not an apology for what he’s said, but perhaps for how harshly it landed. “Tell me to fuck off, if you want, but tell me something.”

Robby inhales. His first instinct is to bristle, to tell him he’s dead wrong, in fact. But he’s bone-tired, and uncomfortable, and the pain medication is wearing thin, and that constellation of feelings makes him hungry for comfort he’d normally pretend he doesn’t want. The thought of fighting — of letting this moment turn into an argument — exhausts him before he’s even opened his mouth.

“What’s there to say?” Robby asks. “That’s what you think, and I hate hearing it. And I really, really want you to be wrong. ” He swallows. “I’m just . . . not sure you are.”

The admission hangs there, cooling the space between them like a draft slipping under a door. Robby sits with it, feeling the shape of it in his chest, the small ache of having nothing better to offer.

“Why didn’t you say anything sooner?” Robby adds, softer now, something frayed in the edges of his voice. “Why didn’t you push back when I asked you to?”

“I did. I told you it wasn’t a good idea.”

“You didn’t say it like this, though.”

“I couldn’t have.”

“What, you thought I wouldn’t have listened?”

Something brief and unreadable crosses Jack’s face. “It just wasn’t the right time.”

Robby lets out a quiet, huffed laugh. “And now is?”

Jack’s shoulders loosen, the line of his mouth softening as he leans into Robby’s attempt to lighten things. “Probably should’ve waited till the breakup was more than a week old before I dug into you like that, huh?”

“Or at least until I don’t have an open head wound.”

Jack smiles, apologetic. “But you’re so agreeable when you’re concussed.”

“Who said anything about me being concussed?” Robby shoots back, a flicker of a smile tugging at his mouth.

The moment hangs there, light enough that for a moment they can catch their breath again. But the levity ebbs almost as quickly as it arrived. Robby feels it — the weight in his chest, the way humor slips through his fingers just as he tries to hold it, leaving guilt in its place. When he speaks again, his voice is different, more careful.

“Say you’re right,” Robby begins, bracing himself for a question he does not want to ask but can’t seem to avoid. “Say I fucked up exactly the way you think I did, and dragged Heather down with me. What then?”

“First of all, you haven’t dragged her anywhere yet,” he replies. “She’s been calling out, maybe because of the breakup, maybe because she’s sick, maybe both. But if she’s communicating with Dana, she hasn’t fallen off the map. She hasn’t dropped out of the program.” Jack shakes his head. “And the point isn’t whether she’s struggling. It’s that you can’t be the one managing it.”

Robby’s jaw tightens. “Right. And I’m supposed to do what exactly, then? Pretend none of this was my fault?”

“That’s your problem, man. You think it all lives or dies with you,” Jack tells him. “Nobody’s saying you absolve yourself. Hell, you step back because it’s your fault. Because, like it or not, you can’t be her attending and her ex at the same time without one of those two fucking up the other.”

Jack leans in a little from where he sits, voice steady. “You wanna do right by her? Let someone who isn’t compromised figure out what she needs. If you trust Dana to be fair, go to Dana. If not, go to me. Hell, go to both of us. That’s what you have a team for.” He holds Robby’s gaze, unwavering. “You hear me, right? I’m here to help you, if you let me.”

Jack’s words settle between them carefully, languidly, like dust catching in the light. Robby wonders, not for the first time, where a man like him ever learned to speak with such impossible earnestness. His eyes drop to the floor, to his hands on his lap, to his socked feet, and when he lifts them again to meet Jack’s waiting stare, something unguarded has already worked its way loose.

“Why?” he asks.

Jack blinks, caught off balance. “What do you mean, why?”

“You said it yourself. I crossed a line. Fucked a resident, did what Adamson wouldn’t, right? And Heather, she was the first person I started seeing after you. So, why would you help? Is it just—” His jaw works. “Is it because you’re my colleague? Because you think you’re supposed to step in whenever another attending screws up? Because I can go to someone else —”

“It’s because I love you, man,” Jack interjects, simple as anything, as if that alone is the beginning and the end of everything. “I can help you because it’s my job, and I wanna help you because you’re my best friend. Because you’re a good man who made a bad call and now you need help finding the best way through it."

Robby nods, swallows around the impossibility of how to respond to that. How strange it is, he thinks, to hear those words from Jack for what feels like the first time and in this context.

Jack watches the hesitation flicker across Robby’s face. “You don’t believe me?”

“No, that’s not — I know you mean it.” Robby rubs a hand over his thigh. That’s the problem, he almost blurts out. “Sometimes I think you see something in me that isn’t really there.”

Jack frowns. “What, because we used to sleep together?”

“Maybe that’s part of it,” Robby says. “Maybe it’s because of how we met — when we did.”

He pauses there, feeling the words catch onto something that feels unexpectedly like the truth. He doesn’t know if he’s saying any of it right. He doesn’t even know how he’s begun saying it — this suspicion he’s carried around for years, like a worry-stone in his pocket. Maybe it’s fatigue. Maybe it’s the pain meds. Maybe it’s the simple fact that Jack is here, and listening, and it’s been a very long time since they’ve done this, talking to one another in the dark of Robby’s living room.

“I don’t know, Jack,” he says at last. “Maybe you still see that guy. The one from before Adamson, before COVID. Before the wheels came off.” He huffs out a dry, humorless laugh. “Feels like I’ve been coasting on your good memories for years now.”

Jack tilts his head, brow creasing — as if Robby has handed him a calculation so off-base he doesn’t know where to begin fixing it. “Brother, you’ve got this whole thing backwards.”

Robby meets his eyes, wary. “You think so, huh?”

“I know so,” Jack says. “You talk like I don’t know you. Like I’m squinting through the years at the kid you were and pretending he’s still standing in front of me. I don’t need to invent a better version of you, Robby. I see you just fine.”

Jack leans forward slightly, as if trying to make sure the words land the way he means them. “Yeah, when we met, I thought you were — God, I don’t know. I thought you were something I dreamt up. You were this handsome guy about to go chase the life I wanted, but not before keeping me in your bed for a weekend.”

He pauses then, a brief flicker of memory crossing his face, something distant and fond.

“You know my sister thought I’d died in a ditch somewhere?” Jack asks him. “I never called to say I wasn’t coming home that weekend. She almost went to the cops and everything.”

“Eileen did that?” Robby asks, smiling at the thought. “No, you never told me.”

“It’s true. She likes to make a whole story out of it now,” Jack says, sharing his amusement. His voice gentles further. “Look, you’re right that I held onto that memory of you for a long time after. But, when I found you again, after everything life did to the two of us? You think I was disappointed?” He gives a small, almost helpless laugh. “C’mon, Robby. Not for a second, then or since. Never.”

Robby gives him a look — not harsh, not exactly dismissive. He feels Jack’s words settle over him like a warm hand he’s afraid to lean into, like familiar fingers threading through his hair again. Moved, yes. But somewhere beneath it, a small, stubborn knot of doubt.

Jack sees it. Of course he does.

“So you fucked up — so you did something you shouldn’t have. You think I don’t have any red in my ledger?” He huffs out a breath, laughless. “Hell, I wish the worst thing I’d ever done was jump into bed with a resident.”

Robby sits with that, that vague gesture to a past that Jack so seldom talks about. He feels its depth, its edges. Knows better than to press. Knows Jack won’t offer more unless he wants to. And because the room has grown too heavy for the moment, he tries to tilt it back toward something lighter.

“Right,” he says, letting a wisp of humor soften his words. “I forgot there’s no winning Pain Olympics with you.”

Jack smiles that easy, crooked smile of his. “There are no winners in a race to the bottom, my friend.”

Robby takes a slow, steady inhale, trying to let the words settle over him. “That’s a good one,” he says, eventually. “That another one of those adages they teach you in groups?”

“Nah. I cooked that one up all on my own,” Jack tells him. Something in his demeanor changes, just slightly — becomes, for some reason, almost guarded. “I’m not really going to meetings.”

Robby blinks. He can’t quite help it. “What, you mean this week?”

“I mean I’m not going right now.”

“Not at all?”

“Not at the moment,” Jack says. He’s careful with the phrasing, measured in a way that suggests this is something he doesn’t want to linger on. “I’m not opposed to going back. I’m just trying something different these days.”

Robby studies him, the way one does when a familiar shape suddenly tilts at a new angle. For as long as he’s known Jack, his veteran support group meetings have been a nonnegotiable — as much a necessary part of his life as his prosthetic, or his stethoscope, or his routine at the gym. Those in-person meetings were the last thing Jack gave up at the start of the pandemic and the first thing he returned to once it was safe enough for those involved. Robby remembers when they were still sharing space together in those days; he remembers sitting on Jack’s couch with his laptop balanced on his knees, helping Jack set up his account once his meetings had gone virtual.

And now, for some reason, he’s not going?

A litany of questions hang there, unasked, but Robby knows better than to press. He recognizes the boundary between them for what it is; he knows that there are so few things that Jack withholds from him, that it isn’t exactly fair to demand more than he’s ready to give.

And because the room has gone a little too quiet, a little too tense, Jack nudges it back toward lighter ground.He shifts forward, forearms braced on his knees, and catches Robby’s gaze in that way he always does when he’s trying to make sure he’s actually listening. “Look, my point is that my help isn’t conditional on you not fucking up — else it wouldn’t be much help at all. ” Jack says. “And I’m offering it because it does right by Heather, and it does right by you. That’s simple enough, isn’t it?”

But it isn’t simple, Robby wants to say. None of this is simple.

Not the guilt that’s been sitting under Robby’s ribs all week, sharper now with every missed shift and every brisk, vaguely-worded text message Heather sent his way. Not the fear that he’s nudged her into a situation she wasn’t ready for — that his affection, genuine as it was, had not protected her from harm, but instead ushered her into it. Not the ugly thought that her silence might be the start of something unraveling in her, or the first step toward consequences he never meant to set in motion.

And Jack — God, Jack — sitting here offering help without flinching. Not judging him, not stepping back, not letting him carry the whole weight of it alone. Jack, who knows exactly where his worst instincts live and somehow still keeps showing up anyway.

He wants to say all of that. He wants to say that he doesn’t deserve so much grace, or that he’s afraid of what will happen if he accepts it.

But what comes out instead is a thin exhale and: “When you put it like that, anything is.”

Jack gives a small, satisfied nod, like that’s enough. “Perfect,” he says, simple as that. “Give her until Friday. If she doesn’t show, you follow protocol. That means documenting the absences and looping in Dana or Lena first. Let them try to reach her. They’ve got good rapport with her, they know the workflow, they’re neutral. Worst case scenario, you could loop Gloria in, but that’s —”

“The nuclear option,” Robby mutters, grimacing.

“Right.” Jack’s tone stays even. “Let’s not drop a bomb unless we have to. Until then, I can step in as the other attending, keep it objective. I’ll talk to her if we get her on the phone, help sort out whether this is a wellness issue or a professionalism one. Best-case, she’s overwhelmed and just needs support. Worst-case, yeah, we go up the chain of command, but we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.”

Robby nods along, accepting the plan. “And you’re really okay getting pulled into this?”

“I’m already in it. The only question is whether you’ll let me help you do this the right way.” He straightens where he sits, catches Robby’s gaze more pointedly than before. “So, Robinavitch — question of the hour: are you gonna let me help you?”

Robby inhales. He knows this game, knows exactly the kind of clean, verbal commitment Jack is fishing for — something he can throw back at him later, when Robby inevitably tries to shoulder some part of this alone. What the hell, he thinks. Let him have it.

“Yes,” he says, at last.

Jack tilts his head, smile cutting warm and crooked. “Yes what?”

“Yes, I’ll let you help me.”

Jack’s grin widens, shameless, boyish in a way that makes something in Robby’s chest twist. “Wanna try that again? This time with feeling?”

Robby gives him a level look. He could say fuck you, could throw it like a pebble into the space between them and watch the ripples. Jack might even laugh, might take it as affection the way he always seems to, the way Robby always means it.

Instead, he says, “Don’t you have a shift to run off to?”

Jack’s eyes flash to his watch. “Shit,” he says, already unfolding from the couch, pushing up with a startled urgency that feels almost clumsy now. “Jesus Christ, Lena is gonna rock my shit.”

He starts patting down his pockets: cell phone, wallet, ID clipped to his scrubs, the usual inventory. But then he pauses, frowns, does it again — brows furrowed, like something’s missing but he doesn’t yet know what.

Robby reaches toward the coffee table, fingers closing around cool metal. “This what you’re looking for?”

He glances over, caught mid-pat-down. And in that brief turning of his head, he rolls his eyes at himself, embarrassed. “Knew it had to be somewhere.”

Robby holds the penlight out to him. Their fingers graze when Jack takes it from him — a thin slip of contract, almost too brief to register. Still, the touch seems to bloom in Robby’s hand, faint and insistent. Jack’s hands are warm now, he realizes. They’ve sat together long enough, pulling apart this knotwork of difficult truths together, that his body has forgotten the cold. And now, watching Jack gather his things, Robby thinks of the night air beyond the front door, the snow forecasted to fall tonight, much too early given the season.

It’ll be frigid outside, sharp and biting, and Jack’s hands will go cold again, even shoved deep into his pockets, walking to work through the deepening dark.

It would’ve been a shorter walk, of course, if he hadn’t come here first.

“Thank you,” Robby tells him, apropos to nothing. “For checking on me, for wanting to help with Heather, for all of it.”

Jack pulls his coat on, shaking his head. “You don’t have to thank me.”

“I do,” Robby answers, more firmly this time. “You’re always picking up after me. One mess or another. Any time I’m out of my depth, I turn around and there you are.”

“It’s what friends do.”

“Yeah, but half the time I don’t even think to ask, you just show up and you never — you never hold it against me, Jack. Never stop to point out that half the messes I’m in are the ones I’ve made.” He swallows, measures his words. “I don’t say it enough. Thank you.”

Jack pauses mid-zip. “You make it sound like I’m some kind of saint,” he says, displeasure threading through his voice. “I’ve got my own messes, Robby. And if I can do right by Heather now, I want to. I owe it to her.”

Robby’s brow pulls together. “What does that mean?”

Jack hesitates. Then he sighs, like he’s tired of hearing himself think. “You wanna know the real reason I didn’t tell you how I felt about you seeing her? It wasn’t because you wouldn’t listen. It’s because my own shit kept getting in the way.” He drags a hand over his face, anticipates Robby’s question before he asks it. “I knew I didn’t like it. But for a really long time, I couldn’t untangle the good reasons from the stupid ones.”

Robby doesn’t interrupt. Something in him braces, waiting.

“Some of it was legit — the power stuff, the boundaries, all the things I’m riding you about now.” Jack gives a thin, humorless smile. “But some of it wasn’t fair at all. Some of it was just ugly. I didn’t want to have to think about you seeing other people. I didn’t want it to be her. I mean, Jesus, you could’ve dated anyone, and you picked someone I’d see every day — someone I’d have to supervise, someone good at her job, and that — don’t ask me why, but how good she is — that made it worse.”

He blows out a breath, like expelling the last of it. “Anyways, I had no right to feel that way. Thought it was better if I said what felt safe to say, and let you do what you were gonna do. For all I knew, maybe you two would’ve gone the distance.”

Robby swallows, tries to suppress the surprise he feels. “I’m sorry,” he tells him. It’s funny, he thinks, how insufficient that seems, how some words cannot carry all the weight of what they mean. “I didn’t know. I didn’t mean to make anything harder for you.”

Jack shakes his head, waving it off. “There’s nothing to be sorry for. Besides, we’re good now. It’s all behind us.”

Robby nods, but it's slow, reluctant. “Yeah,” he says. “If you say so.” He pushes himself up from the couch, rubbing a hand over his chest, the motion doing nothing to ease whatever unnamable feeling still lodged there. “C’mon. I’ll walk you out.”

They move toward the door together, and when Robby opens it for him, stepping aside so Jack can pull his coat tight, a draft slips in from the hallway. He glances out towards the nearest window. A soft flurry of white catches in the light.

Jack fishes his headphones out of a jacket pocket, untangling the cord ahead of his walk. “Alright, I’m out. Try not to give yourself another head injury while I’m gone.”

Robby rolls his eyes, the gesture tugging a small, worn smile from him anyway. “Don’t worry about me.”

“Oh, I’m going to. It helps me pass the time.” Jack jerks his chin towards Robby, motioning at the side of his head where he’s hurt. “I’ll be back in the morning to check on that. And before you say anything —”

“I’m not coming in,” Robby interrupts. “I’ll stay home.”

Jack’s brows lift, surprised but pleased. “Glad you see it my way.”

“Call me if you need anything,” Robby tells him. Then, like a small light flickering on, a thought brightens his face. “Oh — if you see Samira at handoff, ask her about the central line she pulled off today. She won’t bring it up unless somebody asks her. It was her first. ”

“That right?”

He nods. “She’d tried her hand at it a few times before, but today she actually managed it — even after I cracked my head. I think it motivated her.”

“That happened while you were working with Mohan?” Jack huffs out a laugh. “You sure she didn’t put that lamp there on purpose? Revenge for that awful nickname?”

“Slow-Mo? You know I didn’t start that,” Robby tells him.

“No, but you find it funny and that’s half as bad,” Jack shoots back, without any real bite. He reaches for his bag and slings it over his shoulder. “Enough shop talk. Get some sleep — in bed this time, you’re too big for that ratty old couch.”

Robby pushes the door open wider and leaning the weight of his back against it. “Yeah, yeah. Get outta here.”

Jack steps toward the threshold, hitching his backpack higher on his shoulder. The space between them is scant, tighter now with the bulk of that bag behind him, and up this close it would take almost nothing to touch him — hardly even a reach. It would be so easy to clasp a hand on Jack’s shoulder, or pull him into a hug, or soothe the pad of his thumb across the faint lines that crease at the corner of Jack’s eyes when he smiles at him now.

It would be easy which makes it, perhaps, all the more difficult after all. Robby does not touch him. But he smiles back, grateful that this, at least, can be his alone — Jack’s smile, generous and warm, the kind he rarely sees him offer to anyone else. Brilliant as a ray of sunlight, pointed only at him.

And then it’s over, wordless as it began.

Jack breaks the moment first, dipping his head in a quiet goodbye before stepping out into the hallway. Robby watches him only briefly; just long enough to feel the draft brush at his ankles before he closes the door, cuts it off.

He does not, in the end, make it to the bed.

Instead, Robby falls back into the couch, closes his eyes. He thinks about all that Jack had said. His faith in him. His willingness to say the uncomfortable thing and his unfathomable ability to say it in a way Robby can never quite hold against him.

I see you just fine, he’d said, and meant it. He believed it. Believes it still, in fact, despite everything.

His lids grow heavier, leaded by the weight of the day. He thinks about Jack’s jealousy, his admission of it, a confession that, some months ago, had been something Robby longed to hear and thought impossible. Could this really be what he had wanted? Wasn’t it supposed to have felt satiating, in some secret and terrible way?

Outside, the snow picks up, cascading heavier down the vertical slant of his windows, visible to him even now, from where he lays on the couch.

He thinks of Jack in the snow, walking down Palo Alto Street by now, and then Sherman Ave.

He thinks of the snow, and attempts to count it, like one might do with sheep. One, two, three, four, five, he counts, if only to quiet his thoughts. Snow. He thinks of the childish impulse to catch a flake on the tongue, the placid dissatisfaction in learning that all the brilliant and inimitable geometry of ice melts into little more than water on the tongue, tasteless.

There you have it, he tells himself. Jack had been jealous, after all. But this knowledge runs short, doesn’t fill the shape of the ache inside him. Tasteless on the tongue. And with that thought, he slips under, drifting into sleep.

In the morning, Jack makes good on his promise to check on him. Robby hears — vaguely does, at least, through the thick haze of sleep — three knocks at the front door, the turning of the knob, the metal clattering of the key. What wakes him is not that, exactly, but a voice some moments later: “Hey,” Jack says, voice hushed. “You awake?”

Robby rubs his eye with the heel of his hand. “No.”

“Got it,” he says, his voice rounded with good humor. “I texted you, but you didn’t reply — figured you were sleeping and, well — I just thought I’d stop in and check on you, like I said I would. That alright by you?”

Robby gives something that is almost a reply — a low hum, a breath catching on a yawn. His eyes stay closed, the words dissolving before they can form.

He hears a soft huff of laughter. He hears Jack say, “I’ll take that as a yes.”

Then, the soundscape shifts softly around him, beyond his still-closed eyes: a soft pace on the floorboard, the distinct cadence of Jack’s stride, the harder, more solid companion to each one of Jack’s soft-footed steps. The quiet whisper of movement and clothing as he moves closer, perhaps abandons his coat. A yawn, half-caught and not quite swallowed, and his voice — his voice, frayed around the edges with the kind of bone-tiredness Robby recognizes even through half-sleep. It must’ve been a hard shift.

“I just came from outside,” Jack murmurs. “So this’ll be a little cold.”

And it is.

Jack’s hand is startling, both in its temperature and its gentleness, and he presses it softly against Robby’s forehead, checking for a fever that is not there. The chill almost makes Robby shiver. None of it is unpleasant. Jack’s hands on him never are. Those same hands move carefully to the crown of Robby’s head now, the tender place that throbs now that last night’s painkillers have thinned away.

Robby doesn’t know why he does it. He does not think about it at all. He hums at the touch, still half-dreaming. The sound escapes him before he can hold it back and when it leaves him, he hears Jack let out a breath — something like a laugh, low and tender.

He slips back into sleep again the way one sinks back into warm water, weightless and without resistance.

When he wakes again, the room is brighter, and Jack is still there.

He is sitting in the chair across from him, in fact, just as he did last night, only this time he is sleeping. His coat splayed out over one of the arms of the sofa chair. The very bottom of his pants are dark with moisture, evidence of having walked through the snow — snow that is still, as Robby can see now, falling steady against the window.

Robby watches Jack for a while like this, sleeping: his head slanted awkwardly to one side, the line of his arms softened in rest, his lips parted slightly on each slow, even breath.

Robby thinks, almost absently, of pain medication, of making coffee, of washing his face. Somewhere between those thoughts and the sight of Jack asleep in his chair, he puts it together — why Jack’s jealousy felt so empty, so weightless, nothing but air between his hands. It isn’t the full shape of what he wants. It isn’t even a good approximation.

Chapter Text

X. Late Summer, 2025

Most days, the shift doesn’t really begin until he sees Jack. Everything before that feels something like a held breath, a necessary preamble before Robby can properly exhale. Before he finds him, Robby’s morning routine consists of a series of small, unremarkable acts: a jacket thrown into a locker, a phone silenced and tucked away, the last dregs of coffee swallowed down to shake loose whatever drowsiness he hadn’t yet shed after his brisk walk to work. And when he steps onto the floor of the ED, his gaze goes where it always goes, almost without aim, without any conscious intention, as natural as breathing, as instinctive as listening for his own name — his eyes wander, scanning the floor until they find the familiar shape of Jack’s body.

When he does find him, Jack is never alone. Instead, he’s laughing with Parker beneath the hub, or standing shoulder to shoulder with Dana as he finishes his notes, or chatting with Lena while she tidies her station, their voices tired and low. Robby doesn’t linger on any one moment for very long; he doesn’t have to. Just knowing Jack is there, moving through the morning, is enough — only then does something in him settle, click into place, ready to start, the hours ahead arranging themselves into something workable, something Robby knows how to move through.

He doesn’t know when it began, or how it became so embroidered into the fabric of his morning routine, but that brief and golden seam of time — Jack easing out of his shift, while Robby eases into his own — feels like an anchor, a small patch of dry land before the day’s litany of turning tides: one emergency crashing in after another, one wound to mend before the next, and the inexhaustible frustration of their patients all the while, most of whom wait too long and hurt too badly to meet Robby in good spirits when he finds them.

It’s ridiculous, maybe, how much that narrow sliver of time steadies him. Fifteen minutes, often less. Jack reporting the night shift’s unfinished business in a low voice, rasped from twelve long hours of talking, and Robby listening faithfully, enjoying its roughened edges.

Some mornings, Jack is his usual self: bright and easy, his charm effortless. Others, he is more reticent, something aching around his eyes, and Robby knows that the night has wrung something out of him that he’ll have to recover privately and in his own time.

And then there is another kind of quiet — Robby’s favorite, though he’d never say it outright — where Jack is prickly and short-tempered and well overdue for sleep. It’s a harmless, peeved sort of quiet, the kind that only shows up after a night shift has gone sideways in a way Jack will laugh about later, but only once he’s had rest and distance and a hot meal.

It’s endearing maybe because it’s so rare, so entirely unlike him, to see him so out of sorts.

Jack doesn’t talk much about his service, but there are tells: his near-infinite patience, the way he comes alive in a crisis, the way he can stand in the middle of chaos and think his way right out of it. The way that, when everything is going brutally wrong, he might shrug, might laugh, might mutter to nobody in particular that well, this beats being shot at, as if that alone is enough to put the whole world back into perspective. And perhaps, for him, it is.

So when Jack is bitchy, when he bristles at the minor irritations of the day, Robby can’t help but feel almost tender about it because — because, well, it’s a wonder. It’s a wonder to know, as Robby knows, that Jack’s capacity to complain and stew and be a curmudgeon also belongs to the same man who has survived things most people can’t even imagine — that this side of him, too, is one half of an unbelievable whole.

On such mornings, Robby might smile and offer a joke at Jack’s expense; he might even reach out to touch him, squeeze Jack’s shoulders the way a coach might do to steady a half-beaten boxer who’s won a slow and punishing fight. A brief, grounding press of his hands, a treat for Robby just as much as it is for Jack, whose muscles feel warm and solid beneath the kneading pressure of Robby’s thumbs.

That, then, is Robby’s routine: the walk in from the cold, then stowing his stuff in his locker, a brief check-in with Dana, and finally the search for Jack, after which the day can, at last, begin. Perhaps a touch, too, if he can be so lucky.

So when he steps onto the floor and Jack isn’t there when he ought to be, the morning stutters a little, goes briefly slack in the middle, as if Robby’s skipped a stitch.

At first, he thinks little of it. Jack is always getting pulled aside by a nurse, or a resident, or a case he refuses to leave nearly-finished. To kill time, Robby logs onto a computer, keeps a mental tally of who is coming in today, lets his hands move through the motions he knows by heart. The night shift hands off to the day shift, and Robby’s gaggle of students and residents begin to file in one by one. Parker is already gone, Lena’s station is empty, and still, Jack is nowhere to be found. Between tasks and even some patients, he waits, and he waits, and he waits, for Jack’s voice to surface somewhere behind him, for the warmth of his hand to land on Robby’s shoulder and squeeze.

It doesn’t come.

After a while, his eyes sweep the floor again, with slower, more careful deliberation. Dana stands at the desk now, shoulders tight, jaw set in a way Robby recognizes with some unease. That’s not routine, either, he thinks. It’s not like Dana to start the day this tense.

“Hey,” Robby says, stepping closer to her. “You seen Abbot?”

Dana doesn’t answer right away. “I have.”

Robby waits. The space between them fills with the low hum of the ED.

“You wanna tell me where he is?” he asks, baiting.

Almost imperceptively, Dana braces. “He’s upstairs.”

Upstairs. The word lands, but doesn’t make sense right away. Upstairs is Walsh and her team. Further upstairs than that are the empty wings of the hospital. Jack Abbot does not end a night shift upstairs.

“What’s he doing up in surgery?” Robby asks.

Dana hesitates again. “He’s not in surgery,” she says. “He’s . . . well, he’s on the roof.”

“The roof?” he repeats. The word sounds pitched, wrong in his mouth, like a bad joke. He almost laughs. “What do you mean he’s on the roof?”

Dana’s mouth tightens in a thin line. “I’m not supposed to talk about it,” she says, lowering her voice. “I told him you’d find out eventually, but you know him. He said you’d just go ballistic and —”

“Holy shit. You’re serious,” Robby cuts in, his tone suspended somewhere between a statement and a question. “You’re telling me you had a conversation about this?” He runs a hand over his face, fingers pressing into his eyes. “Dana, are you telling me this is a thing?”

“I’ve known about it for a while now,” she admits. “It’s not frequent. And it’s never this long.”

“Okay,” he says, dumbly, when what he’s hearing now is anything but. “Okay. So, you’re saying he just — what? He just stands up there? Does some lunges, practicing for the big one?”

“I don’t know what he does. If I had to guess, he goes up, gets some air, comes back down before anyone’s the wiser.” She hesitates, then adds, with a faint, apologetic curve to her tone, “The only reason I even know is because — well, I know everything.”

The attempt at humor barely lifts the air, but she doesn’t seem to expect it to. Her voice gentles when she goes on. “It’s only ever a few minutes, Robby. Five. Maybe ten.”

“And today?” Robby asks.

Dana glances at the clock mounted up on the wall. “It’s been . . . a while.”

Something cold slides through Robby’s chest. He swallows around it, the panic catching in his throat.

“Hey,” Dana says gently, reading his face. “He told me I had nothing to worry about, and I believe him. I wouldn’t have kept this from you if I really thought he was in a bad way.” 

“But you’re telling me now,” Robby says.

Dana meets his eyes. She doesn’t stop him when he straightens, already glancing around to see what it'll take to get his bases covered while he goes upstairs. She seems to read his mind, motioning him to go, clearing the narrow space between them so he can pass.

“I still don’t think it’s serious,” she says, evenly. “But, yeah. I’m telling you now.”

The stairwell smells like concrete and stale air. Robby takes the elevator as high as he can, and then the stairs the rest of the way — two steps at a time, his badge knocking against his chest, the sound too loud in the narrow space and the darkness. With every floor he climbs, the hospital sheds another layer of noise until all that’s left is the sound of his own breathing and the heavy thud of his steps.

By the time he reaches the top, his pulse is in his ears.

The door to the roof is heavy. The handle is cold beneath his palm. For a moment, just a moment, Robby hesitates. He thinks of Jack’s patience, his steadiness, the way nothing ever seems to knock him off balance. He thinks of the way Jack has always had a support system in place for when the weight of his past would press too hard. And then he thinks of that quiet admission, offered months ago and set aside at the time: that Jack wasn’t meeting with his support group anymore.

The thought lands and won’t shake. What if the whatever new thing Jack was trying hadn’t held? What if whatever had been keeping Jack level had slipped, little by little, without Robby noticing?

He pushes the door open. Cold air rushes to meet him, sharp and clean, and Jack is —

Jack is there. Solid. Breathing. Alive. There. Alive. Alive.

Robby’s heart slams so hard against his ribs he thinks, briefly, absurdly, that it might just give him away before he ever so much as says a word. Jack is standing on the wrong side of the railing, too close to the edge, much too close; the distance between him and that steep fall downwards feels enormous and vanishing all at once, and Robby has to stop himself from closing the space between them in a few quick strides and grabbing him outright.

He clears his throat instead, forcing his voice to behave.

“Enjoying the view?” Robby asks, evenly.

Jack startles, just a little — a hitch in his shoulders, a sharp inhale that makes his chest rise before it falls and he turns to look at him. Robby sees the words Jesus fucking Christ more than he hears them, Jack’s mouth shaping them as he drags both hands over his face and schools his expression into something even, guarded, harder to read.

“You scared the shit out of me,” Jack tells him.

“That makes two of us,” Robby answers.

He watches Jack inhale, an irritated edge to the downturn of his mouth. “Who did it? Who ratted me out?

Robby feels something in himself bristle in response. Who ratted you out? As if that’s the problem. As if this is some harmless little habit everyone’s been politely tolerating. As if half the hospital hasn’t apparently known about this while Robby’s been walking around blissfully unaware.

But Robby keeps his expression even, his tone light. Reminds himself that Jack never reacts well to being fussed over too loudly, that they can have a proper argument about how batshit this is when they’re both within a healthy distance of the ledge.

“Does it matter?” he asks.

“It wouldn’t have been Ellis. Was it Shen? Evans?”

“You know I can’t tell you that. Snitches get stitches.”

“Yeah, well, apparently you’re the only one who still knows that.” His gaze flicks past Robby, to the open door behind and then, unthinking, toward the edge again. “Look, you can relax, I’m not going to — I was just —” He stops himself, jaw working. “I was getting some air.”

Robby nods, like that explains anything at all. “Last I checked, there’s plenty of air on the ground floor.”

Jack shoots him a look. “Don’t start.”

“I’m not,” Robby says, and he means it. He keeps his voice even, keeps his hands loose at his sides, resists the urge to step closer. What he knows he must ask feels so insufficient it’s almost laughable, but he asks it anyway: “You okay, Jack?”

“I’m fine,” he replies, clipped.

That bad then, Robby thinks, but does not say. “Is that right?”

“That’s right.”

“If something went sideways last night,” he says, trying again, aiming for casual and not quite landing it, “there are better ways to cope, yeah?”

Jack lets out a short, humorless laugh. “Yeah? And you’re suddenly the authority on healthy coping mechanisms now, are you?”

Robby winces. “Jesus Christ,” he says, pressing a hand briefly to his chest, as if struck. He means it as a joke, a way to shrug off the sting, but some trace of how he really feels must show all the same.

Then, Robby says something he does not think through. “Big talk for someone standing that close to a ledge.”

Jack blinks. Whatever response he’d been bracing for, it wasn’t that.

“If threatening to push me off a building is your idea of suicide intervention,” he says, “you should go back downstairs.”

“I didn’t say anything about pushing,” Robby replies. “Maybe you slip. Maybe there’s a strong gust of wind and then —” He makes a soft, whistling sound, the kind you’d hear after a delayed fall in an old cartoon. "Keep making jokes and see." 

It’s a wicked joke — sick, maybe, to play around like this when the thought of losing Jack has Robby’s pulse actively skidding right now — but it works.

Jack snorts, sharp and surprised, the sound breaking loose into a laugh. “Nobody would ever suspect the good doctor.”

“Much less your best friend,” Robby says.

Jack shakes his head, still smiling. “Guess I better watch my step.”

And with that, at last, he does. He steps back, ducks through the railing, puts himself firmly on the right side of it. He leans there with his arms crossed, the metal undoubtedly cold beneath his forearms, facing the city instead of the drop.

It’s enough to help Robby’s lungs remember how to work — his first proper, deep breath since he spoke to Dana. He moves closer and joins Jack at the railing, close enough that their arms brush as they stand shoulder to shoulder, both of them looking out at gray skies. The wind worries lightly against Robby’s cheeks.

“Wanna tell me what’s on your mind?” Robby asks.

“Not really.”

“Tell me anyway?”

Jack inhales slowly. He keeps his gaze out ahead of them. “We had a domestic,” he says, eventually. “She came in with facial bruising. Broken wrist. Old injuries, too. Her story didn’t line up.” He exhales. “We got imaging done, set her to rights, then looped in social work.”

A pause.

“Then the husband shows up in the waiting room,” Jack continues. “You know how it goes: he wants to know where she is, why he can’t see her. And I thought —” He stops for a moment, then starts again, exhausted with himself. “I don’t know what I thought. He started banging on the glass, talking shit to the front desk. I figured if I made it clear we weren’t playing around, he’d back off, but I fucked it up, pushed too hard. Next thing I know, the cops get involved, and suddenly the whole thing flips.” His voice dulls. “Now she’s defending him and she’s — she’s tiny, man. 120 pounds soaking wet with a swollen eye the size of a baseball and she’s getting in between us. Says we’re overreacting, says I put words in her mouth, that she’s fine.”

The wind cuts between them, cold and metallic with the taste of impending autumn.

“They left together,” Jack concludes. He rubs a hand over his mouth, frustration bleeding through. “I don’t know what’s gotten into me, why I can’t shake it off. That girl’s not my first and I know damn well she won’t be my last, but I keep going over it in my head. I keep playing how it might’ve gone if I slowed it down, done less. Instead, I made it worse.”

Something twists in Robby’s chest. “You don’t know that.”

Jack turns his head just enough to glance at him. “Come on, brother. I’ve been doing this long enough to know when I’ve blown it.”

“You don’t know that,” Robby says again. “She wasn’t ready to leave last night, but she almost was. That’s not nothing.”

Jack scoffs. “C’mon, man, save it for the kids.”

“No, I’m serious. She came in. She told her story to strangers. She let you document it, let you put resources in her hand that she didn’t have when she walked in. Now she knows where to go if she needs help. Did she speak to Dylan?”

Jack nods.

“Good,” Robby continues. “So, she knows she has options. Maybe that doesn’t look like going to us — maybe she goes to the next hospital, the one he won’t think to check. Either way, it’s progress. And none of that disappears just because she walked out with him.”

Jack’s jaw tightens. He looks away again and out towards the city.

Somewhere beneath the churn of Robby’s nerves — the sight of Jack alone up here still fresh on his mind, too close to the edge for comfort — something else makes itself felt. He looks out at the expanse of buildings below them. It’s almost peaceful here — here where the city is muted, here where they can watch the ambulances go to and fro, but cannot hear their sirens. At this height, the world is a blur of motion and light, anonymous and undemanding, and nothing below can quite reach up to touch them.

Still, he cannot imagine standing on the wrong side of the railing the way Jack had — cannot imagine being that close to the prospect of death without intention, without it meaning something he could not take back.

“How long have you been doing this?” Robby asks, his voice quieted by a feeling he doesn’t yet have a name for.

Jack hesitates, then shrugs. “I don’t do this every shift, if that’s what you’re asking. Just every now and then, when I really need it.” He frowns. “Really, Robby, I’m fine. I just didn’t tell you because I knew you’d lose your shit.”

“Oh, sure,” Robby says dryly. “Anyone else would see you hovering over the edge of a twenty-story building and take it in stride. My bad.”

“Smart ass,” Jack snorts. “Believe me, if I wanted to go out, I wouldn’t do it like this. I’d have to be a real piece-of-shit bastard to leave that mess to sanitation.”

Robby frowns at that visual. “Why come up here, then?”

Jack shrugs again, smaller this time. “I like the quiet,” he says, as if that answers everything. “It’s a good place to be alone.”

Robby nods, taking that in. The funny thing is . . . he believes him. If Jack were lying, he’d seen it. He’d know. He watches the set of Jack’s shoulders, the way his hands brace against the railing. The skin between his fingers looks rawer than usual, chapped from the cold, from constant washing, the mundane hazards of their job. It must sting, he thinks. He imagines the feel of it without meaning to: the roughness, the chill, the way Jack’s fingers would warm slowly if only Robby could hold them, if he laced his fingers through Jack’s own.

It would take so little effort to do it. Nothing more than the smallest lifting and falling of his hand, already so close to Jack’s own they might as well be touching — it would be so easy. Or, at least, it used to be.

He shakes the thought away.

“You know you don’t have to be,” he says instead.

Jack looks at him.

“When shit goes south like that,” Robby continues. “You don’t have to sit with it alone.”

He lets out a breath, long and slow. “I know,” he says, “but that feels like too much to put on anyone when I’m all —” he gestures mildly at himself. “All fucked up, and mean, and bitching at you for checking up on me.”

“Like you did just now,” Robby says, only teasing.

“Like I did just now,” Jack agrees. “Sometimes, I need a minute before I can ask anybody else to tolerate me. Even if it’s you.”

Robby studies him for a second longer, then lets the moment ease. “I get needing a minute,” he says, lighter. “But if you had any concern for my blood pressure, you would’ve picked literally any other quiet place in the building.”

Jack nods dutifully. “Noted.”

“I’m just saying,” Robby continues. “The call room. A supply closet. The janitor’s lounge, even. I’m pretty sure Esme would let you in for a couple bucks.”

Jack gives him a level look, mouth tilting. “You done?”

“Almost,” Robby says. “The third floor’s been pretty empty since COVID. But if I had to pick a place to have an existential crisis —”

“Enough,” Jack cuts in, rolling his eyes. “I get it. Message received.”

The wind worries at them again, sharp enough to cut through the thin morning. Robby feels the cold settling in his bones now that the adrenaline’s worn off and Jack braces, too, sharing in his discomfort.

“Alright,” he says to Jack, motioning towards the stairwell door, “let’s get you downstairs before Dana sends somebody to perform a wellness check on the both of us.”

“Ah, so it was Evans who told you.”

“I never said that.”

“You might as well have,” Jack says, teasing and a little put out. “So much for keeping my confidence.”

“She was worried.”

Jack snorts. “Yeah, well. That tells me everything I need to know about whose secrets she keeps and whose she doesn’t.” He cuts a glance Robby’s way. “Must be nice being everyone’s favorite, Robinavitch.”

The door thuds shut behind them, sealing off the roof, the city, the ledge. The stairwell is dim and narrow and concrete, and as they go down together, they do not touch, but the sounds of their footsteps do, echoing together in near-harmony, a rhythm in the otherwise perfect silence.

At the first landing, Jack slows.

“You alright, brother?” Jack asks, his voice and his gaze pitched forward, towards the stairs, instead of the man beside him.

Robby does not need to ask precisely what he means by the question. He knows it. He knows Jack is not asking about the climb down, but instead the climb up, and what Robby saw there, and what he thought he might’ve been walking into. There’s still too much in his chest — fear, yes, but also a relief so big it's dizzying, and something so achingly tender beneath it that it unsteadies him — but he keeps his voice even.

“Yeah,” Robby says. “Yeah, I’m alright.”

“I didn’t mean to scare you, man.”

“I know,” Robby tells him, surprised by how quiet his own voice sounds in the echoing stillness of the stairwell.

“I wouldn’t. Least of all here, at work. I wouldn’t do that to you.”

“I know.”

They keep going. Shoulder to shoulder, not touching, then almost. At one turn, Jack stumbles just slightly on the edge of a step. Nothing dramatic, barely enough of a misstep to register, but Robby’s hand comes out on instinct all the same, catching his wrist.

For a second, they are drawn close together in that narrow stairwell. And then the rest happens on its own — Jack backed to the wall, Robby close enough to feel the thud of it, and the answer of Jack’s pulse beneath his thumb. The concrete holds the cold, but between them there is none, none at all.

Neither of them speaks. Neither of them pulls away.

Jack’s breath leaves him in a long, unguarded spill, something eased loose from its careful keeping. Robby feels it against his chest, feels the way Jack settles into the hold, not asking for it, not resisting it either.

“See?” Robby asks him. “Hazardous. This is why you gotta stick to the ground floor.”

Jack’s reply is a soft huff, more air than sound. “Shut up.”

Who moves first? Who is it, between the two of them, that decides to close the distance?

In the end, Robby never quite figures it out; he only knows that one moment there is space between them, and the next moment there is not.

His arms wrap around Jack, as if through their own volition, and Jack folds into the embrace wordlessly and easily, his forehead slotting naturally against Robby’s shoulder, his hands coming up along Robby’s back. They hold each other in the dim stairwell, the cold walls, the echoing quiet, and neither of them says a word. To speak would be, somehow, to break it.

So, Robby thinks of all he cannot say. He thinks of words he did not speak aloud years ago, when they were still sleeping together and such words should have perhaps come more easier, but did not; now, there are things he could say to Jack that he can only say in jest, framed by humor or friendship so as to not give himself away; and right now, if he were to speak those words, he would give himself away he would not be able to take back.

They stay like that until the holding has done its work. Until Jack straightens first, breath steadier now. Only then do they separate, lingering, and turn back toward the stairs side by side, carrying the rest of it with them, intact and unspoken.

The next time they’re alone together, a few days later, it’s Dana who brings it up.

They’re not at work, which is perhaps why she feels emboldened to go there with Robby; instead, they’re standing in her kitchen together, her daughter’s footsteps thumping duly along the ceiling overhead. She’s mentioned, offhand, how quickly the costs of sending her youngest to state university were stacking up, and Robby had offered to drop off a mini-fridge he’d been meaning to get rid of — a squat, humming thing that’s been taking up space in his basement since his last move. Easy as anything, they drove it over after work, where he wrestled it out of Dana’s trunk himself, waving off her protestations that she could carry it herself.

Now it sits slotted against the wall, beside everything else Dana’s daughter will take with her to her new dorm.

Dana pours them both coffee, invites him to stay for a while, and, for a few minutes, they stand at opposite sides of her kitchen counter, talking absently about nothing in particular, laughing about some little, nonsensical thing that happened between Langdon and one of their regulars at work. It’s only when they sit down, and Dana cups her mug between her palms and turns it slowly to and fro, to and fro, that Robby realizes she’s been buying time.

“I feel like I owe you an apology,” she says, her voice casual in a way that doesn’t quite match up to the tired line between her brows, “for not tellin’ you about Jack.”

Robby lifts his cup, buys himself a second. “You told me when it mattered.”

Dana hums, unconvinced. “No, I told you when I had to. That’s not the same thing.”

“He asked you not to.”

She sucks her teeth. “He could ask me for the moon, too. Doesn’t mean I have to give it to ‘em.”

Robby smiles into his coffee. “You know, this is why he thinks you play favorites.”

Her brow arches. “Oh, really?”

“Apparently,” he tells her, “I’m your favorite.”

She purses her lips. “That’s a textbook case of projection if I’ve ever heard one.”

Robby smiles at that. “All the same.”

The look she gives him in return is fond, edged with fatigue. Then her hand drifts up, and she hooks the chain at her throat with her fingers, drawing it free from her collar. She worries the small gold cross between her fingers, thumb running along at its edges like she’s sanding it down to make it smooth.

“Y’know, I really did feel awful,” she says, quieter now. “Watching you look for him. Realizing you didn’t know where he was. And then when I figured out how long he’d been up there . . . I kept thinking, if I stayed quiet and wasted time and something terrible happened to him —”

“It didn’t,” Robby says gently.

“I know.” She nods, then takes a steadying breath. “I know. And, for the record, it’s not like he came up to me one day and volunteered that he’s been going up there, either. I heard something about it from the night-crew. I figured if Lena wasn’t nervous, then I didn’t have to be, either. But . . . I don’t know, Robby.”

Robby waits.

“There’s never any daylight between the two of you,” Dana continues. “You have your occasional disagreements, sure, but with the way you two act . . .” She trails off, searching. “I figured if he hadn’t told you yet, it was only a matter of time, so I kept my mouth shut until I didn’t.”

Robby looks at her. “What do you mean, the way we act?”

She blinks, surprised by the question. She pauses, runs it over in her head, like she’s been asked to describe the taste of air. “You know. You’re a package deal. Always have been — it’s the freakiest thing, you two act like you’ve known each other all your lives.”

“I mean, sure. He’s been with us for how long now? Of course we know each other.”

Dana shakes her head. “Yeah, but you were like that from the start. That’s what always got me. In all the years I’ve known you, I’ve never seen you take to someone like that. Never that fast.”

“You think so?”

“I know so.” She pauses, her face softening around a fond thought. “Y’know, Adamson used to have this joke about you two — back when Jack first started and he kept picking up all those shifts with us, do you remember that? Monty used to say the only time we ever saw one of you alone was when you were out looking for the other.”

“Adamson said that?” he asks.

“All the time,” Dana says, smiling.

The ache of missing his old mentor arrives the way it sometimes does, like opening a drawer he’s rummaged a hundred times before and finding something unexpected at the back.

Dana chuckles at another though. “Y’know, Emery had this crazy pet theory about it, that you two had history before Jack ever showed up. Used to say that’s how he landed the job.”

“That’s a fucked thing to say. Does Jack know she went around saying that?”

“Yeah, but you know her. She probably didn't mean a word of it, she just likes to get under his skin.”

Robby rolls his eyes. It’s nearly reflex now, whenever Walsh’s name comes up in connection with Jack, easy enough to dismiss, but then he notices Dana still working the gold cross between her fingers. Her nervous habit, slowed but lingering. His thoughts slip, unbidden, back to the rooftop. Jack standing too close to the edge. He thinks of the shape Jack’s absence in the morning and how loud it had briefly been, during that narrow, terrible stretch of time between fearing the worst and being spared it.

Maybe that’s why he tells her the truth now, after all this time.

“She’s only half right,” he says at last. “I mean, I had nothing to do with him getting hired. That part he did all on his own.” He clears his throat, the words catching just slightly as he goes on. “But, yeah, the, uh — we first met before my residency.”

Dana’s brows lift in genuine surprise. “No kidding? Why didn't you tell me?”

“We didn’t tell anyone. Not even Adamson.”

Dana’s expression shifts, a small crease forming between her brows. “But I thought . . .” She pauses, sorting through a perceived discrepancy. “Didn’t Jack come up through Texas? You two didn’t go to school together.”

Robby shakes his head. “We didn’t meet in school.” He hesitates, then sits up a little. “Do you remember Charlie Walkiewicz? You met him once, at that networking thing we went to in Philly last year.”

Dana squints, reaching for the memory. “Was he the tall one? The one you knew from UPenn?”

“That’s him,” Robby says. “There was this bar he’d go to because it was one of the only ones around where he and his husband could dance together; where Rhonda — you met her, too — could be with her girlfriend at the time.” He clears his throat. “That’s, uh — that’s where Jack and I met.”

Dana furrows her brows, just slightly. It’s a familiar expression, the one she always makes when she’s setting something down carefully in her mind. He knows she knows what it means that they met there; he can see her working it out in her head, putting the pieces together.

“That’s why we say anything,” Robby adds.

Dana blinks, a little incredulous until she recovers. She shifts her weight, glances once over her shoulder before leaning in, voice hushed. “So, you two —” She pauses, recalibrates. “How long were you two together?”

“We weren’t together. Not really.” He hesitates, then clears his throat. “It, uh — it wasn’t very long. Just a couple of —”

“Weeks?”

“Days.”

Dana’s brows lift. Then a grin tugs at her mouth. “Alright, tiger. I didn’t know that’s how you move.”

“It isn’t,” Robby says immediately.

“It used to be,” she counters. “I always had a hunch you must’ve been trouble back then.”

He scrubs a hand over his face as it warms. “Dana, don’t make me regret this. Please.”

“I’m only playing.” Dana reaches across the counter and rests her hand over his, steady and warm. She lets it stay there. “Y’know, now that I think about it, it tracks. I mean, it explains a lot; I just — I can’t believe you never told me.”

“Well, I don’t really talk about it. It’s a lot to explain,” he says, which feels like a lie, so he offers something else, something honest: “I didn’t want it to change things.”

Dana watches him for a moment, and there’s that furrow in her brows again, like she’s been presented with yet another equation to solve. “I understand that, it’s just — I mean, you know about my brother. And Alana — well. I’ve had a hunch for a while now and with her heading off to college, I figure she’ll tell me any day now.” She lets that go, gives Robby’s hand a small squeeze. “I love you, Robby. This wouldn’t have changed anything. You know that, right?”

“I know,” he says, and he does. “But it wasn’t only my story to tell.”

Dana’s brows knit, just slightly. “Jack didn’t want anyone to know?”

Robby shakes his head. “No. I don’t think it was that.” He searches for the right phrasing. “He doesn’t advertise that he’s also into men, but I don’t think he hides it either. I think Ellis knows. I’m pretty sure they joke about it.”

Dana hums, absorbing that.

“I mostly only ever see women,” Robby goes on. “And at the time, we both thought it was over. No reason to make something out of it if it wasn’t going to happen again.”

She looks at him, careful. “And did it?”

He nods.

“Longer than a few days that time around?”

He nods again. “Almost a year,” he says, and watches the surprise on her face. “It was after Janie and I ended things. A little while after.”

Dana leans back against the counter, thinking. “I wondered,” she admits. “I remember that stretch. You were . . . I don’t know, lighter than I’d seen you in a while. Happier. I guessed you must’ve met someone.”

Robby nods, stares into his cup, the dark surface gone still. “I didn’t let it last,” he says, after a while. “I think I said something like I didn’t want anything serious, and I mostly believed it, so that’s how it went. Then COVID happened. Adamson happened. It all kinda fell apart.”

Dana doesn’t say anything. It’s as if she knows there’s more coming, senses it before he does. Her hand stays where it is, solid and warm.

And maybe because she’s right, or maybe because the silence itself seems to expect it, Robby goes on. “After that, Jack wanted to give me some time to find my footing again.” He swallows, the words coming a little slower now. “He was open to us trying again, but I kept waiting it out, kept thinking, if I rushed and tried again too soon, I’d just hurt him again.” He lifts his shoulders, a small, helpless motion. “Anyways, I figured it might’ve been better for him if we just moved on.”

Dana’s thumb shifts once, a subtle pressure, and she looks like she’s about to say something and thinks better of it. “And Heather,” she says instead, carefully neutral. “Is that when you started seeing her?”

Robby nods.

Dana tilts her head, considering him again, that same quiet steadiness in her gaze. “Does she know about any of this?”

He nods, throat working. “Some of it, but I never told her it was Jack,” he says. “When she ended things, she told me she felt like I never really showed up all the way. And I’ve heard that before. From Janie, from others.” He gives a faint, humorless breath. “Apparently I’m hard to reach.”

Dana watches him carefully.

“She made this comment,” he goes on, gesturing vaguely before he commits to the words. “She said it felt like there was always a third person in the relationship. And that it felt like she had to compete.”

Dana doesn’t respond right away. She watches him, the quiet stretching without strain. And then, what she says next is not about Heather at all. “Do you think you ever really gave him a shot?” she asks.

He frowns. “What do you mean? Of course I did.”

“Mmm,” she hums, nodding, like she’s just been told something that doesn’t quite add up.

Robby gives her a look. “What’s that mean?”

“Nothing,” Dana says, offering him an unassuming look. “It’s just — well, if you’re askin’ me, it sounds to me like you decided how it was gonna end before you even got there.”

It’s a gift of hers, that tone. Every now and then, it makes him want to speak. Robby lets out a breath that might almost be a laugh. “How long have you known me, Dana? When does it ever end any other way?”

“Maybe it could’ve,” she tells him. “Maybe he never really got the chance to prove you wrong.”

Robby doesn’t answer right away. He slips his hand out from beneath her own, resting it instead over his mouth, as if to seal a response that might come up from his throat.

“It’s been a few months since Heather,” Dana adds, undeterred. “Do you think it’s worth trying again? Doing it right, this time?”

He shakes his head, the motion small but firm. “I can’t do that to him again,” he says. “And even if I tried, I don’t think he’d want it anymore. I think that ship’s sailed.”

Dana exhales — a quiet, affectionate sound, something between laughter and a sigh. “Oh, Robby, what I wouldn’t give to spend a day inside that head of yours,” she says. Then, as if settling in for a longer conversation ahead, she rises and pours herself another cup of coffee.

September, 2025

What is all too easy to forget after the fact, what feels almost impossible to hold onto by the time Robby drags himself home after the worst fucking shift of his life, is that, right before everything went wrong, the day had nearly been a success.

Before Leah and Jake, before Heather and Langdon, and before Robby’s episode on the floor in pedes, he and the team had met the largest mass-casualty event their city had ever seen and held the goddamn line. Even the newbies, the interns and the med students, saw a crisis unfold in real time and they jumped into action.

And then, just before the work teetered on the wrong side of challenging, Jack appeared. As if attuned to the sound of his footsteps, Robby sensed him, somehow, before he saw him. He didn’t even have to think about — he just turned around, crossed the floor to meet him, and wrapped him in his arms before they got to work.

But even before that, before the sirens and the bloodshed that came crashing down on them like a wave they could neither outrun nor brace against, there had almost been for Robby another, smaller victory — because that day, for the first time in five years, he had worked straight through the anniversary of Adamson’s death. He did not opt for a sick day. He did not quietly take himself off schedule for yet another consecutive year. He felt the weight of the date somewhere deep and reflexive, because he could not help it, and he set it aside, deliberately, where it could not reach him and make demands. He made room. He put distance between himself and that biting grief, and its hold on him loosened just enough for him to think he’d conquered it.

That, too, is what gets lost in the telling: that there was a good stretch of the day where Robby really believed that he was going to walk out of that shift unscathed.

Now he is home, and alone, and his body knows better.

The walk from the front door to the bedroom is brief, but he feels every step, the ache in his knees settling deeper the closer he gets to the bed. Once there, Robby strips down without ceremony, letting his clothes fall where they land. He doesn’t even look down to them; there isn’t the energy.

After he’s changed, he sits on the edge of the mattress and stays there, head down and hands loose between his knees. The room is cool and dark and faintly disordered; this morning, he thought he might come home and clean. Now, like the clothing left on the floor, the mess belongs to tomorrow’s work.

Eventually, he lies down, pulls the covers up over his body, and sinks into the familiar hollow of the bed. He stares at the ceiling. He closes his eyes. He counts down from a hundred — he tries to, at least. His mind, unhelpful, keeps playing the day back over and over again, in useless and punishing circles. He breathes through it, starts counting again, bids sleep any way he can.

It doesn’t come.

He does not know how long he waits, only that it is enough to frustrate him, so Robby reaches over to his nightstand, gropes in the dark for his phone, and squints at the bright glow of the blue-white screen when it comes to life beneath his thumb.

Jack picks up the call on the second ring.

“How are you not sleeping yet?” he asks, instead of hello. His tone is scolding, or at least it’s supposed to be, but Robby can hear the smile in it all the same.

“It’s not for lack of trying,” he replies. “I can’t turn my brain off.”

“That’s adrenaline for you. Stop thinking about it so much and you’ll be out like a light.”

“Easier said than done,” Robby says. He closes his eyes. He can hear the distant hush of passing cars, the low rush of wind, footsteps hitting pavement. “You still walking home?”

“Mm,” Jack hums. “Got roped into a second round of beers with Princess and Donnie. You know how it goes.” He exhales. “I’m close, though. Ten minutes, maybe less.”

Robby shifts under the covers, turns onto his side. “Wanna stay on the phone with me till then?”

There’s a brief sound of movement as Jack adjusts his grip; the noise crunches softly over the receiver. “I can do that,” Jack says finally, easy as anything. “But no shop talk. We can talk about anything you want in the morning, but not tonight; I don’t have it in me, after the day we’ve had.”

Robby knows that’s a lie or, at least, not the whole truth. If he had to guess, Jack is probably drawing that line more for Robby’s sake than his own. He’s always been good at that: anticipating where Robby might get stuck, then steering them both around that tripping stone without making a show of it. The least Robby can do in turn is pretend not to notice.

“Tell me what you did today after your shift this morning, then,” he says.

“Nothing exciting,” Jack replies. “Went home. Slept for a bit. Hit the gym.”

Robby hums, noncommittal. “What’d you do there?”

A hint of amusement creeps into Jack’s voice. “I picked heavy things up, then I put ’em back down.”

“I could’ve guessed that, smartass.” Robby all but rolls his eyes. “Use some describing words. Paint me a picture.”

Jack’s smile comes through the line. “If you want a picture, all you have to do is ask.”

“I figured I should warm you up a bit first.”

“I’m warmed up plenty.”

“I’m sure you are,” Robby says, leaning into it because that’s always been the easiest way past Jack’s teasing. “So —” he drawls, deliberately overdoing it, “how heavy are we talking here, tough guy?”

Jack laughs. “You don’t give a shit about that.”

No, but you do, Robby thinks, but Jack might not see how much that matters. “Tell me anyway.”

The sound of footsteps changes over the line, as if he’s walking more slowly. “It’s nothing impressive. I’m trying not to wreck my shoulder again after the last time I PT’d,” Jack says. “One of the younger guys at my gym put me onto this app: you pick a coach, get sorted into a team, and they send you a new plan every week. I usually program my own training, but it’s nice not having to think about it, and anyways there’s a free trial —”

Robby yawns, wide and unguarded.

“See?” Jack says. “I told you. You don’t give a shit.”

“I’m just soothed by the sound of your voice.”

“Yeah, I’m sure that’s it,” Jack says, voice dripping with disbelief.

They lapse into quiet without either of them meaning to: Jack still walking, Robby still listening. Neither of them rushes to fill it, and Robby realizes how different this silence feels to the one they shared on the rooftop only an hour or two before — how Jack, never particularly unnerved by silence, filled up the quiet with talk of purpose, and war, and, of all things, bees.

Now, neither of them is particularly rushing to speak, despite how useless it is to be on the phone with one another and not speak; but the silence between them feels easy and intimate at once, measured in blocks and breaths and the call connecting them.

“I’ve switched to taking creatine,” Jack says, out of nowhere, like he’s circling back to finish a thought. “It’s a little over-hyped right now, but it works.”

“Oh yeah?” Robby says, already smiling.

“Yeah. You know me, I hate those protein shakes they’re always peddling at my gym, so I wasn’t too sure about it at first, but —”

Robby feels it coming a second too late — a yawn tugging at his jaw. He turns his face into the pillow, tries to smother it.

There’s a brief pause on the line.

“I’m hanging up on you,” Jack says.

“Not yet.”

“You’re falling asleep.”

“I’m awake,” Robby says, despite the fact that even he can hear that his voice has gone heavier, the effort slipping out of it as the sharp edge of adrenaline finally dulls. “Tell me more about your thrilling supplement regimen first.”

“Why? So I can listen to you snore the rest of the way home?”

“I don’t snore.”

The sound on the line changes: the open air falling away, the gentle, rippling clatter of keys. He must be home now. When he speaks, Jack’s voice sounds closer now that he’s indoors. “Oh? Did you finally get a CPAP machine?”

“Fuck you,” Robby says, smiling. “I never heard any complaints before.”

“What? From me?”

“Yes, from you, Jack. Who else?.”

Jack hums, something warm tucked into the sound, and maybe half-distracted, he says: “Yeah, alright. But, in my defense, I was just happy to be there.”

The line lands softly, almost carelessly, and Robby is surprised by how little it hurts. There was a time when mentioning things like this would’ve felt like pressing a hand to an old bruise, something tender they both instinctively guarded against. Now it feels different, somehow. Not so much an ache, more like a pull, a door that might open if he were only to test it.

Maybe it’s the knowledge that Jack is home now. Maybe it’s the distant realization that they’d only meant to stay on the phone until this point and the fact that Jack doesn’t mention it, so neither does he. Whatever it is, it gives Robby just enough courage to lean forward, just enough.

“I know we said no talking about work tonight,” Robby says, lightly, ready for pushback.

“Uh-oh,” Jack says, amused.

“You mentioned a therapist,” Robby goes on. He keeps his tone loose, casual. “I didn’t know you were going to therapy.”

Jack doesn’t answer at first. Instead, there’s a faint rustle of movement on the other end of the line. Without meaning to, Robby finds himself matching each sound with its probable cause, assembling the mental picture piece by piece: the soft shift of fabric as Jack shrugs out of his jacket, the dull thud of shoes as he takes them off at the front door. He can picture him so clearly — phone to his ear, peeling off layers and choosing his words, deciding how much to give away.

“I’ve been going for a while now,” Jack says at last. “On and off at first. More regularly lately.”

“How long is a while?”

Jack exhales. “Over a year.”

The number lands heavier than Robby expects: a year. Long enough that it should’ve come up, long enough that it feels strange it never did, given how much else they know about each other. There’s a pause between them over the phone then, like Jack knows this, too.

“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?” Robby asks eventually, unsure if such a thing is his to ask.

“It wasn’t because I didn’t trust you,” he says, seeing — as always – right into the heart of what Robby’s really asking. “I just got in my own head about it. And then I got embarrassed about being embarrassed, but it’d been a long time since I needed that kind of help myself. That support group I’d go to really used to be enough.”

Robby shifts against the pillow. He listens to more shuffling movements over the phone. He knows when Jack starts to take off the prosthetic only because of the hum that slips out of him; a low, absent sound Robby remembers from years ago. It’s an old habit, that hum. It means he’s in some pain.

“I wondered why you stopped going,” Robby admits. “It always meant so much to you.”

There’s a faint change on the line then – space opening up, the sound thinning, and Robby imagines Jack setting the phone down somewhere nearby after setting it on speaker.

“It was good for what it was,” Jack says, voice carrying from farther off. “I still drop in now and then, but there were some things I had to work on that didn’t feel right to bring there.” When he speaks again, he sounds closer to the phone, lighter on purpose. “Anyway, if you’re interested, I could always ask my guy for a referral.”

“What about me tonight is screaming in need of urgent mental health intervention?”

“I wouldn’t say urgent. You’ve probably got till Monday.”

“You’re funny,” Robby says, flatly. “I don’t think I’m built for lying on a couch talking about my feelings.”

“I’ve got good news for you: no couches. That’s more of a TV thing. And nobody makes you talk about anything you don’t want to.”

Robby stares up at the ceiling. The sharp edge of tension inside him has eased away over the course of their conversation, but he can still feel how wrung thin the day has left him, everything scraped out of him except this dull, floating fatigue. The idea of digging around inside himself, of finding something to hang over to a stranger, feels not just unappealing, but faintly impossible, like bleeding from a place that’s already dry.

“That’s the problem,” Robby says. “I don’t know how much I’d say, if it were up to me. I think I’d just sit there and waste everyone’s time.”

“I’ve done that. I’ve sat there and stonewalled. Turns out, that can still count towards the work.”

Robby shifts against the pillow, listening. “Sometimes you don’t talk,” Jack goes on. “Sometimes you talk around whatever it is you can’t touch until you can. And when you do, it — well, sometimes it hurts like a bitch and you walk out thinking you just paid good money to feel worse. But that’s usually how you know you hit something worth digging into.”

There’s a moment of quiet then, the line open between them and neither of them filling it. What Robby thinks, but does not say, is that he does not know how he’s found himself on the receiving end of this conversation. He knows how to name pain when it belongs to someone else, how to tend to a wound that isn’t his to feel, how to talk to patients about therapy, and trauma, and the dangers of suffering in silence. He’s always been good at that. He’s never been quite as good turning any of that inward.

But then again, today has already upended so much of what he thought he was good at, and here they are anyway, talking to one another at the other end of a nightmare.

“You can ask about that referral,” Robby says at last. “I just can’t promise anything yet.”

“I’m not asking you to,” Jack answers, like that’s enough.

There’s a faint sound on the other end of the line; nothing he can place other than a shift in movement or perhaps weight, as if Jack has settled somewhere. In the ambient hum of that brief silence, Robby feels the night press back in around the edges of his fatigue. It would be easy to let the conversation end here, to say goodnight, to leave the rest untouched — but then he remembers something.

“Speaking of promises,” Robby tells him, “I got your note to the vet’s family.”

“They showed, huh?”

“His sister did,” Robby says. “She came in the morning. She couldn’t get through it on her own, so she asked me to read it for her.”

The memory rises unbidden: Jack’s handwriting, careful and unmistakable; the deliberate way he folded the paper afterward and handed it back to that crying stranger, watched her press it to her chest like something that might hold her back. “It was good, Jack. I didn’t know you wrote like that.”

“I don’t know that I write like anything,” Jack replies. “It’s just something I picked up in the army. All those long stretches of nothing, all the shit you see when you're out there – lotta time to pick up a hobby. ”

“So you started writing about it?”

“Yeah, I mean, I had nowhere else to put any of it down.” He yawns, then adds, dry as ever, “You want to learn a thing or two about stonewalling? Enlist. Get shipped halfway across the world with a bunch of twenty-something-year-old guys. That’ll teach you what to do with your feelings.”

Robby lets that sit. He thinks of Jack in those years between when they separated and when they found each other again — younger, greener, learning the habit of deciding, over and over, what was safe to say aloud and what was not.

“Did it help at all?” Robby asks. “Writing to people, I mean. Having someone to talk to about it.”

“Not really,” Jack says. “I wrote more letters than I ever sent, and the ones I did – well, it wasn’t really about keeping people in the loop.”

There’s a faint sound on the other end of the line — movement, a shift, a mental image of him in bed, perhaps, just like Robby.

“The only letters I actually sent were to my family,” Jack continues. “My sisters. My mom. A girl I dated for a bit, before I enlisted. I wasn’t gonna tell any of them the shit I was seeing, it’d just scare ‘em. Why do that if I didn’t have to, right?”

Robby pictures it without meaning to: a pretty girl at a kitchen table, maybe, paper unfolded between her hands. He sees the creases, the carefulness of it, the same carefulness with which he’d unfolded a letter earlier that day, addressed to someone else entirely. It’s a stupid thing to feel — a sharp, misplaced lurch in his chest — but he feels it all the same.

In the meantime, the line goes quiet again. For a second, Robby wonders if Jack has finally drifted off, the day catching up with him at last.

And then Jack says: “You know, I sent you a letter once.”

That catches Robby off-guard entirely. “You did?” he asks, because he needs to hear it again.

He hums. “Yeah, when I was in Iraq. I sent it to your old apartment.”

Robby’s mind stutters. He recalls the narrow hallway of the apartment complex he lived in through most of his early twenties, the line of mailboxes on the ground floor, the way he’d filed a forwarding address before leaving for residency — and still, how little ever seemed to follow him from that apartment onto the next.

“I never got it,” Robby says. The words land heavier than he expects, a small, belated ache blooming in his chest over something he only just learned he’d lost. “I filed an address change before I got to New Orleans, but I hardly ever got my mail.”

“Yeah, I figured you hadn’t, or else you probably would’ve brought it up.”

“Yeah, no,” Robby confirms, still a little taken aback. “I can’t believe you even remembered my address.”

“I used to have it memorized, if you’ll believe it,” Jack tells him. “I walked back there a few days after we split; I knocked on your door, but you weren’t there, so I wrote it down on a receipt or something.” There’s a brief muffling sound over the phone, like he’s suddenly a little restless, despite the tiredness in his voice. “Anyways, I figured if it got to you, it got to you. And if it didn’t . . . well, trying was the point.”

“If I’d known you’d do that, I would’ve —” He stops himself, breath catching for just a second. “I don’t know why I never gave you my number.”

”Probably for the same reason I didn’t give you mine,” Jack tells him. “We were young.”

And that admission, simple as it is, rings true in the brief quiet that follows. They were young, Robby thinks. That is the beginning and the end of it: they were young, and stupid, and careless in the way young people always are when they don’t yet understand what can be lost by pretending not to want anything too badly. They could not yet imagine a future where they would hear one another’s voices again, or the old club where they first met would shutter its doors; they had not yet learned that time does not keep what isn’t taken when it’s offered.

And now, to think that Jack had gone back to his empty apartment, had thought of him years later, across distance and war and the long middle stretch of life Robby had believed belonged to forgetting —

Robby inhales, lets it out slowly, silently. The moment feels thin as glass — just as breakable, perhaps, if he presses too hard. “Your letter, Jack,” he says at last. “Do you remember what it said?”

“Not really,” Jack says and with a reluctance that’s a little unconvincing and, more importantly, unlike him. “Only bits and pieces.”

Robby swallows. He keeps his voice even, though the wanting in him has sharpened to something bright and insistent, a feeling that doesn’t ease just because he refuses to name it. “What do you remember?”

Robby waits for more. His heart ticks in his chest, steady and unmistakable, already bracing for the familiar deflections — a joke, a half-turn, the gentle dodge that would let them both pretend this wasn’t asked in earnest.

“Robby,” Jack says instead, and exhales. “What I wrote — I mean, it was from twenty years ago, man.”

His hesitation is confusing until it isn’t, until Robby remembers how long they’ve been practicing this other way of speaking — nearly four years now of circling, of keeping certain things safely out of reach.

Of course, whatever Jack wrote back then wasn’t written from the place they stand now. It came from earlier: after they’d hooked up in their twenties and before they tried, and failed, to make something of it again. It came from before the careful repair that followed, before they learned how to keep what they’d once wanted folded neatly into jokes and half-mentions, always in the past tense.

Robby knows what it would mean to ask anyway, to try and open the door they’ve agreed, without ever saying so, to keep closed but never locked. “I don’t care how long it’s been,” he says. “Tell me what you remember. Please.”

Robby can hear Jack take a deep breath on the other end of the line and then, slowly, let it go.

“I really don’t remember a lot,” he begins. “I know I was in a bad way when I wrote it. I never told you this — I haven’t told anyone — but before the medical discharge, I had something going on with a guy in my unit.”

That alone raises more questions than Robby anticipated, but Jack seems to anticipate it.

“It wasn’t serious,” Jack says, quick, almost reflexive. “I don’t think we even liked each other that much, but any port in a storm, right?” The line lands with the faintest lift, meant to pass for levity, perhaps, though neither of them laugh. “I don’t know what tipped anyone off to the fact that he was fucking around with guys — if he got caught doing something stupid, or just got sloppy and let it slip. I just know that when people started asking questions, he needed to get eyes off of him.”

Jack doesn’t say where that attention finally settled. Robby doesn’t need him to.

“By the time anything could really come of it, the IED happened,” Jack says. “Turns out that buys you a lot of grace.”

“Jesus, Jack,” Robby says, around the mess he feels in his chest. There’s sympathy there, yes, but threaded through it is something sharper, a frustration for him that has nowhere useful to land. “I’m sorry. That’s — I had no idea. That’s fucking awful.”

“Ah, it’s fine. That was all a long time ago, anyway,” Jack says, and the words barely seem to carry any weight at all — like Robby’s just apologized for bumping into him in a hallway, a clumsy elbow that didn’t even bruise. “When I wrote to you, I remember trying to make sense of how I’d ended up where I was. I kept thinking about what it would’ve taken to end up somewhere else. And that made me think of you.”

The line goes quiet for a moment under the weight of that admission.

“You sure you still wanna hear this, big guy?” Jack asks.

Robby smiles, despite himself. “What, that I made an impression? And after the day I’ve had? Yeah. Go on. I can take it.”

Jack hums, a low sound of acknowledgment. “Yeah, I don’t know what it was about you. You weren’t the first guy I slept with. You weren’t the last. But I thought about you for such a long time after.” He pauses, like he’s not sure he meant to say this much, then adds: “In that letter I wrote to you, I wondered what would’ve happened if we’d met sooner. If we’d had more time. If you’d stayed in Pittsburgh, or I’d been able to afford school and met you there, like your friends had.”

Robby listens, the possibilities stacking one by one, each offered gently and then set aside.

“You know, half the reason I enlisted was because I wanted out of my house,” Jack goes on. “I think I wrote something like I might’ve done just as well in New Orleans.”

“With me?” Robby says, incredulous despite himself. “You’re telling me you’d have run off with me after a weekend together?”

“Maybe not,” Jack huffs, the sound halfway to a laugh — soft, fond, a little worn around the edges. “For what it’s worth, I was probably still a little doped up from surgery when I wrote that letter. But . . . I don’t know, Robby. I thought I could’ve loved you. That’s what I wrote to tell you. That if things had been different, I would’ve wanted the chance to find out.”

Robby’s breath catches before he can stop it. Then, without sharpness or judgment, only the last thinning dregs of disbelief, he says, “You hardly knew me.”

“Yeah, but I know you now, ” Jack says. “And, in the end, I wasn’t wrong, was I?”

“No,” Robby says, the word coming out steadier than everything he feels. “I guess you weren’t.”

In the listening quiet that follows, Jack does not speak, so neither does Robby. He closes his eyes instead, and pictures Jack easing toward sleep the same way he is: heavy-limbed, worn down, curved onto his left side in the dark — the way he always used to do when they’d share a bed. He turns over what Jack has just told him in his head. Through the haze of his exhaustion, Robby feels something like hope, like courage or recklessness, or all three. Tonight has taken nearly everything from him, pared him down to something spare and aching. What remains is this: Jack’s voice in his ear, the remembered heat of his body beneath the covers, the almost unbearable wanting to feel him again.

He would go to him now, just to look him in the face and ask. He would drag himself out of bed and crawl across the city tonight to find him, if only Jack and his knees would let him.

Could you love me still? he would ask, if only he could see the look in Jack’s eyes as he asked it. If I asked you for another chance, would you give it to me?

For now, he makes do with this: breathing together on the phone, unguarded and slow, the quiet between them swelling and easing like water against a shore, all easy rhythm.

“Are you still going in tonight?” Robby asks, apropos to nothing.

“Hmm?” Jack murmurs and does not answer, so Robby has to repeat the question. “I think I said I’d go back to work at two if they needed me. I’m waiting on word from . . . Ellis. Or John, I think.”

“And if they don’t call you?”

There’s a muffle sound over the phone, like Jack has moved the phone away so that he’s not yawning right into Robby’s ear. “Then I’ll stay home. I‘m on for Saturday anyway.”

That leaves Robby a narrow margin of morning. He could wake early, dress quickly, stop by his apartment — it would add only fifteen minutes to his walk to work. Fifteen minutes, and he could see him. Fifteen minutes, and everything might tilt.

“Don’t go if you don’t have to,” Robby says, careful not to press. “You hear me, Jack?”

There’s no answer. Somewhere on the other end of the line, Jack must’ve slipped fully into sleep. Robby thinks of hanging up the way he might think of turning off a light he’s already too tired to reach — maybe in a minute, but not yet.

When Robby wakes, his phone lies on the pillow beside him, black and unresponsive.

He plugs it in on the nightstand and lies back, staring at the ceiling, wondering how long Jack stayed with him after he himself drifted off and the phone finally gave up.

He throws an arm over his eyes to block the thin, pale morning light. In the darkness it makes, his thoughts sharpen, crowding in: want and exhaustion and hope, all tangled together. And then, when he’s done thinking, when there’s nothing left to turn over except what he wants to say, he gets up and gets dressed.

Robby knocks twice, then lets his hand fall. He waits, heart climbing too fast in his chest, counting the seconds by breath alone. He already knows Jack is home; he checked before he left — typed out You end up calling Jack back in? as he pulled on his shoes, thumb hovering over the screen before he finally pressed send. Negative, Shen replied. Didn’t need him after all.

Whether Jack is awake is another question entirely. But before Robby has time to doubt, he hears him—footsteps, uneven and familiar, drawing closer before the door opens.

Jack blinks at him. It’s immediately clear he wasn’t expecting Robby—probably wasn’t expecting anyone. He’s still in the clothes he slept in: loose pants, an old t-shirt, one sleeve caught awkwardly between his arm and the crutch tucked beneath it. The fabric pulls tight across his chest, rides up just enough to bare a narrow strip of stomach.

“Robby, what —” Jack starts, then stops. “Don’t you work today?”

“I have time,” Robby says. He hears how fast it comes out, how close to breathless. “I told Gloria I’d be late. Figured it was the least I could get after yesterday.” He hesitates, then adds, “I wanted to talk to you.”

“Got it,” Jack says, brows knitting, his tone suggesting he very much does not. He shifts his weight; the crutch sounds lightly against the floor. “Didn’t get your fill of talking to me last night, big guy?”

“This is about last night, actually —” Robby starts, then stops short. “I figured we should talk about this in person. We won’t have enough time to at work and we won’t be alone —”

“Is this the kinda conversation we need to have alone?” Jack asks, a little wary.

Robby looks at him and swallows. The answer must show on his face because Jack ushers him into the apartment, guiding him in only so far that they’re standing together in the kitchen.

There’s a beat where neither of them moves or speaks, because to do either would necessitate figuring out how, and where, to start. It’s awkward — so awkward it almost tips into something ridiculous. Robby lets out a breath that sounds too much like a laugh to be accidental.

“Yesterday was the worst fucking day of my life,” Robby says, because the truth is as good a place to begin as any. “I didn’t think that was possible. But every time I thought I’d hit rock bottom, it somehow got worse. I wasn’t there when Dana got hurt. Then there was this issue with Frank, and it’s a long story, but he’s not coming back — not for a long time, at least. And then I couldn’t help Leah, and Jake —” His voice catches. “I lost Jake”

Jack’s brow furrows. “Hey, c’mon, you didn’t —”

“I had an episode at work,” Robby says, cutting in, not unkindly. “Whittaker saw it. Apparently a nurse did too, so there’s that.” He exhales, rough and humorless. “And I don’t know what the hell I’m supposed to do with my life now, except that everything keeps changing and you don’t. You’re the only constant. You’ve always been.”

Jack studies him more carefully now, gaze tracking over his face like he’s looking for something specific in his expression — a tell, maybe, or some sign of reluctance, an inevitable but. He doesn’t rush to fill the silence between them all the while; he never does. It’s part of what makes this harder.

“Last night, you said you weren’t wrong about what you wrote in that old letter,” Robby says. There’s nothing left to lose now, he thinks, except maybe everything. “I know that was twenty years ago. And I know I fucked things up when we tried the first time —”

“Hold on,” Jack says, cutting in. “We split during COVID. Everything was upside down then. What happened to us wasn’t only on you.”

Robby shakes his head. “But I fucked it up earlier than that.”

“You didn’t —”

“I did,” Robby says, a little sharper than he intends. “I set us up to fail, and I regret that, and I regret all the things I never told you —”

“Like what?” Jack cuts in.

Robby blinks. “What?”

“If this is just leading up to an apology, you know I don’t need one. And if you’re serious about wishing you’d said something to me, then there’s one way to fix it,” Jack explains. His tone of his voice isn’t biting, it isn’t cruel, but it makes Robby feel like he’s being tested somehow. Like Jack is waiting for him to offer something that’ll let him relax the tension in his shoulders. “What is it you should’ve said?”

How to say it? How to start? Robby has been circling these regrets for years, worrying them like a loose thread. It feels strange, somehow, to finally speak them. But Jack is waiting for them, asking for them, and that is no small thing.

“I didn’t like us seeing other people,” he begins. “I hated sharing you. I hated that it was my idea when the truth is I didn't need anyone except you.”

Jack nods, watching him carefully. The light through the windows has shifted while they’ve been talking — brighter now, catching the flecks of green in his eyes, the depth of all that hazel.

“What else?” he asks, pressing just a little further, asking more from him.

“I hate that I didn’t let us become anything serious.”

Jack makes a face at that and Robby can see it – he can see the impulse in him to dismiss this, too, before he swallows it down and chooses instead to keep listening. “You’re gonna have to give me a little more than that, man. I don’t know what that means.”

Robby swallows, hard. How did Dana put it, all those weeks ago? He drags a hand over his mouth, buys a second to measure his words. “I told myself it wasn’t going to last, so I didn’t let it . . . matter that much.” He exhales, frustrated. “Or I pretended it didn’t.”

Jack’s eyes don’t leave him.

“I kept waiting for the part where I screwed it up,” Robby goes on. “Where you’d see something you didn’t like, something I hadn’t managed to fix yet, and that’s it — it’s over. I figured if I didn’t give you too much — if I kept a little distance and I never showed you anything too ugly — then when it fell apart, at least I’d still have you. As a friend. I thought that was the safer bet.”

Jack’s brows furrow. “You talk like I was expecting you to be perfect.”

“I know. The problem wasn’t you.” Robby drags a hand over his mouth, looking away from Jack for a moment and then back again. “Look, I — I don’t know what it is about me. The longest relationship I ever had only lasted because there was a kid between us.”

His voice falters; he swallows it down.

“I’m the common denominator in all my relationships, Jack,” he continues. “I don’t know what it is — I get restless, I spook, I always cut bait before it gets real. And you were real. I didn’t know what to do with that.”

Jack nods. Robby can watch the work in his neck as he swallows. “I get it,” he says slowly, “If you tell yourself it’s doomed, you don’t have to really fight for it, do the hard stuff. You don’t have to be the one who wants it more.”

His brow creases; something tightens there, in Jack’s expression, before it softens.

“But you knew I wasn’t going anywhere, didn’t you?” Jack asks. “Not unless you asked me to. And even then —” He breaks off with a soft, incredulous laugh, one hand lifting in a loose, helpless gesture. “You can’t scare me off, man. I mean, after all we’ve been through — how we found each other — I hate to tell you this, but at this point, I think you’re stuck with me, whether you like it or not.”

Robby exhales, and this time it shakes a little. “I didn’t know that.”

“Didn’t I make it obvious?”

“I couldn’t believe it,” Robby concedes and that — that feels more true. “But I get it now.”

Jack steps closer before he can say more. He reaches out, fingers brushing Robby’s wrist, a gentle stop. “Alright,” he says, careful, like you’re alright, slow down, like he’s talking to something skittish he doesn’t want to scare off. “Alright, so you fucked up. I did, too. I knew what I wanted and I didn’t fight for it. I didn’t push you enough, didn’t talk to you half as much as I should’ve.” He pauses. “What about now? What are you trying to ask me, Mike?”

Somehow, it’s his name in Jack’s mouth that does it. It makes the leap of faith he’s considering feel survivable, like what waits for him at the bottom isn’t stone, but water he can tread, clear and blue and gentle. Robby swallows against the knot in his throat the way he might take one last gulp of air before a dive.

“Last night, you said you weren’t wrong — about loving me, I mean. And the way you said it, it sounded like you still mean it,” Robby says. “And I’m asking if that’s true. If you still mean it.”

Jack just looks at him. For a beat, he looks genuinely stunned. “Of course I mean it,” he says, “Robby, of course I fucking do. I love you.” He lets out a short, disbelieving laugh. “I never stopped. Are you insane?”

The word yes nearly comes out of Robby’s mouth, but Jack doesn’t wait for Robby to voice it. One moment he’s watching him. The next he’s close enough that Robby barely registers what’s happening before Jack’s mouth is on his.

There’s a brief, breathless moment of surprise between them. Then, Robby’s hands come up instinctively, finding Jack’s jaw, sliding back until he’s cradling his face in both palms. His thumb settles just in front of Jack’s ear, warm against his skin, holding him there as one kiss rolls into another.

“Hey — hang on,” Robby says, pulling back only enough to speak, though he doesn’t let go. His thumb stays where it is, brushing once against Jack’s temple. He’s half-laughing, still dazed. “Am I insane? It was a fair question.”

“And I answered your question,” Jack says, leaning back in, lips catching the corner of Robby’s mouth. “And right now I’m trying to show my work.”

Robby studies him up close like this — the crease between his brows, the way his breath stutters when he’s trying to stay controlled. His hands tighten slightly at Jack’s jaw.

“You want this?” Robby asks. “Me? Like this? Because if the last twenty-four hours proved anything, it’s that I’m not exactly operating at full capacity.”

Jack stills under his hands, eyes steady. "Do you want this?”

Robby doesn’t look away. “I do.”

“Yeah?” Jack’s mouth curves faintly. Cause, if that’s true, that means I’m pushing you. I’m talking to you. You’re talking to me. No more Mister Nice Guy, you hear me?

“I hear you,” Robby says.

“Alright,” Jack says, and there’s something settled in it now. “Then, I’m not waiting on a psych eval to do this, Robby. I want this with you now. I’ve wanted this for years.”

Robby squints at him, still incredulous, but smiling despite himself. “Okay, but a couple months ago, you were seeing that guy you met through your sister. Whatever his name was. And you hooked up with Walsh, and —”

Jack frowns. “You knew about Walsh?”

“Yeah, because she told me,” Robby says. “Not you.”

“Well, that’s because you hate her,” Jack corrects. “Not because I love her.”

Maybe it’s his tone, or the look on his face, but it sounds unfinished to Robby — not because I love her, not the way I love you — and he might’ve liked to wait and hear that unspoken half, but he kisses Jack instead.

The shock that this is happening, even as it is happening, is almost dizzying, a clean rush of disbelief that nearly knocks the air from Robby’s lungs, except it doesn’t matter. What matters is that Jack kisses back, kisses him eagerly, with such a force and such a hunger that there can be no room left for doubt. He must know, Robby thinks, as he brings both hands over the back of Jack’s neck and pulls him just a little closer so that he can slip his tongue into his mouth and deepen the contact — Jack must know that is all Robby wants, all he’s ever wanted in the five years since he’s last had it.

He hums softly into Jack’s mouth for want of saying so, and lets himself be guided until they meet the nearest wall — Jack pressing him there, kiss deepening, licking into his mouth and catching his lip with his teeth however he pleases. And Robby, for his part, gives as good as he gets; kissing Jack the way he likes to be kissing, earning little noises from him, the sensation of Jack smiling against his lips — it’s familiar in a way that feels impossible after all this time, like something the body remembers long before the mind can catch up.

Inevitably, Jack pulls back just enough to breathe, their foreheads touching. “Jesus,” he murmurs, soft and stunned, a little breathless. “There you are.”

Robby laughs weakly, fingers tightening in the worn fabric of Jack’s t-shirt. “I haven’t gone anywhere.”

Jack thumbs over the corner of Robby’s mouth, catching the moisture there gently. “You did,” he says. “But you came back.”

The knot in Robby’s throat aches too much for words, so he kisses him instead — slides a hand up to cup Jack’s stubble-rough jaw and drinks him in again. And the sound Jack makes — God, that sound, it could kill him. It could raise him from the dead.

“How long do you have before work?” Jack asks in the rare space between kisses.

“I told ‘em I’d come in at nine.”

He hums, doing the mental math. “So, what’s that, two hours?”

“Probably an hour forty-five now,” Robby confirms. “Thought I’d account for the chance that this conversation wouldn’t be over in five minutes.”

“So, what you’re saying is you were counting on getting lucky. Is that right?” Jack asks.

His hands slip beneath the hem of Robby’s hoodie, palms warm over the fabric of his scrubs and moving south, and Robby realizes he’s smiling into the kiss, laughing too — having counted on nothing at all except Jack himself.

It takes a few attempts to get off the wall. One of them shifts, ready this time or the next, and then the other reaches back out — grabbing fabric, a handful of hair, a wrist — and then they end up pressed together again, breathless and distracted. At some point Robby shrugs out of his hoodie, loses the top of his scrubs somewhere on the floor without either of them paying much mind.

Jack’s bed, when they finally fall into it, carries none of the heat of when he was sleeping in it, but it smells like him. In different circumstances — had he but world enough, and time – Robby might stop to breathe in the scent of the sheets, the fleeting traces of Jack’s laundry detergent and sweat, and delight in the small thrill of knowing that this is something they can share again.

It is strange, perhaps only because it doesn’t feel strange at all, how easy it is to fall back into rhythm together. It’s a process of rediscovery, almost; It’s a matter of Robby tugging on Jack’s hair, of slotting his leg against the heat between Jack’s own, and testing to see if these things still produce that same eager hum Robby remembers. And the thrill of learning yes, in fact they do, even after all this time.

Jack’s weight on him feels perfect, but Robby wants him beneath him. He wants to watch him while he touches him, wants to study him carefully, memorize everything about him all over again, the way one might hold a piece of amber up to the sun. So Robby rolls them, reverses their positions so Jack is the one on his back now. He goes easily, spreading out beneath Robby without hesitation. He’s still as toned as Robby remembers, which is frankly a little absurd, and Robby has never forgotten the wash of freckles scattered across his skin, but it’s a different thing entirely to see them up close again. To touch the expanse of the warm, freckled skin of his stomach and feel Jack shudder beneath his hand.

This is so easy, Robby thinks, as his hands drift over Jack’s ribcage, fingers splayed, pushing his t-shirt up until it bunches at his collarbone and leaves his chest bare. Easy, he thinks, both warning and wonder, a reminder to slow down, to be patient despite the thrill. Easy as Jack’s hand finding purchase on Robby’s bicep, bare now that he’s wearing only an undershirt. Easy as the sigh that leaves Jack at the pass of Robby’s thumb along his left oblique, all the way up to the quick flutter of his heart beneath Robby’s palm, rabbiting there because of him. Easy as Robby letting his hand wander with more intention now, the pad of his thumb sweeping once over Jack’s nipple and back again until it pebbles under the attention.

This is so easy, Robby thinks. It’s a wonder I ever did anything to make this hard.

He leans forward, following the teasing his fingers have already done with the flat of his tongue, a slow drag that leaves a faint sheen of moisture on Jack’s chest. It earns a promising reaction from the man beneath him — a sigh, a subtle arch of his back — so Robby closes his hand around Jack’s other nipple, worrying it gently between his thumb and index finger. Jack shifts under the attention, hips lifting in response when Robby returns to saliva-dampened skin again, mouth lingering, a shallow pull of the mouth that ends with teeth grazing over sensitive flesh

Robby pulls back after that, meaning only to shed his undershirt, but the sight Jack makes stops him short. “God,” he says, before he can stop himself. “Look at you.”

The words come out raw, a little awed, and for a moment he wishes he’d held them back — wishes he hadn’t given himself away so completely before they’ve really gotten started — until Jack reaches up, curls a hand into the back of his neck, and pulls him down.

“Don’t just look at me,” he says, mouth brushing clumsily at the corner of Robby’s own, breath uneven.

His hand slides over Robby’s side, over the thin black cotton of his undershirt, and closes over Robby’s own, lifting it from his chest and guiding it lower, slipped beneath the waistband of his pajama pants and into the narrow space between them.

“Feel me,” Jack tells him. “Feel what you do to me.”

Robby does. He goes where Jack guides him, almost groans at the first touch of Jack’s cock in his hand, already hard in its wanting for him, an impossible thing to hide, or deny, or doubt.

Jack shifts beneath him, a small urgent movement, hips lifting just enough for Robby to help him tug his pants down and then kick them aside. Freed of that restriction, Robby licks his own palm, wetting it generously, and takes proper hold of him this time, stroking Jack once, slowly, slowly, if only so that he can pass his thumb over the head of his cock and spread the bead of moisture he finds there as far as he can. It makes the next stroke smoother, easier, so he does it again, which lends itself more easily to the third pass, the fourth, the fifth.

The sounds that spill from Jack’s mouth are broken, gasping things — breathless hums that rattle like something wounded, almost whining. His hips jut forward as he rocks into the wet circle of Robby’s fist, chasing a pace that Robby won’t give him.

It would be easier if they separated for just a minute, Robby thinks, distantly. He still has his clothes on, after all. It would be easier if Robby would stop touching him, if only for a few seconds, so that he might at least kick off his bottoms, and then peel off his socks as well, because he’s running hot now — sweating, in fact. He can feel it when Jack touches him, his hands on the damp skin of his waist, the dimples of his lower back. It would only take a minute. But Robby can’t manage it. He can’t find the discipline or strength of mind to do anything that might interrupt what’s started.

When Robby finally pauses, it’s only because Jack makes him.

With clumsy hands, he finds the hem of Robby’s pants and tugs them off, then shoves the waistband of his underwear as far down as he can manage before Robby helps him, shimmying so the clothes pool at his knees. Then, Jack moves beneath him with sudden intent, widening his legs to accommodate Robby’s breadth, beckoning him closer. Robby almost can’t look at the picture that makes, can’t spend more than a few, stunned seconds on the sight before him: the muscle of Jack’s thighs, the smattering of body hair across them, light until it darkens at the juncture of his thighs, his cock flushed and wet and canting slightly to one side.

He’d put his mouth on him if he could, if Jack would let him. But Jack’s hands lace over the back of his neck before he can try for it, guiding him where he wants him. Robby kicks the last remnants of his clothing off from his legs and then goes willing, settling over him, forearms braced on either side of Jack’s shoulders; it brings them close enough that their chests meet, close enough that the length of Robby’s cock rests flush and heavy against Jack’s own. Jack tilts up into the contact. Robby rocks down instinctively with him, finding the rhythm Jack is asking for without either of them having to say it aloud. Robby thrusts hard, and sometimes gracelessly, keeping a steady, quickening pace as best he can while Jack gasps in his ear, kissing the slick skin of Robby’s temple, saying his name.

“Robby,” Jack gasps, voice rough from panting. “Fuck, baby, come on, c’mon.”

God, even that — even just Jack’s voice, simple as that is, the warm huff of his breath against the shell of his ear — feels like it might undo him.

In lieu of a response, Robby goes to kiss him. But they’re moving against each other, chasing friction, and he misses his mouth. He settles for the cords of Jack’s neck instead, bared for him when he throws his head back into the mattress — so Robby kisses him there, licks him, tasting the faint salt of his skin. Then, he mouths his way upward, along the rough line of Jack’s jaw, over his stubbled cheek, bumping noses once, twice, before finally finding his mouth.

They kiss, and kiss, and kiss — rutting against each other all the while, fucking into the slick mess of sweat and precome between them, a compromise to the kind of fucking they would be doing if they’d only had enough foresight, and prep, and time. Jack drags his hands down from Robby’s lower back, down to the meat of his glutes, finding purchase there, pulling him forward, hurrying him along.

“I missed this,” Robby tells him between kisses, his voice gone thin and almost tender with it. “I missed — God, Jack, I’ve missed you so much.”

Jack pulls back just enough to look at him, searching his face as if the truth might flicker there. “Yeah?”

There’s something in his expression Robby can’t quite place — something searching, like he’s looking for some kind of tell that’ll give Robby away — and it makes him want to press his mouth to the furrow in his brow, to smooth it away. He reaches down into the scant space between their bodies instead and takes Jack in hand again.

“Oh, god, Mike —” Jack breathes, and the name fractures when Robby answers that touch with movement of his own. He lifts his head just enough to look down at where their bodies meet and groans, undone by the sight of it.

“Did you ever think of me?” Robby asks him, though he already knows the answer. He can feel it in the way Jack’s body moves, in the frantic, helpless nod he gives. Still, he wants to hear it. “Did you ever do this and imagine me?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I — fuck, Robby, all the time.” The words tumble over each other. “I even dream about you. I couldn’t get you out of my head if I tried.”

Everything feels like it’s already giving way, too fast, too easily. It’s because of him, Robby thinks, because of both of us — both of them so turned on that the work of jerking Jack off now is so slick it's audible and punching out so much noise from him Robby worries he might ruin his voice for later. He knows it's over when Jack goes rigid beneath him, a sharp intake of breath, the dull line of his fingernails biting into Robby’s ass, and then he’s done, done — silent, eyes squeezed shut, and spilling all over Robby’s fingers. It takes Jack a few seconds to find himself again. It takes Robby nearly just as much time, momentarily breathless just at the sight of him, the heat of him, the feel of his come between their bellies. But Jack moves out from beneath him eventually, slowly and carefully, and the movement — which creates a dull friction, a slick drag of Robby’s neglected length against all that mess — makes Robby shudder.

He closes his eyes, like it hurts him, because it almost does. That’s why he doesn’t quite track what Jack is doing until it’s already happened. One moment he’s still, breath loud and uneven, the wanting in him so sharp it drowns everything else; the next, he’s on his back. He lets Jack move him, position him without thinking what for, trusting the safety of his hands. He would let Jack do anything he wanted to him now, he thinks dimly, the thought drifting through him without resistance.

Robby’s eyes open on a shaky breath. He looks down just in time to see Jack between his legs, head bowed, mouth following the dark trail of hair along his stomach, then trailing lower, until it closes around the head of his swollen cock. He swallows him down with unhurried intent, inch by inch, pausing, briefly, to lick messily up the tender underside of his length. He pulls back just as slowly, teasing and mean. Robby is trembling by the time Jack swallows him down in earnest, his hands clammy and shaking as he cards his fingers through the salt-and-pepper of Jack’s hair.

He does not mean to push up into his mouth; at least, not consciously. But before he can even think to apologize, Jack moans around him, using his free hand, the one that is not wrapped around the base of his member, to squeeze Robby's thigh. He could pin him down if he wanted to, Robby knows. He’s strong enough for it. He could anchor Robby down, keeping him firmly planted against the bed so that he doesn’t push into his mouth like that again. But Jack doesn’t do that — he looks up at Robby instead with expectant eyes, like he’s waiting.

Robby decides to test this, just a little. He cups the back of Jack’s head first, watching Jack carefully for some kind of tell, some flash of resistance or disinterest. He sees none. Jack pulls back a little instead, just far enough that Robby’s cock is resting on his parted lips, his mouth open and waiting. So, Robby presses up against the hold in his hip and it gives — Jack lets him push up into his mouth easily, closing his lips around him again, but not tightly enough that Robby can’t push deeper into him the way he wants to. Robby tests this again: withdrawing out of Jack’s mouth until he almost slips out entirely, pushing deeply back in. The answering hum Jack makes, the way his eyes shut not in discomfort but in something like bliss, tells Robby everything: he likes this, wants this, might even want more.

So, he gives it to him: with slow intention at first, then a little more frenzied, a little sloppier. He can’t last this way, fucking his mouth like this and at this pace. Robby wishes he could — would give anything for a few more minutes of this, or to be a few years younger if only so that finishing now wouldn’t require so much time to recover before going at it again. But it’s just too much, hot and dizzying all at once — not just the feeling of Jack’s mouth, but the way he gives himself over to it, the hungry sounds he makes, the way his hips roll faintly against the mattress as they fall into a new rhythm.

Robby’s grip tightens at the back of his head. “Jack,” he manages, voice gone rough, meant as a warning. Jack only hums in response, unbothered and unyielding, pushing forward to swallow him down, almost impossibly, even deeper.

“Jack — oh, god, please — please,” he says again, over and over, reciting his name like a prayer until he can’t speak at all — until Robby breaks with a shuddering gasp, giving in to it, to him, to the sensation of Jack swallowing down around him as he comes down his throat.

Jack pulls off after, mouth wet, and wipes it once with the back of his hand, almost absently. He looks unreal, Robby thinks, taking stock of him: lips pink from use, the light stubble around his lips visibly damp, his face flushed like he’s just run a marathon.

He might be as tired as he looks, because he slumps a little, resting his head against the muscle of Robby’s thigh, cheek pressed to warm skin. Who knows if it’s comfortable, what with the slight tremble that’s still running through Robby’s body and beneath Jack’s cheek, but Jack closes his eyes, clears his throat a little, and sighs.

They stay like that for a while. Robby’s fingers find Jack’s hair without thinking, nails tracing slow, soothing lines along his scalp, the back of his neck. Every now and then, Jack makes a small sound at the attention, something contented and tired, and shifts closer into the touch.

“You alright?” Robby asks, when his breath is finally steady enough for him to speak again.

Jack huffs a laugh, muffled against his leg. He tilts his head just enough to look up at him. “Alright?” he repeats, incredulous. “Alright might just be the understatement of the century.”

“That wasn’t too rough?”

Jack scoffs and rolls his eyes. “I hate to break it to you, partner, but this ain’t my first rodeo.”

Robby gives him a look. “What kind of rodeos are you running, exactly?”

“Let’s just say they don’t call me an ER Cowboy for nothing.”

Robby tries, and fails, not to laugh. “You’re really pleased with yourself, aren’t you?”

Jack lifts a brow. “Aren’t you?”

“Understatement of the century,” Robby answers.

Jack smiles up at him before dropping his head again, resting his cheek back against Robby’s thigh.

In the quiet that follows, Robby keeps his hand at the nape of Jack’s neck, scratching thoughtlessly, as if he might anchor this moment between them by continuous touch alone. He closes his eyes, for a moment, long enough to feel how easy it would be to sleep and stay.

He can’t, though. There’s still work, which means he’ll have to drag himself out of Jack’s bed eventually, gather himself and his clothes. He’ll have to step into Jack’s shower, too, and let the hot water wash the evidence of what they’ve done from his skin. It’s a thought that, though practical, lands entirely unwelcome.

Still, he doesn’t move. Neither of them do.

Robby thinks about the shower again. He wonders, idly, if Jack could be persuaded to join him. He weighs the idea against the narrow margin of time he has left — knows they’d likely have room for nothing more than actually showering together. He thinks of steam, and soap, and water. He thinks of Jack’s flushed, freckled skin. It’s a simple enough pleasure, he thinks. But the thought of it, the tangible possibility of it now, feels like plenty.

Nobody talks much about the weariness in the air at work, the collective fatigue they’re all carrying, but it drifts through the ED like fog, tangible in the air they breathe, lingering on everything. It isn’t just the newbies that are tired, either. Mohan works a little quieter, her resistance and her compassion both still intact, but rationed. Robby sees a similar exhaustion in Perlah and Princess, the shadows beneath their eyes deepened, and even in Jesse, who steals away for a breather after someone from labs comes down to complain about mislabeled blood draws.

Robby feels it, too, of course. He’s exhausted, sore in ways that are both physical and not, still carrying the weight of yesterday in his body. But, the work moves along so he goes along with it. Much of the day is spent tending to the delayed fallout of PittFest, the cases that were on the whole neither as lethal nor as immediate as the cases they saw yesterday — twisted ankles, thrumming migraines, blown-out ears.

There’s not much time to breathe between patients. There never is. But there’s just enough room for Robby’s thoughts to wander, and wander they do, however briefly. He thinks of Dana and Heather. Frank and Adamson. Jake and Leah. Occasionally, he thinks of Jack: the taste of him, the muscles of his thighs, the sound of Robby’s name in his mouth. Afterward, too, in the shower: Jack tilting his head back beneath the spray of the water, eyes closed as he washed his face, so Robby could stare all he wanted, without the welcome distraction of Jack’s gaze.

He regrets, in a faint and ridiculous way, the act of washing the evidence away, of rinsing clean the mess they made of one another. It might’ve been nice, Robby thinks, if there was something left behind to show for it. A mark, a tell, even a bruise if it meant he could catch sight of it later in the mirror and carry the evidence of their morning together on his skin.

Janey texts him once to let him know that Jake, given the circumstances, is holding up alright. She promises to let him know when she hears back from Leah’s parents about funeral arrangements and relays what she says is their thanks. It’s the closest thing to a word from Jake he gets all day.

By late afternoon, Robby peels off his gloves for the last time and scrubs his hands, watching the water bead and run, thinking, unhelpfully, of Jack again. Shift change arrives the way it always does, in a low tide of movement and noise, and the thought of him is rewarded almost immediately with the real thing: Jack coming in through the doors, the strap of his backpack slung over one shoulder, looking bright-eyed and ready to step into the fray.

Their eyes meet, just briefly. It’s nothing anyone else would notice: a flicker, a recognition, the barest lift at the corner of Jack’s mouth. But Robby feels it all the same, the echo of the morning humming back to life under his skin.

“Howdy, partner,” Jack says by way of greeting, voice easy and even.

Robby feels himself smile, before he schools it into something less telling. “Howdy.”

Jack sees it anyway. His own smile answers back, warmer this time. “How’d it go today? Anything I should know?”

“Today was manageable. We saw some of the fallout from yesterday. We’ve got a guy in five on a CIWA protocol who’s been climbing all afternoon, and a woman in ten we’re still ruling out for a small bowel obstruction — surgery’s aware. Other than that, no news fit to print.”

Jack nods, eyes lifting to the board above the hub, already mapping the work in his head. “You on first thing tomorrow?”

“Nope,” Robby says lightly. He knows why Jack’s asking. He watches him instead — how one hand braces against the edge of the circular desk, how his eyes catch the blue glow of the screen he’s still pretending to read. Robby sets his own hands down beside Jack’s, close enough that the space between them feels deliberate without being obvious.

Jack makes a noncommittal sound. “Mm. Lucky you. I’m back here tomorrow night.”

“Not so lucky,” Robby says dryly.

“Well, you know, Dana helps with the scheduling and I’m not the favorite, so —”

“Sucks to suck,” Robby says, smiling. Then, casually, he lets his gaze drift. Perlah is mid-conversation with Javadi some yards ahead, back turned to them, distant enough that she can’t hear them, either. Princess already ducked out for the lockers two minutes ago.

“You got a lot to do when you get home tomorrow morning?”

Jack shakes his head; Robby catches the motion in his periphery. “Negative. I’ll eat, do some laundry, get some sleep before my shift. Be a responsible adult.”

“All day?”

Jack finally looks at him then, mouth curving just a fraction. “All day.”

Jack’s pinky shifts, the movement so slight it could pass for accident, brushing against Robby’s own. Robby leans into it without looking, closing the scant distance between them with a barely perceptible adjustment of his hand on the desk — just enough to feel the side of Jack’s finger against his. It’s a brief touch, a small, non-incriminating thing kept secret by the distracted churn of the room. And while it ends almost as soon as it begins, it leaves something fixed between them, like a promise made without words, like the knowledge that something is already waiting for them on the far side of their goodbye.

The next time Jack reaches for his hand, he laces their fingers together.

He’s lying on his side, back flush against Robby’s chest, and the faint smell of his soap lingers between them. It’s a habit they both share, cemented to the point of compulsion ever since the pandemic: taking a shower as soon as they get back from work. When Robby unlocked his front door and padded across the apartment to Jack’s bedroom, Jack was still in a towel.

It's a shame, almost, to smear the clean warmth of his skin with sweat again.

Still, Robby lets himself be guided as Jack steers his hand past his cock — already half-full between his thighs — and leads him farther down, past his balls, past the tender skin behind them, to the tight ring of muscle just there.

There’s so much lube on Robby’s fingers that it’s dripping, making a mess of Jack’s skin and, surely, the sheets beneath them, but it eases the way, takes the edge off of what might otherwise hurt. Jack’s breath shifts when Robby presses the pad of his index finger to his entrance, so Robby takes his time. He indulges in working him through it. He eases forward only a little, then pulls back slow, letting Jack settle into the sensation at his own pace.

So it goes — unhurried, almost self-serving for all that it turns Robby on to stretch this out as far as he can take it. Jack wants him to fuck him, and Robby will, but getting him prepared for it is its own pleasure; He moves as Jack allows it, down to one knuckle before drawing back out, then pressing in again with two fingers this time, and starting all over again — slowly at first and shallow, then a little deeper with every subsequent press inside him. It’s a wonder how easily Jack yields to it, how good he is for it — the sounds he makes, his sighs and hums. By the time Robby’s quickened the pace, Jack is shaking, breath turning uneven as he rolls his hips, pushing back into Robby’s palm.

“Think you’re ready for another?” Robby asks him.

“I don’t need it,” Jack answers.

Robby’s brows lift, just a fraction. “You sure about that?”

“I’m sure,” Jack insists, though his voice fractures when Robby presses in again, crooking his fingers just enough to brush that soft, hyper-responsive spot inside him. “Oh — Jesus fucking Christ, Robby — I’m good. You can fuck me already, I’m good. It’s just been a while, that’s all.”

Robby might’ve guessed as much, both from the tension threaded through Jack’s body and his usual preference for how they used to do this. Still, the confirmation kicks up a little thrum of pleasure in his chest. It’s not that he’s under any illusions that Jack was abstaining from sex all-together, waiting for Robby to return some day. He knows there have been others. Of course there have. But there’s something in knowing that Jack hasn’t let anyone have him this way in a long time; that whatever else he has done recently, he hasn’t done this. And now here he is, pliant and breathless against Robby’s chest, melting into his touch, yielding completely.

“If I fuck you now, like this, you’ll be sore later,” Robby tells him.

“Good,” Jack replies. “I wanna feel it tomorrow.”

Robby huffs a quiet laugh against his neck. “Or,” he offers, “we take our time and go slow now, and I fuck you tomorrow, too.”

Jack laughs properly at that, the sound bright and a little breathless. “Yeah? After my shift again? And when exactly do you think I’m getting any sleep?”

“You don’t want sleep,” Robby says, brushing his mouth along the back of Jack’s shoulder. He withdraws his fingers from inside of Jack, pulling almost completely out of it, just to see what would happen; he reacts instantly, a sharp hiss leaving him as he pushes back into Robby’s hand, chasing the contact.

“You’re right. I want you to fuck me,” Jack tells him. “And if you’re not going to do that, then go faster, or harder, or gimmie another — just do something.”

Robby does pull away from him then and, despite the glaring look Jack throws his way because of it, he isn’t doing it to tease him. He sits up a little, changing the angle so that he can be more precise with what he does next. If Jack wants him to fuck him, he thinks, better to do this way, where he can see what he’s doing instead of going mostly by feel alone. And the view this gives him, of course, is an added plus. He looks at Jack, drinking him in: the flush spreading across his chest and climbing up his throat, the damp curl of silver hair at his temple, the way his mouth falls open on uneven breaths.

He doesn’t need to coat his fingers in lube again, but he does it anyway; it can’t hurt, after all. When he presses his index and middle finger inside him, Jack takes him easily, smoothly, all in one go. He fucks him like that, for a little after, picking up pace and force, just a little, before giving him more. He knows the size of his hands, the breadth of his fingers; He presses a third digit in slowly, slowly, listening to the way Jack’s breath catches and then breaks. He answers it with movement, finding the rhythm and the position Jack is asking for without having to say it — building, quickening, hitting that perfect spot inside of him until Jack’s whole body tightens and reacts and he’s squirming, a little, away from Robby’s reach.

“Lemme get on top of you,” Jack manages after a moment, voice gone rough and low. “C’mon, Mike. I can’t keep going like this.”

Robby’s mouth curves, warmth threading through the tease. “You don’t think so?”

“Fuck no,” Jack breathes. He must be serious, Robby thinks, because he doesn’t push back into his palm this time, doesn’t arch in protest when Robby begins to pull out of him. “C’mon. It’s now or never, baby.”

“God, you’re bossy. Whatever happened to please?” Robby asks, because he can’t quite help himself.

It’s one push too far. Jack gives him a half-hearted slap on the thigh. “Man, fuck you.”

It’s easy work to get into position: Robby eases to lie down on his back and then Jack climbs on top of him, straddling him so both knees are braced on either side of his hips, one hand flat on Robby’s chest so that he can steady himself while the other takes Robby’s cock and lines him up against his rim. He inhales, his chest rising and then falling in one slow, steady breath as Robby enters him, and he’s beautiful, so beautiful, as his eyes flutter shut at the sensation.

For all his impatience, the preparation serves them well; it’s pleasure that overtakes his expression, not pain, as Jack sinks deeper, pulling off and then pressing back down on him incrementally, until Robby is finally, fully buried inside him, their bodies drawn flush, the otherwise silence of the room breaking around a shared, stunned exhale.

Robby keeps still, even though every instinct inside him tells him to move, aches for it after the growing heat of his own arousal that started the moment he started opening Jack up with his fingers. Those same hands find their anchor now at Jack’s hips, fingers digging in just enough to ground himself, to keep from chasing the rhythm before Jack is ready to set it.

“Okay,” Jack murmurs, more to himself than to Robby. He braces his hands against Robby’s chest, draws himself up in a single, trembling motion, and then sinks back down again, deeper this time. Again, but softer: “Okay.”

The first full roll of his hips is tentative, experimental — but the next gathers fluidity, and the one after that more so. It’s slow and coaxing, and Jack seems to luxuriate in it, despite — or perhaps because of — the effect it has on Robby. When he looks down at him, Jack must know exactly what he’s doing — taking him deep, but not fast enough to grant Robby enough relief, stretching the pleasure out until Robby’s patience fractures and he tightens his grip on Jack’s hips, thrusting up into him once, almost by accident.

Mercifully, Jack takes the hint. He straightens slightly, pushing up from his sitting position in a small, balanced movement that works because, despite the slight challenge of his right leg, he plants both hands firmly on Robby’s chest for leverage. He draws up, pulling nearly all the way off of Robby’s cock in a move that makes his breath hitch — and then he sinks down again. It punches a noise out of Robby. The next time he does it, Robby answers by driving up into him on the descent, matching his movements, coaxing a soft, startled sound from Jack’s mouth.

After that, they fall into a perfect rhythm: Jack controlling the drop, Robby driving upward in answer — each meeting matched by the sound of skin against skin, and their labored breaths, and the mattress shifting beneath them as the careful edge between them finally gives way.

At this angle, Robby doesn’t just get to feel him, he gets to watch him. Looking up at Jack, he drinks in every detail: the heat blooming across Jack’s cheeks, the taut flex of muscle in his arms, the way his body shudders when one particular thrust hits exactly where he needs it to. It’s almost enough that Robby thinks he could come on this alone — not just the sensation of Jack riding him, but the sight of him, the moans Jack can’t swallow back anymore, low and repeating.

Then, something about the angle they hit must land right on the mark, because Jack breath pitches into a deep gasp, and then he shudders out his exhale, and then tries at that exact angle again. “Harder,” he tells him.

Robby obeys without thinking, thrusting up into him hard enough. He tries for the same angle he stumbled upon, and it works. The impact draws a sharp breath out from them both.

Jack’s mouth curves, pleased. “Yeah, just like that, c’mon — I wanna feel what you’re doin’ to me later. Wanna walk around and think of you all day.”

The possessive edge of it hits Robby somewhere low and electric. “Jesus,” he breathes, tightening his hold on Jack’s hips. “You can’t talk like that.”

Jack only smiles wider at that, flushed and bright-eyed, his hair damp at the temples, his chest rising and falling hard as he keeps moving over him with slow, deliberate intent.

“If we do this —” he says, voice roughening when Robby meets the next roll of his hips with a firm upward thrust inside of him, “if we do this again, we do it for real this time. You hear me?”

Robby’s hands tighten, fingers digging in before he can stop himself. “Yeah,” he manages, unsteady. He shifts beneath him, driving up just enough to prove it. “Yeah, Jack. I hear you.”

“Yeah?” Jack pants, leaning down now, his mouth brushing along Robby’s jaw before pressing a brief, open kiss there. He drops his forehead against Robby’s own, breath hot against his skin. “You’re not — oh fuck — you’re not gonna go running off on me?”

“No,” Robby says, and means it. He reaches up and slides his hands to the back of Jack’s neck, holding him there, fingers splaying into the damp curls of his hair. His voice wavers despite himself. “I can’t. No, Jack, I — I think it’d kill me.”

Jack makes a soft, affirming sound, a little hum of pleasure, but whether that’s in response to Robby’s words or the way he’s fucking him, Robby can’t tell. “I’m not sharing you this time, Mike,” he says, the words rough, almost fragile beneath the insistence. “If we do this, I won’t — I can’t do it again.”

“No, no,” Robby cuts in, shaking his head, pulling him down with him on the next hard meeting of their bodies. “I don’t want anybody but you.” His voice fractures on the truth of it. “I’m yours. I’m all yours.”

Jack makes a sound at that — half laugh, half wounded exhale — and Robby draws him into a kiss, slow at first, anchoring him there, and then deeper when Jack answers with equal hunger.

After that, it becomes harder to stay measured. Harder not to chase it. Harder not to let instinct take over and pull them both into something wilder, stripped of patience and rhythm and finesse.

Jack is saying his name when Robby reaches down to fist his cock — thinking, a little hazily, that he probably doesn’t even have to, that Jack could probably come just like this, and wouldn’t it be nice to watch that happen? — but when he does touch him, Jack’s cock is so slick with pre-come there’s no friction at all, only slip, and then he realizes all at once that he can’t stop this now for anything in the world.

“Don’t stop,” Jack pants, voice breaking as his movements grow erratic, falls of rhythm, stutters. He strains closer, closer still, a hiss of pleasure escaping him with each breath.

Robby knows it’s over when Jack’s hands dig into the flesh of his chest, when his mouth falls open on Robby’s name again and again until the word dissolves into nothing but breath. He tightens around Robby’s cock in quick, involuntary pulses as he comes, striping Robby’s stomach and chest with his release. He shudders through it, panting roughly against Robby’s ear, and Robby holds him there, steady, feeling the heat of his release between their bellies, feeling the aftershocks ripple through him.

It’s almost too much — almost unfair, to feel that good and that desperate to chase his own pleasure and know he shouldn’t fuck Jack yet, not while he’s still so sensitive and still trembling around him. He stays where he is, breathing slowly through his nose, willing himself to slow down.

Jack senses it, somehow.

He shifts again almost immediately, trying to roll his hips, and Robby’s hands firm on his waist to still him. Jack shakes his head, still too breathless to speak, so when he tells Robby to fuck him, he’s mostly just mouthing it, lips shaping the words almost without sound.

It’s rougher this time, less careful. Jack rocks down into him, breath still unsteady from before, and Robby answers with a steady lift of his hips, meeting him halfway. Robby knows Jack’s tired when he feels a tremor in his thighs — a hitch in the roll of his hips, the way his weight shifts unevenly as he tries to keep the pace, one leg bracing harder than the other, the muscles of his thighs working overtime to compensate. Jack doesn’t say anything about it. He never does. He probably doesn’t even really mind it, knowing him.

“Hey,” Robby murmurs, one hand sliding from Jack’s hip up along his sweat-slick back. “Slow down.”

Jack shakes his head. “I’m fine.”

“You’re working too hard,” Robby tells him. “Lemme just —”

Robby readjusts them slightly, planting his feet more firmly against the mattress, takes more of the motion into his own hips so that he has all the leverage he needs to drive up into him, as hard and as fast as he’d like. Like this, it’s Robby who does the bulk of the work, and all Jack has to do is take it, and somehow even that is hot — the way he just follows along, holding Robby tightly, a little string of noises spilling out of him from the overstimulation of the work.

I missed you, Robby thinks, for what feels like the millionth time. I missed you, I need you, I love you, I fucking love you, he thinks, and thinks, and can think of so little else that he does not even realize he’s saying it until Jack kisses him.

Robby is coming before he has even fully realized it’s going to happen, and then it does — he surges up into him one, final time, and finishes inside of him, ruining their kissing with an involuntary, shaking gasp into Jack’s mouth.

They don’t separate immediately after.

They stay together instead, if only for a few more moments. When they move, it’s only slightly: minor adjustments so that they’re both more comfortable in the loose embrace. Robby shifts one leg out a little to ease a small tinge of discomfort. Jack lets himself rest, just about flopping down over Robby so that he’s a comfortable weight on top of him. When he wraps his arms loosely around Jack’s waist, he can feel the cool dampness of his sweat.

Their breathing slows, then steadies, into a shared rhythm.

It’s the breathing, in fact, the slight movements of their bodies that come from it, that finally makes the fact that Robby is still inside him almost unbearable when they’re both so sensitive, in different ways. Robby exhales and eases back, careful, hands steady at Jack’s hips as he pulls out of him and Jack makes a small sound at it — like it’s a loss, somehow, something to lament perhaps just as much as it surely must relieve him.

For a while, Robby thinks Jack might fall asleep on him like this, and Robby, too. He could take the dead weight of Jack’s sleeping body, he thinks. If not, what a way to go. But before that happens, Jack rolls off of Robby and lies down on his side, eyes closed.

For a moment, Robby just looks at him — at the flush cooling across his chest, no longer red but a faint tinge of pink, and the smear of white on Jack’s stomach, flaking now at the edges. And he’s tired, Robby can tell. For all their joking about it, Robby probably should’ve turned down Jack’s invitation to meet him at his place after he finished his night shift — but then they’d both have to wait longer for this to have happened, and they’d both already wasted so much time, waiting.

“I’ll be right back,” Robby murmurs, though he isn’t sure Jack hears him.

He slips from the bed on awkward legs, his knees duly aching, and pads into the bathroom, turning on the faucet and letting the water run warm over a washcloth until it steams faintly in his hands. He wrings it out, casting a spare glance at the sight he makes in the mirror, duly stunned by the wild mess of his hair — god, how did Jack get off to him looking like this? — and the flush on his face, the splotch of pink on his collarbone where Jack must’ve sucked on his skin between kisses.

When he comes back to the bedroom, Jack hasn’t moved much: he’s stretched out across the mattress now, one leg slightly bent, the other resting straight, the sheets wrinkled beneath his foot. His arm is tossed over his eyes, his triceps relaxed, but shapely at this angle. Bitable, Robby thinks. It might be nice to put his teeth to those cords of muscle, if only just to feel how little the flesh would give beneath his mouth — though he suspects Jack wouldn’t very much like that right now.

When Robby touches the warm cloth to his stomach, Jack exhales softly but doesn’t stir much beyond a groggy hum, a delayed shudder in his abdomen.

“Hey,” Robby says quietly. “Turn over for me a little.”

There’s no answer.

Robby’s mouth curves despite himself. He cleans what he can, wiping away the last traces of their release on their bodies. When he’s finished, he goes to rinse the washcloth in the bathroom sink, washes his hands, and does not lay back down before he sets the alarm on his phone for the hour Jack usually likes to wake before his next shift.

Then, finally, Robby slides back into bed beside him. He is sore, and tired, and happier than he has felt in a long, long time — but he is also awake. At least for now. So, he lies there watching the slow rise and fall of Jack’s chest, listening to the soft drag of his breathing the way one listens to an old song — one he might have sworn he’d forgotten, until he realizes, only through the act of listening, that he still knows every beat of it by heart.

Jack does not withhold anything from Robby in the months that follow, not in some demonstrative way that leaves him nervous or wanting, but Robby feels a difference when Jack finally, truly eases into the relationship. It doesn’t happen all at once, and not dramatically, but it is more like Jack slowly begins to exhale, as if he’d been holding his breath in some small way until he realizes he doesn’t have to.

Robby understands why.

After PittFest, after the way Robby came undone and didn’t know what to do with the pieces of his life once they’d splintered, there had been a stretch of time when even he wouldn’t have trusted himself. Robby tried therapy the way he approaches most things he doesn’t want to need — defensively, stubbornly, half-convinced it won’t warrant the effort. He went through three different therapists in as many months. It wasn't until he found someone whose worked with medical workers and first responders that he finds his match — a man who takes very little shit from him, who knows how to call Robby out and in without mistaking him for some kind of noble hero or some pity-project, broken beyond repair. Robby appreciates that. Occasionally, and only fleetingly, he finds it exhausting.

He and Jack have their grievances from time to time — small ones, sometimes sharp, but always manageable. Age-old habits resurface on occasion: Robby retreating when pressed, Jack bristling when he feels shut out. But they’re more honest in this second go at being together, less willing to feign disinterest, or hurt, or the things they want from each other. And what they want, stripped down to its barest bones, is simple. They want everything — the highs, the lows, and the unremarkable plateau in-between, where their life together is neither crisis nor endlessly victory, but just . . . life, banal and beautiful.

And then one day, after nothing particularly special except perhaps the meal they share together on the couch, it’s as if something between them relaxes. Like Jack has finally given himself permission to breathe out and take his next heady lungful of air. It’s subtle at first: the way he leaves spare clothes in Robby’s dresser again, the way he starts referring to the apartment as home without catching or correcting himself, the way he reaches for Robby in his sleep.

In the years between when they found one another again, Robby often thought of Jack.

In the years between when they broke up decades later, Robby often dreamed of him.

He dreams of him now, and more frequently. He dreams of moving a new couch into their apartment only to learn that they cannot maneuver it through the front door without disassembling it first. He dreams of a surreal dinner at his late grandmother’s table where Jack fits so seamlessly into the scene it feels as though he had always belonged there. He dreams of kissing him, of tasting him, of being fucked by him, of the familiar weight of his body in the dark.

When such dreams come, he wakes to find Jack beside him. Or he stirs briefly, shaken from sleep only briefly, when Jack bends to press a kiss to his temple before a shift, or after one. Waking beside one another became as unremarkable as sharing coffee, or splitting a grocery list, or Dana rolling their eyes at them when they think they’re being casual at work.

The cost of movers — and the quieter, accumulating costs of making their new place livable for both of them, but especially for Jack — means that Robby dips into the little pool of money he once kept for a motorcycle: some sleek, black thing he used to picture himself riding down along interstate highways, back when he was still working his residency as a young man. It surprises him how little it stings to let that fantasy go — how little distance, and isolation, and traversing to some far corner of the continent appeals to him anymore if Jack is not there beside him.

The invitation to Rhonda’s wedding arrives a year and a half later, in late spring.

Their trip to this Colorado wedding becomes the first time they request more than a long weekend off at the same time— a gamble that feels absurd until Dana suggests, with a look that implies she’s sure of what she’s saying, that they speak to Gloria. She’s right. By the time they sit down in her office, Gloria is already outlining the coverage: a temporary attending stepping in for the week — a trial run, really, a chance to see how she fits before offering her a more substantial daytime position now that the budget finally allows for another hire. In the meantime, Shen and Parker will rotate nights, Parker newly minted as an attending in her own right, the department adjusting easily between them.

The work, in other words, will go on without them — steady, humming, self-sufficient in their absence.

They split the twenty-hour drive across three days — stopping in Chicago to visit one of Jack’s sisters, then west again, through Missouri and into the long, unbroken flatlands of Kansas. They drive with the windows down, the vast plains rolling outward on either side of the interstate. Wind turbines turn lazily in the distance, white arms cutting circling arcs against a sky too large to hold in a single glance.

The ceremony is small, and fun, and unassuming in a way that suits Rhonda perfectly. She is less wiry now than she was in her twenties and thirties. Time has rounded her out a little — in the hips, in the face — in a way that sits beautifully on her frame, as though she has grown more fully into herself than when Robby last saw her. When her bride leans in and murmurs something that catches her off guard, Rhonda still laughs the same way she always has — loud, and contagious, and unabashed. It’s a smile that warms her face brilliantly, and shows off every tooth. At the reception, Robby and Jack find themselves at a table with Charlie and Henry Pratt, who look softer, and older, the way Robby knows they must look, too. Their daughter sits to Jack’s left, cheeks flushed pink from the altitude and champagne, listening with bright, undivided attention as Jack slips easily into another one of his night-shift stories upon her request — the crowdpleasers, the crazy stories people outside of medicine always ask about, the kind of chaos her fathers never quite see, working in a dermatology office and a Planned Parenthood.

When the music changes — something slower now, something old enough to please most of the adults in the room if not quite their children — and Rhonda invites people up to join them, chairs scrape back from tables. Guests begin to drift toward the dance floor in twos and threes, as though tugged there by an easy, unseen current.

Robby notices Jack watching.

His chin rests in his hand, elbow braced against the table. There is a softness to his expression — something unguarded, almost boyish, with the soft ambient light of the room catching in the brightness of his eyes. He watches the couples find one another, palms settling at waists, bodies softly swaying, smiling in the way he does when he doesn’t know anyone’s watching; all his happiness gathered, there, right in his eyes, the faint wrinkles that frame them.

His left hand lies open against the white linen.

Jack had stopped wearing his old wedding band a few months ago, without announcement or remark. Much like the way he had relaxed into their relationship, Robby registered the change the way one notices a slight shift in temperature — not because what came before had been uncomfortable at all, but because the adjustment was a subtle improvement, almost imperceptible except for the fact that it made something good feel, almost impossibly, better.

It happened sometime after they had a conversation about Heather — about the pregnancy, about what it had and had not meant to Robby, who had loved her, who had felt a real, complicated sadness when she announced she was moving back to Portland at the end of her residency — and who had also felt an unmistakable relief when she admitted she hadn’t wanted a child with him.

He and Jack had been walking home from dinner one night, streetlights throwing long, uneven shadows ahead of them, when Robby told him the news that Dana had relayed to him at work: Heather had gotten through her first trimester and everything was progressing perfectly, at last.

“Do you think you’ll ever regret not having kids?” Jack had asked him then, casual on the surface, but careful underneath, like this was not the first time he’d had this question.

Robby shook his head easily. “Nah. I don’t think I’m the fathering type.” Then, after a pause, he added: “Why, do you think you will?”

Jack huffed out a small laugh. “Absolutely not. Sof and I decided pretty early on we wouldn’t try for kids. Believe me, I’m good.”

“Why do you ask then?”

“Well, because of Heather,” Jack said. Then, after a beat: “And because you have Jake.”

“Sure,” Robby smiled faintly at that. After Leah, he and Jake found their way back to each other eventually, but slowly — they’d made amends, rebuilt something steadier, if quieter now that Jake was off at college and living his own life. “But I think the only reason we work is because I’m not his father.”

They kept walking. Their shoulders brushed once, twice, before drifting apart again.

“Honestly,” Robby said, “I never pictured myself as the kind of guy who gets married, has two and a half kids, the whole white-picket-fence situation.” He let out a quiet laugh. “Then again, I also never pictured myself making it to fifty.”

Jack cast a look his way. “Has any of that changed?”

“Well, I made it to fifty,” Robby said, smiling. “I know it doesn’t show.”

“Brother, if you have to say it —”

“Shut up,” Robby cut in, bumping him lightly with his shoulder. They drifted closer again, and this time Robby let his hand slip into Jack’s. It wasn't exactly like them to do this, neither of them particularly fond of public displays of affection or perhaps just too used to being wary of it, but - well, it felt right to do it, so he did.

“I don’t know,” Robby admitted, after working through another thought. “I can see it for us. Maybe. Exchanging rings, at least. One day.”

“Really?” There was no teasing in Jack’s voice now, just something faintly surprised.

Robby shrugged, suddenly a little embarrassed at his own earnestness. “Yeah, why not? It doesn’t have to be some big production. Doesn’t even have to be official. And only if you wanted to.”

Jack hadn’t said much after that. Just nodded once, and smiled a little, and squeezed Robby’s hand.

A few days later, the ring was gone. His wedding band lives now in the top drawer of Jack’s bedside table. Robby has seen it there, resting on a small jewelry plate beside a tub of lotion, a journal he writes in on occasion, a half-empty bottle of pain-killers he keeps close in case the occasional ache in his knee works up to a biting pain Robby might try, at least, to soothe away with medicine, and heat presses, and the massaging press of his fingers.

There is still a faint ribbon of paler skin circling his wedding finger. It lingers there, that paleness, as though that strip of skin has not yet learned to color — as though, out of long habit, it refuses to bronze and freckle the way the rest of Jack’s skin does after those first blazing days of early summer. The rest of him warms almost too easily, pink before turning to gold. But that narrow band remains lighter, deliberate in its reluctance, as if something about Jack’s hand is not complete without the shape of a ring. And maybe, Robby thinks sometimes, it isn’t.

The air through the open reception hall doors is cool and thin and satisfyingly clean in Robby’s lungs. He has had just enough to drink that the hesitation he might otherwise feel about dancing in public dissolves before it can fully form. There is no one here who will see them again. No one whose memory of this night will matter beyond it, except perhaps for his old friends, who’d seen Jack and Robby do something like this once before, so many years ago.

He watches Jack watching the dancers. Robby feels something loosen in his chest at the sight of it, and then reaches across the table, his hand folding over Jack’s own and gently squeezing.

“C’mon,” he says.

Jack looks up, blinking once as though surfacing from somewhere far away. “What?”

Robby tilts his head toward the dance floor, toward the slow swaying bodies and the low amber light. “Dance with me,” he says, and after a beat, softer: “For old time’s sake.”

Jack studies him for a breath — that old, reflexive caution flickering and fading — and then it gives way completely. His mouth curves, slow and certain, into a bright, long-familiar smile.