Chapter Text
Robby’s vision is bleary, white-streaked and spinning as he blinks up at an unfamiliar ceiling. It comes slowly into a sharper resolution: the speckled drop ceiling, the stark-white walls, the blinding fluorescent panel lighting. The other senses join in quick succession. The steady song of a heart monitor, the tender, clothespin pressure around his index finger, and in his arm, the silk-wrapped distance of pain felt through medication.
Robby makes a small noise, a little whine of reluctant consciousness, and rolls his head toward the sound of his heart’s translation into hard fact. In bright green: 91. Not bad. He huffs, satisfied, and then lets his head swing to the other side of the room to take in his surroundings.
A normal, unfamiliar hospital room. It’s not PTMC, thank God. The room is small, but he is not its only occupant. Pale, blue-checked curtains are pulled around his part of the room to give him privacy from whomever is on the other side of the room. But that person, that stranger, is not Robby’s primary concern.
No, that would be the man asleep in the chair beside him. One arm crossed over his chest, the other extended long on the bed alongside Robby’s. His eyes are closed, his breath steady. Curls unkempt, freckles devastating.
Jack is here.
Robby blinks a few times, trying to clear his head. Trying to remember what had landed him here, how long he’s been here. What the hell time is it?
He finds that he cannot remember. Not the details, anyway. There are snatches: looking down at his phone, at a text from Dana asking if he was planning on returning anyone’s calls. The pavement, hard and hot under his back. The blue of the sky. A paramedic asking his name. Vague, motion-sick memories from the back of an ambulance.
Robby closes his eyes, stemming a sick swirl of anxiety.
Beside him, Jack’s hand moves. Slow, as if he’s trying not to disturb Robby; gentle fingers wrap over the top of his hand and rest there, unmoving.
It is indulgent, selfish. But Robby does not immediately make it known that he’s awake. He stays perfectly still, allowing the contact to linger. It’s his good arm, after all; the other one is hung close to his chest in a sling.
But what good is it, really, to pretend? Much as he might wish to, holding onto Jack has only ever been something that could happen in stolen moments, in blinks of time that dissipated as quickly as they’d come on.
Robby looks back over, head heavy. Jack’s eyes meet his immediately, widening with surprise and relief at once.
“Robby,” he says, voice warm and gentle. “Hey, man. How are you feeling?”
“Like I got run over by a truck,” Robby tells him.
“Well, it was a Prius.” Jack smirks. “But close enough, I guess.”
With even that modicum of clarity, Robby’s body spasms with memory and sensation. His back is sore, bruised; pain is radiating across his collarbone, into his shoulder and down his arm. His face is bright with pain, too, as if it’s too exposed. His skin is broken, scraped open.
As if reading his mind, Jack hums. “Your collarbone is broken, but otherwise, all your injuries were superficial. Your face is a little cut-up, but it should heal up fine. Didn’t even need stitches.”
“Damn. Could’ve looked rugged with a scar.”
Jack doesn’t laugh, just leans forward. “You’re lucky.”
“Sure feels like it," Robby says drily.
“It could have been much worse.” Jack tilts his head, forcing eye contact. “Some bystander told the EMTs that you walked into the street without even looking at the traffic.”
Robby clears his throat, trying not to see the concern tightening into Jack’s expression. A beat passes with neither of them saying anything. But Robby isn’t naive enough to think Jack is done with him; he braces for the next wave of information, for being told about himself and feeling as though he’s hearing about a stranger.
“Robby, the light was green,” Jack says quietly. “You walked in front of a moving car.”
“I was distracted.”
“By what?”
Robby shifts back against the bed, avoiding the eye contact Jack is pointedly trying to maintain. “I don’t remember.”
“Bullshit.” Jack furrows his brow. “What are you even doing here? Why haven’t you been returning anyone’s calls?”
“What are you doing here?” Robby fires back, as though deflection has any hope of distracting Jack from his lack of an answer. “Did Cincinnati sound so interesting you just couldn’t stay away?”
“I’m still your emergency contact, asshole,” Jack snaps.
Robby’s face heats and he looks fully away. “I know.”
“Answer the question. Why have you been ignoring all of us?” Jack’s voice softens. “You’re scaring me, Robby.”
“I just needed some space.” Robby’s voice is thin. “Needed to get away from that place for a while. After— after everything.”
“You think I don’t know this is about Adamson?” Jack asks, so softly that it hurts. A needle slipped under the surface of Robby’s skin, pinprick-painful. “It’s okay to be fucked up, man. Everyone’s fucked up right now.”
Robby scoffs, doesn’t answer.
“You can’t just go walking into traffic. That’s not grief, Robby, that’s— that’s something else.”
“Says the man who flirts with jumping off the roof every other shift.”
In the corner of Robby’s vision, Jack scowls. “That’s not going to work,” he says. He keeps his voice level, still so gentle. “I know that losing Adamson was hard on you. I wish you would just— just talk to me, man. I want to help.”
“You can’t.”
“Robby.”
“You can’t.”
“Robby,” Jack murmurs. “Please. Let me in.”
His head hurts. His body hurts. His heart, his mind, his entire being hurts. Robby winces around it: the memory of his own body, waking battered and bruised on the asphalt. The memory of Adamson’s labored breath around the last words he would ever say to Robby: I trust you.
It had been thirteen months since then. Some of them agony, some of them the exhausting slog that follows it. Robby had fought his way through all of them, through every week, with nothing in the tank. Hollowed out, empty. He had dragged himself, the department that was suddenly his in tow, into a new, grief-grayed reality.
The breaking point had snapped like a bone. He hadn’t meant to leave so abruptly. But four days ago, he’d woken up so sick at the idea of going to the hospital that he’d actually vomited. He’d called in for coverage, then promptly gotten into his car and driven out of Pittsburgh.
“You can’t,” Robby says again, traitorous voice breaking. “I can’t.”
Jack’s hand, still on top of Robby’s, squeezes in. “You don’t have to do it like this.”
“Like— like what?” Robby asks wetly.
“Alone.” Jack reinstates their eye contact, all tender and soft. “Robby, I’m here, man. I want— let me help you.”
Robby slips his hand away from Jack’s, brings it to his face to push his fingers into his eyes. It’s a feeble attempt to force down the swell of his emotion; he’s not quite crying, but it’s close. He squeezes his eyes shut, contorts his face.
“I’m fine.”
It’s such an obvious lie that Jack actually laughs. “Michael, for Christ’s sake.”
“Jack, please,” Robby murmurs. A broken little thing, a tiny plea for mercy.
Jack sighs, sits back. “Okay,” he says quietly. “Okay.”
This will not be the end of it. Robby knows, but he exhales sharply anyway with relief. He sags into the bed, breathing slowing and limbs heavy. It flattens him, the reality of the situation. Jack driving to come to his side, Jack trying desperately to get him to admit to how dark things had gotten in his head.
And Robby.
He hadn’t walked into traffic on purpose, that much is true. But he had been so distracted, so swallowed by his own mind, that he hadn’t even noticed that he was doing it. He’d put himself in harm’s way: not actively, but negligently. Without caring enough to realize it was happening.
If he was his own patient, he would—
Robby shakes his head minutely, stopping that train of thought in its tracks. He cannot pursue it any further, not without risking the fragile balance keeping him upright. At least for now.
“Robby,” Jack tries hesitantly. “I don’t know what I would do if—”
Robby tips his head to look at him as Jack chokes down the end of his sentence. They stare at one another, the things left unsaid heavy between them. Robby fights down the sob he’d swallowed, nodding slowly.
“I can’t have you leaving like that,” Jack says firmly, eyes heated when they snap back up to Robby’s. “You hear me? No more unannounced departures, okay?”
“Okay, Jack. I won’t leave without telling you,” Robby says quietly. It falls between them, unfinished and inadequate and true. They lapse into an uneasy silence and as the pain starts to fracture through the medication haze, Robby lets it hurt.