forEVER obsessed with fanfiction

Gloria.

Nine-thirty.

Resident compliance paperwork.

Robby closed his eyes again briefly, one hand dragging slowly over his face while he pictured the exact expression Gloria was going to wear when she realized half his residents still had documentation floating somewhere in administrative purgatory because none of them respected deadlines unless Dana personally threatened them with bodily harm.

From the kitchen came another muffled noise followed by Dennis swearing softly under his breath at something.

The apartment still sat in that strange gray stretch between night and morning where everything felt quieter and softer around the edges. Weak winter light filtered through the blinds in pale stripes across the bedroom wall, catching on discarded clothes, abandoned pens, and the patient notes Dennis had spread across the comforter sometime after midnight before promptly falling asleep face-first on top of them. One sock hung halfway off the edge of the mattress like it had simply given up at some point during the night.

Robby stayed where he was another minute just listening to the sounds drifting in from the kitchen.

The refrigerator door opened.

Closed.

Then opened again almost immediately.

“You own six different kinds of coffee,” Dennis called eventually, voice roughened by sleep, “and somehow none of them are normal.”

Robby smiled into the pillow before he could stop himself.

That had started happening more often lately, those small instinctive reactions that bypassed thought entirely whenever Dennis stayed around long enough. Somewhere over the last few weeks the sound of another person moving through his apartment had stopped feeling temporary. Dennis drifted through the space now with sleepy familiarity after overnight shifts, making coffee half awake while wearing stolen clothes and reading charts at the counter like he had been part of Robby’s mornings for years instead of weeks.

The first time Robby walked into the kitchen and found him barefoot in one of his old PTMC shirts while simultaneously making eggs and reviewing patient notes, the image had lodged itself somewhere beneath Robby’s ribs hard enough that he kept thinking about it through the entire next shift. Now Dennis stole hoodies directly from the dryer, left sweatshirts folded over the couch, and wandered through the apartment carrying coffee mugs like he belonged there naturally.

The dangerous part was how quickly Robby had started looking forward to it.

He finally pushed himself upright, exhaustion settling heavily through his shoulders as he reached automatically for his glasses. His gaze caught almost immediately on the sweatshirt lying crumpled near the edge of the bed.

Old university hoodie. Dark gray. Pitt Med logo cracked and faded from years of washing. The thing had survived residency, three apartments, two hospital systems, and at least one deeply unsuccessful attempt at convincing himself he was capable of throwing old clothes away like a functioning adult.

It was also older than Dennis.

That realization landed strangely every single time. Robby sat there staring at the faded lettering while his brain supplied the deeply unnecessary reminder that Dennis had been born while Robby was already dragging himself through overnight shifts in hoodies like this one, surviving almost entirely on caffeine, bad cafeteria food, and stubbornness.

Most days the age difference stayed distant enough to ignore. Then mornings like this happened, and the years between them became tangible again through old sweatshirts and faded concert shirts pulled from the backs of drawers Robby barely opened anymore.

Dennis carried responsibility with a steadiness that still surprised him sometimes. Patients trusted him quickly. Other residents listened when he spoke. He stayed late to finish things properly and apologized to furniture when he bumped into it half asleep after fifteen-hour shifts. Watching him move through the apartment wrapped in clothes older than he was pulled something complicated through Robby’s chest every single time, equal parts tenderness and guilt twisting together tightly enough that he still had not figured out where one ended and the other began.

Eventually he got out of bed and followed the smell of coffee toward the kitchen, stopping in the doorway the second he saw Dennis standing at the counter.

Apparently one stolen article of clothing had not been enough for this morning.

Dennis had also unearthed a pair of Robby’s old sweatpants sometime during the night. The navy fabric hung loose around his waist with the drawstring pulled unevenly tight, hems bunching around his socks whenever he shifted his weight against the counter. Robby remembered buying them during residency after hospital laundry machines destroyed half the clothes he owned.

Seeing them on Dennis did deeply unhelpful things to his nervous system.

The old Pitt Med sweatshirt stretched broader across Dennis’s shoulders than it ever had across Robby’s at that age, sleeves shoved carelessly toward his elbows while he waited for the coffee to finish brewing. Dennis stole Robby’s clothes constantly now. Hoodies vanished from drawers. Shirts disappeared directly out of the laundry before Robby even folded them. Things simply migrated gradually onto Dennis over time until Robby occasionally lost track of what had originally belonged to who.

Robby crossed the kitchen slowly, eyes catching on the faded black Pearl Jam shirt visible beneath the unzipped hoodie.

That shirt dated back to pre med school, fabric worn soft and thin after decades of washing, the old tour print cracked badly enough that half of it barely existed anymore. Dennis had found it shoved into the back of Robby’s dresser two weeks ago and quietly claimed it without discussion.

Robby remembered wearing it through overnight study sessions in freezing Pittsburgh apartments while Jack smuggled terrible food into the library after midnight.

Third year of med school. Forty hours awake. Jack throwing french fries at him across the table because Robby had started muttering differential diagnoses out loud while half asleep over anatomy notes.

The memory arrived sharply enough that for a second it layered itself over the present, young Jack laughing somewhere behind him while Dennis stood barefoot in his kitchen wrapped in clothes from a version of Robby’s life that already felt impossibly far away.

And somehow Dennis fit there perfectly.

That was the part Robby still had not adjusted to. The ease of it. Dennis moving through soft morning light and old clothes like he had quietly slipped himself into spaces Robby stopped expecting anyone else to occupy years ago.

Dennis turned toward the refrigerator again and squinted suspiciously inside.

“You seriously don’t have normal creamer.”

“I have milk.”

“That’s not the same thing.”

“You’re twenty-eight years old. Drink coffee like an adult.”

Dennis snorted softly while reaching for the mugs, and the sound folded easily into the quiet rhythm of the apartment. Robby still had not adjusted to how natural all of this felt now, another person standing half awake in his kitchen before sunrise arguing about coffee like it had always been part of his mornings.

Dennis held out a mug without looking. Robby reached automatically to take it, fingers brushing briefly against the sleeve shoved over Dennis’s wrist. The contact barely lasted a second before Dennis shifted past him for his own coffee, shoulder bumping lightly against Robby’s chest with the same absent familiarity he brought to everything lately.

Robby felt the contact linger long after Dennis moved past him, brief enough to mean nothing and somehow impossible for his brain to ignore anyway.

That had become its own separate problem.

Dennis checked his watch a second later and immediately swore under his breath.

“Oh, shit.”

Then he drained the rest of his coffee in two quick gulps and disappeared back toward the bedroom in socks, already dragging the hoodie over his head as he went. Robby watched him go with slow amusement pulling briefly at the corner of his mouth. Dennis could run a code without blinking, catch medication interactions half the department missed, and calm terrified family members with steady effortless confidence, yet somehow remained physically incapable of arriving anywhere on time unless another person actively intervened beforehand.

A drawer slammed somewhere in the bedroom.

Then another.

“You alive in there?” Robby called while crossing toward the refrigerator.

“Debatable.”

Robby snorted quietly and pulled out the meal prep containers he had thrown together two nights earlier during a rare burst of optimism about becoming organized. Past Robby deserved recognition for that one. He slid both containers into his bag, then reached automatically for the travel mugs sitting beside the coffee maker and filled them both before snapping the lids into place. Behind him Dennis continued ricocheting around the apartment, drawers opening and shutting in increasingly frantic rhythms followed by muffled swearing and the unmistakable sound of somebody hopping on one foot while trying to pull pants on too quickly.

By the time Robby grabbed his keys from the counter, the rain outside had settled into a cold steady drizzle against the windows. He paused near the door long enough to consider the motorcycle before glancing back toward the weather again.

Probably not worth it.

Dennis had a habit of falling asleep against his back at red lights after overnight shifts, and while Robby found the whole thing dangerously endearing, he also preferred they both survived the commute.

He tossed the bike keys back into the bowl and grabbed the car keys instead just as Dennis reappeared from the bedroom with his backpack hanging crookedly off one shoulder and the edges of his curls damp from where he had apparently splashed water on his face in a last attempt to wake himself up properly. The Pearl Jam shirt had disappeared beneath navy scrubs and the soft dark green hoodie again, sleeves shoved carelessly toward his elbows while he adjusted the strap of the bag.

Dennis looked at him sheepishly. “Okay. Ready now.”

Robby looked him over once, taking in the damp curls, the rumpled hoodie, and the faint coffee stain near the cuff that Dennis clearly had not noticed yet. Something warm settled low in his chest before he stepped forward, pressed a quick kiss against Dennis’s temple, and opened the apartment door.

The drive to the hospital settled them back into familiar rhythm almost immediately. Dennis curled toward the passenger window with one foot tucked beneath him despite Robby repeatedly informing him he was eventually going to destroy his knees doing that. At least the dashboard habit had died after Robby gave him a particularly graphic explanation about femurs during high-speed collisions. Dennis had listened in visible horror before slowly lowering his feet back to the floorboard with the expression of somebody reconsidering several life choices at once.

His coffee balanced precariously between his legs while he scrolled through overnight charts on his phone with complete disregard for self-preservation.

Outside, Pittsburgh dragged itself awake beneath a low gray sky while traffic crawled sluggishly toward downtown. Rain streaked softly across the windshield. Some old soft rock song played quietly through the speakers, blending into the hum of tires against wet pavement and the occasional hiss of passing cars through standing water.

Robby barely paid attention to it until movement beside him caught his eye.

Dennis was mouthing along absently to the lyrics while reading through charts, brows furrowing deeper every few seconds at whatever disaster the night shift had documented this time. The contrast between the quiet music and the increasingly offended expressions crossing his face pulled another reluctant smile out of Robby before he could stop it.

At one point Dennis snorted under his breath without looking up from the screen, thumb pausing mid-scroll while he silently mouthed the next line of the chorus anyway.

The kid knew all the words. Of course he did.

A second later Dennis tilted the phone closer to himself like maybe the chart would somehow improve from a different angle.

“Oh, come on.”

Robby already knew Ellis Parker had probably gotten involved somehow. Jack too, depending on how badly the night shift spiraled before sunrise.

Dennis huffed another incredulous laugh under his breath. “Apparently the patient tried to pull out his IV because ‘the vibes were hostile.’”

Robby barked out a laugh before he could stop himself.

“Yeah,” he said, still grinning faintly. “That sounds like Parker.”

Dennis kept scrolling, growing visibly more horrified with every line. “And somebody wrote ‘IV reinserted after therapeutic Sprite.’ What does that even mean?”

“That probably means night shift got bored.”

Dennis let his head thunk lightly back against the seat. “You people should lose charting privileges after midnight.”

“Probably fair.”

Night shift had evolved into its own ecosystem years ago. Somewhere between Shen replacing his bloodstream with caffeine and Jack deciding professionalism became optional after two in the morning, the entire shift had developed the energy of sleep-deprived raccoons with medical licenses.

Traffic slowed again while rain drifted softly across the windshield. Beside him Dennis kept scrolling through the charts, mouthing pieces of the song automatically whenever the chorus returned. One sleeve of his hoodie had slipped halfway down his forearm again, exposing the faded remains of pen ink near his wrist from some earlier shift he had probably forgotten about entirely.

Robby caught himself watching him for a second too long before dragging his attention back toward the road.

“I still don’t understand how the whole ‘weirdest and the wildest’ thing became real,” Dennis muttered eventually.

Robby smiled despite himself. “Jack made a joke one night and Shen thought it was funny. After that the situation got completely out of control.”

Dennis turned to stare at him. “That’s genuinely the least surprising explanation possible.”

Robby snorted softly while traffic crawled forward another car length. Somewhere beside him Dennis laughed quietly under his breath and went back to the charts, still mouthing along absently whenever he recognized the lyrics coming through the speakers.

Robby became aware of him again the second they pulled into the employee parking lot and Dennis reached over automatically for both travel mugs before climbing out of the car, immediately hunching his shoulders against the cold drizzle still falling steadily across the lot. He hurried around the hood with the coffees balanced awkwardly against one arm while trying unsuccessfully to keep rain from dripping straight down the back of his neck, backpack sliding lower on his shoulder with every step.

Robby watched him through the windshield for a moment while Dennis adjusted the drinks again and ducked his head against the weather, damp curls tightening immediately near his temples beneath the hood hanging loose under his jacket. Then he headed toward the employee entrance without even bothering to check whether Robby followed.

Apparently that had become assumed now.

Robby grabbed his own bag a second later and headed after him, deeply unimpressed by the fact that something as stupid as Dennis carrying his coffee through the rain could still affect him this much.

This was ridiculous. Genuinely embarrassing behavior for a grown man with decades of clinical experience and a fully developed frontal lobe.

Inside the department the morning swallowed both of them almost immediately. Shift change rolled through the Pitt in overlapping motion and noise, nurses weaving stretchers around each other while phones rang somewhere near triage and overhead pages crackled briefly through the speakers before dissolving back into static. The familiar chaos settled around Robby’s shoulders like muscle memory the second he stepped through the ambulance bay doors, his attention already splitting automatically between monitor alarms, movement in the hallway, and the half-dozen conversations happening around him at once.

Dennis stayed close beside him while they walked, half reading charts, half tracking movement around him with growing instinct now that the department had finally started making sense to him instead of feeling like one giant uncontrolled disaster. Robby kept catching flashes of the dark green hoodie moving through the hallway beside him between staff and patients, coffee balanced carelessly in one hand while Dennis scrolled through another chart with his thumb. At some point Dennis had handed the coffee back without looking up, their fingers brushing briefly during the exchange before Dennis immediately went back to his phone.

The touch barely lasted a second, but Robby still felt it afterward while Dennis kept walking beside him completely oblivious.

He tightened his grip slightly around the cup and forced his attention back toward the department before his own brain embarrassed him further. Somewhere down the hall somebody was already yelling about wait times before seven-thirty in the morning, which honestly felt reassuring in its consistency. The Pitt functioning normally usually sounded at least a little bit like impending litigation.

Luckily for Robby’s sanity, they got slammed almost immediately.

He lost track of time somewhere between relieving Jack from shift and the first incoming ambulance.

“Morning, brother.”

Jack looked exhausted enough to qualify as a workplace safety concern as he handed Robby a tablet without slowing down. Trauma shears hung crookedly from the front of his scrub pants, one glove shoved halfway into a pocket, and there was a dark stain near the cuff of his jacket that Robby sincerely hoped was coffee. Judging by the dead look in Jack’s eyes, the night shift had probably started unraveling around three in the morning and simply never recovered.

“You’re late.”

“It’s seven-oh-two.”

“Exactly.”

Robby snorted softly while skimming through the chart. “Bad night?”

Jack dragged a hand over his face hard enough to flush the skin beneath his eyes pink before exhaling slowly through his nose.

“Guy came in naked and covered in axle grease because apparently tasers are government mind control now. Shen fed him crackers.”

“That feels… medically questionable.”

“It worked though.”

Nearby, Dennis was halfway through pulling gloves from a wall dispenser while listening with obvious interest.

“Honestly,” he said, “crackers fix a lot of situations.”

Jack nodded toward him immediately without looking up from the chart in his hands. “See? Whitaker gets it.”

“Don’t encourage him,” Robby said automatically.

“Too late,” Jack muttered, already walking backward toward the exit doors. “Good luck, by the way. Shen had three coffees and started reorganizing triage.”

“Oy vey.”

“Exactly.”

Then another ambulance rolled in and the department swallowed all of them whole again.

That part still settled around Robby effortlessly after all these years. The noise. The pace. The constant shifting movement of an emergency department waking fully for the day. Phones rang somewhere near triage while monitors beeped in uneven overlapping rhythms and somebody shouted for respiratory from down the hall. A patient demanded apple juice with the righteous fury of a man negotiating international hostage terms while transport pushed another stretcher past him toward imaging.

One patient rolled directly into the next before the previous chart was even finished. Respiratory distress became a construction worker with crushed fingers, which became a college kid with alcohol poisoning while his friends repeatedly insisted he was “usually way smarter than this.”

Santos, helping shove the stretcher into a room, informed them loudly that she doubted that very much.

Somewhere in the middle of the chaos Shen reappeared carrying a coffee large enough to qualify as structural support. His scrub top was wrinkled, his badge hung sideways against his chest, and there was a crease pressed into one cheek that suggested he had spent at least ten minutes asleep against a desk before somebody dragged him back into circulation.

“Morning,” Shen said cheerfully while passing by.

Robby looked up from the chart in his hands. “Why are you still here?”

“Mel called in sick.”

Robby paused briefly. “And they stuck you with a double?”

Shen shrugged and lifted the coffee slightly, like that explained everything. “I was apparently the only one functioning enough to cover.”

Dennis glanced over from the supply cart nearby, narrowing his eyes at the drink.

“That’s not coffee anymore,” he said. “That’s basically life support.”

Shen pointed approvingly at him while continuing down the hallway. Then triage called overhead about an incoming respiratory distress patient, and Robby was already moving again before Shen even disappeared around the corner.

The morning settled into its usual relentless rhythm after that, patients rotating through rooms quickly enough that time stopped separating itself cleanly in Robby’s head. Orders. Scans. Consults. Reassessments. One problem folded directly into the next before the previous task was even fully finished. Somewhere in the middle of it, Robby reached automatically for tubing during a respiratory workup and found Dennis already holding it out toward him before he asked.

That was the thing currently destroying Robby’s ability to function normally around him.

Dennis had gotten good. Quietly and steadily, without ever turning it into a performance. Somewhere over the last few months he had stopped moving through the department like a student trying desperately to keep up and started moving like somebody who genuinely belonged there. He knew when to speak, when to stay quiet, when to anticipate what somebody needed before they asked for it.

Robby watched him talk a shaking teenager through an IV placement by asking about motorcycles and college football, voice calm and even while his hands worked without hesitation. Ten minutes later Dennis corrected a medication order so gently the intern only blinked once, fixed it, and kept moving before embarrassment even had the chance to settle in.

The kid had good instincts. Better people instincts than half the attendings in the building, honestly.

During a lac repair Dennis stepped around the tray table for another suture packet and braced one hand briefly against Robby’s side to steady himself. Robby lost the thread of his sentence immediately. Dennis, meanwhile, kept talking to the med student across from him while tearing open packaging with practiced efficiency.

“You want absorbable for the deeper layer,” he said. “Skin gets staples unless Dr. Robby feels like making you suffer through interrupted stitches today.”

The med student gave a nervous laugh.

Robby stared at the wound for half a beat too long before the silence caught up with him.

“Dr. Robby?”

He blinked hard and reached for the needle driver again.

“Interrupted’s fine,” he muttered. “Builds character.”

Dennis glanced at him briefly then, brows drawing together for half a second before his attention shifted back toward the tray. Robby focused on the repair in front of him and ignored the lingering awareness of Dennis’s hand against his side like his brain had not apparently decided to archive every single point of contact now for future analysis.

By the time the department settled into something marginally less catastrophic, a headache had started pressing steadily behind Robby’s right eye. Three unfinished charts sat open at the workstation near the Hub because apparently none of his residents possessed the miraculous ability to complete documentation before it became a legal concern.

Around him the Pitt slipped into its usual mid-morning rhythm. Phones rang somewhere near triage. Printers spat out paperwork in uneven bursts. Somebody laughed too loudly down the hall before Dana immediately shushed them back into professionalism.

Robby dropped heavily into one of the rolling chairs and pushed his glasses higher up his nose while opening the first unfinished chart. The headache behind his eye had settled into something steady and unpleasant by now, pulsing faintly every time somebody raised their voice too close to him. Around the Hub the department continued moving in constant uneven rhythm, printers spitting paperwork somewhere behind him while Dana redirected an intern with the exhausted authority of somebody who had already prevented at least three disasters before ten in the morning.

He had barely made it through two lines before Santos appeared beside him with the unmistakable energy of somebody carrying information purely for the joy of watching another person suffer through it.

“There you are.”

Robby kept his attention on the chart.

“No.”

“You don’t even know what I’m going to say.”

“With that tone? I already know I don’t want it.”

Out of the corner of his eye he saw her lean one hip against the counter, visibly delighted with herself already. Trinity Santos approached gossip the way some people approached hostage negotiation: patient, strategic, and enjoying herself far too much.

“I just ran into Gloria.”

Robby closed his eyes briefly.

Right.

Nine-thirty. Employee files. Resident compliance. Gloria and her increasingly personal campaign against incomplete administrative paperwork.

He glanced automatically toward the clock mounted above the station and swore quietly under his breath. Technically, the meeting had started three minutes ago already. Realistically, Gloria was probably somewhere upstairs checking the time, growing steadily more irritated, and debating whether she needed to come downstairs personally to drag him into her office.

“She’s already looking for me?”

“Oh, she’s hunting you.”

“Fantastic.”

“And before you start blaming everybody collectively,” Santos added, “apparently Huckleberry over there still hasn’t finished his file.”

Robby looked up before he could stop himself.

Across the station Dennis stood beside Javadi at one of the computers, focused hard enough on the labs in front of him that he had gone slightly cross-eyed from squinting at the screen. The dark green hoodie he had thrown over his scrubs that morning still looked rumpled from the drive in, the hood caught awkwardly beneath the back of his stethoscope while he leaned one elbow against the counter beside the computer. He looked completely absorbed in whatever Javadi was showing him.

Robby felt his irritation weaken almost immediately, which was deeply unhelpful considering the circumstances. Like he physically sensed the attention, Dennis glanced up from the screen and smiled at him automatically, warm and completely unsuspecting in a way that hit Robby square in the chest before he could prepare for it.

Robby pointed at him immediately, crooking one finger in a silent come here gesture while nudging his glasses higher again, and Dennis’s expression collapsed into pure guilt so quickly Santos actually made a strangled delighted noise beside him.

“Oh, that is incriminating,” she said happily. “That is the face of a Huckleberry who absolutely forgot paperwork.”

Robby made a vague shooing motion in her direction without taking his eyes off Dennis, though they both knew perfectly well Santos was never voluntarily leaving a situation once it became entertaining.

Across the station Dennis muttered something to Javadi before heading over with visible caution, like he suspected he was walking into an ambush and had already accepted his fate anyway. By the time he reached the workstation both hands were slightly raised in surrender.

“I handed everything in,” he said immediately. “I swear I did.”

Whatever irritation Robby still had disappeared the second he heard the genuine worry underneath the words.

Dennis always reacted like this whenever he thought he had dropped something important. He started apologizing before anybody even sounded upset, already trying to solve the problem while mentally blaming himself for it at the same time. Robby had noticed the pattern months ago and disliked it more every time he saw it.

“It’s probably sitting on somebody’s desk,” he said.

Dennis still looked unconvinced. His shoulders stayed tight beneath the hoodie while he mentally retraced every administrative task from the last few weeks, eyes narrowing slightly with concentration. Robby recognized the exact moment Dennis started trying to figure out whether he had forgotten a signature somewhere and felt something inside him soften almost immediately in response.

He reached out without thinking and squeezed Dennis’s shoulder once, thumb brushing absently against the thick seam of the hoodie. Dennis eased beneath the touch almost immediately, tension loosening visibly through his posture before he even seemed aware he was reacting to it. Robby, unfortunately, noticed everything. The warmth beneath his palm lingered after he pulled his hand away, settling somewhere low and distracting in his chest while Dennis leaned subtly toward him for the briefest second longer than necessary before finally straightening again.

“I’ll deal with Gloria,” Robby said, forcing himself to focus before his own brain embarrassed him further.

That seemed to help more than anything else had. Dennis’s shoulders lowered properly this time, the tightness easing out of him while he stepped back from the workstation with a quieter kind of relief that tugged at something soft inside Robby almost immediately.

Beside them Santos had gone very, very quiet.

Robby turned slowly toward her and immediately regretted it.

She was looking between the two of them with narrowed eyes and an expression that screamed I know something you don’t know I know, which was significantly more concerning coming from Santos than it should have been. At this point Robby strongly suspected Dennis had already told her entirely too much at some stage, because she had started watching both of them lately with the smug fascination of somebody sitting three episodes ahead in a television show.

“Hm,” she said.

“Don’t,” Robby warned immediately.

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You were about to.”

Santos ignored him entirely and looked straight at Dennis instead. “You wanna tell him, or should I keep enjoying this?”

“Dennis made a quiet choking sound that was very obviously suppressed laughter, immediately ducking his head afterward like hiding the smile would somehow make him less suspicious.

“Oh my God,” Santos said, delighted. “That is absolutely the guilty face.”

“You’re insufferable,” Dennis muttered, still visibly fighting a grin.

“And you,” Santos informed him smugly, “are terrible at pretending nothing’s going on.”

Robby looked slowly between the two of them, catching the silent conversation apparently happening over his head with growing suspicion before he finally just shook his head once and pointed at Santos in warning.

She grinned back at him without an ounce of shame.

Then an alarm sounded sharply somewhere down the hall, cutting straight through the noise around the Hub, and the moment dissolved instantly back into motion as staff started moving toward the ambulance bay.

Dennis reacted on instinct now. The softness disappeared from his expression almost immediately as he turned toward the incoming stretcher, already reaching for gloves while Santos fell into step beside him and started firing questions at the paramedics before they even cleared the doors. Dennis adjusted automatically around staff and stretchers while catching a chart somebody handed him mid-stride, glancing down once before redirecting a transporter trying to push through the wrong hallway and shifting closer to Santos as report started.

Robby watched him for a second longer than necessary.

Somewhere along the line the hesitation had vanished completely. Dennis no longer moved through the Pitt like somebody trying to keep up with it. He moved like he belonged there, the noise and chaos settling around him with the same instinctive rhythm as everyone else who had survived the department long enough for it to get into their bloodstream.

Robby dragged his attention away before he stood there staring any longer like a complete idiot and finally headed toward the elevators instead.

Technically, as Chief of Emergency Medicine, he had an office upstairs on the administrative floor alongside the other department heads and people who willingly attended meetings containing phrases like budget allocation and staffing projections without developing stress-induced migraines halfway through.

Robby used the office as little as humanly possible.

The room itself was perfectly functional. Too functional, honestly. Quiet in the deeply unnatural way only administrative floors ever managed to be, all polished tile, muted conversations, and people carrying clipboards with terrifying purpose. Every time he spent more than twenty minutes upstairs he started feeling vaguely trapped, like he had been removed from his actual habitat and placed somewhere his nervous system fundamentally refused to adapt to.

Upstairs meant paperwork.

Upstairs meant Gloria.

It did occur to him occasionally that the office might become significantly more tolerable if he ever managed to get Dennis upstairs long enough for five uninterrupted minutes alone together. Unfortunately, that line of thinking tended to spiral quickly into mental images of Dennis pushed back against the office door while half the administrative floor wandered past outside, and there were entirely too many windows upstairs for thoughts like that to be remotely survivable. Not to mention far too many people who enjoyed “quick check-ins.”

The elevator doors opened with a soft chime and Robby stepped inside, already mentally preparing himself for whatever fresh administrative catastrophe waited upstairs. The quiet hit him almost immediately once the doors slid shut again.

His hand found the tubing of his stethoscope automatically. He turned it once around his fingers while leaning back against the elevator wall, eyes closing briefly as the car started moving upward.

That was the dangerous thing about silence.

Downstairs there was always another patient, another monitor alarm, another voice calling his name from somewhere down the hall before his brain had the chance to linger too long on how tired he actually was. The chaos kept him moving. Moments like this, sealed inside elevators and administrative hallways where nobody was actively bleeding or screaming at him, were usually when the exhaustion finally managed to catch up enough to settle heavily behind his eyes.

Sometimes Robby suspected Gloria possessed some deeply unfortunate sixth sense specifically designed to locate him the second he entered the administrative floor. The elevator doors opened again and immediately proved him correct. Gloria stood directly outside waiting for him, one eyebrow already raised like she had spent the last ten minutes becoming less and less surprised by his behavior.

Robby glanced automatically toward the clock hanging on the wall and winced slightly.

Yeah. He might have kept her waiting longer than intended.

Despite what half the department seemed to believe, Robby did not actually avoid Gloria herself. He just preferred her in settings that did not involve compliance folders, staffing reports, budget meetings, or reminders that his job technically included responsibilities he could not delegate to trauma surgery.

“Robby,” Gloria greeted curtly the second he stepped off the elevator, “I was about to come drag you in here myself.”

Robby lifted both hands slightly in surrender while falling into step beside her down the hallway. “Sorry. We got slammed downstairs.”

“You’re always slammed downstairs.”

“That’s because people insist on having emergencies in the emergency department.”

Gloria did not look remotely impressed by that explanation.

“I’m here now, aren’t I?” he added cautiously.

She fixed him with a long pointed stare before turning sharply toward her office without another word. Robby suppressed a sigh and followed after her instead of making the extremely poor decision to push his luck further. Irritating Gloria before she even sat down usually doubled the length of whatever meeting followed, and he already had enough unfinished charts downstairs waiting for him without adding another forty-five minutes of compliance lectures onto the pile.

Contrary to popular belief, he actually could behave professionally when necessary.

Gloria’s office looked exactly like every other office on the administrative floor, organized within an inch of its life. Even the framed certifications looked aggressively symmetrical.

Robby distrusted all of it instinctively.

Hospital offices were supposed to contain at least one unstable paper stack threatening structural collapse somewhere in the corner.

He dropped into the chair across from her desk while Gloria immediately started sorting through folders with sharp efficient movements. The next twenty minutes turned into a relentless parade of incomplete compliance forms, unsigned evaluations, expired online modules, missing signatures, scheduling discrepancies, and several employees who apparently believed deadlines were philosophical suggestions rather than actual requirements.

Robby listened with growing resignation while Gloria moved through highlighted spreadsheets like she was preparing evidence for trial. Half the missing paperwork belonged to residents who vanished post-shift before signing anything. The other half belonged to attendings who treated administrative responsibilities like personal attacks. Spreadsheet after spreadsheet slid across the desk while Robby skimmed names and mentally calculated how much bribery, harassment, and direct physical pursuit it would take to get everything finished before the end of the week.

“I’ll track down the day shift people before I leave tonight,” he said finally, rubbing a hand tiredly over his face while scanning another highlighted section. “And I’ll ask Jack to bully the night crew into finishing the rest.”

“That is not an appropriate management strategy.”

“It’s an effective one, isn’t it?”

Gloria exhaled slowly through her nose, which in Gloria terms qualified as conceding the point. Some of the irritation eased out of her posture after that, though only slightly, and she reached for another folder sitting at the edge of her desk before pushing it directly toward him across the polished surface.

Robby looked down suspiciously at the stack. “Why do these feel personal?”

“Because,” Gloria said flatly, “they’re yours.”

Robby stared at the papers for a long moment. Right… apparently he had also forgotten to complete several forms himself.

Between running the department again, covering shifts, surviving budget meetings, and readjusting to hospital administration after months away on sabbatical, his own paperwork had probably died quietly in a pile weeks ago without him noticing. Somewhere along the line his brain had apparently retrained itself into believing compliance modules and departmental evaluations simply stopped existing if he ignored them long enough.

Dennis had not exactly improved his concentration lately either, but Robby chose not to examine that thought too closely while sitting across from Gloria under fluorescent lighting.

Robby spent the next several minutes rapidly signing forms before Gloria found another stack to drop in front of him. Papers shuffled beneath his hands while he scrawled signatures across dotted lines, initialed things he vaguely remembered receiving three weeks ago, promised to print out one missing evaluation form before the end of his shift, and filled out the remaining sections in handwriting that deteriorated steadily the longer the pile became.

Honestly, he already felt sorry for whichever poor administrative assistant eventually had to decipher half of it.

Across the desk Gloria watched him the way trauma surgeons watched interns holding power tools for the first time, visibly unconvinced he could be trusted unsupervised around official documentation for longer than five minutes.

By the end of it, Robby shoved the completed forms back toward her before she could uncover anything else from the neatly stacked folders surrounding her workspace. Then he escaped the office carrying an entirely new stack of paperwork under one arm, already mentally drafting the lecture he was going to inflict on half his residents before the end of the shift.

The elevator had not even arrived yet before he started flipping through the remaining compliance notes. Most of it looked routine enough now that Gloria had finished verbally beating him over the head with it.

Then he found Dennis’s name.

Robby stopped on the page for a second before snorting quietly under his breath. Of course that was it. Dennis was only missing one document for the employee file update: a copy of his birth certificate confirming citizenship status. Easy enough to fix. They could probably request the damn thing online during a quiet stretch downstairs and Gloria would have it sitting in her inbox by next week.

He hit the elevator button absently while glancing down at the note again, the corner of his mouth twitching faintly.

Jack’s name appeared immediately beside three incomplete attending evaluations and one unsigned procedural review, which honestly surprised nobody. Robby stared at the paperwork for a second before making a mental note to dump the entire stack directly into Jack’s lap during evening handoff and let him deal with the consequences himself for once.

Further down, McKay apparently still needed to sign off on two competency forms she had been carrying around for almost a month. Santos had somehow filled out an occupational health update incorrectly badly enough that Gloria had attached an actual note in red text asking whether she had completed the form “under emotional distress or active sedation.”

Robby didn’t even need to guess which question Santos had answered wrong.

Another page revealed that two night shift residents still had expired online compliance modules because, according to the attached comments, they kept “forgetting their passwords” and then simply giving up halfway through the reset process. Robby rubbed tiredly at his forehead while flipping farther down the stack.

Yeah, most of this could become Jack’s problem later. If Robby had to suffer through administrative hell upstairs, then Jack could survive fifteen minutes of tracking down feral night crawlers and forcing them to sign documents before disappearing back into the darkness like medically licensed cryptids.

Nothing looked catastrophically wrong by the time Robby stepped back onto the floor of the Pitt. Near the Hub, Dana was redirecting a cluster of visibly lost med students toward one of the residents with exhausted efficiency while Santos sat hunched over one of the computers nearby trying to chart fast enough to catch up with the morning rush. Every few seconds Santos stopped typing just long enough to glare at the screen like the documentation itself had personally offended her before attacking the keyboard again.

Robby’s attention caught on Dennis almost immediately anyway. The kid emerged from one of the trauma bays at a near jog, tablet balanced in one hand while he tapped something onto the screen without slowing down, already angling back toward triage like he was mentally tracking six different problems at once. Halfway past the Hub he handed the tablet off to Javadi in passing without even breaking stride, stethoscope bouncing lightly against his chest as he kept moving through the hallway.

Robby reached out automatically the second Dennis passed close enough, catching the back of his neck in a quick familiar cuff that broke his momentum just enough to redirect him sideways into step beside him instead of barreling straight past.

“Don’t let Dana catch you running on her floor,” Robby said, amused despite himself as he squeezed briefly at the back of Dennis’s shoulder before letting go. “I don’t need another lecture from anyone today.”

“That sounds less like concern and more like self-preservation, boss.” Dennis shot him a long sideways look, still a little breathless from moving too fast, the corner of his mouth lifting as he shoved both hands briefly into his scrub pockets. “So the rule is no running unless somebody’s actively dying or Dana’s distracted?”

Robby rolled his eyes immediately and knocked his shoulder lightly into Dennis’s side hard enough to make him stumble half a step before recovering with a quiet laugh. Dennis shot him a mock offended look for that, though the grin tugging at the corner of his mouth ruined any real attempt at intimidation. There was a spark in his expression that made something in Robby’s brain immediately flash warning signs, the same dangerous glint Jack got whenever he was about to say or do something that would almost certainly become somebody else’s problem within the next thirty seconds.

Before Dennis could act on whatever terrible idea had just crossed his mind, Robby hooked an arm loosely around his shoulders and steered him back toward the Hub instead.

Dana did not even glance up when they approached. At this point she was either deliberately ignoring them for the sake of her own blood pressure or simply too exhausted to care after months of watching Robby and Dennis orbit each other in increasingly obvious patterns. Santos, meanwhile, looked up from her charting long enough to narrow her eyes suspiciously at both of them before returning to aggressively typing.

Robby dropped the stack of compliance paperwork onto his workstation with a level of resentment usually reserved for active personal enemies before letting himself sink into one of the rolling chairs. The thing squeaked faintly beneath him as he spun slightly toward Dennis again, unclipping his glasses from the collar of his scrub top and sliding them back onto his nose.

Dennis blinked at him from where he stood beside the desk, still faintly flushed from rushing around the department. Then he visibly squirmed beneath the look Robby gave him over the top rim of the glasses.

“I have to warn Jack about the paperwork avalanche waiting for him during handoff,” Robby muttered while flipping through the stack again. “Pretty sure Gloria’s one missing signature away from committing homicide.”

Dennis snorted softly.

Robby shuffled farther through the papers until he found Dennis’s note and held it up between two fingers, amusement tugging faintly at the corner of his mouth.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “You’re only missing a copy of your birth certificate.”

The tension visibly eased out of Dennis almost immediately. He stepped closer to peer down at the form over Robby’s shoulder, brows furrowing slightly when he noticed another familiar name directly beneath his own.

Robby followed his line of sight and huffed out a quiet laugh.

“Santos apparently needs to refill one of her compliance forms.”

“What?” Santos looked up immediately from the computer. “Aw, fuck no.”

“You filled out the wrong section.”

She glared at both of them like they had personally betrayed her, muttered something deeply unfriendly under her breath about administrative sabotage, then dropped her attention straight back to the keyboard and resumed typing with violent determination.

Robby nudged Dennis lightly with the edge of the paperwork instead.

“Your birth certificate?”

Dennis shrugged one shoulder. “Oh. Yeah.” He cleared his throat once, something almost sheepish flickering briefly across his face. “Fun fact, I guess. I was actually born here. My parents were driving through Pittsburgh and had to stop because I decided to show up early.”

Robby blinked once.

“Huh.”

Honestly, he had somehow always pictured Dennis being born in the middle of a Nebraska snowstorm with a tractor running outside and at least four anxious relatives hovering uselessly around a kitchen table while somebody boiled water for no medically explainable reason. The idea of Dennis being born here, inside the Pitt, felt strangely wrong for a second. Or maybe just strange in a way Robby could not immediately place.

Beside him Dennis smiled faintly and leaned one hip against the edge of the desk. “Pretty sure the records should already be in the system somewhere.”

Robby hummed absently and turned back toward the computer, fingers already moving across the keyboard as he logged into the employee database. The system loaded with its usual irritating slowness before Dennis’s employee file finally appeared on screen, another notification linked directly beneath it.

Existing patient record found.

Robby frowned slightly.

That definitely had not been there the last time he checked employee files. Administration must have finally finished digitizing another batch of archived records from storage downstairs. God knew how many years of old paper charts still sat boxed away in hospital basements waiting for somebody to remember they existed.

Beside him Dennis leaned closer to look at the screen.

“Yeah,” he said with a quiet laugh. “Kinda feels like destiny coming back here, doesn’t it?”

Robby barely processed the words.

Because the second he opened the linked chart, something inside him seemed to abruptly stop functioning properly.

Dennis shifted a little closer beside the chair, probably reacting to how suddenly still Robby had gone.

“You okay?”

Robby did not answer.

His eyes stayed locked on the screen while his brain struggled to catch up with what he was looking at. The birth date itself meant nothing. He knew exactly how old Dennis was. The age gap had never exactly been hidden from him. That part was not new.

But this–

His gaze moved automatically down through the newborn admission details, the information registering in clipped fragments that somehow still hit with disorienting force.

Premature delivery.

Trauma Bay 2.

Five day inpatient observation before discharge.

His chest tightened strangely.

Robby could practically picture it without meaning to. The old trauma bay layout before renovations. The terrible fluorescent lighting they finally replaced in the early 2000s. Exhausted residents stumbling through overnight shifts half alive on cafeteria coffee and adrenaline.

Himself among them.

Back then he had been finishing an elective rotation at PTMC before continuing the rest of his residency down in New Orleans, existing in that strange stretch of training where every shift blurred into the next until entire weeks disappeared beneath exhaustion and fluorescent lights. He could still remember dragging himself through the department at three in the morning with cold coffee in one hand and unfinished charts tucked under his arm, young enough to believe functioning on two hours of sleep counted as resilience instead of slow self-destruction.

He had spent so many years inside rooms like these that parts of the hospital still existed in his head exactly as they used to be.

Then his eyes moved lower.

For one strange suspended second Robby genuinely thought his brain had misread it. His gaze snapped back to the line automatically while something cold and electric rushed through his chest hard enough to leave him almost dizzy.

Beside him Dennis was still talking softly about something now, voice edged faintly with confusion at Robby’s complete silence, but the sound barely reached him over the sudden roaring static filling his own head as he stared at the screen, unable to look away from the name sitting there in black and white beneath Dennis’s birth records.

Delivering Physician.

Michael Robinavitch, MD.

✦••──────────•• ✧ ••──────────••✦

✦••──────────•• ✧ ••──────────••✦

This is based on the awesome prompt of @haggravated-lassault

If you’re interested in checking out the clickable file, you should definitely read the fic on AO3! I spent way too much time crying over the coding for it 😂

Anyway, everything in Dennis’s employee file is probably complete nonsense and I have absolutely no idea how accurate any of it actually is.

Does it make sense? Maybe.

Did I spend an unreasonable amount of time building a fake employee file, a birth certificate, an archived patient chart, and thirty-year-old medical records anyway? Absolutely.

Chapter 2 will be a flashback to March 14, 1998, featuring baby Dennis, exhausted resident Robby, Dana bullying him about his tie, a terrible shift, and one very unexpected delivery in Trauma Bay 2.

That made him snort quietly under his breath.

Some British narrator was calmly explaining deep-sea pressure while blurry footage of rusted equipment drifted across the screen, and somehow Robby looked genuinely invested instead of treating it like the background noise it was supposed to be.

“You know,” Dennis muttered, glancing sideways at him, “most people pretend to care about documentaries like this.”

Robby didn’t even look away from the screen. “You’d learn something if you listened.”

Dennis huffed softly, the sound warm with amusement as he shifted a little deeper into Robby’s side. “I learned plenty today, thank you.”

That finally earned him a glance, brief but faintly amused before Robby looked back at the TV like underwater implosion risks genuinely mattered to him at this hour. Dennis shook his head a little, still smiling to himself as he let his attention drift instead, his body sinking further into the couch now that there was finally nothing demanding anything from him.

The apartment had gone quiet around them at some point without Dennis noticing exactly when. Their plates were still abandoned on the coffee table in front of them, pushed slightly to the side to make room for the remote, and the lights had been dimmed low enough that the glow from the television softened the edges of the room. Outside the windows, the city had settled into that late-night hush where everything felt further away.

Dennis let his eyes slip half closed for a second, listening to the steady rhythm of the narrator’s voice blend into the low hum of the apartment. He could already tell Trinity was going to become unbearable tomorrow. Not because of anything dramatic, not yet, but because she’d gotten exactly what she always wanted: information. Ellis’s account alone was enough to keep her entertained for days, and Dennis knew her well enough by now to know she was probably already mentally reorganizing half the department based on a couple tweets and three passing comments.

And somehow, despite fully recognizing the danger, Dennis still found himself amused by it more than anything else.

Maybe because he was warm. Maybe because Robby’s thumb had started absentmindedly brushing once against his shoulder without him seeming to notice. Maybe because after years of feeling like he existed somewhere at the edge of things, there was still something unreal about ending a shift here instead, tucked into Robby’s side while Robby took a documentary about underwater engineering catastrophes far too seriously.

Honestly, the fake farm excuse was becoming less believable by the day.

The thought made another quiet laugh slip out of him before he could stop it. He really didn’t want to imagine Trinity’s face once she finally figured out where he had actually been disappearing to every time he casually mentioned “staying out at the farm.” At this point she was probably one suspicious glance away from staging some kind of intervention over his increasingly mysterious overnight absences.

Which was unfair, honestly, because he had actually been out there sometimes.

And he liked it there.

Amy had somehow turned into his best friend over the last months without Dennis fully noticing when it happened, and little Theo had made himself comfortable in Dennis’s life almost immediately after that. Some days it felt weirdly easy to sit at Amy’s kitchen table with a baby balanced against his shoulder while she complained about animals or work or life in general like they’d known each other for years instead of months.

He missed his nieces and nephews too, more than he usually let himself think about when the shifts got busy enough to drown everything else out. Theo helped with that a little. Not in the same way, obviously, but enough to settle some quieter part of him he hadn’t realized had been homesick.

Apparently Trinity had picked up on some of that too.

Dennis could still remember the look she’d given him the first time he casually referred to Amy as his “best friend,” her expression doing something oddly betrayed before she recovered quickly enough to turn it into suspicion instead. Dennis had immediately gone red trying to backtrack and explain that Trinity was different, which only made it worse once he awkwardly muttered that Trinity was “more like an annoying sister at this point.”

That had been a mistake.

Trinity had looked unbearably pleased with herself for all of three seconds before immediately shoving him into a headlock in the middle of the staff lounge and loudly declaring him “the best little brother” she could’ve asked for while Dennis nearly suffocated trying to get her off him.

He hadn’t even bothered correcting her that he was technically older.

Dennis shifted again automatically, settling closer without thinking about it, and beside him Robby finally glanced down.

“What.”

Dennis smiled faintly, eyes still half on the TV. “Nothing.”

Robby looked unconvinced but let it go, his attention drifting back toward the documentary while Dennis let himself sink further into the couch, the warmth, the quiet, and the steady weight of Robby’s arm around him.

Yeah.

He definitely wasn’t trading this for the actual farm tonight.

Eventually the documentary ended without either of them really noticing when. One minute the British narrator was still talking about catastrophic pressure failures, and the next the credits were rolling quietly across the screen while the TV automatically suggested three more documentaries that looked equally depressing.

Dennis squinted at them. “Why are all documentaries either about the ocean trying to kill people or capitalism.”

Robby huffed softly through his nose, finally reaching for the remote. “Go to bed.”

Dennis made a vague sound of protest anyway, more out of obligation than actual resistance, but he let Robby pull himself upright and followed a second later, dragging himself off the couch with the kind of reluctance that only happened once he’d already settled in somewhere comfortable.

The apartment stayed dim around them as they moved through it, Dennis grabbing the abandoned plates off the coffee table on instinct while Robby turned the TV off behind him. He dropped the dishes into the sink once they reached the kitchen, fully intending to rinse them and immediately deciding that sounded like tomorrow’s problem instead.

Robby clearly agreed because he didn’t even comment on it.

By the time Dennis wandered into the bathroom a minute later, Robby was already standing at the sink brushing his teeth, one hand braced lazily against the counter while he stared at nothing in particular with the exhausted thousand-yard look of someone who had worked emergency medicine for too many years.

Dennis, meanwhile, reached automatically for the increasingly alarming amount of skincare products currently occupying one side of the counter.

Robby noticed immediately.

Slowly, visibly, he lowered the toothbrush from his mouth. “There are more bottles every time I look.”

Dennis ignored him completely, already washing his face. “That’s because your bathroom had the skincare routine of an old man before I got here.”

Robby pointed the toothbrush at him. “I used moisturizer.”

“Expired moisturizer,” Dennis corrected. “From the Bush administration.”

Robby looked deeply offended by that.

Dennis snorted quietly to himself as he reached for another bottle, patting something cold onto his face while Robby watched him with the same expression he usually reserved for particularly questionable patient decisions.

“You don’t even know what half of that does,” Robby accused around toothpaste foam.

“I do actually,” Dennis said easily. “Trinity explained it to me.”

Robby’s eyes flicked toward the collection of products crowding the counter before he gave Dennis another look through the mirror.

“Ah,” he said dryly. “That explains a lot.”

“Exactly.” Dennis pointed at him without looking away from the mirror. “Your skin could be glowing too if you stopped resisting progress.”

“My skin is fine.”

Dennis finally glanced sideways at him then, eyes narrowing slightly as he took in the exhausted ER shadows, the sleep deprivation, and the fact that Robby apparently thought hand soap counted as a skincare product.

“Mhm.”

Robby rolled his eyes hard enough to be visible in the mirror. “You’re twenty-seven. Of course your skin looks like that.”

Dennis grinned faintly, entirely unbothered as he reached for another bottle. “And yours could too.”

Robby made a low, unimpressed sound and went back to brushing his teeth while Dennis continued what had somehow become a genuinely complicated nighttime routine over the last couple months.

The worst part was that Trinity had been right.

His skin had gotten better.

He hated that she knew that too.

“Jack started using some of this stuff too, by the way,” Dennis added casually. “Not just the moisturizer anymore.”

Robby paused mid-brush, eyes narrowing slightly in the mirror.

Dennis kept going before he could ask. “Cleanser. Serum sometimes. I caught him using the eye cream last week.”

Robby let out a low grunt that sounded deeply betrayed and immediately reached over to pinch Dennis lightly at the side.

Dennis jerked away with a quiet laugh, nearly smearing serum across his cheek. “Ow. That was targeted.”

“Good,” Robby muttered.

Dennis watched with poorly concealed judgment as Robby finished brushing his teeth, rinsed, and then very obviously prepared to consider that an acceptable nighttime routine. The pointed look Dennis sent him through the mirror was enough to make Robby sigh quietly and at least wash his face properly, though Dennis still considered the effort deeply insufficient given the amount of sleep deprivation and ER stress Robby’s skin had been surviving on for years.

Still, there had been progress lately.

Small, stubborn progress, but progress.

At the very least, Robby had finally started taking care of his beard after both Dennis and Jack complained enough about beard rash to wear him down. Dennis still remembered Jack dramatically announcing that he was “being exfoliated against his will,” which had apparently been the final straw. Now there was beard oil sitting in the cabinet beside the sink, which honestly felt like a bigger victory than it probably should have.

The skincare would happen eventually too. Dennis was patient. Trinity had trained him well. And honestly, if Jack had somehow gone from mocking the entire routine to secretly stealing cleanser, moisturizer, and occasionally the eye cream when he thought nobody was paying attention, then Robby didn’t stand a chance long term either.

Dennis lingered another minute, rinsing his hands and pushing damp hair back from his face as he caught his reflection in the mirror. Trinity really had ruined him a little. A year ago he would have laughed at the idea of owning this many skincare products, let alone using them consistently enough to notice a difference. Now the routine happened automatically, built into the end of his shifts as naturally as kicking off his shoes or checking whether he had remembered to charge his phone.

Unbelievable.

He flicked the bathroom light off on his way out and wandered down the hallway barefoot, the apartment quieter now after the constant noise of the ER. The muted glow from the living room still stretched faintly across the floorboards, softer than the harsh hospital fluorescents his eyes had spent the last twelve hours under, and somewhere ahead he heard the quiet rustle of paper turning.

Warm light spilled out from the bedroom when Dennis stepped inside, catching on rumpled blankets and the open journal resting across Robby’s lap. Robby was already stretched out against the pillows with one leg bent beneath the blanket, reading glasses low on his nose while he worked his way through dense blocks of text like this counted as relaxing. He looked unfairly comfortable for someone who had worked nearly the same exhausting shift Dennis had.

Dennis slowed at the sight.

It still did something strange to his brain sometimes, these small moments that felt so deeply domestic they almost caught him off guard. The reading glasses. The low bedside lamp. The complete concentration on Robby's face, like the world had narrowed down to whatever was on the page in front of him. The whole thing felt steady in a way Dennis still hadn't entirely gotten used to. Robby half asleep with reading glasses on probably shouldn’t have affected him this much anymore, and yet Dennis still felt something warm loosen quietly in his chest every time he saw it.

Robby glanced up briefly over the top of the glasses when he walked in. “You done conducting your chemistry experiment in there?”

Dennis ignored that completely.

The mattress dipped beneath him as he climbed onto the bed and settled onto his side facing Robby. The blankets were warm from where Robby had been sitting there for a while already, the journal balanced comfortably across his lap. Dennis shifted closer automatically, one hand slipping beneath the blanket to rest across Robby’s stomach.

He pressed in close for a second, nosing tiredly against Robby’s shoulder.

Robby made a quiet sound under his breath, something acknowledging without really requiring a response. His attention drifted back toward the journal almost immediately. A second later, his free hand came up on instinct alone, fingers dragging slowly through Dennis’s still damp hair while he continued reading.

Dennis closed his eyes briefly at the touch.

The movement was familiar enough now that neither of them really thought about it anymore. Robby turned another page. Dennis felt the slow drag of fingertips through his hair again, absentminded and steady. The apartment had gone almost completely still around them, the kind of late-night quiet that only settled properly once the city outside finally started winding down too.

“What are you reading,” he mumbled eventually, voice rougher with exhaustion than he intended.

Robby hummed softly, eyes still moving across the page. “Article.”

Dennis cracked one eye open just enough to glance down properly at the journal spread across Robby’s lap. Dense columns of text. Highlighted sections. Anatomical diagrams squeezed between paragraphs. Something trauma-related from the look of it, probably newer research Robby had decided to read at midnight because apparently decades in emergency medicine still hadn’t cured him of voluntarily assigning himself homework.

“Boring,” Dennis informed him quietly before letting his cheek settle more heavily against Robby’s shoulder again.

That earned him the faintest twitch at the corner of Robby’s mouth as he turned another page.

It didn’t take long for Dennis to fall asleep after that.

The steady rhythm of pages turning faded first, then the low glow of the bedside lamp behind his closed eyes, and eventually even Robby’s hand drifting absently through his hair slipped somewhere out of reach as exhaustion finally pulled him under properly.

The next time Dennis stirred, it happened slowly, awareness returning in uneven pieces instead of all at once. The mattress shifted behind him with a second dip of weight that didn’t fit the shape of what he’d fallen asleep against, and Dennis frowned faintly without opening his eyes yet, his brain still slow and heavy as it tried to catch up. Sleep clung stubbornly to him, keeping everything slightly out of focus. For a few seconds he stayed exactly where he was, suspended somewhere between asleep and awake, not quite invested enough to figure out what had changed.

Robby was still there.

He could feel him immediately, warm and solid at Dennis’s front, one arm still loosely wrapped around his waist beneath the blanket. The familiar weight registered before anything else did, grounding enough that Dennis relaxed slightly without even thinking about it. For a second Dennis assumed that was all it was, Robby adjusting in his sleep or shifting closer again. Something normal. Something familiar.

Then the mattress moved a second time.

Something else threaded into the space behind him, heavier, less careful about settling in quietly, and Dennis blinked sluggishly as his thoughts finally started reconnecting. The shift in weight felt different from the way Robby moved. Less absentminded. Less concerned with whether anyone noticed. It took another second for his brain to process that the movement was on the other side, awareness dragging itself reluctantly into place.

And then he caught the smell.

Coffee.

Strong, fresh, and entirely too present for someone who was supposed to be asleep. It cut through the remaining haze almost immediately, familiar enough that Dennis recognized it before he fully opened his eyes. The realization slotted itself together piece by piece, connecting the second weight on the mattress to the presence behind him until the answer became obvious.

“Jack?” he mumbled, voice rough with sleep.

“Go back to sleep,” Jack muttered immediately, his voice rough with exhaustion and faint annoyance at the fact that Dennis had apparently become conscious long enough to perceive him.

Dennis ignored that completely.

Not now that he was awake enough to be curious.

He shifted just enough to look over his shoulder, blanket dragging with him as his eyes adjusted to the low light. Jack was halfway through pulling his shirt off, movements slower now that the shift had finally caught up with him, his hair a mess from repeatedly dragging his hands through it over the course of the night. One hand was already reaching down toward the prosthetic, fingers moving through the familiar routine of loosening it and setting it aside before he climbed fully into bed. The exhaustion sat visibly on him now that he’d stopped moving long enough for it to catch up, shoulders looser than usual, posture softened by the simple fact that he was finally off the clock.

And the coffee smell was strong.

Dennis squinted at him. “You smell like a coffee shop.”

Jack stopped mid-motion, fingers pausing where he’d been kneading at the muscles in his leg after finally getting the prosthetic off. He let out a long, deeply offended groan, dragging a hand down his face like the entire night had personally insulted him. “I hate coffee,” he muttered flatly. “I hate this job. I hate Shen. I especially hate whatever radioactive sludge he was carrying around tonight.”

Dennis felt his mouth twitch immediately, sleep-heavy amusement creeping in before he could stop it. “What happened.”

“Shen,” Jack repeated, like that answered the question completely. He gave the muscles in his leg one last irritated rub before abandoning the effort and throwing an arm over his eyes. It looked like his body had finally remembered it had been awake for far too long. “He is no longer allowed to bring coffee into my ER. If I see him walk in with another oversized caffeinated abomination, I’m escorting him right back out.”

“Kinda dramatic,” Dennis murmured, voice muffled slightly against Robby’s shoulder.

“Still generous,” Jack shot back immediately. “He spilled half of it on the floor and the other half on me.”

There was a brief pause before he continued.

“Lena made him clean everything and promised to keep him late for it.” Jack shifted slightly behind him, sounding much more satisfied now. “I got to leave early. Lena’s the best.”

Dennis huffed softly into Robby’s shoulder, his shoulders shaking with quiet laughter as Jack continued sounding genuinely betrayed by the entire concept.

After a second Dennis shifted, rolling onto his back before turning properly toward the other side of the bed. The movement earned a sleepy, instinctive adjustment from Robby, the arm around his waist tightening briefly before settling again. Dennis barely noticed. His eyes were already on Jack.

“Unbelievable,” Jack added, still sounding personally offended by the entire experience. “I’m surrounded by incompetence.”

Dennis smiled faintly at that, already sinking deeper into the mattress again now that the initial curiosity had worn off. The exhaustion in Jack’s voice sat heavier underneath the sarcasm now that he was closer, roughened around the edges in a way that usually only showed up once the shift had fully caught up with him.

“Are you coming in earlier then,” Dennis asked softly, shifting slightly to get comfortable again without actually moving away from either of them.

Jack made a vague sound, something halfway between acknowledgment and dismissal. “I’ll come in early. Later. At some point.” He paused. “Time is fake.”

Dennis let out a quiet breath that almost turned into a laugh, the logic – or lack of it – familiar enough not to question too hard.

“That’s not how time works,” he murmured, eyes already slipping closed again.

“It is tonight,” Jack muttered back immediately, like that settled the matter completely.

Dennis didn’t bother arguing further. There wasn’t much point, and he was already drifting again anyway, awareness softening around the edges as the warmth of the bed pulled him back under. At some point he rolled back toward Robby without really thinking about it, chasing warmth more than making an actual decision. Dennis felt Jack shift behind him a moment later, the mattress moving slightly before an arm slid around his waist and pulled him back just enough to close the remaining space between them.

Robby didn’t wake. He shifted slightly at the change in the bed, something instinctive rather than conscious, his arm tightening around Dennis just enough to pull him closer against his chest like his body had registered the movement and adjusted automatically without ever fully surfacing from sleep.

Dennis let out a soft breath that turned into a quiet laugh before he could stop it as he realized he was now effectively pinned between them, warmth pressing in from both sides in a way that made the idea of moving feel completely unreasonable.

Not that he had any intention of trying.

Jack leaned in a second later, pressing a brief kiss against the side of Dennis’s head before settling properly behind him. The contact was quick, tired, deliberate enough to linger for a second afterward, and then Jack shifted closer fully, one leg hooking loosely over both of them like he had already decided this was where he was staying for the rest of the night.

“Shut up and sleep,” he muttered quietly.

Dennis smiled faintly into the pillow but didn’t bother answering. The earlier wakefulness was already slipping again, dissolving beneath the steady warmth surrounding him and the familiar weight of both of them anchoring him in place. Somewhere behind him Jack exhaled heavily into the mattress, exhaustion finally settling into stillness now that he had stopped moving long enough to feel it.

Dennis let himself sink with it.

This time he didn’t wake again until morning.

Awareness returned slowly, more sensation than thought at first. A shift in the mattress. Movement somewhere beside him. The gradual absence of warmth when Robby pulled away just enough to sit up. Dennis stayed exactly where he was for another few seconds, clinging stubbornly to the edge of sleep while his brain struggled to catch up with the fact that morning had apparently arrived without his permission.

“Dennis.”

Robby’s voice came with a nudge against his side a second later.

Dennis groaned immediately and dragged the blanket up over his face like that might somehow protect him from both consciousness and the responsibilities attached to it. “No,” he mumbled into the fabric.

“Work,” Robby said simply, already moving around the room.

Dennis made a vague protesting sound that didn’t contain a single actual word, but it pulled him a little further awake anyway. He blinked slowly against the morning light and rolled onto his back just enough to track Robby moving around the bedroom pulling clothes on, glasses abandoned on the nightstand beside the trauma journal from the night before.

For a second Dennis just watched him in silence, thoughts still lagging somewhere behind the rest of him.

Then Robby reached back without looking and jabbed a hand in Jack’s direction. “Up.”

Jack reacted immediately, making a deeply offended sound as he turned away and dragged the blanket with him like he was retreating from something genuinely hostile.

“Absolutely not,” he said into the mattress, voice muffled but no less firm. “Just got here.”

Dennis let out a quiet, sleep-heavy laugh at that, the sound catching in his throat as he shifted slightly. The movement was enough to remind him that Jack was still half wrapped around him beneath the blanket, one arm loosely anchored at his waist like he had no intention of moving anytime soon either.

“If you’re here,” Robby said, already heading for the bedroom door with complete indifference to the argument, “that means you got enough sleep to help with breakfast.”

Jack went completely still for half a second.

Then he shoved the pillow down just enough to glare in Robby’s direction, eyes narrowed with genuine offense. “Nope,” he shot back immediately. “You were asleep, Mike. You know nothing.”

Dennis pressed his lips together harder to keep the laugh in this time, warmth settling low in his chest at how absurdly predictable the exchange felt now.

Robby didn’t even slow down. “I heard you complaining. You got here early enough.”

“Emotionally,” Jack muttered as he dropped face-first back into the pillow with dramatic finality, “I just arrived.”

That finally broke Dennis properly. A quiet laugh slipped out before he could stop it as he pushed himself upright just enough to lean against the headboard, the blanket bunching loosely in his lap while Jack continued radiating deeply personal betrayal into the mattress beside him.

Robby disappeared out into the hallway without another response, apparently deciding the conversation had reached its natural conclusion already.

“Coffee?” he called a second later from somewhere outside the room.

Jack groaned immediately, louder this time, and dragged the pillow fully over his head like he could physically shield himself from the word.

“No, never say that again,” he complained, voice muffled beneath the pillow but somehow still intense. “I’m serious. I’ll file a complaint. I hate coffee. I hate this house. I hate all of you.”

Dennis snorted softly as he reached for his phone on instinct, blinking against the brightness of the screen while his eyes adjusted.

“Tell Shen I’m filing a formal complaint,” Jack added from underneath the pillow, shifting just enough to turn further away like he was doubling down on the protest.

Dennis didn’t bother looking back.

A quiet smile tugged at his mouth as he unlocked his phone and opened Trinity’s messages. The coffee smell was probably still trapped somewhere in the blankets, and Jack was undoubtedly still glaring at the concept from underneath the pillow. Dennis glanced at the time in the corner of the screen and felt his smile widen slightly. It was technically early enough that he could already be at work, which made things considerably easier.

Jesse had worked nights, right?

Dennis frowned faintly as he thought about it. He was pretty sure Mateo had mentioned switching a shift with Jesse. Or maybe Jesse had mentioned it… Either way, Mateo had somehow ended up getting absorbed into the Night Crawlers after Jack decided he belonged there, and Dennis distinctly remembered hearing something about a schedule swap. Mateo had been on days with him yesterday, and now that he thought about it, he hadn’t seen Jesse once.

Good enough.

Luckily, Jesse loved gossip almost as much as Trinity did. Just with a little more tact, and he had his own ways of getting the good gossip. With Jesse on nights and Dennis conveniently arriving early, he barely had to change anything. Jesse noticed everything. Especially when something ridiculous happened. Jesse saying something about Shen was practically a law of nature. The story could start there and nobody would question it.

The truth would probably be more interesting. Unfortunately, the truth also involved Jack climbing into bed smelling like coffee and launching into a five-minute rant about Shen, caffeine, and workplace incompetence. Dennis was absolutely not handing his relationship over on a silver platter. Trinity would have a field day with that, and Dennis was already giving her enough material without openly admitting where some of it came from.

Or how he had somehow managed to start dating the two attendings he’d spent months quietly crushing on.

Yeah.

Absolutely not.

His thumb hovered briefly over the keyboard as he mentally rearranged the details into something Trinity would appreciate. The coffee smell. The dramatic suffering. The formal complaint against both Shen and caffeine. Close enough to the truth that he didn’t feel particularly guilty about it.

Then Dennis started typing.

Staring at Trinity’s final message, Dennis felt a faint grimace pull at his mouth. He scrolled back up through the conversation, eyes narrowing as he reread parts of it. The coffee disaster had been funny. Jack declaring war on caffeine had been objectively hilarious. Unfortunately, somewhere between those two things, Dennis had apparently volunteered the information that he had personally seen him after the incident…

In hindsight, that might have been a mistake.

Had he given her too much?

The thought lingered as he stared at the screen. Trinity was annoyingly good at noticing patterns, especially when she had absolutely no business noticing them. Most people would have focused on the coffee or the fact that Shen had made an absolute fool out of himself. Most people would have gotten distracted by the visual alone. Coffee everywhere. Shen suffering. Jack threatening to physically remove caffeine from the emergency department. But Trinity had somehow skipped straight past the coffee accident and landed on the fact that Dennis had hinted at something completely different. Which either meant she was suspicious already or she was about to become suspicious, and neither option felt particularly encouraging.

His gaze drifted to the time in the corner of the screen before dropping back to the messages. Maybe he had gotten too comfortable with the excuse. It had started out innocently enough with Amy’s blessing and then somehow evolved into a convenient explanation for every mysterious absence in his life.

Worse, it usually worked. People heard “the farm” and stopped asking questions. Or started teasing him relentlessly. Most people accepted it immediately. Some people wanted details. Dana occasionally asked after Theo. McKay seemed convinced Dennis spent his weekends doing manual labor for fun. Nobody ever seemed particularly interested in looking any deeper than that.

Trinity, apparently, was developing immunity.

Dennis frowned at the screen, thumb tapping idly against the edge of his phone as he considered the problem from every angle he could think of. The excuse itself wasn’t the issue. The problem was that lately he had been using the explanation far more often than he’d actually been out there. Maybe he needed to actually spend a little more time out there again. Lately he had been relying on it a lot more than he’d been using it.

Dennis could already picture the look Amy would give him if he admitted that he was considering visiting purely for the sake of maintaining plausible deniability. She’d laugh at him for a week. 

She would probably find it hilarious. Theo definitely would too, if he could already understand. Dennis smiled despite himself at the thought. At the moment Theo’s strongest opinions seemed to revolve around naps, bottles, and whether somebody was holding him. Still, Dennis was fairly certain the kid would grow into the type of person who found this entire situation deeply entertaining. Which, unfortunately, meant Amy would absolutely encourage it.

Honestly, if Trinity ever figured it out, it probably wouldn’t be because of the farm. It would be because she noticed something stupid. A look. A comment. One of them standing too close to him for half a second longer than usual. The woman could build a conspiracy board out of three facial expressions and a poorly timed coffee run. Dennis had watched her do something alarmingly close to that before.

Which was exactly why Dennis wasn’t about to hand her additional evidence.

He shook his head and locked the phone before Trinity could send anything else alarming. Whatever theory she was currently building could stay hypothetical for a little while longer. The last thing he needed was to open another message and discover she’d somehow connected five unrelated events into a conclusion that was far too close to the truth.

Dennis dropped the phone onto the nightstand and finally pushed himself upright. Beside him, Jack remained buried beneath enough blankets and pillows to qualify as a geological formation. From this angle Dennis could only see a portion of his hair and one hand sticking out from under the blankets, which somehow made the entire thing even more ridiculous.

Yeah.

Maybe he should actually visit the farm this week.

And send a few pictures to the Pittlings group chat while he was at it.

Dennis stretched briefly before reaching for the first clothes he could find, already moving on autopilot. There wasn’t much time to waste anyway. Robby had never understood lingering in the mornings, especially on workdays. Once he was awake, he was awake. Breakfast might slow him down by a few minutes, but not much more than that. As far as Robby was concerned, standing around waiting to leave made about as much sense as standing in the ambulance bay after the ambulance had already arrived.

Dennis had learned that pretty quickly.

Which meant if he wanted breakfast, coffee, or even a chance to see Robby before he disappeared out the door, he needed to get moving. More importantly, Robby was his ride. Letting him leave without Dennis was a fantastic way to end up explaining a suspicious Lyft charge to Trinity later, which felt significantly more dangerous than simply getting out of bed.

He pulled on a hoodie that had definitely started its life in Robby’s closet. At some point the ownership had become questionable. Dennis couldn’t even remember taking it anymore. It had simply migrated into his side of the closet the same way several of Jack’s T-shirts had, and neither of them seemed particularly interested in correcting the situation.

The sleeves sat a little tighter on him than they did on Robby, the fabric fitting differently across his shoulders and chest than it probably had when Robby bought it. According to the pictures Jack had shown him, Robby had been a tall, scrawny thing in med school. Dennis paused for a second, tugging the hoodie into place before glancing down at himself.

A year ago the thing would have swallowed him.

The realization caught him slightly off guard. The change hadn’t happened suddenly. It had happened gradually enough that he rarely noticed it from one day to the next. Moving in with Trinity had helped. Sleeping somewhere that wasn’t a hospital bed helped even more. The constant exhaustion that had followed him through most of fourth year had eased enough that he actually had the energy to take care of himself occasionally.

Moving equipment around the farm helped too.

So did having two attendings who seemed personally invested in making sure he remembered to eat.

Dennis rolled his eyes fondly as he shoved his arms through the sleeves completely.

Somewhere along the way he’d stopped looking like somebody surviving on caffeine, vending machine pretzels, and bad decisions. His shoulders had broadened. There was actual muscle on him now. Not enough to make Jack stop calling him kid, but enough that some of Robby’s clothes fit differently than they used to.

Which was probably why Robby kept stealing them back.

Or pretending to.

Dennis was fairly certain half the arguments about stolen hoodies existed purely because Robby enjoyed having something harmless to complain about. The accusations never carried much actual conviction behind them. Robby would point at a sweatshirt Dennis was wearing, inform him that it was his, and then make absolutely no effort to reclaim it. Sometimes he would even hand Dennis one himself before immediately complaining about how all his clothes kept disappearing.

The system made no sense.

Dennis had stopped questioning it weeks ago.

A faint grin tugged at his mouth as he headed down the hallway. He stepped over Jack’s crutches automatically before stopping a few feet later and looking back at them. Jack was eventually going to need those…

Dennis looked toward the kitchen, where the promise of breakfast was waiting somewhere beyond the doorway, and immediately felt his priorities attempt to reorganize themselves. Food sounded incredible. He could already hear movement from that direction, cabinets opening and closing, the familiar sounds of somebody who had been awake long enough to become productive. On the other hand, Jack was currently buried beneath enough blankets to disappear entirely and would eventually have to navigate the apartment without his prosthetic.

Which normally wouldn’t have been a problem. Jack had his crutches. On particularly bad days, he had his chair. More often than not, the prosthetic came off within minutes of him walking through the front door and stayed off until he needed to leave again. Home was one of the few places where he could give his leg a break without thinking about it. And Jack took full advantage of that.

Dennis couldn’t really blame him for it.

The crutches made life easier. They also made it significantly harder for Jack to recruit other people into helping him, which was unfortunate because Jack seemed genuinely fond of that particular pastime. Dennis had lost count of how many times he’d walked into a room and found Jack comfortably settled somewhere while casually directing Robby toward whatever object had ended up out of reach. A glass of water. A phone charger. The remote.

The requests were rarely urgent. Jack just liked being taken care of. Or, more accurately, he liked pretending he was being terribly inconvenienced while Robby rolled his eyes and got whatever he wanted anyway. It was an annoyingly effective system, considering how often it worked. Even Dennis had fallen for it more than once. Not because Jack couldn’t manage perfectly well on his own, but because there was something oddly endearing about the whole performance.

The crutches, at least, gave him fewer opportunities to turn minor inconveniences into quality bonding time.

Dennis gave the kitchen one last longing look before doubling back for the crutches. He carried them into the bedroom and leaned them against the wall. Jack had surfaced enough to notice by then. One eye cracked open as he looked from Dennis to the crutches and then grinned.

Dennis rolled his eyes immediately. The grin only widened. Jack looked more awake than he had a minute ago, though not by much. He was still sprawled beneath the blankets, hair a mess, clearly unwilling to acknowledge the concept of morning after the amount of sleep he’d gotten. The grin lingered anyway, warm and pleased enough that Dennis felt something soften in his chest despite himself.

Dennis crossed the room before he could think too hard about it. One hand settled briefly against Jack’s shoulder as he leaned down and kissed him properly. Jack hummed quietly against his mouth and tilted into it without hesitation, one hand coming up to catch at Dennis’s side. The kiss lasted a second longer than Dennis had intended before he finally pulled back, remaining close enough to catch the satisfied look that immediately settled across Jack’s face.

Jack was smiling again, which seemed suspicious.

Dennis pointed at him immediately. “Don’t.”

The grin widened another fraction.

Dennis sighed through his nose, entirely unsurprised, then abandoned the situation before it could get worse and escaped back into the hallway. If he stayed any longer, there was a very real chance he would end up crawling right back into bed beside Jack, and that felt like a dangerous precedent to set when they both had somewhere to be.

Besides, mornings like this were rare.

Most days Jack was either heading home when Dennis and Robby were starting their shift or arriving just as they were getting ready to leave. Jack and Robby saw each other more during shift change than anywhere else, catching snippets of conversation in hallways, sharing coffee between handoffs, and stealing whatever time they could manage before one of them had to run back into the department.

Dennis got lucky sometimes. Every now and then he’d end up on nights with Jack, which usually meant spending twelve hours watching him terrorize the ER and then finding an excuse to linger a little longer afterward. Most of the time, though, Dennis worked days with Robby. He saw Robby constantly. Jack was harder to catch.

Days off together were even rarer. Usually one of them was working while the other two weren’t. If Jack had the day off, they’d get the evening together after Dennis and Robby got home. If Robby was off, he’d have the morning before Jack left for work. Actually getting all three of them in the same place with nowhere else to be felt surprisingly uncommon considering how much time they all spent in the same hospital.

Dennis was aware that turning around and getting back into bed remained a very real possibility.

Which was exactly why he kept walking before he could change his mind.

By the time he stepped through the kitchen doorway, Robby was already plating eggs, moving through the morning routine with the same efficiency he brought to everything else. Dennis’s attention immediately locked onto the food. The plate had barely touched the table before he pulled out a chair and dropped into it, reaching for his fork almost immediately.

The first bite disappeared so quickly it probably qualified as inhalation rather than eating. Dennis hadn’t realized quite how hungry he was until there was actual food in front of him. Left to his own devices, he could go half a shift surviving on caffeine and momentum without noticing. Presented with breakfast, however, his body suddenly remembered every meal he’d skipped recently and demanded compensation.

Across from him, Robby glanced up from his own breakfast and shook his head, something fond and entirely unsurprised passing briefly across his face before he looked back down again. Dennis caught it anyway. He grinned around a mouthful of eggs in response and immediately followed it by taking an aggressively large bite of avocado toast.

Robby sighed.

“One day you’re gonna choke.”

Dennis shrugged.

Under normal circumstances he probably would have said something inappropriate just to watch Robby regret speaking. Something crude about how Robby usually didn’t seem to mind his choking. Unfortunately, his mouth was currently too full to manage anything beyond chewing. Instead he settled for a slow wink over the edge of his coffee mug.

The reaction was immediate.

The tips of Robby’s ears turned pink.

Dennis felt absurdly pleased with himself.

It remained one of the most reliable phenomena in the known universe. Jack and Dennis had both discovered it independently and then, upon comparing notes, immediately started treating it like a challenge. The fact that Robby could handle virtually anything the emergency department threw at him and still get flustered by the two of them being annoying never really stopped being entertaining.

Across the table, Robby narrowed his eyes.

Who still hovered, still kept that careful distance like he wasn’t entirely sure he was allowed to take up space, and yet somehow always ended up exactly there anyway, close enough to reach without ever making it obvious that he was trying to be. It was subtle, practiced in a way that suggested he wasn’t aware he was doing it, and Robby found himself tracking it without meaning to, adjusting around it before he could stop himself.

Robby told himself that made it easier to keep an eye on him.

He shook his head, something quiet and familiar settling in his chest as he watched Dennis roll his shoulder. The movement was small but tight, the kind of stretch that didn’t actually fix anything but probably felt better than nothing. There was a faint grimace there too, gone almost as soon as it appeared, like the kid thought no one would notice if he didn’t draw attention to it.

Robby noticed. He always did.

Whitaker had a habit of running himself into the ground before admitting he needed a break. He pushed through shifts on stubborn momentum alone, like stopping counted as failure instead of basic self-preservation. Robby had seen it enough times by now to recognize the pattern, the way the kid’s focus narrowed, the way he stopped checking in with himself entirely and just kept moving, like as long as he didn’t pause he wouldn’t have to feel how bad it had gotten.

He let it go for longer than he should have, telling himself the same thing he always did, that the kid would catch it himself, that he’d step off before it actually mattered. He knew better.

Then Dennis stepped backward without looking.

Robby was already moving before he said anything, his hand coming up to catch him by the shoulder and pull him just out of the path of a passing wheelchair. “You’re about to get run over.”

Dennis blinked, slow to catch up, his body following a second later as the moment settled in, like he needed the extra beat to process what had just happened.

Robby kept his hand there a fraction longer than necessary, steadying him. He felt the tension under his palm before easing his grip, the tightness sitting deeper than it should have. He gave his shoulder a brief squeeze before letting go, his gaze flicking over him automatically, taking in the flushed skin, the slight delay in his reactions, the way he still hadn’t quite caught up.

That confirmed it.

“When was the last time you ate?” Robby asked.

Dennis opened his mouth, paused, and then shut it again.

Robby didn’t bother hiding the look he gave him. “Yeah. That’s what I thought.”

He didn’t wait for anything else. He placed his hand back on Dennis’s shoulder and turned him slightly, guiding him out of the main traffic flow with the same ease he used when moving patients through a crowded trauma bay. He adjusted his path without breaking stride, already factoring in where they needed to go.

Dennis followed immediately. He always did. He adjusted without thinking about it, falling into step like this was expected, like it made sense that Robby would intervene and redirect him without explanation, like the correction didn’t need to be questioned to work.

Robby tried not to think too hard about that, about how easy it had become, how little resistance there ever was.

“Go grab something before Donnie finds it,” he said over his shoulder. “You’ll lose that fight.”

Dennis let himself be steered the last few steps, lingering just long enough to look like he might say something before disappearing into the staff lounge.

Robby’s gaze stayed on the door for a second longer than necessary before he forced himself to look away, the department already pulling his attention back into place, the moment folding back into everything else like it hadn’t just happened.

Michael Robinavitch liked to think he took care of his people.

Not in a way anyone would call soft, probably. He wasn’t good at that and never had been. He didn’t sit people down and talk things through or offer reassurance in neat, careful words, and more often than not he came off sharper than he intended. He knew that about himself. Short-tempered, blunt, difficult when he was tired, which was most of the time. It wasn’t something he liked, but it was consistent, and consistency counted for something in a place like this.

What he did do was pay attention, and that counted too. Maybe more than the rest of it.

It showed in the way he moved through the department without thinking about it, in habits that had settled too deep to question. He noticed when someone was off before they said anything, caught the shift in posture, the hesitation, the small delays that meant something wasn’t lining up the way it should. He stepped in early when he could, redirected, adjusted, kept things moving before they had the chance to spiral, and he kept track, quietly, of who was holding it together and who was one bad moment away from dropping something they wouldn’t be able to recover from. It wasn’t conscious most of the time. It was just there, running in the background, something he trusted himself to get right.

He didn’t say he cared. He wasn’t sure he would even know how to phrase it without it coming out wrong. He just made sure it showed up in ways that mattered.

Most of the time, that was enough. Sometimes it wasn’t.

There were days where he got it wrong, usually when he was already stretched thin and someone caught him at exactly the wrong moment. He would see it, recognize that they weren’t themselves, and instead of steadying it, he’d push. Say something sharper than he meant to, watch it land, and realize too late that he’d made it worse instead of better.

Those were the shifts that stayed with him. They followed him up to the roof afterward, where the city spread out below him and the noise of the ER dropped away just enough to think, and he’d go over it all again, picking apart every decision, every missed chance to handle it differently. He told himself that was part of the job too, the part no one talked about, the part where you carried it home whether you meant to or not.

He never let it sit without trying to fix it. A hand on a shoulder the next time he passed, a quiet acknowledgment slipped in when no one else would think to say it, a brief “good job” that didn’t draw attention but still landed where it needed to. Small things, easy to miss unless you knew what to look for, and he told himself that was enough to balance it out.

It had started with Jack.

Back in med school, before any of this had turned into something complicated, they had been impossible together. Constantly arguing, pushing at each other just to see who would give first, turning everything into a challenge neither of them was willing to lose. Robby hadn’t known how to take care of someone then, hadn’t even really understood that he wanted to, but Jack had made it unavoidable. Somewhere between the fights and the long nights and the shared exhaustion, something shifted without either of them naming it.

They learned how to lean on each other without admitting that’s what they were doing, learned that the other one would stay no matter how hard they pushed, and Robby had found himself wanting to take care of him without quite knowing when that instinct had settled in.

That part had come easier than he expected. Everything else hadn’t.

Because it didn’t stay contained. It didn’t stay in arguments and late nights and that familiar, manageable tension. It shifted into something heavier, something that blurred into territory Robby had never been comfortable examining too closely. Jack never seemed to hesitate with it, moved forward like there was nothing to question, nothing to hold back. Robby had never found it that simple.

He still didn’t.

Whether he meant for it to or not, that instinct carried over into everything else. It spread outward, settled into the way he handled the department, the nurses, the residents, the students rotating through the Pitt, until it became part of how he functioned. Thinking about it as part of the job made it easier to manage, gave it structure, something he could point to instead of picking it apart too closely.

Still, he knew exactly where it got him.

He put people on pedestals. Built them into something steady in his head, something reliable, something he could trust to hold under pressure, and when they didn’t, when they cracked in ways he hadn’t accounted for, it hit harder than it should have.

Langdon had been the worst of it.

Robby had looked at him and seen a future he could step into, someone who could take over when he finally burned out, someone who understood the weight of the job well enough to carry it without letting it fall apart. He hadn’t questioned it, hadn’t looked too closely, just trusted his instinct and let himself believe in it.

And Langdon had still managed to fuck it up.

Stolen from the department, from the patients, from himself, feeding something that had been there the entire time while Robby stood right there and missed it.

That part stayed with him. It settled in and didn’t leave, a quiet certainty under everything else that he should have seen it sooner. The signs had been there, even if they were small, even if they were easy to miss, and he was supposed to catch things like that. That was the job.

He should have asked the right questions, pushed in the right places, done something before it got that far. Instead, he had been buried under everything else. His own mess, his own losses, the constant pull of the department, the steady stream of new students who needed guidance and structure and someone to keep them from making mistakes they couldn’t come back from.

All while Frank slipped further and further under.

Frank had always been high-energy, constantly moving, always talking, which made it easy to overlook the edges that didn’t quite fit. The mood swings. The sharper reactions. The moments that should have stood out but didn’t. Robby had written it off as exhaustion, as stress, as the job wearing someone down the way it always did, because that explanation fit, because it was easier to accept. Sometimes Frank was just Frank, and that had been enough at the time.

What did he always say? “We all have ADHD. Other clinics were too boring for us.”

He would laugh, brush it off, disappear down the hall before anyone could tell him to slow down, and Robby had let that be enough. He had taken it at face value, let it pass like everything else that didn’t immediately demand attention.

It shouldn’t have been.

Knowing that didn’t make it easier to carry. If anything, it made it heavier, because it meant that even when he thought he was doing his job right, even when he believed he was taking care of the people who relied on him, something still slipped through.

Something always did.

So maybe that was part of it… Maybe that was why Robby found himself paying a little more attention to Dennis than strictly necessary, why the kid kept ending up on his radar even when there were a dozen other things demanding it.

He could justify it easily enough if he wanted to. Professional interest. The kid had potential, and Robby had seen it from the start.

That first shift had been a disaster by every possible metric, the kind that chewed people up and spit them out before they even had time to figure out where they were standing, and Whitaker had taken it head-on. Robby had heard about the bodily fluid incidents, seen enough of it himself to know it hadn’t been exaggerated, and still the kid hadn’t folded. He’d kept going, kept showing up, kept trying even when it would have been easier to walk away and never come back.

Most of them did.

Whitaker hadn’t.

That alone would have been enough to mark him as someone worth watching.

And then–

Robby’s jaw tightened slightly as the memory pushed forward before he could stop it, uninvited and far too clear.

The makeshift morgue in peds had been too cold, too still, the kind of silence that didn’t actually feel quiet but pressed in from all sides until breathing itself felt like an effort. The air had clung to the back of his throat, metallic and wrong, and he hadn’t meant to end up there in the first place. He must have walked in to grab something, or to get away from the floor for a second, but the sequence blurred together now, one step turning into another until he was suddenly alone with it, with all of it, and there was nowhere left to redirect his attention.

His knees had hit the floor before he fully registered the movement.

Sh’ma Yisra’eil–

The words came out uneven, catching on breaths that refused to settle, his fingers curling tight around the chain at his throat like it was the only solid thing left anchoring him. His chest felt locked, something tight around his ribs that wouldn’t loosen no matter how hard he tried to pull in air. Every inhale came shallow, incomplete, like his body had forgotten how to finish the motion.

Adonai–

He couldn’t slow it down. Couldn’t get ahead of it.

The room shifted around him in a way that didn’t make sense, edges blurring and sharpening in quick succession, his vision narrowing and expanding without warning as his focus slipped out of his control. He knew what was happening, recognized it in the abstract, but that knowledge sat somewhere distant and useless while his body continued to spiral anyway.

Eloheinu–

His hand shook where it pressed against his sternum, like he could force his heart to steady if he just held it there hard enough, like pressure alone could fix it. It didn’t. Nothing did. The panic built regardless, sharp and relentless, familiar enough to make it worse because he should have had control over it by now.

Adonai echad–

He didn’t hear the door open. He didn’t register the shift in the room until a voice cut through it, too sudden, too alive for a space that had been holding still just seconds before.

“Whoa. Jeez.”

Robby flinched.

A sound broke through the pressure in a way that felt almost violent, his breath catching harder as something in him tried to reorient and failed, his focus stuttering as the world snapped back into place in pieces that didn’t quite fit together yet.

“Dr. Robby?”

No. Not now.

Adonai–

“Dr. Robby, you okay?”

The words didn’t land properly at first. They hovered just out of reach, like his brain couldn’t quite process them over everything else happening inside his chest, couldn’t prioritize them over the sheer, overwhelming need to get his breathing under control.

Barukh sheim k’vod malhkuto–

There was movement beside him, too close, too immediate, and Robby recoiled on instinct, his body pulling back before he could stop it, breath hitching into something tighter as awareness started to push its way back in. He recognized the kid a second too late, the realization cutting through the haze without actually fixing anything.

Of all people.

“You have to go,” Robby managed, the words rough and uneven as he forced them out, barely holding together. “You have to go. They need you out there.”

He needed him out there.

He needed–

“We need you out there.”

That caught.

Not enough to steady him, not enough to stop the spiral completely, but enough to shift something small and stubborn at the center of it, enough to register as something real outside of himself.

Robby shook his head, the motion uneven, his hand coming up to the back of his neck like he could hold himself in place, keep himself from slipping any further. His breathing still wouldn’t settle, still too fast, too shallow, each inhale catching halfway like his body had lost track of the rhythm.

“I can’t,” he said, quieter this time, because that was the truth of it in that moment. “I can’t.”

There was a brief pause, and then–

“Okay, come on, give me your hand.”

For a second, Robby almost laughed, or maybe choked on it, the reaction catching somewhere between disbelief and frustration because the suggestion didn’t make sense, because nothing about this made sense.

“I can’t.”

“You have to… because if you don’t, we’re fucked.”

The words landed differently that time. Not because of what he said, but how he said it.

Robby’s head lifted before he consciously decided to move, his gaze dragging up to meet Whitaker’s, and the world narrowed just enough for him to focus on something outside of himself. The kid looked terrified, not composed or steady or in control, but still there, still standing too close, still reaching out like leaving hadn’t even occurred to him.

Like Robby getting up mattered more than anything else happening outside that room.

That didn’t line up. That wasn’t how this was supposed to go.

The thought came slower than it should have, pushing through the panic instead of cutting cleanly through it.

He’s trying to help.

Robby stared at his hand like it belonged to someone else, like lifting it required a level of coordination he wasn’t entirely sure he had. His breathing still wouldn’t settle, his chest tight, each inhale catching halfway like his body had forgotten how to follow through, and for a moment everything in him resisted the motion, held in place by something instinctive and stubborn even as something quieter pushed back.

Then, slowly, he moved.

Whitaker’s grip closed around his hand without hesitation, firm and steady in a way that didn’t leave room for doubt, and Robby let himself be pulled forward. He let the movement carry him up, even when his balance lagged behind, even when his breathing hadn’t caught up yet.

The contact grounded him more than it should have, something solid cutting through the noise just enough to give him something to hold onto, and for a brief moment it worked, the panic loosening in uneven increments as he found his footing again.

It didn’t last.

The instinct to pull away came sharp and immediate, and Robby broke the contact before it could settle into anything else, his hand coming up with more force than necessary as he pushed Whitaker back. The movement was quick, decisive, creating distance in a way that felt safer, more controlled, even as his chest stayed tight and his breathing refused to fully even out.

Whitaker staggered slightly from the shove, catching himself quickly, and for a split second his gaze flicked up to Robby, something quiet and unmistakable in it, his eyes a little too open, a little too unguarded before he could pull it back. The expression didn’t fully settle, caught somewhere in between, like his face hadn’t decided yet what it was supposed to be, and there was a brief tightening at the edges that didn’t belong there, something that flickered through and was gone almost immediately, smoothed over so quickly it would have been easy to miss.

Robby didn’t miss it.

He looked away anyway.

Whitaker lingered there for a beat longer than necessary, like he wasn’t entirely sure what to do with the moment, his hand hovering before he reached for the blankets. There was a brief hesitation in the movement, small but there, before he committed to it, folding everything that had just happened into something practical, something that made it look like that had been the point all along.

“Okay… see you out there, Captain.”

And then he was gone.

Robby stayed where he was for a moment longer, the echo of the contact still lingering in his hand, his pulse loud and uneven in his ears as the panic slowly, reluctantly loosened its grip. Once the room fell quiet again, something in him gave way, a sharp, quiet sob slipping out before he could stop it, his eyes squeezing shut as he tried to force his breathing back into something steady, something controlled.

He’d been pulled out of worse before.

Robby knew what it felt like to have someone refuse to leave, to stay longer than they should have, to step in when he hadn’t asked for it. He also knew what it looked like from the other side, what it meant to be the one who stayed anyway, who ignored every warning sign and every attempt to push him out just to keep someone upright.

He’d done that for Jack.

After everything fell apart, after his loss hollowed Jack out in a way that made him mean and reckless and impossible to be around, Robby had stayed through all of it. Through the sharp words that were meant to land, through the silence that followed when that didn’t work, through every version of Jack that tried to make it easier to walk away. He had taken it and stayed anyway, because leaving hadn’t been an option, not really, not for him.

He knew exactly how much it took to stand there and not move, how much it cost to keep choosing it when it would have been easier to step back.

Which was probably why it stuck.

Because Whitaker hadn’t hesitated. He hadn’t second-guessed it, hadn’t backed off when Robby pulled away, hadn’t taken the easy way out when it would have made more sense to just leave him there and get back to the floor.

He’d stayed.

He tried to help Robby out of his own head, out of the panic poisoning his mind, and for some reason that landed harder than it should have. It settled somewhere deeper than it had any right to, sharper for the fact that it had come from someone who didn’t know him well enough to understand what he was stepping into.

It shouldn’t have meant anything beyond that. A student stepping in when an attending slipped, pulling him back together because the floor needed him functional and upright. That was all it was supposed to be. But somewhere along the way, that had shifted into something else, something Robby hadn’t been paying attention to until it was already there.

Robby hadn’t planned it. He didn’t plan attachments, especially not to students, and he had made that rule for a reason. It kept things clean, kept lines where they were supposed to be, kept him from repeating mistakes he already knew the outcome of. But Dennis had slipped past that without much effort, settling into his awareness in a way that felt gradual right up until it didn’t, until there wasn’t a clean point he could trace it back to anymore.

One shift he was just another MS4 passing through the department, and then, somewhere along the way, that stopped being entirely true. Robby couldn’t have said when it changed, only that it had.

He started noticing him without meaning to, not because of anything obvious he could have pointed to if someone asked, but through a collection of small things that settled into place over time. The way the kid flinched at first, all sharp edges and uncertainty, like he expected to be corrected before he even spoke, and the way that shifted under the smallest amount of attention, how quickly he steadied when someone gave him something to hold onto.

It didn’t take much. Just a word, a nod, a quiet confirmation that he was on the right track, and Dennis would straighten up like he’d been waiting for it.

Robby had given it without thinking, the kind of thing he did automatically on a floor like this, and only later realized how easily the kid responded to it, how quickly he adjusted around it.

It wasn’t obvious unless you were looking for it, but it was there, consistent enough that Robby started picking up on the pattern. The way Dennis looked to him before committing to something, the way he hovered just close enough to catch direction without asking for it outright, the way he settled when Robby stepped in, like that alone was enough to steady him.

It was… easy.

Too easy.

Dennis was earnest, soft-spoken in a way that didn’t get in the way of doing the job, willing to be guided and quick to adjust when he was. There was a steadiness there under the nerves, something that had grown since that first shift, something sharper tucked under the surface that showed itself in small flashes when he stopped second-guessing every move.

Robby had watched that happen in real time. Watched the kid go from barely holding it together to finding his footing, bit by bit, confidence building in ways that didn’t always show unless you knew what you were looking for.

And Robby did.  He always did.

Which meant it was easy to justify keeping an eye on him.

Dennis nearly got taken out by a gurney and Robby was already there before the kid even realized what had happened, hand closing around his arm, pulling him back into place like it was instinct instead of a decision. Dennis hesitated over a diagnosis, doubt creeping in just enough to slow him down, and Robby stepped in without thinking, steadying it with a brief squeeze to the shoulder, a quiet “you’re right, go with it,” watching the tension ease out of him almost immediately as he adjusted and moved forward again.

Small things. Routine things. Things Robby did for everyone.

That was what he told himself.

It didn’t explain why he noticed it more with Whitaker. It didn’t explain why the kid kept ending up exactly where Robby could reach him, like proximity itself had settled into something predictable, something Robby had started to rely on without meaning to.

If the last hours of the shift hadn’t already blurred together, that alone would have been enough to tip it further off balance.

The sharp click of heels cut through the noise before Robby even looked up, and something in him tightened on instinct as Gloria stepped directly into his path, cutting off whatever space he had left to breathe between patients. He didn’t bother pretending surprise. He just shifted his weight, already bracing for it as she launched straight into numbers, percentages, expectations delivered in that same clipped tone that never left room for interruption.

“Thirty-six percent, Robby. That’s the target. We are at eight. Eight. And only eleven percent of patients say they would recommend this department.”

Robby let her talk, his expression settling into something neutral out of habit while irritation built underneath, slow and familiar, the kind that didn’t burn hot enough to explode but didn’t go anywhere either. The floor kept moving behind her, voices overlapping, stretchers rolling past, the constant rhythm of the ER carrying on without them, and all he could think was how disconnected her numbers felt from the reality he was standing in.

“We are implementing new communication protocols. Patients need to feel seen.”

“They’d probably feel better if they weren’t waiting six hours,” he said, already knowing it wouldn’t matter.

“That’s not what we’re discussing.”

Of course it wasn’t.

He gave her something noncommittal eventually, something that sounded like agreement without actually solving anything, and the second she stepped out of his space, the pressure eased just enough for him to feel the shift in his shoulders, the faint release of tension he hadn’t consciously registered building.

And then Dennis was there.

Robby didn’t see him approach. He just… was, slipping into his orbit like he always did, close enough to register, close enough to interrupt, holding out his phone with that same tentative certainty, like he wasn’t entirely sure he was allowed to take up that space but had decided to do it anyway.

“Dr. Robby, I wanted to show you something.”

Robby’s attention shifted immediately, the interruption landing like relief, something clean and uncomplicated cutting through the leftover irritation. He leaned in just slightly, letting his focus settle on the screen without resistance.

The video was already playing, the rider leaning into a long, sweeping turn. The bike angled low in a way that only worked if you trusted it, if you understood exactly how far you could push before it pushed back. The throttle control was clean, no hesitation mid-turn, no correction that suggested uncertainty. Good posture, too. Relaxed where it mattered, tension only where it was needed to hold the line. The engine note dipped just slightly as they adjusted, then picked back up, clean and controlled, no wasted movement. Whoever it was knew what they were doing. You didn’t get that kind of line by accident.

“That’s a clean line,” Robby said, already tracking it. “Good control on the turn. You can tell they know what they’re doing.” He glanced at Dennis briefly, a small hint of a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth before he looked back at the screen for a moment longer, as if actually considering it. “Thinking about getting one?”

He could picture it too easily.

The weight of it under him, the way the world narrowed when you rode, everything else falling away until it was just the road, the machine, the control of it. It had always made sense to him in a way most things didn’t. Simple. Direct. You either handled it or you didn’t.

Dennis behind him, closer than he probably had any right to be, arms wrapped around Robby’s middle in that instinctive way people did when they weren’t used to riding, holding on just a little tighter every time Robby pushed the speed, every shift in weight translating directly through him. He could almost feel it, the press of it, the way the kid would tense at first and then settle as the rhythm of it took over, the way his grip would adjust without thinking, learning as he went. Robby wondered, briefly and far too clearly, if Dennis would try talking over the engine or go quiet, if he’d laugh or just hold on and trust him to handle it.

The thought lingered a second longer than it should have before Robby let it go.

Dennis had remembered.

That thought landed a beat later, softer, threading through everything else.

It hadn’t been important when Robby mentioned it to Jack. They’d been out in the ambulance bay, leaning against the wall between calls. Robby had said it casually, like it didn’t matter, like it was just something he’d been thinking about.

It had gotten exactly the reaction he was aiming for.

Jack’s eyes had narrowed almost immediately, his attention sharpening in that way it always did when he caught onto something, and he’d stepped in closer without hesitation, crowding into Robby’s space like he had every intention of turning a passing comment into something else entirely. Close enough that Robby had felt it, that familiar shift in the air, the edge of something that would have crossed at least three lines if he’d let it. There had been something else under it too, something quieter but just as clear, a disapproval Jack didn’t bother to hide, the idea of Robby getting back on a bike clearly not something he was willing to entertain without a fight.

Robby had stopped him before it got that far, a hand braced between them, half warning, half habit.

And Jack had the audacity to smirk at him before peeling away, all of that tension snapping cleanly back into place as soon as the ambulance doors burst open. He was already moving like nothing had happened, already calling out orders as they rolled the patient in, slipping into it like nothing had happened.

“Don’t even think about parking a motorcycle at my place,” Jack threw over his shoulder without looking back, voice easy and almost casual, like it wasn’t threaded with anything sharper underneath.

At the time, Robby hadn’t even registered that Dennis had stepped outside to help with the patient. But the kid would have heard that, must have, because somehow he’d held onto it, carrying that one offhand comment with him long enough to make the connection later, to see the clip and decide it was worth showing Robby.

It was such a small thing.

There was something quietly disarming about the way Dennis did that, the way he picked up on things that weren’t meant to matter and treated them like they did anyway, like they were worth remembering, worth returning to.

It was… endearing.

Robby let himself settle into it for a second, the tension from earlier bleeding out of him without resistance. His attention stayed on the screen, on Dennis, on the simple fact that this was easier than anything he’d been dealing with five minutes ago, something clean and contained that didn’t ask anything complicated of him.

Dennis shook his head quickly, stuttering out a few words as his eyes flickered from Robby to his phone and back again, like he couldn’t decide where to land. He was standing just a little too close, a little too flushed, a little too focused on something that clearly wasn’t just the video anymore. “No– I mean– I just– I just saw it.”

Robby’s gaze flicked up briefly, catching the stumble in his words, the way his focus had shifted somewhere else entirely, and then–

The sound cut through it.

Sharp. Distinct. Familiar in a way that bypassed thought entirely.

Robby’s brain recognized it before he consciously placed it, something immediate and instinctive snapping into place because he’d heard it too many times not to. He’d heard it from across rooms, from Jack’s phone lighting up at the worst possible moments, the same tone cutting through whatever space they were in like it belonged there.

For a fraction of a second neither of them moved.

Robby felt it, that brief suspension where everything held, the awareness sharpening without fully catching up yet, and then his gaze dropped back to the phone on instinct, following the source of the noise before he could stop himself.

Dennis froze. “I– I can– I mean–”

The notification lit up across the display, bright and impossible to ignore, the familiar app icon sitting there in clear, undeniable view, and Robby felt his focus narrow in the same instant. Everything else slipped out of reach like it had been cut away.

He didn’t need to read it.

He already knew.

Still, his eyes tracked it anyway, pulled there by habit, by recognition, by something automatic that didn’t give him the chance to look away in time. The message. The profile name.

For a moment Robby’s brain stalled, though it wasn’t from confusion. Quite the opposite, really. He understood what he was looking at too quickly. He had seen Jack’s profile picture too many times over the last months, had caught glimpses of the notifications lighting up his phone often enough to recognize it without effort, tied now to that stupid little hellhole of hookups Jack had dragged himself into, one Robby had never touched himself but knew well enough through proximity alone.

Jack.

And before anything else could catch up, before the implications had time to line up properly, before he could stop himself–

“Oh,” Robby said, calm, automatic, like he was identifying something obvious. “That’s Jack.”

The words landed, and Dennis went completely still.

And just like that, Robby’s brain caught up with what he had just done, the realization hitting a fraction too late to stop it, settling in with a clarity that made everything else fall into place whether he wanted it to or not. He felt the shift as clearly as if he’d caused it with his hands, the atmosphere between them tightening in a way that had nothing to do with the noise of the ER and everything to do with what he’d just said, with the way Dennis was looking at him now, wide-eyed and silent, like the ground had just dropped out from under him.

That was when the rest of it hit.

The notification, Dennis’s reaction, the timing, all of it aligning at once into something that made far too much sense in hindsight and absolutely none in the moment. Robby went very still, his thoughts catching half a step behind reality as the implications lined up in quick succession, each one worse than the last, and for a second all he could think was that he should not have said that out loud.

He knew what that notification was.

He knew who it was from.

And now Dennis knew that he knew.

There was no clean way out of that.

His gaze flicked back to the phone, then to Dennis, then away again, like looking at either of them directly might make it worse. His brain tried and failed to assemble a response that didn’t immediately dig him deeper into whatever this had just become. The instinct to fix it was there, automatic and familiar, but there was nothing to grab onto, no version of this that could be redirected into something normal.

Robby very briefly considered the possibility of simply deleting the last twenty seconds from his life.

The kid moved first.

Dennis jabbed at the screen harder than necessary, the motion abrupt, almost clumsy as he dismissed the notification and locked his phone like that might undo it, like that might somehow rewind the last few seconds into something survivable. The flush in his face only got worse as he took a step back, already putting distance between himself and Robby like proximity itself had become the problem and not Robby’s inability to keep his mouth shut.

Robby caught movement in his periphery.

Santos.

He saw her approaching the nurses’ station a second too late, the timing lining up in the worst possible way, and his hand twitched at his side on instinct, the urge to reach out and stop Dennis from walking straight into her almost immediate.

He didn’t.

Dennis did exactly that.

The collision was quick, awkward, and entirely avoidable if Robby had moved when he should have. Santos steadied him without thinking, one hand coming up automatically, and Robby watched the realization settle in across her face in real time.

Her eyes moved over Dennis first, quick and sharp, taking in everything at once, the flushed skin, the phone clutched too tight, the general look of someone who had just walked out of something he had no idea how to recover from.

Then her gaze shifted.

To Robby.

Back to Whitaker.

And then, inevitably, to the phone.

Something in her expression sharpened, curiosity settling in with that familiar edge that meant she had already picked up more than she should have, one eyebrow lifting slightly as the pieces started lining up behind her eyes.

Oh God. She was entirely too similar to Jack sometimes. No wonder he’d been warned, repeatedly, never to put the two of them on the same shift together. And now she was looking at him like that.

Dennis made a small, strangled sound.

And then he bolted.

Actually bolted, slipping past her in one quick movement, already turning, already moving, already putting distance between himself and the situation like it might fix something. His pace picked up immediately, uneven and too fast, and within seconds he disappeared down the hallway, swallowed by the noise of the ER.

Santos turned slightly, watching him go. Then she looked back at Robby.

Robby cleared his throat, the sound quieter than he intended, and reached for a chart off the counter like it had suddenly become the most important thing in the room. His focus dropped to it with deliberate intent, posture shifting just enough to signal busy, occupied, not engaging, even as he was still half a step behind everything that had just happened.

“Dr. Robby,” Santos said, her tone light, which somehow made it worse. “What the hell was that?”

Robby winced, small and quick, gone almost as soon as it registered.

He didn’t look at her.

He flipped the chart open instead, eyes scanning lines that didn’t settle into anything coherent right away, his attention catching and slipping before he forced it back into place. “Nothing,” he said, too easily, already leaning into it, into something that sounded neutral enough to end the conversation without actually answering it. “He’s fine.”

Santos made a noise.

Then she muttered something in Tagalog that Robby absolutely did not want to unpack, and he cleared his throat again, adjusting his grip on the chart as if that might anchor him back into something resembling control.

He didn’t get the chance to say anything else.

An incoming emergency cut through the moment, voices rising, movement shifting, the floor snapping back into focus around them, and for once, Robby was grateful for the interruption. It gave him something to do, something to focus on that wasn’t the last few minutes replaying themselves in increasingly unhelpful detail.

It didn’t fix anything.

What followed settled into something that would have been almost ridiculous if he’d been in the right headspace to appreciate it, something just shy of absurd if it hadn’t been so obviously tied to what had just happened.

Every time Robby caught sight of Dennis somewhere on the floor, the kid vanished just as quickly, slipping out of his line of sight with a kind of frantic precision that would have been impressive under different circumstances. He turned corners too sharply, redirected mid-step, nearly walked straight into a supply cart at one point before veering off like it had always been intentional, or disappeared into an open hallway like he’d just remembered something urgent that couldn’t possibly wait.

Robby saw all of it.

And he understood exactly why it was happening.

That was the problem.

Because one glimpse of Dennis and he was reminded of it… the look on Dennis’s face, the timing, the way everything had lined up in the worst possible way, and the embarrassment sat heavy under everything else, sharp enough that even thinking about calling him on it felt like a bad idea.

There were too many ways this could go wrong. Too many ways it already had.

The whole thing had the faint outline of an HR issue, and Robby had absolutely no interest in finding himself dragged into another seminar, because he couldn’t keep his personal life from bleeding into his work. That line had already blurred more than he liked, and he wasn’t interested in seeing how far it could be pushed before someone else decided it was a problem.

He still hadn’t quite recovered from the last ones.

Back in the 90s, when Jack had made a habit out of leaning in just a little too close, throwing out comments in that offhand way that was never actually casual, just to see Robby flush and lose his footing, pushing at boundaries like it was something to test rather than respect. It had taken exactly one complaint from a nurse who’d had enough of watching it happen for them both to get a slap on the wrist and three hours of sitting in a room listening to someone talk about appropriate workplace behavior while Jack looked entirely too entertained by the whole thing. Jack still did it, of course, but at least now he had the decency to keep it out of earshot.

There had been other ones too.

The time someone thought it was appropriate to run a betting pool at the nurses’ station, numbers scribbled on a whiteboard until Dana made it disappear without a word and everyone still somehow knew who owed who money, which should have been the end of it. It wasn’t. Someone reported it anyway, and suddenly it became a “professional conduct concern.” The whole thing dissolved and reformed like it had never really been shut down in the first place, and somehow that had only made it worse, because now the whole thing was being run by the security guards in broad daylight, completely out in the open, like that made it legitimate. Robby still had no idea how they weren’t getting caught.

The time a resident tried to prove a point by arm wrestling in the break room and took half a supply shelf down with him. Loud enough that patients heard it, which meant it turned into a safety issue instead of just stupidity, and that was apparently enough to justify another seminar.

The time Jack climbed onto the roof railing in full view of a patient’s family, and Robby ended up in a conversation about “modeling appropriate behavior,” like he’d been the one up there. Like he hadn’t been the one trying to get Jack back on the right side of the barrier before someone called it in. That one had come with a written warning and a follow-up training that Robby still suspected had been scheduled out of spite.

The time Princess and Perlah translated something just loudly enough in Tagalog that it turned into a department-wide rumor within ten minutes and somehow circled back to Gloria by the end of the shift. Half the story already twisted into something else by the time it reached her, which meant it got framed as “creating a hostile work environment,” whether that had been the intention or not.

The time a group of med students decided it was a good idea to practice suturing on each other in an empty room, and Robby walked in halfway through like he’d stepped into a malpractice case waiting to happen. One of them still holding a needle like that made it defensible, which, unsurprisingly, led to an immediate report and a mandatory session on patient safety that somehow included everyone.

Each time it ended the same way.

Someone reported it, or it got too visible to ignore, and suddenly Robby was sitting in another room that smelled faintly of disinfectant and burnt coffee, listening to someone explain policies he already knew, watching a slideshow that somehow managed to feel longer than an entire shift. It always came with sign-in sheets, forced participation, and those quiet glances around the room where everyone tried to figure out who had been the reason this time.

And then there had been Garcia and her ridiculous nicknames. Robby could still remember the exact moment Gloria caught wind of the nicknames, the way she shut it down immediately and then informed them they would all be attending another seminar

Which hadn’t actually stopped anything.

Garcia still called Whitaker “white chocolate” across the floor like she was announcing it to the entire department, still threw “Rabbit-bitch” at Robby whenever he got on her nerves, still referred to Langdon as “ER Ken” like it was his legal name.

And every time it happened Robby half expected Gloria to materialize out of nowhere and drag them all back into another mandatory training, the other shoe dropping the second anything slipped just a little too far past acceptable, like the Pitt existed in a constant state of being one bad comment away from another three-hour lecture no one had time for.

Hell, Robby was probably already on thin ice, just by the way he kept touching the kid.

It had started small, easy to justify. A hand on Dennis’s shoulder to steer him out of the way, guiding him through the chaos of the floor without breaking stride, something practical, something efficient. Then it turned into brief squeezes when he got something right, grounding him just enough to keep him moving forward without second-guessing himself. And sometimes it lingered longer than it needed to. A hand settling at the back of his neck instead of dropping away immediately, fingers brushing through the soft curls there without thinking about it, contact stretching just enough to cross into something that wasn’t strictly necessary anymore.

Robby noticed that. He noticed it every time and let it happen anyway.

He knew better.

Every other med student or resident would have reported that behavior by now. If it had been anyone else, it probably would have been a problem already, something that would have been flagged before it had the chance to turn into a pattern.

And that should have been enough to shut it down. It should have been simple. A line drawn and held, a correction made before it turned into something else, because Robby knew exactly how this worked. He had spent years telling other people where those lines were, stepping in when they got blurred, calling it out when it crossed into something it shouldn’t.

He knew what this looked like from the outside. He knew exactly how it would read to anyone who bothered to pay attention.

It didn’t stop him.

Because the truth of it was, Robby still couldn’t even properly make sense of what he felt for Jack, and that had been there for so long it had stopped feeling like something separate from him.

It had never settled into anything clean. Never something he could point to and define without qualifiers, something that stayed in one place long enough to understand. It shifted depending on what they needed from each other, changed shape without ever really disappearing, stretching and pulling until it fit whatever version of them existed at the time.

It had always been easier not to name it.

Easier to let it sit in that space between things, where it didn’t have to hold still long enough to be examined too closely, where it didn’t demand anything concrete from him.

Because the moment you tried to pin it down, it stopped making sense. It contradicted itself. It asked for things Robby didn’t know how to give without breaking something else in the process, without shifting something he’d spent years keeping contained.

It had also never gone away.

Not when they fought over things that didn’t matter until they did, arguments that spiralled into something sharper because neither of them knew how to stop once they started. Not when they kept ending up fucking each other because that was easier than saying anything out loud, easier than dealing with what it actually meant. Not when Jack found someone else and built a life that Robby didn’t quite fit into, even when he stayed close enough to orbit it, close enough that leaving would have meant cutting something out of himself he didn’t know how to live without.

And not when that life fell apart again.

Not when loss hollowed Jack out in ways Robby recognized too well, leaving something jagged behind that pushed back against everything, everyone. Robby had stayed through that too, through the sharp edges and the silence and the versions of Jack that made it very clear he was not easy to keep. He had stayed anyway, because leaving had never really been an option, not for him, not where Jack was concerned.

That had been constant. Complicated, frustrating, sometimes infuriating, but constant in a way Robby had learned to live around, to build himself around, until it stopped feeling like something separate from the rest of his life and more like a fixed point everything else moved around.

Which was exactly why this didn’t make sense.

Because Dennis wasn’t supposed to register like that, wasn’t supposed to slip into Robby’s awareness beyond what the job required, wasn’t supposed to become something he looked for without thinking, something that pulled his attention even when there were ten other things demanding it.

And yet, at some point, that line had shifted.

Robby couldn’t even say when it had happened.

One shift the kid had just been another med student trying to keep up, hovering at the edges, careful and unsure, and the next Robby was tracking him across the floor without meaning to. He noticed when he disappeared into a room, when he lingered too long over something, when his focus slipped just enough to matter. He found himself reaching out more often than necessary, adjusting, correcting, steadying, like Dennis had quietly become part of how he oriented himself in the middle of everything else.

It was subtle, and it was constant, and it didn’t feel accidental anymore.

He could try to explain it if he wanted to.

There were similarities between Jack and Whitaker if he looked for them.

The curls, softer on Dennis, less controlled but just as distracting when the light caught them right, that same underlying sharpness that only showed when he stopped second-guessing himself, when instinct took over and he trusted it. And something else, something Jack had mentioned once, that the kid was more mischievous than he looked, quieter, less practiced than Jack’s but there all the same if you knew what you were looking for.

It would have been easy to leave it at that.

It didn’t explain enough.

Because that didn’t account for the way Robby’s attention kept circling back, or the way his hand stayed a second too long, or the fact that he had started noticing things he had no business noticing at all. The way Dennis’s voice changed when he was uncertain. The way he looked to him before committing to a decision. The way he steadied under the smallest bit of praise like he’d been waiting for it.

And that was where it stopped being something he could ignore.

Because it wasn’t just professional anymore, wasn’t just mentorship or habit or instinct, it was something else, something that sat under all of it, persistent and uncomfortable and impossible to neatly file away. Something that didn’t belong here, not in this context, not with this kind of imbalance, not with everything else already tangled up in it.

Robby didn’t have a clean way to deal with that.

He also didn’t have the luxury of pretending it wouldn’t matter.

Because if this went wrong, it wouldn’t land on him the way it would on Dennis. Robby would get a warning, a conversation, maybe another seminar he’d sit through and forget the moment he stepped back onto the floor. Dennis would be the one dealing with the fallout, the kind that stuck, that followed him through evaluations and attendings’ opinions, that made everything just a little harder in ways that didn’t show up on paper but still mattered.

And Robby wasn’t going to be the reason for that. That part, at least, was clear.

What wasn’t clear was why that certainty didn’t immediately fix the rest of it.

Because Dennis looked at him like he mattered. Not in any way that was overt or demanding, nothing that would draw attention if you weren’t paying for it, but there in the way he hovered, the way he listened, the way he adjusted himself around whatever Robby needed without being told. It was quiet, easy to miss if you weren’t looking for it, and impossible to ignore once you were.

Robby had seen it.

He knew exactly what it was.

A crush, misguided, inconvenient, obvious if you knew where to look, and he had done nothing to stop it, because it was easy, because the kid was sweet, because it felt good in a way Robby didn’t want to examine too closely or unpack into something that required action.

And Jack – of course Jack knew. He always did.

Robby didn’t know if that made it better or worse, because Jack didn’t just notice it and leave it alone. He let it sit just long enough for Robby to become aware of it, and then he pushed, in that way he always did, a comment that landed too close to the truth, a look that said he’d already put the pieces together.

And then he’d go a step further, encouraging it in his own way, subtle enough that it could be denied if it needed to be, but deliberate all the same, like he saw the same things Robby did in Whitaker and had already decided it was worth watching, worth seeing what Robby would do with it.

Before closing the distance like it didn’t matter, like none of it mattered, like Robby wasn’t standing there trying to keep his footing while everything else shifted just slightly out of place, like it was all a game Jack had already figured out how to win.

And then he’d kiss him stupid.

Jack knew exactly which buttons he had to press to get Robby worked up and right where he wanted him, and it should have scared him more than it did. It should have set off something sharper than the quiet acceptance that settled in instead, because Jack had always been the one relationship Robby hadn’t managed to walk away from.

Everything else came with an exit built into it, something temporary, something that could be let go before it had the chance to matter too much, something that stayed contained as long as he kept it that way.

Jack didn’t.

Robby still had the occasional girlfriend, something that fit into the gaps, something easy to step into and out of without too much fallout, even if Jack rolled his eyes about it and called it the “seven-week itch,” like it was a pattern Robby had consciously chosen instead of something he kept falling back into because it was easier than dealing with anything that lasted longer.

Robby hated that name, mostly because it wasn’t wrong. Because without it, without something that kept things contained and manageable, he was left with the part he didn’t quite know how to deal with, the part that made commitment feel heavier than it should have been, whether it was with women or with Jack.

Because what if he fucked it up.

What if he pushed too far, or not far enough, or said the wrong thing at the wrong time and watched something that had held for years finally break in a way that didn’t come back together.

What if he lost Jack.

That thought sat there longer than it should have, heavier than it had any right to be, settling somewhere in his chest and refusing to move. Underneath it, quieter but just as persistent, was the rest of it, the hesitation he had never quite managed to shake, the instinct to pull back before anything settled into something he couldn’t walk away from, tangled up in things he didn’t like looking at too closely.

Fear, judgment, the possibility of disappointing Jack in ways he couldn’t take back, or worse, finding out that whatever this was didn’t hold up once they actually tried to call it something real, something that required more than what they’d been doing all these years.

He wouldn’t have minded being in love with Jack, not really, and if Jack weren’t – no.

That had never been the actual problem, not in any way that held up under scrutiny, and Robby knew that well enough not to pretend otherwise, even if it would have been easier to blame it on that instead of everything else sitting underneath.

It had been a while since the last girlfriend, long enough that the pattern had started to thin out at the edges, long enough that the absence of it felt more intentional than accidental. Robby found himself thinking, more often than he liked to admit, that maybe he was ready for something that lasted longer than seven weeks, something that didn’t come with an exit already built into it.

With Jack.

He could have left it there, left it unspoken and untouched the way he always did, and maybe it would have stayed manageable. And then Dennis had gone and complicated it, slipping in somewhere along the way without asking, without meaning to, and settling just deep enough under Robby’s skin to make everything else feel less straightforward than it had a few weeks ago.

Which brought Robby right back to the situation he was currently stuck in, one that had already been complicated enough on its own and had somehow managed to get worse the second Jack chose exactly the wrong day to show up early for his shift.

Robby had tried to play it off, falling into the same routine they always did, something familiar enough to hide behind, but he knew the moment he couldn’t quite bring himself to meet Jack’s eyes when he greeted him that it hadn’t worked. Whatever this was had already tipped just far enough out of place to be noticeable, and that was all it took..

Jack caught things like that. He always had.

And of course he lit up for it.

Robby saw it in the way Jack’s attention sharpened, in the way his mouth pulled into something just shy of a grin, something that meant he had already picked up on it and was now just waiting to figure out the rest. It had the same energy as a kid on its birthday, like he’d just been handed something interesting to unwrap, and if the way his gaze kept flicking between Robby and Dennis was anything to go by, it wasn’t going to take him long to get there.

He would corner one of them.

Probably both.

Robby had been counting on time, on the shift getting busy enough to bury it, on enough distance and distraction to make it through without Jack deciding to poke at it directly, to pull at the thread until the whole thing unraveled.

That had been optimistic at best.

They didn’t even make it to the end of the shift.

The universe, apparently, had decided this was funny.

Because the second Robby thought he might get away with it, might make it through without Jack pulling the thread, Dennis stepped back into his line of sight like he’d been placed there on purpose, and everything tightened all at once, his focus snapping to him before he could stop it.

The timing was bad enough on its own.

The phone going off made it worse.

Dennis froze mid-step, the movement cutting short in a way that was almost abrupt, like his body had stalled out before his brain could catch up, and Robby felt the reaction hit a second later, sharp and immediate, something in his chest tightening in a way that had nothing to do with the noise itself and everything to do with what it meant.

Not again.

Not here.

He didn’t need to look at Jack to know he’d noticed.

He did anyway.

And then, because there didn’t seem to be a better option, because standing there and waiting for Jack to connect the dots felt worse, Robby did the only rational thing he could do and tried avoiding Jack the same way Dennis had been avoiding him, which might have worked if it had been anyone else.

But Jack had spent years learning exactly how Robby moved, how he thought, how he reacted when something was off, and he adjusted accordingly without ever making it obvious he was doing it. It wasn’t something Robby could track in the moment. It only registered after the fact, in the way Jack kept ending up exactly where he shouldn’t have been able to.

He didn’t chase him down or call him out across the floor. He didn’t force the issue where anyone else could see it. He just shifted his timing, altered his path, and showed up exactly where Robby didn’t want him to be, with an ease that made it clear this wasn’t guesswork.

Which was how Robby ended up walking straight into it anyway, barely registering what had happened until Jack had him cornered in an empty trauma bay.

Robby realized too late that he’d boxed himself in. There was no clean way past him without making it obvious, and Jack knew it.

For a second, neither of them said anything, the noise of the ER bleeding faintly through the walls, close enough to remind him this was a terrible place for this, not private enough, not far enough removed, and still Jack looked at him like none of that mattered, like he had all the time in the world. Like Robby wasn’t already running out of it.

Jack tilted his head slightly, watching him with that same open curiosity he never bothered to hide, and Robby could feel himself bracing for it before a word was even said, his shoulders tightening in anticipation of something he couldn’t quite name but knew was coming anyway.

“You’re making this worse, you know that, right?” Jack said, tone easy, almost conversational. “If you’d just told me to mind my business, I might have considered it.”

Robby exhaled slowly, keeping his gaze somewhere past Jack’s shoulder instead of meeting it, like not engaging might buy him something, even though it never had, not with Jack, not when he already had his attention locked in like this.

Silence stretched, heavy as it settled into him. It pressed behind his ribs with a weight that made it harder to pull in a full breath, something tight and uncomfortable that refused to shift. The expectation sat there, the certainty that it wouldn’t break on its own, and he dragged a hand down his face just to have something to do, something physical to anchor himself with while his thoughts lagged a step behind everything else.

But Jack’s mouth pulled slightly at the corner like he’d seen enough already.

“There’s no point pretending, Mikey,” Jack said quietly. “So just tell me.”

A beat.

“I’ll figure it out anyway.”

Of course he would. Robby’s jaw tightened before he could stop it, and he forced it to ease, dropping his hand and finally looking at him because avoiding it wasn’t helping anymore, wasn’t buying him anything except more time for Jack to fill in the gaps himself.

“You’re reading into it,” he said. “It’s nothing.”

Even as he said it, he knew it didn’t land right.

Jack didn’t answer, just looked at him, and that was worse, because Robby could feel himself being read, the tension in his shoulders, the way his focus kept slipping, the fact that he was already halfway out of this conversation in his head.

“Right,” Jack said at last.

And then he moved like he was done, pushing off the doorway, shifting his weight like he’d lost interest, like Robby had managed to shut it down. Robby didn’t believe it for a second. He felt it instead, the way the pressure didn’t disappear, just changed shape, settled differently without actually going anywhere.

“So it’s not Whitaker.”

Robby’s head turned before he could stop himself, the reaction immediate and unthinking.

Fuck.

“Got it,” Jack said, almost pleasantly.

Robby exhaled sharply, gaze dropping as he tried to pull it back, to undo it, to–

“It’s not–” he started, then cut himself off, because there was no version of that sentence that didn’t make it worse.

“C’mon,” Jack said, stepping closer, his voice dropping just enough to make it feel more private than it was. “You can do better than that, Michael.”

Robby felt it, the immediate tightening in his shoulders, the way his body reacted before his brain caught up, the response already there before he could control it, already giving something away whether he wanted it to or not.

“Don’t make me work for it,” Jack added, softer. “Be a good boy and just tell me.”

Robby’s head snapped up.

The reaction hit harder than it should have, something that bypassed thought entirely and landed somewhere lower, deeper, familiar in a way that had nothing to do with this conversation and everything to do with contexts they did not touch at work. It wasn’t even the words themselves, not really, but the way Jack said it, easy and measured, like he knew exactly what he was doing, like he knew exactly which line he was brushing up against and chose not to stop.

That was new. Or not new, exactly, but misplaced, dragged out of somewhere private and dropped here, in the middle of a trauma bay with the ER still breathing just beyond the curtain.  Jack didn’t do that here. They didn’t do that here.

And the worst part was that Robby felt it anyway, the instinctive pull of it, the way his body reacted before his brain could catch up and shut it down, irritation flaring fast to cover it, to push it back into something safer, something he could actually control.

“Absolutely not.”

Jack laughed, low and satisfied, like that had been the point, like he’d been waiting for that exact reaction.

“Yeah,” he said lightly. “That’s about the reaction I expected.”

Robby set his jaw, irritation pushing up sharper now, easier to hold onto than anything else sitting underneath it, something solid to brace against, something that didn’t leave room for the way that word had landed or the fact that Jack knew it would.

“You’re bad at this today,” Jack went on. “Usually you at least pretend better.”

Robby let out a breath that almost passed for a laugh, dragging a hand over the back of his neck, buying himself a second.

“I don’t know what you think you saw–”

“Oh, I know exactly what I saw,” Jack cut in. “You heard that notification and damn near stopped breathing. Whitaker looked like he was about to pass out. And now both of you are acting like you’ve signed some kind of mutual restraining order.”

Robby didn’t answer, because there wasn’t anything he could say that wouldn’t make it worse, nothing that wouldn’t confirm exactly what Jack was already circling.

“Which would almost be funny,” Jack added, “if I wasn’t suddenly involved in it.”

His gaze snapped back to Jack before he could stop it, pulled there on instinct, like his body had already decided before his brain caught up. He felt it a second too late, the way he’d just handed something over without meaning to, something he couldn’t take back once it was out there.

“Yeah,” Jack said quietly. “Thought so.”

Robby felt his shoulders pull tighter, the tension settling deeper. “You’re making assumptions.”

“Am I?” Jack shifted slightly, just enough to stay in the way without making it obvious. “Because from where I’m standing, either Whitaker started talking to someone he shouldn’t have–”

Robby’s expression tightened before he could stop it, something in him giving just enough to be seen, too quick to catch and already gone by the time he tried to pull it back.

“–or,” Jack continued, not pausing, “you did.”

Silence dropped between them, heavy as it settled, and Robby didn’t move, didn’t speak, could feel the exact second it landed, the moment Jack stopped guessing and started knowing.

“Wow,” Jack said quietly. “Okay.”

Robby closed his eyes briefly, then shook his head. “Drop it.”

Jack didn’t.

“You really want me to?” he asked, quieter now. “Because right now I’m working with very little information and still getting pretty close.”

Robby stayed silent, but he knew it showed anyway, knew he wasn’t hiding it nearly as well as he thought.

“Let me help you out,” Jack said. “You can keep dodging me, which is fun for a bit, or you can just tell me what the hell is going on so I stop guessing out loud.”

A beat, brief but pointed.

“Your call, Michael.”

Robby held his gaze for a second longer, then dragged a hand over his face again, trying to reset, trying to push it down into something manageable, something–

It didn’t work.

Jack’s hand closed around his arm, firm and grounding, and for a second Robby’s brain didn’t catch up to it at all, the contact registering somewhere lower, somewhere faster, before anything else had the chance to interfere. The spiral didn’t stop, thoughts still stacking too quickly to sort through, but something in him caught on the pressure of it anyway, the steadiness, the fact that Jack was right there, solid and unmovable in a way nothing else in the last twenty minutes had been.

It should have made it worse. It should have pushed him further off balance, another variable in something already slipping, but instead it pulled him in just enough to hold him there, the edge of it dulling as his focus snagged on something real, something he could actually feel instead of everything running ahead of him. His chest still felt tight, his thoughts still loud, but there was something under it now, something that kept it from tipping any further, and he hated how easily his body responded to that, how quickly it settled around the contact like it had been waiting for it.

He stayed where he was, not pulling away, not leaning into it either, just caught in the middle of it, aware of his own breathing in a way he hadn’t been a second ago, aware of the way Jack’s grip held him there without forcing it. For a moment, that was enough to keep him upright, enough to keep everything from sliding any further out of his control.

“Brother,” Jack said, softer now, “just talk to me.”

“This is exactly why I don’t want to tell you,” Robby muttered.

Jack smiled. “Oh, you’re definitely telling me.”

Robby shot him a look that would have shut anyone else up, sharp and warning, and entirely ineffective, and he knew it even as he did it, felt it in the way nothing shifted, nothing gave. It didn’t work. It never worked.

He exhaled again, sharper this time, but it didn’t come with the same resistance. Something in him already tipping, already giving way whether he wanted it to or not, the words sitting right there, too close to hold onto much longer.

“I know your profile.”

Jack tilted his head slightly, like he was considering it, like the question was still open, and Robby knew immediately that he wasn’t taking the bait, that whatever Jack had already put together wasn’t going to be handed back that easily. The look sat too carefully on his face, too controlled to be anything but intentional, and Robby felt the shift of it settle under his skin, the quiet certainty that Jack was already ahead of him and just choosing how to play it.

“Do you.”

He didn’t rise to it. Just held Jack’s gaze, steady and a little too deliberate, letting his expression settle into something that felt flat from the outside and a lot less controlled underneath, the words already there before he could second-guess them.

“I saw it on his phone.”

And there it was.

Robby watched it click, fast and precise, the shift so clean it was almost invisible if you didn’t know what to look for. Jack’s focus sharpening as the pieces lined up all at once, everything falling into place with a kind of certainty that left no room for anything else.

“…huh.”

Jack’s gaze dipped for a fraction of a second, following the thought through, and Robby could practically see the pieces line up – Whitaker, the notification, him, the timing, everything.

“Oh,” Jack said, quieter now.

A pause that stretched just long enough to settle.

Then–

“You’ve got to be kidding me.”

Robby just shrugged, like that might take some of the weight out of it, his hand coming up to scratch at his beard in a gesture that felt easier than saying anything else, easier than engaging with the way Jack had lit up in front of him, something sharp and bright settling into his expression like he’d just been handed something he was very much looking forward to.

Robby caught the look, the way it turned just a little too mischievous, a little too interested, and felt the immediate drop in his patience. Whatever came next was going to be unbearable. Worse, Jack was clearly already enjoying himself.

“Just leave it,” Robby said, leveling him with a look that would have shut most people down.

Jack just smiled at him, wide and open, all innocence on the surface, and none of it reaching where it mattered. It didn’t hide anything. It never did. If anything, it made it worse, the contrast of it, the way Robby could still see the calculation underneath, the interest, the fact that Jack had already decided this was something worth poking at.

Jack had always been like that. He thrived on it, on the chaos, on the way things unraveled when you pushed them just a little too far, and Robby had been drawn to that once, pulled in by it in a way that had made sense at the time, that had felt inevitable.

Now, standing there with Jack looking at him like that, Robby seriously reconsidered every decision that had led him here.

“Mikey,” Jack started, his grin slipping into something sharper that made Robby’s skin prickle, “you’re telling me our Whitaker is embarrassed because of me? And you, cause you couldn’t keep your mouth shut?”

Robby ignored the bait, jaw tightening instead. “Jack…”

“Don’t ‘Jack’ me, this is the most interesting shit since that guy tried to walk into triage with a nail gun still embedded in his thigh and argued about wait times.”

“The kid is mortified…”

Jack just smirked at him, tapping his chin thoughtfully like he was considering something amusing instead of anything remotely serious. Robby felt the shift of it immediately, the way Jack settled into it, already a step ahead, already enjoying himself in a way that meant this was about to get worse before it got better.

Robby should have known Jack would be the reason he went down earlier than expected. It felt obvious in hindsight, like something he should have accounted for from the start, because the second Jack had enough of torturing him in the trauma bay, he shifted focus like it was the most natural thing in the world and set his sights on Whitaker instead.

Robby barely had time to register it before Jack was gone, slipping back into the department with that deliberately casual stride that only ever meant he was about to do something he shouldn’t. There was nothing hurried about it, nothing that would draw attention if you didn’t already know what to look for, and that was what made it worse.

While Robby was still trying to maintain some version of distance, still working around the edges of Dennis’s avoidance like that might be enough to keep things contained, Jack cut straight through it. Without hesitation or adjustment, he just broke the pattern cleanly as he planted himself directly in Whitaker’s path like he’d been aiming for it all along.

Robby saw it happen in real time.

Dennis didn’t.

He walked straight into Jack’s chest.

Robby had to actively resist the urge to say something he wouldn’t be able to take back as Jack glanced up and winked at him, quick and cheeky, like a private acknowledgment of exactly what he was doing. Then his attention dropped back down to Dennis, a smile settling into something just a little too sharp to be called friendly. His hand came up automatically, steadying Dennis at the waist before sliding to his shoulder, holding him there a fraction longer than necessary, like he was making a point of it.

“Careful there, Whit,” Jack said easily. “You alright?”

Dennis froze.

The flush came back fast, climbing up his neck and settling high across his face, and his eyes flickered between Jack and Robby like he didn’t know where to land, like both options were equally bad and neither offered a way out. His attention caught on Jack’s hands for a second too long before he ducked his head, words tangling over themselves as he tried to recover, trying and failing to find something that sounded normal.

“Y-yeah… I mean– I should– Santos needs–”

Jack hummed, entirely amused, like that had been exactly the reaction he was hoping for, like he’d been waiting for the kid to trip over himself like that.

Robby felt his grip tighten around the stethoscope at his neck, the movement small but intentional, something to ground himself with before he did something worse. There was a very brief, very real moment where wrapping it around his own neck and letting Myrna yank would have felt justified. Or letting Myrna pinch his ass again. Probably less painful than watching this unfold in real time, less frustrating than standing here and letting Jack get away with it while looking so unbearable pleased with himself.

He caught Dana’s eyes across the nurses’ station. She had one hand on the phone, her attention split between whatever call she was on and the situation unfolding in front of her, and the look she gave him was sharp enough to land even from across the room, cutting straight through the noise of the ER like it was nothing. Robby already knew that look. Dana didn’t care what kind of disaster people got up on their own time, but the second it spilled onto her floor and started disrupting traffic patterns, she took it personally.

“For Christ’s sake,” she said, not even bothering to lower her voice, “whatever that is, stop doing it in my ER.”

Jack turned his head, smiling at her with wide, practiced innocence that didn’t fool anyone, his hand squeezing Dennis’s shoulder again just enough to throw him off balance before letting go entirely. The kid immediately tripped over his own feet, catching himself awkwardly as he tried to recover some kind of dignity on the way out.

“I have no idea what you’re implying.”

Bullshit.

Dana hummed at that, unimpressed, rolling her eyes before pointing two fingers at her own eyes, then at Jack, and finally extending the gesture toward Robby like a warning she didn’t feel the need to repeat out loud. Like she already knew that neither of them were going to listen and wanted it on the record that she at least tried.

Jack just shrugged it off, watching Dennis scramble away with open amusement before sauntering back toward Robby’s corner and leaning against the wall like he hadn’t just caused the entire situation in the first place.

Robby glared at him.

Jack looked entirely too satisfied with himself for someone who had just blown up what little stability Robby had managed to scrape together. He didn’t even attempt to hide it. If anything, Jack looked proud of himself, like watching everything spiral counted as a successful use of his afternoon. Which, honestly, it probably did.

For a brief second, Robby seriously considered pulling rank on him. Technically, he could. Robby was still the attending on shift, which meant Jack answered to him until handoff, at least officially… on paper. He could tell him to knock it off, tell him to stop screwing with residents and med students in the middle of the department, tell him to act like a normal human being for once, and Jack would probably comply.

For maybe thirty seconds.

The problem was that Jack treated authority like a puzzle designed for him personally. The second someone tried to box him in, he started looking for seams to slip through, loopholes to exploit, ways to push right up against the line without technically crossing it. Half the reason Jack survived in emergency medicine at all was because he had somehow turned antagonizing authority figures into an art form. And judging by the smug way he was lounging against the wall now, he already knew what Robby was thinking anyway.

“Don’t,” Robby said finally, voice flat with warning.

Jack’s smile sharpened immediately, which really just proved Robby’s point. “Aw, c’mon, Michael. I barely did anything.”

Robby almost laughed at that. Barely anything… Jack had practically hunted Dennis down for sports the second he realized the kid was avoiding both of them.

“You nearly short-circuited the kid in the middle of the ER,” Robby hissed, trying to keep his voice low enough to not envoke the wrath of Dana. The last thing he needed was her deciding this had officially become disruptive enough to intervene personally.

“You really should appreciate the artistry a little more.”

“Artistry,” Robby repeated, deadpan.

“You saw him. Whitaker practically forgot how to breathe.”

Robby had seen him. That was part of the problem. Dennis had looked so genuinely overwhelmed by the interaction that the guilt had landed almost immediately underneath the irritation, because none of this would have happened if Robby had just kept his mouth shut in the first place.

“That’s because you’re being a menace.”

“Mm.” Jack tilted his head slightly, entirely unbothered by the accusation. “Counterpoint. It’s funny.”

Robby stared at him for a second, briefly wondering if homicide would still count as premeditated if the entire department agreed the victim had it coming, or whether strangling him in the middle of the ER would actually be worth the paperwork.

“You’re making it worse,” he muttered.

Jack looked almost offended by that. “Me?”

“Yes, you.”

“I’m not the one who identified my Grindr profile out loud in front of the poor kid.”

Robby closed his eyes briefly. Fuck. Hearing it repeated somehow made it worse. Saying it out loud again cemented the reality of it in a way he deeply resented.

Of course Jack wasn’t mortified. If anything, he looked delighted by the entire situation, already storing every reaction away for future use. Robby could practically see it happening in real time and immediately regretted every decision that had led here. Jack was going to hold this over him for the next decade minimum.

“You should’ve seen your face,” Jack said, laughing quietly to himself.

“I lived it.”

“Oh, don’t sound so miserable.” Jack tilted his head slightly, studying him now with open curiosity. “I didn’t realize Whitaker getting flustered around you was this bad.”

“It’s… not.”

Jack raised an eyebrow.

Robby immediately regretted answering at all.

“You know,” Jack continued, voice taking on that thoughtful tone that usually meant trouble, “I actually think Whitaker’s avoiding me more than he’s avoiding you right now, which is kinda impressive considering you’re his direct supervisor and also the reason he wants to dissolve into the floor.”

Robby scrubbed a hand down his face again, already exhausted by the conversation and by the fact that Jack clearly planned on stretching it out as long as possible. The worst part was that Jack wasn’t entirely wrong. Dennis had looked at him earlier like eye contact itself might kill him.

“The kid’s embarrassed enough already,” he muttered. “Can you stop making it worse and just leave him alone for five minutes?”

Jack looked genuinely thoughtful for a moment, like he was honestly considering the request. Which meant absolutely nothing.

“No,” he decided. “I don’t think I can..”

“Jack.”

“What?” He spread his hands slightly, innocence settling over his expression in a way that would have been more convincing if Robby hadn’t known him for half his life. “One of us has to get this moving, because at this rate Whitaker’s gonna spend the next three months fleeing every hallway you walk down.”

Robby stared at him, his brain catching slightly on the phrasing.

One of us.

Jack said it so casually, like this had already become a shared problem, a shared interest, something they were both involved in whether Robby liked it or not. Maybe that should have bothered him more than it did. Maybe he should have shut it down immediately instead of standing there letting the implication settle under his skin. Instead, he just felt the slow, sinking certainty that Jack had fully latched onto this now, and that there was absolutely no chance he was going to let it go anytime soon.

Which was a problem, because Jack got like this whenever something genuinely interested him. Curious in a way that always turned invasive eventually, all sharp observation and relentless nudging until he’d pulled every reaction he wanted out of the people around him. And right now he looked downright fascinated. Worse, he looked welcoming.

Jack, apparently deciding he hadn’t done enough damage yet, just kept going.

“You’re both doing the same thing,” he said, almost conversationally now, like he wasn’t talking about something that made Robby want to walk directly into traffic. “He panics and runs every time you look at him, and you keep pretending this is gonna magically resolve itself if you ignore it hard enough.”

“It’s not a thing,” Robby said automatically, even though the words felt weak the second they left his mouth.

Jack’s expression turned deeply unimpressed. “Michael…. He looked ready to burst into flames because you recognized a Grindr notification.” A beat. “That’s a thing.”

Robby groaned quietly under his breath. He hated that Jack could reduce the entire situation down to one humiliatingly accurate sentence and somehow make it impossible to argue with.

“Relax,” Jack added, completely unhelpful. “I’m not gonna eat him alive.”

Another beat.

“Probably.”

Robby shot him another sharp look, and Jack just grinned straight through it, completely immune after all these years. That was the problem with him. The second Jack got genuinely invested in something, there was no redirecting him anymore, no convincing him to back off once he’d decided something was worth his attention.

And judging by the look on his face right now, Jack was very, very invested.

Jack’s grin lingered for another second before he pushed off the wall again, stopping close enough that Robby could feel the heat of him at his side before he leaned in slightly, casual as anything, like he wasn’t about to make the situation infinitely worse.

“Maybe we should just take him home,” Jack murmured, voice low and threaded through with amusement. “Poor kid looks overwhelmed enough already. Think we’re both exactly his type, too, which really doesn’t seem fair on him. He might actually die if either of us flirts with him again.”

Robby nearly choked on air.

“What–” he started, the word catching badly enough that Jack’s smirk widened immediately. “Jack, are you–”

Jack just looked delighted by the reaction, all sharp amusement and effortless confidence as he straightened again. “See? That right there.” He gestured vaguely toward Robby’s face like he’d just proven something important. “You’re making this way too easy.”

“Jesus Christ,” Robby muttered, already feeling heat climb up the back of his neck, which only made the whole thing worse.

Jack laughed softly under his breath, clearly pleased with himself, and then, before Robby could recover enough to threaten him properly, he was already moving again, peeling back into the chaos of the ER like he hadn’t just deliberately detonated another problem in Robby’s lap.

✦••──────────•• ✧ ••──────────••✦

I didn’t plan for this chapter to be that long. I just kept adding more lore and, well, now we’re here 😂

I thought about splitting the chapter into two parts, but I couldn’t find a good place to cut it, so now you all have to deal with one massive update.

BTW, I went back and changed a few lines about the app in previous chapters. Nothing major, just making things a little more accurate. And I might have added some more CSS screenshots from ao3 too, like a Grindr notification in chapter 2 and Dennis’s lock screen in chapter 4 👀

I downloaded Grindr to get the layout right for future CSS use for ao3 👀 Turns out I’m way too ace for dating apps 😂

And yes, I will absolutely make it a thing to include my best friend’s reactions at the end of chapters now:

“Uhm. Excuse me… did you kiss the brick before you threw it at me?! GURL. Robby imagining Dennis on a motorcycle with him???? Didn’t know I needed that. I want more (I have more but still).”