Hi!

Or, in the case of the fourteen year old girl you have sitting in North-5, one lung breathing and one lung hypoventilating. You’re looking at her x-rays now, knowing you’re going to have to get her into surgery and bracing yourself to tell her parents. 

“They’re lungs.”

Robby is standing behind you, squinting down at you under the flickering hospital lights. He’s not wearing his glasses, so you almost want to hit him back with a quip about how does he know they’re lungs, old man. Your mouth is dry and you sit there for too long that it wouldn’t be witty if you did say it. 

“You okay, kid?” He presses when you don’t respond. 

You know you’re being strange, can’t help it when you feel like this (though exactly what this is, is up for debate. Amongst yourself), and you have to scramble to say something. “Yeah, hi. Sorry. Lungs.” Your voice sounds strange. Too soft. Inauthentic. 

“One’s got a pneumo?” He asks.

You nod, practically shoving the pictures into his hand. “Yeah, I’m getting her up to the OR now.” He examines the lungs for a moment, long enough that you think something must be wrong. Confidence in your diagnoses is something you struggle with - you assume (there’s still that voice in the back of your head that tells you confidence isn’t the problem, instead it’s the diagnoses that need working on). Every time Robby or Abbot or even Shen, who doesn’t really feel like your boss, checks over your work your pulse starts rushing like they’re going to decide you’re actually such a bad doctor that there’s no point in you even completing your residency so you might as well go home now. 

“Good, yeah, she needs it.” Robby nods affirmingly, passing you back the images. His eyes linger on you for a second longer than they should. You’re the one who has to break eye contact, not liking the way that his eyes seem to bare straight into you. 

You don’t like it when Robby looks at you, not like that anyway. Not in like, a HR violation way, just like he’s examining you in a way you aren’t ready to be seen in.

“We’re going to round for handoffs soon.” He speaks up again, softly. “You’re off the rest of the week aren’t you?” Robby’s voice goes high at the end of his sentence and he shoves his hands in his pockets. 

You really do like Robby, there’s a reason you turned down the night shift residency offer you got from Gloria. It had been a tempting offer too.

It’s a rare moment of quiet in the ER, and you’re hoping silently to yourself it stays that way. Not daring to actually utter the hope, not wanting to jinx it. You’re not necessarily superstitious, but you’re not going to utter the Q-word so close to the end of your shift.

“Yeah, three whole days off.” You try and say it casually, but the words don’t sound right coming out of your voice. You have a lot of different voices, a lot of pitches and tones. You genuinely have no clue which one is your natural state. 

Robby sounds even when he talks, a sound you could pick out with your eyes closed. “That’s good. You deserve it, you’ve been running on fumes.” There’s a tenderness that catches you off guard. Robby’s not a mean boss, he’s exceptionally kind. But he’s also not comforting if he doesn’t think you need it, not the type to throw out pleasantries for pleasantries sake. “Any good plans?”

It’s not something you’ve thought about, it feels kind of pathetic to admit. Like, having plans is actually something you haven’t considered. You work long hours, about sixty most weeks, so it makes sense that on your few precious days off you like to spend it resting and recuperating. Catching up on your laundry or your sleep, or even a TV show that everyone is talking about. Those things are just as important as going out and seeing friends. 

If they’re easier and more accessible, then that’s just an added bonus. 

“Uh,” you have never felt more unnatural than in this moment. You’re certain Robby can tell you’re not being entirely truthful, as if he has some sort of innate sense for when people are doing things for the first time. It’s the teacher in him. “Yeah, maybe. I’m not a hundred percent sure what I’m doing yet.”

You feel so transparent it’s as if he’s looking directly through you. Perhaps he is - already looking for ways out of the conversation, ways to speak to someone more interesting. Someone who isn’t pretending to maybe have plans. 

Someone who regularly had plans wouldn’t be embarrassed to admit they don’t have plans. It could be cool, casual: “No, not this weekend. I have a date with my couch and some take out.” Instead, you’d given what feels like the only wrong answer to a question about yourself. 

“I hope you have a good time,” Robby nods at you. 

The ER is cold, especially at night, especially in December. You’d discarded your jacket when you had entered, worried about being sweaty so early in your shift. Going to get it feels silly now, like you’d made the wrong choices. 

Most of your coworkers make something of their scrubs. Javadi has a collection of pastel hoodies she rotates between, jewellery more often than not sitting under the neckline of her top. Santos has tattoos and wears graphic tees under her scrubs rather than just the standard block colours. Mel doesn’t even usually wear scrubs, instead opting for one of her own shirts without the added layer. 

Your scrubs are standard, your undershirt is black, your winter coat is thrifted and warm but a neutral navy. You’d liked it when you bought it, but you feel silly whenever you wear it. 

You slip it on at the end of your shift, grabbing your backpack. You can hear Santos and Mateo chatting amicably about how a music artist they both listen to is coming to the city the week after next and how they both have tickets and are thinking of coordinating. 

You shut your locker, keenly aware of the other people in the room and even more astute to the fact that none of them are looking at you. 

You slip out the doors, not bothering to untangle your earbuds until you’re down the street. 

I’m not cold, I’m not cold. The woman singing has a lovely voice. It hits you like thorns down your ears, scratchy and uneven in a way that is only beautiful. The burn masks the sting of your eyes. Take my hand, take ahold. 

—

You take the train to and from work. The station is close enough to your house that the dishes in your kitchen cabinet rattle when a particularly zealous one goes past. You were told when you moved in that eventually you wouldn’t even notice the noise - it would become apart of you and you would absorb it and be able to go about your day.

You wake in the late hours of the night from the tremors, convinced you’re going to die. 

You’re not entirely sure what time the train stops running. You never check the time in the moment. 

The apartment you’ve lived in your entire residency has been good to you. You had applied for a lot of places, starting out in Allegheny west and eventually settling for Bethel Park. It’s nice and small, not too much to clean after a long week. You’re on the third floor so laundry is a bit of challenge lugging your basket to the basement but you also get a fire escape which is nice enough that you like being so high up. 

Days off have become a sort of anomaly in your life. You never quite know what to do with them. Your coworkers always have plans, both together and separately, you’ve noticed. Santos and Whitaker live together, the nurses all seem close, even Robby and Abbot talk about going to the Pirates games together.

You walked a lot when you first moved in. Pittsburgh has been your home for the last eight years - from student housing in Oakland during med school, then into your current place - but it hadn’t always been. 

There are lots of pretty places close to your apartment. Even more the further you walk, corner stores and community gardens. Sometimes you leave your phone at home and just wander, taking note of each and every street. Every facade, every storefront, every alley. It all stayed in your head. You could recreate the city in your sleep. Well, the city within an hour’s walk of your apartment.

The deli on Library road is open when you finish work. Sometimes you get off the Blue early and go sit in the stark white of the fluoros. The floor is linoleum, speckled with colours too small to identify but you know they’re there. 

You sit cross legged by the window at one of the two tables in the shop. It shakes under your elbow every time you shift, and the guy behind the counter, nametagged as Jeffrey, eyeballs you strangely every time it makes a noise. 

Your sandwich is misshapen in your hands. Red and white paper wrap up the second half, ready for you to stash it in the work fridge behind one of Langdon’s Redbulls. It’s printed real small on the bottom of the laminated menu they’ve taped to the table - $4.99 for a sandwich with a random assortment of ingredients on it. You’ve always been indecisive, this had felt like a nice way to make a choice without making a choice. 

They pick something different every time, condiments, vegetables, protein, even fruit sometimes. Once they’d given you one that included both mangoes and ranch. That hadn’t been your favourite. 

The one you have now is nice, though. Mozzarella, turkey, chips for some crunch, some other stuff you haven’t really cared to identify, all on pumpernickel. You’re not working tomorrow; you might eat both halves now. 

There’s an empty chair on the other side of your table that you’ve dumped your bag on. It’s meant for two people, and sometimes when it’s a bit busier than just you and Jeff you feel bad for taking it. You’ve got nowhere else to be though, and you’d like to sit and eat after twelve hours of not getting to do either. 

You don’t usually come on your off days, but you’d felt like you were going crazy holed up in your apartment all day. You’d done your laundry, washed all your matching scrubs and the few other clothes you wore. Tidied, caught up on your Instagram feed, and when you’d gotten to the bottom of the Hulu menu without anything jumping out at you you’d shoved on your shoes without another thought. 

It’s late, Friday night, and people are coming home from the clubs. You’re not particularly close to any, but the people who go there don’t seem to mind. Small gaggles stumble in every once in a while, giggle over the menu, and order an egg and cheese that they’ll probably barf up before they get home. 

God, you sound bitter. 

You gather your things when you finish the first half, can sense a group of drunk guys weighing up the effort of coming inside from where they hang out across the street. One of them is smoking a cigarette, and the other three seem to be caught up in a heated discussion.

It’s not snowing. You toss up taking the bus the rest of the way back. You’d walked here. 

You hear your last name, ‘doctor’ preceding it, and whirl around. On a very rare occasion you’ll get recognised on the street - people don’t tend to forget the person who saved their life, or their daughter’s or brother’s or cousin’s life. 

You’ve never seen Robby outside of work, not wearing the standard Pitt black scrubs. He looks nice in a collared plaid button down with a thick fleece over it and the top few buttons undone. You’ve never seen him wear jeans before. In your head Dr Robinavitch doesn’t exist in the same world where jeans also exist. 

You don’t know what to say to him. You end up saying nothing. Robby doesn’t even bat an eye at your silence - used to your oddness, the way it seeps into every interaction. 

“Thought that was you.” He’s smiling, wide and crooked like he does on the rare occasion he has a reason to. “What’re you doing out here so late by yourself? It’s almost midnight.”

“Dinner,” you say lamely, holding up your wrapped up sandwich. 

He looks at the checkered lump in your hand then back at your face. He looks different in the dark, the planes of his face look more severe in the light of the hospital. Maybe that’s why you like the harshness of the deli, so bright it brings you right back to work.

“You always eat so late?” He asks. You feel silly with your coat hitting your chin, your work shoes, and your sandwich in your hand. You look like a doctor - a med student. Robby looks like a man. 

The sensory feeling of the paper in your hand is suddenly too underwhelming and you can’t stop yourself from digging your nails in - needing a desperate anchor of your hand. You’ll regret that later when you go to eat it and it’s smushed, but later doesn’t matter more than the underwhelm in your palm. 

“I work in the ER,” you point out. His hands are in his jacket pockets but one of them is clutching an opaque white plastic bag with something heavy weighing it down. Robby laughs, crinkling the handle of the bag in his hand in his pocket. “What are you doing here? Didn’t you work today?”

He nods like he’d already forgotten about it. Like it did not matter to him in a moment he was not actively experiencing it. 

“Abbot’s sick- not bad, just all stuffed up.” He gestures vaguely with the hand not holding the bag at his nose/mouth area. “Only thing that ever makes him feel better is soup from PJ’s.” He nods down the street from the direction he’d just come where a neon sign is just being turned off.

“What a diva.”

Robby laughs again. “Yeah, he’d never admit it. Rather suffer in silence.”

It feels like the wrong thing to have said. You don’t know Dr Abbot well enough to make jabs at him, especially not to Robby. 

You want to be out of this situation, it all crushes you at once. You’re in the dark, fifty minutes from your apartment, talking to somebody whom you intrinsically do not understand. You are a hollow body, your skin is translucent and you can see every organelle and every shift of the movement of your organs. You can see all the hallways and gears and caves in your anatomy. Every link in every chain that tugs on each and every thought that spins through your head. How your life started from birth to now and a timeline for why every facet of your personality and your soul has ended up the way that it is.

Robby is solid, and in front of you, and you will never understand him.

You’ve broken your nose trying to walk through him - he will remember this about you for as long as the two of you know each other. That you put your words where they do not belong, and that you think Jack Abbot is a diva. 

Robby opens his mouth to say something.

“I should head home,” you jab your thumb somewhere behind you. You live in the direction Robby is standing. You’ll loop around the block to avoid passing him. “I’ll see you at work, Robby. Hope Abbot feels better.”

When you circle the street, Robby’s gone. The walk home is long, the walk up the stairs to the third floor is longer. You arrive home a little before one in the morning. You don’t bother with the lights, coming to sit on the floor in the kitchen. The clock blinks on the oven with each passing minute. 

It lights your skin up red, and if you look close, you can see the flow of your blood.

You unwrap your sandwich.

—

Shen’s on the next time you work. He greets you casually, a “good morning” around a drink from his water bottle and barely gives you a second glance. Your shift passes without incident - the other doctors treat you normally, when you speak they listen. Javadi initiates small talk with you and you do your best to return the sentiment. 

At one point Santos reads a 9 as a 6 aloud to you and gives you a look. “Whoops,” she snickers, looking at you like the two of you share some sort of secret.

You like Santos. The two of you are about the same age, you’re only a few years older than her, the same number of years further into your residency. The two of you talk sometimes between patients, but that’s bound to happen when the two of you spend so much time in an enclosed space.

She has a way of making everything feel like an inside joke. You know she struggled a little when she first started, hitting the wall with the other doctors when she first started her residency. You wouldn’t know that now, seeing the way she interacts with the rest of the people here. Her and Whitaker are so close they’re practically in a sitcom, Shen’s taken a special liking to her, and you’ve even seen her and Mel giggling by the lockers after shifts.

The two of you barely speak about anything that isn’t work. Which is fine, she’s your coworker, you guys don’t have to be speaking about your personal lives. But she has this soft little spark about her like she’s created a world to be in and it’s the most important place to be. 

“That thing you did with the guy in Central 13?” She sidles up to you towards the end of your shift, hanging behind the monitor you’re using to finish up the chart for that very patient. She lets out a heavy breath. “Wow.”

You’d inserted a double lumen tube during an intubation. Nothing super fancy, but you know that Santos probably hasn’t done a whole lot of intubations in general. Shen had raised his eyebrows at your suggestion but hadn’t stopped you, and when you’d finished he’d grabbed your shoulder and squeezed, muttering a “sick, good job,” and then heading out. 

You look up, genuinely startled. “Thanks.”

“I’d never even heard of the thing you did,” she doesn’t let up. “I wouldn’t have thought to do it. That was really cool.” Her voice drops and she looks down at your hands. You’ve gotten compliments before, but all from people above you in the food chain, Langdon, Abbot, people who are kind of obligated as your educators to give you praise. Santos is a PGY-1, so unless she’s sucking up you’re not sure why she’s being so nice. You’re not high enough up that sucking up would be worth anything.

You have fifteen minutes of your shift, no incoming ambulances, nothing urgent in chairs, all your patients are stable. 

You feel sick - not the type of sick that would get you sent home, or even to the staff lounge. It’s normal at this point. You genuinely don’t remember a time you haven’t felt like this. 

“You’re only an intern,” you say, trying to be empathetic without sounding condescending. “You’ll get there.”

She nods, low and slow. She’s already got her jacket on, thick and leather and dark brown. Santos watches you finish up your chart and you try to shake the feeling of being observed. 

“I’m, uh, I think I might head down to the Hills,” she leans her elbow on your table. “There’s this bar on Liberty street. They do live music sometimes, they have a killer plate of nachos, some cool cocktails.”

You log out of the system and stand from your chair. You’re about to round and want to head to your locker first. “That sounds great.”

Santos smiles at you, shoving her hands in her pockets. She bounces when she walks and she follows you on your way to your locker. “Yeah, I found it right when I started here. I’ve been trying to get Samira to go with me but I don’t think she likes me much.”

You open your locker. Coat on, backpack on, shut locker, look back at her. You really like Dr Mohan; she’s kinder than most of the other doctors, and the two of you started on the exact same day so you’ve always felt like a special kinship with her.

“She does,” you tell her honestly. You think she does. You don’t know Samira very well - if she disliked Trinity she probably wouldn’t be telling you about it. “She just prefers to keep to herself I think.”

Santos nods, rocking on her heels and biting her top lip. “Yeah, maybe. I don’t know, I think there’s only so many times you can ask someone to hang out and have them say no before you gotta accept they’re just not into it.”

She’s not wrong. It’s very much something you have to play by ear, you’ve learned. Some people are busy, some people don’t know how to say no without worrying about sounding impolite. 

People are gathering for rounds, you can see at the end of the hallway. It’s the only thing standing in front of you and a huge nap. Santos is digging in her locker for something.

“I hope you have a good time,” you tell her earnestly. “Nachos sound great, I might have to get some on my way home.” You feel nauseous. The idea of eating anything, let alone a bunch of cheese and meat, makes your stomach turn. You just want to be home. You miss your couch. 

Santos doesn’t say anything as you walk out towards rounds. When she reenters the room, she doesn’t join you, she comes to stand shoulder to shoulder with Mel. 

—

The little girl in Trauma-2 is going to die. 

Today was meant to be a day off. Robby’d called you a little after five, apologising for waking you and asking if you could come in to cover. You’d said yes, sitting out on your fire escape and painting your nails. They’re clear - it stops you from biting them. 

It had been a fairly quiet morning. Most people won’t spend their Saturday in the ER waiting room unless they really have to so you have slightly less of the patient type that maybe didn’t have to come into the ER at all. 

Then the ambulance had dropped her off a little over a half hour ago, and you’ve been fairly convinced that she’s not going to make it since you’d seen her. 

You were the primary doctor on the case only because you were the only one around at the time. Now, Robby and Collins are there, and they’ve taken over. Robby practically shoved you out of the room and told you to take a break.

You’re sweaty. You’ve ducked into the bathroom to swap your long sleeves for a t-shirt under your scrub top and taken a well earned cry into the mirror. 

Robby’s standing outside Trauma-2 like he’s on guard. The girl’s parents are out in chairs, and you really don’t want to have to be the person to tell them. You know Robby will do it if you ask, but you don’t want to have to ask. Don’t want to have not yet asked, don’t want to ask, don’t want to have asked. 

The time will pass anyway. You just wish you didn’t have to get pushed along with it.

“Ah-ah,” Robby snaps as sharp as he can without any real bite. You’re hovering in the doorway to the room, watching as Collins works on her. “You’re not going back in there.”

You failed to save her. You are the reason that two parents have lost their only daughter. He’s not mad - can’t be mad that you did your best to save someone who couldn’t be saved. But sending you in there when you’d already done no good would be a waste of time. A change in tactic, a change in doctor, is probably necessary.

“Well where can I go?” you snap back, much harsher than he’d been. You want him to tell you, don’t want the mistake to be yours. Working in the ER and being mostly self guided you feel a lot of aimlessness. The pulling behind your navel that dulls to a low throb most of the time, signalling when you’re making a bad choice. Making Robby tell you what to do means that feeling goes away, just for a little.

Robby gets this look about him sometimes, when he’s tired and trying to brush someone off without them asking him what’s wrong. “You can get some air.” He raises his eyebrows, tone light and sarcastic. He lifts an arm to point out through the dark tunnel of night streaming through the open ambulance bay.

Your feet move on autopilot, taking you out into the cold. Your arms hurt from the change of temperature, but you made the choice to take your long-sleeves off, so you don’t complain about it even internally.

Robby follows behind you just close enough for you to hear him. “Are you okay?” He puts the emphasis in strange places in his sentences sometimes. In the middle instead of one of the edges.

You nod. “Yeah, Robby, I’m fine.”

It’s quiet in the way outside only is right when you step out into it. The noise from the ER bleeds into your veins and when the ambulance bay doors shut behind you it takes getting used to the difference. It almost feels like submerging yourself, for a brief second the world shifts, and then it goes back on kilter.

Robby looks at you for a long time. You still do not understand him, he’s impossible to get a read on. He could be waiting for you to say something.

“I’m parking you,” he says finally. 

Your mouth drops open. “P-parking me?”

“Doctor’s orders.” Robby nods with finality. “Stay here. I’ll come and get you.”

You want to shout something back at Robby as he goes inside - angry with him and grateful for him both at once. How dare he not think you’re up to doing your job? You’re not, but you don’t want him thinking that. 

You watch an ambulance pull up, both the paramedics ignoring you as they haul a gurney in through the doors. They know enough about the job that it’s clear you’re not waiting for them.

It was her birthday in three days. You’d seen it on her chart right when she first came in, the little girl who would be taking her final breaths inside the room you’d have to continue working in. Her life would end in that room. How many had? How many had died where you were standing?

Surely, with how long humans had been inhabiting the earth, someone had died on this spot. People had stood here and spoken. Perhaps a bed had been placed here, centuries before the hospital was even conceived of. A couple had laid in the grass, hand in hand, watching as the untouched space stretched on.

In a hundred years, would someone stand on this exact spot again and cry as you were trying not to?

She was seven years, eleven months and twenty-seven days old. You don’t even remember what you were doing that long ago. The thought dredges you up, lifts you like the moment right before the fall, when you’re anticipating. Awaiting another birthday.

The human body comes in a lot of pairs, a lot of symmetry, a lot of even numbers. And then suddenly it can be zero. Reduced to nothing but the meaning someone else gives it. A period, a full stop.

You take a shuddering breath in. It’s a morbid way to think of your own life, but you wonder sometimes what will continue to happen when you finally take your last breath. The last breath is usually out. An even way to close. Nothing remaining, no leftovers.

Robby’s hand finds your shoulder. “Hey, kid.”

You don’t know how long you’ve been out here. 

“I’m ready to go back in,” you say, because you feel like you’re meant to be. You’re not sure if you’ve ever been ready to go in.

Robby just shakes his head gravely. “It’s 7:03, you are officially relieved from duty.”

Relieved. It’s such a strange word. You feel like you’re bordering on pretentious. You wonder who the first person to ever say the phrase was, and how it got picked up enough that it’s commonplace now. If they had to explain themselves, or if the other person knew what they meant by it. 

Relieved implies a weight lifted from you. A lightness. Perhaps you left it in Trauma-2.

Robby follows you as you grab your stuff from your locker. You’re acting on autopilot. Tonight you will not get food on the way home. You will take the train, you will walk home, you will shower and change and climb into bed and you will wake up the next morning with your alarm. You do not have the capacity to make any more choices for yourself.

When you step back out through the ER doors, you can see Princess, Jesse, Whitaker and Santos sitting on the benches. You’ve never been to their after work wind-downs, but you’ve heard enough people usually go that it’s fair to assume there will be one after whatever shift you’re finishing. 

Robby is still behind you. “Hey,” he says. His backpack is slung over one shoulder. He’s wearing a thicker jacket than you’ve ever seen on him. It suits him. “Come on.”

You follow him. “Where are we going?”

“Dinner,” he says simply. “You haven’t eaten this afternoon, and I know how tempting it is to just want to go to sleep. You need food.” He walks like he expects you to follow behind him; you do without complaint. The sureness required to make an assumption about a coworkers needs and to be correct, you don’t think you could ever muster it. 

You walk for almost fifteen minutes, which is less than you usually walk, but by the end your cheeks are red and you’re trying to quiet your breathing. Robby walks faster than you, with a difference bounce, smoother and softer. You’re slower but it’s stilted. Unbalanced - sometimes your left knee behaves funny. He walks like where he’s going is the most important place to be, and you’d believe it. 

He stops in front of a place you’ve never seen before. A diner, real and busy, not an out of the way spot only he knows about from his wanderings. A staple; there are families here. 

“Hey,” you say as you reach the door. Interrupting the flow, trying to pause. A period, a moment, or whatever you’d been thinking less than half an hour earlier. Your feelings never make sense when you’re not actively experiencing them. It’s why you could never get into journaling. “You know you don’t have to-”

Robby doesn’t even let you get the words out. “I want to.”

Want is harder to argue with than obligation. It shuts you up in a way you’re not fond of. 

The lights are golden, warm in a way your eyes have to adjust to after the bright whites of the hospital, and there’s a handwritten sign taped to the inside of the window advertising that you can get four pierogies for a dollar. 

Robby leads you inside without another word. It smells like coffee and oil, and it’s louder than you’d expected. You’re not a huge fan of noise, but working in a hospital you’ve gotten used to it. You realise with a start that it has been so long since you’ve heard volume that stemmed from love. Parents chastising their kids for giggling too loud. a group of high schoolers that look like they’ve just come off stage from a school play - taking up two booths and beaming like they’ve just headlined the Tony’s, couples on dates.

“You come here a lot?” You ask as Robby sits down at a booth in the corner. 

He nods. “The food’s good, and they don’t look at you weird if you order something and can’t eat it.”

The vinyl squeaks with every shift of your legs, but it’s loud enough in here that it doesn’t make you feel self-conscious. Noise born from love, it wraps you in it. 

“Get whatever you want,” Robby says like it’s a no-brainer. You know instinctively that he’s not offering to pay for your dinner - though he probably would if he thought you’d want that. You don’t. Him paying obligates you to order, eat and enjoy something. He’s telling you to ignore the conscious thought, all the brain stems, all the lines shooting off in a mind map - focus on the core idea. The want. It gets clouded by the mind sometimes. 

“Soup is not a food,” he says helpfully. “Not right now at least.”

“I know that,” you say, defensively. You don’t want soup, and you know he’s suggesting you eat something solid, but it slips out before you can question why. The soup they have on the menu seems semi-clear, more like broth. Incorporeal, translucent. The essence of a food. Robby’s steering you away from it like he knows how you feel about things that are concrete. Your ego hasn’t quite recovered from trying to barrel through him with your assumptions the last time the two of you were alone together. 

“I’m sorry,” you say it because you are, not because you think you should be. The two feel indistinguishable sometimes. You should be sorry, so you are. You’re not sure where the line comes but it’s somewhere between you and Robby. “I’m not good at this.”

“Eating?” Robby asks. 

“Being a person after work.” Or before work, or during work. But admitting that means drawing attention to it, and you’d rather him think you’re oblivious. “I’m… sensitive.”

Robby doesn’t say any of the usual things; you’re not sensitive, it’s fine, don’t worry about it. You really like him for it. 

He leans forward, elbows on the table. He’s not looking at you like he’s your attending. He looks completely different in warm lighting; different in the way the noise is coated with affection. It suits him. “I like that about you. It’s not a character flaw, you know that right?”

You snort before you can stop yourself. “Yeah, okay, put it on my performance review.”

“I will,” he says dryly. When Robby laughs the sound feels like it’s had holes poked in it, gravelly and messy, the punctures letting something soulful out with the sound. “Second guesses her authority figures.”

You huff. “Wow.”

“I’m dedicated to accuracy,” he says seriously. 

The waitress understands you both immediately; the scrubs, how you’re kind of leaning on the table. Robby slaps down a ten and orders twenty pierogies and a cup of coffee. You flounder under her gaze, having not even looked at the menu, and Robby smiles at you in a way that feels conspiratorial and not polite.

“Can I get like, half of what he got?” You ask. “Is that a thing?”

She nods kindly and takes the menus from your table, ducking back into the kitchen.

With everything between you out of the way, Robby leans forward more. “One time, after a rough shift, I took apart my kitchen cabinets just so I could feel myself putting them back together. To prove I could.”

You mirror his posture. “This feels infinitely healthier.”

“Low bar, but I’ll take it.” You clasp your hands together to keep from picking at your nails. 

Robby gets you talking without you realising. First about work, then about not work. You’d read something, probably way back in college, about how some sculptors, instead of taking a block and adding their intricacies to it to make their art, they’d instead sculpt away from the finished product until all they had was art left. That’s how talking to Robby feels as you get your dinner. You talk about everything until all that is left is the little girl in Trauma-2.

“You did everything right,” he says, right when you need it. “No one could have saved her.”

“Doesn’t matter,” you shake your head. “I still didn’t.”

Robby looks at you very seriously. When he speaks, it is firm. Solid. “It mattered. It mattered that when she closed her eyes she wasn’t alone in that room. It mattered that her parents knew someone was fighting for her, that someone cared about someone that was theirs. The outcome isn’t the only metric that counts.”

You feel heat behind your eyes. “You really believe that?”

Robby nods, serious and stern, leaning forward to take your hand. “I wouldn’t say it if I didn’t believe it.”

The food arrives, sitting between you two like something to share instead of something to separate you both. 

Loneliness eats at you on your worst days. You thought you knew how it felt to be real and truly lonely, and then you moved to Pittsburgh. You’re not homesick, per se, more sick for a life you feel belongs to you. You miss being tied to places, no one here holds memories with you in them.

At home, you can walk down Main street and practically provide director’s commentary: There’s the cafe I lost my scarf in when I was a kid, there’s the movie theatre I saw that in, there’s the restaurant that didn’t hire me in high school. You miss being somewhere where you are as much a part of the place as the culture is a part of you. 

In Pittsburgh, you cease to exist the moment you leave a place. 

“I’m really glad that I got to steal you from Abbot,” Robby says through a mouthful of decaf. “I know you got offered a night shift spot, and I have to admit I was a little worried for a bit. I thought you would take it up.”

That had been a long time ago, back when you were just starting your second year of residency. It was a really tempting offer. You’d declined it because, at the end of the day, you really love the people you work with, even if they exist in the bubble of the ER. 

“I thought about it,” you admit, ripping apart a pierogi in your hand. “But, to be honest, I’ve been feeling kind of… isolated?” You muse over your word choice. “Sometimes I feel so small in this city, and I figured being asleep when most of the people who live here are awake would just take me out of it that much more.”

Robby chews slowly, using it to formulate a thought. “You leave a very strong first impression.”

You blink. If you were eating you probably would have choked. “Excuse me?”

“Abbot’s always talking about you whenever you work a night,” he says, like it’s something worth holding on to, not to keep but rather to let you follow him as he keeps going. He looks so tired, always older after a shift than before one. It looks good on him, he wears age handsomely, and you wonder - not for the first time - how he fares. It feels inappropriate to think of your boss that way, especially just because he’s being so nice to you. “You were the first one that really got through to Santos, you two are clearly close” Are you? That makes you sad, that you’ve missed a closeness that you haven’t understood. It feels like something you will never get back. You have missed it. You will miss it. 

She hit a bit of a wall when she started, you’d been able to see that. You wonder, for the first time, how many times she had broken her nose trying to walk through you. 

“And I…” he flushes, scratching the hair at the back of his neck. “I worry about you.” It lands, heavy and warm. 

He worries about you. That should make you feel worried - what have you been doing to worry him? Instead, it strikes you right in the heart. Worry, as gnawing of an emotion as it is, requires space to hold it in.

Space you take up in his chest when you are not in the room. 

“You don’t have to,” you say. “I’m a hard person to be around a lot of the time.”

Robby, to his credit, does not correct you. This whole conversation he has spent not saying the things you are ‘meant’ to say to someone confiding in you, and each time he has said exactly what has sparked something in your chest cavity. 

“You’re worth the effort, though.”

You laugh, startled and a little breathless. “You make it sound like I’m like, a piece of IKEA furniture or something.”

“A kitchen cabinet,” Robby jokes. 

Robby relaxes against the vinyl, and pushes one of the containers of pierogies towards you. It sits heavy inside you as you eat, and you feel like maybe it’s filling something inside you that you didn’t realise you didn’t have. Closer to whole than you have felt in a while - almost like you’ve forgotten. Further away from zero. 

He talks more than you do, and you believe it’s a kindness. He tells you a story of a med student he had years ago who insisted on calling him Dr Robinavitch - you never realised you didn’t know Robby’s first name until that very moment, and you can tell he also realised that. “One time he had a patient throw up on him and he threw up in response.”

You’re deadpan. “Probably picked the wrong career path, I won’t lie.”

He laughs over his coffee. There’s a pile of napkins between the two of you, helping with the oil of your hands as you eat with them, not even noticing it through the conversation. 

“I mean, I’ve been there,” you say, wiping your hands for the fifteenth time. 

You’ve been there for almost an hour, unworried. The sign above the counter says they’re open past midnight, so you don’t have to worry about them closing while you’re sitting here. Robby’s been looking at you with soft eyes and pink cheeks for the better part of thirty minutes. 

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he says. “Worst thing about you is your terrible self-esteem, you’re great, shut up.”

You laugh. “Bedside manner is dead,” you say, pushing your plate away from yourself, full and happy. “And we killed him.”

“Why is bedside manner a man?” Robby asks. “That feels unlikely.”

You leave a little after nine. Robby walks to the train with you and then gets on without saying anything. You have no idea where Robby lives, but you know he walks to work. The two of you share a bench, thigh to thigh. Neither one of you mention where you are at any point, how close your respective places are, where you both need to go. 

You probably do the less walking than any night in recent memory. The city has shaped itself around your solitude, your routines, almost crushing in the way it attempts to fold itself around you. 

When you stand on the T, he stands with you. He’s so close, he smells like something warm and heavy, and he seems to be drinking you in. He laughs at almost everything you say, even when you don’t mean for it to be funny. 

The conversation stays steady, it doesn’t lull like you’re always terrified of. They’re not your strong suit, speaking with people. It comes with a feeling of sparity, it’s easy to feel like you are the remaining essence. The human body is naturally paired, but your human experience is roughly singular. 

Robby walks with you like he wants to share the same space. 

You think a lot about numbers. Odd being defined almost lazily, as though no one could bother to think of a better descriptor, not being divisible by two. You wonder, in your quietest nights, if you were to be split open, would you be divisible by two? You feel often like a remainder, not to be dramatic. But everyone else seems to gravitate naturally to other people, snapping together like magnets. 

It’s something you’d always struggled with. You’re not sure what people clock about you that solidifies it. You don’t just feel uneven, you feel odd. It’s something that festered behind your ribs when you were a child and as you grew, so too did it. The version of the word lodged in your bones. Like there is a correct way to be a person, everyone else learned it - learned it enough to know which rules to follow and which to break. It takes a deep and intimate knowledge of how something works in order to go against the norms and have it still work, and it feels like everyone you’ve ever met is able to do that. 

And people notice. They’re not cruel, that’s almost worse. They’re not trying to judge, but pattern recognition dictates that it is human nature to notice when something is off. 

Robby’s arm brushes yours and he makes no effort to move away. Two feet on the pavement, two people walking together. Your footsteps are half a beat after his. 

You wonder how long until he sees the error. A small part of you hopes he has already - that this is him noticing. 

Robby says something—you don’t catch all of it—and you answer a second too late, your words stepping on the edge of his sentence. He doesn’t seem to mind. He never seems to mind. That almost makes it worse, how easily he accommodates you, like you are something fragile or precious instead of incorrect.

“This is me,” you say as you reach your apartment building. You have no idea how Robby is getting home. 

He sighs morosely. “Are you sure?”

You look up at your window, pretending to think. “Pretty sure.” He squeezes the top of your arm and in moving his hand down, almost touches your fingers. “I don’t think I’ve ever had someone walk me home before. It’s not something I usually do.”

“It doesn’t have to be a thing, if you don’t want?” His tone lightens at the end, and you’re high enough on the night air that you are determined to interpret it in good faith. Him prioritising your comfort. You become acutely aware of the space between you — not empty, exactly, but loaded. Charged. Like something left on overnight.

You shake your head. “No, I liked it. I just…” you’re going to end the night being vulnerable. Robby has done nothing to indicate he does not like you. You will not be the kind of pathetic person who argues with someone when they show they like them. “Is it selfish to say I want to matter to someone?”

Robby steps impossibly closer to you. “Not selfish at all. In fact, bare minimum.” His gaze drops to where his breath is fogging the air between the two of you. It’s freezing. You don’t feel so silly in your thrifted winter coat. “I would go as far to say you already do.”

Robby looks different under the glow of your street light - different than at work, different than at the diner. You think you might start to understand him. He is still direct in front of you, solid and unmoving. But he shifts in the light: kitchen cabinets with their doors taken off. 

There are so many things you could say to him. Thank you. I’m sorry. Please don’t forget me when the sun comes up and it’s loud again and I am still quiet. 

You think of all the times you have spent standing in this very spot, feeling temporary in your own life. 

Robby falters. You realise with a start it’s not the first time you’ve seen him do that. If anyone had asked three hours ago you probably would have answered as honestly as possible that you’d never seen it. How many times had it happened and you hadn’t seen it?

“Can I-” he stumbles over his words. Reconsiders. “Do you want me to kiss you?”

You feel rooted to place. The honesty of his voice hurts. “Are you asking permission or if I have the audacity?”

He laughs and you feel it against your face. “The first one.”

Robby smiles, warm and unmistakably fond. When he kisses you it’s soft and coursing with something you can’t name. He tastes like decaf coffee that you didn’t realise was shitty now you’re still tasting it almost two hours later. You can feel his beard against your face and the scratch is electrifying. You’re just two people. His hands settle into your waist, palms against your scrub top under your coat. It’s just the two of you and the quiet hum of the city you live in. 

“You should get some sleep,” he mumbles against your mouth. He lets you kiss him for another few minutes, seeming like he’s indulging himself more than letting you have what you want. It’s dizzying, the idea of being wanted, and by someone like Robby. 

The kind of guy you think might’ve liked you even if you didn’t like him back. 

You’re working tomorrow. You’re pretty sure he is too. You hope, as well, that Santos is and that she’s in a good mood. The seed of an idea plants itself within you hopefully, and you decide tomorrow will be the shift you ask if she maybe wants to get drinks after work. The thought of her saying no terrifies you, but the thought of her saying yes terrifies you a little less than you’d first thought. 

“I’ll see you soon,” he pulls back, flushed and seemingly just as enthralled as you. Soon. Continuously. “Text me when you get up there, need to make sure you’re awake enough to lock your door.” He doesn’t walk away until you’re up and locked away in your apartment. 

The oven clock blinks at you as you turn the overhead lamp on. You shoot him a door’s locked text that he heart-reacts to. 

The EKG detected signs of a previous heart attack, one that had occurred with little to no symptoms, which had undoubtedly been adding to the young man’s strengthening chest pain anyway. The discovery bumped up his prioritization and opened up a room in the O.R. for him, before he could have another, potentially more fatal MI.

“I wasn’t trying to go over your head, Dr. Robby, I swear!” you rambled in a single breath, talking anxiously in your hands, certain you were in for a scolding from the older attending. “But I went to school with this girl, Beth Wildfire— We were on the soccer team together, and she had a heart attack at seventeen because she was training too hard and none of the doctors would take her seriously about her chest pain—”

“Breathe, kid… You’re not in trouble here, alright?” Robby had laughed, hiding his smile behind his fist, because Gloria had sent him to scold you, after all. “You just need to work on that savior complex of yours, alright?”

You flinched in offense, chin jerking as your mouth parted to argue.

He continued before you could. 

“You were right this time. I get it. But you’re not gonna be right every time, and we can’t waste resources just because you have a hunch… You can’t save everyone, kid.”

He patted you softly on the back as he walked on by, smelling of a foreign cologne you could feel sparkling in your chest.

“Isn’t that our whole job?” you asked before he could get too far. “Aren’t we supposed to save people?”

“The ones that can be saved, yeah,” he nodded with a heavy huff as he spun in place to face you again, pushing the sleeves of his white undershirt up to his elbows. “But sometimes watering a plant too much— you know, loving it too much— can kill it, right?”

Your brows lowered in confusion. “But… People aren’t plants…”

He exhales hard through his nose. “It was a metaphor.”

“Oh…”

Robby choked back the instinct to smile again.

“In here— you’re their doctor, alright? Not their mother, not their sister, not their friend. Just help the ones you can,” Robby said before turning on the heel of his sneaker and sauntering off in the opposite direction. Over the chaos of the crowded E.R., he called to you over his shoulder, “Don’t over water your plants, kid!”

You realized, then, that that’s probably why you had a tendency to stick around in bad relationships for far longer than you needed to; why you were always so patient even when people didn’t deserve it, especially when they didn’t deserve it; and why you’ve always been so strikingly tender in the face of so much cruelty. Because you were over watering your plants, as it were.

Because you’d suffocate an innocent thing to death just to prove how much you love it. Because you’d strike a match on yourself if it meant keeping everyone else warm.

You figure that’s also why you take the rowdy patient in South 4 that no one else wanted — all bloodied from a fall and far too gone on pills and booze to realize how badly he was hurt. He’s sallow-skinned, glassy-eyed, and smiling lazily despite the blood in his teeth. He spends an hour shifting anxiously on the bed, all twitchy with a pent-up aggression.

He’s like a stray dog in a shelter, with “Don’t touch me, I’ll bite” written outside of the cage.

You reach out to pet him, anyway. 

Connor Stevens was young, just a few years older than you, dressed in a nice suit with a glittering Rolex on his wrist that cracked in the fall. He had a long history of drug use in his chart, and a longer history of reckless behavior that borders on masochistic. A number of falls, car crashes, DUIs, fist fights; each of which had landed him in one E.R. or another.

You create a fiction of his life story inside your head — of a young boy with a nice trust fund, working at his parents’ million-dollar firm, slipping into the same cycle as the father he despised, and using drugs and pain to forget how much he hated his life. 

You can’t help but see a version of yourself in him. You choke on your want to save him accordingly, and work with gentle hands to clean the scrapes on his pretty face. It feels like teaching an aggressive dog what it means to love again.

“You smell nice…” the young boy murmurs distantly, inhaling sharply through his sloped nose while you lean over to wash the dirt from a deep cut on his jaw. “What is that?”

“It’s drugstore perfume,” you confess with a sheepish laugh. “It was barely five dollars— I’m not entirely sure it even has a name.”

The cheap scent is hardly enough to drown out the smell clinging to the man below you, who smells overwhelmingly of whiskey, sweat, and cigarette smoke — a bitter, sour sort of concoction that hit you the moment you walked into the room.

“Let me guess…” he says and shifts on the bed. He doesn’t seem to notice, or otherwise care about, the dark black bruise on his right elbow as he props his weight on both of them. “My friends always say that I have a really good sense of smell—”

You jerk back on instinct when he leans in too close, nostrils stinging at the bitter scent of blood and alcohol clinging to his breath. 

“Jeez…” he scoffs, blonde curls flopping over his forehead as he jerks his chin back. “Didn’t mean to scare you...”

“No, you— you didn’t scare me,” you stammer with an awkward laugh, voice shaking in an unconvincing waver. “I just… Wasn’t expecting it, that’s all.”

“No, I did,” the boy insists, with an observant squint in his dark brown eyes. “Look at you, you’re trembling…”

Your breath catches in your throat when he reaches suddenly for your hand, halting your movements over his jaw with five cold, long fingers caging your wrist. 

His thumb digs hard into your pressure point and cuts off the blood flow to your fingers almost instantly. A sharp ache blooms where his fingers press into the bone. You twist your hand to free yourself without escalating, but he only holds you tighter.

“Please, let me go, sir,” you try to plead in an even voice, but clear your throat a second later when the words get stuck there.

“Sir?” he mocks with a gritty laugh, smiling with all of his bloody teeth. His canine is cracked and weeping crimson from the fall he took, not that he seems to notice.

He laughs harder when your head whips over your shoulder, peering anxiously through the glass door on the other side of the room, hoping to find someone looking back at you — hoping to find Robby.

But the emergency department is far too busy. 

You might as well be invisible just now.

“Look at you,” the boy chuckles with amusement. “I am scaring you.”

“I just want you to let me go,” you say, voice cracking, but firmer still.

His dark eyes narrow in a daring squint. The chocolate irises dart over your features like he’s studying them, like he’s enjoying every ounce of fear he’s etched into your face. 

“Say please…” he croons.

You lose your breath when his grip tightens. The pain flares hotter, sharper, and your fingers go numb with a tingling feeling.

“Please,” you spit through gritted teeth.

His smile grows. His hold slips from your wrist. 

You jerk your hand to your chest, curling the fingers of your opposite hand around the ache spreading beneath the skin. Your feet shuffle back on instinct at the sly look he gives you — like he’s debating on how to torture you next. You’re rushing out the door before he can utter another word.

You can feel your pulse hammering in your throat, strangling all the sharp breaths you struggle to gulp into your lungs. The chaos of the E.R. muffles to a low droning sound in your ears, drowned out by the sound of your thundering heartbeat. Everything falls too bright, too fast, too much. 

But anywhere is safer than in that room — anywhere is safer than with him.

“You alright, kid?” you hear a familiar voice call from beside you, though it sounds like you’re hearing it from underwater.

Your head snaps in the direction of the sound, and you go dizzy in an instant. You blink away the haze clouding your vision to find Dr. Abbot sauntering towards you, in his black shirt and camo pants, with his brows lowered in a look of visible concern.

“Yeah,” you answer on instinct, through a series of strangled breaths. “I was just— I was just gonna get some air…”

He nods slowly. His attentive eyes dart over your twisted features, and then to where you cradle your wrist to your chest. “Did you hurt your arm?”

“No, but…” You gulp down another breath. “But my chest feels— a little funny… I think— I might be having an MI—”

Your vision goes distant in a flicker, like you’re suddenly watching your reality play out on a cinema screen. You feel Jack’s hand wrap around your shoulder and underneath your arms to keep you steady, then the warm breeze of a summer’s day brushing like honey over your skin.

Robby feels his phone buzz twice in his scrub pocket from where he stands at the back of the room, watching Santos walk the interns through a patient with an ankle fracture. There are only three contacts he keeps notifications on for during the day, and he drags the device from his pocket in hopes of seeing your name on the screen.

He does, just not in the way he had hoped.

It’s Dr. Abbot’s contact info that he sees first, right over the first message, which is short and hastily typed — your name, ambulance bay, asap — Robby makes out through the typos. The second text, in all caps, says: GET HERE NOW!

Robby forgets to dismiss himself as he rushes out halfway through Santos’ presentation. He weaves through the bustling emergency department with a tunnel vision concentrated only on the exit doors ,and the worry of what he might find outside of them. The distant calls of his name turn into muted buzzing in his ears as he rushes out to find you.

He spots Jack first, kneeling on the sidewalk and looking up at something Robby can’t see until he turns the corner. Then he finds him crouching in front of you, from where you sit on the ledge before the older man, cradled by the strong hands he keeps around your shoulders. 

You rub at an ache in your wrist that Robby can’t see from here and try hard to even out your breathing. His footsteps quicken at the sight.

“What the hell’s going on?” he blurts in lieu of a greeting. “What happened— Are you okay?”

Your eyes widen at the sight of Robby when he takes Jack’s place in front of you, kneeling with a quickness and snatching the stethoscope from around his neck. You have to keep reminding yourself to breathe when he presses the cool chestpiece against your burning skin, just above the dip in the V-neck of your scrubs. 

You had been avoiding him all day, in truth — avoiding him and yet hoping to run into him all the same. Because your conversation from the night before hadn’t ended on the best of terms. No conversation the two of you had ever had about his hiatus ended on good terms, actually, but this one felt especially world-ending

“I’m not just gonna wait around for three months and just hope that you’ll still want me when you come back, Robby!” you’d said, while the boiling water on the kitchen stove began to boil over.

“Is that really how low you think of me?” the older man scoffed with a disbelieving look on his smiling face as he leaned over the kitchen counter. “What? Am I not good enough to wait for?”

“Depends— Am I not good enough to stick around for?”

Neither of you could answer.

The silence felt deafening at the time.

But he forgets to be mad about all that now, as his head fills only with thoughts of taking care of you.

“She was having some trouble breathing, and had some pain in her right hand,” Jack explains for you, grimacing slightly as he adjusts his prosthetic to rise to full height again. He towers behind Robby’s crouched figure with his arms crossed over your chest. “She was tachy for a bit, but it’s even now— I think she was having a panic attack.”

Robby brows lower as he concentrates on the sound of your heartbeat in his ears. He hears a faint flutter in your pulse, and his eyes dart from the chest piece he holds between his fingers to your anxious face. 

“A panic attack?” he echoes, plucking out the earpieces and twisting the stethoscope back around his neck.

“I don’t know…” you shrug shyly.

“Well, have you eaten anything today?” 

“Yeah, I had a protein bar in the break room.”

“What about water?” he asks and ducks his head when you try to look away. “You staying hydrated?”

“Mostly.”

“Any chance you could be pregnant?” he hears himself ask, getting lost in the basic questions he would ask any patient, and quickly forgetting that he’s talking to you. 

You, who he’s been seeing for close to a year now — you, who he fucked within an inch of your life in the center of your bed just last night, an hour or so before you fought.

Your eyes widen and dart wildly between the two attendings standing before you.

You swallow hard and shake your head.

“It’s not— It’s not like that, okay?” you assure him, breathing deeper when you feel the oxygen growing thinner once more. “It’s just… been a hard day, you know?”

“What happened?” he presses.

“Nothing!” you lie and struggle to meet his gaze. “I just… I got a text from my ex-boyfriend yesterday— I haven’t heard from him in a year, not since the—” Protection order, you try to say, though Robby’s already arguing before you can.

“Your ex?” the older man scoffs with the same amused smile the kid in South 4 had given you. “That’s what this is about— You’re having a panic attack over some boy trouble? Is that why you picked a fight last night? Seriously?”

“What?” you exclaim, features screwed in offense. “No!”

“Jesus!” Robby chuckles as he rises to full height, blocking the golden sun as he towers over you like a storm cloud. “Do you need to go home? Is this job too much for you?”

Your jaw clenches as your eyes burn. “It’s not like that,” you choke through unshed tears.

“Yeah, I think it is,” the man scoffs, stumbling backwards with his hands splayed before him. “Go home, alright? I don’t need this liability— Not today.”

“Liability?” you echo, though your voice breaks halfway through. You shake your head and turn away, before Robby can see the emotion glinting in your eyes.

“Brother, c’mon…” Jack cautions lowly, boots heavy on the worn sidewalk as he rushes to catch up with the man’s longer strides. His shoulder nudges into Robby’s as he mumbles in his ear, “You guys are fighting or whatever. I get it. But you don’t get to talk to her like that when you were the one breaking down in pedes last year.”

Robby scoffs in response. A cynical smile curls slowly at his mouth as he shakes his head. “That’s not the same thing—”

They cross the automatic doors and enter the air-conditioned ER. Jack stops the man with a firm hand on his shoulder, forcing him to meet his gaze. “Yeah, because no one gave you shit for it the way you just did to her.”

Robby softens his hardened edges, but only slightly.

“Look…” Jack sighs. “I don’t know what’s going on with the two of you, man— but she’s still your resident. She needs you right now.”

Robby shakes his head again — too proud to admit when he’s wrong, too stubborn to face the fact that anyone would be counting on him these days; least of all you.

“No, she doesn’t, brother. Trust me,” Robby says in the usual sarcastic lilt he does when there’s an emotion he’s trying hard to bottle up. He just smiles and walks on ahead of him. “She made that extremely clear last night…”

Your first mistake is not going home like Robby told you to. Your second one is not telling anyone about the aggressive patient in South 4. Your third is believing the man inside when he tells you he’s sorry, like you’re a kicked puppy that doesn’t know when to stop coming back.

You make the mistake of doing what you always do — the exact thing Robby warned you about the day you met. You convince yourself that you’re the only one who can help him; the only one who could possibly understand the weight of this man’s situation. You’d tell them what he did, and they’d call the cops; they’d restrain him, sedate him. No one would truly listen; not the way you would. 

You convince yourself you’re the only one who could give him the help he needs, and you realize very quickly what Robby meant when he said you had a savior complex. 

“I really didn’t mean to run you off, you know?” the young man mumbles, gaze averted to where he picks at pills of cotton on the white blanket beside him.

He winces slightly while you test the range of motion in his knee. His long, scruffy legs hang off the edge of the bed while you hold his dirtied foot in a gloved hand, bending his bruised knee before straightening it again.

“I know,” you nod with a kind smile, though you hardly believe it yourself. “I’m just glad you’re letting me help you now, Mr. Stevens.”

“Mr. Stevens?” the boy scoffs and adjusts his hospital gown when it slips off his pale shoulder. “That’s what they call my dad.”

“How’s your relationship with him?” you wonder tentatively, twisting gently at his ankle. “Your dad, I mean?”

“Shit,” he answers without missing a beat. “Why?” 

“No reason,” you shake your head. “I just… had a hunch.”

“What? You tellin’ me you’ve got an asshole for an old man, too?”

“My dad…” you trail off with a sigh, trying hard to find the right words. “…Tried his best. Sometimes, that’s all you can do.”

“Yeah, well, my dad’s best made me a fucking lunatic,” the boy confesses with a dry laugh. You notice his pupils are less dilated as his gaze flits everywhere but at you. “I was addicted to cigs when I was twelve, coke when I was sixteen, sex when I was seventeen… My dad thought he was preparing me to take over the firm, but… Really was destroying my whole fucking life, so…”

Another laugh sputters suddenly from his pink mouth.

Your eyes soften around the edges as you set his leg gingerly back into place, tugging your gloves off with two quiet pops. “I can have a social worker come talk to you if you want. Kiara’s the best; she’s been working with people with addictions for years—”

“I don’t want a fucking social worker,” the boy snaps. “I don’t need to be fixed.”

“I-I’m sorry!” you blurt and shake your head at yourself. “I didn’t mean to… I just wanted to say that people are here to help you— that I’m here to help you.”

“Yeah, last time I heard that, I was shipped to a psychiatric hospital for two months,” he confesses, dark eyes hardening a flicker. He jerks his strong chin backward, looking very suddenly skeptical of you. “You’re not… You’re not gonna send me back there, are you?”

“No!” you squeak out. “O-Of course not!”

“You are…” he nods slowly. “You are. That’s why they brought me here. To send me back.”

“Sir, I promise, I’m not here to—”

The words get stuck in your throat, in the very most literal sense. 

The man rises to his feet in a flash, despite the purple-black bruise on his ankle, and closes the brief distance between you before you can blink. 

You feel his cold fingers snap around your neck first, then your feet stumble over themselves second, then your back slamming hard into the nearest wall with a heavy thud third. 

You try to gasp, but the oxygen fails to fill your lungs. You just whimper instead, and attempt to pry the man’s strong hand from around your throat. Your features twist in anguish when he leans in close, grimacing at the scent of blood and whiskey on his breath as his it fans over your chin. 

The tip of his nose brushes the bridge of yours as he mumbles through gritted teeth: “I’m not going back there. I’ll die before I go back there—”

You don’t have the oxygen to tell him that you have no plans to send him back there, wherever there is — or that you’d still fight to get him real psychiatric help, even after all this. Your mouth just parts to gulp down breaths you couldn’t take if you wanted to, while you keep trying to move his fingers from the bruises they dig into your neck. 

Black spots begin to invade your vision. You go from red-hot to ice-cold in a flicker. You lose feeling in your hands first, then your eyesight next. There’s a bright white, a staticky black, and then nothing at all.

You don’t see Dana rush in when she catches sight of the altercation. You don’t see her trying and failing to pull the man off you while she shouts for backup. 

You don’t see Robby pushing through the crowd and over to you. You don’t see him wrench the patient away with a strong hand on his neck; or the way Robby traps the struggling boy in a headlock on the ground to force him into submission. You do think you hear his voice, though, as your mind floats in and out of consciousness from where Samira scoops your crumbled body into her arms.

His shouting filled the suddenly crowded room:

“Stop! Stop now, or I swear to fucking god, I will break every finger you think you can lay on her, do you hear me?” Robby had threatened, voice low and lethal. 

It took both Ahmad and Abbot to pull the man away, and three more security guards to pin down the screaming patient.

You trace your fingers over the dark splotches on your neck — four on the right and one on the left, from where his thumb dug in to cut off your air supply. You can still feel the man’s fingers on your throat with every breath in; colder than ice, stronger than steel. You force yourself to look away from the blooming blotches on your skin, dragging your eyes instead to where Robby looms behind you in the bathroom mirror.

He passes you a fresh icepack to wrap around your neck, and you let your fingers linger against his for a few moments before you take it from him.

“You gonna answer my question now?” he wonders quietly, voice bouncing off the tiles of the empty bathroom, as he meets your gaze in the mirror.

You swallow hard through a prickling throat. Your voice is still raspy from the assault as you tell him, “I have answered every question you’ve asked me… For the last ten minutes, Robinavitch…”

You watch the man fight back the urge to smile, though his dark eyes soften with it anyway. He crosses his arms and tilts his chin to his chest as he repeats, “Why didn’t you tell me that the patient was aggressive? That he hurt you before you went back inside— You said it was your ex that—”

“Because that’s who Mr. Stevens reminded me of,” you answer through a ragged breath. “My stupid ex. That’s why I freaked out.”

“Why didn’t you just tell me?”

“Because I knew you wouldn’t listen,” you rasp. “He’s only aggressive because he’s scared— He needs more than a doctor, Robby, he needs a friend.”

“I know you have this condition where you only see the best in people, and you don’t know when to stop helping them—”

“You used to call it over watering my plants,” you quip with a faux-bitterness.

Robby continues with a smile. “—But you know I wouldn’t have let you handle all that by yourself if you had just told me.”

“It’s not my fault that—”

“I’m not saying that it is.”

“No, I’m saying it’s not—” You cut yourself off with a huff and wince at the ache it puts in your throat. You turn around to face him and tilt your chin to keep his gaze at the proximity between, which makes his musky cologne swaddle you like a shroud. “I’m saying it’s not my fault that you make it impossible to talk to you sometimes.”

Robby’s scruffy features soften with hurt.

“I didn’t want to tell you about the patient because I knew you wouldn’t listen to me about getting him proper psychiatric care,” you say before clearing your scratchy throat. “It’s the same reason I didn’t want to bring up your sabbatical last night, because I knew you’d just fly off the handle without even trying to understand where I was coming from.”

“You’re right,” Robby concedes with a firm nod.

“And I know what you’re gonna say— Oh,” You cut yourself off when his response finally hits you. “I didn’t— I didn’t expect you to agree with me so quickly.”

Robby exhales a quiet laugh despite the stinging in his chest. 

“No, you’re right. You always are,” he tells you and lifts his calloused palms to your neck, cradling the icepack to your skin to give your hands a break. His stomach swirls with warmth when you rest your palms against his chest. “If I wasn’t so goddamn stubborn, this wouldn’t have happened to you—”

“That’s not what I’m saying,” you argue firmly, though your voice is still a bit weak.

“I know it’s not. ‘Cause you’re too nice for that,” Robby hums with a solemn shake of his head. “But that doesn’t make it any less true.”

You swallow hard and struggle to meet his gaze as you wonder meekly, “What’d they do with him? Mr. Stevens, I mean.”

“Well, I took you off the case while you were in North 1 with Dr. Mohan and Dr. King,” Robby tells you, faking an apologetic grimace. “So unfortunately, I can’t give you all the details without Mr. Stevens’ permission.”

Your eyes narrow in a challenging squint. “How long have you been practicing that one?”

“About the entire time I’ve been waiting for you to ask me that question,” Robby grins. “But he’s safe. And we’ve got him on meds to keep him calm— not sedated. I’ll make sure he gets the psychiatric care he needs, I promise.”

Your eyes glaze over with fresh tears. 

“Thank you…” you murmur, voice cracking.

A quiet smile blooms beneath his mustache as the pads of his thumbs smooth over your burning jaw, from where his fingers cradle gently at the sides of your neck. “And I think you’ll be very happy to learn that the rest of the E.D. is now calling me your guard dog, so…”

“That does make me happy, actually,” you say with a giggle, though it comes out a little more raspy than normal. You twist a rogue thread on his scrub top as you go suddenly shy. “Maybe my guard dog should stick around for a little while, then… You know, keep me safe and everything…”

Robby’s dark eyes narrow in a playful squint. 

“You didn’t plan this whole thing just to keep me from leaving, did you?”

“…I really didn’t want you to find out this way,” you quip with a fake grimace.

He smacks his lips against his teeth and shakes his head. “You’re lucky I love you, you know that?”

You jerk your chin back when he ducks down to kiss you.

“Love?” you echo in a fragile voice, wet eyes dancing between his darker ones. 

“I probably would’ve killed that guy for hurting you if they hadn’t pulled me off,” he confesses with a scoff, before tilting his head to his shoulder. “And all the poets say love makes you crazy, don’t they?”

“Yeah…” you nod. “I'm pretty sure that was the acclaimed poet Beyoncé, actually.”

“That’s the one,” Robby laughs before ducking down to kiss you, hard, like he should've been doing this whole time.

The facility is supposed to be abandoned. No bio signatures on the initial recon scan, no movement from hostiles after an extended stakeout, nothing. An abandoned underground lab for an experimental arm of Umbrella, potentially full of important documents on bioweapons research.

Your mission is to gather as much information as possible, should any of the viruses created there pop up on the black market or worse.

Easy, compared to the shit you're usually assigned.

Leon agrees.

Well, you think he agrees. He treats every mission as seriously as the last. You've grown to appreciate his consistency. It makes him easy to trust, which is essential in this line of work.

He's the best partner you've ever had. Thorough, direct, and smart. He never questions your abilities and relies on you just as much as you rely on him.

And, god. He's kind. Funny, too, when he wants to be. One time on a weeklong stakeout in the middle of nowhere, Argentina, he explained to you, in detail, the plot of The Count of Monte Cristo, all because you said you'd never read it. You hadn't even known he liked to read.

He's hard to crack, though. Professional to a fault, more dedicated to the cause than anyone you've ever met. And he's handsome.

How could you not fall in love with him?

You keep your ever-growing feelings to yourself. Asking him if he feels the same isn't worth ruining your partnership, isn't worth being someone else who wants something from him that he maybe can't give. Not when you can have him this way -- at your side with your life in his hands, his in yours.

In some ways, this is more intimate than any regular relationship you've ever had.

You'd spent the chopper ride here watching him as he looked out the window, even though you knew he felt your gaze. He's always doing that, always taking in everything around him with militant attention. You wonder what he sees that most people don't. Connections, patterns, maybe even beauty. You've never asked. Whatever it is has kept him alive this long. It's kept you alive, too.

And so, the mission.

You drop from a very long hatch into dark, stale air. The ladder leaves your hands aching and your shoulders tight, but there's no time for recovery.

Training takes over. Leon leads, with you at his right flank. Flashlights on, service weapon at the ready.

"Stay sharp," he says.

Sometimes you tease him about it, his constant readiness for a threat. But you feel it this time. Something's not right here, scans be damned.

Flecks of dust and grime float through your bright beams. The corridor ends maybe 15 meters in front of you in a set of metal doors, no windows. The security pad on the left side blinks a dull red.

"Emergency power," you say.

It was in the brief as a possibility but not a guarantee. Leon approaches, and you follow, digging into one of your belt pockets for the access card some other agent had to steal last week for this purpose.

"You want to do the honors?" you ask.

Leon shakes his head. "Be my guest."

The red light blinks green with a hover of your hand, and the unlocking mechanisms creak to life. The doors open slowly with a hiss. You're greeted with a dark lobby, dull yellowish lights lining the base of the walls.

"Must be on throughout," Leon says. Sometimes these places are zoned, or some other needlessly complicated system of power distribution. "Hopefully that means doors will keep opening."

He's still tense, arms outstretched to shine his light into the new space, shoulders taut. You feel it too, a prickle at the base of your neck.

"If not, I'm sure the power systems will be super easy to find with no issues," you say lightly.

He huffs, as close to a laugh as you can hope for at the start of a mission, but it's a win.

"Ready?" he asks.

You dip your chin. He glides into the room, clearing one side as you clear the other. There aren't any signs of disturbance, but that's how it goes with these places. The closer you get to the exit, the more normal it seems -- because all of the horrible things happen behind closed doors.

And no one makes it out.

"Clear," Leon calls. You echo it.

There are two single doors that reveal a bathroom hallway and the security office, as well as a set of double doors that resemble the locked entrance, another keypad glowing red at one side. Leon finds a map of the facility in the office and spreads it on the desk.

"That locked door will take us to an elevator that goes down to the labs," he says, tracing the path with a finger under the beam of his flashlight. "Three of them, all on different levels, connected by staircases instead of the elevator shaft, only accessible by keycard and on the other side of an anti-contamination corridor."

"Isolated," you observe. "In case of an outbreak?"

"It's bare bones compared to the other Umbrella stuff we've seen. This must be really out-there shit. Less resources, less of a footprint, less of an issue when it goes wrong."

You try to commit the map to memory. Leon will undoubtedly fold it into one of his pockets, but it's hard to consult a piece of paper when you're running from a B.O.W..

Level B1: MENIS, Level B2: KAMATOS, Level B3: PYRETOS

"Greek," Leon mutters. "More creative than T-virus, that's for sure."

This is just like him, surprising you after countless missions as your partner.

"Do you speak Greek, Leon?"

He shrugs.

"Not really." He tightens the strap on his glove, a cue that he's frustrated. You know most of his tells by now. "I don't know the last one. Fire, maybe?"

"Not really, he says," you tease. "What else are you hiding, Kennedy?"

He rolls his eyes at you, but if the lights were on, you're sure you'd see some pink in his cheeks. Battle-hardened agent he may be, Leon S. Kennedy still blushes for you.

If only...

No. You swallow the pang in your chest and roll your shoulders. "Start with B1 and go down, then loop back up?"

It wouldn't be out of the question to divide and conquer, but the slimy unease dripping down your spine prevents you from suggesting it.

He grunts his agreement, eyes still on the map, frowning.

As a pair, you work so well together because of your communication. It took practice, sure, but now you know each other across a crowded room, through the heat of a fight, in the dark. You don't let things go unsaid.

Well, most things, your traitorous heart says.

"Leon," you say. "It feels off, right? We're missing something."

Blue eyes meet yours. He sighs.

"Yeah," he says. "Guess we just have to find out what."

You can't help it -- you put your hand on his bicep and squeeze just a little, holding his gaze. His fringe hangs in his eyes. In another life, you'd push it back.

"Be careful, okay?" you ask him, faces so close you can feel his breath.

Leon got shot on your second ever mission together. It was a clean wound, through and through, except for the fact that he'd already been shot in that shoulder back in Raccoon City. The bullet fucked up the already fragile joint, so he needed surgery and was benched for six weeks (he was back at your side in four).

There was nothing you could have done. It was nobody's fault. But you felt responsible for waylaying your new partner, who was one of the most well-known agents in the whole damn place, so you went to see him in the hospital to alleviate your guilt.

"They have you with anyone while I'm out?" he asked you.

They did, actually, but hadn't told you who. Leon was troubled by it.

"Well, be careful," he said, as if he didn't trust anyone else to watch your back, even then.

"Only as careful as you," you replied, pointing at his shoulder.

That was the first time you made Leon Kennedy laugh.

Now, it's something you say to each other in the field. A mantra, a reminder, a promise.

Leon gives you a small smile.

"Only as careful as you," he replies, like he always does. We keep each other safe.

You release him and busy your hand at your belt immediately, god forbid you touch him more.

He rolls his shoulders back and checks the chamber of his sidearm.

"Into the depths, huh?"

"Into the depths."

--

Level B1: MENIS

The elevator opens to a dead contamination chamber. Nothing happens as you walk through the three zones where you'd expect to be scanned, doused, and dried. Another set of metal doors opens with a hiss when you tap the keycard. The smell of death hits your nose and makes your eyes water.

There are at least 10 bodies piled on the other side, most of them in pieces.

"Fuck," you curse, sidestepping a caved-in head.

"Looks like the party started without us," Leon says quietly.

"Great," you mutter. "God, that's nasty."

There aren't any claw marks or avid stains or other tell-tale signs of B.O.W.'s you see with this caliber of violence. One look at Leon and you know he's realized the same thing. You tilt your head down the hall. He nods, following your lead deeper into the floor.

Red emergency lights pulse along the base of the walls, illuminating the blood splattered pretty much everywhere. You pass the occasional corpse, most of them so horribly disfigured it's hard to tell if they were staff or test subjects or something else.

There are so many things you want to say, but you keep them to yourself until Leon leads you to the floor's main office. You slide in but don't relax.

"They look like they were torn apart," you say as soon as the door is closed. Leon frowns at you, since you didn't clear the room first, but it's a square office. You can see all the corners from where you're standing.

"I know," he replies. "But no sign of what did it."

You sigh. "So, are you going to tell Hunnigan the location survey was wrong, or should I?"

"I think I've run out of my 'bad news' calls for the year," he says. "That one's all yours once we get topside."

"How generous of you."

Leon smirks. "I'm a giver."

The office is small and the computers are dead. There are papers scattered around, so you divide and conquer.

You find an official logbook. Mostly in-the-weeds science stuff, but you skim until you find a change in handwriting.

LOG #57:

Development continues under new staff. Blood transmission remains the only method that carries enough sample to infect a host; airborne tests were unsuccessful. Vaccine/suppressant formulas abandoned for the time being after we were told that our subject supply would be steady. B2 wants to set one of theirs against one of ours, which seems pointless because any B1 subject will win that fight. B3 is a joke, but they're insistent that it'll work.

No vaccine...that's not good news. But what were they actually testing here? Infecting people with what?

You flip more pages until you find something that makes your blood run cold.

LOG #63:

We've finally gotten a host to survive. B2 and B3 are nowhere near this. We won't be sharing. Their subjects die within hours. B3 is practically useless, anyway. What use is controlling people if they die on you in an hour? But here, we've cracked it. I managed to figure out how to get the virus to work with the host's adrenaline production, stabilizing it into a constant state of fight or flight without short-circuiting the nervous system. If this batch survives the week, we'll ask permission to start on the suppressant. Once we have that, we'll be able to control the whole herd. The future of hostile takeover is here! Now, if only they'd let us out of this fucking dungeon more often…

Holy shit. They were making viruses to infect large populations, to control them. But using what? Changing their brain chemicals, making them reliant on suppressants? Leon told you about this kind of manipulation, how it infiltrated a military unit and even made its way to the White House a few years ago. Who knows how far they got this time?

"Leon," you call, turning with the folder in your hands. "You should look at this --"

You make eye contact and fall silent. He's got his finger over his lips and his gun at the ready. 

You toss the papers aside and take your place on the other side of the door.

That's when you hear it.

Groans, grunts, screams. Footsteps -- a lot of them.

He holds your gaze.

Clear the chokepoint, get into the lab rooms down the hall around the corner, make for the stairwell on the other side of the floor.

That's what you'd do, so you know it's what he's thinking, too. No confirmation needed.

The door bursts open. You duck, missing the arms reaching for your neck. It's dark in here, but you rely on muscle memory and gravity to sweep the zombie's legs out from under it and stomp on its head while you fire at the next one.

The attackers are -- well, they look mostly human. But their eyes are wild, blood running down their faces like tears, pink foam and spit dripping from their mouths.

Leon's movements are sharp and decisive. Headshot, parry, twist. Uppercut, knee sweep, headshot. He occupies the air around you like he's magnetized to your movements, always filling the space where you aren't, ceding room when you need it. After hours upon hours of mat practice between the two of you and hundreds of field opportunities to master it, you work together like a well-oiled machine.

It's exhilarating.

You're forced back from the door, but you keep firing, slicing, covering each other. It's essential that you get into the hall sooner rather than later to avoid being trapped in this room.

A zombie rips the arm off another in its attempt to get to you. That's new.

"What the fuck were they doing with this shit?" Leon grunts. He's splattered with blood now. No doubt you are too.

"That's what I was going to tell you before our party of two got crashed," you say between shots. 

"They wanted to control people."

"Yeah, this sure looks like control to me!"

"We have to clear it or we'll have to fight through on our way back up."

Leon grunts his agreement. "They're not biting." His aim is true, as always. He downs two, three, four infected. "They just want to rip us apart!"

"We need to go into the hall. Cover me," you say, dodging bloody fingers and sliding through the door. "Switching weapons!"

Your assault rifle is strapped to your back. You holster your pistol and reach around for it, but something catches your jacket and pulls.

The fabric tears. For a split second, you worry your flesh will be next, but then the tug disappears. Leon grunts and he breaks the neck of whatever had you.

You keep your gaze on the approaching pack, maybe 10 or 15 strong. Leon keeps taking them down while you holster your pistol and check the new cartridge.

"Gonna need to reload in a second here," he calls. "Six left. Five. Four --"

"Ready," you shout. Leon stabs a zombie in the neck and walks behind it, using it as a wall against reaching fingers until he's at your side again. He tears his knife free and slides beside you, solid, ready.

You open fire.

That's all it takes. The hallway is soon empty and bloodier than before. All you can hear is your combined panting.

Leon lowers his gun. "Nice job," he says.

You drop yours, too. "What was this floor called again? Menace?"

"Basically," he says, slamming in a new clip. "Divine wrath or anger."

"No shit." You look down at the tear in your jacket. "God damnit, this is my favorite."

Leon checks his chamber. "I'll get you a new one," he says.

You laugh. He almost smiles, like that was his goal all along.

The rest of the floor is mostly clear. A few stragglers here and there, but they're no match for the two of you. The containment chambers seem to be where the infected gathered in the months since this facility went dark -- the walls are covered in scratch marks.

"I can't believe they didn't kill each other," Leon says with mild disgust. "Not having control of yourself like that...I wouldn't wish it on anyone."

You've read the report from Spain. He knows how it feels.

"Do you think they're aware?" you wonder aloud.

He looks so sad for a moment that you almost reach for him. "I hope not."

--

Level B2: KAMATOS

The stairwell is a mess. The door to B2 is barricaded, but you manage to get through after slamming your shoulders against it over and over.

This floor is quiet, but in a different way than upstairs. Years of field-trained instincts tell you there's nothing left alive on this floor. That, and it made a hell of a lot of noise getting the door open, and nothing popped out.

It's dustier down here, like things have been still for longer.

"What's this one mean?" you ask. "This virus."

"Extreme fatigue," Leon tells you.

"So if they controlled adrenaline levels on the first floor to make them angry, they're depriving people of sleep on this floor?"

He shrugs. "Maybe they found a way to keep the brain awake without killing it."

They did not.

The documents you find suggest the virus was a failure. The bodies you find confirm it. Hosts died from heart failure, self-inflicted wounds, a number of things, no matter what the scientists did to keep the mind from giving up. All by depriving them of sleep.

Being so tired that you see no other way out…

The horror of it all rises in your throat. You leave Leon with the corpses so you can press your forehead to the cool hallway wall.

This job asks a lot of you. Your time, your well-being. Your security, your personal relationships, your hobbies. It's overwhelming and can bury a person. The things you see, the things you do -- it gets to you. It’s easy to shove it down, to pretend like you're untouchable, but that's no way to live, either.

Sometimes you just have to feel it.

These poor people.

Leon's hand is light on your shoulder. Not patronizing, not rushing, just there. Warm, solid.

You take a deep breath, then stand up straight.

"Let's take a quick break before the last floor," Leon says.

"I'm fine."

You turn to face him, but he's already crouching, back against the wall.

He grins, a real smile this time. It makes him look younger. "Who said it was for you?"

It's like he's giving you permission to put it all down for a second. To forget where you are, why you're there, what you're doing. Leon's guard is rarely fully down, and right now he's telling you that he's got you. Rest for a second, I'll take care of us.

He's proven to you over and over that he will.

So you smile back, shaky but genuine. "Getting old, Kennedy?"

"Something like that." He looks up at you, grin softening into something fond. "Do you remember Greece?"

You slide down the wall to his level. "Do I remember Greece? Be serious. How could I forget --"

"All those stairs," Leon finishes. "Exactly."

It was last year in the height of summer. A small, sleepy cliffside town, except for the fact that a scummy billionaire moved into the monastery and started developing B.O.W.'s in the catacombs.

The town was evacuated. You were sent in to apprehend the guy and secure whatever virus he was using. It turned into three days of running up and down stone staircases away from bats with tentacles and lizards with thousands of teeth where you wouldn't expect teeth to be.

Over the course of your partnership, you've seen each other in all states, but you've never seen Leon as exhausted as he was after that mission.

"I thought I was going to have to carry you to the rendezvous point," you remind him. "You fell down so many stairs."

Leon rubs his knees as if remembering the way they smacked stone over and over.

"And you would have," he says.

He catches your gaze and holds it. He's reminding you that you're in this together. That he trusts you, something you do not take lightly. It's hard to know who you can trust in this job, even your very own employer, but he never doubts you. You never doubt him.

The familiar ache of everything you feel for him sits warm and heavy on your chest. He's the best man you've ever known.

"I would have," you say.

Leon dips his chin, his mouth curling into a smaller smile than before, but this one is just as fond.

"We should go back," you say without meaning to.

It surprises him, but he hides it well.

"That would be nice," he muses. "I don't know the last time I took a vacation."

"We could go to the beach," you continue. It's scarily easy to imagine -- Leon in swim trunks, cheeks pink from the sun. "Stay at the bottom of the stairs and not walk up a single one."

"But you liked the monastery," he reminds you. "We'd have to go back up to see the windows."

Of course he remembers how you'd looked up in awe at the stained glass, gun in your hand and blood on your face.

"I'll climb up by myself. You can relax."

Leon sighs. "Relax," he says. "I don't even know if I know how to do that."

"You're good at everything," you say. "You'll pick it up in no time."

Whatever game this is, you're having too much fun playing it. Leon doesn't lie to you, so while he might be indulging you, there's a part of him that means all of this. He has to know that you mean it, too.

He stands and offers you his hand.

"One more floor," he says. "Then we can go to Greece."

--

Level B3: PYRETOS

The hit comes out of nowhere.

Maybe you're distracted by talk of vacation, or your guard is down after the silence of B2, but you don't see it coming. One second you're rounding the corner, the next you're flying backwards through glass, back slamming against a cabinet. You land heavily on the ground, more glass and something wet raining down on you.

Leon yells your name.

You try to catch your breath, but it's stuck in your chest. He's still calling for you in between gunshots.

"Fuck," you croak, finally finding air. You roll onto your side. Glass crunches under your weight as you try to figure out what the hell just happened.

Everything hurts, but you try to shake it off and push up to standing. Leon hauls himself through the broken window. He begins to clear the room after he sees you on your feet.

"Clear. That was one ugly son of a bitch," he says. "Must have gotten down here from upstairs."

You open your mouth to say something, anything, but the words catch in your throat.

Something isn't right.

Your skin feels tight, like you already went on vacation and got burned to a crisp. Your pulse won't slow. Deep breaths feel impossible. Strangest of all, it's almost like –

Well, your core is buzzing. You press your legs together and try not to panic.

In the early days, after Leon got shot but well before Greece, you hid an injury from him.

You took a knife to the ribs during a fight. It wasn't too deep, but it was wide and bleeding steadily. Adrenaline allowed you to get through it. You figured you could patch yourself up the next time you slowed. But Leon pushed on ahead, and you followed without saying anything.

That is, until you left a bloody handprint on a door. He stopped immediately.

"Is that yours?" he said. "Where are you hurt?"

"It's nothing," you protested. But Leon S. Kennedy does not give up easily.

"Show me," he said, pulling out bandages from his hip pouch. "When did this happen?"

"I'm not compromised," you said, even as you lifted your jacket to show him.

"I know you aren't," he said. "I want to know when you're hurt so I can make sure you're okay."

"I'm fine," you said weakly. He patched you up quickly and thoroughly.

"We're partners," he told you. "We have to help each other."

Here, now, you don’t hide from him.

"Leon," you croak. "Something's wrong. I think I --"

He's at your side in an instant, so close your breath hitches. Why are you so affected by him? Why are you so warm?

"The rip in your jacket," Leon says. "Your arm is bleeding."

"Liquid," you gasp. "It felt wet when I hit the cabinet."

The pieces come together. Shattered vials at your feet, an empty cabinet behind you. The dull red emergency lights make it hard to tell what color the puddle is, but you know it can't be good.

"They wouldn't keep a virus out in the open, would they?" you ask weakly. You're shaking now, shivering even though you don't feel cold.

"Fever," he breathes. "Pyretos. It means fever."

You've rarely seen Leon afraid. He's human, so it happens, but normally he faces things head-on without complaint.

Right now, he looks terrified. That scares you more than anything.

"Leon," you whisper. "What do we do?"

He snaps into action. He hands you a roll of bandages.

"Wrap it," he says. He presses a few buttons on his watch until it beeps. Setting a timer, no doubt. Just in case. "How do you feel? Describe it to me."

"Feverish," you say. "But not dizzy. I can think clearly."

Leon starts to dig around the lab, tearing open drawers and rifling through what he finds. The office on this floor wasn't in the same place as the other two, so any information must be in here, right?

"What else?"

You follow his lead, desperately searching for anything helpful. How do you explain the fact that your entire body is pulsing with a very specific kind of need? It scares you, feeling this out of control physically while also being in your right mind.

You land on achey. The buzzing under your skin gets worse every minute you spend looking and finding fuck all.

"There's nothing here," he says, frustrated. "Shit."

You're thinking the same thing: no vaccines. Any hope for you is in this lab.

But then -- your eye catches on a cabinet sitting on deep grooves in the floor.

"There's a door," you tell him, already heading for it. A wave of need hits you so suddenly that you have to brace yourself on the wall to catch your breath. Leon brushes by you. The slight contact has you swallowing a moan.

Jesus Christ.

He shoves the cabinet aside. Behind it is a door that opens into the lab office, as dark as the others.

You follow him in and start searching the shelves. Leon drags a table into the perfect place to effectively barricade you in.

"We don't have time to be interrupted right now," he says. He starts searching the desk.

You're sweating now. If this thing is going to turn you, Leon can't be here for it. You don't want him to see it. "Maybe you should go back to the surface --"

"I'm not leaving you," he interrupts. It's sharp, final.

"But if I turn--"

Leon whirls around. "I'm not leaving you," he says again.

Your nose stings. It's not the rational choice, but it's the Leon Kennedy choice. You can't help but be grateful for it.

He returns to the papers. Everywhere your clothing touches your skin feels heavy, almost painful. Your skin is sensitive, your throat dry, breath still fast.

You're so turned on, you think you might explode. It's all you can do to just stand there and try to keep it together.

"I found something," Leon says. He says nothing else. It's hard to see his expression in the dark without being close to him. You don't know if you can handle that right now.

"Bad news, doc?"

He swallows and begins to read.

"In an effort to bend the subject to commands, a fever is introduced via the bloodstream that increases testosterone and dopamine to near-unbearable levels of arousal. We have successfully altered the balance to allow the mind to be unaffected, making the reaction purely physical. The fever, if detected and combated within 1 hour, can be reduced by repeated bursts of oxytocin until the subject's internal temperature returns to normal. Required oxytocin levels seem to vary by subject; no pattern discernible at this time."

"What the fuck does that mean?" you pant. Your skin feels too tight. You still can't take a full breath. Control is becoming a missed opportunity. "Do I have a sex fever?"

No answer.

"Leon."

He exhales sharply.

"I think you need to be touched," he says. "To release the chemical that will help you fight this on your own."

Your responding laugh edges on hysterical.

"I do have a sex fever. So, what, you're going to hug me and hope I don't die?"

"I could," he says. He runs a frustrated hand through his hair. "I just don't think it'll be enough. This says bursts, and a lot of them. The best way to trigger that kind of response is --"

It clicks in your mind.

"Orgasm," you whisper. "Oh, god."

Leon closes his eyes for a second too long.

"I don't know what to do," he admits. He looks at his watch. "It's been 10 minutes. I don't know what--"

"I'm so sorry," you breathe. The gravity of your situation is like a bucket of cold water. If only it actually made you feel cold. You have to fuck your partner or die. What kind of sick joke is this? "Leon, I'm so sorry. You don't have to do anything, this is my fault --"

He tosses the file onto the table.

"I'm not going to let you die," he says with all his usual conviction. He really believes it, and it makes it easier for you to believe it, too. "Not when there's something I can do about it."

"But not like this," you croak. "This is --"

"I know."

God, you wish the lights were on. You want to see every detail of his face to discern what he's feeling. Can you ask him to do this? Will it ruin everything forever?

A tremor wracks through you. You have to brace yourself on the desk.

He yanks open drawers until he finds a thermometer. It beeps alive, somehow, and he holds it up to your forehead.

"Shit," he mutters.

"What?"

Leon flips the device to show you the screen. 103.2.

"Shit," you echo.

Your brain is going to cook in your skull sooner rather than later. You swallow frustrated tears along with your pride.

"I'm so wet," you whisper. It's the lewdest thing you've ever said to him. "I can feel it."

Leon inhales sharply, standing ever-so-still just next to you, just out of reach.

The pain radiates through you, molten lava in your veins. It's strange to be able to think so clearly. You want Leon as badly as you always do. That's bearable. But the pain. The heat. It's something else, something all-consuming.

You need him to touch you.

"Please don't make me beg," you whimper, turning towards him.

"Jesus," he mutters, filling the space you make for him. His hands find your face. You groan. The contact is like a balm, even through his gloves.

"Oh god."

You nuzzle into his palms. It's like you can feel the battle in your blood, the virus doing its best to cook you from the inside out, but Leon's touch is giving you a foothold, a reprieve.

If it wasn't so awful, you'd laugh at the idea that you're so horny you might die.

"Whatever you need, I'll do," he says. His voice is already hoarse. "But just -- you have to tell me if it's not okay. And I'll stop. We'll figure something else out."

You lean back on the desk and grab his elbows. You've touched plenty, but never like this. Never loaded with all of the unspoken things between you, never with such desperation.

"It's okay," you tell him. "Whatever it takes, it's okay. I trust you."

His thigh slides between your legs.

"Can you forgive me? If I do this?" he whispers, lips so close to yours. You lean forward on instinct, pulled to him by more than just the fire in your core.

"There's nothing to forgive," you say, and then you're kissing.

What you need is an orgasm, but this is something you've wondered about for a long time. Something you've wanted. It almost feels selfish to take it now.

But, fuck, it's good.

He's not shy. You trace the seam of his lips with your tongue. He opens for you immediately, licking into your mouth as he pulls you forward and onto his thigh.

His kisses are desperate, exposing his worry, but also tender, exposing his care. You're in good hands, hands you love.

Even through your pants, the pressure of your cunt on his thigh is enough to steal your breath.

"God," you gasp.

"Not quite," Leon says, kissing a path from your mouth down your neck. "Does that help?"

You grind down on him in reply. His palms have made their way to your hips, aiding you in your quest for pressure on your core.

It's too much. It's not enough. But still, the coil tightens. "Sorry, I just need --"

You chase it, grinding down on his thigh even harder, panting into his neck. You're close, you can feel it. You're chasing it, that snap, that reward. Leon just lets you take and take and take.

You thread your fingers through his hair, panting into his neck. When you tug just a little, he bounces his leg and you keen.

"More, please."

It only takes three more bounces before you're coming, shudders ripping through you, his name on your lips.

When you return to your body, Leon is dragging his palm up and down your back.

"Did you just--"

You're becoming very familiar with the fabric of his shoulder, his leather harness pressing into your cheek.

"Mhm," you manage.

There's a world where you're embarrassed. In that world, you asked Leon out for dinner and then up to your place after. In that world, you made out on the couch and ground down on his thigh until you came. In that world, he laughed with you, utterly charmed, and it was the beginning of something wonderful.

In this one, he gently tilts you back so he can check your temperature with the thermometer.

"Holy shit," he breathes. "102.1. It worked."

You don't feel that different, but the number doesn't lie.

Leon is panting, too. "More?"

You nod. Your cunt aches like you didn't have an orgasm at all.

He tugs off a glove with his teeth, dropping it god knows where.

"Don't know how clean my hands are," he says.

A laugh bursts out of you, but it sounds close to a sob.

Two fingers go in his mouth faster than you can open yours. He doesn't waste too much time wetting them, given how turned on you already are, but he gives them a good suck. A trail of spit hangs from his lip when he finishes.

You work at the buttons of your pants, unbuckling your tactical belt. It clangs onto the desk behind you. Leon slides his hand down under the waistband of your panties. You collapse into him with a guttural moan.

"Leon," you gasp. He holds you up, no problem, even as you go utterly boneless at just his fingers in your folds.

"You weren't kidding," he says, breathy. "You are wet."

"I'm sorry," you pant into his shoulder.

"Please don't say sorry again," he groans. "I can't take it."

"Can I say thank you?"

"That's worse," he says, sliding two fingers into you at the same time. "I just wish it wasn't like this, is all."

The absurdity of the whole thing makes it hard to keep your emotional walls high. What's the point? You're having sex with your partner to save your life in an underground Umbrella laboratory. You're way past keeping your emotions from him.

So you hear his words for what they are. For what he's not saying.

"Oh, yeah?" He curls his fingers and you groan, arching into him. "You have something you want to tell me, Kennedy?"

"Little late for that."

He presses his lips to your jaw, but you pull back so you can see his eyes. He's flushed, his pupils taking over almost all of the blue you love so dearly.

"I always want to know how you feel," you tell him. It's honest, raw, perhaps out of place when he's knuckle deep in your cunt.

"Fuck," he breathes, like eye contact is enough to undo him.

"I just want to help you," he says. "I always want to help you when you need it." He picks up the pace with his fingers. "I like being the guy who has your back."

His thumb circles your clit. It’s all you can do to hang onto his shoulders and ride it out as he keeps talking.

"I want to give you everything you've ever wanted," he says. "I miss you when you leave the room. I trust you more than anyone I've ever met."

"Oh, Leon," you gasp, grinding down onto his hand. "Me too. Me too."

He scrapes his teeth along your neck. "Yeah?"

"Yes, yes, yes --"

The orgasm washes over you. You clench around him over and over. He carefully pulls his hand from your panties and licks his fingers. Good god.

Something has shifted between you. It's still about the mission, about breaking your fever, but now it's more. It's more, because you both want it.

Leon leans in for a kiss. You meet him halfway, tasting yourself on his lips.

Beep.

"101.3," he says.

You push his hair back from his forehead. "Is that low enough?"

This time, you do feel a bit different. Maybe it's the confirmation that Leon has feelings for you, but your muscles feel more relaxed, your skin less taut. The need still burns, though.

"There's no way to say this without sounding like a creep," he says wryly. "But I think you should have a few more."

You drag your hands up and down his torso, but your gaze lands on his makeshift barricade.

"Do we think we have time?"

Even as you ask, you're toeing off your boots and shoving your pants down. Leon is quick to help you.

"If anything comes through that door," he says, fingers hooked in your underwear, "I can kill it with my eyes closed."

He hooks his hand under your thighs and helps you up onto the desk fully, sweeping everything onto the ground.

"So could you," he adds. You hum in agreement. Your hand returns to his torso, trailing it down to the front of his pants.

He's hard.

It's not entirely a surprise, but you're pleased.

"I know, I'm sorry, it's kind of fucked up --" he tries. You don't let it get very far.

"Don't you apologize," you say. "You're allowed to want, Leon. I promise you, whatever you want, you can have. You already do."

His answer to that is a kiss, not searing and heated like before, but soft and slow. Like he's memorizing you, learning every inch of your mouth just because he can.

A wave of heat rolls through you, so intense and unexpected that you have to close your eyes and grit your teeth against the pain.

Leon rubs your back and tells you to breathe, it's okay, you're going to be okay.

The heat dulls. "How long has it been?" you ask through gritted teeth, eyes still shut.

"26 minutes."

His thumbs stroke your cheeks, helping you come back to yourself.

"Are you okay to keep going?" he asks. "I'll do whatever you want."

You reach for his belt with shaking hands. Not because you don't want him, or because you're scared, but because you need him. You need him to survive. This was just as true before you got infected as it is now. And you have him.

He has you.

Leon lets you unbuckle his pants as he undoes his harness and his tactical pouches. They both fall to the ground.

You take him in hand and he hisses. His cock is warm, another layer of heat against your already burning skin. His hips jerk when you stroke him root to tip.

His fingers circle your wrist to stop you.

"Another time," he says. He kisses your chin. "Okay?"

There will be another time. Leon doesn't say things he doesn't mean, so you take it to heart. This will happen again.

It's not exactly romantic, the way you lean back on some long-dead bioterrorist's desk naked from the waist down, Leon's pants shoved down his thighs and his cock in his hand. But it's what you've got, and it's what you'll take.

You spread your legs for him. He sucks in air like a man just saved from drowning.

"Ready?" he asks. You feel his tip at your entrance and can't swallow the moan that rips from your throat in the shape of his name. He wastes no more time sinking into you in one stroke.

You come immediately, legs wrapped around his hips. You might scream, it's hard to tell. But you're so full and it finally feels right. Like you've been missing something all along and finally found it.

Leon says your name over and over, like a mantra, like a prayer.

"I wish I could see you properly," he says, voice breaking. "I wish –

His hips jerk forward even though he's bottomed out. He leans forward until he's bracing his forearms on either side of your head, brushing your nose with his. He's right. It's hard to see him fully in the red-washed office.

"You know what I look like," you tell him.

"Not like this," he shakes his head. "Not like this."

"You're doing so good," you say, lips brushing the shell of his ear. "Leon, it feels so good --"

It's a strange sensation to feel your blood cooling while he's inside you, to regain control of your body just as you surrender your heart.

Leon starts to move his hips, a slow drag at first, but it quickly becomes a snap. You dig your fingers into his biceps and hold on. You can hear how wet you are as he fucks you.

The coil in your core tightens again. "Leon," you moan. "I'm gonna--"

He kisses you, hips slowing to a grind. He reaches between you with one hand to find your clit and give it some messy circles.

"Go ahead," he says against your mouth. "I can take it."

Your cunt clenches around him. Tears prick in your eyes not from overstimulation but from everything else -- the heat in your veins, the tenderness of his hold, the way he's kissing you as you fall apart, swallowing your gasps.

"So beautiful," he says. And god, it sounds like he means it. Half-dressed, sweaty and bandaged, he means it.

Leon goes back to shallow thrusts, but they're becoming more erratic.

"How many is that?"

"Four," Leon says.

"Are you..."

He nods. "I'm close."

His forehead is damp from the effort. You wipe it with the heel of your hand.

"It's okay," you tell him. "It's okay, Leon. You can --"

You tighten your legs around him to hold him inside.

His breath hitches, but he picks up the pace without argument.

The smack of your flesh fills the room. The only thing on your mind is Leon Leon Leon.

The noise he makes just before he comes inside you is a punched-out whine of your name. He stills above you entirely, eyes screwed shut in pleasure.

"So beautiful," you echo. "So beautiful, Leon."

He keeps his weight off you but presses his face into your neck as he catches his breath.

"Fuck," he says. "How do you feel?"

You need to check your temperature, but remarkably better. The heat in your veins is an expected one. You can feel sweat cooling on your skin. The incessant need in your cunt has dulled to a satiated ache.

"Still alive." You kiss him chastely, considering he's still inside you.

"Let me check -- where the hell did that thing go?"

He pulls out. You both hiss just a bit, but he finds the thermometer on the ground.

Beep.

"98.3," Leon says. "That's normal."

You feel boneless and make no move to get up from the desk. If you did, you'd surely make a mess.

"Finally, something normal about today."

Leon tucks his cock back into his briefs, buttons his pants. He drags his hands up and down your thighs.

"Can I clean you up?" he asks.

Even though you now know how he feels, know that he wants you just as much as you want him, he's done so much for you today. Your temperature is back to normal. You still need to make it back to the surface.

"You don't need to," you say. "Just...give me a clean bandage, or something --"

"Let me do this for you," he interrupts. Begs, really, already getting on his knees between your legs. "One more. Just to be safe."

The heat that builds is nothing like the wild, uncontrollable fire of before. This is all you, all Leon. 

The fact that he wants his mouth on you, wants to lick his own come from your cunt.

"Okay," you breathe. You thread your fingers through his hair. He preens.

He kisses the inside of your thigh and pushes your legs wider.

Maybe you should feel exposed, but you don't. You feel wanted. You feel safe.

Leon pulls your folds open with his thumbs. He starts with long licks with the flat of his tongue along your seam, flicking your clit when he reaches the top. But your entrance quickly becomes his focus, and suddenly he's a man possessed.

He laps up his own release as it drips from you, humming when you tug on his hair. He hardly comes up for air, but you know he's paying attention to your reactions based on the way he moves his mouth. He sucks on your clit. Your hips buck, so he does it again.

"Leon," you gasp. How is it possible that you're going to come again? But you feel it, the rising tide in your core. All it takes is a glance down to find him watching you, soaking in whatever he can see in the dim light.

He keeps his mouth on you through your final orgasm. This time, a few tears leak from your eyes. Your breath evens out and your heartbeat actually slows the way you expect it to. The fever is broken, you're certain of it.

"Just to be safe," you say to the ceiling. "You just wanted to show me how good you were at that."

Leon wipes his face with the back of his hand.

"I like to be thorough," he replies. He stands, drags your underwear and pants up with him. 

"Are you okay? How are the symptoms?"

"I think so." You scoot forward on the table so he can pull your clothes over your hips. "It doesn't feel like a fever anymore."

"What does it feel like?"

Your legs are a little shaky, but you stand and wrap your arms around him. You've just had sex to save your life, but you don't know if you've ever hugged Leon before.

"It feels like you," you tell him, cheek pressed to his shoulder.

Leon stills, but you can hear his heartbeat pick up. He envelops you in his embrace, lips pressed against your temple, his inhale shaky.

"I'm glad," he whispers. "I'm so fucking glad."

He's hidden his fear from you so well this whole time, but you saw the look on his face when he realized you were infected. You hug him tighter, willing the fear to leave him. You're okay. You're here, in his arms. He saved you.

"What now?" you ask. You turn in his arms. He releases you so you can reach for your tactical belt.

"We get out of here in one piece," he says. "We get you to medical."

"Fucking medical," you mutter. You shove your foot back in your discarded boot.

"I won't leave you there," Leon says. They could keep you for days, but you know he means it. "Then I'll take you home. And we'll sleep for days."

You almost forget that you don't have to keep your feelings from him. You let the joy take over your face. "Yeah?"

"Yeah," he says, a little sheepish. "If you want to."

"I want to," you assure him. "I want to."

You'll have to talk about this, surely. The way it changes your partnership, how to navigate field work. There is so much to learn about him. What he's like on a quiet morning at home instead of a stakeout. The noises you can pull from him in a real bedroom. His face when you tell him you love him.

The future is bright.

Leon buckles his harness. He laughs to himself, tearing you from your thoughts.

"What?"

He straightens your belt and grins crookedly, boyish and lovely.