dennis who regularly has princess and the pea moments. he doesn’t even recognize them as sensory issues, just thinks he’s weird and dramatic.
the seam of his sock was wrong. he absolutely had to take off his shoe mid-conversation. he apologized to robby the whole time, acknowledged that it was unprofessional to do it in the middle of the hallway, but he just couldn’t think about lab values and differential diagnoses with his sock seam on his toes like that.
robby didn’t think much of it. everybody had those things that bothered them. maybe dennis was a bit more bothered by them than most other people, but it wasn’t that noticeable.
it popped back up again when dennis started sleeping over in his and jack’s bed.
they both had problems sleeping, they would stay up well past their bedtime, watching TV, reading, eating. dennis couldn’t handle the crumbs in the bed.
jack and robby didn’t even feel them. but they were there, pressing into dennis’s skin, bothering him so much he had to just change the sheets completely. they vowed to never eat chips in bed again when dennis offered to just go back to trinity’s.
a couple days after the bed debacle, dennis had no clean undershirts. jack gave him one of his own. dennis gratefully accepted.
“i need scissors,” dennis declared to robby about an hour after their shift started.
robby looked up from his tablet, taking off his glasses. “second drawer to the left of dana’s station. why?”
dennis rushed over there with an urgency that made robby question if there was a trauma he somehow didn’t know about. he didn’t even shut the drawer before crossing back over to robby, handing him the scissors, and turning around. he messed with the back of his shirt collar before finding the tag and pulling it out, “please cut this off. it’s killing me.”
“ok,” robby snipped at the tag, careful not to get any of dennis’s hair. he smoothed the collar back out, expecting for dennis to be soothed.
except his shoulders went back up when he felt the rough edge itching him. “fuck this,” dennis cursed while just shucking off both of his layers, standing shirtless in the hub. myrna whistled somewhere. he roughly yanked his scrub top back on and took a deep, centering breath. “ok. better.”
robby watched as dennis took the now tag-less undershirt back to the lockers, sort of bewildered at the whole thing. dennis was oblivious to the multiple eyes tracking his departure.
yeah, they were gonna have to talk to the kid about his sensory issues.
