#sunshine!intern!reader

“How are you not freezing?” Victoria hisses, jamming her shoulder into yours.

You jump at the sound of her voice, glancing down at your arms, which are currently hosting a very enthusiastic colony of goosebumps. You cross them over your chest and rub slow circles into your own forearms, as if friction alone might coax warmth from marrow. 

It doesn’t help. Nothing helps. You’re fairly certain even your cells might have frostbite. And okay, yes, maybe wearing short sleeves in January was a bit... idealistic. But you had faith. In body heat. In central heating. In the power of sunlight. In the flawed yet beautiful science of layering. 

All of those have failed you today.

“I am freezing,” you say, which is a generous interpretation of the breathy little gasp that leaves your mouth. Your teeth haven’t started chattering yet, but it’s a close call. Pride’s the only thing keeping them in line, white-knuckling it through sheer force of delusion. “I just… wasn’t expecting the heat to be broken.”

Victoria makes a face. “That was your first mistake.”

“What was?”

“Trusting this hospital,” she says. “It’s constantly praying on our downfall. This place senses hope and snuffs it out.” 

You let out a graceless snort, breath nearly clouding in front of you. “That’s… a lot of existential dread for a Tuesday morning. Do you wanna talk about it or should I just let you have that one?”

“Please,” she says. “It’s too early for self-reflection.” Then she jerks her chin toward the side hallway. “Why don’t you go work whatever weird spell you have on Robby. He’ll listen to you. He never listens to me.”

The tips of your ears begin to burn.

“Okay, first of all, that’s not a thing. Second of all, if he listens, it’s probably because I’m annoying and he wants me to go away.”

“Right. Sure.” She shrugs. “Tell yourself that if it helps.”

“I just feel like we’re assigning intention to something that is very much not intentional,” you say quickly. “Which is… not fair to me, frankly —,” Your pager chirps. You nearly skip out of your skin, relief flooding you as you glance down. “Oh — that’s fourteen. Flight risk. I should, uh, go before she makes it to the elevators.”

You pivot like you’re on a mission (because you are — an extremely cold, slightly frantic get-away-from-Javadi mission), heading toward Room 14 with your mental script already queuing: soft tone, kind eyes, lots of de-escalation language, maybe a distraction about her grandkids if she brings them up again.

It helps. Work always helps. It gives your thoughts somewhere to stand that isn’t the suffocating echo of Victoria’s voice and the very inconvenient realization that you sounded… defensive. Which is annoying. And suspicious, you know.

But as you reach the door, you notice it’s cracked open. And through that narrow slice of space, you catch the edge of a white coat, a familiar posture. Dr. Robby. 

You pause in the doorway, hands twitchy at your sides, watching him do what he always does. Speak plainly, calmly, like every syllable is weighed for maximum impact. You’d heard once that effective communication is about tone and rhythm, and he’s got both down to a science.

You know you’ve been hovering around him a lot lately. You're not proud of it, but you also don't have the emotional bandwidth to deny it. He speaks and things seem to fall into order.

You’ve been trying to wean yourself off the instinct to orbit him, to ask him things you already half-know the answer to, just to hear his version.

Santos even teased you once, just like Javadi, said he was your emotional support attending.

You laughed like it was funny. You also maybe had a small internal crisis and contemplated transferring to plastics.

But it’s fine. You’re working on it. You’ll just… circle back later.

He glances back once more at the patient, murmurs something low, then steps out into the hall. When his eyes find you, he gives you a subtle nod, then reaches out to touch your shoulder. He pulls the door shut behind you both. 

“She’s planning her next jailbreak,” he says. “I told her we lost the key to the ambulance. Bought us ten minutes. Maybe.”

You manage a tired, lopsided grin.

 “Well,” you say, eyes flicking toward the door, “if she actually makes it to the ambulance bay, I say we let her go. Anyone who clears that much ground in a hospital gown has earned her freedom. That’s just Darwinism.”

You glance at him, then immediately look away. “That was a joke,” you add, just in case. “I’m definitely not advocating… you know. Ditching patients.”

A tremor starts low in your back and rolls upward. It travels from your spine to your shoulders to your fingertips, and by the time it’s done, you’re visibly vibrating.

Robby’s gaze dips for a heartbeat. His jaw tightens. Whatever passes behind his eyes is gone as quickly as it appeared, shuttered and carefully controlled.

He clears his throat. Looks sideways. “You cold?”

“Just a little,” you lie, cheeks prickling from more than the wind now, almost as if trying to compensate for the lack of warmth. “Which makes sense, actually, because prolonged exposure to low ambient temperatures can cause muscle tremors even when core temperature is technically normal, so this is probably just my nervous system being enthusiastic. Overachieving. Really giving it its all.”

Robby frowns. You know he’s unconvinced.

“I’ll call the HVAC company again. And Gloria.”

It’s your turn to frown. “But — don’t you like hate Gloria? Or —,” you wince. “I don’t love the word hate. Strongly dislike? Actively avoid?”

He ignores you, reaching out then, thumb brushing your wrist as if he’s checking for a pulse. His hands warm you from the inside out instantly.

“You feel like an ice pack,” he mutters more to himself than you.

“Okay, see, when you say it like that it sounds much worse than it feels. Which is not me arguing. Just… contextualizing.”

He doesn’t respond right away, which is fine, totally fine, except your brain immediately interprets the silence as rejection, or judgment, or that maybe you’ve finally reached your lifetime word limit and this is the moment he’s decided to put you in time-out.

But then, his jacket is suddenly off and moved to drape over your own shoulders, heavy and warm and still holding the ghost of his body heat like an intimate ecosystem you weren’t prepared to be invited into. 

You blink up at him, mouth open slightly because you don’t know what you’re supposed to do with this kind of care that isn’t professional or clinical or required. 

“Talk me through it,” he says plainly, either oblivious or ignoring your state. You don’t know which is worse. “How do you rewarm someone who’s freezing but stable?”

“Peripheral circulation first,” you say, a little too quickly. “Movement, friction, muscle activity. No sudden heat, no hot showers, because vasodilation too fast is bad.”

“See? Atta girl,” he says. “You know what to do. Do it. I’ll be back.”

You’re still standing there like an idiot by the time he walks away.

Your blood is no longer blood but some sort of unstable soda stream. You feel like a Mentos got dropped into your cardiovascular system and now you’re vibrating with the combined power of gratitude, panic, and deeply repressed feelings about tall men with control issues and kind hands.

You don’t even hear Langdon until he’s right next to you.

“Well, well,” he says, eyeing the jacket like it’s a name tag that says property of Robby. “Didn’t realize we were playing teacher’s pet this early in the semester.”

“Wait — no, it’s not like —”

He’s already gone, leaving you shouting denials into a hallway that does not care.

You whirl to flee, heart hammering, only to make the gravest mistake of all, eye contact with Santos, who is leaning against the wall with a glint in her eye that screams I’m about to be so annoying.

She cocks her head. Opens her mouth.

You don’t give her the chance.

You duck into the nearest bathroom, slamming the lock shut, and only then do you catch your reflection.

Your nipples are clearly, undeniably, aggressively visible through your scrubs.

You stare for a second too long.

Oh.

And now your brain is playing the last ten minutes back in slow motion, pausing on Robby’s eyes dropping for a fraction of a second, on the little clearing of his throat, on the very deliberate way he handed you his jacket without a single comment because he’s probably a professional and a gentleman and also now irrevocably aware of the current status of your chest.

God, you hope the HVAC people get here soon. Because if the cold doesn’t kill you, the mortification definitely will.

And they do, eventually.

The heat kicked back on with a rattling groan, vents coughing out lukewarm air.

Victoria thanked you later, not Robby. In her mind, the cause-and-effect was obvious.

“Does it get worse when you rotate your hand like this,” you ask, lifting your own wrist into the air and slowly turning it in demonstration, “or is it more of a constant ache?”

The patient rolls his shoulder in a loose shrug, the exam table paper crackling beneath him. 

“Honestly? Hard to say,” he says, flashing a grin that’s probably carried him through a lot in life. “I’ve got a pretty high pain tolerance. Played college ball. You learn to push through stuff.”

Of course he had to throw that in there.

College ball. 

Robby finds himself wondering, almost against his will, if the resume continues along its expected evolutionary path. 

Fraternity, maybe. The kind of house that permanently smells like cheap liquor and burnt pizza rolls. Backwards caps. Red plastic cups accumulating like a minor ecological disaster across a sticky kitchen counter. Someone shouting his name across a lawn at two in the morning while music rattles the windows and neighbors contemplate calling the police.

Brad. Or Chad. Possibly Kyle.

A man whose greatest formative hardship was probably losing a championship game and then immediately being told by twenty teammates that he’d “get ‘em next season.”

There is, technically, no evidence for any of this. Robby acknowledges that. But the visual indicators are… persuasive. 

The posture alone makes a strong argument. 

Elbows spread wide. Knees planted like boundary markers. The casual territorial sprawl of someone who has never once considered the possibility that he might be inconveniencing another human being.

If he had a remote control and a beer, Robby suspects he’d settle in for the evening.

The man does, in fact, possess a real name. Robby read it on the chart not ten minutes ago. 

He cannot remember it now. 

Robby doesn’t forget names. He forgets anniversaries. He forgets to answer administrative assistance emails until they become passive-aggressive follow-ups, with lots of exclamation marks. He forgets where he put his own coffee approximately six times per shift.

But names usually plant themselves somewhere useful.

He attributes this lapse, generously, to the noise of the ER. The overlapping voices, the beeping monitors, the distant clatter of something metallic hitting a floor somewhere down the hall.

Yes. That must be it. 

Definitely not to the fact that every time you speak, the man’s entire face rearranges itself into a gleaming, toothpaste-commercial grin like he’s auditioning for the role of Guy Who Is Extremely Invested in Whatever the Pretty Intern Is Saying.

“Oh, what position did you play?”

Robby recognizes the move immediately. Context questions. Mechanism of injury. Establish the biomechanical chain before you ever touch the joint.

One of the things he’s taught you, repeatedly, this week. Athletes are walking anatomy lessons if you ask the right questions.

What position. What movement pattern. What repetitive stress their body has been quietly absorbing for years like a structural beam developing hairline cracks.

The patient reacts before he even answers.

He straightens in the bed, vertebrae stacking one by one, chest lifting like someone just opened the blinds inside him. 

That familiar little flare of pride men carry around like dry tinder, catching the moment someone looks at them with genuine curiosity and says, tell me about your glory days.

Robby feels a flicker of annoyance that is irrationally disproportionate to the moment.

You asked the right question.

He should be pleased.

He is not, exactly.

Robby glances back at the chart again because he requires confirmation that the man exists as something other than the caricature he has already built for him in the last thirty seconds. The mind does that. Fast sketches. Quick outlines. 

Football guy. Ego intact. Wrist injury. Anecdote about “back in the day” warming up in the bullpen of his consciousness, ready for deployment the moment someone shows interest. 

The brain loves shortcuts like that. Loves categories. Categories are tidy. They conserve cognitive energy. But categories also do something else — they flatten people. Compress them into types instead of individuals.

They require less empathy, they don’t remind you that the man sitting on the exam bed has a complicated, inconvenient interior life full of memories and failures and small humiliations Robby will never know about. 

A name interrupts that process.

Justin.

“Linebacker,” Justin clarifies. “Back in college, anyway. These days I mostly just pull things at the gym and pretend that’s normal.” His gaze slides back to you aftward and stays there. He’s waiting. Watching your face to see if the joke lands, if the charm does what it’s clearly meant to do. “But if talking about football helps the medical process, I’m all for it. Happy to provide whatever background information you need.”

Robby steps forward before you can respond. 

“And were you lifting when the pain started?” He asks.

You flinch at the sound of his voice.

Not because he startled you exactly, more like the sound of his voice briefly knocks you out of whatever thought you were standing in the middle of. The interruption hangs there for a second, visible in the slight pause behind your eyes, like you’re mentally closing one conversation before opening another.

For a brief second it looks like you genuinely forgot he was standing there. He tries not to take offense, especially because once you fully turn toward him, the transition on your face is instant.

Your attention sharpens, posture tipping forward almost unconsciously, the subtle physical reorientation of someone aligning themselves with a point of reference. A compass snapping toward north.

Robby has seen that look from you a few times already this week. 

It’s the look people get when they’re waiting for instruction from someone they trust not to steer them wrong.

And Robby is not entirely comfortable being on the receiving end of it.

Because in his experience, trust behaves a lot like good weather. Pleasant while it lasts, but rarely something you can rely on sticking around. 

“Oh, that’s good,” you say quickly, nodding as if the answer has unlocked three more thoughts in your head at once. “Because if it happening during the movement that could point more toward —”

You stop yourself. Then glance back at him with the face of someone who has just remembered that the lesson is still technically in progress and they’ve been narrating over the teacher.

You shift immediately, a quick step to the side that clears the space beside the bed and gives him the better line of sight to the patient’s wrist. 

“Sorry,” you add with a quick smile. “Go ahead.”

“Finish your thought.”

He doesn’t know why he says it. 

Well.

That’s a lie.

He knows why he says it. You were on the right track, the deferral was unnecessary, letting interns collapse mid-reasoning is bad pedagogy and he is, above all things, a good teacher. That’s why. That’s the complete and total reason. 

It has nothing to do with the stepping aside, which he did not particularly care for, or the sorry, which he cared for even less. 

You blink once, recalibrating, then look back toward Justin.

“Right,” you say. “If the pain started during the movement, that can tell us which structures were under stress.”

Robby’s attention drifts as you speak. Not away from the reasoning, the reasoning is sound, but sideways, landing briefly on Justin’s face and, more specifically, the tan.

Which is… notable.

The color sits a shade too warm against the fluorescent hospital lighting, faintly orange around the edges, with the almost reflective quality of pigment that did not originate from prolonged outdoor exposure.

Which tracks, because Pittsburgh in March is not exactly conducive to UV rays. Pittsburgh in March is a city that spends most of the month looking like a damp dishrag beneath a permanently offended sky. Grey sidewalks. Grey rivers. Grey clouds layered endlessly over more grey clouds like the atmosphere is personally disappointed in everyone living under it.

Natural sunlight is, at best, a rumor. So if Justin has achieved that orange hue this time of year, there are only a handful of possible explanations.

Tanning beds, then.

And he’s not judging. 

Except he is, a little, because voluntarily climbing into a glowing plastic tube to cook yourself to like a rotisserie chicken while a machine hums around you… It’s a choice. 

It’s a documented, intentional, repeated choice. The dermatology literature on this is not ambiguous. 

Justin has presumably encountered this literature and decided, with full information, that the tan is worth it. 

“Yeah, actually,” he says, leaning forward a little. “I was doing incline dumbbell presses. Felt this sharp thing right here —” He taps the inside of his wrist with his other hand. “At first I thought it was just a normal gym tweak. You know, the kind where you shake it out, pretend nothing’s wrong, and keep lifting so the guy next to you doesn’t swoop in and steal your bench.”

You guide his wrist through the movement once more, slower this time, studying the angle of the joint. 

“Okay,” you murmur, half under your breath. When you press along the inside of the wrist again, Justin winces on contact. “There it is.” You nod faintly, more to confirm the pattern in your own head than to announce anything to the room. “If it started during the press and the pain’s localized here, that’s most consistent with a flexor tendon strain. Probably from stabilizing the dumbbells at the top of the lift.”

Justin reacts to the explanation by instinctively flexing his arm, as though the diagnosis might improve if the muscles involved are given an opportunity to present themselves properly. 

Roby watches with the detached awareness of someone who has never, at any stage of fifty-two year life, had arms like that.

Not at eighteen when he was mostly collarbones and academic anxiety, not at twenty-two when his primary physical activity was carrying textbooks and the specific hunched posture of someone spending seventy hours a week trying to memorize the human body rather than doing anything interesting with his own.

And definitely not now, when his body’s ambitions have been scaled down to the realistic pursuit of sleep and food consumed in something resembling a seated position.

His arms are capable arms. They have done serious things. They have done meaningful work. They have stitched skin, held pressure on bleeding wounds, and steadied people during the worst moments of their lives. 

They are simply not decorative, in the way that Justin’s are decorative, in the way that Justin is clearly understands they are decorative.

Robby is not entirely sure why this distinction feels worth noticing.

“Flexor tendon strain,” Mr. Orange Muscles repeats, like he’s testing the words out. Then he smiles at you again. “Glad you were the one figuring that out,” he says lightly. “Makes the whole injury thing feel a lot more worth it.”

Oh, come on.

You pause. There’s a beat where your brain is clearly completing a sentence it wasn’t expecting to have to finish, the whole internal apparatus of wait, is he — yes, he is, he’s — okay running just behind your eyes before you surface with, “Oh — well, thank you,” delivered with the endearing awkwardness of someone who has just been handed a social situation they did not order and are now trying to return politely. “But honestly the exam makes it pretty clear.”

Robby clicks his pen. Once. It helps, slightly.

He is not blind. Despite every professional instinct he has to behave as though he is. It would be dishonest, intellectually dishonest, to pretend otherwise.

You are a beautiful woman. A younger one, which introduces a series of additional considerations he has no interest in thinking about.

But the evidence exists whether he chooses to engage with it or not. The way people look at you when you speak, the way conversations bend in your direction, the way people seem to lean toward you without quite realizing they’ve done it.

He is aware, somewhere in the distant administrative wing of his brain, that men will flirt with you. They will try to make you laugh, offer compliments that pretend not to be compliments, test the possibility that a brief interaction might become something more interesting.

None of that surprises him. What he did not anticipate was being forced to watch the process happen live, like an educational video he did not consent to view.

“Sure.” Justin tilts his head. “But I don’t think I would’ve made it through the exam with just anyone. You’re really good at what you do.”

You open your mouth.

“We’ll get you set up with a splint, ice twenty minutes on twenty off, avoid any loaded wrist flexion for the next two to three weeks.” Robby hears himself saying it, hears the clipped efficiency of it, the attending-closing-the-encounter tone he didn’t consciously decide to deploy. “Follow up if the symptoms aren’t improving.”

Justin looks at him. You look at him. There’s a half-second where the room takes stock.

You close your mouth again, the unfinished response dissolving before it ever quite becomes a sentence.

After a moment, you nod and reach for the paperwork instead.

Robby looks back at the chart.

The chart, which he has already looked at far too many times today and which is suddenly very interesting and absolutely deserving of his full attention.

The man wasn’t being inappropriate. This arrives too late to be useful. But he really wasn’t. 

You’re really good at what you do is, objectively, a normal sentence. A complimentary sentence. The kind of thing people say to medical professionals when they feel well cared for, which is, technically, a patient satisfaction win, which Gloria has been on his case about for months, so really he should be pleased.

And even if the guy was flirting (which remains another working theory, not yet proven), for all Robby knows this could very well be your type. Clean-cut, easy-going, the kind of uncomplicated confidence that probably feels like sunshine to someone who spends twelve-hour shifts in the emotional trench warfare of the ER.

For all he knows, you were about to say something perfectly warm and open back, because that’s who you are. 

You walk into your shift and somehow manage to make people feel like they are the most important person in the room. You laugh at things that technically aren’t jokes because you’ve located the real joke underneath them. You apologize to rolling stools when you bump into them. You remember the names of patients’ dogs.

You are, constitutionally, the kindest person in any given room, and the room is always better for it.

You do not need Justin’s attention to confirm that.

And you certainly do not need Robby stepping in front of you like some kind of Neanderthal.

It’s not his call.

He definitely didn’t make it look like it wasn’t his call. In fact, he made it look extremely like his call, which is a detail he now has to live with.

You set the discharge paperwork on the tray beside Justin. 

“The splint’s going to feel weird for the first day or two,” you say, “but you’ll adjust. Just don’t try to tough it out at the gym before it’s healed.”

Justin grins. “Yes ma’am.”

“Take care of yourself,” you add simply.

Then you turn, chart tucked against your chest, and move toward the door. 

Robby follows.

The door swings shut behind you with a click, the sound briefly sealing the room and its lingering testosterone behind. For the next few steps the hallway fills with the familiar sounds of the department.

You turn before he’s fully cleared the frame.

Robby braces for it. Not visibly, he’s been doing this long enough that his face stays neutral, but internally there’s a quick, unpleasant tightening of someone expecting a question they don’t particularly want to answer.

Something along the lines of why did you do that back there, which would be a fair question and therefore extremely inconvenient.

Instead you say, “If the strain’s been there for a few weeks without treatment, does the recovery timeline change significantly? Like, is there a window where it stops being conservative management and starts being a surgical conversation?”

Robby clears his throat, momentarily thrown off balance by the sudden realization that you were, apparently, paying attention to the medicine the entire time.

“Depends on the degree of involvement,” he answers. “Partial tears managed conservatively within the first few weeks usually resolve without intervention. You let it go long enough, scar tissue starts complicating the picture.”

You nod, already writing something down in a notebook that, from the angle he’s standing at, looks less like handwriting and more like a small, determined storm of ink. “Okay. And imaging — MRI over ultrasound for soft tissue here, or is ultrasound actually sufficient for initial —”

“Ultrasound’s reasonable first line,” he interrupts, anticipating the question before you finish assembling it. “Dynamic assessment, cost-effective, readily available.” He pauses. “You’re already thinking about the next case.”

“I’m always thinking about the next case,” you reply, still writing, like this is not only obvious but possibly the entire point of being here.

It is. He doesn’t know why he said it. 

It’s the equivalent of pointing out that water is wet. 

That’s the unspoken rule of emergency medicine: the current patient is the one in front of you, but the next three are already lining up somewhere in the back of your mind.

He waits until you’re a reasonable distance from the room, which he tells himself is purely for other reasons and absolutely has nothing to do with the fact that apologies travel farther than he likes in these hallways, and then says, without preamble, “I want to walk back something from earlier.”

You look up. “The ultrasound recommendation?”

“No.”

“The two to three week timeline? Because I was reading that some studies suggest —”

“Not the timeline.” He exhales once, a small release of air that carries more reluctance than frustration. “When we were in with the patient. I shouldn’t have stepped in back there.” He glances down the corridor briefly before looking back at you. “You were managing it. That was yours to handle.”

You stare at him in a way that makes it immediately clear the explanation he expected to be obvious is… not landing. 

Robby watches the mental process unfold anyway. The rewind. The careful reconstruction of the last twenty minutes of clinical interaction, examined with the same thorough attention you apply to a differential diagnosis.

“When you closed out the discharge?”

“Before that.”

Silence.

Then you shake your head slightly. “I’m sorry, I’m not —” A small crease forms between your eyebrows. “Did I do something wrong?”

“No.” The word comes out immediate, slightly sharper than intended. “No, you didn’t do anything wrong.” He reins the tone back in with a slow breath. “I’m saying I overcorrected. You had it handled.”

You look even more confused now.

“Had what handled?”

He looks at you. 

You look back at him, pen hovering, expression open and earnest, the look of someone who is clearly attempting to locate the missing variable in a problem that should, theoretically, have a solution. 

And in that moment Robby understands something with the slow, weary clarity of a man realizing he has followed a perfectly logical chain of reasoning directly to the wrong conclusion.

You did not experience what happened in that room the way he experienced it.

That the patient's smile and the loaded pause and the words may have registered as straightforward, as kindness, as nothing worth questioning, because you move through the world expecting the best of people and so far the world has not done enough to correct this.

He won’t be the first.

“Nothing,” he says. “Forget it.”

You don’t.

“Okay but,” you say, falling into step beside him anyway, your pace adjusting automatically to match his longer stride,  “you’re clearly bothered by something that happened in there, and you apologized for it, which — you don’t really do that, so now I’m just going to be thinking about it all day.”

He looks at you sideways. “You’ll survive.”

“I’ll survive distracted,” you reply, “which is arguably worse for patient outcomes, so really this is a liability issue.”

The corner of his mouth does something he doesn’t authorize. He smooths it away almost immediately. “You’re prying.”

“I learned from the best,” you say simply.

Your eyes drop back to your notes, your attention rearranging itself into the careful, studious focus of someone who has decided that statement was entirely neutral and therefore does not require further analysis.

Robby faces forward.

He decides, with equal determination, that it does not require further analysis.

“He was flirting with you,” he says finally and reluctantly, because he’s sure you won’t let this go. “I stepped in. It wasn’t my place.”

The words sound reasonable enough once they’re spoken, but he’s aware, even as he says them, that the explanation feels thinner than the impulse that caused it.

“Oh,” you say. Then, smaller, “I didn’t — I thought he was just being nice.”

“I know,” Robby says. “That’s why it wasn’t my place.”

You go quiet after that. 

Robby doesn’t look at you. That decision arrives quickly and then calcifies into policy. He fixes his gaze somewhere in the safe, noncommittal middle distance. A patch of hallway wall that is peeling and suddenly fascinating. Riveting, even. If anyone asked, he could probably give a full lecture on its paint texture.

“For what it’s worth,” you say eventually, “I wasn’t — I mean, it’s not like I was interested.” He doesn’t say anything. “Not really my type. I think I just… I always end up gravitating toward the ones who are hard to get close to.” You say it like a confession to no one in particular, like you're just noticing it out loud for the first time. “My therapist has thoughts about that.”

Something happens in his chest that he declines to name.

He has been described, by people who have known him for years, in almost exactly those terms. Not flatteringly. Not as a feature. As a recurring complaint, a pattern, a thing that makes him difficult to be around for sustained periods.

You didn't say it about him. He is clear on this. You said it about a type, a pattern, something that lives in your history and has nothing to do with him specifically.

He is, in all probability, not the thing you're describing.

He is also, in all probability, exactly the thing you're describing.

“Your therapist is probably right,” he says, because it’s the honest answer and also the only safe one.

“She usually is,” you agree. Then you add, like you’re still thinking it through while saying it, “Although… I don’t know if she is this time.”

Robby looks at you, expression narrowing just enough to suggest he’s trying to decide whether that sentence contained something he’s supposed to respond to.

“What does that mean?”

You hesitate like you might actually answer. Instead you glance down the hallway.

“Room seven was waiting on labs, right?”

Robby doesn’t miss the deflection. 

“Yes,” he confirms. 

“Okay.” You nod once and start walking.

Robby watches the door to room seven swing shut behind you and thinks, not for the first time, that the brain likes shortcuts. Categories, patterns, quick explanations that make people easier to hold at arm’s length.

Unfortunately, he has a feeling you are about to make a liar out of all of them.

“Doc, you pick up a stray or something?”

Robby doesn’t concern himself with looking up.

Dana has a quirky habit of exclusively using that tone when she’s already amused, and lately her amusement has a tendency to hover somewhere just behind his shoulder.

You’re still there, he’s sure, still balanced precariously on the rolling stool you commandeered about an hour ago.

He can hear you muttering at the computer, half to yourself, half to the chart, reciting discharge codes and mediation schedules as if the words might organize themselves better if you talk them into submission.

There’s a new ink blot on your cheek, just beneath your cheekbone. It matches the freckle beneath your eye, just taking on a different hue.

He notices it before he realizes he’s even turned his head.

It’s on the right side. Surely from the blue gel pen you alternate between chewing, clicking, and chasing down whenever it rolls off the desk.

You dropped it three times during pre-rounds. He’s not sure why he knows that.

He tells himself he notices these things because someone has to. Interns burn out fast here, especially the ones who don’t know when to stop talking. Or when to be still. Or where not to stand. Ones who are sunshine and rainbows reincarnated.

“Don’t start.” He tries to make himself sound almost bored, but there’s an edge underneath it that he has a hard time sanding down. He already knows what she’s about to say, and he’s not in the mood to entertain it. “She’s fine.”

“Fine is a minimization,” Dana says, tilting her head. “She’s a gem. One of the good ones. And from the looks of it, she’s already picked you as her favorite.” She sips her coffee. “Wonder why that is.”

“She’s new,” he says easily. “She doesn’t know better yet.”

Dana snorts. “You’re assuming she’s clueless.”

“I’m assuming she hasn’t been disappointed.”

“By you?”

“That’s usually how it goes.”

It’s meant to be flippant. A joke with teeth dulled by repetition. But it doesn’t feel funny anymore and it hasn’t in a long time. People come to him hopeful. Interns, residents, families who think he can be their saving grace. But the outcome never changes.

Sooner or later, he lets them down. It’s just a question of when.

“Dr. Robinavitch, um, sorry —,” 

You speak up so suddenly that for half a second he thinks you must’ve heard everything. 

He doesn’t look at you right away, just angles his body a fraction, buying himself a second to decide whether he needs to deflect or pretend the conversation never happened.

“If someone’s pain is way out of proportion to their imaging,” you say, words rushing like you’re afraid they’ll evaporate if you slow down, “when do you start thinking neuropathic instead of inflammatory? I don’t want to jump to conclusions, I just —” 

You stop mid-sentence, eyes flicking up to his face like you’ve suddenly remembered he’s a person and not a walking index of answers.

He doesn’t mind the implication.

Dana, however, makes eye contact with him and gives the faintest of nods, as if she’s just verified a working theory. Cocky in its barest form.

It somehow irritates him more than an outright comment would have.

But Robby is a rational person, so he doesn’t rise to it. Couldn’t even if he wanted to considering you’re a mere two feet away.

So instead, he pushes his chair back, stepping behind you and leaning forward to brace himself on the desk.

He realizes he’s close. Close enough to see the hitch in your shoulders as soon as hems there, to notice how they drop in increments, like your body has decided the problem has been handled without him even saying a word yet.

He tells himself he can’t step back now, because that would somehow invite even further scrutiny from the watch dogs, and convinces his firing synapses that it’s spatial efficiency.

Easier to see the chart from here. Easier to correct mistakes before they happen.

“Is the pain localized or is it radiating along a specific distribution?”

“It’s — um, it’s mostly radiating,” you say after a beat, fingers lifting to gesture at the screen like you’re tracing it in the air. “Kind of starts deep and then shoots down along the lateral side, which is why I was wondering if it might be following a nerve path instead of just being generalized inflammation. But then sometimes she describes it like this burning pressure, and I didn’t know if that contradicted it or if I was forcing it to fit.”

He taps the desk once. Index finger.

“Burning pressure doesn’t disqualify neuropathic pain,” he says eventually. “A lot of patients don’t have the language for what they’re feeling, so they borrow whatever comes closest.”

You turn to face him, quick and unthinking, and suddenly he’s moving too, rocking back on his heels, shoulders pulling away as he narrowly avoids colliding his nose with yours. 

It would’ve hurt you more than him.

He sucks in a harsh breath, then releases it in a measured drag.

He really hates how aware he is of everything. But he’s always been like that. That’s the only explanation for why he can feel the heat radiating off your skin and diffuses into his.

Why he recognizes that you smell like citrus peel rubbed between fingers or some shampoo he doesn’t know the name of but wouldn’t mind learning, wouldn’t mind smelling again on your scrubs or on the collar of a coat you leave hanging too close to his.

It’s nothing cloying. It’s not sweet or obnoxiously artificial like the hand sanitizer everyone overuses (for good reason).

Just… nice. You smell nice. Especially considering the ER’s stench of sweat and antiseptic has been his constant companion for the last eight hours.

“That makes sense. I thought I was overcomplicating it, like maybe I was just bad at listening or trying to hard to connect dots that didn’t exist. But she really did seem unsure how to describe it, and I just didn’t want to be the person who hears ‘burning’ and runs off shouting neuropathy when it’s really just, like… bursitis. Or a pinched something. Or — god, I don’t even know. I’ve had eight hours of sleep in the last three days. You could tell me she had fire ants in her spine and I’d believe it.”

He watches you let the words run, doesn’t interrupt. You seem like you need to get it out, like momentum is the only thing holding the thread together.

“You’re not wrong for questioning it,” he finally says. “If anything, the fact that you are is a good sign. People who jump to conclusions don’t usually care whether they’re right.”

He straightens, arms crossing loosely, posture shifting into something more formal, more distanced, then adds, “You should take ten and eat something before you lose your ability to connect any dots at all.”

You frown. The first time he’s seen you do that all day. “I’m fine.”

He doesn’t bother disputing that, because he knows better than to argue with exhaustion when it’s convinced itself it’s holding up just fine, and because he’s already seen what happens when people push past the warning signs and think pride will keep them upright.

Instead, he reaches out and taps the back of your chair, two fingers against the edge of the plastic like he’s just stabilizing it, but the message is clear, and you read it without him needing to say anything else. 

The stool swivels slightly beneath you as he nudges it back from the desk, and when you don’t resist, don’t ask what he’s doing or why, he steps into the space where you were and keeps his tone neutral, like this is protocol and not concern.

His palm lingers against the plastic for a second longer than it needs to, steadying you not because you’re going to fall but because he can’t shake the feeling that, if left alone, you might.

“Ten minutes,” he says, firm without being harsh he hopes. “Go sit. Hydrate. Eat something that didn’t come out of a vending machine. Then come back.”

You nod once, barely perceptible, and slide off the stool with the kind of quiet reluctance that makes him think of stray animals being gently shooed inside.

You start toward the breakroom, kind of, glancing back once like maybe he’ll stop you (he doesn’t) and then you mutter,  “Right, yeah… food, hydration… not candy, got it…”

He pretends not to hear it. But the corner of his mouth almost twitches.

Dana side-eyes him once you’re out of earshot. “What are you smiling at?”

“I’m not smiling,” he says, glancing up over the rim of his glasses with the kind of narrowed look that’s supposed to end conversations, not invite more.

It’s his favorite look.

“Uh-huh.” Dana nods. “Tell your face.”

He doesn’t bother responding, just looks back down at the chart in his hands like it might suddenly require his full attention, like the words haven’t already settled into something familiar, and if his mouth is doing something unprofessional, something suspiciously close to a smile, it’s purely incidental, a trick of the light or muscle memory or exhaustion finally catching up with him.

Michael Robinavitch, as it turns out, is a person who owns blue jeans. 

It is not an extraordinary fact. It is barely a fact at all, really, more a mundane administrative detail of being alive.

Men own jeans. Men stand in public places and are not, generally speaking, treated as if they have split themselves open and revealed some secular miracle inside.

Attendings must have closets. They must have drawers. They must have lives that continue after the hospital spits them into the dark.

You know this. You are not stupid.

You understand that he does not simply power down and reconstitute at six in the morning with coffee and stubble. 

Still, seeing him like this feels indecently revelatory, like a curtain has been drawn back on a room you were not supposed to know existed. 

Your eyes behave terribly. You don’t know where to put them.

On his face seems too intimate. On the floor seems weird. Anywhere else feels like a confession written in neon. So, disastrously, they go everywhere.

Lace-up boots. Dark denim. A forest-green shirt stretched over his shoulders, fraying soft at the seams, unbuttoned just enough at the throat to show that dark, shadowed wedge of chest hair. 

You blink twice, fast, sharp little pulses of irrational worry that if you stare too long, too openly, reality might self-correct and whisk him back into scrubs. 

“You actually came.” Even to your own ears it sounds slightly crooked. You wouldn’t say drunk, exactly. You’re fine. Maybe just like your mouth has been left too close to a space heater and is beginning to lose structural integrity.

His brow folds, only just. It’s such a minor movement and still you read too much into it, because with him every expression feels calibrated beyond your access.

Concern, maybe. Or disapproval. Or that cooler, harder thing that is not quite either, simple disbelief that this — you, here, like this — is what he has arrived to.

“You invited me,” he remarks.

“I didn’t think you’d say yes.”

“No,” he says, glancing pointedly at your drink, “I gathered that.”

And it’s true. You really did not expect him to come.

You had mentioned it in passing at the end of shift, flinging the invitation at him with all the composure of someone throwing bread at a duck and running away: “You obviously don’t have to come. I just didn’t want to not invite you and then have that be weird, because then I’d be rude, and then I’d think about it all night, and then I’d probably apologize tomorrow, which would be awkward for both of us.” 

An appalling performance, in hindsight.

And he had given you almost nothing in return, which you had interpreted, reasonably as a big fat stinking no. And that was fine. Expected, even.

He is Dr. Robinavitch, after all. He does not do birthday bars trips with interns and paper sashes and cheap cocktails named things like Malibu Meltdown. He does not stand around while someone you went to med school with screams, “Shots for the birthday girl!” 

That was the assumption, anyway. 

“Do you want a drink?” you ask. “Or, um, I can get you one. I don’t actually know what you drink, or if you drink, but the bartender’s been really attentive to me tonight. I think because it’s my birthday. Which you know. Since this is my birthday party. Not, like, a party-party though, that sounds too juvenile. It’s more of a… birthday gathering. Night out. Socially acceptable adult celebration.”

His eyes flick over your face.

“I’m familiar with birthdays,” he comments dryly.

“Right. Of course. Sorry. Obviously. You’ve had several.”

His mouth does something dangerously close to amusement before he glances toward the crowd packed around the bar.

“And yes, I drink. But I’m not sending you into a crowded bar like this, so either tell me what here is worth ordering, or I’ll improvise.” 

“So bossy outside the hospital too,” you say, and the sentence is already out, already alive in the world, already standing between you with a little cigarette and a criminal record before you can drag it back by the collar.

Shit. 

Heat climbs your face in one violent sweep, right up into your ears.

The rum is not helping. The rum, actually, seems thrilled. It is doing bright, idiotic laps through your bloodstream, waving tiny flags, encouraging candor, dismantling your career prospects molecule by molecule.

Because that is not something you say to your superior. Maybe to a friend. Maybe to a boyfriend, in some speculative future where you have not died of embarrassment before acquiring one.

Maybe to a stranger, even, someone disposable and inconsequential whose opinion evaporates when the night ends.

Maybe to literally anyone whose opinion is not attached, however indirectly, to your future in medicine. 

Bosses are meant to be bossy. That is the central organizing principle of bosses. They boss. They point. They correct. They say things like “eat something that didn’t come out of a vending machine” and somehow make it sound less like advice and more like a law passed by a small, attractive dictatorship. 

They are not, however, supposed to be informed of this quality by their subordinates in bars.

His eyes sharpen all at once.

“And are you always this mouthy off the clock?”

You gasp.

“No I —” you start, then have to stop and regroup because everything coming up feels wrong. “I’m not usually this mouthy. With you, I mean. Specifically with you. Not that I’m secretly walking around being mouthy with everyone else, because that sounds like a terrible character witness statement and also probably untrue. I just meant I don’t usually say things like that out loud. To you. Because you’re… you.”

Stunning work. Absolutely no smoke coming off that wreckage.

You swallow. “Sorry. I’m making this worse.”

“You can stop apologizing.”

“Right.” You nod, too fast. “Okay. I will. Starting now.” 

You rock backwards onto your heels, which turns out to be an ambitious choice. Your center of gravity defects. The room gives a lazy little swim. 

His hand catches at your elbow.

He’s frowning again. Always with the frowning. Beautifully shaped lips wasted on a man devoted to austerity.

You wonder if he ever smiles without that sardonic slant to it.

Probably not. 

That would be too generous of the universe, and the universe has already given him the look of his thighs in jeans. 

“Jesus —”

“Is that him?” comes a hiss from somewhere over your shoulder, and the thing about alcohol, you are discovering, is that it makes people believe hissing is discreet when it is, in fact, just yelling with theatrical intentions. 

You recognize the voice as one of your friends.

Before you can pretend you have never met her in your life, another one of your so-called friends grabs at your shoulder and leans in, “You didn’t say he was this hot.”

You go cold and hot at the same time. 

Your free elbow shoots backward into the soft, shrieking mass of your friends, and you start swatting at them with one hand, all frantic wrist and whispered threats, trying to disperse them the way one might scatter pigeons from a sidewalk or raccoons from an unsecured trash can. 

A hopeless gesture. A paper fan against a house fire.

Someone yelps, then laughs into your hair, delighted by your suffering in the specific way only women who love you can be delighted by your suffering. 

You look back at Robby, hoping he somehow didn’t hear, which is stupid and sweetly, fatally naive because everyone heard. The whole bar heard. Nearby wildlife heard. Someone in Ohio paused mid-bite and thought, wow, that girl is going through it. 

His hand is no longer at your elbow.

It’s at the back of his neck now, rubbing there as he tilts his head, that sardonic smile making its appearance like he reached into your private thoughts and decided to prove a point.

“I’m going to get that drink now,” he says. 

Once he leaves, you turn back to the table with violence in your eyes, or at least the most violence your face can plausibly organize while warm-cheeked and wearing lip gloss, and receive only laughter for your trouble. 

Someone squeezes your arm. Someone calls you dramatic. Someone else says, “He smiled,” like a jury of your drunk peers has already reached a verdict and you are simply too emotionally compromised to accept it.

As if.

However, you have no good defense against it.

You have several bad ones, most of them involving the words respect and he’s my attending and please stop looking at me like that, but even inside your own head they sound frail and paper-thing, so you do the only dignified thing available to you, which is finish your drink and pretend the burn in your throat is from the alcohol.

Robby comes back with his drink at some point. A beer. Boring.

He remains near you for most of the evening, sometimes at your shoulder, sometimes at the end of the booth, sometimes not even speaking to you but close enough that your body keeps quietly including him in its map of itself.

There is the table, there is your glass, there is the sticky patch under your elbow, there is Robby. Nearby. Adjacent. With you, your brain offers, idiotically, filing him into that category.

You decide it is concern.

That makes sense.

You are, at this point, a liability in a nice top.

He is simply watching your intake, your balance, your pupils, your increasingly loose relationship with volume control. Concern means he has identified you as a drunk, underfed, and prone to smiling at people with the trusting expression of someone who could be kidnapped at any moment.

That is all. 

And he stays close to you even as people begin to leave. When the clock strikes 2 am and rideshares announce themselves. When coats are pulled from the backs of chairs and goodbyes stretch and collapse.

Someone hugs you too hard, Jenna, you think, their perfume clinging to your hair, and tells Robby to “make sure she gets home alive.” 

Then the bar empties by degrees, the music dips lower, the tables clear, the night loses its crowd until there is no buffer left. 

Just you. Just him. And the water glass in your hands, ordered sometime around drink five, refilled once without you noticing, condensation slipping cold over your fingers.

Finally, he glances over, his beer long abandoned in front of him with an inch left at the bottom. “You have a good birthday?”

You roll the glass between your palms, watching the ice turn and collide and diminish, all those hard little edges softening into water because that is what happens when something is held too long. It changes. It gives up its shape. 

“Yeah,” you answer, then smile a little. “I think I did.” 

“You think?”

“I mean, I learned a lot.”

“About?”

“You.” The word slips out too easily, then you rush to soften it. “Against my will, obviously. Under extreme peer pressure. Very little of it admissible.” 

It was no surprise to you that your friends had interrogated him earlier in the night.

Once they sensed there was a locked door somewhere inside Michael Robinavitch, they had all immediately taken turns jiggling the handle. 

And for weeks, maybe months you had been feeding them little scraps of him like contraband: the mysterious older doctor who lived in your daydreams and, on the more morally indefensible nights, your wet dreams. Dr. Robinavitch said this. Robby thinks that. 

And then they had him in front of them. Flesh-and-blood proof of your worst little confessions. 

What did surprise you was that he had answered their questions at all.

Reluctantly, unevenly, like every harmless personal detail had to be pried from him with dental tools, yes, but still. He had given them something. A handful of small, strange offerings placed on the table between empty glasses and damp napkins. 

You now know the following:

He had once reset his own dislocated finger against the edge of a kitchen counter.

He could identify a medication by the sound of the pill bottle shaking, which everyone found impressive until he clarified that he meant “sometimes.”

He believed birthday candles were unsanitary.

He kept his apartment too cold.

He preferred aisle seats.

He never ordered dessert but would eat half of someone else’s if it was placed near him. 

It wasn’t a complete portrait. Barely even a sketch. A few dark lines. A corner of light. The smallest picture of a life continuing somewhere out of frame.

Still, it was more than you’d had yesterday.

“I wouldn’t make a habit of confusing that with a good night.” His mouth tugs at one corner, before clarifying, “I don’t think the success of your birthday should be measured by how much you learned about an old asshole like me.” 

“You’re not that old.” 

His eyes flick to yours. 

“That’s the part you’re disputing?” 

You shrug your shoulders. It’s no secret that Dr. Robinavitch could be an asshole with a capital A. In fact, you were wanted about him several times over before even stepping foot in PTMC.

“I’m just saying,” you manage, slowly, because every word has to be chosen with tweezers now, “accuracy matters.”

“Then accurately, you should have had more interesting material for your birthday.”

“Maybe I did.” You look at him and hope he catches the meaning.

His expression shifts, almost imperceptibly.

Something tightens around his eyes, something catches and fails to smooth out fast enough, like the compliment has entered the room with wet shoes and no one knows whether to offer it a towel. 

He looks down and drags his thumb through the sweating ring left by his bottle, smearing the neat circle into something uneven. 

“Maybe,” he says at last, voice low enough that you almost miss it, “you’re too easy to impress.”

You smile into your glass. The water smells faintly of lemon and melting ice, cold against your lip, a ridiculous little shield. “And maybe you’re harder to dislike than you think.”

“You’re drunk,” he says.

“Less than I was.”

“That’s not the standard I’d use.”

“It’s the standard I have available.”

He looks away toward the windows, where the night has gone glossy and black and the streetlights are smudging themselves into little halos on the wet pavement. 

You hear someone laugh too loudly beyond the door. Then a car rolls past with its bass trembling through the glass, a dull little pulse you feel more than hear. 

Your phone buzzes against the table. Your ride’s here.

You stand too quickly, then pretend you didn’t when his hand twitches like he might catch you again.

You also pretend not to see it. 

Outside, the humidity sobers you.

Your car waits at the curb.

Robby stands beside you with his hands in his pockets, looking tired in the amber light.

He looks real again. Less like a thought you’ve been having all night and more like a man you might actually miss when he turns around. 

“Happy birthday,” he mutters, voice dipping two octaves as he places a hand on your shoulder. The contact burns.

It’s weird. People have been saying it all day with varying degrees of sincerity and intoxication and one deeply questionable song, so by now you should be immune to it, probably.

It feels vastly different from him. 

“Thank you for coming.”

His mouth tilts, barely.

“Against my better judgment.”

You get into the car smiling like you’ve won something.

A tiny victory you hadn’t even realized you’d been fighting for. Maybe it was unfair to ask him here. Maybe his better judgment is the responsible adult in the room and you’re both just ignoring it, but the idea of Dr. Robinavitch losing even a fraction of control over something as simple and inconsequential as you feels strangely exhilarating.

His judgment, clearly, never stood a chance. 

sunshine!intern!reader is an emergency medicine intern at PTMC's emergency department. she runs on hospital coffee, adrenaline, and the hope that she's getting better at this. she grew up in phoenix, arizona with dry heat, a loud family, and a house full of siblings and people talking over each other. she learned early how to move through life by being warm, easy to be around, and quick to help. she is sunshine-reincarnated. she makes eye contact, she loves people, she talks with her hands. she moves quickly, a little scattered, like she's always catching the next thing before it falls. she's tired most of the time, but there's still something bright about her that refuses to go dim.

sunshine!intern!reader moves through the er like a small patch of daylight. she thanks the nurses every time they help her. she apologizes when she bumps into someone in the hallway even when it wasn't her fault. she laughs easily, asks questions with genuine curiosity, and remembers little details about her patients.

sunshine!intern!reader follows dr. robby around with the unintentional devotion of someone who has decided he might know everything. she does not mean to do it. it simply happens. he moves through the er like everything already makes sense to him and she wants to understand how. so she ends up a step behind him during rounds, leaning forward when he explains something. she asks follow up questions because she genuinely wants to know more but also because she likes hearing the way he talks when he's explaining something complicated.

sunshine!intern!reader loves pressed flowers in books that no longer close properly. she loves words that feel good in your mouth and holding the elevator for someone sprinting down the hall. she loves rain on hot concrete which is a memory now not a weather event. she loves her plant in the on-call room which she named and worries about. she also loves desert logic that empty-looking things are always full underneath. she applies that logic to people without knowledge or consent.

sunshine!intern!reader hates pennsylvania in january. and march. she is not adjusting. she hates when she's too tired to tell the difference between intuition and catastrophizing. she hates when she's told she's too sensitive and when patients are scared and there's nothing simple she can say to make it better.

SOCIAL MEDIA AU COLLECTION

part I

LOOSE PAGES FROM THE ARCHIVE

smut = ✧ clean (ish) = ♡ angst = ✩

newest to oldest

♡ lovin’ you is just like sipping on straight syrup, sugar, sticky soda after inviting robby to your birthday drinks on impulse, you're shocked when he actually shows up and even more shocked by how much you like having him there.

♡ several unrelated observations about a man named justin dr. robby is an excellent doctor, a good teacher, and deeply committed to professional boundaries. right up until someone flirts with his favorite intern

♡ it was only a field trip / 'til my blood cooled a tired intern accidentally imprints on her attending. unfortunately for him, the feeling is mutual he’s just better at lying about it.

♡ cold front incoming you get labeled as a teacher's pet when dr. robby lets you borrow his jacket