Chapter Text
Being a doctor meant being haunted.
This was the first thing Robby learned in his residency. That might not be the way his attending would have phrased the lesson, but it was true. It was something that everyone who had their thumb on the scale of life or death had to come to terms with, and the sooner they did the better. Robby, however, would have preferred it to not be on day one. But that, like many things, was out of his control.
Marcus Baptiste had been the boy’s name. Robby had held his hand while Dr. White and Dr. Durand worked to get the bleeding to stop. He’d been so small and so pale, at the end, begging Robby not to tell his father. The last words out of his mouth had been a demand for Robby to swear . And he’d promised. He’d sworn to the flatline that Marcus wouldn’t get in trouble. That no one would be mad at him. That everything would be okay.
He’d known that, eventually, he would lie to a patient. He just also would have preferred not to do that on day one.
Robby stood in the room when the parents were told. When the brother, who had technically been the one who pulled the trigger, was told. Later, in the debrief, he didn’t hear a word Dr. White said because he was still replaying the horrible crying and screaming he’d heard in that room.
And then the day went on.
No one else died. No one else even came close. Robby worked on burns, sunstroke, extreme food poisoning, and two drug overdoses before his shift was even close to over. He helped Dr. White with a gunshot wound in the evening and Dr. Durand with an intubation; both calm and smooth with the patients almost definitely expected to pull through. But, by the end of the day, when he finally handed over his work and clocked out none of those happy cases were the ones on his mind.
Marcus Baptiste. His name was Marcus Baptiste.
And he was haunting Robby.
Robby walked for hours. He’d gone home, showered, tried to sleep, and then just gotten dressed and started walking. He’d been in New Orleans for a total of two weeks at that point, and got lost trying to find the grocery store, so where he was headed was anyone’s guess. It was a 50/50 shot whether he’d find his way home before his next shift, but he didn’t really feel like it mattered. He just walked.
And thought.
And cried.
Marcus Baptiste had been so small. The bullet had lodged too close to his heart and there was no way anyone in the fucking world could have saved him. Still, Robby replayed the whole event from the moment Marcus was wheeled into a trauma bay to the moment Dr. White pronounced time of death. He retraced each step hoping a new path would emerge this time. It was both a disappointment and a relief when none did. They’d done everything they could.
“Sometimes,” Dr. White had said when she’d found Robby in the cafeteria, picking at his sandwich instead of eating it, “People just die. And we must accept that.”
It was a lesson easier to digest when discussing an eighty-year-old man than a five-year old boy, but that was perhaps part of the point. Either way, it didn’t help.
Robby walked until his already sore feet were getting obvious blisters. He walked past bars, and houses, and through unhoused camps, and tourist-trap shops. He walked as the evening rowdiness sunk into the early morning depression. And It was only once he saw a white gate in front of him that he even considered he was walking to something as opposed to away .
Of course he would be walking to a cemetery.
There was no one there at this point. The gate was closed but not locked, and Robby considered whether it would be ruder to lurk in doorways or intrude at this late hour. As though anyone here would care. But the air itself felt hallowed and quiet. Peaceful in a way he was not. For a moment he felt like a contamination, seeping into a protected room and infecting everyone with his pain. But that was insane: these people were dead, and beyond such things.
Pain was for the living.
Robby walked through the graveyard, reading the mausoleums; the names that meant nothing to him, and everything to someone else. Marcus Baptiste would be one of these names soon. Someone else would walk by and wonder over the short, five-year span of life, feeling nothing else. The facts would be etched in stone: date of birth, date of death, beloved child. The nuance of a child’s time on this Earth; his fear of being in trouble, his dinosaur t-shirt, the way he squeezed a stranger’s hand would be lost.
Time would move on, and the story would be lost. The broken promises Robby whispered into his ears would be lost. Marcus Baptiste was now a piece of history, preserved in imperfect records of neurons and guilt; alone. And Robby wasn’t okay with that. He needed to accept that this would happen again, and again, no matter what he did. But he wasn’t okay with it. He needed something more. Something greater.
He needed someplace to put this feeling, and Marcus Baptiste, that was stronger, and more honorable, and peaceful . Like a graveyard.
And that was it. That was why he’d walked all this time.
The answer was here.
The next shift, Robby was not alone. He never would be again.
“How are you holding up?” Dr. White asked, meaning it.
“Fine,” he responded, and it was not so much a lie as it was short-hand. Robby knew that now. He knew there would be an asterisk next to that question for the rest of his life, when he spoke to people who knew death. Subtext; understood and not discussed.
“How are you holding up?” *
* Given that you failed. That you have a graveyard inside of you that will only get larger with time. That the people you lose will weigh five times more than anyone you save. How are you holding up, considering that you are now a haunted house, filled with ghosts and crumbling under your own weight?
“Fine.” *
* I’m back. I’m here. The walls have held another day and I will trust the foundation to carry me through. I am haunted, but these ghosts are mine , and I have made a space for them where I can tend to their memory. The house, for now, stands.
Dr. White smiled, understanding. She reached out and squeezed his shoulder.
“It gets better with time,” she said.
And Robby had known, eventually, his attending would probably lie to him. He would have just preferred she’d been more convincing.