Chapter Text
They’re lucky it's a warm night, really, Jack thinks as he drains the last third of his beer and gestures for another one, because they needed this. There is a bar nearby that they’re always welcome at, cheap and cheerful and entirely kept in business thanks to the hospital, but on a stressful day that’s been spent eating nothing but stress, ego and humble pie under fluorescent lights, it helps to get some fresh air and be without walls, limitless, for just a while.
Robby leaves, and Jack watches him walk away for a pensive, long moment, watching the way Robby holds himself, how he’s clutching his bag over one shoulder like it's holding him to the ground.
Around him, the conversation keeps going, the nurses continuing to laugh at these poor kids, the changing of the MD guard who had no idea what was going to happen to them when they were pulling their socks on that morning.
He watches Robby as he disappears behind the curve of trees, and then is distracted by someone taking Robby’s place next to him. “You're different outside of work,” the young woman, who insists he calls her Victoria, says politely, sitting down next to his prosthetic where it's perched on the bench. There’s a flicker in her eyes as she measures the length and saves the information for later.
“You haven't even worked with me properly yet,” he drawls, flirting with her the way you flirt with children, and from behind the coolbox Princess shakes her head at him.
“You be careful, Doctor Javadi,” she says, eyebrows high. “It's a rite of passage for medical students to fall in love with their attendings, but you’re better off going for one of the others than picking that one.”
“It’s okay, I’m not into old men,” Victoria says, gazing at Mateo with exhausted lust, and then realising too late what she’s said, slams her hand in front of her mouth. “Oh my god I am so sorry,” she says, turning to Jack, and looking so mortified it makes him laugh, which doesn’t help her mortification one bit.
“Princess is right,” he says, patting her on the shoulder and then reaching to hand her another beer. “It's important to choose your attending crush right, you never know if it can impact the rest of your career.”
This still does not stop Javadi looking utterly horrified, so he clarifies. “You don’t want your speciality to be driven by your hormones,” he says, cracking another can open.
“Who was your attending crush, Doctor Abbot?” Mateo asks, because he’s a little shit at heart.
“Oh, well, this was of course an extremely long time ago, I’ll have to try and remember,” he says, stretching out as best he can on the park bench. “You’re third year?” he asks Javadi, and she nods. “A surgeon, then, a Doctor Portman, during my,” he frowns at how hazy the memory is now, “final rotation. I hadn’t considered her as anything other than a good doctor, but then I watched her do a triple bypass and bam, fell in love.”
“A bit literal, don’t you think?” Mohan asks, archly.
“The way to a man’s heart is through the sternum,” he shrugs. “You can’t blame me for appreciating masterful technique. And she had lovely hands.”
“Such a nerd,” Princess heckles. “Do you remember anything else about her?”
Jack grins. “You should have seen who I fell for during my urology rotation,” he says, archly. He waits until Javadi takes another sip before saying, “Doctor Koch was so dreamy.”
“No way,” she says, laughing, and he smiles at her.
“You can look him up, he’s still practicing. Dr Andrew Koch, out of Boston.”
She pulls out her phone, and he catches Princess’ eye and winks.
“There he is,” Javadi says, a few moments later, and then passes her phone around. “He is quite dreamy,” she says, nicely, before putting her phone away. “Did anything come of it?”
“I’m not so old that hooking up with medical students was allowed, even back then,” he says. “Not that that stops anyone, but, and I’ll only lower the tone for a minute, because I am the boss, but you hear of any of that here, you come to me immediately, okay? Even if it's just a rumour. I’ve been doing this long enough to know to be better than to ask forgiveness than to have to testify in an employment tribunal.”
Her eyes are huge, and she’s so very, very young, and she nods and sips her beer and it takes everything to stop himself from ruffling her hair and asking where her parents are.
“What about the rumours about you then?” Mohan says, casually. “The ones about you and Robby, sneaking off to the roof at handover to watch the sunrise and sunset together?”
Something hot and angry flares in him, thinking about Robby’s sad eyes and the way he hid his shame and mortification in jokes and male bullshit, but he tamps it down with humour. “A lady never tells,” he says, but the way she backs down immediately makes him feel it didn’t come out as cool and aloof as he intended it.
“He’s not normally like he was today,” Donnie says to Javadi. “Doctor Robby. It was a bad one, for a whole bunch of reasons.”
“He was really good though,” Javadi says earnestly, “just, wow”, and Jack feels a spike of love for her, with the knowledge that the kids might be alright after all. “Like, no offense Doctor Abbot, but if I was going to have a crush on an old man, it would be Doctor Robby.” She smiles with teeth, and he’s never going to underestimate her as she sweetly says, all wide eyes and a dollop of tease, “and like, after a day like today, trauma bonding is totally a thing.”
“Someone page psych,” Mohan says, and everyone laughs, and that’s when Jack decides to call it and begins to put his foot back on. It's never a good look for the boss to linger too late after the party starts getting lewd, and if he’s going to come back in later, he needs to shower and change the liner of his prosthetic to a thicker one, and at least try to get the beer out of his system.
The rest of his colleagues wave goodbye, and go back to their conversation, probably just long enough for him to get out of earshot so they can start gossiping about him in turn.
It's fine, he’s glad that these days he has nothing to fuel the gossip fires, save for the secrets of the roof. How many people saw him go up to the roof, he wonders, as he walks back to the parking garage, but then he realises it doesn’t matter. People saw him and Robby come down together. If they say they were making out up there, it would be far less harmful than anyone saying poisonous barbs laced with the truth.
His car is parked just long away. He gets in and pulls his phone out, and thumbs over to order food for pickup. While he waits for the order to be accepted, he goes over to the messages app to triage between the properly concerned and those who just want to be sure he wasn’t caught up in the disaster as a patient. He had tickets to day two, so it's fair that people would be asking, and true to form, there’s an email from the organisers that the second day is cancelled and there’ll be a full refund, generated by the system, available in 7-10 business days. Typical.
He looks at the messages list, and something catches his eye, the little dots of someone typing a message bobbing up and down next to Robby’s name. The last message was just a thumbs up two days ago; he’s never been good at communicating, even when it's faceless.
The three dots bounce over and over for a full minute before they stop, but no message comes, so Jack puts his phone away and throws his car into drive, and heads to pick up dinner to calm his growling stomach.