Chapter Text
Truthfully, it starts off quite innocent in his opinion, which is the only correct measure of honesty where he’s concerned.
Dr. Robby is… handsy to say the least. If Whitaker had to guess, he’s a physically affectionate older man who can’t put his hands on any of the female staff without coming off as weird (understandably) and his once-protege Langdon is long gone, so Whitaker might as well be the next best thing for a man who has nowhere else to put his physicality into.
He doesn’t necessarily mind. It’s strange yet deeply paternal. Dr. Robby always keeps his hands to his shoulders and neck, guiding him around areas when he’s too fast, too leisurely paced, or to be pulled into an on-call room for a teaching demonstration. He doesn’t do that last one often, but when he does pull Whitaker by the shoulders to come learn something, it means a lot.
It comforts him. He realizes a few days after his first shift that the older man is putting his hands on him in the same way that his father and the preacher used to. They were much more of a mentally guiding force, less of a physical one, but it’s all the same to his brain.
He comes to associate the incoming touch with warmth. Misplaced, yes, but fatherly warmth. He lets himself bask in the heat of knowing that he’s at least looking out for him, even if he feels nauseated with homesickness at every touch, every fingerprint indented into his collarbone and back of neck.
Which is why he’s unsurprised to learn that Dr. Abbot, seemingly one of Dr. Robby’s few friends, is just as touchy as the man himself. It’s only surprising that his hands roam with completely opposite intentions when comparing the two later on.
The first time Abbot grabs him is purely accidental. He’s been put onto the two week-long mandatory night shift rotation, rushing towards an incoming MVA, already running himself through the checklist of what to expect when someone’s been ejected out of a windshield, when his shoes simply lose traction with the ground. Later, after the situation is long over, he’ll realize he was running in the exact spot a patient's family member had dropped a cup of water and had yet to be cleaned up. For now, he careens towards the floor before large hands pull him up from underneath his right arm. He’s quickly planted back onto his own two feet, Abbot steadily moving ahead of him, towards the original goal.
Abbot looks behind him, gestures with his head for Whitaker to get a move on, and joins seamlessly into the chaos of the moving gurney. Whitaker screws his head back on straight, adds himself to the group of bodies working in tandem with each other, and the moment that just occurred is forgotten with the rush of commands given to him.
He ends up cleaning the water himself after a nurse almost faceplants in the same area. A gaze burns a hole into the back of his neck, the same one he felt when his preacher would stare at him through the small holes during confession. He looks for the source as he bends over again, drying it with a washcloth, unable to find the eyes plaguing him.
It’s inconsequential enough that he barely remembers it.
The second time gives him a bit more to think about. Whitaker’s current patient is a woman in her early 70’s pretending she’s remained in her 20’s, shamelessly hitting on him while a night shift nurse (who he still hasn’t learned the name of and the guilt is slowly eating him alive) and him are asking for more information about her visit today. She plays coy, fluttering her eyelashes in a way he thinks he’s supposed to find attractive, revealing she’s having some pain and itching sensations at the bottom of her left foot. The nurse standing close to him charts her symptoms after taking her temperature, noting it’s a little high, and motions for Whitaker to continue the examination.
Whitaker asks for her to remove the shoe and sock of her affected foot, quickly donning gloves. The older woman makes a comment as he turns around, something about his “ass filling out those scrubs” that he tries to ignore as his face goes red hot.
He sits down on a stool, rolling down the bed to her bare left foot, running through the various possible reasons for her visit. Plantar fasciitis is near the top, followed by fungal infections, continuing on into vast infinity.
“I just got a pedicure, don’t you think the color looks lovely on me?” The older woman coos at him right at the exact time the putrid stench reaches his nostrils. He looks away as he gags internally, making eye contact with the wide eyed nurse, steeling himself and his face for what lies ahead.
When he reaches the end of the bed to see the bottom of her foot, he spots the issue: The mid arch section of her foot contains a massively inflamed red bump, an open pore centered at the top. He looks at it for a moment, noticing how similar it looks to a boil, and gently moves her foot towards him at an angle to inspect it closer after asking permission.
He knows she just made an incredibly insensitive comment about the non-existent bulge in his pants but it refuses to register mentally. His cheeks have lost most of their color as he makes eye contact with the multiple maggots moving inside the opening of her wound. He thanks God for the way that his own guilt is only metaphorically eating him alive, not literally.
At the same time he maneuvers her foot back into its original position on the bed, he feels Abbot's presence right behind him. The man simply leans down, his right hand grasping his hip through his scrubs. Abbot’s grip is large enough that he feels his thumb gently caressing the lower lumbar region of his spine before pushing him towards the base of the bed. He ends up facing the situation in its entirety from a new point of view as Abbot gloves up.
He looks for the nurse only to see that they’ve left, more than happy to leave him and the literal maggots with the attending doctor. When Whitaker returns his gaze, he sees the astonishment and horror slowly creep onto the patient's face when she realizes exactly what Abbot is saying to her after his own inspection. More specifically, what lies inside.
Abbot steps back and situates Whitaker via his shoulders into proper position near the patient's left side. Dr. Abbot then questions him on further proceedings.
Whitaker, despite the gaze burning into him, rattles off the answer. Irrigation, manual removal, surgical if necessary, and then dressing. Abbot nods, seemingly pleased with the response, and rifles through the drawers for supplies, putting everything right next to Whitaker on a tray.
The man plants himself at the base of the bed, crossed arms carefully instructing Whitaker when he seems unconfident or pausing for a beat. Thankfully, it’s not often that he stops, really only after he looks one of the larvae in the eye before dropping it into a clinical waste bag.
No more inappropriate comments come from the patient outside of her small groans of misery. Whitaker ends up feeling so awful for her that his own body shoots pain up his left foot as he works quickly. He makes small conversation with her about dogs, learning more about pomeranians than he ever knew he could. She seems a bit relieved as they talk about the difficulties of properly raising them until she remembers her surroundings. He has half a heart to tell her he’s only ever had herding dogs, much bigger than her 12 pomeranians combined, but he doesn’t want to burst her brief bubbles of happiness.
She ends up apologizing to him about the sexual remarks as he applies the dressing onto her foot. It's genuine enough of an apology, even if made from shame, that he thanks her for it.
Whitaker finishes off the rest of that shift, Abbot letting him out early, and grabs a few hours of sleep until he’s up again at 8am joining Sunday's street team crew. He’s started making real connections with people outside of work and med school through it. It’s also one of the few moments he sees Dr. Abbot in the daytime, soaking up the sunshine when it appears, along with McKay (Cassie now!) and Kiara, then with some of the nurses he’s become pleasantly acquainted with through the program. Surprisingly enough, Victoria joins a little while after him. She’s uncomfortable but trying, something that spurs him to ask for her number (as a friend, he clarifies when she blushes).
They text sometimes, mostly about school, but it’s nice to know he’s not alone in the pursuit of actually being decent in the department.
It’s nice. They all look out for him, he looks out for them, and the world continues spinning in an order he can only describe as mostly smooth. It’s why he notices that Abbot grabs the back of his scrubs when they all pair up now, forcing him to join the man instead of Whitaker's usual pairing with Cassie.
Cassie looks confused for a second before smiling and sending him a thumbs up in response, pairing up with Victoria after a few seconds.
Dr. Abbot moves his hand upwards from his scrubs, lightly scratches at his nape, then lets go of him entirely to prepare medication from their prepacked backpacks as they walk towards the camps ahead. The gentle touch burns through his skin, melting flesh and muscle and vertebrae in its path.
That third time was the beginning of the end. One became two, two became three, and so on and so forth. Or, more adeptly, when the touches became so frequent every time he was around the doctor that he stopped counting them individually. Now they’ve categorized themselves into locations throughout the hospital and various routes.
A firm pat on the back after a successful assist during surgery in trauma room 2. A squeeze of the bicep after he’s able to bring a patient back with CPR in patient room 5. His hair gets ruffled for the 7th time near the nurses station after taking the initiative to do a closed reduction when a patient came in with half his ulna sticking out.
It’s nice, really, really nice, even nicer than the street team in some aspects. Abbot seems to reward him with lingering touches of affection after every correct decision, any accurate diagnosis, and for simply showing up at 6pm every night. The worst part is that he’s become far more confident than he was before the physical contact. He’s interacting with patients better, more sure of himself in general. Something akin to exposure therapy with eye contact as well, having to keep a constant piercing gaze with the man when talked to.
He might be addicted. As well as embarrassed at the way he’s basically treated like an anxious mutt and that it’s working on him. He’s turned into a mix of apprehension and fear for when the mandatory night shifts end. On one hand, he misses working with the day shift crew and his roommate/friend. On the other, the gentle caresses have kept him afloat during the shifts where he can’t save every patient, when he does make mistakes that have consequences. Abbot is there, reassuring him with a light caress of the wrist, and moving past as if nothing’s happened.
It’s too late to complain to Trinity about it or risk a single word getting around about the situation, so he’s forced to bottle it all up inside until he explodes in one way or another.
Whitaker does end up exploding before the night rotation ends, just not in the way he originally envisioned.
The night before his last shift, he feels a firm palm press between his shoulder blades when he’s leaving the locker room, a command of getting plenty of rest rolling off Abbot’s tongue as he turns away to return to work. Whitaker simply stands there for a minute, cataloguing the moment away into touch 26 in the main station, until he reminds himself he needs to go home and actually sleep.
When he gets home, barely missing Trinity leaving for work, he thinks for once about the situation as he lays down. He has half of a mind to look up workplace harassment protections at PTMC before another part realizes he wants to see this through, he wants to be better. Abbot is clearly making him a better student if his work reflects any of the teachings.
The worst part of it all is that he suspects Abbot is coming onto him somehow. It’s far fetched and definitely out of the question, and yet he has no other explanation for the situation. Dr. Robby has never put his hands anywhere near where Dr. Abbot has, and that’s not mentioning the consistent eye contact paired with the stupid smile sent his way occasionally. Nobody else is receiving this treatment, why is he singled out? Is he that pathetic?
There’s a chance that he’s gone completely insane and projecting misplaced intentions onto a man twice his age. So he thinks a bit more.
He thinks of the searing touch that he can still feel in his back and about the scattered freckles that become more prominent when the older doctor privately smirks at him. He wonders how big those hands are when wrapped around his own forearm, remembers how each vein carefully hides underneath the man's skin until Abbot tenses his flexor tendons holding a scalpel during surgery to make a perfect incision. Whitaker realizes he’s already mapped out each visible mole on the other man's body and can't help but imagine himself bent over a gurney with Abbot's front pressing against his ass, all under the guise of adjusting Whitaker’s form for a procedure.
That last mental imagery makes him cum over his first and onto his chest, briefly unable to recall when he even shoved his hands down there in the first place.
Oh God. He must be perverted in some way. Grossly, deeply, and shamefully perverted to even think his boss would be into him of all people, him ejaculating to the thought of it, and then how much he must be staring to know his silhouette so intimately. All of it so deeply unprofessional that he can’t swallow this impossible pill of reality. He wallows in the feeling of shame until the stickiness of his own cum becomes too unbearable of a sensation on his body.
He washes his hands, throws his now cum-stained shirt in the laundry bin, and thanks the higher powers that be for him having the day off as he dives into his pillows for comfort.
Hopefully he can get to the bottom of the issue before it kills him.