Chapter Text
Hips pinning you to the counter. Fingers clinging to you for dear life, at your waist, in your hair. Lips burning a trail down your neck, whispering, begging: “Just one night, I just need one night.”
Stupid. Impulsive. Reckless.
Because just one night hadn’t been enough for him. He had crawled back into your bed, among other places, so many more times than just one night over the course of that fateful week.
It was supposed to be a treat. A reward. A bittersweet distraction. After the horror that was PittFest, Jack’s idea of an attendings-only break away to a lakeside cabin was the breath of literal fresh air that everyone needed. Five days of nothing but water, trees, mountains, and an obscene amount of alcohol. Five days to talk it out, drown your sorrows, heal, move on.
It was a simple enough process, except, as you quickly learned, Robby’s pain was not so linear, not so easily painted over.
The two of you had been something and nothing before, what Dana had called a ‘professional flirtationship’, and what you had both brushed off as teasing in the moment. If there was ever any heat behind it, then it had usually been thoroughly stamped out, beaten, and run over come shift end. It had been fun, a little bit of light in an otherwise dark and twisted job.
Then, things changed. PittFest fucked him up. It fucked all of you up, but it really, truly fucked him up.
You moved to nights, desperate for something different, and barely a shift change went by when you wouldn’t find him on the hospital rooftop, leaning over the edge like he was just waiting for a good gust of wind to do the job for him. Lacing your fingers with his, reeling him back in, became commonplace. He’d press his forehead to yours and whisper apologies and obscenities out to the night. Sometimes the whispers twisted into sobs, into screams.
He would hand over his patients, go home, and come back to greet you in the morning like it never happened, like everything was fine, like he wasn’t falling apart from the inside out, bearing every inch of his broken soul to you. Night after night, you’d be back on that rooftop, a life ring to a man that wanted to drown.
It shouldn’t have come as any surprise when it was you he came to for comfort that week, finally torn away from all the distractions The Pitt had to offer. With whiskey on his breath and dark eyes raw with tears, he begged and you caved, and then you caved again, and again, and…
Maybe if you hadn’t, maybe if you had been stronger or cared for him a little less, maybe if it had stayed at just one night, you wouldn’t have found yourself in the predicament you were in now: with your head in a toilet and a concerned mama-bear charge nurse rubbing circles into your shoulders, as you threw up the sandwich she had stolen for you earlier.
“This secret’s only going to get harder and harder to keep, kid,” Dana sighed, eyeing you sadly as you uncurled yourself from your porcelain friend, “How far along are you now, fifteen weeks?”
“Sixteen.”
One grainy, black and white sonogram was already pinned to your fridge, ready to be joined by another in a few short weeks’ time. Your baby. Your blip. There to remind you every day that this was real, this was happening, just in case the constant nausea and dizziness weren’t enough.
“And it’s not a secret,” You were quick to add – to lie – pulling yourself up and flushing away your sorry waste of a lunch, “You know.”
“I figured it out, that doesn’t count,” She scoffed, “I’m just saying, you’re putting yourself through this alone, when you don’t have to.”
Smirking at your side-eye, she left you with that annoying little nugget of wisdom, answering her ever-ringing charge phone before she’d even made it out of the bathroom – the traumas were always coming, your roiling stomach would just have to buckle up and knuckle down.
The department matriarch saw and heard everything. She clocked that something was different a week after you tested positive, and whilst you hadn’t revealed who the father was, and she graciously hadn’t pushed to find out, you knew she knew. She had been your rock – attending your check-ups, holding you when you threw up, sitting you down when you got dizzy, keeping you properly fed and watered through even the most disastrous of shifts, all without saying a word to anyone else.
All that said though, her loyalty to Robby was unmatched. They were the oldest of friends. She wouldn’t tell him, but she sure as shit had made it clear that she wished you would, carefully broaching the topic under various disguises: he was the department chief, he was your friend, he had helped raise Jake. Hints, subtle pushes, very not normal of Dana, but then, this was not exactly a normal situation.
Maybe she wouldn’t have been so eager for his involvement, if she knew what he was really like, what he’d done. Because, in truth, an ever-fading part of you did want him to know, didn’t want to go through this entirely alone, but those thoughts and feelings were minor and fleeting, compared to the lingering pain he had caused.
He had always struck you as somewhat sentimental, with the way he clung on to Janey and Jake, to Heather, long after things had ended, and even to his patients, long after they had passed on. Robby was a man that was unable to let go.
Until it came to you.
Because the brutal, bitter reality was that after he’d spent the better part of a week fucking your brains out, burying his cock and his feelings inside you, he seemed to have no further use for you.
Once you’d all returned to Pittsburgh, he didn’t text or call. When you all returned to work, he barely looked at you, barely spoke unless it was to exchange patients or get snippy at the state of the board. You tried to take some comfort in the fact that it wasn’t just you – everyone was walking on eggshells around him – but the sting lingered nonetheless, stagnating.
Almost mercifully, someone higher up convinced him to take a step back from the clinical side of things, and actually embrace his role as the chief of a major hospital department for once. He spent fewer days on the shop floor, and more tucked into an office that most of you had assumed was just a permanently locked supply closet, for how little it had been used previously.
The bitterness began before you could fully realise the consequences of your actions. Good riddance to him, let him get snowed under with paperwork and other asinine administrative tasks he had always loathed. The less you saw of him, the easier it would be to forget, to move on.
The nausea and the missed period rather turned that notion on its head, and then some. What was the saying? Fuck around and find out? Yeah… You didn’t think it would be quite so literal.
It took you all of a week to decide to keep it – the blip, the oopsie, the oh-fucking-no. Through med school and your residency, and several failed relationships, becoming a mother had felt like a pipe dream, unachievable and unimaginable, but now? Now you were an attending, you were making the money, paying off the debts. Sure, having a partner at your side and the mortgage paid off first would’ve been nice, but the fine lines at the corners of your eyes, and the handful of grey hairs tucked into your bun, served as anxious reminders that time was against you – it was now or never.
You tried to remind yourself of that when you’d get so dizzy you could no longer see straight, or when you’d spend at least ten minutes of every hour unleashing the contents of your stomach into a toilet.
Dana was right though, as always – you’d have to start spilling the beans soon, before your symptoms and a set of maternity scrubs did the talking for you.
One other thing you could rag on Robby for was the unintentional side effect of his newly acquired office hours: there were more attending hours that needed filling. With you, John, and Baran being the newest ones to join the higher ranks, it fell to the three of you to fill in the gaps, switching and swapping between nights and days, doubles and splits and endless on-calls.
Not only were you completely exhausted, but your symptoms were worse when the sun was up, and harder to hide with all the extra people around that day shift required.
Whilst Dana had been the only one thus far to actually put two and two together, it was impossible to ignore all the concerned gazes that lingered on you a second too long every time you came back from the bathroom, off-colour and shaking, with bloodshot eyes and scuff marks on your scrub pants from the tiled floor.
There was one pair of coffee-brown eyes that hadn’t seemed to notice yet though, and those were the ones that probably should’ve, given he was the one responsible for how miserable you looked and felt.
Partly. Partly responsible, you reminded yourself. Because you had been an embarrassingly willing participant, and staying angry all the time not only wasn’t healthy, but it was also exceptionally hard, when he still looked so sad and broken, so out of sync with the world around him.
You, on the other hand, had no choice but to keep up the pace, stay focused.
The cases came in all shapes and sizes, the typical flavours of seizures, strokes, and STEMIs, thrown in with drunkards and junkies. An extra sprinkle of car crash victims had just been wheeled into the trauma rooms.
You were assessing the bloodied and unconscious driver, or trying to, when the stench of whiskey overwhelmed you in a single breath, choking your senses.
An all too familiar tingling sensation crept through you, the blood draining from your limbs until you could no longer feel them. Breathing through it didn’t help, only serving to further swallow up the scent of the one drink that had gotten you in trouble in the first place. You tried to blink away the fuzzy black spots in your vision, but the spots became blobs became everything – all you could see, feel, was that fuzzy blackness.
You woke up cold and aching on the hard floor, with someone shining an obnoxiously bright light in your eyes.
“Look who’s ready to get back to work,” Langdon trilled above you almost gleefully, though you caught the anxiety pinching at his features, beyond the penlight, “You okay?”
Body wracked with shivers, and a vicious nausea ripping through you, your voice was barely recognisable above the sound of chattering teeth, “I’m on the f-floor Frank, what the fuck do you th-think?”
“I think it’s lucky you’re my second favourite attending,” He smiled softly, curling an arm around you, “C’mon, let’s get you up.”
So much for staying focused.
Frank and Dana dragged you to a bed, threatening to handcuff you to it if you didn’t let them give you the once over and run some tests.
Half an hour was all you had planned to give them, to let them worry and poke and prod, then you really needed to get back to work. That was the plan in your head, but your body had other ideas, and the sound of a curtain screeching open jolted you awake almost two hours later.
Langdon’s face, as fresh and gorgeous and chiselled as it was, was also suddenly very punchable.
“So your blood work’s back: iron-deficiency anaemia,” He paused, eyes shifting back and forth to anything that wasn’t you, “And it seems you are also pregnant.”
Fuck.
Breath hitching, you struggled to keep your voice low, for all the fear and frustration pulsing through you, “You ran a pregnancy test without my permission?!”
“A woman of your age, passing out for no obvious reason… It’s standard protocol, you know that,” He shrugged, not even having the decency or perhaps the common sense to attempt to look apologetic, “I’m prescribing you some iron supplements – take them every day with a glass of orange juice if you can stomach it.”
“I’m not an idiot,” You scowled, hands fisting the threadbare hospital blanket that someone had thrown over you.
“I know you’re not,” He sighed, lips pressing into a tight line as he rocked on his heels in a manner that was so unnervingly Robby-like, “So, do I congratulate you, or…?”
Tears threatening to fall, you pulled him in for a hug, burying yourself in his shoulder, “I need you to keep this to yourself, Frank, please? You can’t tell anyone – not even Robby.”
“Sure,” He squeezed you back carefully, nodding against you, “But seriously, is this a good thing or not?”
For the first time in what felt like months, you cracked a laugh, “It’s a good thing.”
“Okay, well then, congratulations Mama,” He drew back, his expression softer than you’d ever seen it.
Mama. It was the first time you’d heard the word uttered and been able to associate it with yourself. That was you, that was what you were going to be.
Fresh tears were spewing out of you, these ones borne of fleeting and giddy happiness, “Thank you.”
Once you were cleared for duty again, the rest of the day passed a little easier. The stares and whispers were a little more obvious than usual, but The Pitt took no prisoners, if its minions had time to gossip, then it didn’t hesitate to throw them a curveball or two to keep them busy.
Blessedly, John rolled in for his night shift an hour early, iced coffee in hand. He had been worked to the bone just as much as you had lately, and real sleep had become a thing of the past, dark circles pulling at eyes that had long lost their sparkle.
When Dana conveniently let slip what had happened, he sent you home immediately, and you didn’t protest, knowing better now than to look a gift horse in the mouth. Tomorrow would be a rare day off for you, and now you had an extra hour to spend easing into it.
There was still some daylight left when you finally traipsed out into the fresh air, a faded orange glow bouncing off the car-lined streets. The warm breeze whipped at your undone hair as you took your first good, long breath in hours.
You’d barely made it to the end of the block, when:
“Hey, wait up!”
The one voice you didn’t want to hear shouted out from somewhere behind you, and sure enough, when you peered over your shoulder, Robby was sprinting after you.
It had been a pipe dream to think him capable of fully committing to the cushy 9-to-5 side of his office job. He would come in early, stay late, hover. Even so, you’d thought he had gone home, having not seen hide nor hair of him all evening.
You didn’t wait for him, but he caught up easily enough anyway, a firm hand closing around your elbow to stop you.
“I’m off the clock,” You muttered, a barely hidden sharpness to your words; you already knew how this conversation would go.
He stepped in front of you, blocking your path and forcing you to meet his gaze, “Frank said you fainted?”
“That was hours ago,” The disquieting anger you’d spent months trying to bury began to bubble out, “I’m fine.”
“If you’re fainting on the job, then you’re obviously not fine,” His voice came out weary but clipped, matching the edge in yours.
“It’s not really any of your business.”
His jaw tightened then, annoyance flashing across his features, “It is my business – I’m your boss.”
It was the worst possible thing he could’ve said. Cold. Detached. I’m your boss. Not your friend, not the man whose shattered soul you had helped piece back together, not the lover that had laid his fingers on every single inch of you.
Something inside you cracked wide open, and suddenly tears were racing down your cheeks again before you could stop them.
Robby’s expression shifted instantly, first to confused and then markedly concerned. There was the slightest pull to his grip, urging you closer, but there was no follow-up, and that flicker of restraint somehow managed to hurt you even more.
How many nights had you spent on that freezing fucking rooftop, holding him close when he fell apart?
You swallowed hard, forcing down all the vitriol you were eager to throw at him. You had to play it careful as you shrugged him off, because he was right – he was still your boss, and he could absolutely cause more trouble for you if he wanted, when you were already hanging on by a thread.
Broken, you whispered, “I have to go.”
His eyes were still burning into you as you walked away, but he didn’t follow, and he was gone when you chanced another look back over your shoulder.
The rest of the walk home felt longer than it ever had before. The city noise blurring into one droning, shapeless hum around you as your mind reeled.
How dare he show even an ounce of care or concern for you now, unless… Did he know? No, he wouldn’t have let you go so easily if he did. Or maybe he would’ve, he had already dismissed you, hadn’t he? Cast you coldly aside the second he no longer needed your hands in his hair, your mouth on his skin. He didn’t need or want you, why would he feel any differently about a baby?
By the time you’d reached your front door, your reeling mind had turned into a rolling stomach. Saliva filled your mouth, a clammy sweat prickling its way up your neck, across your forehead. You barely made it to the bathroom in time, already-bruised knees hitting tile yet again as you unleashed all your nerves, and your dinner, into the toilet bowl.
“Fuck me,” You seethed, teeth chattering as you shivered, your whole body aching.
The tears came thick and fast once more, and they would not stop – not when you scrubbed your shift away in the shower, not when you climbed into your favourite lazy-day t-shirt and sweatpants, and not when you curled up on the sofa with a cup of what was supposed to be a soothing peppermint tea.
Sniffling, eyes viciously tired, you flicked absently through the TV channels, not taking in a single frame. You just needed background noise more than anything, to drown out the pounding heartbeat that pulsed in your ears.
When sleep finally found you, it wasn’t kind. It slipped around you slow and gentle enough, but did nothing to ease the tension coiling inside you. It was deceptive, like the calm before the storm.