Chapter Text
Ten months is a long time to pretend something isn’t happening.
The rotation stretches, thins, refills. Faces change. Residents graduate. New interns arrive with fresh white coats and the same stunned look Dennis once wore. The Pitt remains—fluorescent, relentless, precise in the way it asks for everything and never explains why.
Dennis learns to be excellent.
Excellence is safer than honesty.
He learns when to speak and when to disappear. He learns how to read Robby’s pauses, how to anticipate orders before they land, how to stand close enough to be useful without drifting into the gravitational field that pulls at him every time Robby says his name. He prays before shifts some mornings, lips moving around words he half-believes, bargaining for steadiness. He tells himself desire is a symptom—stress, proximity, adrenaline. He tells himself God understands context.
God does not answer.
Robby, for his part, rebuilds boundaries like levees after a flood.
He stops using Dennis’s first name unless he has to. He leans on titles. He shortens sentences. He keeps his hands busy and his eyes forward. When the instinct to adjust Dennis’s stance or guide his wrist rises, he redirects—verbally, professionally, clean. He tells himself this is leadership. This is what doing the right thing looks like.
And then he starts calling him kid.
It happens once, offhand, during a crowded afternoon when the board is red and yellow and screaming for attention. “Kid—grab a second set of labs,” Robby says, already moving on.
Dennis freezes.
It shouldn’t mean anything. It’s not unkind. It’s not inaccurate. It’s a word Robby uses with others, sometimes. But it hits something raw, something buried under years of sermons and silence and learned obedience. It lands like permission and prohibition at the same time.
“Yes, doctor,” Dennis says, too quickly.
Robby hears it then—the pitch shift, the way Dennis’s shoulders lock like he’s bracing for impact. Robby’s jaw tightens. He doesn’t look back.
He uses the word again a week later. Then again. It becomes a tool he doesn’t admit he’s using: distance disguised as familiarity, authority wrapped in warmth. He tells himself it’s necessary. Dennis tells himself it hurts because it should.
Both of them are lying.
The medical crisis comes on a night that smells like rain and old coffee. The department is thin—staff stretched, tempers shorter than usual. A power fluctuation knocks out half the monitors for thirty seconds, just long enough to raise heart rates and remind everyone how fragile the illusion of control really is.
A patient crashes in imaging.
Post-op complication. Internal bleed. Pressure plummeting.
They wheel him into a procedure room that’s too small for the number of bodies it holds, then smaller still when the doors shut and the noise of the department drops away. It’s just the hiss of oxygen, the clipped cadence of orders, the tick of a wall clock that no one has time to look at.
Robby takes the lead without thinking. “We don’t have time to move him,” he says. “Prep here. Massive transfusion protocol. Dennis—stay with me.”
Kid, he almost says. He doesn’t.
Dennis nods and steps in, hands steady, heart trying to crawl out of his throat. He can feel Robby’s presence like heat—close enough to register, contained enough to hurt. He focuses on the patient’s skin tone, the way shock drains color and leaves wax behind.
“BP’s sixty systolic,” someone calls.
Robby swears under his breath. “Clamp. Now.”
Dennis passes it. Their fingers brush—accidental, brief, electric. Dennis’s breath stutters before he can stop it. Robby notices. Of course he does. He notices everything.
“Focus,” Robby says, sharper than he means to. Then, softer, “You’re doing fine.”
The room narrows.
The bleed is worse than they thought. Blood pools, dark and insistent. The patient groans, then goes still. The monitor’s pitch climbs.
“Stay with me,” Robby says—not to Dennis, not exactly. He presses in, hands sure, voice anchoring the chaos. “We’ve got you.”
Minutes stretch. Sweat gathers under Robby’s collar. Dennis counts silently—sponges, instruments, breaths. He feels boxed in by the walls, by the sound, by the wanting that has nowhere to go.
“Kid,” Robby says, without thinking this time. “Suction.”
Dennis flinches like he’s been struck.
Something in Robby snaps to attention. He looks at Dennis fully, really looks, and sees it all at once—the guilt worn like armor, the hunger misnamed as discipline, the way Dennis keeps himself small because he was taught that wanting is dangerous.
Robby swallows.
They stabilize the patient by inches. By skill. By luck. The monitor settles into a rhythm that doesn’t promise survival but allows it. Relief doesn’t come. There’s no room for it.
When it’s over—when the patient is moved, when the room empties—they’re left standing there with the aftermath. The smell. The quiet. The door still closed.
Neither of them move.
⸻
Right before he chooses to react, before anything can claw its way out of him, Dennis’s eyes snag on the blood drying at the edge of the tray—darkening, thick, ordinary. It shouldn’t mean anything anymore. He has taught himself that blood is just blood: venous, arterial, controllable, accounted for. He learned that lesson early, in bathrooms and bedrooms where guilt pressed harder than any hand ever had, where pain felt like proof that God was still watching. The sight still pulls at him, though—not with temptation, but with a hollow familiarity, the memory of believing that bleeding could quiet desire, could scrub him clean. Standing here now, hands steady, surrounded by the sanctioned violence of medicine, the illusion finally cracks: this blood saves someone, and his never did. The disillusion sits heavy in his chest, unavoidable, and it leaves him raw enough that when Robby calls him kid wrong—too close, too charged—Dennis realizes he can’t keep pretending that discipline has made him holy.
Dennis breaks first.
“I’m sorry,” he says, voice low, sudden. “If I—I can be more careful.”
Robby turns toward him. Really turns. The room feels too close now, like it shrank once the work stopped.
“With what?” Robby asks.
Dennis opens his mouth. Closes it. The words tangle with scripture and fear and the memory of home. “With… boundaries.”
Robby exhales, long and slow. He leans back against the counter, creating space he doesn’t want. “You haven’t crossed any.”
“That’s not what it feels like,” Dennis says.
There it is. Unavoidable.
Robby doesn’t answer right away. His jaw tightens. His hands curl at his sides, knuckles whitening like he’s fighting his own body.
Robby’s eyes flick down before he can stop himself.
It’s subtle. It shouldn’t be obvious. Dennis is still, professional, doing everything right—but there’s a tension in him that doesn’t belong to adrenaline anymore. The way his breathing hasn’t slowed. The way his posture is locked, like moving wrong would give something away.
Robby feels heat crawl up his spine.
“That’s not—” Robby starts.
Dennis lets out a sharp, embarrassed breath. “When you call me kid,” he says, cutting in, voice tight, “It just makes it worse.”
The words land hard.
Robby looks back up, pulse thudding. “Make what worse.” It was said like a sentence, demand almost.
Dennis laughs once, breathless and strained. “You know what.”
Silence snaps tight between them.
Robby swallows. He should step back. He should say something clinical, something corrective. Instead, he hears himself say, quieter, “Dennis.”
Just his name. No title. No distance.
Dennis’s head snaps up, eyes dark, wrecked, furious with himself. “I hate that it does this,” he says. “I hate that I stand there and you say it and my body—” He cuts himself off, jaw clenched. “I don’t want to be like this.”
Something in Robby fractures.
He moves before he decides to. Not touching—yet—but close enough that Dennis’s breath stutters, close enough that there’s no pretending this is still contained.
“Look at me,” Robby says.
Dennis does.
The wanting is naked now. No reverence. No careful distance. Just need, sharp and humiliating and alive.
Robby exhales, shaky. “Jesus,” he mutters, like he’s angry at himself for noticing, for wanting back.
“Tell me to leave,” Dennis says, barely audible. “Tell me to walk out.”
Robby doesn’t.
Instead, he grips the back of Dennis’s neck and pulls him in.
The kiss is rough from the start—no testing, no hesitation. Months of restraint crash together, teeth clicking, breath breaking. Dennis makes a sound he doesn’t recognize from himself and surges forward, hands fisting in Robby’s scrubs like he’s afraid Robby will vanish if he loosens his grip.
Robby kisses him like he’s starving, like he’s furious about it, mouth hard and unyielding. He presses Dennis back a half step, crowding him, thumb digging into the hinge of his jaw, commanding without a word.
Dennis melts into it, reckless now, all the discipline gone. The way he kisses back is desperate, messy, like he’s been holding his breath for ten months and finally lets himself inhale. Dennis forgot what it felt like to have someone else’s mouth on his, the hit didn’t take any time to get to him.
Robby breaks the kiss only when he has to breathe, forehead dropping to Dennis’s, both of them shaking.
“This,” Robby says hoarsely, “is exactly why I can’t stay.”
Dennis’s chest rises and falls fast. “I know.”
Robby’s hand lingers at his throat anyway, traitorous, grounding. “I’m taking a sabbatical,” he says. “Season break. I have to put space between this and me before I ruin it.”
Dennis nods, eyes bright, ruined smile flickering like he knew this was always the cost. “Doesn’t undo it.”
“No,” Robby says. “It really doesn’t.”
The back doors hiss open nearby. A stretcher rolls past, seen from under the curtain of the room their in. The Pitt breathes on, indifferent.
Robby steps back first this time, ripping his hand away like it burns. Dennis lets him, barely.
They don’t look at each other as they straighten themselves, as they put the masks back on.
But now the wanting isn’t theoretical.
It’s already happened.
And neither of them will survive pretending otherwise.
______________
They leave the room separately.
Robby goes first, because he has always gone first, because leadership is muscle memory and cowardice wears the same shoes as discipline. He pulls the curtain aside and steps back into the noise like nothing happened, voice already recalibrating, posture squared. He gives orders. He signs off on imaging. He jokes once, thin and practiced, with a nurse who doesn’t notice the tremor in his hands because no one ever does.
Dennis waits ten seconds. Maybe twenty. Long enough for the echo of Robby’s breath to leave the room.
When he follows, the department hits him like cold water. The Pitt doesn’t care what almost happened. The Pitt does not pause for guilt or revelation. The board is still full. Someone is crying in triage. Someone else is laughing too loud at the desk. Life keeps leaking out of people at inconvenient rates.
“Dennis.”
He turns. It’s not Robby. It’s charge, clipboard tucked under her arm.
“You good?” she asks.
“Yes,” he says, reflexive. He has always been good. He has always learned how to say that word like it doesn’t cost him anything.
She studies him for half a second too long, then nods. “I need you on fast track. And grab labs from three.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
He walks away before his body can betray him again.
The rest of the shift stretches into something brittle and strange. Dennis works on autopilot—suturing a hand, explaining discharge instructions, smiling at a woman who calls him “sweetheart” like it’s a blessing. Every time Robby’s voice cuts across the department, Dennis’s spine locks. Every time he hears someone say kid to someone else, the word echoes wrong in his head, stripped of its camouflage.
They pass each other twice without speaking.
Once at the med room door, where Robby steps aside automatically, hand hovering at Dennis’s back out of old habit before stopping short, fingers curling into a fist instead. Dennis murmurs “thanks” anyway, because he doesn’t know how to stop being who he is.
Once at the sinks, shoulder to shoulder, washing blood off their hands. The fluorescent lights are unforgiving. Robby stares straight ahead, jaw tight. Dennis keeps his eyes on the soap dispenser like it might give him absolution.
Neither of them touches.
That’s the cruelty of it—the restraint. It feels more intimate than the kiss.
Near the end of shift, a lull settles in. Not peace. Just the absence of immediate catastrophe. Robby stands at the desk charting, glasses pushed up his nose, posture rigid like he’s holding something in place by force alone.
Dennis watches him without meaning to.
Robby senses it anyway. He always has.
He doesn’t look up. “You can go,” he says. “I’ve got it.”
Dennis hesitates. “I can stay.”
“I know,” Robby says, quiet. Then, carefully, “You shouldn’t.”
The words are clean. Necessary. They hurt anyway.
“Okay,” Dennis says.
Robby nods once, like that settles something, and keeps typing.
Dennis clocks out. Santos hasn’t even left yet.
The locker room is empty. He sits on the bench longer than he needs to, staring at his hands like they belong to someone else. When he finally pulls his shirt over his head, the chain around his neck catches, the small metal cross warm from his skin.
He freezes.
For a moment—just a moment—his mind betrays him. The pressure of Robby’s hand at his neck. The command in his voice. The way his name sounded when it wasn’t buffered by distance or protocol.
Heat floods him, unwanted and immediate.
Dennis swears under his breath and yanks the cross free, the chain biting into his fingers. His chest tightens, panic and shame tangling until he can’t tell them apart. He presses the cool tile against his forehead, breathing hard.
This is not who he is supposed to be.
He drops the cross into the bottom of his locker like it’s evidence, like it might accuse him if he keeps it close. The clang is too loud in the quiet room. He flinches anyway.
When he leaves, he doesn’t put it back on.
Outside, the air smells like wet asphalt. Rain finally coming down, soft and steady, washing nothing clean. Dennis walks to Santos’s car and sits there with the engine off, forehead against the steering wheel, letting the ache settle into something duller.
He prays out of habit.
The words feel hollow.
⸻
Robby finishes charting alone.
He doesn’t notice the quiet until it’s too late, until the adrenaline drains and leaves him with his own thoughts for company. He signs off the last note, closes the computer, and stands there longer than necessary, staring at the board like it might rearrange itself into a version of events he can live with.
It won’t.
He rubs a hand over his face, fingers catching on stubble he hasn’t had time to shave. For a split second, he imagines following Dennis out. Saying something real. Something irresponsible.
He doesn’t move.
Leadership, he reminds himself. Boundaries. The words feel thin now, stretched over something feral and aching.
When he finally leaves, the rain has turned the parking lot into a mirror. He stands under the overhang and watches the water bead on his shoes, thinking about a doctor he used to teach, standing too close, wanting something he can’t give without breaking everything.
Robby exhales, slow and controlled.
Ten months is a long time to pretend something isn’t happening.
But pretending has always been easier than confession.
Inside, the Pitt hums on, fluorescent and relentless, keeping score.