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Dennis is consumed by only three things: the need to scour the brutal events off his body. The need to sleep. The stark certainty that he won't sleep at all.
He will settle for collapse.
His soul all but departs his body with the slam of the door of his makeshift accommodation behind him.
He doesn't know whether to cower for cover or pivot in place to size up the threat. His body opts for both. He whirls around, shoulders hunched in some futile attempt at protection, his blood splattered sneakers squeaking on the floor as he loses his footing. The result is him half-tripping, half-holding himself upright against the hospital bed, and one of Dr. Robby's hands clutching the front of his scrubs. Dennis doesn't have enough information yet to know if this is to save him from falling flat on his ass, or to throttle him.
“What the fuck is this, Whitaker?” Dr. Robby demands, gesturing to the untidy sprawl of Dennis's scant belongings. It's more intense than the escalating pimping he does when as he leads Dennis through a case. Then again, everything is more intense today. The black-red of blood, the new and gut-churning ways a body can come apart, the sight of Dr. Robby wailing out a prayer on the peds room floor. Dennis doesn't know if any one of them will be able to be anything but intense ever again.
Robby shakes him, fist still clamped tight on Dennis's scrub top, chafing the back of Dennis's neck and knocking his stethoscope awry.
“Sorry,” Dennis finds enough breath to offer. “Sorry, sir. I know I shouldn't be here, I'm just short on rent this month—”
Dr. Robby makes a noise of displeasure that dries up the rest of Dennis's lie. It's not just this month. It has been every month since his clinical rotation tuition ate up the paltry remainder of his line of credit, leaving him dependent on doctors' lounge snacks and the sadistic fucking scrub dispenser to get him through until residency and the promise of an income.
Robby looks wild, his beard somehow more grizzled than it was fifteen hours previous, his sclerae dry and bloodshot.
“Pack it up,” Robby snarls and Dennis's heart plummets. He isn't sure he can face another night on the floor of a study room in the Med Sciences building, kept half awake by the thought of security finding him and kicking him to the street. His quarters on the abandoned ward of the eighth floor have made him soft, made him forget just how bad off he really is. He has always had a soul-rotting habit of wanting more than he deserves. “All of it.”
Robby moves like a tropical storm, throwing everything in his wake into Dennis's worn backpack: notebooks and anatomy flashcards and the fucking tuning fork Dennis had bought as an eager, clueless MS1.
To further his humiliation, Dennis feels tears prick at his eyes, and it is somehow indecent, unnatural of him to cry at this little indignity, when he kept it together through the bloody triaging, the rapid-fire sorting of flesh into 'too late' and 'maybe', the impromptu morgue where he stumbled onto Robby falling to pieces.
“I'm sorry,” he repeats thickly, shoving a small stack of laundry into an empty banker’s box he had previously ‘borrowed’ from Kiara's office.
It's over in a heartbeat, Robby searching out Dennis's toiletries and throwing them in a haphazard jumble atop Dennis's roughly folded clothes. Dennis clings to the box, holding it tight to his chest, as if it could protect him from this.
“We good?” Robby demands. His gaze sweeps the room before finally landing on Dennis's sniveling face. “That everything?”
Dennis feels a fat, obvious tear drip off his nose and watches despondently as it splats onto his toothbrush. A third apology flutters uselessly against his larynx.
“Oh,” Robby says. He rubs a weary palm over his even wearier face. “Shit.”
He reaches out, an abortive gesture, but for a moment Dennis imagines he might feel that rough skin against his cheek, wiping away his tears. The exhaustion must be driving him to delusion.
“I'm not mad—” Dr. Robby starts. He clears his throat. “No, that's not it. I am mad. I am furious, pissed, actually. But I'm mad at the system, kid, not at you. I'm sorry, I realize how this must have looked. I'm not at my best. Hell, you saw me. I'm probably at my worst.”
Dennis doesn't contradict him, mostly because he doesn't know where this is going, and he definitely doesn't know what to say.
“It's this fucking day,” Robby sighs. “This fucking God awful day, and the added knowledge that this fucking place will use your labor for 15, 24, 36 hours, and not have the decency to help keep a roof over your head. Even after something as horrific as all that. It isn't right. It isn't right, Whitaker, and I'm sorry.”
Dennis looks away. “It's–”
“Dammit, don't say it's fine,” Robby interrupts, the spitfire fury leaching out of him, leaving him deflated. “It's not fucking fine. That wasn't a learning opportunity down there, that was a battlefield.”
Dennis shrugs. “Well. I learned not to put an IO into a conscious patient.”
Dr. Robby stares at him for a moment, Dennis's ratty backpack slung over one shoulder, then shouts.
Well, at first Dennis thinks it is a shout. It turns out it is a laugh, a shocked rasp of humor.
“You'll be the death of me, kid,” Robby says. He shifts, pressing his free hand between Dennis's scapulae and ushering him towards the door. “Come on. I've got a spare room I can put you up in until we get something else figured out.”
Dennis nearly trips over his own feet. Maybe he should have guessed where this was going, but he didn’t. He can never think when Dr. Robby is in the room, he gets too tongue-tied with admiration and envy and with just how badly he wants to prove himself. He wants to end up here, wants to be, or at least be near, Dr. Robby, he isn't even sure which.
“No, Dr. Robby, you don't need to–”
“I do need to, actually. Everything in the ER is under my purview. Including you. I’m not letting one of my med students go homeless. That’s what’s happening here? I’m not misinterpreting things? Not just spending nights at the hospital to show you're a gunner?”
Dennis shrugs, hoisting the banker’s box higher up his chest. His hands are sweaty and the box is dusty. It is forming a tactile nightmare of grime on his palms. He wants a shower. He'd bet that Dr. Robby has a nice shower. He’ll probably even be allowed to use it.
“I’m between places,” he admits.
Robby snorts. “Between places. Yeah, and how long have you been that way?”
Dennis chews on the inside of his cheek, wondering how much of a lie he can get away with, what with Dr. Robby's seeming omniscience. Probably not much.
“A year, maybe," he admits. "A bit longer."
“Christ, a year?”
Dennis doesn’t even register that they are outside until the cool air hits his face. Dr. Robby shepherds him to the curb, pulling out his phone and ordering an Uber. “Sorry, brought the bike today. Not gonna get you home on that with all of this. Shouldn’t be long.”
Dennis doesn’t mention it’s not Dr. Robby’s responsibility to get him anywhere, least of all home.
“A year, huh,” Dr. Robby continues. “Where the fuck’s your line of credit? Aren’t the banks tripping over themselves to give you guys those any more?”
Dennis's molars go back to work on his cheek. He momentarily considers telling Dr. Robby that Dennis’s finances are none of the attending’s business, but his resolve quickly crumbles. Keeping anything from Robby feels like trying to run with a fistful of water.
“They are. They did. Just…Humira. It’s not cheap, and it’s pre-existing, so it’s not covered, and I can’t exactly do sutures if my fingers are swollen all to hell."
“Shit,” Robby shakes his head. “Rheumatoid?”
“Psoriatic.”
“Sorry, kid. Rough. Just gets worse with stress, though, you need stability, a lack of housing isn’t doing you any favors.”
That pisses Dennis off. “Yeah,” he mutters, sarcasm evident. “Thanks. Great tip.”
Robby has the decency to laugh.
Their Uber arrives. Robbie’s standing close, suddenly, a hand on the back of Dennis’s neck, so briefly Dennis isn’t sure it even happened. Then, Robby’s taking the banker’s box from him, shoving the pathetic scarcity that is all of Dennis’s worldly goods into the trunk of the car, and then guiding him into the back seat, touching him again, his back, his hip, like Dennis doesn’t know how to get into a damn car on his own. Dennis wishes he could resent the help.
°
“Bathroom,” Robby points out as they make their way down the hallway. The townhouse is upscale, but spartan. Overfull bookcases, but no art, a jar full of change, but no tchotchkes. “I use the ensuite, so this one is all yours. Help yourself to towels, washcloths there.” He nods to a linen closet across from the open door. “And this will be you.”
The room isn’t huge, but it’s tidy. A double bed, a wooden side table and a lamp, a dresser. The walls are bare, but it doesn’t smell like death and rat piss, so compared to the eighth floor ward, it’s basically luxury.
“You don’t have to do this,” Dennis says again. “I mean, it’s not that I’m not grateful, sir, I am, I just–”
“It's Robby. We’re not at work. And we're not having this argument. We can figure something else out when this nightmare is behind us, when we have both had food and sleep, and a fucking day off. Until then, here’s a room, nobody’s sleeping in it, so take it. There’s food in the fridge, shower shit in the bathroom. Just use it, God knows nobody else is.”
Dennis doesn’t know why he feels like he is suddenly being scolded, when the context is Dr. Robby’s ludicrous generosity.
“I’ll figure out a way to pay you back,” he promises.
“Kid,” Robby sighs, “and I mean this nicely, but don’t you fucking dare.”
°
Guiltily, Dennis turns the water on as hot as he can tolerate. The hospital showers were weak and unreliable, and the steady beat of pressure on his depleted muscles feels like bliss. He scrubs every part of himself as though he might never get the chance again. It is the first time in ages he has felt really clean.
He checks the hallway like a cat burglar before darting out down the hall to Robby’s guest room. He forgot to bring a change of clothes with him to the bathroom, and he is loath to put his sweaty, soiled scrubs back on, even for a minute. He dashes down the hall in only a towel, dripping on the hard wood and feeling young and foolish.
He swallows when he sees an old tee and some sweats which have been placed on the end of the bed. The banker’s box has been emptied and he realizes he can hear the thrum and clunk of a washing machine coming from a cupboard at the end of the hall.
He almost starts crying again. He would almost rather take Robby’s bitter anger over this obvious pity, this bewildering care.
He thinks about putting the new-old clothes in the dresser, sliding into the covers and praying for sleep, but his mouth is dry and gummy from dehydration, and he can’t remember when he last had a sip of water. He is going to give himself a damn AKI if he doesn’t smarten up, so he pads down the stairs, Robby’s old sweats bunching above the elasticized ankles and making him feel like a little kid.
He finds Robby in the kitchen, stony faced, leaning against the island.
“Eat,” Robby directs.
Dennis sees a plate has been put together for him in the breakfast nook: sliced avocado and apple, toast with peanut butter, a boiled egg. There is a large glass of water, precipitation forming on the outside. It must be cold, just how Dennis likes it.
“Oh, that’s okay,” he says, not able to bear any more charity. His father would just as ashamed now as when Dennis first left Christian Science for material medicine. “I’m not hungry.”
“Eat,” Robby said again, arms crossed. “Adrenaline will tell you don’t need it, but adrenaline’s a fucking liar. You’re never going to wind down if you don’t get some calories in you. Calories and cold water, remind your parasympathetic it exists.”
Dennis wants to object, but a lifetime of obeying the hierarchy is not going to be undone in this one, bizarre night. He realizes he doesn’t even know what time it is. His vision feels like it is lagging a second behind each minute shift of his head. He wonders dully if he is having a stroke or if he is just very, very tired. He sits down. He eats. Robby watches, stern, but satisfied.
And that’s all. Despite all the touches, the bursts of emotion, the frisson of maybe something, the horrific fucking day. Dennis drinks his water. He tries to put his dishes in the dishwasher but Robby won’t let him, taking them from him and doing it himself instead.
They go upstairs. Robby says good night and closes his bedroom door firmly behind him. Dennis brushes his teeth. He crawls into bed. He doesn’t sleep.
°
Dennis regrets ever taking Dr. Robby’s advice, because it turns out trying to turn off the fight and flight only opens the door for what any psychiatrist worth their salt might call rumination. The images of the day rush at him like a movie trailer on the inside of his eyelids. Mr. Milton. His christening of Huckleberry, how he is not sure if it was meant as collegial or mocking. The crowd in the waiting room, the constant threat of volatile tempers and grasping fists. The violence and the blood and the mops running through it. Victim after victim after victim and the helpless drowning feeling of not knowing enough, not doing enough, the cold dread and the certainty he’ll fuck something up to catastrophic results. And through it all, interspersed, intercut, Robby’s hands. Robby’s touch. Robby crying out. Robby.
Dennis all but catapults out of the bed. It is too nice, too comfortable. He thinks he has forgotten how to sleep in a proper bed. He feels strung out and irritated, his scalp hot and tight. He already regrets the long shower. This is what he gets for his avarice. Maybe his parents were right, he always wanted too much attention. He wanted the prayers for his aching joints, his flaking, crumbling finger nails, the painful, pruritic scaling of his skin. His greed was what kept it from ever getting better. His greed and his parents' fucking negligence, he reminds himself.
But still he wants. His skin burns and crackles with it. He’s been so used to being on his own, holding himself apart from his classmates, not wanting them to know about his radical family, the crisis that is his finances, the looming question mark that is his sexuality. He’s been so removed and so untouched and now, Robby’s hands have undone it all, his rough, shorn nails, the clinical smell of sanitizer and vinyl gloves, and his sheer fucking competence. Dennis is certain he's never wanted something so badly in his life. Not even to be free of his condition. None of his desperate childhood prayers to heal the painful inflammation and fissures had reached these far-from-godly heights. He doesn't even know what it is he wants, only that he needs. It is deep and uncomfortable and all-consuming.
He flings his door open, paces the hall, trapped, a lion in a luxurious cage, but where else can he go, especially when he doesn’t want to be anywhere else at all?
He lets his head thunk quietly against the wall. The cool, dry paint feels like relief.
He jumps when Robby’s bedroom door opens.
Robby looks calmer, somehow. He tilts his head as he observes Dennis in the dark. Dennis still has his forehead pressed to the wall like some sort of psych patient.
“Can’t sleep?” Robby hazards.
“No,” Dennis admits, stupidly, obviously.
Robby does that fed up thing he does, again: he scrubs a hand across his face like all the problems of the world are laid bare before him, with Dennis at the forefront.
“This fucking day,” Robby mutters. He stares hard at Dennis for another long moment, then suddenly strides forward. Before Dennis can even process the movement, Robby is reaching out, his large palm solid on the base of Dennis's skull, shifting him away from the wall.
They stay like that for an instant, Robby cradling the back of Dennis’s head in one powerful hand. Dennis is still, lost and wanting and clueless as to where to go from here.
And then Robby pulls him in, crushing Dennis to his chest, his other arm a tight grip around him, his beard scraping where he presses his face to Dennis’s neck.
It’s a hug, Dennis realizes sluggishly. A good one. He gulps back a sob of gratitude, collapsing into the embrace. He waits for the wave of wrongness, the alarm bells in his gut to remind him this is his attending, his mentor, a man over 20 years his senior, a man, period. They don’t come. Instead, he clings more fiercely, wishing he could wrap his legs around Robby’s waist, burrow under his shirt, take shelter behind his ribs.
"It's alright," Robby whispers, his tone sounds a shade off from resigned.
He holds Dennis like that for a long time, the rise and fall of his chest a soothing wave. Eventually he attempts to step back, to end the contact.
Dennis is not proud of the whimpery protest that emanates from him, unbidden, or the way he grips tighter to Robby’s shirt, refusing to be let go.
Robby exhales slowly and shifts to nudge Dennis’s temple with his forehead. “You're alright."
Dennis shakes his head. He's not. He's never been.
"Okay," Robby gives in, his arms settling consolatory and calm back onto Dennis's shoulders. "What would—Christ. Seems like you could use a cuddle, hey, kiddo?”
Dumbly, Dennis nods, because even if he couldn't have named it, he knows it's what he wants.
"Yeah?" Robby confirms and Dennis miraculously manages to repeat the syllable back, muffled as it is against Robby's chest.
"Okay," Robby repeats, walking them back until Dennis's calves hit Robby's bed and at last, they break apart.
It's awkward at first. Dennis sits timidly on the end of the bed, afraid to look at Robby out of fear he will change his mind.
"To be clear, I wasn't insinuating anything," Robby tells him. "Just offering a moment of some human fucking comfort after an inhumane day. And only if you want. You want to go back to your room, nothing's going to change in the morning, either at work or here. You're still welcome to stay, we'll still figure something out, no contingencies needed. Nothing's at stake, Dennis. I need you to know that."
"I want to," Dennis says quickly. He doesn't know how to clarify that it is not that he doesn't want to, and more that he doesn't know how to. That basic, non-clinical touch is as foreign to him as moon dust and twice as unreachable. "I think you're right. In the other room, by myself, I couldn't, like, shut off properly. I couldn't stop—I just mean I think I might need that sort of help. The kind...like you said."
He trips over his words, trying his best not to repeat the word 'cuddle'. He wishes he knew why even saying it feels infinitely more mortifying than asking for something far more intimate, or even sexual. It is probably screwed up that he thinks it might be simpler to beg Robby to fuck him than to hold him.
"Jesus, Whitaker," Robby says gruffly. Dennis is too altered to catch the meaning in Robby's voice. Robby's hand lights on Dennis's shoulder and Dennis jumps.
Robby pulls away immediately. "Maybe this is a bad idea. I mean, I know it is a bad idea. I'm just trying to help, kid, tell me what would help."
"It will help," Dennis urges. "I know it will. I just can't—I need you to, like, start it."
His face burns hot at his own clumsy attempt at an explanation, but Robby only huffs out a chuckle, like Dennis has thrown a suture wrong, a rookie mistake.
"Okay, if you're sure," Robby murmurs, his voice so patient and kind despite Dennis's ineptitude. The sweetness only deepens Dennis's shame. "You wanna lie down? I can take it from there."
Dennis feels himself nodding, then convinces himself to maneuver up the bed and under the covers, his head on the unused pillow. A rustle of fabric, and then Robby is there behind him, threading one sinewy arm beneath Dennis's neck, drawing his body close, slotting in against him.
Dennis all but gasps. It feels like the first breath after drowning.
"Well," Robby tells him quietly, "this is it. This is all I had in mind. Still okay?"
"Yes," Dennis responds immediately, emphatically. "Very okay." What he doesn't say is that his heart is flickering and swirling with grief for all the years he never had this, never knew it was something he could ask for, that his body, like everyone's, was capable of wanting and receiving touch.
"Good, then," Robby says. "As long as you need, alright?"
Dennis nods again and lets the covers be rearranged and tucked up against him, lets himself be soothed by the twining of Robby’s limbs around his, the sharp point of Robby’s pendant into his back.
“Today was the worst of days,” Robby murmurs, one hand easing tenderly through Dennis's hair, then digging into the strained muscles of his scalp and occiput. It might be the best thing Dennis has ever felt. “A real trial by fire. But you’re still here. You did good. So good, yeah? I wish you hadn't had to be there, but I was lucky to have you at my side."
Dennis nods a little, more to show that he is listening, than agreeing with the words. He doesn't trust himself to speak.
"I'm really proud of you, kiddo," Robby continues and Dennis swallows hard because he's never fucking heard those words and they hurt, they hurt worse than anything, worse maybe than the lack of hearing them ever did. He wants to be good. He wants to make Robby proud. He wants to give himself entirely to this thing that he has sacrificed so much for. He turns, eyes hot where he buries them in Robby's bicep. He doesn't think he makes a noise, but maybe he does, a half-whimper or a stifled cry, because Robby is shushing him gently.
"You’re safe, okay?" Robby promises. "I know it might not feel like it; it is common to feel under threat after something like that, even if the danger has passed."
Dennis shakes his head uselessly, for how can he explain that despite it all, he is the safest he has ever felt?
"I know I didn’t help things, today, earlier," Robby confesses. "I am sorry I couldn’t hold it all together. I can do better. I will do better.”
Dennis wills himself not to cry out in protest. Instead, he reaches out tentatively to the hand of the arm currently cradling him, pressing their palms flush together and linking their fingers. Robby gives his hand a squeeze and Dennis has a stirring of amazement that Robby will even let him do this, that he doesn’t seem to see how omnipotent he is. It kills him to know that Robby thought for even one second he didn't do enough, when in reality Dennis was almost relieved to witness him break open, just for that glimpse of proof that Robby isn't some sort of deity.
“I think,” Dennis whispers, “that a panic attack in the middle of a mass casualty event is actually probably the most normal thing in the world.”
Robby gives a dry laugh. “I hope you’re right,” he agrees. He presses his mouth gently to Dennis’s mastoid process, his nose riffling through Dennis’s hair. Dennis isn’t even sure it is a kiss, or just platonic affection. He wants it all, whatever it is, craves more, fathoms more. Robby trails his free hand down the bare skin of Dennis's upper arm, goosebumps sprouting and tingling as he goes, and that feels fantastic, too. Dennis wonders how so much can feel so good.
“Maybe I'm not the only one who needed this," Dennis ventures hesitantly, smiling in the dark. It makes this whole thing more equal somehow, knowing he can give Robby something he needs, too. That Dennis isn’t just taking taking taking, like he’s always done.
“Maybe not,” Robby relents. "You really will be the death of me, kid." Robby nuzzles closer, voice heavy with sleep. "And I think I'm alright with that."