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Dennis doesn’t notice the flowers until late at night, after Santos had found him hiding away in the abandoned wing of the hospital and taken him home like a puppy left on the side of the road. He still doesn’t know how to feel about all of it, about the way Santos would tease and poke at him like his brothers sometimes did, only to turn around and open her door for him to sleep there, indefinite time of stay.
He knows he’s grateful, and he will be for longer than this will last, even if Santos starts thinking that he’s a terrible roommate and kicks him out soon. But he’s also numb, and he can’t think about his feelings without the memories of the entire day making a wreak out of him.
It has been a bad shift, a really bad one, and only the first one in the PTMC’s ER for both of them, so to say they are exhausted is an understatement. Santos hasn’t offered dinner, and Dennis isn’t sure he could stomach anything right now. He just want to sleep, but he’s covered in sweat and blood and who knows what else after spending so many hours running around the hospital, trying to stay on his feet while everything else crumbled around him, while his attending—
No, not going to think about that one. Not now, not ever, probably.
At least, Santos hasn’t been lying when she promised him a room with its own bathroom. The room is nothing special, clearly a guest bedroom reformed as a storage room, with boxes filled with more history than Dennis is prepared to uncover tonight, or any time soon. There’s still more than enough space left for his meager belongings, all stuffed in his backpack and a duffel bag. He sets them on the bed, springs squeaking under the weight as he takes a clean shirt and his shower supplies.
A shower, whatever sleep he can get with the remnants of adrenaline still wreaking through his mind and body, anything to get him ready for the next day.
At the bathroom, he breaks. Not really, and not fully, but it’s the most he would allow himself in this situation—in any situation, with how he had been raised. He bends over the sink, fingers grabbing at it tightly until his knuckles turn white and his arms are shaking, all so he can avoid staring at the wrecked look on his face.
It’s not his first rotation in a hospital, it’s his last year of med school already, but this one has definitely been the hardest one so far, enough to make Dennis wonder if he can do all this again tomorrow. He’s aware today has been a tragic exception, that despite the deaths that place sees everyday a MCI of that scale isn’t the norm, and that he has sacrificed too much already to turn back now, but the thought lingers for a beat.
Enough to remind him of what awaits for him if he ever dares to come back home, enough to make him snap back to reality.
Maybe it’s fucked up, maybe Dennis is fucked up, yet a part of him can’t help but feel good, even after everything that has happened. There have been so many casualties, so many people who came in through the doors of the ER and never made it out, some of them under Dennis’ care, others just a presence in the overly white corridors of the hospital that he caught a glimpse of. But those who made it, who thanked him alongside their families or grumpily walked out, muttering about never coming back here, those made a difference—Dennis made a difference. It was all he wanted when he decided to be a doctor, he decided to ditch his family’s plans, to abandon a future as a pastor because he wanted to help people more directly, not through a faith he can no longer follow as closely as he once did.
Perhaps every doctor just needs to be a bit self-centered, enough to believe their hands and orders will be enough to change the world, or just a part of it. That’s a thought Dennis will hold on for now, because otherwise the only thing left in the ER for him are the losses he can’t bring himself to face yet.
His arms are still shaking when he tries to take off his shirt, scrubs that he has forgotten how many times he had changed and that he will probably need to wash again anyways, the exhaustion after so many rounds of CPR and just moving around all day making his body feel like a dead weight. He drops the shirt to the floor, and when he raises his head he almost falls with it, legs shaking with something more than fatigue.
There, on the mirror, his shoulders are patched red, strikingly so. It’s no the same redness that used to appear whenever summer kicked after a long and cold winter, when he started helping around the farm shirtless and burned himself from spending too long under the unforgiving sun. This red is defined, harmless but painful all the same, in a way that’s not physical at all.
Dennis knows about soulmates, is aware of the technical aspects of them and has studied all the related affections that could follow the lost of one just so he could be prepared with his future patients. He doesn’t know about the real aspect of it, about having a soulmate.
Until now, it seems.
His parents hadn’t been soulmates, that much has been clear to Dennis. His mother used to tell him that not everyone finds their soulmate, back when he was a kid and she still found the time and energy to talk to him, before he drifted away from her as his father’s attitude changed as well. Even back then, he used to think that was strange—if God was smart enough to pair you up with someone, why wouldn’t you be able to meet them?
He realized why quickly, when he turned thirteen and his eyes never wandered towards the girls his classmates talked about, but lingered on his brother’s friends instead, on their big hands and the shade of a beard against their sharp jaws. Dennis was thirteen when he realized why some people never get to meet their soulmates, or talk about them, and he was seventeen when his father made him realize he will never meet his if he stayed in the farm.
Still, he tried to be with them, despite the disappointment in his mother’s gaze and his father’s hateful words, faith and duty mixed into something that made him feel hollow inside. Their parents weren’t soulmates, flowers didn’t bloom on his mother’s arm as his father touched her, the brief brushes of skin against skin that Dennis got to see, but they were together after decades, they had built a family together and were happy about it. Perhaps he could try too, he could marry a kind girl and forget about the reason his nose sits a little crocked in his face now, take care of a farm just like his father did.
The idea of that future stayed with him until he found himself in a plane to Pittsburgh, suitcase filled with everything he could manage to get before he was kicked out and he realized he could’ve never gone through his original plans.
He forgot about soulmates as he started med school, ignored the possibility when he first hoked up with a guy, didn’t think about once he got too busy to have any kind of a personal life and he ended up in the streets as he became increasingly indebted.
It’s the only thing in his mind right now, as he stares at the flowers looking back at him from the mirror. The red of blood in the back of his mind is replaced by the red of the petals, a sharp contrast to the paleness of his skin now that he spent most of the day working or studying far away from the sun. Dennis feels short of breath, his hand hanging on the air, as if touching them would make this any more real than it already is.
He touches the reflection of the mirror instead, fingertips tracing over the soft looking petals and the tangled stems. Dennis is a doctor, or he’s on his way to become one, so he tries to be clinical about it, he pushes away his feelings as he analyzes what is right in front of him, even as his hand shakes against the dirty glass. Even if he has always had trouble keeping his feelings at bay when it mattered.
They look like poppies, he musses, though there’s something different about them he can’t point. He had never been one for flowers, and though he likes tending to the land, his family’s old farm had been of beef cattle. He doesn’t know that much to pinpoint exactly what kind of flower this it, what they could mean, but he can try to identify when they appeared—even though he doesn’t want to think about whom they appeared for.
The flowers sit over his shoulders, right where the shirt could cover them, but some of the stems curl up towards his neck, peeking from underneath his clothes. Dennis has been surrounded by people all day, both patients and doctor and nurses, moving from case to case because the opposite—sitting down and relaxing—could mean someone might lose their life. Despite the constant presence of others, he knows he hasn’t been touched all that much, except for one person.
A breathless, shaky sigh leaves his chapped and dry lips. His poor attempt to be analytical and objective about this falls short as his heart rate picks up. It can’t be, it can’t, and yet there’s no other possible explanation, there’s no one else who had been manhandling and guiding him with warm, grounding touches all day.
Michael Robinavitch, his new attending, is the reason his body is painted with blooming red flowers. Robby is his soulmate.
Dennis doesn’t tell anyone about it.
The flowers are slightly blurry when he wakes up in the morning, almost translucent, a reminder that he had met his soulmate lingering in his skin. They will most likely disappear as the day goes on, unless Robby decides to invade his personal space again.
He thinks that maybe they won’t even meet today, that perhaps Robby will take a day off after what happened yesterday—the mess of Pittfest, his breakdown in the improvised morgue. Dennis knows he wants a day off, but he needs to end this rotation as soon as possible to move onto the next one.
Robby is there when Santos and him arrive, talking to Abbot next to the nurses’ hub. Dennis looks at him, takes a really long look at the man who apparently is his soulmate, feeling his heart squeeze at the sight of the white hairs on his beard or the crowfeet around his eyes as the other attending says something that makes him smile. Then, Robby turns around and their eyes meet, his smile turns softer then, more real, before he nods at Dennis and then redirects his attention towards Abbot again.
Dennis knows Robby is his soulmate. No one else could be, and he feels it in his heart that this is not him making things up. That the immediate attraction he felt towards Robby from the start meant something more than simple fascination.
The thought is as comforting as it is terrifying. Dennis never thought he would find his soulmate, because he knew it would be a man, that his family would never accept that part of him he still has trouble accepting himself. He never expected that said man would be old enough to be his father, that it would be his boss who clearly will never be interested in him—soulmate or not.
Despite his mousy attitude, as Santos describes it, Dennis doesn’t have a lack of confidence in himself. Sure, he’s still nervous around the ER, but that’s just because he has barely started there, and while the unstoppable pacing of the place is something he can see himself growing to enjoy, it’s still a lot of pressure—lives that need to be saved, patients that need the best care possible while he feels barely able to care for himself after hours on his feet. He’s still green, rough around the edges, and he often wonders if this is the place where he should be, but that doesn’t mean he will stop trying. And he doesn’t see himself as overly attractive, not when he has bags under his eyes that might never disappear, no matter for how long he sleeps, and with how much weight he lost while living on the streets, but he has had enough men interested in him before to know he’s good-looking, charming to some.
But he just knows Robby and him wouldn’t work out, or rather, they would never start and see if they did. The age gap, the obvious power imbalance, the way Robby keeps everyone at a safe distance and the rumors running around about his past relationships. Dennis has heard enough stories about soulmates being the ones to make their partners change for the better, to help them find themselves and grow; two halves of the same soul, literally made for each others. Maybe he could be that for Robby, or maybe not, and both of them would be miserable instead of happily ever after. Dennis wants to try it as much as he wants to run away and never seen the older man again.
He avoids Robby, as much as he can given their situation. Dennis lets the older man touch him like he did that first day, apparently still appearing like he was a lost lamb in need for guidance. Robby doesn’t hold back either, finding Dennis wherever he is and moving the med student to where he wants the younger man to be. It almost makes something flutter in his chest, that Robby seeks him out and is always able to find him, before he turns that feeling down.
Dennis doesn’t touch Robby as much as the older man does, or anything at all. He keeps his hands to himself, worried of what might happen between them if he ever lets go of this self-imposed rule. It’s not strange, he tells himself, it’s not like Dennis has any reason to go around feeling up his attending, but it’s still remarkable enough that some people start to notice.
Obviously, Santos is among them.
It has been a few weeks of them living together when she approaches him about it, Dennis’ time at the ER about to end soon.
“So,” she starts, attempting for casual in a way that makes Dennis know it will be nothing but. “What’s going on with you and doctor Robby?”
Dennis likes her, likes her more than in the grateful way he thought he might have felt at the start of all this. She feels like the sibling relationship he never quite managed to have with his brothers, all of them older than him, finding him a weakling and a punching bag. Santos still picks on him, but there’s an underlying warmth to it, burning stronger when they sit together on the couch after a long shift, no words exchanged but a sense of peace settling between them.
He doesn’t like this particular line of questioning, though.
“Nothing is going on between us,” he replies, throwing a confused look at her before looking back down to his dinner—heated up leftovers from last night takeout order.
“Yeah, sure,” she nods, clearly not convinced nor willing to let this conversation go. “I’ve seen how he acts around you. How you act around him.”
For a moment, Dennis panics, and he hopes it doesn’t show on his face. Has she noticed what he tries so hard not to think about?
“I have no idea what you mean, he’s my attending,” he tries to finish this impromptu talk by pushing more food into his mouth and turning up the TV sound. Trinity beats him to it, snatching the remote from his hands and turning it off entirely.
“That’s exactly what I mean,” she says, the earlier casualness of her voice nowhere to be found. “He’s our attending, and you’re clearly his favorite.”
He almost chokes with the food he hadn’t managed to chew yet. “I’m not!”
“Yes, you are. I’ve seen how he treats you, and I know he doesn’t treat anyone else the same.”
“You’ve known him for as long as I have,” he rolls his eyes. The longer she doesn’t bring up the soulmates fact, the more relaxed Dennis grows, which only seems to piss her off.
“But I’m not you, I notice these things, Huckleberry,” Santos points her fork towards his face, like she’s wielding a sword and not a plastic utensil. “He’s always hovering around you, always touching, praising. He stares at you like—”
“Like what, Trinity,” he says, but he’s not sure he wants to know the answer to that.
“Just… Fuck. Are you comfortable with him doing this?”
“Why wouldn’t I be? He has been nothing but nice to me,” his obvious confusion makes his roommate laugh, or maybe it’s his words. Dennis has never been considered funny, his jokes always landing flat, and now more than ever he fails to find the humor on what he said.
“I’m sure he has been,” she mutters under her breath, but this close together, sharing a small and old couch that has clearly seen better days, Dennis hears her loud and clear. “Let me know if that changes. I’m a doctor, I know how to kill a man and make it look like an accident.”
Dennis laughs, shoulders relaxing. “Not sure that’s a useful skill when you’re supposed to be saving lives.”
“Oh, trust me, it is.”
His relationship with Trinity goes well, growing as the day passes, until Dennis feels comfortable calling her a friend. Perhaps his best friend, definitely his only friend right now.
In the meantime, he investigates.
The red like-poppy flowers are actually anemones. Poppy anemones, actually, a fitting name Dennis only found after looking them up. He has never seen these flowers in person, but he had spent far too many hours staring at pictures from his private browsing, irrationally afraid that someone might pull up his search history and notice why he was doing it. So far, the only person who might see his phone is Trinity, but she seems to have her own opinions about his relationship with Robby, or lack therefore. An opinion she seems eager to share but that he can’t be bothered listening to.
Dennis has wasted far too much time researching about flowers and comparing them with the ones in his body, the red against his shoulders and his neck and even his arms. He had grown used to wearing long sleeves under his scrubs, trying to hide as much of his skin as possible and thankful for the cold weather that allows him to do this. Santos still doesn’t notice it, and he doubts anyone else is paying enough attention to him to think he’s acting weird—or, weirder than usual.
Flowers have meanings, an assigned arbitrary symbolism that Dennis has never understood or cared for, if he’s being honest. But now that those flowers are attached to his skin, he finds himself suddenly interested.
His curiosity is ill-rewarded, hopes for something that will never happen dimming the longer he reads about it. A symbol of illness, of bad luck in some cultures, representation of a forsaken love even though they never had a love story to begin with. He reads about Adonis and Aphrodite, about spilled blood and tears, and wonders if that would be the end for Robby and him as well.
While investigating, Dennis has also noticed that indirect touches tend to last for just a fleeting moment. The ones when Robby touches him with gloved hands, or when he’s wearing too many layers between Robby’s hand and his skin.
Dennis goes to the bathroom, a quick break from the constant chaos of the ER, and while he’s there he looks under his scrubs, sees the flowers with petals so translucid they almost look sickly, as if his body was complaining about the lack of a proper embrace.
The longer he spends here, under Robby’s steady and commandeering presence, the more he starts to complain about that as well.
He’s about to end his rotation at pediatrics when Trinity brings it up.
“Robby has been acting up,” she says one night, driving back home after a long shift.
“How so?” Dennis asks back, trying to go for slightly interested yet nonchalant, probably failing at both and coming off as eager for any crumbs of information he can get about the older man.
Trinity shrugs her shoulders, eyes set on the road before them. “I don’t know. Snappier, I guess. Rude to the doctors over small mistakes. Almost erratic sometimes, like you never know if he’s going to praise you for a job well done or give you a dragging over anything.”
Dennis gulps, arms tightening around the backpack on his lap. “Has he acted like that with the patients too?”
“God, no. You know how he is. He’s still professional with them, and he apologies when he says too much, but it’s still…”
“Yeah. Yeah, I know.”
Trinity doesn’t say anything else after that, and Dennis is glad for it, he has too much in his mind to bother talking right now.
Of course he knows what’s going with Robby. Or, at least, he thinks he does. He has read about it, felt it shimmering under his skin the past few weeks. Soulmate withdrawal was real and documented, though it tended to happen in established couples, not… whatever they are — an attending and a med student that had to do his rotation under his watch, two people who spent twelve hours together for almost every day during weeks, that barely got to known each other besides their favorite snack from the vending machine and the things that trigger them to a full breakdown in the middle of a shift.
He sometimes feels it himself, how the hold he has around his feelings grows weaker, anxiety settling deep in his bones in a way that has nothing to do with the overwhelming pressure of med school or his lingering debts. Whenever he feels himself slipping, he tries to hide in his room, or wherever he can find, stealing a few seconds to breathe. His hand finds his shoulder, caressing it while thinking of someone else’s hand and the flowers that haven’t bloomed in weeks.
For a fleeting moment, he considers if it’s a good idea to wait for Trinity inside the ER one day, to greet everyone that has worked with him during his time there. He wonders if Robby would be there, if he still remembers Dennis (if he misses Dennis as much as he misses the older man). Perhaps if he goes, Robby would greet him with a smile and a hand on his shoulder, a fleeting touch that will be marked on his skin for longer than the moment would last.
“Huckleberry? You okay?” Trinity’s voice wakes him up from his thoughts, and Dennis realizes they have already arrived home. “What are you thinking about? You look weird.”
“Nothing,” he replies easily, because it’s the truth—he’s thinking about nothing that can happen.
It’s the fourth, Robby’s last day before his three month long sabbatical, and he had been acting strange. Or, stranger than usual, at least.
For how much Dennis has been observing the man during his rotation and thinking about him the rest of the time, he still has trouble reading Robby. He used to think that maybe he could be the exception, that after seeing his walls crumble during that accident at pedes Dennis would be able to see through him more clearly, but those barriers seem fortified now.
Robby is always moving, always everywhere and nowhere all at once. It’s hard to see him as much as he’s constantly hovering around. Dennis isn’t looking for him, but he isn’t avoiding him entirely either. The older man has been holding back from touching him, just casual fist bumps after a good catch or a heavy trauma that went well, so Dennis grows more relaxed about the marks on his skin; he’s safe as long as Robby keep his distance, and yet that makes him want to seek the older man more, as if his soul was aching for its other missing half.
He doesn’t find Robby anywhere he might be, but he passes through an open door with a very interesting scene happening behind it. Mohan is helping Abbot with a wound on his back—Dennis knows she has been taking more night shifts lately, or working doubles until her usual schedule starting to mix with those anyways, but he never realized she has grown that close to the other attending.
However, this situation means Abbot has to be shirtless, and for the passing moment Dennis allows himself to be there, he sees them, the dead and wilted flowers. The yellowed stems grow around his ribs, down to the middle of his abdomen where dry petals sit, almost like a hug. It’s impossible to tell what kind of flowers they were, but given the amount of them, the gentleness with which they surround the man, Dennis can tell his soulmate loved him even in death. Dennis walks away, afraid of interrupting the quiet moment, feeling like he knows far too much already.
In the end, it’s Robby who finds him, right when Dennis takes a break to fill his rumbling stomach with something before he passes out in the middle of the ER. If he thought Robby had been behaving uncharacteristically today, it only becomes more evident when the man offers his house to Dennis. Three months of house-sitting, no rent and a place all for himself. Dennis expected the talk about Amy, specially with how often Trinity brings it up when it’s just the two of them, but he hadn’t been expecting it.
He says yes, perhaps a bit too eagerly. It’s a mix of wanting to be closer to Robby in any way he can and honestly just wanting to help him, though maybe those are more closely related than he allows himself to think about.
The problems come later, with what Robby says right after. The words linger heavy in the air, tightening around his heart like ivy and poisoning his thoughts. He doesn’t want to think the worst, nobody does in this type of situations, but it’s almost impossible to miss the implications now.
The way Robby has been acting, his careless words and unsettling comments, they all pile up until Dennis is sure he won’t be seeing the older man after his sabbatical, and it’s not only because he might plan to leave his job at the hospital.
Dennis allows himself a few seconds to panic, to let the weight of the situation crush him under its impending doom, before he’s moving again. For a moment, he feels directionless, not knowing who to reach out for first, what do to now that each passing second counts. He tries to think about it methodically, like he has been trying to do all this time about their soulmate situation, and he knows he’s falling miserably.
Abbot is the first person he sees, the most fitting one to help him with Robby. Dennis catches him just as he’s about to leave, probably trying to catch some rest before he has to come back in a few hours—he almost feels bad for dumping this onto him, almost. The older man sees the look on his face, probably something deranged and panicked, and pushes him to a quiet corner.
Dennis tries to explain as best as he could, recounting the events as if he was citing a clinical history, stuttering when he can’t remember exactly the words Robby said despite them being etched into his mind. Abbot stares at him all the while, expression unreadable, before he shakes his head.
“Don’t worry about it, kid,” he says, dropping a hand over Dennis’ shoulder. It’s heavy, warm, and not at all like when Robby does it. “Go do your job, you have done enough here. It was never your responsibility to take care of this.”
In the end, Abbot leaves before Dennis can tell him why, exactly, he should care about this, about Robby, the words he was never brave enough to say burning in the back of his throat.
Dennis Whitaker is not a coward. He had spent most of his live hiding who he was in fear, until that constant dread turned into indifference and he couldn’t be bothered to keep hiding anymore. Not loud, certainly not proud, but done pretending to be someone he is not. That’s why he decides to stop running away from it, from the fact that Robby is his soulmate. Maybe he could do something more to help him than look after his house while he’s on a trip he might never come back from, or while letting Abbot handle it.
It’s not hard to find Robby this time around, his commandeering and overwhelming presence felt even on his last day as their boss. The problem is to find Robby in a moment where the both of them can have a chat without the prying eyes of the ER’s staff looking at them. It’s even harder when Robby seems adamant to be surrounded by people for once in his life, even if it’s only to snap at them, his words growing heavier and sharper as the hours until the end of the shift pass.
Watching from the sidelines only make him feel more helpless, a burden rather than a crutch for Robby to lean on.
Finally finding a quiet moment with Robby ended up being an accident. Dennis is looking at the whiteboard with the patients’ names on it and hoping all gets sorted soon when he sees the attending quickly walking away, to nowhere in particular and yet a place Dennis hasn’t managed to forget.
That moment in pedes is something Dennis tries not to think about too often, and yet it ends up in his mind anyways. It makes him wonder if he will ever be allowed to see that vulnerable side of Robby he intruded upon, if he could be there for something more than a stolen moment.
Robby doesn’t seem to be having a breakdown right now, or not so openly at least, not like the last time Dennis saw him here. He paces around the room, arms crossed about his chest in a gesture that mockingly resembles a hug.
“Dr. Robby?” he asks, closing the door behind him quietly.
The older man pauses his movements, dropping his head down until his jaw hits his chest. He must be trying to hide his expression, but Dennis can see the hints of a smile tugging at his lips, a smile he can no longer believe it’s entirely real.
“Whitaker,” Robby says. He doesn’t fully turn around, just enough to look at the younger doctor. “What are you doing here? Last I saw, you had a patient in room 7.”
Dennis gulps, but he feels almost calm as he steps closer. Confident, like he had been feeling since he started working here for real, and although fluttering at moments, now he can’t allow himself to hesitate. This is the place he should be, where Robby should be as well. His job now is to save people, he can save Robby. “Are you alright? You—”
“I’m fine. Go back there, they need you.”
Robby doesn’t let him speak, already turning away and hoping that the younger man will leave him. He wonders if Robby notices the similarity of this situation, the parallels with the last time they were both in this room alone, the words that were exchanged in that moment—or maybe it’s all a blur to the attending, Dennis has had his fair share of panic attacks to now by now how faint his memory of them becomes when they’re over. However, he’s adamant to make a change this time, he doesn’t let himself be pushed away and instead places one hand over Robby’s crossed arms.
When he first realized Robby was his soulmate, Dennis has tried his best to keep his physical distance from the man. Perhaps he’s more of a coward than he likes to give himself credit for, because he was scared of Robby’s reaction if he ever noticed it himself, a secret for only Dennis to carry. Now, he realizes how unfair he had been, how selfish.
“Robby, I—”
His touch seems to wake the other man from his thoughts, but this time his expression as he stares back at Dennis is unreadable. He seems to feel something through the skin to skin contact, and then Robby stares down to where Dennis’ fingers are still gripping around his arm, staring at the flowers quickly blooming in there, a splash of yellow over his skin.
It’s gone before Dennis can figure out what they are, as it’s the neutral expression on Robby’s face. Dennis watches the feelings rushing through it, fast and disconnected and impossible to make sense of, before Robby settles for a sneer that has never been directed at Dennis before.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Robby says after a while, the words landing like knives. He runs a hand across his hair, huffing something that seems almost a laugh but that comes out as a scream. He keeps muttering under his breath, nothing good and nothing someone expected to hear from their newly revealed soulmate, until he’s laughing again.
He walks away without looking back the next moment, leaving Dennis alone in the room.
When Dennis finds himself composed enough to leave pedes, he doesn’t see Robby again. He tries telling himself it doesn’t matter, that he doesn’t care about being so openly rejected by his soulmate. It doesn’t make it any more real.
They don’t talk for the rest of the shift, if Dennis needs anything he tries to find a senior resident. He doesn’t know if he’s grateful or pissed off that Robby is ignoring him after hovering over him all day. When the shift ends, he skips Robby’s little speech, he wonders if the man even did it, a final nail on the coffin, or if he decided against it altogether.
Before going to the break room to take his things, he sees Abbot talking to Robby. This far away and with the loudness of the Pitt around him, Dennis can’t make out what they’re saying. He can’t see Robby’s face either, but he doubts the words exchanged are being well received by the man in question. He couldn’t talk Robby down, but Abbot will, he’s sure of it, they’ve probably known each other for longer than Dennis has been alive, been there for each other—he tries not to be bothered by it.
Dennis remembers the wilted flowers in Abbot’s body, and he wonders if that’s what will become of him before Robby’s sabbatical is over, if that’s the entire point of it now.
Dana hands him something before he leaves, saying that Robby left something for him. The words are enough to make him grow helpful, but that hope is quickly extinguished. Dana hands him a bunch of keys and a piece of paper with Robby’s rushed handwriting in it, the security codes and the direction of his house, nothing else.
He almost forgot he promised Robby to house-sit for him, he almost thought Robby would’ve forgotten as well after what happened. Maybe Robby believed he needed to do this anyways, tying the lose knots and helping Dennis, not realizing that what would actually help him would be if Robby stayed. In truth, he doesn’t want to go now, not if he will have to spend three months surrounded by the man’s presence, by his ghost.
Trinity is already waiting for him outside when he steps out towards the parking, and Dennis is surprised to see her there. He had thought Trinity would be spending the night with Garcia, not looking at the sky lit by fireworks here alone.
“Are you ready to go?” She asks, impatient and eager to move just like she always is, though there’s something else sharpening her words tonight.
He hesitates for a second, mouth opening and closing. He stares down at his hand, where the crumbled piece of paper and the key rest. “I can’t. I promised Dr. Robby that I would house-sit for him while he was gone,”
“Are you serious?” Trinity stares at him for a beat, trying to see if he’s joking or not. Dennis’ expression must be more miserable than usual, because she just turns around towards her car. “Whatever.”
“Trin? Are you okay?” He asks, though he’s not sure he can deal with what Trinity seems to have been carrying all this shift, if he’s being honest. He still wants to try, because he let someone slip today already, he doesn’t want to see Trinity alone as well, not the only person who might care about him here.
“Fucking peachy, Huckleberry.”
She doesn’t say anything else as she leaves, through Dennis can see her face as she drives away, the dark cloud lingering over her eyes, and he wonders if tonight he will lose two people instead of one. He wants to walk towards the place he has been calling home from the past ten months and spend the night with Trinity, but instead his feet carry him towards Robby’s house.
The place is more bare than he imagined it, like nobody was living there for a long time, not just a few hours. No family pictures in the walls or the fridge, no plants that struggle to remain alive, no shoes thrown right besides the door and jackets misplaced around the living room, much like Trinity’s apartment always is. The couch looks as unused as it is uncomfortable, but Dennis doesn’t even make it to the bedroom, he crashes there instead.
Dennis takes off his shirt, not because of the humid summer heat making him sweat, but because he needs to see the fading flowers in his skin, see that they are still real. He wonders if he will ever see them in that vibrant hue of red again, the one that accompanied him throughout his entire EM rotation. He wonders if they will reappear, withered this time, and how long it will take them.
Fifteen days.
No place at the PTMC is ever quiet, not even the memorial wall. People walk past him, conversations that he can’t pinpoint or care about.
“Are you alright?” Trinity asks him, suddenly by his side. With all that noise, Dennis hasn’t heard her approach at all. Or maybe he was just too deep in his thoughts.
Dennis stares at the pictures before him for a beat longer, the empty feeling in his chest a bottomless pit threatening to swallow him whole.
“Yeah,” he hums, though he doubts it sounds convincing. “Yes, I am.”
Trinity doesn’t touch him, but she stays by his side as they walk towards the ER together, leaving behind one of the only memories he has from Robby, his picture standing there for anyone to see. Meanwhile, he carries the one thing from him that nobody knows about, the wilted flowers on his body settling a heavy weight over his shoulder, a ghost of a man he will never get to see again.