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1.
"Nah, man," Jack was saying as Robby poked his head around the exam room door. He was reading through a set of results on the computer screen, peering over the top of his glasses in a way he'd be giving Robby shit about if the situations were reversed. "I've got to give it to the Europeans on this one. It provides vital structural reinforcement."
"It's not natural," the patient said from where he was lying on a gurney, his face smeared with a lurid, drying paste of flour and blood. God bless the ability of people to continue to find new and innovative ways to acquire a head lac. "Who'd ever think to do that? It's gross."
Jack looked over at Robby, and nodded in response to Robby's questioning eyebrow. "Well, Mr Sanderson, in good news, your test results are all that we want them to be. Someone will be in shortly to get you cleaned up and see to that cut to your head, okay? And while you're waiting, just ponder this: you don't want the condiments to weaken the bread's integrity, right? To everything there is a purpose."
Robby blinked.
Jack followed Robby out of the room, applied some hand sanitiser, and said, "The guy in Trauma 2?"
"Yeah," Robby said, walking with him across the ED. "Do I want to know what all that was about?"
"All wh—oh," Jack said. "We were talking about whether it's okay to put butter on a sandwich."
Robby squinted at him. "Butter?" He couldn't think of a single reason why he'd put butter on a perfectly good Reuben.
"Sure." Jack shrugged. "Provides a natural barrier between the bread and the sandwich ingredients in a way that mayo or mustard can't, so if you're making, like, a good chicken salad—"
"But butter?" Robby said, wrinkling his nose. Corned beef, sauerkraut, Swiss and Thousand Island dressing on rye: it was a classic for a reason. Who'd introduce butter to that?
"Okay, okay, we need to hook you up with the good shit, brother," Jack said, spreading his arms wide. "Then you'll see what I'm talking about. Broaden your horizons, get you treating yourself right. None of the low butterfat crap. Tell me, you ever heard of Kerrygold?"
2.
"No, see, here's what you do," Jack said. As best as Robby knew, Jack wasn't on shift today, but here he was regardless: sitting at the break room table and working his way methodically through a slice of the apple turnover cake that Dana's eldest kid had sent in for the staff. "You go, but you make sure you've got an exit plan. You scope out the major egress points, you make sure you've got a team you can get an alert to if you get trapped, you—"
"Are you planning a bank heist?" Robby poured himself a cup of coffee. It was as terrible as always, but he was desperate. "Because traditionally planning a crime in a public area goes badly."
"Why would I be planning a bank heist with Antoine?" Jack said, and the emphasis there was vaguely suspicious.
Robby raised an eyebrow. "You planning a heist with anyone else I should know about?" Let's face it, if there was anyone in the ED who could work well with Jack on something like that, it was Robby himself.
"Hey, man," Antoine said, "I bet I could do some real Ocean's Eleven stuff if I wanted to!"
Jack swallowed another mouthful of cake and said, "Antoine, man, focus. Logistics are the only way you're going to get through this one."
"Or I could just break up with her?" Antoine let out a sad little sigh. "But she's just so pretty, man. And she smells so nice."
"No one's breaking up with anyone," Jack said firmly. He set down his fork, held out his hand, waggled his fingers. "Here, give me your phone."
Robby leaned against the kitchenette countertop and said, "This feels less like a bank heist, but..."
Jack shook his head, finished typing something into Antoine's phone, handed it back. "You've got my number in there now, but I'm listed as Westside Senior Living. If you send me a text that's just a phone emoji on Thanksgiving Day, I'll call you back in five minutes. Oh no, your comatose Great-Aunt Tilly just took a turn, you've got to get over there ASAP. Too bad, so sad, bye."
Robby felt light begin to dawn. "Are you actually..."
Jack shrugged. "Antoine's got a hot new girlfriend, but her family's not so hot."
"Her mom asked me if I'd been Saved within two minutes of meeting me," Antoine said. "And her dad keeps talking about shit I have to google because I've never heard about it before, and I've only skimmed the wiki page for palaeolibertarianism but man, that ain't it. But they asked me to go to Thanksgiving, and they know all my folks are in Jersey, and if I don't go then Lily will be pissed with me, but if I do go—"
Robby blinked. "Exit plan it is."
Jack ate another forkful of cake, looking smug.
3.
"But your whole question is way too broad! That's my point," Jack was saying as Robby walked up to the central hub. He was leaning against the desktop, arms folded, with the look on his face that Dana had once—three espresso martinis deep and pink-cheeked—whispered to Robby made him look like an exasperated prairie dog. "Man, I know your undergrad degree was in History, you telling me you don't understand the importance of defining your terms?"
Shen shrugged and said, "What's to define? These are concepts that an elementary school kid is familiar with."
Jack let out a snort of annoyance.
Robby rounded the desk, stowed away his jacket and his backpack beneath it. "Do I want to know?" he asked Lena out of the corner of his mouth.
"This has been going for two hours," Lena said, flatly, "and it all started because a patient came in wearing a WWE t-shirt. Run, save yourself."
"Kids know the category of vampire, sure, the basic concept," Jack said. "But what exactly does the Count from Sesame Street have in common with Lestat?"
Shen scrunched up his face, took a considering drag of his iced coffee. "Innate sense of camp?"
"You're side-stepping the point," Jack said, jabbing a finger against the countertop. "I'm asking for specifics here. Look, Count Chocula fighting Lon Chaney's Wolf Man is not the same thing as Stoker's Dracula taking on Michael J. Fox in terms of vibes or capabilities. We're not comparing apples and oranges."
"We got here from WWE?" Robby asked Lena. Could there be a path from A to Z here? Sure. Robby just couldn't intuit what it was.
"Don't ask me," Lena said, signing out of her work station and turning to retrieve her tote bag. "I just work here, and my shift ended four minutes ago. You're the boss, he's your problem."
Robby looked over at Jack—how animated he always got when faced with something he was trying to solve, how focused, a bright-eyed terrier with a bone—and thought that problem wasn't the word he'd use.
4.
Five in the morning, and Robby found Jack sitting on the floor in the stairwell next to a kid who looked to be six or seven. Jack didn't seem to notice Robby at first. All of his attention was focused on the kid, who was wearing grubby clothes that were far too thin for the weather outside and who was putting clear, heroic, little-kid effort into trying not to cry.
"No, buddy," Jack was saying gently, "I pinky-swear with you, that's not how it works. Think of your mom like, uh... Like she's a clementine, okay?"
Robby stopped where he was, folded his arms, leaned against the wall. No point in interrupting wherever the hell this was going.
"If you just dug your thumb right into a clementine, sure, you'd get juice coming out everywhere," Jack said. The tone of his voice—careful, urgent, grasping for something to say—made Robby think, briefly, of standing on a rooftop in the dark and hearing Jack say we're the bees that protect the hive. "But if you peel it carefully, you can just open it out, and on the inside there are all these little pieces of clementine that you can take out without getting juice all over you, right?"
The kid nodded warily.
"So your mom's insides are kind of like the inside of a clementine. The surgeon will open up her belly very carefully, so nothing's going to fall out. I promise. Some of the pieces of her insides have some tears in them. The surgeon has to sew them up so that she can get better."
The kid drew his knees up to his chest, planted his face against them, so whatever he said next was too muffled for Robby to hear. But Jack said, "Yeah, I know there was a lot of blood. But we've got some spare blood we can give her to help replace what she lost. I promise that the surgeons are only trying to help her, not hurt her."
For a long moment, the only sound in the stairwell was a small boy's sobs, and Jack saying, "It's okay, buddy, it'll be alright." Robby turned his face away.
Gradually, the crying tailed off and Jack said, "You know, they should be starting to serve breakfast in the cafeteria round about now. I think I'm kind of hungry. You want to come with me, see if we can find some pancakes?"
"I like pancakes with syrup," the kid said in a wobbly voice.
"You've got excellent taste," Jack said. "C'mon, up we go."
When Jack got to the bottom of the stairs, he didn't seem surprised to see Robby standing there. He just said, lightly, "Hey, Dr Robby. Would you like to come and get pancakes with me and Ethan here?"
Robby had to be on shift in less than two hours. He had a mound of charting he'd been hoping to tackle before then, and an email inbox that had a red-text banner across the top warning him that it was at 98% capacity. He smiled at Jack. "Sure," he said. "I'd love to."
5.
"Not sure that one's my colour, but go back to the—yeah, no, I think that one could work." Robby hadn't intended to eavesdrop—had been hoping, in fact, for five minutes alone in the break room to chug a cup of microwaveable soup—but Jack's voice carried easily through the cubicle curtain.
"Yeah, I think you're right," said a young woman who sounded a little sad and a lot tipsy. "You're totally a Soft Autumn. I don't know how I could ever have thought you weren't a Soft Autumn. I can, like, totally picture you in a desert at sunrise."
"You'd be surprised at how easy that is to do," Jack said dryly.
"I'm supposed to be better at this stuff by now!" the young woman said. "I took a whole course, it was like thirty-six hours and there was reading and a quiz and everything."
"Well," Jack said. "Sometimes the way we really know we've learned stuff is when we put it into practice. People aren't exactly the same in real life as they are in books. You've got to work with the real them, not the person you imagine they are."
There was a sad sniff. "I guess that's true."
"And I think that sweater you picked out was very nice," Jack said, in that low, confidential tone that Robby knew had reassured more than one nervous med student over the years. "Okay, you should be all numbed up by now, but you let me know if there's any pain."
Robby walked over to the central hub as casually as he could, made a show of studying the whole board but focused on one row in particular. It wasn't that enlightening. N_02, SPEN, 21, Hand Injury, Abbot, Jesse. No further comments. "Hey, Dana," he said after counting to five, "does Abbot need any help with that patient in North 2?"
Dana looked at him over the top of her glasses. "Does a senior attending need help dealing with a non-confrontational patient who has a simple nail avulsion? Anything's possible, cap, but I got to tell you I'd be surprised."
"I'm not, I mean, I just..." Robby felt his treacherous cheeks flush a dull red.
Dana raised her eyebrows at him.
"I was just, you know, curious." Robby looked around and then leaned into her and said, "What does it mean when a woman tells you you're a Soft Autumn?"
Dana looked at him sadly, shook her head. "Oh, brother."
Plus One Conversation that Robby Understood Perfectly
There was a nook just around the corner from the ambulance bay proper that Robby had come to know really well back when he used to smoke. You were in earshot if needed, but you were invisible to anyone who came looking for you, and an overhang shielded you neatly from all but the heaviest rain. Bless whatever architectural oversight had created it. The nook still worked even when you were chewing furiously on some nicotine gum and hiding out from Gloria and her need to have him put on a penguin suit and go charm potential donors. It was like she'd never even met him.
Robby was standing there, arms folded and looking out absently at the light rain falling, when he heard the ambulance bay doors slide open. Robby peeped around the corner for a second: Jack, snapping on a pair of nitrile gloves and Santos next to him, bouncing lightly on the balls of her feet. From off in the twilight distance came the first faint wails of an ambulance siren. Three minutes out, in Robby's experience.
"They really like him up in surgery, though," Santos was saying. "He handled this really complicated tibiotalar dislocation and fracture the other week, and Miller was so impressed that he told him there and then he wants him to write it up. And then Yolanda said—"
Jack's snort was loud. "So he can fix bones and write about them. Doesn't make him a good doctor."
"If that doesn't make someone good, what does?" Santos sounded confused. "He does more procedures than any other ortho surgeon up there. Plus Conway said that he also like, does some kind of badass Crossfit thing that—"
"I'm going to stop you at Crossfit," Jack said. "Man's a jagoff. He'd be a jagoff just for going around calling himself Park the Shark."
"He's confident," Santos said. "You've got to be confident to make it in surgery."
"Jagoff," Jack said, enunciating carefully. "I spent a decade in the United States military, I know what a guy high on the smell of his own farts looks like. Someone tells you to look for role models in this place, you don't need to look further than this department."
Santos barked out a laugh. "Humble."
"Not me," Jack said. "Robby."
"Sure," Santos said. "Dr Robby's cool."
"Dr Robby is an excellent physician," Jack said crisply. "I've seen him pull off saves that I don't think most other EM docs could have managed if they were given twice the resources and the time. But he's also a good man. Someone like Park's going to try to convince you that's a disadvantage in medicine. That's why Park's a jagoff. Stick with us down here, kid. Someone like Robby's got more to give."
The ambulance roared up, and the EMTs handed over the patient to Jack and Santos in a flurry of words and activity. Within sixty seconds, the bay was quiet again. Robby stood alone there, the rain coming down more heavily now, and wrapped his arms around himself and thought.
It was fully dark by the time Robby went back inside. Whatever patient had come in must have been a relatively straightforward case, because Jack was already back at the central hub, sitting in front of one of the terminals and catching up on his charting. Robby leaned over and tapped him on the shoulder. "Dr Abbot, could I have a word with you? In private?"
Jack cast a glance up at the board—a relatively slow evening—and said, "Sure." He followed Robby over to the elevator without another word, but once Robby had punched the button for the top floor and the doors had closed, he looked sidelong at Robby and said, "I thought you'd gone home an hour ago."
"Gloria's staking out the main exits," Robby said glumly. "It's not safe."
"Oh, well then," Jack said, and subsided.
The rain had died away, and the hospital rooftop had been left washed clean. Away in front of them, the city lights glimmered.
Jack stuck his hands in his pants pockets and said, "Lay it on me."
That made Robby huff out a laugh. He squinted out at the rooftops below them and said, "Small confession time."
There was a pause, and then Jack said, "Okay."
"I was outside earlier," Robby said.
"Okay," Jack said, more slowly this time, his brow creasing in confusion.
"You shouldn't be..." Robby didn't know how to put it in words. He looked over at Jack; away again. "You shouldn't be telling her things like that. That's, it's too much, that's not me. That can't be it."
Jack went very still, stared at him for a long moment. "Can't be what? Can't be how I see you?"
Robby closed his eyes. The thought of letting someone else down—of letting Jack down—was unbearable. He wasn't who Jack seemed to think he was. It wasn't fair to Jack, to let him keep on thinking that. "Jack—"
"Newsflash, buddy, you're not the boss of me." A beat, and then Jack went on, "Well, in a very technical sense, kind of, but..."
Robby made a low noise of frustration. "I'm just trying to explain to you what—"
"Trying to explain to me what I think?" Jack snapped. Robby opened his eyes, almost took a step back in surprise at the look on Jack's face. "Oh for Christ's sake. Which of us here is the bigger fucking idiot? I don't know."
"This question feels like a trap," Robby said, wary.
"Of course it does," Jack said, "because you're a very smart dumbass," and then he wrapped a hand around Robby's wrist and tugged him closer and kissed him.
It wasn't the longest kiss that Robby had ever had during his life, or the filthiest, but it was the one that most thoroughly reorganised a number of very important synapses.
"Well?" Jack demanded when the kiss ended. "See?"
"Yeah," Robby said, and licked at his lips, and stared at Jack's mouth. "Yeah. Good talk."