Work Text:
For the last half of his shift, Dennis has the feeling he’s missing something. Like when you know you’ve forgotten something but you can’t remember what. Or a word is just on the tip of your tongue.
It’s not until he hears Dana grumbling “damn suicidal idiots think I don’t know” as she marches past him smelling of cigarettes and rosemary. The rosemary he thinks is from her shampoo and the cigarettes are her own way of flirting with suicide. He knows better than to say that at this point. But it’s not until then that he realizes what it is that’s scratching at his brain like a dog demanding entry into the house.
“If I don’t come back, you'll have a sweet bachelor pad…”
Dennis moves without thinking, without questioning his own motives, without wondering about Robby’s reaction. Without thinking about exposing his feelings for the other man.
He finds Robby in the bay, looking haggard and older than he’s looked in the eight months that Dennis has worked with him. And he looks even closer to that edge he was pushed to in Peds during Pittfest.
“Dr. Robby?”
Dennis hears his attending mutter, “How does this keep happening?” before he lets out a long breath, seems to shake something off and says, louder this time, “Yes, Dr. Whitaker?”
He feels like he should say something to pull him back from that proverbial ledge but Robby shoving him away in Peds is fresh in his mind.
Instead, his hand finds his cross like it does when he’s looking for guidance. It’s been a long time since Dennis has taken his cross off. Years, in fact.
Silently, Dennis unclasps it, holding a strand of the necklace in each hand as he steps in close. He moves slowly, letting Dr. Robby object if he wants to. He does not.
“My parents gave me this on the day I chose to be baptized,” he shares, voice soft, non threatening. Robby has to bend forward so that Dennis can reach around his neck to link the clasp together. He lets one hand trail along the chain, reverently touching the cross before realizing how close he is and stepping back. “I’ve worn it for seventeen years and it reminded me that even when I had no one, I wasn’t alone.”
The necklace had been given to him as a reminder of his commitment to God, his choice to live as close to godly as he could, to repent and ask for forgiveness when he could not. But Dennis has never thought of the cross in that way. It has always been his link to life. Instead of an anchor holding him back, it has always been the light that guides him. God chose to make him queer, God chose to give him a gift to help heal bodies rather than the souls, God has guided him through both the light and the dark times to be here, right where he feels more at home than anywhere else. Right where he thinks he’s needed.
The little silver cross settles next to Robby’s own necklace, over his scrubs, and the man doesn’t say anything but his face is a myriad of emotions.
“I know your Magen David is for prayer, for strength, for belief. My cross is to remind you that you aren’t alone,” Dennis is filled to the brim with all the things he wants to say but Robby is spread too thin, he’s too brittle to hear them. So Dennis just lifts his hand to the hollow of his own throat, feels the memory of the cross he has borne almost his whole life and adds, “I hope it guides you back.” He doesn’t say ‘to me’ but it hangs between them all the same.
And, with a nod, he leaves Dr. Robby standing there, looking just as lost as he had when Dennis had come out to find him.
*Jack*
Of course Jack goes to the hospital early for his shift.
He’d seen the way Robby had looked earlier, no way was he letting the other man go without touching base again. He’s lost too many of his brothers that way. Not that he thinks of Robby as a brother. Even if he does call him that
When he’s walking up to the bay though, Jack hears Dana yelling at Robby before stomping off. He gives Robby a moment to sit in it, to acknowledge how right she is but before he can approach, someone else exits the bay doors. Whitaker. The kid has really come into his own over the last few months. He’s a teacher in his own right but is still open to learning, Jack imagines that’s how Robby was when he first became a resident.
Jack has too often found himself watching how the kid moves with confidence when he thinks no one is watching. How every day in the ED makes him a better doctor. After losing his wife, Jack thought there would never be anyone who could catch his eye the way Sarah had. But once he realized that he was always aware of Whitaker, Jack had been forced to admit to himself that for a long time, he’d been aware of Robby in the same way.
Watching them standing together, both looking vulnerable in a way he hasn’t seen from either of them, it isn’t jealousy he feels but something tender that he hesitates to name.
The kid’s voice is too soft to carry in the way that Dana’s had but Jack watches him remove something from around his own neck and reach up to clasp it around Robby’s. Even with Whitaker up on his tiptoes, Robby has to bend forward, bringing their faces a little too close for coworkers. Whitaker is looking at the clasp so he misses the longing on Robby’s face. Jack doesn’t though.
Robby never seems to say anything but after the younger doctor walks away, Robby brings one hand up to whatever Whitaker had put around his neck and squeezes his eyes shut. Jack thinks he might be mumbling something but the facial hair makes it hard to read.
As he walks up, Robby schools his features, shakes his head and says, “You’re early.”
Jack shrugs, the backpack slung over one shoulder shifting a little, “You’re still here.”
Robby scoffs a little laugh, “Yeah, yeah.”
There’s a silver cross hanging next to Robby’s gold Magen David that wasn’t there before.
Before Robby can make an excuse for it or brush it off, Jack reaches under his own collar, pulling his dog tags over his head. For Jack, his tags are a reminder of two things:
One, that he belongs to a family beyond the one he was born into and while, yes, he has suffered—every time he sees another set of tags around someone’s neck, he knows that they have suffered, too. That even in the dark, even in the chaos, he will never be truly alone.
And two, that death comes to us all. Mors venit pro nobis omnibus.
The first time he’d slipped his set around his neck, Jack had known that if he fell in battle, the tags would say what he could not. Name, number, blood type, religion. A man narrowed down to his mortality, his spirituality and the identity the government and his parents gave him. Because in death, we are nothing but what people chose to remember. And everything dies.
Especially soldiers.
Jack doesn’t have religion. He doesn’t have prayer. He needs no absolution for his sins because there is no one to provide it. But he has something to believe in, something that anchors him to humanity, to society. That one day, he will die. Every time he lays his head on his pillow after a shift, he knows that today was not that day and it keeps him going. Death is not something he has to chase, because it comes for us all - we just have to hope it doesn’t catch us too soon.
He loops the chain around Robby’s neck, touching the cross and the Magen David before tapping on his dog tags.
“If it gets dark,” he taps the tags again before letting his hand fall.
Robby nods and with a single return nod, Jack heads into the ED.
*five weeks later*
An alarm blares but before Robby can reach for it, someone else shuts it off.
“Sorry,” Dennis whispers softly, turning in his arms and stretching up to press a kiss to Robby’s cheek.
“‘S okay,” Robby mumbles into his hair as he pulls Dennis flush against himself. They’re not naked but there’s plenty of naked skin to press together. He gets a handful of Dennis’ ass, squeezing a yelp out of him before dipping down to his now exposed throat and kissing along the column of it.
Dennis moans. “I’m going to be late, save it for Jack.” He pulls away but comes back for another kiss before eventually dragging himself out of bed.
“Sure you don’t want me to blow you before your shift?” Robby asks innocently, chuckling when Dennis almost trips over someone’s discarded scrubs.
With a groan, Dennis yanks on a pair of clean scrub pants, tying them securely around his waist before stealing one of Jack’s clean henleys out of the laundry basket to wear under his scrub top. “You’re a menace.” He scoops up all the discarded scrubs and tosses them in the dirty laundry basket so Jack won’t trip over them.
“Blame Jack, and his suggestion of a slutty sabbatical,” Robby smiles, rolling onto his back. The cross, his Magen David and the dog tags slide with him as he rolls, settling into the large patch of hair covering his bare chest. Even after just five weeks in this weird but wonderful threesome thing they have going, he knows how much his body hair turns Dennis on.
Dennis just shakes his head, muttering about insatiable mid life crisis sex. The sink turns on in the en suite as Dennis brushes his hair and teeth, they’d showered last night after …well, after…so his morning routine is quicker than Robby would like but that just means Jack will be home sooner.
Once he’s ready to go, Dennis crawls across the bed, throwing a leg over Robby to straddle his hips while laying a kiss to his lips that makes his toes curl. Then he’s gone, bounding out the door with the energy of a man still in his twenties.
After the front door shuts and the house is silent, Robby brings the dog tags up closer to his neckline so he can hold the cross, the Magen David and the tags in one hand. He thinks of the hard, cold floor of Peds, the warm sun rising over the rooftop, and the brilliantly loud and showy fireworks exploding in the sky behind him as rode out into the darkness.
The words of the Modeh Ani come easily to him; he has repeated them every morning since that night. That dark night when he’d pulled his bike over to the side of the road, his hand clutching at the tightness in his chest where it felt like he was suffocating. The solid weight of Jack’s tags had shifted, heavy under his hand, tangling with the gentle but no less meaningful pull of Dennis’ cross around his neck and he had taken a breath. Then another. And another.
It wasn’t soul searching that he’d needed to do, it was soul renewal. It was faith. His, yes. But theirs as well. They’d given him their talismans to help his own guide him home. Belief, hope, death.
Reminders that he doesn’t have to carry it alone. The Magen David, the cross, the dog tags, they were all reminders that there are people to help him bear the weight. He just has to let them.