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"Uh. I know I'm normally pretty good about keeping up with the current lingo and whatnot," Jack said, "but you lost me on this one, buddy."
Shen shook his head. "Not a reference. Not a joke. I'm serious."
Jack frowned, because Shen did look like he was being serious—but then again, John Shen often looked his most serious when he was also at his most silly. "Sorry, man, I'm just not seeing what the punchline is here."
"There isn't one," said Shen, with what Jack would later realise was an incredible degree of self-control. He pulled his backpack out of his locker, slung it over his shoulder, and as he walked over to the ambulance bay exit with Jack at his side, he nodded over to the stairwell doorway, where Esme was busy mopping up a steady patter of water drops. To Jack's eye, it looked like the trail you'd leave behind you, cursing, as you hustled a leaking trash bag outside before the bottom totally fell out of it.
"See?" Shen said. "He went that way, up to the roof. Probably a good idea for someone to check it out, yeah? See you tomorrow." He slapped Jack on the shoulder in a friendly sort of way and walked out the door.
Jack gaped after him for a moment, then turned to look at Dana. She was juggling two separate landline phones and had a harried look on her face. "Don't look at me," she said, "I can't explain it, and anyway shit's all fucked up at the Blood Bank. I have to figure this out, you're on your own, Abbot."
"Is this some kind of mass psychosis event? Or," Jack's nose wrinkled as a worse thought occurred to him, "I don't know, comedy improv?"
"Don't I wish," Dana said. "It's just a Friday. Go get your guy, I—yeah, yes, I'm still holding. Why wouldn't I be holding?"
Jack slogged his way up the stairs and pushed through the fire door and onto the roof. He was half convinced that he was going to be met there by a snickering Javadi and Santos, filming the startled look on his face for some social media gotcha—but no, the only other person up there was Robby, and Shen had been telling the truth.
Hovering about two feet over Robby's head was a small but perfectly formed thunderstorm: roiling clouds of a dark blue-grey, ones that were intermittently letting out tiny bolts of lightning and cracks of thunder, but were always, continually, raining. The actual weather—the main weather? what the fuck was his life like, Jack thought vaguely—was fine and clear, the day ahead promising to be a nice late April day, but Robby was soaked through. His hair was plastered to his scalp, his green hoodie was so wet it was almost black where it stretched across his hunched shoulders, and his hands, shoved into his pockets, were probably helping to hold his sodden pants onto his hips. Around his feet was a slowly spreading pool of water.
"What," Jack said, "the fuck."
"I'm fine, Jack," Robby said without turning around.
"Fine? You've got your own microclimate! What in the..." Jack approached slowly, cautiously, because maybe this all still was some kind of elaborate prank, some smoke-and-mirrors illusion that would fall apart as soon as Jack got close enough—but no, no, it was real. "What happened?"
Robby shrugged, looked at Jack out of the corner of his eye like some wild animal that was on the verge of spooking and bolting. "Don't know."
"You don't know why you developed your own fucking weather system?"
"To be fair," Robby said, in a voice that sounded as sodden as the rest of him but that was clearly striving for this is fine, "not sure what the differential diagnosis is for this one is. You want to go check a copy of Harrison's?"
"Oh, we're going to be sassy about this one, brother? Because I'm not sure we should be sassy about this one." Jack stepped in between Robby and the railing, right into his eye-line, and the fucker just looked down at the ground. As if that move still worked; as if Jack hadn't earned the right to look him in the eye at this point, ten years and counting. "Have you tried—"
"Yup," Robby said. His beard was soaked; beads of water trembled on the ends of his lashes, the tip of his nose. "Everything. Tried running from it, tried putting up an umbrella, tried crouching underneath the hand dryers in the restroom. Nothing worked. It keeps following me, and I can't..."
"Does it... Let me see." Jack went up on tip-toe, stretched out a hand beneath the cloud. During what Jack sometimes thought of as his previous lifetime, he'd spent three ill-fated months stationed on a base in the Midwest. He'd seen some of the great storm systems that rolled majestic across the Great Plains, indifferent to what they passed over and making the hairs stand up on the nape of Jack's neck. This cloud seemed just as ominous, but compressed to an impossibly small size.
Raindrops landed on his spread palm, real raindrops, that then trickled warm down his wrist. Huh. One of the miniature lightning bolts zapped his thumb, no more painful than getting a static shock during winter. Double huh. And as Jack watched, the little cloud grew just that bit less grey. A hypothesis began to form.
Jack took a step closer to investigate. What would happen if he... And yeah, yup, the cloud shrunk again, ever so slightly; the rumbling it emitted grew fainter.
"Hrm," Jack said, and lowered his hand.
"Hrm?"
"Yup. Hrm."
"This is your diagnostic process, as a senior PTMC attending? Hrm?" Robby wrinkled his nose, and maybe it was telling that a bitching Robby seemed like a positive sign in comparison to miserable passivity, but Jack would take whatever he could get.
Jack planted his hands on his hips. "Yeah, a hrm. And I'm going to do you one better."
"Enlighten me," Robby said. He was shivering faintly now, teeth chattering, and if Jack's hunch worked out, he was going to have to take Robby right downstairs to check him out for hypothermia once this was all over.
"First you should know that this is going to hurt me a lot more than it's going to hurt you," Jack said.
"We really have to work on your bedside manner," Robby said, "the Press-Ganey scores are—"
The extremely rare occurrence of Robby marshalling Press-Ganey scores in a defensive manner was cut short by Jack wrapping his arms around Robby and hugging him close. Hugging someone who was soaked to the skin wasn't the most pleasurable experience that Jack had ever had—he could feel the wet seeping through the front of his scrubs—but it was Robby, so it was okay. He didn't give a shit.
"What are you—"
"Shh," Jack said, and squeezed him tighter, and remembered the last time he'd hugged Robby, properly hugged him, the first time he'd walked through the Pitt's door after that stupid, stupid fucking motorcycle trip, when Jack could finally be sure that he hadn't lost him, not for now, and he shuddered, and rested his head briefly against Robby's shoulder.
"Jack," Robby said softly, and Jack lifted his head and looked up and saw that the cloud overhead was shrinking, was dissipating, was gone.
"Look at that for a diagnostic process," Jack said, satisfied, because he fucking loved being right, and when Robby said, "What are you even talking about?", Jack tugged him closer and kissed him, and kissed him, and high overhead the sun came out.