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Not much is predictable in the emergency department. Oh, there are patterns -- long wait times, lack of beds upstairs, and angry patients who blame the doctors in front of them instead of placing blame where it belongs -- on the suits who run the show, the shady insurance companies, and Cousin Jim who decided to “hey, y’all, watch this” himself into an ambulance in the first place. And there’s a certain predictability, of course, to the medicine. But even the science of medicine bends and flexes in the hands of PTMC's medical artists. In the Pitt, doctors wield science like a blow torch and hammer, malleating medical procedures into the unique shapes required to rapidly repair what Pittsburgh's fine citizens have broken on any random Tuesday.
The staff of the Pitt are, perhaps, more predictable than the medicine, which is ironic given that the medicine is science and the people are painfully human, fallible, susceptible to whims and lapses of judgment and bad days with too little sleep and too many slugs of burnt black coffee that's sat in the carafe too long. There are Dana and Lena at the helm, reliable in that they are perpetual, passing day to night and night to day like some planetary relay race. The pattern holds at the attending level, Dr. Abbot handing off to Dr. Robby with the sunrise, Robby handing it all back to Jack as the night falls, meeting at the board more often than not, meeting on the roof just frequently enough to feel it. Sure, there are schedule changes and sick days and PTMC will not roll over your PTO if you fail to use it by the end of the calendar year, so there are blips, but the blips fade quickly into the tapestry of routine, a little patch of different-colored thread nobody can see if they step back far enough to gain perspective.
Though the doctors rarely do.
So -- not much is predictable in the ED, except that, everything is, a little bit, predictable in the ED.
But Jack has failed, thoroughly, to predict this.
It's not like Jack isn't used to trouble. It finds him frequently. It found him in high school, which, though a convoluted series of detentions and distractions led him to ROTC, which led to the Army, which led to the desert, which led to mad skills in emergency medicine and a notable deficit in bodily symmetry. It found him again in his marriage to Calliope, who left him two days before she left everything, and he hadn't taken off the ring yet, so he hasn't taken off the ring. It finds him, routinely, with regards to Michael Robinavitch, his oldest friend and most guarded hope, the man who invades his first waking and last conscious thought more days than he’s altogether comfortable with.
But trouble, today, has failed to find Jack. Jack is just fine. Hydrated, dressed reasonably for the abysmal weather, relatively well-rested for an emergency room attending. Approaching the charge desk with the clusterfuck of dayshift's board looming over him and the sun and moon of charge nurses hosting a meeting of the minds front and center, Jack is just fine.
And yet.
Some people might call it a sixth sense, but Jack Abbot is a doctor, so when he walks into the ED already feeling the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end, he knows it’s not magic, it’s his amygdala reading infinitesimal changes in the room. He isn’t conscious of it, exactly. But he’s not not conscious of it, either. His subconscious brain is processing minute changes in the environment, in the energy around him, in voice tone and volume, in motion and stillness. Patterns, and the changes therein. His therapist calls it hypervigilance, a trauma response. Jack calls it paying the fuck attention.
And okay, maybe it overreacts sometimes, this hypervigilance, but it's rarely wrong outright. So when he gets that feeling of shit about to go down, Jack turns toward the source without consciously deciding to.
His eyes meet Robby's across the ED, and his entire body goes cold.
Robby is quietly working a patient on the table in Trauma 2. Jack has to look twice, because Robby’s urgency and the monitors behind the patient don’t match up. At the sight of Robby, Jack's stomach drops into his feet. Which is quite the trick, considering the net tally of Jack's feet.
Something isn't right.
The patient is down, has been down. Yet Robby hasn't called a code, hasn't shouted out the door for backup, has silenced the alarms. He's actively performing compressions on a patient who is clearly fading, and he hasn't asked for anyone to help him. For a split second, Jack worries about Robby's mental status, worries he's gone so deep in his own head that he's forgotten he's allowed to ask for help. But that's Robby in his personal life, not Robby practicing medicine. Far gone though he may be, Robby would never be so far gone as to compromise patient care. The day it comes to that is the day Jack calls the 302 himself, and this -- this isn't that.
No, there's another reason Robby hasn't brought anyone else into the room with him, and it's the same reason his eyes meet Jack's now, before flicking his gaze, deliberately, to his left, Jack's right.
Jack surveys. Reads the room. Finds himself standing soldier-straight with adrenaline sharpening his everything.
"Lena, call security," he says, the low whip-crack of his voice cutting through the conversation at the desk. "Get them here quiet. And call the police."
To her credit, Lena moves immediately to do as he's asked on trust alone, while Dana steps out from behind the charge desk, frowning with Jack in the direction of Robby, who has returned his focus to his patient.
"What is he doing?" Dana asks, brisk, not out of curiosity or even self-preservation but from concern. That's Robby in there, and if there's anyone in the building who loves the man as much as Jack does, it's Dana.
"Patient's family member in Trauma 2 is armed," Jack says tightly, and winces at Dana’s sharp intake of breath.
Robby's gaze finds Jack's again, for a long heartbeat. It feels final in a way that sends Jack's brain scrambling to catch up. By the time he realizes what's happening, Robby has lifted his hands from the patient, pulling compressions, and the monitor draws a straight, silent line, and Dana says, “Oh.”
The man with the gun crosses the room in three strides, raising his weapon, pressing it right to Robby’s forehead, and suddenly what Jack saw moments ago is evident to everyone in view.
Jack can't hear what the man says at first -- his voice lost to the high whine of adrenaline-fueled rage that has taken over Jack's body -- but he hears it loud and clear -- everyone does -- when the man shouts, "If she dies, so do you!"
Robby says something too quiet for Jack to hear. But he resumes compressions, the heart monitor drawing patterns in response to Robby's hands, a caricature of life.
Jack doesn't know how long he stands perfectly still, eyes fixed on the point where the barrel of the gun meets Robby's skin. It must be a beat longer than he realizes, because Ahmad is suddenly at his shoulder.
"Police are six minutes out," he says.
Six minutes is a lifetime, or the potential end of one. Jack needs to get his head in the game right now. "What are we doing?" he asks, checking for the presence of a plan. If there is none, he will quickly put one into action. Most of the plans that flit through his mind involve brute force, an explosion of anger, and the gunman falling victim to any number of ways Jack knows to disarm, to maim, to kill -- He's startled by how quickly the sharp edge of his rage is available to wield, given the restraint he shows both in career and daily life.
But it's Robby. It's fucking Robby.
Ahmad is talking and Jack can't hear him over the buzzing, which has gotten louder and more distressing. The only thing that eases it is walking toward the trauma room, so that's what Jack does, despite protests behind him. He shakes Ahmad off his arm. Shakes Dana off his arm. He frames himself in the doorway, hands raised as if he's not a threat, as if his hands themselves aren't weapons. The distressed man jerks his gun toward Jack and then back to Robby.
"What the fuck do you think you're doing?" he demands, looking wildly between the two of them.
"I'd like to know that, too," Robby says with that super-reasonable diplomat voice he uses sometimes, the voice that landed him chief in the first place. Then, as if they are meeting on the rooftop on any old day where things have gone to shit, “Evening, Jack.”
Jack nods. “Robby.”
The gunman is a tall man, arguably taller than Robby and with a breadth to his shoulders that suggests long hours of manual work in his career. His eyes keep moving from Robby to the dying -- dead? -- woman on the bed and back again. Young for a wife, Jack thinks, but old for a daughter. The woman is tough to age given her condition, a traumatic injury to her face that looks to be very likely self-inflicted. Fuck. Even when it doesn’t involve being held at gunpoint and forced to perform compressions on a corpse, suicide cases rattle Robby. Jack thinks that for Robby, it’s like looking in a funhouse mirror, and he never knows which way is out.
Jack studies the patient, studies the gunman, resolutely does not study Robby, whose horrified gaze he can feel fixed on him. Robby was calm, Jack registers, until Jack walked in. Now his panic matches Jack's.
"Dr. Robby's good," Jack says easily, feigning casual as he leans on the doorframe, "but even he needs a trauma team to work a code. Your ... wife? What’s her name?"
The man’s gaze flicks to him a few times, untrusting. "Cara," he eventually supplies.
"Cara deserves a fighting chance, and for that, we need more help. Which we absolutely will not call in here until that gun has gone away."
"Or --" The bereaved husband returns his focus to Robby, jamming the barrel of the gun into the soft flesh under his chin. "You could call everyone you need in here to save my wife, and I don't shoot your friend." Jack feels a lightning bolt of rage burn down his spine, because it’s better than fear. Robby swallows and closes his eyes briefly, then opens them. His hands never stop compressions, despite the way the motion makes him contact the gun's barrel again and again.
"Mr. Sorley," Robby says softly, "I know you love her. I'm sure she loved you, too. Is this what she would want to see you doing?"
"Loved?" the man repeats, and Robby winces, realizing his mistake. Even as his hands continue to press a heartbeat into the body on the table, his doctor's mind has assessed the patient and written her off as gone.
Jack’s amygdala prepares him for battle. But there’s nothing to be done to stop Mr. Sorley, who throws a punch with the hand still holding the gun. The crack of metal against the thinly-cushioned bone of Robby’s temporal region snaps right through Jack. He holds himself still by sheer force. If he rushes the gunman now, he's as likely to cause gunfire as to stop it.
“She isn’t -- going -- to die,” the gunman snarls, punctuating each utterance with a crack of the gun to Robby’s skull. “You’re -- going -- to fix her!”
"He can't while you're hitting him!" Jack protests, and the gun stops hitting Robby and aims instead at Jack. Jack, in a twist he knows he’ll need to unpack with his therapist later, sighs in relief at the change. If he's in the sights, then Robby isn't being actively hurt.
Robby has reeled backward at the repeated trauma to his head. He knocks into an instrument tray, which clatters to the floor and does little to stop Robby’s drunken trajectory. He would fall entirely, but the dead woman’s husband grabs him by the shirt and hauls him back toward the table with the hand not holding the gun on Jack.
The situation has gone to absolute shit, and everybody in the room knows it. But Robby is still Robby, so he pushes through, hands returning to his hopeless patient.
"I've got her," he says, voice tight with pain and fear. "See? Kyle, there's no reason to hurt anyone, I'm still going. Get that gun off Dr. Abbot so I can concentrate.”
Kyle Sorely stares Jack down in rage for a full ten seconds longer, then returns the gun to its original position, pointing toward Robby, as if nothing has happened in the interim, as if the man working on his dead wife isn’t now dripping blood from multiple scalp lacs.
Jack replays the mechanism of injury in his mind's eye. Three separate blunt force impacts to the temporal region in the space of a moment, and two more to the parietal. They could be looking at anything from bruising and stitches with luck on their side, to a brain bleed, seizures, coma, or death before Jack can even extricate Robby from this room.
First order of business: Tag Robby out.
"Why don't you let me take over compressions for a while?" Jack suggests, calm and casual, moving forward a step. The gun swings in his direction at the first hint of motion.
"Nobody moves," Kyle says tightly.
"Sir, allowing us to tag team will give your wife the benefit of a fresh set of hands, and thus a better chance of survival." Fuck that man, fuck his wife, fuck survival. Jack just wants the damn gun away from Robby.
Kyle seems to consider Jack's words before slowly nodding, gesturing with the gun that Robby and Jack should indeed switch places. Jack has just started to move when, as usual, somebody fucks something up.
The police have arrived, and not quietly. When he sees them, Kyle lunges toward the door to slam it closed, as if the glass door of the treatment room means anything against a police force and their weapons. Jack meets the man shoulder to shoulder, hoping to take him down, but the angle at which Kyle’s body impacts his own and the disadvantage of his goddamn prosthesis means they both tumble to the floor, halfway out the door into the bullpen. He was a different shape, a different man, half a world away when he learned to use the skills he’s now trying to employ, and he has just enough time to hate himself for not pulling it off before there is a sound, more pop than roar, which Jack knows in his bones but which Robby seems confused by for a second.
Jack lands on his ass outside the treatment room, and Kyle skitters backward inside it, kicking the door closed, gun in hand.
Fuck fuck fuck fuck. Jack does not like being separated from his team -- from Robby -- during an active threat. The gunfire and the adrenaline wrench his nervous system from the present into some weird limbo that is partially here and now, partially fighting for his life back then. He forces his body to still, his eyes to find Robby, forces the doctor in him, not the soldier, to do what doctors do and assess.
Robby has gone ghost-white and is staring at Jack through the glass, hands stilled above his doomed patient. Jack wants to shake him out of it, to remind him to keep going for now -- I know you're tired, Mike, I know you've been performing compressions on a corpse for god knows how long and I know you’re hurt, but you gotta keep going, don't give him a reason to - a reason to -
Except Jack can't tell Robby any of that from here, on the floor outside the room, separated by glass and distance and a growing sense of wrongness permeating his own body.
Somebody shouts that they need a gurney.
Robby's still staring at Jack, though his hands start their rote movements again as the gun presses to his injured temple. Jack stares back at Robby, each of them equally horrified at the plight of the other. Jack moves to go to Robby.
"Don't, no, don't get up yet," Dana is saying near Jack's ear as Jack struggles to rise, to return to his friend's aid. "Hold still, let me look, let me see what it hit, Jack."
Bewildered, Jack follows her gaze to the blood pumping fresh and bright from a wound in his upper thigh.
Oh.
Robby's pale face and wide eyes make more sense now.
Mateo and Parker begin trying to move Jack, but he shoves their hands away, wordlessly fighting. "No," he finally manages to choke out, panic overtaking him for the first time since this nightmare began. "No, no, I'm not leaving, I'm not leaving Robby. Dammit -- Parker, stop, no!"
"Okay." Ellis raises her hands in brief surrender. "Okay. We won't move till you're ready, but Abbot, I want you to think about this from Robby's perspective, okay? He's in there with an armed man and he's injured and he's so worried about you right now, he can barely follow the gunman's commands. Watching you get treated for a gunshot wound on the floor of the ED, still in the line of fire, well -- that's gonna compromise his ability to keep himself as safe as he possibly can right now.” She begins moving again, gently, even as her no-nonsense voice continues. "You know I'm right, Jack. You need to come and let me treat you, get you fighting fit as quickly as possible so that when Robby sees you, it's a boon to his energy, not a drain. Okay?" She seems to take Jack's physical compliance as agreement. "Okay," she repeats, and this time she and Mateo manage to get Jack on the gurney.
When the gurney rolls, so does Jack's stomach. It occurs to him that he might be hurt worse than he realized when the lights of the ED seem to swoop and dance around him. Fuck. He knows this lightheaded feeling, knows he's losing blood, that he's going to lose consciousness, and suddenly he's terrified, terrified that when he wakes up, it will be to the news of Robby's death. He grabs Parker's sleeve, catches her attention. He needs to give an instruction, a directive, something she can do for Robby in his stead. Except, there's nothing. The situation with Robby is completely out of his control.
A confession, that's all he has. "I love him, Parker."
"I know," Ellis says, managing to be both compassionate and matter-of-fact in that finely-honed way of hers. "Shit, Jack, people in Canada know. Now lie the fuck still so I can fix you for him."
The blood loss is dragging him under. There's nothing left to do but allow it.
Robby's arms are shaking. His hands. His back is spasming, the muscles locking, screaming arcs of pain throughout his latissimus dorsi. He's been compressing the chest of the dead woman for over half an hour, fatigue, shock, and pain making him nearly incoherent even in his own thoughts, the terror overriding everything.
Not terror for himself, but for Jack. The memory of blood welling from a gunshot wound in Jack’s thigh makes him physically sick. Which, his addled brain supplies at the most inappropriate time possible, is not usually the effect the thought of Jack’s thighs exerts on him.
Shit, this concussion might be bad.
Robby continues to follow Kyle Sorley's commands on rote, but the fact of the matter is that Cara Sorley is dead, irretrievably, and that, ever since Sorley fired his weapon at Jack, Robby has simultaneously wanted to murder the man himself and has understood him a tiny bit better. If it were Jack beneath his hands, Robby wouldn't stop. Would never stop. He doesn't stop now, as little as he might sometimes value his own life, because Jack risked his to save him and he's not going to waste a gift given at so high a price.
His brain won't stop going to dark places.
Jack might be dead.
Jack might lose his other leg.
Jack might hate Robby for his stupid, slow responses to the gunman, for getting him shot.
Jack might be alive right now only to die before Robby can get out of this damn room.
He knows there are police in the building, and he also knows there is next to nothing they can do. Sorley refuses to open a line of dialogue. He has no demands save the impossible. He will simply have to ride out this grief-fueled denial to its end, and that end is likely to take Robby with it, and possibly Jack as well, and that's all there is to it. There's nothing Robby can do at this point to change it, to alter the outcome.
But he’s the chief, so he still has to try.
Words are specifically difficult to access right now, cracked into shards inside his rattled skull. He can’t see things properly, knows the lights of the ED are bright but not as bright as his brain is telling him, knows the pulsing nausea that shadows his every movement is a sign of brain injury, knows he is very hurt. He can’t fight. Never could, really, even uninjured. Physical fighting is Jack’s domain. Robby’s is speech.
He has to find his words inside the rattling space that is his aching head, has to talk is way out of this situation before anyone else gets hurt.
"Hey ..." He can't remember for a minute, and then he does, pulling the man's name up from the depths of his early work-up of the patient and her family situation. "Kyle?"
"Keep going," Kyle commands, but his voice lacks the previous heat. He sounds wounded and tired and scared.
"I am," Robby says. "I will. But --" He works, he works to pin down his thoughts, to line them up together like beads on a string. "But you and I, we both know -- we do -- that Cara's not here anymore."
"Shut up, you don't know Cara. She wouldn't leave - she wouldn't leave me." His voice breaks. Robby feels something akin to compassion for the man, now crying openly over the body of his wife. "She swore she wouldn't leave me."
"She didn't want to leave," Robby says softly.
“Bullshit,” Kyle sobs. “She did this shit to herself. Who fucking does this shit to themself when they don’t want to leave?”
"She tried,” Robby says. “I’m her doctor, man, I know. I saw it. She tried to stay. But she’s tired." His voice breaks on the word, tears cutting tracks through the blood on his face. "Please, Kyle," Robby pleads. "Please let her rest." Please, Kyle. Please let me rest.
For a long moment, Kyle keeps the gun trained on Robby. Then he folds, leaning low over his wife's body, forehead to cooling forehead. Robby pulls compressions, digs deep, finds the last words he'll need for a while. Speaks them softly into the sacred space of a death doing part, as once promised. "Time of death, 21:32." He’s only sixty percent sure he’s calling the right time, as the clock is flickering -- or maybe that’s his eyes closing.
Kyle sobs openly while Robby sinks to the floor, unable to hold himself up another minute. He can feel himself collapsing inward like a balloon, days old, sagging under its own weight, no longer full of what it used to hold. He's wrung out, empty. The floor tilts to meet his cheek, cool tile damp with his own blood. He goes away.
There's a crash, and a collection of small, solid objects rain down on Robby with a musical chime. Time isn't acting right, his perception stretching to accommodate how slowly his brain is processing. He doesn't have the words for things, only the sensations. Hot, wet droplets splatter his face along with the shards. His eyes drag open and he finds that he's nose to nose with Kyle Sorley, whose sightless eyes are open, fixed on nothing. Blood pours from the exploded side of his face. Robby can't make sense of what he's seeing. He lays on his side in a sea of broken glass, face to face with a dead man who, moments ago, was commanding his every move.
He hears boots hitting tile. Hears voices he can't make sense of. Static on somebody's radio. The police. The police must have seen their shot and taken it. Robby should probably feel relief. It's over. The gunman is dead. He's safe. But what he feels is deep sadness. The threat had passed, the grieving husband caving under the weight of his loss. The police didn't have to take him, but maybe this was the more humane option. Not leaving him to deal with the fallout, to grieve the loss, to navigate next steps without her.
Robby's tired. He's so so tired. He remembers hearing a popping sound, seeing Jack’s blood. Seeing Jack sink to the floor, oblivious to the flurry of activity around him. Tears slip beneath Robby's lashes as his eyes flutter closed. Kyle was dangerous, yes. He was violent. He shot Jack. He hit Robby hard enough that language is a sideways thing, slipping further from his grip. But he was sad. He was mourning someone he loved so much that he couldn't picture life without them, and, well --
Robby can understand that.
He prefers his eyes closed so he can't look into the dead man's face. He should be helping. Saving. Rendering aid. But he's beyond movement, his aching arms stilled at last, his head refusing to coordinate his limbs, his voice refusing to corral his thoughts into language. He slips under.
A flurry of movement. Hands. "No. No, goddammit, Mikey, you were just here. Open your fucking eyes, man."
“Jack! Fuck …you’re hurting yourself.”
"Robby, please. Please. Fuck. Please don't go anywhere, man, okay? I'm here. I love you. You did so good, Rob, so good."
"Abbot, you just fucked up my work. Would you get back on the goddamn gurney?”
Hands on his face.
“Jack. Jesus. Come on, Jack, you have to let go of him. You both need surgery now."
"I can't, I need to be there when he -- I need --"
Hands losing their tension, slipping away from him. Shouting. Whoever is upset sounds horrified and Robby wants to help, but he’s not really here anymore.
Cold. A mask pressed to his face. A cool voice counting backwards from ten, trying to entice him to join them. A hand at his hairline, firm but comforting.
A voice he knows but can't name, matter-of-fact like always. "You'd better come back from this, Robinavitch. I'm not gonna be the one to deal with Jack Abbot if you don't."
A gripping sort of quiet. Relentless. Cold. He can’t see anything. He can’t hear anything. Why can't I -- where am I -- Jack?
Heavy slumber, just starting to lift at the edges. The kind of sleep he hasn't gotten in years. Did he drink? Is he sick? Why can't he finish waking up?
"You're all right, honey, settle down. Don’t try to move yet.”
The voice startles him worse than the inability to wake. He sleeps alone, relentlessly. Hasn't let someone stay over since Heather and never felt quite right about her presence even then. Is this Heather? No. Janey? No. It's a woman, though, and someone he knows. He can't find her name in the jumble of fragments and space that is his mind, but he knows two things: one, he is safe with her, and, two, she is not who he expected to find at his bedside when he woke. The absence of the person he did expect is concerning. His mind casts about for a reason, conjures up breaking glass, slamming doors. Fireworks? But just the sound, not the light.
And blood.
"Jack!" He gasps awake on a shout, tries to sit up and regrets it emphatically as his head explodes into shards not unlike the glass shards that had rained down on him during the shooting in the trauma bay. A hand presses him gently back into the pillow.
"No, stay down," Dana says. "You're all right. Listen to me, Robby."
Didn't she hear him? Jack! He tries again. This time he realizes the word hasn't left his mouth. Hasn't even formed itself. His eyes go wide, fill with tears, spill over and fill again as he fights to find language in the fractured landscape of his mind. Last time he saw Jack, there was blood. He needs to know right now if -- well. If.
Dana looks at him, really looks, and seems to hear him then, despite his inability to speak. "He's okay," she says. "Jack's okay. He'll be here as soon as he can, he just needed some care."
Robby stares at her, heart pounding, realizing belatedly that he can hear his racing heart on the monitors. And if he can, she can.
"I promise, baby," Dana soothes. "Jack's just fine. And you're gonna be fine, too."
He doesn't know about that second part -- can rattle words around in his head but can't shake them loose, like a Magic 8 Ball that's been jostled too hard and now the little dice won't line up to the window and only the corners are visible, floating in a dark void --
He has managed exactly zero words, and he is exhausted by the effort.
Dana cups his cheek, thumb wiping away his tears. "You can rest, honey," she says. "I'll wake you when Jack comes."
Down the hall, Parker Ellis is fighting a similar battle with Jack.
"They do not," Parker says, "for the record, pay me enough for this."
It's the first thing Jack remembers her saying, but not the first thing she's said, judging from her perturbed expression and the pinch of worry she thinks isn't evident around her eyes.
He's staring, he realizes, when Parker says, "Abbot, you back with me?"
Is he? He thinks he is, but then, he isn't sure where he's been. His eyebrows must ask, even though his mouth hasn't caught up to the game yet, because Ellis snorts. "Yeah, you've been a troublemaker," she says. "You came up swinging, my dude."
"Di --" His throat is dry, wrecked. Man, he hates waking up from surgery. Certainly has done his fair share of it. He probably should have warned them that he and anesthesia go way back and that the relationship is not amicable. Parker mercifully does not make eye contact as she guides a straw to his lips, allowing him a sip of water. "Did I hurt anyone?" He manages to get the whole question out this time.
"Nah, we've all met you, so we know to dodge," Parker says easily. Jack doesn't know whether to be horrified or grateful, and settles on matter-of-fact. "Oh."
Then his mind catches up, and he jolts dead upright, fast enough that the room spins and he has to swallow nausea as he sags back against the pillow. "Robby --?"
"In recovery," Parker says. "You can see him as soon as you can sit up without puking. Or as soon as he can." She wiggles her phone at him. "Dana's been texting me, trading updates, because her stubborn old white guy is as determined as my stubborn old white guy to undo everything the surgeons just did."
"He's okay?"
Parker must sense that Jack isn't capable of humor yet, not about this, not about Robby, who, when he last saw him, was lying on the floor of Trauma 2 in a sea of shattered glass, unconscious and bleeding from the head. She makes direct, steady eye contact with Jack. "He's okay," she says.
Jack feels himself go limp with relief, closing his eyes and focusing on taking a couple of long, slow breaths. "How bad were his injuries?" he asks when he can get the words out.
"I don't have details, just broad strokes," Parker cautions. "I know he underwent repair for a depressed skull fracture and I only know that because shit was evident."
"You could stand not to be so gleeful about the obvious caving-in of my best friend's skull," Jack admonishes.
"Robby'd have thought it was cool if he could have seen it," Parker says lightly, dismissing his concern.
"Did you at least take a picture for him?"
"Did I at least take a picture of my boss's caved-in head prior to them rushing him to life-saving emergency surgery? Not as such, no."
"Eh. That's okay. He can look at his scans." Jack forcefully maintains the air of nonchalance he specifically cultivates with Parker -- it's their thing -- although continued discussion of the caving-in of Robby's skull is likely to lead to vomiting on Jack's part and that will surely disrupt the illusion. "Any notable deficits? How long ago did the surgery wrap?"
"An hour after yours did, but he didn't wake up in fucking Iraq, my dude."
Jack blinks a beat longer than necessary. "Sorry you had to see that," he says.
"I’m not after an apology. I just want to make sure you're all the way back before I inflict you on Robinavitch."
Jack makes steady eye contact with her. "I'm good."
She arches an eyebrow. Okay, maybe not entirely steady. But after a moment, she does send a text, which he can only hope is in his favor.
"You know," she adds once her attention is back on him. "There's a question you haven't asked yet."
He runs through potentials -- is the gunman dead? Doesn't matter, he's neutralized. He can fuck all the way off, dead or alive. Is Robby going to make a full recovery? He knows Ellis well enough to know she won't extrapolate on the prognosis of a patient she hasn't examined. Why is he waking up to Parker Ellis of all people at his bedside? Because, despite her spiky exterior and her relentless professional detachment and the wall of sarcasm she uses as a buffer between herself and the world, Parker Ellis is a giant softie and he counts hers as one of the few genuine friendships in his life -- but he comes up short.
"You don't want to maybe ask me about your own prognosis, you single-minded freak?"
Oh.
He plays it off with a shrug. "Left leg can't be any worse off than the right one." He glances down at himself. "Shape of the blanket tells me that much."
She snorts audibly. Then nudges him. "Let me give you the deets, so you can answer when Robby asks."
"Okay, shoot. What's -- the deets?"
She shudders. "No. Please never say that again."
"You literally just said it."
"We are two very different people."
"What's the word, doc, am I gonna persist to kick left-legged ass another day?"
"As well as you ever could,” Parker says, in a tone that says exactly how well she thinks he ever could. “You had a through and through GSW to the upper left thigh. It missed your femoral like the damn thing jumped out of the way, so even though you caused massive bleeding and wound tearing by launching yourself off the gurney like a fucking fish out of water, you were actually very lucky. You’ve been embolized, stitched up, topped up, and commanded to use a wheelchair for the duration of healing, not just for the thirty-six-odd hours it takes you to decide you’re over it.”
His mind is stuck on launching yourself off the gurney, and the image replays itself, unwillingly, in front of Jack's eyes. Regaining consciousness while being rushed to surgery. Spotting the gunman folding over his wife's body. Robby going limp like somebody cut his strings. The police opening fire. Breaking glass, people screaming who had no business screaming when Robby, brave Robby, had stayed so level-headed even with a literal dent in his skull --
He’d -- well. He’d had to get to Robby, didn’t he?
Parker's hand gives his forearm a quick squeeze, there and gone. "Hey." She waits till his eyes track up to hers. "He's okay, Jack. Really."
"I need to see him."
She studies him for a long moment and then nods. "All right, then, let's roll."
Dana stops them at the door. "Glad to see you with a little more color," she says, leaning down to kiss Jack on the cheek. Then hesitates in a way that makes his stomach hurt. "Listen, honey --"
"What’s wrong?" Jack's nerves are shot, his voice coming out a little more breathy than intended.
Dana exchanges a glance with Ellis and then looks back at Jack. "He just -- he's not talking yet, is all."
"Is he awake?"
"Awake, alert, oriented as far as I can tell. Damn near took a header trying to get out of bed to come find you. Just -- not talking."
"Wait, if he's not talking how do you know it was me he was trying to find?" Jack asks, and Dana and Ellis snort perfectly-matched snorts of disbelief, and neither dignifies him with a response.
"Just be patient with him," Dana adds, as if Jack would ever be anything else.
Parker wheels him into the room and he catches his first glimpse of Robby since the man folded on the trauma room floor like a house of cards in a stiff wind. Robby's eyes are closed, but when Jack reaches him, they open, immediately widening and filling with tears when his gaze fixes on Jack.
“Fuck you for scaring me like that, man,” Jack says.
Robby opens his mouth, closes it, quirks half a smile, and satisfies himself with flipping off Jack. Message received.
“Fuck,” Jack repeats, this time at a whisper. “I’m so fucking glad you’re okay.”
Robby reaches out one shaking hand and Jack wheels himself close enough to reach it. Hands clasped, the two of them simply stare at each other, both awake and alive, against the odds.
Dana clears her throat and Ellis inclines her head toward the door. "I'm just gonna --"
"Yeah, we'd better --"
The two of them slip out unnoticed as Jack drinks in the sight of Robby, and Robby of Jack.
Robby is drifting, warm and comfortable, aware that it’s partly because he’s heavily medicated but deciding he’s earned it. He didn’t mean to fall asleep, and he opens his eyes to find he’s not the only one who’s given into it. Jack’s tilted in his wheelchair in a position that cannot be comfortable but is entirely endearing.
“Jack,” Robby says, voice hoarse but present. “Hey, brother, wake up before your neck gets stuck like that.”
Without opening his eyes, Jack says, “You’re a doctor. I know you know that’s not how that works.”
A moment later, Jack’s eyes open, his gaze already on Robby. Robby smiles at him, slow and slightly puzzled.
“What --” He pauses, regroups. Recovery is going to take some time. “What were you thinking?” he asks, then clarifies, off Jack’s confused look, “Barging into a room with an armed man?”
Jack studies him, stares at him, as though trying to decide how much to divulge.
“I was thinking,” Jack said finally, “that you were in that room. And for some reason, I always seem to want to be in whatever room you’re in.”
Robby’s smile widens. He casts about for the right words, something to say to make Jack understand how he’s feeling in this moment.
In the end, he lifts the covers and jerks his chin. Jack obediently locks his wheels and uses his upper body strength and his residual limb to transfer himself to the bed. It’s awkward, and it takes a while, like most things that end up important, but eventually, Jack is there, gathering Robby into his arms, holding him.
Later. He can find the right words later. Right now, there’s nothing that needs saying.