Chapter Text
Abbot steps onto the roof, letting the heavy doors clang shut so Robby hears. No sense appearing soundlessly behind the guy and spooking him, like Abbot does with the medical students. Sometimes not by accident. He’d checked with Dana and done a quick sweep of the department on his way in, so he knows day shift was normal—as normal as pinballing between dozens of medical crises can be. But you can never be too careful.
Abbot figures he’s in the clear. Robby is on the inside of the guardrails, forearms leant against the metal bars, gazing out at the city lights. Abbot has been finding him here more often, after Pitt Fest. It’s a good spot: quiet, fresh air, clear sightlines. And he doesn’t mind sharing it with Robby.
“Anything interesting today?” Abbot says, leaning his hip against a rail.
“One case of Stevens Johnson syndrome, diagnosed by Mohan.”
“Nice catch.”
Robby stares straight ahead. The low light softens the lines carved around his eyes and across his forehead, but does not hide how his eyebags have eyebags. “And the hospital is going to be sold.”
“Kinda buried the lede.”
“Good news, then bad news. It’s the shit sandwich.”
Abbot shoves his hands into his pockets. “More like a turd in our lunch pail.”
“It’s not confirmed.” Robby exhales through his nose. “Who knows. Maybe we do our jobs so well and so unprofitably, we scare off the private equity vultures.”
“If you need help torpedoing our budget, I’ve got the area saleswoman for CricKit on Facebook.”
Robby huffs a laugh, crow’s feet deepening. “Of course you do.”
Abbot watches Robby pull his hoodie closer around him. There’s a chill tonight. Fall slipping into the spaces left by summer’s ebb. But it’s not the reason why Robby is brooding on the hospital’s roof, shoulders hunched inwards to protect himself.
“That why you’re here?” Abbot says.
Robby sighs. Then straightens and stretches, rolling his neck. “Time for handover.”
Abbot raises his chin. No more pussyfooting around. “Ever call the number I gave you?”
“I—not yet.” Robby blinks, caught off-guard by the direct question. “I thought it would be better if we didn’t go to the same therapist.”
“And you’ve found one.”
“Been shopping around.”
“How’s that going?”
Robby runs a hand over his cropped hair. “Fucking terrible, actually, no thank you for asking.” He grimaces. “Their methodology is limited to CBT worksheets.”
“So call the number. She’s good, trust me.”
“People are overflowing into the hallways, Chairs is stacked to the ceiling, and both Attendings are yakking on the roof.” Robby stalks towards the doors and motions to Abbot. “Come on.”
Walls are up. This is exactly why he needs therapy. Everyone knows their department chief refuses to follow his own advice, and they side-eye one another whenever he monologues about the importance of mental health and the support available to them, should they need it. When someone who can’t be bullshitted—usually Dana or Kiara—tries to corral him into taking care of himself for goddamn once, Robby would always slip past and gallop to the nearest crashing patient. But they have fifteen minutes till they need to descend into the Pitt, and Abbot has worked long enough with Robby to know he can push him further than most people. Time to bring out the big guns.
Abbot folds his arms.
Robby groans. “Really?”
Abbot levels his gaze at the other man. He knows the effect this has, though sometimes it makes especially anxious interns cry.
Robby throws his hands up. “Really? ”
“What’s eating you, man?” Abbot says.
“Chronic understaffing, the lack of beds, our patient satisfaction scores,” Robby lists off his fingers and stomps back towards Abbot, “the economy, climate change, nuclear war—thought we solved that one in the nineties—the implosion of human civilization, want me to go on?”
He collapses onto the guardrail and cradles his head in his hands. A siren wails in the distance. Mercifully getting fainter, so they can actually finish this conversation.
“Yes,” Abbot says.
Robby’s fingers lace together over the back of his neck. “Does therapy always suck?”
“It sucks for a long, long time,” Abbot says. “But it does get better.”
“Why do you keep going?”
Abbot settles next to Robby. Thinks about gently nudging the other man’s shoulder, but refrains. “After every session, I’d get a beer. Sometimes, I’d get a beer and think about drowning myself in the Ohio river. But after a couple of months, one of the other regulars would sit next to me at the bar. Always wore the same Gary Anderson jersey. Didn’t say anything. Just drank his beer and watched whatever was on TV. And he’d stay until I’d finished, and we’d nod as I left.” He drums his fingers against the railing. “Never got his name.”
“I appreciate you sharing that with me,” Robby slowly says, picking his words with care. “Objectively, and with love, that’s the saddest defense of therapy I’ve ever heard.”
“It worked. How about I buy you a drink after each session? The bar’s close to the therapist’s office.”
“You’ve got better things to do on your day off.”
“Not really,” Abbot says, and he smiles at Robby’s surprise. “The nachos aren’t half bad.”
---
The call is made. The night shift before Robby’s first appointment, Abbot texts him the bar’s address while harvesting a bumper crop of foreign rectal bodies. Perhaps it’s a sign. Or perhaps, as Ellis says, it’s a recession indicator. Abbot is not a superstitious man. But when he steps over the bar’s threshold and wipes his boots on the grimy welcome mat, a shiver steals between his shoulder blades. One which has little to do with the freezing rain slicking the sidewalk outside. It lingers as he takes his preferred spot—back against a wall; close to the emergency exit; with an unobstructed view of the bartender, the entrance, and the majority of the other seats—and he’s momentarily transported to all the other bars he has frequented in his life. Dives with the same sticky floors, bad lighting, beer coasters stacked like rolled quarters, wooden countertops worn smooth by the hundreds of sleeves that have dragged across it. All of them friendly to servicemen, and later, one-legged veterans. Though they would have been much less friendly if he didn’t pass.
Abbot watches the bartender, a stocky bearded man armoured in flannel and ennui, uncap two beers. Right on cue, the door swings open and in walks Robby, dripping and miserable, tracking water as he trudges to Abbot and flops onto the seat next to him.
“Got you a fancy IPA,” Abbot says.
Robby nods. Wan. Tired. But Abbot knows better than to ask how the session went. Robby looks like he’s gone four rounds with a bear. With Dr. Pillai standing at five-nothing in heels, that would make her a sun bear.
“I’ll drink anything right now, brother.” Robby glances at what Abbot had ordered for himself. “Even PBR.”
“I’ll swap you.”
“No, thank you. How can you choke it down?”
Abbot shrugs. “Self-hatred.”
Despite the rain and getting his ass kicked by his—their—therapist, Robby laughs. Two loud, raspy honks wrenched from the gut, and then he grins and holds out his beer. “I’ll drink to that.”
“To self-hatred,” Abbot says. Glass clinks as they cheers.
---
They fall into a routine. Once a week, Abbot buys Robby a beer as a reward for attending therapy. Sometimes, Abbot can only stay for forty-five minutes and a Diet Coke before leaving for night shift. But most days he gets his usual, and they sit side-by-side in the empty bar, half-watching whatever the bartender has playing on the TV and making small talk.
It does mean they see a lot of each other. But they aren’t talking about the hospital, or teaching, or patients, and Abbot’s enjoying himself, so. What the hell. It beats sitting alone in his apartment and falling asleep to nature documentaries.
“You lied to me, Jack,” Robby says to him three weeks in. It’s nearly Halloween, but a faded Santa cap hangs off the corner of the TV. A holdover from a previous Christmas that no one had bothered to put away.
Abbot pauses, can halfway to his lips. “About what?”
“These nachos are terrible.” Robby crunches a tortilla chip. “The chili is jarred marinara sauce, and this cheese goop hasn’t seen the inside of a cow.”
“So it’s vegan,” Abbot says, and he swigs his beer triumphantly as he watches Robby laugh.
“Wouldn’t go that far,” Robby says.
“Kosher, then.”
Robby swipes another chip through the snot-coloured mound of guac. “There’s more to that than separating meat and dairy, man.”
“Sunday school taught us different things.”
“Such as?”
“Abstinence, obedience, and if you ever did this—” Abbot makes his left wrist go limp. “Mrs. Wilson would hit you with a metal ruler.”
Robby winces. “That's rough.”
“It was the eighties.” It’ll do for an explanation. He knows Robby will get it. “Can't say it didn't help in the Army.”
On the TV, a snowboarder barrels down a steep hill towards their jump. Silver jacket sparkling in the winter sun.
“Right,” Robby says. He chews.
Abbot notes how Robby’s brows have drawn together. “It wasn’t that bad. I’ve survived worse.” He sips his drink. “The abstinence lessons didn’t take either.”
Robby snorts. “They never do.” He stabs the guac again. “From experience, they never do.”
Now that’s interesting. On the list of things Abbot knows about Robby, most entries are related to work. Like how Robby wants the department to run, or how they’re so familiar with each other’s M.O. they rarely need to speak. He knows Jake by sight, Janey by name, and that half the nursing pool is convinced that Robby and Collins had a thing. Anything more than that, anything personal, is blank space. This is normal for Dr. Robinavitch. But not for his other colleagues. Shen’s accounts of his family’s dynastic dramas are hot currency in the breakroom, and Abbot knows as much about Ellis’s tours of duty as he does his own. Now that Robby has been removed from his usual environment, maybe that blank space will start filling in.
“What did a young, hormonal Michael Robinavitch get up to?” Abbot says.
“You’re gonna need to buy me three more of these before I tell you.” Robby raises his bottle. “At least.”
Abbot signals the bartender for another round. “I’ve got nowhere to be.”
---
A month into the new year, Robby doesn’t show. Abbot was half-expecting it. Because Robby had been looking shittier and shittier after each session, his beer nursed in silence and his walls thirty-feet thick. During those weeks, Abbot had just watched TV. Bearing witness to the bartender’s choice to dump sports for YouTube compilations of Japanese men in trunks beating the crap out of each other.
He knows it’s tough. God, he really knows, and he feels for Robby. But sometimes, they have to break a bone to heal it.
Abbot drinks both beers and goes home. A WhatsApp message lights up his phone later, at 0213, when he’s thigh-deep in a brace of journal articles and a Best of Madonna playlist. It's Robby. Apologising for bailing. He needed time alone to clear his head.
No problem, Abbot types. I'll be there next week.
Thanks, brother, Robby replies, see you in 18 hours.
Get some sleep. Abbot sends back. A red heart emoji pops up in the bottom-right corner of his message, and then it immediately changes into a yellow thumbs-up.
“Don't panic, man,” he says to his screen.
---
Robby turns up the week after, snow powdered across his shoulders like a sugar donut. There’s a spring in his step today, and as Abbot watches him pull off his beanie and dust his jacket, Robby looks up and smiles at Abbot across the bar. Therapy went well. Maybe there was a breakthrough.
Abbot pushes Robby’s beer towards him. “Good to see you, brother.”
“The highlight of my week,” Robby says, stuffing his scarf and hat into a jacket sleeve. “Hanging out with a guy I see most days out of seven.”
“You can’t get enough of me,” Abbot deadpans.
Robby drapes his jacket over the seat next to him. His cheeks and the tip of his nose are faintly pink. “That reminds me. I needed to fill you in on some, uh, oof.” He cringes as the two women fighting on the TV screen crash through a wooden table. “Some interpersonal dynamics on day shift.”
“Ellis mentioned beef between Santos and Langdon.”
“Beef is an understatement.” Robby rubs his beard. “But that’s not currently an issue, because Langdon’s checked into rehab.”
Abbot nods. He doesn’t need more details. “Santos has settled in with the others?”
“Her efforts to improve her bedside manner have not gone unnoticed. Whitaker has gotten his sea legs and has not killed more rats. Javadi is.” Robby pours his beer into a glass. “Javadi is thriving.”
“Doctor Shamsi’s gotta be happy.”
“She’s been banned from visiting the ER. I overheard Javadi talking to her. Probably doesn’t want her mom to know she has a crush.” Robby clinks his glass against Abbot’s can, then pauses. “I wasn’t supposed to say that.”
“Workplace dynamics are complex, and that will be important information if I ever cover for you.” Abbot leans in conspiratorially. “Is it Mateo?”
“I should not be gossiping.” Robby sips his drink. “How did you know?”
“Look at him, man.”
“I…do?” Robby says, confused. “And—okay, yes, I get what you mean. He’s conventionally attractive. But how did you know about Javadi’s crush?”
Abbot fiddles with the beer can’s pull tab. “I saw the way she was acting around him, at the park. What do the kids say these days? There was ‘a vibe’.”
“As long as it doesn’t distract her, she can have as much ‘vibe’ as she wants.”
“Come on. She went to college at thirteen. This is the first time she can cut loose and talk to cute boys. Where's your sense of romance?”
“Black-bagged in the morgue.”
Abbot grins. “You're cold.”
“We work in an emergency department, not Love Island.”
“How do you, a fifty year-old man who drinks fancy beer, know Love Island?”
Robby fights to keep his expression neutral. Takes a long swig to buy himself time. Not that it matters, because Abbot can read him anyway. As far as open books go, Robby is as straightforward as the contents page, his feelings stamped in big block letters all over his face.
The beer glass returns to the coaster. “Came up on Netflix autoplay,” Robby says.
“Just like that.”
“Yup.”
“The algorithm served it up to you, unprompted.”
“Guess so.”
“What were you watching before?”
Robby shrugs, staring at the amber bubbles fizzing in his drink. “It was late. I don’t remember. They were still on an island, but everyone was Korean.”
“Sounds like Singles Inferno.”
“Could be.” Robby looks askance at him. “Wait, how do you know?”
“The night nurses and younger residents are obsessed, man. I watched a couple of episodes to see what they were yelling about, but I didn’t get it. I let them add me to the group chat, though. Whatever makes a hard shift easier.” He winks at Robby. “Don’t worry. Watching trash TV doesn’t ruin your mystique.”
“I only put it on when I can’t sleep.”
“And while you’re folding laundry, or eating dinner, or ignoring my messages—”
“It’s better than watching MRE review videos.”
“Ouch.” Abbot clasps his heart, reeling in mock shock. “I told you that in confidence. You’ve always fought dirty, Robinavitch.”
“We’re not fighting.”
“Oh, we are.”
“We are not.” Robby is trying to keep stern, but there’s no hiding the smile creeping in. “You’d know if we are. Remember the names we’d throw around?”
“Anal-rentive tyrant,” Abbot says.
“Jack Rambo,” Robby replies, “rushing into rooms, guns blazing, barking orders.”
“While you went for passive-aggressive sniping and eyerolls.”
“It’s a wonder you didn’t transfer after that first year.”
Abbot folds his arms. “I couldn’t let you win.”
“I wasn’t going to lose to you either.” Robby shakes his head and chuckles. “Look at us now. Gossiping about Javadi and Mateo like two old ladies.” Deep lines fan from the corners of his eyes and frame his mouth. He is handsome like this. When he allows himself to just. Be.
Abbot leans his elbow on the countertop and rests his chin in his palm. “This is the highlight of my week too, brother.”
The smile stays gathered at a corner of Robby’s mouth. He gazes sidelong at him, and glances at the wedding ring on Abbot’s finger. “After your partner, surely.”
Out of instinct, Abbot covers his left hand. Then uncovers it. Clears his throat.
“He’s passed on.”
Robby pales, dark eyes widening. “Shit. Brother, I am so, so sorry. I didn’t know.”
“It’s fine. It happened years ago.”
“I should have—”
Abbot’s hand waves, cutting Robby off. “Seriously, it’s fine. The medicine took—takes—up all our time.”
Robby opens his mouth to speak, changes his mind and dips his head. “How are you doing now?”
“My work isn’t affected.” Abbot’s shoulders square themselves and pull his spine straight. The field of vision narrows to his left hand, its fingers starfished on the wooden countertop. “I kept wearing a ring because.” The hand makes a fist. “Because we never thought we’d be able to get married, legally. Seemed a shame to throw it out.”
Another of Robby’s smiles. But the one which doesn’t reach his eyes. “Where did you get your rings?”
“Costco. Kinda bought them on a lark.” The can of PBR rises. Beer wets Abbot’s lips and fizzes down his esophagus. “JP loved a bargain.”
The thick band dully glints.
“I’m fine,” Abbot says, focusing back on reality. “Don’t feel anything most days. Unless my stump is acting up.”
Robby runs a hand over his hair. “Well. Thank you for telling me.” He slouches over on his stool. “I’ll respect your privacy and keep it between us.”
Abbot holds the memory of it. His phone in his pocket buzzing like a hornet. His sister-in-law sobbing hysterically from an international number. An accident on a road half the world away: clear skies, drunk driver, killed on impact. Ellis eyeing him as he hung up. Shen asking if he was okay. Their jaws dropping when he relayed that his husband had died. Turning back to work. Because there was nothing he could do.
“Shen and Ellis know,” Abbot says, releasing the images. “But they’re the only two I’ve told. Now you’re the third.” He shoots Robby a thumbs up. “Congrats.”
“Night shift keeps their secrets.” Robby fishes out his wallet. “Want another? On me.”
“Nowhere else to put them,” Abbot says, “and thanks. Appreciate it.”
---
The routine holds into Spring. They stick to breezy topics like thoracostomies, the surprising lack of progress on the hospital’s acquisition, and Robby’s continued and inexcusable ignorance of Madonna’s career.
They don’t bring up dead husbands. All in all, Abbot thinks, it’s going well.
As their cold-weather layers peel away, Robby tells stories. About his grandmother and her voyage to America. Med school and how he lived next to a frat house. Working multiple jobs to pay tuition, and the time he nearly became a phone sex operator but became too embarrassed during the orientation and left, faking appendicitis. The qualities which make him a great teacher also make him an excellent raconteur. And as Robby talks, lighting up in a way that smooths the furrows in his forehead, Abbot finds himself enraptured.
“You’re like a hairy, middle-aged Scheherazade,” Abbot says one week. After Robby has wrapped a tale about a spirit medium who had followed his grandmother home one day, and proceeded to deck every surface in their apartment with crystals that would cleanse their, quote, ‘generational psychic pollution’.
“Throw depressed in there, too,” Robby says, putting his glass down.
“Dr. Pillai made the formal diagnosis?”
“It’s pretty obvious if even Dana’s kid is calling me a sad boy.”
“That really got under your skin, huh,” Abbot says, grinning.
Robby shrugs. “The patient is allowed a second opinion.”
So far, work-Robby and bar-Robby have felt like separate people. Abbot likes both, obviously. But work-Robby is steely and constantly moving, playing defense when he doesn’t need to. Bar-Robby is relaxed and laughs at jokes, patting Abbot’s back when the punchline is delivered, and he listens like a friend rather than Abbot’s superior. Now, however, the two are beginning to blur. It’s how Robby smiles when Abbot walks in to relieve him. Or when the friendly hand on Abbot’s shoulder stays for a second too long. Or how Abbot can feel Robby’s eyes tracking him across the department, but only when Robby thinks he isn’t looking.
There is. A ‘vibe’. To see where it leads, Abbot will have to follow.