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Heat on suppressants is pretty much all the miserable bits, without any of the sex. That's what Trinity's been led to understand, anyway.
It explains why Dennis has been holed up in his room for the last two hours since they got home. If Robby weren't on his Mad Max pilgrimage she's sure he'd be with him, doing shit she isn't remotely interested in hearing about. But he's not, so Dennis is, instead, in his room, where she truthfully isn't sure he'll be leaving for the next 24 hours, until his leave day is done and he's back on shift. She knows he’s got that weird hoarder stash of ramen under his bed, a microwave and a bathroom, so he's not exactly going to die, but he's been struggling since Robby left, and she's not obtuse enough to deny that she might actually give a shit about him at this point. She's not sure whether it's instinct, or genuine developed affection, but one (or a combination) of the two leads her to knocking at his bedroom door at half 9 with a poke bowl of leftovers from her dinner. It's not like she made enough for two. Honest.
“C’min,” comes the voice from the other side, and she does, swings the door open and lets the hall light cut a wedge into the stuffy darkness of the room.
“Shit,” he groans at the light, mound in the bed, so she closes the door behind her. The place reeks of him, at his most potent and gross, and reminds her of her brothers - boy smell and a stale lingering undertone she’s learned not to raise her hackles at at work every day: Robby.
“Mind if I crack a window?” she asks, letting her eyes adjust to the dim light from outside and picking her way over the clothes strewn on the floor. The place is a mess, and she doesn't look too closely for fear of what she might find.
“Please don't–” he says, “Sorry, I know it's probably gross, I just. I've gotta make this last for five more weeks.”
Ah. So he wants it to smell like hormonal soup. She makes it to the end of the bed and sits down heavily, looks at how he's holed himself up, wrapped in that damn green fleece under the covers. It's all very well omega influencers with Pinterest heat aesthetics and room-sized beds, making nests with seemingly endless supplies of their partners’ clothes. Most often it's this: sweaty bedsheets and the one item of clothing that should have been put in the wash weeks ago.
“I had some dinner leftover, so. Thought you could use some protein.”
“Thanks,” he says, a little warily, as he props himself on an elbow. Normally she only cooks for him when she's got a shelf that needs putting up, or wants him to cover a shift.
“No catch,” she insists.
So he sits up, wave of Robby-scent rolling off him as he does that makes her block her nose. His eyes are red, like he might have been crying, or it might just be everything else making him look a mess. He takes the dish and fork.
Dennis eats like a fucking animal. She used to think it was part of the whole homelessness situation, but it just turns out he's just a boy, and all of them are kind of like that. She stomachs about thirty seconds of it before she pats the sheets somewhere near his knee and makes to leave.
“Leave it outside the door when you're done. I don't want you growing any cultures in here.”
“Wait–”
He’s choking on something - rice, maybe - as she turns around.
“Hm?”
“Sorry,” clears the last of it from his throat, face pink, “Just– you could stay. Are you busy?”
She’s not, but it’s not exactly her idea of a good night. She was planning on holing up with YouTube and waiting for Yoli to text and give her something to do, which as she thinks it sounds about as lame as riding out a suppressed heat with Dennis Whitaker. What comes out of her mouth is:
“Dennis, it reeks in here.”
He has enough spine to look affronted.
“No, it's– You don't think it's nice? I kind of like the way the two of you– Together.” He stops himself from the look on her face. “Sorry.”
The thing with Robby is an open secret at this point. Nearly all of Robby's things are, and everyone else is just expected to carry on as normal while he sends his hormones pumping out around the department, knotting whoever he fancies. For the last few months, that's been his new golden boy Whitaker - the only real markers of which being an uptick in Dennis's scent and the way that, in a kind of reverse psychology, he's stopped touching him all the time. But it’s still disgustingly obvious.
The thought of her becoming a part of Dennis’ strange codependent pack with Robby is a complicated one. She likes Robby - more than she thought she ever would - or she did, before all this started with Dennis, that is. She can’t quite square it away, him deciding that's where his interest is best placed. Sure, Dennis is an adult, but there’s something about it that digs deep in her, makes her hackles rise when she sees Robby lay a hand on his arm mid-shift. Maybe it’s just the realisation that Robby is an alpha like any other - that he's not any better than the rest of them, would still cross all professional and ethical boundaries to get his dick wet. With Huckleberry, no less. It makes her feel stupid, if she's honest, for thinking he'd be any different. It's not a feeling she particularly likes.
And this. How fucked up over him Dennis is. Maybe it's the distance, the having to be apart from him during heat, but he's decidedly pathetic. Trinity doesn't entertain patheticness very well. But she does have a heart.
“Okay,” she sits back down, “Fine” and tries not to watch him eat.
“How's his trip going?” she asks, eventually.
He shrugs.
“Dunno,” he says, around a mouthful of salmon, “He's off his phone. We called last week, to check in. It seems fine. He asked after the fucking students.”
It's amusing, to see him more pissed than her over something.
“They're not so bad,” she says, and he shoots her a withering glare.
“Ogilvie's an asshole.”
“Okay, twin on twin crime.”
“I would have eaten him in the womb.”
“I think he would have had the foetal advantage.”
“That's so sexist,” he tells her, and sniffs, wipes his nose with the fleece sleeve.
“Are you, like, okay?”
“Sure. I'm not– Y'know, I just feel crappy. But it's not too bad.”
“It could be worse. At least you aren't bonded.”
Dennis laughs, a small thing.
“Yeah,” he says, then: "Do you get like this with Yolanda?”
“Please don't call her that,” she grimaces, and means it. “I guess. It was weird– She wouldn't spend my first rut with me even after I told her I was on suppressants. She's still fucked up about it, won't fuck until like three days after. And we're not synced, so it's just annoying, more than anything.”
It's an understatement. The thing with Yoli is a constant push pull, even six months in, and Trinity would be lying if she said she wasn't tired. When it's good, it's good - it's spending three days holed up in Trinity's room ordering takeout, Yoli wrist deep inside her, thighs burning from riding her, sleeping with the charcoal-cinnamon scent of her soaked into her skin. When it's bad– well, it's never really bad. It's just nothing. They'll be busy, or plans will change, fall through, and she’s being cool about it. Mostly.
Except not at all, truthfully. She finds herself chasing her tail, agonising over texts that go read and unanswered. She knows that Yoli likes her independence, her bite, drive, whatever - she likes it when she nips at her ear and has to be pinned down, she uses those strong fucking arms to hold her to the bed and hook fingers up until she comes apart beneath her, but Trinity’s been feeling a little soft around the edges lately. Gooey. It’s freaking her out, and she knows Yoli isn't interested in any of that. There's a reason she's A4A. She doesn't want a mate.
The scent is the other thing. Trinity's been trying really embarrassingly hard to alter her scent lately. Constant performance reviews telling her it's too abrasive and affects her beside manner, Al-Hashimi on her case about the holistic impact of the ED experience on patient wellbeing. A mixture of emotional coaching and drinking fucking coconut water and mindfulness techniques - y'know, when you're not trying to reduce a shoulder dislocation or diagnose a screaming toddler with strep. Despite all that, it has been working. Her scores are ticking up. She's getting really good with kids.
Yoli doesn’t get it. She asks why Trinity would want to change herself for anyone - or rather, tells her it’s bosses who don’t know how to deal with female alphas without making them change themselves. But Yoli deals with patients passed out on a table. If Trinity’s going to make it in the ED, which Lord knows she’s still trying to, she has to at least try. Yoli tells her she should transfer to surgery, where she won’t have an ancient knothead telling her to sweeten up her scent for the sake of patient satisfaction, but the thought of being in the same department as her right now makes her stomach knot. She doesn’t have the heart to tell her it’s Al-Hashimi gunning for her to sweeten up. Yoli likes having an imaginary Robby to rail against.
She can feel Dennis all tensed up beside her, like he’s got something he wants to say. Sure enough, he sets the dish to the side.
“I'm– Before he left, I had this nightmare–,” he shakes his head and laughs slightly, “I don't even know why I said that, it wasn't a nightmare. It was just a thought. I–” He chews on the inside of his lip for a second.
“You don't think he's going to kill himself, do you?”
It takes her a minute to drag herself out of her own thoughts enough to realise who he's talking about.
“Robby? Why do you think…” but even as she thinks it through she trails off. The bike is reckless, sure, but then there's the spiritual quest, the lack of contact. Robby's not exactly what you would call well adjusted, but it's Robby. He's tied to the Pitt in an inextricable, fucked up way. If he died she'd half expect all the lights to go out. Dennis is spiralling, beside her - she can practically hear the thoughts whirring around his head.
“He seemed happier, before he left,” he says, “Like he had a plan.”
“He seemed like his usual bitch self to me.”
It's intended as reassuring, to cut his nosedive short, before she remembers hormonal Dennis is pretty much made of custard and has the emotional integrity of such.
“Trin–” he says.
“Alright, I hear you. I'm trying to say that I do hear you, but I personally didn't get the vibe. If that means anything.”
He looks at her with those stupid sad eyes, then down at his hands.
“Can I tell you something?”
“Uh– sure.”
“You can't tell anyone. Even Garcia.”
If he's about to tell her he's pregnant, she's gonna lose her mind.
“Back last September, at PittFest– I found him in Paeds. In the middle of the MCI, he was having a panic attack, some kind of breakdown. I think it was– COVID, and Adamson, and Jake's girlfriend, and everything. He wasn't okay. I don't think he's spoken to anyone about it. And I– I haven't told anyone. He asked me not to.”
He looks at her.
“What if it's my fault?”
The question makes her feel sick. She knows that question inside and out, knows the shape of the words inside her mouth. She wants to take Robby between her hands and shake some fucking sense into him, wants to hunt him down on the Canadian highway and slash his tyres and tell him if he's going to fuck up a twenty-seven year olds life he'd better do it by knocking him up rather than fucking off and putting his life on his conscience. Dennis is sensitive, they've even discussed as much. He's empathetic and wet and has a stupid big vulnerable heart that Robby might be intent on breaking by breaking himself, and she's not about to stand by and watch it happen.
“That's… Yeah,” she manages.
“I'm just scared I will have let it happen.”
“Dennis,” she tells him, sharper than she would like. It comes out like that, sometimes. “Robby's a grown man. If he wants to kill himself, that's something he's chosen to do. It's not on you.”
But even as she says it, something barbed and ugly twists inside her chest. Something she knows the shape of, that sits behind all the right words leaving her mouth and reminds her that she doesn’t believe them, she never has before. She takes the dish from him, for something to do.
“I'm gonna go wash this.”
Her hands are shaking as she pushes up from the bed.
“Would you come back? Your scent. It's nice.”
She almost thinks she's misheard him for a second. She knows he just probably likes the scent of an alpha that isn't weeks old, stale, it’s nothing to do with her specifically. But still. It calms something inside her to hear him say it. With the work she's been putting in, it's nice.
So she bites her lower lip between her teeth, looks back, and tells him she will.
She leaves the dish in the sink, because she can't be fucked to deal with it right now, and by the time she edges her way back into Dennis' room, he's already asleep again, mound under bedsheets pressed up against the wall. She unclips his badge from the scrub pants on the floor, doing her best to avoid coming into contact with any pair of his underwear, and sets it on his nightstand. She sits herself up against the wall. He should really get a headboard.
It makes her feel weird and uneasy, looking down at him like this. She's only just gotten used to watching Yoli sleep - there's something so open about it, so vulnerable, that freaks her out. She wants to take him by the shoulders and shake him, poke him until he develops some kind of armour, some kind of instinct for self-preservation.
She doesn't do that, though. She gets her phone out, opens Project Makeover and picks up at Level 376. Everyone's got their own vices. And she did tell him she'd come back.
It's when he turns over in his sleep that she sees it. He tips his head further down into the pillow, twists his shoulders so the collar of his shirt, old and stretched out, pulls down to expose his clavicle. In the meat of his traps (a little low, if she had to judge) is a raised, white bite. She doesn't need a dental record to know whose teeth they are.
It's like she can feel her blood spike, her scent sour. Dennis must notice, cause he shifts, just a touch in his sleep and tugs the shirt back over it, like it's second nature.
For the first time in a while, Trinity Santos wants to break Michael Robinavitch's nose.
She wonders how long it's been there. How it happened. Whether it was planned, premeditated - enough, evidently, to place it out of sight. Or whether it was just Robby getting carried away, another reckless symptom of his mid-life crisis. It's no wonder Dennis is fucked up over it: him leaving, him calling once a week, him playing fast and loose with his life.
And the worst bit of all, that she realises as she looks at him wrapped up in the dark green fleece soaked in Robby's scent, is that she's jealous.
She wants someone to want her badly enough to be stupid with it. Not to hold her at arms length, but to need her in a foolish kind of way that she would never admit to wanting. Sue her, she wants a dumb kind of love, and it makes her feel kind of sick to admit to herself.
There's not much to be envious of, she knows that, but she still feels it. Her phone buzzes.
yoli ❤️🔥🩺
Long weekend begins nowww 🥳
wanna come over?
help me celebrate sewing your MVC's leg back on 😘
Me
kinda wiped tonight :(
tomorrow?
She gets a heart react, but not a reply, and knows she's fucked it. The screen makes her eyes smart, in the darkness, and she tells herself that's where the tears come from.