Chapter Text
The baby has no name.
The plastic hospital bracelet is too big for her wrist and a note in her chart labels her ‘Jane Doe’, a name used for people left behind and forgotten.
She sleeps through the broken noises of the emergency department. Her eyelids are translucent, veined like flower petals, mouth pursed in a perfect pout, hands curled into fists no bigger than walnuts pressed against her temples.
Robby stands beside her with his jacket on and his helmet tucked under one arm — not that he plans on wearing it -- but he hopes that it’ll help to remind him that he’s got somewhere to be. Maybe he’ll still ride on the roads, disappear for three months, hopefully become the version of himself everyone keeps insisting exists somewhere outside this hospital.
His sabbatical started an hour ago.
Dana had given him a hug so tight it hurt, her arms a vise around his ribs. Jack had cornered him by the lockers and told him, with the blunt affection only Jack gets away with, that if he comes back from his trip without at least one stupid story, he’s banning him from emergency medicine on principle.
And then there’s Langdon. His sentence still rattles in his head, words from a person who he was meant to be teaching, who he was supposed to be showing how to be better.
You need help.
As if Robby hasn’t been telling himself that for years.
Now the department’s quieter. The worst of the night has bled into leftover paperwork from when the systems were down and exhausted silence. It’s eerie, the difference in the night shift to the day. Someone laughs too loudly down the hall and there’s only a steady pace to the footsteps. The ED feels like it's wrapped in gauze.
Jane Doe doesn’t stir. She’s six pounds of peace and hospital blankets.
He reaches down and adjusts the blanket near her shoulder, the rough skin of his thumb brushing against the bottom of her soft cheek.
He shouldn’t be here.
He should be halfway home, throwing clothes into a bag, pretending a motorcycle trip can outrun the dark that’s chasing him.
Instead he’s standing in Pedes at midnight, beside a baby nobody came back for.
Earlier, when she'd been wailing that newborn cry that sounds like the end of the world, he'd picked her up without thinking. He'd held her against his chest and started talking, words spilling out that he'd never said to his closest friends, confessions he didn't know he was carrying. He'd expected her to sense the rot he feels burning in his chest, the wrongness that everyone else had seen so clearly. He'd expected her to cry harder.
But she hadn't.
She'd snuffled against his shoulder, her tiny fist clenching into his scrubs, her weight settling into him. She didn't feel the bad in him at all.
Just two people, left behind by people who were supposed to love them.
Abandoned recognizes abandoned.
He looks at her now and feels…
Responsibility? Recognition? Maybe it’s just some exhausted part of him looking at something small and helpless and deciding, irrationally, that this is life presenting him a crossroads.
A social worker appears in the doorway with a weary face and a tired smile.
“Dr. Robby.”
He looks up, his hand still resting near the baby's shoulder.
"We found a temporary placement option," she says, her voice carrying that professional gentleness social workers learn. She steps into the room, and the door softly shuts behind her. "If you were serious earlier… we can discuss emergency foster discharge."
Robby swallows, letting the words wash over him.
Because he had been serious. He'd known it the moment the words left his mouth.
Let me take her.
He'd expected to be told no. Expected her to laugh, or look at him with pity, or gently explain all the reasons he isn't good enough, isn't stable enough, isn't the right person.
Instead, the social worker had said, gently, “You’d need support, paperwork, home checks. It wouldn’t be simple.”
He’d told her he’d needed time to think about it. Apparently an hour is as long as he’s getting.
The baby snuffles in her sleep, turns her head. The fine hairs at the base of her neck are damp with sweat, sticking up in all directions.
His bike is parked outside in the cold, tucked away in the corner of the parking lot so no one knows he’s still here. The road north is waiting.
But for the first time in longer than he can remember, leaving feels like the wrong choice.
He lets out a breath he feels like he's been holding his entire life. It shudders out of him, taking something with it.
"Okay," he says, and his voice comes out rough, gravelly, barely more than a whisper.
He clears his throat and tries again.
"Tell me what I need to do."
-x-
For five hours, Robby hides from the staff in the ED.
He’s camping out in an old consult office on the third floor, half-abandoned, with a desk that’s missing a leg and a lamp that flickers. The rest of the office is bare, with just a stack of cardboard boxes piled in the corner.
He sits in the rickety desk chair that he can’t lean back in too far or it’ll tip over and signs every form that the social worker brings him, not even bothering to read the details.
There’s emergency placement paperwork, temporary foster placement, discharge authorization, medical release. The social worker talks him through home visits and says a thousand different words and Robby nods like he’s absorbing any of it.
He’s not. He’s mostly running on caffeine and the adrenaline of doing something pretty fucking stupid. At some point Abbot texts him.
Jack
did you leave yet? you safe?
He stares at it for a long moment and he considers, for just a split second, telling his best friend what he’s done. That he’s not going anywhere. But he’s just — it’s going to take one look of concern or disapproval and he’s going to regret this entire thing.
So he just texts back:
Robby
Hit my first stop. Going to sleep.
He doesn’t tell him there’s a crib being arranged for delivery to his apartment in a week and a bassinet delivered tomorrow, or that someone handed him a leaflet about infant sleep schedules he’d handed out a hundred times to other people.
He sleeps for maybe twenty minutes with his head against the wall and wakes up disoriented, almost tipping the desk chair back, heart pounding.
He only gets ten seconds to rub his hands over his face and blink the sleep out of his eyes when there’s a quiet knock at the door.
The social worker steps in with the baby in her arms.
And suddenly, everything becomes very, very real.
“She’s cleared,” she says softly with a smile. “Paperwork’s done. I’ll walk you through the rest over the phone tomorrow, but for tonight, she’s yours.”
Yours.
Robby stands too fast and nearly kicks the chair over. His hands hover in the air, trembling, and the social worker passes her over, the patches of the blanket still warm from where she’d been holding her.
He takes her with the softest, most careful hands.
She weighs almost nothing, wrapped in a pale yellow hospital blanket with a tiny hat that keeps slipping over one eye.
She blinks blearily at the movement, her face still slack with post-waking sleepiness. He knows, logically, that this small human can’t feel complex emotions yet, but the look she’s giving him feels judgemental.
“Yeah,” he murmurs to her with a smile that won’t leave his face. “I know. Not what you expected, huh?”
The social worker smiles at the two of them, then gives him three more instructions he immediately forgets, a folder thick with paperwork, and a number to call if he needs help.
Then she leaves.
And Robby stands alone in the silent office holding a baby and realizes, with a horrified shudder, that he has not thought this through at all.
He can’t put a baby on a motorcycle.
“Don’t worry, I’ll get you home,” he says.
Twenty minutes later, he’s standing outside the hospital at dawn with a diaper bag that has three days of supplies, taken from the hospital, and the baby still in his arms. He’d managed to avoid any familiar faces, though he’d almost ran into one of the night shift nurses on his way out of the hospital.
The driver pulls up, glances once at Robby, once at the baby, and says only, “Long night?”
Robby laughs and it comes out a little hysterical.
“You have no idea.”
The driver, wisely, does not ask follow-up questions. He doesn’t even question when Robby climbs into the back of the car with the baby in his arms with no carrier.
Pittsburgh slides by in early morning grey, backlit by covered sunshine and washed-out streets. People go about their daily lives not knowing that sitting in the back of the car that passes them is a person who just changed his entire life.
Robby barely sees any of it.
He can’t stop staring at the baby -- Jane, for now — her eyes unfocused and blinking around at their new surroundings, but his eyes pinned to her face. Eventually her blinks slow and her limbs go heavy.
She sleeps through potholes, red lights, cars beeping, sunlight on her face. It’s like she trusts him completely to keep her safe.
Which frankly, feels irresponsible on her part.
When they pull up outside his house, a weird sense of separation trickles through his body. The man who last walked out of that house had been preparing for his final shift at the ED, maybe he’d even locked his front door for what he thought would be the last time.
Now that man’s back with a baby.
He pays and gets out, then stands on the pavement for a second with his keys in one hand and the baby tucked against his chest. He looks up at the townhouse and suddenly, going inside doesn’t feel so daunting. It doesn’t feel like he’s about to walk into a place that he usually goes to spiral, sinking further and further into a hole he can’t get out of.
As he unlocks his front door, he can smell the curry that Mrs. Alvarez is cooking next door — an odd breakfast choice that he’d gotten used to smelling when he’d leave for work in the morning. He can hear Mr. Dalton’s dog barking in the garden a few doors down. The construction workers across the street are drilling. It’s odd how the most mundane surroundings that he’s gotten used to over the years feel brighter and new.
Life moves on around him and Robby feels like instead of standing still, he’s finally taking steps with it too.
He unlocks the door and walks in, dropping his helmet and the diaper bag onto the floor.
He sighs, pulling the blanket tighter around Jane, and suddenly the exhaustion of his day shift and being up most of the night catches up to him. As he steps through the hallway towards the lounge/kitchen, his body feels heavy and separate from his brain. He’s already mentally calculating where exactly one puts a newborn down safely without a crib and how he’s going to have to cook his breakfast with one hand and then--
He stops.
Dennis Whitaker is standing in Robby’s kitchen. He’s in pajama pants and a tattered, navy t-shirt with a stretched collar. His hair is sticking up on one side, and he's got his phone tucked between his shoulder and his ear, mid-conversation with someone.
"—yeah, no, I'll grab it on my way in," he's saying, his voice still rough with sleep. "I’ll pay you back when I get there—"
He looks up.
He sees Robby.
His eyes drop to the bundle in Robby's arms.
The phone slips from his shoulder. He catches it reflexively, fumbles it, nearly drops the cereal box, and manages to save both at the last second in a graceless juggling act that would be funny if Robby's heart wasn't trying to climb out of his throat.
Dennis stares at him.
Robby stares back.
There's a long, airless moment where neither of them moves. Dennis's mouth is slightly open, his eyes wide, and Robby can actually see him trying to process what he's looking at. His gaze flicks from Robby's face to the baby, back to Robby's face, down to the baby again.
"I'll call you back, Trin," Dennis says into the phone, his voice sounding disconnected from his body. He doesn't wait for a response before he hangs up.
The house goes very quiet.
Robby can hear the buzzing of the refrigerator and the faint rattle of the AC. Jane makes a small snuffling sound against his chest, and Dennis's eyes track the movement.
Robby, with a fog lifting from his mind, realizes…
Right.
Three months. He’d told Dennis he could stay here for three months.
It had completely, entirely, left his mind.
Dennis speaks first.
“What…” he says, very carefully, eyes on Jane, “...is that?"