Chapter Text
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have,
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all
— Hamlet, Act III, Scene I, William Shakespeare
EXUENT OMNES
exeunt om·nes —(ˌ)əntˈämˌnēz, -ˌu̇nt‧ˈȯmˌnās
To all go out : all go off the stage —a stage direction to specify that all the characters leave the stage
Stay on the streets of this town
And they'll be carvin' you up alright
They say you gotta stay hungry
Hey baby, I'm just about starvin' tonight
— Dancing in the Dark, Bruce Springsteen
Robby was only leaving because he didn't know how to stay, and Jack had never asked him to.
After he left Baby Jane Doe in the Peds room, it was muscle memory that carried him out of the hospital, through the sliding doors and into the night air, the shift from fluorescent sterility to humid darkness abrupt and disorientating. The Bonneville waited where he had left it, blessedly upright this time, and when Robby swung his leg over the seat, it was with the same practiced ease he brought to thoracotomies and emergency C-sections. The engine came to life beneath him, a low, steady vibration that traveled up through his hands, his arms, his chest, until it slowly replaced the erratic rhythm of his own pulse.
And it wasn't muscle memory, not exactly, that had him turning left where he would usually turn right, wasn't habit in the strictest sense, but something adjacent to it—something less mediated—a quiet, almost subconscious directive that rose up and Robby didn't have any fight left in him to meet it with resistance. In that moment, he simply followed the desire, because obeying it felt easier than deciding something on the contrary, because the simple act of moving in a direction that was not away but toward something—however ill-defined—was enough to quiet the incessant, circling noise in his mind.
Fireworks bloomed overhead as he rode, sudden, violent bursts of color against the night sky, their echoes ricocheting off the buildings and collapsing back down into the streets in a series of delayed, hollow reports. He registered them only peripherally, as light more than sound, as a series of brief illuminations that caught on the edges of things—windows, pavement, the metallic chrome of the bike—and then disappeared just as quickly, leaving the world momentarily darker for the contrast.
The wind against his skin was cool, almost startling in its immediacy, a clean, unmediated sensation that cut through the residue of the day—the heat, the sweat, the accumulated weight of hours spent in rooms where the air never quite moved and everything felt faintly recycled. Being on the Bonneville was, though just for a few minutes at least, a kind of relief, not because it solved anything, but because it required nothing of him beyond presence, beyond the simple fact of being there, moving forward, the road unspooling beneath him in a way that felt, if not purposeful, then at least inevitable.
One moment he is riding, and the next he is standing, helmet in hand, in front of Jack's house, the quiet of the porch a stark contrast to the noise he has left behind. It is only then, in the relative stillness, that he feels the return of himself, the reassertion of thought, of awareness, of all the things that had been, briefly, held at bay.
His shoulders slump as he stands in the doorway, the familiar, almost imperceptible shift from outward competence to inward fatigue occurring with such regularity it has become its own kind of ritual. His pockets feel wrong—lighter, emptier—without the usual weight of his own keys now given to Whitaker, and the absence registers not just as a physical discrepancy but as something more disorienting, a small but tangible reminder that he is not, in this moment, oriented toward his own usual space, his own usual way of living. Everything has changed because he has made it so. He has so thoroughly and effectively taken a red pen to his own life he has managed to even remove himself from it.
And yet, beneath the fabric of his cargos, there is the key to Jack's house, pressing faintly into his thigh with each movement, a presence that is both reassuring and unsettling in equal measure.
Robby lets himself inside, the quiet click of the lock sounding loudly in the stillness of the house. The air inside is cooler, and carrying with it the faint, indistinct scent of Jack—his soap, maybe, or his cologne—and Robby pauses for a moment just inside the threshold, allowing himself to register that he has, in fact, come here.
He shrugs his backpack off in the hallway, letting it fall with a soft thud against the wall, a small signal of his presence to save Jack from an unnecessary fright at a figure in his bed. He hangs his coat on the front hook, the gesture feeling oddly significant, as though it marks a transition from one state to another, from movement to stillness, from walking out to, well. Walking back in, he supposes, his heart doing a traitorous lurch at the thought.
Toeing off his shoes, he rolls his neck, slow and deliberate, feeling the vertebrae shift and release in a series of small, satisfying pops, the gathered tension of the day loosening incrementally. It's a physical relief more than anything else, a reminder that his body, at least, is still responsive, still capable of recalibration even when his mind feels fixed in place.
He moves into the kitchen and pours himself a glass of water, watching absently as it fills, the clear liquid sloshing against the sides as it rises steadily toward the rim.
He takes a sip, the water cool against his tongue, and leans back against the counter, the glass held loosely in his hand, wondering how the hell it was that he had gotten himself into this mess.
It had begun, in earnest, after PittFest, but it had also begun months before that, after the usual waking nightmare that was working in the PTMC Emergency Department, and it had begun even as late as this morning, after Al-Hashimi's wunderkind bit that wore off pretty quickly within the first forty minutes of meeting her.
It should have been enough of a red flag that it was Gloria who'd suggested the sabbatical to him. When he'd voiced his concerns to Dana, she'd been his ever reliable voice of reason, pointing to her own sabbatical and the wonders it was doing for her. It was a necessary evil, she reassured him. It was nothing to worry about. At the time, he had believed her. At the time, she really did seem better, happier.
He hadn't asked Jack about it, and he wonders now if maybe that was where he went wrong. But then again, he hadn't asked Jack about a lot of things; and on this particular matter, the words always seemed to get lodged in his throat and his skin tightened and got prickly at the thoughts of Jack agreeing readily for him to leave, as if it would have been proof that this thing between them— this thing they'd been doing off and on for seven years—was legitimately immaterial. It would be unfair to be upset by that, considering that it was Robby, always, who put a stop to it every time, Robby who went out of his way to find a new woman to fall into bed with, to put some distance between Jack and him until it became just beers in the park again. But Robby was a deeply unfair man, so while he had no right to be upset at the dynamic that he had not only created but demanded between them, he was also the one who came crawling back, every time. And every time, it was Jack who accepted him back with open arms and a knowing smile, and Robby no longer gets annoyed when the other man quips "I could set my watch by you, brother."
But the truth was simpler and uglier than Robby's fear of getting hurt: Robby didn't ask because Jack might not have agreed, and Robby didn't have a contingency plan for Jack asking Robby to choose him; to choose this thing between them.
And worse than that—though he would not, even here, even alone, allow himself to say it plainly—was the quiet, corrosive certainty that if Jack did ask, if he asked Robby simply, to stay, Robby would say yes, and in that yes would be the beginning of something he did not know how to survive, had never been able to survive. Because loving Jack was not, as he had once tried to convince himself, a matter of appetite or timing or proximity; it was not one of those manageable affections he had experienced before, the kind that could be indulged and then set aside, folded neatly back into the life he had already built. His feelings for Jack altered the scale of things, that made other attachments feel provisional by comparison, and demanded that he reorder himself around it, and Robby did not trust what would be left of him if he ever did that.
He did not trust the version of himself who would wake each day with Jack as the fixed point, the axis around which everything else turned; he did not trust how much he would need him, how that need would grow teeth, would become a dependency he could neither justify nor control. He had spent his entire life learning how to stand in the breach, how to be left behind again and again as the people around you either left of their own volition or by mortality's claws, how to be the one others leaned on, how to carry without asking to be carried in return; and here was Jack, who consistently resisted that logic that without even trying, making Robby want—obscenely, humiliatingly—to be known in full and kept anyway, to be chosen, day after day.
And what would happen, then, if that was taken from him? If Jack left, or changed, or simply ceased to love him in the particular, consuming way Robby suspected he might? It would not be like the other losses, the ones he had survived and displaced into the dark parts of him he refused to look at too long; for Jack to leave Robby behind would be something more final, more disorganizing, because it would not just be Jack he lost but the version of himself that had dared to build a life around him.
So Robby did what he had always done in the face of anything that threatened to unmake him: he stepped back and told himself there would be time later and that clarity would arrive of its own accord. But beneath all of that was the truth he could not outrun, no matter how far or how fast he rode: that he was not afraid of loving Jack because it might hurt him, but because it might not stop, because it might root itself so deeply inside him that there would be no clean way to extract it, no version of his life in which Jack was not, irrevocably, the thing he could live without.
He finishes his glass of water, washes the cup out in the sink and leaves it drying on the rack. As he goes to turn, his eye snags on something— a portrait of Kerry, and Jack, smiling, on their wedding day, incandescently happy. It was one of only two relics Jack displayed of her, three if you counted his ring.
He feels the guilt rise like bile from his stomach as he stares into the black-and-white face of this woman—this woman who had loved Jack, he was sure, with a depth and fullness that mirrored his own—and it was that recognition, more than anything, that unmoored him: that he was not singular in his adoration of Jack, not exceptional, but part of a lineage of people who had held Jack carefully and reverently, and that he, unlike her, had fumbled that care, had taken something that demanded steadiness and met it instead with hesitation and retreat, with all the small violences of his fear.
His guilt is not the clean kind, not the kind that has borders and logic and can therefore be addressed, amended, forgiven. No, what he feels about his actions toward Jack is something thicker, more pervasive, a slow, spreading thing that seeps into him as he stares—because the photograph does not accuse him, exactly and yet it contains within it a kind of unbearable evidence: that Jack had once belonged, wholly and without fracture, to a life and a love that made sense; that there had been a version of him that smiled like that, open and unguarded, a man for whom happiness did not feel provisional, or borrowed, or contingent upon another person's ability to stay.
Robby finds himself studying the details of the photograph as if they might indict him further—the angle of Jack's shoulders, relaxed in a way he rarely sees now; the way Kerry leans into him with the easy certainty of someone who knows, without question, that she is wanted there. There is no negotiation in their posture, no careful calibration of distance, no sense that either of them is bracing for departure. It is, Robby realizes with a kind of dull horror, a closed circuit: self-sustaining and complete.
And what has he done, stepping into the aftermath of that? What has he presumed, inserting himself into the long shadow of a life that ended but did not, in any meaningful way, conclude? Because that is the part he cannot escape—that Kerry is not gone in the way her absence suggests, not really; she persists here, in these small, deliberate preservations, in the ring Jack still turns absently on his finger, in the careful sparseness of her presence, as though too much would dilute it, make it commonplace, and too little would risk forgetting.
And Robby, who has always prided himself on knowing where he stands, on understanding the boundaries of a thing, realizes that he has trespassed into something he does not fully comprehend. Not replaced—never that, he is not so arrogant—but altered, perhaps, bent slightly out of shape simply by his presence.
There is something almost obscene in it, he thinks, the way he has taken what Jack offered—imperfect, fractured, but real—and handled it so carelessly, as though it were not in conversation with this other, prior love, as though Robby were not, in some quiet and inescapable way, accountable to it.
Because Kerry had loved Jack. That much is indisputable, visible even here, flattened into monochrome but no less vivid for it. And Jack had loved her—still loves her, Robby knows, in that enduring, subterranean way grief allows, where love is not diminished but simply rerouted, forced to exist without its object.
And what, then, has Robby done with that love, when it was placed, however partially, in his hands?
The answer comes to him with a sickening clarity: he has been careless with it. Worse than careless—he has been afraid of it, and in his fear, he has pushed it, tested it, withheld from it, as though by doing so he might lessen its weight, make it something he could carry without consequence.
He looks again at the photograph, at Kerry's face, and for a moment he feels something almost like the urge to apologize, which is absurd and unplaceable, because to whom would he direct it? To her, for what he has done to the man she loved? To Jack, for failing to meet that love with anything resembling steadiness? To himself, for recognizing all of this and still, somehow, not knowing how to be different?
His guilt tightens, sharpens, and becomes briefly unbearable.
So Robby does what he has always done when confronted with something he cannot fix: he retreats. He severs his gaze first, because that is the easiest cut to make, turns his head as though the act itself might undo what he has seen, might grant him absolution.
He turns his back on the photograph, on Kerry's bright, unknowing smile, on the version of Jack that existed before him and, perhaps, more wholly than he ever will again.
And then Robby leaves the kitchen, carrying the guilt with him, undiminished, into the dark of the bedroom.
A few weeks before Gloria had suggested the sabbatical, about a month after PittFest, they'd both come off a rare back-to-back shift— Jack swapping to a day shift to attend some board meeting with Robby, assessing the efficacy of their MCI protocols. That evening, after handover, they left their shift to be greeted by the kind of rain that made the ambulance bay look like a shipping dock. Robby's scrubs were soaked through within a minute of making it to the parking lot, and without comment Jack had driven him to his apartment, tossed their scrubs in the dryer, reheated leftovers, and then fallen asleep on the couch halfway through some documentary Robby had pretended to be interested in.
It had been nothing, mind-numbingly mundane; they didn't even have sex.
And Robby had lain there on the couch, his feet on Jack's lap, and realized with a kind of clinical horror that if he stayed much longer he'd start wanting things— real things, future things— and Robby had never survived wanting anything he couldn't have.
Seven years of this dance between them, of leaving and returning, of the same rhythm over and over: the two of them, bright and terrifying in their brilliance, and Robby vanishing into someone else's arms for a measure of distance he thought he needed. Long enough to feel untethered, long enough to convince himself he was free, long enough to forget, just for a little, that he was coming back.
And the women—fleeting sparks he chased like a fever—blurred together into a gallery of brief distractions, each one a rehearsal for returning to Jack. Faces, voices, kisses that burned for a moment before fading, leaving him hollow and restless. Seven weeks of wanting nothing more than attention, then a slow, inevitable creeping hunger that only Jack could fill.
And then, with Jack's hands resting on Robby's ankle, his hair tousled from a hard day's work yet looking relaxed and almost childlike as he dozed, Robby felt that old pull in reverse. The itch wasn't the same—it was deeper, more dangerous. With Jack, wanting wasn't a game, because Robby was starting to realise that the wanting wasn't temporary, and that terrified him more than loneliness ever had.
Robby half hated Jack for this dependence Robby had on him, and half loved him for it. And he wholly hated Jack for the way he kept pushing therapy, and loathed himself by double measure when inevitably, whatever therapist foisted upon him by Jack or Caleb or both wouldn't be right or quite hit the imaginary mark Robby had set for them.
Talking about his feelings made him feel sick, and it made him cry, and he hated crying, and he hated entertaining idiots who thought they knew what his job was like just because they had a college degree with a price tag to match his. And he hated that he was becoming meaner and more isolated from the world, but day by day his fuse got shorter and his words became sharper, and it really did seem like the nicest thing to do; to remove himself, slowly, from the lives of those he cared about.
So, when Gloria asked about going on a sabbatical later that week, he'd told her he'd think about it. And think he did. For a month, thinking about it was all he did.
He had thought about it for long enough that he was able to map out the whole sabbatical like a clinical trial in his head. Subject A will remove himself from the familiar environment. Subject A will attempt to experience rest. Subject A will schedule, and follow through with, the nervous breakdown he's been flirting with for the better part of a decade. Confounding variables include unresolved romantic entanglements, untreated trauma responses, and the subject's charming predisposition toward self-destructive behavior.
Every time he tried to imagine himself staying— staying at PTMC, staying in Pittsburgh, staying with Jack— his brain short-circuited somewhere between "staying" and "with."
He thought on it long enough for the idea to calcify into inevitability, long enough that when Gloria brought it up a second time in a week— casually, folding her arms in the break room, saying something about "burnout metrics" and "professional and personal renewal"— he didn't even argue.
The more he imagined leaving, the less oxygen there seemed to be in staying. It was like those disaster drills they ran once a year: identify the exits, assess the damage, triage yourself if you must.
So when Gloria handed him the sabbatical paperwork, a thick stack of alabaster white paper, he signed his name without reading most of it. A beginning and end date was chosen, a phrase was repeated— professional development, personal rest— and no one seemed to notice that Robby kept nodding as if someone had asked him a question he didn't hear; he hadn't said yes to the sabbatical so much as he stopped saying no.
But he can't absolve himself of all responsibility, because he had filled in the blanks, he'd signed on the dotted line. He pretended it was about medicine, about him. He went out for a drink to celebrate when HR came back to let him know his sabbatical had been approved. He met Katherine there that night, a familiar face in a crowd of familiar faces, because it was literally two blocks from the hospital. But he smiled anyway, and flirted back, and asked for her number, and even told her what had him drinking top shelf whiskey on a weeknight.
He told himself, and others when they asked (all with varying levels of disbelief) that it was about burnout, about professional stagnation, about finally experiencing a work/life balance. And sure, that was all true. But the part he didn't say out loud— the real part— was that Jack had put his clothes in the dryer and fallen asleep on his couch and Robby hadn't known how to breathe for hours afterward.
Jack said nothing, all the while, and Robby tried not to be hurt by it— which was a stupid, egotistical and selfish thing to feel, but he was a stupid, egotistical and selfish man who'd got himself into this mess in the first place, and was more than happy to throw a tantrum about it all the while.
And now, nearly eight months after the fact, the day was coming; he was approaching the precipice which beforehand had seemed unfathomable to him a year prior.
Robby has no plans to wear a helmet, or check the weather, and he hasn't told anyone his route. He's said he wants the freedom of the open road, but what he means is: maybe it will kill him, maybe it won't. Really, it's the oldest game he knows— roll the dice, see if the universe cares enough to intervene.
"Robby?"
His name, from Jack's lips, enters the room quietly, almost cautiously, as though it is unsure of its reception, and Robby registers it not as a word at first but as a disturbance in the air, a shift in the delicate and temporary stillness he has constructed around himself. He does not open his eyes immediately. Instead, he lingers in that half-state between sleep and waking, where sensation arrives before thought, where the body understands what the mind has not yet caught up to: the soft weight of the mattress beneath him that is not his own, the unfamiliar arrangement of shadows behind his closed lids, the faint, unmistakable presence of another person in the room.
He becomes aware, then, of the shape of himself as he lies there—curled slightly inward, one arm tucked beneath the pillow, as though in some unconscious attempt to make himself smaller, less obtrusive—and with that awareness comes the slow, creeping recollection of how he got here, not in any linear or coherent sequence, but in fragments: the ride, the hallway, the quiet click of the lock, the decision—if it can be called that—to lie down just for a moment.
"Robby?" Jack says again, louder now, and there is something in his voice—something tentative, edged with a kind of disbelief—that pulls Robby the rest of the way into wakefulness.
He opens his eyes.
For a second, the room feels disjointed, unreal, as though it has been assembled around him while he slept, and then it resolves: the familiar, careful order of Jack's space, the dim light filtering in from the street, and Jack himself, standing just inside the doorway, still half in shadow, as if he has not yet decided whether to fully enter.
There is a pause—brief, but dense with unarticulated things—in which neither of them moves, and Robby becomes acutely aware of the fact of himself here, in Jack's bed, in Jack's room, occupying a space he has not been explicitly given permission to occupy, and yet has taken all the same.
He pushes himself up slowly, his movement unhurried, as though buying himself time he does not quite know how to use, and as he does so he feels the last remnants of sleep fall away, replaced by something sharper, more immediate: the awareness of Jack's gaze on him, the quiet scrutiny of it.
"Are you still going on your roadtrip?" Jack asks, and Robby's gut roils at the hope in it, and the knowledge that he will have to let Jack down again.
He can't speak the words, so he just nods them, and averts his eyes from where he's sure Jack's face has dissolved from cautious hope to disappointment.
"Well, hell, Robby, why are you here, then?"
The question doesn't so much startle him as it does hit him with a kind of dull, inevitable recognition, as though it has been waiting, patient and unspectacular, for one of them to finally give it voice, and Robby feels, with a flicker of irritation he cannot quite justify, that it is unfair of Jack to be the one to say it aloud, to force it out of that safer, internal register where it could remain half-formed and therefore deniable. He looks at the other man, and there is a moment—brief, and betraying—where he knows his own expression has slipped into something unguarded, something too close to confusion, as if he has been asked to account for the very decision that landed him in Jack's bed; a decision he couldn't explain with all the time, all the vocabulary, in the world because it continually defies even his own logic.
"If you're so sure," Jack continues, and there is something in his voice now that Robby cannot quite name but recognizes all the same, a strain that sits just beneath the surface of it, taut and carefully managed, "If you're so sure this is what you want—then why are you here? Why did you come back, here, to my house, to sleep in my bed? Why didn't you just keep going?"
Robby inhales, opens his mouth, but nothing coherent presents itself; the answer exists, he knows it does, but it is lodged somewhere deeper than language, somewhere he lost the translation to, or maybe never had. He breaks away from Jack's gaze instead, his eyes drifting upward, fixing on the uneven line where the wall meets the ceiling, as if the answer might be written there in script, as if he might simply read it off and be spared the indignity of claiming it.
He could lie, he suddenly thinks. He could say he came back to get his spare house keys, once given to Jack. But the thought leaves him as soon as it comes. He could never lie to Jack—because it was not simply a matter of principle or habit, not some moral uprightness he could point to and say this is the line I will not cross, but something far more ingrained and, in its own way, far more damning: that with Jack, there had never been the possibility of concealment to begin with, from the very first moment they had recognized something in one another that rendered dishonesty not just difficult but structurally impossible, like trying to build a wall in a place where the ground would not hold it.
And it occurs to him, dimly, that this—this unwillingness, this incapacity to lie—is also why Jack has seen him at his worst, why Robby has never barred the door when the cracks began to show, why he has stood there, again and again, and allowed himself to be witnessed in those small, humiliating collapses he would rather pretend did not exist: the nights when the exhaustion tipped over into something sharper, more volatile, when he found himself on the roof, on the wrong side of the railings, when the words left him entirely and he was reduced to something quieter and more animal, just to breath and the involuntary betrayal of tears.
Because it is not that Robby does not know how to hide—he does, he has done it all his life, has perfected the careful partitioning of self required to move through the world as he does, competent and composed and unassailable—but that with Jack, the effort itself feels absurd, like performing a trick for someone who already knows how it ends. Jack looks at him and sees not the version Robby assembles for everyone else, but the sum of him: the competence and the fracture, the steadiness and the slow, accumulating damage beneath it. And so Robby, without ever quite deciding to, stopped trying.
It is why he had not turned away earlier that day, when Jack asked him—plainly, directly, with that same unbearable clarity—why on earth are you going? People talk, that's death wish behaviour. It is why he had answered, haltingly and without finesse, offering up the truth in pieces rather than constructing something neater, more palatable. Anyone else, he might have deflected, might have softened it into something logistical, professional, temporary; he might have said I need a break, or it's just for a while, or any number of half-truths that would have satisfied the question without exposing the rot beneath it.
But Jack had asked, and so Robby had told him. Not exactly coherently, but honestly—because that is the other thing, he realizes now with a kind of weary resignation: that honesty, with Jack, has never been synonymous with clarity. It is often messy, incomplete, frustratingly inarticulate. But it is always, at its core, true.
And so the lie dies in his throat before it can take shape, dissolving into nothing, leaving only the far more difficult task of saying what he means.
"Why did you come?" Jack asks again, softer now, and it is the softness that unsettles him more than the insistence had, because it suggests a patience Robby does not deserve, a willingness to wait for something Robby is not sure he can give.
You, Robby thinks, with a clarity that feels almost obscene in its simplicity, and immediately recoils from it, because to say it—to even allow it to exist unchallenged for more than a second—is to collapse the careful distance he has been trying, with varying degrees of success, to construct between himself and this thing, whatever it is, this gravity that seems to pull him, repeatedly and against his better judgment, back into Jack's orbit.
"You said it yourself," Jack is saying, moving closer. "Whitaker's got his new bachelor pad, apparently, and up until I left you at the hospital you were still insisting that you wanted to be out of here tonight, halfway gone already. So why are you here?"
"That's a stupid question," Robby says, because dismissal is easier than confession, because it buys him a fraction of time in which he does not have to confront the fact that he does not, in any meaningful sense, have an answer that will satisfy either of them. He hears how hollow it sounds, how insufficient, and he hates himself for it more than anything else he's ever done to Jack in that minute.
There is a pause, and then Jack exhales, something brief and disbelieving, and when he speaks again it is with a kind of brittle composure that Robby recognizes as the precursor to something else, something less contained.
"Alright," Jack says, his jaw snapping closed after every word, almost biting them out. "Fine. Be that way. Go on, then. Go. Get back on the bike, hit the road, do whatever it is you think you need to do."
Robby doesn't move, and he cannot, in that moment, entirely explain why; it is not defiance, not exactly, and not hesitation in the way he might have once understood it, but something more inert, as though his body has simply refused to obey a directive his mind is no longer certain it endorses.
"Go," Jack repeats, and there is something sharper in it now, something that edges less toward anger and more towards hurt. And then Jack is in front of him, closer than he expects, his hand coming up—quick, decisive—to cup Robby's jaw, thumb and forefinger pressing just firmly enough to tilt his face upward, to force him into that line of sight he has been so carefully avoiding.
"Look at me."
Robby does, because there is nothing else to do, and there is a moment, suspended and fragile, in which he is acutely aware of the proximity between them, of the steadiness of Jack's gaze, of the fact that there is nowhere, in this narrow space, to conceal himself.
"Now listen to me," Jack says, and his voice has changed, lowered into something controlled but no less intense for it. "If you go out there and something happens to you—if you die, or you so much as get a scratch—"
Robby feels the words land before he has even processed them, a sharp, physical drop somewhere beneath his sternum, as though his body has understood the implication faster than his mind can.
"I will go to the nearest store, I will buy a gun, and I will put a bullet through my head," Jack continues, with a calm that is profoundly destabilizing. "And then I will follow you, wherever the hell you've gone, and I will haunt you for the rest of your days. Do you copy, Mike?"
"Jack—" Robby says, and there is something in his voice now he cannot quite suppress, something like alarm, or recognition, or both, because there it is, suddenly, stripped of all ambiguity: the extent to which Jack has, knowingly or not, tethered himself to him.
And isn't that it, really? Isn't that the thing he has been circling, refusing to name?
Because it is not just that Jack loves him, or something adjacent to it—it is that Jack's life, in some quiet but undeniable way, has come to include Robby as his fixed point, as something non-negotiable, and the weight of that realization is immediate and suffocating, because it demands, in return, something Robby does not know how to give without dismantling himself in the process.
"Go," Jack says again, cutting him off, though his voice has softened, if anything, become steadier. "Do it. I'm giving you permission. Go out into the big wide beyond."
"I— Jack," he says, desperately, and then finally, finally, really looks at him, and hopes that his expression translates his own emotional turmoil at this whole thing that's gone seven ways to hell in a handbasket before his very eyes. "I'm not going out there to die, I promise." He snakes his hand out from under the comforter, wrapping it around Jack's wrist, swiping his thumb gently over the velvety skin that covers Jack's median cephalic vein, feeling the thrumming of it. "I'm just... I'm going out there to see if I still want to live."
"Mike, don't say shit like that," Jack says, almost begging. "How can I let you go, when you talk like that?"
"It's just three months," Robby reasons.
"Three months, and then you're going to come back," Jack says, turning his hand to grip Robby's own wrist in turn. "You're going to come back here, and you're going to get your head on straight, and you're going to get the help that you need."
And then, Robby doesn't know who does what (isn't that always the way with them? It's him and Jack, never one without the other), but all of sudden Jack's lips are ghosting over Robby's own, and Robby, helpless to the magnetic pull of Jack, crashes into him, his lips insistent against Jack's, licking into his mouth, trying to commit the wet hot feel of him to memory.
They neck like teenagers for God knows how long, just feeling each other, slow and steady at certain points and almost frenzied in others, their hands roaming from hips to napes of neck to hair.
Jack pulls away first, his hair sticking up from the indents of Robby's fingers, his lips bright and shiny, his breathing hard. He looks at Robby, his eyes sorrowful and alight in equal measure.
"Do you know how scared you make me?" Jack whispers. "I have to let you go off into the world like this and I have no clue if you're going to come back."
Robby's mouth dries as he tries to swallow down the shame he feels. "I— It will make me better, I promise."
And Jack... Jack just looks sad, despondent even. Robby can see how it's eating him up, his inability to get through to Robby, even though Robby himself knows there is no perfect word or medicinal cocktail that will fix him; just as Jack knows. The only cure for what he is feeling is your own, firm resolve, in which Robby is decidedly deficient. "Just... Jesus, Robby. Just come back. Not to me, or even to the Pitt, just... come back."
"But what the fuck am I without those things? Without the Pitt? Without the medicine? Without all my fucked up relationships?" Robby whispers, hating how broken he sounds, trusting Jack once more with this tiny, small and fragile honest piece of himself. He wants to tell Jack everything—about the silence at home, the way the looming spectre of death echoes in every quiet corner of his mind, the fog he's been walking through for years, growing thicker and thicker that he can't quite put his finger on the exact moment he stopped being able to see through it. But the words stick somewhere in his throat, brittle and sharp, and he can't make them safe enough to say.
Jack's mouth turns down, incredulous. "Is that what this is about?" he asks. "Brother, therapy is cheaper and closer."
Robby shakes his head, biting out a frustrated groan. He wishes it were as simple as that. "I'll be okay. It'll— Jack, I will be fine. It's medicine, in its own way."
He thinks of his sabbatical as a kind of lifeline—something external to grab onto before the silence swallows him entirely. Not a cure, not even a hope of one—but a chance to keep moving, to keep breathing, to keep existing. He wishes that Jack would just do him the favour of believing him, even just for tonight, so Robby can feel normal and well-adjusted for five seconds.
Jack says nothing more, just keeps watching him, and in that quiet, Robby lets himself cling to the faintest tether—In the silence, it could almost be a normal conversation. It could almost be real, be true. He could almost be fine.
He could, he could.
"Are you?" Robby asks, breaking the uneasy silence that has fallen between them.
"Am I what?"
"Going to be okay." Robby swallows. "With Dr. Al-Hashimi, and Gloria, I mean. I know you're going to have to pick up on my work load a little..." Of course, what Robby wants to say is Are you going to be okay with no one else in it with you? Are you going to be okay on the roof, by yourself? You're asking me not to crash, but can I trust you not to jump? But Robby would never say that, because that would imply that he would be doing something cruel by leaving Jack like this, that would imply that they were anything at all, it would imply that Robby was running for the hills from all of the shit he struggled to deal with on a daily basis— that they both struggled to deal with— and he was leaving Jack to fend for himself, while Robby took off into the night, it would prove true that Robby is horrible and selfish and that Jack is too lovely and kind by far.
Jack looks at him as if he's been struck blind, as if Robby's grown three heads. "I'll be fine, brother," he says, slowly.
Robby nods, once. His knuckles flex tightly around Jack's fingers, where he's caught them in a vice grip.
Words fail Robby, frequently. He's an avid reader but he's never been one for grand speeches— he can hardly get through them without crying, and so he's found reticence to be the best port of call for him. He remembers a blind reviewer once commenting on an article he'd submitted for publication that his language was reserved at best and mercenary in its minimalism at worst.
But if he could, if he could speak, right now, he'd probably tell Jack he was sorry. That he was sorry for not asking, sorry for springing this on him, sorry that he had to find out that Robby was up and leaving from a text from Lena. He might even apologise for Katherine, or Noelle, or Rebecca. But he would never apologise for the moments in between, because those? Those were the best. No one had him like Jack had him, and really, wasn't that the whole problem? Wasn't that why they were in this mess? Jack commanded a softness in him he wasn't accustomed to, that he was unable to keep up in a world of hard knocks. He melted under Jack's hands in a world that required him to be solid, sure. If he could speak honestly, earnestly, he'd tell Jack this, and more, tell Jack that he is the best thing he has ever had, and that's precisely why he can't have it because look at him— fifty-two, and not much to show for it except for a ridiculous motorbike and a string of women he can't keep around for longer than two months.
He would tell Jack that in a perfect world, this trip will end in one of two ways; he'll die a death so quick it will be essentially painless, or he'll hit his head on a rock and become magically cured of his many emotional maladies over night. He'll come back to Jack like Odysseus, like Gilgamesh, like Cú Chulainn, rid of his hamartia, having flirted with death and found it lacking, rejoicing in his life, in his love, and fixed for evermore.
And then he would tell Jack that he'd trade all of that for even just the bravery to be better, but that was the most difficult thing of all because Robby didn't really give a shit about being better, except that he wanted to be better for Jack, and that was a tall order because really, Jack was the best of them.
Robby would never in a million years be able to say any of that, though, it would demand too much eloquence, too much vocabulary from him that he wouldn't even know how to acquire let alone use. So instead, he does what he can, which is reach over, tilt Jack's chin up to expose the tanned and freckled skin of his neck, and place a kiss right by Jack's carotid artery.
"What's that?" Jack asks, but he can't temper the fond curiosity in his voice, even though his face is still set in stone.
"A present," Robby murmurs, placing another kiss softer, lower, closer to his collar bone and the hem of his t-shirt.
"I'd settle for a postcard," Jack snipes back, but he's not so slick because Robby can hear the way his voice goes breathy at the close of the sentence.
"C'mon," Robby says, taking his perfect, chiseled chin between his index and his thumb. "Let me give you a going away gift."
It is there, lodged just behind his teeth, pressing insistently against the back of his mouth as he lies there in the quiet aftermath of it, the air still thick and unsettled, his body not yet entirely his own again. He can feel the echo of Jack everywhere—on his skin, in the slowing rhythm of his pulse, in the strange, disorienting awareness of having been seen and held once more and it is precisely that, he thinks, that makes the words rise up so urgently, just on the tip of his tongue: I don't want to go. Jack, please don't let me go. Jack, please— I have to go.
The contradiction of it is almost unbearable, because both things feel equally true, equally binding, as though he has split himself cleanly into two opposing imperatives, one pulling him toward this—toward the warmth of the body beside him, toward the quiet, unguarded intimacy of this room, toward the possibility, however fragile, of staying—and the other pulling him away with equal force, insisting that this, precisely this, is why he cannot.
He turns his head slightly, not enough to look at Jack fully, but enough to register his presence, the outline of him in the dimness, and there is a moment—brief, almost imperceptible—where something in Robby loosens, something that feels like longing, like the desire to remain exactly here, suspended in this narrow, borrowed peace where nothing has yet been named and therefore nothing has yet been lost.
But Robby knows—better than most, better than he would ever willingly admit—that moments like this are not self-contained, that they do not exist in isolation but extend outward, threading themselves into the larger fabric of a life until they become structural, until they begin to dictate the shape of things. And leaving, he knows, is not a neutral act, not something he alone will absorb, but something that reverberates, that alters the architecture of another person's life in ways that are often only understood too late.
To stay would be to answer the question Jack has never deigned to ask; it would be to take this—this fragile, deliberately undefined thing between them—and give it weight and consequence. It would mean allowing this moment to become something more than a moment, to extend beyond the boundaries of this bed, this night, into something sustained, something that demands a kind of constancy Robby does not trust himself to give to the man he trusts the most.
And leaving—well.
Leaving is its own kind of answer. Not a kind one, not an easy one, but one he understands, one he has practiced, one that allows him to take something vast and unmanageable and reduce it, over time and distance, into something he can carry without it consuming him. Leaving is not a neutral act; Robby knows that better than anyone.
He exhales, slow and measured, steadying himself against the weight of his own thoughts, against the impulse—still there, still pressing—to turn toward Jack and say the words he knows he cannot take back.
"I'm still going," he says at last, instead, his voice quieter than he intends, roughened slightly by the residue of everything that has just passed between them. "I'm sorry, Jack."
There is a pause, and in it Robby becomes acutely aware of the space between them—not physical, not exactly, but something more intangible, something that has already begun to reassert itself even as the warmth of their closeness remains.
"But I came here first," he adds, after a moment, and he keeps his gaze fixed somewhere just past Jack, does not trust himself to look directly at him as he says it, because anything more precise, anything that edges closer to the truth of it, would risk undoing the fragile control he has managed to maintain.
He doesn't elaborate; he can't. Because that is the answer, whether Jack accepts it or not, whether Robby himself fully understands it or not.
Not that he's staying; but that, before he could leave, he had to come back.