Work Text:
'Til we find our way in the dark and out of harm
You can run away with me anytime you want
It's dark beneath the covers of Jack's bed, the room itself barely visible against the drawn blackout curtains and the weak glow of the sunrise slipping under the bedroom door from the hallway in a thin blade of light.
That's how Jack finds him: not asleep but folded inward so tightly it's as though Robby is trying to disappear inside himself, knees drawn to his chest, the palm of one hand pressed hard against his mouth to smother the sound of his breathing, of his grief, of whatever animal panic still lives in him after the long ride to Jack's house.
Robby lies there, wrapped in Jack's blanket and the sweet smell of him; sick with it, with the thought of getting back on the bike, with the memory of the asphalt rushing beneath him and the wind through his hair and his head, helmetless. With nothing else to distract but the smell of Jack's fabric softener and the feel of his well worn cotton sheets, Robby is powerless to finally face the horrifying, nauseating understanding of what he had almost done that night, setting off into the great wide beyond under the cover of night; as if the darkness might offer him some comfort like Jack always said it did, as though doing it at night would render the act of his death invisible, like a magic trick; there one minute and gone the next. Like it would become permissible, forgivable.
The actual understanding of what he had set out to do no longer presents itself in the same abstract way it had before, when he was trying to convince himself and everyone else it was just a harmless adrenaline rush, but now he acknowledges it literally, physically, the knowledge sitting inside him like poison, and his stomach turns sharply as he remembers Jack's arms around him in Trauma 2, remembers the strength of them, the desperation in them, the way Jack had held onto him with both hands as though Robby were something already halfway gone; held him the same way that later Robby would hold Baby Jane Doe, swaddled and impossibly small against his chest beneath the harsh fluorescent lights of that room heavy with old ghosts, with the sediment and sentiment of every loss Robby had ever carried, every child he couldn't save, every person he had watched slip away while medicine and prayer and effort failed them, and it was there, standing in the middle of all Robby's deepest griefs and most profound regrets while the baby slept warm and oblivious against his heartbeat, that Robby finally understood the careless, flippant brutality with which he had been gambling his own life, tossing it away like it belonged to no one, like it would leave no wound behind when it was gone.
And what terrified him most was not the fear of dying but the sudden, unbearable knowledge that someone had asked him not to; because Jack had begged him to stay.
He didn't order Robby, or scold him, or reason with him in the clipped professional cadence they both donned in the Pitt, but begged, his voice rough and breaking around the edges, his face stricken in the way Robby had only seen once before; when he told Robby that Annie had died. It had taken years off of him, Robby remembers, it made him look younger—not just younger, but childlike, it made him naive and innocent as he voiced to Robby this profound loss that he couldn't understand, giving it to Robby as if it was his to make sense of, because Jack couldn't.
The memory of it hollows him out now because Jack had looked at him, earlier that day, like losing Robby would once again unmake something fundamental in Jack's world, as though Robby's existence, like Annie's, mattered to Jack in a way Robby had never allowed himself to believe it could; and so the desire to stay rooted itself inside him then, thin and fragile and trembling as the flame of the matches his Bubbe used for the candles before Kiddush, not because he suddenly loved his life or believed in the future or thought himself worthy of survival, but because Jack had asked it of him, and Robby had always bent instinctively toward Jack's will, the same way flowers turn helplessly toward light.
Terrified to leave, more terrified to stay, unable to bear the thought of being alone with himself for even a single hour longer, he did the only thing he had ever known how to do in moments like this, which was run blindly toward the person who frightened and comforted him in equal measure.
"Robby?"
The bed, shifting. Jack's weight dipping the mattress as he sits down by the left edge of it. The sound of his prosthesis coming undone, quick under Jack's practiced hands. He doesn't even bother to do his cursory skin check as he immediately turns, slipping under the blankets, prying Robby's hands away from where they're now clutched either side of his face, a half hearted attempt to muffle his sobs.
"Robby, Mike, you're okay. I got you. You're okay."
"I'm sorry," Robby gasps eventually, the words breaking apart through the deep, hiccuping sobs that hurt his ribs, his throat, his lungs. "I couldn't go home and I don't want to go. I'm sorry, Jack."
And Jack—dear, exhausted Jack, whose compassion always seems to survive long past the point any normal person's would have curdled into resentment—says nothing at first, only grips Robby's hands tighter in his own, bites his lip, momentarily inert and taken aback by the sheer collapse of the man before him; such a sorry sight for sore eyes Robby must be. He brings Robby's hands up to his mouth, pressing one, singular kiss to the knuckle of his index finger.
"Mikey," he whispers, voice low enough it almost disappears between them. "You're okay now, brother. I got you."
Afterward, when Robby's crying has lessened into something marginally more controllable, they lie there facing each other in the dark, foreheads resting together, hands still tangled between them, breaths gradually falling into the same rhythm while the world beyond the bedroom walls continues on, apathetic and indifferent—traffic lights change colour, the good people of Pittsburgh begin their shifts, strangers order their coffees, revellers nurse their hangovers, and many millions of lives carry on, untouched by the enormity of this small and fragile moment—and slowly, so slowly, Robby feels the panic ebb, feels the terrible shaking quiet, feels the tears cooling and drying on his cheeks while Jack remains there, unmoving and certain beside him, holding him together simply by refusing to let go.
Many, many hours later, so many that Robby can't quite tell when exactly in the day it is, he gets up, takes a piss and avoids his reflection in the mirror, knowing that he'll hate the reflection he sees: the red rimmed eyes and unkempt beard, the hair mussed by his own tugging at it during that long night of the tortured soul. He changes into the worn sleep pants and faded Bruce Springsteen t-shirt that Jack mercifully left out for him. When he pads into the kitchen, Jack has changed out of his work clothes, too, into low hanging grey sweatpants and an old army t-shirt that stretches across his biceps in a way that would look, frankly, ridiculous on anyone else were it not Jack.
"Hey, brother," Jack says evenly, his voice dragging Robby's eyes up and away from the peek of the elastic band of his boxers—is he wearing Calvin Kleins?
Robby doesn't know what look is on his face but blessedly, it mustn't be outright lust, but instead some kind of weird thousand yard stare, because Jack's face is soft with sympathy as he asks him, "How you doing this morning?"
"What time is it?" Robby asks, voice scratchy with sleep and the remnants of his breakdown.
"Two o'clock in the afternoon," Jack says, grabbing a mug from the counter. "Coffee?"
"Please," Robby says, sitting down by the kitchen island. "Sorry, did I fuck up your sleep schedule?"
Jack waves him off, or gives the impression of it—pretty hard to do while on crutches, though he's a whiz at them. "Don't be stupid."
Jack putters around the kitchen, in his element. Breakfast is a religion to him; Robby supposes partially due to his working pattern, and partially because he loves fried food and sweet things in equal measure and breakfast is one of the few meals where both are not only complimentary to one another, but, according to Jack, necessary to a full and hearty start (or end) to your morning.
Robby watches him, unable to stop the curl of warmth bloom in his chest as Jack bops his head to Jack Johnson playing low through his speakers;
It will defeat you then teach you to get back up
After it takes away all that you've learned to love
"You always make a spread like this after a shift like that?" Robby asks over the rim of his mug, the coffee rich and delicious as it always is in Jack's house. Everything always tastes better in Jack's house.
Jack gives a noncommittal shrug. "Only when I have very special company." He slides a plate heaped with hash browns, banana pancakes, and a side of bacon over to Robby. "Here."
He puts a glass jar of Canadian Maple Syrup down on the counter between them. "Who needs Alberta now?"
It's a risky joke, Robby can see that Jack knows it is, his eyes sparkling but his mouth turned up in an ever so slightly tentative smirk, but nonetheless, Robby barks out a laugh, mostly from the sheer absurdity of the whole situation.
Jack's shoulders sag in relief, his lips curling up into a proper smile as he redirects his attention back to his plate and begins to eat like a man starved.
Afterwards, Robby insists on cleaning up and as soon as the last dish is put on the rack to dry, he can feel his skin start to prickle. The inertia of the past while has begun to wear off, the ridiculousness of his actions beginning to catch up with him; the knowledge that he knows Jack is going to ask him why he came, why is he here, what does he need? And the worst part, of course, is that he would be right to, and the even worse part is that Robby has no clue what on earth to tell him.
Thankfully, Jack takes pity on him, and before he can be still for too long, he asks Robby, "Hey, you want a hot drop?"
When Robby nods, Jack dutifully pours him another cup, and nods to his own, steaming, on the counter. "Bring those over for me, would you?" He makes his way over to the couch, and Robby follows dutifully behind.
In fairness to Jack, he lasts two whole minutes before asking, "So, you want to tell me about last night?"
Robby's hands clench around the ceramic cup, which proclaims Let's keep the dumbfuckery to a minimum today; a secret santa gift from Parker last year. Jack's own was from Dana; My friend went to Florida and all I got was this lousy mug!
Jack speaks once more into the silence. "Don't get me wrong, brother, I was thrilled to see you here, but you were pretty rattled."
Robby squeezes his eyes closed, the tears already coming, hot and insistent and humiliating, and for a moment he feels an irrational anger toward them, toward this betrayal of his own body, which has always seemed to understand things before he does and to announce them publicly long before he has decided whether they deserve acknowledgment. He has spent so many years mastering the small arts of concealment—the tightening of his jaw, the careful arrangement of his expression, the practiced redirection of conversation away from the areas where he is weakest—that crying still feels, even now, like a failure of his discipline rather than an expression of his feeling.
"I can't—" he chokes out, his fingers drumming against the mug, "I can't go home, Jack. I gave Whitaker my keys, I asked him to house sit while I was gone."
Jack shifts closer to him, setting his mug down on the burnished oak coffee table.
"And when I got on the bike, Jack, I didn't want to die, but I really, really didn't want to live. I just wanted everything to stop. And I got scared. And I don't know what to do, and I'm such a fuck up and I have nowhere to go and—"
"Shut the fuck up," Jack says swiftly. "That's stupid, Robby. You're here. You'll always have here, you can always come here. You'll stay with me, no big deal."
Robby lets out another shuddering sob, and although he is dimly aware of the embarrassment of it, of the fact that he is sitting in Jack's living room crying with a kind of helplessness that would have horrified him at almost any other point in his life, he finds that he can no longer summon the energy required to stop himself, because what has exhausted him is not merely the panic of the previous night nor the accumulated strain of the previous months, but the effort of concealment itself, the endless labor of arranging his face and his voice and his body into something reassuring for other people, something competent and dependable and untroubled, and there is a strange relief now in the collapse of that performance— humiliating though it may be—because for the first time in longer than he can remember he is no longer attempting to convince anyone that he is fine.
For a long moment neither of them speaks.
The room is quiet except for the ticking of the clock and the music drifting from the speaker, the playlist repeating back on itself. Through the window behind Jack, Robby can see the balmy July afternoon pressing itself against the world outside, the verdant leaves on branches of the trees moving slightly in the wind, everything carrying on with a steadiness that feels almost insulting.
Jack reaches over eventually and takes Robby's coffee mug from his hands before he shatters it; it's such a small gesture, so practical and unremarkable, but it breaks something else open inside him.
He lowers his face into his hands.
Robby is so tired.
The exhaustion feels cellular now, woven through him so completely that he can no longer separate it from himself. He has spent so long running from one thing to another—one obligation, one patient, one disaster, one relationship—that he has forgotten what stillness feels like, and now that he has finally stopped moving he discovers there is no relief waiting for him there, only the accumulated weight of everything he has spent years outrunning.
Jack watches him quietly for several moments, and when he finally speaks there is no impatience in his voice, only a kind of careful concern, which almost feels worse. "How long have you been feeling like this?"
Robby wipes at his face with the heel of his hand, although the gesture is futile, because the tears continue to arrive with stubborn regularity. "I don't know," he says, voice wobbly from his outburst, and then, because the answer sounds dishonest even to him, he shakes his head and tries again. "Actually, that's not true. I do know. I just don't know when it started, exactly. But a while."
The admission seems to settle over Jack like a dark cloud.
Robby can't stand the look on Jack's face—so soft, so stricken—so he drifts away from it, eyes snagging instead on the bookshelf across the room, at the photographs scattered among the books, Annie and Jack on their wedding day, Annie and Jack and Robby at Jack's surprise 40th birthday (no small feat, but that was Annie), Jack and his sisters as kids on vacation in Sarasota; all of them recording the persistence of Jack's life despite his many seemingly insurmountable losses. Robby is struck, then, by the realization that where Jack has stared into the face of life-changing grief and persevered, Robby has crystallised there, instead. Catastrophe is easy, if you do it long enough; the body shuts down to make way for adrenaline, the only concern is the very next step. Continuity, and commitment to your life, ordinary though it may be, is much harder, demands much more; namely the willingness to keep showing up every day despite the absence of any guarantee that doing so will ever feel worthwhile.
"I thought it was burnout at first," he says eventually, his voice rough and wobbly. "Then I thought maybe it was grief; y'know, delayed, or maybe with everything with Jake, because that was like a loss, in its own way. Then I thought maybe I was just tired. And every time I figured out a name for it, I convinced myself that once I solved that particular problem everything would go back to normal, except there was always something underneath it, and every time I dug down far enough I found another thing waiting there."
Jack remains silent, which Robby appreciates, because advice would be unbearable right now and reassurance even worse, and so he continues speaking, not because he has decided to be honest but because something in him has finally become too exhausted to continue his evasions.
"And the stupid thing is that nothing even happened," he says, chuckling wetly. "Nothing dramatic, not really. All of these things that happened to me, they happen to everyone. I'm an emergency medicine physician, people die. That's the job, that's the oath I took. And y'know, Jake, he's just a kid, I know he's got all kinds of shit wrapped up in what he said to me. But I just kept waking up every morning feeling a little more disconnected than the day before, and then one day I realized I couldn't remember the last time I had been excited about anything, and after that I started noticing all these other things, like how every plan I made felt hypothetical, like I was making arrangements for someone else's future instead of my own."
Jack leans forward, resting his elbows on his knees, letting out a slow breath.
"Mike," he says carefully, "when you got on that bike last night, what exactly scared you?"
Robby looks down at his hands.
For a long time he says nothing, because he knows the answer immediately and yet recoils from it, because there is something frightening about speaking aloud the truths that have governed you in secret, and because he knows with painful certainty that once he says this thing it will become real in a way it has not been before.
Finally he inhales; exhales.
And then, staring fixedly at the cuticle he has begun to pick at, he says, "I realized that if I'd kept driving, I genuinely didn't care where I ended up, or how."
The words seem to alter the air between them; because until now they have been speaking around the problem, circling it cautiously, both of them pretending that his breakdowns, plural, first in the trauma room and then in Jack's bed, were the story when in fact it was only the symptom, and as soon as the sentence leaves his mouth Robby feels a peculiar mixture of relief and dread, as though he has finally set down something impossibly heavy only to discover that he has no idea what comes next.
Jack's expression tightens almost imperceptibly, and when he speaks next, his voice is very gentle.
"And that scared you?"
Robby laughs, although there is no humor in it.
"It scared the hell out of me," he says, and as he does he feels another wave of tears rising, because what he is remembering now is not the road to Jack's but the moment preceding it, the moment he had stopped and stood alone beneath an empty stretch of sky as the fireworks exploded above him, while the wind whistling past the buildings around him, and how suddenly he had understood that the danger was not that he wanted to die but that he had become frighteningly indifferent to whether he lived, and that realization had struck him with the force of revelation, because it exposed the extent of his own disappearance from himself, the degree to which he had been enduring rather than living, surviving rather than participating, moving through the world as though his presence within it were optional.
Jack reaches over then and places a hand on the back of Robby's neck, and the gesture is so familiar, so unremarkable, that it nearly undoes him all over again, because there are moments in a person's life when grand declarations become meaningless and what remains are these smaller acts, these ordinary demonstrations of loyalty and affection, and Robby understands suddenly that he had not come here because he possessed a plan, nor because he expected Jack to solve anything, but because some frightened part of him had wanted proof that there was still a place in the world where he did not have to earn his right to exist.
On the speaker, Jack Johnson continues to croon.
It will teach you to love what you're afraid of
After it takes away all that you've learned to love
There is a moment, only one, as ingrained in Robby's memory as the words of the Sh'ma, and insistently, without warning and completely unbidden, it will present itself to him at least once every day; sometimes at night, just before he goes to sleep, and other times in the middle of a resuscitative C-section; and each time, every time, even though now it's so familiar that Robby can almost pinpoint the thing in any given day his mind will make some convoluted connection to that moment that has become his anchor and his chain, it will knock the breath clean out of his chest and send him reeling for a few, destabilising minutes.
Robby has come to understand over the years since it happened that what makes this particular memory persist is not its intensity but rather its ordinariness, the way it occurred without announcement or consequence, the way it didn't appear to mark itself as important at the time, and yet nevertheless has rearranged something essential in him that has not since been put back into its original shape.
When Annie died, when the sepsis took her from them in a manner so abrupt and so disorientating in the sheer speed of her decline that it even took Robby and the Internal Medicine team off-kilter, Jack had been rendered almost unrecognizable by his grief; he still spoke, still moved, still occupied the same rooms, but he was no longer accessible to Robby in the way he had once been, like overnight he had learnt some new and terrible language, untranslatable to Robby.
So Robby had stayed with him in those early nights because there had been no other possible response to witnessing that kind of undoing, because leaving would have felt like abandoning Jack, and because in the absence of anything resembling instruction, he had done what he had always done when faced with Jack's pain: remain close enough to be useful, to bring water he would not drink, to sit beside him through hours that did not beckon sleep, to try and keep him tethered to a world that no longer seemed to have any coherent claim on him.
And yet, in some ways, those nights had been simpler than the ones that followed, because in the immediate aftermath of Annie's death there had at least been a structure to Jack's collapse, a rough legibility to his devastation, whereas later, when the funeral had passed and the casseroles and mourners had stopped arriving and the world had resumed its ordinary indifference to Jack's private catastrophe, what remained in Jack was something far more difficult to navigate, a silence that did not feel like absence so much as refusal, an anger that had nowhere to go and therefore turned inward, and a kind of exhausted, almost bureaucratic despair that seemed to flatten everything it touched, including Robby himself, who found that he could no longer tell whether he was helping or merely witnessing, whether his presence was an act of care or simply inertia disguised as loyalty.
The nights, they were dark; it had been late September when Annie died, the autumn just beginning to creep its way into the natural world, and when Robby thinks back to that time, he remembers October, November and December in the various hues of the gloaming; always arriving after his shift, as night began its descent, and as the season progressed, it was under the cover of night that Robby left the Pitt, arrived at Jack's, and later, would leave Jack's again; daylight became something of a myth to him, only glimpsed through the sliding doors of the ambulance bay when a trauma was rolled in.
And then there had been one night, just one, sometime maybe in December, though Robby would never be able to locate it precisely in time. They had been drinking together in a way that was not celebratory but also not quite mournful anymore, something looser than both, something that resembled, uncomfortably, the beginning of a return to ordinary life, though Robby could feel Jack resist it every step of the way, and Jack had asked him to stay as he often did in those weeks, in that half-casual, half-desperate way that had begun to characterize all of his requests, and Robby had agreed without hesitation because it had already become easier to remain there than to leave, because the guest room had slowly ceased to feel like a temporary place to him and had begun to feel very much like his own room.
But when Robby had finally gone to lie down that night, Jack had come after him and caught his wrist. And when Robby turned back and looked at him, he had seen, in Jack's face, something so exposed and so unguarded that it made the air between them feel suddenly altered, as though whatever had been quietly accumulating for months had finally pressed itself to the surface without either of them having agreed to allow it.
"No, Mike—" When Robby looked into Jack's eyes, it was like a wild animal caught in headlights. "Please. Just tonight. Please."
"Sure, Jack," he remembers responding, struck dumb by the plea. Of course, Jack. Anything you want, ever, Jack. Such was Robby's life; such was Jack's, if he ever asked.
So they lay there, in the dark, together, curled on their sides like parentheses, and Robby remembers thinking that this was not what he had expected grief to look like from the inside, because he had always imagined it as something dramatic and outward, something loud and collapsing, something that took up space in a room in a way that could be pointed to and named, which was how it had been when he lost his Zayde and then his Bubbe; it said look at me, this is where I am, and it was hard, yes, and painful, but slowly he had been able to move around it, and slowly it lost its sharp edges and its teeth, and instead, when he thought of them, which he still did often, it was less like a cavernous ravine and instead like a patch of warm sunlight that surprises you on a winter's day. Whereas what he was experiencing now with Jack and in Jack's bed, which used to be Jack and Annie's bed, was something far more private and therefore far more disorienting, a silence so complete it seemed to erase the boundaries between them, so that he could not tell where his body ended and the room began and where, if anywhere, Jack existed within that same dark. It was not a ravine, and it was not sunlight, it was worse than both; it was just nothing, at all. Just dark, all around them.
At first there had been nothing except the sound of their breathing, uneven at first and then gradually synchronizing in a way that Robby found both comforting and unbearable, because it suggested a kind of intimacy that felt illicit, as though by simply existing in proximity like this they were trespassing against some unspoken rule that governed what men were allowed to ask of one another in the aftermath of love and loss, and Robby remembers being acutely aware of the fact that if he shifted even slightly he would be able to feel Jack's warmth against him, not touching exactly, but near enough that the possibility of it became its own presence in the dark.
"I don't know how to do this," Jack had said at some point, so quietly that for a moment Robby thought he might have imagined it, and when he did not respond immediately Jack had repeated it, a little more urgently this time, as though the words themselves were slipping away from him the longer he held them outside his body, "I don't know how to do this without her."
Robby had wanted to answer in the way he always did, with something stabilizing and simple, something that could be followed like instructions, but there had been nothing in him that could meet the scale of Jack's revelation, because it was not a thing that could be solved, only endured, and so instead, Robby had simply moved closer, slowly, cautiously, as though approaching an injured bird, or some other fragile being capable of startling and of flight, until there was barely any space left between them, and Jack had not moved away, which in itself had felt like a kind of permission so profound it almost frightened him. Robby remembers that his hands shook, slightly, and remembers thinking that his hands never shook, that it was not exactly conducive to practicing medicine, nor comforting a friend. But still, with more care than he'd give a hilar flip, he reached his hand out, first his index finger, anchoring into the neck of Jack's shirt, and then when that was not met with resistance, moving his whole hand up and by Jack's neck; the heat of him, the way Robby had felt his carotid artery jump at the contact, the way Robby had tried to convey to him: You'll do it with me. I'll keep you here.
And then, after a long time, Jack had reached back for him.
Just reaching, blindly, until his hand had found Robby's wrist and held it there with a grip that was not quite strong but absolutely certain, and Robby remembers the exact moment he understood that Jack was not asking for comfort in any abstract sense but for something much more specific and much more dangerous, because what Jack was asking for was not reassurance or words or even presence, but the suspension of loneliness itself, even if only for a night, even if only in a way that neither of them would never be able to articulate afterward.
"Please," Jack had said, and this time there had been nothing in the word except exhaustion, the kind that strips language down until it becomes almost childlike in its simplicity, and Robby had felt something in him give way at the sound of it, not desire exactly, not even clarity, but a kind of terrible tenderness that he had never known what to do with, a tenderness that felt less like affection and more like recognition, as though in that moment he had seen Jack not as the man he had always been—the brother, the husband, the strong one, the one who held things together—but as someone exposed and unguarded and therefore almost unbearably vulnerable and wanting.
So he moved, closer, and closer, until his lips met Jack's, which parted under Robby's with a soft sigh.
Robby does and doesn't remember it; it was dark, and there was fumbling, but he remembers the velvet feel of Jack, the surprising softness of his hair, and more than that, the way he'd clung on to Robby for dear life, as if he were the only thing, in that moment, anchoring him to the Earth itself, and when he came, it was with Robby's name on his lips.
And later, when Jack had shifted closer without looking at him, resting his head in the crook of Robby's neck, slotting them together with legs and arms slung across Robby's torso and hips, Robby remembers the sensation of Jack's chest pressing against his, the smallest possible contact that nevertheless altered the entire architecture of the night, of what they now were to one another, and how carefully still they had both remained afterward, as though any further movement might break something neither of them understood but both of them needed desperately to remain intact.
When Robby woke the next morning, Jack had gone, maybe to the gym, or maybe to his therapist; Robby never knew, never found out. In some ways it seemed to him afterward that it didn't matter where Jack went so much as the fact that Jack had a life that continued to move even in Annie's absence, even in Robby's presence, a life with appointments and obligations and routines that didn't pause simply because Robby had given him a handjob, and so Robby had stripped the bed with a kind of careful, almost ritualistic attention, and he made it again with hands that felt slightly foreign to him, smoothing the sheets as though the act of restoring order might somehow restore him as well, and he put a load of laundry on, watching the machine fill and begin its slow rotation, seeping the bed sheets with water and soap, and then he slipped out of the house, closing the door behind him.
He had stood for a moment on the step outside, the morning air cool against his face, the sky a dull greyish purple, like a particularly nasty bruise, the sun yet to rise but the world already moving forward in its indifferent way, and it occurred to Robby that nothing about what had happened the night before had altered the structure of anything at all; not the house, not the street, not Jack's life, not even Robby's own in any immediately visible sense. Yet he carried it anyway; knew that he always would, that his life would now be parsed cleanly in half—Before That Night and After That Night, and the night in question would come to exist not as an event that could be pointed to or explained, but as something heavier and less definable, something that pressed quietly against every other that night that would come after it, and would shape Robby's life in ways he did not yet have the ability to understand.
As he began to walk away from Jack's house and back toward his own, he found himself thinking that what he had never been able to admit to himself in any sustained or honest way was not that his feelings for Jack were unresolved, but that, actually, they had already been resolved in advance, closed off long before they ever had the opportunity to become anything actionable, because there had always been Annie, and there had always been the life Jack had chosen beside her, a life that had been real and good and binding in all the ways that made any competing interior emotions Robby had felt not only impossible but morally obscene, and so whatever had existed between him and Jack—if it could even be called something that existed rather than something that simply accumulated in the spaces between Robby's ribs, in the darkest corners of his heart—had been something he had learned, over years of practice, to file away into a place inside himself that did not require resolution, only containment, and he had done so with such efficiency, such discipline, that he had come to earnestly believe that he had succeeded in ignoring it altogether, or at least in reducing it to something harmless, something inert, something that could be safely categorized as admiration or gratitude or the uncomplicated intimacy of his most cherished friendship.
But then, in the aftermath of that night, he understood that nothing had been undone, that nothing had been reduced, and that what he had called containment had in fact been nothing more than postponement, because even during the years of Jack's obnoxiously perfect marriage, even in the fullness of the happiness and stability and the rare, uncomplicated goodness of being known and chosen by Annie, there had still been moments in which desire for Jack had surfaced in Robby with a persistence that he had trained himself not to interrogate too closely, a thought here, a memory there, a flicker of attention in a room that did not belong to him, and each time he had met it with the same quiet, almost bureaucratic act of dismissal, as though he were sorting through correspondence that had been mistakenly delivered, insisting to himself that it meant nothing because it could not be allowed to mean anything, and for a long time that had been enough, or at least it had been sufficient for him to continue living without fracture.
As he walked into the last dregs of the night, with the phantom weight of Jack's arms still around him, Robby couldn't avoid the humiliating understanding that what had once been theoretical had, in a single night he would never speak of again and Jack would never acknowledge, become irrevocably material, and that the cruelest part of it was not even the fact of what had passed between them, nor the fact that it would remain unacknowledged and therefore unalterable, but the realization that even if nothing else had changed, even if Jack never reached for him again and even if Robby never again allowed himself to cross that threshold of need that had brought him there in the first place, his life had already been permanently rearranged, because he had now, just once, however briefly and under whatever conditions grief had made permissible, been held by Jack in a way that he would spend the rest of his life remembering, and worse still, desiring in a form that could never again be justified by circumstance.
So what remained for Robby was not a choice so much as an orientation, a private and irreversible continuation of wanting that could not be acted upon without consequence, and would not diminish simply because it had no permissible outlet, and as he walked he understood, with a kind of bleak and almost tender acceptance, that this was not something that would fade or resolve or return to silence, but something he would carry forward indefinitely, because wanting Jack, he knew then, was as essential to him as breathing, and did not require permission, only endurance, and he had always thought himself good at that.
Afterward, though neither of them ever discussed it, Jack returned to work after the New Year, but when the rota came out he had arranged, whether deliberately or not Robby could never determine, to work opposite shifts, and so while Robby moved through the fluorescent brightness of days spent beneath the Pitt's harsh and unrelenting lights, Jack disappeared into the hospital's nocturnal machinery, into the long dark hours when the corridors emptied and the city beyond dissolved into shadow. For months afterward it seemed to Robby that he knew Jack chiefly through evidence of his existence rather than the fact of it itself, through notes left in patient charts, through half-finished cups of coffee abandoned at nursing stations, through stories passed from one shift to another like fragments of scripture, and sometimes, if he arrived particularly early, he would get to steal a few moments with him on the roof, already leaving as Robby arrived, a figure receding into the darkness at precisely the moment Robby was stepping toward the promise of morning.
And perhaps that should have felt fitting to him, because when Robby thought back to that winter, to Annie's death and everything that had followed in its wake, what he remembered most clearly was not the bed or the kisses or the sex or even the unbearable tenderness of being held and getting to hold Jack as he always had wanted to, but the walking: that seemingly endless walk home, alone, through streets still submerged in darkness, his breath clouding before him in the cold, the city silent except for the occasional distant siren, the morning dark stretched around him like something living.
It seemed to Robby afterward that he had spent months moving through darkness toward Jack, and then years moving through darkness away from him, and that neither journey had ever truly ended. Even now, when he thought of that time, he could see himself alone beneath a sky not yet touched by dawn, and walking steadily toward a morning that never seemed to actually arrive in any real way; instead the sky just turned, imperceptibly, one shade lighter than the darkness that had preceded it.
"Robby."
Robby squeezes his eyes shut, drags the blanket tighter around his head, gathering it around himself with the desperate, irrational conviction that if he can make the darkness close enough, if he can cocoon himself deeply enough inside the sheets and sweat and the sour fug of too many hours spent sleeping, then perhaps he might be spared the indignity of existing for another few minutes.
The soft tapping of Jack's hand against the bed; "Mike."
He's already feeling the familiar, contradictory ache of it. Because while there's a part of him that wants to remain hidden, wants to burrow deeper into the dark and let the day pass over him unnoticed, there's another part, smaller but more enduring, that had already begun listening for the sound of Jack's footsteps, already measured the distance between them, already waiting to be found.
"Mmph."
"C'mon man, I got pizza for us."
Well, he might be a useless sack of shit and a ghost of his former self, but never let it be said that Michael Robinavitch would look a gift horse in the mouth.
He tugs the comforter down from his face and cool air meets him at once, brushing across skin gone overheated beneath the blanket's stale warmth.
"Did you get the—"
"—Is the Pope a Catholic? Yes, I got the dough balls. Now, come on, up."
It is eight thirty at night. Jack had been relegated to day shift after Al-Hashimi requested him to be the second on-call Attending, which, so far as Robby could make out from Jack's bitching, translated to being pretty much the only on-call Attending, because Al-Hashimi prefers to sit through meetings all day and cozy up to the big wigs, making sure the font and the coloring of the patient passports matched the advertising team's schematic, instead of actually, God forbid, practising medicine.
Robby, meanwhile, is spending his hard-won sabbatical not traversing the great plains of the United States but instead becoming intimately familiar with the topography of Jack Abbot's house, with the subtle variations in the ceiling visible from his bed, with the particular groan of the wooden floorboard in the hallway, with the way the evening sun moved slowly across the hardwood floors and disappeared again long before he ever bothered to rise and witness it. He didn't take the Bonnie west, he didn't stand beneath the vast Alberta sky he had spent months imagining, nor did he visit Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump, nor did he answer Caleb's increasingly worried calls, which accumulated in his voicemail alongside texts from Dana and queries from Whitaker about the exact scope of his house-sitting duties and a steadily expanding collection of messages whose contents he never quite managed to read because reading them would require acknowledging the version of himself that those people believed still existed, and Robby had become increasingly uncertain that such a person, such a version of him, existed at all anymore.
Instead, he slept.
Or, perhaps, sleeping was not quite the right word, because sleep implied rest and restoration and some eventual return to oneself, whereas what Robby found himself doing felt closer to disappearance, to a gradual retreat from consciousness that seemed less motivated by fatigue than by a profound reluctance to participate in his own life for any longer than was strictly necessary. More often than not he remained awake through the night, stretched out beneath the blankets while the darkness pressed softly against the windows and Jack slept beside him, watching meaningless videos on his phone until his eyes burned and his thoughts lost coherence and eventually, sometime after dawn, exhaustion would finally overtake him. Then he would sleep through the day, through the bright and ordinary hours when everyone else appeared to be engaged in the business of living, and it occurred to him more than once that there was something perversely fitting about this reversal, because he understood now, a little bit, what Jack had meant when he said he found comfort there; darkness asked nothing of him, required no optimism or plans or explanations. Under the cloak of night, there was nothing or no one to insist upon his future. It simply existed around him, vast and impersonal and strangely merciful, concealing the world and, for a few brief hours, concealing him even from himself.
What frightened Robby, although not nearly enough to compel action, was how little resistance he offered to any of it. He had always assumed that if he ever found himself becoming depressed there would be some dramatic recognition, some moment of clarity in which he would understand what was happening and marshal his considerable intelligence against it, because he was, after all, a physician, and yet what he discovered instead was that the mind could adapt itself to almost anything provided the deterioration occurred gradually enough. There was never a time in which he woke and decided to withdraw from the world, there was never a conscious choice; but something deeper and more difficult to name, something that had been quietly hollowing him out for years beneath the surface of an otherwise functional existence. Increasingly he found himself thinking of Annie, of all those patients who arrived septic, whose bodies compensated so effectively for so long that by the time anyone realized how sick they truly were, entire organ systems had already begun to fail. He wondered sometimes whether the same thing could happen to a soul. Whether a person could continue functioning, continue speaking and laughing and paying bills and showing up to work, long after some essential part of them had begun to die.
The thought disturbed him enough that he usually abandoned it before reaching its conclusion.
Besides, there was Jack.
Jack, who seemed to understand instinctively that leaving Robby alone for too long was a dangerous proposition, and who therefore kept returning home to him with food and errands and transparently fabricated reasons for requiring assistance, creating a steady stream of obligations so minor they were almost impossible to refuse. Sometimes Robby suspected that Jack knew exactly what he was doing, that he had recognized something in Robby because he had once recognized it in himself, during those terrible months after Annie died when darkness had ceased to be merely the absence of light and had instead become a place, a territory through which Jack wandered, half-lost and half-willingly. But if Jack knew, he never said so. Instead he simply arrived, over and over again, like daylight creeping beneath a closed door, patient and persistent and impossible to entirely shut out, and Robby, despite himself, found that he began orienting his time around Jack's arrivals, sleeping until he heard Jack's truck in the driveway, drifting back toward consciousness at the sound of footsteps in the hall, because increasingly Jack's presence had become the only thing capable of interrupting the terrible gravitational pull of his own thoughts.
And of course, there was the matter of the bed. The bed that was Jack's, that Robby was sleeping in. At first, Robby told himself—promised himself—that it was just for that first night, because when he had gone to the guest bedroom, there had been Jack's go bag and its contents laid out on the spare bed, and woe betide the man who got in the way of Jack and his go bag; but then, it continued, Jack insisting he share the bed, claimed the mattress was better and the pillows ergonomic, and Jack had offered it as if it were nothing, as if beds were interchangeable and bodies even more so, as if the past did not accrete weight in places like this, where memory has a physicality that refuses to be ignored, and so Robby couldn't refuse, because to refuse was to acknowledge that there was anything wrong with the offer in the first place.
And what unsettles Robby most is not the intimacy of this odd domesticity, but how easily it arrives disguised as nothing at all.
Because Jack never treats any of it as significant. Not the food, not the house, not the bed, not even the repetition of returning. He behaves as though these are simply the things one does when someone is nearby and not entirely well—practical responses to a practical situation. Slowly, throughout the summer, Robby has begun to depend on something he has never been asked to acknowledge, that Jack's presence has become less an event than a condition of the world continuing to feel inhabitable, and that whatever this is, it no longer matters whether it is named correctly, only that it remains.
"I thought we could eat out back," Jack says, as he plates up the pizza. "Enjoy the last of the long summer nights. The neighbors are out of town, so they won't bitch if we throw the fire on."
"You going to make s'mores too?" Robby drawls, grabbing two beers from the fridge and following Jack outside.
"Joke all you want, man, but I'm not the one that ate six in a row," Jack shoots back.
"That was because Jake kept burning his, and I didn't exactly see you making an effort to help me, did I?"
Jack chuckles, and soon Robby joins him.
They eat their pizza in companionable silence. When they're done and the boxes are recycled, Robby gets them another two beers, and lets Jack bitch about whatever cockamamie idea Al-Hashimi and Gloria have foisted upon them this week.
It's with no preamble at all that Robby can't help but ask, "Am I a fuck-up?"
Jack pauses for a minute, taking a swig of his beer, swallowing. His mouth presses into a hard, thin line, before he answers. "You're fucked-up, Mike. Not a fuck-up, never that."
Robby laughs bitterly. "What the hell is the difference?"
Jack lets out a breath through his nose, the corner of his mouth twitching as though the answer ought to be obvious.
"A fuck-up is somebody who quits showing up," he says. "A fuck-up blames everybody else, never says sorry, never looks back. Michael Robinavitch wouldn't know how to be a fuck-up if it bit him in the ass, I'll tell you that for free."
Robby stares into the fire.
The logs have settled into themselves now, flames licking lazily around blackening wood, the heat of them pushing back against the cooling evening air, and somewhere down the block a dog barks once, happily, before falling silent again.
"It's a rough time for you, Mike," Jack says, softly. "But you'll get back to yourself in no time, I promise."
There are those treacherous tears again, blurring the fire's flames into a wash of liquid gold, so that the light appears to move not in tongues or sparks but in great breathing pulses, expanding and contracting behind the veil of his vision, and for a moment he is overtaken by the strange feeling that he is watching something beautiful from an impossible distance, separated from it not by space but by himself, by the thin, invisible membrane of sorrow through which the world has lately seemed to reach him.
"But what if this is just who I am now?" he asks, sniffing and wiping at his cheeks.
Jack tsks, as if the answer were axiomatic, as if the answer wasn't even worth saying, because the question was so implausible.
"Don't be stupid," Jack says easily.
"I'm being serious," Robby insists.
Jack shakes his head, halfway to getting frustrated. "You think you're the first guy in the world to lose his footing a little bit?"
"No," Robby retorts, wiping at a stray tear and taking a sip of his beer. "Just the first one stupid enough to do it at fifty-two."
Jack worries at the label on his beer bottle with the edge of his thumb, lifting it away in damp, curling strips that cling briefly to the glass before surrendering altogether, the bottle slick with condensation in the summer heat.
One by one the stars begin to emerge from the darkening sky, tentative at first, then with gathering confidence, until the whole expanse above them seems quietly stippled with light, breaking up the immense and ancient darkness by stars that have outlived generations of people who, like him, had once mistaken their little lives for the centre of the universe.
He feels, at once, impossibly small, reduced to a single body beneath a sky so vast it renders every human concern faintly absurd, and at the same time impossibly large, swollen with the humiliating certainty of his own suffering, as though his thoughts have expanded beyond the natural boundaries of himself and colonised everything they touch.
"Do you remember that night?" Jack asks, suddenly.
Robby freezes, his heart immediately going double time, and feels the blood drain from his face. When he turns his head, Jack's eyes are fixed on him, soft, impossibly fond, and a little bit remorseful.
"We never talked about it, after," he continues, gently. "And I never thanked you, for everything you did for me."
"You didn't have to thank me," Robby responds, immediately. "Jack, it was—an honour. It was the privilege, of being your friend."
Jack sideeyes him, a coy smile playing at his lips. "Back atcha."
Robby just rolls his eyes, trying to will the blush on his cheeks away, praying that Jack will be kind enough to excuse it as a flush from the fire.
After a minute, he steels himself, before saying, "That was different. That was... Annie was your wife, Jack. I don't even know what the fuck I'm crying over. Okay, I'm a workaholic, most Americans are. Okay, I didn't get the life I wanted, most people don't. It's stupid, and selfish, and it makes no sense that it has me feeling this way, this bad. Like can you imagine it, at my funeral? Here lies Michael Robinavitch, he offed himself because life got a bit too hard for him. People go through worse things every day, man, I'm so... I'm so ashamed of myself, that I'm feeling like this, for not one good reason."
Jack shifts towards him. "Mike, that night was the first good thing that happened to me after Annie died. And not just the sex, although—" Jack lets out an awkward huff of a laugh, and when Robby looks up he's surprised to see a blush crawling up Jack's own neck. "The point is, after she died, it always felt like everyone was doing everything they could to make me get over it, to cure me of the grief of her, and I know they meant well, but it just felt like I was getting dragged kicking and screaming into a life I had never imagined having, and I didn't particularly want. But you..."
Jack's mouth screws up, as his hand reaches up and hooks his finger into the collar of Robby's t-shirt, a mirror of that same gesture Robby had done to him, all those years ago.
"You just stayed. And you never asked me to be healed or perfect, or get better faster."
Jack exhales through his nose, his forehead coming to rest against Robby's. "Mikey," he says, quietly, fondly. It's the same way someone might say baby, or love, or honeybee. It's devastating in its gentleness, in its care. "I can't make you do anything, same as you couldn't when I was grieving. I wish I could; I wish I could take the burden of your own wellness from you. But I can't. You have to want it for yourself." He reaches out to brush a tear from Robby's cheek, hot and wet against his skin. "But don't you think that if you were scared enough of your thoughts to not want to go on the trip, you should speak to someone about that?"
Robby's throat tightens, but he forces the words anyway. "I don't know how to talk about it without making it worse," he admits, and there is a small, almost embarrassed exhale of breath that might have been a laugh if it weren't so thin. "And then it's not just in my head anymore, it's—" he falters, searching for the word, and what he finds instead is a sensation: being contained, being assessed, being handled. He swallows. "It's not mine in the same way. And I don't know what to do with that. I don't know how to be a patient, anymore, I guess."
He shifts slightly, just enough to press his forehead a little more firmly into Jack's, as if trying to steady himself against the inevitability of what he is saying. "And I think I'm also afraid that I'll go in there and I won't be able to explain it properly," he adds, softer now, almost reluctantly honest in a way that costs him something. "That I'll just sit there and say things that sound... fine. And they'll think I'm fine, and then I'll leave and nothing will have changed except now someone else knows, and then it will be like, proof, that there was nothing really wrong with me in the first place. Or I'll get in there and they'll have me involuntarily committed."
His eyes sting, but he doesn't let the tears fall this time. He keeps them there, as if holding them in place might preserve some control over what he is trying, clumsily, to offer. "I'm scared," he says finally, though even this feels like an overstatement he is not fully entitled to. "Jack, I'm really scared."
Jack pulls away for a fraction of a second, and before Robby can even begin to miss the warmth of him, it's returned, except this time, it's Jack's lips pressed hard and true against Robby's cheek, one hand come up to cradle his face, and the other still hooked in the collar of his shirt. Jack's forehead presses back more fully then, re-establishing that contact between them, as though refusing to let Robby drift even a fraction away into himself, his thumb rubbing soothing circles into his cheek. "I know, Robby. But being scared doesn't mean they're going to give you a clean bill of health, or that you're going to be committed, it just means you're scared. I promise you, nothing bad will happen to you. I promise you, Robby."
Robby clutches at Jack's wrist by his cheek, anchoring him in the moment.
"I've been thinking," Jack starts, then stops, and exhales through his nose, a small moment as he gathers resolve. "About love," he says, more quietly now, and there is something almost awkward in the simplicity of it, as though saying the word directly is harder than any elaboration could be. "What it actually is. Not what people say it is, or what it's supposed to look like. I guess you, being here, brought it all back up, that night."
"I think people talk a lot about sacrifice when they talk about love," Jack continues, carefully. "And I think there's something true in that. But I also think it's... easy. Easier than people admit. Saying you'd die for someone, that's not actually the hardest thing you could do for them. Dying is... finite, it doesn't require any real follow through, you know."
He shifts slightly then, and presses a kiss to Robby's forehead—simple, unshowy, almost matter-of-fact in its tenderness, as though it is not meant to punctuate anything so much as to keep them connected through the weight of what he is trying to say.
"Annie was the thing that kept me going, when I lost the leg and I had to come back. Hand to God, she was the only thing that stopped me from eating my gun. Isn't that the greatest act of love we can give to one another? To keep living, despite it all, despite how much we might want the opposite. So for her, I did; I lived. And after Annie, there was you. And there still is you. On every bad day, every tough call, every morning on the roof."
He pulls back, only to look Robby in the eye.
"Mikey," he says softly. "You inspired—you inspire me, to live."
Just like that first night, Robby can't remember the exact choreography of it, only that he looks up, and Jack is looking at him and there are tears in his eyes, and the look is one of such love, such adoration Robby couldn't ever remember feeling bestowed upon him, that there is nothing else for it, really, only to meet Jack in the middle this time, and press their lips together.
It is as if the time between that first night and now has collapsed into nothing. They remember each other, mouths parting in perfect synchronicity, Jack's hand coming up to anchor itself in Robby's hair just as it did the first time, Robby's hand coming up to rest against Jack's carotid artery, feeling it jump now as it did then.
As they part, Robby says, a raw confession, "I don't know how to do what you're asking me to do, I don't know how to just... accept that I need help, or be okay, or be someone who inspires anything."
His fingers tighten slightly against Jack's wrist.
"But I'll try," he adds, quieter still. "Jack, I promise, I'll try."
The next morning, unlike that other night years ago, Jack is still there in the bed, warm beside Robby, but despite the muggy August morning, Robby can't bear to let him go. His leg is wrapped around Robby's waist, his arms across Robby's chest, and his head rests perfectly in the hollow between Robby's neck and shoulder.
"Good morning," Robby murmurs, his voice still thick with sleep. He squeezes Jack's hand gently, almost reflexively, as though to confirm that it is still there, still responsive, still belonging to a body that is not his imagination.
Jack does not move much when he answers, only shifts fractionally closer, the smallest recalibration of proximity, and whispers it back into him, his lips brushing the skin just behind Robby's ear.
For a while, neither of them speak again. The silence is not empty; it is occupied, densely so, by the slow accumulation of morning—the faint sound of traffic beginning somewhere far away, the changing quality of light as it gathers itself into the room, the subtle awareness Robby has that his own breathing has begun to adjust itself to match Jack's.
Jack shifts first, not away, but slightly within the space between them, orienting himself toward wakefulness proper, and his voice comes again, carrying the residue of dreams that have not fully let go of him.
"Hey," he says, and there is something almost childlike in the simplicity of it, something unguarded. "Look."
Robby follows the direction of his attention, and through the thin gap in the curtains the world is indeed changing—the sky is not yet fully illuminated with the sun, but it is no longer dark, and there are the faintest hues of purples and pinks creeping in through the curtains that he knows, instinctively, it will be beautiful.
And Robby realises then that maybe this is what the beginnings of recovery might look like; simply to remain long enough for the light to return.
"The sun is rising," Jack says, almost to himself.
And all around them, the world fills with daylight.