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Jack barely has the door closed before Robby is pushing him back against it, and Jack reaches out blindly to set the six-pack of Modelo (his turn to pick) on the narrow table next to the entrance. He meets the kiss just as eagerly, trying to shrug out of his dark green jacket, one hand curling at the back of the other man’s neck.
“Fuck, eager tonight, huh?” he murmurs against soft lips, feels how Robby smiles into the kiss. Jack lets his jacket fall to the floor, focusing on how the lines of their body fit together when he pushes forward, how his hands settle on Robby’s hips and keep him close. Robby tastes like mint gum (probably Nicorette) and coffee, and it’s nice, it’s sweet.
He doesn’t taste like beer, like he usually does. When they do this.
Robby’s hands are slipping under his black t-shirt, pressing against smooth flesh, and Jack lets out a gasp of surprise at the cold skin. The gasp turns into a laugh, and he slots their hips together, wanting as much of their bodies touching as possible. “Down the hall, c’mon,” Jack murmurs, pressing into the hard line of Robby’s body until the other man takes a step back, and follows him to his bedroom.
Jack drops to the edge of the bed, fingers curling into the front of Robby’s sweater to pull the man down into more rough, demanding kisses. His other hand slides down along his right leg, down to his prosthesis, fingers on the valve that releases the seal, and then he’s discarding it to the floor, and Robby has learned to ignore this process, learned to not engage with it, through a select few instances where he’d accidentally brushed up against Jack’s fight or flight reflex by seeing him too much. Times when Jack felt too seen by lingering glances, when things felt too vulnerable, raw and intimate in a way that Jack was very sure Robby did not want this to be. It was a direct threat to how hard he worked to keep this casual when Robby was tender and careful with his body, and Jack had to hold some arbitrary boundaries to make it feel like he was still in control.
The little bit of distance feels like the only safe-guard Jack has left against this man.
After, Jack settles back into his sheets, the dim light at his bedside table casting a warm glow. He’s naked, at ease, one hand tucked under his head, thinking of the different muscle groups in his body and relaxing them one by one. It’s his go-to grounding exercise, courtesy of years of brutal therapy with periods of mixed commitment from Jack Abbot. Therapy that felt like Jack was in a battle against his own nervous system, locked in the push and pull of knowing he needed to do this and how much worse he felt sometimes afterwards, how much closer to the edge therapy could put him some days, before he started really untangling the hot mess of trauma and pain.
Robby reaches out for his phone on the other nightstand, groaning softly. “It’s late, almost one. I should go,” he murmurs, already moving to sit up, reaching for his discarded briefs next to the bed.
Jack reaches out, letting his fingers walk the ladder of the other man’s spine for just a moment. A casual, warm touch, the kind he only lets himself have in these moments, when Robby’s guard is low, until he slams the walls back in place. It’s late , he says, or I think I had one too many . Excuses.
Excuses that Jack doesn’t need. He knows who he is. He’s known since he was a kid, he’s not ashamed, it’s not a secret, he’s not scared, he has a goddamn spine. He knew when he enlisted, he knew when he came home, when he got into med school, when he married Alison, when she passed away, and he knows now, with this man naked in his bed.
What a fucking cliche, to be pining after your straight best friend at his current stage of life. Alison would think it’s incredibly funny, and she’d be right.
“You could stay, you know. You could sleep here.”
A familiar script, performed again.
Robby clears his throat, his back still to Jack, but he stands up, pulls his briefs on and grabs up his jeans. “Thanks for the offer, we’re just… on different schedules, you know,” Robby offers weakly, like the bullshit excuse it is.
Jack lets out a bitter laugh and nods, shifting up in the bed until he can sit against the headboard, watching Robby move around the room. “Yeah, sure. Different schedules, different pages, different goddamn book,” he mutters angrily, desperately wishing for a cigarette even after years without.
How mad is he allowed to be, really, when he accepted these terms? He’s half responsible for this fucked-up in-between they live in, where they work together as responsible adults and professional colleagues, go back to one of their apartments, drink two beers each, and stick their tongues down each other’s throats. And he’s fine with it, it’s fine, so fine, so good bro, except when it’s not and he wishes Robby would stay .
Robby gives him that usual tight expression, half grimace, half placation, even as he’s dressed and moving around the bed. He leans in and presses a quick kiss to Jack’s lips, one Jack doesn’t even really have time to reject out of bitterness, and then Robby is gone.
The silence in his wake feels stifling. Jack reaches over, checks his phone out of habit. 0057. He settles back in the bed with a sigh, feeling the familiar pain at his temples as a new headache situates itself there.
M. Robinavitch [0347]: i’m sorry.
M. Robinavitch [0349]: i’d like to
M. Robinavitch [0353]: to get on the same page. for us to be on the same page.
M. Robinavitch [0415]: maybe if you're free this weekend we could figure it out?
Jack Abbot [0529]: yeah Mikey. this weekend.
He has a harder time than usual recovering from work the next afternoon, feels like his body is heavy, like he’s surfacing from deep underwater and everything just takes a little more effort. He chalks it up to nightmares he doesn’t remember (a blessing every time it happens, where he can leave them in the safety of sleep), or a shift where he’d had to climb onto the edges of stretchers and do compressions more than once. His muscles ache, worst along his shoulders and upper arms, and he tries to focus on that instead of the cracking sensation under his palms when he broke two ribs on the first one. The feeling often conjures unwelcome memories of performing the same procedure in bombed-out buildings, in dusty fields, and sometimes brings on the headaches he’s dealt with for the last fifteen years.
I’m getting too old for this shit, he’d joked to Robby at handoff, and Robby had just rolled his eyes and not given the comment any more airtime than needed. And yes, it felt awkward, of course it did, but apparently only for him. Robby seemed as simultaneously casual and world-weary as always, able to fake his high-performer status so easily (another red flag in a minefield of them), and they were a busy week away from having the talk they clearly needed to have, and Jack played it so cool, relaxed, everything is fine.
But hours later, his body still aches, his chest feels tight, and he's digging through the top drawer of his nightstand before he even makes it out of bed. Jack’s fingers close on the small red and white inhaler, rarely used, mostly there for the security of having it. He holds it in his hand for a moment and sits up the rest of the way to draw air in, slow and steady.
Four careful breaths, and he’s able to suppress the urge to use his albuterol, letting it drop back into the drawer. A fifth breath.
The tightness ebbs, and he’s able to grab for his crutches, make it to the bathroom. He turns the shower on hot, far hotter than would be safe or comfortable on his skin, and leans back against the sink, taking more slow breaths. The steam settles over him, and he thinks he’ll probably need an actual shower before he can feel ready for the chaos of the upcoming night shift, but he tries to keep as much focus as he can on the pull of hot, humid air into his lungs. It’s not treatment, it’s not medicine, it’s far from a nebulizer, but he focuses on how the steam lets him breathe just a bit easier, the lowest-barrier treatment he can manage at the moment.
The next afternoon is worse.
Jack does remember those nightmares, remembers pressing his hands down hard over a gaping wound, hot blood between his fingertips because he can’t push it all back in, and there’s screaming and maybe some of it is him, he can’t tell, but Boyd is going to die right here, in front of him, and there’s nothing, there’s nothing, “I’m so sorry, fucking Christ - ”
He sits in the steam again, sets a timer for twenty minutes, and takes two puffs of the albuterol after, when he tells himself his lungs will be nice and open. They feel neither, but the albuterol takes the edge off, and he’s able to get himself together, to slip on his prosthesis and take his little sister out for a nice dinner.
If he slips the little red and white inhaler into his pocket, touches it a few times during the evening for reassurance, well… that’s nobody’s business.
The third day, he can admit (under Parker and Shen’s interrogation) that something is going on. The tightness doesn’t come and go now, he feels it almost constantly, along with a cough, dry, burning that makes him wince with how non-productive it feels. It’s not enough to clear whatever has settled in his lungs, leaving him stuck in some sort of miserable in-between state.
“What, you two have never gotten a cold before? I’ll be fine in a day or two. Your attending is not gonna drop dead and force you to take his place, don’t worry,” Jack scoffs, working hard to keep his tone neutral, normal, relaxed.
A cold. Good. He can believe that, if he says it enough.
In the morning, he goes home and he sits against the sink of his bathroom again with the shower running, imagines the steam filling up his lungs and healing the scar tissue there. He drinks a capful of guaifenesin, piles his pillows a bit higher to elevate his upper body, and sinks into the induced sleep of cough syrup.
The fourth day, he calls out.
“It's got a few names, Staff Sergeant. You can imagine creativity is sometimes lacking in the armed forces, so it's generally called DRLD, Deployment Related Lung Disease, or Burn Pit Exposure Syndrome which is even less creative, in my opinion. You’re showing early signs of interstitial lung disease secondary to your exposure on deployment.”
He likes Doctor Wahl. She's smart and dry and doesn't think he's funny. He respects that.
“So… what now?”
“We wait. And we watch. You’ll get chest x-rays with us once or twice a year, I’ll write for a Ventolin HFA, and if you have an exacerbation, we can do Medrol. But, work out, stay in good shape as your condition allows,” she says, barely a glance down to his right leg, “and your lungs can take care of you for a while, Jack.”
“So, we add pulm to my team of specialists, joining ortho and neuro? Seems a little much, doc.”
“Speaking of, how are the headaches?”
Jack doesn’t say anything at first, just takes a deep breath and nods. “Not much to be done about TBI. They’re fine. I don’t need anything for them, neuro is just following.”
Dr. Wahl nods, and she lets that silence fall between them for a minute, in a way that distinctly reminds him of early days in therapy, when Frank would wait and Jack felt as if the moments of quiet were meant to twist his arm into speaking. But Dr. Wahl surrenders quicker than Frank, and manages a small smile. “Just… try not to worry about this yet. We’ll see what comes.”
Jack bites back a comment about how he’ll certainly have to worry about it sooner or later, and accepts the scrip she writes.
The fourth day, everything he tries barely takes the edge off. The steam shower helps for a bit and he takes two puffs of Ventolin but resists a third, not wanting the jitters that come after too much. He hears the distant, stern voice of his favorite lecturer in MS3, “why would we continue with an intervention when it is clearly ineffective after multiple attempts?”
Out of desperation , he responds. He takes more cough syrup, and sinks back against his pillows.
It’s nighttime when he wakes again, and the world feels blurry. He’s covered in sweat, and his chest feels like he’s sunk to the bottom of a lake and taken gulps of cold water. He manages to sit up, the effort feeling immense, and grabs for the inhaler again, taking two hits that do very little. His white undershirt sticks to his chest, and his throat feels thick, occluded, sore.
Jack grabs for his phone on the nightstand, swipes a thumb over the seven missed calls and eleven text messages.
J. Shen [1642]: bro u PROMISED u wouldn’t force me to be daddy, i’m not made for it
J. Shen [1654]: ok but only this ONE TIME and only for u 💪👑
Dana [1711]: You okay Jack? Call me. I can bring stuff over?
M. Robinavitch [1718]: what’s going on? you don’t get sick
Dana [1758]: Robby’s pretty worried, you might get the full mother hen experience
M. Robinavitch [1813]: is it your leg? we can get coverage for tomorrow night too
M. Robinavitch [1932]: parker says you had a cough, that you looked like shit
P. Ellis [2004]: okay 😩 this is bullshit don’t leave him in charge again
P. Ellis [2110]: he just told a med student “yolo” when we found this patient’s DNR 😭😭💀
P. Ellis [2116]: you better be so sick right now but better by 7pm tomorrow 😤
M. Robinavitch [2317]: if you don’t answer me by the morning i’m calling in a welfare check so help me jack
2352. It’s almost midnight. His brain is fuzzy, and he takes a moment to rub his hand over his temples at the near-instant headache from his bright phone screen, tries to inhale but feels how it doesn’t quite reach down into where he needs it most.
J. Abbot [2354]: sick
M. Robinavitch [2356]: yes, clearly
J. Abbot [2357]: call off your dogs
Three dots appear and disappear a few times below his response, but Jack drops his phone back to the nightstand and fumbles for his black crutches. He feels weak, fragile, can’t fathom the mental or physical load of slipping into his prosthesis, but he gets himself out to the living room of his condo, heading to the closet by the door. His camouflage backpack sits just inside, stocked and ready to go, waiting for some new horror. Jack digs around until he finds the small black pulse oximeter, slipping it onto his finger. He closes his eyes as he waits, as if he can get twenty more seconds of sleep while the thing works to give him the numbers he needs.
Pulse, 104. Oxygen saturation, 87.
Jack stifles a chuckle at how fucked he realizes he is even as he rationalizes the saturation as exertional, as if walking to the hall closet is usually a massive effort. But none of this is okay, and none of it is normal.
Showering is well beyond his reach, but he manages to make it back to bed, pulse-ox juggled tenuously in his grip. He thinks distantly on how stupid it is, that he has to limp down the hall and sort through a go-bag of trauma supplies to be able to take his own vitals. It’s not like no one saw this coming, a day where his breaths would come with more effort, where his chest would ache and burn, where the tightness would settle into his lungs.
Jack props his crutches back in their narrow spot between the headboard and nightstand, praying for unconsciousness to find him again.
A hand, moving his hand, gently. Cool fingers against his too-tight clammy skin. A digit pressing against the inside of his wrist, moving to press into the soft flesh at the side of his neck.
Jack blinks his eyes open slowly to find Robby standing at his bedside, brows knitted with concern, looking at his watch. Counting beats. Jack tries to swallow, tries to talk, but his throat burns, feels as if he’s trying to breathe through a straw, and he starts to cough, can’t stop once it begins.
“Jesus Christ,” Robby says, so low it’s barely a whisper, moving to pull Jack up into a sitting position so he can try to suck in more air. Robby’s hand moves over his shoulders and down, patting gently over his mid-back, the lower lobes of his lungs. As if he already knows where the pressure is, the space into which Jack has struggled to draw breath for days .
Robby has that familiar goddamn expression on his face, that “I’m concerned and I care” that is so practiced as he moves to sit on the edge of the bed gingerly. The hand that had been at his back moves to his forehead, and they both know it’s more of a comforting gesture than any reliable gauge of fever in a sick person. “You need to be on O2, Jack. We need to take you in. Your vitals… you need supplemental oxygen.”
Jack shakes his head, has to swallow a few times to even try to speak, tries to take another deep breath as if this will be the one that does it, that finally penetrates.
It does not.
“What time is it? I need to call my doctor, I need… Medrol, my doctor at the VA, Wahl, I was going to call at eight AM - ”
“I can call Wahl, you introduced us at the co-occurring disorders symposium. It’s early, if I had known you were this fucked up I wouldn’t have waited. Jack, you need IV antibiotics and oxygen, I think this is beyond home management. Have you had pneumonia before?”
“I’m not fucking going to the Pitt,” Jack forces out, but the effort leaves him gasping for air again, and he fumbles for the inhaler on his nightstand. Robby watches for a moment, before he gently intercepts Jack’s hand and plucks the Ventolin from his fingers. He pulls it away, uncaps it, primes it away from both of them, before lifting it to Jack’s mouth and giving one dose. Robby caps it again, worry etched into his features as he watches, waits, to see if Jack can finish whatever bullshit protests he was about to wage.
But Jack drags in a ragged breath, and says, “Take me to the VA.”
Deal.
The process of getting out the door takes an hour and is made up of many small negotiations.
I need to shower. “Fine, only if I stand outside the shower in case you go down.”
I haven’t eaten in a day. “Good, you should probably be NPO anyway. We’ll stop fluids too until we get through triage, just in case.”
Where’s my goddamn albuterol? “You don’t need albuterol, we’re going to a hospital, Jack.”
I should take something, maybe dexmeth? “No, there’s PRNs at the hospital. Let’s go.”
What about my leg? “Sure, put it on for now, I’m putting you in a wheelchair at the door anyway.”
Finally, Jack is in the passenger seat of Robby’s old black Prius, slumped against the door and just aware enough to regret several life choices that have brought him to this place. He can almost feel the worry emanating from his friend (and are they friends? Because things have been feeling a little more than friend-ish between them recently and the current series of events is definitely advancing that narrative), but he holds himself back from the guilt that would threaten to drown him if his own lungs weren’t doing a perfectly good job at that.
“ED entrance is on Brackenridge,” he whispers, and Robby scoffs, does not dignify the information with a response.
Robby pulls into the front loop of the emergency entrance, and a minute later he’s at the passenger door with a wheelchair, true to his word. Jack wants to fight, wants to demand that he can walk on his own two feet, but he feels so tired, so weak, and his chest feels like thick cords of rope are surrounding him and growing tighter every minute. He lets it happen, lets Robby slip strong hands under his arms, lets him transfer Jack into the chair like he would any patient who can’t help themselves.
Robby is wheeling him in a minute later, waving to the first nurse he sees to start rattling off the HPI that he can offer. “ Jack Abbot, forty-five year old male, he’s been sick a few days, found him in his apartment, hypoxic to 88, dropped to 82 on exertion, pulse 112, lungs are full of fluid and crackles on the right lower.”
And when the fuck had Robby listened to his lungs? Clearly, he was farther gone than he thought.
“He’s been using albuterol and guaifenesin at home, not sure if he’s tried anything else.”
This fucking control freak, Jack thinks distantly, with so much affection that it surprises him. If he’d convinced Jack to let him take them to the Pitt, he’d already be barking out orders for oxygen and meds to get on board. Here, he has no power, and Jack thinks he can actually hear how much it annoys Robby. “He sees Doctor Elizabeth Wahl, can someone call her?”
There’s soft voices talking over each other around him, and he’s wheeled back, a pulse-ox slipped onto his finger, a blood pressure cuff on his other arm. They’re in an ED room, glass doors, a curtain being pulled shut for privacy. Someone parks his wheelchair next to the stretcher waiting for him, and a nurse moves to his front, but then that familiar voice is speaking up, and Jack relaxes.
“I’ll transfer him,” Robby says in a tone that leaves little room for argument, and then hands are on him again, lifting under his arms, and he struggles to get his legs under him, to help. But Robby is pivoting, helping him sit back on the stretcher, lifting his legs onto it. Confident hands push up his sweats, finding the seam of the gel liner over his knee just above where his prosthesis anchors. He hears the soft hiss of the vacuum seal releasing as Robby shifts it from side to side, but Jack feels like a rag doll, like a CPR dummy, dead weight against the stretcher.
“Febrile, tachy, hypoxic, get a high-flow nasal cannula on him, let’s start with ten liters, once we get an IV placed, we’ll run fluids and point-three of ket, we can get him comfortable that way. Let’s pull labs and figure out what we’re looking at, and call Wahl down to the bedside - ” A woman’s voice, unfamiliar, but strong and sure in a way that relaxes Jack further. Hands are all over him, turning his arm, starting a line, placing a tube at his nose with oxygen, and he can’t fight, he can’t do much, he just has to let this all happen to him. And he hates it, feels nauseous at the thought of being tended to, fussed over, at the creeping fear that one day (again, even though he’d gotten better, he’d learned to adapt) he might not be able to take care of himself. It conjures memories of waking up in a sterile white room in Landstuhl, so sedated he’s not sure if any of it is real, a masked nurse leaning over the bed and trying to soothe his panic as he overbreathes the vent, as alarms sound. Weeks of being confined to a bed while strangers clean his body and surgeons debride the wounds on his remaining leg, while he waits for his concussed brain to heal just enough so that he can have the curtains open and can move from laying to sitting without feeling like someone is stabbing him in the forehead.
“Staff Sergeant,” the new voice says, moving closer to the head of the stretcher, and it’s been a while since anyone addressed him as such. “You might fall asleep soon, we’re giving you ketamine, I imagine you’re intimately familiar with the mechanism. We’ll take great care of you. Take a few deep breaths through your nose for me.”
The fifth day?
He’s not sure if it’s the fifth day when he opens his eyes next, it could be six, seven, he could be fully into a 28 Days Later scenario, where he’s the last human in Pittsburgh and -
“Jack?” a voice asks, hoarse with concern or lack of sleep.
Jack looks to his right, and sure enough, Robby is sitting there, chair facing the bed, his thumb holding open a novel. He closes it quickly, leaning forward to catch Jack’s hand in his, which feels simple and normal, and simultaneously intimate and too big.
“What happened?” he whispers. The lights in the room are dimmed, and he can hear distant beeping and alarms that feel comforting (the same beeping and alarms he often hears in his dreams or sometimes imagines when he’s awake). He looks down at his body in the bed. The blankets are pulled up to his chest, but he’s in a gown, an IV at his left elbow, telemetry monitoring his vitals, nasal cannula still in place.
“Doctor Wahl is coming down. You didn’t miss her,” Robby murmurs, in lieu of any actual answer. And the answer is… not a reassurance, more of a further confirmation that something is wrong.
“How long?”
“Just a few hours. We got here this morning, maybe about nine. It’s only five now. They’re giving you ceftriaxone and prednisone. No one… no one’s really told me anything, I’ve asked.”
Jack nods, picturing the prompts for his patient portal in his head. The space where it asks for “emergency contact” left blank after his wife passed. He was too deep in it at the time, and it felt like too much to put on his sister, ten years younger and at the peak of her career in public health research.
It had felt like too much, asking his best friend to take a role he shouldn’t need to fill. And so, the lines remained blank.
Jack falls quiet, and maybe Robby thinks he's slipped back into some level of unconsciousness, because he steps out after a few minutes. Jack drifts while he's alone, isn't sure how long it is, before Robby is returning with Dr. Wahl behind him.
The older woman smiles fondly when she sees Jack, moving to the bedside and resting a hand on the raised rail. Jack watches her come close, manages a small smile in return, soothed at the site of her. Her light brown skin, long black locs pulled up into a bun, the wrinkles at the corners of her hazel eyes.
Maybe the ketamine has him more poetic than usual.
“Staff Sergeant Abbot, I do miss our visits when you're away too long. Had to come see me, huh?”
“Well, you're just so pretty, I can't keep myself away,” he manages, his voice weak. His whole body feels so weak, like he can't imagine lifting a finger, and he can't be sure if it's the infection or the lingering effects of sedation.
Dr. Wahl sighs softly and looks back towards the door, where Robby stands watch, and then back to her patient in the bed. “Should we talk or…?”
Do I need to kick this fucking guy out?
Jack manages to shake his head, his gaze settling on Robby. And the other man looks right back at him, like he's putting something together, cracking some mystery wide open, figuring out something Jack already knows. Robby moves closer to the bed, standing opposite his doctor. “Yeah, doc, let's talk,” Jack says, but he knows they both mean you talk, I listen .
“I told you, years ago, that your interstitial lung disease may someday progress. It's too soon to know if that’s what happened, you got yourself a pretty severe pneumonia, Jack. Right lower lobe. So, we're going to treat that, with antibiotics and Medrol like we've always planned, and we'll keep you overnight. Then, we'll do scans every month for the next six, yeah? We'll… see what we're working with.”
Jack takes a shallow breath, keeping his eyes on Dr. Wahl, unable to look at the man on his other side. But he feels Robby's eyes on him and, prepares his defenses mentally, tells himself that his friend-from-work has no right to know anything about his medical history, about his personal life, about what he's been through. That’s the stance they’ve been operating from., They’ve both set it up that way. They are colleagues, friends, and Jack needs to keep telling himself that. Robby’s concern for him over the last few hours is clear, Jack can see it written into his body language, his expression, the furrow of his brow. But even still, he tries to remind himself of what this is, of what it is allowed to be, boundaried and simple.
But they both know that's not true, or that maybe at one time it was true, and that those boundaries have eroded so much that they feel transparent. That they passed that point, some time ago, or that point passed them, but they're both deeper into this than they expected to be. Robby's hand moves to rest on his arm, a warm weight, moving closer instead of pulling away.
Jack nods, doesn't try to say anything because he doesn't think he can get anything out.
“Alright, Jack,” Dr. Wahl says, gentle, her gaze lingering for just a moment on Robby’s hand over Jack’s arm. “Just get some rest, we’ll discharge on oral antibiotics in the morning. You’ll need to take a few days off, then I’m going to refer for a short course of PT for re-conditioning.”
Dr. Wahl and Robby exchange pleasantries, and then she’s gone, the sliding glass clicking closed behind her. Robby moves to sit back down in the chair he’d been stationed in, but his hand doesn’t leave Jack's arm. Silence falls, but it’s not the twilight-lethargy Jack’s been in and out of all day. It’s tenser, more active. That familiar push and pull is so close, just under his skin, wanting Robby to see him, to care for him like he cares for Robby, coupled with his constant hunger for independence and a wholeness he hasn’t felt for more than fleeting moments in the last fifteen years.
“So, I think they lifted your NPO. I’m sure you’re hungry. I could go down to the caf, see if they’ve got something easy, soup?”
The question is so silly, so basic, it startles a laugh from Jack, which turns into a brief coughing fit. Robby kicks into action without a word, moving to elevate the head of the bed a bit more, helping Jack to sit up so he can catch his breath. It takes a minute, and Robby rubs his back, so patient, so gentle, until Jack finally looks up at him, flushed at the effort.
“You find out my lungs are only getting worse and one day, they’ll probably give out entirely, and you’re taking my dinner order, Mikey?”
Robby raises a brow, looking towards the glass doors, to the nurses station beyond, and then back to Jack, tilting his head. “Sounds like you wanna talk about it. I figured you didn’t. So, yeah, Jack, let’s talk. Interstitial lung disease?”
“Occupational hazard. ‘Deployment-related’, a presumption of service.”
“And it hasn’t progressed?”
“Not… not yet.”
“Not treating pulmonary infections seems like one way to help it progress.”
Jack rolls his eyes and drops back against the bed, his jaw clenching for just a moment before he’s able to relax, to let his guard back down just enough. “Yeah, well, I guess that was pretty dumb of me, huh?”
“Mm. Now we’re on the same page.”
Jack looks down to where Robby’s fingers curl around the side rail of the bed, and he hesitates, but then he reaches out, lays his hand over the other man’s, lets their fingers find the spaces between. Something confused and hopeful flashes over Robby’s face, looking down at their hands together, and Jack sees how he swallows, how he opens his mouth but can’t find anything to say.
“Are we, Mike? On the same page?” Jack whispers, gives his friend a small smile. He wishes he could reach up and kiss Robby, and the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak .
But Robby is here, at his side, and he is trying so hard. Jack can see it, Robby’s nervousness coupled with worry and affection. And Robby leans in, his other hand fitting so perfectly at the back of Jack’s neck, pressing their lips together in a slow, chaste kiss that promises more in the future.
“Yeah, Mike,” Jack murmurs against soft, dry lips. “Soup sounds fine. Then, we can talk some more.”