Chapter Text
Robby’s apartment was shrouded in the dark.
He could feel that same darkness reaching towards him.
It was some time after seven in the evening, on the Fourth of July. And he was finally back home, back from a shift that lasted far too long.
He hadn’t turned on the lights. Outside, in that narrow strip of sky, a firework cracked open across the sky. Red, then white, the brief flare ghosting across the walls of his apartment. Then it died, and the dark rushed back in, heavier than before.
He stood in his doorway for a while.
He wasn’t sure how long he had stood there. Time had been doing strange things since he walked out of the Pitt. He remembered stepping through the glass doors, the weight of his helmet swinging on his backpack. He could still taste the evening air, thick and cloying and smelling of gunpowder and charcoal and a festivity that he couldn’t feel from the inside. Then there was the ride on his motorcycle, and then, somehow, there was this. Back in his apartment. The door still open behind him.
He closed it.
His tank bag sat by the door where he’d left it, his backpack leaning against it. He had packed them carefully, over the past several weeks. He had thought that it would be difficult, packing everything needed for his sabbatical—shrinking up his whole life into those two packs. But, in the end, it had been disarmingly easy. A change of clothes. Accessories. A handful of photographs and old trinkets, the accumulated evidence of fifty-four years. That was all there was.
Everything else was gone—sold, or given away, or left by the garbage bins and claimed by strangers.
And now, stripped of everything his, the apartment had seemingly forgotten him. Only the walls still held the pale outlines of memories. Darker rectangles of slightly less faded paint, the places where his things had been—a photograph here, a shelf there—evidence that he had existed here, already on his way to become a ghost.
He sat down on the floor.
The couch was too far away and too pristine. Gone was the worn throw blanket that once lived on it, a Secret Santa gift from some years back. The blanket was red and gold and hurts the eye if you stare at it for too long. Dana had snickered when he had unwrapped the gift and Jack had said that it was a perfect fit for his sense of fashion. Adamson had smiled from the side with that particular indulgent expression he reserved for the three of them when they were being idiots together. Robby had defended his taste with mock outrage, even though the blanket was objectively hideous. He had stubbornly hang onto it, and over the years, the glaring colors had mellowed into something softer—warm and familiar, the remains of those bygone days.
And now the blanket was gone too.
He sat with his back against the wall. It was hard and cold.
Outside, another firework. Another brief, bright flare.
He was so tired.
The apartment was too quiet and his thoughts much, much too loud.
He had believed—thought, hoped—that when he walked out of the Pitt tonight, the voices would stop. That they could grant him mercy. That the door to the ER could close behind him like the door of a confessional, and he could walk out into the cool July night and be, if not cleansed, then at least lightened.
But it was a foolish dream.
—what do you need to get some basic human empathy back?—
He closed his eyes.
He had apologized. He was—
—I think I was being—
He’d said it himself.
—a dick—
Mohan’s voice. Her voice floated up alongside the memory of her face—those big sad eyes, and the expression in that gaze. The fraction of a second before disbelief, before fear. Just hurt, naked and unguarded. She had looked at him as if he had taken all her tender trust and crushed them at her feet.
—Is this a panic attack because of your mommy issues?—
He could still feel that cold smile twisting his face. A panic attack, just like what he’d had. At least his own was caused by an actual patient. An actual death.
The consolation tasted like ash in his mouth.
—talking to cartoon animals in Pedes—
Langdon’s voice, joining in.
Robby pressed the back of his skull against the wall.
He had thought—he had been so certain—that the leaving would silence these voices, like turning over a ink-damp page. But the stain had bleed through.
The darkness pressed in at him from all sides, the evening light long gone.
He should have known better. He did know better. If he was honest with himself, he didn’t deserve the quiet. He didn’t deserve the clean exit, the relief of the confession booth. He had looked at Mohan scared and spiraling in that room, and he had seen with diagnostic clarity what she needed then. And he had taken that knowledge and done the opposite.
He had hurt her. Had failed her.
Just like he had failed everyone else.
—you killed your mentor—
Dr. Adamson, the man who had believed in him first, whose faith in him had been unconditional and absolute. Who had died believing in him.
—He trusted you and you—
He had taken Doctor Adamson off the ECMO. But it was the only way—
—you took him off because you gave up—
He hadn’t given up. He had made a clinical—
—you gave up on him the way everyone will give up on you eventually—
He tried to think up a response. But he had none.
And the voices kept coming.
—you drove Heather away—
She had been right to leave. He was… was emotionally unavailable.
—you were the reason Langdon had to use those drugs—
His stomach turned over.
He hadn’t known. He hadn’t known about the stolen pills, the addiction. But that was precisely the problem, wasn’t it? He knew what it looked like when one of them was struggling. He was supposed to see it, to catch it, to offer support.
And then Langdon had stood in front of him, shifts after shifts after shifts, and Robby had looked right at him and seen nothing.
—you can’t see it when it matters—
—you can’t do anything right—
—no wonder everyone leaves—
—you deserve no one—
Through a storm of tears that didn’t reached his eyes, he watched the fireworks bloom and die beyond the window. The whole sky was lit up in red and gold and blue. But the sounds drifted through the closed windows muffled and strange.
—now that you are gone—
He listened.
—they can finally flourish—
He didn’t want to believe it, but conviction crept in, and spread.
—They can breathe now. All of them. Mohan. Langdon. McKay. Al-Hashimi—
Unbidden, Al-Hashimi’s face came up before him—the carefully maintained professional neutrality, the measured tone of someone approaching a triggered bomb. She had been right. But he had argued with her because it had become impossible to stop arguing.
—the ER is better without you—
Al-Hashimi was a better doctor than him, a better manager, a better chief. A better human.
—everyone is better without you—
There was a certain comfort in that. The damage was already done, so the removal of the perpetrator was all that remained. He listened to the voices, feeling himself settle into the alcove carved out by those voices, and let himself believe—
—they don’t need you—
—they never needed you—
—they needed Adamson—
—you were a poor substitute, a meager simulacrum—
His phone dinged.
The sound of it cracked through the dark like one of the fireworks outside, cutting clean through the flurry of voices. He lurched after it with a swiftness that surprised and embarrassed him, like someone underwater breaking the surface after deciding to drown because he hadn’t yet managed to fully override his body’s longing for air. He hated how much he’d wanted that. That small, humiliating taste of hope.
He looked at the screen.
Jack.
He stared at Jack’s name for a moment and felt comfort mixed with shame.
He opened it.
What the hell is wrong with you.
It took him a moment to understand the words. He had reached for Jack’s words blindly, without thought or preparation. He hadn’t expected this. Hadn’t expected running through the doors for warm spring light and instead getting caught in a frigid winter storm.
I heard about Mohan.
The words found purchase in his chest with a feeling he couldn’t name.
What you said to her.
It wasn’t quite pain. No, pain wouldn’t—couldn’t be this heavy.
Are you serious right now? That is NOT what you do. That is the opposite of what you do.
He was still reading. Reading slowly, each word arriving with a delay as if coming in from a great distance.
She is a resident, under your care, who came to you in crisis. And you mocked her. You. The man who has given that speech about taking care of your people about a thousand times. Who told ME to ask for help. Who sat across from me in the worst weeks of my life and said that this job will break you if you don’t let people in.
His lips parted slightly.
What happened to that man, Robby.
He read that line again.
I don’t know what’s going on with you. I don’t know if you even know. But this…
Is not okay. She deserved better than that. You KNOW she deserved better than that.
He noticed, distantly, the shallow, rasping quality of his breathing.
What the hell were you thinking
He set the phone face down on the floor, and sat there for a moment with his hand resting on it, the glass still warm from being in his pocket.
But the floor was cold, and he could feel the cold moving through him, surrounding him, filling every crack.
He pressed the back of his hand to his mouth.
He didn’t know what to think.
He hadn’t expected this. Maybe he should have had. But he wasn’t thinking—and wasn’t that an accurate description of him. He had reached for Jack… and had received this. A fitting indictment. Exactly what he deserved—no, less than what he deserved.
He picked up his phone and read the messages again.
—what the hell were you thinking—
He had been thinking that Mohan needed to be tougher. That she was going to get herself killed if she didn’t. That he was helping her.
But he understood now, sitting in the dark, that he had only been thinking about himself. He had looked at Mohan’s panic and seen his ow failures reflected back at him. So he punished her, belittled her for his own mistakes, weaknesses. He made her cower because he had been ashamed, ashamed of his own breakdown.
He felt the tremblings stirring somewhere deep inside of him, like the ground shaking before a wave that was about to break. He felt his stomach seized up, muscles contracting as if to hold off some phantom attack—a body’s automatic response. But he didn’t deserve that protection. He should feel the pain.
He read the texts again, dug into them with a heedless joy of a child tearing the wings off flies. The pain built and built, until it became a tightening in the chest, an almost foreign pressure behind his sternum. It felt, almost, like relief.
He reached for more.
What is wrong with you, Jack had asked.
He was. That was the answer. He was what was wrong. The problem. The poison.
He had known this for a while, known in the sense of acknowledging the truth in order to hide from it. But now, with Jack’s words on the screen in from of his eyes, he could finally accept it. Embrace it.
He is broken.
And ne needs to be brought to justice. Contained. Punished. Removed.
Erased.
He turned the words over in his mind, let them fill him with rage, regret, and relief. As he pushed himself deeper into the maelstrom, it was as if some profound clarity came over him all at once. As if the envenomed had been freed of his affliction by taking the ultimate dose of poison.
He pocketed his phone and pushed himself up from the floor.
His path forward was clear.
He walked to the door, leaving his backpacks behind, leaving his whole life, a life already divested of meaning.
He walked out of an apartment that was already forgetting him, and pulled the door shut.
He wouldn’t be coming back.
[Jack’s POV]
Jack had been doing the rounds when his phone rang.
It took a moment for the ringing to pierce through the fog of his bone-deep fatigue. He would never admit this to anyone—not to his colleagues, not to his therapist, not even to himself—but three hours of sleep before a full shift was perhaps a bad idea.
By some genuine miracle, the ER tonight was not as catastrophic as it could have been. Burns, lacerations, one memorable incident involving a bottle rocket and a mailbox that had kept him occupied for the better part of an hour. Busy, but still manageable.
He had been grateful for it. Grateful for the work, for the chance to be kept busy, for something else to occupy his mind instead of the endless ruminations about Robby.
Because the thing about the Robby situation was that it didn’t make sense.
Mohan had approached him before his shift had officially started. She looked tired, and a bit scared, asking for a recommendation letter in the careful manner of someone expecting a refusal. He had been utterly confused.
“I’m flattered, Dr. Mohan, and I will write you a letter,” he had said quickly, watching the tension in her shoulders. “But—if I could ask—why not Robby?”
Mohan had went very still, eyes slipping from his face to focus on the floor.
He thought that she was embarrassed. A bit shy. So he pressed on gently, trying to draw her out.
And then the truth came out, piece by distressing piece—about how she didn’t think she belonged, didn’t think Robby would write a good letter, or any letter for her. About how what had happened today, how he had blown up at her, in front of a roomful of her colleagues.
Jack was stunned speechless.
He must have stayed mute for a beat too long, and Mohan took his silence as disbelief and quiet rebuke. Her jaw had clenched tight, her eyes blinking rapidly, holding back the tears threatening to spill out. She had apologized for bothering him.
He had looked at her—this capable, compassionate, and knowledgeable doctor—and felt something in his chest break cleanly in two.
He spent the next twenty minutes doing damage control. Carefully, methodically, trying to rebuild what Robby had so callously shattered. He had watched her face for the slow return of that confident R3 he had remembered, and when she had finally cracked a small, hesitant smile, he had felt relief like a physical thing. Then he sent her home to rest, but not before assuring her two more times that he would write her a stellar recommendation letter—for whichever program and whatever specialty she would like.
Only then did he dare to loosen his tight grip on his anger. How dare Robby do this to Mohan? Mocking her in front of all the residents and nurses. Laughing at her for a panic attack she had no control over?
He had written those texts in that anger, and afterwards, he had left them there because he didn’t know what else to say. And because everything he had said was true.
Robby had not texted back. He never did, when he was ashamed or cornered. For him, avoidance was not a habit so much as a reflex, an instinct. And Jack had known this for long enough that he was used to it. They had fought before. They knew how to do this. There would be a period silence, and then there would be a conversation, awkward and long and difficult. But eventually they would come out the other side of it more or less intact.
He was telling himself this—leaning against the nurse’s station, head buried in a chart that he wasn’t reading—trying to get himself that everything was fine. But there was something else. Something bigger.
It wasn’t just today. Yes, today was uncharacteristically bad, but if Jack was being honest, Robbby had not been himself for weeks. He had tried to put it down to sabbatical restlessness, to the agitation of someone who didn’t know how to live and not work. But the sabbatical itself was strange—three month, from a man who had never even taken three days off.
And then there was Robby’s face the last time they had talked, that half smile half sob his face had twisted into when Jack had asked him to call him if things got too dark. The lack of a verbal response. The way Robby walked away almost at a run, as if staying there for one more second might cost him something he couldn’t afford.
His mind went back to what Mohan had told him. He believed her—no doubt about that, and he was mad at Robby on her behalf. But, at the same time, this wasn’t Robby. Jack knew what he did with people in crisis. He had seen it. Hell, he had been the direct recipient of it—those mornings on the rooftop, and evenings in Robby’s apartment because his own was too silent, too haunted by old ghosts. Laughing in the face of a panic attack is just not what Robby does.
All of it, all of Robby’s recent strangeness piled up, churning in Jack’s mind like a giant ball of wool, stringing its muddled weirdness into every thought.
He had been shocked, confused, and alarmed. And—he realized with a start—he was afraid for Robby. A fear like watching someone travel down a long, dark road, alone, further and further from the light, and being unable to follow.
But he was a doctor. so he buried his fear into his work, pretended that everything was fine, that Robby was either asleep or brooding at home, and either way he wasn’t going to pick up his phone to be lectured at. He had almost convinced himself.
He was almost convinced when his phone rang.
His notifications were silenced. He had kept a short list of exceptions, the same list he had kept for years: his wife. PTMC emergency line. And Robby. And it couldn’t have been the first two.
He looked at the screen. It was Robby.
He felt his apprehension take up residence in his chest without fully knowing whyd. He told himself Robby must be calling to apologize, or to argue; that this wasn’t too much of an anomaly; and he would pick up the phone and answer and they would meet up after his shift and talk it all out. But his finger shook when he pressed answer. He blamed it on his lack of sleep.
“Robby.”
There the low buzz of background static, the silence stretching for a moment too long. Then: “Hey.”
Jack straightened off the nurses’ station.
Robby’s voice was… wrong. There was no other word for it. He had been braced for anger—those clipped, harsh words, or for deflection—the deliberate, evasive tone that begged let’s not do this right now. But this was neither.
The word was too slow, not merely the slowness Robby got when he was exhausted, that particular heavy flatness. It was simultaneously too light and too still. And there was something beneath it—something thin, like a bird lost in a storm.
“What’s going on,” Jack said carefully.
“I just—” A pause. Long enough that Jack pulled the phone from his ear to check that the call was still connected. “I wanted to call.”
“It’s two in the morning.”
“Yeah.” Another pause. “I know.”
“Are you—Robby, have you been drinking?”
“No.” Almost immediately. “No, I haven’t—I’m not drunk.”
Jack knew that before he had asked. He knew what a drunk Robby sounded like, could identify it half asleep, and this wasn’t that. This was something else and Jack’s mind was already cataloguing, running through scenarios with the clinical proficiency that kicked in before he could stop it—
“Where are you?”
“I’m fine.”
“That’s not what I asked.” He turned away from the nurses’ station, walked toward the corridor, to a spot offered some semblance of privacy. He was aware of the nurses eyes on him, of the way his voice was carrying. “Robby. Where are you?”
A long silence.
“Outside.” And then, with an odd quality had a hint of a younger’s Robby’s whimsy: “There are stars.”
Jack’s hand tightened on the phone.
“Stars,” he repeated.
“Yeah. Lot of them. Without the light pollution, you can—yeah.” Robby’s voice dipped. “I forgot what it’s like.”
“Are you on your bike?”
“Not anymore.”
Not anymore.
Jack went very still.
He rode somewhere and now he’s stopped, and there are stars, and it’s two in the morning, and Robby never called after a fight, and his voice was wrong, and his cadence was wrong—
Jack felt fear crept into his heart and then he was afraid, afraid of the fear and of the yet unknown reasons behind it.
“Robby,” he said. “Talk to me.”
“I’m talking to you.”
“You called me at two in the morning. You sound—” He couldn’t find the right words, then trying again: “something’s wrong. Tell me. Please.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It matters to me.”
Another pause.
“I wanted to say I’m sorry,” Robby said. “About Mohan. About—” A small sound, not quite a breath. “About a lot of things. I was—you were right. In the texts. Everything you said.”
“Okay.” Jack kept his voice steady with some efforts. “We can talk about that. You want to come over after my shift, we’ll get coffee, or drinks—”
“I’ve said things I can’t take back. Not just today. I’ve—I’ve caused a lot of damage. To a lot of people.”
The hairs on the back of Jack’s neck stood on their ends. He shivered.
“Robby—”
“I want you to know that I know that.” There was a strange weightlessness in his words. A horrible, unmoored lightness, like a man who had finally put down a great burden. It reminded Jack of flowers, confessionals, churches, and tombstones. “I know what I am.”
“Stop.” Jack said. Firmly, gently. “Tell me where you are. I’ll come and find you.”
“No, Jack.” And there it was again—that undercurrent of something just beneath the careful surface. “You should—you should focus on your shift. You’ve got a few more hours.”
“I don’t care about my shift.”
“You do.” An instant reply. Robby’s voice was quiet and fond. “You really do. Even when you pretend otherwise. You’re a good doctor. You know that? The best.”
“Don’t.”
“I mean it.”
“Robby—”
“I mean it.” And his voice softened further. Eah word arrived with slightly more effort than the last, or perhaps he was imagining that, listening to things that weren’t there. “You’re the best doctor I know. And you’re—you’ve been a good—” A pause. An unsteady breath. “I’m sorry I wasn’t better. I’m sorry I made it so hard.”
“Robby, stop.” Jack was pacing now, in short tight turns, because the corridor was short, because he couldn’t stay still. “Stop taking like that. Tell me where you are.”
Silence.
The expression on his face must have been terrible because a nurse took one look at him, turned, and walked—ran away. But he couldn’t bring himself to care. His fingers had white-knuckled on his phone.
Then suddenly, out of nowhere—
“I love you.”
The words arrived in a voice he had never heard Robby use, unguarded in the way that Robby almost never was, stripped of the wit and the humor he used as a shield, down and down to something that sounded frightfully young, and so innocent that it made Jack want to weep. Jack couldn’t find his voice. He held the phone with both hands and waited for the next words to land.
Robby’s next sentence arrived quieter still. “I should have said it before. I’m sorry I didn’t.”
This was wrong. An ancient, instinctual need came over him, the need to make Robby stop, to pause this surreal ritual before it was too late. Jack floundered, like someone caught in a nightmare he couldn’t escape. But Robby was still talking.
“Thank you. For all of it. For everything.”
“Stop.” Jack felt something crack and break in his chest. “Stop it. Tell me where you are, Robby, tell me right now—”
“There’s nothing—” A pause. Something in it that frightened Jack more than everything else. Something almost peaceful. “Whatever you—whatever happens, I want you to know that.”
An understand had arrived, whole and terrible. This… this was Robby’s goodbye.
“No.” The word came out of him without his conscious control, he could feel his whole body shake with the force of it, the volume loud enough that Ellis’ head popped up from the far end of the hall. He turned his back to her. His voice hardened. “No. Don’t you dare. Don’t do this.”
“Jack—”
“Do not say goodbye to me.” He heard his own voice shaking and couldn’t stop it. “Do you understand me? You do not get to do this.”
“Jack, please—” andd Robby’s voice cracked too, and that crack was worse than anything else and better than everything else, because it meant that he was still there, still reachable, that it wasn’t too late—
“I don’t forgive you!” Jack shouted into his phone, held between numb fingers. He must have been drawing a crowd now, but he wouldn’t—couldn’t care. “I don’t forgive you. You don’t get to say goodbye. You hear me?” He pressed his free hand flat against the wall. “I need you to listen to me. Are you listening?”
Silence.
“Robby.”
“…Yeah.”
“You are not allowed to die.” His voice trembled on the last word, but kept going. “I won’t allow it. Do you hear me? I will not allow it. So you are going to tell me where you are, and I am going to come to you, and we are going to—Robby—”
He felt the change on the other end before he heard it. A different kind of silence.
“It’s too late,” Robby said. Softly. With a kind of exhausted honesty that was so much worse than everything that had come before it, worse than the goodbyes, worse than the I love you.
“It’s okay, Jack.” The voice came from very far away. “I couldn’t—I can’t forgive myself either.”
“ROBBY—”
The line went dead.