Chapter Text
The lock turned at seven-fifteen on a Tuesday evening and Dennis didn't move.
He heard the door open. He heard the sound of someone who knew the space well, no hesitation at the threshold, no fumbling for a light switch, no pause to get their bearings. He lay in Robby's bed in Robby's hoodie and looked at the ceiling. For the briefest of moments, he wondered if it was Robby who had come home. But he knew it couldn't be Robby, not really. Robby had sent a text that morning, a campsite and a river, proof of elsewhere. Of course Robby had given someone a key. Of course he'd done it without mentioning it, without thinking it would ever matter, without considering that eleven days after his sabbatical started Dennis would be lying in his bed at seven in the evening with no particular plans to move and someone would let themselves in and find him like this. He probably didn't trust that Whitaker could handle it.
Of course.
Footsteps in the hall. They stopped outside the bedroom door.
A long pause, then a soft voice. A voice he knew. "Whitaker."
He pulled the sleeve of the hoodie further over his hand.
"I can see the light under the door, I know you're in there." Abbot said.
Dennis reached over and turned off the bedside lamp. The room went dark. There was a silence from the other side of the door that managed, without any words at all, to convey a steady patience. Not irritation, not amusement, just the settled weight of someone who was prepared to wait as long as this took and didn't particularly mind either way.
"That was already on when I got here," Dennis said, like he hadn't been coming here for almost two weeks.
"Sure," Abbot said. "Can I come in?"
Dennis considered his options. They were limited. The window in here didn't open very wide and they were on the second floor.
"Yeah," he sighted. "Fine."
---
Abbot opened the door and stood in the doorway. Dennis didn't need to look at Abbot to know the look on his face, precise, unhurried, missing absolutely nothing. He wore a jacket, hands in his pockets. He took in the room the way he took everything in. The bed, the hoodie, the lamp Dennis had just turned off, the general evidence of a person who had been existing in someone else's space without much intention or plan. The glass of water on the nightstand that Dennis had refilled twice today because refilling it gave him somewhere to go. The work clothes he'd changed out of draped over the chair in the corner rather than hung up. The way the other side of the bed was undisturbed, because he'd been sleeping on one side and not moving, as though he were trying to take up as little space as possible.
Abbot took all of it in. He didn't say anything about any of it.
"Hey." Dennis said finally, the silence weighing down on him.
"Hey." Abbot echoed.
There was a beat. Dennis waited for him to explain himself. Why he was here, in Robby's house, at seven-fifteen on a Tuesday evening, with Robby's key in his pocket. Abbot didn't offer anything. He just stood in the doorway with his hands in his pockets and looked, and Dennis had the uncomfortable sensation of being assessed without being judged, which was somehow worse than being judged would have been.
"I was about to get up." Dennis offered, hoping it would change whatever Abbot was thinking about him.
"Okay." Abbot said.
"I wasn't — I wasn't just lying here." He wasn't sure why he was making excuses, but he did it anyway.
"Okay." Abbot said again, in exactly the same tone, and Dennis understood that he was going to keep saying okay until Dennis ran out of things to defend himself with and there was nothing left to do but get up, so he got up. He pushed the sleeves back over his knuckles and swung his legs off the bed and stood, and Abbot stepped back from the doorway to give him room to pass.
"I'll make coffee." Dennis offered, desperately needing something to do with his hands.
"Sure." At least this time it wasn't okay.
---
Robby's kitchen had everything in the right place. The coffee where you'd expect it, the mugs where you'd naturally reach, the drawer with the useful things organised by someone who had thought about which useful things you'd need most often and put those at the front. Dennis had been moving through it for eleven days with the feeling of borrowing something he hadn't been offered, using a system that wasn't his, and he kept catching himself doing things the way Robby would have done them rather than the way he would have, because Robby's way was built into the space and his own had no foothold.
The hoodie was too big for him. Robby had broader shoulders, a longer reach, and the sleeves came down past Dennis's wrists and the hem sat lower than it would on Robby, covering his boxers and he'd been swimming in it for eleven days and he knew how that looked but he couldn't make himself care enough to change it, which was something he wasn't going to examine.
He made the coffee and brought it out.
Abbot had settled on the couch, phone face-down on the cushion beside him. He took the mug Dennis handed him and said thanks as Dennis sat in the armchair across from him, because the couch felt like a concession he hadn't agreed to make. Dennis wrapped both hands around his own mug and looked at him.
"How do you have a key?" Dennis said.
Something moved across Abbot's face that wasn't quite a smile. "Robby gave it to me."
"When?"
"A while ago." Again, not quite a smile.
Dennis looked at him. Abbot looked back, easy and unhurried, the mug held loosely in both hands.
"Did he ask you to check on me?" Dennis wasn't sure he wanted to know the answer to that.
"No," Abbot said. "He didn't."
He said it evenly, without weight, a simple fact. Something in the tone told Dennis not to pull that thread further. Not tonight. He filed it under not my business and moved on.
---
Abbot asked how he was finding the year, and Dennis told him, because it was a real question with a real answer and significantly easier than talking about anything else. They fell into the texture of it without effort, the rhythms of first year, the exhaustion of being new enough that everything still required conscious effort, the way a shift could turn on nothing, the way some attendings made the work feel possible and others made it feel like punishment. Abbot listened the way he always listened, with attention that made Dennis feel like everything he said was being accurately recorded and considered, which was either deeply reassuring or faintly unsettling depending on what he were saying.
Abbot asked good questions. Not the evaluative kind, not the kind that were really assessments wearing the costume of conversation, just questions that showed he'd been paying attention, that he kept a running model of Dennis in his head and actually updated it. Dennis found himself answering more than he'd intended to as Abbot asked the right thing at the right angle.
That was the thing about Abbot. He was relentlessly, almost aggressively competent, and he wore it without performance. It was just the baseline, just the water he swam in, and there was something about being in proximity to it that made the air in the room feel more organised. Like problems had a shape and the shape was manageable. Dennis had always found it easier to think around him. He hadn't examined why.
The work conversation wound down the way conversations do when both people have been using it as scaffolding and the scaffolding has served its purpose. They were left with the actual room, the house, the absence in it, the hoodie Dennis was still wearing that smelled less like Robby every day and which he had been reluctantly, persistently aware of.
Abbot's voice was quiet when he asked, "When did you last eat?"
Dennis opened his mouth. Closed it.
"Today." He was reluctant to elaborate any further.
Abbot waited.
"This morning. There was bread. Toast." He offered, trying to make it sound like it had been more than it was.
"Just toast."
"It was a busy day." Dennis huffed, tugging on his curls.
Abbot didn't say anything. He had a way of not saying things that was its own form of pressure. It wasn't aggressive, not pointed, just the weight of his attention and the absence of any indication that he was going to fill the silence to make it easier. Dennis had seen him do it in the trauma bay, with patients who were catastrophising and needed to run out of words before they could hear anything. He'd found it impressive then. He found it considerably less impressive from the inside.
"I wasn't very hungry." Dennis grumbled, hand back inside of the hoody sleeve.
"Okay," Abbot said.
That was all. Just okay. No follow-up, no visible judgment, no indication that he was filing this alongside the glass of water and the undisturbed side of the bed and arriving at a conclusion. He picked up his mug and drank his coffee and looked at the middle distance, and Dennis felt the tension in his chest loosen, almost against his will, in the way it did sometimes when he'd been braced for something and the something didn't come.
---
Abbot stayed for an hour.
They talked about the heat for a while. It had been brutal all week, the kind of July that made the city feel like it was being held underwater, and the hospital's air conditioning had been losing the argument since Tuesday. And then they talked about nothing much, a conversation that required the presence of another person but didn't ask anything of either of them. The fan in the corner turned. The house settled. Outside, the street was loud. Pittsburgh got loud on summer nights, windows open everywhere, the neighbourhood audible in layers. Someone's television, a dog, a car with its bass up taking the corner too fast.
Dennis had forgotten what it felt like, having someone else in a room. Not at work, work was full of people, work was never the problem. But here, in a space that wasn't his, in the evening, with nowhere to be and nothing to perform. He'd been alone in Robby's house for eleven days and he hadn't let himself feel the size of that until Abbot sat down on the couch and the room got smaller in a way that was a relief.
At eight-fifteen Abbot stood up and put his mug on the coffee table and shrugged his jacket back on.
"I'll let you get some sleep," he said.
Dennis almost said I don't sleep much.
He didn't.
"Thanks for stopping by." Was what he finally settled on as he followed Abbot to the door. Abbot did the thing where he checked for his keys automatically — jacket pocket, a small pat — and Dennis noticed he had two sets. His own, presumably, and Robby's. Neither of them made anything of it.
Abbot paused on the threshold and looked back.
"Eat something tomorrow," he said. "Before the afternoon."
It wasn't a question. It wasn't quite an order either. It sat in the space between the two. Directive without being demanding, the kind of thing that left room for Dennis to comply without the compliance feeling like submission. He was aware, in a dim and unexamined way, that it was a very specific register to speak in.
"Sure," Dennis said.
Abbot nodded. He left. Dennis stood in the doorway and listened to his footsteps on the steps, the sound of the street door, the silence that came after. Then he went back inside and stood in the middle of Robby's living room and looked at the two mugs on the coffee table — his where he'd been sitting, Abbot's where he'd been — and listened to the house settle around him.