Chapter Text
Jack found out Robby was trying to foster Baby Jane Doe the same way he found out most of Robby’s worst decisions: too late to prevent them and just early enough to develop a stress headache.
Two days earlier, just after eight o'clock in the morning on the far side of the Fourth of July shift, Robby had texted him instead of getting on the motorcycle.
Not going.
That had been the whole message.
No explanation. No apology for the night before. No acknowledgment of the fact that Jack had just spent the better part of an hour following Robby around saying things so sincere and humiliating he was considering legal action against himself.
Just: Not going.
Jack had read it in his kitchen with one hand braced on the counter, and the relief that hit him had been so sudden and violent it nearly folded him in half.
He had sat down hard at his own table.
Then, because he was not a man who handled enormous emotions by expressing them in healthy ways, he had texted back:
Good.
A minute later, because apparently his nervous system had decided to become theatrical in middle age, he had added:
If you’d died in a ditch after making me do that speech, I would have been furious.
Robby had taken four minutes to answer, which Jack remembered because he had stared at the screen for every single one of them.
Noted. Also your speech was kind of overwrought.
Jack had laughed out loud in his empty apartment, too relieved to care that his eyes had burned a little.
He had slept that day.
Not well. Not enough. But better than he would have if Robby had vanished onto the highway with burnout in his bones and self-destruction dressed up as freedom.
Now, forty-eight hours later, Jack was standing in the pediatric ward outside the nursery, holding a coffee that had gone cold twenty minutes ago and listening to Robby say, in a tone of grim professional determination, “I’m applying for kinship fostering.”
Jack blinked at him.
The nursery windows reflected both of them back in washed-out hospital light. Robby looking out of place in the Emergency Department in his own clothes, beard rougher than usual, posture held together by force and caffeine. Jack in scrubs, with the added sensation of his soul trying to leave his body through his left eye as it twitched dangerously.
“You’re what,” Jack said.
Robby, irritatingly, did not even have the decency to look sheepish. He looked tired. Wired. Certain in the way people often were when they were about to attempt something either noble or insane.
In Robby’s case, history suggested both.
“For Baby Jane Doe,” Robby said. “Temporarily. Assuming they approve me. Which they may not. There are procedures.”
Jack stared.
Through the glass, a nurse crossed the room carrying a bundled infant. Somewhere down the hall a monitor chirped. The hospital kept doing what hospitals always did, continuing to exist with unbearable normalcy while individual lives quietly detonated in its corners.
Jack said, very carefully, “I told you to get help.”
“I did get help.”
“No,” Jack said. “I meant therapy.”
“To be fair, I have started therapy."
“I did not mean therapy and a baby.”
Robby’s expression tightened with something that was not quite defensiveness and not quite shame. More dangerous than either. Conviction.
Jack took a breath. “Tell me this is a thought you had five minutes ago and not something you’ve already started.”
Robby looked past him, toward the nursery window.
That was answer enough.
“Robby.”
“I asked questions.”
Jack closed his eyes briefly. “Of course you did.”
“Not recklessly.”
“That is not the phrase I would use.”
Robby finally looked at him. “She doesn’t have anyone.”
The words landed with a quiet force that made irritation briefly impossible.
Jack had known, in the abstract, that this was about the baby. Obviously, it was about the baby. But this was the first moment he heard the shape of it underneath. Not saviorism. Not sentimentality. Something older. Rawer. A bruise pressed hard.
He followed Robby’s line of sight through the glass.
Baby Jane Doe was asleep now, a tiny, swaddled comma in a plastic bassinet. Small enough to fit in the bend of one arm. Small enough that the phrase no one felt like claiming felt less like bureaucracy and more like a sin.
Jack scrubbed a hand over his mouth.
“She does,” he said at last. “Have people. Social workers. Foster placement. The system.”
Robby’s laugh was short and jagged. “That’s a beautiful sentence if you don’t think about it too hard.”
Jack winced.
Fair.
“That’s not what I meant,” he said, softer now.
Robby folded his arms. “I know what you meant.”
“I don’t think you do.”
“Jack, you told me not to disappear into the dark alone.” His voice stayed level, but there was something frayed under it, some edge of held-together emotion scraping against the words. “You told me to get help. You told me to find somebody to dance through the darkness with.”
Jack stared at him for one long, disbelieving beat.
Then, because life was cruel and Robby’s timing was worse, he let out one incredulous laugh.
“Oh, absolutely not,” he said.
Robby frowned. “What?”
“That,” Jack said, pointing at him with his cold coffee like it was legal evidence, “is not what I meant.”
Robby’s shoulders rose and fell. “Well, it’s what I heard.”
“I meant a therapist. A support system. Friends. Possibly medication if indicated. I did not mean acquire an infant.”
“I’m not acquiring an infant like she’s a sectional.”
“Robby.”
“She needs someone.”
“And you,” Jack shot back, “need eight consecutive hours of sleep, a psychiatrist, and to stop interpreting emotional advice like it’s an emergency procurement order.”
That actually made Robby smile, small and unwilling.
It vanished quickly.
Jack knew that look. Had seen it on trauma nights, on grief nights, on those bad stretches where Robby got so still he somehow looked more exhausted than if he were falling apart outright. It was the face he made when he was about to say something painfully honest and resented the need.
“When I talked to her,” Robby said, eyes on the floor now, “I heard myself saying things I didn’t know were still in there.”
Jack said nothing.
Robby swallowed once.
“I told her she’d be okay,” he said. “I told her I knew she got off to a rough start. I told her there were good things ahead.” His mouth twisted. “Which was apparently a weirdly intimate thing to say to a newborn.”
No, Jack thought. Not intimate.
Instinctive.
He understood, all at once, with a sort of sinking dread, exactly where this was coming from. The speech in the trauma bay. The text message that had spared him a day of sleep, imagining headlights vanishing into black. The two days of Robby being quieter, more remote, as if all the walls had shifted half an inch and he was still learning the new floor plan. And underneath it, the baby. Abandoned. Unclaimed. A child-shaped wound pressed right up against the oldest injury in Robby and left there to throb.
Jack leaned back against the wall.
“You think this is about her,” he said.
Robby’s eyes flashed. “It is about her.”
“It is also about you.”
Robby did not answer, which was answer enough.
A nurse passed them pushing a cart and gave them the brief, incurious glance of someone who worked in a hospital and therefore considered two attendings having what looked like a hostage negotiation outside the nursery to be background scenery.
Jack waited until she was gone.
Then he said, quieter, “That’s what scares me.”
Robby looked at him.
Jack kept his voice even by force. “Because you are not usually impulsive about the wrong things. You’re methodical. Which means if you’ve decided this, you’ve already built yourself a moral framework around it sturdy enough to die in.”
“Jesus.”
“Don’t ‘Jesus’ me.” Jack set the coffee down on the windowsill before he did something regrettable with it. “I know how you work. You pick up people’s emergencies and carry them like they’re proof of character. You turn usefulness into religion. So forgive me if ‘I’m going to become responsible for an abandoned newborn two days after I almost took a passively suicidal road trip’ does not strike me as uncomplicated healing.”
That hit.
Robby’s face went still in the dangerous way.
For a moment Jack thought he had pushed too hard, too fast. Then Robby looked away toward the bassinet again and said, in a voice that had gone flat with effort, “I didn’t almost kill myself.”
Jack’s temper flashed bright and clean.
“No?” he said. “What exactly were you doing then? Because from where I was standing, ‘I’m just going to get on my motorcycle at ten o’clock at night after a catastrophic shift while my head is held together with duct tape’ felt like a distinction without a difference.”
Robby’s jaw clenched.
Jack lowered his voice immediately, not softer, just less likely to carry.
“I was relieved,” he said, and hated how raw the truth sounded once it was out. “When you texted me. I was so relieved I nearly cried in my kitchen like someone watching a video of a dog welcoming back their owner from war. So yes, maybe I’m having a strong reaction to finding out that your version of stability now includes state paperwork and a dependent.”
Robby looked back at him then, startled clean through.
Jack regretted the sentence instantly. Not because it was untrue, but because now it existed in the air between them, embarrassingly alive.
Robby blinked once. “Jack.”
“Don’t make this about my emotional transparency. I hate that.”
Despite everything, despite the ward and the baby and the stress headache starting to pulse behind his eyes like a tiny marching band, Robby laughed. A real laugh this time. Brief, tired, but real.
Jack felt some internal organ unclench.
Then Robby scrubbed a hand over his beard and said, “I know it sounds insane.”
“It does.”
“I also know I’m not doing great.”
“That is a criminal understatement.”
“But I’m not doing what I was doing two nights ago.”
Jack said nothing.
“I’m going to therapy,” Robby went on. “I’m sleeping. Badly, but more. I’m not getting on the bike and trying to outrun my life.” He took a breath. “This isn’t that.”
Jack listened.
Robby looked through the glass again, shoulders tight. “This feels like… choosing something. On purpose.”
That was the worst part.
Jack believed him.
He believed Robby was sincere. Believed this was not some manic fantasy, not really. Believed that if Robby could have reached into the earth and pulled this child out with his own hands to spare her whatever came next, he would have. The man had never once encountered suffering and thought, not my department.
The problem was that Robby had also never been particularly good at distinguishing love from sacrifice when it came to himself.
Jack folded his arms.
“Have you told your therapist?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
Robby made a face. “She was professionally alarmed.”
“Excellent. At least one of us is acting correctly.”
“She also said if I pursue it, I need a support system.”
Jack stared at him.
Robby, to his credit, had the decency to look a little uncomfortable now.
The pieces clicked into place with terrible, inevitable elegance.
“No,” Jack said.
Robby did not speak.
“No,” Jack repeated. “Whatever expression that is, get it off your face.”
“I haven’t asked you anything.”
“You’re not asking very loudly.”
“That sounds made up.”
Jack laughed once, all edges. “Robby, there is not a world in which you say ‘support system’ in that tone and I don’t know I’m in the blast radius.”
This time Robby really did look sheepish, which would have been more reassuring if Jack hadn’t known him for years.
“I wasn’t,” Robby said carefully, “going to ask you to do anything.”
“Liar.”
Robby opened his mouth. Closed it. “I was going to ask if you could maybe be listed as my emergency contact for the home visit.”
Jack stared at him in silence.
Then, because apparently God had left him on read years ago, he tipped his head back against the wall and laughed. Not because anything was funny. Because the alternative was strangling a beloved idiot in the pediatric ward.
“Emergency contact,” he repeated.
“It’s just a line on a form.”
“You are unbelievable.”
“I’m aware.”
Jack turned his head and looked at him fully.
There was no swagger in Robby now. No smugness. Just exhaustion, resolve, and something else beneath both. Fear, maybe. Not of paperwork. Not of logistics. Of wanting this too much. Of being told that the tenderness he felt toward that child was evidence of damage rather than humanity.
Jack knew that fear. Had lived in adjacent neighborhoods.
He looked through the glass one more time.
The baby slept on, tiny fists tucked uselessly close, indifferent to the adult catastrophe unfolding in her honor.
Two days ago Jack had stood in a trauma bay and told Robby not to let the darkness take him. Had told him to get help. To find someone to dance through it with.
He had meant therapy. Structure. Connection. The thousand ordinary things that keep a man tethered to the world when his own mind starts making a case against it.
He had not meant this.
He had absolutely not meant this.
The trouble was, standing here now, he could feel the edge of another truth pressing in behind his outrage.
This might still be a terrible idea.
But if Robby was going to do it, there was no universe in which Jack was letting him do it alone.
He exhaled slowly.
Robby glanced at him. “That look is concerning.”
“That’s because I’m resigning myself to making a bad decision.”
“Jack.”
“I want the record to show,” Jack said, holding up a finger, “that I continue to think this is not what I meant.”
Robby’s brow furrowed. “What are you saying?”
Jack looked at him, looked at the nursery, then back again.
“I’m saying,” he said, each word sounding like it had been dragged reluctantly into existence, “if you are actually doing this, then I’m not leaving you to white-knuckle it by yourself.”
Robby went very still.
Jack hated how much it mattered immediately, the way something in Robby’s face loosened before he could stop it.
“Jack,” he said again, but this time it was softer. Less warning than disbelief.
“Don’t get sentimental. I’ll retract it.”
A laugh escaped Robby, thin and helpless.
Jack pressed on before he could think better of himself. “I mean it. Home visits, pediatric appointments, formula, whatever bureaucratic hellscape this turns into. Fine. But I am not watching you turn this into another way to quietly martyr yourself.”
Robby stared at him.
Jack added, because apparently self-preservation had left the building entirely, “And if this gets approved, I’m moving in.”
Now Robby just blinked.
“You’re what?”
“Temporarily.”
“That sounds fake.”
“It probably is,” Jack said. “But I know how this goes. You’ll say you’re fine. You’ll stop sleeping. You’ll decide asking for help is weakness and start trying to carry the whole thing on your back until your spine snaps. I am not interested in living through that.”
There was a long silence.
Hospital air hummed around them. Someone laughed down the corridor. Overhead, fluorescent lights buzzed like badly suppressed panic.
Robby looked wrecked by it. Not in the dramatic sense. In the small, devastating one. Like being offered company in the dark had hit some part of him still too bruised to expect it.
When he finally spoke, his voice was rough.
“You don’t have to do that.”
Jack held his gaze. “I know.”
That was the point. That was always the point.
Robby looked away first, throat working. “You’re still allowed to think I’m out of my mind.”
“I do think you’re out of your mind.”
“Great.”
“I also think,” Jack said, choosing the truth because at this point the evening had already become unsalvageable, “that if there’s a baby in this story now, then somebody has to make sure both of you survive your own terrible instincts.”
Robby laughed through what was very obviously almost tears, which for him counted as practically operatic.
“That’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me,” he muttered.
“It’s not nice. It’s triage.”
“Mm-hm.”
Jack picked his coffee back up, grimaced at the temperature, and drank it anyway out of spite.
Beside him, Robby stood in silence, staring through the glass at the child who had somehow become the axis of both their lives in less than a week.
Then, very quietly, he said, “I know this is not what you meant.”
Jack looked at him.
Robby’s mouth twitched.
“But it might still count as dancing through the darkness.”
Jack should have rolled his eyes. Should have refused the line on principle. Should have done anything other than let the corner of his mouth give in.
Instead he said, “Christ, you’re annoying.”
Robby smiled, tired and real.
For the first time in two days, Jack felt something that was not exactly peace but had some of its structure. Not certainty. Not comfort. Just the solid, uneasy sense of stepping onto a bridge that might hold because the person beside you had stepped onto it too.
Through the nursery glass, Baby Jane Doe slept on, tiny and oblivious, while two exhausted ER doctors stood watch and accidentally rearranged the rest of their lives around her.