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Langdon was pretty sure he knew what to expect from rehab.
He had seen enough detoxes, withdrawals, and subsequent relapses come through BH during his time in the ED to know what his body was about to go through.
Yet, nothing could have prepared him for the absolute hell that is withdrawing from benzos on an old mattress that, by the way, feels like literal concrete, while his back rapidly deteriorates.
There’s nothing he can do about it, besides writhing around and screaming into his pillow. It’s like someone has this iron grip on his spine, all day, every day, and won’t let go. It’s like a thousand knives, all at once, every time he takes a step. It’s fire in his veins, his nerves, his muscles, his everything.
Every day is a ten out of ten on the pain scale. He’s lucky if the nurse doesn’t draw a sardonic “12” out of him when she asks.
At least with the pills — the good ones — the pain would dull and his mind would quiet. Here, they won’t even give him acetaminophen. (Which, like, what the fuck? What kind of medical facility doesn’t give out acetaminophen? Fuck this place.) Now, the pain is ten times worse, he can’t sleep, he can’t eat, and his brain won’t shut the fuck up.
It’s all you could have come to me, and you let me down, and FUCK! YOU!
He closes his eyes, and all he sees is that look, hurt and guilty, on Robby’s face after he’d torn open his locker. There’s a tableau of Abby behind his eyelids: her, from months ago, holding a Ziploc full of Diazepam and Librium she’d said she found in his car.
He closes his eyes and feels hands, skilled and resilient, pushing him toward the door. (There’s this pull in his stomach when he thinks about it. The way those hands, which he’d regularly allow himself to get distracted by, had turned on him. The way his touch had lingered, hot against Langdon’s shoulders.)
When the orderly comes to get him, he’s curled in on himself, his pillow crushed under his hip.
“Mr. Langdon?” He calls, his voice distant as the blood roars in Langdon's ears. He almost laughs at the orderly referring to him as Mr. Langdon. (Seriously, fuck this place. And fuck the hospital for sending him here.)
“Not—” He gets out, teeth clenched and fingers tight in his hair. Breathe through it. “It’s not a good time.”
“I’m supposed to bring you down the hall,” he says. “You have a visitor.”
Ugh. His fucking sister. It’s shitty, he knows, but he can’t stand to look at her right now. The twisted up and unfamiliar look on her face. The tightness in her voice. Her general apathetic vibe.
“Tell her I’m busy,” Langdon groans, rolling onto his stomach. The repositioning takes more effort than it’s worth, sending a shockwave all the way down through his pelvis. “Or dead. It’s up to you, man, have fun with it.”
“Not your sister,” someone says, and fuck.
Langdon pushes up on his elbows, slowly, and cranes his neck around to see Robby, tense, with his hands shoved deep into his hoodie pockets, and Jesus, if his heart doesn’t jump in his chest.
He tries, vaguely, to think about the last time they’ve gone this long without seeing each other. He doesn’t think they ever have.
“Come on,” Robby says, nodding his head toward the hallway. Langdon stumbles to his feet with a familiar sort of urgency. Even here, at what is arguably his lowest low, he’s still following orders. Always eager to please.
They walk in relative silence, the only sounds cutting through being the orderly directing them where to go and the hum of the fluorescents above.
The visitation room here has always reminded Langdon of the Family Room back at work. Colorless, bleak, and stale. He hates it — hates this — all of this.
He lowers himself into one of the chairs, slouching in such a way that his mid-back hovers over where the seat and back meet. He’s not entirely unaware of how he must look to Robby right now, in his rehab-issued sweatpants and scratchy oversized hospital socks.
Robby sits down in the chair across from him, perched on the edge of it like he can’t wait to get out of here, which, for some reason, makes Langdon want to jump out of his skin.
“It’s good to see you,” Langdon breathes, letting himself stare, because fuck it, what else is there to lose?
Langdon’s eyes follow the lines of Robby’s furrowed brow. The gentle curve of his nose. He’s not sure when this infatuation, attraction, whatever it is, started, but it’s been heady, incessant, and sharp, throbbing under his skin for a while now. Maybe it’s been there the whole time.
“Yep,” Robby nods, his mouth pressed into a tight line. He draws out his next words, like he almost can’t believe he’s saying them. Really, it’s classic Robby. “Are you doing okay here?”
Oh.
That throws him off a little, because they’d essentially broken up the last time they saw each other, and Langdon had said some particularly awful shit, he admits, and now Robby’s here — in fucking Cleveland — asking him how he’s doing.
Langdon blinks at him. “Uh,” he stammers. “They won’t give me acetaminophen.”
Robby lets out a noise that’s half-laugh and half-scoff, and shakes his head. “No,” His eyes stay trained on the ground. “No, they won’t.”
There’s a beat of silence, then, where Langdon watches Robby stare at the floor.
“How’s, uh, Abby?” Robby asks after a moment, and Langdon can practically hear the disconnect in his voice. The subtly clinical tone. The forced distance.
It makes his blood boil. He wants to grab Robby by the shoulders and yell You know me! You know me!
Maybe, if he does that, Robby will talk to him like nothing ever happened. Like he didn’t put both patients and their careers at risk by doing some stupid shit without thinking about the consequences. But, he doesn’t.
“Uh… don’t know,” Langdon sighs. “We’d already been… separated, I guess. For a while,” he gestures vaguely to the visiting area, letting out a cynical laugh. “This was barely even a drop in the bucket.”
“And the boys?”
Jesus Christ, Langdon thinks. Robby’s here, sitting feet away from him, staring at him with those sad fucking eyes of his, and he wants to talk about Abby and his kids?
He’d been expecting screaming. Fighting. For Robby to say something about irreconcilable differences and the revocation of his medical license. Not this. Not the quiet, borderline gentle small talk he’d let himself get used to.
“They’re okay,” He sighs. “I, uh, I get to call them once a week, and I’ll get supervised visits every other week once I get out of here.”
“That’s good,” Robby says, a strained smile pulling at his face. “That’s a really good step.”
“It’s better than nothing,” Langdon breathes, snapping the beads of his bracelet against his wrist. He can’t do this. He can’t sit here and talk about them without wanting to scream. He holds his breath for three, four, five seconds, before saying, slow and measured: “I really don’t want to talk about my kids.”
Robby nods. “You look good,” He says, redirecting.
Langdon laughs at that. “I look like shit.”
He isn’t oblivious to the fact that rehab hasn’t exactly been doing his appearance any favors. His hair is always a mess, and he’s pale, with heaving bags under his eyes, and cold sweat clings to every available inch of his skin.
But Robby smiles at that, one of his real ones this time, and tilts his head downward. There’s a moment of silence, and then:
“How’s the back?” Robby asks, doing that thing with his eyes that makes Langdon's chest hurt.
“It’s—” Langdon tries, breathless as the weight of this, all of this, everything about this, bears down on him. “The pain’s never been worse. I can’t sleep. It’s like I’m on fire,”
Robby hangs his head low, breathing deeply. Langdon watches the rise and fall of his shoulders and tries not to cry. (He had never been much of a crier, but they do say that rehab changes people.)
“I wish you had come to me,” Robby whispers, fumbling for his necklace through his hoodie. A nervous tick, as Langdon has come to learn. (He had watched, once, after a particularly difficult shift, as Robby held it so tightly that the six points drew blood.) “I could have helped you. Why didn’t you come to me?”
“No, no,” Langdon breathes, pushing the heels of his hands into his eyes until he sees stars. This is too much. Every part of this. Robby, sitting there, staring at him. The sterile lighting. The scratch of his stupid facility-issued socks. “I couldn’t have.”
“You could have,” Robby pushes, worming his way under Langdon's skin, the way he always does. “What is it? You don’t trust me?”
“No, what? Come on, man,” Langdon pushes back, heat curling at the base of his neck. Something like discontent claws its way up his throat, raw and hot and thick like bile. “It’s not that, I just—”
“Then what was it, Frank?”
And that, for whatever reason, sets Langdon the absolute fuck off.
“What else was I supposed to do, Robby?” He yells, jumping to his feet. It comes out sharp, biting. Way harsher than he’d meant it to. For a moment, he’s back in the ambulance bay, going too far, twisting the knife the way he always does. “I told you, I told you! You made some joke about me getting old — I told you what was happening! What else was I supposed to do?”
He feels like shit, standing over Robby now and yelling at him about something he didn’t — couldn’t — have known the extent of.
“I can’t talk to you when you’re like this,” Robby says, then. He stands up and starts to push past Langdon. “I never could, and the withdrawal is obviously making it worse.”
Langdon's hands are all over him, then. Pulling at his sweatshirt and keeping him away from the door. Pressing his hands to Robby’s shoulders.
“What do you want me to say?” He pleads, voice low and rushed. “I’m sick,” Langdon drops to his knees, attempting to pull Robby down with him. “I’m an addict,” he grabs fistfuls of Robby’s hoodie and stares up at him through the hair that’s fallen into his eyes. It feels like an apology. Like seeking absolution. Like atonement. “I’m selfish, and I’m arrogant, and I’m mean—”
Robby pushes Langdon's hands away, then stands up and presses the heels of his hands to his temples. Another tick, Langdon thinks. Maybe he really does cause breakdowns in others.
“I can’t do this with you again,” Robby says again, biting out what almost sounds like a laugh. He’s at the door faster than Langdon realizes, and he’s leaving.
He gets the feeling, suddenly, that their mentorship, friendship, relationship — whatever — has been irrevocably changed. It’s been shuffled around, twisted, and broken into something new.
They might — might — be able to reconcile, Langdon thinks, but things will never go back to how they were. The story has been written at this point, and there’s nothing he can do to change it.
“We’ll talk when you’re feeling better,” Robby adds, looking down at him. His voice is tight, professional. Again, he pulls at the words as they come out, like he’s not sure about them.
“You’re gonna come back?” Langdon asks, suddenly out of breath. He feels stupidly, pathetically hopeful at that moment.
The door closes slowly behind Robby, then shuts with a bang.
That night, in the little sleep he does get, he dreams about hands pushing roughly at his hips, in his hair, at the place where his neck and jaw meet.
He dreams about fingers scraping against his canine teeth and blood in his mouth.
He dreams that he’s a dog, aching and bitter, waiting by the door. He dreams about ghosts and false promises. He dreams about forgiveness.
Robby doesn’t visit for another three weeks.
(Which, again, is classic Robby. To promise he’ll come back and then ghost him for almost a month. But it doesn’t matter. At least he’s here.)
The visit comes, coincidentally, on a day when Langdon’s already emotionally fragile and scraped raw. So, he’s hoping Robby didn’t come here to fight with him.
It’s Tanner's fifth birthday, and he hasn’t seen his kids in almost two months, and Abby doesn’t want to ‘disrupt’ their schedule by letting him call on what she calls an ‘off-day.’ (Which, like, he understands. This whole one-call-per-week arrangement is entirely his fault, he can admit that now. But also, what the fuck? It’s not like it’s a regular ‘off-day,’ it’s Tanner’s birthday.)
He’d basically broken down about it during group, which he’ll totally deny if anyone brings it up later, and then had to spend two hours breaking down exactly why he reacted the way he did with his counselor. This, he thinks, is why people hate psychiatrists. It's a zero-sum game. A bunch of running around for little to no productive outcome for either the doctor or the patient.
He’s on his way back inside from his ‘outdoor therapy’, also known as being forced to touch grass for two hours, when he sees Robby leaning over the check-in desk. He’s nodding, grimly, at something the receptionist says before she gestures toward the door Langdon just came through.
His center of gravity shifts as Robby turns toward him.
Langdon watches him trudge over, tracing the slant of his shoulders. (That’s where Robby wears his grief, he thinks. It’s heavy, two sizes too big, and hangs off him like an old coat.)
“You came back,” Langdon breathes out, words thick with disbelief.
Robby nods, the same quiet gesture he’s perfected, and nudges the tip of his shoe against Langdon’s. It’s something he’s always done. This small, grounding gesture he started four days into Langdon’s residency after Robby found him — practically catatonic — in the call room after losing a peds patient.
Langdon watches as his face softens in a way that’s been intensely out of character for him lately. “Of course I came back.”
It hits him like a bomb. Like the wind getting knocked out of him. Of course I came back. Of course I came back. Of course I came back.
“I, uh,” Langdon tries, throat clicking. I was starting to think you wouldn’t. I thought I’d fucked things up beyond repair. “Visitor room?”
“Yeah. Okay,” Robby agrees.
This conversation, well, brief exchange, feels tense in a way it never has been before. Even at their worst, it was never like this. (Well, he supposes this whole thing is probably their new ‘worst.’)
But now, weeks removed from the depths of his ousting and subsequent detox and withdrawal, he struggles to think of something to say. For once, he’s at a loss for words, too uncharacteristically embarrassed and awkward to make a sly comment or witty remark.
Robby goes a few yards and then starts to walk upstairs, throwing a look at Langdon over his shoulder, a mix of confusion and something else, when he doesn’t take his usual place at Robby’s heels.
“Sorry,” Langdon coughs. “Uh, stairs…”
He looks down and rocks back on his heels. This is so fucking stupid. Like, really fucking stupid. (He’s thirty-two, not seventy-two. He should be able to go up a flight of stairs without being bedridden the next day.)
Robby doesn’t say anything, just looks at him in a way that makes his stomach flip.
It’s all soft eyes and upturned brows, and Langdon gets the sudden and nauseating feeling that he needs to come clean to Abby and apologize for letting this work-crush go too far.
(If he’s being honest, which his counselor wants him to work on, ‘work-crush’ doesn’t even begin to cover it. This is something else, he’s come to realize. He just doesn’t really know what. He’s not sure he wants to know.)
Langdon shuffles over to the elevator and leans against the side as they go up. He’s making a point of not looking at Robby, too embarrassed and frustrated by his inability to perform a simple task, but he can feel Robby’s eyes on him the whole time.
“You shouldn’t apologize, you know,” Robby says as they reach the visitor room. “Stairs can often exacerbate symptoms in patients with chronic back pain. It makes sense you'd want to avoid them.”
“I know,” Langdon laughs, bitterly. “I used to be a doctor, too.”
Robby’s face screws up into something like distress, his shoulders stiffening. That was probably — well, most definitely — a shitty thing to say, he realizes quickly.
“Fuck, I’m sorry,” Langdon mumbles, slowly sitting down on the couch. What a way to ease the tension, he thinks. “That was— I shouldn’t have said that. It’s— it’s been a hard day—”
“No, that’s—” Robby starts, sitting an aggravatingly respectable distance away from him on the other side of the couch. Langdon watches him close his eyes and take a deep breath. Reset. “I understand.”
It’s suffocatingly quiet for a moment before the words spill out of Langdon, who has never been quite comfortable with silence: “I’m sorry about last time.”
He’s not used to apologizing, especially without being told to, but there’s something about seeing him here, wringing his hands and looking at Langdon like he’s waiting for a bomb to go off, that makes him sick. He did that to him. Langdon. No one else.
It’s a strange feeling, holding the words I’m sorry in his mouth. He memorizes the shape of them, the weight. He has a feeling he’s going to be using them a lot.
I’m sorry, he wants to say, I just wanted you to see the best in me. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.
“Me too,” Robby pushes his mouth into this tight line, nodding. After a second, he adds: “I heard you’ve been doing better.”
“Better is pretty relative,” Langdon says, chewing on the inside of his cheek, leg bouncing. “At least I’m not trying to hop the fence anymore.”
Unexpectedly, Robby laughs. It cuts at the thick block of tension between them and melts some of it away. Okay, Langdon thinks, this can be okay. This can be a normal, professional stop on his apology tour.
“You look better,” Robby whispers, then, all quiet and sincere.
Well, shit. Professional boundaries be damned.
“Yeah?” Langdon breathes, his eyebrows pulling together.
He’s sure he does, having clawed himself out of the heat of withdrawal since the last time they’ve seen each other, but hearing Robby say it still hits like a truck.
“You…” Robby says, his eyes softening again. He searches Langdon’s face for something, but he can’t tell if he finds it. He shifts closer to Langdon’s side of the couch. “You look like you again.”
If that first comment had hit him like a truck, this one hits him like a bullet train.
Despite his sudden onset nausea, his hands, heavy against the seat cushion, itch to reach out and touch. To smooth down the bumps in Robby’s hair. To breathe hot, heavy I love you’s and I’m sorry’s against his skin. To grab him by the shoulders and never let three, Robby-less, weeks go by again. (It’s selfish, he knows. But in his bones, he’s nothing if not selfish.)
No. Nope. He definitely can not let himself get distracted by whatever this thing Robby’s doing is.
“I need to apologize to you,” Langdon breathes, shaky and uncertain. “It’s, uh, step number nine.”
Robby’s face flashes with something akin to complete bewilderment before he very professionally schools it into something neutral. “Okay.”
“I know I fucked up,” His voice comes out higher than he means it to. There’s this newly familiar pressure building in his forehead that nearly forces these hot, embarrassing tears to fall. Maybe today wasn’t the day for this. “I let you down, I let myself down, I let the job fuck me up, you were right, and— and I thought—”
Then, Robby’s in his head again, like he always is: You thought?
He takes a sharp breath in. This is going to go downhill quick. He needs to pull back, to reel it in before the line is too far out at sea to reach.
“I was negligent,” Langdon fumbles, the words falling out of him faster than he can stop them. “I thought I was doing the right thing, but I put a lot of people — you — I put you at risk, and I can see that now, and that shit I said to you? I just— yeah, fuck, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
It’s quiet for a while after that. Robby lets the silence stretch out between them and just stares. (Honestly, if Langdon didn’t find him so attractive, it would have gotten creepy by now. He probably would have even filed a report with HR.)
“I…” Robby thinks, rubbing his hand down his neck. Langdon forces himself to look away, swallowing hard. “I listened to all your voicemails.”
At that, Langdon's stomach drops to his feet.
He can barely recall what he had said, but he remembers the broken, watery pleas: I’ll do anything, anything, and I can’t do this without you, and most embarrassingly I just need to hear your voice, please pick up.
He remembers the crushing grip he had on his phone. The leather steering wheel pressing against his forehead. The almost mechanical way he continued to hit the call button, over and over again, twenty, thirty, forty times.
He thinks about the texts he’d sent, too. After their fight in the ambulance bay. (Part of him hopes Robby trashed them without looking. The logical part of his brain, the one that knows Robby, knows he didn’t.)
10:08 > Shouldn't have said that back there. Sorry man.
10:20 > It's NOT what you think. Please just hear me out
10:20 > I can explain if you let me
10:59 > You ok? Getting worried.
11:46 > rbby:(
11:46 > answr me pls
12:04 > im so sosorry . ill do anythng
He steels himself, clenching and unclenching his fists just to have something else to focus on, because what the fuck is he supposed to say to that? “Okay, Robby, I—”
“I didn’t want to,” he adds, quickly, shaking his head. Langdon looks at him. Robby’s making that face again, all closed eyes and scrunched nose. (Langdon wonders, briefly, what it would be like to actually reach out and touch, to smooth the lines of his face.) “I wasn’t going to.”
“You shouldn’t have,” Langdon breathes, desperate to put a stop to what must be some sort of humiliation ritual he’s being put through. “They’re stupid, man, I was being stupid, I wasn’t thinking straight—”
“Kiara thought that it might help,” Robby interrupts, sucking a deep breath through clenched teeth. Langdon stills, his eyes meeting Robby’s.
“You’ve been talking to Kiara?” He asks, breathless.
He’d told, well, yelled at Robby to look in the mirror, to see that pushing down all his PTSD shit will only get him so far, to see that all Langdon had done was what Robby had taught him to do.
They’re two sides of the same coin, he thinks. Mirror images of each other. Really, it was only a matter of time before Langdon went too far, like he always does when feelings are involved.
Still, he hadn't expected him to listen.
“Mhm,” Robby hums, and Langdon knows him well enough to know he wants to leave it at that. “She thought it would help me to… process the day, and you know I’m not one to disagree with her.”
Langdon smiles at that. “Me neither,” He says. “She’s the best of us.”
“That she is,” Robby breathes, his arms folded across his chest. “She offered to talk to you, too.” He knocks his knee against Langdon's a few times, then lets the touch idle. “When you come back.”
“When I— what?” Langdon breathes, eyes wide and jaw hanging slightly open.
“You’ll finish out the month here,” Robby nods. “Then do a few months of outpatient. If you stay on track, with the NA and everything, we can start to think about a date for you to come back. I might even write you a script for Celebrex, if you’re good.”
“Okay, yeah,” Langdon agrees quickly, stomach flipping at the phrase if you're good. “I can do that. I’ll fucking— I’ll crush outpatient.”
“I’m sure you will. You’re my best resident.”
Langdon laughs, falling back into the easy rhythm he’d become infatuated with. “But not your best friend, because you’re too cool to have one.”
Robby studies him again for a moment, and then he’s twisting his body — wordlessly — in this awkward way and moving so close that the hair on the back of Langdon’s neck stands up.
He suddenly wedges his hand between Langdon’s back and the couch, poking and prodding around Langdon’s spine under his hoodie. (Good Lord, this man and his savior complex.)
The tips of his fingers ghost over a knot in Langdon’s right lumbar region, circling for a moment before he presses down. Hard.
“Ow, fuck—” Langdon flinches away, or, well, up, and grabs Robby by the shoulder. He flattens his other hand below Langdon’s belly button, then, forcing his hips back into the pressure.
“Breathe,” He whispers, not unsympathetic. “We’ll only do a minute, it will help, breathe through it.”
If it were anyone else, any other doctor, friend, whatever, he’d push back. But it’s not someone else. It’s Robby, so he does as he’s told, like he always does.
Langdon, very pointedly, stares up and away from the hand pressing above his waistband, red crawling up his neck in these big, ugly splotches.
He breathes through the searing pain that is Robby’s knuckle pushing into him, counting the seconds as they pass. Twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three.
The knot starts to soften out forty or so seconds in, and he could sob with the relief it brings. He had already kind of had this conspiracy theory — as Dana prefers to call it — that Robby has some sort of magic healing powers, but now there’s no question about it.
“Okay, that’s a minute,” Robby says, pulling his hands away. The loss of contact is so sudden, he almost feels like he’s been pushed off a cliff. “I know it’s uncomfortable, but it’s the best way to soften those pesky knots. Better?”
“Yeah, uh, better,” Langdon croaks, throat dry and hot. (This is truly getting ridiculous now. Like, really, it’s just pathetic.) “Where’d you learn that?”
Robby smiles again, all toothy like he did in an old photo Abbot had shown him once. “I did a pain management rotation when I was in New Orleans.”
Langdon tries not to read into it when he catches Robby’s eyes flick down toward his mouth and stay there for a while.
“Of course you did,” Langdon breathes, staring back at the sharp point of his canines. Pain management makes perfect sense for Robby, he thinks, as someone who personally follows up on discharged ED patients.“Of course you did.”
(This is totally normal, by the way. Just two bros staring at each other's lips. Totally regular mentor-mentee conduct, for sure.)
It gets quiet, and they kind of just stare at each other for a while, before:
“I should, um,” Robby says, finally breaking eye contact and pulling himself back together. “I should go. I offered to cover for Jack tonight. Give him the night off.”
“Oh, okay,” Langdon says, quickly standing up (which he definitely should not have done, by the way. Ow.) and watching Robby walk to the door. “It was— I’m glad you came back.”
Robby nods, then lingers in the doorway for a second.
“You know,” he says. “I think if I did have a best friend, it would be you.”
“Really?” Langdon laughs. “Over Abbot? That’s unprecedented, man, but I’ll wear the title with pride.”
Robby looks over his shoulder, a fond smile on his face, and says: “Don’t make me change my mind.”