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1. Jack
Jack is a sucker for tub time.
Has been since before he lost his leg, actually. What's the opposite of a tepid shower in the middle of the desert? A long, luxurious soak with oils or salts that smell like fucking Eden. Losing the leg only taught him that a hot bath is a great way to alleviate phantom pain.
Given the size of the bathroom to begin with, it's not like it took a whale of a lot of remodeling to turn the place into his own private spa. His wife had thoroughly approved, and rewarded him accordingly every chance she got, before -- well, he hasn't had anyone else to bathe with since then, the fuck does he know. Only one other person has used the tub since then, and they ain't talkin'.
He takes care of that tub like most men look after their midlife crisis cars. He services the jets regularly, polishes the enamel with a special cream, even takes care to de-gunk the grout. (Present Jack thanks Past Jack for choosing a large tile pattern for the walls in that corner. Less grout.) He keeps his shampoo, his other shampoo, his whipped especially-for-curls deep conditioner, his ten-dollar pot of Dr. Teal's sugar scrub, and his eau-de-parfum body wash in a basket on the ledge by the faucet. A hook is suction-cupped there, on which he hangs one clean washcloth at a time.
There are even steps built into the tub, going in and out, so he doesn't hurt himself. Karolina's idea. The late Dr. Czajkowska knew a thing or two about combat injuries. Damn pity she got herself killed in Ukraine, though by now Jack knows there's nothing that could've stopped her going in.
"Myszko, if Zelenskyy doesn't stop them, Poland is next," she'd said. "I must serve now, or serve later."
They also serve who sit and wait. In their bathtubs. Their very lonely, very expensive multi-jet tubs. And wish like hell their wives were less patriotic. But he's living proof that people will do stupid shit for patriotic reasons.
So he stockpiles the bougiest toiletries he can find, in the name of self-care, and lets himself have just one true beautiful thing.
2. Frank
He doesn't regret getting caught, now that he's on the other side of it all -- the withdrawal, God a'mighty that was hell; the marriage counseling; the mediated divorce, because Frank hadn't wanted to pony up for lawyers; the fight to keep his job -- he's through it and he's grateful it happened, because the fuck of it is that he's been living someone else's life all along.
Girls like Abby Nickerson didn't go for wild child boys from the wrong side of the tracks, unless of course they were drunk off their ass at a nightclub. When they did go for boys like that, boys like Frank, they didn't bother to call back the next day; Frank chatted her up, she was a busy UPitt sorority girl, barely old enough to drink but this was where her sisters were so this was where she was. That's all.
He damn well hadn't expected the phone call to end all phone calls six weeks later, but that's the kind of luck Francis Tanner Langdon inherited from his mother, luck that ends in Tanner Joseph Langdon being born in December of 2020 to his newlywed parents. Because hell if Daddy Nickerson was going to have a bastard grandchild.
Frank tried to be a good husband. Really. Abby could never say he failed to keep them adequately, though things did get easier once he began getting paid to work in his field, just in time for Sophia Laureen Langdon to make her way into the world.
And then the postpartum everything that didn't hit Abby the first time around. And then the hard realization that Frank and Abby had two under three, with daycare bills for miles, which meant Frank would pick up as many shifts as the law allowed.
But now that's over. For the first time in too long, Frank Langdon is a man unencumbered, forced at last to reckon with everything that's gotten him this far. And reckon, he knows, he will.
3. Jesse
Jesse Van Horn is a married man.
His wife is a social worker with Behavioral Health, a floater between upstairs and the Pitt, with a Manic Street Preachers ringtone, a gold ball in her left nostril, and a brown pageboy haircut. He wears her ring on a chain around his neck; she wears his on the appropriate finger. Engraved on the inside of each: whither thou goest.
She pushed their bed up against the wall when they moved in together and claimed the inside, because she felt safer there. Less likely to fall out in the night. It wasn't until they were engaged that she allowed him to pull the bed back toward the middle of the room. But by then she was in the habit of tangling her limbs in his and butting her head up to his back. Apparently it had been a long time since she'd literally slept, never mind had sex, with anyone else.
The floater thing isn't something anyone would notice, except maybe Frank Langdon, who is much more than just ED Ken. Jesse knows a thing or two about being underestimated because of his looks; people write him off all the time as someone who peaked in the 2000s as an overgrown scene kid and just... never outgrew it. Frank, of all people, respects the work Behavioral Health does. He's even been known to summon Eleanor on the hard cases. Which of course she cries out in his arms late at night, when her own therapist is in bed and she doesn't want to be a burden. Some days he swears he's married to the Chief, who could really stand to get his head shrunk. Just sayin'.
She was there for Pittfest, in dark green scrubs and a matching cap to keep her hair out of her face, and all he could do was watch Dr. Robby send her toward Mel King to work the yellow zone. She held it together long enough to find him in the aftermath, yank him into the on-call room, and remind him exactly how good it was to be alive.
The real miracle is that Javadi hasn't told anyone what she walked in on. But my goodness, does she blush pretty whenever she sees either of them these days.
4. Robby
His parents died when he was not quite three.
Robby was only a baby when his parents decided to make aliyah. Bubbe had flat-out told them they were crazy to leave Squirrel Hill, but leave they had, and they took their infant son along for the ride. They settled in Kiryat Shmona, a name that would become, briefly, infamous.
He has no memory of the place nor the events of that Pesach, except for warm arms and the smell of Bubbe's famous thin brown sauce, the kind that was tart and rich and went well with noodles that looked like large snail shells. He must have seen something, though, because he does remember years' worth of nightmares that are all about hiding from the sound of gunfire ripping the spring air. This is before the nightmares turn into Robby in the camps, helpless to save anyone, least of all himself. That will come later, when Robby is nine and finds a Time-Life book about World War II, and from then on obsessively collects all things Shoah-related.
His parents died when he was not quite three and he doesn't know how to miss them. Because they simply don't exist to him. In the beginning there was Bubbe, in the end there was Bubbe, or rather there was Robby, giving back to her what she gave to him. Robby held her in warm arms, regretting that he smelled mostly of antiseptic, when she slipped into the next world.
He understands by now that no-one will be there to do the same for him. But sometimes he is made of pure longing for that to be false.
5. Jack
People joke about Robby's and Princess's facility with languages, but they skip over Jack. Mostly it's because Jack doesn't let on that he's got Google Translate up in his head.
("We had a lady in earlier," Robby told him. "You would've known she was speaking Nepali."
"I probably would've missed that," said Jack, "since I've never spent time there. But thanks for the vote of confidence.")
He married a Polish woman because after years of Dari, Pashto, Arabic, and Kurdish, Czajkowska wasn't really going to break his teeth or his brain. All she had to do was pronounce it for him once and it was in there, nice and solid. From there, he picked up on the way the letters mapped to the sounds, the way he'd been doing all the way back to being a kid and learning his parents' English and his grandparents' Gaelic. Sometime in high school, when he'd been juggling Spanish, French, and Latin, he'd understood that with his upbringing, what linguists called the critical period for language acquisition, would be... extended. Also, he'd been studying linguistics on his own, so he was probably not going to Prom with a pretty girl. Or any girl.
The Army had offered him language school and a much cushier life, but there was medic blood in his veins: his father had served, albeit briefly, in Vietnam. When he said to everyone at Karolina's funeral that he understood why she'd gone to Ukraine, he meant it. In her shoes, he'd have done no differently, even down a quarter of a leg.
But there are words he can't say, words he can pronounce but they never make it past his voice box. Words like "ya tebe lyublyu" and "neshama sheli". They'll stay buried as deeply as "kocham cię".
6. Frank
The stupid thing was to pick up the drug habit in the first place.
Everything else he did, he will swear until he's blue in the face, was perfectly rational. He knows benzodiazepine withdrawal can be deadly. He had a patient once whose med chart showed two different benzos -- at low doses, but still there -- and she'd admitted to him that sure, she would love to see whether she could handle life without her whole med cocktail, but she'd tried and failed even the baby steps of tapering multiple times. And she'd been through a hell of a lot by the time she walked through those doors.
"I work not far from here," she said, "and instead of going straight, I hung a left. Because Doc, intrusive thoughts about driving off a bridge just don't play well with a forty-minute commute twice a day."
"Would you do it?" Frank asked her.
She shook her head. "Hell, no. With my luck, the car would be totaled, but I would survive to rack up insane medical debt. It's just that twenty-five years of being this way teaches you when you need to get help."
But not with the benzos. No, apparently those were part of what was tethering her to functional adulthood.
"I'm only staying if you promise me they won't fuck with my meds," she said. "My psychiatrist is old but I've been with him since I was eighteen, he's literally the only practitioner left here who won't blink at my cocktail."
"I can't promise you anything." Frank figured honesty was the kindest, not just the best, policy in cases like this. "I can promise to try."
"Because the idea of the shakes, the sweats, the vomiting, the rebound anxiety, no, sir, I would rather go cold turkey and pray that a seizure takes me out."
He looked at her funny then. "Are you secretly a psych nurse?"
"Just well-informed."
All right, perhaps Frank was a little stupid for thinking he could be his own medical supervision for the weaning part. And for trying to hide it from everyone he worked with. And for resorting to stealing the necessary drugs.
But Dr. Robby, he has discovered during his time in rehab, knows how to forgive, if not forget. It's the ho'oponopono thing. Even though Frank isn't dead, for awhile there he was dead to Robby. They are still in the process of making amends to each other, for the myriad ways mentor and mentee can become too close to see the forest for the trees. At least Robby is trying. And if Robby can try, so can Frank.
7. Robby
Robby has been in Jack's ginormous tub. Multiple times, now.
The first time was the yahrzeit before Pittfest. Robby couldn't stand to be on his own that night. Jack seemed settled into a routine of therapy-night shift-contemplation of earthly demise-handoff-repeat, but Robby hadn't even gotten to the therapy part.
"Listen," Jack said, "we've lost good people, you and I."
"Yeah," Robby said, gulping back one of those fruity Belgian beers that Jack still kept in his fridge. They were good for more than toasts to the dead, after all. "We lost the same ones."
Because if they were honest, and what else could they be after a decade of working together, Karolina had accepted this covalent bond between the two of them when she met Robby. Robby had respected that Karolina needed to be Jack's only sexual partner. Karolina in her turn had loved Robby with the same fierce protection that Jack offered.
(Maybe if Robby had loved her back better, she would still be here --
No, Karolina-in-his-head always said and still says, you couldn't have stopped me either.)
They were in Jack's living room, Robby sprawled out on his front on the couch, Jack stretched on the floor with his back against the seats and his head somewhere in the vicinity of Robby's hip.
"Me, I'm on the good stuff," said Jack, "but you are wound tighter than a ten-day clock, and you move like it, too."
"Well, maybe it's the time of year, and maybe it's the time of man --"
"Don't quote David Crosby at me," said Jack. "Have the courtesy to play it for me, instead. After we do something about 'the time of year'. You ever been for a massage?"
Robby, still flopped out on brown corduroy, shook his head. "Nup. Nyet. And I'm not starting tonight, brother." (The word has been stabbing him in the lungs for years.)
"I'd show you the ropes, but my leg's off for the duration," said Jack. "So I'm gonna let you try the next best thing. C'mon."
"No," said Robby, roused enough from his stupor to turn and watch Jack lever himself upright. "You can't be serious."
"This is coming from a place of love," said Jack. "Your five-minute showers with Irish Spring all-in-one wound me to my soul."
"The tub is your sacred space," said Robby. "I'm pretty sure you regenerate there every afternoon, like a Cylon."
"Nerd-ass Spartan," said Jack, who could only really get away with the second half of the insult because he knew the reference. He tapped the floor with one crutch. "Up and at 'em, or I book you a session with Larisa at the good place five minutes from the Pitt. Or would you prefer Lars? They both work there. Both tall. Both blond. But Larisa speaks Russian."
"Lars would be safer, in that respect," said Robby, heaving himself to his feet. "I can't accidentally blurt out something embarrassing in, what, Swedish?"
"Norwegian."
Robby trudged after Jack, still only half believing what he was about to do.
The bathroom was a thing of beauty, softly lit and painted a reassuring dusky violet. The tiles were white and the tub, it had to be said, gleamed.
"Now strip," Jack ordered him, not making one single move to offer him privacy.
Robby hesitated. He knew what he was. He had a paunch despite spending twelve hours a day on his feet. His ass was getting softer by the year. Jack, he was still God's gift to humankind; Robby, only five years older, felt more like fifteen.
Jack dropped his crutches, flinging his hands in the air. "Come on! It's not like I've never seen it before."
"Not all of it," Robby had to remind him. "Just down to my swimsuit."
"So who gives a fuck?" Jack asked, propping himself up on the marble vanity. "I'll get naked, too, we can be Roman bros."
"Not necessary," Robby said, perhaps too quickly for plausible deniability.
Jack really did not appear to notice Robby's nudity. He busied himself with the tub, starting the water, selecting just the right unguent to pour into the water. "Here we go, chamomile, lavender, and vanilla," he announced, uncapping a vial and dumping it straight in.
(Robby has a pillow mist with the same fragrance now.)
"Get in while it runs," Jack suggested. "Stretch out. Once the water's up, I'll turn on the jets."
And holy G-d were those some jets, pummeling Robby's skin until it itched. But his back loosened almost at once; his shoulders finally dropped from somewhere around his ears; the knots in his hams dissipated under the force. He sank deeper, shutting his eyes. Soft music registered dimly in the back of his thoughts, which were quieter with every... passing...
Jack snapped next to his ear. "Don't drown on me, now." He sat on the stairs on the dry side. "You see why I do this?"
Robby nodded. He saw.
"Now, you parboil for a little while," said Jack. "I will play Candy Crush until you're done. Howzat?"
It beat hell out of going all the way down to wherever Lars worked. Which Robby still won't admit. But he's got a key to the house, now, and free rein to use that tub whenever he needs it. For when a five-minute decon with Irish Spring just doesn't cut it.
If he finds himself at Jack's for reasons other than a bath -- that's his own damn business.