Chapter Text
The lost and found bin of the ED constantly cycled through a collection of abandoned things. Jackets were abandoned on waiting room chairs, rings got stuck in the gaps of the beds, and a full mismatched wardrobe occasionally picked apart by the street teams. It’s what’s left behind by patients no matter which way they left, their own version of a nuclear shadow on the battlefield of the department.
Decades on, the military had drilled a sense of neatness and organization almost as deep as they’d gone in to scrape the last jagged chunk of shrapnel from his thigh. Jack would live for the chaos in the dead of night, but the sun would rise again and he’d slowly sink into a routine and seek out. Pristinity was a luxury, even under the sterile light of the ED. It was in the small hoard of paper coffee cups building on the breakroom table he’d rinse out in the sink and sweep into the garbage, their rims worried over and cracked like a mouth in the desert; it was in the straight-edged corners of overflowing beds that echoed the endless span of beds on base.
Jack collected abandoned things and found them a place in the PTMC. If he was sitting on the slightly understuffed couch opposite Dr. Erickson at their bimonthly appointment, she’d tell him it was how he seemed to cope with the uncertainties he couldn’t control. He’d had no control over the landmine the Stryker MEV had driven over in the final months of his tour; he’d had no control over the drunk driver that T-boned his wife’s car a month after he started working full time at the VA.
Like any other competent doctor, Jack had memorized the layout of every storage cabinet and closet available to him. If he went blind, all he would need is a hand steering him towards the trauma bay and life could continue on as normal. He would always take it a step too far—something he could only half joke to be a result from being down one leg—and when pressed, could rattle off not just the general contents of the PTMC’s collection of equipment, but the roster of field equipment kept in all three of his go-bags.
A good night in the Pitt could be classified as a Category 3 hurricane—leaving the staff worn out, broken down, and usually soaked in something—but every decision in there had been his own and would stay contained in the monolith to medicine still standing in the aftermath. Controlled chaos, staying somewhere he could keep an eye on and course-correct when needed.
Jack knew that no matter how long he would stare and catalogue every car passing on the road below, he’d step over and stand on the right side of the railing. Right where he belonged.
He had his place in the world, controlled and contained. Every member of the night shift staff had a handful of places they could be found. Whoever was on day shift would either meet him on the roof or at his workstation. A pattern he could cling to when he was forced to take a breath.
Robby was never meant to be on that side of the railing with his stethoscope hanging on the railing like a wordless letter of resignation.
Jack was never meant to wonder if Robby was going to walk or jump off the roof. If the look Dana gave him was the same she gave Robby every morning at handover. If Robby really liked keeping his gear clean or if the faceless helmet was going unused.
It still ended the same; they walked out of PTMC with both feet on the ground and split off back home. Only then, Jack had been anointed with a new found sense of vigilance and a sharper eye focused on one Dr. Micheal Robinavitch.
—
It’s in the fifteen minute overlap between their shifts, just two months after Pittfest, that it started appearing across the back of Robby’s hands. There’s no encounter on the roof, a blessing given by a q-word night.
Jack kept thumping his right leg while he charted, trying to shake the pins and needles forcibly prickling through skin and carbon. He was already regretting not bringing in a crutch or keeping a wheelchair that didn’t cough and creak like it was on its last breaths around the hospital. He’d had every intention to since Pittfest left the remainder of his leg swollen and raw, enough to get a scolding from his PT and three days off that were composed of a rotating set of icepacks and fighting uneven sidewalks in between errands.
“Could feel you shaking the ground all the way back in the ambulance bay, what, are you trying to dig through into the basement of something?” The span of Robby’s hand clapped down across his shoulder, drawing attention to the intense curvature that had slowly set in Jack’s spine while he was leant over the desk. Clearly, his back was looking to outdo his leg to win the attention of the cold pack and Voltarol tonight, lighting his spine up like a Christmas tree when he twisted his head back to face Robby.
A comment like that might’ve been a good sign, he still couldn’t be sure if the momentary half-smile that flashed across his face came from amusement or a futile attempt at convincing himself he could go back to normal.
Ever the diagnoser, Jack called it as ingenuine but treated it as real. Putting his faith into the placebo effect, he let the laugh dissolve some of the tension tangled within his shoulder as he twisted his shoulders towards Robby. “I’m not shaking the earth man,” he had to bite his tongue to regain composure in his god awful pun, “I’m Jack-hammering it. Trying to see if I can make the Pitt into a pit, if Gloria’s that set on renovations.”
It wasn’t enough to just know where things would go, he needed to have a set of replies ready to fire off. Not mechanically detached and autonomous, just a contingency. After a few years in the ED, there were always a handful of phrases that would inevitably be repeated daily. So much so that on slower days, predictions of their frequency were placed onto the betting board just to fill up space.
“Yes, we’ll get you a sandwich Earl” with a record of ten in one shift, “We don’t have any more beds, can you move someone to the hall?” which would be parroted at least twice a day, and with an ever increasing highest record, “Myrna…” for how many times Robby had to beg the woman to call him anything else besides Fruitcake and Cocksucker (which had only been a bet once as she learned about it herself, only encouraging her to repeat it in a much louder tone).
“I am so sorry for your loss”, “We did everything we could”, “Does anyone have anything they’d like to say about the patient before we get back to work?”. They knew better than to try and keep track; it was repeated more than their own names.
So Jack held onto a handful of remarks for their handovers, workshopping them a little too intently. He watched the lift of Robby’s shoulders as he barked out a laugh, settling tight and lower than usual like they’re bearing the weight of the world. If one man could make himself into a martyr just by waking up, it would have to be him.
“Let me know when you’re finished, we can expand the waiting room a little more, a handful of beds down there, the works. Alright, what’ve you got for me? I didn’t walk in 35 F for nothing,” he laughed again, a short, bitten back sound that tried to claw back into his chest. A detail Jack is forced to file away as he focuses on the fact Robby fucking walked to work for the first time in a month.
When they didn’t have adjacent shifts, a handful of nurses would gladly report to him in exchange for a box of 0.7mm gel pens (a better currency than protein bars even in the face of tablets and computers for scribing, you never knew when you had to go analog). Every shift, the chief of emergency medicine himself would walk in with a bicycle helmet that clung to the back of his bag just as it did on the ride over.
Methodically clicking the mouse into the empty flashing textbox and repeatedly highlighting the empty space, Jack pivots away from the desktop in favour of a tablet. A good walk-and-talk to settle himself before heading home and reprieve from his spine's current configuration. They’ve mastered the art of handing over, following the other throughout the debrief and landing right back at central by the end.
“It was one of those nights, the worst we got was an orbital migraine from a kid drinking his bodyweight in Bang Energy and a lateral ankle sprain from someone tripping on a curb. There’s a seventy year old woman booked into South 22, you’ll want to take a look at her sometime tonight, she keeps giving us different symptoms in every time we ask. Either the early stages of dementia or the world's worst hypochondriac.” Turning the tablet towards Robby, the pair weave around a handful of displaced beds as their morning lap begins. Never more than ten minutes, even if they stopped for watered down coffee.
There was something true in the idea of a moving target never getting hit by depression. Jack had a neat, rotating roster of workout routines even for the days he had to give up the prosthetic entirely, he wouldn’t miss a single Thursday workout. His and Robby’s morning walk was emblematic of those mall walkers—the ones they had a less than zero chance of becoming—warmed a part of Jack that went slightly dormant after one too many days without the sun. There was a brutal ache that the cool night sky eased, but the small overlaps in time the two attendings shared tied off the bleed he couldn’t find the source for.
“You just leave me with all the fun ones, don’t you?” As he shook his head in faux disappointment, Robby began gloriously fumbling with the touchscreen despite the years of integration. Somehow the hospital had simultaneously spent too little and too much money on upgrades, leaving them with plenty of decent tablets with piss-poor software to boot.
A creeping ache in Jack’s spine echoes through his body, a sensation he could try and label as a friendly fondness, when he gets to watch Robby fumble about one-handed to slip his glasses on to squint at the chart. Pinching and swiping the screen and getting nothing in return, slapping his palm along the edge of the case with a look that contemplated how aerodynamic it could be.
Jack couldn’t help it, he’d already set his objective of observing Robby like he was an endangered species bordering on zoochosis. Immediately, he wrapped his fingers around his wrist and yanked it up towards his eyeline (he was still dragging his feet about needing glasses himself, no matter how many times he’s struggled with reading from screens).
Work had rapidly accelerated their aging, dragging through their faces and chipping away at the integrity of their anatomy. Jack had gone from a fine-haired redhead to a silver fox in under a decade, Dana had amassed a collection of compression socks so vast she’d started to run out of normal ones, Robby finally had grey hairs peaking through his beard, and even the staff young enough to not have lived through the Bush administration grumbled and grabbed various aching segments of their bodies like a group of pensioners.
Liver-spots could’ve been considered normal, if not a little early, if they’d appeared gradually in smaller quantities. Large splatters of darkened skin painted the back of Robby’s hands, disappearing up his sleeve like a sickening dermatological magic trick.
“Fucking Christ brother, what the hell? How long have you had these?” He’d barely finished his thought before calculating the answer. Less than 48 hours. They’d seen each other a day and a half ago on a shared afternoon off to edit each other's research papers, slowly migrating across Jack's house from the kitchen table to the couch while they swapped laptops. Their hands bumped and brushed each other in passing; passing over the latest edit, pushing another cup of coffee across the table, pointing at the laminated takeout menu filed into the third kitchen drawer, patting each other’s shoulders before parting for the night. They were fine.
Just as Jack began examining the edges of the pigmentation and caught a glimpse of the slight greyness of his skin, Robby finally snatched his hand back and stuffed it into his pocket. “It’s nothing, just a few bruises, man. I tried going to the gym and dropped a dumbbell on my hand, alright?” Refusing to reveal his hand again, forcing the attending to park the screen four inches from his eyes to finally start reading it. “Last time I’m listening to you about the ‘joys of working out’ bullshit,” he half-heartedly laughed, more likely at the list of symptoms nearly as long as the waiting room turnover time.
“Sudden hyperpigmentation with irregular edges; you have heard of skin cancer haven’t you?” He hissed, fingers twitching and waiting for an opening to wrench Robby’s hand free from the hoodie. ‘Add in the social withdrawal,’ he thought, ‘possible candidate for Addison’s’. A myriad of adrenal and hormonal disorders flash through his mind alongside the series of tests to confirm or deny their presence.
Though there wasn’t much left, Jack felt the last scattered patches of red hair turn grey. Most of the conditions he conjured up needed continual care, thorough management that he knew Robby wouldn’t keep up with. At most it would be a week of a somewhat genuine attempt, shots primed and left to warm to room temperature and meals with more than two minutes of thought and preparation behind them. Slowly, it would devolve into vials being used too quickly from the fridge and lunch became two cups of black coffee and a handful of saltines. Before the month was up, Robby might remember to do his injection every other day or so and resigned his efforts to cook. Every January for the last four years had been like that.
Between the rhythmic clicks of his prosthetic and the dulled tapping against his belt, he categorizes the likelihood of each disorder before he can hunt Robby down and stick him with a needle for a blood panel. It might not be a cancer; Jack hasn’t seen a melanoma go from a one centimeter freckle to a three inch span of darkened skin. The symptoms of being an ED physician heavily overlapped with adrenal issues: fatigue, muscle pain, a wildly inconsistent appetite, and an ever present headache tucked somewhere at the base of their necks.
Greyed skin draws up images of melasma as Jack craned his neck to check the remaining state of Robby’s skin. An awkward question bubbled against the tip of his tongue, sitting uncomfortably against his teeth whilst he bites it back. A blood panel would answer it anyways and save the almighty awkwardness of asking his best friend if he was pregnant in the middle of the ED. Robby had preferred to be stealth in and out of work, offering up a few quiet and half-assed explanations that involved some incidents in medical school and a stilted cough to move the conversation along.
“Come on, you know I’m not that stupid. It’s bruising and I’m getting old, I’m getting papery skin. I’ll do something if they don’t leave in a week,” he sighed, attempting to zoom in on the screen and scroll through the patient history.
“I’m fine, thank you Dr. Abbot for the concern. Get back home and get some sleep before I start making the same threats.” Internally, Jack has already dragged him onto the bed, drawn blood for labs, and started the physical to find the remaining marks hiding beneath his scrubs.
Both of them were rooted in place like a pair of stubborn old oak trees, planted between the stairwell and an empty hallway bed. “Holding you to that, or I’ll tell Gloria that you’re interested in giving a speech at the next donors' event.”
“You wouldn’t,” Narrowing his eyes, Robby tried hunting out his intent hidden behind the beginnings of his stupidly smug grin. After all these years, he could on guess right about 40% of the time. “Fine,” he sighed, reaching up to scratch around the nape of his neck. “But if they’re gone by next week I’m not checking it out because they’re clearly bruises.”
‘Small victories,’ Jack thought, but it meant the Gloria card couldn’t be played for a few weeks to maintain some level of intent behind it. As well as the fact that if he did volunteer Robby for something, he’d somehow get pulled in alongside him for an unforgiving night of tight-lipped smiles and hours of conversation so dull he’d fall asleep standing up.
“Good. You’re still coming over Sunday for the game? I might try and cook something, but if I don’t, what are you thinking for dinner?” Alternating hours forced them to schedule out any outside interaction that was devoid of hospital talk, their unbroken routine of watching either hockey, baseball, or whatever rerun that felt nostalgic enough for them had lasted through lockdown; even though neither of them had ever truly figured out how to set it up without the audio echoing or someone losing video for half the call.
They’d only ever gone to three places for takeout: a Chinese restaurant they’d sheltered in from the rain repeatedly, the deli that was nearly open 24/7 so Jack and Robby could take turns buying lunch and shoving it into each other’s hands, a Turkish place that stuffed extra bowls of lentil soup and manti ever since they’d shambled in with sweat soaked scrubs after a five car MVC rolled in at handover.
“There’s some new sushi-something place downtown, Jake…he uh, he recommended it.” Three months on and they’ve just started texting again, missing exactly fifteen weekend basketball games and not a word exchanged vocally.
Routine thoroughly disturbed, distress prickling through his pores painfully hot and pooling in his socket, Jack grimaced and carefully nodded towards him. That empty silence that coursed through the air like the radio static, overflowing and hollowing out a cavity in his chest had never really left. It whittled him down, an uncomfortable mass worming its way between his spinal column and stomach. Wrong, off and uncanny. It was just a restaurant, just Robby trying to reconnect with Jake.
“That’s great man, we can get something from there. You could figure out what to order ahead of time and look like you know what you’re doing there. Pretty lit, right?” Jack had a knack for adopting phrases into his vocabulary and had delighted in integrating the Gen Z slang Dana parroted from her kids (though he seemed about five years behind).There was a type of comedic exasperation it forced from Ellis that kept him studying terms like it was high school Spanish all over again. “You talking to him a little more?”
Down the hall, a patient brutally wretched into what was hopefully a garbage can and not another med student, filling the choking silence resetting between them. Both of them shift back and forth like bowing willows, aching with every motion.
He’d seen this before; the breakdown of Robby’s relationships followed by a brief phase of bargaining before devolving into self pity and despair. All or nothing was his way of fixing things, eventually settling on a slightly jaded middle ground. That was a little too observational to subtly suggest he tried seeing someone about it professionally.
Pittfest was rough, managing to shake up the entire department so badly they’d hired a few temporary social workers alongside Kiara to keep up with the demand of the staff. Nothing and no one could talk Robby into even taking an appointment, refusing to add in her number or take emails offering every available appointment for the next month. Jack had half a mind to stuff the number into their next Chinese takeaway’s fortune cookie just so he’d have the number.
Fourteen hours and seven minutes on his feet have finally begun to catch up to him, groaning at the sensation of blood pooling in his foot and admonished by a cluster of white hot pins circumferencing his knee in slow, methodical jabs. His nightly lap was designed to officially bookend the time spent on his feet and allow him to graciously sink into his forearm crutches after the drive home.
Dragging both hands down his face, Jack dug the heel of his palms into the slowly expanding pressure rising behind his eyes. While he avoided going as low as to entirely survive a shift on watery coffee and the latest rubbery protein bar, there were only so many miracles a ziploc of unsliced cucumbers and Liquid IV packets performed before the spots dancing in his eyes couldn’t be blinked away.
“I’ll see you Sunday, get some sleep and rest up,” he paused, finally looking up from the tablet to meet Jack’s insistent stare. “If you stay on your feet any longer, I wouldn’t be surprised if your leg just fell off.” Robby was notorious for laughing at his own jokes like a nervous stand up comedian, sending himself into hysterical hyena-like fits when they weren’t surrounded by immediate disaster. In response to this morning's set, it was like the attending was actively smothering his responses. Withdrawing from his own conversation, slowly hollowing himself out.
“Yeah, take it easy brother.” Waving him off and heading for the locker room, he momentarily debated whether or not he should try to get another look at Robby’s hands so he could commit to detail their newest iteration. For diagnostic purposes.
Slipping between an abandoned mop and bucket and a newly soaked Whitaker, Jack shouldered his way into the locker room to start retrieving his stuff. Lent up against his locker and squinting at the lock, he spent a few too many minutes trying to turn a flat part of the door to finish putting in the combination. He shouldn’t drive, shouldn’t put himself into line as the next victim of tired driving being rolled into the PTMC and getting declared dead within five minutes. God knows the shit Walsh would be giving his cooling corpse if he ended up an easy statistic.
Dissuaded from walking by the persistent burning flaring around his liner, he finally slid the combination into place and wrenched the door open. Bare besides his bag, coat, one pair of extra scrubs, and a half filled box of granola bars. A shelf organizer wouldn’t go amiss, but there’d be nothing to put in it.
Packing his bag was a misnomer—Jack didn’t remove anything but a water bottle and a lunch for his whenever-five-minutes-are-free break. It slipped free easily, knocking against his thigh and swinging back against the frame. His knee shifted awkwardly beneath him, pressing into his socket at an acute angle and jarring his entire stance. “Motherfucker!”’ White hot flashes of pain radiated beneath his knee, constricting around the remaining bone. A telltale heartbeat buried beneath his skin foretells a day spent wrestling a swollen residual limb free from his prosthetic.
Slamming the door shut, he hobbled out and into the main floor again. A faint flicker of the fluorescent lights irked him more than usual, a flash of nausea cutting through his throat. ‘Move,’ he thought, grinding down on his teeth and swallowing thickly, ‘get outside before you’re late.’ Late to absolutely nothing, but it would crawl beneath his skin and scrape his bones clean.
No more Robby to be seen, disappeared out of sight in escape of either patients or the aggressive army of admin that had been thoroughly hounding him and the rest of the attendings since the proposal of being bought up and managed externally. One of the few fights that Jack could happily step aside and let anybody else handle.
Weaving through the outstretched legs and misplaced bags littering chairs, Jack glanced around triage for anything left abandoned. A small chunk of the street team's donations came from the lost and found once it’d been a month, and the slowly encroaching threat of frosted streets and the kind of wind that ripped through skin to freeze bone meant they needed more donations.
Parked up against the far wall was the lost and found box, a large plastic storage tub that used to hold something or other in a supply closet until it was dragged out here.
A sleeve hung over the edge, the stony blue leather meeting the cracked linoleum of the floor. Typically, they’d have a handful of resellers—the kind of thrifters that poached nicer donations to sell for a markup—poking around the lost and found or donation boxes.
Approaching the box, Jack began to sift and rummage through to gauge the quality of their possible donations. Most people never came back for their things; they were happy enough to never step foot in the waiting room again after their abysmal time. Half pairs of gloves, sweat soaked hoodies, pants that people managed to walk out without, and a few broken toy cars.
Draped atop the pile was the jacket, splayed out like a starfish in a sea of well worn clothes. It initially looked like a cheetah print spackled along the back, which was littered with small, darkened half-circles. Running the back of his hand across it, Jack’s skin snagged against the leathery fabric and caught on the hem like a piece of worn out Velcro.
Before distributing, him and the rest of the street team would take the time to clean up the donations as best they could. Every month, each of them would haul home a garbage bag or two stuffed full of the previous month’s lost items. Jack had already invested in his role as a pseudo-dry cleaner with a cupboard beside his washing machine converted into a armoire of stain removers, colour correctors, and fabric softeners.
There was a box of leather care products buried behind the lavender laundry detergent that his wife had loved.
It would be a nice surprise for the owner if they came back; for them to come back and find their jacket conditioned, oiled, and spared from absorbing the smell that infected most discarded items in the ED.
Jack collected the jacket from the lost and found him, folding it across his forearm as he stepped out into the early morning rain. Sparing it from more water damage by tucking it towards his chest, he side steps a collection of puddles filling the craters of broken sidewalk concrete until he almost walked into the side of his car.
It was just another abandoned thing in the waiting room, one of hundreds that cycled through the lost and found bin before being reused as a donation. Jack wanted to ignore the pulsating burning that infiltrated his throat as he tried to reduce the jacket into just another thing, that ugly and unnatural upset that arose from a place he was still unwilling to understand.
Folded in the passenger seat, the jacket filled up the space with loose folds and the light fuzz haloing its edges. Under softer light, the dark grey tones shone a faint silver like a slightly tarnished coin. Luxuriating in place with a relaxed posture Jack envied.
A day or two at most, that’s how long the coat would spend in his house.
Lost things had their places after all.
