Chapter Text
The thing is, Jack Abbot doesn’t remember getting shot.
Try as he might, when he thinks on that key moment, he remembers nothing, not even the blur or half-felt memories suppressed in deference to his mind’s desire to bury the trauma. Try as he might, reflecting on what he knows happened even as he blinks in realization of that event having happened, he remembers nothing; it’s a blank. He remembers the pain of it, obviously, he remembers shoving Robby out of the way and the way he’d had done the same to Jack in. He remembers the impression of heat, a moment of searing pain as the tiny, deadly piece of lead ripped through his body, but those impressions are loose, disjointed, vague, almost if it had happened to someone else.
He doesn’t remember the actual impact of being shot, though, which is weird because he remembers vividly the way it had felt as the IED that had taken his leg had ripped through him, the way the jeep he had been riding had shuddered from the impact, the way it had felt as the force of the implosion had sheered the majority of the bottom of his right left from him. He remembers, all too well, the way it had felt as the shrapnel had torn through him, and he remembers that moment, that pain, that shock, with a vividness too easy to be remembered and too often to be fair.
This is different.
Because he doesn’t remember getting shot earlier that day, at work on that random Wednesday, even though he remembers well how it had felt seeing it happen. He doesn’t remember being shot, though and he doesn’t feel it now; he doesn’t feel the wound or see it imprinted on his body, though he knows it happened, knows it happened in the vague way that he knows that there once been an earthquake in San Francisco in 1908 or that a Nova Scotian Christmas tree arrives in Boston every December in thanks for help offered without question following an explosion over a century ago or that the sun had risen at some point that morning.
“Hello, Jack.”
He’s been shot; he has been, he knows it. It’s a simple fact, the knowledge of which he has absorbed just as he had absorbed those facts of his youth. He had been shot, this morning, only moments ago, he thinks, and he knows that has happened; he knows it, objectively at least, but it’s hard to reconcile how it feels as though it happened in another life, to someone else, maybe; it’s hard for him to reconcile that fact with the fact that he feels no pain. More, he has no idea where he is now, or how he got here. He’s standing in what looks to be a beautiful garden, walled, draped and greens and shadowy draping, drifting, dripping light. He doesn’t remember being shot, and he has no idea where he is or how he got there – has no idea exactly where, exactly, here is – has no idea why he’s here, or why, at a small stone table placed in the middle of the garden not two feet from him, is sitting there someone who might be Michael Rabinovich.
“Nice of you to join us,” says the man sitting there, a twist to his words, as he smiles, as he looks like Robby and is not Robby but wears his face.
The Robby who might be Robby, who looks like Robby but cannot be, the figure sitting there, he seems to have been expecting him, but though Jack recognizes the voice of the man he has known for decades, though he knows the voice and the words it speaks, it all, everything, it all still seems somehow akilter, alien. Being shot, his being shot, he knows, this has happened. What he doesn’t know is where he is or how he got here, or why Robby is – in some ways, at least – here.
Or, at least, he doesn’t know why, standing there, looking over, he sees someone who looks like Robby, a figure wearing Robby’s skin. A figure who is in some ways indescribable, wearing Robby‘s skin and who bears his face, a someone who might be Robby and yet is decidedly not him. Someone shaped like him but of a different kind, a Robby who might have been in a universe unlike any which Jack has ever imagined – because Robby has never been this serene, centred, this calm, this relaxed – hell, for that matter, this rested – in all the time that Jack has known him, and Jack has known this man for a very, very long time.
“Come sit,” says the man wearing Jack’s best friend’s face, and he stares, still unsure.
As he remembers, suddenly.
The last time Jack had seen Robby, really only moments ago, he had been bleeding out.
Then again, so had been Jack.
It takes a moment for the realization to hit him - he had been bleeding out, just then, and even then, lying on the ground, struggling to make his brain work even as he had felt the first moments of the shock, he had known his chances slim, how could he not? He’d been shot, perhaps even more than once – and then the second realization hits him. He’s standing on both legs, sturdy, sure, seemingly as untouched as they had been originally, before that IED had sheared a large section of his right leg clean off.
His prothetic is gone; the shock of it has him stumbling as he stands, weak and shaky.
Moving almost desperately for a seat, still staring at the Robby in fron of him, and with his legs – two legs, whole, unmarked, unscarred, strong, study – seeming to move all by themselves, he takes his seat opposite the strange figure even as it watches him, as it smiles in a way that has his blood curdling in his veins. It’s almost a relief, how the stone bench is cold, hard, the sensation of it bleeding through the sturdy material of Jack’s pants to imprint itself on his skin; it’s almost a relief, for feeling the sensation of sitting on that stone bench means that he can feel – for a moment, Jack had wondered if that very fact were possible.
“Isn’t that better?” the Robby who is not Robby says, mocking Jack and yet somehow, seeking to soothe.
And it is, just as it isn’t; just as everything is here.
“I’m surprised to see you here,” Jack says instead of agreeing, for he doesn’t know what else to say as he looks over at the ghost of his lifelong friend sitting before him.
“Oh, really? I imagined it as comforting.”
Again, it is, and it isn’t, Jack thinks, even as the memories from earlier in the day are coming back now; none of them are from the shooting, but rather of his surroundings, the context of the moment before he’s ended up here. It’s only more confusing.
“Robby was there with me.”
The figure bearing Robby’s face merely tilts his head in a disconcerting echo of a move that Jack sometimes sees when he looks in the mirror in search of something in his face that not even he knows.
“He was.”
It’s hard for him to ask, what Jack has to ask next, hard to form the words to put the question into words, it's harder somehow than it might be to ask after himself – not that he cares, not that he has to.
“Is he–? Is Robby–”
Dead?
The shooter was pretty fucking determined after all, as he’d emptied what had to have been a full clip of bullets into the two of them as they had stepped into the ambulance bay, and Jack had noticed in the last few minutes, in that vague unconcerning way of all things here, how he himself had emerged far from unscathed. So what does that say about Robby? Robby, who had been standing next to him, Robby who had moved to shove him out of the way even as Jack had done the same, seeing the glint of metal as the strange man standing there had pulled the gun.
“Is he somewhere here, you mean?” The spectre tilts his head again as he asks, and Jack reads the rest he leaves unsaid as Jack’s unsaid question lingered. Is Robby here? Is he here, in this land between the living and the dead, stuck as Jack is in this garden of nothing and everything of everything that ever was and absolutely could ever have and forever never was?
Is he dead? Is Jack?
“Yeah, is he here?” Jack asks instead, still, somehow, reluctant, to ask what he really wants to know. Wherever ‘ here’ might be.
As the spectre sitting there merely smiles, calm, centred, serene in that infuriating way of his. “Do you see him here?” he says instead of responding to Jack’s question, seemingly content to continue that game of answering a question with a question.
“Well, no,” Jack ponders, teeth gritted despite himself, “but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything, not unless–”
Well, he doesn’t exactly know, just that things here don’t work according to a set scheme, at least not one he imagines he’d be familiar one, and thus, even if he can’t see Robby – the actual Robby, not the fake one – that doesn’t mean that he’s not here.
It doesn’t mean he is, either.
But then, where is he? And in what kind of shape? Because if he’s not here, or if he is here, either way, it doesn’t necessarily mean he’s dead, but then it doesn’t necessarily mean he’s alive. It could be either/or, it could be one and the same at the same time. Where is he? Jack wonders. Is he working on Jack right now? Is he standing over his prone body on the sturdy table in Trauma Two? Is that possible or just wishful thinking? Is he still fighting for him, or has he already called it, signed his name next to the time of death assigned when Jack gave in, when his heart stopped forever?
But no.
It’s most likely, if anything, that Robby is lying in a trauma bed of his own.
Robby was there, Jack remembers that, remembers him standing there alongside him. Robby was in the path of the bullets that took out Jack, the same ones, or at least ones cousin to the ones that had Jack crashing to the concrete, that much, at least, he knows. Still, Robby can’t be dead. He can’t be. Jack, maybe, but not Robby; Robby still has a future, still has contributions he could be making, wants to be making. Robby has students, Robby has plans, not like Jack, Jack, whose only plans are finding a way to make it through each day. Robby is a force of nature. Unlike Jack, Robby would be missed.
“He was next to me when the guy started shooting, and then he wasn’t. But he’s not dead,” and Jack’s voice is hard, and certain somehow, even though it’s a statement and a question rolled all into one, but there’s no answer, not an immediate one, and not one that answers any of the unspoken questions that come along with it.
Instead, there’s only a half-answer to meet it.
“He was there with you, yes. He’s not here, though, you’re right about that; it’s just you and me, I’m afraid.”
It’s unclear, this answer, but somehow, Jack’s choosing it to read as an answer that Robby‘s not dead – because he can’t be – but it’s still not clear to Jack whether or not he is. What is clear is that Robby isn’t here, so that means either he’s alright or it means he isn’t, or it means he’s elsewhere, somewhere, or it means well – Jack doesn’t know what it means. Anyway, it seems, at least, he, Jack, is stuck here, and it’s just him, facing down this strange apparition sitting in front of him, it seems, no matter why that is or what that means.
Him with this creepy figure wearing Robby’s face.
Struck by a thought, he pauses.
“Is he stuck sucking to someone looking like me while I’m here, stuck talking to a ghost of a shadow that looks like him?” he suddenly smirks, feels the wryness of it curl his lips. The only thing that’s worse than talking to your goddamn self is doing it while it wears your best friend‘s face; would the universe really do that to Robby?
But then it certainly seems to delight in doing so to Jack.
The Spectre smiles, with it reveals a flash of white teeth against the expanse of a black beard that the white strands had started to spout in during the course of the last few years. The contrast is more pronounced somehow, the difference between white and black in that beard somehow sharper in the soft light that comes in dappled by the trees. As the stressful years of emergency medicine at long last had started catching up with Robby, those strands of white had become more pronounced, just as the years had started to show more and more on the face of a man once known for his youthful visage. (Not that Jack was one to talk; his wife used to tease him for his babyface; he wonders what she might think of him now, seeing the silver in his hair and the crinkles that radiate from his eyes when he smiles, when he grimaces, when he cries. He wonders what she might think about a lot of things.)
“Do you think yourself alone in here?” the figure in front of him asks, and Jack has to pause before he answers.
As with everything else here, he knows the answer is both ‘yes’ and ‘no’. Just as he knows that he’s existing neither in the past nor the future, not even the present, that he is neither among the dead nor the living, that he is instead suspended in the ether of the inbetween, transfixed between the very essence of what and what is not reality.
So why is he here, then, in this place resembling something like an afterlife?
“No,” he responds, cautious, no, he doesn’t think himself alone here, even if he doesn’t know exactly where he is or who it is, or perhaps what it is, that keeps him company.
Because while Jack had long imagined that if, in the unlikely event he’d ever be welcomed in something resembling one, it would almost certainly not look like in the movies he’d grown up watching, but it would be peaceful, serene. He’d certainly imagined it welcoming, and while this place does, as he’d imagined, have decidedly less fluffy clouds and harp music than those movies of his youth had featured – not to mention a decided lack of pearly gates – it also had a great deal less comfort than he’d anticipated.
“If not me then, who?” the Robby who isn’t Robby asks. “The person you would expect sitting here in my place?”
It’s an easy question in any number of ways, but Jack doesn’t know he doesn’t know who he had expected; he just knows it hadn’t been this. It hadn’t been this figure of Robby sitting opposite him, looking at him like he’s a specimen, like he’s an insect ripe for study, analysis and dissection, like he’s a surprise, a puzzling and intriguing species alien in so many unusual ways, one apparently fascinating and disgusting all at once.
The figure sitting there, though, seems oblivious to his musings, merely smiles and continues.
“Your wife, maybe?” he asks in a tone new to the moment, and Jack would almost think it mean. “You’d expected to find her sitting here?”
A flicker, a shade, passes as the light shifts in this garden and in it, Jack thinks maybe, maybe, he sees her, sees a figure wearing a tiny hint of her smile, maybe – and then it’s gone, she’s gone, and if he hadn’t known for sure it wasn’t Robby sitting before him, stationed quietly there across the table, he would’ve known the truth immediately. For he’d never known Robby to be cruel, at least not deliberately. But then, there’s maybe a hesitation or at most a twist of an eyebrow as the figure who wears Robby’s skin shimmers again, shifts, transforms to become someone else.
Someone worse.
Until this time, as the light shifts and then solidifies, Jack sees himself there across from him in the place of the strange figure who had been there seconds forever. He’s there, across from him, as solid and present as real as the stone bench on which he sits, and just as cold and as unforgiving. It’s him he sees there, but not him. It’s him, but ten years younger, him from the time Before, him from the days Before he had ended up twisted, him from the time Before he lost himself, him in a time where he’s still been in some sort of way whole, him from a time Before when his body was still mostly intact. It's him, from that time Before when he still had both legs (permanently) and a heart that mostly worked.
It’s him, his sandy red hair untouched by silver, him, biedaled and only slightly broken, him from when the ring on his left hand had meant something more to his heart than guilt. Him, as a man whose smile came a lot easier and didn’t feel like he might crack open, maw gaping wide and eyes sightless, at the end of a long day.
Looking at himself as a younger man, sitting in front of him, it takes all he is not to be sick.
“Time comes for us all.”
True. Sometimes it’s a relief how it passes.
A flicker and the figure masquerading is Robby returns, looks at Jack as he struggles to stay upright as he sits on that stone bench, staggering at the image that had been in front of him – and only smiles (it’s a smile Jack is truly beginning to hate).
That smile is still there as it speaks before Jack can respond.
“Perhaps you’d be more comfortable with another in my place then, as you find the sight of yourself so disturbing.”
Again, there’s a flash once again, a shift, a sharp moment bleeding into the sun that dapples this space, and it’s moving this time, the shades of it, the figure shifting and shaping. The spectre, moving as quickly, as fast, as deadly, as it had when the echo of Jack’s wife had shown itself, appearing and disappearing as fast.
Samira Mohan sits there.
It’s a relief how quickly that image disappears. It’s a relief how fast it’s gone, how it fades even before he has a chance to get more than a glimpse of her. He’s not sure he would’ve been able to survive hearing the disjointed voice of Death – as Death, this could only be – coming from Mohan’s curving lips, in her voice. Just as he’s not sure he could survive seeing the twisted grimace of Death’s mask on her face, any more than he could seeing the rictus of it shape Mohan’s lips to take the place of the sunny, gentle brightness of her smile.
“You’re so firm with that,” Death asks. “Do you ever wonder why?”
As the impression of it lingers on the face of Robby now.
The sound of Jack’s voice as it comes out in response is rough, rougher than he ever remembers it being; it comes out as rusty as if he hasn’t spoken in weeks. It comes out deep and halting, as if he’s forgotten how to speak, just as he has forgotten how to laugh without it coming out sounding broken.
“With what?”
The defensiveness is so clear in it as he answers that even he can hear it.
“‘Mohan’ this… ‘Mohan,’ that. ‘Dr. Mohan says…’; ‘Dr. Mohan is…’; ‘Mohan and I will…’; ‘Dr. Mohan is the smartest of the bunch…’; ‘let me confer with Mohan…’; ‘Dr. Mohan is smarter than we ever were…’”
Pretending not to understand, hoping to brazen it through, Jack tilts his head, keeps his face as still as he possibly can, knowing, as he always does when this conversation comes up with Robby, that he is fooling no one, least of all himself.
“She is smarter than the two of us, I mean, smarter than me and Robby, smarter than the two of them put together, smarter than we could ever be, always has been,” – and it’s not even close. Smarter, quicker, more adept at putting the pieces together and gentler in it, kinder, more compassionate, even when it comes to ripping out a piece of someone and getting her hands in them to fuse the bleeding parts back together. Certainly smarter than anyone he’s ever known, especially him. She’s the best of them; he doesn’t even try to deny it with anyone he speaks to; he’s known that salient fact for years, after all.
“She just is.”
A pause, as seemingly his companion waits for him to incriminate himself further, but Jack doesn’t break, simply waits for it to continue.
“Yes,” the figure says then, as he looks at him with a semi-feral grin, looking all too much like the Cheshire Cat Robby can sometimes be, “she is, but that’s not the question at hand here. The question is, why is it always ‘Mohan’? Why is it always ‘Mohan’ and not ‘Samira’? Mohan, as if she’s your coworker and nothing more, ‘Mohan’ as if you barely know her, as if she’s at most a stranger and not even the colleague she’s been these past years.”
A devastating pause before it continues.
“Why do you insist on referring to her that way – ‘Mohan’ – as if you don’t feel it the moment she walks into the room?”
It’s a question Jack hates to answer.
She’s ‘Mohan’ after all, the brilliant, amazing, young, incredible doctor, his colleague. She’s ‘Mohan’, she is a senior resident, his subordinate. She’s ‘Mohan’, she’s thirty, she’s his junior, that’s why, she’s nothing more – he’s nothing, not in comparison to her, he can be nothing more – so that’s why. She’s ‘Mohan’; she’s a colleague, nothing more. She is Samira Mohan, she is everything, she is the future, she is whip smart, brilliant, kind, increadible, a force of nature; he's Jack. She can be nothing more.
“Not even a friend then?”
“Yes,” a pause as he pretends to consider the question, loaded as it is, a pause as he pretends he has to think about it, and this time, the silence is so thick, lingers so hard and so long, he has to find a way to fill it. “A friend. She is a friend.”
He doesn’t speak the words that form the reminder he thinks next – anything else would be inappropriate – but can see from the smirk on Robby’s face that he doesn’t need for the thought to be heard. A smirk, the shape of it all too knowing and familiar, the one that shows all too clearly his teeth, and this time Jack sees Robby – not the figure that bears his face, not Death, not the Void, not the strange companion that haunts him here – all too clearly.
It’s not hard to see it there; this is also a conversation that the two of them have had before, after all, even if in more limited, more implied terms.
I see how you look at her, brother; everyone has, you’re not nearly as subtle as you think.
“Inappropriate. An interesting choice of words indeed. So. ‘Mohan’, she’s a valued colleague, a friend. Nothing more.”
Nodding, short and sharp, Jack pretends his mouth hasn’t gone dry.
“I think you no more think that, even to yourself, than does anyone else. You’ve just never been ready to admit it. Something to discuss, I think. Regardless, so. These last months – years? – as you have so clearly chosen to think of her only as ‘Mohan‘, even in your mind, is that your means of holding it all together? Is that your means, for yourself, that you haven’t crossed that line – that unbreakable boundary – at least, in your head? Is that how you reassure yourself that if you only call her by her last name, you haven’t wondered if your ‘friend’, your ‘colleague’, if she can’t be more? Is that how you tell yourself you haven’t spent all too much time wondering if she would suit being more, is that it?”
“I don’t,” sharp, defensive, eyes quick on those of Robby-brown.
He doesn’t, he can’t. (He does. Of course, he does. How could he not?)
“You don’t?”
“Don’t wonder about that.”
A heaving sigh moves through Robby’s chest; Jack wants to punch him in the face.
“Oh, brother. Don’t try to bullshit a bullshitter. I’ve seen inside your head, remember?” Because he’s not Robby, this figure sitting in front of Jack, they both know this, even if sometimes Jack wants to forget. Because even if he were Robby, he could still see inside Jack’s head, even still, at least when it comes to this, at least when it comes to this one thing, this one person, this one intractable question.
Her.
“Refer to her however you want out loud, Jack, we both know how you think of her before you can strop yourself. So, I know, like you know, that while it’s always ‘Mohan’ you speak of, force yourself to consider most times, even to yourself, at night, it’s ‘Samira’ you dream of.”
There’s heat rising along the pale, vulnerable skin of his neck; he can feel it as the edges of his cheeks are on fire. He’s blushing, he can’t control it, he’s too obviously flushed, but then, he can feel how his heart is beating out of control, and he doesn’t know where to look. He’s flushed, exposed, and he’s wishing the spectre before him, and the man it represents didn’t have the ability to see him so clearly; he’s wishing himself elsewhere, anywhere. He’s wishing himself gone. Lost. Gone. Safe.
“I’m afraid I’m going nowhere. But then I’m merely a figment of your imagination, right?”
There’s that smirk again, that stupid, infuriating smirk.
“Aren’t I?”
Again, he wants to punch the face that bears it until that smirk fades under the weight of his fist; he’d do almost anything to have it fade from his very gaze, even as he knows it’s a smirk impossible for him to avoid.
“‘Cause, after all, I’m only your subconscious messing with your conscious mind.”
Jackass.
“You want me gone; the only way is to learn to shut out the voices in your own head. I’m you, Jack, remember. Remember that fact, remember who I really am, after all, under all this. Remember who you’re speaking with here. Remember: I’m ultimately only your innermost thoughts made flesh, after all – or, well, not flesh, I guess, but close enough. I’m you, ultimately, remember that. You want me gone, you’ll first have to make that tired old brain of yours shut up long enough to let you rest.”
Impossible, he thinks, though God knows he’s tried.
“Guess you’re stuck with me then,” and this time the voice is both in his head and emanating from the mouth of the figure sitting in front of him.
Stuck with him; yes, he supposes he is.
“At last,” ‘Not Robby’ says, smiling this time, the smirk at least, temporarily hidden away. “We’re getting somewhere. Tell me, Jack, what, or even who, do you think we should be talking about, hmm, you and me? Where should we begin?”
Leaning back comfortably on his stone bench, that seat a mirror to Jack’s across the way, he leans back, braced on the edge of it with his hands, looking over at him with that knowing look, the one Jack hates, he relaxes, settles in, seemingly at his ease as this figure who is and who is not Robby, who is and who is not Jack, prepares to dissect him while he’s not yet dead.
“Don’t worry. We can talk it all over. We’ve plenty of time.”