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Dennis hides behind the word admiration when it comes to Dr. Robby. It’s the only way to stop the hemorrhage. He’s allowed to covet Dr. Robby’s spirit, surely... to look at a godly man and want to mirror his image. But there is a very clear line between wanting to reflect a man and wanting to hold him, and Dennis is terrified of how easily he’s crossing it.
The word admiration is starting to rot. It’s this thin, shaking thing he tries to wrap around himself. A pathetic little scrap of a lie that doesn’t even cover the ugliness.
But he keeps his chin up. He focuses on the ceiling, on the rafters, on the hierarchy, on anything that points toward heaven.
(Upward. Always upward.)
Because that’s what they told him, wasn't it? That safety is found in the heights. So he stares at Dr. Robby and prays for him to be worshiped. He tries to turn him into an altar, or a mentor, or some kind of distant, terrifying god of the ER, anything but a person. Anything but a man with hard hands and a voice. Because if Robby is a god, then Dennis is just a disciple. If Dr. Robby is a god, then this suffocating heat in his chest isn't a sin.
He has to believe that. He has to. Because the alternative is a shame so disgusting he doesn't think he’ll ever be able to stand up again.
But the God Dennis grew up with doesn't like the way he watches Robby’s hands. He knows that. He feels the chain tighten every time Robby’s sleeve brushes his arm. It’s a heavy, iron thing.
And he’s so, so tired of looking up. His neck is starting to ache. He is so desperate for the floor to drop out from under him, that he's clawing at his own chest, trying to find a way to breathe through the weight of the altar pressing down on him. If he looks at Dr. Robby, if he actually stops praying and just looks, the world might not end. After all, Dr. Robby is just a man, right?
Dr. Robby is just bone and blood and soft, exhaled breaths. And Dennis Whitaker is just a faggot, starving and lonely and hollow, who would trade every scrap of his soul just to feel Dr. Robby’s fingertips graze the inside of his wrist. Dennis is just a sinner who wants to be touched. Yes, he thinks, it would be nice to be held until I disappear.
The thing is, Dennis is powerless because Dr. Robby is... well. What isn't he? He's everything. He's the easiest person in the world to admire, and Dennis hates him for it, except he doesn't, he actually wants to study him under a microscope.
The man is just pure, unadulterated competence. It's a physical weight in the room. His mind moves at a terminal velocity that leaves Dennis feeling dizzy and stupid and desperate to keep up. And don't even get him started on the way Dr. Robby talks. His tongue is all sharp edges and jagged, mean-spirited brilliance. It's that specific kind of old intelligence, the kind that feels like a serrated blade, and god, for some reason, when it’s pointed at Dennis, it feels intoxicating. It feels like being seen.
Dennis watches him work the way a martyr watches the blade. And there is a stillness in his chest that he hasn't felt since he was a kid at the altar, knees bruised from the cold stone and heart full of expectant silence. It's a terrifying kind of peace. It's the certainty in Dr. Robby's hands; it feels almost sacred. It feels holy.
The thought hits him like a physical blow, a jolt of nausea that makes him wince.
Sacred. Holy?
He isn’t supposed to think like that, he knows the architecture of the cage he was built in. Okay, he’s had crushes before. He's known the shallow, flickering heat of wanting a man, but nothing like this. Every time he lets himself use a word like holy to describe a man who smells like sweat and mortality, he’s just digging the hole deeper. He’s fashioning a noose out of his own rosary beads. He's looking at Dr. Robby and he’s realising that he’d rather be damned for this, for the way Robby moves his fingers, than be saved by a God who wants him empty.
And there's a difference between a crush and an altar, and Dennis is currently kneeling in the dirt. He can almost hear the echoes of every sermon he’s ever sat through. The ones that smelled like floor wax warning him about the unnatural weight of his own heart. His heart is weight, and it’s pulling him straight to the bottom of the lake.
He's going to hell. He knows it with the same certainty that he loves Robby. He’s going to burn, and it’s not even just for the wanting, though the wanting is a living, breathing thing inside him. It’s for the sheer, blasphemous apathy of it all. He looks at Robby and thinks, Fine. Let it burn.
He would trade the pearly gates, he would trade the golden streets and the eternal peace and the very concept of grace, for ten minutes. Just ten minutes of Robby actually looking at him as a man. Dennis is standing on the edge of the abyss, looking at the smoke rising from the pit, and he’s ready to jump if it means Robby might catch his eye on the way down.
That's the part that actually kills him, the part that carves him out from the inside. The realisation that he’s already burning. The fire is already licking at his ankles, climbing his shins, and Dennis isn't even reaching for the water. He's just standing there, hands open, letting Robby be his God. Letting Robby’s movements be his scripture and Robby's voice be his choir, even while he feels the weight of the real God’s gaze pressing into the back of his neck in lieu of a branding iron.
He knows he should stop thinking. If he could just go numb, if he could just lobotomise the part of his brain that translates Robby's competence into worship, he might actually be able to save himself. He might be able to crawl back to the light.
But, still... when Robby moves, just a tilt of his head, Dennis is suddenly a satellite trapped in his orbit. He doesn't fight the pull anymore. He just follows the gravity of him. Down, down, down, into the dark, into the heat, into the beautiful, terrifying ruin of his own soul.
The thing is, it’s still there. The crush, except it’s not really a crush, let's be real, because crushes are for kids who get to be normal. This thing he has for Robby is an actual parasite, he thinks. It takes up physical, agonising space in his chest, a weight he drags through the streets of Pittsburgh, a corpse he can't bury.
He’s tried to scrub it out. He's spent twenty minutes at a time under water that was way too hot, looking back now, and using that industrial, toilet-smelling soap from the hospital bathrooms, trying to scour the feeling of Robby off his skin. It's ironic, really, considering the bottle says it’s supposed to be able to clean anything off.
But the soap is a lie. The labels are a lie. Everything is a lie, and Dennis is the only one standing there in the steam, smelling like cheap chemicals and staring at his own red, raw hands, realising that no amount of scrubbing is ever going to reach the part of him that Robby has already ruined.
Sometimes the weight of it gets so heavy he actually collapses under it. Sinking to his knees on the cold tile of a patient’s room or folding into the suffocating dark of a supply closet. He presses his palms together, grinding the bones of his hands into one another until it hurts, until the physical pain is the only thing he can hear over the screaming in his head. He begs a God he isn't even sure is listening anymore to just take it.
Take it, take it, take it. Please. Peel it out of me. I don't want it. Take it from your greatest sinner, if you’re even there.
it’s the exhaustion of a lifetime spent under immense internal conflict. He's been seeking inner peace since he was old enough to realise his heart held complexities that felt at odds with the world around him. He thought he’d finally endured enough struggle to just... be.
But now he’s back in the depths of despair. He’s pleading for relief for the crime of wanting connection, the only anchor he feels he has left in a world that often feels overwhelming. He spent years building resilience out of his own experiences just to feel like he's still in conflict within himself. He's asking to be emptied, to be made numb, because the intensity of his feelings is a force that feels like it’s unraveling everything he fought so hard to build.
Dennis knows the math, of course. He’s been sitting in those hard wooden pews and sterile classrooms for his entire childhood, tallying the cost of his soul in the margins of bibles. He knows he’s a man meticulously, painfully built from the wreckage of a little girl who had to die so he could breathe. He's already living on borrowed time in a world where God supposedly doesn’t make mistakes.
And the wanting? The way his heart stutters when Robby breathes? It's just the greed of a man who doesn't know when to stop taking. It's not enough that he clawed his way out of the earth to be himself; now he wants to be loved, too. He fought for this life, he bled for this name, just to take the whole beautiful, ruined thing right back to hell with him. It feels like a scam. It feels like he stole a life that didn’t belong to him and now the bill is finally due.
He grew up knowing that wanting is a hairline fracture in the soul that lets the dark leak in, and Hell is patient. Hell has all the time in the world to wait for him. It's been sitting there, smiling, since the very first time Dennis looked in a mirror and dared to see a man looking back. It was never a question of if he would burn, only a question of how long he could pretend the heat wasn’t already there. That old theology degree is still there, rotting in the back of his mind like a loaded gun pressed against his temple, clicking every time he dares to take a breath. The body is weak. The heart is a deceitful thing above all else.
And he had this desperate, stupid hope that it would be different once he was a man. He thought the transition would be akin to heaven, that if he could just get the outside to match the ache on the inside, the haunting would stop. But is it really any different than when he was someone else? The cage just has a different shape now.
Because his body and his heart, they’re both screaming lies right now. They’re telling him he’s allowed to want. They're telling him that the way he feels for Robby is everything. And Dennis knows better. He knows that the person screaming into the mirror is usually the one telling the truth. He's just waiting for the moment Robby realises that Dennis is nothing more than a collection of holy mistakes held together by spit and spite.
Every time Robby's hand brushes his, a glancing, accidental touch over the railing of a gurney, it's like another link in the chain tightening, metal clicking against metal until Dennis can taste the rust in the back of his throat. He’s going to hell, he knows it with a peace that surpasses understanding. He's going there in the body he fought for, carrying the love he was never supposed to have, a thief caught with his pockets full of starlight.
He’s failing. He's failing every test, every commandment, every silent expectation of the God who let him survive this long. And the thing is, Dennis has had second chances before. He's been given a million opportunities to correct himself, to bow his head, to be the person the pews wanted him to be. But not here. not with Robby. He can't fix the way his lungs only seem to work when they're breathing the same air as a man who doesn't even know he's being worshipped.
And the part that makes Dennis want to scream until his ribs crack, is that he’d do it. He’d walk into the fire himself. He'd step onto the coals and let the heat take him if he knew, if he just knew, that Robby would be the one to carry him there. He'd choose damnation in a heartbeat if it meant he got to stay in Robby's arms for the descent.
It's ugly when Robby laughs, that low, rough, exhausted sound that feels like a hand reaching out through the dark to find him. Something warm and traitorous flares up behind Dennis's ribs. It's a spark in a room full of oxygen tanks. It's enough to blow the whole world apart, and Dennis is standing there with the match in his hand, waiting for the blast.
He hates himself for it. He hates the way his body betrays every prayer he’s ever whispered. He tells himself it’s just one big, cruel divine joke, a cosmic prank played on a man who already sacrificed everything just to exist. He pictures God leaning over the gold-leafed balcony of heaven, stopwatch in one hand and a ledger in the other, cold and meticulous, marking down every second of Dennis's failure.
He’s being timed on how long it takes for him to finally, completely fall apart. And the worst part is that Dennis wants to win. He wants to break the record. He wants to show God that he can love Robby more than he fears the fire, because terrifyingly, he does.
For every extra heartbeat, he spends them watching the way Robby's hands are so sure, so impossibly steady. Hands that know exactly what they’re doing, while Dennis is just a collection of frayed wires and static, falling apart in real-time. But the real, jagged rot at the center of the wound is that Dennis doesn't hate Robby. He can't.
He doesn’t have any room left for it, because he already hates himself enough for both of them. He hates that he clawed his way through the dirt, and that he’s still a failure in the eyes of a Lord who only seems to value the versions of Dennis that don't exist anymore.
Then, his thoughts turn. They sour, becoming something darker and uglier and desperate. He starts to wonder if the fire was always the destination. If the struggle to become Dennis wasn't a journey toward freedom, but just a more efficient way to build the pyre. If he’s just a man who traded one cage for another, only to find out that in this one, the bars are made of Robby’s hands and the lock is a prayer he can't stop saying.
Dennis thinks about Robby properly again, the man. And a thought crawls out from the damp, dark corners of his mind. It's a parasite of a thought. It's mortifying. It makes his blood run cold and his skin feel two sizes too small.
What if Robby is like me?
The idea is a jagged piece of glass in his throat. What if Robby isn't just competent? What if that Questionable Human Being label isn't a joke, but a confession? What if it's a mask for a soul that’s just as twisted, just as wrong as Dennis's own? What if Robby is a sinner, too? What if he’s been standing in the same shadow this whole time?
Dennis feels a wave of nausea so violent it leaves him dizzy. He wants to scream at the sky until his throat bleeds; he wants to grab Robby by the shoulders and shake him. Beg him to stay on his pedestal. He desperately needs Robby to be holy. He needs Robby to be every clean, perfect, righteous thing that Dennis is not. He tells himself he’d hate for Robby to be a sinner. He tells himself he’d hate for Robby to be a faggot.
(The word catches in his throat like a shard of bone. He can't even think it, can't let the label touch the man he worships.)
It's a lie. It’s the biggest, most pathetic lie he’s ever told in a lifetime of performing. Because the truth is, he’d give anything. He’d trade his remaining scrap of salvation just to not be alone in the fire. He'd give his very breath to know that Robby is right there with him, standing in the same gutter, breathing the same sulfur. He wants to drag Robby down until they’re both unrecognisable. It's selfish, and it’s cruel, and it’s the only thing keeping him alive. The desperate, starving hope that Robby is just as broken as he is.
But he can't say that. Because if Robby is a sinner, then Robby is going to Hell, too. And Dennis would rather burn for an eternity by himself than see one hair on Robby’s head touched by the flame.
He’s drowning, he realises eventually. The ugly, frantic kind. He hates, he hates how his body reacts before he can even think to stop it. It's a betrayal of the worst kind; his own pulse has turned witness against him, hammering out a confession against his ribs for the whole world to hear.
Every time Robby stands close, Dennis's breath trips, a jagged, pathetic little catch in his throat that makes him want to claw his own skin off. It sounds like a pig, he spits at himself, the mental insult sharp and vitriolic. He's disgusted by his own need, by the way his body becomes a soft, wanting thing the second Robby is in his orbit.
And the praise. God, the praise is the most dangerous part. When Robby tells him he’s done a good job, when that sharp, jagged tongue turns toward him with something like approval. It's a lure that pulls Dennis deeper into the current, making him crave the very thing that’s going to kill him. Praise from robby feels like a benediction from a god he isn't supposed to worship, and every time he hears it, he feels the fire get a little bit hotter.
And of course, the spiral is always, always interrupted by his father’s voice. It's a tectonic rumble that lives in the very marrow of his skull. Dennis knows exactly what he is. He's a 'something' who had to carve himself out of a lie with a dull blade, only to find a new, deeper wrongness waiting for him underneath the skin.
He wonders, with a sick sort of fascination, what his father would say if he could see him now. If he could see Dennis's eyes tracing the line of Michael Robinavitch’s jaw with the same frantic, starving devotion he used to give to the verses he was forced to memorise.
His father would call it idolatry. He’d call it a double-death. He would look at Dennis and see a thief who took the body God gave him, broke it into jagged pieces, and then had the audacity to use the wreckage to build a shrine to a sarcastic, tired doctor in Pittsburgh. Dennis is an architect of his own damnation, stacking the bricks of his identity just to create a place for Robby, of all people, to stand.
He was so stupid and honestly, just fundamentally, embarrassingly stupid, to believe that if he saved enough lives, the ledger would finally balance out. He thought that if he worked until his vision blurred and his hands shook with exhaustion, he could somehow outrun the version of himself his father prays for every night. He thought he could out-work the ghost of the girl he buried.
But goodness never sticks to him. It's an anomaly to his body, a foreign organ that his system keeps trying to reject. No matter how many people he pulls back from the edge, he’s still just... that.
He stands there in the middle of the absolute chaos of the ward, surrounded by the screaming and the sirens and the frantic, rhythmic thumping of chest compressions, smelling like copper and industrial chemicals and the slow, cloying scent of his own rotting soul. He’s covered in the evidence of his attempts to be good, but he feels like a hollowed-out cathedral. He's standing in the wreckage of his own life, realising that he can’t save enough people to make God forget what he looks like when he's looking at Michael Robinavitch.
Dennis wonders if Robby has ever felt it, too. The teeth of a ghost sinking into the soft part of his neck. He thinks about how Robby's childhood must've gone, and he realises he’s a liar. He’s the worst kind of liar, actually. Because he doesn't want Robby to be holy; he wants Robby to be queer. He wants it so bad it’s a physical ache in his jaw. He wants Robby to be destined for the same dark, burning place Dennis's father always screamed about. Not because he hates him, but because he’s so goddamn lonely.
The silence of the hospital hallway starts to roar in his ears. It's the sound of every disappointed look from a relative who shared his DNA but refused to share his truth, and suddenly, the desire and the trauma are the same thing. They're both just weight. They're both just the sound of him choking.
He’s so tired. He knows he is, but doesn't get the help he's so kindly offered by Dana every other week.
(How does she know? She always does...)
He's just so incredibly tired of being a man who is constantly apologising for the space he takes up. He’s tired of his existence being a series of footnotes and explanations. He looks at Robby and he doesn't see a mentor anymore, he sees a potential mirror. He sees a chance to finally stop saying I’m sorry, and start saying, You, too? but the roar in his ears tells him the answer is probably just more silence, and more fire, and more Pittsburgh nights spent scrubbing his hands until they bleed.
Robby is kind, but it is the most violent thing he has ever done. He is so devastatingly attentive that he catches the collapse before it even registers on Dennis's face; and he sees the minute, frantic vibration in Dennis's hands during a trauma and he steps in. Dennis hoards that warmth like he’s shoplifting his own soul, stuffing the memory of Robby's proximity into his pockets and hoping the sensors don't go off on his way out. But even as he clings to it, he can feel the rot spreading. He can feel the theft of it.
He grew up with the mantra that his body was a temple, a sacred vessel carved out for the divine, but Dennis knows the truth. He's the one who had to clean up the mess. It's a place where he’s being buried alive for the crime of wanting the only man who treats him like he’s human. Every time Robby is kind, he’s just treading over the chalk outlines of Dennis's previous lives. He's walking through a massacre, and Dennis is just the survivor standing in the rubble, wondering why he fought so hard to live in a house that’s already on fire.
Dennis then looks at his hands and he doesn't see flesh and bone. He sees the scars of his own transition, the sheer, exhausting will it took to drag himself out of the earth and demand to exist as himself.
And then he thinks of Robby, as one does.
He thinks of Robby’s hands. Natural, of course. Robby doesn't have to think about his own masculinity; he just inhabits it like The King he is, while the Ratcatcher Dennis is still outside in the rain. Robby's manliness makes Dennis feel like a counterfeit. It should’ve been his original sin, liking boys. That would have been a normal kind of broken.
But instead, he’s this. A man who had to invent himself, only to realise he’s using his hard-won hands to reach for a version of manhood that will always be a foreign language to him. He’d trade every ounce of his will to exist just to have Robby's effortless, unearned certainty for a single hour.
And it's probably not a good deal, anyway... the first lesson Dennis ever learned was that he was born a debtor, and the interest was his life. He's spent every year since then trying to whittle himself down, carving away his edges and tucking his elbows in, trying to become something small enough to fit into a heaven that the scriptures explicitly told him was never built for someone like him. He's been trying to squeeze a hurricane into a thimble.
And god, does he feel it now. The desperate, feverish wickedness flaring up behind his ribs. It's the debt coming due. He feels the weight of his family's disappointment, the crushing silence of his God, and the blood-soaked memories of his past all converging on him at once. He's bankrupt. He's out of time. There's nowhere left for him to go but down, into the dark, into the fire he’s been promised since the nursery.
But then, a thought flickers.
But what if God isn’t like that at all?
What if the God of the pews and the tectonic rumbles was just a man with a loud voice and a small heart? What if the real one, the one who actually made the stars and the nerves in Dennis's hands, is watching him right now and doesn't see a crime scene? What if the fire isn't for the lovers, but for the people who told them they weren't allowed to love? The thought is more terrifying than hell ever was, because it means Dennis might actually be allowed to be happy. And he has no idea how to do that without apologising first.
The question terrifies him. It’s more than simple doubt; it’s a betrayal of every scar currently mapped across his body and every desperate, gasping prayer he ever whispered into a tear-soaked pillow in the late morning. Because if God isn't the monster his father described, if the divine isn't a predator waiting for him to trip, then what was all that suffering for?
Why did he have to bleed so much just to be seen, exactly?
If the fire isn't real, then the war he fought to survive it was a farce. If he wasn't being hunted, then he was just... hurting. For nothing. The idea that his agony was unnecessary is a blade in his gut, sharper than the damnation ever was. He's spent his whole life justifying his existence by his endurance, by how much he could take without breaking. If there's no ledger, no debt, and no monster in the sky, then Dennis is just a man who was broken for the sake of being broken. And god, he can’t handle that. He'd almost rather be a sinner in the hands of an angry God than a victim in the hands of a silent one.
What the actual fuck?