Chapter Text
The shift had been going wrong since the very moment Dennis Whitaker clocked in right before 7 AM this morning. Not as bad as his first shift in the ER—nothing ever was, not really—but by the sixth hour he had gone through a similar amount of scrub changes and could no longer count the amount of times he’s been covered in various liquids.
Blood had a strange way of finding him. So did vomit. So did the unforgettable, devastating moments when a patient stopped being a person and became a body, and then even that slipped away into nothing more than a mental tally of people he’s killed that Dr. Abbot has been telling him to let go. The ER chewed through people indiscriminately; patients, nurses and hopes alike. Dennis had learned within his first year here that the only way to survive was motion. If he kept moving, kept going, there was less time to think. Less time to spiral.
They’d already lost two patients before noon. One of them was an elderly man that had gone in a way that felt abrupt and cruel, alarms screaming while hands moved in too late. The other had been a young woman with a slower death, the kind of loss that stretched out and hollowed him from the inside.
By the time the third critical patient was rolled into one of the trauma bays at 1 PM, Dennis felt scraped thin, held together by habit and muscle memory rather than strength. Sounds stacked on top of each other quickly. Chirping monitors and squeaking shoes had voices overlapping them in tight, efficient bursts. Someone called for blood and he heard his own voice rattle off vitals, but it sounded distant to his ears. The patient, a teenager that had a dare go wrong at some party, lay motionless beneath the fluorescent lights, chest unmoving without outside help, a body suspended between machines and gloved palms, between life and whatever followed afterwards.
Dennis stepped in where he was needed without thinking. He always did. He found a spot at the bedside, handing supplies and pumping oxygen without being told to do so. His fingers brushed the edge of the gurney, close enough to the tubing and the patient’s shoulder to feel grounded by it all. He focused on the rhythm of tasks, numbers and movement and the hope that if he did everything right, this one might stay.
He’d learned how to pray before he’d learned how to read, and even now the words rise to his mind automatically. Our Father, who art in heaven, he recites. Hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done. Please, let this one stay. Please, let this one live.
Dr. Robby anchored the room from the foot of the bed. He barked orders and stepped in when he needed to, but with each passing moment and case Dennis was steadily reminded that PTMC was, in fact, a teaching hospital. Most of the calls and even more of the procedures were left for the students and residents.
Everything about Robby’s demeanor screamed experience. He could see the way Mel’s eyes widened at the sight of the teen's nearly detached arm, could feel the way his own heart tightened as the patient’s ribs cracked under Mel’s hands. Robby, however, even when his attention was pulled by Langdon or Garcia snapping a question, or another resident tugging at his sleeve for some help in the next trauma bay over, upheld an amount of steadiness to him that made the chaos feel, albeit briefly, manageable.
Dennis tracked him in his periphery the way a planet tracks gravity, an orbit, orienting himself around that calm. The prayer he never got to finish burns on his tongue when his eyes linger a second too long on his attending’s throat.
“V-fib on the monitor!” Langdon shouts suddenly, Mel’s hands lifting from the teenager’s chest, the skin already bruising where his ribs had snapped so clearly. Langdon moves in with the paddles, setting them up before Robby has the chance to yell out “charge to 200”. Dennis’s eyes linger on his attending once more, the way his gloved hands burrow into his armpits, crossed over his chest. Dana comes in behind the man, hand on his shoulder, making him turn away to inform him of something. Mel already has her back turned to prepare for the next step of action after the shock. Jesse’s eyes are transfixed on the blaring monitor.
“Clear!” Langdon yells, eyes down turned to double check the numbers one last time. The word cuts through the noise, sharp and practiced, but the warning doesn’t land where it should have. Not to Dennis. Dennis, who is too deep in the moment, too focused on the patient’s bruising chest, on the rise and fall that isn’t there. His hands are still there, steadying himself against the gurney, barely brushing the teenager’s shoulder. His fingers barely graze plastic and skin and metal all at once, but they still do. They terribly, horribly do.
The shock tears through him without a second warning.
There’s no pain. Not at first. It’s a violent, absolute seizure of his muscles, every part of him drawing tight as if pulled inward by an unseen force. God knows he’s all too familiar with the all-body aches of hard farm labour. He knows all about lactic acid and torn ligaments. But nothing has ever felt quite like this.
His vision flares white, the room disappearing in a blink, the overlapping sounds collapsing into a single, high-pitched note. He’s distantly aware of the way his jaw clenches, the way his teeth burrow into his tongue and draw blood. His heart stutters for an awful three seconds, before lurching into something wild and unfamiliar in time with the teenager on the gurney.
Dennis’s body jerks back on instinct alone. He stumbles, catching himself against a cart that crashes into Jesse’s hip and makes him wince. Dennis’s breath is punched out of him in a sharp, involuntary sound, and he struggles to get any of it back in.
Thankfully, the moment passes almost as quickly as it had come, only leaving behind a buzzing wrongness under his skin, a sense that something fundamental had been knocked just slightly out of place. When the trauma bay finally comes back into focus, he’s met with Jesse’s angry glare, but there’s something else behind it when the nurse’s eyes land on his trembling fingers. There’s no time to address any of it, though, as Mel is already calling for more blood.
No one had seen it.
Everyone had been turned away; reaching for supplies, adjusting machines, or chatting with the head nurse. The room keeps moving. The choreography of code blue doesn’t falter, only Dennis does. He continues holding onto the cart, knowing full well that if it hadn’t been there, he’d be sprawled out on the bloody floor.
“Whitaker, move,” Langdon’s irritation finds him before his balance does. It’s a sharp reprimand, he sounds angry, but Dennis knows where to look for the stress that laces it. He opens his mouth to respond, to apologise, but the words tangle uselessly. There’s a chunk of his tongue on the left side that’s missing. His arms feel heavy and uncooperative, muscles still twitching beneath the surface, and his palms all but burn. He can feel the blisters there without ever having to look down. His chest aches horribly, both the skin there and whatever resides behind it.
Jesse slides seamlessly into the space Dennis vacated. He glances back at him once more, and Dennis thinks the concern he’d seen in his eyes moments prior had been a hallucination. Now he just seems annoyed.
When he feels Dr. Robby’s attention shift, he thinks of home. It isn’t dramatic; it’s merely a pause, a look that lingers a second too long all too familiarly. Robby’s eyes move over him, taking in the way Dennis holds himself upright, the tremor he can’t manage to still. Concern flickers over him, brief and contained, but Dennis is an expert at catching what hides behind it, settling heavily over his already abused chest.
Terrible and all too familiar, there it is, Dennis thinks. Disappointment.
Rural Nebraska had been all sky and silence and sermons that promised hellfire for boys who looked too long at other boys. The corn fields were endless, and so was the fear.
He straightens instinctively, tries desperately to pull himself together, but his body betrays him once more. The room feels too bright, the noises suddenly overwhelming rather than grounding. Sweat prickles along the curse of his spine. His palms explode in pain when he clutches them into fists.
A few seconds later the teenager is deemed stable enough for them to shift their attention from his breathing and heartbeat to his nearly detached arm. Robby says something Dennis can’t make out, leaving the wounds up to the residents, before gesturing Dennis back with a flick of his wrist. The motion makes his world tilt for the thousandth time.
There’s no time for this. Dennis knows Robby, of all people, has his hands full without Dennis adding to the pile of issues in the ER. But his knees wobble as he slowly drags himself away from the cart, and Robby’s expression shifts from watchful to decisive.
His hand is in its respective spot on Dennis’s shoulder the moment they leave the trauma bay. The contact burns more than it should. Dennis can feel the tremor in himself and prays Robby can’t. There’s a weird look on his face, calculating, and Dennis selfishly wishes another critical patient would roll into the hallway, cutting the conversation short before it ever had the chance to begin. The ER, for once, refuses to oblige. The hallway hums but does not explode.
“You okay?”
“Yeah,” Dennis croaks, finally, and his voice sounds clipped and horrible. Robby’s eyebrows furrow further. The fluorescent lights carve faint shadows beneath his eyes. He hasn’t slept much either, Dennis realizes distantly. None of them have. “I’m—Yes. I’m fine.”
“You looked a little spooked in there,” Robby says. His tone is even, but there’s something careful beneath it. “The kid’s alive. As alive as he can be right now. You brought him back.”
Dennis shakes his head too quickly, the motion tugging at the ache in his chest. “I didn’t do anything.” His palms are still buzzing faintly, like he pressed them to a live wire and hasn’t quite let go. “And again, I’m okay.”
Dr. Robby studies him. Dennis has the disorienting thought that he feels transparent, like colourful church glass under scrutiny. “You had a bigger reaction than you did with the patients that weren’t so alive and well. Is… Is he someone you know?” Robby asks.
“No.” The answer is immediate, almost sharp. Almost angry. “No. I don’t even remember his name.” That part stings more than it should. Names always mattered to him. He used to whisper them under his breath when he prayed, back when prayer came easier. More often. “Honestly.”
Robby’s gaze flickers at that. “That’s even more unlike you.”
Dennis presses his lips together. He knows what Robby means. He’s the one who lingers a second longer at the bedside. The one who learns about dogs and high school tattoos and half-finished college degrees. The one who believes, stupidly, that knowing a patient changes the outcome.
“Listen,” Robby continues, quieter now. “If you’re feeling unwell—”
“I told you, I’m fine.” The words snap out before Dennis can soften them. Heat crawls up his neck, defensive and ashamed, alongside the burning around his throat. He hates the edge in his voice, hates that it’s directed at Robby, of all people. “I’m fine. And we should probably get back before Dana chews us out for standing around like this.”
As if she were in on the situation, Dana stares pointedly at them behind the nurse’s station. She motions towards the occupied rooms with a finger. For a moment, Robby doesn’t say anything. The noise of the ER swells and recedes like distant surf. Dennis becomes acutely aware of his heartbeat; too fast, then oddly hollow, like it’s skipping steps in a rhythm he’s supposed to know... by heart. Ironically.
“Right,” Robby says finally. There’s something missing from his voice now. The warmth has receded, tucked away. It feels so far away Dennis thinks it might’ve been another hallucination. “You’re sitting this one out, though.”
“But—”
“No buts. Take five, go help Santos with chairs. Then we’ll talk.” Robby’s eyes drag over him again, lingering at his face, his hands, his posture. “You look like you’re about to keel over.”
Dennis almost laughs. Instead, he swallows and tastes copper. He isn’t sure if it’s from biting his tongue during the shock or from something deeper, something his body is trying and failing to tell him. Either way, he doesn’t reply, only nods stiffly.
He turns away before Robby can read any more of him than he already has, the fluorescent lights blurring slightly at the edges. His chest throbs in quiet rebellion beneath his scrubs, the ghost of heat spreading outward from where his necklace rests against his skin. He squares his shoulders and walks towards the staff bathroom, trying to ignore the strange, uneven cadence of his own organs. Trying not to think about how, for a split second in that trauma bay, it had felt like something reached inside him and rearranged everything entirely.
He doesn’t let himself linger on the impossible moments after the shock that he let himself believe this was an answer to his prayer, finally, something strong enough to burn the sin out of him.
Dennis leaned against the probably dirty bathroom wall, chest heaving as the situation finally caught up to him. Failing to move out of the way at the sight of a defibrillator was probably the most rookie mistake anyone could ever make. And yet, here he was, with his trembling hands and a heart that skipped in a way that made his breath hitch.
Beneath the fabric of his scrubs, right at his sternum, was a deep, pulsing heat. Dennis pulled the shirt down with trembling fingers and felt the sight beneath steal the little air he had left. The silver cross branded him just below the collarbone, searing flesh in the neat shape of salvation, and he cannot help but think God has finally decided to leave a mark that will not fade.
Dennis closes his fingers around the cross and lets it fall away from his neck, tucking it into his pocket like a secret. He thinks of wooden church pews and the taste of sacramental wine. He thinks of mean brothers and handsome altar boys. He thinks of Robby’s hands fitting perfectly on his shoulders and the searing pain the shock had left behind.
And how, despite everything, he still hasn’t said a word about it.
He misses Nebraska. Freedom terrifies him.
During his second year of med school, Dennis catches himself watching a classmate too closely in anatomy lab. The careful hands and low voice feel more godly than anything he's felt in a long, long time, drinking away his sorrows during Christmas break in a house that doesn't believe in medicine. Old nausea returns full force. He locks himself in the bathroom at the shelter he frequents afterward and kneels beside the sink, body trying to expel the contents of his stomach, despite there being none.
“Please,” he'd whispered into folded arms. “If I can’t be clean, let me not be anything.”
Today, the bathroom hums similarly with its fluorescent light and the distant rush of pipes inside the walls. He presses the back of his head against the cool tile and counts his breaths the way he used to count Hail Mary's when he was small and afraid of fathers and thunderstorms.
In for four. Hold. Out for for. Repeat.
His heart refuses the rhythm, stuttering against the cage of his ribs like it wants to leap out and escape the body it never felt safe in. Five minutes, Robby had said, and Dennis decided it was pointless to argue. He pushes himself upright when he thinks enough time has passed. His knees wobble once again in quiet protest, and he grips the edge of the sink until the world steadies. The mirror above it shows him something pale and glassy eyed, lips drained of any semblance of colour. He looks like someone who’s seen a ghost. In a way, maybe he has.
Dennis cups his hands beneath the tap and fills them with water. The burns on his palms, no doubt from clutching the gurney, scream in protest, but he ignores the burn. The water tastes metallic going down, sticks halfway to his stomach like his body isn’t sure what to do with it anymore. He swallows it down anyway, chasing the dryness out from his throat.
His hands are still trembling when he’s done, but he feels a little better already. The bathroom stops spinning every time he so much as twists his neck, and his legs feel a little steadier.
Miraculously, he manages to escape the bathroom without being spotted and sneaks into the break room next door. He unwraps the gauze from the small medicinal cabinet with practised efficiency, ignoring how the adhesive tugs at the tender skin around the burns. He winds the white fabric around his palms and fingers, biting his lip to stifle any groans, layering it thick enough to hide the redness. He pulls on a pair of gloves over the gauze and flexes his hands experimentally. The tremor is definitely still there, but it’s dulled. The gauze does a good enough job at steadying his hands.
He finds Trinity exactly where Dr. Robby said he would. She’s triaging the overflow of minor complaints with exaggerated patience by the rows of plastic chairs lining the waiting room. She looks up as he approaches, eyes narrowing immediately.
She must realise he’s not there to call her back into the ER when he comes to a silent halt beside her. Her calculating eyes look over him once, twice, before addressing him with a low whistle. “You look like something out of a Victorian novel. Should I fetch thee a fainting couch?”
Dennis rolls his eyes, grateful for the familiarity of it. “We both know you’d use it before I got the chance to.”
She snorts. “True. I’m so done with this shift.”
“It’s barely 2 PM.”
“Shut up, Whitaker.”
They move through the waiting patients together, trading charts and sarcastic commentary under their breath. Dennis ends up having to bump two patients up the waiting list because of a seizure and a wound that won’t stop bleeding.
Trinity bumps her shoulder lightly against his as she hands him a clipboard. “Did Robby bench you?”
“Temporarily, yeah,” Dennis says, attempting to sound casual.
“Sheesh. That’s gotta sting. It takes a lot for him to bench you, of all people.”
He doesn’t answer, but the pain in his chest flares as if in agreement, sharp and insistent. It crawls towards his shoulder and makes him adjust his posture subtly, hoping Trinity wouldn’t notice. She, of course, does notice.
“You’re not, like, actually dying, are you?” She asks, quieter now.
“Nope, I’m alright.” If his voice sounds strained as he says it, screw it– he’s allowed to struggle through speech while actively trying to calm down his heart rate.
“See, you say that, but you look worse than most of these guys.”
He huffs out something that could almost be a laugh if it weren’t for the shortness of breath accompanying it. “You’re dramatic.”
“And you’re a terrible liar, Huckleberry.”
Dennis doesn’t rise to it. Instead, he crouches in front of an elderly woman complaining about dizziness, keeping his movements measured, deliberate. His heart thumps unevenly, skipping a few beats in a way that makes him swallow hard, before catching up by hammering against his ribs twice as much as it should. He focuses on the woman’s pulse beneath his fingers, counting beats that feel so much steadier than his own.
They work like that for nearly a full hour. Minor lacerations, flu symptoms, headaches. A sprained wrist. Trinity keeps up a steady stream of commentary while she writes things down on her clipboards, equal parts teasing and efficient. They move like a team, practiced and familiar in each other’s space, filling the gaps without having to ask.
For a while, Dennis almost forgets the brand on his chest.
Almost.
Because every time he straightens after assessing a patient, the burn pulls cruelly. Every time he breathes too deeply, something tightens beneath his sternum. And every time he glances towards the main ER floor, he feels it again—the echo of Robby’s gaze, searching and assessing him, like it hasn’t left him at all.
The cross had once felt like protection. Now it feels like a cruel verdict pressed into his skin.
Eventually, it’s the board that pulls them back. He drifts towards it, but Trinity catches his sleeve. There’s an uncomfortable look on her face. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
“Yeah.”
“You don’t look—”
“Trin, I’m fine.”
She studies him for half a second longer than she usually would, then releases him with a deep sigh. “Text me if you keel over and die. I am not finding out from Dana. Or worse—”
“Ogilvie,” they both mutter in unison, and Dennis manages a laugh that sounds normal. He turns away before Trinity can see how much effort it costs him.
Things feel relatively calm after that. His heart continues to have strange spurts of skipping a few beats before thrashing way too hard, but they’re so far apart Dennis can almost forget he ever made the mistake that he did.
Right before things get busy, he manages to slip away into the break room and snatch the tube of Neosporin they keep in the cabinet, as well as another roll of gauze. He makes quick work of spreading the cream over his collarbones and palms in the bathroom, re-wrapping the burns and switching out his gloves.
By 3 PM, the ER is busy with a mass of patients that overwhelm them after a big collision on the Liberty Bridge. It’s so busy, in fact, that Robby finally stops tracking his every move. Dennis gets to do compressions on three separate people in the span of an hour and a half and McKay lets him perform an intubation for his struggles. She trusts the tremor in his hands is due to the sight of mauled bodies. Robby isn’t convinced, but Dennis slips away before he can get interrogated again.
The next patient he picks up is a teenage girl with a deep gash along her forearm, courtesy of a shattered bedroom mirror and an argument that had escalated too quickly. The wound is ugly and deep but manageable.
He’s been repeating that word in his head all day. Manageable.
Inside the room, the girl refuses to meet his eyes. He introduces himself softly, crouching to her level. His hands, still wrapped and gloved tightly, hover over her arm. He numbs her up with a needle easily after warning her about the pinch and burn, but when he comes back around with a needle and thread in hand, the tremor is back.
Worse.
He steadies her wrist gently, willing his fingers into stillness. The fluorescent lights hum overhead. His chest throbs in slow, persistent waves. He can feel his pulse in his throat, irregular and insistent. He can hear the girl’s breathing pick up with each passing moment as he fails to start sewing her up.
“You’re gonna be okay,” he tells her, but he’s not sure who he’s trying to convince.
As he irrigates the wound, a spike of pain shoots through his sternum, sharp enough to make him pause and cough into his elbow. He inhales carefully, shallow, and the room swims at the edges for a fleeting second.
His body betrays him on the sixth stitch.
It’s slight, barely more than a stutter in the thread, but the girl is watching him like a hawk and notices. Her breath quickens, eyes darting from his shaking hands to his damp forehead and glassy eyes.
“Are you sure you can—”
The curtain draws open before she can finish and Dennis doesn’t have to look to know who it is.
A hand settles on his shoulder, firm and grounding. The contact sends a shock of awareness through him that has nothing to do with the electricity still running wild in his body. Robby steps in close enough that Dennis can feel the rise and fall of his breath at his back, steadier than his own. He’s sure Robby can feel it too, with the way his grip tightens.
“Hey,” Robby says softly, smiling at the panicked girl. “I’m Dr. Michael Robinovich, you can call me Dr. Robby, though. Everything’s alright. Whitaker here’s just been running since seven this morning.”
There’s a smile in his voice, the kind that lowers heart rates of both physicians and patients alike. The girl exhales, some of the tension draining from her shoulders.
Robby’s hand squeezes Dennis’s shoulder once, unaware of the way it pulls on his burn, before sliding away. “Why don’t I take over for a minute, yeah?” He says lightly. It isn’t phrased as an order, but it lands like one anyway. Dennis burns in more ways than one.
He steps back because there is no way not to. He peels his gloved hands away from the girl’s arm, tries not to notice how badly they’re trembling now that he’s not actively using them. Robby steps seamlessly into the space, not without shooting a strange look his way.
“See?” Robby murmurs to the girl as he begins to suture. “Clean edges. You’ll have a cool scar to show off.”
The girl huffs a small laugh. Dennis stands useless with the room shrinking around him. The ache in his chest sharpens into something pointed and insistent. He wishes the crash cart from this morning was still there for him to grip onto. He’d even take the edge of a gurney at this point, even if it was what hurt him in the first place.
No. What hurt him was his incompetence, the inability to listen to the most basic order in the ER. But that train of thought only has one ending, so Dennis pretends. He tells himself the dizziness is dehydration, the tremor in his hands is caffeine, the crushing ache in his chest is just anxiety. He’s always been good at explaining away what hurts. He takes the nausea for conviction, guilt for morality, and the flutter in his chest for punishment rather than arrhythmia.
When Robby finishes stitching the girl up, she’s all smiles and thank-you’s. Dennis slowly backs toward the curtain, telling himself he’s simply moving on, that this is fine, that he can go. Grab another chart, be productive, be useful. Be anything other than this.
He makes it three steps into the hallway before he feels someone quickly catching up. He almost makes it into a sprint before fingers wrap around his wrist, not harsh or painful, but immovable all the same.
“Whitaker.”
His name lands low and controlled, and Dennis knows there’s no getting out of it.
Robby doesn’t let go as he guides him down the hall, ignoring Dana’s furrowed brows as they pass the nurses’ station and walk into the North wing before disappearing into the empty pedes room. It smells faintly of disinfectant and plastic toys. The door clicks shut heavily behind them and the sounds of the ER fade away into a deafening silence.
For a second, neither of them speaks. Dennis’s pulse roars in his ears and he decides to look at anything other than Robby’s shoes while he’s pretty much cornered against one of the cartoon animal-adorned walls.
He waits for Robby’s verdict like it’s a bullet and he’s a man on death row. At this point, it no longer feels like a metaphor. He’s surprised his heart is still within his ribcage.
When the man finally speaks, it’s calm and gentle. “What’s going on?” Robby asks, level and even, dangerous in its restraint.
“Nothing,” Dennis blurts out quickly. Too quickly. “I told you. I keep telling you. I’m okay.”
Robby’s jaw tightens. He follows the movement of his salt and pepper beard and can almost taste the cheap ceremonial wine they had back in his family’s church in Broken Bow. Robby looks so much like one of the pastors.
“Your hands are shaking so badly you can’t suture a simple wound. You looked like you were going to pass out earlier. You’re pale, diaphoretic, and clutching your chest like the man who’s trying to skip the line out in chairs. Should I keep going?”
He stays silent.
“Tell me, Whitaker, should I keep going? Should you be skipping the line instead?”
Dennis laughs weakly. “I’m not—”
“Don’t,” Robby’s voice cuts sharper now. Dennis shrinks under his gaze. “Don’t lie to me. Not you. Not here.”
The room feels too small and too warm, but he’s shivering all over. Dennis’s heart slams hard against his bones, then skips, a hollow thud that makes his vision flicker for the thousandth time.
He remembers being fifteen, locked outside in February without a coat because he had hesitated—fuck, he’d only hesitated—when his father asked whether he found the youth pastor’s daughters pretty. The cold had been sharp and righteous. He had stood in the yard staring up at the wide Nebraskan sky, flat and endless and merciless, as he begged God to cauterize whatever wound was running wild inside him.
He had promised then, had whispered to the stars above. If You fix me, I will never ask for anything again.
God had not fixed him. But God had sent signs. Sermons, bruises and silence.
And now this.
As a boy, he prayed for God to make him normal. As a man, he prays for God to make him numb. To walk out of pedes with his dignity and heartbeat intact.
“It’s just– stress,” Dennis insists. He doesn’t remember why it’s so hard to admit what’s wrong. He doesn’t remember why he’s hiding his burns and bruises and heartbeat– or lack thereof. “We lost two patients before noon. That– that kid almost died. It’s been a long shift.”
Robby’s about as close as he could be without it being an HR violation. At least Dennis thinks that, because right as the thought makes it past the mush that is his brain, he steps impossibly closer, looming over him. Dennis has no choice but to look up from his attending’s hiking boots and look him in the eye.
Lord, do not deal with me according to my shortcomings, but according to Your loving kindness. Free me from thoughts that weigh me down and help me grow when I stumble. Let Your mercy open doors I cannot open on my own—
“Whitaker, I’m going to admit you.”
“Stop,” Dennis shakes his head. His throat feels tight. “I didn’t sleep.”
“You never do.”
“I had way too much caffeine.”
“You always have too much caffeine.”
Each excuse crumbles as soon as it gets past his lips. The pain in his body spreads, radiating outward, crawling into his shoulder, his jaw. His left arm tingles faintly beneath the gauze and glove. Dennis looks down at his palm to make sure it’s still there. He’s about to lower it back down, but Robby catches it, a bit too harsh, and he lets out a pained hiss. Robby recoils like it’s him that got burned.
“Why are you wrapped?” He picks up his hand again, gentler this time. It burns all the same.
Dennis curls his fingers instinctively. “Paper cut,” he spits, aware of how ridiculous it sounds without Robby having to tell him. He just stares at him, and Dennis crumbles when the annoyance in his eyes starts feeling a bit too much like pity.
God, I ask for Your mercy today. Thank You for Your love and kindness. According to Your great compassion, blot out my transgressions. Wash away my iniquity.
“Whitaker.”
Let me walk out of this room once more.
“If something happened in that trauma bay—”
“Multiple incoming from structural collapse at St. Bartholomew’s! Six patients en route. Two critical. ETA one minute.”
Dennis’s pulse surges violently, a chaotic thing that makes him tense up like he’s gotten shocked once more, before settling into something he can work with. The sweat still clings to his forehead though, making him too warm and too cold at the same time.
For once, God heard him. For once, God listened. For once, he can feel Him all around– from the nurses rushing past the door right outside, to the tightening grip around his wrist. He promptly pulls his hand back, ignoring the flare of pain on his burn.
“Don’t even think about stepping foot in that ER until you tell me what’s wrong.”
“I already did,” he spits, angry now. “I don’t have time for this. You don’t have time for this.”
“You don’t have the stability for it, Whitaker, for fuck’s sake,” he spits, trying to grab his arm again, but after months of manhandling and never-ending touches, Dennis sees it coming and moves out of the way, sprinting to the door.
Robby’s voice rises, sharp enough to cut through the rush of feet and gurneys as Dennis draws the door open. “Whitaker, stop—”
But the ER is already shifting into crisis mode. Doors slam open. Curtains draw shut. Nurses shout for supplies.
The tide is rising, and Dennis lets it carry him away.
Away from pedes. Away from Robby. Away from God.
He slips away before Robby can block him again, not testing his luck any more than he already has by glancing around his shoulder to see how far he’s gotten. He merges into the swarm of scrubs and scalpels. For a moment, he feels almost triumphant, anonymous in the chaos.
The victor of this game of cat and mouse.
He catches glimpses of Robby across the floor, searching for him with a furious look on his face. Dennis pivots away each time, ducking behind curtains, switching out his gloves, grabbing charts he doesn’t intend to keep. If he stays moving, Robby can’t corner him. Neither can his heart.
After all, Dennis had learned within his first year here that the only way to survive was motion.
The first patient he sticks around for is a middle aged man covered in dust, debris and blood, rebar wound through his thigh from the collapsed building. Dennis easily steps in where he’s needed.
His heart is no longer racing. It’s pounding, irregular and violent, but that makes it manageable to work with. Each beat feels like it’s landing somewhere it’s not supposed to, but the tremor has calmed down, even if his arm still feels like it’s not there. His fingers continue to tingle beneath the gloves and gauze, but he pointedly ignores it.
Mel slides in beside him when they finally stabilize the patient eight long minutes later, efficient as always. She instructs him on what to do while he reaches for the right supplies. He has to brace one wrist against the other to stabilize himself, but it works. He does everything he’s supposed to.
Despite this, Mel notices. He knows she does from the way her instructions slow down, before coming to a halt entirely. When he peels his eyes away from the man’s wounds to look up at her, her brows are drawn tight.
“Dennis,” she says quietly, merciful enough to keep this conversation hidden from the rest of the bay. “Are you feeling okay?”
“Peachy, Mel,” he whispers, aware of the bite in his words. He doesn’t mean to, he really doesn’t, but the questions were getting old quick. As well as harder to answer.
“Are you sure?” She wrings her hands at the annoyed stare she gets in return, turning away. “You don’t really look fine.”
He swallows hard. The copper taste is back. His jaw aches finally. His vision pulses at the edges.
The shift is almost over. Yesterday, while Dr. Robby was debriefing with Dr. Abbot, he’d overheard plans of coming in early, which usually meant a quicker clock-out for Dennis and a few others. With how Robby’s been acting, he’s sure he can get out a full hour early. He just has to make it a bit longer, a bit further, before he’s back at Trinity’s apartment and can pass out on his bed. Just a bit longer. A bit further. A bit—
The patient groans below him. Dennis presses down on the wound as the machines pick up in volume. Blood pools around his palms. Someone calls for O-negative as he tries to press down harder, but the exertion makes his chest seize painfully. He heaves, breathing shallow and insufficient, but pushes through it. He’s not about to be the reason a third patient croaks today, as Ogilvie would bastardly say.
Mel looks at him again, openly concerned this time. “Dennis, m–maybe I should get Dr. Robby—”
“No!” Dennis yells, insistent, even though the word comes out strained. Mel looks like she’s about to argue, but Langdon peeks his head inside right in time, needing her in the other trauma bay.
He directs the transfusion with clipped precision, voice steadier than he feels. He calls for pressure adjustments, refuses to let go of the wound because he knows he can keep straining until the finish line, guides Joy through securing the rebar, times the push of fluids like he’s conducting something holy.
The patient stabilizes. The monitors even out into something survivable. The blood loss is controlled and the room exhales as one organism. Miraculously, Dennis feels a sense of pride wash over him. He’s aware of how dangerous this feeling is, of how hard God might punish him for thinking avoiding this loss is anything but his will.
He doesn’t wait around for praise. There’s no time for that, not now, and he hands off the patient to the surgical team before slipping away, pointedly ignoring the wild look Garcia shoots his way.
The ER is too loud now. The lights are too bright and the air feels thin around him, it must be thin, since he can’t get a full breath in. Dennis can distantly feel his thoughts slide out of order, drifting strangely, so much like his feet.
He doesn’t remember heading for the stairwell. He doesn’t remember a lot of things, like why he’s had the bright idea of keeping this ordeal a secret, or what had started it in the first place. What had caused his slip up. What had caused his sin.
He finds himself pushing through the heavy door and into the echoing quiet. He’s already been in this hallway today, except he’d gone left, into the viewing room with one of the patients he’d lost. One of the patients he’d killed.
This time around, he grips the railing and starts climbing upstairs. One step after the other, he realises the sudden absence of noise was making his ears ring. He’s only had to fetch blood from the roof once, during his first ever shift, and it feels almost ironic struggling up there again.
He makes it halfway up before his knees buckle.
Dennis catches himself on the landing between floors, collapsing against the wall instead of the ground. The concrete is cold and grounding against his back. He’s shivering so badly he has to crawl into the corner to keep himself upright, drawing his knees in like he was trying to disappear into the wall.
He struggles into his pocket with shaking digits and pulls out the cross. The chain dangles uselessly, and the silver is warm from his body heat. He curls it into his palm and clutches, hard, ignoring the pain. Barely feeling it at this point.
Keep me safe, my God, for in you I take refuge…
The revival tent rises from the Nebraska dirt with its flapping canvases and folding chairs arranged in obedient rows. The air smells like sweat and hay and hot plastic– not quite church-like, but the holiest he’s ever smelled. He sits between his parents, shoes not touching the ground, while the preacher paces and shouts about fire.
Hell is described in detail; flames that lick bone clean and men who burn for what they’ve done with their bodies.
Dennis does not understand most of it, but he’s always been bright, as his teachers liked to say. He understands tone. He understands that danger lives inside certain kinds of boys.
When the altar call comes, his father’s hand clamps around his shoulder and steers him forward.
I say to you: “You are my Lord, apart from You I have no good thing.”
The preacher pushes him backward into a livestock trough filled with murky water. Dennis goes under choking, eyes open to brown distortion, ears filled with muffled shouting.
For a brief, suspended second beneath the surface, there is quiet. There are no voices and no sin.
Dennis is eight years old the first time he doesn’t want to come back up.
Those who run after other gods will suffer more and more.
The youth group swims in a neighbor’s pond after Bible study. The other boys strip off their shirts, all elbows and laughter and sunburned shoulders. Dennis tries not to stare.
He really does.
By the time they are home, the Bible is already open on the kitchen table. Leviticus is read aloud in a voice that does not waver. To this day, he thinks of the word sodomy the way other men think of cancer.
The first blow catches him across the mouth mid-sentence. On the linoleum, staring up at the yellowed ceiling, he tells himself the pain is instruction. The pain is rescue. The pain is a wall being built between him and hell.
He thanks God for it later that night.
He really does.
I will not pour out libations of blood to such gods, or take up their names on my lips.
He has just come home from Sunday service where the pastor preached about unnatural desires, about men who corrupt other men, about the sickness spreading in cities. Dennis had felt every eye in the church turn toward him, though no one had moved.
He stands in the narrow dirt path between rows of corn and presses his fist to his sternum, trying to crush whatever is blooming there. He prays until his throat aches. He hits his chest until it bruises.
“Take it,” he yells into the night. “Take it. Take it back. Take it away.”
Nothing changes. God doesn’t listen. At sixteen years old, he decides unanswered prayers are answers as well.
Lord, you alone are my portion and my cup. You make my lot secure.
The stairwell door slams open below him. Footsteps pound upward, increasing in their frenzy, before the very center of his sin echoes off the concrete. Robby’s eyes widen as he sees Dennis in the corner after nearly running past him. Dennis tries to straighten his back. He tries, desperately, to look less like a man unraveling on a stairwell landing.
“Jesus, Whitaker, what the hell are you doing up here?” Robby demands, breathless, but somehow more controlled than Dennis ever could be. He bristles once Robby’s words finally register.
“You shall not misuse the name of the Lord, your God, for the Lord will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name,” he recites perfectly. Robby looks taken aback for not more than a second, before stepping closer, crouching in front of him. “I just needed air.”
“Fuck, you’re gray.”
Dennis huffs something that might be a laugh. “The lighting’s not ideal.”
His heart stutters so hard he has to arch his back off of the wall. It feels like he’s chasing the organ where it’s trying to leap from his chest. He brings the cross up again, desperately clutching it between shaking palms.
“I will praise the Lord, who counsels me,” he whispers, tears pooling at the edges of his bloodshot eyes. Robby looks at him like he’s a cornered hare. He feels like one.
“What are you talking about?” Robby mutters, glancing at the cross. “Why is– you don’t take that off. Why is it–”
Dennis’s fingers tighten reflexively around it. Robby’s gaze sharpens and he moves quicker than Dennis can react, gripping the neckline of his scrubs, tugging it down just enough.
The burn is impossible to miss. It’s angry and blistered and perfectly shaped.
It looks like salvation. It feels like penance.
For one suspended, terrible second, understanding floods Robby’s beautiful face. “You weren’t clear,” he breathes, voice trembling.
Dennis doesn’t answer.
“You got– the paddles, you– you got shocked.”
His silence, like his teenage prayers, are enough of an answer.
Robby’s composure all but shatters. He lunges forward, pressing two fingers to Dennis’s carotid, the other hand bracing his jaw. He waits for his attending’s expression to shift from personal to clinical, but it never does. His face is raw and open and absolutely terrified.
“Why didn’t you tell me? Tell anyone?” He demands. Dennis’s vision tunnels. The stairwell narrows to Robby’s face, sharp and close and painfully familiar. Painfully beautiful. Painfully not his to admire.
“It’s a rookie mistake,” he swallows, breath hitching. “I’m not a rookie. You’d be– you’d be so disappointed.”
Robby’s hand tightens involuntarily against his jaw. His eyes glisten the way they do when he talks about patients they’d lost. There’s something so cruelly warm about it– Dennis never thought Robby would look at him like that.
“Disappointed?” His voice cracks, just slightly. “Oh, Whitaker. Fuck, Dennis, I—”
Dennis’s heart spasms violently. His entire body jerks in Robby’s arms.
The rhythm under Robby’s fingers turns chaotic, then disappears into something far worse.
Nothing.
“No, fuck, no,” Robby mutters, already lowering him flat onto the landing. The annoying light above their heads feels like a cruel joke compared to the light at the end of the tunnel that he was promised. That he was waiting for. “Stay with me. Don’t you dare, Dennis.”
He tries to focus on him. On the way his hair falls onto his forehead when he leans over. On the warmth of his hands, his fingers. On the way he miraculously manages to avoid the smell of disinfectant and gloves, always smelling like that ridiculously expensive cologne.
“You make known to me the path of life,” he slurs the memorised prayer, not trusting himself with forming his own sentences. Robby’s eyes look over him wildly.
“Fuck– Help!” Robby shouts, the word echoing down the stairwell. “I need help up here, now! Code blue!”
His hands hover over his chest, but Dennis manages to stop them. A tear that’s not his own lands on his cheek. Footsteps thunder upward, voices overlapping. He thinks he can hear Mel gasp. He’s not so sure.
Dennis doesn’t look away from Robby. For once during his time at PTMC, for once in his life, he doesn’t feel guilty for the thoughts that snake their way into his head when he looks at him. He doesn’t feel guilty for admiring him. He doesn’t feel guilty for loving him.
“You fill me with joy in your presence,” he whispers, the line between who he’s praying for blurring impossibly. God is Robby. Robby just might be god. Robby is saying something, but he can’t hear him anymore. He’s just glad he can still see him, beautiful as ever. “With eternal pleasures at your right hand.”
The world narrows further, light folding inward like a curtain being drawn. His thoughts scatter like the beads of a rosary. If he could just lift his hand to Robby’s cheek, he’d caress the wrinkled skin there, prove he’s still here. But nothing happens when he tries.
His first shift at PTMC had been the worst one he’s ever had.
His last one, he thinks as Robby’s face fades away, might have been the best.