Work Text:
Jack Abbott has gotten good at compartmentalizing stuff. Maybe it is not all going into the right boxes a lot of the time – storing survivors guilt in with his sense of professional pride might have been a bad call in hindsight – but it can be very useful to notice things, store them neatly and reassess at a later date, if they are not urgent. He is also a pretty perceptive guy.
In the aftermath of the Pittfest, and as they prepare to restart the engine of the ER at its regular speed, Jack notices something. He’s waiting on Robby, trying to get him to hand over to Dr Shen, looking left and right for him. Yes, he’s also in the middle of following up with Dr Mohan on their cardiac embolism patient, but again – compartmentalize. Dr Mohan, who is still going around like she’s about to pull a double shift, looking like someone who is a rough shove from a breakdown. Brave girl, that one. Capable, reliable. Smart, though not exactly at the moment; really, they should all be going home. All the more reason to find Robby and have him round up his day-lings out the ER.
He spots him as he’s coming back around from the south bay, with Whitaker in tow. And in tow really is the right way to put it, the way Robby hauls the boy to steer his way. They are too far, too many people in the way that demand as much if not more attention than Robby and one of his students, but Jack notices. The way Robby’s hand finds his shoulder, then the nape of his neck. And then, more flagrantly, the moment it almost does, before Robby seems to remember himself and- stops. The hand hovers, and then he’s shoving them into his pockets and getting on with his round.
In the grand scheme of things, with the day they have had, that interaction is so minor that it falls right down at the bottom of Jack’s priority list. He does not disregard it, not at all – his brain categorizes it and stores it away for later. And, intimately, Jack hopes that it will not be something he has to worry about.
*
When Abbott and Robby were coming up, it used to be fairly well accepted that attendings and teachers alike took on protégés. It was deeply engrained in the culture at the time, and to most doctors and students it would not occur to really question it. During his first years of ER residency, Robby grew used to performing every intervention alongside Adamson. The older doctor would shadow him, guide him through each step in a way that he did not quite do with the other med students or residents. It’s not so much that Dr Adamson was not also diligent with the others, but he put something special into how he handled Robby – maybe back then he could already see what it’d take Jack another handful of years to realize; that Robby was tempered glass with a good paint coat on to make him look like steel.
Adamson had personally vouched to get Robby into programs at other hospitals that would greatly advance his career, had brought him along to conferences, out with the street team, anything he thought might be a valuable teaching opportunity. He’d learned too how Robby learned best, and changed his tune to match his. Robby had Montgomery’s personal phone number to call him at home in case of an emergency, or anything else he might need. On his first year of residency, Robby was frequenting his fucking house, dammit – drinking with his boss on his day off, playing rugby with his ten-year-old and the dog. And not a single person would bat an eye.
(Maybe there was some jealousy, here and there, but that too was seen as normal). ‘That’s just how it’s always been’.
Sometime in the 2000s, however, there was a big culture shift. Ethics committees and the university boards started getting wise to a growing number of complaints from certain factions of the faculty that, for years, had gone unheard, ignored. And when the lens shifted and landed on this sort of favoritism, a very ugly bias came into the picture.
To make a long story – and a difficult shift in the mindset of not just the individuals but the system as a whole – short, doctors are not supposed to have favorites among their students, these days. Most still do, obviously, as they have biases and preferences, they also end up liking some of their coworkers more than others. However, there are now a lot more guidelines to follow to prevent those sort of personal feelings from influencing the workplace environment, to ensure all students and residents are treated, if not fairly, at least equally.
Jack thinks he’s quite good at this. Keeping it fair. He keeps his cards close to his chest, focuses on the mission, on the patient. Or maybe he’s just been lucky: Jack likes competent, likes focused and driven. These days, there are a lot of women coming through the medical field who are fiercely driven, virtue of all the challenges they’ve had to face to get to the ER to begin with. So, when Jack lends that drive more attention and motivates it… it doesn’t feel like favoritism, to those who might watching. It feels fair.
The optics are good.
Robby’s optics are fucking awful.
Following Adamson’s death, Robby threw himself into work. And Robby likes teaching, loves the process of it, and being deeply, intimately involved with it. Frank Langdon, first year resident, father-to-be, matched onto the Pitt entirely by chance, and immediately imprinted on Robby. And Robby, fresh off his loss, imprinted right on back. And whereas Jack’s more personal involvements tend to fly under the radar, Langdon very quickly earned himself a plethora of nicknames – ‘wonder boy’, ‘golden child’, ‘teacher’s pet’ – that made it evident Robby was not getting one over anyone with his pretense at fairness.
“You’re short staffed,” Jack says on the handover, Tuesday after Pittfest, “One resident short.” The board is fairly clean, he figures he can afford a quick chat. Robby doesn’t look up, acknowledging him with a hum as he signs a discharge on a girl with a UTI.
From the other side of the desk, Dana is already shaking her head vehemently. Her sharp eyes cut into Jack’s smile, which dies right there on the ER floor, another fucking casualty. Don’t prod him if you know what’s good for you. But Jack has just come in, and is still fresh, wide-eyed and bushy-tail, so maybe he’s feeling bold. Jack lifts a brow at her, then looks back down at Robby.
“Langdon?”
“-iiis taking some personal time off.” Robby finishes.
“… for?”
“However long he needs to get it together.”
“I meant why is he taking time off.”
“I know what you meant.”
It hardly feels worth to keep on pushing and ask again, not at work anyways. But Jack and Robby have been friends for many years, and the latter knows better than to think he’s gotten away with it by dodging the issue. Offering to buy him a drink is a trap, but then Robby knows that too.
Despite his demeanor in the Pitt, Robby practically jumps at the opportunity to vent about the incident. It is shockingly easy, once they are out of their scrubs, and the lights above are a little less ‘fear me not, mortals!’ and more ‘chill out, dude’. It is… it is difficult, when they’re down there, to face this sort of stuff head on. They need to be ready at any time to go onto the next thing with an entirely new mindset, it is not any one patient’s fault if the one they just saw was a piece of shit to deal with. And it isn’t anyone’s fault, not the patients, not the staff, if Robby feels like he was stabbed in the back right where it hurts the most. But that shit builds up, and it compounds, not just over the course of one day, but and specially day after day after day. Because come the end of the shift, the knife is still there, and someone’s got to do the ugly work of pulling it out and letting it bleed so it can start to heal.
“Man.” Jack says when Robby’s finished, and it is only because Robby’s head is in his hands and he’s red and furious all over again, so it doesn’t feel right to say nothing. What is there to say? “And you’re sure he’s going to sign up?”
“I know he will…” His voice is small, thin and so hurt. “Medicine is his whole fucking life. It’s…”
“What he was put on earth to do?”
“Yeah.”
Jack sighs and looks out across the bar. Part of it is to give Robby some grace, but there’s also another part that is to save himself the sight. “Hm. Well, that is good. That’s what the program’s there for.” He mumbles into the rim of his glass.
Robby, he can see just in his peripheral, is shaking his head, breaths coming to him short and a bit shuddered. Jack almost doesn’t say it, almost wants to let that be that, and they will sit in silence and drink their respective drinks.
“It’s not your fault.” It sounds flat, and it sounds like he said it on some fucking empathy training tape.
“Fuck that, fuck—it is.” Robby punches out, without aggression just wrung out from having this argument with himself, “It was happening right before my fucking eyes, who knows how long. It’s not—It’s not as if I wasn’t looking, either – I keep thinking that maybe I saw it? Maybe a part of me knew? If Santos hadn’t—” Robby winces, as if the knife has twisted in a little deeper, just before pulling out. “Fuck, I need to talk to her.” He murmurs.
For a brief moment, Jack’s thoughts go out to the first-year resident, and he worries. Worries what Robby might have told Dr Santos, or just how he spoke to her following the incident. It is just messy and personal enough for that concern to arise, but is it enough to go behind Robby to ask her, make sure she’s alright? He looks at Robby, crumbled around his untouched mug, tugging at an already receding hairline that doesn’t need to be helped further along. Maybe not… Fuck, isn’t he supposed to be better than this? Aren’t they?
“Michael,” Robby snorts, and his lips turn up in a grimace that isn’t quite yet a smile, “You didn’t know and you couldn’t have known.”
“Then he was hiding it, because he knew it was wrong, or because he knew I couldn’t approve, and I’ve been putting my faith and my trust in a scumbag for the better part of five years. That isn’t better, Jack.”
“You don’t really believe that.” Oh, shit, Jack can hear himself now: he’s sounding like Dr Jefferson. No one had told him, when he started doing therapy, that he’d start taking on the lingo and start trying to fit other people into his own diagnosis, same as he did first year of med school – diagnosing family members and friends in his own head according to whatever pathology they’d heard about last.
Robby and him are very alike, but they function very differently. Jack knows that, and he also knows that there is nothing Robby can get out of an armchair therapist he won’t get out of his own head. They work well with one another when they fucking check each other, not when Jack offers to sit and listen and let Robby reenact his internal monologue at him to come to some greater conclusion.
Robby closes his eyes and works his jaw instead of responding. But his hand is reaching for the beer – now a little more stale than it was about twenty minutes ago when they sat down – and Jack knows he’s missed his chance already.
“We didn’t have this conversation. I’m not going to…” He bites his own tongue, chews down on it really, but Jack doesn’t make him say it.
“What conversation.”
It might not be good. It might, even, be fucking terrible that Robby – and now Jack, too – are allowing it to work out like this. But if there’s a test of character somewhere on the other side of the guardrail, they never stood a chance to pass it, and keeping a damn good doctor off the ER floor, or any other in any hospital of the city, was never going to make their case better. That sort of guilt is more Robby’s playing field anyways, and Jack knows any remorse he might eventually feel isn’t even in the same weight class.
Jack knows where he draws his lines, has never needed an ethics’ commission to help him sort it out: Langdon is on one side of the line. What Robby is going to do for him and for his career barely brushes it.
“Will you let me know when he gets back?” Jack asks after a while, and Robby lets out a pained scoff.
“Sure. You’ll be the first to know… Might let you take over my shift.”
“And prevent you from your warm reunion? Not a chance, brother.”
“Betrayal,” he says flatly, the rhythm of the retort still missing the usual humor of their banter, “betrayal on all fronts.”
“… You really liked that kid, uh?”
“Maybe that’s the problem.”