Work Text:
August 6, 8:35 PM
“Come on, Huckleberry is just being nice to Ogilvie because he doesn’t want to end up on his list.” Trinity covered her smirk with a hand and leaned over, bumping Dennis with her shoulder.
Victoria giggled, she was one and a half drinks in, and her tolerance was just as low as it was the night she turned twenty-one.
“I don’t think that’s very funny,” Mel said. She tangled her fingers together nervously, with that same determined set to her jaw that she got when she was in the ED.
Trinity was a good person. She would lay down her life for anyone she thought needed protection, but she wasn’t nice. Dennis was sure that no one in her life had ever described her as nice. And that was fine, nice wasn’t that important, not when you had a heart as big as Trinity Santos did. He was used to her attitude, the strength and magnitude of her feelings.
So he didn’t say anything. He didn’t protest against her calling Ogilvie a school shooter because he was used to that from her. He was tired of it. He was tired of a lot of things.
Mel wasn’t used to it from Trinity. She wasn’t tired of it, not yet, but she didn’t like Ogilvie; she didn’t even talk to him.
Dennis talked to him a lot more than Mel did; he followed Dennis around the ER, and over the past month, they had come to a tentative understanding of one another, but he still couldn’t bring himself to stand up for Ogilvie.
“Ooh, Mel doesn’t want to end up on the list either.”
“Trin,” Dennis warned.
“You guys know I’m right.” She rolled her eyes, and Dennis could feel her thinking, reminding herself why they never invited Mel King out with them after work. He gave Mel a smile, small and sympathetic, and she nodded back at him. He wondered if Mel was thinking the same thing, that this was why no one invited her out.
“He has trouble empathizing,” Mel continued.
“No shit.” Victoria’s eyes were wide and earnest, like they always were. “I’ve noticed.”
“He’ll be a good doctor. He just has trouble connecting with patients.”
“He couldn’t connect with a fucking…” Trinity waved her hand around like she was hoping to pluck whatever mean thing she had to say out of the air. “Blank piece of paper if you put it in front of him.” She took a swig of her drink, something with an embarrassing name that Dennis had regretted offering to order at the bar.
“Mel, you can’t be serious,” Victoria said, leaning forward.
She was. Mel was almost always serious. Dennis thought maybe that was why she had a hard time connecting with them, at first. He tried to stick around, to let her finish her sentences and to pretend he was interested in what she had to say when he wasn’t (and he usually was interested, it was the other people who weren’t).
“Guys. Come on, enough about Ogilvie. He doesn’t have a list. He’s not a bad person.” He finally said something. He knew it wasn’t much, wasn’t enough, but at least he wasn’t sitting there letting Mel defend his- well, not his friend.
“His bedside manner is like, so bad,” Victoria said. “And he thinks he knows everything.” Victoria probably thought she knew everything, too, but she was too ashamed of herself to act like it. She carried everything she knew, every good thing she thought about herself, and held it close to her chest because she was terrified of someone else sitting at a bar with a cocktail in their hand, complaining about what a know-it-all she was. She was terrified of being just like Ogilvie.
“I can’t believe we leave him alone with patients.”
Dennis winced. “Trinity. Enough. Talk about something else.”
Mel’s face twisted up unhappily.
“I didn’t know you guys were such close friends, but whatever,” Trinity muttered.
Mel spent the rest of the night looking uncomfortable, and Dennis spent it feeling guilty. He wasn’t in the practice of diagnosing his coworkers (it felt wildly unprofessional and extremely biased), but he was almost certain that Ogilvie was autistic. Mel’s sister Becca, who he’d met in passing on the Fourth, was too.
It was shitty that she had to be the one to stand up for Ogilvie, because Dennis was too much of a coward to do it himself. He didn’t want Mel to think they were bad people, or to worry that they talked about her like that behind her back.
They had at one point. That was what made Dennis feel even worse. A few days into their residency, Mel had referenced something Langdon had said on their first day, and Trinity had held it against her for months.
Trinity was his best friend. And she was mean. Two things could be true at once.
It was easier to let her get it out of her system, to say whatever she wanted to say, instead of making her keep it inside, where it festered and grew uglier. Dennis found it simultaneously exhausting and endearing. He liked being her favorite. He liked being the one that she could shove around, because that meant that he could shove her back.
He liked that, being in.
It was a pattern in his life, he knew that, and he’d accepted it. A long time ago, way before the Pitt and before Trinity Santos and everything else that had come with this job.
There was nothing wrong with liking being liked.
August 17th, 1:38 PM
There was a man in North Four who’d begged Dennis to pray for him before his surgery- it was routine, as routine as things got in the Pitt. Dennis had smiled at him and told him he would.
“Do you believe in God, Doctor Whitaker?” Ogilvie had asked him, much too close to him while he charted.
“I’m not sure.”
“You told him you’d pray for him.”
“I know a lot of prayers.”
“Were you raised in the church, growing up?”
“I was.” That was all he wanted to give Ogilvie at first, mostly because his breath smelled like cranberry juice. “I was a theology major. In college.”
“You must be familiar with God, then.” Ogilvie hummed. He let Dennis type for a minute. “I don’t.”
“What?”
“Believe in God.”
“Oh.”
“That can happen when you’re gay,” Ogilvie said, like he said everything else, matter-of-fact. Flat.
‘I know,’ Dennis wanted to say. He didn’t. ‘I didn’t know you were gay.’ He didn’t say that either.
“It’ll save me a lot of time.” Ogilvie's breath hit his cheek when he turned his head. “Not praying for patients. Give me more time for charting.” Dennis hadn’t wanted to smile at him. He wasn’t sure if Ogilvie meant it as a joke, and he definitely wasn’t sure if he was supposed to laugh, but he did. Ogilvie grinned. His face transformed with it, his eyebrows raised, and his eyes crinkled in the corners, and he laughed, too loud, like he was surprised.
“Go pick our next patient, since you have so much time. I guess I’ll stay here and pray.” He crossed himself exaggeratedly.
“Funny.”
August 20th, 3:31 PM
“You’re on the street team?”
“Yeah, why?”
“You’re going to get burnt out before you’re 30.”
“I’m only 28.” Dennis looked affronted. He put down his lunch (a tupperware of ground beef and broccoli). He hadn’t bothered heating it up; by the time he got around to finishing it, it would be cold again anyway.
“Exactly.” Ogilvie sat down across from him in the break room. He resisted the urge to sigh. He only got so many minutes alone, away from patients and coworkers and other med students, and Ogilvie had found him somehow, even though he was sure that he had ditched him with McKay.
“I’d ask if Dr. Santos put you up to this, but…”
“She doesn’t talk to me.” He finished.
“She’s like that. It’s not personal.” A lie. A bold-faced one too.
“It’s fine. I’m not worried about it.” He said, and Dennis snorted. “I’d like to come with you.”
“You?”
“Yes, me.”
He wanted to say no. He wanted to tell him that the street team disbanded and that they’d never go out again, but Ogilvie was smart, he was intuitive with medicine, and he worked hard. Dennis had never met anyone else so hungry for it.
“Why?”
“I’m sorry about Louie.” That wasn’t what Dennis had been expecting. At all. It had been weeks, and he was sure Ogilvie had entirely forgotten the calloused way he had told Dennis that he’d lost Louie- ‘He croaked’, he had said, and Dennis had been so consumed with the knife in his gut twisting and the acute pain of failure that he hadn’t spared more than a minute of fury at Ogilvie. It wasn’t until days later that he’d had another patient in late-stage liver failure that he’d remembered what he said. How he had acted like Louie’s death was a given.
“So you want to join the street team to make it up to me?”
Ogilvie scoffed. “No. I want to join the street team, and I’m sorry about Louie. Two separate things.”
“Okay?”
“I don’t always think before I talk. So, I’m sorry about Louie. I didn’t-” He did look sorry. His eyebrows were drawn together, and Dennis couldn’t help but think that they were his favorite part of Ogilvie’s face, along with the mole on his jawline, which was a really fucking weird thing to think. “I didn’t know he was that important to so many people. And everyone is important to someone. Obviously.”
“Obviously.”
“You don’t have to say anything. I just wanted to say I was sorry. And I want to come with you one day, when you go out with the street team. I have a lot to offer. I know I’ll be good at it.”
“What happened to getting burnt out before I’m 30?” Dennis said, half-teasing, just to show him that he appreciated the apology, that he understood what Ogilvie was trying to say.
“If I’m there, you might get a few more years, until 35 at least.” Ogilvie smiled at him again. “You should eat.” He pointed at Dennis’s lunch, cold and forgotten on the table next to him.
September 3rd, 9:18 AM
“You need a surgical debridement. Have you been to the-”
“Do I look like I can afford to go to the fucking hospital?”
“Um. No?”
“Then don’t ask stupid shit like that.”
Dennis was kneeling next to a woman outside the Sunoco. She had an open sore on her leg that was definitely necrotic, and Ogilvie was giving him a look that he recognized as poorly concealed panic. Dennis almost wanted to laugh, but the memory of his first shift slammed into his head, cradling that woman’s leg in a bag full of ice with a wild look in his eyes. ‘Ogilvie. Deep breaths, ok?’ He had said. And Ogilvie did it. And they sat, thigh to thigh, and he could hear Ogilvie’s soft, shaky inhale-exhale-inhale as they waited for the OR to come down, to see if they could put her leg back where it belonged.
“What’s wrong with this kid? He looks fucking terrified.” She asked. In the car, Dennis had called her homeless, and Ogilvie jumped on the opportunity to tell him he should use the word unhoused instead. He had to take a deep breath and resist rolling his eyes. When he was homeless, sleeping on the eighth floor of PTMC, he hadn’t given a shit what anyone would have called it; any word that meant he didn’t have a safe place to live was bad, and it wasn’t like using a different word would have made it easier.
“With necrotic tissue like that in your wound, it could lead to sepsis. You could lose your leg, or worse.” It was harsh, but it was true. Some of the other doctors, even some of the attendings, would have said something, but they weren’t at work. They were outside of a gas station, and Dennis wasn’t going to correct his bedside manner or stop him. Ogilvie needed to learn that on his own, but the woman didn’t seem angry, or at least, not any angrier than she should have been, given the fact that she was sleeping on the street with a gaping wound on her shin. He knelt down on the other side of the woman, across from Dennis.
“You'd better hurry up with it then.” She was in her forties, and she looked sober, but summer was ending, and as it got colder, it would get more tempting to turn to drugs to keep warm. Ogilvie was from California, UCLA. He should be used to homelessness, drugs, and all the sad shit that came with it. Dennis wasn’t, not when he moved here. Nebraska was nothing like this. Maybe in Nebraska City or Omaha or Lincoln, but not where he was from.
“How do we sterilize?” Ogilvie whispered, and Dennis should have known that was what he was worried about. The street team wasn’t like the ER.
“As best as we can. Ready?” Dennis handed him a bottle of saline. “We’ll numb the area for you, flush it with saline, and I’ll remove the infected tissue. We’ll provide you with all the supplies you’ll need to keep this clean to avoid infection. We’ll give you an antibiotic shot, and as long as you follow the instructions Doctor Ogilvie gives you, it should heal nicely.”
“Is it his first day?” She asked, eyeballing Ogilvie as he started flushing the wound.
“Is it that obvious?” He gave her a dry smile, and she laughed.
“Clear as fucking day, kid.”
“He’s on rotation in the emergency department at PTMC, down the street. It’s his first day out here on the street.” Dennis, strangely, wanted to defend Ogilvie, wanted her to know that it wasn’t his first day treating real people. He wanted her (and everyone) to know that he was good- better than they would assume, looking at him and his cargo shorts and his waterproof hiking shoes. It was raining, just a little bit.
September 12th, 6:25 PM
Dennis drummed his fingers against his steering wheel at the red light.
His truck was a piece of shit, the paint was peeling on the hood, and it was starting to rust around the wheel wells from his first Pittsburgh winter. Ogilvie’s car was nicer, shiny and practical, and it still had that new car smell to it when he turned on the air conditioning.
He was picking at a paint stain on the glovebox and not saying anything about Dennis’s truck. He knew he had student loans- a fuck-ton of them, and anyway, Ogilvie was never rude intentionally, not if someone didn’t deserve it. (But he was plenty rude unintentionally when he was stressed, tired, or unsure of himself.)
“I’m an only child.” He said. He did that sometimes, offering facts about himself when the conversation ran dry. Trinity thought that he just liked the sound of his own voice, but Dennis didn’t agree.
“I can tell.” Dennis glanced over at Ogilvie and gave him a crooked grin.
“Fuck you, Whitaker.” He said, good-naturedly. He had changed after his shift into what Dennis secretly thought of as his second uniform: the same cargo shorts from the street team on their weekends, a t-shirt with a band, a poetry night, or a coffee shop logo on it, and waterproof hiking shoes. His hair looked over-brushed, soft and frizzy.
“We’re getting drinks after work, you can call me Dennis.” Dennis loved those smiles he gave him, the kind that softened his face, transformed him into someone unfamiliar.
“Fuck you, Dennis.”
“I have three brothers. I’m the youngest. They’re mostly all still in Nebraska. My oldest brother helps my parents a lot around the farm.”
“Youngest child… patient shows signs of desperation for approval that align with his family’s birth order. Hmm…” Ogilvie- James- pretended to write on his hand.
“Come on.” Dennis shoved at him blindly.
“You help that widow with her farm out in the country, right?”
“Yes…” He stiffened.
“You really are going to get burnt out before you’re 30.”
“Okay, James, I’m really starting to get suspicious that Trinity put you up to this.”
“She didn’t.”
“Good.”
“But she might have mentioned it to me.” Dennis was going to kill her.
“You gonna ask to come with me to her farm too?”
“Christ, no.” He was serious in his vehemence, too.
“Wow. I guess you are a city boy after all.”
“Proudly.”
“I wanted to be a veterinarian when I was a kid; my family had a lot of animals.” They were almost at the bar, and Dennis was nervous. This was different from the street team, different from making conversation with patients.
“I never wanted to be a veterinarian. I like people more than animals.”
“That bad, huh?”
“You pretend to be a nice, innocent farm boy, but you can really be a bitch sometimes.”
“Fuck you.” Dennis didn’t mean it. James smiled at him, and Dennis would never get tired of that, now that he’d earned this version of him, the one who laughed at his jokes and wanted to know more about him.
“Hey, thanks for inviting me out. I know what your friends think about me.”
“They don’t… they don’t dislike you.” Dennis winced.
“I didn’t make myself very likable.”
“You’re not unlikable.” Dennis pulled into the parking lot, his tires crunching on uneven asphalt. James was chewing on a thumbnail in the seat next to him.
“Well…” James said. “It’s work. I don’t need to be liked.” Dennis disagreed on principle, but James hadn’t been wrong about him. He was a pathological people pleaser. It was why he had such dark circles under his eyes, why he spent his days off and evenings and mornings with Amy instead of in his bed in his apartment. It was why he stepped up and took Langdon’s place at Doctor Robby’s side, why he liked that Trinity didn’t like everyone, but she liked him.
“I like you.” Dennis meant: I like you as a person, I like hanging out with you. I don’t think you’re unlikable, not now that I know you. But he also meant: I like you. His face was flushed when he looked over at James, who elbowed him lightly in the side.
“I like you too. Not just because my professional diagnosis was that, as the youngest of three, you need to be liked.”
“Well, that’s good. I wouldn’t want a doctor who just told me what I wanted to hear.” His ears were still burning; he knew his face was bright red.
“Come on, Whitaker. Let’s go.” James gave him a different kind of smile, a different one he hadn’t noticed before. He grabbed his backpack and climbed out of Dennis’s shitty truck, and he knew he was fucked.