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This year’s flu season is giving everyone a run for their money.
Jack can’t remember the last time it was quite so bad. Not that it’s ever smooth sailing—thanks to the infinite wisdom of the management, they’re always just a little short-handed, and having a few players benched is enough to give the rest a rough time. Willingness and grit can only absorb so much strain. This year, though? If this were a sport, they’d be disqualified for fielding an illegal lineup.
Usually, Jack is happy enough to show his face at work. Sure, emergency medicine gets heavy, but the existential dread normally takes hours to set in. Shifts start well and go downhill; that’s the general rule. No matter how wrung out he felt clocking out, some shut-eye and a sandwich set him straight, and twelve hours is just enough time to remember that he does, in fact, enjoy the ER. Jack could never tolerate idleness very well—that’s why he picked up that SWAT gig. Better to be in the thick of it in equally restless company than sit on the couch and complain that there’s nothing good on TV.
That said, there are exceptions to every rule, and right now, Jack suspects some idleness might have its merits. Even the proverbial TV is starting to have a certain appeal, especially if it comes prepackaged with a nap.
There have been times, both in training and on deployment, and certainly plenty of self-inflicted occasions in med school, when Jack would sleep a couple of hours a night and report for duty or class in the morning, alert as anything. For his last few shifts, he could barely drag himself out of bed. He’s sore everywhere for no discernible reason; he'd had a headache coming on before his eyes were fully open; his leg is already complaining, and it's barely handover time. He's not even sick—just unwell in that compounded way dozens of miscellaneous discomforts beget beyond a certain point of exhaustion.
Robby is out, on which matter Jack has rather ambivalent feelings. A sort of vindication, because getting the man to take a break and stay home is like fishing with your bare hands, and now he’s too sick to argue the point, so Jack can at least be satisfied that he’s getting some rest. A sort of regret, because Jack would rather stick around and supervise his convalescence personally. But then someone needs to pick up the slack. Everyone is so accustomed to Robby being here, there and everywhere, the department is really feeling his absence.
Jack loves both their hellhole of an ER and Robby enough to refuse to let the place go to seed while he’s taking a much-needed sick leave, so there's nothing left to do except buckle up. Jack swallows two Tylenol to give himself a head start and gets moving.
“All right, who do I get?” he greets with as much cheer as he can muster, eyeing his ragtag society gathered around the central hub.
It's a surprise, these days. Every shift is staffed with whoever the schedulers managed to beg, browbeat, or blackmail into coming in.
There are so few capable people left to pick from, the shifts are mishmashed—between the staff getting shuffled like cards and all the doubles he’s pulling, Jack keeps getting night and day mixed up. Everyone’s dead on their feet. Whenever they have an open bed in triage, it’s sure to be immediately occupied by someone sneaking in a nap before their next turn at the grindstone.
Today's catch isn't so bad. Jack surveys his little kingdom: Langdon is always a pleasure to have on hand, and a senior resident is a precious commodity these days; McKay has found her footing and needs little to none hand-holding—she's been getting heaps of practice; Ellis is still recuperating from her very own bout of flu, so she’s at half-power at best, but her fifty percent are some people's hundred and ten.
Oh, and a singular unlucky med student whose name Jack could swear he knows. Getting plunged into one’s ER rotation in the middle of the great flu disaster is simultaneously fucked up and plenty educational, so Jack intends to go easy. Teaching won't be a priority anytime soon, anyhow.
He's sorry to miss both Santos and Whitaker—Jack would comment on the imprudence of letting two doctors from the same department bunk together during an outbreak if he didn't spend most of his resting hours in Robby's bed. Jack's banking on his battle-tested immune system, the likes of which the juniors are yet to build.
God knows where the rest of Robby’s crew is. Working nights, for all Jack knows.
They start strong, objectively speaking.
The board looks no worse than yesterday. There’s a bowel obstruction in dire need of someone to call upstairs and make a fuss. South Ten houses a breakthrough seizure—now resolved, but something is making Jack cautious. A long-suffering hip fracture from Tuesday is still boarding—ortho isn't too keen on superseniors.
Overall, your typical day shift crowd. The common afflictions don't stop cropping up because there’s an epidemic.
Jack shudders just thinking about COVID. At least Robby gets to skip some of this mess. It’s nothing as extreme, and they largely avoid dealing with the flu directly—it’s the collateral damage that's hitting the hospital hardest—but it’s still too close to home.
“Such are the cards,” Shen says. “Play them as you will.”
Not his best. Even he looks thoroughly sick of it all, which is the real testament to the ER being in dire straits. No overpriced sugar bomb coffee in sight, either. What is the world coming to?
“Go home, man,” Jack advises.
He’d love for Shen to stick around—they play well together, and rushed handovers make for sloppy work, but this is a long game. More of a marathon, really. If they’re to keep giving their all, which they won’t have a say in for another couple of weeks at the most optimistic estimate, they must at least pretend they’re keeping things sustainable. Every minute the off-shift staff spends dawdling around the floor is one less minute of rest.
“You look like you should have stayed there.” Shen gives him an appraising look. “You’re getting too old for this.”
Jack is not getting too old for this, and he doesn’t like having the tables turned on him when it comes to concern. He’s having an off day, which means nothing because having a tumultuous life and a disability to boot means you happen to have an entire off year now and then. Teaches you to power right through. It’s not so bad once you get the hang of it—the trick is to make good choices and not feel too sorry for yourself.
“In my time, we treated our elders with respect,” he grouses. It's not his best, either. The atmosphere in the department hasn’t been conducive to anyone’s sparkle lately.
“In your time, workers’ rights didn’t exist. You just signed up for it to suck and rode it out to death,” Shen says pointedly and disappears in the direction of the lockers.
Now, what’s that supposed to mean?
Jack’s been watching Langdon all morning, and four hours in, he does not like what he's seeing much.
Admittedly, everyone else seems to have been watching Jack with the same suspicion in mind—he keeps catching furtive glances from all sides. Rude, if you ask him, and altogether unwarranted. Jack is fine, a sudden affinity for naps aside. Frank is approximately twice as slow as his usual pace, has no interest in conversing with his fellows, which is nearly as concerning as Shen bereft of his coffee, and keeps tripping over tool carts.
Jack’s inkling morphs into absolute certainty at the least opportune moment possible. They're gathered over a trauma—high-speed MVA, a nasty puzzle of dislocations and fractures—and Jack is giving out instructions, but there’s friction where he wouldn’t usually expect it. When he asks for a hand, he wants to consider it done.
“Traction, Dr Langdon!” he repeats, louder.
Frank moves—clumsy and too late. His eyes have a glassy, faraway look that Jack recognises. Great. Just what they needed. At least the trauma’s not the clock’s ticking kind; it’s nothing to scoff at, but it will bear a switch-out.
Jack isn't frustrated with Frank—it's not his fault he’s sick; colour Jack surprised if any one of them escapes this influenza strain unscathed—but he's hoped to keep Langdon on the line a bit longer. The kid’s energy is just the thing for tight spots like these, when the entire department is treading water. Well, there's no helping the inevitable.
“Take a break, Frank,” Jack commands. “Dr McKay will take over.”
Frank snaps out of it just in time to give him a hurt look, but he knows better than to argue. McKay picks up where he left off without a word. They’re good team players, Robby’s bunch. There’s no extra attending to step in for Jack, but he’s better at weathering discomfort, so he stays put.
Ten minutes later, Jack enters the men’s bathroom to the unmistakable sound of violent retching. He waits by the sinks until Frank emerges, pale as a sheet and sweat-soaked. He’s been so preoccupied, he almost jumps at seeing Jack, and on most days, Jack would find it a little funny. Right now, he’s torn between feeling sorry and nursing his own headache.
“Pretty sure that means you’re done,” he says.
Frank runs his fingers through his hair, wincing. “You need me. You’re already swamped. What the hell are you going to do, war doctor your way through eight more hours?”
He looks miserable—the flavour of sick that won’t be outpaced by determination; you lie the hell down of your own free will or live to regret it when your face meets the floor ten minutes later. It’s a wonder how quickly some people deteriorate. Quickly enough to be a somewhat unnatural development. Later, Frank and Jack might have a talk about knowingly coming in maxed out on cold meds and caffeine.
“I’m not going to do anything,” Jack says patiently. “Admin is going to call in some backup, reroute a bunch of ambulances, and then we’ll all sit pretty and wait for reinforcements. This isn’t the fifties, Frank. A lone cowboy won't cut it.”
Frank looks sceptical, and Jack isn’t entirely convinced himself. The Army has put a lot of unintentional effort into teaching him that higher-ups rarely come through when they’re needed. Nonetheless, he considers badmouthing superiors in front of junior staff poor form. Gotta stay classy, and then again, he can at least instil the right values into these kids. This is still a teaching hospital; some pedagogy has to happen once in a while.
Before mid-shift, Jack has to divert Ellis to the break room for a breather and loop Dana in to send one of her nurses home—same deal as Frank's. Every time Jack passes the central station, it seems like Dana is on the phone with four people simultaneously, arguing with all of them—arranging the promised reinforcements, no doubt.
Garcia comes down from the OR to check out a thigh GWS, freshly delivered off the streets. She’s masked, but Jack can still read the face she makes as she enters the bay. “Wow, this place is a plague ward.”
She snaps on a pair of gloves and digs around the GSW, assessing their work. Like butchers in a meat shop, these OR upstarts. Jack isn’t about to let her get choosy—he needs patients to move off his floor, because he can't spare the extra hands and eyes needed to babysit boarders.
“What’s upstairs?” he croaks. His throat is dry in that insufferable way that makes him feel like coughing but never quite kicks off the reflex, so he’s just uncomfortable and fighting against the incessant distraction.
On the counter in the break room, there sits his favourite thermos—Robby’s gift he found at some mountaineering store, an overpriced two-litre monstrosity that keeps your coffee capable of inflicting third-degree burns for hours. Jack has never coveted any drink so hard in his life, and he served in the deserts.
“All non-emergency procedures cancelled,” Garcia replies, offensively bright. “We’re down to a skeleton crew. Could be worse, though. Could be this.”
Normally, Jack views banter with the surgeons as part of his job description. Someone has to defend the department’s honour in the battle of wits, and the day shift takes itself far too seriously to be relied upon. Today, just thinking of fooling around makes him want to lie down. There's time for no-frills communication in life, and that time is now.
Garcia can read his masked face just as well, because she tones it down a considerable amount—don't say I never do anything nice for you on the way out is practically a pat on the shoulder, coming from her. Jack hates being handed an easy win.
He bundles the GSW off to the OR with minimal resistance, but only gets about thirty seconds to celebrate. Then, the South Ten seizure takes a downturn. Knew it! Trusting your gut is the number one field medicine skill, and Jack has no intention of abandoning it just because his current workplace has walls and fancy imaging machines.
His current workplace is also getting so overwhelmed that they're one pile-up away from battlefield triage, so the practical difference is negligible.
By the time he’s finished with the seizure, McKay needs an assist on a pediatric case, so the rendezvous with his thermos gets pushed back. Then it's all hands on deck for a trauma again—with that number of hands present, they're more of a boat than a ship-of-the-line, but hey, as long as this metaphor doesn't end in a shipwreck. Then a patient’s family needs Jack pronto; they should really put a lid on excessive family visits when the place is a pressure cooker. It's one emergency after another—which, yes, emergency room, but Jack just wants two minutes to grab his fucking coffee.
“Not looking so hot there, Abbot,” Dana calls out after him as he stomps past the hub in a desperate bid to secure it before something explodes. His head or the entire damn hospital—take your pick.
Jack is too frazzled to come up with a quip to placate her. “Tired,” he grinds out. “Leg fucking hurts. When are we getting those extra hands?”
The answer seems to be later than Jack will be around to appreciate it. Flu doesn’t generally respect service areas, so it’s not like they’re the only struggling hospital in the city. Trained professionals are hardly lining up for an awkward half-shift at a trauma centre on short notice.
Army life was fuck-ups all the way down, to the point where Jack was more surprised to see promises fulfilled than discarded. Missing supplies, undermanned teams, transport that never showed up where it was expected... you get used to it. Learn to account for it, if you're smart. Putting up with the same deficits stateside proves harder.
Doesn’t mean he forgot how. This isn’t a natural disaster; they’re just having it a little rough. Jack can take more than a little.
There’s no shame in getting a little pharmacological help when you need it—his therapist’s words, more or less. Half a litre of scalding coffee does nothing except create another inconvenience down the line, so Jack is obliged to call in the big guns: asking Dana for a quick trip to one of the exam rooms to give him a shot of painkillers. He could swallow another pill, but they take a while to hit, and he needs the sensation of a blazing metal rod stabbing through his bad knee at every step to recede sooner rather than later.
He could also give himself the shot, but where’s the fun in that when a friendly nurse could do the deed with more finesse? The way Jack's day is going, he’d just give himself a nasty bruise sticking his own analgesic.
Predictably, Dana isn’t thrilled to be dragged off to be informed that Jack needs a pick-me-up before they both go once more unto the breach—nice and quick, please.
“Well, maybe you shouldn't be workin’!” She folds her arms across her chest as he attempts to hand over the supplies. It’s the same old back-and-forth: are you compromised yet? Could this harm patients, or could this harm you?
“And who will?” Jack argues. “You sure as hell know we aren't getting any help in the next few hours. I’m not asking you to shoot me up with narcotics. These are my own prescribed meds that will make me more… more comfortable!”
Years of practice allow him to ignore Dana’s disapproval—just barely, and only because she knows he’s right and chooses not to make this harder for him. She’s upset, but not with Jack. He turns around without waiting for her go-ahead.
Even if he weren't feeling so lousy, they're well past embarrassment. Work in the emergency room with the same people long enough, and you’ll witness an entire array of their private afflictions—every sort of gastrointestinal distress there is, period cramps, UTIs… Dana can give him an intramuscular injection; they’ll both live.
Jack's not one of her own, but they’re close by nature of her being best friends with Robby, so he doesn’t mind that it’s her and not Lena. She’s exactly as nimble and careful as he needs her to be, even though she does fewer routine procedures now that seniority keeps her trapped behind her desk more often than not. Jack sighs as the needle goes in—barely a prick, and the burn of the meds is nothing compared to the pain he’s already in. The effect won’t be instantaneous, but knowing relief is on the way livens him up.
“You'd better tell me if you get any worse, Jack,” Dana threatens as he pulls his scrub pants back up. Jack is glad to re-dress—he has little use for his modesty, but they're sure keeping the ER floor chilly these days. He might complain when they're past the outbreak, and he gets some free time for antics again. “Robby will turn three times more insufferable if you hurt yourself, and he’s already getting on my nerves as is.”
It’s flattering, if you take the right perspective. Jack considers being fussed over unbecoming, but the idea of the man he loves caring about his pain so much is appealing. It must mean he’s doing pretty well on the romance front, for someone like Robby to care.
Jack does owe it to Dana not to multiply trouble—she’s having a hell of a time now, herself. Jack wouldn’t want to be a charge nurse today. In fact, he’d never want to be a charge nurse, or a department chief, for that matter; that’s why he never chased the Major stripes, either—boots on the ground is more his speed. He’d go nuts directing their backbreaking emergency room ballet.
“No, no,” he swears. Pinkie promise, don’t you know. “It's just my fucking leg. The world's worst timing, as usual.”
Jack’s sense of time is, as a rule, excellent. He could eyeball seizure durations in a pinch—his inner clock is just that accurate; a military knack.
Right now, he couldn't say whether they're still slogging through the same day.
It's not just time that's acting odd. Everything is strange and woozy—no, wait, wrong word. Woozy implies confusion, and he's sharp as can be. You can't be anything but sharp in a trauma bay, which is where he is, working on a trauma. He watches his own hands move, dissecting skin, staunching the bleeding, inserting a chest tube, every minute movement calculated to precision. His lagging awareness seems to have no bearing on his ability.
Jack is doing his best work, he’s quite sure.
Wouldn’t be the first time he felt like a passenger in his own body while said body was busy doctoring. The brain protects itself; when things get dicey, the worst you can do is lose your head. Jack has worked concussed, on the verge of heat stroke, delirious with pain and adrenaline. A reliable autopilot is a solid asset under pressure. There are times when life-and-death decisions happen so fast, your conscious self never gets the chance to engage. Makes no difference as long as your hands know their job. Which is to say, the patient is fine, and so is Jack.
“I’m fine,” he tells McKay after she says something he doesn’t catch.
Her face suggests he's just answered the wrong question. “...I was hoping for some directions here.”
He blinks at her, momentarily lost. McKay has a son, doesn’t she? Active service is no place for a single parent. Jack knew his fair share of deployed fathers and even a few mothers, but there’s always been someone at home with the kid.
His confusion only lasts a fraction of a second: before he fully processes what a nonsensical thought that was, his mouth is already open, and he’s guiding McKay through wound closure. There is no deployment. That life is long behind him. They’re both at work at their bedlam of a hospital that can’t be bothered to shell out to keep enough replacements on call. Safe, secure, and supremely uncomfortable.
Jack's head is pounding something awful from staring at LED lights all day long; taking five in a dark breakroom after this is starting to feel like a splendid plan. McKay’s eyes are on the patient, but Jack is well-versed in sensing his people’s moods—she’s a little uneasy about him sticking with it to the end.
A resident would have seen enough of the system to know how a hospital operates in a bind. Sometimes you just gotta bite the bullet. She'll get over herself.
Jack's gait never went back to normal, but he's usually careful about concealing it. Nothing makes him quite so annoyed as people subtly gauging if he's a fucking fall risk. Right now, it’s so low on the list of Jack's concerns that he forgets he was ever bothered. His limp is so pronounced, it’s reaching the point of swaying. His stump is on fire. His entire body is on fire, except that makes no fucking sense, so he’s choosing to blame the devil he knows.
He can't wait to wash his hands of this place for a while and get home to Robby. Jack wonders what he’s up to. Probably sleeping. He might be persuaded to let Jack burrow into his side and stay there until his next alarm. Changing out of scrubs would be a kindness, too—Jack's sweating through the fabric. A nice scalding shower, then, and then their shared bed.
Busy fantasising, he almost misses the harbingers of freedom: the next shift is starting to trickle in; he recognises Dr King. The anticipation—it's almost over; they’ve held their own long enough that their counterparts are here to take over—mixes with annoyance: all this begging for backup, and all he's getting is a regular hand-off to their regular troopers. Reasoning with admin is, as usual, about as effective as assessing reflexes in a prosthetic foot.
Not his problem now. Or, well—it won't be his problem for the next twelve hours, which is good enough for Jack. He can get himself into trouble via purposefully disrespecting authority when he stops getting queasy every time he turns his head too fast. Fuck, maybe he is getting old. The last time a single shift did him in this hard, he turned out to have been working through a brewing appendicitis.
Well, he's not repeating that performance tonight. He’s going to talk the newcomers through the board, call a taxi—he can drive, his car is modified to accommodate the leg, but he certainly feels no inclination—and go straight home. More or less. He’s so tired, a couple of detours won’t change the tide, so he might as well pick up a few things from the pharmacy, make sure Robby is all set.
“Dr Abbot!” Mel rushes towards him, and he'd love to greet her back with half the enthusiasm, but he's all done—and then Jack blinks, and she’s right in front of him, not looking happy anymore. Her earnest face is etched with worry as she wrings her hands. “Um, you don’t look… very good.”
“I’m great,” Jack reassures her. “Good as new by tomorrow morning.”
His confidence proves premature, as a curious weightless feeling comes over him. The last thing he hears is Mel’s frantic voice calling out to him, and then the lights are out.
Jack wakes up feeling like death warmed over. A deep, resounding ache has nestled in his joints. His eyes water the moment he cracks them open. This is the sickest he's felt in years, and those years saw several surgeries, injuries in the line of duty, and a few legendary hangovers.
After a second or two of pained blinking, he discerns that he’s lying down—not too comfortably, so he's not back home. The hospital equipment surrounding him drifts into focus and then into conscious awareness faster than he can become too unsettled. At work, then. As a patient, if the pitiable state of him is anything to go by.
Robby stands next to his bed, fixing a monitor cable. He glances down when Jack moves, and his face softens. “You’re awake.”
“Hi,” Jack croaks. His lungs rattle ominously in his chest as he speaks. “You're better.”
His mind feels sluggish and unwieldy, but he remembers this much. The last time they saw each other, Robby could barely lift his head, and now he seems fine, just tired.
“And you're worse,” Robby asserts, not sounding too pleased about it. “You can’t be trusted out of my sight.”
Jack is undaunted. He’s just glad to see his husband—isn't Robby glad to see him? Jack sure as hell hopes Robby is here for him and not because he’s working. Seeing how Jack is now a patient, the ER is down another attending, but god help them if Jack learns that they've guilt-tripped Robby into taking Jack’s place so soon. Jack will… well, he’s not sure what he’ll do—he’s not feeling all that resourceful right now. But not feeling equal to the task has never stopped him before.
Robby isn’t wearing his scrubs, and there’s an undeniable imprint of a hospital-issue pillow on his cheek, so he probably is here for Jack alone. Jack finds himself appreciative.
“I just had the most god-awful shift,” he shares, delighted to finally gripe to someone who doesn't need him to hold it together.
Well, it’s mostly just chatter. Jack is not a downer as a rule; he’s just used to saying whatever comes to mind with Robby. Who did get better suspiciously fast, for the record—Jack should probably try and chase him away. It’s sweet of him to visit, but it’s not like Jack can’t spend a few hours in bed by himself. He’s not exactly dying. He’s still in the dark about what happened, but he’s tried dying before, and it was a considerably bigger deal.
“You had that shift three days ago,” Robby says.
Jack gawks at him.
Robby sighs. “I’m not surprised you don't remember. You're the worst case we’ve had on staff so far, and that strain’s no joke. You came to a few times but were too out of it to know which way was up.”
That explains his thoughts and emotions jumping around so much. Prolonged fever and some of the meds they give for it make Jack clingy and talkative in a disjointed way. Explains Robby’s gloomy expression, too—he’s not a fan of acute respiratory infections going south. Jack would say sorry, but Robby isn’t a fan of apologies, either, so they just stare at each other without saying a word.
Robby reaches out, tangling his fingers in Jack’s curls the way Jack likes. His hair is damp with sweat and gross after days of laborious illness; his entire self is rather lacklustre. Robby still makes it feel like the most tender gesture in the world, and Jack nearly whimpers with relief as he leans into the touch.
The revelation that he's lost some time fails to arouse alarm or any particular surprise in him. From the available evidence, he can readily deduce that the hospital is still standing, and Jack presumably did a decent job not killing anyone. Everything else can wait until the sticky feverish fog lifts up.
“You're all fucked up, huh?” Robby says with sympathy Jack would usually find unbearable. Right now, he has no energy to protest. Robby presses the advantage: “You did a brilliant job holding the fort, you know. Even Dana is begrudgingly impressed. Mostly mad, though. Martyr bullshit—that's a quote—makes her mad.”
He’s not playing fair, sneaking in sweetness under the guise of scolding when Jack has no brain power to detangle them and argue. He’s not big on praise—that’s for children and overachievers, and Jack is neither—and Robby is religious about giving it, so they’re always trying to outsmart each other.
“Pot, kettle,” Jack complains weakly, hiding his face in the pillow. He doesn't need anyone to admire his sacrifice—there was no sacrifice, he was just doing his fucking job. He's especially opposed to the wording; it's almost as bad as thank you for your service.
But he really is fucked up, and some affection for his troubles feels pretty damn good.
They stay like this for a while. Jack is too loopy and ill to think straight, so time doesn't mean much. Robby seems equally content to sit and play with his hair indefinitely. There are certainly perks to being loved.
“How’s Frank?” Jack remembers. As much as he'd like to block it all out and enjoy himself, the welfare of their temporarily shared residents is still his responsibility.
“Sick,” Robby grumbles. “Same as you, only not nearly as dramatic. Worry about yourself, brother, why don’t you? Everyone else is fine and pestering me about paying you a visit.”
He’s soon proven right when a familiar face appears in the glass window on the door, which swings open to admit Ellis. She's better, too—the spring in her step is back, and so is the usual shrewd expression. There’s a crinkling bag in her hands. Jack’s stomach isn’t in the mood—he bets it's doughnuts—but it’s the thought that counts.
Javadi is trailing after her; she still hasn’t quite lost the newbie mannerisms—med students always follow their elders around like ducklings. She pauses by the door in uncertainty, then follows Ellis inside. With everything that’s been going down, Robby’s diurnal critters have been mingling with Jack’s nightcrawlers. They’re nice kids and good doctors, and they mean a lot to Robby, which automatically means they're Jack’s business, too.
Apparently, it makes Jack their business right back.
“Looking mighty conscious, boss,” Ellis approves.
Teasing aside, she does look pleased and a little relieved. Jack gives her a thumbs-up. Javadi gets a bright grin, just so she knows she’s welcome, too.
"Before we know it, this will turn into a pilgrimage,” Robby tries to object, but Jack feels excited. He wants to see his team, check that they're really all right; their interest in his recovery has him giddy with pleasure. It’s kind of them to care—embarrassing, to care so much about a fainting spell when he's been through plenty worse, but kind.
Spending time with the people he cares about is a vastly potent source of motivation, so he's choosing to look alive.
“Maybe I want a pilgrimage,” he suggests, all innocence, using Robby’s arm as leverage to sit up a bit. “It’s proof they like me. I’m a likeable person.”
Robby holds his hands up. They argue, sometimes, about each other’s well-being, but in matters like these, they’re wrapped around each other’s fingers. Whatever one of them wants, he gets from the other.
“Yeah, Jack. Everybody likes you,” he says. It’s supposed to be a statement of exasperation. It sounds fond, so Jack chooses to disregard. “Fine. What do I know? It's not like I’m a medical professional or anything. By all means, carry on.”