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"Heard about how you took down the Kraken." Abbot looked Whitaker in the eye and grinned wryly. "Was it fun?"
Whitaker remembered the aftermath, a spasm of disgust visible on his face. "Uh, I got peed on. That's not fun."
"I mean the part where you actually wrestled him down and injected him. Would you do that again?" Whitaker could not interpret what was behind Jack's mischievious smile.
"Uh. Yeah, if I had to." Whitaker blushed slightly. It would be fucked up to admit that about a man who was going through what must have been one of the worst times of his life, who so rarely received compassion from those around him, who even Whitaker himself had treated as more of a "what" than a "who." Still. He enjoyed it.
Abbot was getting tired of Whitaker's hesitation. "You can be real fucking dense, kid. I'm asking you to do it again. For fun."
"With a patient?" Was this like when Santos kept asking to do a chest tube? Even if he wanted to see more cases of acute psychosis—which he didn't think he did—he wasn't going to ask for them to be reserved for him.
Abbot rolled his eyes. "What did I just say about you being dense? I'd be the patient. You ever heard of roleplay?" Whitaker had to take a moment to mentally recalibrate the entire conversation. He stared at Abbot as he replayed the conversation in his head.
"You can get back to me about it later, kid." Abbot sounded confident that Whitaker would get back to him.
Whitaker could have waited to talk to Santos until they were home, but Abbot's proposal kept running in his head. It was a bewildering idea, but it also felt exciting. Whitaker fondly remembered roughhousing with the few other kids in Broken Bow; why did that have to stop in med school?
"Hey Santos," Whitaker lowered his voice, so only she could hear him over the noise of the ER, "if someone asked you to do something physical with them, and called it 'roleplay', do you think that's a gaming thing, or..."
"Oh my god, Huckleberry, you're adorable. It's obviously a sex thing," she said with her characteristic sarcastic tone of voice. "So, who's the lucky girl? Or guy? Or... piece of farm equipment?"
"We don't even... what? Who would want to have sex with farm equipment? Anyway, I don't think I should say." Whitaker thought the moral thing to do would be to turn Abbot in to Robby, before he realized he didn't actually mind. He still wasn't sure if he wanted to have sex with men at all, for real, not just in a fantasy. He certainly didn't want to have sex with a man twice his age. Yet he felt flattered by the offer, especially since Abbot didn't say anything objectifying or creepy about Whitaker's body, the way some older men did.
His rotation in the Pitt was hard. Sometimes he felt livid after days on end being on the receiving end of bullshit from the admin, patients, residents, even Robby—and it would feel so satisfying to take out all of his frustrations on an attending.
"I'd say don't mix business with pleasure, but if that tractor's really sexy, then you should go for it." Santos left the room to go back to her patient. Whitaker stared at the board without really looking at it, trying to figure out what he really felt about this.
It was hard to run into Abbot sometimes since he was on the night shift, but Whitaker eventually did, after making a point to get to the ER early enough to catch Abbot before the night shift was over.
"Hey, Abbot." Whitaker's voice was tentative as he waved awkwardly. "Got a minute?"
In stark contrast to Whitaker, Abbot sounded completely nonchalant. "You're here early. Is it about a patient?"
"No, um, I think we should take it outside."
"I was heading out anyway."
They walked to the parking lot as Whitaker built up his resolve.
"Okay, Abbot," Whitaker gulped and trembled a bit before saying what he really needed to, "I'm not going to have sex with you."
"Where's that coming from?" Abbot actually looked surprised. "Did I ask that? Did I say a damn thing about sex? Because I wouldn't have sex with a goddamn medical student either. Do I look like I'm insane?"
Whitaker stops cold, recalibrates a third time: this isn't a sex thing? Thank God this isn't a sex thing. "Um, I think I need to take a moment."
"It's not sexual. It's literally just what I said it was. No fucking, no sucking, you just hold me down and stab me. Take it or leave it."
"No, it... does actually sound fun. I had actually started looking forward to it before someone I asked"—better not to mention Santos—"said it sounded like a sex thing. But it took 5 people to take down Krakozhia, and you look stronger than him. I'm not going to be able to take you down myself."
"Don't worry, I got you. I usually did this with Robby and Langdon until the shit hit the fan."
So Robby would be there. This made him feel less nervous that he would be taken advantage of.
"Alright, I'll do it, as long as Robby will be there." Whitaker trusted him to make sure there's no funny business.
Robby arrived, vial of olanzapine and Abilify Maintena injection kit in hand, to see Dennis and Jack mid-conversation. He never liked having to sneak around in the hospital, but even he had to admit that these scenes got much easier to arrange once the 8th floor was abandoned. There was a verisimilitude to doing it here rather than in Robby or Jack's house, and the medication was easier to procure when the pharmacy was right on-site.
"So we wrestle you down, then we give you an injection of saline, right?"
Oh. Dennis doesn't know what he's really about to do. Apparently, Jack forgot to explain this part. Robby quickly pulled up Jack's chart on his phone—no working computers on this floor—and showed it to Dennis. There it was: olanzapine 5 mg IM PRN, Abilify Maintena once per month, all prescribed by Jefferson.
"It started when I was 25. Almost ended my residency, until I wound up in the hospital and got properly medicated. When the long-acting atypicals came out, it was a godsend."
"But you don't just go to a pharmacy to get your medications." Dennis had that voice he would use when he was about to try a motivational interviewing technique with a patient. He must have recognized it too, because he quickly course corrected. "I mean, not saying you have to."
"Yeah, of course I don't. What's the fun in that?" Jack winked at Dennis, whose awkward, hesitant grin grew into a genuine smile.
"Honestly, I think it's even cooler that there's gonna be actual medication in there." Behind the stammering hesitance was obvious enthusiasm.
Relieved, Robby's expression brightened. "Looks like we're all on the same page? Then let's get to it." He rubbed his hands together in anticipation.
Jack struggled against his restraint. He was familiar with being held down by Robby, a mighty hulking bear of a man, but he was taken aback by Dennis's wiry strength. It was one thing to hear about his prowess in taking down the Kraken, but it was another to actually feel it. All that farm work had given him some absolute muscle. "Fuck you! Get off of me, you bastards! Fuck! I'm not taking any of that poison!" he shouted. He could curse and rage as much as he wanted, but they would keep forcing him down unless he said "droperidol."
Jack's adrenaline spiked as Dennis pinned him back down. Words could no longer come out of his mouth, only grunts and growls. In the moment, he felt like his colleagues truly were his captors, accomplices in some grand conspiracy that his mind would sometimes conjure when unmedicated. His muscles burned from the intensity of his futile effort. As he saw Dennis pull out the syringe, his fear became excitement.
Jack continued to writhe against the restraints, eyes dilating slightly from the adrenaline rush. Dennis impaled him through his shirt, 1" of metal spiking into his deltoid within a split second. Jack could handle the pain—he'd been through much worse so many times—but he still screamed as if riding the drop of a rollercoaster.
Being suspended in the moment between takedown and the long, flat horizon of calm ahead of him felt like experiencing zero gravity.
The first alert was a feeling of heaviness in his limbs. His movements slowed, his motor control was reduced and his muscles were relaxed enough that it became hard to continue struggling. His sense that persecutors were around every corner melted away. The voices of the dead quieted from a whisper into complete stillness.
Jack began to feel something more than calm: a nearly complete flattening of his emotions. He could no longer struggle at this point; his thinking had slowed to a glacial pace and so had his reaction time. He had completely ceded control. Robby and Dennis could do whatever they wanted with him. He needed to trust that they wouldn't.
This isn't like being tied up: no key, no EMT shears. He could safeword out of the rest of the scene, but he couldn't safeword out of the effects of the drug. There's no antidote to antipsychotics. When he was younger, he had to learn that sometimes there was no way out.
His mind slowed to a crawl until it only had space for the same thought over and over: some things have to be endured.
Dennis stood up, his scrubs sweaty, his muscles sore, his breath ragged and slightly panting.
Jesus Christ, he needed that.
Seeing Jack on the floor, feeling him struggle, penetrating him even if it was only with a needle. Taking out all the rage he suppressed every day to be a good student and a good colleague and a good doctor, rage he was barely aware of because he was so used to being nice.
In his afterglow, this felt more like it had been sex than roughhousing. Maybe Santos was right after all. Dennis started imagining if he had met Jack in any other situation, if Jack wasn't a middle-aged attending but a younger guy he met at a bar, Dennis would have wanted to pin him down, hold him by the scruff of his neck, and fuck him on the floor.
But he had felt the charge in the room. Whatever was going on between Robby and Jack was different than sex, different from medical care, but he couldn't tell what.
Robby started his spiel that he gave to patients about the benefits of long-acting injectables. Don't need to pick up pills at the pharmacy, stay out of the hospital for longer, stay out of jail, get your life back on track.
He had said this dozens of times to patients after an injection had temporarily alleviated their psychosis or mania. He tried to reach people on their second or third episode: their lives hadn't been derailed by a revolving door of hospitalizations, they still had ambitions beyond getting back to normal, they might accept the medication voluntarily without a court order.
He had said it even more often to Jack.
Jack had, of course, accepted aripiprazole into his life a long time ago. Once, after a few drinks, he admitted to Robby that he couldn't stand going into a regular psychiatrist's office to get his monthly doses. It felt like a humiliating submission. At least this way he could feel like he was putting up a fight.
Again the same battle, fought uncountable times. Jack always lost, giving bleary-eyed consent to the drugs that would make him feel human again until the cycle had to repeat.
This was how they cared for one another. Robby gently pulling up the sleeve of Jack's shirt, softly rubbing his upper arm with an alcohol swab, grabbing the pre-filled syringe from the injection kit. Jack allowing Robby to see him at his weakest, trusting him to catch him when he falls.
Robby slowly inserted the needle into Jack's deltoid. The pain was something Jack normally wouldn't even flinch at, and while sedated he barely even noticed it.
Robby remembered their first time. He thought it was hot as hell when Jack first asked him to "help him out" with his injections—to pin him down and dominate him. He was disappointed, but still game, when he found out that Jack wasn't interested in sex. The act of injection had felt unbearably intimate: eye level, able to feel each other's breath, touching in a way that was achingly far from what Robby wanted. His heart sped and his face flushed as images came to him unbidden of what he could be doing right now, but Jack was giving a look of such utter trust that Robby had to repeat to himself: don't fuck this up.
It was clear to him that Jack didn't see this as a doctor-patient relationship, or even as a simple favor between colleagues. Robby took a while to figure out what exactly Jack did see it as. The next few times, he still thought there could be something there in the style of a conventional relationship. If not sex, then at least an erotic experience shared between romantic partners; if not between romantic partners, then friends.
The type of care that Robby and Jack shared for each other, over time, grew into something that Robby never had the concepts to precisely place, and Jack hadn't learned the words for. Robby caring for Jack during his episodes, Jack caring for Robby after Adamson's death. Comforting each other with an arm around the shoulder after a tough shift. Even living together for a spell, after the divorce. Friends, yes, in the way that romantic partners or family or mentors are also friends, without really being any of those 3 things either. Something wholly other and wholly special and wholly their own.
Robby once again focused on the scene before him. He gave his discharge instructions, hand on Jack's shoulder, as they looked in each other's eyes. Jack's expression showed almost nothing of his usual confidence and sense of control. He seemed small, still, and tired.
For the first couple days, Jack would almost doze off for a second on the rare moments he sat down and stayed still. That's how it usually was, when his aripiprazole blood levels rose to steady state while he was still exhausted from his recent struggle.
Anything could still happen at this point. Dystonia. Akathisia. Depressive episode. Neuroleptic malignant syndrome. All out of his hands.
He knew Robby was there.
"Hey, dude!" Jack reached out his arms, his movements controlled and restrained, as he saw Robby get out of his car.
"Jack! Looking good, how are you feeling?" Robby returned the hug, each man tapping each other on the back, as though they were two heterosexual friends.
"Better already, my man." Jack paused almost imperceptibly. He lowered his voice slightly, not trying to keep the conversation secret, but to unmask. "Robby, we gotta start calling our relationship what it is."
"An HR nightmare? A medical board complaint waiting to happen? True love?" Behind the jokes, he could see that Robby looked genuinely perplexed.
"What the kids are calling 'queerplatonic.'" Sometime, when he wasn't about to drive home, he'd have to explain to Robby the term he'd overheard from a patient's phone as they played TikToks at full blast. It would change nothing about their relationship. "One more thing, before I go."
"Yeah?"
"Let that kid know he's a keeper. Hope he's up for it again."