Work Text:
The email showed up on a Tuesday at three in the afternoon, while Dennis was still on his shift, finishing a newborn's discharge note. The subject line got straight to the point.
Career Day, 4th Grade
He opened it between cases, not expecting much. Ms. Toledo explained, in that upbeat tone of hers, that next Friday was his turn to talk to his daughter's class about his job. And then, almost at the very end, the line that stuck with Dennis.
I thought of you two for the same session, since you both work in healthcare. It could be a great combination for the kids!
You two. Cc'd to Michael Robinavitch.
Dennis sat there staring at the screen for a good while, with the vague feeling that he must have done something truly awful in a past life to deserve this.
He started drafting a careful reply, asking about the exact length of the session, whether there were any rules about using real medical supplies versus models, how many kids would actually be there, and whether they should coordinate the content beforehand so they wouldn't repeat each other.
He'd gotten through three paragraphs when a notification popped up. A new reply in the same thread.
From: Michael Robinavitch
To: Ms. Toledo
Cc: Dennis Whitaker
Count us in! This is going to be a blast.
Dennis read the line twice, like a second read might reveal some nuance the first one had missed. It didn't. It said exactly the same thing. A flat out yes, in plural, with zero prior consultation, without even the courtesy of a quick does that work for you? before signing him up too, in front of a room full of nine year olds.
He deleted his three carefully worded paragraphs and typed something much shorter instead, straight to Robby's phone.
Dennis
couldn't you check with me first before answering for both of us?
The reply came almost instantly.
Michael (Ollie's Dad)
we're neighbors, coworkers & friends dennis. obviously we're going together
Dennis
that's not an answer and we're not friends
Dennis looked at his phone for one more second, decided it wasn't worth pushing any further, and put it away. He went back to his discharge note and started, without meaning to, making a mental list of everything that could go wrong if he let Robby anywhere near a group of nine year olds with no guidance at all on what he could and couldn't say. The list turned out to be pretty long.
They didn't bring it up again for days, until the universe, with its usual sense of humor, threw them together again without either of them looking for it.
A call came from the floor below, mid morning. A girl not even two years old had come into the Pitt with her arm bent at a wrong angle, after falling off her living room couch.
Dennis went down right away, already resigned to probably running into Robby.
He found his patient screaming her lungs out in her mother's arms, her face red and her nose already a mess. Dennis walked over slowly, sat on the edge of the bed to be at her eye level, and started talking to her in a soft voice, showing her the stethoscope like it was just some toy before carefully bringing it up to his own chest.
"See? It doesn't bite," he told her, letting her, still hiccuping between sobs, squeeze the earpiece in her chubby little fingers. "Want to listen to your heart too?"
She hesitated for a moment, but ended up letting Dennis rest the stethoscope on her chest, distracted enough that Perlah could give her a strong enough painkiller to check her arm with her free hands, without much of a fight.
A resident he didn't recognize stood next to him, walking the girl's mother through everything he was doing.
By the time he finished, the girl had stopped crying, and even let out a small laugh when Dennis pretended to be shocked to hear a dinosaur's heartbeat instead of a human one.
That's when, still crouched by the bed, he felt Robby beside him, leaning against the doorframe with his arms crossed and an expression Dennis couldn't quite place.
"You're good at this," Robby said, with none of his usual teasing for once, genuinely watching the scene.
"It's my job," Dennis said flatly, trying to ignore the presence of the man who haunted him even in his nightmares.
He got sidetracked giving the mother instructions before they took the girl up to radiology. When he finally turned toward Robby, the man already had that smile, somewhere between casual and interested, that Dennis was starting to recognize as the setup for something.
"So?" Robby asked, following him a couple of steps down the hallway. "What are we doing about Career Day?"
"We?"
"You know it's a we."
Dennis sighed without stopping. "I haven't really thought about it yet."
"I have." Robby sounded genuinely excited, which, in Dennis's experience, was never a good sign. "I've got a few ideas."
"That's exactly what worries me."
To Dennis's surprise, Robby's ideas turned out to be, for the most part, reasonable. They agreed to borrow enough leftover stethoscopes from supply so every kid in the class could try one without sharing. Robby threw in a whole box of gloves too, with the idea that each kid could blow one up like a balloon and draw a face on it with marker, which struck Dennis as pointless at first, until he had to admit, at least to himself, that it was probably going to be the thing the kids remembered most. He used that trick himself, on his toughest patients.
The order got settled without much back and forth, either. Dennis would open with pediatrics, talking about what it meant to care for patients who couldn't explain what hurt yet, and about why patience was, more often than not, the most important tool of all. Robby would go next with emergency medicine, though Dennis had already made very clear, more than once, exactly which stories were off limits for a class of nine year olds. And they'd close together, talking about how they worked as a team whenever a small patient landed with Robby first and ended up, sooner or later, with Dennis.
On Friday, the fourth grade classroom got rearranged into a semicircle, twenty three kids sitting on the floor on colorful cushions, Ms. Toledo watching from the back to make sure everyone paid attention.
Dennis started, just like they'd planned. He sat in a chair to be at the kids' level, the box of stethoscopes open beside him.
"I'm a pediatrician," he said, with that same calm he always used on his youngest patients. "Does anyone know what that means?"
A girl in the second row shot her hand up right away. "You fix kids?"
"Exactly. I take care of kids when they're not feeling well."
"Like when I have a fever?" another kid asked, not bothering to wait his turn.
"Like when you have a fever. Or a cough, or a stomachache, or when you fall and break something."
A boy in the back, looking like he was thinking something very important, raised his hand almost desperately. "What about babies? Babies can't even talk."
"Good question." Dennis smiled, genuinely pleased with that one. "Babies don't know how to talk, so you have to learn to understand them a different way. By looking at their faces, listening to how they cry, watching how they move. All of that tells us something too."
That set off a wave of chatter across the semicircle, kids turning to each other, amazed that pediatricians had the superpower of understanding baby cries.
Dennis used the moment to open the box of stethoscopes and start handing them out one by one. He watched Amelia try hers on with a huge grin and then talk Oliver into trying his too. The kids listened to their own heartbeats in awe, some of them completely silent, lost in the wonder of it.
Then it was Robby's turn.
He started off well. He talked, with contagious energy, about working in the emergency room, the part of the hospital where people showed up when something went wrong all of a sudden. He talked about treating people with really high fevers, or broken bones after a fall, and used a stuffed animal to show how you'd immobilize an arm with a makeshift sling, which got the kids excited all over again, even after everything they'd already seen with the stethoscopes.
Then a kid in the front row asked, with total innocence, "Have you ever seen real blood?" and that's when things started to go sideways.
"Tons of it," Robby answered, with a smile that already had Dennis, from his chair, feeling uneasy. "One time a guy came in who'd fallen off a ladder and broken his leg so badly the bone was sticking out through the skin."
A chorus of ohhh! swept the semicircle, mixed with a few faces twisted in delighted disgust, the kind of horror that only genuinely thrills a nine year old.
"Michael," Dennis muttered, just enough warning in his voice.
Robby didn't hear him, or chose not to. "And one time we had a guy come in with a gunshot wound, right here." He pointed to his own side. "And we had to cut him open, fast, to get the bullet out before he bled out on the table."
Another kid, emboldened by how the conversation was going, threw his hand up without waiting his turn. "What about stabbings?"
"Tons of those too," Robby confirmed, completely lost in his own excitement now, the kids practically leaning off their cushions. "One time two guys came in at the same time who'd stabbed each other, and we had to put them on separate beds because otherwise they kept fighting even in there."
"Dr. Robinavitch." Dennis's voice, this time, sounded exactly like when he talked to a first year resident about to make a serious mistake. "I think this is a good time to talk about teamwork."
Robby stopped mid sentence, glanced at Dennis, then at the row of kids staring wide eyed and waiting for the rest of the story, and finally at Ms. Toledo, whose horror was written all over her face.
"Right." He recovered with an ease Dennis found downright unfair. "Teamwork. That's where Dr. Whitaker comes in."
He walked over to Dennis's chair and rested a hand on his shoulder, with the kind of familiarity that didn't surprise anyone in the room anymore, least of all Amelia and Oliver, who shot each other a knowing look neither adult caught.
"When someone comes into the ER really badly hurt, I stabilize them first. Stop the bleeding, start fluids, whatever they need in the moment so they don't get worse," Robby explained, this time in a noticeably calmer tone, though Dennis kept watching him sideways, ready to jump in at the first sign of trouble. "But if the patient's a kid, that's when I call Dr. Whitaker, because he knows things about kids that I don't."
"Like what?" asked the same boy from before, still riding the high of bullets and stabbings.
"Like the fact that you can't explain things to a three year old the same way you'd explain them to you guys," Dennis said, picking it up smoothly. "Or that a stomachache in a baby can mean something completely different than it does in an adult. Little things Dr. Robby doesn't handle as well as I do."
"Hey."
"It's true."
"It's true, but you didn't have to say it that bluntly."
That got a laugh out of the whole class, Ms. Toledo included, who seemed to finally relax her shoulders.
They wrapped up with the glove activity, which turned out to be, just as Dennis had privately predicted but would never admit out loud, the biggest hit of the whole morning. Every kid blew theirs up into some lumpy five fingered balloon and drew a face on it with permanent marker, some of them way more terrifying than any adult could have guessed. Amelia gave hers glasses just like her own; Oliver, true to form, drew a huge scar across his balloon's whole face, "like my dad's patients."
When the bell finally rang and the kids started getting up off the floor, Amelia ran over to Dennis and hugged him around the waist as hard as her arms could manage.
"You were the best," she told him, squeezing a little tighter before letting go.
"Better than Robby?"
"You were both the best," she corrected, with a diplomacy Dennis found suspiciously well practiced, before running off to find Oliver, who was already waiting for her at the door with his own glove balloon tucked under his arm.
The room emptied out slowly, laughter and latex balloons bouncing around, until only Dennis and Robby were left picking up scattered supplies, along with Ms. Toledo, who walked over with her hands clasped in front of her and that particular teacher look that means she's about to say something with a lot more weight than it lets on.
"I really wanted to thank you both," she said, while Dennis packed the last stethoscope back into the box. "And tell you something, if you have a minute."
"Sure." Dennis straightened up and gave her his full attention.
"Amelia's a wonderful girl, but pretty shy too. At the start of the year she barely spoke in class, and she had a hard time making friends on her own." The teacher smiled, glancing toward the door the kids had just gone through. "Since Oliver came along, all of that changed. She talks more now, laughs more, has someone to sit with every day without having to work at fitting in. I really think he's been great for her."
Something tightened in Dennis's chest, that mix of pride and relief that only shows up when someone else confirms something you've been quietly suspecting for a while, without quite daring to say it out loud.
"I had no idea it meant that much," he admitted.
"Kids sometimes just need one person," the teacher said, already picking up her empty mug from the table. "And it's really sweet how well you two get along too. You can tell the kids grew up seeing you as a team."
Neither Dennis nor Robby said anything right away. Robby was the first to react, with a smile Dennis knew all too well, the one that meant a comment was coming that wasn't going to help matters.
"We're neighbors," Robby clarified, perfectly calm. Dennis was almost surprised the man was actually respecting the boundary he'd set. "And coworkers. That's it."
"Ah." Ms. Toledo nodded slowly, though her expression made it pretty clear she wasn't buying it. "Well. Either way, thank you for coming. It was a morning to remember."
She gave a friendly wave goodbye and left the room, leaving Dennis holding the box of stethoscopes.
The second the door shut behind her, Dennis turned to Robby with the exact look he reserved for residents who skipped a protocol.
"We need to talk about a few things."
"Now?"
"Now." Dennis set the box down on a table and started counting on his fingers, taking his time. "One: the bone sticking out of the skin thing was too much. Two: the gunshot thing, definitely too much. Three: the two stabbing victims fighting on separate beds, that was flat out irresponsible, Robby, there was a nine year old about to cry from excitement, not fear, which is worse. Four: if you say the words bled out one more time in front of an entire fourth grade class, I swear I'll..."
"Dennis." He tried to cut in, fighting off a smug little smile.
"Five: you can't promise the teacher teamwork and then just wing the whole thing, that's also..."
"Dennis." Robby cut him off, resting a hand on his shoulder with that maddeningly calm way he had whenever he wanted to talk someone down. "Relax, buddy. It went great. The kids loved it."
"I'm not your buddy."
"Sure you are."
"I'm not." Dennis shook the hand off, a little more sharply than necessary, and grabbed the box of stethoscopes again. "Especially not after you almost gave a whole class collective trauma with stabbing stories."
"But they loved it."
Dennis couldn't come up with a good enough comeback fast enough, so he just picked up the pace down the hallway, Robby trailing behind him with no effort at all, still smiling, like he'd just won something Dennis didn't even know they were arguing about.
They headed out to the parking lot together, where they'd left Robby's car that morning, since they'd decided to carpool instead of dealing with two separate parking spots in front of the school. Robby walked a couple of steps behind, that smile still not quite gone.
"Hey, you know what I thought was funny?" he said, catching up to Dennis just as he opened the passenger door. "That the teacher thought we were friends."
"Worse." Dennis got in, setting the box of stethoscopes in the back seat before settling into his seat. "I think she thought we had something going on."
Robby burst out laughing so hard he had to lean against the roof of the car for a second before walking around and getting in himself.
"What's so funny?" Dennis asked, already frowning, with zero intention of laughing along. "It's more terrifying than anything else, honestly. I've had terrible taste in men my whole life, but never bad enough to end up with you. No offense."
Robby, key already halfway to the ignition, went completely still.
Dennis, still staring straight ahead, took a couple of seconds to notice the silence. When he finally turned his head, he found Robby wearing an expression he couldn't quite read.
And right then, Dennis had a pretty good guess about exactly what was going through Robby's head: he was connecting the dots. Putting together, late but for sure, that comment with everything else Dennis had never bothered to spell out for him.
"What?" Dennis asked, coming out a little more defensive than he meant it to.
"Nothing." Robby still hadn't put the key in the ignition. "It's just, I didn't know you... dated men."
Dennis found that reaction strange. He remembered telling him himself, weeks earlier, that he'd decided to start a family with an asshole. Did he think Dennis meant some relative? He decided not to overthink it and just shrugged. "Well, now you know."
"No, no, it's fine, I have no problem with that," Robby said quickly, lifting his hands briefly off the wheel like he needed to prove it physically. "God, of course not. Zero problems."
"I wish you were homophobic," Dennis said, without missing a beat, in that flat tone he used for the worst things he said seriously. "At least then you'd keep enough distance that we wouldn't have to see each other."
"There's no way that's happening." Robby finally started the car, settling back into his usual tone. "We're friends."
"We're not." He corrected him again, like it was routine by now.
"You heard the teacher." Robby turned the corner onto the main road, with that calm insistence that never seemed to run out. "Together we're good for Mellie... and I really do appreciate you, gay buddy."
Dennis rolled his eyes, unable to stop something like a smile from slipping through before turning back to the window. "You don't have to put the word gay in front of everything when you talk about me, Robby."
"Bear with me," Robby said, shrugging, same easygoing tone as always. "I'm processing things."
"There's nothing to process."
"Back in New Orleans I had a friend at the hospital, he was gay, and he told me all the time, no filter whatsoever, that he thought I was attractive." Robby said it with the same easy tone he used for any other story. "I never really knew what to do with that, honestly."
"I don't see what that has to do with me."
Robby went quiet for a second, like he was still putting the question together in his head, then glanced over at Dennis without fully taking his eyes off the road. "Do you find me attractive too? You know, gay taste and all that."
Dennis went silent for several seconds, looking at him with an expression stuck somewhere between disbelief and desperately hoping the light would change already.
"I think your friend had terrible taste, Robinavitch."
By the time the school year ended, Dennis would have already confessed to Robby, in the most embarrassing way possible, that he found him unbelievably attractive.