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"No, I've discovered the real secret," Santos was saying as Jack approached the central nurses' station. "See, what you do is before each shift, you get two of those big extra-strong energy drinks from the 7-Eleven, you know the ones in the purple and red cans? You mainline the first one, just knock it straight back, that gets you up. Then you sip steadily from the other one over the course of the night to maintain—"
"My god," Parker said, shaking her head slowly.
"—then when you get home, pop two Benadryl and you fall asleep like that," Santos concluded with a snap of her fingers.
"I'm going to light a candle in fond memory of your central nervous system," Parker said, every word tinged with disbelief. "It's been fun, you had a good run with it—"
"Far be it from me to break up love birds who are busy canoodling, but," Jack said, and then propped his elbows on the station and stared blankly at them both.
"We don't have to go home but we can't stay here?" Santos said.
"Something like that," Jack said. "If you're ready to hand off your patients, you should do that and skedaddle before the evening really gets going and you get sucked back in."
"This is a touching amount of concern for the sanctity of our New Year's Eve dinner plans, Dr Abbot," Parker said with a twinkle in her eye.
"You want me to redo the week's roster right now? Because don't think I won't."
"Understood," Parker said, sounding more amused than cowed, and tossed him a sloppy abomination of an excuse for a salute before she and Santos headed for the lockers side-by-side. Santos' fingertips brushed against Parker's in a way that Jack was sure she thought was very subtle.
Oh, to be young and in love, Jack thought, only the slightest bit rueful, before he went to pick up his next case.
Holidays at the ED, in Jack's experience, were a bit of a mixed bag.
The Fourth was firework injuries and sunburns; Valentine's Day was Viagra overdoses and priapism. Black Friday used to bring in crush injuries on the regular, but now people bought things online instead of lining up outside of a Walmart at four in the morning to be in with a chance to buy a flatscreen TV for 99 cents. Thanksgiving itself was often so quiet that there was time for on-duty staff to eat an actual dinner, even if it was cobbled together from the potluck buffet in the break room and consumed in staggered shifts. Jack had seen the waiting room be half, even two-thirds empty. People would walk, stumble, crawl, in the day after, complaining of food poisoning and hands scalded while cooking and fractured eye sockets from long-simmering family resentments coming to a head over Aunt Marge's key lime pie. But the day of? People preferred to stay at home if at all possible, suffer through their pangs and pains, rather than break the sanctity of Thanksgiving Day.
New Year's Eve, though, that was reliably a shit-show. You had a bunch of amateur partiers going out, people who didn't know their limits but who were determined to have a memorable night—and so they had one in the worst way possible, because they knocked back five rum and cokes despite being on epilepsy medication, or because they got drunk and passed out in a snow drift and none of their buddies realised until they were fully hypothermic, or because they wanted to get a memorable photo from on top of the Duquesne Incline and fell what Jack would describe in technical terms as "a really long fucking way."
Case in point: the young woman currently weeping in South 17, whom Jack had just left to Princess' tender care. He heaved a deep sigh as he stripped off and binned his nitrile gloves, which caught the attention of Robby who was over at the south nurses' station.
"You good?" Robby asked, shooting him a look over the tops of his glasses.
"Yeah," Jack said, "I'm just not the most ideal healthcare professional for this kind of case."
"Oh?"
Jack leaned against the desk, taking his weight off his bum leg for a moment. "Nineteen-year-old, drunk, decides for some unknown reason to take a pregnancy test while at tonight's blow-out off-campus frat party—"
Robby let out a chuckle that was clearly of the if you don't laugh, you'll cry subtype. "Kids these days."
"—so she comes here distraught telling the front desk there's something very wrong with the foetus, they bring her right back, it turns out she's panicking because if there's acid in her stomach then how is the baby going to survive in there?"
Robby's eyes went wide. He shot a glance over at South 17, then back at Jack. "You're joking, right?"
"Diagnosis: Catholic school," Jack said with a shake of his head before he headed back to Central to pick up another case. It'd be a while before Ms South 17 was sober enough to call down one of the social workers to talk to her. He placed a quiet bet with himself that it would be a four-, maybe even a five-explanatory-pamphlet-level consult. "It's going to be a long night, brother."
It was rare for Robby to work a night shift, rarer still for him to work one alongside Jack. But a doctor from Paeds was getting hitched to a respiratory therapist; one of the happy couple had extremely rich parents and the other one was likeable, which meant a lavish New Year's Eve wedding bash at a ritzy hotel and a sizeable number of PTMC staff cashing in their PTO to attend. Most of the night's roster was therefore a mix of med students and locums, with Princess reluctantly the Charge Nurse. Extra important to have two seasoned heads around, then, on a night like this one—and there was no other senior attending that Jack would rather work with than Robby.
Jack spent some time in South 21, coaching one of the newest M3s through suturing a nasty leg lac. "Remember, consistent bites and take your time. Slow is smooth and smooth is fast."
"Oh!" Figueroa said, blinking up at Jack from behind his thick glasses. "That's what my great-uncle always used to say. Were you a Navy SEAL too, sir?"
"Was I a... You know what, just carry on," Jack said, after his jaw had flapped a bit for a moment, because which was worse: him being compared to someone's great-uncle, or to a goddamned SEAL? That was some audacious bullshit.
Things were slow enough that Jack had a whole fifteen uninterrupted minutes to work on charting before the first major trauma of the night came rolling in. "Balcony collapse at a nightclub," Princess called out, "Three major, seven minor, ETA three minutes."
Jack stood, looked around to find that Robby was already striding toward him, pulling on a disposable gown. "Look who's Mr On Top Of Things," Jack said.
"Watch and learn," Robby said, flashing him a quick grin as he headed for the ambulance bay doors.
"Always," Jack breathed and followed.
The first major case that rolled in, all that they could do was call time of death; the crush injuries to the chest were too severe, no catching up with the blood loss. The other two, though, they had a chance. Jack and Robby worked their damnedest to make sure it was a fighting one. It wasn't easy, though, and between the adrenaline of it, the hustling back and forth between the trauma bays, the concentration that was needed when working on the younger guy, Jack could feel the sweat standing out on his forehead.
Looked like Robby was feeling it, too, by the time they finally pulled off and binned their gowns and gloves. A flush rode high on his cheeks; the hair at the nape of his neck was damp.
"Hydration break, brother," Jack said, slapping Robby on the back.
"Yeah, yeah," Robby said. "Let me just check on what the situation is like in Chairs first."
Jack grabbed some cold water, ambled back to a work station to start the case notes on the people who'd gone up to the OR, knocked back most of his water. He made it through a chunk of the write-up and then realised something. He wasn't cooling down any. In fact, if anything he seemed to be getting warmer.
"Hey, Princess," he called. "Is it me or is it hot in here?"
"Yeah, I guess?" Princess pulled a considering face. "I thought it was just the leftovers I had for dinner but—"
And then Robby reappeared, with a look on his face that Jack knew all too well. "Shit. What is it this time?"
"The squirrels are back," Robby said tightly.
"In winter?" Jack asked.
Princess furrowed her brow. "Don't they hibernate?"
"I guess not when they have food and warmth inside a building," Robby said, propping his hands on his hips and shaking his head: the portrait of world weariness. "Though we've got one less now than we had before."
Jack stood. "Can the dramatics, Robby, what's going on?"
"Squirrel built a nest on top of that electrical box in the hallway behind reception," Robby said. "Decided to chew through some cables, electrocuted itself, but in the process messed up the controls for the heating."
"Oh my god," Princess said.
"It's currently 74 in here, from the position the dial is stuck in, it looks like the heating is going to try its best to get up to 83, there's now no way to turn it down, and because it's New Year's Eve, no one's going to be here to fix it before tomorrow morning."
"You're kidding me," Jack said.
"Do I look like I'm kidding?" Robby asked, and to be fair, that wasn't the facial expression of his that Jack tended to associate with fun and japes.
"Come on, you're telling me there's honestly not a single Maintenance person available in this whole goddamn hospital right now?" Jack gaped. "Twenty stories, 600 beds, and not one single solitary person with a wrench?"
Robby shook his head, worked his jaw, and Jack was pretty sure that 2027 was going to kick off with yet another blistering row about the departmental budget with Gloria. "At least no one who's qualified to deal with anything electrical."
"Great," Jack groused, and then felt himself mentally tick over to planning mode. Several hours of this would be no fun. "We're going to need a lot of water available for staff and patients, with electrolyte replacement as well."
"Any patient who can go upstairs goes upstairs," Robby told Princess, who was already nodding and picking up a phone. "Prioritise the elderly, kids, anyone on diuretics or otherwise prone to heat intolerance."
They got big fans set up around the ED, and Ahmad knew where to find one particularly large one that they set up at the door to the ambulance bay in the hope that it would suck in some cooler air from outside. Given that the entrance was an L-shape, though, it didn't do all that much to help, and the Pitt grew warmer and warmer and warmer.
"There's some kind of Dante joke in here," Robby muttered around ten thirty, as he shucked his sweat-stained scrub top. Jack, because he was a gentleman, averted his eyes from the strip of pale belly the action revealed for a moment until Robby tugged his undershirt down again. "But I'm too hot to make it."
"Eh," Jack said with as much cheer as he could inject into his voice, "just say that it's as hot as Satan's taint in here and call it a day."
Robby let out a huff of a laugh. "Classy, Abbot."
"As always," Jack said with a bob of his head, and because there was no point in getting distracted on the job by futile thoughts of how attractive Robby was, and because it wouldn't do Jack any good to just sit and swelter in this heat, he decided to do a swing through triage and see if they were managing okay.
Nazely was holding her own, though the fact that she was currently suturing a guy wearing a Peace, Love, and Happy 2027 t-shirt who was so tanked that he'd passed out and was snoring gently probably helped. Singh, one of the locums, looked a bit less impressed as he exited one of the cubicles and stripped off his gloves.
"I was warned about the kind of cases you guys get here," he told Jack with a shake of his head, "but still I didn't believe it."
Jack raised an eyebrow. "Oh?"
"His fiancée caught him in bed with her own sister a few days ago," Singh said. "Waited until he was sleeping and managed to coat his penis with several layers of superglue. It's... to be honest, it looks like it's mummified."
"Well," Jack said after a moment of blinking at the cubicle curtains, "there's a fine mental image."
"I'm going to need a lot more acetone," Singh said. "And if I can't get it off in another hour or two, we might need to consider a suprapubic catheter. He can't remember when he last urinated."
"Hey, once you have a plan," Jack said, clapping him on the shoulder and feeling glad that whatever you could say about how this year had gone for him, he wasn't capping it off with mummy dick. "Cheaters never prosper, huh?"
Back at the hub, it felt like the air had warmed up another couple of degrees just in the time Jack had been away. The nurses and assistants who were there had turned every kind of printed material they could into makeshift fans; Antoine was standing spread eagle in front of one of the big ones, the rush of air making his scrubs ripple around him.
"This is ridiculous," Princess said, pressing a sweating can of soda to her forehead, the side of her neck. "Can't we make them find some repair person somewhere? Lodge some kind of express OSHA complaint?"
"Uh, is there such a thing?" There was a reason Jack had never set his sights on becoming a head of department anywhere: terminally allergic to paperwork. Well, there were other reasons, too, but that was the most relevant one. Fuck spreadsheets. If anyone somewhat in charge around here would know what other options they might have, it would be Robby, but a glance at the board and then over through the window told Jack that Robby was in Trauma One, working on an elderly woman who'd come in having an MI. "Maybe we just find Gloria's personal number, start calling her until she picks up and does something?"
Princess pursed her lips. "Isn't she in Aspen on vacation with her family?"
"Oh, trust that I can be just as annoying from a distance of several hundred miles as I can right up close. Ugh," Jack said, tugging at the collar of his scrubs, "fuck me but it is hot in here." He'd walked through desert in kevlar and had felt less overheated than he did right now in goddamn Pittsburgh in late December. Even with the sweat-wicking liner on his leg, he already knew that it was going to hurt like a bitch when he took his prosthetic off in the morning. "No one's going to clutch pearls about it if I lose a layer, right?"
"Nope," Princess said.
Jack pulled off his scrub top. The black tank that he wore underneath was tacky with sweat, and when he stood in front of the fan for a minute the fabric turned clammy, but at least it was somewhat better than before. That was despite the fact that Princess let out a low whistle and said, "Okay, Abbot, jeez, we all get the point."
"What?" Jack said, resisting the urge to fold his arms. "So I got backed up on laundry over the holidays, so what?"
"Hey, I said that I'm not clutching any pearls," Princess said, looking ostentatiously down at her tablet, right as the doors of Trauma One swung open and some of the nurses wheeled the patient out heading for the cath lab.
Robby followed them, using his forearm to wipe the sweat from his forehead before he stripped off his gloves, and then did an honest-to-god double-take when he looked over at Jack.
"Oh, don't you start," Jack said.
"Who's starting anything?" Robby asked, holding up his hands, his gaze flickering back to Jack's shoulders like he was some kind of scandalised Victorian maiden aunt. So Jack wasn't being the most professional, but so what? It had to be in the high 70s here by now, anyone who was going to be offended by Jack's shoulders could seek care elsewhere.
It was past eleven by that point, and they were heading into the usual turn-of-the-year lull. All across the city, parties were ratcheting up for some, while others were settling in on their sofas to watch televised countdowns and fireworks, and others again were saying the hell with it and going to bed. No one who could help it wanted to be here, angling for a prescription refill or wanting a funny rash checked out, when they could somewhere else when the clock struck twelve.
But Jack knew that come two or three, Chairs would be full once more. He told everyone who reported to him to go grab a break and some food now, while they could.
"I'm okay for now," Nazely told him, and Jack shook his head.
"First rule of the ED, take a break when you're offered one," Jack said. "Well, no, first rule is probably know when to pivot quick when you see someone start to puke—"
From the next computer terminal over, Jack heard Robby let out an amused snort.
"—but seriously, go while it's quiet. Give it two or three hours and you're going to see the aftermath of a whole bunch of drunken bad decisions. You'll need some fuel in your tank."
"Abbot the Oracle speaks the truth," Robby said without looking away from his computer screen.
"And you know that Dr Robinavitch doesn't give out compliments lightly," Jack said, without missing a beat.
Once Nazely was gone, Robby said, "Would we call that a compliment?"
"Course we would," Jack said loftily, "it's about me, and you appreciate me."
Robby looked at him sidelong, but said nothing.
Some of the nursing staff went up on the roof for their break, as much for the cool breezes up there as to snag a good place to watch the fireworks that were soon to light up the night sky. Downstairs, it stayed quiet. Robby told the med students to go catch some Z's in the MedSurg on-call rooms, where it would be far less hot. He and Jack worked on their charting; Robby dealt with some phone calls from Ortho, untangling some issue that had been caused by a contradictory double entry of info in a patient's records.
Jack, in a fucking end-of-year miracle, got caught up on his charting so he went and found an empty plastic supply tub in the break room. He filled it with ice, and put as many cans in it from the vending machine as first his supply of quarters and then his debit card would allow (before some robot at his bank clearly wondered what the fuck was happening and put a restriction on the card). He set the tub out on the counter in the central hub around a quarter to midnight, with a Post-It slapped on the side saying Free to a good PTMC employee home :), grabbed two of the cans and their jackets from beneath the desk and said, "Robby, with me."
"Oh, I was just—"
"Uh uh," Jack said. No point in letting him backslide into old habits. Eating was important; drinking was important. They'd had a conversation on exactly those issues when Robby had returned from his sabbatical, and Jack would insist to anyone that he'd won it. "C'mon."
Robby followed him. They went out to the ambulance bay, tugged their jackets on as they shivered against the abrupt temperature shift, and went around the corner to that weird little seating area that some architect had decided to fill a blank spot on a plan during a bout of 1970s renovations. There was a stone bench and an overhang, which made it popular with smokers looking for a bit of privacy and some shelter when it rained. But the view was of nothing more than a blank, pebble-dashed wall and some scraggly weeds that grew up through cracks in the asphalt. Not what you'd call picturesque.
Jack cracked open his can, gulped down a few deliciously cold mouthfuls; next to him, Robby did the same.
"You ever regret coming back here?" Jack said, once the silence between them had stretched out just long enough. He knew the question mark had been there. It had been a tough few months; tough few years, if Jack was being honest. And what was there that tethered Robby to the Pitt when you got right down to it? Everything had its end. Robby had a solid enough rep that he could walk into another gig anywhere in the country if he wanted, could stay practicing or switch to teaching. Hell, he could comfortably retire at this point and just keep his hand in doing two mornings a week at some UPMC Urgent Care clinic.
But he'd come back.
"Jesus," Robby said with a winded laugh. "Finishing out 2026 on a high note, huh?"
"Sincere question," Jack said, looking down at his knees.
"Isn't the roof our traditional place for this line of questioning?"
"I'm versatile," Jack said. "And you're dodging the question."
"Yeah, I do regret it sometimes," Robby said after a pause, and Jack remembered what he'd looked like late night on the Fourth, his face haggard and his eyes red-rimmed. "But not enough," and Jack also remembered what it had felt like, the first day he'd seen Robby walk back through the PTMC doors and relief had swept through his system with the force and finality of an adrenaline crash.
Jack closed his eyes for a moment.
"It'd seem like you might have scope for a lot more regret," Jack said eventually, risking a look over at Robby. "Place like this. Underfunded, understaffed, everything falling down around our ears even though they renovated the executive board meeting room six months ago."
"Yeah, well," Robby said with a shrug. "My therapist told me that maybe I just might have the capacity in me for a new perspective on life, if I really tried."
"Jesus," Jack said, "the guy's that passive aggressive?"
Robby rolled his eyes. "So I'm paraphrasing a bit. You know what I mean."
"Maybe," Jack said.
"This place has its upsides. Well," Robby said, setting his now-empty can down next to his foot, "maybe not the place, so much. But a lot of the people who work here and what we do, yeah."
"Getting sentimental on me, Robinavitch." Jack's tone was gently teasing, but Robby just nodded and stared at the wall across from them.
From away in the distance came a pop-pop-pop and muffled cheering. Jack craned his head back to gaze upwards and could just about make out, where the upper bulk of the hospital was framed against the nighttime sky, the rippling lights of fireworks: gold and red and blue and green. Welcome to another year. They'd made it one more trip around the sun.
"You think I..." Robby paused and cleared his throat. "You remember when you became my emergency contact?"
"Do I remember when a grown man fucking fell out of the ceiling and landed on you? Yeah, yeah, vaguely."
"It was maybe a bit, uh..." Robby seemed to be searching for the right word. "Embarrassing. Something like that. I was born in this city, raised here. Lived here most of my life. And for a while there I didn't feel like there was a single person I could ask, and then you were... You just offered."
Jack hoped like hell that Robby's therapist was having conversations with him about appropriate definitions of the word embarrassing, and also whether his sense that no one gave a damn about him might not, in fact, be what was technically referred to as insidious brain bullshit.
For now, Jack shrugged and said, "What was I supposed to do? Knowingly let you get smushed all by yourself? That's not buddies."
"It meant something, though." Robby fiddled with the cuff of his jacket. "I knew that at the time, but talking to my therapist about it, well, uh. Perspective."
Jack squinted at him. "Not sure I'm following you on all of this."
"When I told you working here was leaching away some of my soul, I meant it, that was true. But it's not the only thing it's ever done to me. For me. It's also... I don't know what the opposite of leaching is."
Jack scratched at his nose. "Fertilising, maybe?"
"That, then," Robby said. "It's... it's not as simple as a formula for whether the good outweighs the bad, but it's something I've been thinking about more since I got back."
Jack tried to parse all of this. "So me being your emergency contact is like... fertiliser for the soul or some shit?"
"That's not—"
"Am I manure in this scenario? Am I cow dung?" Jack poked him in the side. "And you gave me shit over the bee metaphor?"
"Jack," Robby said, sounding exasperated. "I just spent several hours sweating my balls off while trying to save the life of the most cantankerous old woman to ever have an MI. Would you let me be sincere for five minutes?"
"Knock yourself out," Jack said, and was completely unprepared for Robby to roll his eyes and mutter, "fuck it," and lean over and kiss him.
Holy shit, said a tiny voice in Jack's head.
Maybe this wasn't either of them at their best—tired, sweaty, wrung out and with hours still to go on their shift—but it was truly them. Him and Robby. Robby turning toward him like it was easy; Robby kissing him like this was inevitable, like this was the best way he could think of to start off a new run of 365 maddening, beautiful days. Jack had had a lot of occasion since he'd first moved to Pittsburgh to squash down all thoughts about Robby's mouth and what it might feel like against his. Robby'd never hinted he was anything other than straight; Jack had never wanted to let his lonely hopes ruin what they had.
But now Robby was holding him by the shoulders, very gently, as if he thought that Jack might bolt and he was hoping to persuade him not to. More fool him, because right now Jack wasn't sure that he ever wanted to stop kissing Robby. He felt his breath hiccup. His ass was going numb on this cold stone bench, sure, but Robby's mouth was so hot and he kept making these soft little noises that were totally at odds with how desperate his kisses were. Jack would happily live right here.
"Hey," Jack said, when they finally broke apart, Robby skittish and fidgeting but in Jack's arms, "Mike, hey, it's okay, it's all right, this isn't going to be some one-time thing."
"I know all the reasons why we shouldn't," Robby said, eyes heavy-lidded, voice hoarse, sounding as if he hadn't heard what Jack had just said. His fingers dug into Jack's shoulders, ever so slightly. "I've been reciting them to myself for years. But this is the thing I don't want to end up regretting. This is. For better or worse, I—"
Jack kissed him again, quick and messy, an improvised promise. "Funnily enough," he said, wrapping one hand around the nape of Robby's neck, "that's kind of my life philosophy too, these days. You want to know how much it killed me to see you leave here in July, huh? You want to know how much I was kicking myself, thinking about all the things I could have said to make you stay—"
"Jack—"
"And let me tell you, it takes a lot of regret and effort to get a one-legged man to kick himself."
"Fucking hell, Jack."
"What? I'm allowed to say it." Jack tilted his head, let himself look at Robby and feel all the fondness he'd spent so, so long pushing down. It made the air around him feel as overheated as the rooms on the other side of the wall. He stroked his thumb against the nape of Robby's neck, very gently. "When we're done here, I'm going to take you home with me. We're going to talk and have breakfast and we will fucking shower."
Robby stared at him, eyes huge in the dim light. "And then?"
"And then, I'm going to be fucking real with you brother, it's kind of all down to you. Because I'm all the way in, gone and signed and sealed. Done deal, here. So. Whatever you want." Jack checked the time on his watch, swore softly, turned away just a bit because he wasn't quite brave enough to see what Robby looked like after Jack had all but said the words I'm so in love with you that sometimes letting myself feel it makes my hands shake. "We should get back in there, before more shit falls apart or a patient explodes or something."
Robby levered himself to his feet, something audibly clicking in one of his knees, and said, "Don't tempt fate."
"Eh, been doing that for years," Jack said, and stood and followed Robby into a building that was cracked and crumbling, that had been made to do more for longer and for more people than it had ever been designed to cope with—but that hadn't collapsed yet.