Chapter Text
Chapter 1 - before
You're an angel, I'm a dog
Or you're a dog and I'm your man
You believe me like a god
I'll destroy you like I am
*
The last time Dennis had a conversation with Robby before the day they tumbled down a bridge together was a little over a year ago. It was minutes before dawn. The hallway light was just bright enough to illuminate the horror in the older man’s eyes.
“I’m sorry,” he said to Dennis, choking on the words and rubbing a palm over his eyes. His shoulders were heaving with breaths as if he'd just witnessed the end of the world instead of holding Dennis naked in his arms.
They are crammed at a corner of the bar when Robby turns up later in the night, following Dr Abbott. He's wearing a white shirt and one of the zip-up hoodies he has on every day. Dennis is already a little drunk, more from giddiness than anything. It’s the celebration for the end of his and Javadi’s rotation in the emergency department. He watches as Robby heads to the bar, bringing two bottles of beer for himself and Abbott. Robby looks at him. Gives him a little nod. Dennis waves back.
“I’m not,” Dennis said, or something along those lines. It was difficult to speak through the blood rushing to his head, the sound of static in his ear. His throat was dry. He felt like no matter what he did, no matter how maturely he accepted the defeat, no matter how good he feigned nonchalance, he could not overcome this overbearing sense of naivete under the man’s desperate, pitiful gaze.
Robby pulled himself to a seating position then, his naked back hunched as he buried his face in his arms. Dennis hid his hands between his thighs to stop himself from reaching out, from tracing shaped at the man’s broad shoulders. Just hours ago he was allowed to.
“I’m sorry,” he repeated. His voice was ruffled beneath the flesh of his palm. Dennis wished he was still drunk. “This– it wasn’t right. I’m sorry.”
He had to bite his lip to stop himself from calling the man Dr Robby. Force of habit. “It’s not wrong,” Dennis tried this time. He didn’t know if he believed his own words, though he suspected Robby had a different reasoning for his tormented behavior. He thought about the glass cabinet in the living room. What he would give now to feel a little numb again, though he doubted there was anything in the world that could soften the blow of Robby’s disdain.
The only time they speak to each other throughout the night is when Robby claps him on the back and says congratulations. His hand is heavy and warm, and his thumb hovers over his nape. Dennis wonders whether it’s the alcohol, the sweat on his palms and butterflies in his stomach. You will be a good doctor, Robby tells him. It sounds like a promise, and Dennis can’t do much but nod. It has happened before, a hand on his shoulder, on his neck, on his arm. Dennis knows he hasn’t been dreaming.
They only bump into each other again when Dennis leaves the pub with an Irish goodbye, suddenly too exhausted by the crowd and a little too drunk. A little too loose around the hands. Robby calls out from behind him, not too long after. Dennis takes every step of his life with the hesitancy of someone who knows there is no one to catch him. Yet he keeps taking them. Right then, when Dr Robby is caught up to him in the alleyway, asking if he is alright, asking if he needs a ride.
“I’m your attending,” Robby said in a wrecked voice. Dennis could tell that his hands were shaking, which then made Dennis’s entire body tremble knowing he was the cause of such torment in this mountain of a man.
“Not anymore,” Dennis reminded him. He was done with his emergency medicine rotation. Yes, he was still going to be at the PTMC for a few more months, but he doubted he would run into Robby again. Then again, what would it change? They had been so good at pretending in the last month, pretending that the touches didn’t matter, that the soft voices didn’t matter, that this overwhelming, magnetic urge didn’t matter. Dennis knew he could do it for another lifetime if it meant he could have this. Just this, just a single moment with him. He felt paralyzed with shame.
Dennis takes the step when he pushes the man against the wall of the alleyway, his lips against the man’s, his hands around the back of his head. He has to get on the tips of his toes to reach his height. He tries to be soft, exploring, giving the man enough time to escape, enough time to hold Dennis by his nape and throw him away like a runt. He doesn’t. Robby isn’t necessarily soft. Not the gentlest in the hands. He kisses like he is hungry. A starved, desperate man. Dennis lets him.
“You were drunk,” the man said then, “you are drunk.” His voice became incredulous towards the end as if he couldn’t believe the words he was saying. From where he laid on his side Dennis could see the shivering tense muscles on his shoulders.
“You know I wasn’t,” Dennis said, though he knew it was a losing battle. It was a meaningless, soulless conversation. He knew it from the start. Robby couldn’t be convinced. He didn’t want to be convinced. He wanted to flagellate, to lash out as well. He wanted Dennis to say, yes, you fucked up, and so did I, and so did we. He wanted Dennis to hold him by the lapels and shake him, to blame him for taking something. He didn’t seem to understand there was very little Dennis wasn’t willing to give him.
Dennis didn’t understand a lot about the man, not much to go about but puzzle pieces left by odd interactions– him with Jake, him in the pedes the night of the Pittfest, him hugging Dr. Abbot a little longer after a bad shift, one hand steadying Dana when she heard about the case against the man who punched her, and then, at that moment, in bed, bent in half with the guilt of something he constructed.
Whitaker, Robby says to his mouth. No, stop. Dennis does, like a well-trained dog. The brick wall scratches his back. Robby asks how much he had to drink. I can walk a straight line, Dennis promises. He sounds choked up with something he can’t dare name. I would walk through fire, he thinks to himself. They walk back to Robby’s apartment for forty-five minutes instead, just in case. Enough time to sober up. Enough time to escape each other.
As they walk, stumbling through the mostly empty streets, Robby asks him about life, about his friends and his days, though never about medicine. Oh, he says, you live with Santos? Dennis nods. Robby tells him about his own college roommates. At the red light, he pulls Dennis to his chest. He rests his head on the top of his head. You’re cold, he says, surprised. Not really, Dennis thinks, with Robby's chest to his back. He feels like he is burning alive. Robby wraps his arms around him, tighter, like he wants to pull him inside his skin. Dennis has never felt warmer.
“What I know is,” Dr Robby said, and Dennis saw, right then, the moment his self-made guilt tipped into anger. If he wanted to hold Dennis by the ear and give him a mouthful, he would have let him. “What I know is,” he repeated, his voice louder and clearer and angrier, “is that you are not even a doctor yet. You were a child yesterday. It wasn’t– it wasn’t right of me.”
“I am 27 years old,” Dennis said. He refrained from mentioning other things, like how he couldn’t even remember the last time he’d been a child. How he worked on a market stall or a dark, damp church basement or a field for 14 hours a day every day since he was nine. How he spent days of his undergraduate degree on his knees begging for forgiveness. How many nights he spent in a car, then a bench, then an empty hospital wing until Trinity found him. How at night, sometimes he couldn’t tell whether he was imagining the shouting. Dennis was short, a little small and always red-rimmed around the eyes. Some days he felt so old that the grief of a misspent youth bent him in half.
Robby looked at him then, a half-hearted gaze over his shoulder. He didn’t seem convinced.
“I wanted this,” Dennis repeated. He felt as though every word that had left his mouth was from a cheap movie, coy and embellished. He couldn’t say any more than this. He already felt his pastor’s, his father’s, his childhood’s rough hands around his neck. He was already struggling to breath. This, he said, like this could mean more than a night together, like this was a tangible line of thread tying them together, like this could be anything at all. He wished Robby could understand.
He is pushed between Robby and the wall again. The room spins a little. Through the dim light, he watches the partially-lived apartment, the brown leather couch, the empty beer bottle. A picture of Jake on the mantel, looking younger. When they kiss, hard, Robby wraps a hand at the back of his head so it doesn’t hit the wall. Dennis keens into it like a lapdog. Good boy, Robby tells him when he opens his mouth to suck a thumb in. He is only half joking.
“I wanted it,” he repeated. “You are not my attending anymore. I started it.” He thought idly that he should probably get up. Get dressed. Leave and never come back, scrub himself clean, move to another state. His limbs were lead-heavy. He shivered under the covers.
“I shouldn’t have allowed it, then,” Robby replied. He was still facing his hands. “You– you understand that I am in a position of power–” Even when he stammered he spoke in a sterile, calculated voice, the voice of Dr Robby. Then, quietly, he reached a hand to pull a blanket over Dennis, to tuck it under his shoulders, and Dennis thought he had never felt such a blinding, all-consuming bout of anger.
“Don’t,” he shouted, or threatened. Robby’s hand hovered above him, unsure. “Don’t,” he repeated, quietly.
“You are shaking,” Robby said quietly. He sounded wrecked. He sounded soft and sweet, just like he did a while ago while he held Dennis in his arms, when he wasn’t so scared to pull him to his chest.
You are shaking, Robby tells him. Their bodies are still tangled together. They move in tandem. Dennis finds himself unable to speak, choked up by emotion from the tips of his toes to his scalp. His lips feel to heavy. Instead, he brings his hands up and grabs the other man by the shoulders. Robby seems to understand. He bends his head forward until his lips touch Dennis’s hairline, until he is splayed over him like a flesh blanket.
“Don’t,” Dennis said again. He couldn’t bear his kindness, not then. His voice trembled with anger. “You don’t owe me anything. I’m not a patient and I’m not a child.”
“You are neither,” Robby agreed, finally turning to face him. He had this soft, defeated little smile on his face. “But you are still very young, and I am supposed to be a mentor. A teacher. Tonight, I took that from you, and it was wrong of me.”
Dennis stayed quiet.
Afterwards, he stays still, on the cusp of sleep. Robby becomes impossibly gentle. He wipes his skin. He runs a hand through his sweaty hair, pushes a glass of water to his lips. Okay? He asks, with this tiny, mischievous smile knowing now they have a secret known only by the two of them. Dennis nods. He feels overwhelmed with the weight of it all, how beautiful it has been and how dreadfully temporary. But now, just now, Robby presses a kiss to his shoulder and rubs his scalp with the tips of his fingers, and Dennis is alive. If this night brings him eternal damnation, so be it.
“I take full responsibility,” he continued, “and I meant what I said. If you want to pursue emergency medicine, I think you have a brilliant career ahead of you and I will still be a reference. I wrote your letter weeks ago, the night of the Pittfest. This changes nothing.”
It just changed everything, Dennis thought to himself. He just watched the entire world slip off its axis as the man pulled his pants up, as he buckled his belt.
“Please,” the man said from the door, and Dennis didn’t look because they couldn’t be further apart from Eurydice or Orpheus. No. Dennis didn’t look because for some reason warm drops of tears started making their way down his cheeks. Was it really the alcohol? “Help yourself to anything,” Robby said. Dennis could tell he lingered on the door for another second, unsure about what to say, whether to say anything at all, before he heard the door to the apartment open, then close again.
Dennis can almost pinpoint the moment the man changes. How his idle fingers tracing the line of Dennis’s arm falters. How his breath becomes quiet as if he’s too aware of it. How the soft, blissed out look in his eyes is replaced by something boiling over. The moment the morning light starts to shine through the windows, and the carriage turns to pumpkin.
Dennis set an alarm for fifteen minutes. Fifteen more minutes to let himself lie on this bed, in Robby’s room. In his house. Fifteen more minutes to pretend. The pillows smelled like him. Dennis's skin smelled like him.
On his way home, he found himself in a church. It had a brochure on the front window about progressive sermon on Sunday afternoon. Dennis felt weak on the knees. In the confession booth, he couldn’t get the words out between sobs. He cried for many things, most beyond the confines of the previous evening. “I’m sorry,” he begged, clawing at his chest. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry–”
“It’s alright,” the priest said. “God is forgiving. God is graceful.”
Dennis cried harder until he couldn’t.
*
He got in bed with a man who was a little older than him, though that was about where the similarities ended. The guy was rushed and heavy as he fucked him, holding a vice-like grip on Dennis’s chest. Lying under his navy sheets in the moonlight he thought to himself how even when it hurt Robby was never unkind to him. The thought left him as quickly as it came.
*
He didn’t spend all of his time suffering. He still sang in the shower and he fixed the leaky faucet in the kitchen. He taught Trinity how to make home-made bread, how to pickle any vegetable, how to make jam from orange peels the way his mother used to. He went out with her and he enjoyed it. He made friends. He cried on Trinity's shoulder. He held Trinity as she cried. He went out with Javadi to accompany her as she drank her first legal beer. He volunteered with the street team. He read to children. He tried ketamine. Life kept moving.
Only in certain moments he felt incapacitated by guilt, by memories of that night, by memories of nights that followed. Once, he was doing his internal medicine rotation and came across an elderly man getting ready for a whipple. Dennis knew the odds. He tried to be kinder. Gentler.
He didn’t know when he stopped speaking and when he felt the man’s spit slide down his eyelid, accompanied by words he couldn’t repeat to himself. Dennis knew he wasn’t the first doctor to be called a slur. He probably wasn’t the first doctor in PTMC to be called a slur that day, and he’s been peed on and vomited on and bled on countless times before, yet neither had ever felt so permanent. He rubbed his skin with steriliser and hand soap but he couldn’t get the smell of spit. He must have looked desperate enough that even Dr Shamsi was kinder to him than usual. The skin around his left eye and cheek were red from rubbing.
He thought back to almost a year ago, when he was hit by a half-empty can of coke thrown by a TBI patient who couldn’t control his limbs. The coke had hit him on the brow, the open can slicing the soft skin open around the hair. It hadn’t hurt that much, or the hurt wasn’t what he remembered a year later, but rather Dr Robby’s hand on his shoulder as he’d led him to a quiet corner. He had been tender as he cleaned the wound. It’s a badge of honor, he’d said, and Dennis had smiled, because what was there to do but smile, and it was way before that night, yet Dennis was already paralyzed by the guilt of what had been about to happen. All good, Robby had said, slapping a butterfly bandage on his brow. Let’s get some fresh air. Then, he’d stood there by his side until Dennis didn’t feel so weak in the knees.
This time, when he was allowed ten minutes, he found himself on the roof again, though this time it was with the wrong body. Even from the door he could see the silhouette of a body standing too close to the railing. It wasn’t who he hoped to be. It never was. He retreated back like a quiet little mouse, like he could disappear into the drywall if he tried hard enough. He went back to the abandoned wing on the 8th floor instead. For a while, for a while longer than ten minutes, he sat on the empty bed that used to be his and prayed.
*
When Dennis got matched to the Pitt, he was sitting next to Trinity on the couch. He had said he didn’t want to go to the ceremony earlier, said he didn’t enjoy the fanfare. Trinity pretended to believe him, but still got them a bottle of vodka and two party hats.
“I can’t,” Dennis told her as he stared into the blue link on the email. “Just open it.”
Trinity ripped the phone from his hands before he could even get the words out. A second later, she shrieked and the couch they were sitting on started shaking from her jumps. “Holy shit,” Trinity told him, “holy shit, you did it, Huckleberry.”
Dennis took the phone from her hands. Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center. Emergency Department.
Dennis didn’t tell Trinity that despite lying to everyone, he hadn’t put Pitt as his top choice. Then again, in that moment, Trinity jumping on the couch and forcing a shot of vodka to his hands, it felt a little bit like fate. Like he was supposed to go back. Like he was supposed to be here. May God forgive him.
*
You have such soft skin, Robby whispers to him in the dark, sounding drunk and giddy. Younger than he’s ever been. He lands another kiss on the back of his arm. Such soft, beautiful skin.
It’s so easy to believe him.
*
The first day Dennis started work after matching to PTMC for his residency, he found out Dr Robby was on indefinite, unpaid leave. It’s not really indefinite, someone told him, more like, six months or something. He’d come back. Probably.
Somehow, the world kept spinning.
*
Somehow, Samira was the first person to notice, barely a week into his new role. They were sitting in the break room under the flickering light. Dennis pretended he hadn’t been crying at the gruesome death of a pair of siblings in a school bus accident.
“You did everything you could,” Dr Mohan assured him, though Dennis could hear the weakness in her voice. He knew she cared, more than many. He knew that tonight she’d go home and weep for them, just like him.
“They were so little,” Dennis said this time, his voice breaking right in the middle. They had matching flannels. They were holding hands. He rubbed his face as if the brash fingers could stop the incoming tears.
Samira put a gentle hand on his shoulder. “You carry them with you, but you keep going,” she said softly. Dennis looked up at her. He thought that in another life he would’ve been enamoured by her beauty. “You are different this year,” she continued.
“I think I’m going gray,” Dennis tried to joke. He thought he might be paralysed with guilt. He thought he should pray. He thought he should find someone to whip him bloody.
“I don’t think that’s it,” Samira said, and she had this look on her face, this look of half-pity and half-understanding, and Dennis knew. She squeezed harder. He wondered who it was that left her behind.
“You did good,” she repeated. Her hand lingered for a second longer. “You deserve something good, too.”
*
Dennis kept repenting and floating unnoticed until an early morning that summer. It was the dawn after a night out. He was sticky with the overbearing summer heat and shame. Trinity was sitting on the puke-green living room couch when he tried to sneak in, shoes in hand and his hands stealthy as they turned the key. Her eyes were bloodshot and she looked angrier than Dennis had ever seen her. He wished she would hit him. He knew she would never.
Instead, she leapt to her feet at the sight of him. “What the fuck, Dennis?” When she uttered his name instead of a stupid joke or Whitaker, Dennis felt his balance waver. He put one hand on the doorsill to steady himself. He was shivering despite the heat. He wondered whether he finally managed to turn the one person who still cared against him.
He tried to say he just went home with a date, but then he saw that Trinity was staring at the rope burns around his neck. “What happened– what– Dennis–” Then, she shut her mouth, seemingly at a loss for words. Dennis thought she must have remembered her training, gently prodding around his neck like he was her patient.
“Stop,” he said immediately. “It’s not what you think.” He felt too tired to swat her hands away, though they fell quickly like Dennis’s skin was on fire when he flinched. She became uncharacteristically flustered and unsure, hands moving up and down as if she didn’t know what to do with them. Dennis hated to be the cause of such uncertainty in her.
Finally, she dragged him to the couch, not touching his skin but pulling him through the sleeve of his thin jumper and started inspecting the bruise. “You’re telling me that, you, as a fucking doctor, allowed some fucking rando you picked up at the bar to choke you for long enough to leave these marks? On purpose.”
“That’s kinda the point,” Dennis said flatly. In reality, he hadn’t realized just how far he’d taken things until he caught the night bus driver staring at him like he’d just seen a ghost. He only realized how deep the bruise went when his voice came out as a wheeze.
“I know even you are not that stupid,” Trinity told him. She put two palms around his neck, poking around his vertebrae. “There is no safe way to choke, dumbass. Cutting your blood flow like that, you are increasing your risk of a stroke by a million fucking–”
“Stop,” Dennis repeated. His throat burned with shame.
“You stop,” Trinity shouted, and Dennis only then heard the tremor in her voice. “You look like you just got off the noose. You probably need a c-collar, a fucking head scan, do you have any idea about blood clots after– I don’t– I don’t know what’s going in your fucking head–”
“I’m okay,” Dennis said. Trinity stopped and extracted her hands from his throat. His voice was soft, like speaking to a spooked child. “It’s okay. I’m alright. I won’t do it again.” He thought that among everything else, lying wasn’t the worst sin he committed.
Then, unexpectedly, Trinity reached forward and took him to her arms, squeezing hard. “I know something is wrong with you,” she said, her voice more serious than Dennis had ever heard, “I know things are shit back home, and I see you with that fucking kicked-dog expression on your face, but you can’t do that to me. You can’t.”
“I’m not trying to,” Dennis assured her. In reality, he found himself surprised that he was still so sheer, so open to the world.
“Next time you want someone to beat your ass, come to me,” Trinity said. Her voice was still shaky. “And go get yourself some turtlenecks before Dana sees that and calls the cops.” In the end, Dennis ended up sleeping on the living room couch as Trinity refused to let him out of her sight, two of her fingers pressed to his pulse point on his wrist. Dennis let her hold him until she was calm again.