Chapter Text
“Sorry! Sorry!” Santos called, pushing through the doors and into the ED.
Robby was halfway through his morning brief and unimpressed. “So glad you could join us.”
But then Santos glanced up and Robby felt something almost like concern bubble in his gut.
She looked exhausted, hair plastered to the side of her face like she’d been caught in the rainstorm outside. It’s was almost like–
“Did you walk here?” Javadi asked, nose wrinkled in disgust and worry.
Santos grimaced, ducking slightly and she stepped next to McKay in the line up. “Sorry, Dr Robby. I didn’t mean to interrupt.”
It was just pathetic enough that Robby had to look away. There was something truly disconcerting about seeing Santos be cowed by circumstance.
He finished his briefing quickly, assigning the new med students to their residents on gut instinct and the desire for it to be over.
It still stung.
That Javadi had been able to request a second term in the ED and Dennis hadn’t even asked.
He was off in Plastics and Robby tried not to be bitter.
It was that burn patient; he knew Dennis had gone to the widow’s farm after her husband had passed. Seeking redemption or community, Robby wasn’t sure it mattered when it all led here. To an ED without Whitaker and Robby without Dennis.
“Santos,” Robby barked as the med students all fled from his sight like ducklings in front of a fox. “A word?”
God, he missed Dennis. When he’d left, they’d all gone out for drinks and Robby had thought…
Robby had thought Dennis was going to confess something. To say that the reason he hadn’t asked Robby to keep him around was that now at least he wasn’t his superior. That they would be allowed to act on the tension that had bubbled for the entire length of his placement.
But instead, Dennis had looked up at him with wide bright eyes and thanked him.
And then he’d just… left.
Robby pushed into the break room and held the door open for Santos.
“Look, Robby, I really am sorry–”
“I thought you had a car?” Robby asked, wincing when Santos’s trainers squelched as she shifted on her feet. “I approved your parking space myself.” It was next to his and far too close to the hospital for an intern and a med student. But it was one of the only ways Robby had been able to glimpse Dennis when his shift lined up with Santos’s.
“My car’s in the shop,” Santos admitted. “They offered me a replacement but I…”
“But you..?” Robby pushed when Santos trailed off.
“The bus is fine,” she offered, still dripping onto the floor.
Robby crossed his arms and rested his chin against his sternum. “You’re soaked, Santos. Does that seem fine to you?”
“There was a disruption on the route so I walked.” Santos was trying her best to put her intimidating frown on. It was completely ruined when rain water dripped off her ponytail and hit the back of her neck and she shuddered.
“You live an hour’s walk away,” Robby sighed, glanced once at the ceiling, and met Santos’s eyes. “I’m driving you home tonight and, tomorrow morning, I’m picking you up.”
Santos’s mouth dropped open to argue but Robby just raised his voice to cut her off.
“Or do you want to walk in the rain again? Storm’s supposed to get worse overnight and I don’t need you coming in as a patient when you get struck by lightning.” Robby watched as Santos struggled with the idea of accepting help. “I’m not offering, Santos. I don’t need you catching a cold and giving it to half the staff. I stay thirty minutes past end of shift, be by the lockers or I’ll leave without you.”
“Thank you,” Santos whispered, hands shaking from the cold or something more personal. “I’m going to get some fresh scrubs.”
“You do that,” Robby agreed as Santos fled with her proverbial tail tucked between her legs.
It was only twenty minutes later, as Robby helped Santos give CPR to a mugging victim, that he realised that she hadn’t asked how he knew where she lived.
But then the guy’s pulse came back and he had more pressing things to worry about.
*****
“You ready?” Robby called down the hall; Santos, who had been playing on her phone, jumped at the sound of his voice and pushed off from leaning against the lockers.
She nodded, turning to face him fully as he punched in the code for his own locker. “Thanks again.”
“You’re trying too hard,” Robby said, pulling his bag free and wandering down the hall.
Santos balked before trotting to catch up to him. “Excuse me?” It came out far too rude. Too mean. Perfect.
“That’s better,” Robby said, grinning at her as he held open the door that led out to the parking lot.
It was true that he hated seeing Santos try to be polite.
But it was more that he knew he wasn’t offering to help her out of the goodness of his heart; he hadn’t been able to stop thinking about the possibility of seeing Dennis through the window to their apartment when he dropped her off.
If distance made the heart grow fonder, then Robby’s had grown into thick dense briars and Dennis was trapped in the tower of his mind just waiting to be rescued. Robby didn’t know if he was the knight tasked with saving him or the dragon guarding him with a fiery kind of obsession. He wasn’t a hundred percent convinced there was a difference.
“A guy tried to grope me on the bus,” Santos said as she slid into his passenger side seat, bag tucked between her feet and nail digging into her thumb. Her eyes were trained on the middle distance and Robby turned his engine over.
Robby let out a slow breath as his truck rumbled into life. “That’s why you walked?”
Santos nodded, lip kinking in a sneer. “That’s why I…”
“That’s why you were pretending to be someone who said thank you,” Robby finished as he pulled out into the street. “Well, fuck that guy.”
“Yeah,” Santos agreed, kicking her sneakers up to rest on his dash. “Fuck that guy.”
The look Robby gave her would have killed a lesser woman; Santos just gave him a toothy grin.
“Why didn’t you want a replacement car?” Robby asked, driving towards Santos’s house without instruction.
She fiddled with the radio for a while before Robby took pity on her and shoved her feet off his dash.
The noise she made sounded like a curse word without actually putting effort into the shape of it but Robby just opened his passenger side glovebox to reveal about twenty cassette tapes.
“How old are you?” Santos muttered but she dug in nonetheless.
Robby didn’t answer because he knew damn well that she knew he was old as fuck. “The car?”
“I see why you’re single,” Santos muttered before shoving a cassette into the player and cranking the music as loud as it would go.
AC/DC’s Thunderstruck blared through the shitty speakers and Robby let the conversation lie for now.
And, when Santos left her feet on the dirty mat and not the dusty dashboard, he knew they’d reached some sort of ceasefire.
The neighbourhood Santos and Dennis lived in was nice. Really nice. The sort of nice that Robby had only ever seen in his twenties and thirties when leaving a onenight stand’s townhouse in the middle of the night.
He pulled up against the sidewalk and killed the engine. “Nice place.”
“My Mom bought it for me as an apology for marrying a random guy and moving to England when I was seventeen,” Santos said, like it wasn’t a batshit insane thing to drop on him. “She still pays the bills so we have an understanding.”
Robby just bounced his head and gave her a weak smile.
“I’m not inviting you up,” she said before pushing open her door.
“I’ll be here at six-thirty tomorrow morning.” It was earlier than necessary but he was happy waiting on the curb if it meant existing in the same place as Dennis for just a few minutes longer.
His gaze had already drifted to the ground floor windows, dancing across the soft glow that filtered through curtains for the glimpse of a shadow.
“If you come by at six-fifteen, I’ll let you have a coffee?” Santos offered, eyebrow raised when Robby met her eyes. “But you’ll have to put up with Dennis. It’s his day off so he’ll be around… unless he spends the night somewhere else.”
The light glinted across her bared teeth as she grinned but Robby just shot back his own smirk. “Oh, to be young.”
“Young, dumb, and full of–”
“Okay, you’re pushing your luck.” Robby restarted his engine and TNT by AC/DC exploded through the speakers.
“Six-fifteen, old man!” Santos screamed over Bon Scott’s dulcet tones.
Robby just pointed at his ears and shrugged. “My old man hearing isn’t good any more!”
She flipped him off as she swaggered up her stoop; he waited until the door closed safely behind her before pulling away.
But Santos’s words couldn’t be drowned out by even the late-great Scott.
What if Dennis was with someone else right now?
What if he’d found an older man at a bar and was stumbling through the door of a very different town house right now?
What if they didn’t even make it out of the club?
What if Dennis was in a bathroom stall somewhere with someone who wasn’t Robby?
Robby barely made it back to his house before he collapsed against his front door and shoved a hand down his pants, thinking of wide baby blue eyes and soft blonde curls.