Work Text:
You won't see me cry.
But you can see me bleed,
that's the next best thing I can offer.
Lena Oleanderson,
The Next Best Thing
Before I told you all the things
I was always going to tell you eventually,
I let you take my blood.
Lena Oleanderson,
Medschool Friends
When Jack Abbot asks, “Wanna be partners?” Michael Robinavitch’s instinctive answer is yes.
Or rather, when Jack Abbot asks, “Wanna be partners?” Michael Robinavitch forgets where they are for a good long moment. Forgets to situate the question in the current context of their MS2 ambulatory care elective, about to perform venipuncture on a living, breathing human being for only the second time.
Robby likes the way Jack lives, how he takes up space like he isn’t afraid to do so. It’s not arrogance; it’s tilled soil, something worked for. He likes the way Jack breathes, too, hot air exhaled against the knobs of his spine right before he pushes in—
“Come on, Robinavitch.” A bit of a tease. “What do you say?”
It’s a given. Robby says as much, trying for casual only for it to come out quiet, earnest. He may as well be wearing a sign: I’ve trusted you with my body, of course I trust you with my blood.
Jack smiles in response. A real one this time, all swagger gone and a fledgling left in its wake.
—
The prep is strangely intimate, even and perhaps especially in plain view of their cohort. Their classmates have no reason to interpret the tableau in any way other than peer practice, but that does little to change the fact that it still feels like a confession to touch each other so openly.
“Aren’t you forgetting something?” Robby asks as Jack draws his sleeve up with familiar fingers and loops the cornflower blue tourniquet around his arm.
Jack scans the tray in front of him. Topical antiseptic, gauze, 21-gauge needle, EDTA tubes with smart purple caps. His hands are washed, gloves donned. He raises an eyebrow in question.
“You’re always supposed to ask the patient if they have a latex allergy. You could have killed me, Jack,” he chides playfully.
Jack’s ensuing smile is slow, silky. He hums as he ties the tourniquet tight. Then, murmured: “But in this case, I already know that the patient doesn’t.”
And Robby—well.
Robby flushes a deep red at that.
—
The last time they were due for peer practice, Jack didn’t show. Some formal dinner for the Health Professions Scholarship Program, he’d recounted with disdain, and Robby had bitten his tongue instead of voicing the thought that came to mind—namely, that if the dog and pony show was already grating on Jack, he had a long road ahead: two and some change more years of med school, then one year of active duty for each year of financial aid. But he was not one to judge and watched instead as Jack rid himself of his dress uniform one article at a time, all while going on about the HPSP donors and program staff who looked right through him, or worse, looked at him like he was a piece of meat.
(He wasn’t, Robby assured him, but he still sank his knees into the carpet of the graduate apartment they shared and sucked him off after, and Jack still enjoyed it, very much.)
Because of the prior conflict, though, Jack has never done a live draw before, a fact that thrills Robby. Not because it’s a rare advantage he has on Jack, but because it means he gets to be Jack’s first in the way that Jack has been so many of Robby’s: his first time kissing a guy, his first time being fucked, his first time feeling the swoop of something distinctly more deep in his belly, hungry and needy and sweet.
“Gimme a fist.”
Robby dutifully obeys. Watches with widening pupils as Jack traces the veins that are now plumper in his arm. Like they’ve been taught, Jack palpates the vein with two fingers, a slow roll. He’s done the same with other veins on Robby’s body, speed-running their first-year anatomy curriculum. Great saphenous: the interior of his thigh. Deep dorsal: down the length of his cock. He feels a throb at the memory, and Jack looks at him with that unwavering stare of his like he knows.
Eventually, Jack finds Robby’s median cubital vein, nestled in the crease of his elbow. He goes through the steps with a kind of reverence: cool, concentric circles with the alcohol swab, pulling the site taut with a thumb, inserting the needle.
“Relax,” Jack rumbles, not unlike the way he told him when he fucked him the first time. I’ll make it good. Then, like now, there had also been a breach, then relief and a great bloom of warmth.
—
Jack’s hands are steady and sure but Robby bruises anyway. And oh, how that thrills Robby, too.
—
It isn’t until later, with Jack sprawled out beside him, his chest sticky and heaving, that Robby is able to label the feeling.
The closest frame of reference he has for it is grief. An awareness of something missing, phantom pains. Wishes with sudden fervor that they could go back in time and redo first-year histology lab, but together this time and using his own blood. It would be easier to show Jack how he feels, how Jack has rearranged him on a cellular level. So much simpler a means of communication to swab his blood onto a glass plate and stain it for viewing under the microscope; less risky and open to refute this way than saying the words, I think I love you.
As if reading his mind, Jack lolls his head to look at him. He’s stopped panting, but his curls are still damp with sweat, darker red at his temples. “You good, brother?”
Robby looks at him for a moment longer. Where would he even begin?
“Just thinking,” he settles with.
“Uh oh.”
Robby swats at him at the cheeky response, but Jack is faster, knows him and therefore knows to expect it, and catches the offending hand. Drags his mouth up the length of Robby’s arm until he finds the bruise and presses his mouth to it so insistently that Robby groans, simply has no choice but to tug Jack up for another round, begin again and again.