Chapter Text
I’ve been singing that song again
another ballad that won’t make amends
it’s been giving me nightmares again
and they don’t end
chvrches - nightmares
~
A little after 3:00PM, Santos approaches him. Looking back, he should have seen this as a sign of just how strange the entire day was about to get.
“Do you have a second?” she asks, and he looks around, sure she must be addressing someone else.
“You want to talk to me?”
“Don’t make it weird,” she says, and leads the way to an empty exam room. Langdon trails along behind her, his mind racing with a dozen scenarios for how this conversation could play out. He wasn’t prepared for this. He’s drafted some version of everybody’s amends, except hers.
She closes the door behind them, and then turns to face him. Looks at him in silence for a minute.
Being alone with her, with no patient as a buffer between them, brings the memories back in vivid, terrible detail. He remembers screaming at her in front of a room full of people — a brand new intern, on her first day. He’d been outside of himself, possessed by withdrawal, the plummeting GABA levels in his brain making everything too sharp and too loud. She’d held up remarkably well. Most day one interns would have cried. Hell, he probably would have cried.
“There’s something off with Dr. Robby,” she says, and he pauses, disoriented.
“Off, how?”
“I just watched him lose it at a patient’s family, over basically nothing. They were on the fence about signing a consent form, the dad was being a dick, but nothing unusual. And Robby just went off on them. Yelled in the guy’s face.”
“Huh. Okay. Well, Robby can get heated when he’s advocating for his patients.”
“This wasn’t that. A couple hours ago, he just shrugged off social services separating two siblings whose parents got deported by ICE. It’s like he doesn’t give a shit at all any more.”
Langdon thinks back over the day, their scarce and painful interactions. The truth is that Robby feels like a complete stranger to him, chilly and remote and even a little cruel. But he’d assumed that was him-specific. Robby used to love him, and now Robby hates him, and that’s why he’s acting like he's been bodysnatched. It hadn’t occurred to him that there could be something bigger going on, something beyond him.
Personalization, one of his therapists at rehab had called it. A cognitive bias that puts you at the center of a situation, and discounts everything that’s going on outside of you. Basically a polite way of saying get over yourself. He’s still working on that.
Santos is looking expectantly at him.
“Okay. Why are you telling me this?”
“I thought you might care.”
“I do care, but—”
“Abbott’s gone for the day, the new attending already hates my guts, and I don’t know who else to tell. And I thought you two were friends. That’s the whole reason you’re back, isn’t it?”
“We were,” he says, too sharply. He sees Santos react instantly to his shift in tone, her eyes hardening.
“I’m not blaming you,” he adds quickly. “I’m just saying, I don’t think Robby would call us friends any more.”
“Look, believe it or not, I’m really not trying to get into anybody else’s business. I don’t spend my time deliberately trying to stir shit.”
“I didn’t say you did.”
“I’m not—” She clasps her hands together, looking unusually nervous. “There’s something else. About Robby. I might be overreacting.”
“You have good instincts,” he tells her. “I’m proof of that.”
She makes eye contact with him then. Sees that he means it.
“Did you do a psych rotation?”
“Yeah.”
“You run suicide risk assessments?”
“Sure.”
“That last question on the Columbia, where it asks about preparations. Not just preparing to kill yourself, but selling stuff, giving stuff away. That’s one of the biggest flags for escalation.”
“Making arrangements,” he nods. “I know. And?”
She’s quiet, for just long enough for a curl of anxiety to form in his stomach.
“What does this have to do with Robby?”
“Robby offered Whitaker his apartment. He called it house-sitting, but then he made this comment like… if I don’t come back, you can keep it.”
“What?”
“It was probably a joke,” she says, unconvincingly. And a memory’s coming back to Langdon now, one he’d almost forced himself to forget.
The day after his return to work had been confirmed, he’d caught the T over to the hospital for the first time in months. It felt strange and a little creepy, like he was haunting his own commute, but he’d felt this profound need to see the place again. Walking up East North Avenue, he'd seen Robby on a motorbike. At first, the sight was so incongruous he was sure he was hallucinating. But then, Robby had looked right at him, and there was no doubt at all that it was him, because he wasn’t wearing a helmet.
The light had turned, and Robby had sped away so fast that afterwards, Langdon went back to wondering if he’d imagined the whole thing.
“Oh, God,” he says quietly. The apartment. The no-helmet. The dead-behind-the-eyes sense of calm Robby’s been projecting all day. In isolation, these things could all mean nothing, but together, they feel terrifying.
“Again, maybe I’m overreacting. And I really don’t want him to know this came from me, so just— keep my name out of it, whatever you do with it.”
He sinks onto a stool, feeling suddenly dizzy.
“Have you told anyone else about this?”
“No. Not even Huckleberry. I don’t think he suspects anything. His innocent farm boy mind couldn’t conceive of such dark notions.”
He looks up at her.
“Why did you make the connection so fast?”
“I’ve missed the signs before.”
“In a patient?”
She shakes her head.
“Not a patient.”
“Sorry.”
“Yeah, well. Lesson learned.”
“Dr. Santos,” he says then, because he can see she’s itching to leave and maybe he won’t get another chance. “I've been wanting to find the right time to say this. I’m truly sorry for the way I treated you last year. It was wildly unprofessional, and I was—”
“We don’t need to do all that,” she interrupts, not looking directly at him. “It’s cool. You stay out of my way, I’ll stay out of yours, yeah?”
“Okay. Fair enough.”
She turns and darts out of the door, leaving Langdon reeling. His mind feels agonisingly slow, struggling to process these fragmented new pieces of information. He knows there’s a good chance Santos is overreacting, reading way too much into a totally benign situation, and he’s getting drawn into it because apparently they’re both catastrophizers.
Still, he forces himself to his feet, because there’s only one way to find out. Despite spending half the day begging for scraps of Robby’s attention, he realizes he hasn’t actually been seeing him. He’s been so blinded by his own need for forgiveness and validation that he’s missed the possibility that Robby’s in trouble himself. It’s ten months ago, all over again.
But no, he reminds himself, no it’s not. Now, he’s got a clear head and a steady hand and a somewhat regulated nervous system, and he’s newly strong in some of the places where Robby is weak. Maybe strong enough that he can save him.