Chapter Text
Dennis told himself he chose the Pitt for the program.
It was a good program, that was true. He'd said it to his mother, to his med school friends, to the match coordinator who'd processed his paperwork with the mild interest of someone who had stopped finding residency choices surprising. He'd said it enough times that it had started to feel like something that was true because he'd said it, which was not quite the same as being true, but was close enough that he'd stopped examining the difference.
He stopped not examining it approximately forty seconds into his first shift, when he turned the corner by the nursing station and nearly walked into Dr. Robonavitch.
"Den." Robby's face opened up, immediate, like a door swinging wide. He had both hands free and he used them, one landing on Dennis's shoulder and staying there with the easy permanence of someone who didn't think about whether touching people was appropriate, it just was. "You're back. You actually came back."
"I matched here." Dennis replied, which was not the most eloquent thing he'd ever said.
"You matched here," Robby agreed, grinning, like this was something Dennis had done for him personally. His hand was still on Dennis's shoulder. "How does it feel? Different?"
It felt exactly the same and completely different and Dennis didn't know how to say that. "Ask me in a week," was the response he chose.
Robby laughed. It was the laugh Dennis had been hearing in his head for several months without quite admitting that was what he was doing. "Fair enough. You're on days this week?"
"Days this week." Dennis confirmed.
"Good." Robby's hand moved from his shoulder to the back of his neck briefly—just a touch, quick, the way Robby had always touched him—and then he was already pointing Dennis toward the locker room. "Go find your locker. Come find me after orientation if you have questions. I mean that. Any questions, not just the ones you think are worth my time. All of them." He said it the way he said most things, like it was obvious, like Dennis coming to find him with questions was simply a fact of how things were going to work. Dennis felt something in his chest do a small complicated thing and looked away from it.
"Okay," he said. "Thanks."
"Don't thank me," Robby said, already moving. "Just do it."
Dennis watched him go, onto the next thing, the way Robby moved through his ED, constant and everywhere at once. He stood in the corridor for a moment.
Then he went to find his locker.
---
The morning was unremarkable in the way first mornings were unremarkable. Orientation material he'd already read, a tour of a floor he already knew, introductions to attendings he'd already met. He shook hands and nodded and said the right things and noted, in the back of his mind, that the Pitt looked exactly the same as it had months ago and felt subtly different in a way he couldn't locate.
He was shown to his first patient. He read the chart. He went in.
The patient was seventy-three, post-surgical, uncomplicated. She looked him over when he came in and said "You're young."
"I get that," Dennis said.
"Are you good?" She was watching him closely.
He thought about it honestly. "I'm getting there," he said.
She seemed to find this acceptable. He took her history and did his assessment and wrote his notes and felt, by the end of it, slightly more like himself. This was the part he knew how to do. This was why he was here.
He was almost convinced by the time he got back to the nursing station.
---
Robby found him at eleven-thirty.
Dennis was in the middle of writing up a consult note, fully focused, when Robby appeared at his elbow with a coffee—not from the machine down the corridor, from somewhere better, which meant he'd gone out of his way—and set it beside Dennis's hand without interrupting him.
Dennis finished the sentence he was writing. Then he looked at the coffee. Then at Robby, who was reading something on his own phone with the air of a man who had not just walked out of his way to bring an intern coffee.
"You didn't have to do that." Dennis sighed.
"I was getting one anyway." Robby shrugged, which Dennis was fairly certain was not true, since Robby wasn't holding a coffee cup. "How's the consult?"
"Straightforward." Dennis picked up the coffee. It was good, the right place, the right order, which meant Robby either remembered from his MS4 rotation or had asked Trinity, and both of those options were doing something Dennis didn't want to look at directly. "Cardiology's going to want more imaging."
"They always do." Robby glanced over at Dennis's notes. Not reading them, just checking, the peripheral attention of an attending who had learned to monitor without hovering. "You look less terrified than this morning."
"I wasn't terrified this morning." Dennis huffed.
"You were a little terrified." Robby joked, his hand gently resting on Dennis's nape for a moment, giving him a shake.
Dennis had been a little terrified. "I was recalibrating," was what he chose to say.
Robby made a sound that was almost a laugh. "Recalibrating." He said it with a warmth that meant he found it endearing, which was worse somehow than if he'd found it funny. "Okay. How's the recalibration going?"
"Better," Dennis said. He meant it. The shift had steadied him, the work had steadied him, the way it always did, the way he'd been counting on it to. The floor felt familiar under his feet again. The coffee helped.
"Good." Robby's hand landed on his shoulder briefly, the same as this morning, easy and unhurried. "You're going to be fine here, Den. You know that, right?"
Dennis looked at him. At the direct, uncomplicated certainty of it — not encouragement for its own sake, not an attending managing a nervous intern, just Robby saying a true thing like it was obvious.
"Yeah," Dennis said. "I think so."
Robby held his gaze for a moment, something in his expression that Dennis couldn't quite read, and then nodded once and moved on.
Dennis looked back at his notes and read the same line three times before he could make himself take it in.
---
The afternoon was busier. Two more admissions, a consult that needed chasing, a set of labs that came back wrong and had to be reordered. Dennis moved through it and found his pace, the rhythm of a floor that was starting to become familiar, the remembered knowledge of where things were and who to ask that came from having been here before, even briefly.
At two o'clock he heard it.
Click
He was across the floor, chart in hand, when the sound came—small, plastic, precise—and his body responded before his brain did. A full-stop. A half-second of complete system interruption, every process pausing at once, attention snapping to the source before he'd made a decision to look.
Robby. At the nursing station, twenty feet away, clicker in hand, saying something to a second-year resident who had just, apparently, done something worth clicking for. The resident looked pleased in a slightly confused way. Robby was already onto the next thing, except that his eyes cut sideways across the floor and found Dennis standing there not moving.
Brief eye contact.
Robby's expression gave away nothing. He looked back at the resident, said something else, moved on.
Dennis stood at the nursing station and waited for his brain to restart.
It took longer than he was going to admit to anyone.
He looked down at the chart in his hands. He'd been holding it tightly enough that he'd creased the corner. He smoothed it out with his thumb. He read the same line three times without taking it in.
He was completely fine.
He put the chart down and went to find his next patient and did not think about the way his whole nervous system had just reoriented toward a sound from twenty feet away.
He was absolutely fine.
Robby wasn't supposed to be the one with the clicker.
He was definitely fine.
---
At four o'clock he had a patient who was not straightforward.
She was forty-one, presenting with chest pain, which turned out to be three things at once. A musculoskeletal component that had masked a cardiac component that had masked something else underneath that Dennis had to dig for. He dug for it. He called the consult he needed, ran the workup, sat with the uncertainty while the results came back and didn't let any of it show in his manner because she was frightened and frightened patients needed someone in the room who was not also frightened.
The results came back. He'd been right. The plan was right. He wrote the orders and went out into the corridor and stood against the wall for thirty seconds.
"Good work."
He looked up. Robby, passing with a chart, not stopping, the words tossed back over his shoulder like they were incidental.
Dennis stood in the corridor and felt them land anyway.
He thought about the clicker. About the sound of it from across the floor. About the way his body had stopped without his permission.
Robby had not used the clicker just now. He'd just said good work in a corridor and kept walking and Dennis had felt it in the same place he always felt it, and that was—
He pushed off the wall and went back to his patient.
That was something he was going to think about later.
---
At the end of the shift Robby found him at the workroom door.
"How was it?" Robby asked. Hands in his pockets, shoulder against the doorframe, the posture of a man who had nowhere to be and had decided to be here instead.
"Good," Dennis said. "One complicated one in the afternoon. The rest were uncomplicated."
"The chest pain in bay four?"
"Yeah."
"I saw your workup." Robby said it the way Abbot said things—flat, factual—and then ruined the Abbot impression completely by adding "It was really thorough, Den. You caught something that was easy to miss. That was good clinical instinct."
Dennis looked at him. At the easy, unguarded way he said it. No clicker, no theatre, just Robby in a doorframe telling him something true. This was what Robby had said he was going to do, back in that bar, months ago.
"Thanks," Dennis said.
"I mean it." Robby tilted his head. "You going to be okay?"
"Yeah," Dennis said. "I think so."
"Good." Robby pushed off the doorframe. "Get some sleep. You look like you've been thinking too hard."
Dennis had, in fact, been thinking too hard. "I'll work on it," he said.
Robby grinned. Pointed at him in the way that meant I'm holding you to that and headed off down the corridor, already pulling out his phone, already onto the next thing.
Dennis watched him go.
He gathered his things and went to find the bus.
Third seat from the back. Right side.
He sat down and looked out the window at Pittsburgh going grey into evening and thought about the click from across the floor. The way his body had stopped, the way the eye contact had lasted exactly as long as it needed to and not one second longer, the way he still didn't know whether Robby had noticed his reaction or whether he'd imagined the noticing.
He thought about good work in a corridor with no clicker, landing in the same place anyway.
He thought about how much it reminded him of Abbot.
He thought about the coffee from the right place. The hand on the back of his neck. Come find me with all of them.
He'd matched here.
He looked at his own reflection in the dark bus window and didn't finish that thought, because finishing it would mean looking directly at something he'd been looking away from for months, and he wasn't ready to do that yet.
The bus went on. Pittsburgh went grey.
He wasn't ready yet.