Chapter Text
“What are you doing up here?"
Dennis turns around quickly, startled. He'd been alone in the ward, or rather the only non-patient, for sometime now. He thinks the nurse behind the desk stepped out for a moment, knowing there was a doctor hovering.
Dennis doesn't blame her. She's the only one covering the recovery ward that he can see, but who knows how these odd places work? The in between spaces of a hospital, where action doesn't happen or is considerably muted.
He gets a sense of dread, thinking about those spaces. And yet here he stands in one, the light dimmed, the patients recovering behind the glass of private rooms, and it's so quiet.
He's so unsettled.
And now there's Park the Shark watching him, brow furrowed. He looks as mean as Dennis knows he can be. Humourless, intimidating, scathing. And his presence here only makes Dennis feel worse.
“I wanted to see if Mrs Mullaney made it," Dennis says, tone as flat and dull as a cardboard box. He coughs, tries to regain some inflection, but his energy has flatlined and he can't bring himself to do anything but skulk away.
"She wasn't my patient, so I wouldn't know,” Park says unhelpfully, and Dennis rolls his eyes up at him when he passes. Park simply glares in response.
Dennis leaves the room, hopes the nurse will come back soon, but he's not going to stick around. He's found what he was looking for and now he can go home with the grief of it.
There's so much grief, recently. So much regret. He doesn't actually want to go back to Robby's sad bachelor pad, wishes he'd never accepted the offer of moving in whilst Robby went on his ever-extending sabbatical. It's lonely there. He's surrounded by things that don't belong to him. They all belong to some ghost of man who has now, apparently, ended up in Europe after making the journey across the Atlantic on a fucking ship.
For the bike, obviously.
So, that's what Dennis is doing, walking out of Recovery and away from whatever he hadn't found there.
Park walks after him. Dennis can hear his surgery friendly Crocs squeak on the linoleum flooring. It's not a nice feeling to have a shark at your back, to have one watching you and assessing you and thinking about how you move and act and look vulnerable.
And it doesn't help that Park feels too close behind him.
Dennis moves to the side and makes a sweeping gesture for Park to move past him. Park scowls in what looks like disgust. “Go on," Dennis grunts. Park stands there, just watching. Perhaps, Dennis thinks, he doesn't know what to do with the instruction. Perhaps he's bamboozled by someone noticing the predator and giving it an order like one would a dog.
They stand at a stalemate. Dennis could move on, keep walking or even double back for the stairs. He could get away from this moment, but it's darkly amusing, and a sight better than the angst he'd been feeling moments before Park showed up.
"You were walking too close,” he says eventually, arms crossed, sourly pouting. "It's rude, you know?”
"You're a slow walker,” Park returns, eyebrow raised like he thinks he knows a thing or two more than Dennis ever could hope to know.
But Dennis is tired, unhappy, regretful and feeling all of it, feeling every single nuance of this shit show he's ended up in for the past six months.
So he's unfiltered when he rounds to face Park straight on. "I'm an emergency medicine physician. I run rings around you lazy ass surgeons, asshole.”
Park balks at first, and it's quite the sight to see him knocked off kilter. He's usually so buttoned up tight, infallible. Dennis was certain, up to this point, that Park the fucking Shark had never had a moment of self doubt in his life. Sure, too, that he was too frightening to be intimidated or shocked or even notice when he was being challenged.
Rumor has it that even Park’s superior, the chief of orthopedics, simply has the bigger salary, not the bigger authority. Park is said to quietly run the show, putting everyone in the places he wants them to be, having slotted himself into that role without any contest.
So it's quite the thing to have said enough to shut Park's dry, acerbic response right down. The surgeon is silent for a while, even after schooling himself back into the untouchable man he presents himself as.
Then, having concluded whatever it is that he was thinking, Park reaches out with a long, impressively muscled arm and shoves Dennis out of the way as he passes.
Oh, well, Dennis (who is tired and angry and and the end of his rope with the misery inside of himself) decides he can't let the aggression slide, and so awkwardly takes off his shoe, hopping on one foot as he does.
And then he throws it at the top of Park's back. He thinks about throwing it as the back of the man's head, but he's too aware of the risk, and so settles for near proximity. It sends the same message, or close enough.
Park turns around, furious and astounded, eyes blazing with oncoming recompense. Dennis takes off his other shoe, gears himself up to throw it if Park even moves a step towards him.
“Try it again, you little shit, and I'll–”
"What?” Dennis spits. "Report me? Try to get me fired? Everyone knows you treat me like shit… I mean, you treat everyone like shit, but I get it worse than anyone else. Since the day you met me. Who'd you think they're going to believe? The intern that everyone has seen you pick on, or the dickhead ortho that no one fucking likes?”
“I have seniority," Park says as he advances on Dennis. The shoe gets raised promisingly. Dennis is so blinded by his indignation that he doesn't even consider the consequences of throwing it at Park's face, just hopes Park will give him a reason to do it. “What I say holds weight."
Dennis pulls back to throw the shoe. "Let's see, huh?” he says. He lets the shoe loose, right at Park's head, and Park dodges the full whack, but it still clips his ear.
His chest is heaving with rage. "You want to know what people say about you?” Park seethes. "You're not so popular yourself. A lot of people think you got special treatment from Robinavitch by getting on your hands and knees."
It would be funny if it wasn't so degrading, but Dennis laughs anyway. It's a dark laugh, punched out of his chest, all power in the back of his throat. But it bursts something open in him, that door that kept the vortex of hurt from getting out in one intact structure.
But then Park's words settle inside his chest and Dennis feels the seismic shift from bitterly amused to grief. It's all because he knows that people think Robby was fucking him. For fuck's sake, Robby has put Dennis in his goddamned will to inherit his apartment and car and everything material he owns. And people know about this because of Jack and Jack's big fucking mouth.
Dennis' laugh turns into a sob, and he can't take his eyes off of Shark's maddened gaze, even when the image of the man turns watery.
“You think I was fucking Robby?” he asks, voice strained and horrible. "Robby was my mentor. My idol. And he's gone, and I don't know if he's coming back, or if he's somewhere in Europe hanging from the end of a goddamn rope. And he's managed to keep me in a chokehold, looking after his apartment, unable to leave, unable to repair my relationship with Trinity, unable to repair my friendship with Amy. So no, I never fucked Robby, I never wanted to. I only worshipped the ground he walked on, and worked hard for his approval."
Park is just watching him, always watching, so still. He's unreadable. Dennis falters again. “And let me guess. You've been listening to Garcia, who was only too happy to get in Trinity's ear about why I moved out.”
"Insider information,” Park says, almost smirking. "And your crying ‘cause I hit a nerve. No smoke without fire.”
Dennis sees red, wants to step forward and punch Park and break his nose and watch blood pour. He's desperate for a fight, would take on the Goliath in front of him even though he knows Park would triumph. But still, even being beaten down right now would alleviate some of the agony, some of the slow surrender to the bedlam of his inner life.
But the tears have immobilised him.
"I'm crying because I've had a bad fucking day," he snaps. “A bad six months. I'm lonely, and I don't want to go back to Robby's again and sit around all his stuff, wondering if at some point I'm going to be left with it because he's gone and killed himself. And I'm fucking angry about Mullaney and the fact she survived. I'm angry I had to keep her alive! She gets to live even though she tortured her kids. And I'm tired because I work in the ED. So that's why I'm crying."
Dennis turns his back on Park and sobs, wipes his eyes, keeps sobbing. He feels it all, every grain of suffering that he's hidden away since Robby left.
He hopes Park has walked away, even waits to hear the elevator ding, but nothing comes. He looks over his shoulder and glares when he sees Park still standing there, observing, assessing. It stops the sadness, flings him back to anger.
"Fucking hell, Park, just fuck off.”
Park sighs. Dennis folds, takes himself to sit down on the floor with his back to the wall, knees drawn up, forehead against them.
“Robby's always been like that," Park says after a while. His tone is flat, but he still has a power that commands Dennis to listen. Dennis' shoes clunk down beside him, he sees them in the little gap between thigh and body. “He's always been incredible in the ER and shitty outside of it. I've known him ten years and each year there's some fucking gossip running through the hospital about fucked up things he's done. I'm sorry you're the most recent.”
Dennis scoffs despondently.
When he looks up, Park is at the elevator, back to him, still again and waiting again and almost unnatural.
His words resound in Dennis' ears.
I'm sorry
fucked up things he's done
Robby's always been like that
“What shitty things?" Dennis calls out, the need to settle the maw inside of himself hungry for something to humanise Robby. So far, Dennis has been unable to properly do it, to reduce Robby from a mad god to a flawed human. Even living around Robby's things, slowly becoming braver to open up drawers and see inside and find out parts of what Robby keeps hidden, he's still failed to take Robby off the pedestal.
Park looks over his shoulder. "You're not the first intern that he's picked up and dropped when it suits him. And the man's had several harassment accusations thrown at him. He's got tenure, and those people didn't. You can guess who won each time.”
Absolute gutting shame slices into him. It opens up Dennis' belly and lays him out wide open, lets acid and salt water and alcohol pour over all the livewire nerve endings, skewing his perspective of the world, of the man he has idolized.
The elevator dings as it opens and Park gets in, levels a look at Dennis that doesn't convey much at all. "Do yourself a favour and move out of his apartment. Get your life back on track. Robinavitch ain't worth this."
The doors begin to close, and Dennis knows he crumples, knows it's pathetic that he'd rather be at odds with the shark than being alone.
Suddenly, Park thrusts his hand out and holds the doors open. “Come on," he says grumpily, like Dennis has made a request that Park obliges longsufferingly. Dennis doesn't move. "Come the fuck on. You don't want to go back to Robby's, and I'm waiting around on call. If I get a case, you can scrub in.”
"I just threw two shoes at you,” Dennis says incredulously. One of his eyebrows raises. "And you're inviting me into your OR?”
"Telling you,” Park says.
It's very compelling. Enough, it seems, to delete the tiredness from his mind. He smiles despite himself as he stands and makes his way to the elevator, shoes still off, dangling from his fingers.
Park keeps the doors open right up until Dennis is securely inside. It's then that Dennis realizes how strong the man is, the way his muscles flex from the pressure he's applying to the mechanism. And tall, too. Very, very tall.
"I'm sorry I threw my shoes at you,” he tells the surgeon earnestly.
"Don't be,” Park replies, letting the doors go, pressing his floor number. As the elevator begins moving he gives an amused scoff. “I've never respected an intern more."
“You're insane," Dennis says.
“I'm being honest. It took guts." Then he looks seriously at Dennis, so intensely that Dennis feels arrested by it. “Robinavitch doesn't deserve your loyalty. You're a fierce little thing, and you shouldn't let anyone take it from you."
“That is a very warm compliment," Dennis teases, albeit uneasily.
It's also a little suggestive, if he thinks about it.
And standing there, looking up at Park with his mysterious facade, Dennis realizes that maybe he might just like antagonising a compliment out of him.