Chapter Text
In both of their defenses, it wasn't like they planned it.
Blame it on the decision making skills of an intern and R2’s brains on hour fourteen of their shift. Maybe (though she would adamantly deny it) Trinity had seen something familiar, felt a familiar tug, felt the same urge to protect, god protect them that she’d had earlier that day with every other kid who ended up in this place as she sang a lullaby. Maybe it was all those farm nights, sleeping in Amy’s spare room and getting up to feed Theo a bottle. Wearing the pajamas of a dead man and holding his kid, Dennis remembered similar nights in Nebraska where everybody would pitch in with his nephew’s feedings so his sisters-in-law could sleep.
Maybe it was a lack of faith in the foster-care system, just another damn way for the system to fail vulnerable kids. It wasn’t like Trinity would be able to vet whoever took her, would be able to make sure she was safe. Maybe Dennis over-empathised with whatever other soul was finding shelter in an unlikely hospital room.
But the point is, they’ve had Jane for a week. Jane. Placeholder name. Not theirs to decide.
When Dennis had mentioned this to Amy, as she passed along Theo’s outgrown baby clothes and bassinet, she had quirked her head. ‘That’s what my parents used to say about the cows. Don’t name them yourself or you get attached.’
Trinity had scowled and tugged the box more forcefully out of Amy’s grip. ‘She’s a baby, not a farm animal.’
And Jesus, is Jane a baby.
Most of their mornings now start like this: Jane wakes them with a hungry scream. Somebody will scoop her up, cooing and rocking, and somebody else will stumble to make coffee. As the machine gurgled and drips, they’ll fix a bottle for baby Jane and two plates of eggs.
Depending on what day of the week it is, Dennis will get ready for work. He’d barely been an intern for a week before Jane crash landed into their lives. Go figure. He’s the landing site for enough liquids these days, throw in some baby puke.
Intern year with a newborn is a strange sort of Sisyphean battle, but Dennis feels like the boulder more than the man these days. There’s a baby in his apartment, a baby that, half the week, lies in a bassinet beside his bed and stares up at him with trusting eyes. When Trinity looks more dead on her feet than normal, he violates a sacred rule and brings baby Jane to Robby’s house for a few hours while he waters the plants. She screams for his attention. She screams when she’s hungry. She screams a lot in general. She screams most of all in Robby’s. Dennis kind of gets it.
Trinity, on the other hand, has not told a soul about baby Jane. As far as the emergency department is concerned, baby Jane Doe went to a loving foster home (technically true) and in an unrelated incident, Santos cashed in all her vacation days to get a great aunt’s affairs in order in the Philippines.
Poor phone reception, since she’s got a shitty cell plan. Don’t call, don’t text, don’t contact at all. The paperwork sits tucked away in some file in Gloria’s office. Word travels fast in the ED, and in defence, Dennis has been sworn to silence.
‘You’re going to drive me crazy, yes you are’ coos Trinity. Dennis watches her from the kitchen as she rocks a sobbing Jane back and forth. She glances up at Dennis. ‘And you’re probably going to die of dehydration before that if Huckleberry doesn’t give me your bottle soon.’
It’s a strange sight. Dennis has never considered Santos to be gentle before.
Don’t get him wrong - he knows better than most how Trinity operates. All bluster and no bite; making fun him of him for busting his finger but treated it so carefully he barely noticed until the relief came, grumbles bitterly about how he eats her food but leaves her avocados on his shelves once they’d ripened. Sometimes when Trinity makes him hate watch Grey’s anatomy with her, she kicks him when he complains about the medicine but touches her feet against his leg. He considers it possibly the sincerest affection she can grant a random guy who lives in her spare room.
But still: Trinity Santos, rocking a baby. Wonders never cease.
‘Here,’ says Dennis. He offers her the bottle but Trinity’s eyes flicker to the coffee mug in his other hand. ‘Or - swap?’
Trinity’s eyes brighten. She’s been bearing the brunt of baby Jane - near 24 hour surveillance of a kid that isn’t hers - and Dennis doesn’t really know what that does to the brain. He feels even more like dead weight these days, and he’s barely got half of the baby time she does. Granted, he’s also been on the regular 12 hour shifts but - that’s a tired he’s familiar with, a tired that he’s driven to Amy’s with as a companion and chucked around hay and cattle feed with.
He remembers Amy, in the month or two immediately after Theo. Her mother had stayed with her intermittently, but not often enough to make much difference. Her tired had just about matched his.
At work, Dennis flits around and is a cog in a several person machine to keep a person alive for a few hours of their life. It’s important work. It’s exhausting, but he likes it. Very much. But watching Amy, watching the moving parts of keeping a tiny, little, dependent human alive and not just for a stressful thirty minutes at a time but for forever, no break, no reward, just out of love and necessity and a near biological impulse to care - he suddenly found himself unable to comprehend it.
He had nephews, back in Nebraska. He’d only been a teenager, too young really to fully understand the weight of a new life, a new responsibility on his brothers’ shoulders. Not that they cared all that much. Whitaker men were not usually the involved type when it came to children. He’d never seen that sort of devotion before. Occasionally, over the past week, he’s wondered if he’s the first Whitaker man to care like he does now, and he doesn’t even know how long they’ve got Jane for.
‘Give her to me,’ he repeats. Trinity moves quick, passing Jane over carefully and cautiously. She takes the coffee too, glugs it down, and all but flees to her room after a quick glance at the clock tells her Dennis doesn’t have to leave for another twenty five minutes. Power nap, he suspects. She had Jane last night. She’s going to have her all day.
This weird routine is only going to get worse, thinks Dennis. Trinity runs out of vacation days in two days. Jane isn’t top of the foster list right now, not when Trinity’s on paper saying she can take her for as long as need be. He doesn’t really know how they’ll do it. Maybe they’ll have to talk to somebody about alternating shifts. Maybe Amy can watch her. Dennis would really rather not be forced to ask her though, not when she’s got her own kid under a year to watch over.
But it’s not like either of them have many other friends.
He watches as Jane takes the bottle, looks at the trust in her little eyes - too much trust, he thinks, in two late twenty strangers who know nothing about children. But she’s so little, so small, so uncomprehending of the truths of the world beyond the simple things.
She is in one of two pairs of arms that, for a single eternal week or so, have held her when she cried. She looks into his face, a face that’s greeted her at three am feedings and five am fussing and three pm laughs. She is warm, swaddled in her blanket and tucked against his own warm body. She is safe. She is loved, as much love that a hopeless duo of young strays who found each other can offer another stray they are severely unequipped to deal with. They probably aren’t good enough for her in the long run.
But they’re good enough for her now.
-
Jane nods off pretty quickly after her bottle. Dennis doesn’t really think it’s a good idea to let her sleep again - his brain is too muddled right now, too foggy for thoughts beyond immediate priorities such as my shift starts in twenty minutes to think about the sleeping schedule suggestion Amy had printed and stuck to their fridge.
She had only offered one golden rule though: sleep when baby sleeps.
And well - when he pokes his head in to see Trinity out cold on top of her covers - he thinks he kind of owes it to her to gently set Jane down in the cradle again.
Trinity had left her car keys by the door, with a sticky note that said ‘Don’t you dare crash her, Huckleberry’. He makes it to his shift with maybe thirty seconds to spare. He barely has time to greet anybody, never mind take a minute to gear up for the shift before Dana is shouting out an incoming trauma and Al-Hashimi appears, smiling at him -
‘- Dr Whitaker, why don’t you help us with this trauma? Could be an excellent teaching case.’
And the fun begins.
It’s sort of like the world is out for blood today. Still on med student duty, he tries to keep Joy and Ogilvie occupied and challenged. Beyond that, he’s called into assist on more traumas than usual - they start the day with a college student unresponsive after a car crash - and runs on into almost a dozen others, including a thirty year old in septic shock from a nasty burn on his thigh he never thought to get looked at despite blistering and a middle schooler who OD’ed because she took a few of what she thought was her brother’s caffeine pills but turned out to be more recreational pills than that.
He loses an elderly patient to respiratory failure. The guy had been in a few times before, Dennis had always been involved in his treatment. The man had refused a breathing machine, said he’d rather go easy and natural than cling on, but it didn't stop the bee sting hurt in Dennis’s chest anyway.
The last big case before he clocks off is a kid with heat stroke - a toddler, if even, who had been sick and whose parents had left them napping on the couch facing a window in their apartment with broken AC. The parents had been right beside them, went to wake them up to get them to drink before they realised they were too hot to touch, too groggy.
Dennis has been more on edge with child cases recently. It had started back when he was helping out with Theo - it was the first time he’d ever been fully entangled in a kid’s life before beyond absent familial ties, but the last week, he finds it harder and harder to bear. He can work them, but the cases linger. It’s a physical weight. It sits on his chest and constructs his lungs. He lingers at his locker after finishing up his charting, just to let himself breathe.
He needs to get home. He needs to let Trinity sleep - he’s off tomorrow, which means that it’s his night with Jane, a real wild Friday night. He needs to go to Robby’s to check for mail. He presses his forehead to the cool metal door and takes another shudderingly tired breath.
‘Dennis?’ Nazely appears from some strange abyss, which probably means she’s been dropping her own stuff off for at least a few minutes.
‘I’m all good,’ he says, attempting a reassuring smile. He’s not quite sure he believes himself. He’s still got to drive back to the apartment, and he can’t quite figure out how safely he can do so.
But he’s no use to anybody passing out in the ED post- shift.
Dr Mohan and Mel are stood outside the doors of the department as he goes to leave. He offers them easy goodbyes and good nights. Mel must misjudge when he’s out of earshot because he hears her say:
‘Does Dr Whitaker seem more…’ She struggles to find a word that encapsulates tired, lighter, heavier, brighter all at once. It possibly doesn’t exist. She skips deciding and lets the air talk for her. ‘than usual to lately?’
Dennis doesn’t hear whatever Mohan’s responds with. He feels the weight of the two women’s gazes on his back but when he looks back over his shoulder, they’re back to their original conversation.
It’s a mustering of remaining strength to drive home. It’s a blur of passing streetlights, his blaring playlist of James Brown’s voice, and praying for easy sleep. He gives himself three minutes in the car before heading up, head against the steering wheel, slow and steady breaths filling his lungs and emptying them again.
Santos is asleep on the couch when he finally enters. Jane’s clutched tight in her arms. It’s an almost startling sight. Careful not to wake either of them, Dennis starts to pick up around the place - a spit up cloth, a hoodie of Trinity’s, one of Amy’s old blankets she donated to Jane.
Eventually, his eyes are closing on him too, involuntarily, and there’s nothing else he can do to resist. He takes the other side of the couch and curls up, cautious not to jostle them.
As if she can sense him, Trinity’s leg unfurls and her foot presses against his calf.
The apartment is quiet, and Dennis sleeps.
-
‘Huckleberry,’ snaps Trinity, ‘if you let this get cold, I’m putting you on diaper duty for the foreseeable future.’
Dennis’ eyes flicker open. Trinity’s holding Jane in one arm, pressed tight to her chest and head on her shoulder, and a half plate of what he imagines was once frozen pizza. It's slightly charred now. Once she recognises signs of alertness, she all but shoves the plate on his lap and readjusts her grip on the baby.
‘You didn’t have to -’ he starts but Trinity shuts him up with a glare.
The past week, they have discovered together that when she is particularly tired, there is a vein in her temple that is disturbingly noticeable when she gets pissed off. He tries not to invoke the vein. He thinks he is having nightmares about the vein. Somewhere deep in his psyche, the vein is haunting him. It reminds him of a friend from his undergrad back in Omaha, a girl he met in freshman ‘Comparative World Religions’ who he would smoke with during library breaks. She, too, had a vein like that.
’I'm giving you pizza and another hour to nap. Then, you’re taking hellspawn. And I'm going to go talk to a grown up about something other than baby formula, do not wait up.’
He assumes this means she is seeing Garcia.
Dennis was raised to not look gift horses in the mouth though (figuratively speaking. When he was a kid, they had a neighbour who tried to pawn off her troublesome livestock when winter hit). He eats fast and crashes into sleep again. Trinity snaps her fingers to wake him an hour later according to her word, unceremoniously dumps Jane into his arms and flits out the door. He would like to be a bit annoyed, but he’s been able to go to work and talk to people and be normal, and Trinity has been complaining of feeling one step away from being Stepford inspired.
One of them needs to be getting laid anyway. It doesn’t look like it’ll be Dennis anytime soon.
He blinks bleary eyes at the clock on their wall and sees that it's half past ten. Really, he should be getting ready to put Jane down for bed, but he needs to call at Robby’s at some point tonight. Pick up mail and water his dying houseplants. Make sure there’s no broken windows. Whatever the hell else housesitting means.
It’s only been a week, but Robby’s place is growing on him. He doesn't exactly know what he expected - something a little bit more severe, maybe, something a little more bachelor and a little less pad. But its a simple townhouse, the kind of place that looks cozy and comfortable and severely out of Dennis’ price range for forever, given that he’ll still be paying off student loans at Robby’s age.
He carries Jane’s car seat inside and sets her down by the door while he kicks off his shoes, tosses the keys into the green ceramic plate on the hall table, and lifts the mail from the welcome mat. Robby’s place is really nice. There’s no natural light to speak of right now, but the house bleeds from it in daylight, a thousand sunbeams in a thousand shards in every room. His couches are worn in and comfortable, blankets draped here and there. Medical journals and motorcycle magazines and books, books that strike Dennis from the covers alone to be middle-aged-man-books, lots of harsh colours and Stephen King font.
Robby puts pictures up too, him and presumably his grandmother, Robby and Jack, one of Robby and Dana, tucked away in the upstairs hallway, twenty years younger at a bar, and a couple of him and some kid - the kid from Pittfest, Dennis recognises absently. It feels very lived in. Dennis would like to live in a place like this one day. Trinity’s place is nice, but it's mostly just temporary. He assumes once he can actually afford to rent, she’ll be kicking him out and moving somebody else in.
Dennis makes quick work of it all. He carts Jane around and puts her where she can see him, dozing in her chair. Plants get watered. They are currently making a miraculous recovery from a simple week of care, which makes Dennis think Robby must kill a lot of them. He closes the windows he opened to air out some of the rooms. He closes the curtains in the bedroom. He does other banal chores mostly in hope that it means he won’t have to come back for another two days.
As he gets ready to leave, he clicks off the living room lamp and picks Jane back up. Just as he turns to leave to head down the hall, he hears the clink of keys.
Jane stirs and makes a grumbling noise. Dennis agrees with her.
The door opens and the hall light flicks on.
Doctor Robby stands in the doorway, his motorcycle helmet cradled in one arm. He almost doesn't see Dennis standing there with a baby.
Almost.
‘Whitaker?’ His voice is tired and hoarse.
‘I was just heading out,’ says Whitaker. He can't think of what else to say. He tries to hide Jane’s carrier behind himself, as if it was a box to be hidden instead of a human baby. Shit.
Doctor Robby looks tired. He looks a little lost, standing there in his own doorway in frumpled clothes. There’s a distant look in his eyes, and he smells like fresh air mixed with gasoline.
‘You’re home early,’ says Dennis again. Robby hasn't moved. His eyes are unfocused, and mostly seemed glued on Dennis’ laughable attempt to hide away baby Jane.
‘Got tired of the road quicker than I thought I would. Figured I’d camp the rest of my sabbatical out here’ says Robby absently. After a beat, he says, ‘I can see the baby, Whitaker.’
‘It’s not Amy’s,’ says Dennis quickly. Defensive.
Robby’s eyebrow raises. ‘Who’s baby is it then? I thought I said no babies.’
Gingerly, Dennis walks down the hallway and lifts the carrier up high enough for Robby to peer down into Jane’s seat. She’s nodded off again despite all the moving and fussing. ‘A familiar face?’
‘You took baby Jane Doe?’
‘Me,’ says Dennis, aiming for flippant but sounding instead like an anxious mess, ‘Santos. Me and Santos. Jane’s now our secret third roommate.’
He doesnt really know what he expects to hear out of Robby’s mouth next. A reprimand, more confusion, a question about their suitability to care for a severely dependent little thing like Jane. But none of that comes.
Robby takes a long shuddering breath. Like he is trying to take in all the oxygen in the room. Then, his tense face falls easier.
He lets out a loud booming laugh. It wakes up Jane. She begins to wail softly, angry at the world for bringing her out of dreamland and into the harsh realities of the artificial big light.
Dennis agrees with her, yet again. She may be the only soul on earth that gets him these days.