Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

For a man with a name as long as his, it is a strange but true fact that Michael ‘Robby’ Robinavitch didn't actually have a nickname until he was six years old. Not in the conventional sense, anyway.

In many ways, Michael is a nickname. His parents are a hazy, watery memory, gone before language really kicked in, gone before they could tell him why they chose the name. He’s not named after any relatives, that's for sure, his parents were broadly unobservant but superstitions have a habit of hanging on longer than articles of faith. Until he was delivered by a social worker to his grandmother’s door at two years old, the only one unscathed from the crash that killed his parents, any names he had been called by them save the one on his birth certificate were lost to the spill of blood and brainmatter across the asphalt.

His grandmother was observant, but she was also extremely Russian. She lived on a nice, leafy street a block from temple, in a modest but well built turn of the century house that she had moved to with her husband after they had fled Russia with nothing but their children after the end of the war.

She always called him Mikhail Alexieivitch, a pet name, technically, but long and sardonically formal in her specifically arch Russian way. He didn't realise until she died that he didn't even have a patronymic, formally. His parents had named him Michael Robinavitch, two names, no waiting, very American, his father listed as Alex and his mother Yael. Nothing else.

His grandfather was a quiet man who would never speak out of turn, and anyway, he was gone before Robby passed the spring of life, so for the majority of his childhood it was just him and Bubbe in the house on Fisher Street, making the best of things one day at a time.

It wasn't until school that he got called Michael with the American emphasis on the first syllable. He was a mousy little thing when he arrived, Bubbe kept the picture she took of him above the fire. He still has it somewhere, looking cute and proud in his little peaked cap, the cat standing next to him as if he was off to school too. He was unlike all the other children at that age, too used to speaking Russian, still hurting from his parental tragedy, a little too loud and far too Jewish. Grandmother put him in the best school his parents' life insurance could afford, deciding that it was worth it, so he would travel a full hour across the city on one of the old buses every day to be the only Jewish kid at Catholic school.

He did his best to assimilate. Bubbe took to becoming ‘grandmother’ with bemusement. She still called him Mikhail Alexieivitch, especially when he was in trouble. The kids at St Peter’s were too smart to be cruel in the normal way, and no one would lay a hand on him after the biting incident of 1976, and no one would ask where his horns were the way a kid at college would a decade later, but still, those round American vowels chafe because he knew they were kicking him. They already made fun of him for everything, though they didn't exactly make fun of him for having no parents, or more, they never did twice. He knew they weren’t his friends. He knew that no one was on his side there after the third time the teacher smirked as someone butchered his name into an unending loop of Robobobobninivovovoich.

When he came home crying, he and Bubbe made a plan, and the next time they did it, he leaned back on his chair and said, cool as ice but with his heart in his throat, "just call me Robby if four syllables is too hard for you."

Even though he gets in trouble for leaning, it works. It helps that the kid who was picking on him was also unpopular. Plus, he likes being called Robby. It's a straightforward nickname. Neutral, but cool.

Robby and Bubbe worked on the plan and by the time he went into the second grade, he was what Bubbe called Stalingrad ready. They could siege his walls, but they would never take him. Not the version of him that mattered.

“Why don’t you use a Jewish siege,” he asked, after spending time at Hebrew school and learning about some history. Bubbe shrugged. “I wasn’t there for most of those.”

“Most?” he asks, and in response she smiled her secret smile and ruffled his hair.

What this meant in practice was that he became two people. Bubbe told him about how ancient peoples often believed that you never told your true name to anyone. She would stroke her large cat, who she called Behemoth Beelzabubavitch when he knocked her cup off the table, and make him laugh. She'd say that the first joke is in the bible, Sarah, who laughed at god for giving her a child even though she was nearly a hundred years old. “Like me with you,” Bubbe would say, hugging him. Never seemed funny to him, but maybe you had to be there.

That was Bubbe's favourite joke. A Jew goes to heaven and tells a joke about the Shoah to God. God says it isn't funny. The Jew shrugs. I guess you had to be there.

“Why are we Jews so good at humour?” she'd ask, rhetorically. “Its because we've got experience holding onto our true selves when the hordes would prefer us to do anything but. You may catch flies with honey, but you distract more flies with humour than anything else.”

Thankfully, being funny was something Robby took to and thrived at, and by the time he graduated ‘class clown’ was king among his superlatives, and he didn’t remember there ever being another part of him that he had to hide.

The first person to call him Mike was his college roommate, right after they’d exchanged a strangely damp handshake and found themselves standing together in a room that seemed far larger in the brochure than in real life.

“This is us, Mike,” Sam had said, smiling at him, and in that moment, away from home for the first time, so anxious and excited and terrified he felt nauseous, Robby had clung to that anointing and thought, yeah. Mike. He could be Mike. Mike could work.

And maybe that would have been the end of the story, but the problem with being a Mike in the 90s is that everyone is a Mike. He kept forgetting to use it, so half of his cohort knew him as Mike and the other half as Robby, and the word lost meaning within a few days. He never answered to it, even when someone was actually talking to him, so he reverted back to being Robby, and laughed when someone asked him when his twin brother Mike had dropped out.

One of the holdouts in calling him Mike was the girl he lost his virginity to. Her name was Jackie, and she was blonde and sweet, and they met when he helped her pronunciation during the Intro to Russian Literature class they were both taking. She was perfect in every way, and he loved the way she looked at him with eyes brimming with tears, loved the way she drank vodka soda, loved the way she stood on her tippiest of tippy toes to kiss him, making him feel like a giant. He loved the way she clutched her nails into his back and told him to be careful, as it was her first time. He’d kissed her again and said it was his first time too, and she’d smiled and opened her eyes so wide in shock, even though they’d been at school less than a month. She did it again as he slid inside her, holding himself still braced above her, his core gone weak with desire as she panted and looked at him with wonder. “Oh, Mike,” she’d moaned, and he’d almost busted right then and there, if she’d called him Robby he probably would have. “Wait, wait,” she’d asked, and once she nodded and he’d started to fuck her she’d chanted “Mike, Mike, Mike,” in time to each of his thrusts, like a perverse metronome, her voice climbing higher and higher and getting louder and louder as he hoped and prayed that the combination of his dick and the fingers she had tucked against herself would get her towards the apparently elusive female orgasm. Finally she’d moaned and clutched him to her, gone wordless, thankfully, and that had done for him, and maybe it was okay?

In the aftermath she had smiled that watery smile, holding out her hand to him, but they’d been disturbed by her roommate banging on the door and swearing at her to let her in. “It's not fair you know, Jackie, we both share this room, you are supposed to tell me if you’re bringing guys back, this is the third time this week, I have to study…’

He hadn’t hung around after that. He’d left Jackie and her roommate screaming at each other in the halls, calling each other sluts, and gone back to his room.

For some reason this ended up being a pattern, if it could be believed, to the point that he swore off cute co-eds until the break, deciding to wait and get a proper girlfriend in the new year. He joined a range of clubs, went to a couple of frat parties and to almost all of his 9AM lectures. He was doing well, finding his feet, making friends, but then he joined the future doctors society and met Kevin. Kevin was gay, out and proud and the way he looked at Robby made him feel strange in a good way, and, well, he might be cute, but he sure as hell wasn’t a co-ed, so Robby didn’t feel bad about telling Sam he wouldn’t be back to continue their D&D campaign that night.

Instead, later that night Robby sucked down Kevin’s dick and tried not to choke, mouth full of strange but familiar bitterness and his knees sore, senses full, with Kevin whispering the whole time. ”Fuck, Mike, fuck, I’m going to cum,” he groaned, right before he did, and Robby had been hurt for a moment that the guy didn’t even know his name, only to realise that it was supposed to be him. He’d been so surprised by that realisation and the cum in his mouth, he’d swallowed it. Kevin had given him a pretty good blowjob in return, which turned out to be pretty life changing.

Robby went back to Pittsburgh with a lot to think about.

It was weird to have a sex name. It took him a while to build a hypothesis, staring at the ceiling of his childhood bedroom, hand on his dick, jerking philosophical. First names are intimate, and therefore it is an intimate thing, to break through the surname shell to the soft inner core of what he always pointedly corrects is a given name, not a Christian one.

Again, a lot to think about.

He never gets to put any of these thoughts into practice. He meets Kathy the next semester in organic chem, and they stay together until the end of school, and she calls him Robby. He would have married her, had she not cheated on him. It was his fault for not finishing finals on the same day as her, apparently. The fight wasn’t worth having, so he got drunk instead, and when the girl he took back to his apartment called him Mike, it felt like a weird full circle moment for his whole college experience.

He takes a few years to work out what he wants to do, during which a whole host of things happen, the most notable of which is Bubbe dying. She wanted him to go to medical school, ‘for the Jewish Grandmother points, you know,’ she joked, but also because she knew he wanted it. He filled in the long application forms sitting by the side of her hospital bed, holding her hand as she underwent chemotherapy that slowly but surely failed to contain the cancer that was eating through her bones.

He sits shiva for her, mourns, thinks, and talks to everyone who knew his grandmother over her long life, prays with them, and when it is over, he decides to keep the beard that grew in while he sat. He packs up his things and gets on a bus to Baltimore, even though medical school isn’t due to start for three months. There is nothing for him in Pittsburgh anymore. He watches the light scatter over the water as he crosses the final bridge, and in his grief, hopes it is for the last time. He wants to leave it all here and start fresh. Become someone new, someone worthy.

Baltimore is as good a place as anywhere to reinvent yourself after losing the only family you have. The streets are unfamiliar and endlessly interesting, and over the weeks he tries on names and lives off ramen noodles too much cheap beer until he worries he’s going to turn up to med school with a case of scurvy. There’s no real need for it, his inheritance will pay for school and somewhere to live, if his math is right, especially once the house sells, and while he waits for the lawyers to do their thing, he goes ever so slightly mad. He goes to every kind of club, tries drugs the D.A.R.E program never dared tell him about, loses his head until he’s had a baker's dozen of lovers and a small, embarrassing case of chlamydia and it works; he comes out of it feeling mostly solid again; mostly decided and fully accepting that while he likes both women and men, he is going to focus on women. He’s unpicked the voice in his head that says nasty things, that calls him names he doesn’t like, that pulls him down to dark places, to where that voice that is childhood bully coded lives, ephemeral and implacable, the gnawing pit that whispered disappointment filled all the way in.

He’s going to be a doctor. He’s going to get married, have a family, become an oncologist, find the cure for cancer. He’s going to make Bubbe proud, and he’s going to do so with a clear head, not hiding behind anything.

So he introduces himself that first day as Michael Robinavitch, invites people to call him Michael, never Mike, and puts Robby away in the box with Bubbe’s jewellery, for special occasions and nights when he feels dangerously nostalgic, when only cheap beer and sticky floors will do.

It lasts until his third year, when he gets dropped into the emergency department at Bayview, and falls in love, properly, for the first time. At the end of that first night he goes back to his apartment, says a prayer, and takes Robby out of the box. The kid who yearned, who wanted, who was selfish. The kid who he loves, who he wanted to be, who he knew deserved better than to be pushed down and forgotten. The side of him he’d needed a wake up call to remember.

It works. A year later, he successfully gets a sub-internship at Bayview. He gets a mentor who writes him a recommendation that shines a light above him like a beacon. He’s an up-and-comer. He’s the brightest star in the department. He found his place in the world, and it would all be easy from here on out.

Robby goes to a conference as a last minute replacement for a guy in his department who got mono. His supervisor makes a joke about how Robby better not kiss anyone while he’s there, and so of course, Robby goes with that specific target in mind. He’s just turned 27 years old. He’s a goddamn adult, who can kiss whoever he wants. Work hard, play hard. Being such a last minute replacement there’s no printed name tag for him, so instead they hand him a sharpie and let him write his name on a sticker as a replacement, and, after a bit of prevaricating, he writes Doctor Robby, Johns Hopkins Medical School, and heads out to get his fill.

He ends up at a med students mixer, and then at an after party at a great bar downtown, throwing back pickleback shots and eating hot dogs while filthily eyefucking a guy across the bar, and then, when the guy winks at him, just walks up, pays his tab, and takes him by the arm and leads him back to his bed.

The guy walks fast and kisses faster, snatching little intense tonguefucks as they duck through the back streets to the hotel. Robby isn’t wearing his glasses, so the guy’s sort of a dreamy, sexy blur, all impressions of whisky and hard muscle. Once they get back and get up close, he realises that the guy is a redhead and freckled everywhere, utterly dazzling, an infinite number of tiny stars, and he falls a bit in love, even though Robby can't for the life of him remember his name. The nametags that weren't stuck to sweaters had long gone into pockets, but it's likely something Irish, but that could just be the stereotype of his lily white ass and ruddy complexion. They’d exchanged names over the bar, but Robby had been distracted, though the guy seems pretty good at moaning the right name. Probably thinks it's a nickname for Robert, so he doesn’t try to get more from it, as that already satisfies that American yearning for intimacy. Either way, finding him is a coup; the redhead has strong hands, a filthy laugh, and a throat just as good at deepthroating cock as it was 3 for $5 hotdogs.

Robby can play filthy too, even though it almost physically hurts to remove his dick from the redhead’s mouth and replace it with fingers. “Can you stop choking on it long enough to fuck me?” he asks, sweetly. “I have this craving, you see.”

“Yes sir,” the redhead says, knocking off a messy salute, and then applies himself to the task at hand.

“You with me, Robby?” the guy says, as he jams his dick into a condom and messily lubes up Robby’s ass with three fingers on his other hand, pumping them like he’s fingerbanging a prom queen.

“Ready and waiting,” Robby says, and then lets himself relax as the redhead slides a nice thick dick inside him with the expert grind of a true slut.

It’s a great fuck, better than anything he’s had since he decided to grow up. They’re both into it, the redhead grunting attractively, wiping the sweat off his brow with the back of his lube-slick hand, bending over and biting Robby’s shoulder, flipping him where he needs him, pinning him with precise, devastating moves, stretching his hips and treating him like a fucking princess. “You gonna come for me, sweetheart,” he croons into Robby’s ear, “you gotta squirt all over this bed?” and fuck, that mouth, Robby kisses him and twists, pinning him down and taking his pleasure from him, riding him hard, one hand circling the head of his dick until its all just too much, and when he does come, it is like a fucking fountain, like that video of the Bellagio, ostentatious as wasting water in the desert.

“I didn’t ask before,” Robby says, as he lies in sweat soaked and moderately filthy sheets and basks, “where are you at med school?”

“USU,” the redhead says, pulling a shirt over his head. He takes his name badge out of his pocket and shows Robby his affiliation, and thankfully, his name. Jonathan Ab-something. Robby really needs to wear his glasses more.

“It was fun,” Robby says, as they walk together to the door. It's not a long walk, this is only just a double room, but they take their time, making it last. “Good luck with…everything. I hope you don’t get shot.”

“I’ll do my best,” Jonathan Ab-something says, pulling Robby down for a messy, filthy, utterly memorable kiss. “You do the same. This is America, after all.”

Robby grins, and opens the door, and Johnathan Ab-something fires off another filthy salute, and walks back towards the elevators.

Robby leans against the door jamb and watches his ass as he leaves, and sighs dreamily. A woman walks past and raises her eyebrows at him, and he remembers, oh yeah, fully naked.

“We’ve all been there, son,” she says, smiling motherly. “Enjoy it. You never know what's going to come next.”

“Thanks,” Robby says, embarrassed, and hastily slams the door closed.

He doesn't see the redhead again, of course. USU is the military medical school and while Clinton is making changes, they’re pretty weak. It's still basically a ban, but one that places the blame on the soldier who gets caught. Jonathan Ab-something seems like he’s smart enough, so Robby goes back to Johns Hopkins and forgets about him apart from in the shower, lets it become a filthy anecdote, keeps telling it until he gets a girlfriend who finds it hot. She likes when he recounts the story of the time he got fucked by a soldier as he’s fucking her, and who is he to deny her? She’s perfect, perfect, perfect. Kelly insists on calling him every pet name under the sun, baby, sweetheart, doll, all because she thinks it's even more intimate than boring-old Robby. When she's riding his face though, she calls him kitten, holds him where she wants him, and when she dumps him, she calls him Mike.

“I don't remember giving you permission to call me that”, he snaps, and she looks at him witheringly. “You never stopped me before now. Grow up, Mike.”

So he does.

He matches for his residency and moves away, and tries, this time, to take it all a bit less personally.

New Orleans is exciting, and he falls into another gluttonous phase once he starts exploring. This time, he lets people call him what they want, so at the hospital he’s Doctor Robby, all very well and good, he’d do anything for those long Southern vowels. Everything just sounds so good so it's easy, letting it slide, when someone decides to force that intimacy, but on the dancefloors and in the back of the clubs where no tourists go no one had any use for names. Baby was good enough, though he liked it when they called him bastard, but only if they meant it.

Residency was busy and exhausting, Doctor Gordy riding him hard in all possible ways, and he liked to call him Michael, but it was supposed to be infantilising from him, so it didn’t matter. He was getting a taste for that, for being underestimated, for being able to come from behind and win. It felt like a game, and the triumph he felt when seeing them looking at him with surprise, and then begrudging respect, well. It’s a young man’s game, and he’s still just on the right side of 30. He can burn the candle at both ends. He can be everyone to everyone, whatever they need. He’s got more than enough to give.

In the way of things, all these selves, this house that felt like it had strong foundations, washed away in the horrors of Katrina.

Gordy had gone early with the other senior doctors to the Superdome when this was just a hurricane, but when the levees broke it was Robby, as Senior Resident, who was in charge when the water rose to waist levels on the ground floor of the building.

The phones were down, the cell phone towers long toppled in the 130 mph winds, and even the hardiest of Nokia cannot withstand the catastrophic water levels for more than a few minutes. The smell that pervaded the place, death and shit and desperation, couldn’t be avoided. It got in your nose, in your mouth, on your skin. It made Robby believe in miasma for the first time in his life, because the water was disgusting, but the air felt worse, somehow. The height of summer is always brutal, but the hospital is 100 degrees in its darkest corners and there are no lights to be found once it gets dark, but they keep on. There’s nothing to do but to do it. They hauled patients up the stairs, they stole naps to keep going. The food ran out. They ran TPN into each other, and Robby will never forget the flood of paradoxical fullness, being empty but satiated, his brain satisfied but confused, his stomach roiling.

It hits him, in the heart of the worst of it, that this was what Bubbe was preparing him for. This was his Stalingrad, holed up in the hospital, trapped by rising waters, unable to leave because their patients couldn't be taken. He volunteered to stay as the first evacuations happened. He was in his final year. He was leaving, and the hospital was dead. They knew it, even without anyone mentioning it. The flood had washed away more than just the ER. It had washed away the soul of charity that had always been central to this place. She deserved a proper send off, a mourner who knew the words, who would see it through.

In the end, the government deployed the national guard, and then the army rolled in when it turned out to be past gone. A team rappelled from a helicopter to relieve the exhausted doctors, and Robby didn't fight too hard when the commander put his hands on his shoulders and told him, personally, to fucking stop and get some rest. He found a bed up on the eighteenth floor, far up enough that the heat was there but the miasma wasn’t, shaved, cleaned himself, and then slept like the dead that lay all around, that lined the streets, that were behind his eyes.

He was woken twelve hours later by a harried looking man, unfamiliar in slightly water-stained khakis and a fresh scrub top; not one of the staff. He is handsome, kinda cute in a rat-like way. His hair is covered by a surgical cap he seems to have forgotten to remove.

“Rise and shine, sleeping beauty,” he says, jauntily. “It's another day down here in paradise,” he snarks. “Whatcha name, handsome?”

“R’by,” Robby says, before sitting up. “My name's Robby. How long have I been asleep?”

“A thousand years,” the stranger says. “It's all briars out there now. I slayed a dragon and climbed up here just for you. Do you remember me?” He smiles, and it's sort of familiar, but he's so tired. So bone tired. He shakes his head.

The guy huffs a little through his smile, wryly disappointed. He jerks his head towards the door. “Are you ready to get out of here? We’re evacuating.”

Robby rubs his eyes. Nothing is focusing, his muscles too tired to focus. “Where are we going?”

“They’re relocating you to the Superdome,” the man says, and Robby just slumps back down.

“Let me stay here and I'll do whatever you want.” He shuts his eyes, willing sleep to take him back.

He feels the man sit on the edge of the bed. He leans in, talking low and conspiratorially.

“Look, I'll make you a deal,” he says. “I’ll radio in and say I still can’t find you if you shift up and let me steal an hour. We evacuated all the patients. You're the last one in the building, and this is the first room I’ve been in I haven’t smelled that fucking awful smell. The others have already gone. They won’t send the helicopter to pick us up until I radio and say we’re ready.”

There are five other beds in this room, but this isn't the first time this week that Robby's been cruised. He knows the words, and he is more than happy to hum the tune.

“Its a deal,” he says, and moves over against the raised side of the bed. “Whats your name?”

“Oh, it's so much better if we don’t do the asking and the telling,” the man says, swinging his legs onto the bed, boots and all “but you can call me Jack if you need something to scream.”

They’re both too filthy to do all that much, but there is still a lot you can do in an hour that overrides the part of the brain that cares about germs. Jack tastes of gum and chew tobacco, and he’s a toppy son of a bitch in a way that feels weirdly familiar. He’s got big muscles and a great ass, and he knows how to use it, how to shuck down scrubs and slide between Robby’s thighs, how to spit between them, tongue him wet and intimate and then slide his dick so it hits all the right places, up behind his balls, a little nudge that feels like getting defibrillated in the best possible way, setting his heart back on the right axis. He holds Robby’s chin and tilts him up to gaze at him, and his look is all understanding, bone deep. The windows are open and up here the breeze is almost cool, and it's so nice, so very nice to let go, to let his brain just turn off and experience something nice for the first time in a godforsaken week.

He starts to grunt in time with each of Jack’s thrusts, the way he slides between his ass, between his thighs, the way he moves him so he’s bracketing Robby’s thighs with his own to keep him tight, the way the sweat builds and pools and how Robby feels his dick drip with it, with the hotness.

They do that for what feels like hours, Robby strung along the edge of orgasm until he feels like his brain is leaking out of his ears. It's not one single thing that makes him come, it's just that in the end his body just gives up, the orgasm snapping like a breaking guitar string, and he goes from being nowhere near there to there in the space of a breath.

“I’ll get back inside you later, baby,” Jack says, hot and low into his ear and then comes hard against the crease of his balls, but Robby’s too busy shaking with the aftershocks and the feel of someone else’s cum sliding down his dick to realise what he’s talking about.

They doze together slick and gross and delighted in it, and then wordlessly Jack produces a pack of baby wipes from one of the many pockets of his tac vest, and together they clean Robby up enough that he’s not a walking evidence exhibit.

They stagger the last few flights up to the roof, and then Jack calls it in, and they watch together as the black dot on the horizon rises and comes closer and closer, until it is unmistakably rescue.

Robby climbs in and buckles in, and Jack does the same, talking in millitarese to his fellow man, and then it's too loud to do anything but look down at the destroyed city, and weep for all that was lost.

The heli lands and they clamber out. Jack looks like he’s going to say something, but then he shakes his head. “See you in another life, Robby,” he says, and walks smartly away.

Robby thinks about running after him, but instead takes a deep breath, puts it inside him, and gets back to work.

And then, finally it all comes full circle. Pittsburgh calls him by his name, and even though he promised to ignore it, he answers.

The teaching fellowship he got before the catastrophe says they will wait for him, that he can start when he is ready, but with Charity gone and his beautiful ground floor apartment flooded beyond recognition, there is nothing to stay in New Orleans for. His few surviving belongings are worthless, so on the day he was supposed to start he just gives up sorting through the mess, hails a cab, goes to the airport, and gets on the next plane. He arrives at the hospital’s ER main entrance with a beaten up backpack, the clothes on his back, a winning smile and a firm handshake.

He introduces himself to Doctor Adamson formally, calls him Sir, a title befitting the big man himself, the way Doctor Gordy had taught him, and Adamson laughs. “We don’t do that here, son,” he says. “I’m Adamson, and I’ll be that until the day you call me Monty.”

Robby thought that Pittsburgh would feel full of ghosts, but instead it feels like the home he thought he would never have again. Not just the city, but PTMC, the Pitt, his place in it, they all feel right. Teaching feels right. He loves it, he’s good at it. He likes the fact it builds deep relationships, that he gets to know his students in every way. It is slower and more intimate than anyone gives it credit for. Do it right and you are changing someone for the better. You’re making them whole. Giving them a part of yourself, your experiences, your knowledge. You’re taking them by the hand and raising them up, and then you send them off.

It’s enough. He calls his students by what they want to be called. The Pitt is too open concept, and the staff room too small, so they’re always called by their last names. The lines blur as time goes on and familiarity sets in. At the start, he’s Doctor Robby, never Sir and never Michael, and by the end he’s just Robby.

Charity never leaves him. He gets into reading history books, and thinks about his soldier, about Jack. Wonders where he is now. Wonders who he really is. Whether he made it out in one piece. He thinks about him in places other than the shower. Thinks about him in bed, on nights when he can’t sleep, where he can’t get clean, where he feels the water rising around him, remembers the way the bodies in the stairwell looked, stacked crooked, waiting for dry ground.

He knows there’s something wrong, but as long as there is work, it is fine. He finishes his fellowship and gets offered a place as attending, and he accepts, gladly.

He grows a beard again and grows up. Save for a couple of MSF stints in Sudan, he knows as soon as he arrives that this is where he wants to stay. He’s firmly Doctor Robby in the Pitt. He learns a lot about himself, and breathes out. Breathes in, breathes out.

He meets Janey and Jake a decade in, and he’s going to marry her, he’s sure. This time, he’s sure. It’s perfect, she’s perfect. He’s forty years old, he has to make it happen, but it never happens. She’s the nicest, sweetest, filthiest, funniest woman he’s ever met. He’s never loved his name more as when she’s mewling it, calling him names, telling him not to stop, telling him to go harder, to give her more. She likes it when he holds her down, when he teases her, when he gets creative, pushes her, and he likes how much she likes it.

He’d never wanted kids other than in the abstract, but he has always liked them, hard to be an ER doctor and not grow fond of them, but there’s something special that happens and he and Jake meet, a click like they were destined to be best friends. The first time they hang out, just the two of them, Jake is ten and full of pre-teen swagger but still keeping a childlike humour and cheekiness.

“Your real name’s Michael?” Jake asks, when he proves that he’s been learning sleight of hand by stealing Robby’s wallet from his pocket and inspecting his drivers licence. “That’s so weird. You don’t look like a Michael.”

“That’s because my name’s Robby,” Robby says, taking it back. “You wanna get ice cream? Your mom said we absolutely shouldn’t.”

Jake’s face splits into a toothy smile. “Yeah!”

They date for just over two years, until he proposes to her, Valentine's day, Bubbe’s ring, and she turns him down. She doesn’t want to get married again. It isn’t personal. They break up after because that’s what you do after a failed proposal, even if you both love each other, even if it's the best relationship either of you have ever had.

“You deserve better,” Janey says, through tears, and Robby thinks, “no I don’t.” He goes back to his apartment. Half his things are gone; he had been sure, so he’d made his footprint smaller, expecting to move in with her. He was ready to go.

The next day he goes to the good furniture shop and buys more bookcases, and then to the bookshop and buys all the Russian literature he can find and a book on how to read cyrillic, and throws himself into the coping mechanism of his ancestors.

Finally, there's Jack Abbot.

Jack joins the department in 2019 from Boston, Adamson’s newest hire, and Robby likes him immediately. He can’t really place exactly why, its a combination of everything, his drawling way of saying anything worth saying, counterpoint to his crisp, army trained bark when he wants someone to wrap it up, wins Robby over immediately, as does his blacker than night sense of humour. He gives orders in a way that is undeniable and unmistakable and strangely…familiar.

“Where were you in ‘05?” Robby asks, the first time they hang out just the two of them, curiosity itching somewhere ever so slightly out of reach. The beers are sweating and Robby is peeling the label off his; sign of sexual frustration, someone once told him. He couldn’t possibly comment.

“Hopping between Dallas, Germany and Basra,” Jack replies. “Not realising it was my last year with ol’ Righty. Why?”

“I feel like we’ve met before,” Robby says. “I keep trying to place you.”

“I think I’d remember that beard,” Jack smiles, waggling his eyebrows. “But I get that a lot. I’ve got one of those faces. Irish-American mutt, could be anyone.”

“Must just be that,” Robby says, and orders them both another round of drinks. They talk about everything and anything until it's kicking out time, and they loiter after.

Its been a while since Robby fucked someone from work, but Jack’s definitely been flirting that last hour, after the third drink. He lingers as Robby has a final cigarette, standing together under the lamp post, the sodium light making the whole scene feel like something out of a movie.

It would be so easy to kiss him, but there’s that nagging edge to this, like there’s something he’s forgotten.

“You on tomorrow?” he asks, as Jack looks at his watch.

“Not until the evening,” Jack replies. “I was just looking. Nervous habit.”

“Doesn’t your wife need you at home?” Robby teases. “Or have you left her holding the baby?” and rather than leaning into it, lying, the way married men do, instead Jack’s face shutters.

“I need to go,” Jack says, worrying the ring between the thumb and forefinger on his other hand, and he turns briskly and walks away.

Of course, Robby finds out the next day, after a bit of gentle gossiping with Dana, that Jack Abbot only moved here from Boston because his wife died of an undetected DVT in the first trimester of a pregnancy that they both desperately wanted, and he feels the anxiety and shame slam into him like a wall.

“I’m a fucking idiot,” Robby groans, and Dana pats him on the shoulder. “I’m the worst fucking asshole in the entire fucking world. I wish I was dead. I wish everyone was dead.”

“You are, and I’m sure we all will be eventually” she says. “Careful what you wish for.”

“Wanna bet?” he asks, and she slams $5 on the counter.

“Never joke about a bet with me, Doctor Robinavitch,” she drawls, and goes over to Ahmed’s office to formalise the whole thing. “You should apologise, though,” she says, turning back to look at him over her glasses, and he knows she’s right.

“I spoke to Dana. I’m so sorry, Jack. I didn’t know what I was saying,” he texts. He forces himself not to look at his phone until lunch, but Jack had replied almost immediately with just a thumbs up emoji, and the next time they go for a drink, everything is fine.

But when a few months later they’re at the CDC briefing, learning about the pandemic, she raises her eyebrows at him, and when Jack asks what the fifty dollar note he hands her means, Robby plays it off as a day-shift inside joke, even as the bile rises inside him, the panic and the worry and the fear.

The pandemic is brutal, like Katrina in slow motion. They don’t have enough of anything, everyone is dying faster than they can do heroics, and the shifts go so fast and yet crawl along, through March, April, into June.

They’re on the front line of this hell, but they’re good at this. They’ve trained for years, decades, for all of this. Still, he never expected a second Stalingrad.

Eventually, someone takes pity on them and throws them a bone, and proper PPE comes in and Robby has to shave his beard off fully for the first time since he was last in hell.

Their friendship was fire forged now, Jack having forgiven him for his great fuck up, but the first time Jack sees him clean shaven, rather than tease him or make a joke, instead he turns bright red and starts to laugh, high and nervous.

“I don’t think I look that bad,” Robby says, insulted, as the mask fitter buzzes around his face like an angry fly.

“Its not that,” Jack says. “I just remembered something, we should talk later, you’re not going to believe this –”

Adamson comes in and tells them they’re needed on the floor, and so with their masks properly fitted, they head back out.

When they’re stepping out a few hours later, Robby remembers their earlier conversation. “Hey, what was so funny earlier? When we were being fitted for the N95s?”

Jack flushes, and Robby watches it spread down his chest. God, he hates this.

“I remembered where we met before, is all,” Jack says. His eyes are bright above his mask. “You were right. ‘05. You were mostly clean shaven that day too. Do you remember? The twentieth floor?”

And Robby feels his own flush spread beneath his mask as he remembers that scrub cap and the way the soldier’s body had been stretched before him like the best meal he’d ever had. “Oh,” he says, stopping in his tracks. “I have no idea what to say but um, yes. I know what you’re…referring to. I remember. I don’t know why I didn’t recognise you properly. And I think it was the eighteenth.”

“Eighteenth, right, right,” Jack says. “Damn. What are the odds?”

“Well, we didn’t exactly exchange names.”

“Only fluids.”

“Jack…” Robby says, warning. “We can’t.”

Jack’s eyebrows rise in hurt. “Why not?”

Robby gestures around them, but Jack rolls his eyes and shakes his head.

“Come on. We live alone. We’re exposed every day. I’m not saying we need to do anything more than talk.”

“You really think we’ll just talk? We can talk here.”

“I was imagining something a little less socially distanced, and with a lot fewer clothes, but okay, if that’s what turns you on…”

Robby shakes his head, wanting to laugh, wanting to do a whole lot more. “I can’t. I worry enough. But…”

Jack’s hopeful eyebrows return. “But?”

“When this is over?”

He sees the way that Jack's face creases under his mask.

“I’ll hold you to that.”

Even though he can’t see it, Robby smiles beneath his mask. “Good night, Doctor Abbot.”

“Good night, Doctor Robinavitch.”

That day takes a long time to come, and they lose a lot of people. Adamson, in September, stands out, a wound that never heals, and that night Robby almost does something, almost gets in his car and breaks quarantine, because whats the fucking point? They’re going to die, they should at least be happy. Its only the paralytic level of grief and guilt that stops him. He knows Jack would probably do a lot to ameliorate it, but he wants it. He wants to live here. He wants this, he deserves this, he did this.

Instead, he thinks about Jack, dredges up the old memory, lets it wash over him like that post-storm sunshine, the way it felt so good and so horrible at the same time, to be a survivor, and to feel so awful about it, what it means to be the only one left.

The vaccine comes, and then slowly, slowly, slowly, the world starts to shed its layers. The gaps between people get smaller, the outside world bigger, and one day, the email comes down. Patients want to see them, and so faces, some of which he’s never properly seen, even after years, introduce themselves.

On that morning, he shaves for the last time, and when he’s done he throws his razor in the trash. Rubs his hand over his smooth cheek, and thinks, okay.

He’s off, but he walks to the hospital, and he’s waiting when Jack finishes his shift, leaning against the wall.

Jack’s face splits open into a smile, and he jogs over. “Fancy seeing you here,” he says, pushing Robby back against the hidden bit of the wall, and when Robby kisses him, he tastes entirely new, like a fresh start.

They take Robby’s car and go back to Jack’s house. “Easier, for the shower later,” Jack explains, and Robby agrees. His blood is simmering. He feels like he’s had three too many espressos, or like one of the many times he stayed up for 72 hours. His skin doesn’t feel like his own. If Jack hadn’t been directing him, he’d never have found his way anywhere, not to his own house, not to anyone’s.

When he parks on the road outside of a smart single story house, Jack looks at him with the shrewd eyes of someone trying to work something out. “You okay?” he asks, quietly.

“I’m great,” Robby lies. He opens the door, and steps smartly over to the front door of the house, bouncing on the balls of his feet.

Jack guides his leg as he steps out, then walks up to the door. It’s barely 8AM. The sun is only risen on a technicality, more just a bright blur behind the clouds. It’s cool and sleepy, a perfectly anodyne Wednesday.

“We can just sleep,” Jack says, as he unlocks the door, but Robby isn’t having any of it. He follows Jack in, takes his shoes off, and then leans in for a kiss.

Jack grunts, and it echoes through time. He pushes Robby against the door, gets his hands on his wrists, pins him there. “Is that why you’re so antsy?” he says, between deep, nipping kisses.

“Yes,” Robby says. “I have been thinking about this for months, Jack, forgive me for wanting you so badly.”

“You’re forgiven,” Jack murmurs, and it's very sexy. “I’ll prove it was worth the wait, baby,” and takes him by the hand and leads him through the house, back to the large bedroom that opens out onto the green garden, Jack’s pandemic hobby bursting into bloom as Robby is tumbled onto the bed.

He hasn’t had sex in a long time, and certainly not felt a man rutting over him. They only did this once before, and it felt like a dream, but now this feels like he’s finally awake for the first time in years. Jack’s mouth is preoccupied with kissing and biting every inch of his neck and chest, and he’s having fun with it, murmuring things under his breath, looking up between breaths to seemingly marvel at having Robby underneath him.

He shuffles down, noses in Robby’s happy trail, undoes his cargos with filthy intent. Sucks the eager head of his dick into his mouth and groans.

“Fuck, you taste so good Mike,” and ducks his head back down, but Robby’s brain just seizes to a halt. Before he knows it, he has his fingers in Jack’s hair, and is pulling him off.

“Don’t call me that,” Robby says, feeling panic rise in his chest.

“What?” Jack shakes his head, and Robby lets go. He sits back up. “Don’t call you what? Talk to me, baby.”

“Don’t call me Mike,” he says. “Don’t call me Mike, or Michael, or baby, or slut, or bastard, or anything like that. I don’t like it. Just…please.”

Jack’s eyes are calculating, and then he leans forward, pushing until Robby’s lying down again.

“Yeah? So what do you want me to call you? Jack says, low and hot, leaning over him, bracketing Robby’s head with his arms. Robby swallows. They are really very nice arms. He bucks his hips up, involuntarily, and Jack drives his back in reply.

“Never mind, you can call me whatever you want,” Robby whines, but Jack just smirks, planking effortlessly an inch above him, the bastard.

“Tell me,” he whispers.

Robby groans. “Just call me Robby. It's my name. It's the one I chose. It's the one I tell people to use. Will people stop trying to fucking reveal my inner depths through a magic word and instead…” he gestures at Jack, “get on with it?”

“You still up for me revealing your inner depths the old fashioned way?” Jack says, eyes bright with understanding and mischief, the lube clutched in his hand.

“You have my enthusiastic consent,” Robby says, opening his thighs wide. “Where do you need me to sign?”

“Oh I think we can assume informed consent at this point, Robby,” Jack says, in his most smug patient facing voice. “We can proceed with the procedure without your John Hancock.”

“Already talking about another man in bed, the romance is dead,” Robby says, as Jack slicks up his fingers and gets to work.

He doesn’t say much after that. Mostly sounds. Occasional words. A lot of grunting. But when Jack keens out his name, the one he told him to use, he doesn’t need to think. He knows exactly who Jack is talking to.