jackabbot | A necessary argument

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robby

A necessary argument

Jack was, to put it mildly, cranky. He was probably beyond cranky and into the state that he’d only seen very small children achieve. He, unfortunately, was not allowed to sit down where he was and refuse to move from that spot while also screaming. He had to continue behaving like a mature adult with an advanced degree and a position of responsibility.

He’d just finished working a double because on top of the usual holiday-related scheduling craziness, people also got sick or injured, which meant they couldn’t work and thus Jack got to work twenty-four hours in a row. Robby might have taken the shift for him, but Jack didn’t ask because Robby essentially wasn’t talking to him for reasons he refused to explain or even acknowledge. More importantly, he was pretty sure Robby had already worked his legally allowed hours this week. Jack hadn’t. Well, now he had. He’d also spent entirely too much time pulling Christmas decorations out of places they should not be.

So he was bone-deep tired and annoyed at humanity, his leg hurt like hell and might be starting a pressure sore, his best friend wasn’t talking to him, and to top it all off, it was his fiftieth birthday. He generally viewed birthdays as proof he’d survived another year and that all the various things in his life that might have killed him hadn’t managed it. He didn’t celebrate birthdays, exactly, but he respected them.

He was not feeling respectful right now. He was feeling like finding the nearest bar and drowning his entire existence in bad beer. He was feeling like going and buying a pack of cigarettes, even though he’d given them up at Landstuhl, mostly because they’d suggested a nicotine cessation plan at just the right moment. He was feeling like being anywhere but here, if that was possible, which it wasn’t because Darrow didn’t work like that.

So, yeah, he was cranky. He stopped in front of his door to fish out his keys, then hissed as his lower back cramped. He breathed through it, but it didn’t help his mood at all. As soon as he got inside, he was taking the damn prosthetic off and then calling for some Thai delivery because he did not feel like cooking.

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That hits him like a physical blow, like a slap to the face. Because that's the problem, isn't it? That's right at the heart of it. He's afraid of fucking that up.

"I just..." His jaw works for a moment. "I don't want to fuck everything up. And I do that. I fuck things up." He shakes his head, trying to clear. "You can yell at me all you like -- I deserve it -- but will you at least take your leg off?"

He still wants to look at whatever is making Jack limp like that, but he'll take whatever he can get.

Something about what he'd just said hit Robby hard, and Jack had no idea what it was. If he was feeling less like he was, he would have questioned that expression, dug into it, tried to understand Robby more. But it seemed like he was the only one in this friendship that tried to understand the other person right now and he resented that.

"Yes, you do fuck things up," Jack agreed because truly, Robby was a master at that, "but I would like you to consider for one fucking second that it might actually fuck things up less if you talked to people so they knew what was going on in that giant brain of yours and had the opportunity to tell you what they thought about it. And no, I will not fucking take my leg off, because I want the ability to move around relatively freely right now."

He could move on crutches, but not as easily, and the foldable wheelchair in the closet was definitely not an option right now.

Robby makes a small sound of frustration at that, but he also nods, because arguing with Jack about that isn't going to get him anywhere. He rubs both hands over his face. He's not going to get anywhere. Part of him just wants to leave, but there's a bigger part of him that knows that, if he does that, none of this is fixable and that's a thought he can't stand.

"Jesus. Okay." He draws in a breath, looking up at the ceiling for a long moment like he's going to find a solution written up there. "It's you, okay? You're... The thing I've been trying to figure out and that's why I've been... Because being around you made it fucking worse."

Jack stared at Robby for a second, then moved past him because he needed to move just then, even if it hurt like hell. He saw the presents carefully stacked on his coffee table and the takeout boxes on the kitchen counter, which only made this whole thing worse. He could see how Robby had taken the time to get the containers out of the plastic bag and to put a plate and chopsticks where Jack usually sat because it had the best line of sight to the door, the windows, and the patio door. For all that Robby could not talk about his feelings, he showed he cared in little things like that. And then he did this shit.

"Being around me makes things worse," he repeated, turning to Robby and crossing his arms over his chest. "Do you want to elaborate on that? Because what I'm hearing is I make your life worse, and that's not a great thing to hear."

"Don't do that. That isn't what I said. I said being around you made the shit I was trying to figure out worse." His jaw works for a moment and he stays where he is, arms folded across his chest. "You...you being here, in this fuckin city? It's been like an anchor, Jack. I swear. I just..." He looks over, dark eyes pleading for a moment. "It's...complicated. It got complicated. For me." He leans back against the wall. "And I ran away from it, as much as I can in a city that nobody can fucking leave."

"I'm sorry," he said, since he could and should apologize for twisting Robby's words. He'd absolutely done that and Robby's correction was fair.

He took a deep breath and tried to get his anger under control so that they could actually talk about this. It was hard to do that right now, and a part of him wanted to leave his own fucking apartment, but that would break things in a way he didn't know if he could fix, and he didn't want to do that, as angry and hurt as he was right now.

"What made things complicated, Robby? What changed that made you feel like you needed to run away in a city that neither of us can fucking leave? And to be clear, I do not actually expect you to tell me, but feel free to exceed my expectations here."

He nods, accepting the apology that was so characteristic of Jack and how he does things. He looks down at his hands for a long moment, then tips his head back so that he can look at the ceiling.

"How much do you remember about Sarajevo?" he asks, suddenly. "That night you walked me home, right before I left."

If he'd had to put odds on what Robby would say next, in no universe would he have thought Robby would ask him about things that happened thirty years ago. He stared at Robby for a second and he was sure his expression showed his utter confusion like Robby had spontaneously decided to start speaking Greek at him or something.

"Does this have something to do with what's going on in your head right now? Because if it doesn't I don't think I'm up for a walk down memory lane just for shits and giggles."

That makes Robby laugh, a dry hiccup of sound, and he nods. Jack looks so confused and Robby thinks that he was right all along and Jack barely remembers it and he should just leave now.

He doesn't, thought.

"Humour me," he says.

Jack tossed his hands in the air in a brief "oh, what the hell" gesture. He had really no fucking idea where this was going, but he also had no fucking idea that Robby would be waiting for him in his apartment in the first place. The aroma of the shrimp pad thai was still wafting around, so he was definitely here and so was the food that Jack still wasn't able to eat because he could not eat and argue at the same time.

"I drew the short straw to be your escort. We left the bar around 2300, maybe, and I walked you back to that overgrown doghouse they called the volunteer housing. You invited me in for bourbon. We got naked. We got off. I left. The next day I had most godawful hangover I have ever had in my life."

There was a little more there for Jack, mostly that it was Jack's first ever blow from a man and the first time he'd jacked another man, but he stopped there.

Robby lets out a shivery breath.

"I genuinely thought you didn't remember any of it," he says. "We were so drunk." He rubs his hands over his face. "I... Had a crush on you. For months. Which makes me sound like a fuckin teenage girl but... Whatever." It's easier if he doesn't look at Jack for this next bit. "By the next time I saw you, you were married and it was another a million years ago, so I just...put it in a box and didn't think about it."

He rubs the back of his neck.

"Until we went to to Kagura."

"It might be a miracle that I do. I have never and will never mix vodka and bourbon again," Jack agreed, because it had been utter hell to get up and do PT the next morning with that hangover. Robby's flight couldn't have been fun for him either.

He listened to the rest of what Robby said, didn't say, and sort of said, then tried to put it all into something that made sense to his very tired mind.

"Robby, are you telling me that you ghosted me for a month because you, what, suddenly realized you were still attracted to me?" he finally said evenly. He really did not want to misinterpret this, but that seemed like what Robby was saying.

"You don't want to know how many times I threw up on that fuckin' flight," he says. He stares fixedly at his hands for a long moment.

"It's stupid but I was hoping I could...you know...get it under control. But every time I saw you it didn't feel like that was a thing that was going to happen. And I'm...fuck, Jack. I need it under control, man."

Jack chuckled almost in spite of himself. Robby sounded like he was remembering that flight in a way he wished he could forget, which was pretty much how Jack had felt about PT.

"Yeah, that's pretty dumb," he said, but gently rather than angrily. "Attraction doesn't work that way, man, and you know it. If it did, I would have been a lot happier in bumfuck Maryland."

He was completely unconcerned about Robby being attracted to him again or still or whatever. He was pissed off that Robby had decided to not talk to him about it instead of having a conversation, but he could kind of see where Robby had gotten to where he was.

He would have said something else except his entire lower back had decided that apparently the warning shots it had fired were not enough and now it needed to call down air defense artillery. He grabbed the back of the chair next to him as it seized.

The chuckle and the shift in Jack's tone are both good signs, but then Jack grabs the back of the chair, his face twisting in a grimace and Robby is moving towards him before he really knows it's happening.

"Jesus Christ," he says. "Will you please sit down and let me bring you something to eat while I look at your leg? We can keep talking -- I'm trying -- but just... Let me? Please?"

As good as the surgeons were and as good as prosthetics were now, disrupting normal joint and muscle attachments had inevitable consequences. Sometimes those consequences were more obvious than others. He'd pushed his body too far, he'd known he was doing it while he was doing it, and he'd done it anyway. He still remembered having a conversation with his PT when he'd told her he wanted to go to med school and specialize in EM. She'd told him to think about considering another specialty, one with less time on his feet and shorter shifts. He hadn't done it. She'd probably known he wouldn't.

"Yeah, alright," he agreed, and pulled the chair out to sit in it heavily. They weren't done talking, but this was all pretty heavy stuff and he didn't think a time out was a bad thing, even if it was a time out because his body had decided it rather than his mind.

Robby huffs out a short, sharp sigh of relief when Jack sits down. He's still in his jacket, so he shrugs out of it, automatically pushing his hoodie sleeves up to his elbows as he moves into the kitchen. He fixes a plate for Jack and, after a moment's hesitation, fixes one for himself, too. He grabs two beers.

"Take your leg off so I can look," he says, belatedly realising that he's slipped into the voice he uses for instructing interns. "Please."

Jack raised an eyebrow at Robby for using the student voice on him, which Robby knew Jack would recognize. He didn't think it was intentional, either, which was why he wasn't offended. He was a little amused, though, which he thought was fair. The amusement was barely making it through pain, exhaustion, frustration, and anger, but it was there.

"If you ask me to list the lumbar nerves in order from top to bottom, I'm leaving," he warned. He did, however, take his own jacket off - which sucked since that used all the muscles in his back - and pulled the loose leg of his pants up to his knee. He released the suction socket and involuntarily sighed in relief, then put it to the side.

His entire calf was red and swollen, with a darker red spot on the inside where he knew he tended to put his weight when he was standing for a long time.

"Jesus, Jack," says Robby, gently reproachful as Jack takes his prosthetic off and he sees the actual damage. He squats down in front of Jack so that he can get a proper look. "I'm going to clean it and..." He gently touches the reddened mark. "And I'd like to put a dressing on that. You got hydrocolloids around here?"

The reproach was warranted, so Jack didn't even bristle at it. Robby couldn't be his doctor and he couldn't be Robby's because of the conflict of interest, but at the same time, the only person other than his actual doctor that he trusted to see and to care for his leg was Robby. Nothing in the last month changed that.

"First aid kit in the bathroom should have some," he said. "Sorry about the smell."

Trapped sweat and bacteria in a suction socket was not exactly a beautiful floral perfume.

"Like I'm worried about that," says Robby, shooting him a slightly reproachful look. "Eat. I'll be back."

He heads into the bathroom first, grabbing dressings and cotton swabs and antiseptic, and then he goes to the kitchen to fix a bowl of warm water and grab a clean cloth from under the sink. When he comes back to the table, he drags a chair close enough that he can see to Jack while he eats and then looks at him expectantly, waiting for him to arrange himself.

Jack didn't need any further encouragement to start shoveling shrimp pad thai into his mouth. He wasn't eating quite as quickly as he would have in Basic when they had ten minutes to eat their entire meal, but it was close. There was an unfortunate similarity between mealtimes in Basic and mealtimes as a doctor sometimes.

Robby came back with some supplies and sat down next to Jack with a face Jack had seen more times than he could possibly count. Normally it wasn't directed at him, though, just like the student voice wasn't. He lifted his leg so that, if Robby wanted, he could put Jack's knee on his thigh and work with his calf.

"That what you wanted?" he said, although it was slightly muffled by shrimp.

"Yes. Thank you," says Robby, hands firm but careful as he guides Jack's knee into place, his lower leg across his lap. He starts by taking the cloth, dunked in the water and wrung out, and starting to carefully wipe Jack's skin.

"I still haven't figured out what to do," he says, his attention focused on Jack's leg. "For the record."

There was a particular way that Robby said thank you that was so precise as to be bitchy. He wasn't quite there yet, but Jack could see it from here. He kept his hip and leg as relaxed as possible as Robby's hands carefully cleaned the sweat and accumulated gunk from his leg. Robby knew what kind of pressure was needed to clean skin that was swollen and angry, even if the nurses usually did that rather than the doctors.

Robby wasn't making eye contact again, but Jack was going to let it slide this time. Instead he swallowed a bite of pad thai before he tried to talk.

"That's fine. You don't have to know what to do. You just have to talk to me and tell me you're working on figuring it out, not disappear into a cave and refuse to even acknowledge that there's something wrong. All those times I tried to talk to you and ask you what was going on, you could have just said you were working through some shit and would let me know when you had something to talk about. Instead you acted like I was bothering you by caring. It fucking sucked, Robby."

"I know," says Robby because, honestly, it sucked for him, too. He'd missed Jack in his space. It made him realise that he's come to depend on Jack in an even more fundamental way than he did back in Pittsburgh. "And I am sorry. For what it's worth."

He finishes cleaning and moves on to meticulously drying Jack's skin, using the softest towel he could find in the linen closet.

"I just... Couldn't see any way that the way I was feeling wasn't going to fuck something up. And I still couldn't stop thinking about it."

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