Chapter Text
The brown hair is familiar to him at this point. A sign of the time of day if the sun didn’t tell him otherwise.
“How did I know I’d find you up here?” he asks, sitting down in the beat up lawn chair that had been there before him and if the weather didn’t tear it up, would be here long after him.
“Don’t you know that this is my turf?” Young eyes tilt to the side, hand opening the small cooler and he takes a beer from it without question.
“Long day?”
“Wouldn’t be up here if it wasn’t.”
The sun slowly shifts into golden hour, the kind of mood lighting that would make this a romantic scene if things were different.
“What was wrong this time?” he asks, cracking open the cheap can of Natty Light that is the only thing either of them can afford. Next time he’ll bring the beer because there’s always a next time. “Did Dr. Shamsi lay into you?”
“Nah, I can handle her. She at least knows what she’s doing. It’s Dr. Marcos that makes jabs at my name every time I introduce myself to the patient simulator.”
He snorts. “I told you to shorten it, man.”
“You don’t think people want to say Robinavitch?” A quirk of the lips and he has to look straight ahead.
“Easy for you to say Abbot.”
“Why not call yourself Robby?”
He watches as the man takes a long sip of the beer.
“Robby has a nice ring to it.”
“Better than Michael,” he says with another smirk.
“You got luck of the draw with names. Jack Abbot sounds like a good ol’ boy. All the patients are going to love you.”
“Nah, you’ve got the touch.”
They met on day one of med school at the University of Pittsburgh. Robby a local boy, Jack a transfer from San Diego. He had never quite fit in when he was in California though. Growing up a military brat meant that there was no such thing as home. He went where the wind carried him and where the money was good. At the time, UPitt was offering the best scholarships and med school wasn’t cheap, even with the GI bill that paid for his undergrad thanks to medals on his father’s Marine uniform.
He hadn’t liked Robby at first though. All the professors knew him and the first day of class meant that they called on Robby from the moment things got started. He had been used to hitting the ground running but with a golden boy like Robby with his cavalier smile, floppy brown hair and a sarcastic attitude, it was like walking around with one hand tied behind his back. No one looked at Jack Abbot unless he fucked up.
They were med students, of course they fucked up.
“You have to twist your hand the other way to tie that stitch correctly,” Robby says, looking over Jack’s shoulder.
“Fuck off,” he mutters under his breath.
“Just trying to help.”
“Go kiss ass over there ponyboy.”
“Ponyboy? We’re bringing it back to freshman year English class?”
He had hated how Robby’s laugh was this smoky sort of thing. Like a sultry jazz singer right out of the clubs in New Orleans he had snuck out to when his dad was stationed at the Naval Joint Base when he was actually a freshman in high school.
It had been the first time he had seen a man sing like that and it had fundamentally changed him. There was nothing covering the man’s soul and after growing up watching his father and his buddies be straight laced, never showing their real emotions, to have seen something raw and vulnerable it made him wonder if there was more out in the world.
“How come you hate me?”
He looks up and sees Robby waiting for him by the mailboxes of the off campus housing that most med students called home. Close to the med school and hospital and cheap enough to be the right price. Jack had chosen it because he didn’t need much. Just a bed to sleep when he’s able to do so and a fridge to put his beer in when he has women over to pretend to be something he’s not.
“What?”
Robby leans against the worn brick of the mail room and shrugs. “You don’t have to lie to me. I can take it.”
“Who says I hate you?” he asks, running through the letters that he’s neglected. Letters from his little sister still stuck at the home his parents were making in California, the only reason he had gone to San Diego for undergrad to be closeish to her. Another letter from his mother that he would ignore.
“Well you’re not exactly friendly.”
“Do you want to be best friends and braid each others hair?” he asks, shutting his mailbox, looking up from under his eyelashes. Another thing he hates. Robby’s height makes it impossible to intimidate him if he truly wanted to.
“You’re the other best student in our cohort.”
“And?”
Robby’s lips twist like he wants to say something. Jack doesn’t offer anything more except a raise of his brow.
“I just thought we could work together.”
“We are working together.”
“No we’re not.” Robby frowns, eyes narrowing. “You’re making my life harder.”
Jack pats Robby’s shoulder with his letters. “Exactly.” He scoots around the side of him, leaving him behind.
He had chalked it up to academic rivals. Anytime Robby got a correct answer, he found himself wanting to raise his hand first and get the next one instead. He had wanted the best research opportunities, the best test scores. It had been like being a ravenous dog, snarling and curling itself around whatever scraps it could find.
He supposed it had all come from his parents. Never good enough for his father, always ignored by his mother who had been too busy to make him a prop only to show off to the rest of the military wives at whatever event they made up under the guise of charity.
(His psychology class had given him that little nugget of information. The kind that he had wished he could shove back into the recesses of his mind where it would collect dust and he could pretend that he had never learned it in the first place.)
School made him feel safe in a way that nothing else could compare. It was the rigors of studying and making sure he knew the material and yet still having the adrenaline of not knowing how he did on a test after he slung his backpack over his shoulder walking out.
At the start he had been the first one done with the tests that first year of med school. Then he and Robby would be walking up together until eventually Robby surpassed him.
He had stayed the entire night at the library before the next one until the librarians kicked him out and then he stopped by the coffee shop just before they closed, grabbed three giant large paper cups and continued more studying after.
It was the second semester of the first year that he had found himself on the rooftop the same time as Robby. The other man might have told the story differently, but he had been there first.
“This is my spot,” Robby says, the creaking hinges on the rusted metal door to the rooftop breaking up the noise of the traffic and the occasional domestic disputes down below.
“Got here first,” he shoots back, not looking up from the three textbooks he had out in front of him going over pharmacology, one of his least favorite subjects. He likes the hands on approach. Medication is important but why use medicine when you could trip wire a disease from the back end if you could?
“Alright then,” Robby says, plopping down next to him in the lawn chair that he hadn’t occupied. “Mind if I join you?”
That gets him to look up. “No talking.”
Robby pretends to zip his lip and holds both hands up even and clunks his heavy messenger bag onto the roof. Jack narrows his eyes but allows it.
For a while they sit like this, only the sounds of pencil scratches and Robby’s incessant jumping knee keeping them both company.
“You know there’s meds for that,” he says, tapping the eraser end of his pharmacology textbook and holds it up to the driest section of methylphenidate he’s ever read in his life.
“Nah, tried it. Sucked the soul out of me.”
His eyebrows raise. It’s the first time that he’s actually gotten something real out of Robby that isn’t related to whatever class they’re trying to one up each in.
“My dad has it too and it works fine for him. I think it gives me my edge but I keep losing my keys most of the time.” The corner of Robby’s mouth twitches up and it’s that same sort of lopsided boyish smile that gets to him. “The super hates me because I’ve had to have him change the locks three times already.”
“So you’re why Mr. Torino is always pissed off.”
“That would be the couple in 15 that breaks a light every time they fight actually. I’m right next to them.”
He hums. “So I’m right above you then.”
It’s Robby’s turn to have his brows jump up. “Really? Nice and quiet. Good job. I haven’t thought about banging on the ceiling once since you moved in.”
Jack leans back in his chair, looking out over the rooftop towards the city that’s slowly becoming his home. “Did you live here before I moved in?”
“Yeah, I’ve lived here since junior year of undergrad. Used to have a girlfriend. Well, we were almost engaged, but she left.”
“Oh.”
“Nothing bad. She hated that I was always studying and didn’t want to go out partying like we had done in high school.”
“Oh. So high school sweethearts.”
Robby looks almost defensive for a moment. “What about it?”
A laugh bubbles up to the top and it surprises him as he shrugs. “Nothing. I just didn’t take you for the high school sweetheart type.”
“What did you take me for?”
“The kind that puts school before anything else.”
“Well, that’s kinda what happened isn’t it?”
Jack hums in agreement. “Yeah I guess it is.”
It went like that for a while. The two of them found each other on the roof, studying in silence for a while until one of them broke it with some sort of anecdote about whatever happened in class or something that happened in the building. It was odd in the way it became something natural, like this unspoken friendship between them.
It didn’t translate as well outside the bubble that the roof created. At least not at first.
They sat on opposite ends of all the classrooms and stood as far away from each other in the lab, the rest of their cohort keeping their distance like they were two of the same ends of a magnet, repelling each other like water on a duck’s feathers as his father would say.
Rivals out in the open but when it was just the two of them on that rooftop, there was a camaraderie that he wasn’t used to.
“You know I think you push me to be better,” Robby says one day towards the end of their first year.
“I thought I made your life harder,” he shoots back, taking a sip of the beer they’ve started to bring up with them, taking turns with another unspoken agreement between them. Always cheap because you don’t get paid to be a student after all. He’s running on fumes and whatever free food he can scrounge up from the faculty lounge he sneaks into at least once a week.
“Yeah, you do. There’s no doubt about that, but I think if I didn’t have you, I wouldn’t have tried as hard.”
His eyes slide to Robby’s and he watches as the man takes a sip from the Natty Light, his Adam's apple bobbing as he does. He looks away. “I think you do the same for me. You’re the only other one that I think I would eventually trust with my life.”
“Eventually?”
He looks back at Robby. “Well you don’t have that MD yet. I don’t trust you as far as I can throw you and you’re too fucking tall so I know I can’t throw you far.”
Robby laughs in that genuine way of his, the corners of his eyes crinkling and it’s infectious. He laughs back until they’re both cracking up in a way that is probably from too little sleep and definitely too much caffeine.
“I like you Abbot.”
He reaches over and clinks his can with Robby’s. “I like you too Robinavitch.” But then he pauses and points his finger at him. “But don’t go soft on me.”
“Never.”