Chapter Text
Not a day goes by where Whitaker doesn’t think about the looming absence in his stomach. The new concave spot in his abdomen, the tight scar pulling his skin into a soft black hole. He still remembers what the bandages were like in the first few weeks. Being bonded to you, like a dog laying on your hip. You want to move, but you can’t. The white, woolen tissue soaking up blood and spitting it out day after day.
There’s something about it he misses. But a lot more he doesn’t. The scar, now healed into a dark faded peach, was identical to that of his mothers. The one where she had her first cancer taken out. The tumor, about 11 centimeters when she first noticed the growth. it sucked all the life from her.
Of course, his father was across the country, and his brother was on a tour, so there wasn’t much else to do in the hospital besides stare at the monitor above the bed. When mom couldn’t work anymore, Dennis was the newest heir to delivering calves. The wet writhing bodies going limp in his hands in the first few tries, born wailing but soon closing their square eyes and succumbing to their distress.
He would pickup the gun from its designated shelf on the wall, and let loose a lousy bulled into the calves head.
Dennis hadn’t seen worse back then.
Recalling it now, it was a generational laugh. Dennis slowly hobbling into the house to wash his hands in the sink, a thick white and red silk dripping down to the elbow.
sobbing like a drunk in a local pub.
Scrubbing his eyebrows, whitaker was unhappy. Thinking about life in broken bow had been an upsetting thought. Especially now that dad’s dead too. He knew archer, his eldest brother, wouldn’t be attending any funeral that was set to happen. and Ezra’s wife was in her final months of her pregnancy, so he wasn’t leaving her side. and Josiah was still in rehab, if he was still alive himself.
Dennis wasn’t even sure if he himself was going to show. Last time he had seen his father, a glass shard had been launched in his shoulder, almost giving him tetanus. But father obviously wouldn’t be doing much of any harm now.
The car swayed as santos drove over two potholes. Whitaker let his forehead hit the window a few times before craning his neck to his neighbors side. Santos had been tinkering with the radio on and off, switching between station to station until ultimately settling on 92 . They played classical all morning and 90s hits until 10, when they put on the regular gospel and prayer recitals until enough people were awake to complain about it, which was usually at about 6 am.
For now, Alanis morrisette was on, and santoswas gently humming though a few verses she didn’t know until the repeated chorus chimed in.
Whitaker preferred the gospel music.
Santos always parked in the staff parking garage. The second floor was the least busy and closer to the French pastry shop she liked to stop by before her shift started. Whitaker always let her do her thing. Grab a few baked goods, a sweet coffee, and let him take a solitude elevator ride and a stroll through the sky bridge.
It was a quick trip that skipped past the cancer research center, which always made him a bit queasy.
For now, he was alone. Unbarring. Unburdened.
The tight plastic cotton scrubs tugged at his skin, rubbing a rash into his ankles and stomach. Something itched inside of him. Maybe he had a new allergy that had just started to settle. Maybe the thin sliver cross he found between the mattress in Santos’s guest room was starting to turn his neck green. Maybe he hadn’t quite dislodged that shard of glass from his collar bone.
but for now, he could smell Dana’s new perfume she had been talking about all day yesterday, and hear her gleeful laughs as she talked a hole into mohan about her new bleach job. Another thing she announced yesterday. The light at the far side of the hall way hummed in a way that made Whitaker uneasy. The yellow green vibrance screamed at him.
A choir of mute through the cloud tapestry they hung on every 10 lights or so.
Abbot was adjusting his leg as he spotted Dennis from his seat. Already looking ready to sweat through his scrubs. Whitaker turned his way, offering a pathetic wave his way before pursing his lips and bowing his head. A habit he hadn’t yet noticed he had. Some kind of song was playing a phone somewhere in the distance, and as Dennis slowly trudged off to the locker room, a heavy smack on his shoulder summoned his attention away from his stumbling feet.
“Huckleberry! I got you a croissant from the thing. Oughta fatten you up a bit.”
He had an another habit of stuttering eyes. Looking all over the place all the time. Santos of course noticed this and always had an itch to tease, but she didn’t, even though she knew Whitaker wouldn’t mind. He belched a scarce “thanks.” As he took the paper bag so she could comb her hair into a neat ponytail. “Your hairs shiny today.”
He said as he pushed the door open for her, the stale smell of the the lockers and cigarettes breathing a harsh reminder of their surroundings into him.
”sorry man. I don’t see you like that.” He had known she was a lesbian since before she brought girl over. since then she has never failed to use it when teasing him. He likes to believe they’re friends now. it kind of comes with living and working together, plus she is actually quite a positive person. She calls it her sweet jelly center.
She stuffs the bags into her locker, and covers it with her jacket and spare undershirt. Whitaker takes time to mount his bag on the hook in the wall. Draping his hoodie over it and wrapping the sleeves through the loop. He’s very paranoid about theft. Especially since McKay got her entire bag stolen by a wandering patient.
Santos is already out he door, staring at the monitor, waiting for an interesting patient, while Dennis sits for a bit by the lockers, taking time to close the door and tie his shoe again. He remembers the call he received this morning. From the broken bowe police department. His father had peacefully passed last night.
Something about the subtle absence of his father now hits him. There was no physical symptoms of this emptiness yet, no phantom touch or gentle goose bumps, just that remembrance that Someone has died, and now only you feel this loss.
Death never feels real when it’s close to you. They seem like a person who could never die. Coming into school and hearing on the announcements, a fellow student sucumbed to a fever last night, and now they will have a park in their memory. But you have to remember what dead means. It’s not a simple ‘praying for you’ or a few ballon’s in the sky, it’s a cold body that still has organs and limbs and a heart and skin that holds veins inside of it.
He can picture it now. His father. A hole scared into his chest, his beard, trimmed and proper, no trail of stubble down his throat. He couldn’t picture him cold though. Dennis had never known his father’s warmth. Never felt a flush palm against his shoulder, a real voice telling his words, reciting scriptures under his breath. Death felt so far from true.
———————-
Plucking the head phones out of his ears, the chaos had already began to smother him, and it was five minutes before shift even started.
Dr Robby was disoriented. Muffled moans from behind doors and curtains filled the lobby, people begging to be seen , looking like they had been here for hours, if not longer.
He was already longing for the end.
Something different lingered in the air, like a trail of smoke. low to the ground, crawling slow like water. Something smelled like hardship, looming over the building, threatening the staff with a long shift.
He wondered if the others could feel it as well.
He dove close to the counter of the front desk, searching for Dana, but when he couldn’t find her, he loaded a few hard candies into his pockets.
Whitaker stepped out of the locker room, while dr king approached with a certain anxiety. Adjusting his glasses, he followed dr king into a private room, occupied by a father and his son. The son with a particular wound on his forehead.
Whitaker stumbled into the room as Mel called him in, a look of familiarity rippling though his eyes in waves.
“ Gerard, this is dr Robby and dr Whitaker, they know just how to help you with your head, okay?”
The first thing Robby noticed was that the injury wasn’t serious. Maybe a scrape or bang, but no penetration or a deep puncture. The child had been crying. The red rings around his eyes and his wet nose signaled that. But the father looked burdened. bored. Letting out a thick sigh now and then,silently telling them to hurry up. Whitaker knew exactly what to do though. Cleaning the wound, scheduling a CT, explaining wound care and what to do when a similar situation occurs. But there was something absent.
He could slap a reassuring hand on his shoulder, tell him to prepare for a tough one, but Whitaker had been here long enough to know exactly he what expect. Maybe he felt the smoke as well. Maybe he was suffocating.
At some point, he recognized that he couldn’t help every one.
Patients came first, always.
so no personal affairs or entanglements were allowed in his work. But Whitaker seemed distracted. Distractions lead to poor treatment, and that allows for an exception for personal affairs. Keep yourself in check.
Robby had already lost Whitaker, coiling down the halls to a new patient, leaving him alone in the middle of the room.
the chatter and beeping turns to a fazed drone, and suddenly he remembers exactly where he is. He’s with Mel, wothout Dennis, in an emergency medical hospital. He has a job. He has a life.not much of one but a lifr nonetheless.
Droning turns to chatter and beeping, and a look from dr king. As she walks off.
He shouldn’t feel like this. He shouldn’t feel like a detuned guitar, stings frayed and popping. He shouldn’t smell invisible secondhand smoke. He shouldn’t feel like he’s on a swingset, climbing the air up and down.
Yet he does. It feels like he’s in a meadow, sharp hairy blades of grass cutting though thin layers of skin, tiny beads of blood growing pregnant and falling onto the bugs that bite his feet and legs. He’s at work. He’s working. He saving people.
Mohan is performing cpr on an elderly man, mouth agape, eyes wide and erratic, twitching softly. He’s not going to make it. A couple leaves the family room and stumbles dumbly into the chapel, their hands over their mouth in an attempt to stifle their sobs. sobs that are droned out by beeping. So much beeping.
Whitaker passes by, blood on his face. It takes a minute for it to register to dr Robby that the blood is Whitakers own, and it’s steady flowing from his nose.
Chasing him into the bathroom, he can hear Dana calling for them. Her southern drawl getting heavier as her panic weighs larger.
Whitaker is hunched over the sink, his left eye closed and clutching at his face, a bright red mark across his right half, spreading to his hair line. he’s leaning on his left elbow, Examining his eye as he lifts his lids open. “Whitaker!” Dana busts into the men’s room, foot before foot, slapping her new balance soles onto the tile. She darts past dr Robby, who’s standing staring by the door, dumbfounded, like he had just woken from a coma.
She touches his shoulder, mumbling something nice in his ear, something that makes him laugh, laugh in the way his head swoops downward and the top of his eyebrows meet to crease his forehead as they point uowards, a toothy smile spreading across the visible half of his face.
“What happened?” Robby walks his way over to the scene, dark red dripping onto the sink in fat drops. “Crazy fucker punched ‘im, pushed ‘im right into the edge of the table.”
Dana eyes the two back and forth, speaking with her jaw pointed forwards, something she did when she was either smoking, or irritated.
“He wasn’t.. crazy, he was just on very hard drugs.”
Whitaker interrupted
“I scared him.”
Dana whips her head in Dennis’s direction, wide eyes, her hand on his back going farther to his neck as he cups his nose, hunched uncomfortably. His neck like a wire holding his head, probably a bit unscrewed after everything.
“Dana, Dana, go outside, get some air.” Dana is more upset than Dennis , who is supporting a hand under his nose to catch the falling red from his face. she’s about to say something, before Robby interjects again.
”men’s room.” He points weakly towards the urinals, letting his arm fall and slap his thigh.
He lets out a sigh and mumbles something, probably something mean, and shakes he head as she pushes open the door.
Robby watches her leave, basking in a quick moment of satisfaction before tending to Whitaker.
He’s giggling a bit in the mirror, a large bump raised on the red spot on his forehead, a small mark on his cheek oozing blood.
It might just be the absurdity of the scene.
Whitaker has gotten his few blows from erratic patients, patients with disabilities or addictions who are often scared, he’s had a few sober patients not be too gentle with him in the past. But never something that tosses you onto the corner of a table.
As he lets out a wheezy laugh, there’s a thin orange coat of blood on his teeth, bubbling from somewhere in his gums.
Robby coats a paper towel in water, soaked and dripping, and applies it on his wounds. Whitaker pulls his bottom lip into his mouth, his chin curling underneath it. The fresh touch is sudden, and it can only get worse.
“We’re gonna need to clean this better. Might need to get you to a patient room for stitches.”
Dennis looks like he wants to say something but doesn’t. Instead he holds the towel to his face and follows.
Out in the hall, Robby pushes a curtain away and reveals and empty patient room. He gently plucks the towel from Whitaker swollen face, he starts to pour alcohol on a towel and dab it on his face. He dodges the wound on his cheek, and starts to swipe away dried blood.
The blood has finally started to clot, the ooze from his nose coming to a slow flowing blocked halt.
For a moment, Robby pictured Dennis in his old life, delivering calves and driving tractors. His hands, splattered with the mother’s blood, gently petting her head as she pushes her baby out. He imagines he might’ve looked a bit like he does now. Living miles away from local towns. Denis always talking about his life as a child. But he gets distant. Distracted. Sometimes it brings itself up in conversations, sometimes his isolation is obvious, his little country boy phrases slipping out. Sometimes it would be a bit of an accent, but it had been fading a bit, getting harder to catch now that people had been pointing it out.
..dr Robby had noticed the lingering silence until a scream pierced though his thoughts barrier. A patient in a different. It sounded adult.
“Now that it’s December, got any plans for the winter?”
Awkward timing, but the right message.
It peaked Dennis’s interest though, he shot up like sprout when he heard Robby voice.
“Uh no. No, not so far.”
He looked at his shoes, dangling off the bed. They were newer, he had over heard him bragging about them to Santos, about how they were the best goodwill find of his life. Blue looked good on him . Especially a deep blue lie that.
“No trips back to Nebraska or anything like that?”
…
No response.
Robby was quite skilled at making conversation in bad situations, but he couldn’t pop his bubble yet, couldn’t walk though the grey plastic gum around his eyes.
Robby did a half tilted smile, threw his eyebrows up, and passes him an icepack.
“Rough start?”
“Somehow worse than this, yeah.”
A deep sigh and a throw back of the shoulders. He was already chewing on his cheek and waiting for dr Robby to start sewing sutures into his face.
“Tell me how you can beat this?”
“Well.. if I’m salty today it’s just cause my dad died this morning.”
A beat of silence as Robby cocked his neck, furrowing his eyebrows to hell and back.
“And you’re still on shift?”
“Well, I mean, I got the call this morning yeah. I’m not sure if I should miss a day because of a death in the family.”
“Kid, Dana is rubbing off on you too much.”he shook his head, scooting closer on his stool, shining a light in his eye.
“Pupils reactive.”
He pulled his mouth tight, pursing his lips disappointedly. In a bit of awe at Whitaker lack of care.
He had said like he had said it a million times.
‘my dad died this morning.’
In Whitakers first shift, he admired his keep calm and carry on attitude, the way he didn’t let it affect him much, no matter how much it hurt-
But now it freaked him out. He didn’t think this kid was a phsyco by any means, but maybe a little less steady footing when you tell somebody your father passed in the night.
“Are you sure you’re feeling alright? Your lack of reactivity could be a symptom.”
It was already protocol to get a head ct for staff after any collision or head trauma, but if he’s fucked up that badly, something else might be up.
He opened his mouth to say something, but stopped. instead he started tonguing the roof of his mouth silently.
“What?”
“Ehh- we.. weren’t that close. “
“Especially after I moved out.
Kind of a douchebag.”
He looked up, startled by his own words. dropping his bottom lip with a hiss.
He could tell when he had said was not meant to be said outloud. It was like he had slapped an invisible hand over his mouth.
“I’m.. sorry, he’s still my father- this is so unprofessional of me-“
“No, no, you’re good.”
“ woulda said the same thing about my old man too.”
Dr Robby said, a gentle ease in pitch as he lifted his hand reassuringly.
“ I still have to do these stitches kid, you don’t get out that easy”
Whitaker was already feeling the lidocaine, so when the alcohol hit the wound, a straight breath though his teeth was all he got, although he knew we would’ve been a lot more sensitive.
“D’ya think it’ll leave a scar?”
He looked straight at him as Robby prepared the needle, fascinated by his accent once more.
“Depends on how you care for it.. uhm.. you plan to be good, kid?”
Something ruffled inside of Robby after he said that, realizing how poor it actually sounded. Especially coming from a senior resident. He noticed a bit of a reaction in Whitaker. Palms pressing harder against the mattress, white knuckle grip around the metal frame.
Dennis let out a heavy sigh, shoulders falling low and then propping high as he began to speak.
“Yeah, yeah.. just-let’s start this. I’m not a primary patient.”
This comment disgusted him. Only because it sounded exactly like something a self loathing doctor would say. Robby hated the idea that Whitaker had already come to that point after a year long rotation.
“..relax your eyebrows for me?”
Whitaker shot down a confused look as his gaze bounced from the ceiling to Dr Robby.
“They are?”
Dennis, despite his naturaul ease and supposed nonchalance, had a perma furrow, another trait of a self loathing doctor.
A thin, faint pair of elevens and a few forehead lines had grown on his face. He had eyebages from before he stepped foot in the Pitt, but they had grown deep.
There was a blister on his bottom lip from where he was always chewing it.
Robby felt an immediate itching guilt spread over him as he realized how much he enjoyed the look on him, despite how it was literal physical decay.
“Well then.. close your eyes for me? Hmm?” A gentle nod and his eyes were closed, facing steadily forward as Robby began to run the needle through.
“Feel okay? No pain?”
“Good, just a sting.”
“Good.”