Chapter Text
The first couple of dollars that the machine ate up without remorse were an annoyance, something that made Dennis sigh and unzip his wallet without thinking about it to try again. By the time that the vending machine had eaten seven whole dollars, in coins, and Dennis didn’t have anything to show for it, he was close to thumping his forehead against the cool glass and hoping he could derive some sort of enjoyment or nourishment from simply just looking at the colourful packages as they remained firmly in their coils.
He didn’t often carry coins. Those were his last few dollars and he was woefully aware that somebody had offhandedly mentioned that the staffroom vending machine destroyed notes, so he wasn’t going to be getting a soda, a bag of chips or anything else that might settle his belly from the incessant grumbling it was doing. Really, the hunger wasn’t the worst part; it was the fact that it kind of sounded like he was ripping ass every time his tummy rumbled in a quiet room. Mortifying. Utterly soul-destroying, especially when Robby had glanced up from a chart while in an unconscious patient’s room when it had happened.
“Sorry. I’m hungry,” he said, his hands shifting to his stomach as he looked up at Robby. “It’s not—I don’t need the bathroom or anything.”
He could have taken the chart in Robby’s hands and driven it into the front of his skull, right through his eye sockets and into the soft bits of his brain. Letting it drip down the page, right through the patient’s notes, and onto the floor for somebody else to clean up as they muttered to themself about how embarrassing Student Doctor Whitaker could be in front of a man he was pretty avidly trying to impress.
“Happens to us all. Don’t worry,” Robby said, his mouth forming a smile that lasted about a second before it fell and his eyes settled back onto the chart. “Maybe try and grab something quickly.” Slowly, his eyes rose back to meet Dennis’. “Quickly, being the operative word.”
Dennis’ finger mashed into the buttons at random, hoping that something would trigger if he pressed every single one of them, and it left them slightly damp with the ferocity of it. He’d never known himself to sweat as much as he did since he’d started his EM rotation at the Pitt; not even sweltering summer days on the farm had drenched him as much as simply walking around the ER trying to not let the idle worry find an opening and burrow into his head.
“Fuck,” Dennis murmured, his palm slapping softly against the front of the vending machine as he pushed himself away and settled on the fact that he would have to either go and beg off of Santos or wait around and hope that the staff ordered something in. He’d started to become slightly addicted to the pastrami and dill mustard on sourdough sandwiches that someone had ordered from Primanti Bros once, his mouth watering at the thought of it as he dug his phone out of his pocket and scrolled miserably through Uber Eats. Making himself feel worse by looking at the overly bright images of food he couldn’t afford without suffering deep mental anguish. He had twenty-two dollars in his account. It felt like a disservice to himself to even bother flicking his thumb across the screen.
The door pushed open, letting in the sounds of the ER and turning Dennis’ stomach in on itself in the way that it did when he was brought back to the idea that he was now in (semi-)charge of keeping people alive in a small, crowded space in an inadequate amount of time. The heavy fire door slapped back against the doorframe, and Dennis didn’t need to turn from the vending machine to know that it was Robby who had entered. The air had turned close, almost like plastic wrap had been wrapped again and again over Dennis’ face, trapping in what little he had already huffed into his lungs and he deflated almost immediately as Robby raised an eyebrow and asked, “You good?”
“Nobody told me the vending machine was broken.” Dennis jabbed a thumb behind him towards the offending machine and its damp buttons and broken lighting, illuminating the chips he really would quite like to eat. “I lost, like, seven whole dollars to it.”
“Really? It works for me.” A teaspoon clinked against the rim of a mug that Robby had filled with stale staffroom coffee. The kind of stuff that stuck to the sides of the mug and needed a firm hand to scrub off. Otherwise, it would leave muddy brown residue. Which, unsurprisingly, resided in eighty percent of the mugs in the staffroom cupboard and turned Dennis’ stomach as much as the sounds of the ER did. “Do you need me to bum you some change? I’ve got some loose shit in my locker if you’re alright to wait here while I get it.”
Dennis went cold from the top of his head all the way down to his belly, which then switched swiftly to being so hot that he was sure he was visible from space if anyone were to look down at him. A big, red, embarrassing beacon of self-pity and one heck of a stupid situation. “No. Come on. Doctor Robby—”
“Whitaker, it’s change I won’t use for anything.” The edge of the mug met Robby’s mouth and he took a sip that left a distinct look of disappointment on his face as it lowered down to rest on the rise of his belly. Dennis looked at the soft curve of it for a moment before darting his eyes back to Robby’s face. He was smiling, but only enough that you wouldn’t ever notice it unless you had spent the last week and a half with him. “It’s not a big deal. If it’ll stop your stomach sounding like it’s going to leave your body via your ass, I’ll lend you a few dollars for some chips and a candy bar.”
He didn’t let Dennis argue. He was already out of the staffroom before he could even begin to form the words with his mouth.
Horrifically, in the time it took for Robby to leave and return, Santos had slipped into the staffroom herself, covered in a thin film of white liquid that had Dennis wrinkling his nose and backing away from her. She grabbed a wodge of paper towels from the dispenser, ignoring him as well as she could as she swore under her breath and muttered something about needing to do “a Whitaker” and change her scrubs. Finally, her eyes met his, her top lip rising into what might be a snarl if an animal were to pull the same face, and she muttered with the same disdain she’d just been talking to herself, “It’s baby puke. Like, little baby puke. It’s milk, okay?”
“Okay,” Dennis said. “I didn’t think it was—uh—”
“Don’t,” Santos interrupted, dabbing at her chest. “Unless you have a worse story with a colicky baby, then don’t.” She stopped wiping, pausing to look Dennis up and down. “You look pale.” She paused. “Paler than usual, are you alright?”
“Hungry.” Dennis’ hands patted his belly, which rumbled right on cue, aching for something to fill the space that Dennis had been cultivating since he’d left the apartment that morning without even bothering to glance into the cupboards. He was still battling the strangeness of insinuating himself into Trin’s space. He felt like an extra limb, flapping at the side of her as she moved about her place with the normality of someone who had no problems with existing.
“I told you, you need to eat breakfast.” Santos’ shoulders fell, the baby vomit on her scrubs drying into strange patterns that were just distracting enough from the acidic, milky smell of it that Dennis could ignore the fact he was about five minutes away from also emptying his guts onto someone. He really was deathly hungry. “Come on, man. You can’t come to work and school people on taking care of themselves when you’re not doing it yourself.”
Another addition to the pile of humiliation was Robby strolling back through the door at Trinity’s admission, a wallet in his hands that looked like it had once been attached to a pair of jorts in the nineties, back when Robby was in his twenties and it was suitable for somebody to be attaching wallets to their jorts. Sickeningly, the mental image of Robby dressed like Fred Durst had Dennis’ throat closing up as though he had two hands wrapped around it.
That would be nice. He thought idly, then swallowed around the tightness in his throat as Robby jangled the wallet in the air and asked, completely sincerely, “Is he not taking care of himself?” With a shake of his head and a wayward glance down at the puke on Santos, he continued with, “You’re not going to survive this place if you’re scrimping on your own personal health. You two need to remember that.”
Santos scoffed. “Don’t bring me into it.” Then, as if to physically extricate herself from the conversation and the accusation, she dipped, pushing closed the door as the smell of warm vomit left with her, thankfully.
“Jesus,” with two long strides, Robby was in front of him, looking down at Dennis as he pulled open the wallet and filtered his finger around the random coinage in there. “One of my worst fears when it comes to EM is that I smell bad when I leave, even after a shower. There are so many things in this place that can linger. Baby throw-up is one of them.” His shoulders shimmied in a shudder, his Adam’s apple bobbing gently as he swallowed and Dennis tracked the motion with tired eyes. “You room with her, right?” Dennis found himself nodding as he took the initiative to raise his open palm just enough for Robby to ease a selection of coins into his sweating hand. It was reminiscent of being given pocket money. A handful of dollar coins for a job well done. He barely had the power to listen, too caught in the weight of the coins that had once lived in his attending’s wallet, as Robby said, “Your apartment is probably going to smell sour tonight. Fair warning.”
“Sure,” Dennis breathed. Robby could have said anything in that moment, and he would have agreed. “Sour.”
By that point, one would have thought that Dennis was used to the sensation of Robby’s hands on his shoulder. The weight and the warmth of it as it leached down through his scrubs and into his skin, but it was a shock to the system every single time. He would never consider himself unflappable, something that would be an admirable trait to try and work on if you were to decide at the end of the rotation sets that an ER is where you wanted to work, but he did hold himself to at least a certain degree of composure. However, nothing could turn a human being into a jittery, stuttering mess like the feeling of that hand. It was huge, for one thing. Taking up almost the entire breadth of Dennis’ shoulder as his thumb crept towards the exposed skin of Dennis’ neck as he wheeled him towards the machine with a serene kind of unbotheredness that made Dennis start to think that this was some sort of punishment from God for the fact that he had admitted, shakily, to Santos that he wouldn’t mind seeing the vee of Robby’s chest where his Star of David hung. Which she had remarked was the ‘most virgin, farmboy kind of fantasy to have’, but Dennis hadn’t taken it to heart, as he hadn’t taken anything she had said in the past week and a half to heart.
“Try it now,” Robby urged, nodding his head towards the machine in an unusual display of wasting precious time that they could be stomping around the floor, tending to patients. If somebody died because Robby was indulging in this, Dennis would never forgive himself. “I bet it’ll work if I stand here and give it a stern look.”
The laugh that left Dennis was pathetic and almost curled his toes back on themselves in his shoes.
“Wow,” Robby said, sounding amazed and maybe a bit freaked out. “Didn’t realise I was that funny.” He gestured to the machine, probably wanting the interaction to be over if the nervous thought that bounded about Dennis’ head was to be listened to. “Go on. Get whatever you want.”
Something about the phrasing of the sentence made Dennis audibly gulp in the room, it only being muffled by the rumble of his belly as he slid coins into the metallic slot, hearing them tumble into the machine, before punching in the numbers for a Snickers bar and a bag of chips that looked like the cheapest option that the hospital could buy for their staff. They both fell with a muted thud into the basin at the bottom of the machine and behind him, Robby made a sound of approval, as though he had truly wanted to stick around to make sure the machine wasn’t going to jilt him another time.
The thumb remained tucked into the skin that met the collar of Dennis’ scrubs.
He was sure he was sweating hard enough to overpower the smell of the baby vomit.
But then, Robby’s hand withdrew as he tucked back into his ever-present posture of having his arms crossed over his chest, winding them around himself as Dennis bent to retrieve his food. When he stood back up, turning to look at Robby, he had already angled himself away, his eyes fixed firmly onto the door as he cleared his throat and said, his voice bereft of the vaguely unorthodox chummy tone it had before, “Eat quickly, then get back out there.” Then, minutely softer, “Okay?”
“Yep. Yes,” Dennis said. “Absolutely.”
“She is right,” Robby said, one hand cupped around his chin as he patently ignored looking at Dennis’ face. “Eat breakfast tomorrow, and ask for help if you need it.”
“I don’t need help.” The bag of chips crinkled in his hand and Dennis was thankful that Robby couldn’t see how hot and red his cheeks felt. “I’m not—like—destitute.”
Robby’s mouth opened to say something but closed before the thought could find its way out and instead, he pulled open the staffroom door, wavering in the doorway as he rocked gently on the balls of his feet and gripped the frame of the door so hard that Dennis could see the shift of his knuckles underneath the skin.
“Eat breakfast. I don’t need med students passing out.” Robby’s eyes scrunched up merrily momentarily, the lines at the side of them spidering out and making Dennis’ belly feel like it had gone three miles past hunger and had stumbled into a territory that he had no knowledge of how to escape. “Any more of them, that is.”
By the time the door had shut behind him and Dennis had wolfed down the meagre offering of junk food, he could barely remember the swipe of Robby’s thumb against his bare skin or the warmth of the coins that had been in his wallet as they were pressed into the centre of his palm.