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Robby’s arm hurts.
It’s being crushed under a pile of metal, squeezed between shards of fiberglass, soaked in gasoline and flames, and it fucking hurts.
“I know,” comes Jack’s voice, quiet and gentle in the dim of Robby’s living room. His hands are moving rhythmically, up and down Robby’s side. From the waistband of his shorts, up his side, over the fresh scars twisting across his chest and shoulder, careful over the amputation site. Just enough pressure to ground him. In theory.
Robby breathes heavily, curls tighter around the pillow. Jack presses closer against his back, tucks his face into the nape of Robby’s neck. It brings Robby into the present, but the pain continues, radiating across his chest in waves. He bites back a sob, body shaking.
Jack snakes a hand under Robby’s side, wraps his arm around his chest. He pulls Robby close, tightly, with pressure that would be uncomfortable if not for the throbbing pain coming from his right side.
“I know, I know, I know,” Jack says. The room feels very, very dark.
—
Jack gives Robby space for a week after coming home. Avoidance has always been his favorite coping mechanism, and Jack indulges him in it for a little while. He orders takeout more than usual, and unobtrusively leaves easy snacks in the fridge. He goes to the store the day before discharge and buys a long handled shower brush, a shoehorn, and an electric can-opener at the Target down the street, and leaves them in places Robby will find. Jack feels a bit like he’s approaching a skittish animal, but he remembers how it felt, when he came home.
Jack’s always had a hard time explaining it. The persistent feeling when you acquire a disability, that the world has suddenly become a brand new place. That being suddenly forced to approach every aspect of your life differently can be disorienting to a traumatic degree, and the only thing that helps is time.
So Jack lets him be silent for a while. Gives him time.
In Jack’s head, the line between them gets blurry sometimes, the distinctions between his and Robby’s experiences getting tangled together. Robby lost his arm in Iraq, just below the elbow, and Jack lost his leg in a motorcycle accident, all the way up to the pelvis. No, Jack lost the arm. No, he left his leg in Iraq. Robby left his arm on the interstate, somewhere in southern Ohio.
The scars feel similar at the end of the day, though. A burning vehicle meets the human body the same way, no matter where you are in the world.
Robby looks deep in thought as he touches the end of Jack’s leg. His hand is gentle, curious, as though he’s seeing the residual limb through new eyes. He sits cross legged on the floor in front of Jack, shoulders tilted oddly, like his body hasn’t quite figured out what to do without the weight of his arm. The loose tank top he wears covers most of the scarring, but some of the redness peeks out by the shoulder seam, and Jack aches with remembered sensation.
Robby has his hand cupped around Jack’s stump now, almost cradling it. His thumb rubs over and over on the side of Jack’s knee, and there’s a furrow between his brows. Jack reaches over and puts his hand on top of Robby’s, squeezing a little. Robby looks up almost immediately at the contact, and his expression is so open, so completely unguarded.
“You okay?” Jack asks gently. Robby nods, before looking back at his hand on Jack’s leg. “Weird, isn’t it?” Robby nods again.
“Does it get easier?” Robby asks quietly. The question is so simple, so quiet, and yet Jack feels like he’s been bowled over. Suddenly desperate to be closer, Jack reaches for Robby’s face, cups his cheek in his hand.
“Yeah,” Jack says. He tries to sound confident. “It takes a while, but yeah.” Robby nods against his hand. “C’mere,” Jack tells him, migrating his hand to Robby’s uninjured shoulder, pulling a little. Robby comes easily, rising to his knees and leaning towards Jack, who moves his legs apart for Robby to get closer. He almost collapses into Jack, left arm coming around his back to grip at Jack’s shirt.
Jack pulls him close, lets Robby go boneless against him, mindful of the still-healing scars on his side. Robby’s quiet for a long moment, so Jack just holds him, breathes with him, sits in his emotions with him.
Robby’s knees must start to hurt eventually, because he starts to shift a little in Jack’s arms, as if he doesn’t want to leave but his body complains nonetheless. Jack gives him one last squeeze for good measure, before moving back a little.
“C’mon,” Jack says, tipping Robby’s chin up a little. “Let’s order takeout.”
They eat their takeout-–something easy and one-handed-–and the quiet draws on, and on. They sit on the couch and watch the game, watch M*A*S*H reruns, read side by side in bed. Sunlight comes through the closed curtains and fades, comes again, and fades. The time feels rubbery, somehow, like they’re both floating in a discomforting state of suspended animation, and Jack is almost hesitant to break the spell.
However, there’s the elephant in the room, the reason Robby ever got on that motorcycle in the first place. All those months leading up to it, culminating in a road trip he never intended to make it home from. Now, it hangs like a pressure front building and building, casting darker and darker shadows every day that passes.
Which is to say, when the fight finally happens, Jack can’t say he’s surprised.
“I can’t fucking help you if you don’t talk to me, Rob!” The words seem to explode out of him of their own accord.
“Maybe I don’t want your help!” Robby shouts back, rising to full height. Jack sputters for a moment, stares at him incredulously.
“Yeah, and how’d that technique work out last time?” Jack retorts. “Last I checked, your usual strategy left your arm in the middle of the fucking freeway! But what do I know, I’m not a psychologist.” Robby brings his hand up, grips the back of his head, his neck. His breaths come heavily.
“You’re right, you’re not,” Robby spits, red in the face. “So I don’t know why you keep insisting on smothering me like this!”
“I’ve been in your shoes, Robby!” Jack asserts, “Yeah I don’t have a fucking degree, but are you telling me life experience counts for nothing? That doesn’t sound like Dr. Robby to me,” Jack says, and he knows it’s a low blow when Robby meets his eyes.
“Are you calling me a hypocrite?”
“No!” Jack says. “I’m saying that there are people who want to help you, but if you keep stonewalling them, you’re going to feel like this forever.” Jack looks down at his hands, and he can feel his resolve slipping. “I can’t watch you feel like this forever, Robby,” he says quietly, willing his voice not to crack. “I can’t watch you in the hospital again. I can’t lose someone again.”
Jack can see the moment something cracks in Robby. A switch flips behind his eyes, from furious to so, so sad. His eyes well over until he can’t seem to contain it anymore, and he lets out a heavy sob, shaking his head roughly. His chest heaves, and Jack steps forward to catch him, pulls him close as he crumbles.
“Hey, hey, hey,” Jack repeats mindlessly. “It’s okay. It’s okay.” He does everything he can to envelop him, cursing his short arms as he tries to gather Robby as close as he can. The sobs seem endless, coming from somewhere so deep inside him that Jack aches with sympathy. A month’s worth of bottled up emotion coming out at once, plus the years of buildup before that. Jack presses kiss after kiss to the side of Robby’s head.
“I’m sorry,” Robby mumbles between sobs. Jack shakes his head.
“No, don’t apologize. You’re grieving, it’s okay,” Jack repeats. “Grief leaving the body, yeah?” Robby snorts wetly.
“It’s just–” Robby starts. Jack waits him out, runs a hand up and down his back rhythmically. “I should be able to handle this. It’s my fucking fault anyways.”
Jack takes a deep breath at that. That’s the closest Robby’s ever come to admitting he has a problem, and Jack feels like he’s been handed a precious gift.
“Not your fault,” Jack says softly, pressing his nose into Robby’s hair. “Never your fault, you hear me?” He squeezes Robby a little. “It’s an illness, like anything else we deal with,” Jack says. “There’s things we can do, Rob. There’s things that’ll help if you let them.” Robby tucks himself even closer to Jack. Jack presses another kiss to his head. “You gotta let ‘em, Rob.”
“Okay,” Robby says into Jack’s shoulder, so quietly Jack almost misses it. “Okay.”
—
Things get a little easier after that. A little. Robby goes to his therapy appointments every week, with only a little cajoling from Jack required. Despite this, Robby still seems hesitant to ask for help with certain things. He seems to have built walls, Jack thinks, between the physical and the mental, between at home and at a doctor’s office. A doctor is a doctor, someone whose job it is to help him with tasks. To have his partner help him, though, seems to be a blow to his pride.
Robby would rather walk a narrow tightrope from the kitchen to the living room with a plate, mug, utensils, a napkin all precariously perched in one hand, than ask Jack to carry his mug. Half of Jack is angry at him for it, and the other half knows exactly how it feels.
Interdependence can be defined as the “mutual reliance between two groups”. A fitting concept, Jack thinks, for a household composed of a man with one arm and a man with one leg. It calls into focus something Jack learned some years ago, in that transitional period of his life when he was struggling to think of himself as anything other than a hyper-competent soldier.
“All living things rely on each other, Jack,” his therapist had told him. “We all lean on each other for survival.”
“Is it shameful, for someone you love to need help?” she’d asked gently, and the question cut right through him.
“No,” Jack had said quickly. “Of course not.” She nodded.
“Then why shouldn’t ‘help’ become a mutually beneficial relationship?”
Jack finds Robby frozen in place, staring at the cutting board sitting on the kitchen counter. Jack peers over his shoulder.
“It doesn’t work too well without a knife,” Jack quips. Robby doesn’t dignify it with a response.
“I wanted some fruit,” he says, tonelessly. “Maybe cheese, to use up those crackers that are going stale.” Jack turns, putting his crutches aside and leaning against the counter.
“If I try to cut an apple with one hand, it’s gonna end up on the fucking floor,” Robby says quietly, expression carefully blank. His hand is balled up in a fist at his side. “And if I try and tie my shoes, I can’t pull the knot tight. And if I try to type an email, it takes twenty minutes longer than it should and my hand fucking hurts,” he says breathlessly. He finally looks at Jack. “Fifty-four years old, Jack. And I can’t tie my own goddamn shoes.”
Jack sighs. He thinks of his old therapist.
“Do you think less of me when I ask you to carry something for me?” he asks, nodding at the crutches at his side. Robby brows draw together. “Or when I wake you up with my nightmares?”
“Of course not, Jack, I–” Jack cuts him off.
“Then why do you think I would mind? If you need me to tie your shoes, I’m there, brother.” Robby doesn’t look convinced, eyes still distant. “Interdependence,” Jack says. “I help you, you help me. It’s a two way street.” Robby nods. Jack pivots on his foot, reaches for an apple from the bowl on the counter.
“You want peanut butter or honey with your apple?” Jack asks conversationally, opening the drawer to grab a knife. He nods towards the upper cabinet, prompting Robby. The task seems to spur him on.
“Honey,” he says quietly, opening the cabinet slowly and surveying its contents.
Sometimes Jack looks at Robby and sees himself, fifteen years ago. He’ll watch from across the room, watch Robby stare at his sneakers for a solid minute, before taking a deep breath and opting for slip on boots instead. Jack remembers that feeling, when those kinds of logistics weren’t second nature yet, and he had to turn tasks over in his head a dozen times before even trying to execute them. Eventually, the easy option becomes far more appealing.
“Why do you keep looking at me like that?” Robby asks, not looking up. He’s been trying to get the hang of the shirt buttoning device his OT gave him for the past 20 minutes. Jack is supposedly reading in bed, but he keeps glancing up, seeing Robby standing in front of the mirror with his brow furrowed, the little tool gripped in his left hand.
“Like what?” Jack asks, taking off his reading glasses.
“Like–,” Robby puts down the tool and turns around to face Jack. His flannel is half buttoned, and Jack’s old Bruins t-shirt peeks out underneath. “Like I’m making you sad. Or angry.” Jack sits up from his reclined position, sticks the bookmark in his book. He swallows, tries to decide how he wants to say this.
“You’re not,” Jack says, trying to keep his voice level. “It’s just.” He rubs his eyes. “I remember feeling how you feel now. And I remember that it sucked. It really, really sucked.” Robby’s gaze softens a little.
“I remember being that angry and lost and it’s not you making me sad,” Jack rambles. “It’s the fact that you have to go through this that’s making me sad. Or angry. Whatever.”
Robby sits down heavily on the bed next to Jack, empty right sleeve hanging between them. The words are tumbling out now, and Jack resigns himself to it.
“It’s not you, or your body, or how it is now, it’s like.” Jack runs a hand through his hair. “I feel like my life is in two halves, y’know?” Robby nods, looks down at his hand. “And that time when things changed over between the two was awful. I was awful, Rob, I’m so glad you didn’t have to see me like that.”
“Things are better now, though,” Jack says quietly. “Not perfect, obviously,” he scoffs. Robby smiles a little. “But things make more sense. I know who I am now, and what I want out of life. And I want that for you, too. But in the meantime I’m watching someone I love go through the meat grinder and that fucking sucks,” Jack finishes, the words leaving him in one long breath. Robby is quiet for a long, long moment.
“Meat grinder, huh?” Robby says eventually.
“Uh huh. Brother, it really sucked,” Jack answers. “Nobody should ever have to deal with that much suck.” Robby laughs, finally. He turns his body a little, pulling his legs up onto the bed to face Jack. The furrow in his brow is mostly gone, now, the wrinkles in his forehead returned to their usual gentle baseline. The sun through the window is bright, and the dark circles under his eyes are finally dissipating. Jack feels overwhelmingly fond all of the sudden, gratitude threatening to choke him. He looks down at his lap.
“At the risk of sounding like a complete sap,” Robby starts, after a moment of quiet. Jack looks up, sees him fidgeting with the end of his empty shirtsleeve. “Having you here is helping it suck a little less.”
“Just a little?” Jack needles, deflecting from the choking feeling that’s rising in his throat.
“Just a little,” Robby confirms, meeting Jack’s gaze with a twinkle in his eye.
—
“C’mere,” Jack says, still in his boxers. Robby turns with his t-shirt in his hand, puzzled expression on his face. Jack jerks his chin a little.
“C’mon, over here, yup,” he continues, and Robby moves to put the shirt on. “No, no, put that down,” Jack interrupts. “C’mere,” He repeats. He’d reach over and drag him if he wasn’t leaning on his crutches.
Robby finally acquiesces, and follows Jack across the room. Jack comes to a stop in front of the full length mirror on the back of the bathroom door, and Robby hesitates for a moment, before stepping in behind Jack.
Jack watches Robby carefully, watches his eyes trace over Jack’s body slowly. Jack lets him look, lets him take in the dense whorls of scar tissue around his right knee, and the ones littering his other leg and torso. Lets him see the hard won ease with which he stands, as if to say, Hey, this could be you, if you wanted. Robby swallows after a minute, and drags his eyes to his own body.
Robby stands partially behind Jack, his left arm hidden and his right side in full view, posture still a little lopsided. The stump of his arm is small, only a few inches beyond his shoulder, with thick scars wrapping around and down the side of his torso to the waistband of his boxers. They’re not as red as they were, Jack’s insistence on consistent wound care clearly helping, but there’s a deep line between Robby’s brows despite the improvements.
Robby came back into Jack’s life nearly a decade ago now, after years of lost touch. Those years felt to Jack like multiple lifetimes, and Robby had been a breath of fresh air after so long alone. It took weeks for Jack to even confront his feelings about Robby, let alone initiate more than casual conversation.
They’d gone for drinks one night in June, when Jack had finally gotten his shit together. A beer or two turned into walking home together hand in hand like teenagers, and then to making out in the doorway, and then to the dark of Jack’s bedroom. Jack had been so nervous, and the feeling of teetering on the edge of something terrifying wouldn’t leave him alone.
Robby had handled it so well, though. Jack still thinks about it sometimes, thinks about the look Robby gave him when he saw Jack’s body for the first time. His eyes raked up and down like there was nothing he’d ever change. Like there was nowhere else he’d want to be but right there, in bed with Jack, having sex with Jack, something he’d been so afraid of for the past several years.
Afterwards they’d laid there, sweaty and out of breath, and Robby couldn’t stop touching Jack, hands drifting to wherever they could reach.
“Thank you,” Robby had said, rolling even closer to Jack. He laid his arm over Jack’s torso, running his hand up and down Jack’s side, skating over the long-healed scars there.
“For what?”
Robby hummed, quiet for a moment. “For letting me see you. All of you.” Jack had felt himself flush, pink all over at the attention, at the complement.
“Not much to see,” Jack deflected. Robby’s hand paused.
“What do you mean?” Robby asked, and Jack had avoided his eyes, staring at the ceiling.
“Just,” Jack started, voice catching a little. He gestured down at himself a little. “It’s a lot.” Robby had sat up suddenly, startling Jack. When Jack finally looked at him, his eyes were huge.
“I love your body,” he’d said earnestly. “It’s got you in it. Everything here,” he gestures to Jack’s body, splayed out on the sheets. “It’s you. And I admit I’m a bit fond of you.”
It was such a simple statement, but it had hit Jack anyways. It was the first time someone had so bluntly acknowledged the new state of his body as a part of him. That it was something worth appreciating and loving as a whole, alongside his mind, his emotional self.
Now, Jack looks at Robby, and sees himself staring back. He leans back a little, brushing against Robby’s shoulder behind him. “Hey,” Jack says softly. Robby meets his eyes. “Thank you.” Robby cocks his head a little.
“What for?” he asks.
“For letting me see you,” Jack answers, a little smile on his face. A moment of confusion passes over Robby’s face before clearing, the memory seeming to appear behind his eyes. Jack hopes he’s thinking of his own words, the words that had reframed Jack’s whole world all those years ago.
He smiles, the first time Jack’s seen it in weeks, and Jack can’t help but smile in return.
—
Jack wakes to Robby sitting up on his side of the bed, feet on the floor, staring at something in his hand. The ropy scars up his right side seem to glow in the light coming through the curtains.
“Rob?” Jack asks, voice groggy with sleep. He rolls closer to Robby, propping himself up on one elbow. Robby just grunts in response. Jack sits up, then, scooting over to see what Robby’s holding.
In his hand is his watch, the one he’d worn every day for years, but not since he lost his arm. The nylon band is discolored slightly, shadows of blood and soot and dirt staining the khaki. The time is still correct though, and the second hand moves as confidently as ever despite the scratches to the face. Jack stares for a second, before realizing.
“Do you want a hand?” he asks, aiming for casual. Robby glances sidelong at him, and raises an eyebrow.
“Fuck,” Jack swears, “No, you know what I mean, fuck off.” Robby smirks, but still doesn’t say anything. Jack leans towards him a little, pressing their shoulders together. Robby takes in a deep breath, and lets it out slowly. He hands Jack the watch.
“Yeah,” Robby says, and doesn’t elaborate further. Jack takes it from him carefully, and Robby offers his wrist to him. It feels so strangely intimate, Jack thinks. It doesn’t escape him either, the significance of Robby accepting his help so easily. Jack takes his time with it, making sure it’s not too tight, that it’s sitting in a comfortable spot on his wrist. Jack tucks the band in carefully before turning Robby’s hand over again. He holds it between both of his palms.
“Better?” Jack asks. Robby nods.
“I could’ve tried with my teeth but…” he trails off. “I don’t want to know where that band’s been.” Jack laughs.
“You’ve had a lot of stuff in your mouth lately, haven’t you,” Jack ribs him a little, squeezing Robby’s hand twice and raising his eyebrow suggestively. Robby snorts.
“Too early for that, Yankl,” Robby replies, squeezing Jack's hand in return.
—
“I don’t think I can go back to work,” Robby says quietly. They’re sitting in grass at the park down the street, the midday sun filtering down through the trees. Jack lays sprawled on his back with Robby sat cross legged beside him, fidgeting with a blade of grass between his fingers.
“Yeah?” Jack says noncommittally. There’s that skittish animal feeling, again. He’d be lying if he said he hadn’t been thinking about this exact thing for weeks, but been afraid to disrupt the careful peace they seem to have found in the last few days.
The reality, Jack knows, is that Robby could never realistically go back to practicing medicine the way he has for the past twenty-something years. The realization mirrors his own feelings when he got home, learning that field medicine overseas was now entirely out of reach. But there were still ways, and emergency medicine scratches the same itch while being doable with a prosthetic leg. A prosthetic arm poses a much different challenge.
“At least not the way it was,” Robby adds. “Dana texted me last week,” he says after a long pause. “Asked how I was feeling. But it kinda felt like she was asking when I’d come back. Implicitly.” Jack nods, turns his head to look at Robby. He’s looking off into the distance, at the trees, still fidgeting with an errant dandelion stem. A bird pokes through the grass a few feet behind him.
Robby takes a deep breath. “I was researching arms,” he says eventually. “Not much to write home about.”
“Cosmesis,” Jack says, remembering some of his peers from the VA support group, way back when.
“I’ll say,” Robby agrees. “Can’t imagine doing chest compressions with one of those,” he says dryly. Jack snorts. Robby seems calmer about this than Jack would expect. Six months ago, that would’ve concerned him. Now, he’s not so sure.
Baptism by fire, Jack thinks. Sometimes you go through something worse to get something better. God knows the ED wasn’t helping him, but that kind of obligation is tough to break. Jack watches the clouds for a moment, mulling over Robby’s words.
“You could go into teaching,” Jack suggests eventually, propping himself up on his elbows. “Community college or something.” Robby nods, looks down at the grass again. “God knows you can’t sit on your ass all day,” Jack adds.
“You’re one to talk,” Robby quips, nodding towards Jack’s empty wheelchair beside them. Jack swats his leg, scoffs.
“You’re enjoying this way too much,” Jack says, grinning.
“What can I say, now we’re on equal footing,” he shoots back with a wink. Jack scoffs again, feigning offence and flopping back down. He can feel the grin splitting his face, a warm feeling building in his chest, spreading through his limbs. He reaches out, letting his hand rest on Robby’s knee beside him, and finds his leg warm from the sun. Robby looks down at him, a little smile on his face, and the sun casts his eyes in such a vivid shade of amber that it takes Jack aback for a moment.
Robby takes Jack’s hand, squeezes it tightly. “Thanks,” Robby says quietly. He doesn’t elaborate, but Jack thinks he understands just fine.
“‘Course,” Jack answers, and squeezes his hand in return.
