Chapter Text
Orlando was a tragedy amongst tragedies that Robby intended to bury with no intention of excavating ever again.
It seemed best for his resident that she do the same.
He was a doctor. Not an archaeologist.
"That was the patient's mistake," Robby said, dismissing Mohan's guilt without a second thought.
Otherwise, he might as well bury himself in the senselessness of it all, lacking the emotional strength he knew he'd need to escape the ever-present abyss.
He stepped away from her, gaze forward but fixed on nothing in particular. The air was suffocating. He needed to get out of here before the ringing in his ears got any worse.
She turned to him, and he felt her eyes on his back. "What mistake—getting diabetes?"
"Not picking a higher place to jump from," he retorted—and immediately regretted it. Mostly.
Staring straight at him from a few feet away was the attending psychiatrist.
Of course it was.
Jaw tight, Robby strode forward, bracing himself for whatever Caleb had to say. He could take it. Chastisement. Anger. Whatever it was. He'd take it.
"That's an interesting diagnosis, Michael," Caleb said, his voice steadier than Robby had ever heard it.
Michael.
He swallowed harshly, feeling the intentional punch of that name.
Caleb tilted his head back to look up at him. Somehow, looking down at the man, Robby felt about two inches tall. Caleb's gaze swept his face the way it always did when he wanted a truthful answer Robby had no intention of giving.
"No pithy retort?"
Robby said nothing. He prayed his face wasn't as red as it felt. Hoped Samira had been too fed up with him to stick around. Wanted desperately to get out of here before someone locked him in a room and tried to fix him.
Him. The unfixable.
"Yeah," Caleb said quietly. "I didn't think so."
Robby took a step back—unwilling, at best, to continue this—and had just pivoted to head the other way when a voice behind Caleb stopped him cold.
"Dr. Carter?"
His body locked up. His breath caught somewhere in his chest, painfully wedged between the memories he had no use for and the ones he spent every day trying to forget.
"It's Dr. Carter—Dr. John Carter—isn't it?"
From the corner of his eye, he saw a man in a wheelchair moving out from behind Caleb, toward him.
"Oh my God, I can't—I can't believe it." The man's voice broke with something that sounded like relief. "After all these years."
Robby's world tilted on its axis—slowly, allowing him one careful breath, just enough to try to place the voice.
"I wanted to talk to you years ago. I mean, I tried. I went back to Chicago—to County—to find you. They said you were in Africa. Doctors Without Borders?"
Robby couldn't move. Couldn't speak. Couldn't feel the emotions scrabbling at the cold edges of his chest.
He was pathetic, standing rooted to the spot while a stranger's words dismantled the web of lies he'd spent years building.
"Dr. Carter? You remember me, right? It's Lorcan. The firefighter, during the mass casualty. How could you not remember the guy whose legs you had to amputate in a derailment?"
He blinked. The corridor had gone quiet—too quiet. He scrubbed whatever expression was on his face and turned to face his accuser.
He'd had years of practice lying to people's faces. It was practically second nature. Survival instinct, even.
He plastered on a sympathetic smile. "I'm sorry. I don't know what you're talking about. I'm Dr. Michael Robinavitch."
Lorcan's expression shifted—confusion first, then a slow, almost fond amusement. He shook his head with a short laugh. "No. I'm pretty sure I'll remember you for the rest of my life, Dr. Carter—beard or no beard. I'm alive because of you. I'm here—with this guy—" he jerked a thumb toward Caleb, "—because you'd studied surgery before emergency medicine."
Robby blinked. Several times. His world unraveled the more the man talked, and still his body refused to cooperate. He needed to move. His shift had ended hours ago. He'd been trying to forfeit whatever was left of his sorry existence, and this man was barricading every exit.
"Yeah," Lorcan said softly, watching him with careful eyes. "I did some digging, Dr. Carter—when I wasn't deep in the depression. I learned all about you."
Robby tried to recover words—sounds—letters—any combination that could serve as an escape route.
Nothing came. His mind had turned to static.
"And the more I learned, the more I had to know." He hesitated. "You've done remarkable things despite a long list of your own traumas."
The words should have struck a chord—should have sliced straight through him—but they bounced off, deflected by the same static filling his skull.
"Peter Benton said that even though he'd been pissed you transferred to the ER, you were his best student—even when you were just a surgical intern. He thought the world of you."
He didn't want to remember Peter. He didn't want to remember the biker whose face had been covered coming into the ED earlier today. He didn't want to remember the moment Langdon's addiction had come to light ten months ago, and everything he hadn't seen until it was nearly too late. He didn't want to remember what he'd left behind in Chicago.
He didn't want to remember.
He didn't want a lot of things. Here he was anyway.
He swayed slightly on his feet.
"Man, did I have a story to tell my kids." Lorcan shook his head, something like wonder in his face. "This doctor—a resident, working alone in the field because the surgeon had gone into labor—had the presence of mind to call his former mentor and get step-by-step instructions for amputating my legs. And on top of that, the instincts to recognize when something was wrong and ask for help before it became a catastrophe." He exhaled slowly. "Not just fast. Smart."
And to think—unbeknownst to them all—that Carter had nearly ruined his medical career mere weeks before Lorcan's accident. All for a couple of Vicodin.
Yeah.
The fucking relapse.
Smart.
Robby's stomach turned, nausea creeping up his throat. He squeezed his eyes shut and pressed the back of his hand to his mouth.
"Lorcan," Caleb murmured. "I think you need to do this another time."
Lorcan ignored him, apparently committed to dismantling everything Robby had built. "I also talked to Dr. Corday again, who told me to disregard that asshole surgeon's—"
Robby's jaw tightened. He didn't have to reach far to remember Morano's butcher comment.
"—degrading take on what you did. It was nothing short of remarkable."
He hadn't noticed Lorcan closing the distance between them until the man's hand wrapped around his arm. He tried to step back, but the former firefighter held firm, looking up at him with something close to pleading in his eyes.
"Dr. Carter—I visit your clinic every summer. We make some time for the kids there." He paused. "And I put flowers on the graves. Yours, your wife's, your son's." Another pause, weighted differently than the first. "Caleb came with me this last time. I saw the addition to Kem's stone—Beloved Daughter, An Angel Before Birth. It gave me hope that somehow, somewhere, you were still out there."
Something wet slipped down Robby's cheek.
No one had known about that inscription. No one had known about the child at all—only him, and whatever remained of his conscience, and one drunken night after the Pittfest debacle when grief had gotten through the walls he'd built against it and he'd arranged, from a distance, for the stone to say what it needed to say.
He refused to acknowledge the tear, just as he refused to accept the way his so-called life continued to crumble in front of him in real time.
Lorcan squeezed his arm gently. "I don't know what happened. I don't know why you're here and why you're denying who you are. But I've never forgotten you—or Dr. Benton. I never will."
By now he was certain the corridor had collected more people than when this had started. He didn't have to look to know—he could feel them. And somewhere in that audience he knew, with the particular certainty of a man whose luck had run out, that Samira was watching. Dr. Al-Hashimi. Possibly Dana. Cassie.
His eyes had already betrayed him. He willed everything else to stay locked down.
He looked away from Lorcan and pulled his arm free.
His hands were shaking.
"I'm sorry," he strangled out, his own voice barely reaching him over the hammering in his ears. "I'm not this Carter you remember. I'm—I'm glad you're doing well, but I—I don't know what you're talking about."
Lorcan leaned back in his chair with a slow exhale. "You can deny it all you want. But a man knows the person who saved his life. Especially when they have kind eyes—like yours."
Robby forced said eyes—which were certainly not kind, not now, not ever—to meet Lorcan's.
It was a mistake.
Lorcan tracked the second tear on Robby's cheek. Said nothing about it. Just watched him with the particular patience of someone who had spent years learning to be still.
Robby wiped his face roughly. "I'm sorry to disappoint you, Mr.—Lorcan." His voice was thick, barely held together. "My name is Dr. Robinavitch. I've never been to Africa." He stepped back, clenching his shaking hands at his sides. "And I have no family to mourn. Good luck to you."
He turned on his heel and walked—nearly directly into Dr. Al-Hashimi.
Heart lurching into his throat, he sidestepped one collision and into another.
Garcia.
A breath punched out of him as their shoulders met. She was the one to steady him, hands closing around his arms.
"Easy now, Robby," Garcia murmured—and he couldn't remember her ever sounding quite that gentle with him. "Why don't you take a beat?"
"Please." The word came out wretched, twisted with a grief he didn't want and couldn't afford. "Let go of me."
He tore himself free.
He thought of running—through a window, preferably, top floor—but his legs moved as if packed with wet concrete.
Fuck, he screamed inside his own skull, fuck, fuck, fuck—pressing both hands over his face as he kept moving, fingers dragging hard against his skin as if he could scratch deep enough to find someone new underneath. A metamorphosis. A clean break.
But there was no clean break.
Someone had recognized him—and not just anyone. A man with a years-long memory and an apparently inexhaustible need to talk about it.
There was no guarantee Lorcan would stay quiet. Or that any of the others would. He couldn't blame them. That wasn't the point.
And Caleb wasn't an idiot. He'd know now. He'd have to know—that Robby was in Witness Protection, that he was carrying more ghosts than most people had memories, that the carefully constructed persona of Michael Robinavitch, MD, had just fractured down the middle in the corridor of a Pittsburgh emergency department.
His feet knew the way before his mind did.
Lockers.
He'd grab his things and carve out another existence somewhere else. There was no other option—not if he wanted to keep the few remaining members of his family safe. Not if he wanted to keep them from following him here.
No one could find him here.
He didn't realize he'd reached the locker room until he was already inside, bracing himself with one forearm against the cold metal door, trying to remember how to breathe.
His knees buckled.
He needed to sit down.
So he turned and let his back hit the locker door and slid—body limp, exhausted, spent down to its marrow—until the floor came up to meet him.
He sat with his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands.
Michael Robinavitch had walked in here.
John Carter was sitting on the floor.
"Dr. Robby?"
The voice barely registered.
He'd have to relocate. Start over. New name. Different city. That's what the Marshal Service had told him would happen if anything like this occurred. This time he'd likely be forced into a different profession entirely.
He'd cross the country. Make enough of an impression elsewhere that the people wanting him dead would follow the trail there instead of staying here.
"Dr. Robby?"
Or maybe he could just go back. No motorcycle this time. A bridge. A building. His father's car turned on in the closed garage.
Make it public and make it count.
Just not by train. He'd seen what that could do.
"Dr.—Carter?"
He lifted his head.
Samira. She was crouched in front of him, close enough that he could see the careful steadiness she was holding herself to—the kind that took effort, that was chosen rather than natural. Her eyes were wide and full of something he was almost certain she had never aimed in his direction before.
Empathy.
It hit him somewhere undefended. Somewhere he knew, with a clarity cutting straight through the static, that he was the last person in her life who deserved it.
"Can I—can I do anything for you?" she asked, her voice pitched low and uncertain, as if she wasn't sure of her right to ask.
Confusion moved through him sluggishly. What on earth could she—or anyone, for that matter—possibly—
The thought dissolved before it finished forming. He didn't know how to answer that. He wasn't sure he'd been asked that question in years. He wasn't sure he'd allowed anyone close enough to ask.
Her hand found his knee.
He looked down at it. A strange numbness settled through him, slow and thorough, weaving itself into the spaces between his bones. He thought about what it would feel like to be ordinary. To carry weight the way Samira and Jack and Dana carried theirs—with both hands, upright, still recognizably themselves on the other side of it.
He'd forgotten how to do that. Or perhaps he never had.
He ruined not only himself but the people around him. He always had.
He was just like his father. His moth—
"Is there anyone I can call for you? Do you need water? Food?"
The words took a moment to reach him. He couldn't remember the last time someone had asked him all three things in the same breath. Couldn't remember the last time he'd needed all three at once and been honest enough with himself to know it.
He nodded. Slowly. The movement barely there.
Her brow creased. "Yes? Which one?"
He blinked at her.
She held his gaze for a long moment, reading whatever remained on his face. "Okay," she said, rocking back on her heels. "Okay. I'll get you water and food first. You haven't eaten today, have you."
It wasn't really a question.
He supposed it was true. He couldn't summon an example to the contrary.
"Do you want to go home, Dr. Carter?" she asked. "Or would you like me to call someone?"
The name landed differently coming from her than it had from Lorcan. Quietly. As if she wasn't wielding it so much as returning it to him.
He'd call Peter if he was brave enough.
He wasn't.
"No, I think you are brave," Samira said softly.
His chest squeezed. He wrapped his arms around himself—the instinct old and automatic and entirely beyond his control.
Go somewhere. He didn't want to go anywhere. He didn't want to be anywhere. He wasn't entirely certain there was a somewhere for him to go.
"Samira." A voice at the doorway. Soft. Careful.
She turned her head. "Stay there, okay? I don't want to overwhelm him."
"Understood, honey."
Dana.
John pressed his eyes shut against that word, not realizing he'd started rocking back and forth a moment ago.
That word. Honey. The casual tenderness of it. The way it moved between people who had earned it from each other—unstudied, unremarkable, entirely beyond him now. He'd had that once. He'd had Kem calling him across a crowded room with exactly that register—not loud, just aimed, just his. He'd had the warmth of her beside him in the dark, their unborn child a quiet presence between them. He'd had the unremarkable sacred ordinary of it, and then he'd had nothing.
He'd chosen nothing. Because nothing was safer than something that could be taken. And he probably deserved it.
"Can you get John some food and something to drink?" Samira said quietly.
And then she was settling herself beside him—not in front, not at a careful clinical distance, but beside him. Shoulder to his shoulder, her back against the neighboring locker.
The arm around him was unexpected.
He stopped rocking, body instantly going rigid.
"Sure," Dana said. "I'll be right back."
Samira didn't move. Didn't speak. Didn't make it a question he had to answer.
And slowly—against his better judgment, against every wall he'd suffered to mortar into place over a decade of practice—the rigidity left him. Muscle by muscle, as though his body had made a unilateral decision his mind hadn't been consulted on.
He didn't mean to lean into her.
He did anyway, her hand gentle at the side of his head, guiding it down to rest in the crevice of her neck and shoulder as naturally as if she'd done it before. As if it were allowed.
The warmth of it took something from the pain. Not much. But enough.
He'd call it almost motherly—that quality of it, the particular shelter of it—except that he wouldn't really know anything about that, would he.
The longer she held him, the more his muscles surrendered under her touch. He wasn't trying to. He wasn't trying to do anything anymore.
He relaxed completely.
They sat there in the gray quiet of the locker room, and for a moment—just a moment—John Carter stopped trying to be no one.
"That's it," she breathed. "You can rest now, John."
He lost track of time after that.
He was only dimly aware when Dana returned—shapes and colors at the edge of his narrowing world, the crinkle of wrapping, a bottle appearing somewhere in his peripheral vision alongside something that might have been a sandwich. He could not make his hand move toward either of them.
Dana, patient as she'd always been, held the sandwich out without pressing it on him. Just held it there until some reflex older than his grief moved his hand to take it.
He held it without lifting it.
Then he took a small bite. Chewed without tasting. Swallowed without noticing. Took a few more because his body, apparently, had decided to continue with or without his cooperation.
Samira exhaled beside him—barely audible, barely there.
Dana opened the water bottle and placed it in his hands, wrapping his fingers around it the way you'd help a child. He drank, spilling some when he tried to pass it back, his hands too unsteady to manage the transaction. Nobody commented on it.
His surroundings slipped further away. The world narrowed and narrowed until all that remained was a fixed point on the wall across from him and the distant percussion of the ED carrying on without him somewhere beyond the door. His body would not obey him. His mind had stopped accepting instructions.
It felt like the windows through which he'd been peering into the world were going dark. Operations, abandoned. One by one. Dimming.
He thought dimly that someone was still talking to him—a voice, low and careful, somewhere just past the edge of where his attention could reach. He couldn't find the energy to answer. Couldn't find a reason to try.
He'd done this before, he thought. Checked out. Disconnected. Some trauma response from a long time ago—Weaver on duty, or Greene, or Benton standing over him with that expression he'd never learned to read. He'd been younger then, and frightened by the way the world went muffled and remote without warning.
It didn't frighten him now.
He had no recent trauma, so that couldn't be the reason, could it?
He decided it didn't matter. Nothing much did.
The floating was good.
It was comfort, of a kind. The only kind he'd ever really known how to accept—the kind that required nothing from him, that asked no questions, that let him exist without the exhausting performance of existing well.
It was lonely.
And that, he decided, as the last of the lights went out one by one—was what he excelled at.