Chapter Text
The phone drags me out of sleep so violently I think for one confused second that I’ve overslept for work.
Darkness still fills the bedroom. Rain taps steadily against the windows. Beside me the bed is cold and empty.
My heart sinks. Andrew never came to bed.
I grab the phone off the nightstand before the panic fully lands, squinting at the screen through exhaustion.
PTMC. Every nerve in my body goes taut instantly.
‘Robby.’ I answer before the third ring.
‘Dr. Robinavitch?’ It’s not a physician, but a female voice. Calm but cautious. It’s familiar but for one long, confused moment I can’t place it.
‘Yeah.’ I sit upright fully now, pulse suddenly hammering hard enough to hurt.
‘This is Lena.’ The night-shift charge nurse. Of course. ‘Sorry to wake you, but we have a John Doe patient in the ED who only had your number listed in his phone. You’re saved as “Michael.”’
Cold fear drops straight through my chest.
Andrew.
‘What happened?’
‘I’m not entirely sure yet,’ she admits carefully. ‘He was brought in by EMS after being found wandering downtown disoriented and nonverbal. No obvious major trauma, except a hurt hand. Vitals stable. He appears... altered.’
‘Is he conscious?’ I swing my legs out of bed so fast the room tilts briefly.
‘Yes.’
‘Can he answer questions?’
A pause. ‘Not really.’
Something awful tightens beneath my ribs. I’ve seen this before. Not in Andrew specifically, but enough trauma patients over the years to recognize the edges of psychological collapse when I hear it described. Dissociation, catatonia, acute psychiatric decompensation.
Suddenly all I can think about is Andrew sitting alone in my apartment earlier tonight while I slept peacefully down the hall completely unaware he was drowning.
‘Are you his emergency contact, Dr. Robby?’ Lena speaks again carefully.
Technically no. But in every way that matters? God, yes.
‘Yes,’ I hear myself say.
‘Okay.’ Lena sounds relieved. ‘We just need consent for treatment if necessary since he isn’t able to provide much history right now.’ I’m already pulling my clothes on one-handed while she continues speaking. ‘Dr. Abbott’s with him currently.’
I freeze halfway through dragging on my jeans. Jack. Of course Jack’s there. He’s the night-shift attending.
The resemblance alone must’ve—
‘Robby?’
‘Yeah,’ I say hoarsely. ‘I’m coming. Don’t do anything until I get there.’ I hang up and stand motionless in the dark bedroom for one terrible second while adrenaline crashes through me.
Andrew’s in my ED, dissociating badly enough he can’t talk. And Jack saw him. Jack, who I haven’t talked to about this yet. Jack who has no idea he has a doppelganger out there.
I grab my keys and leave without bothering with anything else.
The drive downtown passes in blurred fragments. My jacket’s not dry from my trip home, and it gets even more drenched now. My hands clenched too tightly around the bars.
I don’t know what caused the spiral, but if history is anything to go by, this is about his family.
I park badly outside the ambulance bay and practically jog through the entrance still pulling my jacket straight.
The ED hits like a physical blow. Bright fluorescent lighting. Phones ringing. Stretchers rattling over tile. Familiar organized chaos swallowing me whole before I’m ready for it.
For one disorienting second I almost forget why I’m here because my body instinctively shifts into attending mode.
Then I spot Jack near the central desk and I stop cold.
Jack sees me. His expression looks deeply unsettled.
‘Robby,’ he says slowly, stepping toward me. ‘What the fuck is going on?’ There’s no greeting. No joke. Just genuine confusion edged with concern.
Behind him I can see Lena pretending not to eavesdrop badly enough that she’s practically leaning sideways.
‘I got a call about a patient.’ I scrub one hand hard across my face.
‘Yeah, I figured that part out.’ Jack lowers his voice further. ‘That guy in Behavioral One looks exactly like me.’
My stomach twists. Hearing it out loud from someone else makes the entire thing feel surreal again. Because Andrew does look like Jack. They look enough alike to plausibly be brothers despite the age difference and different coloring. Hell, they look so much alike they could be twins, if not for the age difference.
So alike that every single person in the department probably noticed.
‘I know,’ I admit quietly.
‘You know?’ Jack stares at me.
Shit. I can already feel this spiraling beyond explanation.
Ellis appears beside us seemingly from nowhere, arms folded. ‘Dr. Robby,’ she says carefully, ‘why does BH One contain your best friend’s depressed clone?’
‘That’s not medically appropriate terminology.’
‘Neither is whatever the hell this situation is.’
‘You know him.’ Jack’s looking at me with increasing disbelief.
‘His name’s Andrew.’ I exhale slowly.
‘Okay, that somehow answers nothing.’
The problem is I genuinely don’t know how to explain any of this coherently because when laid out objectively, the situation sounds absolutely insane.
I met a bleeding stranger in the desert who looked exactly like my best friend, brought him across the country to live in my apartment despite suspecting he might be a criminal, developed deeply confusing feelings about him along the way, and now he’s dissociated because of unknown reasons and was brought to our emergency department.
Not exactly easy elevator pitch material.
‘I met him during my sabbatical,’ I say finally.
‘And then just… kept him?’ Jack stares at me harder.
‘He needed help.’
Ellis makes a very soft noise beside us that sounds suspiciously like oh no.
‘Robby, he looks like me enough that I thought somebody drugged me when I walked into that room.’ Jack rubs one hand over his face slowly.
‘I’m aware.’
‘Did you hit your head on sabbatical?’
Honestly maybe.
Before I can answer, Shen appears around the corner carrying coffee and immediately slows upon seeing all three of us standing there.
‘Oh good,’ he says as he sees me. ‘You’re here for your weird twin situation.’
I close my eyes briefly. Of course the entire department knows already. Busybodies the lot of them.
‘Can everybody stop saying shit like that?’
‘Can your mystery man stop looking like Abbott after a tragic divorce?’
‘See? That’s what I said.’ Jack points at Shen.
‘You said cloned,’ Ellis corrects.
I genuinely consider walking directly back out of the hospital.
Then a new night-shift nurse appears from farther down the hall and spots me. ‘Dr. Robinavitch.’
Everything inside me narrows back toward Andrew. I step away from the others without another word.
Jack catches my arm briefly before I can leave completely. His expression shifts finally from confusion toward concern. ‘Robby.’
I look at him.
‘Whoever he is,’ Jack says quietly, ‘he looked terrified.’
Something twists hard in my chest, because yes, that sounds exactly like Andrew.
Ellis follows me toward Behavioral One even though I know my way around this entire department with my eyes closed. She looks deeply unsettled, which, honestly, scares me more than the phone call did.
Ellis doesn’t unsettle easily. Not after years in emergency medicine. Not after working enough psych holds and overdose cases and violent detox patients to normalize human catastrophe into background noise.
‘How bad is it?’
Ellis glances toward the closed room next to triage before lowering her voice slightly. ‘Depends what you mean by bad.’
‘Ellis.’ My stomach drops harder.
‘He hasn’t hurt the staff,’ she says quickly. ‘He hasn’t really acknowledged the staff either. Vitals are stable. Tox screen’s clean so far.’ A pause. ‘But he’s not exactly with us right now.’
‘Has he said anything?’ I scrub one hand across my jaw again.
‘A few words when EMS brought him in. Nothing consistent.’ Ellis hesitates briefly. ‘Mostly he just sits there staring through people.’ Ellis studies my face carefully. ‘You know him well?’
The question twists uncomfortably through my chest because the truthful answer should probably still be no. But after a week of diners and motels and insomnia and conversations at one in the morning that somehow became more intimate than relationships I’ve had lasting years… then yeah, I do know him.
But do I know Andrew well enough for this?
‘Yeah,’ I hear myself say quietly. ‘I do.’
Ellis nods before she gestures toward the room. ‘He reacted when I mentioned your name earlier.’
‘Okay.’ Hope cuts painfully through panic.
Ellis catches my arm before I can move past her. ‘Security’s already been called once,’ she says carefully. ‘One of the nurses tried touching him during bloodwork and he nearly broke the bedrail getting away.’
My chest tightens further. Of course he did.
‘He’s terrified, Robby.’ The simple honesty in Ellis’s voice hurts worse than judgment would.
Andrew probably woke up in fluorescent hospital lighting surrounded by strangers trying to touch him while dissociation hollowed reality into static around him. A nightmare scenario for him.
‘I’ve got him,’ I say quietly. I’m not entirely sure whether I’m reassuring Ellis or myself.
The door opens softly beneath my hand and my world narrows down to only one person.
Andrew sits perfectly upright on the bed beneath harsh fluorescent light, hands braced flat against his knees while his entire body holds unnaturally still.
The room itself looks mildly wrecked already. A plastic water pitcher is overturned near the wall. Monitor leads are abandoned on the floor. One chair is tipped sideways like somebody shoved it too hard.
Andrew doesn’t look toward the door when I enter. He doesn’t visibly react at all. He’s staring straight ahead at nothing, just like Ellis warned me about.
My chest physically aches at the sight of him. This is what happens when Andrew gets overwhelmed past capacity. Everything folds inward until he disconnects from the world entirely because staying present hurts too much.
‘Andrew?’
Nothing.
I move farther into the room, careful and deliberate in the way I approach frightened trauma patients.
His eyes shift slightly then. Focus dragging toward my voice with visible effort. Recognition flickers.
‘Hey.’ I pull the chair upright quietly and sit down across from him, leaving space between us.
Andrew blinks slowly.
Up close he looks terrible. He’s drenched, his hair flattened against his forehead and his hoody soggy. Dark circles sit bruised beneath his eyes. His face has gone emotionally blank in that frightening dissociative way where expression disappears almost completely. But underneath the stillness, I can see tremors beginning in his hands.
‘You scared the hell out of me,’ I say softly.
His throat moves once before sound finally emerges rough and strained. ‘Craig’s dead.’
I’ve got the general gist of the names by now. Smurf is the mother, though why they call her Smurf is beyond me. Baz, Craig and Deran are the brothers. Cath was Baz’s girl, and Lena their daughter. J is the nephew. That’s about as much as he’s revealed on that front.
Andrew’s gaze drifts somewhere past my shoulder again.
‘They think I’m dead too.’ His voice sounds distant. Flattened. It’s like he’s narrating somebody else’s tragedy instead of his own.
‘Andrew.’ I lean forward slightly.
‘Craig’s dead,’ he repeats quietly. ‘And Deran’s gone.’ Something cracks sharply underneath the numbness in his face.
I see it happen in real time. His control slipping. His breathing changes first—uneven now, too fast. Then his hands start shaking harder against his knees.
‘Hey,’ I say immediately, softer now. ‘Look at me.’
For one terrible second I don’t think he can, but then his eyes finally lock onto mine. The grief there nearly levels me. It’s not just sadness, but devastation. Years of trauma and guilt and damaged love collapsing inward all at once until there’s nothing left holding him together anymore.
‘I left them,’ he says hoarsely.
‘No.’
‘I did.’
‘Craig’s dead and I left—’ His voice sharpens with panic.
‘Andrew—’
‘I should’ve stayed—’ The tremors become violent.
I stand instinctively just as Andrew surges abruptly off the bed like his body can no longer contain the panic flooding through it.
The chair crashes backward.
A monitor slams sideways against the wall.
‘Andrew—’
He hits the cart with both hands hard enough to rattle everything on it, breathing ragged now while the dissociation fractures completely into something rawer and more dangerous.
‘Don’t,’ he snaps suddenly when I move closer.
I’m not entirely certain it is geared towards me. It might be at the room itself, at everything. Because it’s not me he’s looking at. Hell, maybe he’s seeing things that aren’t here.
His fist drives straight into the wall before I can stop him. Pain barely seems to register.
‘Shit.’
The door bursts open behind me and security burst in. Two officers move fast into the room while Ellis appears behind them looking alarmed.
‘Sir, we need you to—’
Andrew wheels instantly toward the movement with pure trapped-animal panic flooding his expression. The shift happens so fast it’s terrifying—all that violence and hypervigilance taught into his nervous system surfacing beneath the breakdown.
One guard reaches toward him.
It’s a huge mistake. Andrew shoves him backward hard enough that the man stumbles into the doorway.
‘Nobody touches him!’ I bark.
Everything freezes.
Andrew’s breathing turns ragged and harsh now, shoulders heaving while he backs himself against the far wall like he genuinely thinks they’re about to restrain him.
His eyes find mine again. He’s not angry. He’s terrified. That’s what breaks me a little, because underneath the violence and panic and destruction, Andrew looks exactly like a frightened kid expecting punishment.
‘I’ve got this.’ I step between him and security.
‘Dr. Robinavitch—’
‘I said I’ve got it.’
The older guard looks unconvinced.
Behind me Andrew paces once sharply before driving his own fist into the side of his head hard enough that my stomach drops.
‘Andrew, stop.’ He barely seems to hear me. ‘Hey!’ I snap harder.
That reaches him. His head jerks toward my voice. I keep my own posture deliberately calm despite adrenaline screaming through my bloodstream.
‘Everybody out,’ I tell security without looking away from Andrew. ‘Now.’
‘He assaulted—’
‘He’s dissociating and terrified. Get out of the room.’
Tense silence stretches briefly.
Then Ellis intervenes quietly from the doorway. ‘Give Dr. Robinavitch a minute.’
Reluctantly security backs away.
The second the door shuts again, the room goes abruptly quiet except for Andrew’s ragged breathing.
I turn back toward him slowly.
He’s trembling hard, one hand pressed against the back of his neck while the other curls bloody from hitting the wall. His expression looks shattered.
‘Andrew.’ I move closer carefully.
He stares at me like he’s trying desperately to stay anchored to something. Then suddenly says, very small and very broken, ‘I don’t know where to put it.’
‘Put what?’ My chest caves inward.
‘The grief.’
The words hit harder than anything else tonight because they sound so honest. So helpless.
Andrew sways slightly where he stands. Without thinking, I close the remaining distance between us. This time when I touch him, he doesn’t pull away.