Chapter Text
3:04 A.M., Sunday, 4th October, 2026
There’s a moth trapped in Robby’s porch light.
Its wing is torn in half, jagged-edged exoskeleton falling to the step that Frank has been seated on for the last two hours. When he reaches his left hand up to his mouth, a warm metallic rush emulsifies with the spearmint that already coats his tongue, rather than the nails he’s been chewing at in anticipation.
His eyes travel downward; he’s bleeding, crimson beading at his nail beds. There’s a streak of blood on the ’P’ of the Pennsylvania on his hoodie; from his nails or from the nosebleed Tanner had that morning, he isn’t certain. Robby still isn’t back, and he wants to pick at his fingers until they bleed, wants to gnaw at his knuckles until the sting distracts him from the ache in his spine, wants to tell himself that Abbot just lied to him about when his suicide mission – sabbatical, Dana’s voice corrects in his ears – ends, but he knows that his hands keep him alive, that the ache can only be dulled by the one thing he can’t have, and that for all that Abbot is (ER Cowboy, Smokeshow Personified, Borderline Suicidal), he isn’t a liar.
It’s when he’s almost near throwing in the towel and walking back home (he isn’t, he would wait for as long as it took, doesn’t even need a conversation, just wants Robby to look at him) that the roaring of a motorcycle assaults the dead of night, with the tell-tale groan that Robby lets out every time his knees go stiff.
(“Knees aching, old man?”
“With a back like yours, careful who you’re calling old man.”)
For a moment, the two simply stare at each other. Behind the brown of Robby’s eyes are waves of exhaustion, and briefly, Frank wonders what the fuck he’s doing with his life.
“I truly do not have the time for this,” is the first thing Robby says, the first thing Robby has said to him in three months, phone calls gone unanswered, messages gone ignored. His eyes are bloodshot, his hair has grown out. His beard is the same length it always is. Again, he says, “I really, really don’t have the time for this, Langdon.”
Frank laughs once, sharp and humourless, the sound scraping out of him like something dragged over gravel. He hates how easy it was for Robby to switch from Frank to Langdon. Hates that he misses the way it sounds from Robby’s mouth – caustic, no room for argument, cruel. “Yeah, well. I’m here anyway.”
The motorcycle engine ticks as it cools, little metallic contractions in the silence. Robby kills the headlights but doesn’t move right away, one hand still curled around the handlebar. In the sudden dark, the porch light above Frank’s head becomes painfully bright, washing everything in sickly yellow. The moth continues battering itself against the bulb with dull papery taps, one ruined wing spinning it crooked each time it tries to fly.
Robby finally looks up at him fully.
Three months is not long enough to forget a face, but it is apparently long enough for a person to come back altered around the edges. The changes hit Frank in strange places first. The deeper grooves beside Robby’s mouth. The shadows pooled beneath his eyes. Hair curling too long at the nape of his neck, damp from sweat at the collar of his jacket. He looks leaner somehow, worn down into sharper lines.
The realisation that Robby isn’t Robby the way Frank has known him punches through him so abruptly that it nearly buckles him.
“You look like shit,” Robby-not-Robby says.
Frank wipes his hands against his hoodie. His fingers smear red across his hoodie.
“Occupational hazard.”
“You haven’t gone to work in a week.”
The words land heavier than they should, sit in the space between his ribs and his recent inability to leave his house. Still, Frank feels himself straighten instinctively, every vertebra in his spine protesting at the action. “Who told you that?”
“Dana.” A beat. Robby removes his gloves, finger by finger. “Abbot.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“People get worried when you disappear.”
Frank almost says that’s rich or you mean, people get worried that I’m off getting high?, but the fight leaks out of him before it reaches his mouth. The anger inside him has gone strange and brittle over the last few hours, cracked open by relief before he could stop it. He watches Robby climb off the bike slowly, stiff in the knees exactly like Frank remembered. His jacket hangs loose off his frame, too loose.
“You lost weight.”
“I’ve been busy.”
“Doing what?”
Robby finally looks at him then, something flinty flashing behind the exhaustion. “Not this.”
There it is. The shut door. The deadbolt.
Frank swallows around the metallic taste in his mouth. “You ignored every call.”
“I told you I was leaving.”
“You said you were leaving, not that you were going to disappear off the face of the fucking Earth.”
Robby drags a hand down his face, sighs, starts, “Frank –”
“No, don’t fucking ’Frank’ me.” His voice cracks harder than he intends. He lowers it immediately, suddenly aware of the sleeping neighborhood around them. “You don’t get to walk out and then act annoyed that I noticed.”
The moth collides with the bulb again. Tiny body ricocheting off hot glass. Whitaker must have forgotten to turn the porch light off before leaving. The moth isn’t going to survive.
Robby’s gaze flicks toward it briefly, jaw working beneath the beard before returning to Frank. “I can’t do this right now.”
“What the fuck does that even mean?”
“This.” A vague gesture between them, tired and imprecise. “All of this. The job.” You remains unspoken, suspended in the air.
“So you went on your sabbatical,” Frank mutters, petulant despite himself.
One corner of Robby’s mouth twitches. Barely there. “You ever considered going on one before turning to benzos?”
“I’d rather be a junkie than sound like I joined a yoga retreat.”
The almost-smile dies immediately.
Shame crawls hot beneath Frank’s skin. Frank Langdon, 32, divorced, cripple. Addict. He looks away first, down at the porch steps stained dark with old rain and motor oil and years of summer dirt. His fingers ache with the effort of not chewing them bloody again.
“I just wanted to talk to you,” he says, voice emerging more child-like than he hoped, like Penny when she wants him to read her a story before bed.
“And what could you possibly have to say to me?” In the dead of night, Robby’s sighs sound like wind against trees. “Or better yet, what do you think I could possibly want to say to you?”
That’s the thing carving Frank open tonight; the utter foolishness of his own fucking behaviour, the hope – stupid, stupid hope – that he’s held onto for the last three months, praying to a God that doesn’t exist for an absolution he doesn’t deserve.
He presses the heels of his hands into his eyes until colors spark behind them. His spine throbs where old damage knots around newer hurt, pain radiating down his left leg in familiar static pulses. Underneath it all lives the deeper ache, the one that never shuts up anymore, clawing through him molecule by molecule for relief he can’t afford to give it.
Finally, he says, “You could’ve answered one text.”
“And said what?”
“That you were alive.” That you were thinking of what I said to you on the 4th. That I made a difference. That I make a difference.
Robby studies him for a moment too long, like his thoughts are being broadcasted in neon lights over his head, a sign that screams PAY ATTENTION TO ME. “I am alive.”
The neighborhood around them feels submerged. Dark windows. Sleeping houses. One of them is Abbot’s, another is Shen’s. Somewhere down the block, a dog barks once before falling silent again. The porch light hums overhead with electrical insistence.
Robby climbs the steps slowly, boots heavy against old wood. He stops one stair below Frank, close enough now that Frank can smell cold leather, gasoline, damp wool beneath the jacket. Familiar scents, lodged somewhere deep in his nervous system. His body responds before his brain can catch up; every muscle in him loosens toward the warmth automatically.
Dangerous.
“Are you high?” Robby asks quietly, and Frank wants to die.
Instead, he does what he does best; snaps his teeth until they sink into skin. He feels it happen in real time, the way a dog curls its lip before it bites.
“Would you give a fuck if I was?”
The porch light buzzes overhead.
“Frank.” Robby frowns. You can hear it in his voice. “Are you high?”
The moth keeps throwing itself against the bulb in crooked little spirals, one ruined wing dragging behind it like a torn flag.
Frank stares at that instead of at Robby.
“No,” he says.
A beat passes.
Then, because lying to Robby has always felt strangely impossible: “But I want to be. All the fucking time.”
Silence settles heavy between them.
Robby doesn’t react immediately, that almost makes it worse. Frank can practically hear him thinking, can feel the careful restraint in the way he stands there half inside the doorway, shoulders slack with exhaustion instead of anger.
A car drives by his house, and the warm headlights spill gold across the porch, catching in the tired lines around his eyes. Up close, he looks wrecked, a look Frank has only ever seen on people who spend too much time trying to keep other people alive.
And there’s the ugly little pulse of guilt again.
Robby breaks the silence with a short laugh that comes out more like a cough that someone takes after holding their breath for too long. “Convince me that it wasn’t an error in judgement to let you back into my ED.”
Frank shrugs. It’s a question that won’t do him any favours to answer.
“Frank.”
His name lands low and rough in Robby’s voice, stripped of accusation, nothing but concern. It makes him want to bolt as far as his legs will carry him. It makes him want to curl up into a ball on the front of Robby’s door, right on the welcome mat Abby had gifted him when they’d visited him for his housewarming four years ago.
“I shouldn’t have come here.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the one I have.”
“You look sick,” Robby says quietly.
Frank laughs under his breath. “Now you give a fuck?”
“Frank.”
There it is again, that tone. Gentle in the way people get gentle around families waiting for the dead body in South 15.
Something defensive immediately bares its teeth inside Frank’s chest.
“Don’t do that.”
Robby’s brow furrows slightly. “Do what?”
“Say my name like I’m one bad day away from putting a fucking gun in my mouth.”
The words hit the porch hard.
Robby goes very still, and Frank instantly wants to take them back, which unfortunately means he doubles down instead.
“What?” he bites sharply. “That not the approved terminology?”
“Jesus Christ.”
“Oh, there he is.” Frank pushes himself upright from the porch railing too quickly, pain flashing molten-hot through his spine, stars dancing in his vision. His expression must betray something because Robby straightens immediately.
“Your back –”
“I’m fine.”
“You can barely stand up. Are you taking anything for the pain?”
“Fuck you.”
The words rot between them on contact.
The moth finally collides with the bulb hard enough to bounce off entirely, spiraling downward, unable to catch itself. Frank watches it stagger through the air, hit the ground. Robby watches Frank.
He remembers Robby asleep on the floor of his apartment three autumns ago, too stubbornly exhausted to make it to the couch. One arm flung over his eyes, socked feet hanging halfway beneath the coffee table, apartment smelling like burnt coffee and antiseptic wipes and the rain gathering beyond the windows, and Frank remembers thinking, with the terrifying certainty reserved for disasters and miracles, that he could get used to this.
He doesn’t know if he could get used to this.
“Abbot told me you did a perimortem C-section last week.”
Frank looks away immediately.
The porch suddenly feels too small. Too bright. Every sound sharpened unbearably – the electrical hum of the light, the ticking motorcycle engine cooling in the driveway, his own pulse beating hard against the base of his skull.
Robby rubs a hand over his face. Fatigue drags visibly at every movement now. Frank can almost watch him choosing patience over anger in real time, and for some reason that hurts worse than if Robby had just started screaming.
Then:
“Are you trying to die?”
Frank’s head jerks up.
“What the fuck kind of question is that?”
“A real one.”
“No, it’s bullshit.”
“You show up here after not going to work for a week, the longest voluntary break you’ve taken since I’ve known you, looking like you’re itching for a fucking fix.”
“I told you, I’m not high right now.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
Silence.
Frank’s jaw locks so hard it aches. He doesn’t know if anyone being asked that question would be able to answer it without the threat of institutionalisation looming above them.
Robby sees something in his face then, a flicker of truth that Frank failed to bury quickly enough. With that, the exhaustion in his expression deepens into something closer to grief.
“Go home, Dr. Langdon,” he says softly. Frank wants to bite him.
Instead, he laughs once, brittle around the edges. “Yeah, okay, Dr. Robinavitch.”
“I mean it.”
“I’m sure you do.”
Robby hesitates, and for one horrible second, he looks exactly like someone standing at the edge of a collapsing building trying to decide whether going back in will kill him too.
“Langdon. Go home,” he repeats.
The sentence slides cleanly between Frank’s ribs.
Everything mean inside him immediately wakes up screaming.
“Fuck you, Robby. Fuck you.”
Robby closes his eyes briefly.
When he opens them again, whatever softness had been there is gone, replaced by the same look Frank remembers all too well from the 5th of September, from the 4th of July, from every single one of his nightmares henceforth.
“Goodnight, Dr. Langdon. I’ll see you at seven a.m. tomorrow.”
Then he steps back into the house and closes the door firmly, directly in Frank’s face.