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“So walk me through it, then.”
They’re not at the hospital. They’re on the roof of Robby’s apartment building. There’s no railing here. No safe place to retreat behind. There’s just Robby standing on brick, the battered edges of his Reeboks touching the cool night air and nothing else. Jack has hit that point where fear has gone white hot, reforming itself into anger. Fear shuts you down. Anger kept you moving. (Keeps you alive.)
Robby is an outline against the darkness, head bowed and shoulders sloped. He looks so tired and Jack gets that, God he gets that better than anyone else. But he’s been fighting that feeling since he was eighteen years old and they put a gun in his hands. He is exhausted with trying to be better when it feels like the people around him won’t do the same. “Tell me you know what happens when you take that step, Robby.”
There isn’t an answer for a long couple of heartbeats, Jack stewing in his misery and anger. He’s debating how quickly and quietly he can move, if he can get his hand on the stupid hood of that stupid Beers of the Burgh jacket and yank Robby backwards before he can commit. But he isn’t sure. He isn’t sure and he can’t have that on his conscience if he’s the one who pushes Robby over the edge. He would be right after him, and wouldn’t that just be a fucking waste of most of his adult life?
“EMS call.” Robby’s voice is distant, flat and soft in a way that Jack has never heard before. It scares the shit out of him. Because Robby was a bleeding heart, a live wire, a raw nerve at all times. But he wasn’t now. He was wrung out. Empty. Fear and anger surge side by side in Jack’s chest.
“Yeah. And where would they take you? What’s the closest hospital?” It’s a cheap shot. Robby spent his whole damn life taking care of other people. He shouldn’t have to think of them at his lowest, his weakest. But Jack doesn’t know what the hell else to do. Because this isn’t the idle call of the void he stares down into when he needs to find his way back into his body. This was real and ready and Jack has failed his friend by assuming they were on the same page. Jack thought about killing himself the way he thought about winning the lottery. It would be nice, but it was never going to happen.
“PTMC.” Robby answers, and Jack can see the shift of fabric on his pockets, but he doesn’t know what his hands are doing. This wasn’t the idle turning of a worry stone. This was a man looking for the only outlet he thought he had left. Jack had failed him. Just like Collins. Just like Janey. Just like his parents, his grandparents, the spiderweb cracks in Robby’s heart could trace out to each and every one of them.
“Who’s on shift right now?” It’s a fucked up call and response and Jack is fighting every instinct to dissociate, he can feel it tingling in his fingertips. He can’t check out now. One of them had to be here, to stand up and fucking feel this. “Who would have to call it, Robby? Who?” The anger is clawing up his throat, making it hard to breathe. “Who would get called?” His parents are dead. His grandmother too. Jack doesn’t actually know who Robby’s next of kin is.
“You.” It’s the first movement he’s seen from Robby, turning his head to look at Jack over his shoulder. And it hurts . It’s a knife to the chest, it puts amputation to shame. Jack staggers backwards a step at the single word. Him. He was Robby’s next of kin. The only person he had left.
“Me?” It comes out a bark of vicious laughter, and Jack feels like he’s watching himself over his shoulder. (Therapy gave him the words for all of this. It didn’t stop his body from doing it.) “They wouldn’t have to call me, Robby. I’d already be there.” He reaches up, dragging a hand through his hair. Grabbing the ends and tugging, the pain a little pinprick to cling to. A single moment of grounding.
“And you know why? Not because I jumped. Not because I don’t want to. You go, I want to go right after you. And that would be easy. It would be so fucking easy, Mike. Seven steps. Eight, max. Momentum right over the edge. Maybe I’d land right on top of you. It’d be the least you deserve, you selfish prick.” He’s shaking now, and it has nothing to do with the muggy night air.
“But I wouldn’t. Because somebody would have to pay for your funeral. Somebody would have to pick the flowers and the songs. Somebody would have to stand up in front of all the people you’ve saved, all the people you’ve mentored and tell them what a good man you were.” The words are sticky in his throat, but the dam is broken now. Jack couldn’t stop if he wanted to.
“Someone would have to clean out your apartment. Donate all your books. Cover your shifts at work. Make sure that Jake is okay. Make sure the med students go and talk to Kiara. Somebody would have to pick up the fucking pieces, no matter how badly they wanted to go with you.”
Jack hates this. He hates that he doesn’t have calm, soothing words to tell Robby. He hates that he can’t say I love you, please come back to me because that was for other people. That was for somebody who listened. Who saw the truth of what Robby was trying to get through. Hell, he hates that he can’t go stand shoulder to shoulder with Robby and offer him his hand. Get at least a couple of seconds of having him all to himself when all he’s had to do is share him with the world for a decade.
Robby’s shoulders are trembling. It takes Jack a couple of seconds to see it through the slick blur of his own vision. He can hear the sound of it, the sharp staccato breath he sucks in through his mouth because his nose is too clogged up to breathe through.
“You want to go? Fine. I can’t stop you. I literally can’t stop you.” There’s too much distance between them. Jack isn’t fast enough. He isn’t strong enough. “But I’m not going to make it easy on you. If you’re leaving me, then you’re taking all my baggage with you, since you’re leaving all of yours with me.”
This isn’t how it should be. In a perfect world, he would say some of this shit over dinner. Cook them steaks in his own kitchen, press his foot against Robby’s beneath the table. Give him the revelation he deserves. But this world isn’t perfect. It’s far from it. And Jack isn’t going to stay silent any longer.
“I wanted you the day we met. It was your hands. I couldn’t stop looking at your hands and I spent my whole damn shift thinking about what they would look like wrapped around my cock.” Robby has gone stock still again, hands curled into fists in his pockets. Jack doesn’t let that stop the words. He lets it make him angry.
“And I knew I loved you when that old lady plowed into the art festival. Everything was fucking blood and chaos and I had a full blown PTSD episode with my hands inside a seven year old’s chest. You stood right there beside me and you talked me through it. You didn’t take me off, you didn’t out me to all the nurses. You trusted me.”
It hurts to breathe. “And brother, I have done nothing but fucking fail you since and I am sorry .” The words catch in his mouth like a sob. “I would sell my soul to the devil himself for a do-over. Because I’m sorry I didn’t hear what you were telling me. And I’m sorry I let it get this bad that we’re here and you’re going and-”
He doesn’t know when Robby moved (and later in the dark, he’ll fear that he might have missed this going the other way in his breakdown) but there are hands on his shoulders and a strong chest pressed against his and isn’t that just Michael Robinavitch in a nutshell? Taking time out of his own suicide attempt to comfort Jack.
He grabs two handfuls of Robby’s jacket in the back, clinging to him with everything he has. Robby’s lips are warm against his temple, his cheek, wherever they can skate against his skin. Jack chokes down another sob, trying to swallow the barbed weight of it.
“It isn’t your fault.” Relief hits him like a train. Not just at the words, but at the rough calibre of Robby’s voice. The emotion in it. “Jack, none of this is your fault. Look at me.” He feels fingers beneath his chin and stubbornly fights against it. But Robby is here and he’s touching him and Jack has never been able to say no to Robby. He looks up.
Robby’s face is splotchy and red, his eyes swollen. He looks exhausted in a bone deep way that aches in Jack’s soul. “It is not your fault. I’m alone because of my own choices. Not because of anything you did. Hell, you’ve been fighting me being alone for years.” His laughter is a soft, sad thing. “I’m just…tired.”
Tired. That word is loaded. And heavy. So fucking heavy. “I know.” Jack reaches up, cupping Robby’s bearded jaw in his palm. He wishes this could have been a different kind of first. But like his old man used to like to tell him, wishes weren’t horses. “So rest, Mike. Put it all down. I can carry it for you.” And he would. Anywhere. Any time. For as long as it took.
“I can’t-” Robby shakes his head, eyes closing for a beat with the weight of pain and his own anger. “I can’t ask you to do that.”
“You’re not. Fuck, you never ask anyone for anything. But I’m offering, okay? Let me carry it for you.”
Whatever answer he’s expecting, it’s not this. Jack expects to have to argue. To take this fight back down into Robby’s apartment. To keep leaving therapy pamphlets in his mailbox like pizza delivery ads. To keep having the door shut in his face.
But Robby looks at him, and something breaks open in those beautiful, broken brown eyes. Because Robby turns his head and presses his lips against the palm of Jack’s hand, sending a vicious jolt of emotion through him.
“Okay.”