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On the morning of July 5th, Jack returns home to a very specific bike parked in his driveway.
His stomach flips and flutters even as relief releases his lungs and lets him take a full breath for the first time since he saw Robby off last night. Apparently, Robby had sat there in peds with Baby Jane Doe until he fell asleep with his finger clutched in her little hand. One of the nurses had tried to shuffle him off toward an on-call room, but he only flapped a hand at the suggestion and then slipped out while Jack was busy.
Inside, Jack spies Robby’s shoes in the hallway and his bag discarded on the couch. Jack’s heart kicks up a notch as he trails through the house looking for him. He’s not in the living room or the kitchen or the bathroom. He crashes in the guest room often enough, but he’s not there, either. Finally, Jack cracks open the door to his own bedroom, and there he is in the scant light that slipped past the blackout curtains: a compact mountain range under Jack’s blankets, all curled up in the corner as if to take up as little space as possible. He’s snoring.
Jack settles into the jamb with his arms crossed, shifting the weight off his prosthesis. He watches for a minute, listens, but his hands itch to find Robby’s carotid anyway. He wants to feel it, wants to absorb the steady rhythm of it into his own bones. Seeing, hearing—these are inadequate to the task of ascertaining proof of life.
He should shower off the hospital. He should eat dinner. He should read some of the backlog of medical journals he’s got lying around until his eyes droop and he doesn’t even need a melatonin with police scanner chaser. Instead, he takes off his leg and his scrubs and climbs into bed in nothing but his briefs. His body slides inexorably towards Robby’s, and Robby’s warmth envelops him. He spoons up behind him and thinks fuck it. Hasn’t there been enough pretending? So he lets his pelvis cradle Robby’s ass, tucks his face into the space between his shoulder blades, rests his arm on Robby’s hip. Breathes him in.
Robby stirs, tension drawing him up rigid in Jack’s arms.
“Time’zit?” he slurs.
“Bout eight,” Jack says. “Go back to sleep.”
“You stink.”
“Oh well.”
Robby huffs out something that might pass for a laugh.
“Oh well,” he says, and melts back into Jack.
Jack strokes over the curve of Robby’s iliac crest. Jack loves this part of the body—a place where the structure of the skeleton imposes so insistently, so elegantly, on the flesh. Robby’s padded there, but Jack can still feel the gentle arc of bone underneath the softness, the perfect handle. The skin is smooth, baby-soft and hairless despite the encroachment of Robby’s body hair on all sides. This bit of him, where he’s somehow still new and so vulnerable, makes Jack feel unbearably tender towards him. If Jack could push his heart into Robby’s body, he would. If he could hold Robby in his hands like a springtime toad, he would. But he’s only a man, and all he has are his body (eloquent) and his words (inadequate).
“Stay,” Jack says into his back.
Robby’s breath shudders out of him. Jack squeezes him in closer.
“Stay,” he says again. “Please, for me.”
Robby’s hand closes over his and pulls them both up to his chest. He presses Jack’s hand to his heart.
“I gotta get on the road eventually,” he says. His voice is full of gravel.
“Yeah but. You could stay.”
That earns him a noncommittal grunt that vibrates low in Jack’s gut. If his dumbfuck cock twitches about it, well, Robby’s a big boy who can scoot away. He doesn’t.
“Jack?” he says after a while.
“Hm.”
“Did you and Michelle ever want kids?”
Jack’s heart gives a little pang. He thinks about what to say, how to say it. How to condense something so huge and private and painful into something Robby can hear without finding a way to flagellate himself about it.
“Yeah,” he says. “But we put it off too late, I think. There was always something—she didn’t want to do it while I was active duty, she didn’t want to do it while she was working on her PhD, I didn’t want to do it while I was getting used to being a one-legged wonder, and then—” He shrugged. “She was almost forty by the time we started trying, plus she had endo. We had a couple miscarriages and I couldn’t keep doing it, man. Watching her get excited only to—it was so fucking sad. She was so fucking sad. So I said let’s just do this you and me. We’ll go on adventures, travel, get some ridiculous purse dog and really live that DINK life. But we fucking didn’t, you know? We just worked, and rotted on the couch, and said maybe next year every time we found a place we wanted to go, and then there was no fucking next year, was there? There was just…me in this empty house.” He scoffs and smushes his nose into Robby’s spine. “Sometimes I’m so fucking shredded that we didn’t have kids, that there isn’t someone around here with her eyes or her nose or her whatever keeping me upright. And then sometimes I think—fuck, isn’t it better this way? Isn’t it better that she didn’t leave some young kids motherless, with nothing but a wreck of a father who could barely keep his own ass alive in the aftermath? Maybe—fuck, maybe it all happened as cleanly as it could have.”
Silence settles over them, oppressive. Robby clutches at Jack’s hand. Jack’s plastered up real close against him, free arm stretched out over his head. It’s the closest they’ve ever been. It’s the longest they’ve ever touched.
“They would have had you,” Robby says. “You wouldn’t have left them.”
“Jesus, they’d woulda been over at Uncle Robby’s house every night while Daddy stared into the abyss.”
“You would have come back to them. You would never take yourself away on purpose.”
Jack frowns. Hitches Robby closer. That’s not how suicidality works, really. People with responsibilities and loved ones and things to do kill themselves all the time. All it takes is for the darkness to overwhelm them in a single convenient moment. All it takes is for the insidious lie to take root in their brain: they’d be better off without you. Everyone would be better off without you.
“Well,” Jack says. He clears his throat when his voice breaks. “I’ve made it through so far in this universe. Hopefully I would in this alternate timeline you’re cooking up, too.”
“You could still have kids,” Robby says. “If you wanted.”
Jack snorts.
“Christ, can you imagine? Me catting around for a woman who wants a baby more than she wants to be picky about who the father is. Fuck me, no.”
“Please, like women aren’t throwing themselves at you constantly.”
“Oh that’s just my air of derring-do.”
“Your fucking what?”
“It’s not me they’re interested in, man. It’s their fantasy of a man in fatigues. As soon as they get to know me—” Jack whistles out a falling note and punctuates it with a fart sound.
“I never thought I’d say this to the Major Jack Abbot, but you’re not giving yourself enough credit.”
Jack isn’t stupid; he knows this conversational thread isn’t about him. He’d love to keep poking and prodding the edges of whatever Robby’s saying like bickering is a contact sport, but more than that, he wants to know where Robby’s going with all this.
“What about you, man?” he asks. “Pretty sure you could have any beautiful woman you look at begging for your babies.”
“Would you believe I’m holding out for true love?”
“Yeah, I would, you old romantic,” Jack says.
Robby huffed out a creaky laugh.
“Nah. I think that time passed me by. I’m too old, too set in my ways. Who wants to try to crack into all that? Besides, I do think it’s important. Who you decide to go all in with like that. It can’t be just anyone you like the look of.”
Jack risks stroking a hand over Robby’s side, down his hip and his thigh. He hopes touch can convey what he can’t find the words for, which is that, for him, there is no one else. That that part of his life, his psyche, his heart, is already engaged, and looking elsewhere is both futile and unnecessary. And maybe Robby, having met his own reflection in the abyss and crawled into Jack’s bed in response, is finally willing to admit it’s the same for him.
Jack hears Robby swallow. He pulls Jack’s arm up to wrap around his waist again, locks his hand in Jack’s. Jack closes his eyes, presses his face closer into Robby’s back, and lets out a sigh. Robby shivers under the plume of Jack’s breath.
“I wish I could take that baby,” Robby says in a strangled whisper. “I wish—I wish I could be what she needed.”
Jack breath catches. He gives Robby a squeeze.
“She was still there when I left this morning.”
“Fuck,” Robby says. He sounds, once again, on the verge of tears.
Jack wants to tug him ’til he turns around so Jack can look him in the eye. It’s his favorite move to keep Robby honest. To make Robby see. But he also knows some things are easier to say in the dark, without looking at each other. He scoots up enough to rest his forehead on the base of Robby’s skull.
“Since we got our alternate timelines going,” Jack says, “tell me what it would mean, being her dad.”
“I don’t—that’s the thing, I don’t know,” Robby says. “I wouldn’t even know where to start. I just, I wouldn’t let her think she’s alone. I wouldn’t let her think she was a burden. I’d take her places, and show her things, and make sure she was clean and dry with a full belly and lots of toys and maybe—maybe I could make up for it. Maybe I could love her enough that being left in a fucking toilet before she was old enough to smile would be nothing but a footnote in her life.”
“That sounds nice, Robby.”
“But.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“I know there’s a ‘but,’ there’s a million ‘buts.’ You don’t have to tell me.”
“Okay, so I won’t.”
A peevish scoff.
“Just say it, Jack.”
“I don’t know what you want me to say, man.”
“Just tell me I’m unfit! Tell me I can’t do any of this until I get my own shit together! Tell me my life doesn’t have room for her even if it wasn’t a goddamn Chernobyl-level disaster site right now!”
Jack takes a deep breath and lets it out real slow. He pets down Robby’s side again. Like a wounded animal, Robby cringes to be touched so gently, but he doesn’t make to leave. Jack speaks softly against the back of Robby’s neck.
“The logistics would be a challenge. Emergency placement is one thing; getting the hours in to qualify as a long term foster is another. Setting your place up for her, getting all the shit a baby needs, arranging child care for when you’re at work, having a support system so you’re not alone in it. And yes, adding a baby to the current dumpster fire that is your brain right now would not be the best move for either of you. But Robby, man, I think what you want is for me to tell you that some aspect of your character means you’re fundamentally not good enough to be anyone’s dad and I’m not gonna play that game.”
“The fuck I know about being a dad anyway, huh? The whole thing’s just a fantasy.”
“Look, I know things with Jake are—”
“Don’t. Don’t, I can’t.”
Jack gives him a squeeze.
“You know I was gonna adopt him?” Robby says eventually. “We had it all ironed out in the same goddamn paperwork as the marriage. And then.” Those big shoulders shrug, jostling Jack’s head.
And then Janey called time of death on the limping, broken thing they called a relationship before it ever dragged itself down an aisle, and Jack got to watch as Robby mourned the son he’d lost more than the partner he purported to love.
“Maybe it’s better this way,” Robby says. “Cleaner, like you said. Just cut off any entanglements at the root, no legal ties. Even my own mother wouldn’t stay, why should I expect anyone else to?”
Jack’s heart clatters against his ribs like a panicked bird before stopping altogether. The million things he’d learned about Robby over the years start to cascade in his mind like static finally taking shape, and the resultant picture, ugly and huge, threatens to crowd out all coherent thought. He tries to set it aside and locks Robby in close.
“Mikey…”
“I don’t care. It’s nothing, don’t make a big deal of it.”
“Okay, well, I can promise you something that I know is a hundred, a hundred thousand million per cent true.”
“What.”
“That whatever made her leave was her own shit, man. It had fuck all to do with you and everything to do with whatever was going on with her. And—and, listen to me, are you listening? Mikey, it was her loss, okay? She missed out on so fucking much, and none of that was because of anything you did.”
Another grunt. Acknowledgment, not agreement.
Jack gives in and bullies Robby into turning over. Even in the low light of the bedroom, he can see Robby’s eyes are red and wet. He forces Robby to look at him anyway.
“You get that, right?” Jack asks.
Robby’s jaw clenches. He shakes his head.
“Michael, I promise, it wasn’t you.”
“I was eight. I was annoying and needy and clingy and she got tired of me. It wasn’t a whim or an impulsive thing, Jack, it was—she didn’t love me, do you understand? She either never did or she stopped. That’s me, that’s something in me.”
Jack’s own lip trembled. He cupped Robby’s face in his hand and swiped at the tear that escaped from the corner of Robby’s eye.
“The lack was hers, darlin’. A lack of love, a lack of knowledge, a lack of support—wherever the lack was, Mishka, it was hers, not yours. D’you hear me?”
Robby squeezes his eyes shut and shakes his head. Jack clenches his jaw to try to stem the sting in his own eyes. He rubs his thumb compulsively over Robby’s cheekbone.
“Hey,” Jack says, choked. “I love you every day, you know that? And not by accident, either. I do this shit on purpose, Michael.”
Robby’s forehead smacks into Jack’s collarbone in answer, and then Robby’s trembling, clutching at him, and wetness is seeping into Jack’s skin. Jack shifts enough to get both arms around Robby and locks him in. He holds the back of his head, murmurs comforting nonsense into his hair.
He doesn’t let go.
In some alternate timeline, Robby gets a handle on himself, and so does Jack. He gets licensed as a foster parent, and so does Jack. They negotiate the terms of a new life: they move into a bigger house, fully accessible, with a yard; Robby gives up being the chief and the chair and the man in charge and drops to part time at the hospital; Jack begrudgingly moves to days. They bring home a baby someone left in the bathroom. They give her a name they spent weeks agonizing over. They adopt her. Their house fills with the sound of laughter and shrieking and stomping. Their house fills with more kids, older kids, kids with baggage to rival either of theirs, kids who ask to be adopted as soon as they meet, kids who scream bloody murder if Jack or Robby come too close, kids who hate them as much as they need them, kids who will stay a week, a year, forever.
This life isn’t perfect—sometimes their demons get the better of them, or they aren’t equipped to help every child that passes through their door, or promises get broken by circumstances outside their control. No, it’s not perfect, but it’s theirs. It is wider, and louder, and more colorful than they could have imagined when they were just two men treading water to survive, but now they know: change only comes when you take the risk of exposing where you are small, and hurt, and alone. And what a joy, to learn in the reaching that the heart is a bottomless well.
Here, now, with Robby all wrung out but bundled up secure in Jack’s arms, Jack peers into the future and sees another life, waiting.
End