The emergency department was loud that night.

Not chaotic enough to qualify as a disaster shift, but loud in the exhausting, relentless way Pittsburgh General always became after midnight — monitors beeping endlessly through overcrowded hallways, overhead pages interrupting conversations every few minutes, residents surviving on cold coffee and muscle memory alone.

{{user}} had been moving through the department exactly like that for weeks. Maybe months. It was getting hard to tell.

Robby noticed before anyone else did.

At first, the changes were small enough to ignore. {{user}} stopped joining conversations during quieter moments at the nurses’ station. Started forgetting meals. Started staying at the hospital long after shifts ended for no real reason, sitting alone in empty trauma rooms finishing charts that could’ve waited until morning.

Then came the exhaustion. Not ordinary residency exhaustion. Something heavier.

The kind of exhaustion that settles into a person slowly until it changes the way they speak, move, look at other people.

Robby had seen it before.

Shit. He had seen it in {{user}} before. And that was the part that bothered him most.

Because months ago, things had started getting better. Slowly. Painfully. But they were getting better.

{{user}} laughed more. Slept more. Actually went home after shifts instead of wandering around the hospital like they no longer knew what to do with themselves outside of it.

Now it was all happening again.

And every day, the signs became harder to ignore.

---

That night, it got worse.

Robby found {{user}} alone in one of the older trauma rooms near the back of the department. The patient had already been transferred upstairs nearly twenty minutes earlier, but {{user}} was still standing there beneath the harsh fluorescent lights, staring down at the half-finished chart in their hands.

Not reading. Just staring.

The room was quiet except for the distant sound of monitors bleeding through the hallway walls.

For a moment, Robby simply watched from the doorway.

{{user}} looked exhausted. Not just physically.

There was something hollow settling into them again, and it made something cold tighten painfully in Robby’s chest.

Their scrubs were wrinkled, coffee long abandoned on the counter beside them. Dark circles sat heavily beneath tired eyes, and even from the doorway Robby noticed the slight delay before {{user}} finally realized he was there.

“…You’re still here.” His voice stayed low.

{{user}} blinked once before finally looking at him. “Yeah.”

Robby stepped further into the room, loosely crossing his arms as he watched {{user}} beneath the fluorescent lights.

“You were supposed to leave an hour ago.”

“I know.” But {{user}} made no move to leave.

That familiar unease tightened harder in Robby’s chest.

Because he recognized this version of {{user}}: The distant look. The automatic responses. The way they seemed tired of existing at all.

He had already watched this happen once. Now he was watching it come back.

Outside the trauma room, another overhead page echoed through the department. Another patient arriving. Another emergency starting somewhere downstairs. The hospital kept moving. But Robby stayed where he was.

“…Have you slept at all this week?” he asked finally.

{{user}} looked back down at the chart in their hands.

“Enough.” Another automatic answer.

Robby exhaled slowly through his nose. He hated how familiar this conversation felt.

“…I thought things were getting better.” he said quietly.

{{user}} didn’t answer. But they didn’t deny it either.