The pediatric room hadn’t been used in years.

The hallway lights were too bright, too sharp, too loud with the rhythm of running feet and clipped commands—Trauma 2’s crashing someone shouted, but it all blurred together into one long, buzzing static that filled your skull until your lungs squeezed tight against it. You slipped through the thin glass door of Pediatric like someone slipping underwater, closing it before anyone noticed.

Darkness wrapped around you; quiet, soft, unbothered. Old cartoon decals peeled from the walls, the faint scent of bubblegum disinfectant clung to the air, and you finally let your knees give out beneath you.

You should have been charting, you should have been helping, you should have been anywhere except sitting on the cold tile floor with your scrubs wrinkled and your heart thrashing like it wanted out of your ribs.

But the image of the trauma patient—glass, blood, too much shouting—was stuck behind your eyelids like a shadow you couldn’t blink away. Your hands wouldn’t stop trembling. That horrible, familiar pressure built at the base of your throat, rising slow and choking-tight. A quiet knock tapped against the door.

You froze.

Another beat, and then the handle clicked open just enough to let a soft gold strip of hallway light spill inside. You didn’t want to look up. If it was any attending, any senior—if they saw you like this—“Hey,” a familiar voice murmured, warm but low enough not to startle. “Figured I’d find you here.”

Michael slipped inside and nudged the door shut behind him; he didn’t flip on the lights, he didn’t bark orders, he didn’t even ask why you were in a closed room when the ER was drowning in chaos. Instead, he lowered himself into a crouch in front of you, resting his forearms on his knees like he had all the time in the world. His eyes adjusted to the dim, soft and steady when they met yours. He didn’t reach for you right away; he just existed there, grounded and calm in a way the rest of the hospital never was.

“You’re alright,” he said gently, just one sentence, quiet as a promise. A beat. “If you let me, I can help you breathe through this.” Another beat.

“Tell me what’s going on, kid.”

The silence stretched, but it didn’t feel suffocating. Robby wasn’t staring in that brutal way some attendings did—evaluating, judging, tallying your failures. He looked more like someone trying to anchor you back into your body. Like someone who’d found a scared intern on the floor before and knew the exact script of panic.

The air in your lungs shivered, sticking in your throat. You tried to inhale. It hitched. Your fingers curled uselessly against your thighs. Robby noticed, of course he did.

Slowly—never crowding—you saw him shift, settling onto the floor beside you. His shoulder brushed the wall, not you, leaving space for you to move closer if you wanted. He angled his body sideways, open, inviting but not demanding anything. “Breathe with me,” he murmured, steady. “In for four, hold, out for six. Just follow my voice.”

You heard him inhale quietly next to you. Then exhale. The rhythm stretched through the dark, gentle as a tide, something you could cling to without feeling like you were drowning anyone else.

Your chest began to loosen, inch by inch. The room felt less like a hiding place and more like a pause; a moment carved out between crisis and collapse. Outside, the ER roared on. Inside, it was just you and Michael, both sitting on the floor of a forgotten pediatric room, while he waited—patient, steady, refusing to let you spiral alone.

He glanced sideways at you again, voice barely above a whisper, giving you room to speak, react, breathe: “You with me now?”