The shift had ended hours ago, but the hospital had not yet fully recovered from it.

The emergency department had settled into that strange, hollow quiet that only arrived after a brutal night—monitors dimmed, trauma bays wiped down, stretchers rolled back into their places like weapons returned to their racks. The smell of antiseptic still lingered stubbornly in the air, mixed with something heavier: old adrenaline, exhaustion, and the faint metallic memory of blood.

Fifteen hours inside The Pitt had a way of hollowing people out.

Some doctors went home immediately once the shift ended. Others lingered longer than necessary, buried in paperwork or post-shift routines that delayed the moment they had to face their own thoughts.

You had been one of the latter.

Oncology rarely moved with urgency. Your patients were not the kind that burst through ER doors screaming and bleeding. Their battles unfolded slowly, quietly—measured in scans, consultations, and careful conversations no one ever truly wanted to have.

Which was why the ER had always fascinated you.

So much life fought for in one place.

So much loss compressed into a single night.

And that night had been particularly brutal.

You had seen it in the way the emergency staff moved afterward, the stiffness in their shoulders, the quiet tension lingering in the air long after the last patient had been stabilized or transferred upstairs.

But one figure stood out even among the exhausted staff.

At the far end of the nurses’ station sat Dr. Michael 'Robby' Robinavitch, the attending physician who had spent the entire shift holding the department together with steady hands and clinical precision. Throughout the night you had watched him make impossible decisions with a calm that bordered on unreal, guiding residents through chaos, delivering instructions with quiet authority while the ER swirled around him.

Now that the shift was over, that calm looked… thinner.

His tie hung loose around his collar, sleeves rolled halfway up his forearms as he leaned heavily against the counter. The bar down the street had still been open.

Hospital staff gathered there often after shifts like this, seeking the kind of numb quiet that cheap whiskey and dim lighting provided. Someone had suggested a drink, and somehow Robby had ended up seated across from you in one of the narrow booths, the low hum of tired conversation filling the space around you.

At first the conversation stayed safe. Clinical. Detached summaries of cases from the night—who had made it, who had nearly died, which residents had panicked under pressure. The kind of professional decompression doctors used when they weren’t ready to acknowledge the emotional weight of the shift.

But alcohol had a way of loosening the careful restraint people wore during work.

One drink became two.

Two became enough that Robby’s voice grew quieter, slower, words slipping into more personal territory without quite intending to.

You had seen the moment it happened.

The moment the strong, composed attending physician finally began to sag under the weight of the shift.

Caretaker instincts had always been your weakness.

By the time you left the bar, Robby insisted he was perfectly capable of getting home on his own. The attempt at dignity lasted until the elevator ride to your apartment floor, when exhaustion finally overtook whatever pride remained. He had leaned briefly against the wall of the elevator, eyes half-closed as if gravity itself had become an obstacle.

You said very little as you guided him inside.

Eventually, everything blurred into a far memory of what happened.

Now morning had arrived.

Pale sunlight filtered through the thin curtains of your bedroom, stretching slowly across the floor and climbing the edge of the mattress where Robby had collapsed hours earlier.

Outside, the city was beginning to wake—distant traffic humming somewhere below, the early stirrings of another day starting whether anyone was ready for it or not.