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several unrelated observations about a man named justin

dr. robby is an excellent doctor, a good teacher, and deeply committed to professional boundaries. right up until someone flirts with his favorite intern

bet u wanna meet the reader! ── .✦ °❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:･

pairing: michael robinavitch x sunshine!intern!reader

warnings: fem!reader, intern!reader, implied age gap, medical slow burn, fluff, mentorship or smthin, pre-relationship pining, flirty patient, mutual pining, attending x intern dynamic, power imbalance, competence kink, robby's pov, jealousy!!!!, medical inaccuracies i am so sure, tired doctors making questionable emotional decisions, idiots in love (eventually)

prompt: here!

wc: 3.8k

“Does it get worse when you rotate your hand like this,” you ask, lifting your own wrist into the air and slowly turning it in demonstration, “or is it more of a constant ache?”

The patient rolls his shoulder in a loose shrug, the exam table paper crackling beneath him.

“Honestly? Hard to say,” he says, flashing a grin that’s probably carried him through a lot in life. “I’ve got a pretty high pain tolerance. Played college ball. You learn to push through stuff.”

Of course he had to throw that in there.

College ball.

Robby finds himself wondering, almost against his will, if the resume continues along its expected evolutionary path.

Fraternity, maybe. The kind of house that permanently smells like cheap liquor and burnt pizza rolls. Backwards caps. Red plastic cups accumulating like a minor ecological disaster across a sticky kitchen counter. Someone shouting his name across a lawn at two in the morning while music rattles the windows and neighbors contemplate calling the police.

Brad. Or Chad. Possibly Kyle.

A man whose greatest formative hardship was probably losing a championship game and then immediately being told by twenty teammates that he’d “get ‘em next season.”

There is, technically, no evidence for any of this. Robby acknowledges that. But the visual indicators are… persuasive.

The posture alone makes a strong argument.

Elbows spread wide. Knees planted like boundary markers. The casual territorial sprawl of someone who has never once considered the possibility that he might be inconveniencing another human being.

If he had a remote control and a beer, Robby suspects he’d settle in for the evening.

The man does, in fact, possess a real name. Robby read it on the chart not ten minutes ago.

He cannot remember it now.

Robby doesn’t forget names. He forgets anniversaries. He forgets to answer administrative assistance emails until they become passive-aggressive follow-ups, with lots of exclamation marks. He forgets where he put his own coffee approximately six times per shift.

But names usually plant themselves somewhere useful.

He attributes this lapse, generously, to the noise of the ER. The overlapping voices, the beeping monitors, the distant clatter of something metallic hitting a floor somewhere down the hall.

Yes. That must be it.

Definitely not to the fact that every time you speak, the man’s entire face rearranges itself into a gleaming, toothpaste-commercial grin like he’s auditioning for the role of Guy Who Is Extremely Invested in Whatever the Pretty Intern Is Saying.

“Oh, what position did you play?”

Robby recognizes the move immediately. Context questions. Mechanism of injury. Establish the biomechanical chain before you ever touch the joint.

One of the things he’s taught you, repeatedly, this week. Athletes are walking anatomy lessons if you ask the right questions.

What position. What movement pattern. What repetitive stress their body has been quietly absorbing for years like a structural beam developing hairline cracks.

The patient reacts before he even answers.

He straightens in the bed, vertebrae stacking one by one, chest lifting like someone just opened the blinds inside him.

That familiar little flare of pride men carry around like dry tinder, catching the moment someone looks at them with genuine curiosity and says, tell me about your glory days.

Robby feels a flicker of annoyance that is irrationally disproportionate to the moment.

You asked the right question.

He should be pleased.

He is not, exactly.

Robby glances back at the chart again because he requires confirmation that the man exists as something other than the caricature he has already built for him in the last thirty seconds. The mind does that. Fast sketches. Quick outlines.

Football guy. Ego intact. Wrist injury. Anecdote about “back in the day” warming up in the bullpen of his consciousness, ready for deployment the moment someone shows interest.

The brain loves shortcuts like that. Loves categories. Categories are tidy. They conserve cognitive energy. But categories also do something else — they flatten people. Compress them into types instead of individuals.

They require less empathy, they don’t remind you that the man sitting on the exam bed has a complicated, inconvenient interior life full of memories and failures and small humiliations Robby will never know about.

A name interrupts that process.

Justin.

“Linebacker,” Justin clarifies. “Back in college, anyway. These days I mostly just pull things at the gym and pretend that’s normal.” His gaze slides back to you aftward and stays there. He’s waiting. Watching your face to see if the joke lands, if the charm does what it’s clearly meant to do. “But if talking about football helps the medical process, I’m all for it. Happy to provide whatever background information you need.”

Robby steps forward before you can respond.

“And were you lifting when the pain started?” He asks.

You flinch at the sound of his voice.

Not because he startled you exactly, more like the sound of his voice briefly knocks you out of whatever thought you were standing in the middle of. The interruption hangs there for a second, visible in the slight pause behind your eyes, like you’re mentally closing one conversation before opening another.

For a brief second it looks like you genuinely forgot he was standing there. He tries not to take offense, especially because once you fully turn toward him, the transition on your face is instant.

Your attention sharpens, posture tipping forward almost unconsciously, the subtle physical reorientation of someone aligning themselves with a point of reference. A compass snapping toward north.

Robby has seen that look from you a few times already this week.

It’s the look people get when they’re waiting for instruction from someone they trust not to steer them wrong.

And Robby is not entirely comfortable being on the receiving end of it.

Because in his experience, trust behaves a lot like good weather. Pleasant while it lasts, but rarely something you can rely on sticking around.

“Oh, that’s good,” you say quickly, nodding as if the answer has unlocked three more thoughts in your head at once. “Because if it happening during the movement that could point more toward —”

You stop yourself. Then glance back at him with the face of someone who has just remembered that the lesson is still technically in progress and they’ve been narrating over the teacher.

You shift immediately, a quick step to the side that clears the space beside the bed and gives him the better line of sight to the patient’s wrist.

“Sorry,” you add with a quick smile. “Go ahead.”

“Finish your thought.”

He doesn’t know why he says it.

Well.

That’s a lie.

He knows why he says it. You were on the right track, the deferral was unnecessary, letting interns collapse mid-reasoning is bad pedagogy and he is, above all things, a good teacher. That’s why. That’s the complete and total reason.

It has nothing to do with the stepping aside, which he did not particularly care for, or the sorry, which he cared for even less.

You blink once, recalibrating, then look back toward Justin.

“Right,” you say. “If the pain started during the movement, that can tell us which structures were under stress.”

Robby’s attention drifts as you speak. Not away from the reasoning, the reasoning is sound, but sideways, landing briefly on Justin’s face and, more specifically, the tan.

Which is… notable.

The color sits a shade too warm against the fluorescent hospital lighting, faintly orange around the edges, with the almost reflective quality of pigment that did not originate from prolonged outdoor exposure.

Which tracks, because Pittsburgh in March is not exactly conducive to UV rays. Pittsburgh in March is a city that spends most of the month looking like a damp dishrag beneath a permanently offended sky. Grey sidewalks. Grey rivers. Grey clouds layered endlessly over more grey clouds like the atmosphere is personally disappointed in everyone living under it.

Natural sunlight is, at best, a rumor. So if Justin has achieved that orange hue this time of year, there are only a handful of possible explanations.

Tanning beds, then.

And he’s not judging.

Except he is, a little, because voluntarily climbing into a glowing plastic tube to cook yourself to like a rotisserie chicken while a machine hums around you… It’s a choice.

It’s a documented, intentional, repeated choice. The dermatology literature on this is not ambiguous.

Justin has presumably encountered this literature and decided, with full information, that the tan is worth it.

“Yeah, actually,” he says, leaning forward a little. “I was doing incline dumbbell presses. Felt this sharp thing right here —” He taps the inside of his wrist with his other hand. “At first I thought it was just a normal gym tweak. You know, the kind where you shake it out, pretend nothing’s wrong, and keep lifting so the guy next to you doesn’t swoop in and steal your bench.”

You guide his wrist through the movement once more, slower this time, studying the angle of the joint.

“Okay,” you murmur, half under your breath. When you press along the inside of the wrist again, Justin winces on contact. “There it is.” You nod faintly, more to confirm the pattern in your own head than to announce anything to the room. “If it started during the press and the pain’s localized here, that’s most consistent with a flexor tendon strain. Probably from stabilizing the dumbbells at the top of the lift.”

Justin reacts to the explanation by instinctively flexing his arm, as though the diagnosis might improve if the muscles involved are given an opportunity to present themselves properly.

Roby watches with the detached awareness of someone who has never, at any stage of fifty-two year life, had arms like that.

Not at eighteen when he was mostly collarbones and academic anxiety, not at twenty-two when his primary physical activity was carrying textbooks and the specific hunched posture of someone spending seventy hours a week trying to memorize the human body rather than doing anything interesting with his own.

And definitely not now, when his body’s ambitions have been scaled down to the realistic pursuit of sleep and food consumed in something resembling a seated position.

His arms are capable arms. They have done serious things. They have done meaningful work. They have stitched skin, held pressure on bleeding wounds, and steadied people during the worst moments of their lives.

They are simply not decorative, in the way that Justin’s are decorative, in the way that Justin is clearly understands they are decorative.

Robby is not entirely sure why this distinction feels worth noticing.

“Flexor tendon strain,” Mr. Orange Muscles repeats, like he’s testing the words out. Then he smiles at you again. “Glad you were the one figuring that out,” he says lightly. “Makes the whole injury thing feel a lot more worth it.”

Oh, come on.

You pause. There’s a beat where your brain is clearly completing a sentence it wasn’t expecting to have to finish, the whole internal apparatus of wait, is he — yes, he is, he’s — okay running just behind your eyes before you surface with, “Oh — well, thank you,” delivered with the endearing awkwardness of someone who has just been handed a social situation they did not order and are now trying to return politely. “But honestly the exam makes it pretty clear.”

Robby clicks his pen. Once. It helps, slightly.

He is not blind. Despite every professional instinct he has to behave as though he is. It would be dishonest, intellectually dishonest, to pretend otherwise.

You are a beautiful woman. A younger one, which introduces a series of additional considerations he has no interest in thinking about.

But the evidence exists whether he chooses to engage with it or not. The way people look at you when you speak, the way conversations bend in your direction, the way people seem to lean toward you without quite realizing they’ve done it.

He is aware, somewhere in the distant administrative wing of his brain, that men will flirt with you. They will try to make you laugh, offer compliments that pretend not to be compliments, test the possibility that a brief interaction might become something more interesting.

None of that surprises him. What he did not anticipate was being forced to watch the process happen live, like an educational video he did not consent to view.

“Sure.” Justin tilts his head. “But I don’t think I would’ve made it through the exam with just anyone. You’re really good at what you do.”

You open your mouth.

“We’ll get you set up with a splint, ice twenty minutes on twenty off, avoid any loaded wrist flexion for the next two to three weeks.” Robby hears himself saying it, hears the clipped efficiency of it, the attending-closing-the-encounter tone he didn’t consciously decide to deploy. “Follow up if the symptoms aren’t improving.”

Justin looks at him. You look at him. There’s a half-second where the room takes stock.

You close your mouth again, the unfinished response dissolving before it ever quite becomes a sentence.

After a moment, you nod and reach for the paperwork instead.

Robby looks back at the chart.

The chart, which he has already looked at far too many times today and which is suddenly very interesting and absolutely deserving of his full attention.

The man wasn’t being inappropriate. This arrives too late to be useful. But he really wasn’t.

You’re really good at what you do is, objectively, a normal sentence. A complimentary sentence. The kind of thing people say to medical professionals when they feel well cared for, which is, technically, a patient satisfaction win, which Gloria has been on his case about for months, so really he should be pleased.

And even if the guy was flirting (which remains another working theory, not yet proven), for all Robby knows this could very well be your type. Clean-cut, easy-going, the kind of uncomplicated confidence that probably feels like sunshine to someone who spends twelve-hour shifts in the emotional trench warfare of the ER.

For all he knows, you were about to say something perfectly warm and open back, because that’s who you are.

You walk into your shift and somehow manage to make people feel like they are the most important person in the room. You laugh at things that technically aren’t jokes because you’ve located the real joke underneath them. You apologize to rolling stools when you bump into them. You remember the names of patients’ dogs.

You are, constitutionally, the kindest person in any given room, and the room is always better for it.

You do not need Justin’s attention to confirm that.

And you certainly do not need Robby stepping in front of you like some kind of Neanderthal.

It’s not his call.

He definitely didn’t make it look like it wasn’t his call. In fact, he made it look extremely like his call, which is a detail he now has to live with.

You set the discharge paperwork on the tray beside Justin.

“The splint’s going to feel weird for the first day or two,” you say, “but you’ll adjust. Just don’t try to tough it out at the gym before it’s healed.”

Justin grins. “Yes ma’am.”

“Take care of yourself,” you add simply.

Then you turn, chart tucked against your chest, and move toward the door.

Robby follows.

The door swings shut behind you with a click, the sound briefly sealing the room and its lingering testosterone behind. For the next few steps the hallway fills with the familiar sounds of the department.

You turn before he’s fully cleared the frame.

Robby braces for it. Not visibly, he’s been doing this long enough that his face stays neutral, but internally there’s a quick, unpleasant tightening of someone expecting a question they don’t particularly want to answer.

Something along the lines of why did you do that back there, which would be a fair question and therefore extremely inconvenient.

Instead you say, “If the strain’s been there for a few weeks without treatment, does the recovery timeline change significantly? Like, is there a window where it stops being conservative management and starts being a surgical conversation?”

Robby clears his throat, momentarily thrown off balance by the sudden realization that you were, apparently, paying attention to the medicine the entire time.

“Depends on the degree of involvement,” he answers. “Partial tears managed conservatively within the first few weeks usually resolve without intervention. You let it go long enough, scar tissue starts complicating the picture.”

You nod, already writing something down in a notebook that, from the angle he’s standing at, looks less like handwriting and more like a small, determined storm of ink. “Okay. And imaging — MRI over ultrasound for soft tissue here, or is ultrasound actually sufficient for initial —”

“Ultrasound’s reasonable first line,” he interrupts, anticipating the question before you finish assembling it. “Dynamic assessment, cost-effective, readily available.” He pauses. “You’re already thinking about the next case.”

“I’m always thinking about the next case,” you reply, still writing, like this is not only obvious but possibly the entire point of being here.

It is. He doesn’t know why he said it.

It’s the equivalent of pointing out that water is wet.

That’s the unspoken rule of emergency medicine: the current patient is the one in front of you, but the next three are already lining up somewhere in the back of your mind.

He waits until you’re a reasonable distance from the room, which he tells himself is purely for other reasons and absolutely has nothing to do with the fact that apologies travel farther than he likes in these hallways, and then says, without preamble, “I want to walk back something from earlier.”

You look up. “The ultrasound recommendation?”

“No.”

“The two to three week timeline? Because I was reading that some studies suggest —”

“Not the timeline.” He exhales once, a small release of air that carries more reluctance than frustration. “When we were in with the patient. I shouldn’t have stepped in back there.” He glances down the corridor briefly before looking back at you. “You were managing it. That was yours to handle.”

You stare at him in a way that makes it immediately clear the explanation he expected to be obvious is… not landing.

Robby watches the mental process unfold anyway. The rewind. The careful reconstruction of the last twenty minutes of clinical interaction, examined with the same thorough attention you apply to a differential diagnosis.

“When you closed out the discharge?”

“Before that.”

Silence.

Then you shake your head slightly. “I’m sorry, I’m not —” A small crease forms between your eyebrows. “Did I do something wrong?”

“No.” The word comes out immediate, slightly sharper than intended. “No, you didn’t do anything wrong.” He reins the tone back in with a slow breath. “I’m saying I overcorrected. You had it handled.”

You look even more confused now.

“Had what handled?”

He looks at you.

You look back at him, pen hovering, expression open and earnest, the look of someone who is clearly attempting to locate the missing variable in a problem that should, theoretically, have a solution.

And in that moment Robby understands something with the slow, weary clarity of a man realizing he has followed a perfectly logical chain of reasoning directly to the wrong conclusion.

You did not experience what happened in that room the way he experienced it.

That the patient's smile and the loaded pause and the words may have registered as straightforward, as kindness, as nothing worth questioning, because you move through the world expecting the best of people and so far the world has not done enough to correct this.

He won’t be the first.

“Nothing,” he says. “Forget it.”

You don’t.

“Okay but,” you say, falling into step beside him anyway, your pace adjusting automatically to match his longer stride, “you’re clearly bothered by something that happened in there, and you apologized for it, which — you don’t really do that, so now I’m just going to be thinking about it all day.”

He looks at you sideways. “You’ll survive.”

“I’ll survive distracted,” you reply, “which is arguably worse for patient outcomes, so really this is a liability issue.”

The corner of his mouth does something he doesn’t authorize. He smooths it away almost immediately. “You’re prying.”

“I learned from the best,” you say simply.

Your eyes drop back to your notes, your attention rearranging itself into the careful, studious focus of someone who has decided that statement was entirely neutral and therefore does not require further analysis.

Robby faces forward.

He decides, with equal determination, that it does not require further analysis.

“He was flirting with you,” he says finally and reluctantly, because he’s sure you won’t let this go. “I stepped in. It wasn’t my place.”

The words sound reasonable enough once they’re spoken, but he’s aware, even as he says them, that the explanation feels thinner than the impulse that caused it.

“Oh,” you say. Then, smaller, “I didn’t — I thought he was just being nice.”

“I know,” Robby says. “That’s why it wasn’t my place.”

You go quiet after that.

Robby doesn’t look at you. That decision arrives quickly and then calcifies into policy. He fixes his gaze somewhere in the safe, noncommittal middle distance. A patch of hallway wall that is peeling and suddenly fascinating. Riveting, even. If anyone asked, he could probably give a full lecture on its paint texture.

“For what it’s worth,” you say eventually, “I wasn’t — I mean, it’s not like I was interested.” He doesn’t say anything. “Not really my type. I think I just… I always end up gravitating toward the ones who are hard to get close to.” You say it like a confession to no one in particular, like you're just noticing it out loud for the first time. “My therapist has thoughts about that.”

Something happens in his chest that he declines to name.

He has been described, by people who have known him for years, in almost exactly those terms. Not flatteringly. Not as a feature. As a recurring complaint, a pattern, a thing that makes him difficult to be around for sustained periods.

You didn't say it about him. He is clear on this. You said it about a type, a pattern, something that lives in your history and has nothing to do with him specifically.

He is, in all probability, not the thing you're describing.

He is also, in all probability, exactly the thing you're describing.

“Your therapist is probably right,” he says, because it’s the honest answer and also the only safe one.

“She usually is,” you agree. Then you add, like you’re still thinking it through while saying it, “Although… I don’t know if she is this time.”

Robby looks at you, expression narrowing just enough to suggest he’s trying to decide whether that sentence contained something he’s supposed to respond to.

“What does that mean?”

You hesitate like you might actually answer. Instead you glance down the hallway.

“Room seven was waiting on labs, right?”

Robby doesn’t miss the deflection.

“Yes,” he confirms.

“Okay.” You nod once and start walking.

Robby watches the door to room seven swing shut behind you and thinks, not for the first time, that the brain likes shortcuts. Categories, patterns, quick explanations that make people easier to hold at arm’s length.

Unfortunately, he has a feeling you are about to make a liar out of all of them.