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blueanatis · 29 days ago

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Is jack a cat guy? Pls say yes but also I trust your interpretation of the character. What about Robby? He seems more dog guy but I’m no expert.

Okay, hear me out—I actually think it’s the opposite, and I’m weirdly passionate about this. Totally just my take, but still.

🐶 Jack Abbot is a dog guy. And not just any dog guy—he’s a mutt-with-a-history, limping-loyalty, broken-trust-and-bigger-heart kind of dog guy.

There’s a dog in Jack Abbot’s house, but you wouldn’t know it at first glance. No chew toys. No leash hanging crooked on a hook. No framed photo with a dumb caption. It’s not that kind of house. It’s clean in a way that feels deliberate—not sterile, just… considered. The kind of clean that belongs to a man who rebuilt this space with his own hands. Furniture that’s sturdy and dark-stained. Leather that wears its creases proudly. Walls the color of late-evening light. A record player he doesn’t admit he uses. The open shelving in the kitchen is all neat rows of mismatched mugs and glassware—none of it new, but all of it used. The military shadowbox sits on top of a bookshelf, not hung. His therapist asked him once if that was symbolic. Jack said, “It’s heavy. Didn’t want to drill into brick.”

He wasn’t lying.

And yet, despite all the order and the weight, there’s a dog. You’ll hear the shift of claws on hardwood before you see it. Big thing—tall and wide at the shoulders, mutt energy but German shepherd eyes. Dark-coated, pale around the snout like ash brushed across fur. It moves slowly, doesn’t come unless Jack calls. But when it does, it presses its whole weight against his thigh like it knows where the grief lives.

Jack named him Clyde. Just Clyde. One syllable, like a call sign or a whispered command. It suits him—solid, dependable, low to the ground. Jack doesn’t remember why he picked it. Maybe because it sounded like a guy who wouldn’t ask too many questions.

He found him in the snow behind a shuttered gas station three years ago. Pittsburgh had iced over. Jack was walking home from therapy—the kind of session where he said too much and didn’t feel better. He stopped when he saw the movement: this shaggy, frozen creature dragging its hind leg, too proud to whine. Most people would’ve kept walking. Jack crouched down, looked him in the eye, and said, “Yeah. Same.”

That was it.

Jack didn’t plan for the dog to stay. But when Clyde followed him home—limping, bleeding, silent—Jack didn’t stop him. He just opened the front door, pointed to the kitchen tile, and said, “You bleed there. Not on the rug.”

Clyde obeyed.

They’ve been coexisting ever since. Quiet. Predictable. Wordless in the best way.

Clyde doesn’t need anything Jack can’t give. He doesn’t ask for walks, but he’ll go when Jack grabs the leash. Doesn’t need affection, but will curl up under Jack’s desk while he reads through trauma case reports. He’s always near but never in the way. He’s what Jack wishes people were like—self-contained, loyal, able to read a room.

And Jack—he loves this dog. Not the way people talk about it on social media. Not loudly. Not with sweaters or treats shaped like bones. But in the way he knows which foot Clyde favors when it’s going to rain. In the way he keeps a heating pad under the couch blanket for Clyde’s hip. In the way he murmurs, “You good?” when he gets home at 4:30 a.m., exhausted and still vibrating from whatever chaos The Pitt coughed up that night.

And Clyde? Clyde just looks at him. Doesn’t wag, doesn’t bark. Just nods in that imperceptible way dogs sometimes do. Like: I’m still here. And so are you.

There’s a kind of ritual in the way Jack lives. Clyde fits into that ritual like breath between chest compressions. Morning—if Jack is off—starts with black coffee and Clyde’s pill in peanut butter. They sit on the porch when the sky is still pink at the edges, Jack’s prosthetic resting beside him on a wooden crate. Clyde lays at his side, chest rising slow, ears alert. Jack reads journals—trauma surgery updates, disaster preparedness papers, anything with data. The living room is a minefield of open pages, underlined notes, broken spines. But Clyde never knocks anything over. He moves around the chaos like he’s part of it.

And at night, when Jack can’t sleep—which is often—he paces the apartment in socks, running through the shift over and over in his head. What he missed. Who he lost. What he could’ve done better. Sometimes, Clyde follows him room to room. Other times, he stays on the couch, thumping his tail once. Like: You’re spiraling again. I’ll be here when you stop.

Jack never says thank you. Not out loud. Not in the clean, linear way people expect. Gratitude doesn’t come easily to him—it catches somewhere between the diaphragm and the throat, too heavy to force out and too sacred to cheapen. But sometimes—on the worst nights, the ones that don’t feel like nights at all, just liminal stretches of exhaustion with no edge to fall off—he finds himself on the floor.

He’s still in scrubs. Collar wrinkled, sleeves pushed up unevenly, the fabric stiff with sweat and something darker. His hands carry the day—still sharp with the bite of antiseptic, the faint chalk of powdered gloves clinging to the creases. His wrists are raw from repeated scrubbing, the skin flushed and tight. Under his nails: a rust-colored rim of dried blood he couldn’t bring himself to finish cleaning off.

Sometimes it’s a kid. Sometimes it’s a man with the same eyes as someone he dragged into a medevac twelve years ago. Doesn’t matter. It always hits in the same place—low, silent, marrow-deep. And there’s never anywhere to set it down.

So he kneels. Not dramatically. Slowly. Mechanically. Like his joints are remembering a movement they haven’t made in years. He rests one hand on Clyde’s shoulder, the other braced on his own knee to keep from tipping forward. Clyde doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t lift his head. Just watches him with those slow, tired eyes, like he’s been waiting for this part of the evening.

Jack leans in. Forehead to fur, cheek grazing the dog’s ribcage. The pressure is grounding. Clyde smells like pine bark and sleep. Jack closes his eyes. Breathes in. Doesn’t say anything for a long while.

And then, low. So low it sounds like a confession:

“You make this bearable,” he mutters, the words scraped raw, like they cost something.

There’s a pause, a shift of air.

“You—just you.”

His voice cracks halfway through the sentence, but he finishes it anyway. That’s the kind of man he is—too stubborn to quit halfway, even when he’s breaking.

Clyde doesn’t move. Just breathes. Just stays.

Sometimes people ask, casually, between cases or during the lull of a shift, if he’s ever thought about getting a second dog. Someone saw a shepherd mix at the shelter. Someone else jokes that Clyde looks like he needs a friend.

Jack just shrugs, wipes his hands on a paper towel, and says, “One’s enough. Two’s a pack. Packs break down.”

He never smiles when he says it. And no one ever pushes.

Because it’s not a joke.

There’s no nostalgia in his voice. No warmth. Just flat pragmatism—like someone remembering how it feels when a convoy gets ambushed or a team leader doesn’t come back from the second sweep. Jack doesn’t do redundancies. Doesn’t invite variables. He has Clyde. And that is enough. That is the point.

Once, Dana tossed it at him playfully—on a long night when a kid coded twice and they got him back both times. “You’re softer than you act, Abbot,” she’d said, eyeing the way he folded a blanket under a patient’s neck without thinking.

Jack snorted. “Don’t tell the dog. He’ll lose respect.”

But he was lying.

Because Clyde already knows.

Has known from the first night, when Jack came home too quiet and sat on the floor without taking his coat off. When he muttered something like “You can go if you want” into the stillness and Clyde simply laid his head in Jack’s lap like he hadn’t even heard it.

Clyde knows everything. The limping cadence of Jack’s gait when the socket’s rubbing too hard. The difference between his angry silence and his hollowed-out kind. He knows when to leave the room, when to nudge his snout beneath Jack’s palm, when to lie still beside the prosthetic like he’s standing guard over something more than metal.

Because animals, in lives like this, aren’t just background. They’re not props. They’re not plot points. They are something else entirely. Something older. Elemental. They become the version of you that survives.

Clyde is that version of Jack. The part that’s allowed to exhale. The part that isn’t a trauma doctor or a soldier or a story people whisper about. The part that doesn’t need to earn his place in a room. The part that just is.

And Clyde stays with that part.

No matter how long the night is. No matter what Jack comes home carrying. No matter how many hours he spends sitting on the edge of the bed, elbow on his knee, staring at the dark like it’s daring him to move.

Clyde stays.

And Jack doesn’t thank him.

But every time he comes through the door and sees that dog lift his head—steady, quiet, still there—he thinks, maybe this is what love looks like when you finally stop trying to deserve it.

🐈 Michael Robinavitch is a cat guy. Not because he acts like one—but because he’s spent his whole life being misunderstood. Just like a cat.

He signs the adoption paperwork with the same pen he uses for time-of-death notes. Black ink. Thin barrel. Clicks it twice before putting it back in the chest pocket of his coat, even though he’s not cold. Not yet.

The shelter’s too warm. Fluorescent. Smells like antiseptic and pine-scented ammonia—the kind they used in old trauma bays before they phased out bleach. The girl behind the counter is chewing on a pencil and trying to make conversation, asking if he’s ever had a cat before. Robby just nods once. He’s not interested in a backstory. Or a narrative arc. Or the kind of sentimental bullshit that makes people cry in animal commercials.

He’s not here for company. He’s here for infrastructure.

The cat in question is six years old, dark grey, narrow-bodied, one white paw like a misprint. Her eyes are amber and faintly bored. She’s been in the shelter for eight months. Returned twice. The staff uses the word “selective.” Robby respects that.

He’d asked for “the one who doesn’t need anything.”

They brought her out in a carrier with a note paperclipped to the top: Independent. Doesn’t like loud noises. Not food-motivated. Will scratch if cornered.

He read it and said, “Sounds like an ex of mine.”

The girl didn’t laugh.

Good.

He didn’t tell anyone about her. He doesn’t tell people when he refills his Lexapro. He doesn’t tell them about the chipped mug he keeps on top of his microwave because it was Adamson’s. He doesn’t tell them why he left the memorial lunch Shelby brought in the fridge until someone else threw it away.

That day he went home and couldn’t sit down. Stood in his kitchen. Opened a beer. Didn’t drink it. Just stared at the condensation running down the neck like the bottle was trying to sweat something out.

He’d been doing everything right. Getting up. Going in. Holding it together like a man with no other option. But that day—the anniversary—hit different. He kept thinking about the moment he didn’t see coming. The sound Adamson made when he dropped. The awful nothingness of a man who had once known everything.

He stood there for an hour.

Then he grabbed his keys, still in scrubs, and drove across town to the shelter like it was a procedure he needed to perform.

He doesn’t name her.

Not in the way people mean. There’s a name on the vet paperwork—something the receptionist made him pick, something functional so they’d stop asking. But he doesn’t say it out loud. She doesn’t respond to it anyway.

Around the apartment she’s just “hey” or “alright” or “Jesus Christ” when she knocks over a pile of post-it notes and blinks at him like do better.

Sometimes, when he’s on the phone and she climbs up onto the back of the couch, he calls her “the auditor.”

It fits.

She doesn’t come to the door when he gets home. She doesn’t whine. Doesn’t wait for him. Some days she’s asleep under the radiator. Other days she’s perched on top of the fridge like a gargoyle. She doesn’t move unless she has something to say, and when she does, it’s usually a single unimpressed chirp that sounds vaguely judgmental.

He doesn’t mind.

He talks to her sometimes, in the same way he talks to the broken vending machine on Sublevel 1. Half under his breath. Half like he’s testing whether the silence will give anything back.

“Dropped a line in a central today,” he’ll mutter, tossing his keys into the bowl by the door. “Kid coded anyway. Too much fluid. Too late.”

The cat flicks her tail. Doesn’t even look up.

Robby exhales through his nose. “Don’t look at me like you could’ve done better.”

She lives in the corners of his life, not the center of it.

Her food bowl is stainless steel. No patterns. No mat. He refills it when it’s empty, not before. Keeps the kibble in a plastic bin on top of the fridge. Litter box in the bathroom closet, tucked next to the old mop and a three-pack of backup stethoscopes he never uses. He opens the blinds in the living room most mornings just enough to let in the sun for her to sleep in. Not because he thinks she needs it. But because she’s used to it now.

And that’s the key: not affection, not codependence—just expectation. Quiet consistency.

She’s not a comfort. She’s a constant.

The night he breaks down, she doesn’t move.

He’s on the floor again. Different reason this time—some kid he couldn’t get back, brain bleed, no family, no name in the system. Something about the paperwork triggered a spiral. He ended up in the hallway between his kitchen and the bathroom, slouched against the wall like a man on the edge of admitting something.

She sits across from him, just out of reach. Watching. Like she’s got him under observation. Not for emotional distress—just for data collection.

He doesn’t speak.

She doesn’t blink.

Eventually, he says, “You know he asked me—before they pulled the tube—if I thought it was going to hurt.”

A pause. A long one.

“I said no.”

The cat tilts her head slightly. Not disbelief. Not pity. Just... a record being updated.

He keeps going.

“I think I lied.”

She doesn’t move toward him. Doesn’t press her head into his palm. Doesn’t make it cinematic.

But she stays.

Dana comes over once, weeks later, dropping off a casserole from someone’s aunt or ex-husband or whoever made the mistake of asking if Robby “ever eats.” The cat appears halfway through the conversation, arches her back on top of the bookshelf, and stares directly into Dana’s soul.

Dana stares back. “That thing’s judging me harder than Gloria ever has.”

Robby shrugs. “She’s not wrong.”

“She’s judging your life choices.”

“She hasn’t left yet.”

“Yeah, but does she like you?”

He glances at the cat. “That’d be a first.”

The cat sneezes.

Dana snorts. “Jesus. Alright, fine.”

Robby doesn’t need her to love him. That’s not the deal.

She isn’t a metaphor for healing. She’s not some soft little redemption arc purring in his lap. She’s a presence. A demand. A subtle recalibration of what it means to share space. She takes up air and sound and physical territory and makes him acknowledge it.

She forces him to keep the blinds open. To buy batteries for the smoke detector. To get home on time. Because if he’s late, she dumps the water bowl over and drags the bathmat into the hallway like she’s staging a protest.

She doesn’t need him. She just expects him.

And Robby—haunted, functional, stubborn to the end—finds himself meeting that expectation.

Not because he has to.

Because he chose to.

And because she, unlike most people in his life, chose him back. Quietly. Permanently. Without ever asking for proof.

#the pitt #jack abbot #michael robinavitch #cat and dog people #day and night shifts #they're opposites your honor so the ship comes so easily

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