Disclaimer: do not own.
Post a year-old fic based off a promo when the episode ultimately played out nothing like this? WHY THE HELL NOT.
Twenty-One Miles
You and the team find the body just after midnight, so soon it's still warm and still smells like him, smells like dust and Axe and cereal. No one screams and no one cries, although your stomach feels like it's gone ten rounds with a pizza cheese steak and a pitcher of beer, so maybe, you think, you'll head for the men's room before it becomes a crisis situation. Standing at the sink, staring in the mirror, you feel like you've got somewhere to be, but the water dripping slowly from the leaking faucet proves far too mesmerizing. A tiny voice in the back of your head makes you laugh as it advises you to call your mother.
And maybe if you hadn't been such a pompous ass, and maybe if you hadn't been so self-righteous about past events, and maybe if you hadn't told him what he needed to hear the least, he would still be napping in the diagnostics room with his feet leaving mud on somebody's else's chair; maybe he wouldn't be draped over gurney on the way downstairs, his limbs going rigid. Maybe if you hadn't dismissed the very concept, deemed invalid the same phenomenon with which you've had such personal experience as well, maybe he wouldn't have been afraid to come to you, and maybe things wouldn't have come to this. The kid- the kid who could have, age-wise, if you were very naughty, technically been your kid- had never asked for much, never asked for more than the occasional glance in his direction.
Your stomach pounds again as you think of men who come home to empty houses, but you realize you're not going to be sick, because that would be far too easy. So you make your way back to the diagnostics room, where a team of police has gathered and is shooing away janitors whose simple, noble duty is to return the hospital to working order. As though concealment equates to redemption. Through the windows the police have neglected to close, you can see the stains on the carpet where the body had voided.
You don't decide to cry so much as you decide to sit and watch, but one of the policemen is on his hands and knees for some reason and it reminds you of crawling twenty-one miles and how you vaguely wondered at the back of your mind what he was possibly searching so thoroughly for. And you never asked because he was never really your friend and it wasn't really the sort of question a grown man asks a colleague, although now it's eating away at your brain as though the answer to it holds the answer to God and the meaning of life and the meaning of suicide.
So your eyes start to burn when the police usher the janitors in and your head falls forward, and you- you- a surgeon and a diagnostician and a man in your forties- are crying in the hallway for anyone to see, keeping your hands at your sides and letting the tears fall unchecked. Your extremities feel hot and your chest feels tight and cold, and every pair of shoes that passes by you should by all rights stop and ask you what's wrong, but you never took the time so you don't deserve it anyway.
But finally a set of black women's boots clip-clops to a stop and spin to sit beside you, and you're bawling into Hadley's shoulder without even thinking about what a pretty shoulder it is. Her hands, weak and trembling, fit themselves neatly into the refuge of your shoulder blades, although she doesn't rub or shush you or tell you that it's going to be all right because, naturally, it's not. HerAnd as you flex your fingers, you realize: you and Kutner had been friends, all along. You just weren't a very good one.