"Meredith, get out of the rig," Derek said in his calmest voice possible. The only person who could hear him over Arizona's frantic shouts was Mark, who repeated what he had said even louder.
"Grey, Karev, get out of there, now!" He shouted. "A car's gonna come around that corner and crash, and that ambulance is gonna blow. Get out of there and leave the kid if you have to!" He yelled.
Alex's phone began beeping and vibrating and he looked down at it, sighing loudly.
"It's the chief. I don't have a good signal in here, I'm gonna go outside. You got the kid?" He asked Meredith. She nodded and stood up, taking a place next to the incubator and stroking the cold glass with her hand. Alex squeezed past her and answered the phone, jumping out of the ambulance and off to the side of the road.
"Meredith..." Derek started, relieved that Arizona had finally finished talking. His wife sighed and shook her head.
"Derek, I'm not leaving this baby! We lost our baby, and this mother doesn't deserve to lose hers!" She shouted at the phone, which was laying in her seat across the small room.
"Is that what this is about? Meredith, we will find a way to have a baby." Derek said. Meredith wasn't even listening. Her attention had been captivated by the pair of headlights coming around the corner and shining in her eyes.
"MEREDITH! GET DOWN!" Alex shouted from outside, seeing the car approaching and pulling the phone away from his ear. The female surgeon was frozen, only capable of staring straight at the car, a literal deer in the headlights.
"Meredith? Meredith, what's happening?" Derek said from the other line, having heard Alex shouting faintly. His eyes went wide and he looked at Mark in shock as they heard thundering sounds of crashing and the line cut off. The three surgeons were silent as they looked at each other, all knowing what they thought might have happened but to terrified to admit it.
"Derek... why don't you let Avery take over?" Mark said slowly, motioning for Jackson to come down from the gallery. The neurosurgeon wasted no time in putting his instruments down and stepping away from the patient, taking the gloves off of his severely shaking hands and leaving the OR in a hurry.
He rushed to the only place he could think of to go. His mind led him there without needing to navigate and his legs thanked him for the relief as soon as he was seating on the stairwell. He ripped the mask off of his face and threw his lucky ferryboat scrub cap to the ground, tears in his eyes.
"God Damn it!" He screamed, slamming his fist on the floor. He felt stupid for blaming a scrub cap for everything that had happened to him that day, but he needed someone to blame other than himself. You're supposed to be lucky. What the hell happened?! He yelled in his mind, grabbing the cap and scrunching it up in his hands.
He held the fabric up to his face and inhaled the scent, remembering that his wife had washed it in a load of her own laundry. Tears jumped to his eyes as he smelled her, feeling her presence as if she were sitting right next to him. His blue eyes had turned navy and bloodshot the way they always did when he was on the verge of tears and he felt his throat seizing up.
A soft hand rested on his back and he didn't need to look to see who it was, leaning into their embrace and allowing himself to cry into his sister-in-law's shoulder. Lexie Grey felt tears in her own eyes as she comforted her sister's husband, rubbing his back soothingly and feeling her scrubs soak with tears.
"I...I can't lose them both in one day. Not my girls. I don't- I can't... I can't imagine my life without her!" Derek sobbed. He felt stupid for being that weak, he was supposed to be the strong one, not the one who cries into other people's shoulders. But in that moment, he just couldn't be strong. He needed to be the one who cried nonstop for a little while. He needed to not have to worry about what everyone else thought of him for just a few hours. He didn't want to be strong anymore. Meredith was his strength.
"Karev? Karev, what happened?! Are you there?!" Owen yelled into the phone. He had heard the resident scream at Meredith to get down and then loud crashing and the line had gone silent. He redialed the number and, after there was no answer, slid his phone into his pocket and set off for Derek's OR.
Meanwhile, Alex Karev was standing, frozen, staring at the wreckage before him. All he could do was look, mouth wide open, at the back of the ambulance, which barely existed as most of it had been smashed in my the car that hadn't bothered to slow down and must have been going at least 80 miles per hour.
He could do nothing as the ambulance crashed forward and he heard horrible sounds of shattering glass and items breaking as he desperately prayed that his friend had taken cover in time. He finally found the capacity to think and broke out into a run towards the ambulance, his phone dropping clean out of his hand and crashing to the ground with a crack.
He remembered what Mark had said all too late as he charged towards the ambulance, hearing a quiet hiss getting louder the closer he got and freezing when he realized what it was. He sucked in a gasp just as a spark went off and the entire ambulance exploded in a shockwave of debris and flames, sending Alex flying backwards onto the ground. He hit the back of his head on the hard ground and his vision blurred, making the horrible scene look even more like something out of a science fiction movie.
He covered his face and clenched his eyes shut, holding his breath and hoping not to get hit with a large piece of debris. As the smoke settled, he caught a glimpse of a female body laying, broken and bloody, on the ground a few feet away from where the ambulance had previously been. His heart sunk into his chest and he called out to her, the effort of yelling so loud sending waves of searing pain through his skull.
"MEREDITH!"