Note: This takes place about two years after the first season.
Later, in the hospital waiting room, she knew she would see the events of the afternoon in nightmares for the rest of her life. Their suspect, Patrick Jones, pulling a gun no one had known he was wearing and firing wildly; Peter collapsing on the sidewalk, clutching his side. Her emergency medicine rotation had been some twenty years ago, but she'd shoved aside the people standing between them and done what she could until the paramedics arrived, trying to slow the bleeding and keep him from going into shock. All the while, she babbled endlessly at him that even though she wasn't technically his boss, she was still ordering him not to die on her because god knew where she'd find as good a partner, or for that matter as good a friend. She'd lost track of everything that came out of her mouth by the time the ambulance got there, but he'd still been conscious when the paramedics clustered around him, pushing her out of the way.
The siren on Bud and Sam's car shrieking, they'd followed the ambulance to the hospital—coincidentally, the one she used to practice at—where she'd demanded information from everyone she could find who remembered her. When that failed rather spectacularly, she tried those who didn't. Finally, she managed to badger a terrified resident into giving her something akin to regular updates while the surgeons fished the bullet out of Peter's side and sewed him back up. Kate called a few minutes later, asking for news and telling her to stay until she knew something definitive—as if she would leave while Peter's life hung in the balance.
Of course, it would help if she could see what was going on.
Eventually, Sam and Bud convinced her to stop haunting the OR doors and sit with them in the waiting room—perhaps the one place in this building she'd never spent much time in while she was practicing. As the detectives flipped blankly through magazines they found laying on the table and discussed in quiet voices how they planned to divide up the work of processing Jones and preparing for his eventual trial, Megan stared at her lap and plotted out paths the bullet could've taken once it entered Peter's body, each of them more destructive than the last as she imagined shattered bones and perforated organs.
At one point, Sam touched her arm and said, gently, "I know he's going to make it. He's strong."
She gave the detective her most withering look. She hated platitudes, especially in situations like this. Not that she'd ever been in a situation quite like this before, but even so.
Bud, at least, took no notice of her frosty glance. "I remember that round he took in the shoulder down at the store on Jefferson. Hell of a wound, but he pulled through."
Peter had talked about the injury, received while he was trying to stop a hold-up, a few times before. He'd transferred to his current position during rehab due both to the resulting reduced range of motion and an interest in medical forensics all that time in a hospital had revealed. But, as she explained, a clean entry and exit wound in the shoulder was a hell of a lot easier to survive than a penetrating shot to the abdomen.
"Do you have any idea what a bullet can do to the colon or large intestine? Even if the blood loss doesn't kill him, the resulting infection has a decent chance. Or god forbid, if it hit a rib and angled toward his lungs, he'd..."
"Look, Doc," Bud interrupted. "I know it's not in your nature, but in this kind of situation, you just have to have faith." Sam nodded her agreement.
Faith? That was what they were relying on? She stood up, ready to say something a better person would regret, but was saved by the young resident she'd coerced into keeping them up to date.
The trauma team had retrieved the bullet and found no organ damage, he said. However, they were having trouble closing a nick in the femoral artery, which meant, as she quickly explained to Sam and Bud, that Peter was still in danger of bleeding out internally.
"But I saw the scars from an earlier gunshot wound," the young man, Dr. Daniel Cole, according to the name tag on his lab coat, said. "In his shoulder?"
"Convenience store robbery a few years ago," she answered automatically.
"He's obviously a fighter, to make it through something like that. I'd have faith in him."
Had everyone taken leave of their rationality? Faith had nothing to do with it. Peter's survival depended on the interplay of all the factors: How bad the bleeding got, how fast the trauma team could work, his relative youth and excellent health, whether his body chemistry responded adequately to the clotting agents, what kind of bacteria had been introduced...
She managed to suppress a frustrated growl, and turned away from the little group, practically stomping toward the bank of windows on the opposite wall.
"Is she...?" the resident asked in a voice that wasn't meant to carry.
"Close enough," she thought she heard Sam murmur. She decided not to bother asking what she was "close enough" to.
It had started to drizzle, and the windows gave an excellent view of the clouds settling over the city. She barely noticed it, her mind's eye again filled with images of hemorrhaging arteries and crashing blood pressure. The thought of never seeing him again, of never hearing him say her name or tell her that test results were in or ask what she was doing to a patient's liver or heart, was so strange and bleak as to be incomprehensible. Suddenly cold, she crossed her arms tightly over her chest.
It wasn't fair, she thought, though of course she knew that fairness had nothing to do with this situation. Nevertheless, it wasn't. She'd never told him how much she appreciated the way he'd...she supposed the word was befriended her, although she knew she was hardly the easiest person to be friends with. She wouldn't have come nearly so far in her quest to change herself into a person who actually gave a damn about both the dead and, occasionally, the living without his help, even if he did lace his advice with enough sarcasm to pierce even her thick skin.
Over the past three years, working with Peter had become the best part of her job. He could follow her trains of thought better than anyone, and she depended on him to help her get around the logistical problems her unorthodox methods invariably caused. And somehow, he always seemed to know exactly how to help her relate to someone she was having trouble communicating with, from her boss to her daughter. She'd jokingly referred to him as her shrink, but sometimes she wondered if the characterization wasn't that far off the mark.
However, for all that he seemed to know everything about her, she'd had a hard time peeling away his layers. For one, she still didn't understand why he felt such a compunction to ensure that she didn't spend her entire waking life in the lab. He was constantly after her to take a lunch break or go home after the usual working hours. And a couple years ago, they'd started making silly bets with each other—whether a tox screen would come back positive for drug use, how much someone's heart would weigh—and while when she won, she usually got him to do a particularly annoying piece of paperwork or some part of lab cleanup she hated, he'd always turned his victories into excuses to drag her somewhere he considered fun: a Phillies game (she'd thought she'd be bored, but in fact Peter was excellent at explaining what was happening on the field, and by the fourth inning, her innate competitiveness had taken over and she was cheering as loudly as any fan in the stadium), kite-flying in the park (they'd lodged theirs in a tree, and she'd surprised him by climbing up and retrieving it), and on a particularly memorable occasion, to his eldest sister's house for Christmas dinner. The prospect of a house packed with some twenty people she'd never met had scared her as much as any board examination, but in fact the noise and bustle and truly incredible amount of food had been just what she needed to take her mind off the fact that it was yet another holiday she wasn't spending with Lacey.
She would never admit it, but she'd come to look forward to losing their bets more than she did winning them.
Though she spent her days investigating the reasons lives were cut short, it didn't seem possible that any chance of losing another bet with Peter, or hearing him mock her latest method of pissing off the police, or telling her to go home already, didn't she know it was late? could vanish in one short afternoon. Not when she'd only known him for three years. Not when he somehow found a way to make her smile every day. Not when she thought she might...
Oh, hell.
She was still standing at the window, shell-shocked by the path her thoughts had taken, when Daniel burst into the room. "Dr. Hunt! Detectives!" he cried. "They stopped the bleeding! He's stable!"
Dropping her arms from her chest, she hurried over to the doctor as Bud and Sam clustered around him. "Can we see him?" Sam asked.
Megan hadn't planned to bother asking permission. "Where is he?" she demanded.
Daniel, conditioned by four years of medical school to answer any question put to him by someone with a "Dr." in front of her name, quickly responded, "Recovery." His eyes grew wide as he realized what he'd done.
Having spent fourteen years of her professional life at this hospital, Megan knew exactly how to get to the recovery room. She pushed past the resident, ignoring his panicked, "But you're not supposed to go back there!" Along with the detectives, he trailed her down the hallways and past the shocked nurses and staff. He was justifiably afraid to try and stop her with physical force, so he was reduced to squawking about how many policies she was breaking and how much trouble this would cause for him from the attending physician. She tuned him out after the first corner she rounded.
She stormed through the swinging doors of the recovery room, startling the two nurses attending to patients in various stages of wakefulness. Quickly spying Peter near the end of the double row of beds, she ran over to him, nearly skidding on the linoleum in her haste.
Force of habit caused her to reach for his chart, and while she picked it up, she looked at him with a surgeon's eye. For a man who'd just come out of emergency trauma surgery, his color wasn't bad. He was breathing steadily on his own, and though the heart monitor's beeping was slow, it recorded a regular beat. An IV pole stood on the left side of his bed, and a glance at his chart revealed that one of the bags contained an antibiotic powerful enough to stop just about any infection that might occur in its tracks. His eyes were still shut, but she saw restless twitches and shivers that indicated he was about to come to.
"Dr. Hunt," an all-too-familiar voice said from over her shoulder, practically in her ear.
Damn, she cursed. She knew this nurse; a few months before her accident, he'd been assisting in a tricky tumor removal and had continually second-guessed her decisions rather than shutting up and following directions. She'd thrown him out of the OR halfway through the surgery and had written a scathing letter to his supervisor. What was his name? Joe, Jack...she turned and glanced at his ID card. "Jason," she greeted him.
He snatched the chart from her hands and glared at her. "What the hell are you doing back here?" Not waiting for an answer, he turned his gaze on Daniel. Megan thought she heard the young man's eyebrows singe from the heat of it. "Did you let her in here?"
Daniel waved his hands helplessly. "I tried—"
"This man is my partner," she said in the tone that had long made children and interns alike quiver. "He was shot while assisting in the arrest of a man who murdered five people over the past six months. I couldn't just wait outside."
"It's true." Bud snorted. "She's never met a rule she actually followed." He and Sam exchanged raised eyebrows.
"Thank you, Detective," she said, thinking she might actually mean it.
"You don't work here anymore, Doctor," Jason said, completely unfazed by either the steel in her voice or Bud's quip. "You have no right to be in this area of the building."
Technically, this was true, but she wasn't about to let that stop her. "Jason, you know damn well that non-staff are sometimes allowed in here, and just because you and I—"
"Megan?" Peter whispered, cutting through their argument.
"I'm here," she said, instantly turning from the nurse to look at her partner. She placed her hand on his forearm and squeezed gently.
"What's going on?" he slurred.
Despite herself, she smiled. "Oh, Peter, you're going to need to be more awake before anyone explains that to you."
"And you are going to need to leave. Now."
She whirled on Jason, clenching her fists. "Next time you're in the OR, you might want to get the surgeon to remove the stick from your—"
"Ah, Megan," Sam interjected, "you might want to let this one go. At least if you don't want him keeping you out of Peter's room purely out of spite." She sent a glare Jason's way. The son of a bitch just smirked at them.
Sam had a point, she acknowledged resentfully. Peter was already drifting back to sleep despite the commotion. The adrenaline she'd been running on since Jones fired the gun had drained away in the few minutes since she'd found out Peter had survived the surgery, and she found herself reluctant to expend the energy required to fight with the nurse. Peter would be transferred to his own room in another half hour. She could probably sit in the waiting room without getting on someone else's bad side for that long. She hoped, anyway.
Besides, it wasn't like she didn't have plenty to occupy her thoughts.
"Fine. But tell me, Jason, is Myra Croft still your supervisor? She and I used to be pretty good friends." Jason blanched, and Megan allowed herself a smirk of her own.
She let Daniel lead them all back to the waiting room, where, after suitably threatening looks from Sam and Bud, he agreed to let her know once Peter had been released from the recovery room and where he'd been moved.
The detectives, now that they knew Peter was going to be all right, had to get back to the station to finish processing Jones. "Can we trust you not to make any more enemies while we're gone?" Bud asked.
She made a dismissive gesture, a tired smile coming to her lips. "My claws are sheathed. For now."
They left, and she called Kate. "Everyone'll be glad to hear it," her boss said when Megan gave her the news. "People have been after me for updates for the past two hours. Ethan practically camped out in my office."
She could just imagine her former Fellow, who had attached himself to her and Peter like a little baby duck when he arrived at the ME's office, frantically pestering Kate for information.
Kate told her she'd get Curtis to cover anything vital pending on any of her patients, then hung up so she could go spread the word. Megan picked a chair far from the few other drawn, anxious inhabitants of the waiting room. Nervously rubbing her hands, she tried to figure out what the hell she was going to do about the epiphany she'd just had.
Several hours later, she had a pretty good idea. The only problem was that a key part of her plan was still asleep.
His chart noted that he'd woken up and answered simple questions in recovery, but he'd had quite a day and was on some excellent narcotics to boot, so it wasn't surprising that he'd gone right back to sleep once he'd been moved to the room she was now sitting in.
Her phone was fully charged, so at least she hadn't been sitting beside him with nothing to do for the past five hours, but her concentration was too shot for the latest issue of Modern Pathology, and there were only so many pictures of cats with poorly-spelled captions she could look at before they stopped being funny. Glancing at Peter once more, taking in the gentle rise and fall of his chest, she narrowed her eyes. If he didn't wake up soon, she was going to have to beg the nurse at the desk for a cot. Thankfully this nurse was one she'd never met before.
She checked her e-mail for the fourth time in the past hour. Lacey had sent her a message, writing, "Thought you might be bored." She'd included a link to a game where the apparent object was to shepherd a rat through a kitchen to a stockpile of cheese, avoiding such obstacles as falling crockery, rolling carts, and irate cooks with brooms and kitchen knives. Within minutes, Megan was directing the rat around the virtual kitchen, cursing under her breath as it came too close to something deadly. She was almost to the goal, practically able to taste her cheesy victory, when she heard Peter say her name.
She left her rat to fend for itself.
Instantly, she focused on his face and saw him looking at her, blinking like an animal who'd just come out of hibernation. "Peter." Relief broke over her like a wave. Of course, she'd known he was going to be okay, but reading it on a chart and seeing him awake and lucid were two entirely different things, a distinction she hadn't always made when she was the one writing charts and giving prognoses.
"How do you feel?" she asked.
He considered that for a moment before replying, "Like I got shot."
Well. At least the ordeal hadn't dampened his penchant for smartass remarks.
He looked down at his body, poking gently at the area where the bullet had entered his side. "How bad was it?"
"Could've been worse. The bullet tore up the muscle at the point of entry, and it nicked your femoral artery, which hemorrhaged about three pints, but they got it to stop in time. You'll make a full recovery; it'll just take about two months."
He grimaced. "Somehow that wasn't the kind of thing I had in mind when I said I needed a vacation."
"Don't worry. I'll bring you paperwork to fill out. You can do that in bed."
He snorted derisively, then winced as the movement jarred his torso. "Remind me to thank you. Maybe by replacing your lunch with stomach content samples."
She grinned. "You know I'd just spike your coffee with saline solution."
Shaking his head, he glanced at the window, and his face registered surprise that it was dark out. "What time is it?"
"A little after nine. You slept for a while."
He looked at her quizzically. "Have you been here the whole time?"
She shrugged. "Didn't want to go home. And I think Kate would've taken away my security pass if I tried to go back to the office."
"Mmm."
She couldn't wait any longer. It wasn't in her nature to stall, and she'd given him plenty of time to shake off any post-op grogginess. "Peter, I...I have to say something."
An emotion she couldn't identify, wouldn't have even noticed if she hadn't been paying such close attention to him, passed over his eyes. Surely the spooky way he understood her couldn't extend to foreknowledge of what she was about to say. "Okay," he said.
Megan drew a deep breath. "When you got shot, all I could think about was how many people we've seen with that same kind of damage who wound up in our morgue instead of back home with their families. When the trauma team was putting you back together, I kept seeing all the ways things could still go wrong. And I thought, 'God, what if he doesn't make it? What am I going to do?'
"I realized I couldn't imagine doing an autopsy and not seeing you across the table, or waiting for a test to run without having you to talk to, or going through a day without hearing you criticize my interpersonal skills or tell me I should go home when I'm still in the lab after five or..." She swallowed against the lump in her throat. "Peter, I thought I didn't need anybody, but I need you."
She always liked to have a theory for how a conversation would go before she started it. But as she finished speaking, she found she had no idea how Peter was going to respond to her confession. The last time she'd been so scared was while waiting for the test results which would confirm whether or not she could ever go back to neurosurgery.
As it turned out, even if she had entertained the wildest flight of fancy, she would never have predicted what he actually said. With the amused grin she'd come to know so well over the past three years, he said, "I was wondering when you'd figure it out."
She felt her jaw drop. "Hang on. I pour my heart out to you, and that's how you respond?" She was tempted to smack him. It probably ought to disturb her how often she felt that way, given that she'd recently realized she was in love with him.
He shrugged the shoulder on his uninjured side, the grin that she had just decided was the most annoying expression ever still on his face. "Well, it has the virtue of being true."
Speechless, she stared at him, her mouth moving helplessly as she tried and failed to come up with a response.
Peter's expression softened. "Megan, if I'd said something like what you just told me in the past...let's say year, what would you have done?"
An indignant reply leapt to the tip of her tongue, but she bit it back. He had her there. "I would've said you were insane and probably avoided you for the next week," she admitted. He chuckled. "Have I mentioned that I hate it when you're right?"
"Only a few hundred times." He reached for her hand, slowly lacing his fingers through hers. "I love you, Megan."
It was strange how happy those words could make her, when six hours ago she hadn't even known she wanted to hear them. "Love you too."
Her hand abruptly went limp in his, and she winced at the familiar sensation. Of all the times...
"What's wrong?" Peter asked, and she saw rather than felt him squeeze her hand.
She sighed. "My hand just went numb." Eventually—she never knew how long it would take—it would prickle back to life, the itching, tingling sensation having gotten no more pleasant in the past seven years.
"It's okay." He rubbed his thumb over her knuckle. "I'll still be here when it comes back."
And so he was.