This one shot is a part of Omelia Angst Week on tumblr; day 1 - Owen dies.
Let's all pray that this never happens on Grey's Anatomy!
Haven't written in a long time, hope you enjoy it and tell me your thoughts!; remember English is not my first language.
Love you, xo.
Amelia had just gotten out of surgery. A peripheral nerve repair. The patient was just fine and would most likely recover entirely from the procedure. No bleeding, no high blood pressure, no cardiac arrest. It all had went so smoothly, except for a few nurses whispering in the back but the neurosurgeon hadn't thought much of it. After all, gossips come and go.
Shepherd had even been making small talk with Callie who had scrubbed in with her, as it was her patient first. He had lost an arm cut by a jigsaw on the job. A carpenter. Billy. Father of three. Nice guy, according to Torres. She suspected the orthopedic surgeon to guilt-trip her into saving this man's life, though it was public knowledge that she was no longer on the « love market »; finally, after months of back and forth, trials and errors, Owen and her had given it a chance. Even through Callie's rambling, Amelia was no fool, she knew she would save the guy and give him back his arm if not even greater than before. Amelia was a great surgeon, brilliant and talented. Everybody knew that. Patients traveled all around the United States for her to treat their incurable tumors. She had the power to do the impossible and she did it amazingly.
As she disposed of the single-use surgical gown, gloves and mask after the surgery, Miranda Bailey, Chief of Surgery, blocked her way out of the O.R. which made the brunette choke a laugh, "What can I do for you, Dr. Bailey?"
Bailey on the other hand was nowhere near smiling, behind her stood Webber and Meredith. There must have been something wrong with them, as if they had seen a ghost. Callie was pale behind Shepherd too, as though there was some sort of secret club they were all a part of but Amelia. She hadn't realized then but it hit her now.
"Who's dead?
- Derek. It's Derek."
"No," Amelia refused, her face puzzled, pushing them out of the way. She shook her head, in denial. Counting down everyone she cared about and loved, and everyone who had died already. She wouldn't let them say it. "No!" She cried harder past Webber and Bailey as she exited the scrubbing room into the hallway that led to all the operating rooms as though she was searching for air. Meredith followed her, "It's Owen." she breathed but Amelia knew the answer already. Now it made sense why he hadn't answered the message she had sent earlier, telling him she would be just in time for dinner and that she loved him. But she thought... She thought... Meredith caught up with her, grabbing her arm to turn her around. "He was shot. Ex-military guy arrived, he was delusional. Owen tried to stop him. But-"
Amelia pushed her away, screaming. "Shut up! You can't do this! He's not-!"
"He's in room B406." Meredith cut her short, and suddenly a glimpse of hope overcame Amelia's body, maybe he wasn't dead after all. Maybe the bullet had barely scratched him and he was just in a room waiting for her, right?
She ran, sprinted, past wheelchairs and gurneys to the room B406; a room in the Intensive Care Unit. Her heart pounded fast in her chest, full of renewed hopes. People stared but they all looked blurry in the corner of her eyes. No one else mattered but Hunt at this moment. She came barging into the ICU yard, but she stopped running as Maggie and Riggs were just leaving the nearest room. Giving her an apologizing look, they tried to stop her but there he was, through the glass doors, on his death bed. He looked flawless to her though covered in tubes and hooked to too many monitors indicating how every single one of his organs was failing and there was nothing she could do. There was nothing the whole 21st century medicine could do.
Her heart had froze then, leaving her body in shock. Her legs somehow made their way to Owen's side on their own accord. Everything was blurry. Everything but his face. His whole face was covered in breathing tubes, and tape, and bandages, but his eyes and a couple of red locks. A sad smile crept on her lips, a hand reluctantly running through his hair, almost afraid to break him, to damage him in more ways than he already was. Though all she wanted was to heal his pain away.
"It's alright, I'm here." Amelia murmured, in the same way she had murmured to her dying child before. A tone too light and too gentle that didn't measure up with the sorrow, the wrath, she was feeling inside. She was used to this. To the pain inflicted in the people she loved most in the world, and the suffering that flooded her body then. The anger that came with the tragic loss, the things that made her alive broken into pieces, ripped little by little from her body day after day. Her father, Ryan, her baby, her own brother and now the man of her life.
"Every man I've ever loved has died... including my baby."
"It's okay." She whispered again, a hand gently caressing his cheek as a single tear ran down hers. "It's gonna be okay, I'm here." She repeated these words as though they would take everything away, as though they were a magic mantra that healed everything. As though it would bring him back. Even though she was a doctor, and she knew exactly that words would not heal wounds so deep.
Behind the glass walls everyone had piled up; Maggie and Riggs gave away the last details on Owen, how he would not survive the next hours, even less the following night, Meredith, Bailey and Webber stared hopelessly, Callie and April were both in tears, Jackson held Kepner. Even Arizona and Karev had joined in. They all had heard, they all had seen, while Amelia was still in surgery. Webber repeated, "You know the protocol."
The damages that had been done to his body, damages so beyond repairs that even someone as stubborn and strong and tenacious as Owen Hunt, MD, FACS, head of trauma surgery and ex-military doctor would not bear. He was strong, so strong. Amelia knew that, she admired him for that. He was her rock, her glue; and she was his. Together they formed the perfect mosaic, broken pieces that together made the perfect match.
Amelia sat down on the nearby chair, staying as close to him as she could be, cradled in the regular beeping of the machines. She would not leave him. Just like Ryan and her baby, she would be there until the very last seconds. Until they take- rip him away from her, until his heart stops breathing and the line flats out, until she no longer has the strength to keep herself from crying, until her soul and body reaches the ground in hopes of never getting up again, until she falls so hard that the pain feels numb compared to the storm swelling inside of her.
She couldn't bring her eyes to look anywhere but at him, sinking in every last details of his face, of his calloused hands, his ginger hair. She was too afraid to forget him. Just like the details and memories of her father, Ryan, baby and brother had started to fade. Forgetting was worse than having to deal with the pain, because it meant that everyday a piece of you faded with them too. And Amelia had very little left to give.
No one had dared to enter the room yet, observing from a distance, they probably had been by his side before she had arrived. She hoped they had, that he was never left alone and unloved. Oh, he was loved.
"Everybody leaves."
"I love you, please. Don't leave me, please." She begged silently without any sorts of hope, she had stopped believing in God a long time ago, but if He could hear her now, she hoped it would be enough just if to take his pain away.
"I love you, I-" As though it was a God-ridden answer, with his sick sense of humor; the monitors rang crazy again. Her head rose to the screens, and the doctors rushed inside the room, Riggs, Pierce, Meredith and everyone else... They said things she couldn't hear properly. She screamed in return, begging them not to take her away from him as they proceeded to CPR. Her head spun too fast, the images appeared too blurry. Nothing but the incessant cry of the ECG, the cardiac line endlessly flat. They wouldn't stop the CPR, but Amelia counted down the minutes until his brain was no longer irrigated and she knew he was gone. There was no bringing him back.
She pushed the doctors away from him, she couldn't even put a name on who it was, before uttering the deepest, most painful of cries as though her insides were being torn apart at the sight of his lifeless body. So many tears swelled at the corner of her eyes that she could barely see when her arms fell on top of Owen's chest, clinging to him until they would take him away as though he was the air she was desperate to drown in.
Everyone else watched, unable to do or say anything that would make the situation any better. Webber stood close, knowing that Amelia would need support in order to overcome this without falling back into drugs and alcohol, he would tell her that he knew her pain, that the road was going to be long and hard and dark before the sky cleared up again, that, sadly she had done this before and survived. She was over a year sober now, all thanks to meetings and mostly Owen's doing. She remembered the day of her 365 days chip, as she took the stage for the second time, explaining about how that past year, unlike the time before where she had lost Ryan and was pregnant with his son, she had had a true person to rely on and hopefully, for many more years to come too. Owen was sitting in the audience, watching her speech with nothing but pride in his big deep-sea blue eyes, and he was the first one to clap. They were about to move out of his trailer, to live together as a real couple in a new found apartment near the hospital. She would have even given him ginger-headed kids to run around after. They would have even gotten married.
They would have had it all. They would have.
