The news station is calling them 'the shots heard 'round the world', or the medical community at the very least.
Burke hears about it the first time on an idle Tuesday afternoon. The census is down, his patients are being discharged and the surgery scheduled tomorrow morning is elective. The decision is easy and he's in Seattle by two am on Wednesday morning.
Really, he could have been in Seattle on Tuesday evening if it weren't for the shoddy flight schedules and the already overbooked flights. Burke settles for a flight to northern California, takes a rental car and drives the rest of the way at a rate much higher than the suggested speed limit.
He makes it to Seattle almost eight hours earlier than an airplane could have gotten him there and it's still not soon enough for him.
The parking lot is empty and so are the hallways. He hears somebody talking about how there are only ten patients in the surgical wing, five of them in active labor, three too unstable to move and three waiting for beds at another facility. The medical wing has four patients waiting for their beds, the medical ICU is emptied out as of an hour ago.
The walk to the surgical ICU is eerie at best, blood splattered against windows and floors, in drag patterns down the corridors. The sound of a door closing becomes a gunshot and the creak of an old chair turns into her scream.
The pace of his footsteps picks up and he tries to clear his mind. He still doesn't know specifics, he doesn't know why the gunman picked Seattle Grace, how she got shot, how critical she is. The only thing he knew is that the news anchor gave Cristina's name amongst the wounded, said she was still at Seattle Grace Mercy West Hospital in very critical condition.
Very critical could be stable with his experience; the news often tends to exaggerate things. She could be one of the people that are waiting for a bed to transfer. Cristina could be just fine. While he wants to hope that she's one of the ones waiting for a bed he knows that she isn't. Burke knows Cristina is one of the ones far too unstable to tolerate transfer to another facility.
When he sees her for the first time, he understands that unstable is an understatement. There are at least four IV pumps, each able to run six medications at the same time and they're all working overtime. She's got a tube down her throat, a tube in her chest draining too much blood for his taste and electrodes on her chest leading to the picture on the monitor of a strong heart trying to support a weak body.
There's a man at her side that Burke pays no attention to as he advances into her room. He takes her hand and murmurs her name, does his best to ignore the names of the drips and medications infusing into the line in her subclavian vein, into the additional lines in her arm because they didn't have enough access. He hopes that her lack of response is secondary to sedation and not the injury, hopes that she can come back from this.
In his experience as a surgeon, he's tried to remain positive on behalf of his patients. Standing before her now, he can't find it in him to do it. Burke knows what death looks like and he knows that she's there.
It's only a matter of time.
Owen has never seen the man standing across the bed from him but he knows exactly who he is. The way he's looking at Cristina makes him uncomfortable but now is not the time or the place to bring it up. There's a dull ache in his shoulder where a bullet tore through his flesh, his head hurts and his heart is aching because he knows he's going to lose her.
His eyes follow the path of the other man's and it's obvious that he's trying to assess the extent of her injuries. Owen clears his throat but his voice still cracks anyway, "Neck. Close range. She…there was a scalpel in her hand…when she went down. It's how she bought the chest tube."
Burke's fist clenches and he sets his jaw. She was operating when the bastard shot her, she was trying to save a life when somebody tried to take hers.
"They've got her heavily sedated," Owen continues. "They tried to lighten it up but her heart rate goes through the roof and her blood pressure bottoms out. She's fighting the vent but she doesn't move much. We're not sure if it's paralysis. The scans are fuzzy and she's in so much pain when she wakes up that we can't get her to follow-"
"Have Shepherd look at them," Burke interrupts, squeezing her hand. It's cold and puffy and he prays that they'll return to the slender dexterity that he knows. Cristina wouldn't want to live if she couldn't operate, he knows that.
Anybody would know that.
"Shepherd is dead," Owen's tone is blunt and unaffected. His body language doesn't change when he sees Burke visibly flinch, doesn't change his tone or feel any sort of sympathy. If Cristina had just let him go, she'd be okay. "The gunman was trying to kill Derek. Cristina was trying to save his life, she wouldn't stop operating when he told her to. So he shot her."
"And what of Grey?" Burke asks, trying to squelch the emotions threatening to rise against his steely exterior and take over, "is she-"
"At Presbyterian with Karev. He was shot as well but his recovery looks promising," Owen finishes the question, "she seems to be taking it okay."
Burke knows better than that because she's with Karev and not with Cristina. Meredith is most definitely not taking it okay because she's not here with her 'person' but he's not going to try to decipher the meaning of any of it right now. Cristina is his only priority.
Owen watches Burke squeeze her hand, the way he brushes her hair from her face and he speaks again, "Cristina wouldn't want you here," he says in a low voice, "I know that you're concerned and I can call with updates if it's that important to you but I don't think you being here is a good idea or good for her."
Dark brown eyes glimmer with anger when they meet icy blue ones but Burke doesn't respond in the manner that he'd prefer. Not with Cristina in this condition, not when she could die at any given moment, "I'm not going anywhere until she can tell me to."
"You're not wanted here," Owen repeats in a low voice, "and if your presence is a detriment to her recovery, I will have you removed."
Helen Rubenstein stands in the doorway of her daughter's room, looking at the two men wearing an expression that both recognize from Cristina. She looks between the unfamiliar red headed man and the man she was going to marry and seeks out comfort from the latter.
"He stays," she says in an eerily calm voice, "I don't know who you are but I know that my daughter would want him here."
If he could muster the energy to flash a smug grin, Burke would. Instead he pulls up a seat for Helen and then takes his place standing at her side. Neither one of them care enough to stop Owen from leaving and never make mention of him when the initiate a conversation.
Anything not pertaining to Cristina is just details.
She codes four times in one day.
Everybody else is ready to let go but Burke is not. He makes some suggestions to change the vasoactive medications that they're infusing. He reassesses the placement of her chest tube and puts second one in to drain the fluid from her lungs. It kills him to do so and Burke does it as gently as he can even though there's not really a gentle way to insert a chest tube.
Burke has to hope that it will heal Cristina rather than harm her.
The words on the pages of his medical journal blur together. Burke has been researching close range gunshot wounds to the neck, the survival rate, the capacity for complete recovery in those patients. It's not unheard of for some of them to survive with early intervention and treatment.
He's heard that Grey was so distraught over Shepherd that she couldn't pull it together for Cristina, that Hunt was down by gunshot and that some kid by the name of Avery was in a physical struggle with the shooter. It's unknown how long it was before somebody had the sense to check on her and realize that she was still very much alive.
There's no time frame, no explanations, only stammering and apologies and absence. Grey still hasn't made an appearance and Burke doesn't expect that she will. If she's anything like Cristina, avoidance will be her drug of choice until circumstance makes her come around.
As much as he hates it, he can understand it.
Hunt steps into the room and leans over to kiss her forehead. It's more of a show than anything genuine. Burke sees the way that he looks at her and there's something suspect in his gaze, like it's forced or tainted in some way. Altman is standing behind him and he's becoming familiar with her less than common treatment modalities, as if she's missing formal training somehow and knows just enough to get by, just enough to get lucky.
He's also starting to realize that there's a story between Hunt and Altman, one he doesn't like because of the implications it carries for Cristina.
The look they share causes anger to bubble through him and he squelches it for her. He draws Altman's attention away from Hunt and to the fact that Cristina hasn't required as many pressors, that her blood pressure is starting to stabilize. He suggests some more fluids, less of one drug and more of another and she agrees but she's distracted.
Cristina deserves better than distracted.
Two weeks after the Tuesday afternoon that brought him back to Seattle, the hallways are more alive. The employees are slowly forgetting about the events and moving forward, or at the very least they're trying. The names of the lost are still uttered on their lips and tears are still shed for them.
Two weeks after the Tuesday afternoon that brought him back to Cristina, they lose another one of their own.
Alex Karev dies from complications secondary to the injuries he receives in the Seattle Grace Mercy West shooting. His remaining two colleagues are too far gone, one emotionally and one physically, to notice his passing.
Burke thinks that Cristina's supposed boyfriend should be more jealous. Not just of him being in the room when she's exposed for whatever medical reasons but because of the fact that he spends almost every waking moment there. There's no telling him to turn away, no telling him to give them some time alone. There's nothing. It's becoming more apparent with each passing moment that Hunt doesn't really love her.
Not like he loved her.
If he did, he'd be here more often. He wouldn't be working or finding another priority above her. Cristina deserves so much better and he has every intention of telling her so when she gets better.
She will get better.
Gently, he wipes the corner of her eyes with a wet cloth, the underside of her chin. They're talking about putting a trach in, about feeding tubes and long term acute care centers and it all makes him sick. They're barely giving her a chance to get better, they're talking about letting her go or giving her a life sentence in a technologically enhanced nursing home.
Nobody is fighting for her, they're all ready to let go.
He glances over his shoulder and fidgets with the IV pump until he figures out how to turn down her sedatives. If they can just get her awake, if they can get her to stay calm and breathe they can work on getting her off the vent. They can find out the extent of her injuries.
Nobody is fighting for her, so dammit, he will.
Burke slides the door to her room shut, pulls the curtain so nobody can see and ups the limits on the monitors so they don't alarm. He's with her and he knows that he can just put her back under if she can't tolerate it. He sits on the edge of her bed and strokes her hand softly, murmurs her name nervously.
The first response he gets is a grimace. He moves his hand up to caress her cheek softly, tells her that it will be okay. She writhes a little bit, the grimace more exaggerated with each passing moment until she starts to cough. Her hand flies up to the tube in her mouth and Burke stops her but a laugh erupts from his lips at the same time.
"That's good," he says, smiling widely. It's something when they have nothing. Her arm moves under his hand and he never thought that the feeling of Cristina fighting him would be so gratifying. "You're okay," he says, still unable to contain his smile. "Cristina, you're okay. There was an accident but you're getting better."
The sound of his voice makes her hand stop moving and her eyebrows lift but her eyes don't open. "It's me," he says, squeezing her hand gently. "I'm here, Cristina."
For a moment there's a lull, her heart rate is good and her oxygen sats are good and she's not too anxious but then she starts to cough again, causing the vent to alarm. He scrambles to the other side of the bed frantically to silence the alarm and her hand goes for the tube again. Burke dives forward to grab her hand and it's just enough time for him to be caught in the act by Tyler. Cristina finally manages to open her eyes while he's trying to explain himself and Tyler pushes past him to assess her.
Burke folds his arms behind his back, watches and waits patiently while he tries to get Cristina to follow some simple commands, asks her if she can nod or squeeze and a host of other things but she's not having any of it. Taking notice of Cristina's focus on her visitor, Tyler asks him to walk across the room and she watches as Cristina's eyes follow Burke from one side of the room to the other.
"We'll leave the sedation alone for now," Tyler tells him in a low voice, "we'll have to restrain her but I'll let the pulmonologist know what's going on."
Burke starts to walk back to Cristina's side but Tyler grabs his arm, "For the record, if you touch my meds again, I'll kick you out of my ICU."
"Don't discount her and I'll keep my hands to myself," he agrees.
"I'll do what I can," Tyler answers, glancing back at her. He can't work miracles but he can see the desperation in Burke's eyes. It may take a little bit of nursing judgment and a lot of bending the physician's wills but he can at least try.
As annoying as Yang can be, she's still a colleague or she was.
Maybe she can be again.
Day in and day out, she watches him.
Burke paces in her room and holds her hand and says things to her and she doesn't understand why. Cristina doesn't understand why he's there. Everything is a haze but she keeps thinking that he's going to mess everything up and then she remembers that there isn't anything. Or there wasn't. She doesn't know up from down right now.
Her arms are fixed at her sides, her fingers are there but they feel like they're not, her eyelids feel like lead curtains and she can't breathe. That's the worst part, being awake and feeling like she's drowning, feeling as if she's choking. He promises her that it will be okay but it feels anything like okay.
Nothing feels okay.
It's rare that she sees Owen, each day is a new realization that he's probably working. Her mother wanders in from time to time and she looks lost, Burke tries to comfort her and she wanders back out. Nurses come in, roll her around in bed, change her gown and her blankets, say little to nothing to her at all and then he straightens her out after they're gone.
She thinks that Meredith must have died because she hasn't seen her.
Cristina thinks she's lucky if she did.
Each day is a repeat of the same thoughts, the day before forgotten in a Versed and Fentanyl haze. Each day she forgets Owen saying her name gently, seeing Teddy behind him and looking anywhere but at her to mask the guilt on her face and her slightly tousled hair. Every day she forgets which man is there because he cares about her and which one is only there out of obligation.
"You have to give her a couple more days," Burke argues, his fists clenched in his pockets, "she's gotten stronger. Her trials have gotten better."
"If she's getting stronger, she can lose the trach. It doesn't change anything," Owen urges Helen, "it's what's best for her right now."
Burke glares at the man across from him. He doesn't care about what's best for Cristina, he cares about what's best for his self conscious when he's busy sleeping with Altman in the on-call room down the hall. Cristina gets a trach, Cristina gets a feeding tube and she gets shipped to a different facility where he doesn't have to face her every day. He can get caught up in work or distracted; he can carry on both lives at his own leisure.
"Three more days won't change anything," Burke says with finality and walks away from the two of them. He doesn't care to hear the decision and he doesn't care to listen to the other man lying to Cristina's mother.
He walks back into her room and her eyes are open and he leans over to kiss her forehead in greeting, "Good morning," he murmurs softly. Burke wants to tell her that he tried for her but he doesn't want to scare her. His jaw sets in a faint smile and he forces the emotion from his eyes and he goes about his day with her.
Cristina doesn't need to know what her future is hinging on.
Burke had considered pulling the knot on her restraints and letting Cristina take care of the job herself but he scared himself out of it. There have been stories about damaged vocal cords and losing the ability to speak and she's already come back from so much that losing her career to something so trivial wasn't worth it to him.
When they wheel her back in from surgery, the tube is out of her throat but it's only replaced by another one. He looks down to the piece of plastic sutured into her throat and then looks away, bile rising in the back of his throat.
It isn't supposed to be like this.
Once his stomach settles, he looks back at her and tries to focus on her face instead. He brushes her hair away, wipes her eyes down and wets her lips. She's still under the effects of the anesthetic and blissfully unaware of everything. She's not going to be happy once she figures it all out and for the first time, he wishes that she wouldn't have to.
For the first time, he thinks that maybe they should have let her go.
The new place is a lot nice than Burke had expected, the room is bigger. There's a chair that turns into a cot and he's highly considering never leaving her side. The idea of her being in a place like this, even if they still consider themselves a hospital, makes him angry and sick all at the same time. He'll stay by her side every moment of the day and help her if it means that she can leave sooner.
If it means she can get back to a normal life.
Burke would give anything for her to get it all back, would give anything to give it all back to her. It doesn't matter to him if he's a part of her life after it's all said and done.
He just wants her to be okay.
Cristina is starting to remember the day before and the day before that. There aren't as many medications and there's less opportunity to sleep. They're dragging her out of a bed and sitting her on the edge of it. They're making her exercise and breathe on her own and it's hard.
There's something wrong with her hands, with her arms and her legs but she can't tell any of them. They move and work the way that they're supposed to except she can't feel them. Her fingertips are totally numb, her fingers feel like pins and needles. She remembers enough to know that there hasn't been a day that it hasn't felt like that.
She's coherent enough to understand the implications of peripheral neuropathy and what it means for her career.
It makes everything the staff is making her do that much harder, it makes her want to give up.
Burke is there, he's been there and she doesn't understand why. She also doesn't understand why Owen isn't. Most of it is fuzzy but she thought that things were okay, there was a calm before it all happened. Maybe it was simply something about a gun pressed to her flesh that made him say those things.
Her mind often focuses on the idea that Burke must have done something to run him out.
The desire to interrogate him about it is overwhelming but she can't talk and it's incredibly frustrating. She's sworn to herself that once she can that she'll never keep anything to herself again. She thinks it's horribly ironic that when she wants to get it all out, when she wants to be obvious and ask questions to figure out what the hell is going on she's physically unable to do so.
If a person could will themselves to die, she thinks that she would probably do it.
All of her friends are gone anyway.
"Cristina, you can do this," he urges her softly, holding her hands to keep them to flying up from the valve over her trach, "just calm down. Take a deep breath and let it out normally. You can do this."
The only thing Cristina wants to do is smack him in the face but he's holding her hands and staying all calm and he has absolutely no idea what she's going through. He's not the one who feels like he's trapped underwater, being held down and then being forced to breathe in that state. The speech therapist seems to accept her less than calm but calmer attempt at breathing normally for the first time in weeks and asks her to say the word hello.
Cristina looks away from the therapist, straight to Burke with narrowed eyes and delivers a verbal slap to the face since she can't physically reach out and do it, "Owen."
Burke watches from down the hall as Owen walks along Cristina's side. She's getting stronger but something isn't right and he can see it. Something about the way she walks, the way she handles things is off. She's saying that everything is fine and the only one not buying it is him.
His muscles tense when he sees her lurch to a sudden stop, he starts to walk after her but she seems steady. She's just stopped.
Owen says something, looks down at the ground and Cristina shoulders slump. They start to shake and he decides that he isn't staying back any longer. There's a helpless look on the other man's face, a guilty apologize stumbling from his lips and he's breaking her more when she's already broken.
"Get the hell out," Burke says coldly and puts an arm around Cristina. He knows something is really wrong when she doesn't try to shrug him off or push him away like she has been.
There isn't a fight when he leaves and he doesn't bother to say goodbye. It takes almost too long to get her back to her room and she's shaking and crying but there isn't much of a sound at all. Burke runs his fingers through her hair, holds her close and doesn't bother with saying it's okay because one of the few times that she's cooperated with them and used the speaking valve she's told him to shut up, that it's not fine and she doesn't want him there.
He figures listening to two out of three isn't bad.
When she finally starts to calm, he lifts her chin to look at her and wipes the remaining tears from the corner of her eyes. He asks her what's wrong and she mouths something and he tries desperately to understand but he can't. Burke asks her to say it again slowly and she looks away but he makes her look back to him again, "What's wrong?" he repeats.
Her eyes well again and she tries to look away again but can't. Cristina finally mouths the words again and this time Burke gets them.
"I lived."
Meredith stands at the doorway of Cristina's room. She hasn't seen the half of it, the vent and the drips and the trach and the blood and the meds. She hasn't even seen a quarter of it. What she sees now is Cristina with a fine pink line in her neck where her airway used to be. She's puttering around her room and looking out the window and something is off but it's like nothing ever happened at the same time.
"Mer?"
Her voice isn't as strong as it used to be.
"Hey," Meredith says. Her voice isn't as strong either but it has nothing to do with physical limitations. "You look good. Burke says that you're going home."
"Yeah, I guess," her tone is less than enthusiastic.
"That's good."
Cristina shrugs and sits on the end of the bed. She flexes her ankle a little bit, moves it clockwise and counter-clockwise trying to get some of the feeling to come back but it doesn't happen.
It never does.
"I heard about Owen," it's a pathetic attempt at conversation but Meredith doesn't know what else to say. She doesn't know how to apologize for not being around for Cristina. She doesn't know what she's supposed to do to make any of it better.
"Everybody has heard about Owen," Cristina mutters, runs her hand over the blanket on her bed and smooths it out. "it doesn't matter."
"Teddy is leaving Seattle Grace. At least you won't have to work with her," Meredith offers. "Though you could accidentally stab her with a scalpel or something if it makes you feel better."
A pathetic laugh erupts from Cristina's lips. She'd kill to work with Teddy. She'd kill to work period. Her hand comes up and she rubs the rough scar at the back of her neck. It pisses her off that her last patient, her first solo cardio procedure and the patient died.
Not only is she unable to work anymore but her record sucks.
The laugh confuses Meredith but she's almost afraid to reach out and comfort her. She almost feels like she doesn't have the right to anymore, like she lost that when she couldn't come around to see her best friend dying after she'd lost anybody else, "Is everything okay?"
The question is loaded and she's tired of hearing it. "Yeah," Cristina says, clenching her fists, "it's all great. My boyfriend was screwing his unrequited love while I was trying to die, Burke was here trying to keep me from dying, I thought you were dead, Alex and Shepherd are dead and I can't feel my fucking hands. Life is great. I'm glad I pulled through."
"Wait, you can't feel your hands? What do you mean you can't feel your hands?" Meredith finally walks into the room at this, sits on the bed and takes one of Cristina's hands in hers. "You can't feel that?"
"Don't tell anybody," she mumbles, looking down at the floor.
Meredith sees Burke standing behind them out of the corner of her eyes but nods in response to Cristina's question. She hasn't been there for Cristina, the last thing she wants to do is rat her out to Burke for keeping it quiet. Meredith waits until Burke is out of the room before she squeezes Cristina's hand in hers and mumbles a soft apology, not that it means much.
Words can't give Cristina her life back.
Cristina watches Burke as he makes dinner, thinks momentarily of the last time that Owen tried to make dinner for her and the way the frying pan ended up slamming into the sink. She flinches slightly at the memory and looks away. She traces her fingertips along the couch, drawing patterns in its cushions. The pins and needles feeling has dissolved into her fingertips and sometimes she gets this ache in her palms and wrists for no reason at all.
Burke sees her examining her hands and he can't keep quiet that he knows it anymore, can't let her destroy herself without putting up a fight, "There's a lot that can be said for muscle memory, Cristina."
She jerks her head over her shoulder to look at him, maybe too fast because a sharp pain travels down her spine and she curses inwardly, "What are you talking about?"
"Your hands."
"Meredith told you," she sighs, looking away from him again. First she isn't there and now she's spouting off everything that Cristina didn't want her to.
Fabulous.
"She didn't," he explains, pulling the pasta sauce from the stove, "I overheard."
"Pretend that you didn't."
"Cristina," every syllable of her name is emphasized, "you don't have to give up just like that. You have come so far."
"Muscle memory will not work," she finally snaps at him, "you don't think that I've thought about it? The different things that can be done? I can go through the movements as much as I want but then what? I'm standing in surgery and my patient's ventricle is profoundly pliable but the only reason I know is because I tore through it with my needle driver. Movements are nothing if I can't tell what my field feels like."
Burke falls silent, angry with himself that he hadn't thought of something so obvious. Ever the optimist, he refuses to give up on her, "What about a neurology consult? We can get some scans. Maybe there's a compressive hematoma, some sort of resolvable iss-"
"I don't want to see anymore doctors. I don't want to spend another three months in a hospital. It's not going to fix anything," she argues, "just drop it. It's over. I lived. It's what you wanted. Whatever."
"Did you want it?" he asks, turning off the heat on the stove and walking over to her.
"Want what?" Cristina knows exactly what he's talking about but actually answering the question makes her a head case and she's not willingly going to go there.
"To live."
"Yeah, whatever."
He knows better but he's trying to let her deal with things on her own. Burke reaches up and runs his fingers through her curls, kisses her forehead gently. There's nothing he can say or do to make it better, no worthwhile replacements he can offer for her losses.
The only thing he has to give is himself and Burke knows it will never be enough.