Disclaimer: I do not own Grey's Anatomy. Or anything affiliated.
Dressed in all blue surgical scrubs, Amelia sprints from the operating room the second her patient is closed and she is scrubbed out, not even bothering to take off her cap or change her clothes. Her focus is completely on the emergent call from Meredith regarding Derek's condition, and the rest of her world goes numb.
"Amelia, where are you going," Owen called down the lobby, "you have a surgery scheduled in twenty minutes!'
"Owen, I need you to bump it or give it to someone else. It's an emergency and I need to leave this hospital now!"
Owen stared at Amelia in disbelief as he watched her slip out of the front doors of Grey-Sloan Memorial hospital. The spat called the attention of nurses and family members roaming, but Amelia paid no attention to the people staring. Running across the sidewalk to her car, she turned on the engine and tore out of the parking lot, speeding toward her destination.
Entering the dinky hospital through the front entrance, Amelia struts to the front desk, a look of sheer determination on her face.
"Where is Derek Shepherd. I need to find the room of Derek Shepherd right now."
A mousy, grey-haired nurse glanced up from the computer her gaze was fixed on, then quickly replaced it on the object she was staring at.
"I'm sorry ma'am, visiting hours are over. You can come back tomorrow at 8 am."
"No, you don't understand. I am Dr. Amelia Shepherd. I need to assess him! I need to save his life!"
"I'm sorry ma'am but you cannot be here this late."
"I'm just going to find a god damned nurse who will bother to look up from her computer to acknowledge me," the older woman looked to Amelia, "You know what, I will do you one up. I will just call Meredith and she will come get me."
Amelia dialed the number of her closest sister and said four words, "Waiting room, get me." And with that she shoved her phone back in her pocket.
Just minutes later, Meredith arrived with a flushed face and looked to find Amelia's impatient stare, words barely forming from her mouth.
"Amelia, I am so glad you're here. You need to help him! I have already talked to the chief and he has given you privileges."
"Meredith, where is he! Where is my brother!"
"He is in room 304. I'm coming with you."
"No you aren't! You have no place coming in with me. You are the reason we are in this position in the first place. You couldn't be happy with him being here. You couldn't make it work, and now look at this situation!"
"Amelia Shepherd, you have no right to talk to me in this way. I am his wife and I have nothing to do with this accident. I am just going to put this off as your stress to your situation. I need you to get your head back on your shoulders and save your brother! He needs Dr. Amelia Shepherd, the amazing neurosurgeon right now. Not his scared sister, Can you do that?"
"Yes. I can do that. I'm sorry for yelling at you."
The two women walk side by side to the elevator, a place where normally things of comfort and love happen to Meredith, but today she feels the chill of the hospital air, smells every conflicting scent. The finish of their ascending motion was marked with a shrill ding, bringing her attention to the task in front of her. Amelia nudges her, and motions toward the hallway before them.
Walking into his room, Amelia is taken aback by the sight in front of her, bandages covering every inch of her big brother's body. He looks frail, the dressing on his head reminding her of exactly why she is here. There is no room for scared baby Amelia to be frightened away from the opportunity of a lifetime, to redefine how to save a life.
A nurse and a red haired doctor that Meredith recognizes from earlier enter. The redhead steps forward and says, "I think we should do that CT now. If we know what we are looking at, maybe we can fix it."
"No, we are not going to CT. I'm going in blind, I will find it. We don't have time. If Derek has any chance of survival, we need to fix him now!"
Amelia rushes to the OR with Derek in tow and she looks to Meredith, who is on the verge of tears but is pushing them back to be as professional as possible.
"Meredith, I know you're his wife and you need him, but I cannot try to fix him with you watching me. I cannot have the one person who this will effect the most watch me as I operate. If I go in with that kind of pressure, I don't know if I will make it back out. I need to go in and be able to convince myself this isn't my big brother, and with you there, I have no hope of that."
Meredith nodded and went to the waiting room, occupying herself with her children.
Scrubbing into this surgery, Amelia hears the sound of an older man's voice. "He has a cerebral laceration, and I suspect frontal lobe based on where his fracture is. If-"
"Listen, Dr. Cohn. Thanks for the information, but I don't need some low life who is supposed to be a healer but thinks that hot dates are more important than lives telling me how to do my job. Unlike you, I know what I'm doing and I am doing it for the right reasons. You need to leave my OR right now!"
Amelia rushes into a nurse waiting to gown and glove her, wasting no time in heading straight to her target. She brings in a deep breathe, relaxing all of her tired muscles and lets it go with all of her worries. Right in this moment it is her and the brain in front of her. No Derek, no car accident, nothing.
"Alright everyone, let's get started," She proclaims loudly enough for the whole area to hear, and then softly to herself, "And I am a superhero."
The red headed doctor looks at Amelia as she begins to uncover Derek's brain layer by layer. As she finds the laceration and the according vessels, she rolls her neck and looks to the red head.
"Listen you have been staring at me this entire time. Why are you not helping?"
"You said something about superheros before you began and I am just trying to figure out where I have heard that before. I was reading a study recently about-"
"Yeah, I read the same one. I stood as a superhero for the full five minutes before operating on Dr. Herman's tumor."
"Oh my God! You're that Dr. Shepherd! You are so amazing, I can't believe-"
"Shut up and give me suction! I need to repair this torn blood vessel and I can't do that if-" Amelia is interrupted by the sound of Derek crashing under her. Tension in the room is thick and all eyes are on Amelia. She takes her hands away from the brain and begins to rub the paddles together. "Charge to 250.. Clear." The shock did nothing, Derek's failing body continues to spiral into the pit of death. "No! You cannot do this to me! Charge to 300. Clear…" She watches the monitor and Derek's heart begins to faintly begin to beat once more. There is a fighter somewhere in there, Derek is fighting for his life. Fighting for the family he just got back.
Moving swiftly back to her perch, she finishes the last suture to the head lac Derek received.
"Okay red, remove the clamp."
The young doctor removed the clamp and everyone in the room held their breath as Amelia began to remove cells from the healthy portion of the brain, and place them into the dying area near the frontal lobe. This task is tedious and should have been done in separate surgeries, but the surgeon operating has a tendency to face problems head on, and not know when she is in over her head.
"Now, in the perfect world, these cells would have had time to culture into highly specialized cells, but I believe that if I do this procedure multiple times and can revive the brain, this man will live, walk, talk, and proceed with life with few deficits. Before I close up I would like to see if we can get a pupillary response, since the whole point of this rushed surgery was to get some base level brain activity."
Amelia takes the light out of her pocket and shines it in quick flicks over each eye, the pupil expanding and contracting slowly, but efficiently. A sigh of relief escapes her lips and she returns to her post and begins to close the newly pink brain tissue before her.
As she is putting the final sutures into the skin on Derek's head, she feels water starting to brim at her eyes and her chest start to convulse with sobs waiting to escape. She suppresses them, and helps guide her brother's bed back to the ICU, memorizing all of his features. The small cut on his lower lip, the wrinkles around his mouth and eyes from his ever present smile. His hands were big and strong, just like the ones she barely remembers her father having. This is her big brother, her idol, her savior. All those years ago he protected her from the shooters that claimed the life of her father, covering her mouth and holding her down, saving her from dying or being injured that day. She was his most prized possession growing up, always carrying around pictures of her and taking her with him everywhere he could. To think she could have ruined it all with stealing his prescription pad. She will never forgive herself for that mess she got herself into.
Amelia leaves the safe confines of Derek's room to go to Meredith, to tell her how to proceed with his care back at Grey-Sloan.
"Well Mer, I can say that he is alive, and breathing. I have slight pupillary responses which is always a good sign of brain activity. But the brain activity is so low that I would like to say that he is still in a comatose state. He cannot breathe on his own yet, but I believe with time he will improve to a PVS. I am going to have him transported to Grey-Sloan in the morning so we can watch him better and I can get him closer to my lab. There is hope Mer, and I will try my hardest to save him. We can do this."
With that, Amelia gives Meredith a soft smile and continues to walk down the hallway and into a supply closet where she collapses to the floor and releases the gates holding in floods of tears. Sobs wrack her body, her arms enclosing her body, seeking the warmth and protection she has always felt even at her lowest when Derek revived her and held her until help came. But in this moment she feel cold, her surgery proved to be successful, but the grief of her dying brother is still a fresh cut in her skin.
Author's note: Thank you so much for the reviews and follows! I did not think I would get such a response so quickly. I posted this as fast as I could, I hope that I will be able to keep on a steady schedule, but life is busy and unpredictable. I will do my best for you guys! I am going to try to include Meredith's POV and Amelia's. I know these chapters are short, but I feel as the storyline progresses they will get longer! Please review this chapter and let me know what you think!
