a/n: a big thank you to whumplove who provided additional help on the medical during Jay's surgery. Any remaining medical inaccuracies are completely my fault, and due to my utter inability to leave well enough alone.
Chapter 2
Don't ask him how it happens, but Goodwin actually takes pity on Will and allows him to watch Jay's surgery from behind the plated glass of the gallery. There are a few people up there when he arrives, med students mostly - all of them bent over their tablets and scribbling notes, or sitting forward in their chairs and watching the proceedings with that clinical yet morbid fascination interns always seem to have. Whispers ripple through their ranks and they all turn to look at him as he makes a beeline for the front of the room, trying his best to ignore them. Goodwin must give some sort of nonverbal command because a moment later they all start packing up their belongings in silence.
If these were normal circumstances, Will might turn around and thank her for the courtesy. Or hell, better yet, maybe he'd even tell the students to stay. Help them learn something useful for a change. Like how a distraught family member breaks down when they think no is looking. Or what happens when that same frantic family member is allowed to stick around and watch the really gruesome bits. Maybe that's what they need to complete their educations, a feel for what the aftermath of torture really looks like.
But these are not normal circumstances, and Will Halstead doesn't need an audience for what's about to happen. So he stays silent and doesn't move until he hears every last one of them leave the room, even Goodwin. Only when he's sure he's alone does he allow himself to put a hand on the glass and really absorb what's going on below.
They've got Jay secured to the operating table with straps, sterile blue drapes covering most of his body-except for his middle, where the surgeons are working over a complicated mess of blood, clamps, and bruised skin. His brother's eyes have been taped shut and while Will knows this is just a precautionary measure, it's still unsettling to see. The whole thing is unsettling to see, but there's nothing much he can do about that at the moment.
He catches Natalie's eye from below. If his friend is surprised to find him in the gallery, she doesn't let it show. She's situated herself against one wall, just beside the two way intercom, and she presses one of the buttons with a gloved finger. Something clicks above his head and then the sounds of the OR flood the gallery space.
"They've been trying to get the bleeding under control. Should be ready to start removing the spleen soon," her mellow voice explains. "He's doing ok so far." She clicks off and there's silence again. It's loud in that way only silence can be. Will swallows down his unease and settles in for the long haul.
While he can't make out everything from this vantage point up in the gallery, he can see enough of Jay's monitors to know that his brother is stable for the moment. Blood pressure and O2 levels are holding steady and the surgeons are working at a calm and collected pace. Everything seems to be going as it should be, yet Will can't seem to shake this sense of dread. Maybe it's the fact that his little brother is unconscious and intubated on the table below, his innards open and exposed for the world to see. There's something inherently wrong about that, and even his training as a doctor can't override instincts that scream at him that everything about this is all wrong. He breathes in through his nose and out through his mouth, all the while reminding himself that these are the best doctors Chicago Med has to offer, and it's high time he put his faith in them. The minutes tick by and he loses himself in his thoughts, almost missing it when someone quietly ambles into the room and comes to stand beside him.
Will flicks his eyes over and sees that it's Connor Rhodes. The cardiothoracic surgeon looks tired, his maroon scrubs wrinkled and speckled with what Will can only imagine is blood.
"Rough day?" Will deadpans and Rhodes chuckles.
"Not as rough as yours, it would seem. I just heard, Halstead." The surgeon leans forward a little to get a better look at what's going on below. "What the hell happened?"
The last thing Will wants to do is rehash the events of the past several hours, so he gives Rhodes the Reader's Digest version of everything. His colleague takes it all in, arms crossed over his chest as he nods in all the appropriate places.
"So they're doing an emergency splenectomy," Rhodes says more to himself than to Will when Will finally finishes his tale. Connor scratches at his chin. "That's a pretty simple procedure, and Philips is the best at it," he goes on, tilting his head towards the doctors below. "Your brother should… Christ, Halstead! What happened to your hand?"
"What?" Will asks, startled by the sudden shift in their conversation.
"Your hand," Rhodes repeats, pointing. "It's bleeding."
Will glances down. Sure enough, blood is soaking into the cuff of the white long sleeved t-shirt he wore this morning after the weatherman informed him that wind chills were supposed to dip temperatures well into the -20s today. It's staining the fabric bright red. He lifts the hand, makes a fist, and it earns him a throb of pain as the skin re-splits and fresh blood oozes out. In the craziness of trying to get up to the surgery waiting room as fast as he could, and then meeting Goodwin in the hall, he'd completely forgotten about his hand.
"Huh." He grunts at it stupidly
"Hold on a sec. I've got some supplies in my office." Rhodes is halfway to the door before Will even has time to register what the man's just said. He calls after the surgeon, but Connor has already disappeared through the door. When he returns a few minutes later he's got a few basic medical supplies with him. There are antiseptic wipes to clean out the cuts, a small suture kit they probably aren't going to need, and gauze to wrap the knuckles up once they're all cleaned out. Rhodes points to the first row of gallery chairs and orders Will to sit.
"I promise it won't hurt," the surgeon jokes when Will hesitates for a moment.
Truth is, right now, in this moment, pain is a good thing. It tethering Will to reality, keeping him focused and grounded, making the fact that his brother is having emergency surgery in the OR right below him while he sits up here and listens to it, somehow easier to bear.
And why in the hell is Connor Rhodes being so nice to him anyway? He glances down at the hand. Cleaning out busted knuckles is grunt work. It's a menial task, and one better suited to someone far less important than Chicago Med's golden boy cardiothoracic surgeon. So maybe Jay's not doing all that hot at the moment. Does that make Will and Rhodes friends? Does it erase years of professional rivalry? ...Maybe it does. Maybe that's what happens in a crisis. Everyone reaches down into the deepest parts of themselves, pushes personal feelings aside and all of a sudden, enemies are friends. Cardiothoracic surgeons work scut.
Connor is eyeing him quizzically and Will realizes he's been standing there for several minutes without moving. He starts forward reluctantly and then collapses into one of the chairs as Connor grabs for his hand. When the antiseptic hits the open cuts, Will hisses.
"I don't think these are going to need any stitches," Rodes observes once the blood is cleared away. The surgeon's hands are warm. Not that that is of any consequence, it's just that his own are so cold the warmth is comforting. Connor finishes up his work quickly and a few trips around Will's hand with the gauze later and it's like the punch to the ER wall never was. Will stares at the white bandages for a moment, surprised at how good it feels to have the evidence of that little blunder downstairs finally hidden away.
"Thanks," he says, wondering where this leaves them.
"No problem," Rhodes replies back, offering no indication.
Connor doesn't stick around much longer after that. His shift is over and it's getting late. The world hasn't stopped for him like it has for Will. So he leaves, but not before promising to check in on Jay later once he's back at the hospital for rounds. Will watches him go with conflicting emotions. While it's nice to be alone again, there was something oddly comforting about having someone else there in the room with him. It made everything seem… less heavy. Made the burden of all this more manageable somehow.
Will scrubs a hand over the ruddy stubble stubbornly sprouting on his chin and lets out a long, weary breath. He flicks his eyes back down to Jay and is surprised to find that everyone below has suddenly stopped what they're doing and are staring at the monitors. Will abandons his seat and immediately searches for Natalie. When he finds her eyes, and the fear held within them, his legs nearly give out beneath him.
No way. No fucking way.
She hits a button and the claxon wail of the alarms fill his ears.
"Cardiac arrest," she says, and his heart is up in his throat in an instant. He puts both hands against the slanted glass, not caring when the gauze of his bandages scrapes against the open cuts of his knuckles. He slams his good palm into the window when Natalie disengages the intercom and she presses it again when she notices.
"You sure?" She asks. There's a slight delay with the sound and it's like he's caught in one of those bad japanese horror movies.
"Leave it on." He mouths. The button he'd have to press for her to hear him is too far away from the glass and there's no way in hell he's moving from this spot. Thankfully, Natalie gets the gist.
Up until this point they've had this unspoken arrangement between them. He sits up in the gallery like a good little ER doc and she leaves the speakers off unless she has some news to give him. Now he doesn't care what happens, he just needs to be able to hear what's going on. Natalie looks unsure about the new rules, but leaves the link activated.
"Asystole," Jay's anesthesiologist announces and the breath is driven from Will's lungs. He can't even pull it back in again as he watches one of the nurses search for a pulse at Jay's femoral artery.
"No pulse." Will's eyes go wide. The room spins as panic seizes his lungs, refusing to allow them to re-inflate, and black spots dance before his eyes. " Somebody get that damn crash cart in here!"
"No, no, no, no!" This cannot be happening.
"Fluids wide open and hang another unit. We need to get his volume back up. Starting compressions!"
"Come on, Jay. Come on, Jay. Come on, Jay..." Will finds himself chanting once he's able to force some air back into his lungs. He's so close to the glass now he fogs it up with each ragged exhalation. Below, Jay's rib cage bows visibly beneath his surgeon's punishing compressions.
"Oh god damn it!" Will bellows to the empty room.
"Epi's in. Hold compressions." Everyone, including Will, looks to the monitors for a rhythm check.
"V-fib," is yelled out even as Will's mind comes to the same conclusion.
"Let's charge to 200."
Will can't watch anymore. This is bad, this is so fucking bad, and it feels like everything he ever learned in med school is being chucked out the window. They teach you to stay detached. They pound it into your brain that you should never, ever get emotionally involved. To stay focused and professional, no matter what you're confronted with, that's the rule. But how can he possibly do that when it's his little brother down there on that table, coding for the second time that day?
Will turns away from the window and yanks at the ends of his hair as the whine of a charging defibrillator fills the room around him.
"Clear!"
Then there's that sound of flesh lifting up then slapping back down against a table. A sound he'll never, ever get used to, no matter how many years he does this.
He runs his hands down the sides of his face.
"Resuming compressions"
Will balls his fist against his lips presses his teeth into his good knuckles, praying or begging the universe, or whoever might be listening, to let his brother live. To make this all some kind of joke, and not the fucking end for his kid brother.
The sounds of CPR continue.
"Alright, hold."
Silence. Will holds his breath again, still unable to look at anything other than the floor. He listens.
"I've got a pulse!" someone announces, and Will lets out something that sounds a lot like a laugh, looks a little like a sob, but feels more like a howl.
It's over.
"Will?" Natalie's concerned voice comes over the intercom and he turns around show her that he's still there. He's shaking like a leaf and the room is spinning, but he's still there.
And so is Jay.
"He was bleeding out," Natalie explains. "But his pressure is back up and they've got him stabilized."
Will nods. Natalie clicks off and he lets her. He collapses down onto the floor and just loses it right there on the threadbear carpet. And it isn't a pretty breakdown either. Because Jay almost died. Because Will came this fucking close to having to put his brother in the ground today. And winter burials are the worst, especially in Chicago. You have to wait until the ground is soft enough for the gravediggers to break through the soil. So people get the joy of dealing with their loved one's death on the day it happens, and then again in a few months time when the ground is thawed enough for the cemetery workers to dig the grave. So yeah, it's the kind of ugly crying that comes from the diaphragm and swells his upper lip. And thank god no one's around to witness it because it's probably the hardest Will Halstead has ever cried in his life.
It takes Will a good long while to get himself back under control, and even then, all he can do is just sit there. In fact, he spends the rest of the surgery on the floor, choking on random aborted sobs with his back to the gallery glass while his nose drips snot into his lap because fuck if he's going to risk getting up and going in search of a tissue. Something could happen while he's gone. So he pulls his knees up close to his chest, just like he did when he cried in the ER, and doesn't look down into the OR again, instead taking comfort in the slow but steady commentary Natalie provides him as things progress.
Mercifully, nothing of consequence happens again and exactly four hours and thirty two minutes after this nightmare began, Will Halstead finds himself slumped in one of those oversized reclining chairs someone has pulled into Jay's ICU room just for him.
They've put his brother in a private corner room and from where Will sits, he has a perfect view of an unconscious and still intubated Jay, every output from every screen monitoring his insides, and the nurse's station situated just outside the room. He divides his time between watching the mechanical rise and fall of his brother's chest and the people who walk back and forth past the doorway. Some people he recognizes. They're familiar faces from hospital charity events and galas. But most are people just like him, regular people, worn and haggard looking from not enough sleep and way too much bad coffee.
Will can always spot the family members of the patients not expected to live. They have this particular way of walking that always gives them away. It's a slight hunch to their shoulders. A particularly inward looking dullness to their eyes, like they're straddling two worlds at once. And maybe they are, because at this moment there are two possible realities stretching out before them. The first is this world in which their loved one pulls through and makes a full recovery. There's laughter and happiness there. And then there's that other reality. That one where they must somehow learn to live in a world that no longer holds someone they once held dear. Will finds himself thankful that he is not at that point with his brother any more, and hopefully never will be again. Jay is stable and expected to recover, even if he is in the ICU and still very much unconscious.
Night has fallen over Chicago, but the pretty view of the city lights twinkling outside Jay's window is hidden behind the drawn blinds. Will thinks about moving to the other side of the room and opening them, but he's not even sure he could pull himself out of the chair at this point. He's too exhausted. The crying and the up and down emotions from Jay's crapshow of a surgery have sapped every once of energy he has left. He nods off every so often, lulled into sleep by the steady woosh of the ventilator and the quiet atmosphere of the ICU, but fear always keeps him hovering just on the edge of actual, restful sleep. He knows he won't be able to keep this up for long, but the thought of closing his eyes and something happening to Jay refuses to give him a moments peace.
"Dr. Halstead," a gentle voice greets him a few hours later and Will stirs in his chair. He recognizes that voice. This is a visit he's been expecting for a while now, but not necessarily one he's been looking forward to.
Will sits forward, the blanket someone must have draped over him sometime during the night slipping down from around his shoulders and pooling in his lap. "Hey Dr. Charles."
The head of psychiatry comes up to stand beside his chair after a quick stop at the hand sanitizer pump just inside the door. "How's he doing tonight?"
Dr. Charles keeps his voice low. They all keep their voices low in here. Even though Jay is down for the count, there something about an ICU that demands reverence.
Will massages at his neck, trying to untangle the knots that have formed in his spine as he stifles a yawn. "He's... ' steadily improving' ," he replies, parroting Jay's attending's latest diagnosis with only a hint of mild sarcasm. Dr. Charles raises an eyebrow but doesn't comment on it.
"That's good. And I hear he'll be off the vent soon."
Will wants to be surprised that the psychiatrist knows so much, but he just doesn't have the energy.
"They've already started weaning him off," he explains. "He's doing ok." Will reaches out and pats the back of Jay's IV'd hand through the bars of his bed. "Aren't you?"
"Dr. Philips was just filling me in on how his surgery went," Dr. Charles putters on. "I heard you were up in the gallery when things… got a little complicated."
Complicated , Will almost snorts at that. Well, that's one word for it, he figures.
"You wanna talk about it?" Dr. Charles studies Will over the rims of his half-moon glasses.
For a fraction of a second, a tiny moment in time, Will thinks that maybe he might, or at least that maybe he should. There's a reason why family members aren't allowed to watch surgeries. Blood, organs, they're all all meant to stay on the inside and it's an affront to nature to open it all up and expose it to the air like that. And not just for the person watching, but for the person being operated on as well. Those things belong to them. They are the building blocks of who they are, and no one has the right to stand there and see all that. Its a sacred, powerful thing, and Will opens his mouth to tell Dr. Charles as much, when the realization that he's exhausted and not thinking straight hits him like a ton of bricks.
"Not really," he admits on a sigh and Dr. Charles surprises him a beat later when he accepts Will's answer on a shrug. Ok, not the reaction he was expecting, but Will appreciates the respect for his boundaries all the same.
"Fair enough," Dr. Charles says with a knowing smile. "Well, if anything changes and you decide you do want to talk, I'll leave my pager number at the nurse's station. I'll be around most of the night so call me if you need anything. And I mean that, Will," he repeats, looking over at him seriously. "Anything at all."
Dr. Charles scuttles from the room and Will watches him go, wondering all the while if the psychiatrist's visit tonight was a true act of altruism, or just the result of gentle prodding from Goodwin. Will likes to think its the latter, but he hasn't seen hide nor hair of the hospital administrator since this afternoon, and this has her name written all over it.
Will settles himself back into his chair and pulls the scratchy hospital blanket back up around his shoulders. Jay slumbers on fitfully in the bed beside him, restless eyes roaming beneath their lids as he floats somewhere between unconsciousness and sleep. Will watches him for a good long while, until something that feels a little like peace settles in around him. Jay isn't going to be awake for several more hours, but the vent is on the way out and his prognosis looks good. Will can stand down now. He's been on high alert ever since this morning when the paramedics brought Jay in, but now the danger has passed. Now here they are: spleen-less for sure, and not a little bit unconscious, but breathing and with nowhere to go but up.
"You really scared the shit out of me today, you know that," he finds himself speaking out loud as he digs the knuckles of his good hand into his sleep encrusted eyes when they start to itch. "When you coded on the table like that..." The words clog in his throat and he looks away, swiping at the stubborn, exhausted tears that burn at the corners of his eyes, again. Damn it, he's got to get hold of himself "Ah shit, Jay," he laughs at himself, "I really thought we were going to lose you there for a minute. Do me a favor and don't you ever do that to me again, okay?"
He realizes just how stupid a demand that is as soon as the words leave his mouth. Jay's job is inherently dangerous. Hell, so is Will's. They each go to work every morning not knowing what's going to happen next. And it's a risk. A risk that neither one of them has any problem taking. Will couldn't ask Jay to give up his job as a cop any more than Jay could ask Will to give up his. They are necessary evils in a world continuously trying to tear itself apart. It's just that, every so often, somebody's got to pay the piper.
Will lets his gaze roam over the payment Jay has made. His eyes are still incredibly bruised, though the swelling has gone down a bit. He'll have scars from the surgery, too. They're hidden under bandages and his hospital gown at the moment, but he'll treat them like he does all of his other battle scars and show them off every chance he gets once they're healed.
The reality of it is, Jay's bruises will fade, and, God willing, so will his memories of what happened here today, but Will is never going to forget. No way in hell. How could he? Forget what it was like to watch Jay gasp for air as his lung collapsed? Block out the memory of what it was like to stand in that gallery and listen to his brother go into cardiac arrest? Nope. No matter how fast Jay bounces back from this, Will Halstead is always going to remember those four hours and thirty two minutes when he wasn't sure whether or not his brother would live or die.
