Four
The locker room, for once, was empty and silent. She had arrived at the hospital at that time of day when interns and residents alike were busy with their patients. No one was taking a break or eating a snack. There was no gossiping in the locker room or the whiny complaints of the lazy weaklings who could not cut the 100-hour work week. She relished this time, this privacy that had been granted to her.
Cristina opened her locker, some of her old clothes spilling out onto the benches. She grabbed her scrubs, which were hanging from one of the hooks. These were clean and had that sterile smell of the hospital. She needed to work today. She needed to cut into someone's abdominal cavity. She needed the feel of a scalpel in her hand.
She needed to forget.
After pulling on the scrub top and stuffing her jeans into her locker, Cristina slid into the pants. She tied the drawstrings, focusing on each and every movement to make them precise. Her curls bounced across her shoulders, cascading down her back. She looked up and reached in her locker, searching for a hair tie. Instead she found a scrub cap.
It was one of Burke's scrub caps, the same one he had worn during one of Denny's surgeries. Her fingers ran over the material. She saw little patters in it weaving themselves across the yellow fabric. When was the last time he had worn this one? It had been a while if she remembered correctly. It barely felt like his now.
Her hands curled around the scrub cap, twisting and wrinkling the fabric. She sat on the bench and examined it. She should do something with it and break the ties she had with him. He clearly had done that when he took everything with him. This object should not matter anymore. Cristina wanted to throw it away, to toss it into the basket of dirty scrubs and let it get loss in the chaos that was the hospital's laundry system. She could not throw it so instead she dropped it on the floor, her eyes following it to the ground.
Cristina sat staring at it, thinking. She remembered her ritual of looking at the scrub cap every morning. Every day she told herself that someday soon she would be a surgeon like Burke. She would cut with skill, make decisions with ease, and become one of the most well-respected cardiothoracic surgeons of the world. She remembered that feeling of admiration and yearning every time she looked at the cap.
Now, however, it had lost that representation. No longer was it a symbol for excellence. True surgeons did not need a piece of fabric to make themselves great. Brilliant surgeons did not need a scrub cap to excel. Excellent surgeons did not need a scrub cap to cut with skill or to secure the best cases. Real surgeons did not need yellow and red scrub caps to bring them luck.
Broken surgeons did not need reminders of how they became broken.