When Cristina is in the hospital, she finds Richard in his room, sitting up and fighting off nurses who are urging to take his temperature. Watching, Cristina smiles, but before she can say anything, an irritated voice echoes in her ear from behind.
"Honestly, Richard," Catherine Avery says, walking past Cristina with a glass of water in her hand. She sets it down on the table next to him. "Won't you just let these poor nurses take your temperature? You've been awake for less than an hour. Do what's good for you."
Catherine smoothes his scalp with her hand and kisses his forehead. Cristina can't help but frown in annoyance. She was hoping to be able to talk to Richard alone. And truthfully, Cristina just really didn't want to spend her last few hours in Seattle with happy couples surrounding her.
"I've got it from here," Cristina says, taking the thermometer from one of the nurse's hand. They scram when they hear her voice, snickering in gossipy whispers. "How are you feeling, Dr. Webber?"
Richard looks up and gives Cristina a tired but warm smile. "Feeling better," he says to her.
Catherine eyes Cristina suspiciously. "Lots of complications in the surgery, Dr. Yang."
"He had a very unstable heart," Cristina tells her, giving Catherine a hard look. While Cristina feels guilty for a lot of things that happened in her two days in Seattle, she does not have any remorse for anything regarding Dr. Webber's surgery. She knows she'd made a solid decision doing the robotic surgery, as well as how she handled other intricacies in the OR. "Complications did occur, but they were resolved. Dr. Shepherd followed up with MRIs on Richard's brain, and everything looks clean." She turns to Dr. Webber and ignores Catherine's disbelieving stare. "Dr. Webber, you're a fighter, you know that? We're going to keep you in here for at least a week, making sure that your heart stabilizes, and that there are no further complications. I will be catching a flight back to Zurich tonight, so Dr. Pierce will handle all of your post-ops, so give her a page if you need anything. And then hopefully after a week, we can send you home to recover there. I know you're itching to get back into an OR."
Richard nods, as Catherine squeezes his hand. After checking Richard's temperature—only a little fever—and making sure he was settled and comfortable, Cristina leaves the room and checks her phone, immediately flinching at the amount of missed calls she has. There is one from Owen, which she plans on ignoring, seven from Shane Ross, and fifteen from Meredith.
Sighing, she pulls the phone to her ear, but immediately holds it back when she hears Meredith's screech at the other end. "I thought you died," she seethes. "Don't you ever check your damn phone?"
"Sorry," Cristina says unapologetically. "I went out to the bar. I got a little drunk."
"What?"
"Did you know that Owen and Amelia are separated?"
"What?"
"I guess not."
"Cristina, what did you do?"
She opens her mouth to explain, although she isn't quite sure where to start, but suddenly someone sneaks behind her to snake her arm and drag her across her hallway.
"Meredith told me to give you a head C.T.," Derek says, as if this is an explanation, pulling a very disgruntled Cristina across the ER wing towards radiology.
"Oh, for the love of God," Cristina huffs, but obliges to be hauled, quite forcefully much to her dismay. "McDreamy, I told your wife yesterday. I don't need one. I'll go back to Zurich, where I have a ton of professionally trained doctors to be at my beck and call."
"Who are you talking to?" Meredith says at her ear, and Cristina remembers that she is still on the line. "Is that Derek? Tell him to get you that C.T. right now."
"Goodbye, Mer."
"Cristina, listen to me, don't you dare hang up the phone—"
Cristina hangs up, glaring at Derek with drained eyes. Not lightly, he shoves Cristina into an imaging room for CAT scans. Before Cristina can make a quick escape, though, she notes that she and Derek aren't the only ones in the room. Instead, Amelia sits in front of the machine, slightly startled when she sees Cristina and Derek enter the room in a less than peaceful manner.
"Unfortunately, Cristina," Derek starts, avoiding her gaze, "I need to do a craniotomy on my patient, a very old lady with very adorable grandchildren, so I can't be here—"
"Of course you can't," Cristina says under her breath, but really, she wants to scream at Derek, Are you fucking kidding me?
"—but Amelia is your second best option."
"Oh please," Amelia says, rolling her eyes. To Cristina, she says, "Even after four years, he still can't get used to me running his neuro department."
"Let's just do this," Cristina says, grinding her teeth. When Derek leaves the room—not quite dodging Cristina's you-watch-out death glare—she takes off her watch, stud earrings and shoes, and climbs onto the CT examination table. The surface is cold and hard against her back, and for a moment, all Cristina wants to do is close her eyes and access the world of oblivion that is sleep.
Amelia's voice chimes into the room, echoic, a wavelength of static. "All right, Dr. Yang. Try not to move."
Cristina holds her breath, as the scan swoops around her body, over her head. It's easy to tell your patients that they'll be fine, to stay still as a loud machine starts waving over you. It'll be over in a second. And Cristina is a brave person—she's endured more than an average person, suffered and lost far more than she would ever recommend. But there is a sort of vulnerability when she is lying on this table, motionless, that is utterly unnerving to her.
As if she is sensing this, Amelia asks, "Cristina? Are you all right? Your scans are a little shaky. We're going to have to do it one more time."
Cristina swallows, exhaling. "Run it again, Dr. Shepherd."
"Okay." With a push of a button, Cristina hears the machine whirling over her body again. "You know," she hears Amelia say through the microphone. "I hate these things too. I'm a freaking neurosurgeon, you know? And I can't stand the thing that gives me all the answers and makes me look like a genius. How stupid is that?"
Cristina tries not to groan, wondering why Amelia would ask her questions when she is unable to move, to respond, to tell her to shut up.
"Owen talks about you a lot," Amelia says, just matter-of-factly, as if this is just normal information you spill out on a daily. Cristina hasn't had many conversations with Amelia, but the one thing she knows for sure is that the woman tends to blab under nervous situations. Which is something else that's foreign to her—when Cristina is nervous, she runs, without a word to anyone. "I mean, I think he tries not to, because it used to bother me. It still bothers me a little, but not anymore really."
Amelia pushes a few more buttons, and the beeping of the machine picks up speed as it continues spinning around Cristina's head.
"And it wasn't anything big that he said about you that sticks to mind," Amelia continues, as Cristina silently wishes she would stop talking. "Just stuff about your surgical skill, and all your Harper Avery nominations, and every time we'd come across anything remotely to fire, he'd bring up the fact that you guys lived in that firehouse on Main. Oh, and he explained the concept of 'my person' to me, but I actually already knew what that meant. And during a few fights, he did call me Cristina…
"Where the hell was I going with this? Oh right," Amelia exclaims, hardly bothered as she switches the machine off. Cristina lets out the breath she's been holding and sits up, her eyes meeting Amelia's through the glass. "My point is that Owen and I are separated. And you probably already know this—God knows gossip travels around here like flies. We fought a lot, and I started drinking again, and even when I got sober for the third time in my life, and even when we had the most beautiful son, who is just my heart and soul in my world, we still kept fighting."
"Amelia," Cristina says, but she realizes Amelia can't hear her in the next room without a microphone.
"I'm not telling you this because I want to find reasons for you to go back to my husband," Amelia explains. "Because I don't want that. I mean, I fell in love with him. I fell in love with him hard—and I still love him. I love the baby we made together. I love that he can make me laugh, that he knows exactly how I'm feeling just by looking at me. I love every part of him, even the parts that I hate, like when he forgets to put the cap on the milk before throwing it in the fridge. Or when he blames himself for things that shouldn't even matter in the first place."
Cristina smiles knowingly.
"And he loves me, too. I know he does, because he is a good man. But you know, he fell in love with you too, maybe even harder than I fell for him. He never stopped loving you, Cristina. I saw it all the time, and I ignored it all the time." Amelia shrugs, as if this is helpless, as if it is something she can't control. "But I can't ignore it anymore. I won't."
Slowly, Cristina stands up and pads over to the exit of the screening room to face Amelia. "You are his wife," she says to Amelia, her voice almost unfamiliar to her, the words she is saying—the words she knows are right to say, but she can't believe they're right because they feel confusing and overwhelming and just wrong—incomprehensible. "He can love me all he want, but you're the one who is married to him. You're the one he chose. You're the one who gave him everything he wanted."
"Not everything," Amelia says quietly. She presses a few buttons, sending the final scans to print. "I don't know what you and Owen had, and I may never understand it, but I know that it's not something you can just shake off, even if it's been four years." Amelia takes a deep breath. "Owen and I are done, Cristina. We have been for a while now. I know you're leaving, and that you don't live here anymore, and I'm not really sure why I'm telling you this, but I just thought you should know," she finishes, and while Cristina sees the sadness in her eyes, she also sees a bit of relief. A cast of rain showers. A renewal. She knows the feeling all too well.
"Amelia," Cristina says softly, not sure what to say.
"I sent your scans to the front," Amelia tells her, and it surprises Cristina when she reaches out to touch her shoulder, a gesture of reassurance that she expected to come from Meredith or Callie, but certainly not from her ex-husband's future ex-wife—or something. "You can pick it up in twenty minutes. I'm due in the OR." Carefully, Amelia pushes herself out of the rolling chair and heads past Cristina for the door.
"Amelia?" Cristina says. Amelia turns around, looking at Cristina with a brow raised. "Thank you."
Amelia nods, before leaving Cristina standing there, barefoot, in a pool of combating thoughts.
"What?" growls Cristina at her phone, as she makes her way towards the front desk to grab her scans, which she intends to rip into a million pieces before her flight in two hours.
"I call you like a ten times," Shane says, his frustration evident.
"You aren't the only one, Sharkie," she tells him. "What do you want? Did you kill any of my patients yet?"
"Your patients are fine. The reason I'm calling is—"
Cristina stops listening when Meredith, fuming so hard that Cristina can picture steam coming out of her ears, comes behind her to grab her arm.
"Okay, you and Derek need to seriously stop acting like I'm a body bag you need to dispose before the police catch you," Cristina says tiredly.
"Funny you mention body bags since you're going to become a dead person in the next fifteen minutes if you don't tell me what the hell is up with you," Meredith snaps, swinging her arm around so that Cristina is facing her. It's obvious that Meredith had just come from a long meeting, dressed in business clothes, and a recognizably irritable voice.
"Dr. Yang," Shane says urgently from the phone.
"Not now, Shane."
"I just got an update from Callie," Meredith says, hardly phased of Cristina's phone conversation. "First, you refuse to get a CT last night like I told you to. Then, you go and get wasted, and then pass out at your ex-husband's place, all without telling me?"
"It wasn't like that," Cristina yells. "Okay, maybe the not telling you part. And the drunk part. But I didn't pass out at Owen's like a drunk sorority girl. We talked a lot, and—"
"Dr. Yang!" At this point, Shane is screaming through the receiver, and Cristina instinctively pulls the phone closer to her ear. "Dr. Wendy Crawford from UCLA called. They got approval from the FDA for you to kickstart your heart printing research at their university hospital. They want to buy, like, a hundred printers from us. We can start expanding phase one of the trial to the U.S.—"
"What?" Cristina whispers, her eyes widening.
Meredith grits her teeth. "Cristina—"
But Cristina holds up a hand to Meredith listens in close to Shane. "You didn't catch your flight back to Zurich yet, did you? I set up a meeting tonight with Dr. Crawford, and if Dr. Webber is doing fine, you can fly in to meet with her. If we're lucky, we'll be able to bankroll this research there…it could mean milestones for this project."
"Milestones," Cristina repeats.
"What's going on?" Meredith asks. Cristina fills her in briefly, and in an instant, Meredith drops all her anger about the previous topics she was ranting about and smiles wide-eyed at her best friend. Cristina is already lost in the vision—expansion of this research, to be able to implement this trial in places other than where she was, is a circling goal. The thrill of it all makes her forget everythingabout this day, as she realizes again how much surgery can heal a heart, in more ways than one.
"Shane," Cristina says. "Tell Dr. Crawford I'll take the next flight from Seattle. I'll be there soon."
A/N: For the record, I really love Amelia. Her character and storyline are mesmerizing; Caterina is an amazing actress. I wanted to reflect a realistic situation between Cristina and Amelia, if Cristina had returned to Seattle four years later. I don't think there would be a cat fight or anything ill-mannered, since it's unlike either of them. I do believe that Owen is capable of loving Amelia, of falling in love with her and creating this big life that he's dreamed of, but I also believe that Cristina and Owen's love story is a deep love that you can't shake off or get rid of. These characters are drawn to each other, even if the situation is inconvenient, and that's what I wanted to get at with this chapter.
ANYWAY, spiel over. None of these characters belong to me - only the brilliant Shonda Rhimes. Thanks for the reviews!