A/N: Sorry that it took me so long to update! I've been working on other projects and studying for exams, but now that I'm officially on summer break, I'm going to try and update much quickly. I'm aiming for a chapter a week for both this one and Help, I'm Alive, but I can't promise that I'll be able to stay exactly on task. Sometimes it may be less than a week, sometimes more. But I will try and update as quickly as I possibly can!
Big thank you to everyone who reviewed this. Your reviews are really great and I love hearing what you think about each chapter! Keep them coming!
It was freezing.
Owen registered this fact dimly as he woke up. He couldn't feel his toes, and his facial muscles ached from cold when they moved. It was worse than all of those nights he'd spent in Iraq, and the desert could get pretty cold at night. The strange thing was, as cold as his extremities were, his torso was warm. Uncomfortably warm, actually.
Frowning, Owen propped himself up on his elbow to get a better view of the bed. As he shifted, something moved beside him, mumbling incomprehensibly. The thing moving turned out to be Cristina, and as Owen brushed his lips against her burning forehead, he suddenly realized where all the heat was coming from. She had a fever. A bad fever.
Owen suddenly wished that he had a thermometer. The good old-fashioned kiss-on-the-forehead test just wasn't going to cut it anymore. He needed to be able to measure her temperature exactly so that he could see specifically how bad the fever was. If it was really bad, he was going to have to take her to the hospital.
There had to be a thermometer here somewhere. What was it Cristina had said? Something about a first aid kit with a thermometer in it. He tried his hardest to remember their conversation, only to realize that she hadn't been able to remember where the first aid kit was either.
Owen sighed and rubbed his face. He was going to have to rip up the whole bloody trailer looking for it.
First things first, though, he needed to find more blankets. And clothes. Neither of them had enough layers on. Cristina may not feel the cold because she was burning up with fever, but she still needed to be kept warm. She wasn't going to recover if she was freezing all the time, and Owen couldn't look after her if he was dying of hypothermia himself.
He had another sweatshirt in the truck. He kept it in the back seat for those days when he forgot to put his coat on in the morning, or didn't layer up enough. The thought of having to go outside to get it made him cringe, but he was going to need it. He was pretty sure Derek had sleeping bags here somewhere; the man was a huge outdoor enthusiast after all, and it made much more sense to keep his camping and fishing stuff here rather than at Meredith's. Problem was Owen had no idea where Derek kept any of this stuff.
Owen dragged a desperate hand through his hair and glanced at his watch. It was quarter to eleven. Was it too late to call Derek? Was Derek even awake? He'd feel bad if he woke Derek up, but at the same time, he really needed to find the first aid kit and some more sleeping bags. He'd tear up the trailer if he had to, but calling Derek seemed like a much more logical solution that would save him so much more time.
Thankfully, Derek answered his phone on the second ring. "Hello?" He sounded absolutely exhausted, and Owen felt a stab of guilt.
"Shepherd? It's Hunt."
"Owen! How are things going at the trailer?" Despite the weariness in his tone, there was a hint of playful teasing.
"Fine," Owen said quickly. "Look, I'm sorry if I woke you."
"Oh, don't worry about it. I don't really sleep well at the hospital anyways." Owen could understand this. The on-call rooms at Seattle Grace didn't exactly encourage a good night's sleep. Perhaps it was because everything smelled sterile, like disinfectant, or because just thinking about all the people who had probably had sex on that bed made sleep become the last of your priorities, or perhaps because they were so lonely. "Besides, I can understand if you needed an escape from Cristina." Had Owen been able to see Derek, he would have sworn the other man winked.
"Actually, it's not about that." Owen wondered how exactly to address the issue of Cristina. "I was wondering if you had a first aid kit somewhere. And maybe some extra blankets? It's starting to get really cold up here."
There was a pause on the other end of the line, as Derek processed what Owen had said. "A first aid kit? Yeah, it's under the sink. Doesn't Cristina know where it is?"
"Well..." Owen considered telling Derek the truth. Then he remembered how pissed Cristina had been and decided against it. "She couldn't remember where it was."
"Oh, okay. What happened?"
"I cut myself." This was technically true, and something that Owen had forgotten about up until now. Now that it had stopped bleeding, he could see that it wasn't actually very deep. He could put a band-aid on it to cover it and keep it from re-opening, but it wasn't going to need any kind of medical attention.
"Well, there should be gauze and band-aids in there. I can't promise there'll be any sutures, though," Derek said, laughter rumbling thought the phone with a rush of static.
"That's fine." Owen suppressed a smile at the assumption that all surgeons had miniature suture kits in their first-aid kits. "It's not that bad."
"As for blankets, there are some sleeping bags under the bench at the table. If you move the cushions, you'll see there are some cupboards underneath. The sleeping bags should be in there. There's also some fresh bed linens in there too, I think."
Owen nodded, glancing at the seat. He could see that the cushions were removable. "Handy."
"I know, right?" He could picture Derek's grin. "I also have a space heater. It used to be under the sink too, but Meredith may have moved it when we were packing my stuff. It might be in the luggage compartment under the trailer."
Owen sighed, praying that it wasn't there. The last thing he wanted was to be digging around in the snow looking for the damned luggage compartment. "All right. Thanks, Derek."
"No problem. Call me if you need anything else. God knows I'm not going anywhere."
He chuckled as he hung up, remembering how adamant Cristina had been to get in to work this morning. Had she been able to go, he wasn't so sure that she would be enjoying it anymore. Getting stuck at Seattle Grace with Derek Shepherd probably wasn't what she had in mind when she was insisting on going in this morning. He had a feeling that Derek was glad Cristina had gotten stuck out here as well. Spending the whole day with Cristina was not part of Derek's ideal day either.
A garbled mumble coming from the direction of the bedroom pulled Owen from his thoughts. Cristina. Dammit. In those few moments since hanging up the phone, he had completely forgotten that she wasn't just sleeping in the bed. Guilt stabbed at him like a knife to the gut. He shouldn't have forgotten about her. He was here to look after her, not cast her aside, even for a moment, because more interesting things had invaded his mind. He couldn't afford to forget about her because he was terrified that she might slip away if he did.
Afraid she might be waking up and not wanting her to wake up alone, Owen headed back over to the bed. As he watched, Cristina tossed and turned a couple of times—tangling herself hopelessly in the sheets in the process—and mumbled incomprehensibly before stilling. Her face was flushed and she was drenched in sweat, which caused her hair to cling to her face and neck in damp strands. It appeared that in the short few minutes that Owen had been on the phone, she had gotten worse. The knowledge of this only made his guilt in forgetting her worse. What if something more serious had happened while he hadn't been paying attention to her?
It was a miracle that she hadn't woken up. She was so hot and feverish that Owen was surprised she was able to stay asleep. Having been on the receiving end of a bad fever before, he knew first hand how uncomfortable it was to be burning up, and knew that he was never able to get much sleep when he was sick without the help of medication, none of which Cristina had been given. Owen reached up to brush a few sweaty strands of hair out of her face, trying very carefully not to disturb her—he knew all too well that once she did wake up, she wouldn't be able to get back to sleep for a long time afterwards—and frowned when his fingertips made contact with her skin. It was very warm, uncomfortably warm, and warmer than he remembered it being when he had checked before leaving the bed. There was no denying now that she was getting worse, and the temperature of her skin was concerning. She shouldn't be this hot with a simple fever.
Cursing himself for being so careless, even for a moment, Owen rose and crossed the trailer to the sink. He wrenched open the cupboard doors, barely able to keep a lid on his anger at himself. That anger was momentarily replaced by relief as he noticed not only the first aid kit, but also the space heater stuffed in the cupboard space; the last thing Owen wanted was to be digging in God-only-knew how many feet of snow to get to the luggage compartment to get at that bloody space heater. He sent a small thank-you to Meredith for having left it where it was.
Just as Derek had said, there was a thermometer in the first aid kit. It was one of the newer ones, the kind that you stuck in someone's ear to check their temperature, and, judging by the brand name, was high quality. Owen was a more traditional man when it came to taking temperatures: he'd always been more of a fan of the old stick-under-the-tongue thermometers, but in this case, he was glad that Derek had a newer one; he didn't want to have to wake Cristina up in order to take her temperature.
Gently brushing aside a few pieces of hair, Owen inserted the thermometer and waited for the temperature read-out. Cristina stirred briefly when he stuck the thermometer in her ear, but settled after a moment. Owen noticed that her breathing was becoming slightly more labored, a sure sign of congestion. He sighed. From the looks of it, Cristina had contracted pneumonia. Owen had only had it once, when he was a teenager, but he still remembered the experience quite clearly, and none of his recollections were pleasant ones. This was going to be a long, rough ride for both of them.
The thermometer beeped, and Owen glanced down hastily at the display. He stared at it for a few seconds before removing the thermometer and inserting it again. There must have been some mistake. That couldn't have been right. He'd read it wrong, that was all. The thermometer beeped again, and when Owen glanced at it, he could feel the icy tendrils of dread creeping up in the pit of his stomach. 103.9º.
Owen needed to get to the hospital. 103.9º wasn't the kind of fever that you could treat in a trailer in the middle of freaking nowhere. 106º was considered fatal, and at 105º, you were looking at the possibility of organ failure. He was going to have to bundle her up well to keep her from being exposed to the cold, and he was going to have to take her to the hospital. They'd be able to put her on fluids, and get some cooling packs to try and bring down her temperature.
It was still snowing outside. Not very hard, but the wind was gusting full-force, blowing the falling snow and the snow that had already fallen in every direction, making it look like the snowfall was much worse. Owen stood on the porch, coat collar turned up against the wind, squinting through the white at the looming shape that was his truck, or the top of his truck. The bottom of it was completely buried under snow, so much snow that Owen realized his chances of being able to open door were next to none. Even if he could scrape away enough snow to be able to open the door, there was no way that he was going to be able to move the truck. There was simply too much snow.
"Dammit!" Owen cried, kicking one of Derek's patio chairs in frustration. He hated this kind of weather. Normally, Owen loved the snow, but when it prevented him from bringing someone that he really cared about to the hospital, he wasn't so enamored by it. The one time Cristina got sick, the one time she needed immediate medical attention, there was so much damn snow on the roads that he couldn't take her to the hospital.
He was going to have to take care of her here.
Cristina had always been told that Hell was the hottest place on Earth. She wasn't a firm believer in Heaven or Hell or any form of life after death, but if she listened to people who did, then there was no place hotter than Hell. She'd discovered, however, that they were wrong. She was pretty sure that there was no place hotter than that which she currently inhabited, and, as far as she knew, that place wasn't Hell. She wasn't dead. Yet. Based on the fire that was slowly consuming her body and the wall of stuff blocking her lungs, death wasn't far away, but she wasn't there yet.
She wanted to say something to convey that she was melting in her own personal inferno, but her throat didn't seem to be working. It was like there was some kind of barrier blocking the air from reaching her vocal cords, so that all she could do was communicate silently, which was useless. Last time she had checked, Owen wasn't a mind reader, so there was no way he would be able to understand her silent pleas. All she could do was lie in the inferno silently and hope that Owen would catch on.
She wished she could go back to sleep. She wasn't exactly sure if she was awake; perhaps more like semi-conscious, given the way the world blurred in front of her eyes and occasionally disappeared completely, but the peaceful oblivion granted by sleep was definitely something she missed.
Another thing she wished for was Owen. When he'd come to bed with her and taken her in his arms, all her worries had melted away. She'd realized there were many sides to him: the focused, commanding professional who ran Seattle Grace's trauma department; the fiery-tempered man who had slammed her against the wall outside Joe's and kissed her with such fury that she could do nothing but stand there, shocked; the passionate yet hesitant man who kissed her senseless in the boiler room and incited in her a terrifying passion; and, most recently, the soft, gentle man who held her when she asked and made her feel safer tan she had in a long time. He was gone now, running around the trailer doing a million and one things, and she wanted more than anything to tell him to stop, but her voice wasn't working.
Hands were touching her, brushing the hair out of her face. Owen. He seemed to do that a lot, the whole pushing-the-hair-off-her-face thing. She tried to focus on his face, but she couldn't get a clear picture; everything was just too blurry. It was like trying to look through a camera lens covered in fingerprints.
There were words too, words tat she had to struggle to process and understand. "Hey." Owen's voice was soft, like a balm amid the burning discomfort. "I'm going to put some cooling packs on you, okay Cristina? This is going to be cold, but we need to bring your fever down."
So she was dying, dying of a fever. Of all the ways to go, and it had to be a fever that got her. It was ridiculous.
You won't die. I'm here. I'm not going anywhere. Owen's words rang in her ears. He had promised, and she knew that he was a man of his word. He would damn well try to keep her alive, but she wasn't so sure that there was anything he could do. She hoped he wouldn't feel too guilty about not being able to save her.
The irony of this situation was not lost on her. She'd been upset with Owen for staying outside so long talking to Shepherd because he might get the flu or something.
There was something cold touching her armpits. It was supposed to make her feel better, but Cristina wished it would just go away. The inferno was better than this. She'd thought, at first, that the cooling packs were soothing, but they quickly became uncomfortable. They were cold, so cold that they burned against her hot skin, not unlike that time the icicle had impaled her. That had been somewhat soothing for a fraction of a second too, until the real pain set in, and she stopped noticing the temperature.
Cristina closed her eyes. Focusing on the world—or trying to at least—was too hard. Sleep wasn't going to come to her; she was too feverish for that. Her only hope now was that the delirium would come and carry her away.
She had slipped. It was that simple. She'd been storming off into the hospital, all pissed at Meredith for ranting about her latest problem with McDreamy, and had slipped on a patch of unseen ice outside the front doors. And then, while Meredith had been laughing at her and saying that this was karma coming back to bite her ass for having been so unsupportive, an icicle had fallen from the overhang and impaled her.
She'd been impaled by and icicle. The thought was so ridiculously absurd that Cristina would have been laughing had she not been gasping for breath. It was surprisingly painful, though not enough to cause her to hyperventilate—that was more likely caused by the shock at being impaled by an icicle.
She could feel it between her splayed fingers. It was cold, and slick, like the blood that was beginning to stain the front of her scrubs. It was lodged in her side, between her ribs from the looks of it, and she was pretty sure that there was no internal bleeding or lasting damage, but they'd need an X-Ray to be sure. Meredith had run off to get a gurney, and Cristina could only hope that she would hurry up. She didn't want to spend another second lying on the ground outside the hospital where anyone could see her, gasping like she'd just run a marathon, with an icicle sticking out of her chest. It was humiliating.
The endless blackness peppered with a handful of stars and the occasional airplane that stretched above her head like a giant canopy disappeared and a head appeared to take its place. Amid her shock, Cristina realized with mute horror who it was: the ginger-haired army officer who'd trached that guy with a pen in the field and had stapled his gaping leg wound shut himself. While she was extremely impressed by his high pain threshold and his fearless improvisational skills in the field, he was honestly the last person that she wanted to find her in this state. The way he grinned when he saw her and said, "A damsel in distress," in a tone that fully indicated he was going to play the hero only made her humiliation worse.
But when he picked her up in his arms, she had to admit that she felt safe. She may still have been in pain and gasping like a fish out of water, but she knew, underneath all the panic and the embarrassment at getting impaled by an icicle and then discovered by a guy she thought was very kick-ass and also kind of sexy, that nothing worse was going to happen to her. These arms were going to keep her safe.
It didn't take him long to get her upstairs to an exam room. He may have been a newcomer here, but this guy seemed to know his way around the hospital pretty well already. He lay her down on the exam room bed with the utmost care, as if she were made of glass, and then moved away. For a moment, she wanted to stretch out her arms and call him back to her, already missing the security of his arms, but the moment was gone as quickly as it came.
"Put her on a monitor, order a portable chest X-Ray." Meredith must have found them somehow, because her voice was here, issuing commands with the brisk efficiency of someone far more superior than a second-year resident, which made Cristina assume that she was issuing her commands to the interns. Great. Because they were so capable of looking after Cristina properly.
"I'm going to cut your top off." Meredith face loomed above Cristina's for a moment, and then disappeared, presumably because she had gone to get something.
The momentary panic at the thought of having her top cut off in front of all the interns and Dr Sexy Army Guy, if he was still here, spurred Cristina into action. "It's between my ninth and tenth intercostals spaces, there's no hemo or pneumothorax, my vitals are stable, just pull it out," she hissed at Meredith desperately. She didn't want to be subjected to any further embarrassment tonight.
"I wouldn't." The deep, baritone voice rang out to Cristina's left, and she turned her head sharply. Her saviour was standing above her, expertly wielding a stethoscope and looking at her with a most serious expression.
"Ah—I—Mind your own business!" Cristina was grateful that he'd saved her life, but that didn't mean she wanted him here, making her life more miserable.
"Who is this guy?" Meredith snapped, suddenly realizing she wasn't the only one tending to Cristina. He didn't answer, but backed off slightly, glancing warily in Meredith's direction.
Cristina sighed. "Just take it out. Please. I already screwed up in front of the Chief once, I can't—I messed up a suture, and now he's looking at me like I'm number twelve! Mer, please, no one gets to see me like this, okay?" The last thing she wanted was word getting out that Cristina Yang, hard core future cardio god had been impaled by an icicle.
No sooner were the words out of her mouth, the door to the room flew open and the Chief barged in, looking furious. "Yang—What the hell happened?"
Cristina sank back against the pillows, hoping that the ground would open her up and swallow her whole. This day had just gone from bad to worse.
"Get her on a monitor and order a portable chest—"
"I did," Meredith interrupted hastily, taking Cristina's vitals.
"Did you check her respiratory function?" The Chief was in full doctor mode now, but Cristina could tell that he was still pissed. She knew exactly how he felt. They'd both been having exceptionally crappy days and this...well this was just the icing on the cake.
"I did!" Cristina cried in exasperation, having recovered from her moment of horror. She was tired of sitting here with everyone fussing over her and bickering about treatment options when they could just pull the damn thing out. "See? Breath sounds clear and equal." She took a deep breath to illustrate her point.
"You, be quiet," the Chief snapped, obviously not interested in anything Cristina had to say. Turning to Meredith, he continued: "What would you advise as a course of treatment?"
"I think we should leave it in until we get the chest X-Ray and the CT back," Meredith replied calmly.
"I'm fine," Cristina hissed, trying to ignore the sting of betrayal. Meredith was supposed to be on her side, not the Chief's.
"But what about infection?" Meredith continued, ignoring Cristina. "This thing is definitely melting dirty roof-water into her body."
"Which is why we should pull it out!" Cristina exploded, unable to keep quiet any longer while they analyzed her like some invalided patient. There was no lasting damage, pulling it out now wasn't going to kill her. It probably wasn't going to do anything.
"Leave it right where it is," Dr Sexy Army Guy snapped, obviously beginning to get irritated himself. Cristina turned to him, startled; in all the excitement, she'd completely forgotten he was there. "If you get stabbed in the chest and you're lucky enough to still be breathing, you leave the knife in, at least until you figure out what's going on inside. Leave it in," he insisted, as Cristina reached to grab the icicle.
"Take it out!" God, why was everyone being so ridiculous?
"Leave it in!" The Chief snarled. "And since you know so much, you can teach your interns how to treat you. This is a good opportunity to get back to the basics."
"But I need to check on Vincent Canor," Cristina protested, in a last ditch attempt to get herself out of here and not be subjected to further humiliation.
The Chief frowned, turning to Meredith. "Grey, Vincent Canor is your responsibility now, but bear in mind that he is my patient, and I'm not about to lose another trauma case today. Keep that man alive." He glared at Meredith, as if to emphasize the importance of Vincent Canor's life. "Can I have a word with you, Major Hunt?"
So that was his name, Cristina thought as Hunt followed the Chief out of the room. Major Hunt. It was kind of sexy, but she really wished he had taken her side on this one. He was the macho trauma guy who'd performed and emergency tracheotomy with a ballpoint pen because that was all he had in his pockets. He should be all for pulling the icicle out, not leaving it in.
With a sigh, Cristina leaned back against her pillows. It looked like she was going to have to try and tech her interns—try being the operative word—how to treat her. It was going to be beyond embarrassing, and she had the feeling that there would be no sexy army surgeon to save her this time.
A/N: So this chapter was a little longer than some of the other ones, but that seems fitting, seeing as it's been a while since you guys have had anything to read. Don't forget to leave a review!
