Title: Extraordinary Measures

Author: J.M. Flowers

Rating: M

AN: I can't believe that this story is so close to the end. I've never dedicated so much of myself to a piece before, so this whole experience has been really emotional. I don't even know what I'm going to do with myself once all of this is done - this story has been more than a year of my life. It's how Kaitlyn and I first started talking, and now she's my best friend. It's given me three really amazing friendships across thousands of miles of distance.

What I'm trying to say is I'm so insanely grateful. For all of you readers, who stuck around through a ridiculous "hiatus" and who've put up with my completely manic updates and still come back to read each chapter that I post. I've never finished something as big as this before, so everything is just really so amazing to me at this point.

I'm already hard at work on chapter 15, and the epilogue which will be chapter 20. Thank you again, a thousand times thank you. I hope you enjoy this last hill of the rollercoaster; I'll let you off the ride soon. xoxo

Omnia causa fiunt

Everything happens for a reason

No one talks about what they do with the body once the machines have been turned off, the screeching flat line silenced, the intubation tube removed. The body goes still, cold, and the whole world turns away. A nurse pulls a sheet over the face and it's like the person never existed.

Dr. Lewis' body is taken from the room on a gurney, blanket covering every inch of him. They push it down the hall to an elevator that isn't used for living patients; transport him to the hospital morgue. There is no grand show to the action, more a stiff following of procedure. They tuck him away and the elevator doors close and he really, really stops existing.

He's just dead.

I stand in his room alone. Nurses have rushed off to another pressing matter, a custodian will arrive soon to disinfect everything. Mop the floor. Tuck new sheets around the plastic mattress so someone else can take up residence in room 318A.

It's a date, the number of his room. The time he was pronounced dead. March 18th. It was an important number, even before he was admitted. Long before they charged the defibrillator. March 18th was a day for celebrating, tequila and birthday cake and girls' night. A night for Arizona and her best work friend to go wild, be stupid, rejoice in the fact that they'd made it through another year.

Teddy's birthday was March 18th.

But she'd died before her birthday this year, almost a week to the day. Bleeding out slowly in her brain and terribly alone. Thinking that the accident was her fault, that Arizona was hurt because of something she'd done.

Until a nurse had covered her with a sheet. Until they'd rolled her on a gurney to an elevator tucked into a corner of the hospital. Until she'd been put inside a body bag in the hospital morgue, waiting for someone to come and claim her.

She'd just stopped existing.

It had been different, the night Arizona died. She hadn't been left alone. Bailey had been meticulous, carefully sewing her abdomen closed and slowly wiping the blood from her skin. She'd been treated like a living person, even as she'd been transported to the morgue. Bailey had stood vigil outside the door, whispering prayers beneath her breath.

But I don't even know if a group of residents stood by in silent respect as Teddy was rolled down the hall. I have no idea if someone held her hand beneath the sheet. If she was carried from the world with the weight of guilt that had stooped Bailey's shoulders when it was Arizona in the body bag.

She should've existed. There never should've been a mistake so catastrophic.

Even if someone had to die that night.

I'd known that; I knew that. Dr. Lewis had said it before, I'd read it in the articles. It was his response anytime a reporter questioned his belief in time travel. There was no such thing as time travel, only time reassignment. You couldn't go back and change one thing and have the world be exactly as it was before. The changes made layers, created new realities upon which your life existed.

But the fates stayed. The death in that car accident had to remain present. The result of that night had to keep pressing its way into reality. The driver of the other car still had to be charged; he still had to serve time in jail for driving drunk that rainy night in Seattle. There still had to be a mistake in the hospital that turned him into a murderer. Someone always had to die.

The laws of time are not something to be altered.

The laws of time are what send a promising young surgeon running home over a simple mistake. They're what put an amazing surgeon in a grave, even though she died in the safety net of antiseptic. They're what place an inventor in your life and destroy his liver before you can even tell him what you've done.

And then I realize that's my biggest regret; that I'll never get to tell him what he made. What his machine was capable of. It was so much more than a tattoo or a mother's kiss. The Memory Machine was more powerful than he ever got to know.

Senna stumbles into the room with a box of Kleenex, whipping it roughly against the wall and startling me from my reverie. Her eyes are red, mascara smudged into dark circles in the hollow sockets of her face. "This wasn't supposed to happen," she swears, her hands balling into tight fists.

I nod a silent agreement, lowering to the slightly dented Kleenex box lying on the floor. I pull a tissue free, wiping at the tears still rolling slowly down my face. None of this was ever supposed to happen.

"He wrote about it," she tells me, tugging roughly at her hair. "He wrote about all of it - everything he put into that fucking machine. He left my mother because of it, left us all alone. And then he came back, and you know why? Because he had cancer. Because he had fucking cancer and he wanted to tell her that he loved her, that he was sorry he'd let the machine take his life. And now he's dead! My father is dead!

"I spent a lifetime trying to explain to my sister that our father wasn't some fairytale. That what she remembered of him was warped, that being three made it easier to think of him as a superhero. But he wasn't anything more than a coward. He was just a man who kissed my mom and taught me how to use his stupid invention and then told us all that he was sick.

"My father was always dead," she spits. "I don't know why all of this is so hard, now."

I shrug, unsure of what to give to her. What to say to make any of this okay. "It's real now. He can't come back anymore." He can never come back.

"Neither can my mom," she whispers, dropping her head. "I had them both and now I have neither of them."

I choke on the lump in my throat, coughing suddenly. Coughing too loudly. It feels rough and out of place, breaking our moment.

"I'm sorry," she murmurs, a wall slipping back up, "I'm being unprofessional."

"It's okay," I swear, but it's already too late. A mask slips over her face, her own sheet. Senna's very existence has faltered.

Just another thing that's all my fault.

#

I put my surgeries on hold for the day, too shaken even to walk through scrubbing procedures, never mind setting a break. I slug hammers at discarded casting, shattering the pieces.

I feel shattered.

I try to find Arizona, but the operating board tells me she's in a lengthy surgery. That I won't be able to find comfort in her for several more hours. So I tuck myself away in the cafeteria, slumped over at a table in the corner, poking at a slice of chocolate cake.

That's where Denia finds me, a stack of journals in her hands instead of a vase. "Dr. Torres?" she asks, just as tentative and soft as she was before. She's a willowy girl, tall and thin, posture impeccable. Like a ballerina, or a flower stem. Hard to break. Harder to fix.

I nod, my voice caught in the lump I've yet to shake free.

She lowers herself into a seat slowly, notebooks set carefully on the table in front of her. "I'm Gardenia Hamilton," she says, "We met yesterday? Outside my father's room? My sister is Senna Hamilton, one of the residents here?"

I nod again. I know exactly who she is, though I'd never admit it to her; that I know the soft stretch of her smile, the darting of her eyes when she feels pressured, the delicate curl of her voice. I know the sure way she once moved her hands, once touched a piece of equipment so powerful it turned dreamers into killers.

"Denia," I whisper.

She nods emphatically, shuffling forward on her chair.

But I want to scream. I want to throw chairs and curse the heavens and tell her just how sorry I am that her father's dead. I want her angry, miserable, like Senna was. Not emphatic. Not excited. She's supposed to be hating me.

"I've read about you," she says.

I balk, thoughts pausing and whipping backwards .

And she reads it in my eyes. "My father kept journals. He wrote of a Dr. C. Torres, but it didn't even click -"

"Your father's dead."

She stills, a single finger scratching at the surface of one of the leather bound books. "I know," she murmurs, drooping slightly. "He's dead in this reality."

The lump lifts, the weight in my throat tipping outwards onto my shoulders. "This reality?" I ask, my hand twitching where it's dropped into my lap.

"The layers," she says, flipping open the first book. "He wrote that time travel was more of a reassignment process - a way to create layer upon layer of reality. In this layer, my father is dead, but in another he still exists."

I shake my head, pushing away from the table.

"Please," she begs, reaching out in an effort to stop me. Her middle finger grazes my skin, scratches a pale line down my arm. "He said there were dreams, glimpses into the other layers. And Senna... Senna said you came from somewhere else. So, are they real? Have you seen another layer?

"Is my father still alive, somewhere?"