8:05 P.M
DEREK
During his internship and residency, the most dreaded part of his ER caseload was the GSWs. He didn't mind the tedium of coughs and colds, the adrenaline rush of burns, road accidents, heart attacks and strokes and seizures.
It was always the gunshot victims that froze him in place for a minute, left him feeling useless and panicky before he was swept up into the rush of trying to save their life, of trying to fix what had gone wrong in the blink of an eye.
Because that's really how long it takes, to end a life. A blink of an eye. A finger pulled back by a centimetre, wreaking havoc through flesh and bone.
Every bleeding victim on his table was his father - every victim had a family, a story that would end unless Derek could write the next chapter of it.
He can't seem to unfreeze himself now, watching the dark stain spread across Karev's thigh. He can't seem to lower his arms, can't move even as Gayle grabs Addison by the arm and moves away.
ADDISON
The first time she saw a lot of blood, it was her own. She'd flipped over the handlebars of her bike - she remembers that bike, with its resolutely pink streamers and tinkly bell - and Archer had had to carry her home, her face smeared with tears and blood, trying not to cry.
Bizzy didn't like it when she cried, and she definitely didn't like it when she stained her clothes with grass and blood and gave herself a very visible scar to boot. To Bizzy, the invisible scars were inconsequential.
She became almost inured to the sight of blood over the ages. It doesn't really faze her anymore, not when it pools on an OR table and drips to the floor, not when she can feel the warmth of it through her gloves as she fights a bleed. Because she knows there's more comingŲ that she can pump more into the patient. Here, there aren't any blood bags, no supplies.
She tries to push against the iron grip on her arms, but it isn't enough. She needs to help, she knows Callie is good but she's just a resident, and he's bleeding so much and there's a white haze of panic descending over her now, sending her heart pounding against her ribs and shortening her breaths.
Focus.
She needs to focus - drown out the noise. Drown out Derek standing white and terrified, drown Callie's hitching sobs, her own white-hot fear, the pain still searing through her arms.
Focus is something they learned gradually, the ability to block out a terrified relative screaming questions, the urgency and pressure of surgery.
Richard used to whisper it to them - focus - when they would spin out in the early days, as he calmed an unsteady hand holding a needle, a scalpel, a scope.
Focus.
"Callie," she calls, hoping her voice is steady. "Your coat."
Callie stares at her, uncomprehending, her eyes dark with fear, for a moment before she catches on and fumbles with her white coat, shrugging it off clumsily and wadding it up. She presses it onto Alex's thigh, and it soaks through with blood rapidly.
CALLIE
The pristine white fabric of her coat quickly runs red, but she can put pressure on Karev's leg better now. It must have just been a grazing wound - he's bleeding in a trickle, not the crazy spraying of an arterial injury.
He's actually still conscious, making grunting noises and clutching his leg. She disliked Karev almost from the minute she met him - in the locker room on his first day, as he sat on a bench in his scrub pants cramming chips into his mouth.
He was arrogant and annoying - all the interns were annoying - and he was gross and kind of sleazy and he had a chip on his shoulder the size of Texas. He looked like he never bathed and he was rude to O'Malley.
She cannot let him die.
DEREK
"I'll start with you," Gayle says. "Dr. Derek Shepherd. You like to play God, don't you?"
He holds up one finger. "Mitch Hunter. He was your patient in your first year of residency. You were on night call in the ER when he came in with a fulminating bacterial infection and when he collapsed you gave him CPR for thirty three minutes, during which his end tidal CO2 was 17 and you did not stop the code until you had a rhythm. You think you saved his life.
"But Mitch is brain dead now, Derek. He's nothing. He's barely alive, he's an organ farm. He could have saved so many lives that night - there was a woman with three kids in acute cardiac failure that night in the ICU, she would have lived to see her kids graduate. His liver, skin, kidneys, eyes, they're still in him, in a long term care facility, Derek.
"Mitch has bedsores. A nurse rolls him over every two hours, a physical therapist moves his arms and legs for him and when he gets an infection they suck the snot out of him with a tube. He costs his family hundreds of thousands of dollars and they're still paying and still hoping.
"That was your first, Dr. Shepherd." Gayle says. "There are so many more. I could tell you all their names, but you won't remember. You might remember Robert Martin, though. He died yesterday, after you and Karev here overdosed him with sodium."
ADDISON
She remembers Mitch. She remembers that Derek cried in the call room, after, when Mitch's family had been informed and their chief resident had reamed him for his decision.
She remembers thinking what a heinous choice it is for anyone to have to make; when you're saving a life, what qualifies as worth saving? How do you decide whether or not a person's life would be worse than death?
"All of you," Gayle says behind her. "All of you have so many. You can call them mistakes, but they're not. They're victims - Dr. Shepherd," he gives her a little sake, and she feels her teeth click against each other. "You remember Jessica Yue, I hope.
"She was twenty two years old-" he continues, and she feels a rush of fury. Of course she remembers.
"I didn't hurt her." she says, gritting her teeth against the lain still throbbing through her. "She never told me about-"
"It was your job as her doctor to find out." Gayle snaps. "A perfectly healthy twenty two year old woman, dead barely three months after she got married and moved here from China -"
"Her stroke was not the norm." she says, struggling to keep her voice even. "She was a smoker. She suffered from migraines that she never told me about-"
"She didn't know they were migraines because she never had access to proper healthcare, and you thought she was just another patient at the free clinic, so you wrote her a script for oral contraceptives and she was dead ninety days later." Gayle finishes. "The clot was so massive she stroked out and died before her husband could get her to the hospital."
CALLIE
The bleeding in Karev's leg seems to be slowing, more of a drip than a gush now. He's still conscious and shaking in pain and shock - he's lost a lot of blood, he needs fluids, and -
And Gayle won't stop talking, his words washing over them like a tidal wave.
"The abortion you performed on a fifteen year old girl, who didn't know any better -"
"She was fifteen and she'd been raped." Addison hisses. "I -"
"You forced it on her." Gayle says, his voice rising. "She didn't understand, and you just kept talking at her didn't you, you convinced her to murder her child, and she listened to you and then she overdosed and killed herself because she couldn't take the guilt. That's the blood of two young lives on your hands, Addison."
Addison seems to have lost her fight, standing limply in Gayle's grip as he plunges relentlessly on. "Olivia Tran. Her twenty-four week fetus presented with pulmonary sequestration and it was collecting fluid in its chest, so you tried to place a shunt and why don't you tell us what happened next?"
"The shunt was necessary, to -"
"You could have operated on her baby after it was born, and you know it."Gayle says.
"The birth would have been too difficult, the lesion was too big and resuscitating the baby would be damn near impossible if I had delivered him at term -"
"Olivia had thrombophilia, she threw a clot on the table and you killed a man's wife and child in one go is what you did."
DEREK
"These aren't mistakes." Gayle is saying. "You played God. You took those decisions into your hands, and made choices that other people paid for with their lives. I'm not saying they all died, but they paid with their lives. You ruined these families, you took their happiness and their security and their loved ones, because you thought you knew what was best for them -"
"That's what we do," Addison says, "You're a doctor. You know better than your patients, it's your duty to make sure they understand."
"And where does that duty end?"
He's louder, now, his grip getting tighter on Addison. Gayle looks trapped, angry... desperate.
Scared.
"Where does it end?" he demands again. "Tell me, where do you draw the line? When do you step back and accept that it's not your decision to make? Because that girl whose baby you aborted, Addison. ...that was my sister."
I am so sorry I've been horrible about updating this. College and stuff has been keeping me busy, but two weeks f quarantine makes it look like I may actually finish this story after all!
Stay home and stay safe, people. Wash yo hands, help keep your healthcare workers outta quarantine and review!
