March comes without a cue, and some day in the middle Sarah wakes up to the gut-wrenching realization that it is Match Day, and the last day of her ED rotation, if that's relevant.

It's been going well, all things considered. She doesn't want to admit the two of them have been avoiding each other, not that it's not easy with her being thrown around all day by the ED staff as all other med students are. The times where they would work together on a patient has gone from several a day to once every few days, and that's about as much time as they spend in each other's presence aside from courteous greetings in the hallway and occasional goodnight wishes for when they have a run-in in the lounge. So no, they're not avoiding each other. They're simply colleagues, and barely even friends.

And as expected, the rumors died down in the blink of an eye. Joey even apologized to her with a slide of the bubonic plague. At the gesture she pretended, of course, to have been super excited about going into pathology and working alongside him every day for the rest of their lives, a lie that might as well be blown apart right this day.

She's been struggling all morning to muster the strength to hold a piece of paper, but there is no time. She feels like floating on thin air as she makes her way down to the lobby, Ethan's teasing echoing in her ears. The guy in front of her in line makes a somewhat idiotic wailing sound at the content of his envelop, which seems to stop her breathing for good.

"Reese, Sarah," that's not her voice, and she watches the women fish out the envelop from the stack as if watching a scene in a movie.

She peels away the seal and pulls out a little bit of the sheet, revealing the name of the hospital where she'll be spending her residency and possibly her entire career.

And she finds herself falling into this whole other world where nothing makes sense to her anymore and it's at this exact point in time that her future is torn clear off her past and has drifted a million miles away.

She had not planned for this to happen, but it did, and there's only herself to blame.

"Reese, how's your match?" Maggie asks quickly as Sarah passes her by in the ED.

"I got my first choice," she states, squeezing out a smile.

"Pathology?" April cuts in from the side.

"Congratulations," Ethan is not giving her a chance to say otherwise, and neither is Maggie.

"Incoming! Baghdad."

Then she hears his voice calling her name, and instantly slips into this deja-vu moment of that night when it had all started.

There's no time for second thoughts, and the last thing she laid eyes on before running off to Connor was that ridiculous smile on everyone's face.

The patient is an eighteen-year-old girl who hit a guard rail and flipped her car. She's bleeding heavily into her chest. After Sarah has managed to quickly tube the kid, she helps Connor with a thoracentesis to drain the blood, and, instead of moving on to the next patient with her usual, pretended nonchalance, she finds herself frozen on the spot, watching him go with the patient. She gets lost in the thought of how much she's going to miss this, and that every minute more she spends here with him feels like a knife made of sugar.

"Reese, you okay?" Will calls her from the nurse station, snapping her out of her trance. "It's not about pathology again is it?"

"No," she deadpans, though aware the question was rhetorical, pulling on a ghost of a smile that not even herself would buy into.

"Well, congrats I suppose," he gives a courteous response, disinterested in prying further, gathering his charts and walks away with barely a second look at her.

Right there and then she finds nothing harder than revealing a secret that no one believed was there, not even herself, one that she's been trying to escape for so long that it becomes a lie that haunts her, and distances her from the people that cared, until no one cares, for she's become a ghost that no one can see.

And no, at least that part's a truth: it's not about pathology, or her match, not just.

On the looks of it, the last day of her ED rotation goes by in flying colors. She's flooded by congratulations from literally everyone she knows, everyone but Connor—she hasn't had a chance to see him yet after the car crash patient—and Joey, who knows ahead of anyone that her name is not among the new staff down in pathology.

"What is this about, Reese?" He confronts her when she's sent down to run a lab, not giving her a chance to explain. "I thought you'd be the last person to betray me."

"Betray you?" She did not see this coming.

"Yes," he snaps, his voice rising. "You screwed up our future together when you quit pathology, and you never told me, left me hanging there looking at what, nothing. You never told anyone, down here, up there, why?"

Why? She's asked herself that question a thousand times. Everyday she wanted to say something, to tell someone, that it's just a maybe, but couldn't, because even that would make it somehow real, her leaving; when it was not, she'd been able to convince herself that this was where she would settle, for the rest of her life, sitting in a lab, with someone she loved and knew loved her back, someone her age, someone who liked the things that she did. Wasn't that all the life she ever wanted? Just to roll along with fate and make do with whatever life throws at her? It was, until she met Connor, and he showed her that she could be in a better place, if she wanted to. And she wanted to. Only she refused to believe that it was possible, that she could be better off in any place without him. Not that any of it matters now, for he's lost to her. She pushed him away, at the right time, and it was the right thing to do. So is this.

"We still have a future, Joey," she says earnestly in her defense, and theirs. "We work in different places so what? We can—"

"Do we? Did you ever believe that?" Joey interrupts her, questioning, and gets no answer. He looks away, then deadpan at her. "This is about him, isn't it."

Her silent confession is all there is needed.

"You think I'm pissed at you going away or quitting pathology?" He remonstrates. "I respected you and your choices. I told you to get over yourself, remember? But you couldn't. You still don't know what you want. You can't be with him alright, so you go about making yourself into someone like him."

"I fought for it okay?" Finally she musters the courage to stand up for herself. "And I am leaving! You think this is easy for me?"

"Right. It was your choice, your doing, not your hormones'," he scoffs acerbically. "You can't imagine, how easy it'll be, once he finds out who you really are, Reese, a selfish, coward."

He practically spats the words at her, one by one, before he turns and walks away for good.

She's a ghost, That's what she's become, to everyone who had a fraction of their heart to befriend her, and none of them can see her, not for she really is. She floats down to the lounge as the curtain of the night calls and it marks the end of her time here.

Unexpectedly but unsurprised, she finds Connor slouching in the couch, alone, his hands clasped around a stethoscope under his chin, his eyes lowered to the floor. She stands for a moment, on the outside looking in, of slipping into this dejavú sense of some other night, lambent and distant in her memory, one that she loves to rewind, but would not allow herself to remake.

He sees her, as she walks in, as always, and blinks up at her, squeezing out a weary smile. Those sad, puppy eyes, they make her heart skip a beat and her stomach twist, and it's not just the butterflies.

Warily she sits down on the coffee table across from him. He blinks up at her, and smiles a weary smile which she returns with full attentiveness.

For a solid yet reassuring minute they share no words, no looks, only silence.

"Do you wanna tell me what happened?"

He draws in a breath, "the girl that flipped her car, she died."

She drops her shoulders, but does nothing to interrupt him. He needs to get it out, and she's willing to take all the weight of sorrow from him.

"She never stood a chance and - and I know that, it wasn't my fault but...she looked at me, and...the light went out behind her eyes."

His voice is coming from a thousand miles away, and all the emotions in it, they echo through time and space, and it elicits something deep inside of her. In that moment, what was between them does not matter, only the way they feel for each other, like all humans do.

"I'm so sorry Connor..." she squats down before him and places a hand over his. He does not flinch, but she can feel the tension slowly draining away from him. He refuses to look at her, and that's okay because she refuses to see the tears fall from his eyes.

Perhaps she is selfish, in just that moment, for thinking she cannot break him more when he's already broken.

"I have something to show you," she pulls away, turns and makes for her locker. She can feels his eyes on her as she retrieves the blue envelop. She hands it to him.

"Mayo Clinic," he reads out, looking up at her.

"I didn't plan on getting in," she hurries off an explanation. "I applied because I needed to prove to myself that -"

"You're leaving," he makes it more of a statement than a question. His voice is now bland, drained of emotions. She can't read his face.

"I'm sorry I didn't tell anybody sooner -"

"Stop," he's pleading more than demanding. He rubs a hand over his face and screws his eyes shut, the tremble in his other hand reflected in the quivering sheet of paper.

"All this time I thought that you didn't care..."

"What?" Now she's genuinely confused.

"You hurt me, Sarah," he blurts out, and it makes her wince. "When you said you were afraid that you'd end up in a life without me, that you didn't want me because I...could be dying."

"No way in the world I could've meant that."

Time seems to freeze and they're stuck in an eternal silence, sharing an everlasting, wordless gaze.

"Then stay."

She'd think she's become immune to it by now, the tenderness in his voice that makes him sound like a lost little boy. But no, it plucks at her heartstrings, tempting her to pull him into her arms.

"I can't," she swallows, deciding to defy once again her feelings for him. "Because if I do that, then it'll be impossible for me to leave."

There and then she puts it to an end, in the most nonchalant, impassive voice possible, while on the inside she hears the sound of her heart shattering, and she flusters to get out, to walk away before it ends and the grieving silence impels her to make the u turn.

The purse. It's pops into sight the moment Connor steps outside the ED, a blazing red against the gentle hue of the streetlights. The mother, crying hysterically into her husband's arms, clings onto it as if holding onto a fragment of her daughter's soul.

He comes to a halt at the sight of them, caught in one delusional trance of epiphany: life, joyous and sorrowful and ignorant and opulent and destitute and everything one second, the next blown to dust, to be forgotten, erased from existence altogether till nothingness is all there left. He's seen it day after day, yet ironically it wasn't until he's had to so abruptly confront his own mortality did he realize that life is short, until he could no longer see clear into the future did he really look in the moment, and frankly into the past, where he ended up looking at the people he'd let down and fade away—his mother, Claire—and those that are still here, Sarah, he'd be damned if he ever did that to her, even though it feels like they've drifted apart and are standing so far from each other that she cannot see him anymore. And that feeling is what really makes him lose grip of his very existence and wonder what in the world he could be doing just to live.

This is all messed up. He tries to shake it off of his head, throwing open his car door and tossing his bag in the passenger seat, and stuffs himself into the car. The world seems to go at the thump of the door, along with all his problems. Inside is a vacuum, where no sound can get in, no light. He sees her face, her eyes, they flicker through the white mist of his breath. He can't stop seeing them, the last glimmer of hope, that faded at once from her eyes as well as from his heart.

Tears boiling in his eyes, he lets them pour out, and turn to ice in the unconditioned air, but he doesn't feel the cold, no more than that inside of him. With one hand he grabs onto his nose and mouth, tight, as if he was ashamed to let those wrecking sobs escape his throat and be heard by someone out there, the sound of him drowning, as if someone cared.