The second she finds him curled up unconscious in the car seat, Ms. Goodwin has every reason to think he might as well be dead. She drops her purse right on the spot and jumps to grab the door, frustrated to find it locked.
"Dr. Rhodes," desperately she slaps on the window, almost shouting his name. "Connor!"
Just then he stirs, and she thinks she can never be more relieved in her life than right now.
"Are you okay?" She raises her voice, warily looking him up through the frosted glass.
He blinks open his eyes. They look bleary and his skin is pale, though other than that he doesn't seem to be in any physical distress. She waits for him to come to terms of his surroundings, and ends up delightfully amused at the panic in his eyes that makes him look like a little bear caught at the poacher's gunpoint.
"m-Ms Goodwin," he straightens up in an eyeblink, and screws his eyes shut against what appears to be a headache. He fumbles for the door lock and she notices that he's shivering.
She yanks open the door once he unlocks it and reaches in to place a hand on his forehead, "you're freezing cold! Did you sleep through the night like that?"
He pulls away from her touch, avoiding her gaze, and drags himself out of the car with one hand gripping on the doorframe. The head rush has him thinking he's actually gonna pass out for good.
"Sorry I'm late for work," he mumbles. Only then does he notice she has a hand on his shoulder steadying him, and it makes him blush with shame and lower his eyes without one more word.
"Don't be. You're not," she reassures him in her usual composed voice. "Why don't you take the day off, Dr. Rhodes. Go home. Get some sleep."
Connor is fully awake by now, though still lightheaded and cold as hell. He entwines his arm for warmth and in defense, returning the stare of the chief to find no trace of reproach in her eyes, just worry. As much as he appreciates her being considerate, the idea of him staring at the wall in his condo being haunted by every messed-up shit that happened yesterday sheerly terrifies him. So he sucks it up the best he can and takes a deep breath, "I'm okay. I'm good to work."
"Are you sure?" She asks sincerely, despite doubt written all over her face.
"Yeah," he has to muster all the strength left in him to pull on an energized look.
"Well at least go take a shower and make yourself warm," she says, patting him dotingly on the arm, twice, before taking her leave.
Little do they know, neither the chief nor the trauma surgeon, that they're being spied on, by a med student, who's sitting in a car a few spaces down the parking lot with a cheesy grin across her face thinking that Ms. Goodwin looks too much like a mother bear to Connor and that it's simply beyond adorable.
And that's how Sarah ends up walking into the first day of her surgical rotation with a giddy smile on her face. That positivity seems to touch every one of her new colleagues, all of whom apparently takes her as the energized, sociable kind of person quite to the contrary of herself, which is not at all in a bad way, she decides, that her day couldn't have started off better with everything exciting and new to take her mind of off whatever it was on completely. It's like stepping into a whole new realm, of lonely corridors and cloistered operating rooms solemnly lit by alien blue lights. And she's found herself to have grown a somewhat clingy, not entirely healthy liking to this environment, for its tranquility and reclusion, its orderliness and the uncalled-for need of human interaction, and perhaps the most dangerously delusive sense of escape it's granted her.
As the day drags on in her dreamlike, stagnant state of mind, it slowly begins to take a toll on her. The long hours of standing next to the resident yanking at the contractor is threatening to paralyze her muscles on the spot and practically the only breaks she gets are trips down to pathology where the lighting and the look on her ex-boyfriend's face is so grim that she might as well could've stumbled into hell. Worse: those emotion-tangled memories of yesterday start to wash over her, to fill in for the post-adrenaline emptiness of late afternoon. She longs more than ever for her day to come to an end, for all she can bring herself to do right now is crash-landing in her apartment and curling up in bed.
Once again the OR team is alerted of an incoming trauma and to prepare for an emergent thoracotomy. By the time she's scrubbed, gowned and gloved and made it to her designated position at the rear end of the table, the patient is already there being prepped. Having been brought in by chopper and straight to the OR, a teenage boy who shot himself in the chest, is bleeding out by the second.
"Reese," Beth is reminding her, and she remembers that her resident was assigned to another case about fifteen minutes ago, which means she "gets to" directly assist the attending surgeon on this one. Sighing, she glances up from the mind-scrambling array of instruments toward the scrub room, transfixed at the sight of him. Connor Rhodes has been the last person on her mind all day long, and frankly though she has no idea how she's managed that, it's never occurred to her that she still has to work with him, probably more than she did then back in the ED. Perhaps it's that she's been trying so hard to shut him out that it's felt like she already left.
The gaze they share for however brief a moment feels suffocating as if they were actually underwater, in the mild depth of the ocean where sunlight begins to dim. She gets the impression that he's physically struggling for breath as he seems to be in worse shape than she is. Knowing painfully inside that she has to be strong for him this one more time, she breathes in and takes two steps to the right into the spotlight, skin bleached underneath, a thin fabric between life and death.
She hands him the scalpel, and watches him slice through the skin and saw into the sternum in a brutal, somewhat frantic manner. There is no time to lose. She can feel the adrenaline kicking in once again, and at the time nothing between them matters more than the life in their hands.
"Help me spread his ribs," Connor is saying, in a strained voice. She jumps and grabs the retractor. With effort they stuck the metal in. With the sound of ribs breaking, a dark bluish fluid-filled pericardial sac is revealed.
"Metz and debakeys," he demands, and starts to incise the pericardium. Sarah watches in awe as the gel of blood breaks down into the chest cavity and is replaced by a freshly oozing source. She scrabbles for a suction device as he trims away tissues to visualize a hole in the left pulmonary artery one centimeter from its origin on the heart.
"Hold this," he hands her the clamps after placing them across the injured vessel, and she leans in and holds them carefully so that the open edges remain aligned, and he goes in with the suture.
"BP's dropping," Marty's warning echoes the alarm sounding across the monitors. "You gotta stop the bleeding now. I can hardly keep up."
"Thank you Marty I'm almost there," Connor replies, his voice unbelievably calm, and she finds it impossible to panic when his self-poise emanates an immense power that stills the water around them. "Reese, follow me, eyes on the field."
She does, and never before in her life has she felt so strongly in the present. The world seems to ebb away and all that there is is the beating heart in front of them. One second she tries to grab the suction with a third imaginary hand, the next she realizes that he doesn't need one, as the blood magically stops pooling in the chest as he ties off the knot around the leaky vessel. The beeping quickly quiets down, and when in silent accord they each removes one of the clamps, it holds.
"Nice work, Dr. Rhodes," Marty applauds.
Sarah feels an almost euphoric wave of relief wash over her, though nothing can be more draining than the lack of adrenaline that comes after. She takes a step back, exhaling, and looks up only to notice that Connor is breathing a little more heavily than normal, leaning aback with his head down. Although no one else seems to notice, she can't help but worry that he might actually pass out.
"Dr. Rhodes," she calls and he lifts his head to look at her, his eyes subtly glazed. Something is definitely not right, not that she can bring herself to point out, and she ends up asking, "do you want me to close?"
"No," he says after a sluggish pause, with a stiff shake of head as he straightens up again. "The kid's too young to have a scar."
Slightly stung by his remark, she takes a moment to mull over the doubt that he was attacking her, and then realizes he was in no mood to get personal, not that she'd feel it unjustified given now that he carries the living proof of her disastrous suturing.
Together they pull the sternum close. They work through layers of muscles and fat, and as soon as the last inch of skin is stapled, Connor seems to be more than ready to throw in the towel. He orders the patient to be patched up and sent to the ICU, before taking his hurried leave.
Even if anyone was to admit something was off, they wouldn't do it out loud. Sarah reasons that everyone has had their fair share of irresponsible surgeons who can't care less, but not Dr. Rhodes. She knows it and they know it, that he's the one to always see the patient through, even wait for them to wake up if he has the time, and never miss a meticulous post-op workup. Now that was beyond an act of inattention. That was comparable to malpractice.
Impulsion-driven, she excuses herself and darts out of the OR after him, leaving the mess to be cleaned up by the rest of the team and not caring what they'd think of her. Out in the corridor, she finds Connor leaning against the wall with his head buried in between both arms, cringing in the throes.
She calls his name. He straightens up and half turns toward her. She can see that he's sweating like a sponge and his eyes are bloated and watery. Without a word she moves closer and puts the back of her hand to his forehead, "you're warm."
He quails from her touch, "I'm fine. It's nothing. I just need to sleep."
"I'm not letting you drive home," she crosses her arm.
"So, are we doing this again."
"I've got an early shift."
They stand, staring at each other, deadpan, too wiped out to emote.
"On-call room, now," she uncrosses her arm, turning away, hoping she's said it assertively enough that he would follow, and he does. Together they make a left turn out into the ward.
"I saw you, this morning in the parking lot," she says as they wander past the nurse station, which has mostly emptied out.
"You did?" A rhetorical question. Neither of them has the slightest idea as to the meaning of this conversation.
"You should be more careful," she finally says—but not the other part, not out loud—if you are infected then this could kill you.
He says nothing, striding ahead of her and spins around to grab a bottle of water from the fridge on their way in. She sees him to bed, watching as he crawls in under the dirty old covers that don't get washed for days, but it'll have to do for now. Then she walks over to the coffee machine in the corner and pours herself a cold brew, and gulps down just enough to get her through the next couple hours.
"Where are you going?"
She turns her head over her shoulder to him. They lock eyes through the black metal frame of the bunk bed. He's turned on his side, his eyes glistening in the dim, eerie light.
"Post-op," she deadpans, stiffly making to the door, and in a peculiar trance thinks she might as well be a robot.
She goes to find their patient in the recovery wing. Absentminded, she breezes through the post-op workup in record speed, earning a somewhat amazed compliment from her resident. Even then, it's well past midnight by the time she starts barging back to the on-call room, roaming the empty hallways, part of the hospital she believes she's never seen at this hour: cold lights burning low, everything dead-looking and forlorn.
That's when she comes to questioning when and on what frantic whim did she sign up for any of this, a surgical rotation for the final module before graduation, and then a residency? When her pathology classmates are probably dozing off in their homes, what's she doing here? Then she remembers. It was that picture-perfect evening celebration at the Hawaiian bar, to which she only went because Connor had invited her, even though she barely knew half the people there, and then by some miracle it was the first time ever that she felt like she fitted in.
She shakes her head to clear it, well aware that self-doubt is of the least use right now, and that she has three hours to sleep if she skips morning wash and breakfast altogether.
She tries not to wake him as she climbs up the squeaky bunk, but he's already stirring.
"Hey," he grumbles in a drowsy voice.
"Hey," she greets him from up above, rolled over on her belly at the edge of the bed. "I though you might like to know that our patient is doing well. You saved him."
"We did," he corrects her. "Thankfully."
Then they're silent for a while, not in any uncomfortable way. Traffic noise, distant and underwater, muffled by those sleazy windows, through which the city lights filter in and cast squares on their coverlets. He's awake and she can't sleep, and it feels as if they were the last two humans on a deserted spaceship, ever so consciously aware of each other's waking presence.
"You're going to be okay. I know that."
He seems startled at her sudden declaration. She hears him sharply draw in a breath. "How can you be so sure?"
"Because you don't deserve it, and I'd like to believe that life is fair?"
He thinks about if for a minute, and then, "who doesn't."
And he drifts off, eventually, his breathing steadies and evens out, but still raspy from the cold and intermittent with short bursts of burbling coughs. At one point, she finds that if she listens very hard, it echoes the room and all the way into her sleep, along with her own voice in her head, words unspoken: because I don't know any other way, don't know what I'd do if I lost you, because it is hope that we need, and I'm finding it in a promise.