My neck hurt as I was sprawled out on the floor of Izzie's room on a pile of blankets with a pillow. I had fallen asleep on the floor behind Meredith's chair who was beside George. Cristina and Alex were asleep in their own chairs on the other side of the bed. We had all passed out in Izzie's room after she got out of the PACU after her surgery. The vibration of my own snoring woke me up and I'm glad that it did so I could move my legs out of the way as Bailey tried to weave her way through us all to get to Izzie's IV bag. I checked my watch to see that it was ten in the morning. I was late for my shift in the emergency room. The monito beeped rhythmically as I groaned and stretched my sore limbs.
"Any changes overnight?" Bailey asked softly.
"No." Alex answered groggily. George's pager beeped and he snorted to my right as he woke up and checked the page.
"Oh, it's the chief." He mumbled.
"Somebody better make a coffee run." Bailey said. "You all look like hell."
"I gotta be in surgery in ten minutes. Um, Mer, will you let me know?"
"Yeah." Meredith answered as George walked past us and out the room. "Get up, Mayzie. We should go, too." Groaning, I climbed to my feet, blinking my eyes a couple of times as I tossed my pillows and blankets onto George's vacant chair. Cracking my neck and stretching my arms over my head as I headed to the trauma bay. Meredith was kind enough to make a coffee run and brought me a cup as she was working the ER as well today. Hours passed without a trauma which was unusual, but I wasn't about to say the Q word and jinx us all. It was about one o'clock when sirens began to wail through the trauma bay. They backed up to the doors and Callie and Meredith came running out. The back doors to the first ambulance opened and wheeled out a bloody pulp on a gurney. The man was unrecognized. Honestly because the face was so swollen and bloodied, I couldn't tell if it was a man or a woman.
"Dude." Callie breathed.
"Unidentified male, dragged by a bus." The EMT presented. "He's clamped down, so we couldn't intubate."
"Didn't they stop when they hit him?" Meredith asked.
"Bus driver didn't know he was there until he got halfway down the block." The second ambulance back up and a woman with her arm in a makeshift sling came rushing out with EMTs right behind her. Leaving John Doe with Meredith and Callie, I rushed over to the woman. She had cuts up and down both her arms and the arm that was in the sling was bleeding through her gauze. She didn't even acknowledge me as I approached her. She kept her fear filled green eyes on John Doe as they wheeled him inside.
"Oh, is he gonna be okay?" She asked.
"They're going to do everything that they can." I reassured her. "Now, what's your name?"
"Amanda Jones."
"Miss Jones, I need to get you inside so we can take a look at that arm. Okay?" She pushed past me and ran through the ER doors. I quickly followed her and followed her route to the trauma room where they took John Doe. She stood in the doorway and peered in and I stood next to her as doctors hastily worked on the patient.
"Push twenty etomidate and one hundred of sux." The monitor was beeping erratically as he was declining quickly.
"He saved my life." Amanda whispered. "The bus was gonna hit me. He threw me out of the way." I gently placed my hands on her shoulders to guide her back out to the ER, but she pulled against my touch. "It was supposed to be me under the bus. He's all alone. They don't even know who he is. Please." I bit my bottom lip as she turned back to John Doe.
"Okay, let's get a trauma series, trauma labs and O-neg blood in here." Callie ordered. "Severe avulsion injury to the left forearm." Owen took the bandage off the face is it was so swollen and cut up and cherry red you could barely tell if he had eyes. "Whoa."
"Okay, his skull is bashed in." Owen observed. "Page Shepherd."
"And Sloan. Start antibiotics and start cleaning out those wounds." I once again placed my hands on Amanda's shoulders and guided her back out to the ER and sat her down on the edge of a bed. I grabbed a suture kit and gloves and gingerly set her arm up on a stand as she stared out into space. I took the sling off and began cleaning the laceration on her arm, putting an anesthetic on it so I could start stitching it.
"You think he's gonna make it?" Amanda asked me quietly.
"I hope so." I replied softly as I prepared the final stitches on her laceration.
"He really has to make it." As I made the last stitch, I felt a familiar presence approach me from behind. Normally, I would tense up with someone approaching me from behind but, I knew this presence. I look up and over my shoulder to see Mark looking down at Amanda's arm, but he never looked at me.
"Dr. Sloan."
"There's gonna be too much tension." He said in a monotone voice that was not like him at all. "Start over and do a layered closure." I looked back down at my work in confusion. I did a subcuticular suture that I didn't think was putting a lot of tension on the skin. But who was I to question the head of plastic surgery? I looked back up at Mark.
"Um, c—uh, c-can I ask a question about that?" Mark still didn't look at me as he nodded once and walked to the side of the ER. "I'll be right back." I got up and followed him as he stared out a window, never turning to face me. I frowned and my eyes grew sad as I began to feel abandoned. "Okay, you brought up moving in together and marriage, and I put it off." Mark swallowed hard as he continued to look in front of him. "And now you're embarrassed, and you won't make eye contact with me because you feel that I have all the power in the relationship, but I don't want all the power in the relationship. I—I'm happy to share it. Can we just skip this part?" Mark looked down and grabbed a pair of gloves from the box in front of him.
"Get some 4-0 vicryl so you can redo your patient's sutures." He turned away from me and walked back over to Amanda. He turned away from. He didn't turn towards me and go back to Amanda. No. He turned away from me. I scoffed and walked off so I could go get the 4-0 vicryl.
GA
Cristina and I sat next to Meredith in the cafeteria watching her in disgust as she stuffed her sandwich down her throat. I didn't think she was even chewing, let alone tasting it. Alex walked over to us and sat down with his tray.
"You gonna chew?" Cristina questioned Meredith and she swallowed her mouth full of food hard.
"Mm." She hummed around a mouth full of food. "My dragged-under-a-bus guy's in Angio, and they're gonna page me any minute. How's Izzie? Is she retaining anything?" Izzie woke up from her surgery but now her memory reset every five minutes.
"No." Callie and Bailey walked up to the table and stood between Alex and Cristina.
"Okay, uh, at six PM, your idiotic colleague George O'Malley will finish his surgery with the chief." Bailey informed us.
"And at six PM you will be standing beside us in the OR hallway, prepared to join in an intervention." Callie added.
"What polite company might call an intervention, though I'm not sure interventions involve whooping people on the behind with a belt."
"What, he's got a drinking problem now?" Alex asked Bailey.
"He joined the army." Meredith told us and I jolted as if I just been electrocuted.
"He did what?!" I exclaimed along with Cristina, my heart racing.
"007? He can't go to the army."
"He's the guy that gets killed." Cristina said.
"He's that guy who gets killed cleaning his own gun." Alex laughed.
"That's not funny." I berated Cristina and Alex. "It doesn't matter how it happens; the point is George is going to get killed over them."
"Grey is going to coax him back as a loving friend." Bailey said, pointing to Meredith before pointing to Cristina. "You are going to use logic and reason to point out the idiocy of his ways. Wolfe is going to put her anxiety to use for once and come up with all the worst-case scenarios she can come up with to scare him. Stevens will make sad cancer eyes and if all of that doesn't work, Karev, you're gonna pull out your I was raised out back with the trash cans roots and just beat the crap out of him." Alex smiled at the thought of it.
"Six o'clock." Alex grinned.
"Six o'clock." Callie confirmed before they left the cafeteria.
GA
I rounded the corner with a stack of files in my arms of all the patients that I've dealt with in the ER so far this morning. As I entered the small room to set them down, I could file them, Mark was standing on the X-Ray illuminator with two house ads hanging up. His left arm was wrapped around his torso as his right index finger was pressed to his lips in thought.
"I thought you were operating on John Doe." I said plainly walking to the back of the room to set the stack down on the counter before turning to Mark.
"I already did." He answered, keeping his back to me. "Right now, I'm looking at houses. One has a stone fireplace, which I like. This one has a backyard the size of Montana." I crossed my arms over my chest and stuck my right foot out, putting my weight on my left hip.
"Uh-huh, you're buying a house?" Mark slowly turned to look at me and I rolled my eyes.
"Yeah. Right." I let out an amused chuckle. "Okay."
"I'm buying a house right now. It's a buyer's market, and I'm buying a house." I walked over to him, so I was only a foot away from him and looked up into his blue eyes.
"The only reason that you're even talking about a house is to make me feel bad." Mark scoffed and rolled his eyes which normally I would find incredibly attractive if it weren't directed at me. "You're trying to prove that you're moving on without me so then I'll regret my decision and change my mind." Mark narrowed his eyes at me in thought.
"Okay, is this what women are doing when they say they're moving on?"
"Yeah, they don't usually take out a home loan to do it, but—" I shrugged my shoulders at him.
"Pathetic. Let me be clear. I'm moving on." He snatched one of the house ads from the board. "I'm a better woman than you." He left the room and I stared after him, scoffing. How was anyone say to respond to that? What we had going on was so perfect and wonderful and surreal. Were we ever going to move past this?