Chapter Summary: Six weeks after Shaun and Lea's daughter is born, Lea dies from a rare postpartum complication. Shaun is saddened by it and is in denial about it.
AN: I just really miss the fanfics about Shaun and his life. And while I still ship Shea, I will always hate the way the show decided to pair them up and the way their characters were written in 3x17-3x18. So, while everything is canon-compliant, I'm just going to say that Shaun and Lea did eventually work things out in a healthy way soon after the credits rolled and went to therapy early on in their relationship. They also apologized for their behavior. And don't worry, in this story, things have gotten better for Claire and Carly. I just realized that I didn't include Kenny in the list of hardships that Shaun went through, and I was super pissed about that. I also wanted to include mentions of Shaun in med school since I just thought about the bullying that happens to some med students. I also thought I should give everyone a brief and quick overview of what happened in this story after 3x20.
Dr. Shaun Murphy sat alone in his apartment full of numbness, somberly staring off into space at his empty beer bottle on the coffee table while the TV screen was playing The Weather Channel. His face was teary, red, irritated, and unshaven. His eyes were stinging with tears of grief that streamed down to his chin. Snot was seeping out of his nose, irritating his nostrils and the skin above his upper lip. He hadn't showered in days, and he hadn't had a good night's sleep for six weeks.
All his life, he was used to personal misfortunes and catastrophes.
For as long as he could remember, his alcoholic father would abuse him, Steve, and their mother, and she did nothing to protect them; Shaun often took the brunt of all of it. Since kindergarten, he was constantly bullied and teased in school. Classmates have dumped on and thrown things at him: food, a ball or two, rocks, dirt, sticks, pee balloons (yes, pee balloons). He has been wedgied, pantsed, spat on, submerged head-first in toilet water, pushed into mud, tossed into dumpsters, beaten up, punched in the face, punched and kicked in the abdomen, kicked in the groin, and many other things. His teachers and the school faculty would often blame him for it, telling him it was his fault for not being like the other students. The most humiliating moment ever experienced was when Colleen Myers, the girl he had a crush on, tried to trick him into exposing himself. He thankfully didn't agree to pull down his pants for her, but it still hurt him that everyone at school thought he was. He was kicked out of so many schools for "behavioral problems".
When he was 14, his father snatched his rabbit straight from his arms and violently threw her against the wall in a rage, killing her instantly. This prompted him and Steve to run away from home and live in an abandoned bus, where they were also introduced to other problems such as hunger, poison oak, tetanus, lice, bedbugs, animals that could have rabies, rattlesnakes, mountain lions, bears, and berries they couldn't eat because they might be poisonous. Steve later died a gruesome death when he slipped and fell off that train they were playing on in an abandoned building that smelled like burnt food. He was never going to forget the sound of Steve's neck snapping as his head hit the concrete ground. The three foster homes he lived in afterward weren't any better.
Things slowly got better after Dr. Glassman took him in, but even during adulthood, Shaun still had hardships thrown in his face. During his rotations in med school, he didn't have the nicest teachers. One of them, Dr. Holiday, would tell him and his peers that they were worthless and threaten them with bad grades or a ruined career if they didn't do what he said, even if they knew he was wrong about something. He was so much worse than Dr. Han. If it weren't for Dr. Glassman or even that viral video of him saving Adam's life at the airport (he hated that someone posted a video of that, though), he never would have been hired to work at St. Bonaventure. Although Dr. Melendez died having full respect for him, he wasn't very fair to Shaun during the years of his residency...and neither was Dr. Andrews. Except for Claire, nobody at St. Bonaventure treated him like he belonged during the first half of his first year.
After he and Lea went on a nice road trip and shared their first kiss, she moved away to Hershey and then Kenny moved in next to him and they became friends after Dr. Glassman told him he couldn't be his friend anymore. Not long after Kenny turned out to be a crook who was using Shaun, Dr. Glassman was diagnosed with cancer. Then, without warning, Lea returned and this resulted in them having a big fight. Everything that went on during his second year of residency - Dr. Glassman's battle with cancer, the pain of seeing Lea with Jake, Dr. Han kicking him out of surgery and into pathology, and getting injured in a barfight - was the worst. He eventually got his job back and got a date with Carly, but things weren't calm for long.
After revisiting his abusive father on his death bed, Carly breaking up with him because she saw that he and Lea loved each other, getting arrested, and then him and Lea mutually confessing their love to each other, there was a long and toxic dispute between the two of them that almost ended their friendship. It took them almost dying in the earthquake for Lea to start getting over her insecurities and also for them to start going to therapy and talking things out so they could make their whole friendship and relationship healthy again. Unfortunately, Dr. Melendez died from the injuries he received during the earthquake. For Shaun and the rest of his colleagues, losing one of their mentors was hard.
Things didn't get better after the earthquake either. Both he and Lea started to suffer from posttraumatic stress from the earthquake. Well, for Shaun, the earthquake only added to it with the trauma he suffered from as a kid. They would have nightmares and flashbacks about it. Not much longer after Lea moved back in with him, the coronavirus pandemic and the quarantine made things even more stressful. They had to have their therapy sessions via video chat and they were at risk for the virus since they worked at a hospital. Even though staying at home was what Shaun preferred, he hated that he and Lea had to spend their free time stuck indoors and had to wear masks every time they left their apartment or went to work.
A few months after the social distancing nightmare ended, Lea found out that she was pregnant with Shaun's child. It wasn't planned at all, but they both decided that they would make this work, and they did. Since that moment, things started to get better for Shaun despite Lea's difficult pregnancy and labor. When their daughter, Eleanor "Nell" Clementine, was born, it was the peak of their happiness and Shaun's happiness. Aside from the stress of the sleepless nights and a needy newborn, Shaun was able to live a conflict/tragedy-free and smooth life for six weeks. It looked like things were slowly getting better...until now.
Just this morning, Lea went away from him again, and this time she was never coming back and it wasn't her choice. All because of one massive, violent postpartum eclamptic seizure...right in front of his eyes.
Since Baby Nell was spending the night with Dr. Glassman and Debbie so Shaun could have some moments alone, he finally earned the opportunity to get the sleep he desperately needed and also to shower and shave.
But instead, he spent the night downing a couple of beers and watching The Weather Channel. For at least one minute, he just wanted to get his mind off of his grief and guilt, and this documentary about "Terrible Tuesday" and all the talk about the Red River Valley tornado outbreak that struck Wichita Falls, Texas and its surrounding areas on April 10, 1979 seemed to be a good distraction.
He didn't want to think about how difficult and stressful the past ten months and year had been. He didn't want to accept that he was now a single father. Shaun wished Lea wasn't dead, and Nell was all that was left of her.
He picked up his phone, turned it on, and then opened his contact list app and selected Lea's name. He pressed the call button, staring at her name and the tiny picture of her displayed on his screen. For a couple of seconds, he listened to the ringing of Lea's phone from both their bedroom - where it had been sitting charging all day - and also from the receiving end of his own phone before it finally went straight to voicemail.
"Hey, it's Lea. Leave a message and I'll call you back ASAP."
Her soft, soothing, sweet voice was a comforting sound for him to hear. It made him felt like she was still here. More tears squeezed out from his eyes when he heard it.