Disclaimer: Nothing's mine.

A/N: Paris steps in. Felt kind of intense, writing this chapter. I'm curious how you feel about it.

Doctor Geller and Doctor Henderson were glaring at each other in a glass window walled office in St Benedict's Trauma Center.

Doctor Geller was seemingly losing her patience. Or maybe she simply acted with irritated frustration towards the whole outside world, considering discussing medical cases with another medical professional a shameless waste of air. She seemed like the kind of doctor who effectively scared their patients into health and rarely needed help doing that.

'He can't lose his leg,' she said for the umpteenth time.

'That's what you've been repeating for the last hour.'

'Duh. Because it's the truth.'

'The truth is he may go septic in a matter of hours if we don't act on the infection.'

'Then act on the infection,' she looked up at the ceiling as if asking for divine help. Why were all doctors who weren't her complete dumb-shells, eh? Why?

She took a steadying breath and told herself to be cool.

'I saw you got i.v. antibiotic started,' she said with forced patience. 'If his leg is iced and cooled to ninety degrees there is a fair chance we may slow necrosis.'

'You're only delaying the inevitable,' Dr Henderson shook his head.

'Not if we manage to get full reperfusion.'

'This is insane.'

'Not insane, just harder than average.'

'You need a highly qualified team for such kind of surgery.'

'Then I'll get one. Imagine that, had I not been rendered to argue the obvious, I would've gotten that team together. But no - here you are wasting my time.'

'Are you always this stubborn?'

'Always.'

'He has localized infection now. He's gonna get a generalized infection and turn from stable to critical in a matter of hours. Are you really gonna take that risk?'

'Yes.'

'Well I'm not.'

'He chose me to be his emergency contact. I'm the person he chose to make those decisions for him.'

'And I'm his attending doctor meaning I'm gonna set the range of decisions you may choose from.'

'I'm gonna file charges.'

'Pleading what exactly?'

'I'll think of something.'

'I'm sure you will.'

'Okay, try me. I'll start with professional incompetence and lack of integrity.'

'Excuse me?.'

Paris huffed, the whole exchange draining her already battered nerves.

'You know there is a chance we can save his leg, you're just too queasy to take it,' she said with contempt.

'I'm scrupulous, not queasy.'

'Your scrupulousness may cost a young fit man his leg.'

'Is this about him being... fit?' Dr Henderson asked disbelievingly. Was this woman completely insane?

'You don't understand, do you?' Paris shook her head. 'He is a very physical person. He's always been a jock. His body has always been his temple and a huge part of how he interacts with the outside world depends on him feeling fit. It's always been who he is, much more than it has been for you or me.'

'So now you know me too, huh?'

'Oh please. If you were like that, we wouldn't be leading this conversation, because you would understand without me having to explain it to you.'

Dr Henderson folded both arms before his chest, a look of displeasure on his face. He was gonna say no to the surgery. She saw it in his eyes. She took a breath.

'You know what one of the first socially embedded concepts we get in childhood is?' Paris asked, forcing some of the belligerence out of her voice and replacing it with her calm reasoning tone... if she ever had such a tone. Oh, hell with it. She had to make that obtuse man see. 'Shame,' she answered her own question, not giving him enough time to come up with a wrong answer. 'Right after love and trust and the feeling of our own self, shame is one of the first feelings society teaches a young human.'

She took another breath,telling herself it was now or never.

'I know Tristan Dugray, and he is never been ashamed of a single thing he's done. He is far from perfect, he's this hybrid between chauvinistic pig, ridiculous clown and considerate human being, and he's never been pretending to be anything else. He is who he is and he's never felt an ounce of regret about what this ensues. If you take away his chance to keep that, you're gonna change him irrevocably. I'm asking you to give him a chance.'

'You're willing to risk leaving his son without a father for the slime chance of this guy keeping his male ego intact?'

Paris chewed on her lower lip, the concern in her frown deepening.

'He chose me to act in his best interest. This is what I'm trying to do.'

'If he wasn't your friend, if he was just a patient and you had to make this decision as his attending doctor, what would you do?' Dr Henderson asked, his eyes sharp.

Paris sighed, knowing he had a fair point. Matthew Henderson was a chauvinist. Maybe not the disrespectful kind, but he was a manly male. A man of reason. In his eyes, she was just another crazed hormone-driven female led by her overtly emotional judgement. And she got that. She did. Because in all other situations, she was the voice of unadulterated reason. She was the harsh truth. In any other situation, had their roles been switched, she would be the chauvinist. But she knew Tristan. This morning he had went out of his apartment building and walked by some building in construction. A couple of different sized construction blocks slipped out as a security belt snapped loose, resulting in a couple of casualties, Tristan included. one could say they were lucky. There were no death cases, only people with different versions of broken this and bruised that. Tristan got a concussion that resulted in a (as the consulting neurologist assured her numerous times) temporary loss of consciousness and a smashed left shin. She had required to see his leg as soon as she got the call and arrived at the hospital. It wasn't pretty. The trauma was extensive, engaging the nerves and vessels, as well as the muscles and bones. Everything was a bleeding mush of bone and muscle and decisions had to be made quickly. Tristan would probably regain consciousness in a couple of hours. They didn't have hours. A decision had to be made. And that's why Paris was here, leading a heated debate with Dr Chauvinism is Us.

If he wasn't your friend, if he was just a patient and you had to make this decision as his attending doctor, what would you do?

The question was still lingering, the air filled with a heavy silence. She hadn't answered it, Paris realized. Not out loud. She looked the man before her square in the eyes. If he was just a patient and you had to make this decision as his attending doctor, what would you do?

'I'm not his attending doctor. That's what he has you for,' she said with what sounded to Dr Henderson a little like sadness, if people like her were ever capable of feeling sadness at all.

'You wouldn't be willing to risk losing a patient over his chance to save his leg,' he answered for her, not needing affirmation that he was right. He was, she had let him read it in her eyes.

'But I'm willing to ask you to do exactly this,' she jutted her chin out, keeping the eyelock.

They kept the stare off for what felt like hours but was probably a couple of minutes. At last Dr Henderson let out a sigh.

'Four hours. If you don't get a team and arrange surgery in the next four hours, I'm gonna proceed with distal amputation. If he starts crashing because of crush syndrome, I'm gonna proceed with amputation regardless your four hours. If he wakes up earlier, I'm gonna do my best to convince him to go with amputation anyway. Do you understand me?'

Finally.

'Don't distract me. I'm gonna need the fucking Avengers team here in less than an hour,' Paris mumbled to herself, leaving the room as she fished for her mobile.

'Have you formed a game plan for the afternoon with Aiden?' Rory asked Jess while she was changing her trainers for her new pair of ankle boots to get ready for work. They had managed to get Josh to kindergarten and Aiden to school without too much fuss. Being a surgeon had its perks. For example, when you suddenly turned missing, your friends could always tell your son you got an emergency call from the hospital and got called in for a surgery. Which was technically true, for both Paris and Tristan. By a far stretch.

Rory was getting ready to go work a shorter shift since she had to take Josh from kindergarten later in the afternoon and managed to swap shifts with a colleague anesthesiologist. It was Jess' day off so he had taken his shoes off and was moving around the kitchen making tea.

'There's a Nick Saluk's exhibition, I'm taking him after school,' Jess answered. 'What about you and Josh?'

'I'm taking Josh to Monkey See Monkey Do Bookstore after work. There's gonna be a Winnie the Pooh gig. For weeks Josh has been bugging me to tell him which character I am, so I made a quick search on our way back this morning.'

'Which character you are,' Jess repeated, pausing with a teabag over his steaming mug to give her a thoughtful look. Then, as he seemingly found the answer, he smirked contently and dipped the tea into the water, letting it simmer. 'You're Pooh.'

'Oh come on, I always thought I'm Tigger,' Rory said while jumping on one leg, trying to get her foot into her ankle boot. 'Cheery-friendly-quirky - see, that's practically me. I even rhymed that one,' she gave him a wink.

'You're Pooh,' Jess insisted. 'He's the one who connects them all, he is the glue to their little weirdo party.'

Rory swept imaginary sweat off her forehead, taking a deep breath of relief as she managed to stuff both feet into their respective boots.

'Phew.'

'If they're so uncomfortable, why did you buy them?' he gestured towards her boots.

Ah, men would never understand shoes.

'Cause I'm off to conquer the world?' she shrugged.

Jess' brows rose skeptically, eyeing her boots.

'Somehow I doubt these are the right shoes.'

'Right... Eeyore.'

Rory had just shimmied into her coat when her phone rang. She fished it out of her bag and checked the caller ID.

'It's Rabbit,' she whisper-informed Jess before picking up.

'Hey, Paris. Did he wake up?'

She listened to Paris' answer, frowning a little.

'Oh. I see. But that's... good, right?'

Jess threw her a questioning look and Rory shrugged with a puzzled expression.

'But he is gonna get better, right? I mean, you're calling the A-team and they're gonna try to resume intact perfusion...' she half-asked, half-hopefully-guessed. 'Alright, alright. Sorry for sounding like an antsy relative.'

She handed Jess the mobile with a sulky expression.

'She wants to talk to you.'

Jess took the mobile.

'Paris.'

He listened for a while, his brow furrowing in thought. He wetted his lower lip and gave a small nod to no one in particular. He listened for another moment, then a small smile tugged at the corner of his mouth.

'Paris, you know what you're doing.'

With that, he gave Rory the mobile back. She looked between her phone and Jess.

'What was that?' she asked incredulously.

Jess rubbed his jaw pensively.

'Paris is having decision freakout. She asked me to listen her out and then tell her that she knows what she's doing without questioning her, so that's what I did. Then she hung up.'

'Oh.'

There was a pang in Rory's chest at the fact that Paris would turn to Jess in moments of insecurity. They had this special bond between them, the bond that forms between survivors who had to be on their own for too long. She couldn't fully understand it and sometimes felt like a child left out of a room where grown-up adults were discussing a serious problem. Somehow, the fact that she had a family she could count on made her the odd one here and every once in a while this imposed isolation would bug her. Not enough to pick up a fight, she wasn't some sort of friend-possession crazed chic after all. It just made her feel a little left out. Like today. Paris was her friend first, wasn't Rory supposed to be the best friend, and not Jess? Rory shook her head at the thought, realizing how childish it was.

'She does, right?' she asked then, making Jess look up at her.

'Huh?'

'Know what she's doing. She does, doesn't she?'

Jess let out a pensive sigh.

'She's Paris.'

Whatever that meant.

He took another breath and shrugged.

'If anyone can get this done, that's her. She's Rabbit, after all. Rabbit gets Tigger out of all kinds of trouble.'

The hospital room was dusky and quiet. The only light coming in came from the streetlamps through the closed windows. It was still mid-afternoon but the sun set down earlier these days.

Paris made a couple of steps and stopped before reaching the bed.

'Have you paid attention to your nose?' she asked the man sleeping in the hospital bed. How convenient of him, to have a concussion when important decisions had to be made. 'How it somehow doesn't belong to the rest of your face? It's pinched and... insufficient when you smile, it just doesn't work with the chin and eyes, have you noticed?'

The room was silent. Only the low buzz of the monitor's inflatable cuff could be heard as it measured Tristan's blood pressure.

'Sometimes this gave me some loose sense of comfort in high school - you know, when you were being an ass to me. At least he has an insufficient nose, I would tell myself.'

Paris moved her mouth to the side, folding her arms before her chest, looking elsewhere but at him.

'Your attending doctor is a clutz and Mercury has been in retrograde since last Monday. How do you exactly expect me to handle this?'

She drew in a sharp breath and let it out shakily, licking her lips.

'Could you drag your work-shy brain back here so we could get back to our natural routine where I'm annihilating your ego and you're letting me because you take sick pleasure in it? Because this stunt you're pulling on me... The kids are with Rory and Jess, we haven't told Aiden yet. Do you realize that if there's any existing etiquette for getting hit by collapsing concrete elements, you're violating it completely?' she looked around the room, carefully avoiding his peacefully unconscious face. 'You're gonna be taken to the OR a couple of minutes from now and get operated on. That's what you get for enlisting me as your emergency contact.'

Paris bit both of her lips in, risking a brief glance at him. He was such an organic guy. She was already risking too much, insisting on having the surgery intended to save his leg done. However, if something went wrong, she would have to let Henderson proceed with amputation.

It could be worse, she tried to tell herself. Distal knee amputation wasn't as bad as femoral amputation... Who was she kidding, Tristan and a bionic prosthesis worked even less than his insufficient nose amidst his grinning face.

'Don't fail me okay?' she asked in a smaller, pleading voice right before she turned and left the room.

In another part of the city, there was a book-walled room with a cozy little stage surrounded by a couple dozens of tiny wooden chairs. On one end of the stage a plush rabbit toy was setting a bird free while on the other end a plush bear and its fellow piglet were sitting on a small hill, looking at the sunset. The bear said he hoped spring was coming soon as he couldn't wait to see Kessie again. The piglet found it peculiar as all this time he thought Rabbit didn't like the bird. The bear said that sometimes people cared too much and he thought it was called love. This amazed the piglet who asked if they should go tell Rabbit. The bear reassured the piglet that he believed Rabbit already knew.

TBC