A/N: Your reviews means the world to me. Leave me a comment and let me know what you think!
Chapter 2
The elevator's door opened. Burke walked out from the elevator swiftly. The institute looked the same, the staff, the decorations, the floor plan, the scrubs, everything is just the same as when he leaves.
Well, technically he never really left.
"Preston! What a surprise!"
He turned and see his former colleague, Weiss, grinning at him.
"Weiss. I am just stopping by and trying to see if everything's okay."
"I remember telling you a thousand times that you really don't need to be worry. Cristina did a wonderful job in running the institute. She started a lot of new policies to attract young, gifted surgeons. And I have to say, they worked! We've now got interns and residents from all over the world. World renowned surgeons also flew here to perform ground-breaking surgeries from time to time."
The two men walked down the hallways while Weiss keep babbling how wonderful Cristina is. Burke remained a faint smile while feeling super proud for Cristina inside. Suddenly, something caught his attention and widen his eyes disbelievingly.
An attending and an intern walked out from an on-call room while tidying their clothes, thought no one had saw them, and quickly walked away to different directions.
Weiss felt drops of sweat dripping down his forehead. What would his boss – his former boss- think of them? Slutty interns and slutty attendings get horny at work and hooking up in on-call rooms?
"For your information, those doesn't happen around here very often." Weiss explains to Burke, hoping he will not get mad and scold them for allowing these kind of things happen.
Out of his expectation, Burke laughed and said: "Well I guess that is another tradition from Seattle brought in by Cristina."
A confused Weiss stood there watching Burke walked away, trying figure out what exactly he means.
"Last night was completely a mistake." Cristina grumbled as she pull on her scrub top. "We should not be doing that, what was I thinking! It must be the alcohol."
She tied her hair into a ponytail swiftly, turned around and saw that Burke was still sleeping. She massaged her forehead and regretting the sex last night.
To be honest, it was great, hot and nostalgic. But her logic tell her that it is wrong. The man she had sex with is married, with kids. And she was supposed to be with Owen, even they are hundreds of miles apart. She SHOULD be in love with Owen, being with Owen is the RIGHT thing to do. But somehow she no longer had idea of what is correct and what is wrong as long as Preston Burke is involved.
She pinches herself to stop thinking about her messy personal life, and poured a cup of coffee down her throat to concentrate on the surgeries coming up. She put on her lab coat and left her office without waking Burke.
When Burke woke up, it had already been hours later. He sat up on the couch and saw a cup of cold coffee on the table beside him. He took the cup of coffee and drank it at once, and he saw the piece of note from the corner of his eyes.
"Burke, Last night should not be happening. Let's just pretend nothing happened and move on. C."
He crumpled the piece of paper into a ball and tossed it into the bin. He stood up and put on his shirt, while staring at the photo of Cristina and the interns on their first day of internship. He missed the days when he was working at Seattle Grace, he missed her. He thought last night was a sign of him having her back, but it seems like he was wrong. She didn't plan on coming back to him. But who can he blame? He was the one walked out on them.
Lifelong of regret seems to be the punishment for him to presume he is doing the correct thing to the woman he loves when he walked away.
The phone at Cristina's office rang suddenly. He hesitated for a moment, and reached to answer the phone.
"Hello, Dr Yang?"
"No, it is Dr Burke, Dr Yang is not in her office now."
"Oh, I thought… Never mind, thank you sir, we will see if she is in surgery."
"What happened?"
"The Zurich hospital of children just transferred a case to us, it's a 12 years old boy that have tumour in his heart. His resident, Dr Ross, said he would need a humpty dumpty surgery immediately. And Dr Yang isn't answering her page. So we decided to call her office to see if she was there."
"Tell Dr Ross to prepare the patient for a humpty dumpty surgery. And call the OR, tell them we will need a lot of blood. This surgery will need more than one leading surgeon, so I will be scrubbing in with Dr Yang. Speaking of that, try look for her in the 3D printer lab. She is probably there." Burke thought of it for a second, and order the nurse calmly.
"Right away, doctor."
He hung up the phone. Changed his suit into scrubs and left the office.
The next time he saw Cristina was in the OR. She walked into the OR, seemed surprised by Burke's presence.
"I thought you were on the plane now." She took a piece of sterile cloth from a nurse, and started to dry her hands.
"Dr Burke said you will need an extra set of hands for this surgery, so he postponed the flight to scrub in. Sir, it is an honour to see you perform a Humpty-Dumpty surgery." Shane answered for Burke, and began flattering him.
"Suck-up." Cristina hissed. Shane shrugged his shoulders, not care of her comment as he was going to witness THE Preston Burke operates.
"Alright, let's start the surgery. 10 blade." Burke cleared his throat to stop the childish argument that is about to start.
The surgery started smoothly, and quickly reached the part that requires the heart to be taken out from the chest. Cristina carefully took the heart out and placed it in the basin Shane has been holding for her.
"Nice work Dr Yang. You really have improved a hell lot." Burke smiled behind his mask. She is definitely his best student, also his proudest one.
"Dr Burke, I know that you worked at Grey-Sloan before, is Dr Yang one of your students?" Shane asked curiously, not noticing Cristina's death glare.
"To be exact, I worked at Grey-Sloan when it was still called Seattle Grace. And yes, Dr Yang is one of my student, also Dr Grey and Dr Karev." Burke answered the resident eagerly despite Cristina telling him to shut up by her glances.
"It is very lucky to have you as a teacher, I hope my teachers can be as good as you too."
"Hey hey, what do you mean by that? Are you saying that I am not qualified as your teacher? I am standing right here Ross!" Cristina complained while scraping off another mass from the heart.
"Dr Yang is an excellent teacher too, I am sure you can learn a lot from her." Burke chuckled at her childish hassle, while acknowledging her skills.
Cristina shot him a glimpse with complicated emotion inside. And quickly lowered her head again to work on the heart.
"So Dr Burke, can you tell me some of the most exciting cases you have encountered?"
"Sure. I remember when I was still working at Seattle Grace, I instructed two interns to operate on a heart in the elevator."
"Really? What happened?"
"There was a black out, and the interns were stuck in the elevator with the patient. The patient was coding and the only way to save him is to open his chest immediately. So I talked them through the procedure, and they cracked his chest in the elevator to save the patient. That is an unforgettable surgery in my career, but not the most dangerous one."
"There are cases even more exciting than this one?"
"Well there was another time, a guy with a bomb inside him came in, and I have to operate on him."
Cristina shot her head up when she heard him talking about the code black incident. It was nearly 10 years ago, but the incident that almost took the life of Meredith and Burke still pops up vividly from time to time. It was the worst nightmare for her, a hundred times worse than the gunman incident, probably because the man she loves was there, on the blink of death.
"I still remembered it was Meredith, well Dr Grey, who put her hand into the body cavity to stabilize the bomb. Very brave act, but also reckless. Then the bomb squad came to remove the bomb. Unfortunately, the bomb exploded after being removed from the patient." Burke closed his eyes trying to recall every detail.
"Wow! Dr Yang, were you there when the patient with a bomb in him came in?" Cristina rolled her eye at Shane's question. She silently damned him over and over for asking inappropriate questions.
"Yes, I was there." Cristina answered. The scene of Burke telling her to leave the OR popped up in her head. Waves of panic hit her, and made her mind shifted for a few second, unable to focus at the work she is doing.
"Damn it Cristina! What are you doing!" Burke shouted anxiously, and brought Cristina back from her daydreaming.
She looked down to see what happened, and realize that she had been scraping the same spot for too long and too hard that she had caused damage to the cardiac wall. At that point, she felt like being dropped into a frozen lake, her brain stopped working and her nerves can no longer transmit impulses to her muscles. She became a statue when she saw the heart in front of her bleed uncontrollably.
"Clamps. Give me more lap pads, keep on suctioning. Faster faster people! 2-0 prolene." Burke moved towards the basin and stepped in for Cristina. She was apparently shocked from the injury she had made to the heart, and now she is holding a scalpel and freezing at the same spot. He sighed and said, "Dr Ross, step in to replace Dr Yang."
The young resident hesitated. He don't have the guts to kick his mentor away from the table. But he surely don't want to ignore the orders from THE Preston Burke. God knows what would happen if he enraged the best cardio-thoracic surgeon in the world.
Shane quickly scanned through his options in his mind, and decided to choose the one with less consequence: step in and replace his mentor. He carefully removed the forceps and scalpels from Cristina's fist, and stood beside her, began suctioning.
Burke took a moment to look at Cristina, and saw a pair of familiar eyes on her face. She was frightened. He knows that look better than anyone else, as he had seen that before, when she was helping him to hide his tremors while operating on the pregnant lady that had a piece of glass shot into her heart.
After the surgery ended, Burke finished the chart for Cristina and entered the scrub room to clean up. He saw Cristina there, leaning against the sink and biting her nails. He stopped in front of the sink, grabbing a bar of sterile soap, started washing his hands and began to talk.
"You know, just now you should not froze in there. Tell me, what is on your mind and what is scaring you." He turned his head towards her, waiting for her response.
"And stop biting your nails. You are a surgeon, you know fingernails are dirty."
A moment of silence passed, and Cristina finally spoke up.
"You. YOU are what is scaring me." Her eyes were filled with tears.
"What?"
"Why do YOU have to return to MY life after seven years. Why do YOU have to offer ME your institute. Why do YOU have to bring ME here. Why do YOU have to come back to ME and tell me that you have a wife and two daughters now? Why do I still have feelings for you even you broke my heart? Your existence is scaring the crap out of me. Because I was supposed to be working very hard in Zurich and doing ground-breaking surgeries here. And I was supposed to love Owen. These are the correct things to do. And things that a sane Cristina Yang would do." The tears that are accumulating in her eyes finally overflow, tears ran down her cheeks crazily. She covered her face in her palms and allowed her emotion to take over her for a while.
He couldn't say a word. He always think that him leaving on their wedding is his blessing to her. She no longer need to bend herself just to make him happy. She will never need to be "Preston Burke's wife the cardio surgeon" and live under his shadow, she can be "Cristina Yang the cardio surgeon". Once, when he accidentally ran into Addison in Paris, she told him that Cristina got married with a trauma surgeon. He was then sure that he was not the one for her, although the news of her getting married broke his heart, he was happy that his departure is able to make her happy. He was happy to hear that she had found her meant to be.
But at this moment, the thing he had believed for seven years turns out to be his delusion. He thought he made a good call, but he never thought that she hasn't been able to move past the damage he had done even after all these years.
"I am sorry. I never… I thought me leaving is the best thing that has ever happened to you. I thought you would be happy if I left. I don't know how to make it up to you. But if you want me to leave, I will go. For good. I will never exist in your life again…"
"Don't you dare say a word about leaving anymore. You cannot just come back into my life this moment and disappear the next." Cristina closed her eyes and allowed her tears to rush down her face even more fiercely.
Burke pulled her into his arms and stroke her hair. He can felt that Cristina's body stop shivering gradually, and her breath slowed down to a normal rate. The two of them stood there, hugging each other quietly, until Cristina bit on Burke's shoulder hardly.
"Owwww! Cristina what are you doing! You can at least give me a heads up!" Burke howled in pain. Cristina giggled and say, "That's your punishment for making me freak out in the OR in front of my people."
Burke quickly kissed her lips, and replied, "This is me saying sorry."