A/N: I have revised this chapter, changing the order of the segments, and tweaking a few words in the second to last paragraph. Hopefully this will read a little better and be more congruent with the characters. Thanks to eTara and Rachel2008 for some really great constructive comments!

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Owen's memory card had burned a hole in Cristina's pocket throughout the remainder of her shift, and she couldn't wait to get home and take a look. She felt guilty for wanting to pry, but was so intensely curious she could barely contain herself. When she finally got home she went straight to her room, and now she sat cross-legged on her bed with her laptop, carefully perusing the photos from Owen's camera. The group shot he had referred to was toward the end of the roll, which made sense given the sequence of events he had described to her. There were also a bunch of shots of his base, a couple of blurry photos of a dog, and a good assortment of people shots – fellow doctors, medics, nurses, a few enlisted people. One shot of Owen with his arm around the shoulder of another soldier seemed to cry out Best Friend! The look on Owen's face was so full of brotherly affection that it nearly took her breath away, and she spent some time examining the other man. He was tanned, good-looking, and had a kind expression in his eyes. The hand he was playfully aiming at Owen's jaw bore a wedding ring.

The group shot, though… the group shot just about blew her away. Cristina took her time going over it in detail. Twenty people, mostly men but a few women, all in desert fatigues, posing in front of a Humvee. The same dog from the earlier part of the roll was lying down in the dirt in the foreground. Someone must have cracked a joke just before the picture was taken, because everyone was laughing. Owen stood slightly left of center, hand on the shoulder of the same guy from the previous photo, elbow crooked around the neck of another in playful roughhousing. Not that she knew anything much about the military, but even to her untrained eye this had the look of a longstanding, cohesive group - a unit one returned to the sandpit for, rather than taking a cushy job offer at a nice hospital in Seattle. No wonder he went back. Recalling the day they had first met in the context of this photo, all of the missing pieces now fell into place for Cristina.

And they were all dead now… all except Owen. It was devastating to imagine this was possible, and sobering to think that but for a miracle, Owen could have been another casualty: that hot guy who breezed in, kissed her unexpectedly, and returned stateside in a box. She would never have known what happened to him, and would probably always have wondered. Seeing the vitality and connection that fairly exuded from the photo, it seemed completely inconceivable that all of these people were gone. Now she felt she understood Owen's resistance to revisiting this photo, and his willingness to hand this task off to her. It did not escape her that he had entrusted her with something incredibly precious.

Omigod, she thought. This is huge. This is fucking enormous. A sense of hopelessness settled in on her as she realized the magnitude of the hurdle their relationship was facing. No wonder he doesn't want to get too close...

Scanning through the whole card again, she was struck by the difference in the Owen Hunt in these pictures and the one she was currently dating – if you could even call it dating at this point. In every photo, there was that smile – that cocky, smartass smile that had drawn her like a magnet the first day she met him. He was clearly into the adventure, loving life, taking chances… While she had seen him smile a number of times since his return from Iraq, she had caught only small glimpses of that particular smile since that first day. Now she knew where he had lost it – and she desperately wanted it back, for his sake as much as for hers.

She printed out the photo, shut down the computer, and got ready for bed - daring to hope that tomorrow would move him one step forward on the path to a new beginning.

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By the time Owen arrived home, he was a mess of nervous energy. The uneasy feelings had started to percolate in his gut as soon as he'd made the decision that tomorrow was going to be his cemetery day. They had developed momentum after he handed over the memory card to Cristina, and had reached a crescendo when he nastily chewed out an intern for a mistake that even a seasoned resident might make. Whoever-she-was had scurried away in tears. He was angry at himself for losing it, but had not sought her out or apologized; she was small potatoes in a much bigger picture. Besides, this was not the first time he had felt his anger leaking out sideways, and it probably wouldn't be the last. He left work with the intention of holing up in his apartment until the feeling passed.

But it didn't pass, and as the evening wore on things only got worse. He tried to distract himself with the TV, but turned it off in frustration a few minutes later. He felt like the little boy with his finger in the dike in that old story, trying desperately to keep the flood at bay – only the dike was now the size of the Hoover Dam, and more cracks were splitting off from that one hole until the whole thing threatened to burst. I really want to hit something right now, he thought. Or stomp it to a pulp. No…, I want to punch a hole in the wall… The anger welled up inside him as the cracks widened. Actually, he realized, what I want to do is FUCK something…just FUCK it really hard until I'm completely spent. The idea of ramming himself with no consideration or finesse into some willing subject seemed to offer the only semblance of relief he could conjure up. Cristina immediately came to mind, and he recoiled at the thought. This was what he was afraid would happen between them if he wasn't careful. He pictured himself in the alley outside Joe's, this time not breaking off contact, but continuing where a dark and shadowy piece of him had wanted to go that night – ripping off her clothes, ramming her right into the wall… A disaster… This would be a disaster. Whatever sweetness could be derived from her willing softness would be trampled under the force of this unrelenting despair. He would destroy not only himself but her in the process, and he would regret it for the rest of his life. Thank God, that night, he had come to his senses in time.

Shit, he shook his head, I'm really, really fucked up. His anger had been on a slow simmer since he had come back from Iraq, but things were reaching a whole new level tonight. He instinctively knew it must be connected with his plans for the next day, but knowing that intellectually didn't make any of it go away. The gym, he thought, I'll go work this off at the gym. Without giving himself a chance to overthink it, he grabbed his gym bag and keys, and headed out the door.

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