Vega walked slowly down the hallway, so pristine and professional that no one who didn't know it had once been the site of a gunfight would ever be able to guess it.
She hadn't been to the FWTC in months, and the signs attached to each door were names she didn't recognize. Patient Port Huron, Patient Ludlow, Patient Humble…
Humble. The town she lived in when she was initially relocated after being discharged. She wondered if she knew the person clinging to life in that room.
She was here because this location was being phased out. Largely due to her, it was determined that too many people knew of it, and that would put the people in the program – as well as the program itself – in danger. They weren't accepting new people, and when the existing patients either died or were healthy enough to move, the building would close. Then, somewhere, a new one would open. She'd heard a rumor that the new location was near the Goodfellow Air Force Base. She might never know for sure.
Angela's replacement ended up being a former nurse, Hannigan, who had alerted Wylie and Vega to the infiltration of the FWTC shortly before she was released. That assassin had been after someone called Patient Tacoma. Vega still had no idea who Patient Tacoma had been. Hannigan had been a good nurse and was now an excellent FWTC director. They would probably go to the new location, wherever it ended up being.
Vega's meeting with Hannigan had been short and to the point. If they wanted her, she would continue coming to any of the locations on the same volunteer basis that she had been here, although she had failed over the past few months.
Nonsense, Michelle. You are one of our greatest successes. You could never be a failure to us. Never.
She knew that. And it did make her proud. For all the misery she had felt since that day at the diner, physical, mental, and emotional, she also had known happiness of enormous proportions. She'd developed her intense desire to succeed in everything she did from a young age, and surviving that shooting, even though she required the best medical attention in the world to do so, was one of her greatest successes as well. This building meant a lot to her. It was where she got her second chance at life. It was where she first kissed Wylie. It was where she fell in love with him. And it was in this very hall where she, her gown soaked with Nurse Jaime's blood, held a gun in her hand for the first time since the diner and once again fell into her role as FBI Agent, the role she was born for, and protected the innocent people waiting behind these very doors.
She owed this place her life, and yet a part of her was…glad…that it was closing.
Because here, she was Patient Greenleaf. And she always would be, even now, when the faculty used her real name. She was always going to be a former resident of that room around the corner.
Vega knew that the rest of her life would be somewhat defined by her injuries; her physical capabilities would likely never be what they once were. But it was almost demoralizing to her to be remembered as Severe GSW, abdomen.
She was more than that, dammit. She was an FBI Agent. She was a wife. She was a mother – to – be.
Her son kicked her in the ribs, and Vega winced. The next kick was gentler.
Hell with mother – to – be. She was a mother already.
Vega punched in the code that would let her into the hallway that lead to the exit closest to her car. A part of her wanted to linger, if for nothing but nostalgia.
She didn't.
This place was an important part of her life, but that part of her life was over. None of her current medical struggles required top of the line techniques or machinery. Sure, she was frustrated with the limitations she had during the last weeks of her pregnancy. But she was Michelle Vega. She'd beaten worse than this. The past few weeks were nothing but stepping stones to the future. That future might be, in part, helping to inspire future patients in these futuristic military hospitals. But it wouldn't include this building any more. It didn't make all that much sense to her, but the closing of the facility she'd decided only seven months ago to not make the rest of her life was somehow giving her a closure she didn't know she needed.
Vega pushed open the door and nodded to the guard before she headed to her car, her hand stroking her stomach.
She didn't look back.
