The intern locker room was a tomb of medical textbooks and stale caffeine. George O'Malley sat on a wooden bench, his head buried in a copy of Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine, looking like a man awaiting his own autopsy.
"You're reading the chapter on endocrine disorders, George," Christopher drawled, leaning against the doorframe with a clinical boredom that felt like a physical weight. "Unless you're planning on treating a goitre in the middle of the intern exam, you're wasting your cognitive bandwidth."
George jumped, the heavy book nearly sliding off his lap. "Dr. Wright! I—I just need to be prepared. The 007 thing... I can't fail this. If I fail, I'm out."
Christopher stepped into the room, his surgical scrubs crisp, his face a mask of sharp indifference. He knew the script. He knew George was the only one destined to fail because he'd spend the exam distracted by Callie and his own insecurity.
"Close the book, O'Malley," Christopher commanded, snapping it shut with a sharp, metallic thud. "I'm not giving you a leak. I'm giving you a frontal lobe recalibration. You don't need more facts; you need a surgical spine."
For the next four hours, Christopher turned the locker room into a trauma bay. He didn't ask about hormones; he threw high-velocity case studies at George like shrapnel.
"Your patient has muffled heart sounds, jugular venous distension, and hypotension. What's the diagnosis?" Christopher barked, pacing the small space.
"Uh... cardiac tamponade?" George stammered.
"Correct. Now, you have a 14-gauge needle and six seconds before his heart stops. Where do you put it?" Christopher leaned in, his sarcasm replaced by a lethal, instructional intensity.
"The subxiphoid space!" George shouted, his adrenaline finally overriding his panic.
"Again," Christopher said, his voice a cool, unyielding blade. "Until you stop stuttering and start leading, we stay here."
By midnight, George was drenched in sweat, but his eyes were focused. He wasn't the 007 anymore; he was a surgeon being forged in the The Wright Way.
"Go home, George," Christopher said, tossing him a protein bar. "And if you let Callie Torres distract you tomorrow, I will personally reassign you to proctology for the rest of the fiscal year."
Christopher walked out to the parking lot, his phone vibrating in his pocket. "I'm at the penthouse. I ordered sushi. Stop saving the interns and come home. - Jack"
Christopher smirked, a genuine, unscripted expression. He had just re-written George's exam day. In the original timeline, George fails. But Christopher didn't like messy endings, and a confident George was a variable the script hadn't calculated for.