The ambulance bay was a mangled cathedral of steel and the acrid, terrifying scent of leaking gasoline. Stan Giamatti was pinned, his lower half crushed by the weight of two emergency vehicles. In the original canon, Stan was a dead man walking, destined to bleed out the moment the Jaws of Life released the pressure.
"Richard, I need to perform a REBOA," Christopher said, his voice a razor-sharp monotone as he knelt in the oil slick.
Richard Webber stopped, his hands slick with Stan's blood. "A Resuscitative Endovascular Balloon Occlusion of the Aorta? Christopher, that's a theatre procedure. We're standing in a gasoline spill with a spark risk that could level this wing!"
"If we wait for the OR, Stan is a statistic," Christopher countered, his sarcasm momentarily replaced by a lethal, clinical focus. "I can blind-insert the catheter through the femoral artery. It will internalize the pressure. It buys us the twenty minutes the fire department needs to cut him out."
Richard looked at Stan—the man who had driven ambulances for twenty years. He looked at the looming explosion risk.
"Do it," Richard whispered, his voice thick with dread. "But if you nick the aorta in the dark, I'm stripping your license before the smoke clears."
"I don't nick things, Richard. I improve them," Christopher drawled, grabbing the REBOA kit from a stunned George O'Malley.
The next ten minutes were a symphony of high-stakes trauma. Christopher worked in the cramped, oily space under the overturned rig, his fingers navigating the femoral pulse by tactile memory alone. The Jaws of Life roared nearby, sending shivers of vibration through the chassis.
"Balloon up," Christopher commanded. He felt the resistance. He knew the anatomy of the aorta like a map of his own home.
Blip. Blip. Blip.
Stan's blood pressure stabilized. The internal balloon was holding the hemorrhage at bay.
"He's holding!" Meredith yelled, her eyes wide with a mixture of terror and awe.
"Of course he is, Grey. He's too stubborn to die and I'm too good to let him," Christopher said, sliding out from under the rig as the firefighters finally pried the door open.
Stan Giamatti—the man who was supposed to be a martyr—was pulled from the wreckage alive. He was hypovolemic, his legs were a mess, but his heart was beating.
Christopher stood in the rain, his scrubs soaked in oil and O-negative. He had just deleted one of the most heartbreaking deaths in Grey's history.
"You saved him," Richard said, leaning against an ambulance, looking exhausted. "You broke every protocol in the manual, but you saved him."
"The manual is a suggestion for people who can't think in three dimensions, Richard," Christopher replied, pulling out his phone.
"The ambulance crash happened. Stan is alive. I am covered in gasoline. Don't light a candle when I get home. - C"
He watched Stan being wheeled into the ER, Sara Giamatti screaming in relief as she found him. Christopher felt a strange, heavy satisfaction. He was becoming the architect of a better world.
But as the smoke cleared, he saw Lexie Grey standing at the edge of the bay, her intern scrubs pristine, her eyes searching for a sister she hadn't met yet.
The Sisters are here, Christopher thought. And Season 4 is officially on the clock.