The wind howled against the windows of the brownstone, a low, guttural moan that sounded far too much like the opening notes of a funeral dirge. Christopher stood in the kitchen, the bottle of Cabernet unopened on the counter. His hands, usually as steady as a dead man's, were vibrating.
I cheated, he thought, his internal monologue a frantic scroll of deleted scenes. I deleted the plane crash. I ripped the pages out of the book. But this universe has a sadistic sense of balance.
"Chris? You're staring at that wine like it's a surgical complication," Jack said, coming up behind him and resting a hand on his shoulder. "The flight was grounded. They're safe. You saved them."
"I did something," Christopher whispered, his eyes fixed on the rain lashing against the glass. "I don't know if the timeline is done with them yet."
His pager didn't just beep; it screamed. A Level 1 trauma activation. MASS CASUALTY. BUS ACCIDENT. STORM RELATED.
"Don't go," Jack said, his voice tightening as he saw the look on Christopher's face. "The roads are turning into rivers, and the NWS is calling for a localized tornado touchdown."
"I have to. If I'm not there to guide the scalpel, the universe will find a much messier way to collect its debt." Christopher grabbed his keys, his face snapping back into that razor-sharp, clinical mask. "Stay inside, Jack. Don't go near the windows."
The drive to Grey Sloan Memorial was a nightmare of horizontal rain and flying debris. When he skidded into the ambulance bay, the atmosphere was frantic—the hospital was already on backup generators. But it wasn't just any bus accident.
"What do we have, Hunt?" Christopher barked, stepping into the trauma bay as the first stretchers rolled in.
"Charter bus from the airport," Owen Hunt shouted over a crack of thunder. "The flight passengers who were grounded were being bussed back to the city. A gust of wind or a microburst caught the bus on the overpass. It rolled three times and dropped twenty feet onto the lower interstate."
Christopher's heart plummeted. The passengers who were grounded.
He had stopped the plane, so they took the bus. He had traded a high-altitude explosion for a high-speed collision. He had tried to play God, and God had simply changed the weapon of choice.
"Doctor Wright! We need you in Trauma 2! It's a crush injury!" a nurse screamed.
Christopher pushed through the double doors and froze. There, on the table, was Lexie Grey. She wasn't under a plane wing, but she was pinned under a jagged piece of the bus's reinforced structural frame that had sliced through the side of the vehicle. Her chest was mangled, her breathing labored, and the familiar, haunting scent of internal hemorrhage filled the small room.
Beside her, Mark Sloan was kneeling on the floor, holding her hand, his own face a map of glass lacerations. "Wright," Mark gasped, his eyes wild with the exact terror Christopher had risked prison to prevent. "You're the genius. Fix her. You have to fix her."
Christopher looked at the monitors. Her vitals were a mirror image of the Season 8 finale he had memorized years ago. The setting had changed from a forest to a freeway, but the Reaper was wearing the same face.
"I'm Dr. Wright," Christopher said, his voice cracking for a fraction of a second before he hardened it into a diamond-sharp edge. "And I don't believe in destiny. Get me a thoracotomy kit and tell the blood bank to send every unit of O-neg they have. If the universe wants Lexie Grey, it's going to have to out-stitch me."
He stepped up to the table, his mind racing through every medical journal ever written on crush syndrome.
"Mark, stop crying and hold the pressure," Christopher snapped, his sarcasm returning like a desperate prayer. "I can't save your future if you're drowning my field in salt water."