Chapter Text
Three weeks later
DENNY
He'd been up since a little before five, which kept happening lately, his body deciding it was done with sleep before the sky agreed. He'd made the coffee in the dark. Carried both mugs back down the hall, set hers on the nightstand, kept his own. Then he'd stood at the window for a while with his palm flat on the cold glass, counting the lit windows in the building across the street, because counting things had become a habit he wasn't telling anyone about, one he hadn't needed a month ago. The lit windows. The stairs down to the lobby. How many blocks he could go before the tightness set in behind his ribs and he had to stop and pretend he was checking his phone.
He sat back down on the edge of the mattress. The springs gave under him. Juni was still out, face turned into the pillow, one hand open on the sheet where he'd been lying. Her hair was everywhere. There was a crease on her cheek from the seam of the pillowcase.
He looked at her for a minute. Then he reached over and ran his hand through her hair, slow, his thumb tracing down behind her ear.
"Hey, darlin'." Quiet. "World's still turnin'. You got people to keep alive."
A sound that wasn't a word.
"That's a yes?"
"Mm."
"Coffee's right there. I'm not bringing it to your mouth, even I've got my limits."
She opened one eye. Found the mug on the nightstand without lifting her head, the way she always did now, like she'd memorized the floor plan in her sleep. His shirt had slid off her shoulder. She pushed up onto an elbow and got a hand around the mug and drank with her eyes half-closed.
"You made coffee," she said. Voice gone rough overnight.
"I'm a giver."
"It's six."
"I was up."
She studied him over the rim. He kept his face easy, kept his shoulders loose, gave her the version of himself that hadn't been awake at five counting windows.
"There's a thing," he said.
"A thing."
He reached into the front pocket of his sweatpants and took out the small box. Held it out to her.
She set the coffee down on the nightstand and took it. Worked the wrapping loose without tearing it, which was the most Juni thing in the world, peeling the tape up at the corner like there was a prize for keeping the paper intact. She got the lid off.
She went still. The silver came up out of the velvet when she tilted the box toward the lamp, the little charms turning on the chain. Her thumb came up and touched the bird mid-flight, just barely, and her mouth opened and then closed again.
She looked up at him.
"Denny."
"Yeah."
She didn't say anything else. She held out her wrist instead.
He took the bracelet and got the clasp between his fingers, which were not as steady as he'd have liked, and fastened it. Pressed his thumb over the catch to make sure it held. Her wrist turned in his hand, the charms catching the lamp, and she sat there looking at it with the sheet pooled in her lap and his shirt off her shoulder.
She leaned in and kissed him. Hand on his jaw, slow and warm, the bracelet cool where her wrist rested against his neck. He brought his hand up into her hair and kissed her back and she made a low sound against his mouth.
When she pulled back she reached for the coffee. He got there first, lifted the mug to hand it over, and she took it straight out of his fingers, and took a slow sip.
"Thank you."
He looked at her. Hair wrecked, crease on her cheek, his bracelet on her wrist, drinking his coffee in his bed before the sun was all the way up.
The phone went off on the nightstand.
He looked at the screen.
"It's Burke."
He picked up.
"There's a heart." No hello. Burke never wasted them. "It's a match. Get here now."
JUNI
She had her jeans on before he was off the phone.
One sock from the nightstand, the other one she found under the bed, didn't match, didn't care. Her shirt was somewhere and there wasn't time, so she kept his on. Sneakers by the door.
She pulled her phone out of her bag and there were two texts from Olivia and three from her dad. She opened her messages and typed one out to her supervisor before she could weigh it.
Can't make my shift today. Sorry.
The reply came back within 30 seconds.
You're on in an hour. Second short-notice callout this month. This is a write-up, Juni.
She ignored the message and dropped it in her canvas bag.
Denny came out of the bedroom with jeans on and his boots half-laced, pulling his arm through his jacket. His color was off, a little gray under the morning stubble, and his hands were going faster than his usual unbothered pace, but he was grinning anyway.
"You ready?" he said.
"I'm driving." She lifted his keys off the hook.
He didn't fight her on it.
The Audi had sat out overnight and the inside was cold enough that their breath hung in it. The heater took its time. Capitol Hill was mostly asleep, a garbage truck working its way down a side street, a man at a bus stop with his hood up and his hands in his pockets. She took the hills faster than she should have.
"You were on your phone," Denny said.
She kept her eyes on the road. "Yeah."
A beat.
"Called out of my shift."
"Juni." He turned in the seat. "You can't be torching your job over--"
"I'm not talking about it."
"You're gonna catch hell."
"Probably." She ran a yellow light coming off Pine. "This is more important."
He was quiet for a second. She felt him looking at her. She didn't look back, because she was driving the man she'd known for a little over a month to maybe-the-rest-of-his-life, and she had no idea which way it was going to go.
He let it drop.
The intake nurse met them inside the doors with a wheelchair. Denny looked at it the way he looked at anything that suggested he couldn't manage on his own steam.
"I walked in here on my own two--"
"Mr. Duquette, hospital policy--"
"Denny." Juni stepped in front of the chair. She put her hand flat on his chest, felt it going too fast under her palm. "Sit down."
His jaw worked.
"Get the heart," she said. "And then we start on the list."
The corner of his mouth went up and he sat.
The nurse started rolling him toward the elevators and he twisted around to look back at her. "Which one off the list?"
"Get a heart and find out."
The room was 412.
He stayed in his own clothes. Somebody still had to fly out and put hands on the donor heart before any of this was real, and gowns were for after, when there was an after to plan for. He sat up on the edge of the bed in his jeans and button down while a nurse ran an intake checklist, and Juni took the chair by the window. The parking structure outside was the same flat gray slab it had always been. Rain coming, by the look of the sky.
Burke arrived ahead of the interns, the way he arrived everywhere, already moving. He checked the monitor, asked Denny two questions, made a note. He was partway into the presentation when they filed in behind him: Doctor Bailey first, then Yang then Stevens, O'Malley and Karev shoulder to shoulder, Grey bringing up the rear with her hair pulled back and a notebook hugged to her chest.
"Thirty-six year old male," Burke said. "Dilated cardiomyopathy, ejection fraction at thirty-one percent, listed status one-A. Notified this morning of a potential donor match, awaiting confirmation of organ viability before--"
"Good lookin' fella, too," Denny said. "If we're being thorough." He tipped his head toward the window. "And that's my girl over there, so everybody mind your manners."
O'Malley's ears went pink. Karev looked at the ceiling. Grey almost smiled. Yang didn't react to a word of it, her eyes down on the labs in her hand, already somewhere ahead of the rest of them.
Stevens glanced over and gave Juni a small, warm look.
"Stevens, you'll take the case," Bailey said from next to Burke. "Scrub in on the retrieval, follow the patient through."
Stevens straightened.
"I want Yang." Juni didn't hesitate.
Bailey's head turned, slow. "Excuse me?"
"I said, I want Yang."
"You're a per diem nurse." Not cruel, just immovable. "You don't have the standing to make assignments."
Juni crossed the room to stand by Denny's bed.
She was in his shirt with the sleeves shoved past her elbows, the buttons done up crooked, dark jeans and two different socks and her hair coming down out of the twist she'd put it in at the apartment.
"I'm not here as his nurse," she said. "I'm here as his partner. And I'm asking for Yang."
Bailey's eyes moved from her face to the bed and back.
"Juni." Denny, easy, from the pillow. She looked at him. "Any one of them is fine by me. They gotta get good somehow."
"You deserve the best intern in the room," she said. "I'm not going to be sorry for asking."
Yang had been quiet this whole time, the chart still open in her hands. When the room went still she looked up at Burke.
Bailey studied her. Her gaze went to Burke, who lifted one shoulder a fraction, leaving the intern to her. Came back to Juni, and whatever she was running behind her eyes, it came out as a long breath through her nose.
"Yang," she said finally. "You're on it. Stevens, you're with Torres today." She pointed a finger at Juni, level with her chest. "And you and I are going to have a conversation that you are not going to enjoy."
"I look forward to it." Juni said.
"This is why I keep her around," Denny said. "She's scrappy. It's a whole thing."
Bailey did not dignify that. She turned for the door. Burke was already going over the retrieval timeline with Yang as the two of them stepped into the hall, Yang firing a question about cross-clamp time before they'd cleared the doorway, every bit of her on the surgery and none of it on the room she was leaving.
The door swung most of the way shut behind the other interns.
The monitor beeped, slow and even. Out the window the first rain started, fine as mist against the glass.
Denny shifted back and lifted his arm.
She climbed onto the narrow mattress, fit herself against his side, her head on his chest and her legs folded along his. His arm came down around her. His shirt was soft between her cheek and his ribs, and under it his heart was going, too quick, the rhythm she'd fallen asleep against more nights than not and learned without meaning to.
His hand moved slow over her shoulder. She turned her wrist so the charms caught the light. Down the hall, Yang's voice carried for another few seconds, asking something about the helicopter, then a door went, and it was quiet.