Chapter Text
It's terrible, after the accident. Helen doesn't have a better way to describe it.
Time and circumstance play tricks on those who'd been in the ambulance, separating them, reuniting them in parts until she can slowly piece together who made it and who didn't. Lauren's gone straight into surgery, and it's touch-and-go, but for now she's alive. One of the EMTs had died on impact, the other somehow walked away with barely a scratch on him. Max and Georgia are in the ED, both under observation but neither of them critical. Helen's pager vibrates in her pocket, and she fishes it out to see the final piece of the puzzle, courtesy of Iggy. Luna—tiny, blue-eyed baby Luna, who has known nothing but chaos in her first hour of life—is upstairs, and in perfect health. Given the circumstances surrounding her birth, this fact feels like nothing short of a miracle.
Helen leans forward on the bed so the resident loitering beside her can strap up her shoulder and put it in a sling, telling herself that the tears she's blinking back are just a reaction to the movement. She can feel her pulse throbbing in her carotid; the adrenaline still racing through her veins and dulling most of the pain, though there's no denying it's beginning to creep in at the edges. As if sensing this, the resident offers her a sympathetic smile and two blue capsules in a tiny plastic cup, which she knocks back without water and without a second thought.
For the first time since she'd put Max in a taxi home this morning, with strict instructions to keep himself alive, Helen leans back and breathes a tiny sigh of relief.
And then, very quickly, everything goes to hell.
She's half way back to the ED from her office, freshly wrapped in the hospital issue hoodie that she's always hated but is oddly grateful for now the shock has worn off and the shivers have set in, when Max barrels round the corner like a man possessed, almost taking out two nurses. She's seen him run through these hallways a hundred or more times since they first met; sometimes a jog, sometimes a sprint, fighting against the body which was breaking down around him. But—and her stomach turns at the realization, always faster at processing than her brain—in of all those times, he's never once had the look on his face that he has right now.
He's just been in a car accident. He could barely hold himself upright this morning. He is running flat out.
Helen acts solely on instinct, and turns on her heel to chase after him. He's faster than her by no small degree so she ends up losing him in the stairwell, but at a pace like this, there's only one floor he could possibly be headed to. A door slams open half a floor below her and she hears Floyd's urgent call of "Max?" echoing off the tiles.
"Up here," she shouts back, not slowing down, her shoulder bouncing in the sling and sending bursts of pain across her clavicle with every panicked stride.
She stops when she reaches them—Max and Vijay, standing frozen in place at the open door to the OR—just in time to hear Hartman's mumbled "I did everything that I could," and to see him hang his head. His hands are covered in blood.
Georgia Goodwin is lying on the operating table, the last of the color already draining from her face.
For five or ten seconds, the world slows down, and the only sounds are the flatline of the heart rate monitor, punctuated by a series of tearful, harrowed breaths from Max. Floyd is on one side of her, Vijay on the other. Nobody looks away. Nobody moves an inch, until suddenly Vijay surges forward, propelled by some instinct which Helen doesn't know for certain but can definitely guess. He reaches Max just in time to slow the younger man's fall as he crumples to the ground.
Helen's eyes fill with tears. She looks to Floyd, who simply shakes his head and backs away towards the stairwell like he can't stand to be an intruder into this any longer. She can hardly blame him. He doesn't know what it feels like to watch the person you thought you were going to spend the rest of your life with die. The sound of an agonizing sob brings her back to Max, who's still on the floor but upright now, his back to the wall. His eyes are glassy as they focus on the floor of the hallway beyond them, his face pale and still streaked with blood. He pulls his knees up to his chest and buries his head in them. Helen sees the moment his shoulders go lax and he gives over his body to grief in its entirety.
She tries to force her legs into motion, to go towards him, to just be here as the world as he knows it ends, but the words she hears drifting out from the OR root her to the spot. Impact of the crash. Hartman's voice echoes back in response to the unknown speaker, solemn. Subarachnoid hemorrhage.
Just like that, Helen isn't in the darkened hospital corridor anymore. She's twenty-five and sitting on the edge of a hospital bed in the middle of the longest night of her life, squeezing Mohammed's hand as he lies unconscious, knowing that the odds of him making it to morning are slim-to-none. Pain is redefined. All previous baselines simply cease to exist. Everything that happens after this will now be measured against this, and little will ever come close. She'd been able to say goodbye to him that night, curled up in a chair by the side of his bed, trying to talk through the tears in case he could hear her voice. She'd never told anyone that she'd wanted to specialize in neurosurgery before his death. After, she'd packed those plans away, quietly, methodically, completely unable to a consider a future where she would ever have to re-live that moment again.
Being here now, with Georgia falling victim to exactly the same fate, is suddenly too similar to bear. She can't do it. Bile rises in her throat, and Helen doesn't stop to look back at Max as she races to the end of the hallway and into the mercifully empty restroom. Inside, she flings open the door to the first stall, sinks to her knees and vomits. Panting, cheeks wet with her own tears, she runs the back of her hand across her mouth and suppresses a sob of her own.
It takes a long time before she can get to her feet. By the time she makes her way—sweaty and shivering—back into the hallway, both Vijay and Max are gone.
~
She doesn't see him again in person until the funeral. Two days after the accident, in the midst of hiding out in bed after canceling all of her weekend plans, Helen sends him a single text.
As soon as she sends it, she feels guilty. Everything she wants to say feels like a platitude. They'd grown strangely close in the weeks—weeks, she has to remind herself, barely even verging into months—that they'd known each other before the accident, but now she feels completely to unable to provide him any kind of comfort or solace. It's a cruel irony, Helen thinks, that even though she's come closer than most people to understanding what Max is going through, they've lost the ability to communicate, so it's worthless. She'd closed off a part of herself to him when she'd stepped down as his doctor, but it was supposed to mean she could carry on being his friend. Now she can't even seem to do that.
Three dots appear at the bottom of the screen, signifying an impending response. She sits up in bed, sweeping her braids over one shoulder and holding her phone in her lap, poised for whatever Max has to say. After a few seconds, the dots disappear.
She hasn't slept properly in days, moving between waking and resting in a hazy kind of slow-motion, her throat tight and her heart heavy. She goes through the motions of taking care of herself out of a weary sense of obligation, tugged along by the complicated feeling that this isn't her tragedy, so it isn't her time to fall apart. This morning, feeling like a spare part in both Max's treatment and his life, she curls up on her side in bed and pulls the covers high up over her head, like she used to do as a child. Cocooned in the near-darkness, she skims through her contacts and makes two calls.
The first is to Karen, informing her that she's taking three months off from clinical work so that Doctor Helen can go out and fundraise.
The second is to the fertility clinic.
~
Georgia's funeral is on a Wednesday, and it feels like a fever dream. It's unseasonably warm for April, the spring sunlight streaming in through the tall church windows in a cruel parody of rebirth. Max looks no better than he'd done the day of the accident, the time off work and the end of his chemo barely counterbalanced by the effort required to single-handedly care for a newborn while in the deepest and darkest depths of grief.
There is a tense, drawn-out struggle conducted in silence entirely via body language between Max and the older woman whom Helen soon realizes is Georgia's mother, as to who looks after Luna. Max does not concede. The baby fusses, and Max rubs his bloodshot tired eyes with a balled-up fist and shushes her, dropping his lips to the crown of her head in a slow kiss. He looks around to check if they're being observed—Helen averts her gaze and fixes it back on him just in time so he doesn't see her watching him—before letting his eyes flicker closed. She knows enough to know he's pretending he's somewhere else entirely. She wonders where his imagination has taken him.
After the service, she makes a few calculated laps of the attendees; enough not to seem rude, but no more than necessary. When asked, she describes herself as a colleague, which feels like lying by omission, because colleague can't possibly stretch to accommodate everything they've been through since Max's first day at the hospital, but right now friend feels like a label she can't live up to.
By the time she reaches Max, he's extracted himself from the somewhat overbearing presence of Georgia's parents. He's leaning against a table, but his posture isn't casual, He's leaning like he needs it to keep him upright, Luna still cradled firmly against his chest. Up close, Helen notices how his suit is drowning him, the weight loss impossible to hide without his usual baggy hoodies. He looks exhausted.
They stare at each for a minute, neither saying a word, before Helen breaks the stalemate and places a hand on his shoulder.
She wants to ask him what she can do. She wants to ask where his parents are—they're alive, she knows that much, but they're definitely not in attendance and she can't for the life of her understand why—or if he needs to sit down for a minute, but Max slips quietly into a mode of formality that she's totally unprepared for.
"Thank you for coming," he says, his voice clipped. He refocuses his eyes on the floor, pointedly avoiding her gaze.
"Max—" Helen tries, not exactly sure what she's going to say next, but it doesn't matter, because he cuts her off.
"Please don't."
Okay," Helen nods, not wanting to start a scene. "But just know that I'm only ever a text or a phone call away, if you need someone."
He looks up at her then, catching her off-guard. The expression on his face is the saddest smile she's ever seen. "I appreciate it," he says, and she believes it. "But Luna and I are fine."
It doesn't feel like being pushed away as much as it feels like Max detaching himself from her, but the effect is the same. Helen swallows the lump in her throat and tries to smile at him. She'd meant everything she'd said about being there for him if he needs it, but she knows Max, knows how determination and pride run through him like his DNA. He is the living, breathing embodiment of 'how can I help?, but he's not yet ready to need it himself.
Later, when she's back home, her heels lying kicked-off in the middle of the living room next to a half-packed suitcase with a pot of chamomile tea steeping on the coffee table, Helen's mind goes back to Luna. Even though Max had looked ready to collapse, he'd steadfastly refused to let go of her, even for a minute. She knows why. If the new treatment doesn't start to shrink his tumor within a few months, he's unlikely to make it to his daughter's first birthday.
Helen hadn't told him she'd be going away. When push had come to shove, she couldn't do it in person, and now she feels like a coward for it.
At a loss, she does the one thing she can think of to help him from afar. She texts Valentina.
~
By Friday, Helen is lying down in one of the clinic's practice rooms wearing a flimsy hospital gown, waiting. She hopes beyond hope that she isn’t making a huge mistake.
~
Ten days later, she's in her hotel room in Boston—running away from New York had been easier than she'd thought—holding a pregnancy test in one shaky hand. Staring back at her are two tiny blue lines.