Author's Notes: This story begins in the past and moves into the future, focusing on Cristina and Owen's relationship from the moment they first met to their reconciliation after the tragic downfall of their marriage. I have been a fan of this show for a while now and this is one of the most heartbreaking and beautiful love stories I've ever seen. Some people may reject the idea of Cristina coming around to having a child, but I think we've seen her grow exponentially throughout the show. Her empathy, compassion, and maturity are evolving whether she likes it or not. Life does that to people. It takes more than twenty-something years to grow up. Owen once told her that one day she would realize that she wants different things, and he was right. Now it's time for Cristina to have an evil spawn to call her own.
I would also like to note that this story expands several years into the future, including almost every (living) character from the Grey's Anatomy universe and wrapping them up in an epic burrito of love, lust, friendship, and medicine.
XxX
Season 5, Episode 2: Dream a Little Dream of Me, Part II
September of 2008.
Cristina was tucked away in one of the corner exam rooms, where trauma patients got dumped after their initial exam. It had been a little over an hour after she'd been impaled by an icicle – it was still protruding from her chest, wiggling around and pinching her nerves when she breathed – and she was running short on patience. She wanted to pull it out herself, but she knew the dangers of stab wounds and she couldn't handle the suturing on her own. She was left waiting for her interns, three idiots she didn't trust to clean out bedpans, and it was all she could do to keep herself from slapping one of them. She tapped her finger – and the vitals monitor that surrounded it – on her blanket and pressed her other hand to her forehead, wondering if the heat she felt was from a growing fever, or cartoon-style infuriation.
"What do you see?" She was impatient. Her voice startled the fawns hanging behind her left shoulder. She heard them whisper something amongst themselves.
One of them, the mousy girl with the nose, responded with a trembling voice. "Uh, it kind of looks like it's hitting nothing?"
"Oh?" she responded sarcastically, "It looks like its hitting nothing? Because it's hitting nothing!" She turned to glare at them, glad to see them shrink in their scrubs, but the movement caused pain to echo out over her torso. She twisted back, taking steady, gentle breaths until the pain eased off. Her eyes fell on the icicle again and she sighed.
"So, like, what does that – what does that mean?" This time is was the floppy haired man-boy speaking. His voice was grating, like utensils sliding on glass.
"What do you mean, what does that mean? Don't you know how to read an X-ray?"
"You-You always read them."
He was right about that. She'd taught herself in the early days of high school and she'd expected them to know. She wasn't in the mood to talk them through it, so she snapped at them. "Well, get out. All of you just… get out. And find me someone with a brain!"
She laid her head down again, frowning when the effort of yelling sent another jolt of pain through her chest. She stared through the window, which she would've happily broken with her face if she could be on the other side of it. There were residents out there fighting for surgeries, and she should've been standing on a pile of their corpses; instead she was benched, and damaged.
"Those your interns?"
Her eyes snapped up at the sound of the soldier's voice. Major Owen Hunt – a trauma surgeon with an abnormally high pain threshold, and authority issues. Just hours ago he'd triaged crash victims and then proceeded to staple his own laceration shut without local anesthetic. He was either insane, or incredibly hot; she was having trouble making the distinction. Either way she didn't want to see him right now. She almost wished he hadn't found her outside. Perhaps she would've bled out and she wouldn't have to face butchering one of her patients.
He started pulling on gloves, commenting, "They seem pretty scared of you."
"I am not scary," she declared.
His eyebrows bounced and he nodded slightly, glancing past her. He planted one hand on the other side of the bed and started leaning in, coming inappropriately close to her. She stared at him, unsure. "Uh, what are you doing?"
He didn't respond, and for a moment she was torn. It seemed like the perfect time to test out the hospital's security protocol, but this man, this soldier, no matter how strangely he was acting, was captivating to her. He was handsome, and his eyes were beautiful, and she knew for a fact that he was intelligent – they didn't let just anyone become a surgeon. It almost seemed like he was going to kiss her, and she wasn't going to stop him.
And then he pulled the icicle out.
She gasped, her hand flying to his shoulder, the pain overwhelming her for a split second. She yelped like a little dog that had been stepped on. Her vision blurred, but a moment later her eyes refocused on the dagger in his hand. It was longer than she'd expected, and wickedly sharp, its point covered in watery, pinkish blood.
"That's my icicle," she stated, mystified.
He nodded. He was working on the wound site with his free hand, but he had barely moved. He still hovered over her, and his eyes kept flickering back to hers.
"Uh, you took out my icicle."
It was like he wasn't listening, just acknowledging that she had spoken. "Yeah." He made a circle with pressure on the wound, trapping the blood that tried to run down her ribcage.
"I didn't give you permission to do that."
He shrugged. "So?"
She took a few pained breaths, watching the gauze in his hand turn red. She was staring at him, mystified, when the door opened, and she didn't even look up until her friend spoke.
"Cristina…"
"He died." It was always worse to say it aloud. She almost wished she had accepted that sad, sad look as confirmation of her failure, but she had to say it. It rolled off her tongue and stuck in the air. She had killed her patient. She had really killed someone because of incompetence. She was not the surgeon she thought she was, and her arrogance, her confidence, had killed someone. She was going to be fired. She had a hole in her chest and she was going to be fired. Someone was dead because of her. She was a holey, jobless murderer.
It all set in at the same time and her breath caught.
Meredith crossed her arms, frowning. "I'm sure the chief's not gonna fire you over this. It was one mistake. One mistake. Everybody-"
"Don't do that," Cristina cut her off, looking away when tears formed in the pits of her eyes. She blinked them out, forcing her breath to even out. "Just… just go. I'm fine."
"I can-"
"I'm okay," Cristina looked up, meeting her eyes. She put on her brave face. "Look, really, I'm fine. I'm a grown-up. I can handle this."
"Okay. Okay. I have to go tell the chief, so…" she uncrossed her arms, bouncing on her heels, and then she left the room. Cristina didn't look at the window, but she could see Meredith walking in her peripheral vision, looking grim, but determined.
Her soldier stirred, having sat back to let them talk. He deposited the icicle in the medical waste bin and put on a new pair of gloves, standing by her side and looking down at her, thoughtful. She stared back at him. He nodded, as if concluding a thought, and said, "Here, I'll sew you up. Just move your arm and maybe slide up a little, if you can."
She shrugged and dug her foot into the bottom of the table, moving herself up a fraction. She threw her right arm behind her head, squinting when he turned on a lamp and wheeled it over her. "Cut off the overhead," she said. "It's giving me a headache."
"Can't have that," he responded, stepping back and flicking the light off. He smiled at her, but she looked away, shutting her eyes and trying to make her head stop throbbing. "I'm gonna numb you," the soldier said. She felt a few little pricks along her ribs, but they didn't bother her. He was gentle – she barely felt it when he prodded the area around the wound, and even the pressure was insignificant once the numbing agent had kicked in. She had to look up to make sure he was doing anything at all, and once she did she was glad, because he was easy to look at.
She distracted herself with him. He was like an artist, using his bulky, rough, calloused hands, hands so big they could comfortably palm a basketball, to grasp thin, almost invisible sutures. He worked as delicately and as quickly as she would have, and he never paused to think about what he was doing. His gorgeous eyes darted from the wound to her face, narrowed with concentration. She wondered how the wild soldier who'd stepped out of the ambulance earlier had become this skilled surgeon.
"Major Hunt?" she said quietly.
"Owen," he corrected, not looking up.
She hummed deep in her throat. His name fit him well. "You're good at that. Suturing."
"Lot of sutures come my way," he responded softly. His eyes stayed on hers for an extra second this time, and he smiled slightly. "I bet you wish you could do this yourself."
"I know how to suture."
"I mean, you wish you could fix yourself, like I did with the staples."
"What makes you say that?"
"You look like a caged animal right now. You just seem like the type of person who would rather get things done for yourself, instead of relying on other people."
She shrugged, admiring how good he was at multitasking. Some of the doctors at Seattle Grace would've sewed their finger to the patient if they kept looking up like he did. But his sutures were perfect, and he barely touched her.
"Tell me about trauma surgery."
He cocked an eyebrow, smiling. "Trauma? Quick and dirty. There's no time to make things pretty and no time for mistakes." He swung around, retrieved a needle, and then turned back to her. "Drop your pants, you need a shot of Cefazolin I.M."
She pulled down her scrubs, shifting slightly to give him access. "No time for mistakes, huh? So what, you don't make mistakes?"
"I make mistakes and people die." He put the needle in, but she barely noticed.
She sighed, her words coming out bitter. "I'm the best surgical resident in my program and… today I killed a man because I couldn't do a stitch."
He nodded, his brow furrowed, and started cleaning up. He spoke while he worked. "In the field you do what you can. You work with what you have. It's about something. It's not about being the best. It's about saving lives." He came back to her bedside. "I make mistakes," he said softly. "Guys die by my hand, good guys, guys who were fighting for their country in a desert. And I don't know everything. Nobody does. So I make mistakes, and I learn. And the next time, I don't make that mistake again, so the next time, the next guy, that guy, he lives."
He had an enrapturing tenderness in his voice. It was strange to look at him, such a rough, flighty guy, and listen to him at the same time. He was handsome, articulate, and skilled, but there was something else in his eyes. It was a shadow. He spoke, and a shadow grew in his expression.
"Mistakes are how you learn." His dark conclusion matched his eyes.
She turned the other way, curling up on her arm. She didn't want to make mistakes, no matter how much she would learn from them. She wasn't the type of person who made mistakes. Now all the chief would see when he looked at her was someone who could kill his patients because she made mistakes – it didn't matter if you learned something valuable. She could not be that person.
Owen took a step back from the table, clearing his throat and checking the area around him. He headed for the door, hanging in the frame. "Hey, sit tight, I'll be back. I'm gonna get something to dress that wound."
She almost said something sarcastic about sprinting for freedom, but she kept her mouth shut. Owen returned ten minutes later with a disinfectant solution and a few bandages. He stood by her side again, applying the solution with a popsicle stick – it was a bit unconventional, and there were other tools for it, but he didn't seem inclined to use them.
She shifted onto her back, stretching out her legs and groaning; she was starting to feel better, as if his presence had drained the crapiness out of the day. For all of its downfalls at least she'd gotten to spend the latter part of it being cared for by a hunk.
"You know you'd be good in the field," he said. "Now that you got this battle scar you'd fit right in."
She laughed. "Oh, right."
"I'm serious," he said. His words were sincere. "You should ditch this place and go for the adventure." He hovered over her again, hitting her with a hard, serious stare. "You're telling me this place gives you a rush? A high?"
She glanced around, nodding. "Yeah. Yeah, it does."
He backed off a bit when the door opened. It was Webber. He looked a lot happier than he had earlier, when he'd come in to find her impaled and therefore useless. She expected him to say something to her about the death of Vincent Kenner, but he had his eyes on a different prize.
"Oh, Doctor Hunt, there you are." He closed the door behind him, throwing out his diplomat voice. "How's the gash on that leg?"
Owen glanced back at her, "Uh, Dr. Yang took good care of me. Excellent care."
"I made a few calls," Webber said, casting a glance of approval at Cristina. She looked at the ground. "They speak very highly of you at Maryland Shock Trauma. I also heard a story that you constructed an OR table from an exploded Humvee in the middle of the desert. That true?"
"Well you have to be innovative in the middle of the desert," Owen responded.
"You have to be innovative everywhere," Webber agreed. "How would you like a job, Doctor Hunt?" He looked so hopeful; it was almost sad to watch.
She was suddenly hopeful, too, though she couldn't explain it to herself. Owen was a nice guy, and from the little time she'd spent with him she could tell that he was a good doctor. It wouldn't be horrible for him to work at the hospital. But when the words left Webber's mouth, the trauma surgeon all but shut down. He looked shell-shocked. She could tell what the answer was before he started talking; his face was an open book.
"Uh… I appreciate the offer, but I am due to go back to the sandpit, finish my tour."
"Well, good luck to you," Webber said. He sounded genuine, but there was no hiding his disappointment. It was hard to face rejection, but he did it well; that's what made him a good leader. He smiled, shook Owen's hand, and left the room.
Cristina sat up and eased her legs over the side of the bed, watching her feet dangle. Owen was disposing of his gloves in the medical waste bin; he slammed the lid down. Cristina looked up, curious, as he pulled the blinds shut. He turned toward her.
"What?"
Suddenly he was right in front of her, his lips pressed urgently to hers. His hands threaded up into her hair. She kissed him back, caught up in the moment. It was a sweet, desperate kiss, right out of a romance novel, straight from the conclusion of a sappy chick flick, but the stars quickly emptied from her eyes and she pulled away from him. "I-I don't even know you."
He gave her a look that made her wish she did know him. His eyes were narrowed; the blue glittered like flame. His lips pressed into a perfect smile and he asked his favorite question.
"So?"
He turned away, effectively breaking the spell he'd put on her. She watched as he opened the blinds and tossed something else in the trash. He left the room without looking back. She stared after him, captivated and confused. He'd literally swept her off her feet and within hours of meeting her, he'd kissed her; and she'd let him. That kind of man was dangerous. It was the kind of intense passion she didn't need in her life right now. He would only complicate things.
And still, she wore a stupid, dopey smile, and her insides were alive with butterflies. She had only one word for him; it came out as a sharp whisper.
"Hot."