The ambulance bay at Seattle Grace usually hummed with the efficient chaos of incoming trauma, but today, it felt like a waiting room for the apocalypse. Christopher stood near the automatic doors, his eyes tracking the clock.
10:14 AM. In exactly sixty seconds, a paramedic named Mary would have a seizure behind the wheel of her rig. She would plough into another ambulance, trapping Stan Giamatti and Ray Sutera in a mangled, overturned cage of steel.
Christopher watched Meredith Grey and Richard Webber prepping to receive a routine cardiac patient. They were oblivious. They were characters following a script that ended in Stan's death.
"Chief! Meredith! Get back from the bay! Now!" Christopher's voice cracked through the morning air, no longer a sarcastic drawl but a primal warning.
Richard looked up, confused. "Wright? We have an inbound—"
The screech of tyres drowned him out. Mary's ambulance accelerated, swerving violently toward the idling rig where Stan and Ray were unloading. Christopher didn't wait for the impact. He lunged forward, grabbing Meredith by the arm and hauling her behind a concrete pillar just as the world exploded into a cacophony of twisting metal and shattering safety glass.
The silence that followed was heavy, broken only by the hiss of a ruptured radiator and the smell of leaking fuel.
"Stan! Ray!" Richard shouted, scrambling toward the overturned rig.
Christopher was already there, his hands moving with a surgical precision that defied the chaos. He knew the anatomy of this disaster. He knew Stan was pinned by the door, his legs crushed, his life leaking out of his femoral arteries the moment they tried to move him. And he knew Ray had an oxygen regulator buried in his back, causing a slow-motion cardiac tamponade.
"Stan, look at me," Christopher said, dropping to his knees in the oil-slicked debris.
Stan blinked, his upside-down face ashen. "I can't feel my legs, Doc. Is that... is that bad?"
"It's inconvenient, Stan," Christopher said, his sarcasm returning like a shield. "I'm going to need you to stop being dramatic while I recalculate your survival probability. Meredith! Get an ultrasound for Ray! Richard, we need the Jaws of Life but we can't tilt the rig or Stan bleeds out."
"How did you know to pull me back?" Meredith whispered, her hands shaking as she gripped the portable monitor.
"I have excellent peripheral vision, Grey," Christopher snapped. "Now, focus. Stan, I need you to stay with me. Tell me about your wife, Sara. Tell me about the songs you sing in the rig."
Christopher knew Stan wouldn't make it. The crush injuries were terminal. But as he looked at the sharpened debris, he saw a variable he hadn't seen in the show. A heavy-duty hydraulic jack had fallen from the first rig. If he could pressure-seal the vessels before the rig moved...
"O'Malley! Get the vascular clamps and the REBOA kit!" Christopher yelled. "I'm not letting this ambulance be your tomb, Stan. I've got a Thai food date at 8, and I hate rescheduling."