Alice ✧ [a. karev]

36. the surge

and till the end, you're my very best friend

Jade had never been close with Owen Hunt. They were really nothing more than colleagues.

But she could've cried with happiness when she opened her eyes, and the first thing she saw was his baby blue eyes.

Not stars, not blue sky through trees, not a hysteric Cristina.

Just his eyes and his worried face and three other doctors who were strangers to her and the bright lights of an ER.

The hospital in Boise was small and their ER wasn't equipped to handle a trauma this size.

"I have to stay awake," Jade muttered, her words slurred and her eyes not focusing on any of the faces in front of her.

"Dr. Taylors," a voice she didn't recognize said as Jade tried to sit up. She couldn't hear them clearly.

Gentle hands tried to push her shoulders back down and a flashlight was shone in her eye. She squinted and let them push her back down.

"Jade," Owen said as she tried to push the tube away from her nose. "Jade, it's Owen."

"Where-" she started to speak but the rest of the sentence died on her tongue.

She looked past him to see them rolling Arizona into the ER. She wasn't even supposed to be on the plane.

"You're safe now," she heard Owen say.

Then she was out again.

That's all Jade remembered from her short time in Boise. As soon as they touched down in Seattle she was taken into surgery for her knee, which she was told was performed by Callie.

Then she woke up in a hospital room. Sun streaming in through the blinds and the warmly familiar shuffle of nurses outside her door and Alex sleeping in a chair next to her bed. The normalcy felt odd.

Jade was out of the hospital quick. Lucky to scrape away from the crash with a now healing dislocated knee cap, a fractured wrist, a concussion, and a ruptured ear drum.

That was the beginning of what a therapist would call recovery.

That beginning was bad. Worse than Alex had imagined it would be or was prepared for.

Jade would wake up in the middle of the night, the memories and the nightmares too much. Screaming and crying so hard she was close to vomiting. This would in turn wake up Gabe, a mere seven months old when his mothers life was altered.

Days weren't much easier. She spent a lot of time crying and a lot of time making up for sleep she didn't get at night. She spent no time talking about it. When Alex eventually had to go back to work he was racked with anxiety that she'd do something to herself while he wasn't there.

She skipped Lexie's funeral service. He tried to convince her to go, to get out of the apartment even if this is what it was for, but she refused.

She stayed home while he went and curled up in her bed and held Gabe close to her chest because how selfish, how careless of her to bring a child into a world where planes crashed and friends died. How cruel that he was subjected to live in a world so merciless. She wanted to hold him and never let him go, protect him against her chest forever.

But forever was a myth and so was recovery. Because three weeks wasn't enough. It was enough to physically recover, which Jade did, but mentally recovering would take years if it ever happened at all. And Jade was thrust back into normal life after those three weeks were up.