CODING ━ grey's anatomy

chapter seventy three

He wasn't wrong.

In fact, Cassie was the exact same as the rest of them. She was born, grew up, went to the same schools, learned the same things, took the same exams. She woke up that morning, went about her life as usual, and ended up stuck in a nightmare in which the people she loved, the people she cherished, the people she needed were bleeding out right in front of her.

They were all the same, now, because of him.

"And you are?"

It was impulsive, and it was crass, but if Cassie was going to die, there wasn't a chance in hell she'd go out like a fucking coward.

Gary's eyes narrowed into slits, and she could see the way he latched onto the pistol even tighter. He couldn't believe her tone, her audacity, when he was the one with the power. He was the one she was supposed to be afraid of. She wasn't supposed to talk back, she was supposed to beg.

"Excuse me?"

"Did you know that in over ninety-five percent of mass shootings, the perpetrators are male?" As she cited off the statistics, it occurred to Cassie that perhaps nervous rambling should be considered a trauma response, as well. "I mean, sure, most people don't choose to shoot up a hospital, so you get some points for originality, but at the end of the day, over fifty percent of shooters are white, and seventy-four percent use handguns, like the one you're pointing at me right now. You say we're all the same, but you're no different."

He didn't respond, but he didn't put down the gun, either. Truthfully, she was shocked he didn't shoot her right then and there.

The longer Cassie stared down the barrel of the gun, the faster her chest heaved up and down, her weighted breath the only sound that either of the two could hear. Her face flushed, blood draining down into her heart, her eyes growing wider and wider each second he refused to respond. Panic. It was something she'd been well acquainted with her entire life, but that she felt an immense supply of over the past few hours, now more than ever.

(Cassie wasn't afraid to die, but for some reason, her body was trying to make her think that she was.)

"You don't know anything," Gary spit out, looking her up and down as if the very sight of her disgusted him. "You're too young, you're a child."

"And yet, you're about to kill me."

When she said it out loud, something shifted.

It was funny, really, the way she didn't understand how much she wanted to live, until she no longer had the option to.

It all made sense, now. People's fear of death, their fear of the unknown. Their fear of god, the fear that singlehandedly bound their arms behind their back and forced them into the submission of religion. The kids who screamed when they heard a monster in their closet, and their parents who were secretly scared too, but checked behind the doors anyway. The people begging for their lives, begging to see their loved ones again, their parents, their spouse, their child, not because they wanted to say goodbye, but because they didn't.

Cassie didn't want to say goodbye.

When she left the office, she told Mark she'd come back to him. When George left for Iraq, he told her the same thing, and then he died. That pain, that suffering, that endless bout of grief that up and changed her entire world for the worse, that was what Mark would feel if she didn't return. The heartbreak, the anguish, the never ending feeling that the world would be better off without him, everything she felt when George died, just amplified. She would be the one who got killed, but he would be the one who was dead inside.