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CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE
sympathy for the devil.
season five, episodes twelve
and thirteen.
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There was just something about the life she was currently living that Billie found really annoying.
She'd been thinking about it. Or, rather, she'd been tossing and turning in bed all night long for the previous two days, unable to even close her eyes long enough to drift into a sleep and forced to go for night walks in order to satiate her anxiety. But things didn't ever go her way.
(Not only because, in one of her night endeavors, she had found on a bookshelf an old picture of her parents and had been horrifyingly reminded that Ian's house had unequivocally also been Ivory and Frank's house, but also because the universe seemed to be set against her lately. Although, thinking back to it, that picture had left her alarmingly numb...)
Billie had been having a very hard time. She'd been overdosing on benzodiazepine for forty-eight hours, hoping to somehow tame the lurking tire that held her to her wake, but eventually, she'd realized that it wasn't insomnia keeping her eyes open-it was, instead, her pervading thoughts, all of which circled around two main things:
Number One: Cristina Yang.
It had been over a week since their fight. Sure, they had apologized to one another (at least made a pathetic attempt at it, which had only resulted in fueled anger, maximized rivalry and the two of them lashing out at one another to the point of overtly insulting each other in their workspace), but the action had only been a light breeze on Billie's ear, from which she only felt the beginning and missed the end. The apology had been completely and utterly ineffective and now, things between Billie and Cristina were the tensest they had been in a while.
Sadly, both of them were stubborn little things and none of them were planning on offering an olive branch to the other one. It would be long before they realized they couldn't live with one another, but for the time being, Billie thought Cristina was selfish and Cristina thought Billie was self-centered. There was just no sorting it out.
Number Two: Alex Karev.
If unpredictability was a person, it would be him.
Billie liked to thing she was a pragmatic person-if she wanted to do something, she did it, and she did it right. Not once had she found herself performing half-assed jobs or leaving behind empty conversations-not even abandoning lousy trysts to save her life. There was something about depthless tasks that made Billie cripple with anxiety.
But whenever she thought about Alexander fucking Karev, she realized she had absolutely no clue what she was doing. Or what he was doing, for that matter, since, apparently and even though Billie had always had a dominant personality, he'd always have the upper hand when it came to their relationship. And she hated admitting that he had that much power over her, but there was just no denying it-Billie Black had a soft spot for Alex Karev, and that, she knew.
However, she did not like it.
She did not enjoy flowing with the tide, letting it decide the pace and the rhythm. She wanted to take control, but it only took a glimpse of him for her to crumble, and she loathed him because of it. He had her so nicely wrapped around his finger that it made her want to bang her head against the wall.
She was not able to perform this job right, and it made her stomach swirl like struck by monsoons.
And, at some point (not yet, but soon), she'd come to the conclusion that, if she had felt that feeling correctly before, she would've been able to determine what it was before it fucked her over.
☆
Billie arrived at the hospital that morning bearing dark rings around her eyes and tiredness-induced acerbity to feed a whole town. The first person she caught sight of, sadly, was her patient (and prisoner), Mr. Dunn.
"Mr. Dunn," Derek greeted rather coldly, seconded closely by Cristina and Billie. "The swelling in your brain is increasing rapidly. The longer we wait to operate, the worse it gets."
Much to Billie's confusion, a small smile eerily took over the man's face. "Excellent. Go, team."
"I'm sorry," Billie interrupted, "how is that good?"
"Princess," Mr. Dunn smiled up at her, "have you ever seen the inside of a maximum security prison? Believe me, if you have to die, this is the place to do it. In good company."
The girl was a little taken aback.
Derek, however, didn't seem worried in the slightest-in lieu, he looked rather pissed.
He took in a deep breath, like chugging in his curses, and turned to Billie and Cristina. "You two will vigilantly monitor Mr. Dunn's elevating ICP's, you will do hourly neuro exams. When he goes unconscious, which he will, we'll rush him to surgery."
"You can't do that. Can- Can he do that?" Mr. Dunn rose up a bit in his bed.
"When you're unconscious and can no longer make sound medical decisions, a two-doctor consent is all that's needed to treat you," Cristina said hatefully, arms crossed over her chest.
"Oh, for God's sakes, I'm gonna be dead as a doornail in five days! Dr. Black, you're reasonable-"
"We're done here-"
"Would you fix a broken television before you throw it out?"
As Derek, Billie and Cristina left the room and closed the door behind them, the brunette couldn't help but shrug minimally. "He's got a point."
"Trying to cheat the system. And we're not gonna let him do it," Derek said wryly.
☆
"John," Billie called out as she approached a nurses station, where the intern in question charted, seeming bored.
"Hm?"
"Have you seen Jay and Robin lately?" she asked out of curiosity. It had been a while since she got a clear update on her interns' love life.
"Uh, no. Why?"
"Do you know if they're talking to each other? Like, are they friends, or something?"
"Friends?" John frowned, lifting his head from the chart in order to look at Billie with a frown. "I... walked in on them making out in an on-call room, if that's what you mean."
Her eyes widened tenfold. "Wait, what?"
"Yeah, I think they're into each other."
"Why did nobody tell me!" Billie threw her hands in the air, utterly shocked at the sudden news. It truly had been a long time.
"I don't know. It's just not the kind of thing we go around telling our boss, you know?" John shrugged, finishing the chart and handing it to the nurse behind the counter.
"Well, I thought we were friends!" She huffed, but when she repeated his words in her head, her eyes widened. "Wait, what else do you know?"
John frowned. "Nothing. It's just that."
"You said 'it's not the kind of thing we go telling our boss'. We, who's we?" Billie took a step froward, squinting her eyes at him playfully menacingly.
"I- I have to go. Look, there's- someone's paging me, I need to, uhm, yeah," John said, struggling to get the words out, but catching a sprint and leaving the resident behind.
"Rogers!" she yelled out, then huffed out frustratedly. "Damnit, these interns."
☆
"Those are excellent stitches, Emerson," Billie said in approval.
On her quest to find gossip, she'd come across Jay, who was taking care of a patient in the ER who had had an accident while skating. Now, Billie lurked around the bed, pretending to watch Jay's job, but really just waiting for the moment she'd be able to ask her about Robin in private.
"Thank you, Dr. Black." Jay smiled proudly as she finished stitching up the cut on the little boy's knee. "You're all done, big boy. Your mother's just down in the cafeteria getting you some food, so you just wait here, alright?"
"Yep," the boy agreed.
Jay gave him one last smile before she was standing from her spot on the stool and taking off her latex gloves, then retrieving the chart and heading towards the nurses station, seconded closely by Billie.
"Your technique has improved a lot, it's admirable," she said. "Congratulations."
"Thank you."
Billie watched her intern as she updated the chart, then squinted her eyes. "Is there anything you wanna tell me?"
"Uhm, no, I don't think so." Jay shook her head with a frown.
"Really? Nothing?"
"Uh, no."
"About Keys?"
Suddenly, Jay's eyes widened and she turned towards her resident, seeming like she had been caught red-handed.
"Oh, God, Dr. Black, I totally forgot!" she squealed.
"I think you did." Billie laughed, glad that she'd finally squeezed the secret out. "You two are in a relationship?"
"Well, yeah... something like that."
"She finally accepted her inner gayness?"
"I think so, yeah." Jay nodded, cheeks turning a bright shade of red in slight timidness. "We've been going on a few dates, lately."
"I can't believe you didn't tell me!" Billie scoffed playfully.
"Yeah, I just... you know, with everything you had going. Your brother and your uncle and all that, I just didn't want to be a bother."
"Oh, that's okay. I'm glad for you two." The brunette smiled, patting her intern's forearm softly. Then, she frowned. "You know what's up with Rogers? He's weird today."
"Oh, yeah, he's been like that for a few weeks. Nobody knows why." Jay shrugged, leaning against the counter and talking nonchalantly.
"Hm, alright." Billie nodded, giving the situation some thought. "I gotta go back to my patient now, but I'll try to find out."
Jay snorted. "Good luck with that."
"Why?"
"John's a vault, he doesn't open his mouth. None of us hang with him much because he's so hard to talk to," she explained, making an expression that slightly resembled that of an empathic wince. "In fact, yesterday, he snapped at Adrian in the cafeteria. It was a huge thing, everyone saw and... he said some pretty bad stuff."
The new spoonful of information seemed shocking to Billie. "Well, don't you think maybe something's up with him?"
"Yeah, something's definitely up with him." Jay laughed a little, appearing no longer concerned about the topic in question. "But how would we know?"
☆
Billie was checking Mr. Dunn's vitals when suddenly, he decided to speak.
"Did you know that they let you choose?" he said, half catching Billie's attention, but the girl wasn't yet sure what he meant. "Hanging or lethal, you get to pick your poison." He laughed. "Literally." Billie turned to him with a frown, immediately knowing what he was referring to, but refusing to accept it. "Which one would you choose? Medically speaking, which one's... better?"
Billie gulped, struck like lightning at the sudden mention of such delicate topic. She hesitated whether to speak, knowing that hearing anything else coming out of his mouth would probably and eventually make some sort of empathy stem inside her, and she did not want to be the poor girl that's so fucked up, she feels bad for serial killers. However, she would never be able to turn her back on someone.
"Uh, well..." she began despite her better judgement screaming at her to turn and walk away, "with hanging, your neck breaks, which severs your spinal cord, which causes your blood pressure to drop to nothing and you lose consciousness. You don't actually die for several minutes. And with lethal injection, they inject an anesthetic first, which puts you to sleep, and then a paralytic which stops your diaphragm and your lungs. And then potassium, which stops your heart." Billie thought she could see traces of a tear on his eyes. "It would be painless."
Mr. Dunn gulped and didn't say anything for a few seconds, but then he nodded. "So lethal injection it is?"
Billie gestured softly with her head. "I suppose."
☆
The machines in the patient room had gone haywire.
"I don't feel so good," Mr. Dunn said amidst the sound of beeping and shuffling around. Billie ran up to him and checked his vitals.
"ICP's critical. We can't wait any longer," she said to the nurses. "We gotta get him down to the OR."
"No! No," he begged.
"We have to get you to surgery, Mr. Dunn, I'm sorry."
He shook his head and spoke within a heave. "I'm not scared of dying. I just don't wanna do it strapped down on a table like some... animal." Billie hesitated to move. "Please... please, Dr. Black. Let me go."
And she didn't move. But Derek and Cristina arrived.
"Okay, start bagging him. Intubate, get him into the OR," Derek said as Mr. Dunn slowly lost consciousness.
"Yeah, right here," Cristina helped him.
"I need another doctor's signature, consent to operate," he continued, handing Billie a paper and a pen which she didn't take. "Billie, sign."
She didn't move a finger.
"Sign the form," Derek repeated, but the girl didn't move. "Billie, sign the form."
She looked at him, then at Mr. Dunn, and opened her mouth to speak, but nothing came out.
"BILLIE, SIGN THE FORM!" he yelled, causing everyone in the room to turn towards them.
Billie didn't. So Cristina retrieved the form from Derek's hands and signed it herself. He glanced at Billie with hatred in his eyes.
"Yang, you're scrubbing in," he said as he left the room in a hurry.
☆
Billie wasn't allowed in on the surgery. Not that she cared, she was too frozen to even blink. Mr. Dunn's words had left more questions in her empty mind that she could ever answer in a lifetime.
Now, with the surgery put behind her and Mr. Dunn's life safe, Billie found herself walking into his room, not sure what she'd say, but knowing what she wanted to do.
The man in question just barely opened his eyes when he heard the footsteps stepping into the room. A ghost of a smile lingered on his lips, but it was sad and off, and Billie felt her heart churning in her chest.
"During surgery," she began with a heaving chest, "Dr. Shepherd removed a piece of your skull. Which means your brain now is only covered by dura mater. It's virtually exposed. If somehow that area were to be damaged, it would cause intracranial bleeding, which would cause your brain to swell worse than it did today," she paused, "which would result in brain death. So, as your doctor, I need you to be very careful not to damage it. Do you understand what I'm saying?"
It took a second for him to realize. He analyzed her face with a frown, and then, very slowly, his expression softened. Very slowly, he understood. There was a smile and then there was a nod. Billie reciprocated the gesture and then attempted to leave the room.
"Dr. Black?" he called out, so she turned. "Are you doing this for me?"
Billie remained expressionless. "Whatever helps you sleep at night."
☆
Billie sat behind the counter of the nurses station in the ICU. Next to her, she could see through the corner of her eye the monitor showing Mr. Dunn's vitals, which she was selectively choosing to ignore. She'd kept the position for a few minutes now, but suddenly, Sadie approached her with a slight sprint to her step.
"Dr. Black, you coming?" she said, beckoning with her head towards Mr. Dunn's rooms, where the nurses were already doing whatever they could to help the bleeding patient.
"If it's bad, the nurses will come and get us," Billie replied calmly, knowing exactly what was going on, but not saying a word.
Suddenly, nurse Tyler came out of Mr. Dunn's room. "Dr. Black, he's seizing."
"Well, how about now? Now can we go?" Sadie asked, seemingly suspicious.
Billie stood up. "Dr. Harris, go find something else to do. Now," she said. "That's an order."
Sadie seemed taken aback. With a hard frown set between her eyebrows, she looked over her shoulder at Mr. Dunn's ICU room, but when she turned and all she found was Billie's glare, she walked away. Billie sat back down on her chair.
☆
Mr. Dunn was temporarily saved by the nurses, so in the end, Billie had no choice but to go into the room and finish the job. However, she did not do half the job she'd ever do. There was still a goal set in her mind-as well as in Mr. Dunn's.
She was getting impatient by the moment, watching as the man in front of her slowly died, but didn't quite reach it yet. Not paging Derek was a decision of her own-doing so was all it took to save the patient, but she couldn't do it. Not when it was the only thing he had requested.
"It's getting a little harder to b... to breathe," Mr. Dunn said after a while, causing Billie to let out a shaky breath.
"You can stop this at any time you want, Mr. Dunn, you just have to say the word," she said anxiously.
"I think we're way past formalities, aren't we?" he said with a small smile, but his words were slurred together due to the pain. "Call me William."
Billie smiled just a little.
"William," she said. "Do you want me to page Dr. Shepherd?"
"He's your boyfriend, isn't he?" he asked.
She bit the corner of her lip ever the slightest. "No, he's not my... he's not my boyfriend."
"Oh. Well, I suppose I- I was wrong."
"I suppose you were." Billie cleared her throat in order to get rid of the lump in it, but it was useless.
She turned away from him in order to pretend to be writing something down on the chart, but really, all she was trying to do was something else other than face the man that, at some point today, would die-because of her.
"Right now, all I think about are lemons," William said after a few seconds.
Billie gulped, still facing away from him. "Lemons?"
"When my grandfather was dying, he said he smelled lemons," he explained. "It was all he could talk about for three days, the smell of lemons." William paused. "I keep waiting to smell them, and I don't. Of course, he was a big liar, so..."
The girl nodded and finally turned around, noticing his expression. He looked like he was falling asleep. Billie wished that was just it.
"When my mother died," she said, then was forced to clear her throat again due to the dryness of it, "she said she smelled roses. Just a couple of seconds before she died. She said she smelled roses and then her machine flatlined. Because of DNR, they couldn't resuscitate her and I just... I kept waiting for her to wake up." Billie looked down. "But she never did."
"I'm sorry to hear that, Dr. Black," William whispered.
"Call me Billie." She shrugged, then looked at him. "Are you sure you don't want me to page Dr. Shepherd?"
"I'm sure," he said.
☆
On her way back from the bathroom, Billie ran into Derek. As soon as she caught him walking her way, she felt her heart sinking down to her feet because what if she had been caught?, what would be of her?, what would be of William?
But when he called her name and approached her, all he did was take out a box with a ring inside it.
Billie frowned. "It's... a ring."
"It's from my mother," Derek said with a wide smile. "Well, it's from me. It was my mother's and I'm gonna give it to Meredith soon, so what I'm looking for is an opinion on whether she's gonna like the ring, or I should have the setting redone to something more modern."
"Well, that's, uhm-"
"Look, I know you and her are still not completely over your fight, but the reason why I'm asking is because when I give this to her, she's gonna need someone to freak out to. And she misses you," Derek said. "You must miss her too. I don't know right now what's going on in your life, but you too must have something you want to freak out to her about."
Billie considered his words. True, Billie and Meredith were not as close to being in a fight as Billie and Cristina, but that didn't mean that Billie and Meredith had also gone anywhere near talking like they did before. And yes, without any doubt, they missed each other.
"Meredith wouldn't care about the ring," Billie said, catching Derek's attention. "If she truly loves you, which she does, then she's not gonna care about the ring. She's gonna care about what it means. And if it means you two are gonna spend the rest of your lives together, then yes, she'll freak out, but she'll love it."
A small smile slowly creeped its way onto his lips. "Okay."
"Okay." Billie nodded.
☆
Billie met Cristina at a nurses station later that day. It was an awkward encounter, none of them said a word, but it was much to Billie's surprise when Cristina decided to break the silence.
"How's your serial killer? Did you monitor him last night?" she asked.
Billie hesitated. "Uh, yeah, I got it covered."
The older woman looked up and eyed her suspiciously. Then, she slammed close the chart she was scribbling down on, handed it to the nurse and began rushing down the hallway.
"Cristina!" Billie yelled and ran after her. "I said I got it covered!"
But it was no use. Cristina, with the idea in mind to get Billie in as much trouble as it was possible, was running through the ICU wing and into William's room, where the man lay deliriously. There, she took out her flashlight and examined her eyes, exposing Billie's secret.
"Tell me you paged Shepherd." Cristina shook her head.
"He wants to die," Billie replied simply.
"Billie! What-"
"He's gonna die anyway! In a few days. And if he dies here, we can donate his organs to the ten-year-old who's gonna die down the hall. And Derek won't allow it. So no, I didn't page him, and I hope you won't either," the brunette argued. "I know you think this is wrong. Just let me do this."
But then, it was William's voice the one that interrupted them. "Please... please help. Please help me," he struggled out the words. "I don't want to die. I don't want to die."
Cristina's eyes widened and she looked at Billie over her shoulder before pressing the button to the intercom. "Page Shepherd right now!"
☆
Derek and Cristina stood in front of the monitor that showed William's CT scans, Billie standing close behind with her arms crossed over her chest. The man was shaking his head in evident anger.
"I want him prepped and in the OR in twenty minutes," Derek said coldly, and Cristina nodded and began working right away. He then turned to Billie and scoffed. "You should've paged me a long time ago. Better yet, when I asked you how he was, you should've told me the truth."
"I was following the patient's wishes," Billie replied, expressionless.
"Patient's wishes? He doesn't get wishes! He killed five women."
"And as much as you believe you're right, so do I. If I said something to you, there would've been a debate."
"He's been manipulating you since he got here." Derek gestured with his hand. "He preys on young women!"
"I made a decision as his doctor." Billie shook her head.
"It was a bad decision. It was the wrong decision." He glared into her eyes, jaw clenched harshly. "You're gonna scrub in on his surgery and you're gonna watch while I try like hell to undo what you did."
☆
Billie felt some sort of anxiety as she stepped back into William's ICU room after his surgery in order to check his vitals. It wasn't the regular anxiety that she'd learnt to live with, the one that was always sitting in the back of her head, tapping its fingers softly only to remind her that it was there and it wasn't going away. It was a different anxiety, one that no longer watched from the sidelines, but rather, performed under the spotlight. She felt her stomach ache and her throat constrict at the thought that she might be about to vomit, seeing as William's eyes slowly shuffled open.
"I'm alive," was the first thing he said, softly, almost like a murmur.
Billie lifted her gaze off the ground and parted her lips. "Yeah."
William looked at her and, for a second, he said nothing. Then, she thought to see what could've been interpreted as regret in his eyes.
"I was playing you," he said. "Dr. Shepherd was right. I wanted to destroy your career. I was playing you the whole time, Billie." The girl remained expressionless. "And I wanted to be here to see the fallout."
She swallowed. "You were scared, William. Death is scary. I'm not gonna lie and say I would've been scared too, because dying doesn't scare me, but I know you were scared and I understand that."
A single tear streamed down his cheek, almost like the reality of the facts was starting to catch up to him.
"It'd be good to have a friendly face in the crowd-" he began with a heave, "-when they kill me."
The silence was deafening between the two.
☆
It was about a week later that Billie found herself walking out of Caldwell Prison. It was late at night already, the execution having been taken into performance only a few minutes earlier and having left an enormous hole on her chest that forced her to subconsciously rub it every now and then to ease the pain. But there was no easing the pain.
Holding back her tears, Billie attempted at walking in the direction of the train station, but instead, as soon as she was out of the building, she was entirely surprised to notice Derek standing on the opposite side of the street, leant against his van. She froze for a second on her spot as two guards closed the doors behind her, and when she managed to recompose herself, she began her way across the puddle-covered street, heading straight towards her friend.
A shy tear slowly crept its way down her cheeks, making her feel like there was a spider crawling around her face.
Finally, Billie stood in front of him.
"I don't know why I came." She shrugged after a moment of silence, her voice ultimately breaking and her tears finally unchained. Derek looked at her apologetically. "I- I shouldn't have- I- I just wanted to show him compassion." Her chins and eyebrows tensed as she finally broke into silent sobs (a technique she'd mastered over time, when she'd cry herself to sleep and she had to cover her hand over her mouth so the sobs were drowned against her palm). "It was awful. It was so awful."
"Billie," Derek whispered, pulling her in for an embracing hug. She pressed her forehead against his chest. "It's okay."
They held the position for a few minutes, comforting each other in the silence until Derek finally made it his job to drive her home. However, he decided to make a stop and walk into a building Billie did not care to even glance at, and when he suddenly came back out followed by Cristina, she was shocked.
The curly-haired woman opened the door to the driver's seat and looked at Billie, who sat silently on the passenger's side. The atmosphere was taut for moment or two. Soon, Cristina was hopping in and closing the door behind her.
Billie pouted subconsciously, eyes bloodshot with spilled tears, and asked: "Are we done fighting?"
Cristina looked at her deeply. "I guess we are."
"Okay." She nodded. "It was about time."
"Yes," she agreed. "It was."