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The Chicago winter feels particularly brutal this evening, a vicious chill nipping at Carter's cheeks as he makes his way slowly through Lincoln Park. His legs are weary from hours of scut work, the hands shoved in his pockets aching from sutures.
Being a med student sucks sometimes.
He doesn't want to complain about it too much- after all, he's thrilled to be in that environment, and anything beats the monotony of the business meetings he'd be forced to attend if his family got their way. But on days like today, he wonders what he's really getting himself into. He didn't save any lives. He didn't even really get to see Benton save any lives. No, he was too busy running for lab results and stitching up drunks to catch a glimpse of the trauma room.
A shiver runs down his spine and he turns the corner, breath misting in the bitter evening air. The forecast says it's going to snow, and Carter, perhaps immorally, hopes it will so that he'll get a few more interesting injuries to treat tomorrow. Sled collisions are always fun. Tongues vs freezing cold lampposts. The occasional smattering of frostbite.
He glances over at North Pond. Squinting slightly reveals that, yes, the surface has frozen over, which means if there happens to be any precipitation tonight, it'll be snow.
His eyes move across the pond, drawn by movement in his peripheral vision. There's a lone figure tottering about on the ice, arms extended outwards to keep steady, stature far too short to be an irresponsible and inebriated adult.
It's a kid.
Carter speeds up, striding now towards the edge of the pond and stopping just before it. He cups his hands around his mouth like a makeshift megaphone.
“Hey!”
His call is carried off by the wind in a different direction, so he takes a deep breath and tries again.
“Hey! It's not safe out there!”
At last, the figure on the ice seems to hear him, pivoting to face him on wobbly legs, arms still out for balance. It's definitely a kid- a little boy- and he looks frightened.
Where the hell are his parents?
Carter casts a cursory glance around just in case he's somehow missed the presence of an adult here, but finds nobody except him and the distressed little boy, who now appears to be attempting to get off the ice by shuffling in the opposite direction.
Well, he might have missed the ‘don’t play on barely frozen ponds’ lecture but clearly the ‘stranger danger’ one stuck.
Unfortunately, the section of ice he's heading towards is noticeably thinner than the rest- Carter can tell, because he's seen it all before, but the kid hasn't. The kid has no fucking clue.
“Hey!” Carter calls again, uselessly. “Turn back around, it's not- it's not safe that way, you'll-”
Fall.
The word doesn't leave his lips, but it happens all the same. The little boy takes another step, and the ice cracks beneath him- one minute he's standing on top of it, the next he's gone, plunging into freezing cold waters. All around him, the pond begins to fracture, the single breach enough to cause a spider web of cracks that break the ice into hundreds of tiny floes.
He's in the water. The little boy is in the water.
Carter's heart lurches, and his knees jerk towards the pond while the rest of him remains rooted still. He looks back, searching desperately for another witness, someone else to assist him. There's nobody. He looks forward. The child can't even be seen.
He drops his satchel. He shucks his coat (it will only weigh him down).
He runs.
Moving across the ice is difficult, especially since he hasn't tried to do it this fast since he was a kid, but something about the urgency of the situation propels him forwards, half skidding, half sprinting. He slows as he reaches the outer layer of the web of cracks, eyes scouring in front of him for any signs of the kid. A small figure in a woolly hat surfaces a few metres away, thrashing about, otherwise silent. He's too cold to even scream.
“Alright, buddy.” Carter calls out, stepping cautiously onto a closer piece of ice. “Hang on, I'm coming.”
His foot slides, but he quickly regains his balance, heart only lurching for a moment. He takes another step. Another. Soon, he's close enough to kneel down, to reach out an arm so far it starts to shake.
“Try to grab it for me- can you do that? I'm gonna pull you up and out of there.”
But the boy is bobbing up and down, so panicked and disoriented that he doesn't even seem to see Carter's hand. And even if he could, it's becoming increasingly obvious that he's too far away to grab it. He's in the centre of what has become a small pond within the pond.
Carter doesn't quite know what compels him to do what he does next. Perhaps it's some misguided sense of heroism, his lifelong inability to just let things be when there's something- anything- he can do about it. Perhaps it's reckless stupidity brought on by yet another shift of doing anything but saving lives.
Whatever it is, he leans into it fully, and slips into the freezing depths.
He takes it slowly at first, knowing from med school that getting into the water too quickly will send him into shock, likely one of the reasons the little boy is struggling so much right now. First, he lowers his feet, gritting his teeth against the sting. Then, his ankles. His legs.
Torso.
As soon as he's in properly, he starts to swim, grateful for once that his old school required him to take goddamn water polo because, at the very least, he's familiar with the strokes. It only takes him a few seconds to reach the boy, though his lungs are already burning, seizing, and he's fighting not to cough as he wraps his arms around his flailing target.
“Sh-shh” he manages, teeth starting to chatter. “I g-got you.”
The boy clings to him, and Carter turns around, holding him close and ignoring the screaming in his muscles. He kicks towards the nearest ice floe. Focuses all of his energy on not letting go.
It must only be a matter of seconds, but it feels like an eternity, and by the time he's close enough to attempt to get the boy back onto the ice, he's already exhausted. The cold is sapping him of energy quickly, and it isn't helped by the fact that he had little to spare to begin with.
With all his might, he tries to lift the boy up. His first attempt is too shaky, his arms too weak, and his rescuee doesn't seem to be able to push himself forward at all. Carter's breaths are coming quicker. His vision feels a little gray at the edges.
“G-get yourself o-over th-there, b-buddy.” He breathes, readying to lift the boy again.
His next attempt is successful- he uses all his strength to almost throw the boy onto the thicker ice, and he sees with relief that he remains there. Waterlogged, and confused, and mostly limp, but there.
He's probably inhaled some water. He needs an ambulance.
Carter needs to-
He needs to-
What… what does he need to do?
He blinks, and finds that he's drifted a little bit away from the edge. His legs are still kicking, but slower than before. The grey at the edges of his vision is starting to encroach further inwards.
The little boy is starting to, mercifully, sit up. He looks over at Carter with large, owlish eyes while the latter fights to stay above the surface.
“G-get… h-help.” Carter manages, voice thin, lungs tight.
The boy doesn't seem to understand him. He doesn't move.
“H-help.”
Carter tries again, but then the boy disappears from view. It takes Carter a few moments to realise that it's because he's slipping under, numb legs starting to cramp, arms exhausted. The surface swallows him, the already-chilled skin of his cheeks hit with a sudden icy burn, vision blurred by the darkness of the pond and the sudden weight of waterlogged hair over his eyes.
He manages a weak kick and rises up again just enough to suck in a quick breath, though he's sinking under again too quickly, so quickly that his parted lips don't have time to close again. He chokes on a mouthful of gritty water. Surfaces again, coughing. Sinks again.
When he was only seven, he and Bobby were playing on the partly frozen lake at the bounds of the Carter estate. They were alone, as always, and they'd spent hours skidding across the milky ice pretending they were hockey players or figure skaters or penguins.
But Bobby had been getting more tired than usual, lately, and Scooter’s endless stores of energy seemed to annoy him. Carter knows now that it must have been unbearable to watch his baby brother run rings around him, but Scooter wasn't so insightful yet. So he'd kept running, kept skating closer to the edge where the ice turned into water, even when Bobby groaned that he'd had enough.
And Bobby, in a flare of rage, pushed Scooter in.
He doesn't remember so much of what happened afterwards, just fragments of shouting (his own? Bobby’s?) and the cold shock of the water as he struggled to stay afloat. He remembers bobbing up and down, choking, spluttering, spots dancing in his vision, none of his limbs doing what he wanted them to do.
He remembers feeling, for the very first time, like he was going to die.
Bobby had pulled him out after only ten seconds or so, of course, because there was nobody else around and they'd long learned to just rely on each other. His brother used all of his waning strength to drag him onto the ice and shake him until he stopped feeling so sleepy, so distant. Then, they'd trudged back, Scooter shivering, Bobby tugging him forwards, until they'd reached the mansion again.
Carter waits for Bobby to pull him out again this time, but the only familiar thing about this experience is the sensation that he's dying.
Those spots are dancing in his vision again, and he knows that the next time he goes under, he won't have the strength to resurface. He tries to inhale as much air as possible before that happens. When he's dragged down below, half of what's in his lungs is water.
There's darkness for only a second. The briefest, longest second of his life.
Then-
A sharp grip on his arm and a tug, far stronger than Bobby's had been, then multiple hands taking hold of him and pulling him out from the depths. He lands, hard, on something solid and cold. The ice.
He gulps down the frigid air.
Someone looks over at him, and as the blurring of his vision fades, so too does the empty muffled feeling in his ears.
“Jesus, man, you okay?”
Carter rolls over weakly and coughs, bringing up a few pathetic mouthfuls of water before shuddering, the numbness in his limbs beginning to dissipate now too. Once he feels able to move his head, he nods. Whether his rescuer(s) can even tell he's nodding from how hard he's shaking is another thing entirely.
“God, that little boy’s almost blue.”
The voice doesn't come from the man who's looking directly at him, but a little ways away. Carter forces himself, every muscle like jelly, to sit up. He looks over to see the other rescuer tending to the boy.
“C-call him an a-ambulance.” He breathes, teeth chattering. “He s-swallowed a lot- a lot of w-water.”
The other man gives him a sympathetic look. “So did you.”
The ambulance rattles along the pothole-littered roads, and Carter holds an oxygen mask to his face, eyes fixed on the gurney where the little boy is sitting. There's a kind of glassy look in his eyes, like he still doesn't know what's going on, but that was mostly explained by the first words he'd spoken when they got him warmed up: not English.
No wonder he didn't know what Carter was doing.
“Pediatric drowning, five minutes.”
Mark glances up from his notes at the nurses’ station, arching a brow. “In this weather? Jesus.” He turns to Carol, who understands what he's about to ask before he can even open his mouth.
“I’ll go grab Doug.”
Soon, the two doctors are moving out to the approaching ambulance, accompanied by a gaggle of nurses, all of them prepared for the worst. When the doors open, though, they're pleasantly surprised to find that the gurney being offloaded is occupied by a stable-looking little boy. He's sitting up, shivering a little in a puffy coat, looking around him with the reassuring curiosity of a normal four or five-year old.
“Little guy doesn't speak English, he slipped into North Pond but was lucky enough to have a good Samaritan nearby. He's definitely hypothermic, temp 94.4, sats 95, a little tachy at 120.”
As the paramedic delivers the handover, someone steps down from the ambulance behind him, and it takes Mark only a second to realise who it is.
“Carter?”
The medical student lowers an oxygen mask from his face, then promptly tosses it back into the ambulance and moves forward, soon walking alongside the gurney into the hospital.
“You're the good Samaritan?” Doug asks.
Carter shrugs, suppressing a shudder. “K-kid was in the lake, I was p-passing by.”
“Weren't you just on?”
“Mhm.” He gives them both a weak smile. “D-didn’t think I'd be back so s-soon.”
It doesn't take an expert to tell that he needs warming up- the damp hair and constant shivering is enough of a giveaway- so Mark points him forwards, adopting his most authoritative-yet-kindly Chief Resident voice.
“Go get yourself in an exam room and out of those wet clothes. Lydia?”
The nurse hurries over from the gurney.
“Can you go get Carter warmed up? I can tell he's borderline hypothermic just by looking at him.”
Lydia nods, offering Carter a gentle smile and urging him on into the lobby of the hospital with a hand at his upper arm. Mark watches them go, then returns his attention, alongside Doug, to the pediatric patient.
“Alright, let's get this little guy into trauma one.”
It's an hour or so later when Mark finally stops hurrying around for long enough to check on Carter, still squirreled away in the exam room. As he enters, he notes first that the telltale beeping of monitors is missing, and second that the reason for this is a frankly quite adorable med student curled up, fast asleep, on the bed. Warming blankets have been applied liberally, as per instructions.
Lydia enters a few seconds after Mark does, swooping past then looking back at him with a wry smile.
“They always look so cute like this, don't they?”
Mark looses a small chuckle. “Oh, absolutely. Makes you wanna just pick ‘em up, plant them outside, and tell them to run far away from a career in medicine so they keep their precious innocence… How is he?”
He steps over to get a closer look at their napping med student, still fast asleep despite the conversation happening around him. Mark remembers when he too used to be able to sleep uninterrupted and unbothered by noise, before his career made that impossible. Carter will no doubt experience the same theft of peace once he starts taking longer shifts.
“Fell asleep about a half hour ago and has been out like a light ever since. Poor baby’s exhausted, unsurprisingly- you know he dragged that little boy out all by himself?”
Mark feels a twinge of affection in his chest. He's had a soft spot for Carter since they met almost a year ago, and unlike what happens with most med students, it's only grown with time. There's no doubt he'll make a great doctor. He’s smart but not cocky, sweet in a way that feels genuine, and boundlessly optimistic.
Mark only hopes that the ER doesn't squeeze these qualities out of him like it often does.
“Kid’s got guts.” He murmurs eventually.
There's something he means to ask, but his pager beeps and he withdraws it to find that he's needed urgently for a GSW and the thought slips from his mind.
He bids farewell to Lydia and hurries out of the room.
He forgets to tell her to turn the monitor back on.
Just in case.
Carter wakes up disoriented, mouth dry, heart hammering. At first he thinks it's just the fallout from another nightmare- he's been dreaming about the lake, Bobby, the bite of the water- but it doesn't fade when reality settles around him. Instead, the tight feeling in his chest lingers and the chills he felt an hour ago are worse.
He tries to sit up, but the room spins around him and he's forced to lower himself back down again, pulse cacophonous in his ears.
Something is wrong. Something is desperately wrong, and he doesn't need to be a fully fledged doctor yet to know that.
But even as he comes to realise this, the exhaustion creeps in again, and he lacks the energy to act upon the panic in his brain. The blankets he's in are warm and he is cold. The lights in the room are dim. It's quiet.
He's… he's really tired.
Just sleep, a distant part of his brain whispers. You’ll feel better if you just sleep.
He knows, deep down where the medical knowledge has been implanted from hours spent reading textbooks and listening to Benton, that this is wrong. That going to sleep right now is arguably the most dangerous thing he can do.
But he's far too tired to care anymore, and if he closes his eyes, his chest doesn't hurt so much.
Benton only finds out his student is in the ER when he overhears a conversation between a couple of nurses- a med student brought in after rescuing a drowning little boy? If that isn't Carter, he might as well let go of his claim that he's got a surgeon's intuition.
He heads downstairs and finds himself in front of the board, scanning through names looking for a J until someone moves in beside him. It's Haleh.
“If you're looking for your student, he's sleeping in Exam 2. Be gentle with him, Peter. He risked his life to save that little boy tonight.”
She disappears before he can say anything else, though even if she'd remained he doesn't know what he would've said. The callous exterior of a surgeon comes naturally to him now, so he's not surprised Haleh expects nothing else, but he wishes she knew that within him, his heart sometimes thrums like a caged bird within his ribs. And often, when that happens, Carter is somehow involved.
He has that quality about him- an ability to force Peter to rethink everything he thought he knew about life and medicine and what it is to be a good doctor.
As he pushes open the door to Exam Room 2, he expects to find the stillness and peace that Haleh prepared him for. Instead, the medical student in the bed is half sitting up, chin tipped to his chest, breathing rapidly and shallowly. There's no monitor to blare out a warning. No nurse to see that he's fighting for air.
He's alone. And he's in trouble.
Turning back to the door, Peter shoves it open and calls out into the corridor for help, then runs to the bedside without waiting another second. He lifts Carter's head, two fingers either side of his jaw, his own eyes searching his student’s for some explanation.
“Carter? What happened? What's wrong?”
Carter doesn't respond at first, still hyperventilating, and in the light Peter can see the bloodlessness of his lips and cheeks. How close it's getting to cyanosis. After a few seconds, though, he breathlessly murmurs,
“D-don’t feel well."
Peter's physician's instincts kick in at last, and his gaze darts around for a pulse ox, EKG stickers. It's been so long since he was the one to gently administer them- back in medical school when he was the same age as Carter, before he'd developed the rough exterior of a surgeon- and his fingers are clumsy. He tells himself it's simply thanks to a lack of practice, not daring to consider the fear pulsing in his chest.
When he gets the monitor running, it takes only a matter of seconds for the alarms to start.
O2 sat 83.
Heart rate 144bpm.
He looks back at Carter, allows himself to acknowledge for the first time the childlike terror in eyes that have so often regarded him with respect.
The door to the room swings open again, and Mark marches in, hotly pursued by Carol dragging a crash cart and Haleh. All three take in the scene simultaneously- Peter’s panicked demeanour, the frantic wailing of the monitor, Carter’s desperate attempts to breathe.
Mark turns to Haleh immediately. “Call for a chest X ray now.”
As she hurries out of the room, he continues his march over to the bedside, slinging his stethoscope from around his neck.
“Carter? I need to listen to your chest, buddy.”
Carter nods weakly, barely keeping his eyes from rolling back into his head, breath coming in out in out in out. When Peter looks over to the monitor, he's unsurprised to see the sats slowly declining.
The chest piece is slipped underneath the thin fabric of a gown now soaked with sweat. Peter fixes his eyes on the chief resident’s, tuned in to every micro expression.
“Take a nice deep breath for me, bud. As deep as you can go.”
Nothing changes. Either Carter is so far gone he doesn't understand the instruction, or, more likely, he's physically unable to carry it out. Mark withdraws the stethoscope and shoots Benton a concerned look.
“He has fluid buildup on both lungs.”
Peter's chest seizes like the diagnosis applies to him.
“Pulmonary edema from near-drowning.” He says, tone clinical and matter-of-fact but laced with frustration. “He should've been on a goddamn monitor, Dr Greene, and you know it.”
The other doctor says nothing, only glancing back at Carter and his waning consciousness.
“We need to tube him.”
“Dr Greene.”
“He's not oxygenating well, Peter. He's on the brink of respiratory failure.”
Benton shakes his head. “High flow O2 by mask first. Give him a chance.”
“Look at him. This is the only chance he has, Peter.”
The panicked look in Carter’s eyes is dimmed now, replaced by something more glazed over and distant. His neck tightens with every rapid, useless breath. In the past few seconds, Carol has moved to his side, brushing back hair from his forehead in an almost maternal fashion.
It hits Benton all at once that, as much as he wishes there were some other way, if they wait even a minute longer, there's a good chance he will be responsible for Carter's death. He inhales sharply.
“Give me the goddamn intubation tray. Preoxygenate and load him up with etomidate and roc.”
Mark doesn't protest, moving out of the way and gesturing for Haleh to grab what's needed. Benton sets himself up at the head of the bed, feeling almost woozy when he looks down at his student, as though he's standing at the edge of a vertiginous precipice and peering down into the valley below.
Carol is handed a mask, which she places over Carter's mouth and nose with one hand, her other still doing its best to soothe him. His breaths barely fog at all.
“Carter? Look at me, sweetheart."
His gaze slides lazily over, and Peter exhales a breath he didn't know he was holding that his student’s eyes are no longer on him.
“You're going to go to sleep for a while, okay?” Carol explains gently, enunciating each word in the careful manner one would use with a child. “You're not breathing very well, so we need to help you. You understand, don't you? That we need to put a tube down your throat?”
He nods. Ever so faintly, but even so it makes Benton feel sick. Somehow it's easier if he fools himself into thinking Carter has no idea what's going on. The fact that he's still conscious enough to comprehend the gravity of his condition is… God, it's horrific.
Haleh is getting a line into the back of Carter's hand- he didn't have one before. He didn't have any IVs. How the hell did he not have any IVs?
“Etomidate going in.” As she presses the edge of the syringe into the new port, she gives his hand a reassuring squeeze and lifts her voice. “This one might burn a bit, baby, I'm sorry.”
It goes in. Benton watches Carter's face for any sign that he's in pain but only sees the barest hitch of breath. There are tears in his eyes, too, though he can't be sure they haven't been there for a while.
“Now the roc.”
While Haleh begins to administer the second syringe and Carol soothes Carter in gentle tones, Mark hands Benton the laryngoscope. It feels heavier than it ever has before.
“You’re alright, sweetheart, it's okay. I know it's scary but we're right here. We're not going anywhere, I promise.”
Peter is a coward. He has wrenched open ribcages, drilled holes into skulls, held feet of intestines in his hands, and yet he cannot bear to watch Carter go under. He hears it, of course- the rapid, shallow breaths becoming infrequent, shallow breaths. The beeping of the monitor slowing. Carol's voice.
“That's it… Good boy. Go to sleep, Carter. We're right here, it's okay.”
Then Mark’s.
“Peter.”
He looks down. Carter's eyes are closed, a glistening tear track adorning each side from far edge to ear. The mask fogs once, then twice, then….
His student’s chest is still.
Carol lifts the mask.
Carter's lips are ever so slightly parted, enough to show boyish teeth.
“Peter.”
He snaps into gear, clicking the laryngoscope into proper alignment and leaning down, trying beyond hope to see this as nothing more than a clinical procedure he's done a thousand times.
Tilt the head back properly, making sure the jaw is slack.
Slide the scope in at the right side of the patient’s mouth.
Apply upward pressure at a 45 degree angle.
Use the blade to sweep the tongue out of the way.
Visualise the vocal cords.
“Tube.”
Extend the right hand.
Feel Mark press the tube into your palm.
Slot it in place, manoeuvring it down Carter's throat, through the vocal cords.
Don't look upwards or you'll see his face, the dark eyelashes and aquiline nose that give everything away.
Inflate the cuff.
Remove the stylet.
Step back and let someone else swoop in to attach the bag valve because there's sweat in your eyes and you feel vaguely nauseous.
Watch Mark press the chest piece of his stethoscope against Carter's skin and confirm that he's moving air.
Let yourself sigh with relief.
Leave the room because the sight of your student with a tube down his throat is becoming too much to bear.
Carol looks up just in time to see Benton disappear, before she fixes her attention quickly back on Carter, more still than he ever ought to be. She squeezes the bag every three seconds. Delivers the air he needs into his lungs. Tries to ignore how fucking ridiculous it is that she's breathing for a guy she speaks to almost every day.
Mark glances between Carter, Carol, and Haleh (who's rubbing soothing circles into the back of the hand she cannulated herself), and attempts to think of something to say that will make everything right.
“I’ll call ICU.” He says instead, voice hoarse.
The mother of the child Carter pulled from the pond comes hurrying in at nearly midnight, scarf hanging loosely from round her neck, cheeks flushed from exertion. She half stumbles over to the check-in desk, a string of unintelligible words falling from her mouth so quickly that Mark doesn't realise she's speaking a different language until Carol begins talking slowly in stilted Russian.
She's brought in to see her son- Alexei, she informs them as she bundles him in her arms and kisses him furiously. The staff in the room remain stiff. As touching as the reunion might be, and as clear as it is that what happened was simply a case of a runaway child (corroborated by the woman herself once she calmed down slightly), nobody can let go of the knowledge that one of their own is fighting for his life because of something entirely preventable.
And the mother isn't stupid. She sees the discomfort in the way they stand and address her, and, still rocking her child in her arms, asks,
“What… what is- wrong?”
Her accent is thick, the words evidently not coming naturally to her, but Mark’s demeanour softens a little with the remembrance that she has no idea the trouble her son’s escape has caused.
“When your son fell into the pond,” Mark says slowly, seeing the nurses in his peripheral vision pause their activity. “He… he could not swim. He couldn't get out. One of our- a medical student who works here saw him struggling and saved him, but he… he came into trouble himself.”
“Came into trouble?” She repeats, as if parsing the words for meaning.
“He managed to get your son out, but he was very tired and very nearly drowned himself. He came to the hospital too but he's quite sick now. Very sick, in fact.”
“Where he is?”
Mark sighs. “He's in the ICU. The intensive care unit.”
The woman’s brow knits together into a sorrowful frown.
“I… I see him?”
An excuse is ready to fall from his lips when he sees the desperation in the mother’s eyes, the kind of genuine concern for another human being that he sees far too rarely. Policies and paperwork and administration seem so trivial compared to instinct and humanity. He nods, and gestures for her to follow him.
Most of the staff have been in at some point or other in the past few hours, leaving with tear-stained cheeks and somber expressions, and when Mark approaches with the woman in tow, Susan is just leaving. She glances over at her, eyes flashing cold before she schools them into normalcy and fixes her gaze on Mark again.
“This the mother?”
He nods, not knowing what else he can add to explain the situation. Susan merely gives him a nod in return and goes to leave, only turning back once to deliver a quick message.
“Try and get Benton to get some sleep and something to eat, would you? He hasn't moved in hours.”
Mark sighs and quietly agrees- not that he thinks he'll really be able to shift the surgeon on this matter. He's stubborn at the best of times, but it seems where his student is involved, he's even more so.
The woman shifts beside Mark, twiddling her thumbs anxiously, and he recalls what he's here to do. Inhaling a deep breath to steel himself, he pushes open the door to Carter's room.
It's quiet, the silence only broken by the low hissing and humming of machinery and the steady shrill beeping of a monitor. A weary figure sits at the bedside, back arched like the quivering, taut curve of a strung bow. His hand is resting protectively on Carter's collarbone when they enter, but at the recognition of footsteps nearby, it is drawn quickly away, Benton shooting Mark an almost accusatory glare at the presumed inference of affection.
“Bozhe Moy.”
The woman at Mark’s side draws a hand to her mouth, tears immediately springing to her eyes. It isn't hard to understand why.
If Carter had looked a little unwell earlier, when he was curled up in bed in Exam 2, he looks critically ill now. His skin is far too pale beneath the clinical white lights, the dark circles under his eyes pronounced. The only ounce of colour on his face is a slight redness around the adhesive pads keeping the ET tube in place, the continual fogging of which, along with the heart monitor beeping, is the only fragile reassurance that he's still alive.
Mark casts a glance at the numbers on the monitor. Sats holding. BP a little on the hypotensive side but nothing too concerning. Heart rate the slow, steady rhythm of deep sedation.
He looks over at the mother again, gestures gently towards the bed.
“You can… you can get closer if you like. Just be careful of the wires and tubes.”
Benton's brow furrows disapprovingly at this, but Mark waves her on anyway- the surgeon is tired. Worried. Scared. Overly protective.
The woman drifts slowly towards the opposite side of the bed, movements unsure, continually throwing questioning looks back at Mark to make sure she's really allowed to approach. With his encouragement, she soon kneels at the bedside, clasping her hands together and studying Carter's face with tears welling in her eyes.
“What his name?” She asks quietly, barely more than a whisper. “I want to thank him.”
Mark clears his throat, sharing a quick grieved look with Benton. “It's, uh… it's John. John Carter.”
“How… how old?”
“23.”
“Bogi. He is… he is malysh. So young.” She sniffs, bowing her head towards the edge of the railing, hands clasped even tighter in prayer. “Otche nash, sushchiy na nebesakh. Da svyatitsya imya Tvoye.”
She murmurs the words quietly, as if only for her recipient, but as she continues Mark soon understands what it is she's reciting. He's heard it so many times from family members at bedsides in a vast array of languages. A desperate, sometimes final, “Our Father’ in the hopes that this time, God might lend an ear.
When she’s finished, the prayer complete, she lifts her head and fixes her watery gaze on Carter's face again. Her right hand comes up tentatively towards his cheek, thumb brushing the skin there with a mother’s touch.
“Spasibo, John.” She breathes. “Thank you. You save my boy- he is all I have. Without him, I am… nothing, I- thank you.”
She turns briefly back to Mark, eyes still glittering with yet unshed tears. “He can… he can hear me? Maybe?”
“Maybe.” Mark affirms.
She turns back.
“You must… you must get better, hm? Srazhat’sya. Fight. You must fight.”
Carter's under such heavy sedation that it's unlikely he can hear anything at all, let alone the quiet urges of a foreign tongue. But Mark hopes, as he often does, that the laws of science turn a blind eye just this once to let the plea reach him.
The hours stretch on. Nothing changes. Peter remains resolute, like a statue at Carter's bedside, only moving for the briefest of periods when it's required of him to eat or bathe or use the phone to call his sister.
Morgenstern pulls him aside on the second day Carter is in the ICU, expression kind but instructive.
“Go home, Peter. You can't stay here anymore.”
For a few moments, Peter says nothing. He keeps his arms folded, eyes fixed on a point past Morgenstern’s face, through the frosted glass of the door towards the blurred shape of the bed behind it.
“I mean it.”
The chief surgeon’s sharp gaze doesn't offer any room for argument. Benton forces his feet to drag down the corridors and out of the hospital back to his apartment.
Everything feels so empty and quiet, the hum of the refrigerator too dull to drown out the lingering sound of alarms in Peter's brain. He brews himself a coffee with hands that are still clinically precise, keeping himself on the edge of alertness at all times as though at any moment, he might be called back to County. He checks his pager just in case. It remains silent, like everything else in the apartment.
He showers briskly, and when the water briefly turns cold, he wonders how freezing the water in the pond was. How cold Carter was, still is. He should go back to make sure they've given him enough blankets, that his IV fluids are warmed. Peter would sit by the bedside and hold them in his hands himself if that's what was needed.
Eventually, he drags himself to bed, setting his pager right next to his pillow as though he's on call. It takes him an eternity to fall asleep.
An hour later he jerks awake with a phantom beeping in his mind. He checks the device.
Nothing.
Rolls over and closes his eyes.
Another hour and it happens again. This time, he stays awake for a few minutes, waiting to see whether he really will get a page, until his heavy eyelids and the unignorable quiet pull him under again.
It's five AM the next time his eyes spring open, and though he's technically committed no sin at all by sleeping for more than an hour undisturbed, guilt gnaws at his stomach. The Chicago sunrise is still in the distant future as he dresses himself, and it's only just creeping over the horizon when he finds himself stepping off the El into the bitter air.
By the time he pushes open the door to that ICU room again, his heart is racing, but nothing within has really changed since he left. It's still quiet, still dreary, and Carter is still in that bed- the only immediate difference is that they've shifted his position slightly.
He's prone now, lying on his stomach with his head turned to the left, presumably to help with oxygenation. The blankets remain draped over him, rising and falling slowly with each mechanised breath. They're slightly too short, leaving his feet uncovered, and Peter clicks his tongue in frustration as he wanders closer.
Unnecessary heat loss. A stupid mistake.
He sets his jaw and tugs the end of the blankets down a fraction to rectify the situation. And if he squeezes an ankle reassuringly on his way to his seat at the bedside, it's only to make sure there are enough layers to cover it.
As he settles into the uncomfortable plastic chair yet again, pulling out a crossword so he at least looks occupied, his eyes linger on his student. There's a scar on his upper cheek. Peter didn't notice it before, in the hurried whirlwind of rounds and trauma cases, but in the stillness it seems unmissable. It shifts slightly with his cheek every time he breathes, every time the ET tube fogs.
There's a story behind the scar, and there's a story behind Carter, too.
It suddenly terrifies Benton that he might never get to hear it.
During morning rounds in the ICU, the doctors on duty are met with a gaggle of expectant staff waiting in Carter's room. Some of them are tending to him, crouched at the bedside, brushing back hair, while others examine monitors or scrutinise IVs.
They're aware, of course, that their presence is at least a little intimidating, because that's their intent- towards these unfamiliar doctors, of course; their gentleness with their charge is unmistakable. And when the preliminary checks are complete, Mark himself steps forward to ensure the doctors don't escape without giving an update.
“Well? What's your plan?”
The doctor at the head of the group gives the bed a perfunctory glance.
“Right now, he's stable, and I'm wary of attempting anything that might jeopardise that. However,” He adds, noting Mark's dissatisfaction with the answer at once, “I don't object to lowering his sedation to see how he responds.”
Mark hums approvingly.
“But,” The doctor continues. “If I have any concerns his condition is worsening, this will be reversed immediately, and a more conservative approach will be taken. Yes?”
The chief resident isn't sure he likes the man’s supercilious tone, but his plan appears to be a sound one. He nods.
“Good. I believe we're in agreement, then.”
Within a few minutes, the IV snaking into the back of Carter's limp hand is dripping at a slower rate. And everyone in the room sits patiently, awaiting an uncertain future.
It's hours before anything happens. Visitors come and go, occupying chairs and squeezing Carter’s shoulder encouragingly before drifting away into the busy halls, leaving Peter once again alone with his protegé.
He sits with steepled hands in that same uncomfortable chair, though he can see there's one in the corner of the room that might be easier on his back. He's not entirely sure why he doesn't swap it out, but an overly analytical part of his brain whispers that perhaps he wants to subject himself to an ounce of the discomfort Carter must be feeling, almost as penance. Like plastic digging into his spine is anywhere close to the sensory horror of breathing tubes and countless IVs and wires upon wires upon wires.
Carter shifts.
It's infinitesimal, no more than a vague twitch of his brow, but Peter scrambles to sit upright and moves instinctively closer.
“Carter? Hey, you with me, man?”
There's nothing more for a few moments, and he half thinks perhaps he imagined it, so sleep deprived he's beginning to hallucinate. But then the beeps of the heart monitor start to quicken, and he sees a similar twitch in Carter's hand. His nose. A slow, unmistakable awakening, like the staggered entrances of a great orchestra.
He places a hand on Carter's shoulder, trying to mimic the ease with which everyone else seems to be able to touch him but feeling his fingers tremble clumsily against the thin paper gown.
“I've got you, it's okay. You're alright, you're just- you're just waking up. Take it nice and slow.”
Like with his touch, he forces his voice to omit the querulousness he feels within. Carter needs certainty. He needs solidity. He needs something real to focus on as the haze of sedation starts to lift.
Over several minutes, the twitches develop into more purposeful movements, his fingers curling against the sheets, his brow properly furrowing, his throat bobbing. Mark and Susan, only intending to duck in quickly, hurry over when they see one foot rub inelegantly over the other.
“He's waking up?”
Peter nods, trying to maintain some sense of distance between himself and what's happening. He forces himself to sit still, hands back to being steepled in front of him, limiting himself to only observing.
Carter must bumble his way through, clawing out some sense of the world with sluggish limbs, extracting information like a newborn through tactile experience alone. It's the method Peter always falls back on for teaching- never hand-holding, simply letting his student figure out what he must do in order to accomplish the task he's been set. Now more than ever, given the witnesses he has, Peter can't be seen to undermine that strategy.
Yet when Carter's breath hitches slightly against the vent, brow furrowing again with confusion and hazy fear, Peter throws it all to the wind. He pulls himself closer again, and places his hand against Carter's head, thumb drifting over his temple.
“It's okay- you're okay. I'm here, Carter. You don't need to be scared, man. You're intubated, on a ventilator right now, but it won't be for long I promise.”
He can sense Mark and Susan’s eyes on him, the surprise that surely must be written on their faces given this hasty change in demeanour, but he's past caring now. Because the beeping of the monitor, once rather rapid, has started to slow since he spoke.
Susan moves to Benton's side, reaching out to squeeze Carter's hand and issuing a small smile when his fingers curl around hers.
“Open your eyes for us, Carter.” She says gently. “Can you do that? Can you give it a try?”
His lashes flutter, delicate as butterfly wing beats against porcelain-white skin, and slowly but surely, a sliver of brown emerges. He blinks a few times, languidly, like his eyelids weigh tonnes, but fights to keep them open. His gaze slides from Susan, the voice he followed here, to Benton, the presence that kept him grounded enough to even hear it.
He blinks again, purposefully, and when his eyes open his nostrils flare slightly. Peter knows his student enough to understand the signal of discomfort.
“Hey. I know… I know. They'll take that tube out soon, okay? You needed it- you had a pulmonary edema secondary to water inhalation, and you weren't breathing well. Do you remember?”
Carter’s eyes don't move from his, clinging to them with all the energy he can't currently muster in his limbs. After a few moments, he manages a small nod. Benton brushes his thumb against his temple again as though rewarding his efforts.
“Alright… and you remember what happened? With the little boy in the pond?”
Another nod. Another sweep of Peter’s thumb.
“Good, good.”
“The boy's doing well.” Mark says from somewhere behind the surgeon, and of course, right, Carter will want to know about the prognosis of the boy. Benton's mind hasn't gone there in hours, but Mark’s always been more of a big picture guy anyway. “He didn't have any major injuries- we sent him home yesterday. His mother came in to see you a while ago. Do you remember that?”
Carter’s eyes well with tears that Peter can't quite interpret. He shakes his head.
“That's okay.” Mark reassures him, tone growing softer. “Hey, that's alright. You've been sedated, so that's normal. It might come back to you later… I'm gonna go find someone about that ET tube, see if we can get you a little more comfortable."
The chief resident slips away, patting Carter's ankle on his journey out, the latter’s eyes fluttering closed as he clearly tries to make sense of all that's happened.
It's an impossible task.
The world comes back in fragments, like the vase he shattered when he was five. He'd been clumsy, knocked into it by accident while Bobby chased him down the halls, and the sound of it breaking against the floor echoed in the quiet vastness. Bobby ran away, of course, and Scooter had been left to gather all the pieces from where they'd skittered to after the impact.
Most were simply littered in plain sight, of course, but one had been under a cabinet. Another was wedged in a seam between the boards. Some he found quickly, and it became easy to know where it fit in the structure of the vase. Others hid from him and refused to reveal their secrets.
He hears a voice. Soothing, familiar, edged with imperativeness. It's the first thing to creep into his awareness.
The second, third, and fourth come in quick succession. A regular beeping, a mechanical hissing and clicking, and distant chatter.
After sound comes touch, trickier to identify at first but blindingly obvious once he has- like the piece of the vase Scooter had found protruding from between the boards. The warm, comforting weight of a blanket over his shoulders. His cheek pressed against a pillow.
An ability to move bleeds back into his limbs, though they remain heavy. There's an IV in the back of his hand he can feel whenever he lifts his index finger. Another in his arm that exists in the itchiness of some tape.
There's…
Fuck, there's something in his throat.
The realisation hits him suddenly, and a wave of terror accompanies it, only amplified by the fact that it can't be expressed. The majority of his sluggish muscles don't respond to the impulses telling them to contract, and even the ones that do are far too weak to be noticeable. His breaths are forced into unnatural regularity. All that changes is the frequency of that high pitched beeping, perhaps the slightest hitch of his breath.
And yet the soothing voice- Dr Benton, he identifies with some surprise- responds to this tiny notifier.
“It’s okay- you're okay. I'm here, Carter. You don't need to be scared, man.”
He feels scared indeed, tossed out into uncertain waters, yet the words and their speaker act as a life preserver anyway. They tell him that he's intubated, and the pressure in his throat suddenly makes sense. They tell him it won't be there for long. They make a promise of this, even though Carter knows Peter doesn't make promises- but everything is so confused that this doesn't feel out of place, nor does the calloused hand that touches his face and soothes the tension in his temple.
He lets himself be soothed, and when he eventually opens his eyes at the request of a lighter voice, his panic is muted. His urges to tear out the tube in his throat and the lines in his arm settle into slightly watering eyes and a furrowed brow.
He bears it all with a stoicism he hopes makes Benton, still watching him with appraisal in his eyes, proud.
The surgeon is true to his word- once the respiratory therapist has been brought in to check him over, it isn't long before talk turns to extubation. Carter listens to it all with a vague detachment, still fuzzy from the medication and unable to see this as anything other than a procedure he's witnessed multiple times.
As they help ease him onto his back and lift the head of the bed, though, reality sets in. His vision swims in front of him, unfamiliar white coats standing amid the people he recognises. The sedation they've been giving him is lowered completely, so that every previously numbed sensation is now achingly visceral. It takes everything in him not to retch.
One of the unfamiliar white coats leans in and starts to peel away something sticky from his cheek at the same time a hand brushes back his hair. He identifies the source as Lydia, her voice low and soothing in an attempt to keep him from panicking.
“Not much longer now, Carter. You just hang on, sweetheart.”
At one point, he closes his eyes, the overstimulation reaching a crescendo. He doesn't open them until he's met with the sickening sensation of something being pulled from deep within him, and when he does they're watering so much that everything around him is a blur. Someone rubs his back. Someone else tells him to cough.
It's an instruction that hardly needs to be voiced, his body acting on reflex to get rid of the invasive object in his throat, muscles spasming again and again as he chokes on plastic.
The whole thing must only last a matter of seconds before the tube is pulled free completely, but it feels like an eternity. Afterwards, he lurches forwards, expelling a thin stream of bile and saliva into a waiting basin and trying desperately to catch his breath. He's so tired he can barely hold himself up, which is why it's a relief that Benton appears to be doing most of the work for him.
“Easy, Carter, easy. I've got you.”
Various comments of praise echo around him. A cold hand grips his jaw, another thrusting a suction catheter into his mouth. He sags against the surface behind him, eyes barely open, and doesn't have the strength to move away when he realises that just as before, the steady surface is Benton. Something cold and metallic is pressed against his chest. A nasal cannula is hooked over his ears, the tubing slipped into his nostrils.
Over a few seconds, his swimming vision starts to clear and his respirations slow down. He can make out more of the people around him, their features softened in sympathy and relief.
“Hey, bud.” Mark says, emerging from the gaggle and giving him a small smile. “How’re you feeling?”
Carter swallows, clears his throat. When he tries to speak, he finds his voice is gravelly and weak.
“T…tired.”
Still, this small response seems to appease his audience, their shoulders relaxing slightly, and Lydia’s hand resumes smoothing back his hair with maternal tenderness.
“That's expected.” Mark continues gently. “You've been through a lot in the past few days. We'll leave you to rest, okay?”
Carter manages a small nod, eyes fluttering closed again at once. It still takes a great effort just to breathe.
“Alright, let's get you lying down properly.“
It's Benton, his voice still retaining that odd softness Carter couldn't have imagined him capable of possessing prior to this, and his hands move to Carter's shoulders. He slips out from behind his student, then carefully lowers him down to the bed.
The material is perhaps more cushioning than Peter Benton, but it feels colder, and Carter finds himself absently missing that unexpected warmth, even when blankets are drawn up over him.
“G’night, bud.”
“Sleep well, Carter.”
“See you in a while, sweetheart.”
The insufferable brightness that seeps in through his closed eyelids is extinguished with a click. The volume of the constant beeping is lowered a few notches. Someone presses a kiss to his temple.
Footsteps recede.
Carter stretches, basking in the ability to move again, and rolls onto his side, cheek pressing against the pillow. He's so wiped out his breaths sink into evenness within a matter of seconds.
On the brink of sleep thirty seconds later, though, he hears the chair beside him creak, more footsteps moving to the other side of the room. The door doesn't open, though, and despite his exhaustion, Carter finds himself cracking open an eye to see what's going on.
He finds a tall figure standing near the wall phone, usually proud but now slightly stooped with weariness. The surgeon reaches for the handset. Punches in some numbers. Lifts it to his ear. Taps a rhythm on the wall with his other hand until the receiver clicks.
“Hey, Jackie. Yeah, it's me.” His voice is intentionally lowered, and he turns back briefly as if to check that he isn't disturbing Carter. The latter quickly closes his eyes and evades detection, only opening them again when he hears Peter resume his quiet conversation with his sister.
“Yeah, yeah, I'm in his room now… they took him off the vent, thank God. He's doing well, just exhausted by the looks of things- he's sleeping now… Yeah. Mhm. It is good, definitely.”
A pause. A small, self-deprecating chuckle.
“I know, I know you told me. But it's hard to believe things are going to be okay when they look so bad, you know that. You just- you jump to conclusions. Scare yourself half to death thinking about what could go wrong.”
Carter forces his breaths to come quieter so he can hear every last word. His heart flutters oddly in his chest. Warmth settles in his stomach.
“I mean, Jesus, Jackie, I thought- I really thought… And the idea that he'd never be there at rounds again, all peppy and excitable like a- like a border collie in a lab coat, it- it made me sick. The thought that he might never ask me some ridiculous, oddly specific question in the OR, I just…”
Benton huffs out a half-sigh, half-humourless-laugh. He bows his head, rubbing the bridge of his nose like there's a deep pain seated there.
“Anyway, it doesn't matter now. He's gonna be fine… No, it’s already pretty late and I have a shift tomorrow, so I'm just gonna stay… Yeah, I will. I'll see you on Saturday, yeah? Good. Alright… alright, love you, bye.”
He puts the handset softly back into its cradle, then pauses to rub his hands over his face and stretch out his long limbs. Clearly, he hasn't slept properly in days.
Carter closes his eyes again as Benton turns around and walks slowly back to the chair at his bedside, listening to the now-familiar creak of the plastic. He feigns the heavy, slow breaths of sleep, aware that he's being observed.
Somehow, he does not falter when Benton takes his wrist, thumb pressing lightly against his pulse point. Somehow, he manages to retain a stillness even when that thumb drifts across the delicate skin there, like it had against his temple hours earlier.
And somehow, within minutes, the soothing rhythm like a tactile lullaby, Carter sleeps.