Post Traumatic Date Disorder, Part Two
So, here is Part Two of PTDD, a Yang/Hunt centric Grey's Anatomy fic.
Disclaimer: See official disclaimer in Part One of PTDD.
A/N: Serious props to Kevin McKidd for going all out with the breakdown in "Beat Your Heart Out".
That kind of emotional commitment isn't easy. (Especially since KMK seems to be a happy go lucky
kind of guy in RL.) Whew!
I'm still not agreeing with the ragged pace of this character on the show. Of course, I don't have to
work under as strict a dead line as the Grey's writers do. I have the luxury of exploring this
character as I see him, based on what I glean from the show. So I'm going to take that and go with
it.
Thanks to everyone who commented on Part One. I've attempted to improve formating. Let me
know if it's better or worse.
On with the story.
Part Two - Know Thy Enemy
When Owen Hunt was six years old he tied a blue bath towel around his neck and jumped off the roof of his father’s utility shed in the back yard. It was all perfectly sensible to him at the time. After all, if Superman could do it, so could he. He was positive that the way it was done was to think like a bird. Little Owen figured it was safer jumping of the shed than jumping off the roof, just incase he couldn’t fly as high as his four colored hero.
It was the first time that he had ever broken a bone. It was also the first memory he had of being in a hospital. Owen even remembered the color of the sucker the doctor had given him after he had wrapped Owen’s pale, freckled wrist in gauze and plaster. The sucker was blue, just like the towel that had still been tied around his neck.
Owen’s sense of wonder and adventure had gotten him into some tight spots throughout his life. Like the time, when he was 12, he had convinced his best friend Steve to hop on their skateboards and go flying down the steep curved roads of their neighborhood. He just wanted to know what it would feel like to go as fast as a car without all that steel and glass in the way.
When he landed at the bottom of the street crushing Mrs. Anderson’s prize-winning lawn sculptures (Lawn Sculptures? Really?), he had broken his arm, fractured his leg and had the wind knocked out of him when Steve landed on him. There may also have been a concussion involved. He couldn’t remember.
Then, then there was the time when he and his friends were out raising hell and cruising around in his Dad’s station wagon. They ended up at the beach, parked, and decided they would do a little late night body surfing. It was perfectly innocent fun. It could have been worse. They could have been drinking, or doing drugs. But the water was cold (that was okay, they were tuff guys) and the tide was in. Steve wasn’t as strong a swimmer as the other guys were.
Owen had been the one to pull him out of the water. But if it hadn’t been for the trauma team at the hospital performing nothing short of a miracle, he would have never seen the lopsided grin of his friend ever again.
Owen had never been more scared in his entire life. His best friend almost died and it was his fault. He was always the ringleader. It was his fault and he didn’t know what to say to the boy whom he had lead to near-death.
Acknowledging that his son needed more strict discipline in his life, Owen’s father made him join ROTC. That incident had been the preverbal straw. Owen didn’t argue. He never wanted to be that scared ever again. He wanted to be more like the doctors who had saved Steve. Calm, collected, efficient, they were real heroes.
Years later, on leave before shipping out to his first out of country post for the Army, Owen had run into his friend and finally apologized. Steve just grinned his lopsided grin, shrugged, and said, “So” and bought Owen a beer.
Owen was so excited to finally be going on his first real adventure he didn’t allow himself to tie one on with his childhood buddy. He was a strictly disciplined medical officer in the United States Army now. He was about to embark on an adventure so big the antics of his boyhood paled in comparison. He sure as hell wasn’t going to report for duty with a monster hang over. That would be stupidly unprofessional. Besides, it had been years since his sense of adventure had led him astray.
---
Twelve years and two life-times later the boy who was sure that flying was a simple thing to accomplish was now a man watching intently, guiding the hand of a junior colleague in a civilian hospital patiently instructing him in the proper technique used to repair flesh that had been slashed open with something that had been sharp and serrated.
“Yes, that’s right. Don’t worry about symmetry; just think of it as one step up from debreding. Once you cut away the shredded meat, it will make it much easier to apply the skin graft to the clean wound. Great, excellent Dr. Karev.”
Alex Karev, formerly the hospital bad-boy and second only to the legendary Dr. Sloan in feats of Man-Whoring let out a self-satisfied breath. He hadn’t realized he was holding it. Carefully, he removed bits of bloody muscle tissue from the patients arm. The poor schmuck had walked into the ER two hours ago looking like a victim right out of a slasher flick. If Dr. Hunt hadn’t stopped the bleeding and packed the more sever wounds on his torso, this guy would have been toast. No, more like ground beef.
As it was, Karev was just grateful for the opportunity to do more that just close up someone with unexplainable injuries like this. This was a lot different than amputating a leg. Although his first solo surgery was awesome, this was even better. When the guy had first shown up, Alex wouldn’t have given two cents for his chances.
Dr. Hunt had swooped in like Superman and had saved this guy’s day. Before Karev had even established how many wounds there were, Hunt had gotten the guy into Trauma 1 and calmly, efficiently started to issue orders like he was still back on the battle field. Then again, they might as well have been. John Doe was so deeply in shock by the time he had walked though the automatic doors (under his own power?!) that they hadn’t been able to establish how exactly he had been wounded, or with what exactly.
Fortunately, Hunt had seen far worse than this.
Karev had no idea how much worse.
Owen looked through the magnifying lenses of his surgical glasses as Karev made the last cut, removing the final piece of useless tissue. “Excellent. Now what?”
“Um, use a small amount prisma to pack the wound before we begin to apply the graft?”
Under his mask, Owen’s lips quirked in a small, knowing smirk.
“I’m sorry Dr. Karev, where you asking me or telling me?”
All Karev could see were cobalt eyes glinting with refracted light from the LED’s built into Owen’s glasses.
Alex hated when Hunt pulled this bullshit. A lot of the time, Hunt only went all Socrates on someone when they were missing a detail. Karev didn’t want to screw this up. As far as he knew Hunt had never let a junior resident work on a patient like this. The guy was stable and everything; Hunt had done all the really gory work on the torso, after all. The gash that had opened up the patients bicep wasn’t nearly as deep nor as wide as the others. But still. He was Mr. Solo Surgery, and he didn’t want to look like an ass in front of a doctor he admired, even if said doctor was a brusk, unforgiving asshole sometimes. Of course he wouldn’t ever have admitted the admiration part out loud.
“Well Dr. Karev? Are you going to proceed or let this guy loose mobility?”
Alex blinked. “Yeah…Yes. If we tried to simply slap him together with some glue or something, the muscle tissue wouldn’t knit back together as smoothly and he would loose mobility. Right. Then we can apply the graft and send this guy to recovery.”
Owen stared across the operating table at Karev.
Karev stared back at Hunt.
“Well?”
“Well, What Dr. Hunt?”
Owen continued to stare at Mr. Solo Surgery. The patient was stable. He could take a teaching moment. Hunt was grateful for this aspect of his cushy civilian job: focusing his attention not only on his patients, but also on his young colleagues when needed. It barely gave him time to think about anything else.
From the first time Karev was on his service, Hunt knew he would eventually be able to either embarrass or scare this kid into a newer and better incarnation as a doctor. Karev had exhibited level-headedness and split second decisiveness on multiple occasions, and could think outside the box when pushed.
Owen was determined to get Karev to the point where he didn’t have to be pushed and could confidently walk into an unknown situation without using the mask of cold arrogance to deflect whatever insecurities haunted him has a person.
Arrogance was not a good quality for a doctor.
Too bad no one could do the same for Owen and his use of marathon work schedules.
Hypocrisy wasn’t a good quality for a doctor either.
Karev finally took the hint and asked the nurse for the two equiangular pieces of prisma and carefully placed small slivers of the collagen infused material between the two sections of severed muscle.
Owen watched the rest of the surgery as Karev gently made four small sutures on each side of the skin graft to hold it in place. This was always his favorite part of the process, especially when the patient, by all rights, should have been killed by whatever had tried to chop him up into fun size chunks. The victim was stable; there was no sign of foreign debris in any of the slashes to complicate things further. Owen could take a second to look over their handy work and bask in the peace that working in the sterile, orderly, civilian OR was beginning to bring him each day.
(Former) Major, (but still) Dr. Owen Hunt took a deep, cleansing breath as he stepped back and let the nurses have access so they could put protective dressings around all of their hard work.
---
Scrubbing out, and pocketing his surgical cap, Owen clapped Karev on the shoulder, by way of a job well done as he walked out of the surgical suite. He needed to get his post surgery report done so he could get something more important done.
Namely, find out who this guy is. He had sprung into immediate action the second he had turned around from the ER nurses station and seen the zombie like form shuffling through the automatic doors that led in from the ambulance bay. If Karev hadn’t intercepted him and caught him as he collapsed, Owen knew John Doe would have aggravated his bizarre injuries even further. He probably would have bled to death. How he had made it from where ever he had come from was beyond comprehension. John Doe wasn’t coherent at all and would not be conscious for a long while still.
When Owen started working on him he had cut off shredded clothing to get to the problem and had discarded the blood soaked garments without sparing a thought. Perhaps there had been a wallet in the pants pocket, or some other identifying thing beyond the copious amounts of DNA that had been bled all over the ER.
The more Owen thought about the gashes he had spent the better part of two hours packing and stitching, it made even less sense. Patches of macerated tissue surrounded some of the wounds, as if they had been soaking in water. Other parts of what little good skin there was on his chest had the red ting of a minor burn.
There were too many minor cuts and contusions on the man’s face to count.
The bulk of the injuries had occurred on the torso with one gash on the right bicep and a perfectly vertical gash on the left leg.
There were no wounds on his back or sides. His hair had been matted with blood but a quick examination had ruled out any open wounds on his head. What in all of Seattle could possibly have done that to someone?
If he had been in the desert, it wouldn’t have been so strange. It wasn’t uncommon for victims of IED’s to get wounds like that from being hit with shrapnel and whatever else insurgents decided to put in the things.
For a second, Owen dwelled on that, images of young men and women rippled over his mind’s eye.
His shoulders tensed, his throat tightened as he tried to swallow. His pulse quickened.
Standing stock still in the middle of a very public hallway, Owen balled his hands into fists. Taking a ragged breath he began to count backwards from 100.
It was a technique that the VA shrink had taught him when he landed back state side.
As if counting back from 100 could possibly make up for being the only survivor.
Through shear force of will Owen ordered his legs to unlock, opening and clenching his fists as he headed for a work station down the hall from the heart of the Pit. By the time he had hit a four-way intersection he had stopped counting and started focusing back on the John Doe.
He would have a good day today dam it. He needed to solve this mystery that hand landed right on his front step. This is what he needed the most.
The rest would just fade away.
He had to believe that it would just fade away with time.
Disclaimer: See official disclaimer in Part One of PTDD.
A/N: Serious props to Kevin McKidd for going all out with the breakdown in "Beat Your Heart Out".
That kind of emotional commitment isn't easy. (Especially since KMK seems to be a happy go lucky
kind of guy in RL.) Whew!
I'm still not agreeing with the ragged pace of this character on the show. Of course, I don't have to
work under as strict a dead line as the Grey's writers do. I have the luxury of exploring this
character as I see him, based on what I glean from the show. So I'm going to take that and go with
it.
Thanks to everyone who commented on Part One. I've attempted to improve formating. Let me
know if it's better or worse.
On with the story.
Part Two - Know Thy Enemy
When Owen Hunt was six years old he tied a blue bath towel around his neck and jumped off the roof of his father’s utility shed in the back yard. It was all perfectly sensible to him at the time. After all, if Superman could do it, so could he. He was positive that the way it was done was to think like a bird. Little Owen figured it was safer jumping of the shed than jumping off the roof, just incase he couldn’t fly as high as his four colored hero.
It was the first time that he had ever broken a bone. It was also the first memory he had of being in a hospital. Owen even remembered the color of the sucker the doctor had given him after he had wrapped Owen’s pale, freckled wrist in gauze and plaster. The sucker was blue, just like the towel that had still been tied around his neck.
Owen’s sense of wonder and adventure had gotten him into some tight spots throughout his life. Like the time, when he was 12, he had convinced his best friend Steve to hop on their skateboards and go flying down the steep curved roads of their neighborhood. He just wanted to know what it would feel like to go as fast as a car without all that steel and glass in the way.
When he landed at the bottom of the street crushing Mrs. Anderson’s prize-winning lawn sculptures (Lawn Sculptures? Really?), he had broken his arm, fractured his leg and had the wind knocked out of him when Steve landed on him. There may also have been a concussion involved. He couldn’t remember.
Then, then there was the time when he and his friends were out raising hell and cruising around in his Dad’s station wagon. They ended up at the beach, parked, and decided they would do a little late night body surfing. It was perfectly innocent fun. It could have been worse. They could have been drinking, or doing drugs. But the water was cold (that was okay, they were tuff guys) and the tide was in. Steve wasn’t as strong a swimmer as the other guys were.
Owen had been the one to pull him out of the water. But if it hadn’t been for the trauma team at the hospital performing nothing short of a miracle, he would have never seen the lopsided grin of his friend ever again.
Owen had never been more scared in his entire life. His best friend almost died and it was his fault. He was always the ringleader. It was his fault and he didn’t know what to say to the boy whom he had lead to near-death.
Acknowledging that his son needed more strict discipline in his life, Owen’s father made him join ROTC. That incident had been the preverbal straw. Owen didn’t argue. He never wanted to be that scared ever again. He wanted to be more like the doctors who had saved Steve. Calm, collected, efficient, they were real heroes.
Years later, on leave before shipping out to his first out of country post for the Army, Owen had run into his friend and finally apologized. Steve just grinned his lopsided grin, shrugged, and said, “So” and bought Owen a beer.
Owen was so excited to finally be going on his first real adventure he didn’t allow himself to tie one on with his childhood buddy. He was a strictly disciplined medical officer in the United States Army now. He was about to embark on an adventure so big the antics of his boyhood paled in comparison. He sure as hell wasn’t going to report for duty with a monster hang over. That would be stupidly unprofessional. Besides, it had been years since his sense of adventure had led him astray.
---
Twelve years and two life-times later the boy who was sure that flying was a simple thing to accomplish was now a man watching intently, guiding the hand of a junior colleague in a civilian hospital patiently instructing him in the proper technique used to repair flesh that had been slashed open with something that had been sharp and serrated.
“Yes, that’s right. Don’t worry about symmetry; just think of it as one step up from debreding. Once you cut away the shredded meat, it will make it much easier to apply the skin graft to the clean wound. Great, excellent Dr. Karev.”
Alex Karev, formerly the hospital bad-boy and second only to the legendary Dr. Sloan in feats of Man-Whoring let out a self-satisfied breath. He hadn’t realized he was holding it. Carefully, he removed bits of bloody muscle tissue from the patients arm. The poor schmuck had walked into the ER two hours ago looking like a victim right out of a slasher flick. If Dr. Hunt hadn’t stopped the bleeding and packed the more sever wounds on his torso, this guy would have been toast. No, more like ground beef.
As it was, Karev was just grateful for the opportunity to do more that just close up someone with unexplainable injuries like this. This was a lot different than amputating a leg. Although his first solo surgery was awesome, this was even better. When the guy had first shown up, Alex wouldn’t have given two cents for his chances.
Dr. Hunt had swooped in like Superman and had saved this guy’s day. Before Karev had even established how many wounds there were, Hunt had gotten the guy into Trauma 1 and calmly, efficiently started to issue orders like he was still back on the battle field. Then again, they might as well have been. John Doe was so deeply in shock by the time he had walked though the automatic doors (under his own power?!) that they hadn’t been able to establish how exactly he had been wounded, or with what exactly.
Fortunately, Hunt had seen far worse than this.
Karev had no idea how much worse.
Owen looked through the magnifying lenses of his surgical glasses as Karev made the last cut, removing the final piece of useless tissue. “Excellent. Now what?”
“Um, use a small amount prisma to pack the wound before we begin to apply the graft?”
Under his mask, Owen’s lips quirked in a small, knowing smirk.
“I’m sorry Dr. Karev, where you asking me or telling me?”
All Karev could see were cobalt eyes glinting with refracted light from the LED’s built into Owen’s glasses.
Alex hated when Hunt pulled this bullshit. A lot of the time, Hunt only went all Socrates on someone when they were missing a detail. Karev didn’t want to screw this up. As far as he knew Hunt had never let a junior resident work on a patient like this. The guy was stable and everything; Hunt had done all the really gory work on the torso, after all. The gash that had opened up the patients bicep wasn’t nearly as deep nor as wide as the others. But still. He was Mr. Solo Surgery, and he didn’t want to look like an ass in front of a doctor he admired, even if said doctor was a brusk, unforgiving asshole sometimes. Of course he wouldn’t ever have admitted the admiration part out loud.
“Well Dr. Karev? Are you going to proceed or let this guy loose mobility?”
Alex blinked. “Yeah…Yes. If we tried to simply slap him together with some glue or something, the muscle tissue wouldn’t knit back together as smoothly and he would loose mobility. Right. Then we can apply the graft and send this guy to recovery.”
Owen stared across the operating table at Karev.
Karev stared back at Hunt.
“Well?”
“Well, What Dr. Hunt?”
Owen continued to stare at Mr. Solo Surgery. The patient was stable. He could take a teaching moment. Hunt was grateful for this aspect of his cushy civilian job: focusing his attention not only on his patients, but also on his young colleagues when needed. It barely gave him time to think about anything else.
From the first time Karev was on his service, Hunt knew he would eventually be able to either embarrass or scare this kid into a newer and better incarnation as a doctor. Karev had exhibited level-headedness and split second decisiveness on multiple occasions, and could think outside the box when pushed.
Owen was determined to get Karev to the point where he didn’t have to be pushed and could confidently walk into an unknown situation without using the mask of cold arrogance to deflect whatever insecurities haunted him has a person.
Arrogance was not a good quality for a doctor.
Too bad no one could do the same for Owen and his use of marathon work schedules.
Hypocrisy wasn’t a good quality for a doctor either.
Karev finally took the hint and asked the nurse for the two equiangular pieces of prisma and carefully placed small slivers of the collagen infused material between the two sections of severed muscle.
Owen watched the rest of the surgery as Karev gently made four small sutures on each side of the skin graft to hold it in place. This was always his favorite part of the process, especially when the patient, by all rights, should have been killed by whatever had tried to chop him up into fun size chunks. The victim was stable; there was no sign of foreign debris in any of the slashes to complicate things further. Owen could take a second to look over their handy work and bask in the peace that working in the sterile, orderly, civilian OR was beginning to bring him each day.
(Former) Major, (but still) Dr. Owen Hunt took a deep, cleansing breath as he stepped back and let the nurses have access so they could put protective dressings around all of their hard work.
---
Scrubbing out, and pocketing his surgical cap, Owen clapped Karev on the shoulder, by way of a job well done as he walked out of the surgical suite. He needed to get his post surgery report done so he could get something more important done.
Namely, find out who this guy is. He had sprung into immediate action the second he had turned around from the ER nurses station and seen the zombie like form shuffling through the automatic doors that led in from the ambulance bay. If Karev hadn’t intercepted him and caught him as he collapsed, Owen knew John Doe would have aggravated his bizarre injuries even further. He probably would have bled to death. How he had made it from where ever he had come from was beyond comprehension. John Doe wasn’t coherent at all and would not be conscious for a long while still.
When Owen started working on him he had cut off shredded clothing to get to the problem and had discarded the blood soaked garments without sparing a thought. Perhaps there had been a wallet in the pants pocket, or some other identifying thing beyond the copious amounts of DNA that had been bled all over the ER.
The more Owen thought about the gashes he had spent the better part of two hours packing and stitching, it made even less sense. Patches of macerated tissue surrounded some of the wounds, as if they had been soaking in water. Other parts of what little good skin there was on his chest had the red ting of a minor burn.
There were too many minor cuts and contusions on the man’s face to count.
The bulk of the injuries had occurred on the torso with one gash on the right bicep and a perfectly vertical gash on the left leg.
There were no wounds on his back or sides. His hair had been matted with blood but a quick examination had ruled out any open wounds on his head. What in all of Seattle could possibly have done that to someone?
If he had been in the desert, it wouldn’t have been so strange. It wasn’t uncommon for victims of IED’s to get wounds like that from being hit with shrapnel and whatever else insurgents decided to put in the things.
For a second, Owen dwelled on that, images of young men and women rippled over his mind’s eye.
His shoulders tensed, his throat tightened as he tried to swallow. His pulse quickened.
Standing stock still in the middle of a very public hallway, Owen balled his hands into fists. Taking a ragged breath he began to count backwards from 100.
It was a technique that the VA shrink had taught him when he landed back state side.
As if counting back from 100 could possibly make up for being the only survivor.
Through shear force of will Owen ordered his legs to unlock, opening and clenching his fists as he headed for a work station down the hall from the heart of the Pit. By the time he had hit a four-way intersection he had stopped counting and started focusing back on the John Doe.
He would have a good day today dam it. He needed to solve this mystery that hand landed right on his front step. This is what he needed the most.
The rest would just fade away.
He had to believe that it would just fade away with time.