Counting To Fifteen [Grey's Anatomy]

chapter forty one - showers & operating rooms

Daisy was numb to the warm water running down her.

It was nice, to feel clean. But even as the bright red water ran down her legs and pooled around the shower drain, she still could feel the fresh blood all over her.

Humans happened to be warm-blooded creatures, of course, so Daisy should have expected it. But she never would have imagined how warm the blood felt on her skin.

Daisy shivered, despite the nearly scolding hot water hitting her.

The usually capable thirteen-year-old was in a daze of sorts, and all she could do was stand there as Caroline attempted to scrub the blood out of the girl's dark hair.

Callie was on a search for spare clean clothes in the locker rooms on account of the fact that Daisy's clothes were stained red.

Caroline scrubbed with a bit more force, trying to be gentle but trying to get all of the dried blood off of the girl.

"I know you don't want to talk, and you don't have to right now." Caroline started quietly. "But you're going to have to tell somebody eventually so that they don't think that you...you know, stabbed your sister or something."

Daisy's eyebrows furrowed at the words. Daisy wouldn't ever hurt Calypso.

The girl used to feel sick to her stomach when her little sister got a paper cut. The fact that Calypso's head was split open made Daisy want to keel over on the spot.

Pictures flashed through Daisy's head at a rapid pace, no thoughts able to form as she saw everything on repeat again and again and again.

There was a black car—a big one, like an SUV. Calypso's pink bike that she had gotten for Christmas was nothing more than a tangle of twisted metal, bent at all the wrong angles.

And the matter of Caly herself, of course, made Daisy nauseous.

The girl hadn't ever seen so much blood. The girl hadn't ever seen the seven-year-old so lifeless and still. The girl hadn't ever seen blood gushing out on pavement like that, crawling at a rapid pace as it climbed over pebbles and stones, sliding farther and farther along the road.

Daisy decided maybe the newest fear she would add to her never-ending collection was hemophobia.

Blood was the worst. Blood was bad bad bad. Daisy decided red was bad too. No more red dinner plates. Daisy didn't ever want to see anything red again, she had gotten her fill for a lifetime.

Callie entered the room quietly, making sure to click the door shut as gently as possible behind her. The woman was holding a bath towel she had gotten from the linen closet, spare scrub bottoms she had tucked away in her own locker, and a Dartmouth sweatshirt Meredith had contributed to the cause.

Daisy continued to feel Caroline scrubbing dried blood out of her hair, and yet she had never felt so disconnected from the two women standing there helping her.

Calypso's blood was nothing more than a faraway trace as it disappeared down the shower drain, and yet Daisy could still feel it. She could feel it burned onto her skin, she could feel it caked in her hair. Daisy felt the blood all over her, despite Caroline having scrubbed the majority of it off.

Daisy could smell it still. The thick and eccentric metallic stench. The smell was burned so freshly into Daisy's mind, like the smell of a thousand pennies. It was an awful smell, a vivid smell. Why did it smell that much like metal?