Counting To Fifteen [Grey's Anatomy]

chapter fifty - dead boys & five minute rules

Daisy sat alone in a bleak hospital room on the night that August died.

Conversations between the girl and the boy had turned from an exchange of words to a muttering of a couple sounds to silence. Daisy's visits with August consisted of complete silence as the boy's body shut down around him.

His vision had been the first to go, and he would joke about his other senses becoming even stronger. He claimed that he could hear a pin drop from a mile away—though Daisy swore he was lying.

But then his hearing had gone too. His motor functions deteriorated to the point that he couldn't even move any of his fingers. August became a shell of what he once was as he was unconscious on the brink of death, and Daisy sat alone as his heart monitor kept a slow and rhythmic pace.

The girl kept tabs on the motions around her for fear she would dissociate from her surroundings completely. The clock on the wall proved to be a helpful judgment of time.

Daisy had been sitting with August for twenty minutes when the nurse came in to copy down the boy's declining vitals. It had been an hour and thirty six minutes when Arizona came in, saying nothing as she kept her focus on August. The woman's eyes drank every ounce of it in as she stood attentive for a few minutes in the doorway, as if each moment looking at August would be the last moment she would ever see the boy alive.

"Can I call somebody?" Arizona asked hesitantly as her pager rang out, signaling her presence was needed elsewhere. "I'll call Mark, or Callie, or...it doesn't have to be anybody you know, if you don't want to talk. I can get one of the interns to sit down here. You shouldn't be alone, can I-"

"No." Daisy shook her head. She didn't want to speak to Mark or Callie or anybody for that matter, lest sit in an awkward silence with a medical intern that wanted to do anything other than babysit a sad teenager. "No."

"I have to."

"No you don't." Daisy's voice was firm again, the girl flicking her eyes over to the woman's obnoxiously loud pager. "You have to leave. You're supposed to leave, they need you."

Arizona's lips pressed down into a thin line, the woman turning her attention to the seemingly emergent page coming through as Daisy was subconsciously pushed to the back of her mind, the woman making a mental note to send somebody down despite the girl's insistent protests.

Daisy just wanted her space, and she felt more at ease when Arizona left the room. The girl liked that she was able to be alone with her friend.

Daisy let her eyes scan over August's frail body, his heart monitor keeping a steady pace. There were doctors and nurses and patients passing the doorway every couple of seconds, but Daisy didn't pay attention to the busy hallway. Daisy kept all her attention cast on her dying friend—taking note of the way his chest rose and fell slightly.

"It's not fair that you're gonna leave." Daisy frowned, speaking out quietly for fear anybody passing the boy's room would hear her. "And...I'll be so mad at you, because that's not fair. You're not being fair."

Daisy knew, of course, that she was being both selfish and unreasonable. August very well couldn't control the fact that he was dying, and Daisy had no right to be angry.

But Daisy was angry. It wasn't fair that August was leaving her all by herself again. The boy knew all about the various people that had left Daisy, and he was going to join the group just like everybody else.

It wasn't fair that August had befriended Daisy in the first place. Daisy wished August had never spoken out to her at all. Daisy wished she had ignored his comment about ice chips and continued on with her plan to hide in the bathroom that day. It wasn't fair that August was leaving Daisy alone. The girl would be subjected to an unresponsive shell of who she once was, acting much similarly in the way she had after Calypso died.