Belamour || Jackson Avery

Good Mourning

Season six, episode one

Elana is standing in the OR, scared and hopeless. She has a feeling this is not going to end well. She tries to console Callie, who is holding her tears back. Elana had never faced this, one of her closest friends on the table, and the odds of them not waking up alive was more than a positive outcome.

"Damn, O'Malley, come on. Live, just live," the neurosurgeon said. "His ICP's 30." 

"Push 70 of Mannitol, start bagging", Owen instructed the nurse 

Meredith starts pumping the Ambubag that is attached to her friend lying on the operation table, George O'Malley. The doctors keep working on him, but their faces look like they have seen a ghost. So perplexed and in fear that they might not be able to save the patient. 

Their worst fears came true when they heard the sound of a flatline on the monitor. It can't be true, Elana kept repeating in her head. This is just a bad dream, a very twisted reality; it is not happening in real life. But it was all true. That was her breaking point; he was gone.

George O'Malley had died.

»--•--«

Day one

"Is he a donor?" Hunt asks out loud, finally breaking the silence that crept through the entire OR. 

Both Callie and Elana started to sob uncontrollably. Elana ran out of the OR and kept running down the stairs until she reached that bed in the outpatient gallery that used to be her safe place when she was an intern. They all used to hang out there. That is where they got to know each other. 

It was supposed to be the six of us panicking outside the rooms when we were supposed to give our boards in our final year of residency, but now George is dead, and Izzie might be dying as well. This is what kept crossing her mind over and over again. Her family was breaking apart, and she didn't know how to fix it. He was gone. He was the first person to care about her when she first came to Seattle, her first friend in her class of interns. They had drifted apart a bit because of the busy schedule of a resident, but at heart, they were always close. 

She somehow managed to stop crying and started walking back up to Meredith. She needed to be there for her friends. She had to go check on Izzie. The tears rolling down her cheeks stopped, but the ache in her heart didn't go away. 

She walked up to the 3rd floor to find Meredith approaching Izzie's room. Neither of them said a word. It was just too difficult. As they came to the door of the room, Meredith held her hand as a token of support in the worst of their times. They had survived so much together; they knew the only way to survive this was also, to go through it together. 
In the room, they saw Alex, Cristina, Dr Bailey and the chief hovering over Izzie's bed. She was awake; she was alive. They were pulling the tube out of her mouth so that she could breathe on her own. That was a good sign. She saw this, Mer looked at Elana and nodded, deciding to tell Dr Bailey the bad news.

"Dr Bailey," Mer said, and that look on their faces was enough to let the senior resident know what had happened. Richard and Bailey stormed out of the room immediately, followed by Cristina and Alex coming out of the room. The three girls looked at each other, all of them trying their best not to break down because now was not the time; they had to be strong. Izzie didn't know, but they knew she would want to.

"Alex, they were best friends. Best friends like to know when their other best friends die. She deserves to know. If something were to happen to any of us, I would like to know," Elana said to Alex. Since he was her husband, he had a right to decide whether or not the bad news should be told to her.