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chapter eighteen ━ an almost wedding ( season three, episode twenty-five )
❝ it's me. i'm the one with a crisis. ❞
𝐀𝐁𝐁𝐘, 𝐃𝐄𝐑𝐄𝐊, 𝐀𝐍𝐃 𝐌𝐀𝐑𝐊 𝐖𝐀𝐋𝐊𝐄𝐃 into the ER following the short-lived bachelor party and Bailey walked over to them, handing the woman the chart. "They found the fourth climber," she informed them as they followed her to the trauma room. "Vitals are stabilizing after fluids, but—"
"I thought he was dead," Abby interrupted, furrowing her brows in confusion. "That's what his friends told us."
Derek nodded in agreement. "Did the CT show a bleed?" he asked.
"Uh—we haven't done a CT yet," Bailey replied, shaking her head and pausing outside of the trauma room.
The two neurosurgeons glanced at each other. "But you paged me and Abby about a head trauma," he said.
Bailey nodded and opened the trauma room door. "Yeah, there's been a little head trauma." Abby and Derek looked down at the man on the table. "Ice axe to the head."
She bent down to be eye level with the head and axe. "What the hell happened on that mountain?" she asked the room.
"That's an excellent question."
Abby stood up and took off her coat. "If somebody could please call my niece's babysitter, that would be appreciated," she said and a nurse nodded. "We're gonna be here a while..."
Later that day, Abby and Derek were standing in the mountain climbers' room. "They recovered Lonnie's body?" Dale asked them.
She shook her head. "Not his body," she replied and they looked at her. "Lonnie. He's alive." She closed the chart and glanced around the room. "Which means you didn't tell us the truth and something else happened on that mountain. Care to share?"
Silence fell over the room before Jack let out a breath, not able to look either neurosurgeon in the eye. "W—We're halfway up this ice wall," he began, playing with his fingers. "There's a... There's a ledge a couple hundred feet above us. We figured we'd set up the tents, and wait out the storm. Only Lonnie's insisting we go down the mountain."
"I told him, we gotta dig in and sit tight," Dale continued, looking up at Derek. "He started freaking out, keeps saying down's the way to go. And then he starts climbing down. We were tied together. And just like that—"
"We're falling." Abby looked over at Andy. "I swing out with my ice axe, just trying to catch a rock. And I clip Lonnie in the back of the head. Axe just... snags. We thought he was dead."
"It was an accident."
Abby let out a breath as she walked out of their room, pulling out her brown hair from its clip and rolling her neck. "Do you think it was an accident?" Derek asked her and she looked back at him.
