Seattle Move

18. Running

"I am here to inform you," Owen began, his voice a low rumble, "that I will be taking a leave of absence for six weeks."

Silence descended upon the room, a collective gasp hanging in the air. Owen, the unflappable chief of surgery, was leaving.

"Owen, what is going on?" Meredith asked, concern lacing her tone.

He hesitated, his gaze flickering over the faces of his colleagues, avoiding Amelia's. "I have been offered an opportunity to go to Iraq and train new trauma surgeons in the field."

A murmur of understanding swept through the group. With his military background, Owen was a natural choice for such an assignment. But there was more to his departure than met the eye. He had been grappling with a profound inner turmoil.

In the aftermath of the tumultuous affair he had shared with Amelia Shepherd, Owen found himself spiralling out of control.

Things had escalated beyond repair when Derek discovered their secret and unleashed his fury on Owen. A brutal confrontation had followed, leaving Owen battered and broken.

As if that wasn't enough, he had sunk to a new low at Joe's Bar. While heavily intoxicated, he had drunkenly described Amelia's body to Alex and Jackson, oblivious to the horrified looks on their faces when they noticed the neurosurgeon approaching them. The incident had been a wake-up call for him. He realized that he needed to get away, to escape the suffocating weight of his mistakes.

"I was going to turn down the offer," Owen admitted, his voice thick with emotion, "But I think I need this. I need to clear my head." His colleagues nodded in understanding. They knew that this was a difficult decision for Owen, but they supported him wholeheartedly.

"Does this have anything to do with a particular neurosurgeon?" Meredith perused once the meeting came to an end, her eyebrows quirked as she followed the redhead out of the room.

"I need to get away," Owen explained vaguely to her as they walked the halls of the hospital. "This deployment will give me the space and time to process everything that's happened."

As the day of his departure drew near, Amelia couldn't shake the feeling that she had made a terrible mistake. The news of his impending deployment brought with it a mix of emotions. Fear for his safety warred with anger and resentment.

Deep down, Amelia knew that she had not truly let go of Owen. The thought of losing him filled her with an unbearable void. She, too, struggled to find peace. Despite her attempts to move on, she couldn't erase Owen from her mind. The memories of their stolen nights and the undeniable connection they had shared haunted her.

———

The sun dipped low in the Seattle skyline, casting elongated shadows across Derek and Meredith's backyard—their dream house on the cusp of the city, a stark contrast to the storm of emotion brewing within the Shepherd. She sat cradling her two-year-old son, Ryan, in her lap, the familiar sounds of the evening settling around them. He was playing with a set of toy dinosaurs, occasionally looking up to offer her a bright smile that warmed her heart, even as her mind was elsewhere.

Amelia's recent relocation from Los Angeles to Seattle had been fraught with both opportunity and heartache. Taking over her brother's job as head neurosurgeon at Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital came with immense pressure and a sense of disconnect from everything she once knew. Her life had taken a new direction, twisting along an uncharted course, reminiscent of the complex surgeries she performed daily. Yet nothing compared to the tangled mess that was her relationship with Owen Hunt.

Casual encounters had spiralled into passionate moments, each one layered with the weight of her brother's raw disapproval. Derek had found out about her and Owen and, in a moment of weakness, and out of brotherly love—or perhaps overprotectiveness—had confronted Owen in a way that was typically reserved for managing heart-stopping situations in the operating room. The beating had ended their connection, forcing Amelia to re-evaluate her emotions.