Flatline ~ Jackson Avery

THIRTY (END)

 Surgeons ask themselves questions all the time. Have I checked for blood in the peritoneal cavity? Have I check the urine output of this patient? Will I have time for a consult? What do I diagnose this patient? Is he dead or should we continue resuscitation? Do I have time for this surgery? But when do we ask ourselves questions? When do we actually have time to take care of our own needs?

"Do you have time to take this to Dr. Sloan? It's a Plastics and Neuro case. Guy has multiple third degree burns or something. He's going to be here in ten hours. They have to extract him from a uh, rock, so that will take a while." She handed me a chart.

"What a joy. I'll be working with you all day." I muttered to myself, half joking. I really wanted to fix things with her, but there were things I need to talk about to Lexie. Lexie, or Kylie. I couldn't chose.

"I would have to agree, unless you take Neuro from under me, and I'll go become a fetal surgeon." Kylie retorted annoyedly. She was in no mood to play with me.

"I'm going to see Altman." Cristina went off.

"Okay, Kylie. That's enough, okay? I know I could have asked to trade for Derek's service, but I wasn't thinking-"

"Just like how you weren't thinking when you slept with Lexie Grey? Maybe you should as Derek for a consult on your own brain. If you do that much 'not thinking' maybe you don't have a brain." Kylie turned away, but I thought I saw a flash of a smile. I wondered if her anger died down a little.

-----

"Hey I just found some dumb secret about Kylie." Alex came over to me while I was signing discharge papers for Mark's patients.

"What?" I asked. "If it's private, I'm sure she wouldn't want me to know."

"Stop being a fraidy cat." Alex shook his head at me. "She just doesn't want us to look into stuff like that."

"Like what?" Alex had gotten me hooked.

"So Webber told me to go get this random residents file for him because I was his 'guy' or whatever, and Kylie's folder was beside it so I got curious and pulled it out. She told you she's 24, right?" We walked into an empty on-call room but didn't close the door.

"Yeah, and...what are you getting at?" I asked.

"God, we always joked that she looks like a twelve year old kid." Alex laughed. "She isn't twenty-four, she's twenty-one. I know it doesn't make much of a difference, but God, twenty one? How the hell did she get into this program?"

"She shouldn't even be in here. I don't understand why the doctors who treated her said she was twenty-four."

"Yeah, about that. You don't need to know." I heard an annoyed voice sigh. We turned around in the dark room to see two blue eyes staring back at us.

"When the hell did you get here?!" Alex yelped.

"I was taking a nap." Kylie responded, still agitated. "But will it make you feel better about your intelligence if I told you I was homeschooled by my siblings and went to school with Amelia sometimes? And when I went to med school I started at year three and I was fourteen because my siblings crammed eighteen years of school and textbooks into my head."

"No, that does not make me feel better." I responded.

"Oh. Well, that's too bad."

Kylie

All I needed was a nice, quiet nap to make myself feel better so I could refrain from punching Jackson with my tiny, ineffectual fists, but Alex and him left. Now I couldn't help but relive the hell I went through as a kid. Of course my family loved me, but when I went to school for the first time in my entire life, I was bullied because everyone was what, nineteen and I was fourteen? I was short and tiny, like a kid. People asked me if I screwed my way into med school. People pranked me. I hated it, and I had nobody to tell about it. April was in love with trauma and the E.R., Jackson had Lexie, Alex had Mer and Cristina, Mer and Cristina had themselves. I had nobody but the razor blade beside me. Not Derek, not Jackson. I had my problems. The razor blade shined beside me, reflecting daylight. Amelia and I both had problems, Amelia had that drinking and drug problem...and I thought I fixed my problems, but maybe not...