CODING ━ grey's anatomy

chapter seventeen

"Yes," he nodded.

"Be the other guy."

Meredith watched her leave with glassy eyes.

"You too, Harper," Burke ordered. "Out."

Cassie snorted. "Fat chance."

Meredith widened her eyes. "Cass—"

"You guys need someone to give the patient air, anyways, right?"

"Leave, Cass."

"No."

"Anyone can do that," Dylan rolled his eyes at her excuse. "You need to get out—"

"I am not leaving you," Cassie snapped suddenly, ignoring the men in the room and staring directly into Meredith's shocked eyes. "You did a very stupid thing, but now you're here, and I'm not leaving. I won't sugar coat it, alright? There's a very solid chance that we'll all blow into a million pieces any minute now. I know that. But if I decided to leave you here alone, and you died? I couldn't live with myself, Mer. I wouldn't want to live with myself. So I'm not leaving."

Meredith took a deep breath, nodding slowly and turning back to Dylan, who seemed at a loss.

"So, you have a plan right? You have a way to get me out of this, right?"

☆

"This area has been evacuated, Dr. Yang," Derek said without looking up, as Cristina put on gloves and a mask and went to his side.

"And somehow you're still here."

"I have to be here," he said, gesturing to Bailey's husband on the table. "You don't."

"Yes I do."

"Dr. Yang."

"Yes I do," Cristina raised her voice, before lowering it once again. "Besides, I guess you need a little company. How's he doing?"

Derek sighed. "He's hanging in there. How's the paramedic Hannah doing?"

"Hannah?"

"The girl with the bomb."

"Oh," Cristina stuttered, deciding not to tell him the truth. "Uh, she's hanging in there too."

☆

Burke and Dylan were whispering by the door, quiet enough so that the girls couldn't hear them. Noticing Meredith's distress, Cassie spoke up.

"Stop it," she interrupted, causing a halt in their conversation. "Meredith isn't a patient. I'm not a patient."

"What?"

"The two of you are looking at her the way we look at patients. Like she's going to freak out at any minute. Neither of us are going to freak out."

"Whatever it is, just tell us straight out," Meredith added.

Burke sighed. "The main oxygen line runs directly under this room."

"Okay," Meredith said, before seeing their faces. "Uh, not okay? I need one of you to tell me what this means exactly. Because I think I know what it means. But I tend to be a glass half-empty kind of girl, so I don't trust what I think it means. Because what I think it means, is that if the bomb were to explode over the oxygen line, the whole hospital could blow up."

They just stared at her.

"And that's just crazy, right?" Cassie asked quietly, knowing the answer already.

"All it means, is that we have to move."

"Move?"

"That's right. We have to move."