Disclaimer: I do not own these characters or anything to do with Grey's Anatomy. They are the property of Shonda Rhimes and ABC. This story is for entertainment purposes only.
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It was my idea in the first place. I should be relieved. Owen closed the door to the on-call room softly as he made his exit, leaving Cristina still huddled under the covers. Outwardly composed, he was reeling inside, and he found himself in front of his locker without remembering how he got there. He was too tired to change out of his scrubs and decided to just wear them home. As he went through the motions of gathering his belongings, he tried to make sense of the incomprehensible.
Amazing how just a few minutes - a car accident, an ambush... a fucking strangling - could utterly change your life. His whole world had shifted in much the same way it had after the ambush, now tilting crazily on an axis he had mistakenly thought was stabilizing over the last few weeks, when in reality, he had slept through one of the most pivotal events of his entire life. Unfair. Hideously unfair. He slammed his hand into the locker and leaned his head on it in agony. If I was going to fuck up the most important relationship I've ever been in, he raged inwardly, the least I could ask for was that I be awake to do it.
The last 48 hours had been profoundly disorienting. The winds had shifted one too many times, and while he was generally a flexible guy, one who rolled with whatever came his way, somehow things had gotten completely out of hand. The craziness probably began with Bailey bullying him into going after Derek, which upset the natural hierarchy of his workplace and sent him into a bit of a tailspin as he got sucked into the black hole Derek had created for himself out in the woods. He had ended up missing all but the very end of Cristina's first solo surgery - an event he had planned on observing start to finish and then celebrating with her. If that wasn't enough, there was the news that Izzy was probably terminally ill, and that Cristina had been the sole repository for this most disturbing of all secrets for days. No wonder she had seemed distant. He had been worried it had something to do with him at the time. In a desire to support her and lighten her mood, he had accepted Cristina's invitation to hang out and watch videos, glad that the day's events hadn't totally ruined his chance for spending time with her. Sitting on her bed, eating popcorn, he had discovered yet another delightful aspect to her quirkiness. Who in the hell watches cardiac surgeries to unwind after work? He had been amused and intrigued at the same time, and had drifted off in Cristina's bed imagining spending many such evenings with her, enjoying them because she enjoyed them, sharing his own special interests with her at some point, and dealing with her snide comments with a half smile and an overwhelming urge to kiss her. As he drew the blanket over her and turned out the light, he had been thinking about those 40 years he wanted, and had already reconsidered that number as being too small. 50 years, or 60 - that was more like it.
Falling asleep next to her had seemed perfectly right at the time. He never suspected that this one small decision would prove to be such a devastating mistake.
He had awakened to find himself in the middle of a nightmare worse than any he'd ever experienced - worse because it was not a figment of his tortured mind, but cold, stark reality. Cristina was gasping and choking, and his hands were around her neck. He had let go instantly of course, but she had continued to cough and sob, looking at him as if he were some deranged stranger who had broken into her apartment in the middle of the night. She had locked herself in her bathroom and left Owen to stew in her living room under Callie's grim, disbelieving glare. He had heard every word of the frantic phone call to Meredith, felt the shame of having done something terribly wrong, and childhood fears - borne of guilt-inducing sermons at church - had surfaced as he sat there staring at his wretched hands. He remembered fidgeting in those cold, hard pews as a child, hearing the pastor drone on about sin and sinners, his 8-year-old mind afraid that he would one day be accused of a crime he didn't commit, then judged by a jury made up of people who couldn't possibly understand him. Never did he imagine that he was destined for far worse that that, that someday his own body would betray him while he slept and he would actually commit the crime, but have no knowledge or memory of it. There was no jury here, but his self-judgment was far worse than anything 12 random people could inflict.
He had apologized to Cristina from the very depths of his mortification and shame, and expected harsh words, fear, censure - anything but the open arms that had greeted him. He did not deserve her. How could she understand so well when he couldn't make any sense of it? How could she be so strong when he felt so weak inside? And what about that niggling particle of doubt that ate at him, convincing him that she was making a terrible mistake to forgive him when he could not forgive himself? He had stumbled out of her apartment and somehow made it home, but if he had had a gun handy in his nightstand he probably would not have lived to see the sunrise. Good thing he'd never had the urge to keep a weapon around.
Things just got worse when, at work, he ran into the brick wall created by her justifiably protective friends - doctors he had considered colleagues and students who suddenly looked at him with suspicion and dread. He couldn't blame them. He would have done much worse to anyone who dared hurt Cristina, so he was taken aback but not really surprised by their reaction. The encounter with Meredith and Callie had reinforced his belief that he had to step back from her, and at the vent, he had pled the case for the demise if their relationship, only to be told yet again that Cristina could make her own decisions. He had known with even more conviction than before that she was wrong about this, but had so wanted to believe in the fantasy that he'd clung to the lifeline she offered even as he saw with fierce clarity that if he allowed her to have her way, he would inevitably pull her down with him. Then, when he'd moved in to kiss her, she'd held him back, and he'd seen that the night's events were not so easily shrugged off as she tried to make it sound. And he saw that she saw it too. He knew then that the seed had finally been planted in her, and that it was only a matter of time before she, too, understood the inevitable.
How had they ended up in bed together, after all that? He had known for weeks that the moment was coming, and in the natural course of their relationship it was likely to happen soon. He had already come up with several scenarios, usually during lulls in the long nights on call when he was too wired to sleep but too tired to do anything else. He had a creative mind, and some of the seductions he'd imagined were pretty far out of the box. But never in a million years would he have imagined a bizarro world such as the one he now inhabited, a world where he would strangle her and sleep with her within the same 24 hours.
When he had asked if he could hold her, his intention had been just that. But the effect of her hands on him, the intoxicating scent of her shampoo, and their physical closeness had been too hard to resist. There was so much he wanted to say to her, and this seemed the best way to get it across. This encounter had not been about the sexual thrill, though that had been all he could have asked for. It had been about cherishing her, reassuring her and himself that she had nothing to fear from him, kissing away the damage he had done. He desperately wanted to show her that his hands were meant for gentleness, not violence. It had been his way of conveying all of the things he had no words for after an incident that was so horrifying it defied description. Somewhere in the tangled skein of sensations, of emotions, of the delight of finally being inside her, he had let down the wall he'd been carefully building and hoped against hope that the separation he was anticipating would somehow not come to pass. This fervent wish paradoxically coexisted with his absolute certainty that he was giving her something to remember him by in the lonely moments that were to come.
He had allowed himself to relax in the aftermath of their lovemaking, and that's probably why, when it finally came, the arrow pierced his heart to the extent that it did. For a few moments, the world had fallen away, and the two of them existed in a bubble where the most important things were the love he felt for her and the satisfied buzz of his body after a great orgasm. And then she had spoken, and the bubble had burst in a shower of pointed shards. The despair in her voice reached in with a cold hand and tore his heart out. "I'm lying here in your arms, and I'm afraid to go to sleep." Of course she was. So was he. Even inside that satisfied bubble they had occupied, he had been fighting the urge to drift off, his fear matching hers and even exceeding it. She would have been an idiot to feel otherwise. It all boiled down to one painfully obvious question: How could he expect her to trust him when he didn't trust himself?
He couldn't expect that. He didn't. After fighting the impulse to disconnect from everyone, working hard to bridge that gap with the one person he felt he could relate to, he was more utterly alone in his struggle for sanity than he had been before it all began. Because now he knew. He knew without a doubt that they were meant for each other, that their connection wasn't just some chance fling, that this woman was the one he'd been waiting for all his life. He had finally tasted the sweetness of a physical connection with her, only to lose it in virtually the same breath. And now he felt like he was the one who was choking.
He made his way across the hospital parking lot to his truck. The night was unnaturally still, almost as if it, too, had lost the ability to breathe.
There has to be something I can do about this, he pondered as he unlocked the door and got behind the wheel. Helplessness in the face of an obstacle did not sit well with him.
Shepherd. Owen took a deep breath, and let it out slowly. Derek had offered to help, and Owen had been so ashamed of himself, so defensive about what he had done, that he'd pissed on the offer and thrown it in his face along with an atrocious below-the-belt punch. He didn't know Derek well enough to have a sense about whether or not he held a grudge, but it was worth finding out. Anything was better than staring into the bottomless pit that was his future without Cristina.
Owen stepped out of the cab of his truck and headed back into the hospital. He had seen Shepherd in the hall as he was leaving. Maybe he could still catch him.