Page 25 of Victorious

Shock, no doubt, the only thing holding him together.

It would wear off, eventually, and he’d be left to face whatever waited in its wake, but right now, he welcomed the detachment.

They didn’t make it, Walsh had said.

Which was of course an idiom, a stand-in for the blunt and brutal truth.

And yet, this time, it wasn’t wrong.

He closed his eyes and saw them, terrified, at the top of the stairs. Heard himself urging them that it would be okay, if they just got to where he was.

They tried. And they didn’t make it.

“Gabriel,” said the other doctor softly. “Did you hear me?”

He blinked, looked up at Walsh. “Where are they now?”

The doctor’s expression softened, and for a moment, he was afraid it was too late, that in the nineteen days he’d been sedated, their bodies had been disposed of. But then Walsh said, “They’re down on B.” The basement level. The morgue.

“There will be time for all that,” Walsh went on, but Gabriel was sitting up now, tugging the IV from the back of his hand.

“Dammit, Gray.” Walsh rushed forward as Gabriel eased his legs off the bed, the stitches straining in his side. He held his hands up. “Just—just wait.”

But Gabriel couldn’t.

He had to see his family. The force of it surprised him, the only feeling so far to pierce the veil of shock. A pull, like gravity. The need to make order out of chaos. The certainty that somehow seeing them would set things right.

He gripped Walsh’s arm, and looked him in the eyes, trying to convey the weight of it, to will the man to understand. After a moment, Walsh relented.

“Let me get a chair.”

As the elevator sank down through the floors, Gabriel could feel Walsh flexing his hands on the handles of the wheelchair, his discomfort radiating through the metal.

Walsh knew how to comfort frightened patients and family members debilitated by grief, even soothe a fellow doctor after a hard shift.

But he’d never known what to do with Gabriel.

None of them had.

Other staff put on a brave show for their patients, only to cry in a stairwell or vent in the break room between shifts. But Gabriel had never needed to. At least, not when he was Dr. Gray.

A mask—that’s what Iris used to call it.

She’d reach up and pretend to take it off, sweeping her hand across his cheeks. “There you are,” she’d say, pretending to toss the mask away.

Lately, Ian had started doing it, too. “Daddy, take off your mask!” he’d say, waving his hand in front of Gabriel’s face as he scowled, or grinned, or stuck out his tongue.

Behind him, Walsh had begun to quietly protest.

“Look, I know trauma is your field of expertise, but still, I don’t think … surely, this isn’t the time or the way…”

But Gabriel wasn’t listening.

He was studying himself in the polished surface of the elevator door. He looked unkempt, worn rough by the accident and the following weeks of sedation, salt-and-pepper stubble shadowing his jaw. Beneath that, though, the body clearly belonged to Gabriel. But the face—the steady gaze, the flat line of the mouth—that belonged to Dr. Gray. He reached up, imagined tugging the mask off, but nothing had changed.

His hand fell back into his lap as the elevator reached the basement floor.

The doors chimed open, and Walsh wheeled him down the hall.