"Prioritise the heart over the harbor, Addison. And for God's sake, stop looking at your hands—it's just a vasovagal response to the blast," Christopher snapped, his sarcasm a thin veil over his own escalating panic.
He didn't wait for her to regain her molecular stability. He sprinted for the parking garage, his mind a frantic index of Season 3, Episodes 15 through 17. In the original script, a container ship hit the ferry in thick fog. Meredith drowned. People lost limbs. It was a peak-Shonda bloodbath that defined the show's middle era. If it happened now, with the interns still green and the hospital glitching, the "reboot" would be a massacre.
He stole a hospital SUV—Richard would forgive the grand theft auto if there was still a hospital to return to—and tore toward the Seattle waterfront. The sky wasn't just white anymore; it was a fractured mosaic of blue pixels and storm clouds.
"DeLuca, are you there?" Christopher shouted into his hands-free.
"I'm at the clinic with Denny," Andrew's voice crackled, sounding like it was underwater. "Christopher, he's not supposed to have the LVAD yet, but his heart is failing now. The timeline is pulling his death forward to compensate for Dylan Young living. If I don't cut, he dies in twenty minutes."
"Then cut! Use the future techniques, use a butter knife, I don't care—just keep him ticking!" Christopher roared, swerving around a stagnant city bus that seemed to be vibrating in place.
He reached the docks. The fog wasn't weather; it was a literal rendering error, a thick, grey wall that felt like walking into cold wool. He could hear the low, mournful groan of the ferry's horn. It was already pulling out.
"Stop the boat!" Christopher screamed at a dockworker, who was staring blankly at the water, his eyes flickering with a dull, NPC-like vacuity.
Christopher didn't wait. He saw a private pilot boat idling nearby. He jumped the railing, throttled the engine, and roared into the grey. He knew the coordinates. He knew the 'collision' point.
As he breached the fog bank, he saw it. The massive container ship, The African Star, was looming like a silent mountain of steel. And there, directly in its path, was the ferry.
But something was wrong. Standing on the edge of the ferry's pier—not on the boat, but on the very edge of the dock he'd just left—was a figure that shouldn't be there. A man in a beige trench coat, holding a familiar black umbrella.
Denny Duquette.
But Denny was supposed to be in the hospital with DeLuca. Christopher looked back at the ferry, then at the man on the dock. The man on the dock waved—a slow, mocking gesture—and then stepped off into the water.
The moment he hit the surface, the container ship didn't hit the ferry. It passed through it like a ghost, the steel rippling like water. The "crash" didn't happen, but the ferry began to dissolve into white light.
Christopher's boat died. The silence that followed was absolute.
"System reboot initiated," a voice whispered, echoing from the fog. It wasn't Richard or Ellis. It was George O'Malley, standing on the surface of the water, looking at Christopher with a peaceful, terrifying smile. "You tried to save everyone, Chris. But you forgot that some people are the glue. If they don't die, the world doesn't stick."
George pointed toward the horizon, where a new hospital was beginning to render out of the mist—a hospital that looked like Grey Sloan, but with a different name on the sign.
WRIGHT-YANG MEMORIAL.