The air in Grey Sloan was thick with a pre-static charge that only Christopher could feel. He knew the date: May 20, 2010. The day Gary Clark would walk through the front doors with a 9mm and a shattered soul.
"Jack, stay at the brownstone," Christopher had hissed into his phone an hour ago. "The hospital's server is down. It's chaos. I don't want you anywhere near this zip code."
But Jack Brady was a litigator; he didn't take orders, he contested them.
Christopher was sprinting toward the lobby when the first gunshots echoed—sharp, metallic cracks that sounded like shattering glass. He rounded the corner near the admitting desk and stopped dead.
Two interns were already down, crimson blooming on the sterile tiles. And there, by the sliding glass doors, stood Jack, clutching a leather briefcase and looking horrified.
Gary Clark raised his weapon, his eyes vacant and locked on Jack. "You're all the same," the widower rasped. "You play God and then you leave us to rot."
"Jack! Get down!" Christopher roared.
The script called for Derek to be shot on the catwalk, but the The Wright Way had diverged. Christopher didn't think; he calculated the trajectory and lunged. He tackled Jack, slamming him behind a structural concrete pillar just as the muzzle flashed.
A searing, white-hot line of pain tore through Christopher's left shoulder. It wasn't the fatal chest shot he'd seen Reed Adamson take. It was a flesh wound, a clean pass-through through the deltoid.
"Christopher!" Jack gasped, his hands shaking as he tried to apply pressure to the bloody lab coat.
"Stay... down, Jack," Christopher wheezed, his sarcasm struggling to surface through the shock. "I told you... to stay at the house. Your inability to follow instructions is statistically infuriating."
Gary Clark was shaking, looking at the blood on the floor as if he'd just woken up from a dream. Before he could re-aim, the tactical sirens began to wail outside. He turned and fled into the darkness of the stairwell.
Christopher slumped against the cold tiles, his face ashen but his smirk still intact. He had saved Jack. He had taken the bullet.
"You're bleeding," Jack whispered, his voice cracking.
"It's a superficial wound, Jack. Don't be melodramatic," Christopher muttered, closing his eyes as the room began to spin. "But I am sending you the dry-cleaning bill for the tuxedo. This silk is ruined."