was numb to the warm water running down her.

It was nice, to feel clean. But even as the bright red water ran down her legs and pooled around the shower drain, she still could feel the fresh blood all over her.

Humans happened to be warm-blooded creatures, of course, so Daisy should have expected it. But she never would have imagined how warm the blood felt on her skin.

Daisy shivered, despite the nearly scolding hot water hitting her.

The usually capable thirteen-year-old was in a daze of sorts, and all she could do was stand there as Caroline attempted to scrub the blood out of the girl's dark hair.

Callie was on a search for spare clean clothes in the locker rooms on account of the fact that Daisy's clothes were stained red.

Caroline scrubbed with a bit more force, trying to be gentle but trying to get all of the dried blood off of the girl.

"I know you don't want to talk, and you don't have to right now." Caroline started quietly. "But you're going to have to tell somebody eventually so that they don't think that you...you know, stabbed your sister or something."

Daisy's eyebrows furrowed at the words. Daisy wouldn't ever hurt Calypso.

The girl used to feel sick to her stomach when her little sister got a paper cut. The fact that Calypso's head was split open made Daisy want to keel over on the spot.

Pictures flashed through Daisy's head at a rapid pace, no thoughts able to form as she saw everything on repeat again and again and again.

There was a black car—a big one, like an SUV. Calypso's pink bike that she had gotten for Christmas was nothing more than a tangle of twisted metal, bent at all the wrong angles.

And the matter of Caly herself, of course, made Daisy nauseous.

The girl hadn't ever seen so much blood. The girl hadn't ever seen the seven-year-old so lifeless and still. The girl hadn't ever seen blood gushing out on pavement like that, crawling at a rapid pace as it climbed over pebbles and stones, sliding farther and farther along the road.

Daisy decided maybe the newest fear she would add to her never-ending collection was hemophobia.

Blood was the worst. Blood was bad bad bad. Daisy decided red was bad too. No more red dinner plates. Daisy didn't ever want to see anything red again, she had gotten her fill for a lifetime.

Callie entered the room quietly, making sure to click the door shut as gently as possible behind her. The woman was holding a bath towel she had gotten from the linen closet, spare scrub bottoms she had tucked away in her own locker, and a Dartmouth sweatshirt Meredith had contributed to the cause.

Daisy continued to feel Caroline scrubbing dried blood out of her hair, and yet she had never felt so disconnected from the two women standing there helping her.

Calypso's blood was nothing more than a faraway trace as it disappeared down the shower drain, and yet Daisy could still feel it. She could feel it burned onto her skin, she could feel it caked in her hair. Daisy felt the blood all over her, despite Caroline having scrubbed the majority of it off.

Daisy could smell it still. The thick and eccentric metallic stench. The smell was burned so freshly into Daisy's mind, like the smell of a thousand pennies. It was an awful smell, a vivid smell. Why did it smell that much like metal?

Caroline reached to turn the shower handle, the water pressure dying in the same way that Daisy thought Calypso probably was in OR 2.

The room was stiffly quiet, the eerily loud drip drip drip of the shower faucet matched the pounding of Daisy's heart.

Caroline whispered something to Callie, the two having a quiet conversation as Caroline turned to leave, and Callie spread open the bath towel.

Callie expected Daisy to make some sort of move towards her, she expected Daisy to be eager to dry herself off and get into some clean clothes.

But Daisy only stood there shivering, her eyes stuck on a faraway point again as the continuous dripping of the faucet sounded louder and louder in her ears.

There was that car in her head again, the one she couldn't stop seeing. There was blood everywhere, and Daisy wondered who would be responsible for cleaning up that pavement.

Callie let out a quiet sigh, taking it upon herself to wrap the girl in the bath towel and try to dry her off the best she could.

Daisy didn't mind Callie helping her. She trusted Callie more than she did anybody else to help her when she was in such an unresponsive and vulnerable state.

"These are all I could find." Callie held out the clean pair of mesh underwear she had retrieved from the mother/baby unit. "They're not the most comfortable things ever, they're for moms who birth humans, usually. But, uh...it's all I could find, and...I'm not sure why I'm explaining this to you. You're not really hearing anything I'm saying anyway, are you?"

Daisy was thinking about the car again. And the blood. There was blood everywhere she looked. She could still see the pool of it surrounding Calypso, the girl's head sunken in as a result of harsh impact with the road.

"Right." Callie nodded when she received no answer, attempting to help the girl get dressed into the clean clothes.

The scrub bottoms were far too big for Daisy, the waistband having to be rolled a few times and the strings of the pants knotted as tightly as possibly. The Dartmouth hoodie pooled on Daisy just a bit, the sleeves reaching far as Daisy's hands were hidden.

Daisy looked mismatched with different colors on. She looked a bit silly too, with clothes on that didn't fit her.

The blood was gone, though, and Daisy supposed that was the most important part. Even though she could mentally feel the liquid still smeared all over her, she knew that she was physically clean.

Callie gently took Daisy's hand, nudging the girl to move a bit.

There was still a waiting game to be played as Calypso was being operated on.

Callie led the girl past dozens of people, all of their faces blurring together as Daisy's thoughts ran wild.

Her blood was so dark that it almost looked black rather than red. It came out so quickly in copious amounts, there was so much of it. How much blood had Calypso lost? How many pints of blood happened to even be in the human body anyway?

Daisy felt her tapping kick in a little as Callie led her down the halls. She tapped against her thigh over and over and over, up to fifteen and then again and again and again.

The narrow hall eventually opened up to a larger waiting room at the end, an array of cushioned seats side by side as magazines were sprawled on a coffee table—as if this were a living room setting rather than the place you wait to hear if your little sister is dead or not.

Mark was sat in one of the seats, wearing an expression that was a mix of exhaustion and sadness. Mark looked sad, and...scared.

Except Mark would be okay, Daisy thought to herself.

If Calypso died, Mark would be okay.

He would be sad for a little bit, of course, Daisy didn't discount that.

But Mark had known Calypso for less than a year, he would be able to move on with his life in a way that Daisy would be rendered unable.

Daisy didn't take a seat in one of the cushioned chairs. They looked immeasurably uncomfortable, and Daisy decided she was too anxious to sit still anyway. Standing and shifting from foot to foot would do her much better.

Mark didn't say anything to Daisy, and the girl was happy about that. She didn't have the answers to any of his questions, she didn't have the ability to open her mouth and utter so much as a word.

Doctors and nurses walked past briskly, each individual on a different mission to get something done.

They were engrossed with their own lives, not paying any attention to the anxious obsessive-compulsive teenager waiting for the worst news of her life.

Daisy tried to think of happy things, but the weight of the lingering what if dragged her down to a much darker place than she could have anticipated.

Daisy decided she would give up if Calypso died.

There wouldn't really be a reason to keep going anyway, and Daisy couldn't stand to be apart from her sister. Calypso was everything, and if everything was gone, there really was no point in any of it.

Daisy was scared to do anything rash, though. The thought of actually embracing death head on made Daisy nervous. She had always viewed death as such a negative thing, and the idea of so blatantly welcoming it seemed all sorts of backwards.

Maybe Daisy wouldn't even have to worry about that, though. Maybe Calypso would pull out a miracle, maybe things weren't as bad as they looked, maybe Calypso hadn't actually lost that much blood.

The tapping on Daisy's thigh picked up speed, her counting quickening as she repeated the familiar run of one through fifteen over and over again.

Daisy was scared to lose Calypso. She hadn't ever really known how to properly pray, but she figured she better learn quick.

• • • •

"Farther to the right." Derek instructed the woman beside him holding the scope, peering intently into open brain matter. "There, stop."

The scope was stilled, Derek moving quickly to try to find the source of all these brain bleeds that kept coming up.

He moved his hands around delicately, squinting into the looking glass as he was growing frustrated.

"Jesus Christ." Derek mumbled. "I can't see anything, it's all..."

"Mush." Amelia provided the word that Derek was struggling to find.

Derek grimaced at his little sister's word choice. "Don't call it mush, Amy."

"That's what it is." Amelia defended her word choice, looking down at the bloodied brain exposed. "A big bloody pile of mush."

"Suction." Derek ignored Amelia, trying to prevent the constant bleeding from pooling up. He didn't pull his eyes away from the exposed brain, calling out to a scrub nurse to look at the monitor for him. "Brain activity?"

"There's still nothing."

Derek mumbled under his breath, continuing to work.

The girl on his table had nearly bottomed out three times already, her blood pressure plummeting before they barely stabilized it. Her body was in a fragile state, hardly able to keep it together.

"She's dead, Derek."

"She's not dead."

"She might as well be." Amelia mumbled. "You're going to confine her to a ventilator for a few days just to, what—prolong telling your friend the inevitable? Her brain is gone, and if her brain is gone, the rest of her body is gone, too."

Amelia was being factual, of course, in the aspect that the brain controlled every part of the human body. If the brain happened to be nonfunctional, the rest of the body was rendered nonfunctional as well.

Calypso had passed the threshold of a vegetative state—they were beyond that. The girl would be a couple of machines, relying on all of them to keep her alive. She wouldn't be able to breathe on her own, her heart wouldn't be able to beat on its own.

If they could even get to that point, Derek thought. Calypso's brain was bleeding so frequently, the surgeon couldn't go more than a minute without suctioning. There was no way she'd survive the build-up of fluid in her brain if they were to attempt to close.

Derek didn't stop working, though, moving his hands at a rapid pace despite the unsettling odds.

"I'm not killing Mark's kid."

"You're not. She was dead when she was wheeled in." Amelia countered, and Derek hated that the younger woman was probably right. With her brain in a state like this, Calypso was doomed the moment she was wheeled onto the ambulance.

The monitors connected to the girl began ringing out loudly, signaling her body was in distress. An overwhelming amount of blood began to pool up in the cranial cavity, and Derek struggled to suction it all.

"She's dropped to 98 over 66."

The kid was losing more blood than they could hang, at this point. Amelia had abandoned the long scope, using her hands to try to help Derek stop the bleeding.

"84 over 58." A scrub nurse called. "She's hypotensive."

"Hang more O neg."

But the blood that was being hung was draining so quickly. It resembled the way that sand fell slowly from an hourglass as it emphasized the passage of time—and Calypso's time was up.

"She's crashing!"

Each time the pair felt as though they had contained the bleeding, more of it seeped up in copious amounts. It was overwhelming, and it felt impossible to gain control over the massive brain bleed.

The shouting and frantic movements ceased when the monitor quit beeping. The machine instead let out a long, single, high-pitched sound that didn't end. It was a knife to the gut, the ghastly scream of a flatline.

Derek didn't know what to say. The shriek of the monitor invaded his brain and stopped any thoughts from coming in, so much so that the only word Derek could let out was a quietly mumbled "Dammit."

Truthfully, Derek hadn't really known Calypso all that well. He had seen her a handful of times, and he did know that she was bubbly, and energetic. He knew she had an older sister, Daisy, and he knew Daisy loved Calypso more than anything. Daisy even loved Calypso more than the number fifteen.

He also knew that she was seven, and seven- year-olds were destined for running all around and eating ice cream until their stomachs hurt. They had their whole lives ahead of them, untouched by the brutalities of reality as their innocence blossomed brightly. Seven-year-olds were destined for climbing trees and picking flowers, playing tag and smiling so widely their faces hurt.

Seven-year-olds weren't destined to bleed out on OR tables.

Derek stole a glance up at the clock on the wall, his eyes met with a minute and hour hand, and an array of numbers.

He couldn't help the brief laugh that left his lips when he saw the time. The laugh was humorless, of course, Derek's only way to possibly express the grief he was holding over the seven-year-old that had bled out.

Amelia picked up on her brother's distress over calling the time of death, and she cleared her throat as she attempted to help him.

"Time of death," Amelia called out to a room filled with three scrub nurses, two neurosurgeons, and one corpse. "15:15."

Derek thought that of all the nation's ills, irony was the sickest.

He wasn't sure how to compose himself to a point that he would be able to talk Daisy and Mark through what had happened. Derek didn't know how to tell his best friend that his kid was dead, and he certainly didn't know how to tell Daisy that her little sister was gone.

The operating room was eerily quiet as one of the nurses made a point to turn the monitor off, ceasing the blaring of the flatline.

Blood plagued Derek's gloves, and blood was pooled in Calypso's head like red wine in a goblet.

Derek's eyes scanned over the seven-year-old who, if not for the crimson liquid smeared all over her, would look though as if she was asleep.

A deep sleep. One in which she wouldn't ever wake up, Derek reminded himself.

The man let out a quiet sigh, his lips parting to produce the only word he could think of as his brain went to Mark Sloan.

"Dammit."