spiceblueeyes | Retroactive Decision Making

Title:Retroactive Decision Making
Fandom: Grey's Anatomy
Prompt: Administer
Warnings:none
Rating:PG
Summary: Set after the end of Sympathy for the Devil, Cristina ponders Owen, and what she should do.
Disclaimer: I don't own the characters, tis sad.

Cristina sat on the couch, wearing some pajama pants and a t-shirt, thinking very hard. She had a decision to make. Well, actually, for all intents and purposes she’d already made it, but she needed to take the time and think it through. So here she was, sitting on her couch at midnight with her hair still damp while Owen Hunt slept in her bed.

At the beginning of the night she’d been angry. He’d asked her out, he was the one who wanted to go on a date, and she’d thought he stood her up. Then, she’d been even more furious when he had shown up, drunk. He thought he could be hours late, show up completely trashed, and it would be okay? No. She had far too much respect for herself for that. So she’d opened the door for him and told him to take a shower, which he had, in his drunken haze, interpreted as “please feel free to use my shower.”

While she had sat listening to the water running, she tried to come up with a plan to get him out of her apartment, and out of her life. Then he’d called for her, and she found him in the shower, still fully dressed, shoes and all. He’d talked to her, told her that story about his best surgery, that had been twisted by the patients later suicide into his worst. She’d looked into his eyes when he’d finished talking, and saw the pain he carried. It was similar to her own, but more recent and therefore closer to the surface. She’d helped him out of his wet clothes; put him on some sweatpants that were too tight for him but were all she had, and an oversized sleep shirt. It had been hard to get him into bed, he’d kept babbling about how he should get going, back to his apartment, but she’d managed. Then she’d watched as he fell asleep almost instantly as his head hit the pillow, snoring softly.

And now she was here, thinking about whether this was a good idea or not. Owen was so clearly damaged, but maybe that was a good thing. Not in the sense that it was good that he’d been hurt, but good in the sense that she needed someone who had experienced pain, and could therefore understand her own. It was one of the reasons she and Meredith had always gotten along so well, until recently anyway. They’d always respected each other’s pain.

However the open wounds on her own soul had long since scabbed over, leaving a permanent scar, but no longer as debilitating as it once had been. Owen’s wounds were only beginning to heal, if even that. She remembered back to the days just after her father had died, bleeding out under her blood covered hands. In the days that followed she had held the edges of her wound closed by sheer will alone. Perhaps she could help Owen do the same, until he could heal on his own. There was no magic medicine that she could administer to make it all better, but she could help him by being there for him.

Logic said to abandon the man sleeping in her bed. He was damaged, broken, and she didn’t owe him anything. Her heart said to help him, and as hard as it was to listen to her heart after everything that had happened, she was going to.