Archive of Our Own

“Dr Carter's… Dr Carter's been shot.”

Those are the words that crackle through County General's radio, but nobody truly believes them until the ambulance screeches to a halt outside the entrance, and Mark tugs open the passenger side door- only for Carter's unconscious body to list out, covered in blood from the neck down. Somebody sobs. 

“I drove as fast as I could.” Zadro explains, stumbling over his words as the assembled team (Mark, Carol, Lydia, Malik) struggles to pull Carter onto a backboard. “Tried to put pressure on his neck but the blood just kept coming.”

“How many- how many times was he-?”

“They fired three shots, but I think only two hit.”

The young doctor is slid gently onto a gurney. The rails are snapped into place. Mark shouts over the clamor that they've got it from here, and just like that, they're rushing into the ER with their hearts in their mouths, blood dripping from the gurney, staining their shoes. 

Carter’s face is deathly pale beneath the lights. Mark makes the mistake of glancing downwards as he guides the gurney along the hall, and the sight of the steadily gushing wound on his colleague’s neck nearly has him tripping over his own shoes. 

“Someone put pressure on that.” He orders, swallowing back bile. A gloved hand, shaking, fills the space at once, and it takes him a few moments to realise the hand is his. He lifts his eyes as they turn the corner at the admit desk, then lifts his voice. 

“Kerry!”

But it's Jerry who answers, eyes wide, quieter than Mark has ever heard him. “She’s- she's in curtain two, do you want me to-”

“Yes.” Mark rasps, feeling the hot blood seeping between his fingers, more undoubtedly escaping from the other wound they haven't yet identified. “Now.”

By some miracle, they get Carter into trauma one, and as they transfer him onto the table, the doors swing open and Kerry bursts in. Her eyes move from Mark to his hand, colour draining from her face the moment she realises that yes, that isn't just any patient he’s trying to keep from exsanguinating. It's the very resident that sleeps in her house, the boy who cuts cucumbers wrong and likes to watch old movies with her every Tuesday night. She rushes forwards. 

“What the hell happened?!”

And Mark can only shake his head. “Zadro just brought him in, he's been shot at least twice. I don't know where the other wound is.”

Carol shears through Carter's clothing as Malik tugs off his boots. When his black undershirt has been splayed out to the sides like a snow angel's wings, the second injury becomes evident. His left chest is covered in blood. Carol's gloved hands move automatically to put pressure on the area, and Lydia swoops in to attach the EKG stickers and pulse ox. The monitors scream immediately. 

It's like something out of a nightmare. For a second, when Mark glances at the screen showing Carter’s vitals, he's so woozy that the numbers are too fuzzy to read. After a few blinks, he ascertains the basics, though- low BP, tachycardia, and an ever-dipping pulse ox. None of the readings are stable. None are good. 

“He needs a surgeon.” Kerry half-whispers, voice choked before it rises again to address the room. “Malik, get Benton. Tell him- tell him Carter has been shot. It's bad.”

The nurse passes the IV kit he was setting up to a colleague and races off. Kerry glances back up at the monitor, a sigh shuddering from her lips when she sees Carter's pulse ox has fallen even more. Mark says the words before she can. 

“We need to tube him.”

“I know. I'll do it.”

“Are you sure? Kerry, if you need me to I can-”

His fellow attending is as stubborn as ever, swiping the intubation tray that Lydia offers up with barely another look in Mark’s direction. “I've got it. Focus on the chest wound and get a- get a FAST scan if you can. Lydia, I need you to give me suction.”

Mark doesn't fight her on this one. He steps aside and joins Carol in tackling the chest wound, feeling a lot like a sailor tasked with bailing a ship using only a teaspoon. The boy needs a surgeon, and he needs one quickly. If Benton doesn't get here soon…

An ultrasound probe is thrust towards him. “Here, I'm setting up the scanner.”

“Thanks, Carol.”

In a matter of seconds, he's dragging the device against Carter's chest, trying his best to concentrate despite the gurgling of the suction catheter at the head of the bed and Kerry's unheard assurances to the boy she's trying to tube. 

“You’re gonna be alright, John. You're gonna be just fine, we're taking care of you, sweetheart.”

The probe glides against skin slick with blood, but it isn't clear where the blood is pooling underneath until at last…

“There.” Carol gestures, index finger shaking. “Oh God, Mark, it's-”

His heart. 

Or, rather, just shy of it. The blood is welling around it rapidly, compressing the muscle as it strains to keep a steady beat. 

Mark curses under his breath. “Alright, alright. We need to-”

“Tube is in. Lydia, check the placement for me, please.”

“-drain the pericardium, that'll give us some more time before-”

“No.” Kerry says. She’s stepped away from her post at the head of the table, and when Mark glances over, he sees Lydia there instead, squeezing a BVM hooked up to the ET tube. The intubation was a success. His brief relief at this is shattered, however, as Kerry continues. “No, there's far too much blood, Mark. If we drained the pericardium with a needle, it'd only be a matter of seconds before it refilled again.”

“What do you suggest?”

Her eyes glitter with restrained emotion. Her lips part. Close. Part again. 

And at once Mark knows exactly what she's thinking. 

“No, Kerry. No. We can't. Peter will be here in a minute, and I’m not- I can't put that boy through anything that he might consider unnecessary.”

“That boy,” Kerry replies, finding her voice even as a few tears slip free. “Is going to die if we don't clear the blood from around his heart.”

As if to prove her point, the monitors suddenly start to screech. 

“He’s in V-tach!” Carol shouts. 

Mark scrambles to grab the crash cart. “Get those pacer pads on his chest.”

“It won't work, Mark.”

“Kerry, get the goddamn pacer pads.”

She obeys reluctantly. 

“Charging to 30… clear!”

The shock is delivered, and Carter's lifeless body jolts against the table. The rhythm on the monitor, however, doesn't change. 

“Mark, I'm telling you, we need to-”

“Charging to 50… clear!”

Another shock. The rhythm does not improve, but continues to deteriorate. 

“V-fib!” Carol yells, voice wobbling. 

“Mark-”

He imagines the whir of machinery. He imagines cranking the retractor and exposing the viscera of Carter's internal organs. 

“Charging to 100… clear!”

It doesn't work. Carter slips into PEA. 

Half-choking on a sob of defeat, Mark steps back and lifts his shaking hands, allowing Kerry to move in instead. She's already holding the sternal saw.

“I need you,” She says, “To make a long midline incision.”

A nurse is handing him a scalpel, and against every instinct, he takes it. Steps back into the field and positions it so that it's hovering over the boy’s sternum. 

“Benton should be here in a minute.” He says, almost pleading. “If we wait, Kerry-”

“-he might die. You know that as well as I do.”

She’s right. It would be easier if she was wrong, but, as often seems to be the case, Kerry speaks only the bitter truth. Benton is probably being informed about what's happening at that very moment, but until he appears in the trauma room, they're wasting precious moments that Carter doesn't have. 

He takes a steadying breath. 

“Okay… okay.”

And cuts. 

Peter doesn't hear anything at all beyond ‘Carter’s been shot’. The words bob past him like driftwood on the waves, and a seasick feeling fills his gut, has him stumbling away from the operating table and tearing off his gloves and gown while the world spins around him. 

“Hold on, Dr Benton.” Somebody says. 

“Peter?” Someone else calls, soothing and familiar. “Peter, let me help you.”

The gown he's wearing is untied, the mask removed, and the second he's unmoored he’s staggering towards the OR doors and slamming his palms against them with all his might. 

Carter. Shot. 

Carter. 

Shot. 

Another phrase, something floating around that manages to lodge in his brain. 

It’s bad. 

He’s almost at the elevator when he realises it will take too long, and as he's doubling back to get to the stairs, Elizabeth appears alongside him. 

“I'm here.” She says. “I’m with you, Peter.”

They hurry down the steps together and tear down the ER corridors, left, right, left, right, all the way to the trauma rooms. Peter lurches into trauma two, but Elizabeth drags him forwards into trauma one instead. As they burst through the doors, his nostrils fill with the metallic tang of blood. His eyes adjust. His stomach threatens to revolt. 

It's Carter. Oh sweet Jesus, it's Carter, and he's unconscious, he's intubated, he’s- he’s been-

What the fuck have they done to him?!

“Peter, thank God you're here- there was no time, we had to crack his chest.”

He forces his legs to move the last few steps and reaches his student’s side, trying to make sense of the incongruence before his eyes. Carter is always bouncing around whenever they bump into each other along the halls. He still grins like a kid, and is as chatty as one too, asking endless questions about how Reese is getting on, how surgery is going. Now, he's lying on a trauma table breathing through a tube, and there's a valley where his sternum should be. There are hands inside his chest cavity, rummaging around, massaging his heart and desperately trying to encourage a rhythm that isn't- that isn't-

The surgeon within him leaps to the fore, and he snatches the internal paddles from Kerry Weaver’s hands. 

“Charge to 50.” He orders, flexing his fingers around the grips. 

“Charged.”

“Everybody out.”

Hands dripping with viscera retreat, and Peter plunges the paddles into Carter's chest, positioning them around the weakly fluttering thing that is his boy's heart. 

He delivers the shock. The heart fibrillates once, then no more. Peter glances up at the pale, intubated face beyond the gore and cannot stop his lips from moving in entreaty. 

“Come on, Carter. Come on, man, don't you dare.” 

Then, he turns back to the others. “Charge to 100.”

“... Charged.”

“Clear!”

Another shock, and another weak flutter that tapers off as quickly as it came. There's so much blood. Every time Elizabeth dips the suction to clear it, more wells in its place. 

“We’ve got a massive haemorrhage here, Peter.” She breathes. 

He ignores her. “Charge to 200!”

The boy’s paramedic ridealong jacket, he notices, is on the floor. Strewn there spattered in blood. Peter feels a bitter surge of anger in his throat- somebody let Carter down. This is somebody's fault. It's the fault of the person who shot him, yes, but it must be somebody else’s too. Who was with him? Who didn't ensure that he was safe?

If he were still Peter's student back up in surgery, perhaps… 

This was his fault. If he'd only fought harder, he could have forced Carter's hand, brought him into the fold where the gravest danger was often sleep deprivation. 

“Charged.”

He lowers the paddles again, and this time, the current that the volt delivers is enough. 

“Sinus tach.” Mark announces. 

Everything kicks into motion. A drape is placed over Carter's open chest, and the brakes of the gurney are released. 

“We’re taking him into the OR.” Elizabeth tells the others, so Peter grabs hold of the railings when she does and trails along after her. She knows what she's doing. He's so glad she knows what she's doing, because right now he feels so nauseous he can barely hold his own head up. 

They move him into the elevator. As the doors close, Elizabeth squeezes his arm and gives him a reassuring look. 

He tries to ignore that her other hand squeezes air into Carter's paralyzed lungs. 

The moment the gurney is out of the room, all the nausea Kerry has been keeping at bay suddenly rises. She’s only just able to lurch over to one of the sinks before she's retching, forearms shaking as she holds herself up. When she lifts her head and turns around, Mark looks pale too. 

He opens his mouth to say something, but no words emerge. All he can do is strip the bloodied gloves from his hands and fling them to the floor. 

“Do you think he'll make it?”

It's Carol. 

“I don't know.” Kerry rasps. The image of her housemate cracked open on the table forces its way into her mind again, and the scent of his blood fills her nostrils. She doesn't wait for anyone else to speak before stumbling through the double doors, desperate for the bitter air outside. 

The damage is so close to Carter's beating heart that Peter holds his breath whenever he pulls a stitch closed. Everything is so fragile. The boy’s already coded twice since being in the OR, and if they have to bring out the paddles again, it's unlikely they'll be able to revive him. 

Elizabeth stands on the other side of the table to Peter with the suction catheter, eyes constantly flicking to him, asking silent questions he doesn't know the answers to. 

How are you holding up?

Do you want me to step in for a little bit?

Why would anybody hurt him?

Romano is the attending, but his usual snark is oddly absent. He speaks only to demand another piece of equipment or a report of Carter's vitals. Alongside Peter and Elizabeth, he helped to stabilise the wound on the boy’s neck, now covered with a sterile dressing and ready for proper suturing once they've tackled the chest wound. 

“Bullet missed the aorta.” He grunts, manipulating torn flesh to reveal the untouched artery still pulsing steadily. “Kid’s lucky.”

This, at least, earns him a glare from Benton as he tugs another internal suture closed. Of all the adjectives the surgeon would use to describe his former student, lucky is not one of them right now. If Carter were lucky, he wouldn't be in this OR in the first place. 

“Shirley. Vitals.” Romano continues. 

“BP is down. Looks like he's getting a little shocky.”

“He needs more blood.” Peter argues. “He lost a lot down in the ER.”

If he hesitates even a second, he can still see it, his boy gutted on that table like a fish, blood all over the trauma room floor. 

“We’ll transfuse more in a minute, Peter. Focus on the stitches.”

“Transfuse him now.”

“Peter-”

“BP’s 80 palp.”

Romano relents. One of the techs hangs another bag of packed cells and connects it to the central line they set up right before surgery. Peter glances over, sees Carter's sweat-sheened face beyond the drapes. If it weren't for the fogging of the tube, he'd look dead. 

They need to wrap this up as soon as they can. 

The boy can't take much more. 

Four hours after stepping into the OR and gowning up, Peter Benton pulls the last suture closed on his student. Somehow, Carter is still breathing. 

“Good work, Peter.” Romano murmurs, already moving away from the table. “By all accounts, he should have snuffed it before we even opened him up.”

Peter ignores him. The OR door soon swings open, and closes again. With Romano absent, Elizabeth huffs out a sigh. 

“Prick… But he's right, Peter. You did very well.”

Considering your personal attachment, she doesn’t say, but it's present anyway in the gentle tone of her voice. Even if she had said it, Peter wouldn't have argued with her. Standing over Carter's lifeless body has made him aware just how great a loss it would be. 

“Fancy a coffee?” She asks, disposing of her gloves and reaching his side. The smile on her face is gentle. “It will be awful, but I need the caffeine.”

He glances at the sedated boy on the operating table, chest rising and falling artificially. The anesthesiologist is peeling the tape from his eyelids with one hand and slowly lowering the propofol with the other. Peter reluctantly returns to Elizabeth's gaze and shakes his head. 

“I’m gonna stick around. See that he comes out of the anesthesia alright.”

Elizabeth nods. “Of course… in that case, would you begrudge the company?”

Peter exhales, the corner of his lip curling up ever so slightly. “Not at all. Stay as long as you like. It might be a while, though- Carter has a habit of never making things straightforward.”

“Sounds rather a lot like someone else I know.”

So they sit at his side, the most terrible backseat anesthesiologists County General has ever seen, as slowly but surely Carter comes back to them. Just as Peter predicted, it takes longer than usual. His student seems content just to float around in a Propofol Haze forever, ignoring the taps on his cheek and the calling of his name until finally, heavy-lidded eyes slide open to greet them. 

“There you are.” Elizabeth says softly. 

The anesthesiologist unhooks the connections to the vent. Orders Carter to cough, then pulls the ET tube from his airway in one slick movement, disposing of it as the boy shudders through the first breaths on his own in what feels like a lifetime. Before the oxygen mask is on his face, he's unconscious again. Small and shivering. Barely there yet.

“He's breathing, Peter.” The other surgeon reminds him kindly, perhaps sensing his anxiety. “That's a miracle in and of itself considering how we found him.”

Cut open. Covered in blood. Alarms wailing, howling, screeching-

“Let’s get him to the SICU.” She says, placing a hand on his arm.

He looks down at his boy again (breathing, breathing, breathing) and nods. 

It really is a miracle, Mark thinks, wandering into Carter's room in the SICU as though he's in a dream. Somehow, despite everything, the kid made it through surgery. 

One of the reasons why is sitting at his bedside. 

Her hair is frizzier than normal, and her eyes are tired, but she smiles when she sees Mark entering and gestures for him to sit down. He only has to lift his eyebrows for the details to emerge in startling clarity. 

“It was touch and go. We lost his pulse a couple of times, but managed to stabilise and repair both wounds. Only got out of the OR fifteen minutes ago.”

The breath eases from his lungs in a sigh. “Jesus… Y’know, when we were- down there, I just- I thought he was going to-”

“As did I.”

Her gaze flickers away for a moment, and Mark turns to discover there's another occupant in the room, arms crossed, head tipped to his chest. 

“He drifted off five minutes after we got down here.” Elizabeth explains. “I’m almost certain he's been working now for nearly thirty hours without a break, so it's hardly a surprise.”

Mark scrubs his face with his hands. It hasn't quite been that long for him, but his bones are beginning to ache with the pent-up anxiety of the last few hours, and now that the jittery feeling is leaving him, all he wants to do is sleep. Kerry would likely be the same, except her own inability to sit still and do nothing has led her back to her house, seeking to gather some things for Carter’s hospital stay (that he’d survive was assumed. It had to be). 

When he lifts his head, Elizabeth has already turned her attention back to Carter. She's gently carding her fingers through his hair, resting her head on her other arm, which itself is propped up against the bed rail. The boy sleeps on. 

His cheeks have more colour than they did when he arrived, but this is hardly surprising given how utterly lifeless he'd appeared then. Even seeing the condensation on the inside of the oxygen mask with each breath is reassuring. 

He lives. Somehow, he lives. 

And an hour or so later, he wakes. 

It's Elizabeth who notices, of course, and her voice that draws Mark forwards as she attempts to soothe their unexpected patient. 

“John? You're alright, darling, you're just waking up from anesthetic. You've had an operation.”

The boy blinks sluggishly, gaze unfocused. His eyes drift from Elizabeth to Mark to the room around him, and it's clear that he's trying to piece together what's happening, to form a coherent narrative from the sparse information he has. He looks to Mark, brow weakly knit. 

“Do you… do you remember what happened before you were brought to the hospital, bud?”

Carter hesitates before shaking his head. Mark’s stomach sinks. 

“Alright- you… you were shot, Carter. A couple of times. It was pretty bad, but you're going to be just fine now.”

For a few seconds, nothing happens. It's as though Mark hasn't spoken at all. Then Carter blinks again, and in the low light Mark makes out the glittering of moisture in his eyes. His hand moves shakily towards the oxygen mask, tugging it down enough to whisper,

“Could- could I have s’ more m-morphine please?”

“I’ll get you some, man.”

Benton. Mark hadn't even realised he was awake, but at once the surgeon is up and rummaging through the drawers for medication, barely even pausing to rub his eyes of the sleep that must have gathered at their corners. 

“Thank you.” Carter rasps wetly when the fresh syringe connects with the tubing of his IV. 

Within seconds, his eyes are closed. Elizabeth, armed with a tissue, discreetly wipes away the errant tear that slips down his cheek as he slackens in sleep, only the barest sliver of sclera visible beneath heavy lids. 

“The pain must be awful, bless him.” She murmurs. 

“I’ll keep on top of it.” Peter assures them. 

Mark wonders how on earth anybody will be able to keep on top of the trauma inflicted and experienced today. 

Kerry settles the bags in the corner of the room, then takes a seat at Carter’s bedside, leaning her crutches against the wall and watching him sleep (aided now by only a nasal cannula). She's been informed by Mark that he was ‘fragile’ when he first woke up, as though this was something unexpected, as though it isn't perfectly anticipated for a boy who nearly died to be afraid. In pain. Nauseous. Tired. 

Fragile. 

While packing his belongings at home, Kerry had mostly held herself together. She'd folded old t-shirts and shorts and that dressing gown he sometimes wears, and she'd layered them all in a duffel with only the threat of tears behind her eyes. Toothbrush, toothpaste, hairbrush, deodorant. Socks- the woollen ones he wears when it's cold and the thinner ones just in case those prove too thick. A few books for him to read. 

She'd bitten her tongue and soldiered on, folding and layering until, as she tucked the covers round his bed and smoothed out the wrinkles, she'd hit a snag beneath the blankets. A little lump that, upon retrieval, transformed into an aged, floppy, stuffed rabbit with a sewn-on smile.

Her thumb traced over the ragged felt of its nose. 

“Who’s that?”

“Hey, no laughing! His name is Mr Rabbit, and he was my first friend.”

“Really?"

“Oh, yeah. Y’know, one time my Mom told me I was playing with him too much, so she hid him on top of her closet. Guess she thought I'd forget about him and move on eventually, but I cried so hard I threw up on her new Nourison rug and she decided it wasn't worth the hassle.”

“He's that special, huh?”

“He is.”

And suddenly, despite doing her best to white-knuckle through, Kerry Weaver was crying- sobbing, even. She’d pressed the rabbit to her chest as though it were John himself, and she'd let the waves of grief roll on and on and on. 

Now, she sits in his hospital room, and Mr Rabbit sits in her grasp. 

She lowers her unoccupied hand to Carter's forehead. Smooths back his hair. Trails the edge of her thumb along the bridge of his nose and desperately tries to soothe. 

His eyes flutter open. She forces a smile onto her face even as the tears threaten to flow again. 

“Hi, John. Hi, sweetheart. It's so good to see you awake.”

He stretches with a small shudder, like a cat who's been lying in the sun, but the pallor of his skin and the dark circles beneath his eyes don't allow for a second the pretence of leisure. Death’s claw marks haven't faded yet. 

“I brought you some things from home, honey. Clothes, toiletries, a few books. And someone special.”

She lifts her other hand to reveal the stuffed toy, and Carter’s lower lip wobbles. He tries to smile, like her, but the medication has rendered him too transparent. By the time she's nestled Mr Rabbit beneath the crook of his arm, he's crying, thick tears rolling down his cheeks as his breath hitches and stutters. 

“John? You're alright, sweetheart. I know. I know.”

“P-pain.”

“I know.”

“S-sick.”

“I know, John. Did you want some water, honey?”

He shakes his head as he sobs, a fierce movement that’s followed by a barely suppressed howl- his neck, she remembers, glancing at the dressing on his skin. He stills, squeezing his eyes shut, colour draining from his face as his breaths start to shudder and sweat starts to bead on his forehead, his cheeks, his upper lip. The sobs are gone at once, and in their place, barely more than a whisper. 

“G-gonna faint.”

“Alright, sweetheart, just take some nice, deep breaths for me. I’ll just go and get you a little more morphine-”

“N-no. Ssstay.”

His hand, weak as it is, curls around her wrist. 

“Okay, John. I'm not going anywhere.”

He half-sobs, breath hitching and extending into a sigh that seems to suck the energy from his bones. Kerry strokes his hair. Moves Mr Rabbit beneath his chin, letting the fabric rub against skin just as it must have first done nearly thirty years ago now. 

After a few moments, he shifts again, and inhales such a sharp breath it sounds almost like he's choking. 

“K-Kerry?”

“I’m right here, sweetheart. You're okay.”

The creases of terror in his forehead and those around his tightly shut eyes suddenly flatten, and he is boneless. Beneath his fluttering lashes, there’s only white. He's out. 

“It’s okay, John.” She continues, though she knows now he likely cannot hear her. “I'm right here. I'm not going anywhere.”

The next day, Peter is doing charts in Carter's ICU room when the door opens, and he glances up to find Lucy Knight on the entryway. She freezes at the sight of him, like a rabbit caught in the gaze of a fox, but he merely waves her in and returns to his notes. It's not his job to police Carter's visitors. 

She closes the door behind her and slowly, tentatively, moves to sit in the chair opposite Peter. Beside her sleeping mentor. 

The surgeon thinks perhaps this is all it will be- Lucy observing Carter for a while, deciding she will visit another day, then slowly slipping out the door and leaving him in peace. His nerves, after all, are too frayed to do much else. 

After only a few seconds, however, the girl speaks. 

“Dr Benton?”

He lifts his head. “Mm?”

“Is he- is he going to be alright?” Her voice is slightly wobbly, and there's a redness to her eyes that suggests she might have been crying. At once it hits Peter that, perhaps, things have changed between the boy and his student since she was last spoken of between them, her name hissed between gritted teeth as he lamented her ineptitude. 

“It's only,” She continues, blinking quickly against would-be tears. “Nobody will tell me anything and I just- I’ve been really worried.”

Peter sets down his chart and affixes her with the gentlest look he can manage. “He’ll recover, Lucy. It'll just take time.”

“So he's not- he's not dying?”

“Not on my watch.” The surgeon harrumphs. “I spent far too much time stitching him up in the OR.”

The student laughs, something small and melodic, and in the tune Peter can hear a higher but almost identical arpeggio to Carter’s. 

In the hours after Lucy leaves, Peter can't help but see his boy as he was in those first few tender weeks, when he barely knew how to start an IV but was already an expert in all the things Peter couldn't master: holding hands, soothing babies, talking for hours to the elderly patients about the lives they used to live. 

He moves his chair right next to the bed and studies every inch of that pale, sweat-sheened face, from the hair that flops down over the boy’s forehead to the steady leaping of his pulse in his throat. He imagines those lips breaking into a grin, the bouncing of laughter in his throat, the glinting of his front teeth under the fluorescents. He pictures the tips of ears turning pink when scolded and expressive eyes softening at the sight of somebody in distress. 

He imagines and he imagines but he cannot imagine how anybody could point a gun at his boy, let alone fire it. The thought fills him with so much anger he has to bite his lip to suppress it. 

And not just anger, either. 

Guilt. 

Wherever his thoughts lead him, they always return to a single truth: if he had kept Carter in surgery, he would never have been out on that ride along, and those bullets would have never threatened his life. 

He knows, on the surface, that it isn't logical to link such distant events. There were a great many steps between John Carter leaving the surgical service and being carved open on the trauma room table, after all. So much was not in his control. Carter is a free man who made the choice to leave. The shooter made the choice to pick up a gun. Whoever was in charge of the rota made the choice that Carter would be doing his ride along that day, not the day before or the day after. 

Yet still the guilt bubbles beneath the surface. 

You failed to protect him. 

He nearly died on your table. 

He would have been safer as a surgeon, and instead he became your patient. 

“D-Dr Benton?”

The voice is small but unmistakeable. Peter lifts his head from his heavy hands (hardly aware it had even sunk there) and meets the hazy brown eyes of the boy in the bed, alive and breathing and awake. 

“Hey, Carter.” He says, clearing his throat. Shuffling closer. “Hey, man, how’re you feeling?”

“M’okay… where's Reese?”

Peter can't hold back a chuckle. The boy is as selfless as ever. 

“Don't worry about him, he's with Carla. Are you in any pain, man? Did you want me to get you some more morphine?”

Carter shakes his head. “M’okay.”

“Sure?”

A weak grin, just as Peter imagined. “Y’can stop fussing. M jus’ tired.”

The surgeon’s shoulders relax just a little, and he leans back in his chair, a smile of his own dancing on his lips. “Alright, alright. Get some rest, then.”

But of course Carter can't let this go without another comment. 

“...Not that tired.”

“God, you're worse than Reese. What do you want, some warm milk and a bedtime story?”

The boy’s eyes twinkle, his chest shaking lightly with weak laughter as he cocks his head. Arches a brow. “S-story doesn't sound h-half bad, actually.” He gestures to a duffle bag in the corner of the room. “There’re a couple ‘f books in there, I think.”

He's probably joking. Peter knows that. But that fiery guilt is still licking at the back of his throat, and in this moment he knows he would do anything to make Carter happy. So he leans over to the duffle bag and sifts through folded laundry until he reaches the silken solidity of a paperback, withdraws it with a triumphant flick of his wrist. 

“Will this one do?”

Carter's amusement settles. He nods, and the affection in his eyes is so palpable that Peter rethinks every joke the boy has ever made. 

“Alright, then. Let's see.” 

The surgeon clears his throat, and flicks to the first page.

“‘Yes,’ said Tom bluntly, on opening the front door. ‘What d’you want?’"