xxix.  cardio god
10.12

Atlas Peter Lee-Sunny Shepherd, or Atly as many others called him, didn't speak much before surgery. Well, sometimes he couldn't shut up, but for the most part he tried to be quiet. He didn't need to speak, there was too much on his mind. The OR was quiet, except for the beeping of monitors and the soft shuffle of nurses prepping the tools and interns asking the occasional questions.

The patient was a seventeen-year-old girl named Maribel, with a congenital heart defect that had gone unnoticed until she collapsed in gym class, having been in the middle of showing her friends a soccer trick she just leant. Her mother had cried through the consent forms, blabbering as she tried to ask Atlas the occasional questions that she didn't want to know the answer too, and her father hadn't stopped pacing since they arrived.

"Scalpel," Atlas said, voice low but firm. His hands didn't shake. They never did, or they never did anymore. When he was an intern, all his hands ever did was shake because he was so nervous.

He made the first incision like he was drawing a line in the sand — precise, deliberate, the cut he knew was the cut he needed to make. The scrub nurse, a second-year nursing student that had the best change to scrub in with Atlas, watched with wide eyes. She'd read about him in journals before she ever met him, she read about him in the paper and published works. He was this legend that her friend in the program had spoken about with dreamy eyes and this huge smile that said she was so excited to match with the nursing program at Grey Sloan.

"Doctor Shepherd," Talia, the nurse whispered, "Her pressure's dropping."

Atlas gave a quick glance to a second year resident he didn't know the name of, which he felt bad about. "Clamp the left atrium. She's bleeding into the pericardium."

The resident moved quickly, hands shaking the slightest, as he moved to do so. He reached in with the clamp, trying to find the bleed that he couldn't see. A jagged rip near the mitral valve, one that he had almost missed if it wasn't for the quick second that the blood had stopped.

"She's fighting," Atlas murmured. "She wants to live."

He believed in anatomy, in skill, in the way a heart could betray you and still beg for forgiveness. He'd seen too many die to pretend otherwise, he had seen his friends die. But this girl — this girl had something in her chest that refused to quit. She was a miracle that Atlas believed in, one of the many but one of the many that kept him believing.

"Patch please," he said, and the nurse handed him the synthetic graft. He sewed with the kind of grace that made people forget he was stitching life back together, his actions so practiced and perfect after a long time of doing what he's done.

Outside the OR, Christina waited. She hated waiting. She hated that Atlas never let her into the operating room during his nightshifts, even though she was his fellow. He had very little rules, but this was one of them. She never knew why, but she had her many gueses.

Inside, the monitor beeped steady. The heart was beating. Slowly. More strongly with each beat.

"She's stable," Talia whispered, smiling behind her mask.

╚═ ☆ ═╝

Atlas couldn't sleep, not when Maribel hadn't woken up. An hour later turned into two, and then two into four, and then the morning shift rolled around a total of eight hours after the surgery and there was no sign of her waking up. He didn't know why, but as he sat beside her and checked his notes, the residents notes, and even all the nurses notes, he still couldn't piece it together.

"You never let me into the or at night, why?" Christina stepped into the room, hair frizzed and her scrubs slanted like she had just thrown them on. "Atlas?"

"Because it's the time I get to do it on my own. You, C, you're this amazing and gifted surgeon that will be better than me. Maybe you're already better than me, but I need the once chance here and there to just operate..." Atlas looked up from his paperwork. "It sounds stupid, I know, C. I just gotta do it this way."

Christina sat in the other empty chair and nodded her head. "It makes sense, Atlas. It does. I'm sorry for never understanding. But if you're worried about me being better, I'm not. You have so much that I don't."

Maribel's chest rose and fell — still, but more rhythmically than before. Atlas hovered at her side, chart in hand, eyes flicking between numbers and her pale skin that hadn't gotten her colour back.

Christina sat opposite him, exhaustion etched in the dark circles under her eyes from the lack of sleep and the patients that she had seen before hand. Her fingers tapped an uneven rhythm against the bedside table as she glanced at the chart that Atlas had refused to let go of.

Suddenly, Maribel's eyelids fluttered. A single breath escaped her lips, ragged and urgent. Christina lunged forward. "Atlas," she whispered, heart pounding when she realized that the girl was waking up.

Atlas dropped the chart and reached for Maribel's wrist, feeling the pulse surge beneath his fingers. It was weak, but unmistakably alive. It matched the screen of her monitors, and his lips quirked upwards at the sight.

Maribel's gaze was glassy, unfocused. She blinked, as though wading back from a dream. "Wh — where am I?" she croaked, voice scratchy from the lack of sleep and the tube that had been down her throat before.

Christina offered her a gentle squeeze, something she didn't do often. "You're safe. You're in the hospital. He patched your heart."

Relief and fear warred in Maribel's eyes. She tried to lift her hand; it trembled. Atlas leaned in, voice low as he grabbed her hand. "You fought harder than any heart I've seen. You're a warrior, Maribel."

"Atlas," A small, tired smile curved Maribel's lips. She remembered who he was, the image of him from when he had introduced herself in the spare moment she had been awake before her surgery, or that's what Atlas wanted to believe. "Thank you."