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Stephen barely even remembered the crash that stripped him of everything.
He remembered the brain scans Billy sent him, remembered the frantic honking and too bright headlights pointed directly at him, then the weightless spinning and the pain-pain-pain-cold-cold-cold and sheer terror between being thrown off a cliff and blacking out before he was found by red and white lights. In his dreams, Stephen remembered blue, white, and red lights, shouting, and glimpses of nurses and bright, fluorescent hospital lights, Christine’s worried face and Stephen’s own familiar OR from the view of a patient rather than a doctor. He remembers silence, and the fuzzy, muted pain around him when he woke up from that first, ill-fated surgery.
Christine’s memory of that night is much clearer.
Hers is clouded by the rushing of adrenaline and worry spiking in her gut when she decided, against her better judgement, to attend Stephen’s neurological engagement, to surprise him, maybe. Wouldn't that be nice, the top neurosurgeon's girlfriend surprising him on his special day only for him to not show up.
She remembers the anxiousness of the announcer, quickly noted by the guests. Strange was the keynote speaker, he was being presented with another flashy award and paraded around the scientific community like a prized lapdog. When he didn’t show up… people took notice.
Christine had used to hate it, but sitting in the back of the room in her nicest, deep forest green cocktail dress that complimented her hair and brought out her eyes, watching some improvised entertainment while the staff desperately tried to reach their favorite speaker, Christine wondered if taking notice was a good thing. Punctuality, however, was one of Stephen’s better qualities and him being late to a Neurological Society engagement was quite literally unheard of.
Christine doesn’t remember pulling out her phone or calling the police.
She did, however, remember seeing the notification from the GPS app she and Stephen installed soon after they started dating, that his phone had gone offline, his last known location up in Port Jervis, near Hawk’s Nest Highway.
She doesn’t remember getting in her car and driving the length of Hawk's Nest, praying for a sign that her boyfriend was alive. She remembers finding the wreckage of Stephen's car, surrounded by policemen and ambulances, stumbling from her hastily parked car to beg them for information. To know if Stephen was alive. They told her that they couldn't reveal that kind of information, that the situation was delicate, but they were going to ship him to Metro General as soon as they could. Christine thanked them and stumbled to her car, shaking and numb. She doesn't remember how she got to the hospital, especially in the state she was in, her dress half ruined and tearing as she scrubbed in as fast as humanly possible. Everything was a blur, but the one thing she will never forget was the first time she saw Stephen on the stretcher.
The paramedics wheeled him in, and Christine ran with the on-call nurses. She remembered his barely recognizable features, the way he struggled against the oxygen mask on his face, white straps soaked in blood, eyes swollen and twitching. She remembers how his right eye was swollen shut, red and purple and leaking tears, the gashes in his face, the blood soaking the bandages around his hands, the red soaking his tattered suit, ruined when the paramedics cut him out of it, the blood everywhere.
She remembered the pervasive relief flooding through her at seeing Stephen alive, if only barely, at knowing where he was, that he was okay, coupled with the pessimism gained after years in the medical field that Stephen could still die. That he still might not survive the night, that their last moments together had been Christine telling Stephen that everything was about him, that his last moments on Earth spent in agony in a cramped car half-buried in the Potomac.
But the one thing that Christine will never forget about that night, above even her first glimpse of Stephen swathed in bandages and dying on a stretcher, was the glint of recognition in Stephen’s functioning eye, pain and the desperation shining through blood-tinged tears and sweat as he was rushed into a surgery that Christine couldn’t legally perform.