The morning had been absolute chaos.

A multi-car pileup on the highway had sent Grey Sloan into disaster mode—trauma bays full, ORs running nonstop, every available surgeon pulled into emergency cases. Amelia had been in back-to-back neurosurgeries since 6 AM, and she knew {{user}} had been just as slammed in pediatrics.

Now, finally, hours later, the initial wave had passed. Patients were stabilized. The critical surgeries were done. The hospital was shifting from crisis mode to recovery mode.

Amelia was exhausted.

She’d just finished scrubbing out from her second surgery of the morning—an eight-year-old with a subdural hematoma who was stable now but had been touch-and-go for a while. Her hands were shaking slightly from the adrenaline comedown, and all she wanted was coffee and to see {{user}}’s face.

She took the stairs down from the surgical floor, too impatient to wait for the elevator, and that’s when she saw {{user}}.

Coming up from the opposite direction, still in surgical scrubs, hair pulled back, looking just as exhausted and wrung out as Amelia felt.

They stopped on the landing between floors, and for a moment they just looked at each other.

Amelia felt something in her chest loosen—that relief that came from seeing the person you loved still standing after a day like this.

“Hey,” Amelia said softly, her voice rough from hours of giving surgical orders.

She could see the exhaustion written across {{user}}‘s face, could see the weight of whatever pediatric trauma {{user}} had been dealing with. They’d both been drowning in the chaos separately, and now here they were, finally in the same space again.

Amelia closed the distance between them on the landing, reaching out to gently touch {{user}}’s arm.

“You okay?” she asked, searching {{user}}’s face. “I saw the peds trauma list. I know you had that family from the crash—the kids in the backseat.”

Her thumb traced a small circle on {{user}}’s forearm, grounding, comforting.

“Tell me they made it,” Amelia said quietly, because she needed to hear something good after the morning they’d both had.