"Well, we could start with Shannon Wallace– who, in your mind, didn’t need to see that being gay was not an affliction, especially if that revelation came in the form of her psychiatrist. I think your oh-so-professional-opinion was: Kim, what were you thinking? Now that’s deferring to my field of expertise. Do you want to move on to Roger Pilarski?"

Kerry flushed darkly at the acid bite of Kim’s tone. "Is that what this is about? Punishing me for thinking you were wrong over Shannon Wallace? What happened to going forward?"

"I’m trying my damnedest, Kerry, and punishment isn’t what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the ease with which you seem to find in questioning my abilities as a doctor. That was one case in point. Today was just another stone thrown down that particular bottomless pit."

"Because I told you that you really didn’t have any business running a trauma?"

"Because you didn’t recognize that I might have known that I had no business running a trauma. I wasn’t about to get near tubing that guy– you saw me, you knew it– but I wasn’t about to leave him. I do know CPR, Kerry, I do know triage—my Hippocratic oath requires that of me. That was what was happening in that room."

"I’m not so sure it was."

Taken aback by the wondering tone in Kerry’s voice, Kim rode the musing silence out– watching Kerry’s expressions ebb and flow with her thoughts, until they returned to the woman across from her. "I wonder if you have any idea of what you looked like coming in on that gurney," she began quietly. "They were looking to you– the EMTs, the nurses– when you rolled into the trauma room. It looked like you did it every day, the way you handled him– the transfer, never missing a beat on the CPR, ordering the workup…"

"I forgot the tox screen," Kim interjected quietly.

A small smile. "True… but otherwise, you were flawless– and you knew it. You looked like you belonged there, and a part of me…" she hesitated, ducking her head and flushing softly. "I couldn’t help thinking, ‘That’s my girl…’"

Kim’s breath seized in her lungs, alveoli constricting violently with the lack of oxygen; and it was all she could do to stop herself from reaching across the table– as she had so many times before– and wrapping her fingers around the other woman’s hand. It had begun for them this way, over a dinner grown neglected and forgotten because of their focus on each other and the incredible connection that bound them in spite of everything else dedicated to pulling them apart.

"And then Carter was walking in," Kerry was saying, as if oblivious to the cacophonous thunder of blood, instinct and emotion pounding in Kim’s body. "And you were shaking your head on the tube, and it reminded me…" Her fingers twitched against the tablecloth, as if the ghostly impulse to entwine wasn’t Kim’s alone. "You aren’t my girl; and as much as it might have seemed like it at the time, you don’t belong in a trauma room. Not in that circumstance."

"Because he does?"

"Because you’ve chosen a different path." This time her hand did reach for Kim’s, clasping them in a warmth that seemed to dissolve the paralysis of the blonde’s heart, lungs, and muscles. "And that path has taken you some extraordinary places and shown you some extraordinary things about the human mind. You deal every day in a kind of pain that I cannot comprehend– and I suppose my ignorance can be taken as a form of second-guessing." She laughed lightly and shook her head. "It just… I mean I never…" Kerry blew out a deep breath and tightened her grip on the hand in hers. "You seem so absolutely confident, Kim– it never occurred to me that you might be…"

"Apprehensive? Uncertain?" Kim offered.  "Intimidated?"

"Not that. Especially that. And not by me."

"Why do you seem so absolutely shellacked by the concept that your abilities are powerful? Your presence even more so? You have a staff full of residents wanting to grow up to be just like Kerry Weaver. And that’s not a bad thing, medically speaking."

"And non-medically?" Diffidence muted the words, rendering the question fleeting and as insubstantial as the breeze that flickered through the open kitchen windows and toyed with the loose curls of her hair. Faintly, Kim recognized the stutter-step shift of the paths around her merging, morphing and separating once more– incontrovertably different, but imperceptibly the same.

Instinct brought Kerry’s palm to her lips and placed the vanishing kiss there. "That’s not such a bad thing either."