"Every Cut Counts"
Rounds were brutal.
The kind of brutal that turned hearts to cartilage and stripped even the strongest residents of their confidence. Bailey had a clipboard in one hand and a metaphorical bat in the other. Her voice cracked through the hallway like gospel and threat rolled into one.
"Cut once, measure never. That's what interns think! And that's how patients *die!*"
Zaria stood in the middle of the chaos, her arms crossed, expression unreadable. Her hair was coiled tight, scrubs spotless, posture perfect. Beside her, April fidgeted. Jackson checked his reflection in a shiny monitor. Alex was clearly hungover.
Bailey turned on Zaria. "You. Memory Queen. Tell me what you see."
Zaria didn't look at the chart.
She looked at the patient.
"Facial droop, right-sided neglect. Subacute subdural with potential meningioma. She's post-menopausal, so it's more likely than an AVM. Also, she smells like copper. That's a bleed."
Bailey blinked.
Cristina muttered, "Damn."
Zaria handed her a printout—already annotated.
Bailey glanced at it, then muttered, "Okay then. Someone call neuro."
"I already did," Zaria said.
Bailey grunted and moved on.
Derek Shepherd wasn't a man easily impressed. But he was curious.
From the window of the attending's lounge, he watched Zaria move through the surgical board like she was arranging chess pieces in advance of a match no one else had seen. She corrected one OR schedule. Highlighted a scan. Tagged a misdiagnosed aneurysm.
All in silence. All before anyone asked.
He turned to Arizona, who had just joined him, sipping her tea with one crutch leaning against her hip.
"She's not guessing," Derek said.
"I know," Arizona replied. "She's predicting."
"It's like her brain runs two seconds ahead of everyone else's."
"She's either a miracle," Arizona said, "or a warning."
Zaria scrubbed in for a straightforward posterior fossa decompression. It was listed as practice. A resident-level rotation. Derek had let her on the team, but everyone else thought it was overkill.
Then the patient coded.
The BP tanked. The pressure on the brainstem suddenly surged.
The attending froze. The resident panicked.
Zaria stepped up.
"Cushion the fourth ventricle! Clamp the sinus—now! You're letting it flood!"
The attending blinked. "Who are you to give orders?"
"The only person here who's not *guessing*!"
She moved.
She didn't cut. She just directed. Like her hands were moving through an invisible OR.
And the pressure dropped.
Stabilized.
Derek watched from the gallery. He didn't say a word.
Afterward, Zaria washed her hands at the scrub sink. Her reflection looked back at her, calmer than she felt.
Derek appeared behind her.
"You're not sleeping, are you?"
"No," Zaria replied, still scrubbing. "But that's not the problem."
"Then what is?"
"I'm seeing them… before they happen. Problems. Failures. Death."
Derek studied her.
"And you think that's bad?"
"I think," Zaria said quietly, "if I start seeing it *too early*, I might start acting before I know if it's real."
Derek was silent for a long time.
"Then we'll make sure it stays real," he said. "You're assisting with my next brain tumor case. Today."
Zaria looked at him.
"Why?"
"Because I want to see what happens," Derek said, "when you cut instead of just calculate."
That night, the hospital lights glowed amber under a half-moon sky.
Zaria stood outside the ER, watching her breath ghost in the cold air.
Cristina found her leaning on a vending machine.
"You're on Shepherd's radar now," Cristina said. "That's either God-tier or suicidal."
Zaria took a sip of her coffee. "I'll take both."
"You're not scared?"
"Not of him."
Cristina smirked. "You know, if you weren't so closed off, I'd almost like you."
Zaria looked at her. "If you weren't so transparent, I'd almost trust you."
Cristina raised her cup in a mock toast.
"To surgical sociopaths."
Zaria clinked hers against it. "To surgeons who see ghosts."
Back home, the house was silent.
Too silent.
She walked past Atlas, who was crashed out on the couch, one foot hanging over the side, a medical journal open on their chest.
In her bedroom, she closed the door.
Stared at the mirror again.
Lit another match.
This time, she let it burn to her fingertips before dropping it.
She didn't even flinch.
The OR was colder than usual.
Zaria scrubbed in without speaking, standing opposite Derek Shepherd beneath the sterile glow of the overhead lights. The patient on the table was a thirty-two-year-old woman, previously healthy, now sedated with a glioblastoma tangled in the left frontal lobe like a spider's web made of nightmares.
It was Zaria's first cut.
Not a suggestion. Not a diagram. Not a whisper from the gallery.
This time, the scalpel was hers.
"Your hands aren't shaking," Derek observed, glancing at her gloves as he passed the marker.
"They never do."
Derek smirked. "Confidence or trauma?"
"Why not both?"
He nodded. "Outline your path."
Zaria didn't hesitate. She traced the incision pattern with surgical accuracy, her mind already rendering the internal structures—veins, folds, pathways, escape routes.
Derek watched her.
"Good," he said. "Now show me how you see it."
Zaria didn't speak. She closed her eyes, took a slow breath, and when she opened them again, it was like something shifted behind her pupils—like her brain adjusted focus without her body moving.
She placed the scalpel down just above the temporal ridge.
"Here."
Then she cut.
It was like music—only sharper.
Zaria's hands moved with frightening grace. Every movement was guided by her internal mapping system: a silent, multidimensional navigation through human anatomy.
She identified the tumor edges faster than the imaging suggested.
Derek held suction and retracted tissue where needed, but otherwise, he didn't interfere.
"Did you memorize this?" he asked, not looking up.
"I *see* it," she said.
Derek nodded once. "You've got a map in your head. Not just static—real-time."
Zaria murmured, "It's not a map. It's a mirror."
By the time the tumor was removed, the gallery was filled with whispers.
An attending had stepped out and called Bailey.
Cristina was watching from the shadows.
Arizona entered late and stood, arms folded, jaw tight.
"Is she assisting or auditioning for godhood?" someone whispered from the corner.
Bailey scowled. "She's still an intern."
But even she didn't sound convinced.
Post-op, Zaria sat in the locker room, peeling off her gloves slowly. She stared at her hands, fingers trembling—not with fear, but adrenaline. The kind that comes after battle. The kind that tells you: *you survived*.
Atlas entered, hair damp, face freshly scrubbed. They tossed her a protein bar.
"You cut today."
"I did," Zaria replied.
Atlas sat beside her.
"You look like you just went through war."
"I did."
"You win?"
Zaria didn't answer.
That night, Cristina appeared in her room uninvited.
"You were quiet," she said. "Too quiet."
Zaria arched a brow. "You're barging into my room to lecture me about silence?"
Cristina leaned against the dresser. "I've been you."
"No. You haven't."
Cristina paused. "Okay. I've been close."
Zaria sighed. "I didn't feel anything."
Cristina nodded. "Good."
"No," Zaria corrected. "Not numb. Not cold. Just… nothing. Like I wasn't even there."
Cristina's eyes flickered.
"Sometimes the only way to get through cutting is to disappear while you're doing it."
"Is that what you do?"
Cristina stared at her. "It's what I *used* to do. Before I realized disappearing isn't sustainable."
Zaria looked away.
Cristina stood to leave.
Then: "You're not a scalpel, Bellamy. You're the hand holding it. Don't forget that."
The next day, Derek cornered Zaria in the imaging room.
"I want to test something."
Zaria narrowed her eyes. "I'm not your experiment."
"No. You're your own experiment. But I want to understand the mechanism."
"What mechanism?"
"Your visualization."
Derek tapped on the MRI screen, then handed her a stylus.
"I'm going to show you a sequence of rare anomalies. You tell me what's wrong—without touching the scans."
Zaria didn't blink. "Five seconds each."
Derek raised an eyebrow. "Confident."
"No. I'm just tired of pretending this is unusual."
They began the test.
A twelve-scan sequence. Rare tumors, microbleeds, surgical errors.
Zaria called each one like a psychic. But she wasn't guessing.
She was *seeing*.
Derek watched her eyes as much as the scans.
"You're not accessing memory," he said finally.
"No."
"You're not calculating probabilities."
"No."
"You're watching it happen."
Zaria met his gaze. "It's like I'm inside the body. I can move through it. I don't know why."
Derek sat down.
"We're going to figure out what that is."
"I already know what it is," Zaria said softly. "It's how I survive."
That night, she got her first patient death.
Not a case she'd touched.
But one she'd seen earlier in passing. A woman in hallway triage. Dizzy. Pale. Short of breath.
Zaria had scanned her with her eyes. Thought *it's probably just dehydration*.
Now the woman was gone.
Pulmonary embolism.
Zaria found herself in the stairwell again. No coat. Just shaking.
Bailey found her this time.
"Why do you care?" she asked.
Zaria didn't look up.
"Because I *saw* her," she whispered. "And I didn't *see* it."
Bailey nodded.
"You're human, Bellamy. Get used to it."
Zaria didn't cry.
But for the first time, she didn't feel in control either.
The hallway outside the morgue was colder than the OR.
Zaria leaned against the wall, arms folded, face carved from stone. Her badge hung from her hip like a weight. She hadn't said a word since hearing the code call. No one asked her to ID the body.
She just came.
Cristina stood a few paces away, pretending to check her messages. Arizona paced in slow circles. Meredith arrived last, silent as fog, coffee untouched.
Bailey stepped out of the morgue, clipboard in hand.
"She's gone," she said quietly.
Zaria didn't blink.
"You okay?" Arizona asked.
Zaria turned, voice quiet.
"She was five feet from me. Pale. Tachy. I looked at her. I thought, 'just low sugar.' And now she's a corpse."
Cristina said, "You can't see everything."
Zaria's lips curled in something that wasn't quite a smile. "I was supposed to."
Later that day, Zaria disappeared.
No one saw her in the pit. Not on the board. Not in rounds.
Derek tracked her down in Radiology.
She sat on the floor beside the CT scanner, back against the wall, eyes shut. A row of imaging sheets lay scattered around her like feathers from a broken wing.
"You're not scheduled," Derek said.
"I'm not clocked in," Zaria replied. "I'm haunting."
Derek stepped closer. "You were right about the bleed last week. And the AVM resection. You've been right more than anyone in that hospital, and you're what—four weeks into your intern year?"
Zaria didn't look at him.
"Being right doesn't bring people back," she whispered.
"No," Derek said. "But it keeps more from leaving."
Zaria opened her eyes. "I saw her and did nothing."
"You *thought* she was stable. You weren't her attending. You weren't even assigned to her."
"I'm not supposed to need to be."
Derek exhaled. "You're not a god, Bellamy."
"I don't need to be. I just need to stop being the girl who lets people die."
Later that shift, Bailey assigned her to a new consult.
"Peds Neuro. MVA survivor. Cranial swelling, blunt trauma. She's awake and combative. All yours."
Zaria entered the exam room with a hard breath.
Then stopped.
The girl was nine. Burn scar across her collarbone. Wild eyes. Hair in braids. Her chart said "No Parents."
Zaria's grip on the door handle tightened.
The child turned to look at her. "Are you the brain lady?"
Zaria nodded. "Dr. Bellamy."
The girl crossed her arms. "I don't want another test."
"You don't have to want it. You just have to survive it."
The child blinked. "You're mean."
Zaria pulled up the scans. "And you're bleeding inside your skull."
The girl's eyes narrowed. "How do you know?"
Zaria didn't look away. "Because I've seen it before."
The MRI confirmed her suspicion.
Slight cortical contusion. Blood pooling in the subdural space. Nothing operable—yet. But the pressure was increasing.
Arizona hovered beside her at the monitor.
"You're doing that thing again."
"What thing?"
"Looking like you've already seen the outcome."
"I have," Zaria murmured. "And it's not good."
"She's stable now."
"For how long?"
Arizona didn't answer.
Later that night, the girl coded.
Just like Zaria had predicted.
Zaria was there before the crash cart even beeped.
"Intubate!" she barked. "Prep the OR. We're going to decompress."
Bailey charged into the room, wide-eyed. "Who the hell paged for OR—"
"I did," Zaria snapped. "And if I'm wrong, fire me. But she's bleeding behind the occipital—undetected on the last scan. I can *feel* it."
Bailey blinked.
Then: "Prep the girl. Now."
They operated.
Zaria assisted.
She didn't speak during the incision. Didn't flinch when the skull opened.
Then: there it was.
The bleed.
Small. Hidden. Deadly.
Cristina, scrubbed in beside her, muttered, "Okay. You're terrifying."
Zaria replied, "But I'm right."
After the operation, the girl stabilized.
When she woke, her first words were:
"You cut into my head?"
Zaria sat beside her. "Yes."
"Did you find anything?"
Zaria paused. "Something that tried to take you. But we took it first."
The girl studied her. "You look tired."
Zaria smiled softly. "You look like a fighter."
The girl smiled back. "We match."
That night, Zaria lay in her bed staring at the ceiling.
She didn't light a match.
Instead, she opened her sketchpad.
And for the first time in years, she drew something that wasn't anatomy.
She drew the girl.
Alive.
Whole.
They called an emergency staff meeting at 6:00 a.m.
Zaria was never invited.
But her name was on the board.
She found herself watching through the glass wall of the upper conference room. Inside sat the power players of Grey Sloan Memorial: Bailey. Derek. Arizona. Webber. Even Owen Hunt, sipping black coffee like it was blood.
"What's going on?" Cristina asked, appearing beside her.
"They're discussing a protocol breach," Zaria replied.
Cristina raised a brow. "You mean your unauthorized OR call?"
Zaria shrugged. "The girl lived."
Cristina smirked. "Yeah. But you keep being right without permission. It's pissing off people who need permission just to breathe."
Inside the room, Bailey pointed directly at Zaria's name. Webber crossed his arms. Arizona looked uncomfortable. Derek said something that made half the table go still.
Then, without warning, he stood and walked to the glass.
Zaria didn't move.
He opened the door. "Come in."
The room went silent as Zaria entered.
No white coat. No apology.
"Dr. Bellamy," Webber said, voice cool. "Do you understand why you've been called in?"
"I saved a patient," she said. "Is this a disciplinary hearing or a thank-you card session?"
Bailey raised a brow.
"Your decisions have clinical implications. Risk. Liability."
"So does indecision," Zaria said.
Derek intervened. "No one is questioning the outcome. We're evaluating the process."
"I followed instinct," Zaria said. "Instinct that's saved more lives in four weeks than some surgeons in four years."
The room bristled.
Arizona interjected, "We're not debating your gift, Zaria. We're questioning whether you're a safe doctor—or just a lucky one."
Zaria's gaze locked on hers. "Luck didn't see the suboccipital bleed. Luck didn't call the sinus pressure spike. And luck didn't predict an embolism no one else caught. That's not luck. That's neurology."
Webber cut in, stern now. "You are not licensed to make surgical calls alone. You are an intern. You will operate under supervision. Is that understood?"
Zaria held his stare.
"Crystal."
After the meeting, Derek found her in the gallery overlooking an empty OR.
"You made a lot of people nervous in there," he said.
Zaria replied, "Good."
He leaned on the railing beside her.
"I'm putting you on a trial protocol."
She turned.
"Cognitive-mapping theory," he continued. "You have a neural adaptation that's unique. It's not just memory or pattern recognition. You simulate systems. Full-body. Predictive."
Zaria narrowed her eyes. "This is research."
"Yes."
"I'm not your guinea pig."
"You're not," Derek said. "You're the blueprint."
She hesitated. "What's the catch?"
"You'll need a neuro-psych evaluation. MRI studies. Simulation labs."
Zaria looked back at the OR. "Fine."
Derek paused. "Why?"
She exhaled. "Because if I don't understand this… it'll control me. And I'm done being controlled."
That afternoon, her schedule shifted.
Interns whispered. Attendings took notice.
She wasn't just an anomaly anymore.
She was being *studied*.
The trial began with cognitive stress tests.
Simple at first.
Verbal memory recall. Reaction times. Logic puzzles.
Zaria scored off the charts.
Then came the virtual OR simulations.
Derek stood behind the glass. Meredith beside him.
On screen, Zaria stood in a simulated OR. A holographic brain floated before her. A tumor. Vascular spread. Time running out.
She didn't flinch.
She closed her eyes.
Lifted her hands.
And cut air.
The hologram shifted in response—adjusting to her motion like the system could *feel* her intention.
Meredith whispered, "She's not thinking. She's performing."
Derek nodded. "It's instinctual. Fluid. Like her brain was wired in a different dimension."
"She's seeing in fourth dimension."
But that night, everything cracked.
She came home late. Alone.
The house was too quiet.
Then the fire alarm chirped.
Just a test.
But her body didn't believe it.
The sound rang like a bell through her chest. A rush of heat—memory—flame—collapse—
Zaria dropped to her knees in the kitchen.
The candle she forgot to blow out flickered on the counter. Its flame high. Wrong.
She crawled toward it. Reached for the switch.
And froze.
Smoke.
She saw it.
In her mind: her parents. The roof caving. Her mother's scream.
She screamed now.
Once.
Raw.
Then nothing.
She curled into a ball on the floor.
Didn't move for an hour.
When Atlas found her, the match was still smoking.
They didn't ask.
They just held her.
For the first time, Zaria didn't fight it.
The next morning, she didn't come in.
She didn't call. Didn't email. Didn't move.
Zaria sat on the edge of her bed, wearing the same shirt from the night before, sleeves rolled, collar loose, matchbook untouched on the nightstand. Her hands trembled around a half-empty cup of tea that had long since gone cold.
Atlas left sometime before sunrise, silently.
They hadn't spoken.
At 10:42 a.m., Bailey walked into her house.
No warning. No text.
Zaria didn't flinch when she saw her.
"Front door was unlocked," Bailey said flatly.
"I wasn't expecting guests."
"I'm not a guest."
Zaria raised an eyebrow. "Then what are you doing here?"
Bailey took one look at her — the dark circles under her eyes, the faded candle wax on the counter, the echo of trauma sitting in her shoulders — and said nothing for a moment.
Then: "You don't get to break now."
Zaria's voice was quiet. "I'm not broken."
Bailey crossed her arms. "Good. Then get up and get dressed. Because you've got rounds in twenty, and I'm not walking in there without you."
Zaria blinked. "You're dragging me into work?"
"No," Bailey said. "I'm reminding you who the hell you are."
Zaria exhaled. Stood.
Walked past her.
"I'm going to shower. Don't move anything."
Bailey smirked. "I don't want any part of your billionaire bougie trauma shrine."
By noon, Zaria was back in the hospital.
The interns looked up as she entered the pit. April blinked twice. Jackson offered her coffee. Alex muttered "damn" under his breath.
Cristina approached, lips tight.
"Word is you cracked."
Zaria looked at her. "That was the word last week too."
Cristina nodded once. "Welcome back."
Arizona caught up to her between floors.
"I saw the trial report," she said. "You scored in the top one percent of every simulation."
"I know," Zaria said.
"They're going to want more from you."
"I know that too."
Arizona paused. "You don't have to give them everything."
Zaria stopped.
"They're not the problem," she said. "I am."
Arizona said nothing more.
That evening, after a long case with Derek, Zaria was back in her locker when Cristina slid onto the bench beside her, a burrito in hand.
"You didn't sleep, did you?"
Zaria shook her head.
"You know that's going to kill your brain eventually."
"I'm aware."
Cristina unwrapped the burrito. "I had a breakdown once. My first solo heart valve repair. Kid coded twice. I was calm the whole way through. But when I got home, I tore off my gloves and cried into the laundry basket."
Zaria blinked.
"I didn't cry," she said.
"I know," Cristina replied. "That's why I'm worried."
They sat in silence.
Then Cristina said, "Don't burn out trying to be a miracle. Just be a doctor."
Zaria finally smiled.
It wasn't wide.
But it was real.
At home, the fireplace stayed off.
Zaria curled up on the couch, sketchpad in her lap. She drew the brain from earlier. Tumor-free. Healthy.
Then she sketched flames.
But this time, they didn't consume the page.
They framed the shape of a face. Her mother's. Soft. Unburned. Whole.
The door opened.
Atlas stood there, hesitating.
"I can go," they said.
Zaria didn't look up. "No. Stay."
Atlas crossed the room, unsure, as if approaching a fragile animal.
"Are we good?"
Zaria looked up at them.
"No," she said. "But I want to be."
They nodded. Sat beside her.
For the first time, they didn't touch.
They just breathed together.
The matchbook on the table stayed closed.