stand-still
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 6 — 1:34 AM
James Rhodes has known Tony Stark for a long, long time.
He met Tony when he was in college—when Tony was fifteen and he was eighteen, and he was apparently the only one who didn’t know who the kid was. Found him in the back room of a frat party, way too many drinks in, puking his guts out onto the floor while a couple sophomores congregated around him, taking photos.
Rhodey didn’t know he’d just encountered the heir to the Stark Industries fortune—he thought it was some high school kid who’d wandered in. He put himself bodily between the guys and the kid, shouted them away like a goddamn drill sergeant, and helped the near-unconscious kid to a bathroom. He brought the kid back to his dorm and watched him—he was a small kid, wiry in the way comp-sci students were, and with the amount the kid had in his system…
So Rhodey watched him, tried repeatedly to feed him sips of water, and instead found himself rubbing the kid’s back as he puked, as he slumped helplessly into Rhodey’s side. When most of the vomiting was done, Rhodey stripped his bed of its sheets and put the kid into it, careful to roll him onto his side.
Sorry, was the first thing the little fifteen-year-old said when he awoke, blinking bleary at Rhodey’s dorm ceiling. Eyes half-closed. Arms curled around his stomach. Dorm light eerily bright on his paled face. I’m so sorry… And he’d passed out again, eyes fluttering beneath their lids, gagging in his sleep, and Rhodey had turned him onto his side. He’d called out for his mother in his sleep; and his father, too.
Rhodey spent the rest of the night caring for the boy—and he didn’t even know the kid’s name.
Rhodey has known Tony for so long; he’s spent more of his life now at Tony Stark’s side than not. Fifty-one years on this earth, and thirty-three of them spent with Tony. He’s seen him after one-night stands, after bouts in the hospital, after Obadiah Stane, after breakups and betrayals and the loss of his parents.
And he’s never, ever, ever seen him like this.
It takes actual hours of persuading to get Tony to leave Peter Parker’s side.
The kid’s been out of it all morning, slipping in and out of his foggy mind, completely absent—he hasn’t spoken a goddamn word since he woke up. “Just ten minutes,” says Rhodey. “Come on, man, we gotta get you cleaned up.” He knows that Tony hasn't slept in days—hasn't showered, hasn't eaten, has barely left to go to the bathroom.
It’s only once Pepper swears not to leave the kid’s side that Tony reluctantly rises, his legs shaking from the effort of holding his bladder, and exits the room with Rhodey. He takes his old friend to a quiet bathroom on one of the residential floors of the Tower—someplace no one will bother them—and he helps the man out of his clothes.
Tony keeps falling asleep against him. “Come on, man,” he says, urging Tony towards the shower. “Come on.” There’s a shower stool there, and Rhodey moves him into it because he’s having such trouble standing. It’s the sleep deprivation—or maybe the drugs. Or the trauma. A combo of all three, most likely.
The man’s barely been eating—let alone showering—so he does reek a bit. His hair has that oily tinge, all tangled up. Rhodey helps him brush through it—mostly Tony just sits on the shower stool with his head in his hands, barely responsive. Physically, sure, Rhodey’s seen him worse—beaten after Iron Man fights or bed-ridden from alcohol poisoning. But emotionally... God, Tony’s barely even moving.
Rhodey washes the man quickly—it’s nothing he hasn’t done for Tony before, given his proclivity for benders. But Jesus —Tony’s trembling like an old man, his arms and legs spasming even in his drowsy state. “The pills,” he whispers, when he comes to again, “I’m sorry—the—the pills…”
“I know,” he says, and Tony quiets; Rhodey’s noticed the man’s twitching since they freed him from the compound. It’s gotten better since they first found him. Now, it’s slower, less frequent, and at least allows him to make it from one room to the next without collapsing.
Since they got Tony to a doctor, Rhodey’s been the one making sure Tony takes his new medications: stimulants weaning him off of that sleep-deprivation drug, blood pressure medication, nutrition supplements, benzos, mild antipsychotics… An entire shelf-ful of them.
They’re out of the shower now, and Rhodey helps him into a new pair of clothes, too. He tries to help the man brush his teeth but Tony can barely hold the toothbrush still, so he just gives him a cup of mouthwash instead. Once he’s clean, he gets through Tony’s dreaded hair with a comb, gets a good amount of the tangles free. It’s much longer than it used to be—about two inches of hair, and it’s much grayer at the top. Rhodey supposes that must be the stress. He cuts away most of Tony’s damp beard with a pair of small shears, cutting away and away as Tony nods off again, lulled to sleep by the sound of the running water. He can’t shave it properly, not with Tony twitching so much, so he settles for a trim, getting it as close to his face as possible without nicking him. And all the while, Tony just lets him, occasionally drifting off to sleep as the water runs. “Oh, Peter,” the man whispers, his face buried in his hands, “oh, God…”
And once it’s over, Rhodey helps him up and back into the elevator, Tony’s arm around his shoulders, and he keeps patting the man’s back, hoping to give him some semblance of comfort.
He’s been thinking about it a lot these days—he abandoned Tony. As soon as shit hit the fan, Rhodey took Pepper’s side and left Tony in there. Didn’t second guess it, didn’t check on him. He just…left him there. Not that there were sides—because what Pepper experienced was real. Lord knows Rhodey had been there for its whole aftermath: the lab, the hit, the Tony holding a gun to his chin and his shaking finger to the trigger…
He failed Tony—just as they all failed Peter.
They make it back to the hospital room with minimal difficulty, and one of the nurses has set up a cot for Tony—the only place he’s been sleeping as of late. Rhodey helps him into the cot, and gives him a glass of water for the medications, which he takes one at a time with his tremoring hands.
Beside them, Peter Parker is asleep in his hospital bed, a space-themed comforter drawn up to his bony hips; without a glance to Rhodey, Tony reaches over, and with trembling fingers, pulls the blanket up over the kid's shoulders.
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 6 — 10:49 AM
Jim’s stepdaughter is not the child she was five months ago.
She has horrible nightmares. Coming out of them is like pulling her through wet sand, thrashing and screaming like someone’s flaying her alive. And even when she emerges, it still clings to her; she’ll look around, shaky, as they coax her and hold her and show her that the room is empty. It doesn’t matter what they say—after every single dream, she always, always cries for Peter.
She can only sleep in Maggie’s arms. if they’re not touching for even a second—Cassie gets worriedly frightened. Even with Jim she is never quite at ease.
She's shaken by the smallest things. Food. Sound. Toys. Gifts. Even the small kisses on the head that Maggie gives her. Everything makes her tense—everything makes her scared.
Even the bathroom confuses her—it’s quite literally attached to the hospital room, just a quick trip through a door to visit it, but Cassie refuses to go inside.
Cassie won’t let go of her.
“Cassie, baby,” she says, because her little girl has started to tremble, “Mommy just needs to go to the bathroom, that’s all…”
They do this every time . Maggie needs to leave—then Cassie freaks out—and eventually Maggie gives and just takes her with, lets her hold her hand as she goes, like a toddler. That’s something Cassie hasn’t done since she was a baby, and now she’s doing it again, shrieking like a wild animal any time her mother’s not there. And they have to leave the bathroom door closed, too—because Cassie starts screaming when it’s open, the sound she makes like she’s in actual pain—and they’ll shut it as quick as they can.
Now, Dr. Alexis Miranda is back in the room, and she’s trying to encourage Cassie to play with her zebra toy—when the woman first arrived, all Cassie would do is hug it and whisper things to it. Now, at least, she’s attempting some form of play.
But the way she’s playing…
It’s…
“It’s not right,” says Jim, when Cassie’s in the room with her mother. “Doctor….”
“Alexis is fine,” she says. “And it’s normal. Your daughter has been through a lot of trauma, Mr. Paxton. This is a completely normal response to what’s happened to her—it might help you understand what she’s seeing.”
He glances back through the window of the hospital room—into the hallway.
“Honestly, I’m just glad she’s interacting at all—at first she wouldn’t engage with anyone, so I’d say she’s making tremendous progress.”
Tremendous?
Jim heads back into the hospital room with a pit in his stomach; as always, Cassie moves very suddenly when people enter the room, backing up, grabbing her mother in a cinch-tight grip, making small sounds, so he stops, waits until she’s used to him, and moves very slowly to his chair.
He thought she’d be less…jumpy by now. He supposes, in the situation she was in, she had to be.
Cassie’s holding her zebra and banging it against the side of the bed with this silent stare, whispering in a voice so quiet that neither Jim nor Maggie can catch what she was saying. Like she was hurting it. She’ll hold it down by the legs and press her fingers into its eyes, or she’ll put it facedown on her lap and squeeze its neck. She’s always hurting it—bumping her fist against it, squeezing it, whispering things to it that no one can hear.
Maggie tries to get her to play with it the way she used to—a play trot, wiggling across the bed like zebras do—but whenever Cassie has the zebra, it’s like she enters another world. Hitting it against her lap, covering its face with her hand. When Cassie had control of the toy, there was never any talking; that zebra never spoke.
With each new development in Cassie’s playtime, Jim Paxton grows increasingly disturbed. It’s not until Cassie holds the zebra by the neck and squeezes and squeezes and squeezes that Jim says, horrified, “Cassie, stop.”
And Cassie’s head jerks up like she’s just been struck, breathing in sharply, and she immediately drops the toy.
She clings to her mother for hours after that, refusing to look at the little stuffed zebra, and Dr. Alexis Miranda, that child psychiatrist in the pink scrubs, takes him from the room to speak to him.
“Jim,” says Alexis, “I know you don’t like it, but this is Cassie’s way of processing what happened. It’s completely normal.”
He wants to laugh. Normal? Nothing about this is normal. His daughter went missing for five months and everyone’s acting like it’s normal that she’s strangling her stuffed animals and wetting herself daily and wakes up screaming the name of a battered teenage boy. It’s not normal. None of this is normal. They’re sitting in Avengers Tower, for God’s sake. Captain America wanders the place like a ghost; a trembling Tony Stark roams from room to room; CEO Pepper Potts stalks the halls, one hand to her pregnant belly and the other pressing her phone to her ear.
None of this is normal.
His daughter’s so afraid to eat that she can only eat the way she did when she was kidnapped. How is that normal? She can’t sleep, she can’t eat a normal meal, she can’t go an hour without crying for Peter Parker.
He doesn’t like any of this—the Medbay, the psychiatrist who keeps telling them what’s normal and what’s not, the way Avengers keep floating in and out of Cassie’s room like they have some right to be there.
He just wants to take his little girl home. Cassie wouldn’t be acting like this if they could just take her home.
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 6 — 1:41 PM
One of Peter’s IVs has become infected—the back of his left hand.
They catch it early—thanks God. Nurse Kaelyn comes in with a small bucket of supplies—she has lined the bucket with soft sheets ino order to minimize noise, and she takes careful steps in Peter’s direction, announcing what she’s doing as she does it. “I’m approaching your left side,” she says quietly, and Peter watches her, his breath coming out of him in quick shudders. Kaelyn is wearing a white labcoat; all of Peter’s staff are now required to wear matching coats like this, because it seems to calm him down.
On his other side, a recently-washed Tony Stark sits beside him, whispering to him.
“My name’s Kaelyn,” she says quietly, as her patient starts to shake. “Remember me? I’m a nurse. I’m just a nurse, that’s all.”
The kid trembles, staring at her with these wide, wary eyes, gaze shifting from her face to her hands and then to her white jacket. “Can I have your hand, Peter?” she asks, once. She thinks he might recognize her, which might be why he’s the calmest with her—she’s easily recognizable with her blonde-and-pink hair and her many tattoos.
The kid glances over to Tony, and Tony gives him this approving nod. “She’s okay,” he assures him. “Doctor, remember?”
“Doctor,” the kid whispers back.
The kid turns his hand towards her, but he turns his face away from it, his eyes squeezed shut, weak arm outstretched, like he’s expecting her to cut the whole thing off. She does it fast—she has to do it fast, or the kid gets so scared that he’ll have another breakdown. “I’m gonna touch your hand,” she narrates, taking the kid’s hand by the palm, like she’s gonna hold it instead of removing his catheter. There on his hand, the infection—pink and leaking clearish fluid, redness spread like a rash up the injection site, the rest of the plastic tubing curled up and taped by his wrist to hold it still—she twists the tubing from the injection cap first, telling Peter as she does it and resting the dangling tube on a table beside her.
“Okay,” she says gently, moving fast, gingerly, scanning his arm for anything else of alarm. “We’re gonna take off this tape right here, first—it won’t hurt at all—” And she peels off both sides from Peter’s pale arm, holding the tubing still as she does; the kid’s shaking so much that she’s having trouble keeping him still, and she moves a little faster, announcing she’s taking out the cannula, and swiftly presses the gauze and removes the needle in one smooth motion, pressing down over the now-bleeding spot, holding that white gauze down with two rubber-gloved fingers. “And we’re just gonna stay like this for a couple minutes, Peter—I’m not gonna move—I’m not moving.” She has to stay here—to make sure the bleeding from the site isn’t too bad, to keep pressure as the blood clots, and still the kid is shaking like a leaf.
“You’re doing so good,” Tony Stark is saying, as quiet as he can manage, “you’re doing such a good job, Pete. Just one more minute.”
Kaelyn’s not usually alarmed by blood or injury. But the amount of scarring on his forearm alone— there’s an pinkish inch-wide scar there on his skinny forearm that comes out on both sides. Both sides. And it’s months old. Like someone had taken a knife and it stabbed it straight through. In order to do that—the bone would have to be broken already, a wide enough gap for the knife to go through, which means…
She tries not to think about it, and she does her job.
When the time’s up, she tapes down the gauze to Peter’s hand, takes the used catheter for a blood culture, and leaves him quickly and quietly.
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 6 — 1:41 PM
Dr. Cho tells him that they’re giving Peter a central line instead of a new IV. “It’ll work better in the long-term,” explains Dr. Cho. “It’s better for him, especially with the amount of fluids we’re giving him, we’re constantly changing out his—”
“What about other veins?” asks Tony. “You could—you could use one of those?”
She gives him a sad look. “Those people truly did fry many of his other veins—that super-soldier sedative was not made for people who never took the serum, and they were essentially overdosing him on it to keep him weak for such a long period of time. That and there’s scar tissue over most of those sites—this is easier for everyone, Tony, including Peter. And his reactions to needles, sometimes—”
“But he’s been better,” says Tony, desperate, “ please, he’s been…”
Tony doesn’t know why he feels like this—like Cho’s got Peter strapped down to a chair, like she’s holding a sharp blade to his chest, a hammer to his knee, a bucket of water over his face, a wire to his thigh. She’s just trying to help him, he reassures himself, and still it feels like a lie. He’s okay. He’s safe.
“Tony,” she says slowly. “This is a good thing, I promise. It won’t even hurt.”
So they give Peter the central line. It looks a lot different from an IV—a white cord feeding up into a vein in his upper arm, taped down in one large patch. It involves enough medical personnel and enough manhandling that Peter has to be sedated for the insertion.
Tony stays with him through the whole process: holding his hand, stroking his hair back, telling him that he’s safe.
Tony and Sarah put up a couple clocks into Peter’s room, as well as a permanent calendar displaying the year and date. Sarah explains it might help with some of his disorientation, get him rooted in the right place. A couple more of his blankets, too, the ones from the compound, because he seems to like them. He recognizes them, at the very least. “Mine,” he whispers when he gets it, and then Peter spends a long time painstakingly wrapping the stuffed bear in one of the blankets, his weak fingers struggling with the folding.
The other medical staff have given him a couple neurological exams when he arrived—but most were inconclusive given his scattered mental state. Sarah Wilson, of course, wants to perform a couple more. “He’s tired,” says Tony, feeling like he did with Cho—like he’s the only thing standing between them and Peter. “Sarah, please …”
“If we let him regress,” she says, “then I don’t know if we can get him back, Tony. Our best bet is to keep him awake, keep him engaged, keep him present.”
So they do that first test again—the alert and oriented one. Peter gets his name again, and the place—but the year question seems to shake him again, and the situation question starts him whispering about Charlie and hyperventilating with enough force that he starts to sway from the dizziness of it, and they have to give him a few minutes to calm him down—he spends the whole of it curling the bear into his chest and breathing in shuddery gasps.
“Don’t ask him about it,” he says when it’s over, and he grasps Sarah’s wrist suddenly in his hand. “Please—he’s not. He’s not ready. He can’t—he can’t.”
The woman looks at him, and then down at the hand on her wrist, and she gives him this strange, sad frown. “I’m not going to,” she says. “We’re nowhere near that place, Tony, I promise.”
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 6 — 5:57 PM
They try other things to try to keep him awake. Pepper brings him jigsaw puzzles, some stuffed toys, Avengers action figures, board games, even his old Nintendo DS system, and she spreads them out on his bed like it’s Christmas. “Come on, Pete,” he says. “You recognize this stuff?”
It’s definitely got his attention—the kid’s eyes find each item and scan over them, and his eyes jerk back to Pepper abnormally quickly. And then he just… stares at her. “Peter?” she says, and he flinches.
He looks to Tony; his eyes are wide, confused, and he can already tell the kid’s drawing back into himself. He’s still got that nasogastric tube, that little plastic tube, and it’s taped sideways across his face, shifting slightly as Peter jerks his head around to look at them both. “It’s okay,” he says, but that tinge of sweat is coming over the kid like something foreseen, and Tony knows he’s going to go out again—into that fugue state, into that blank-eyed place. “You’re okay, buddy. You don’t have to—”
But then Peter’s chin goes up a little, his eyes going dull, his grip on that teddy bear loosening, and Pepper lets out a defeated sigh. The kid’s gone again, his face looking like it’s been wiped clean of all feeling, and the teddy bear has fallen into his lap.
So Peter doesn’t like gifts.
Tony doesn’t know why the blanket’s fine and the toys aren’t, why Pete can barely look at food, why he goes ballistic every time the door opens. And why did Peter touch his hand days ago, thirteen days ago—when they were in that New Hampshire hospital, when Cassie was in his arms—but not now? Maybe some part of Peter knows the teddy bear’s not real. Maybe he thinks he’s still there. Maybe if he got to talk to Cassie, he’d be able to stay stable. Then he’d know what was real and what wasn’t.
Tony keeps looking at that tube—that nasogastric tube, the one that’s feeding Peter because he won’t eat anything himself. It trails, white and curved, from his right nostril across his gaunt cheek—held down by a square piece of medical tape, trailing up and over the curve of his ear. We usually use the left nostril, Cho mentioned to him when they put the tube in, but with the state of his left ear, we… We thought the right might be easier.
He saw a lot of horrible, horrible things on that television—but he hadn’t expected this. Peter’s complete inability to function, his struggle to hold a conversation, his bare-minimum level of consciousness, his refusal to eat, his reliance on disassociation to get through the tamest interactions.
That’s what Sarah Wilson keeps calling it. Disassociation. Tony’s still not sure what it is exactly, but she keeps explaining. That doctor—Dr. Jackson, back in New Hampshire—had mentioned it, too, when Peter had gone all fugue-state. It’s not uncommon, she said, for victims of severe assaults to act like this. They find that it’s easier than being present for the assault itself. The mind just…tucks itself away for a while. Because Peter had gone through so much trauma, it was all he expected now—even a conversation, a gift could make him go out like this.
“I can’t be sure yet,” says Sarah Wilson, cracking open her notebook, “but Peter does show several signs of a dissociative disorder. He went through an unprecedented amount of trauma, Tony, and it makes sense that his mind would want to protect itself. It might’ve been the only way. Do you know if he…” She looks down at her notebook, and then back up at him. “...if Peter had any significant trauma as a child?”
God, Tony hasn’t thought about this in so long. About that day in March when he’d returned barely able to speak, about that day in December after that musical—when Peter had started screaming when Tony mentioned consent, about the day in May when he’d gone to that frat party and woken up in a delirious sleep, murmuring about rape kits.
“Yeah,” he says finally, and he almost chokes on the word. “I think he did.”
The woman watches him, and he shields his face with his hands—what is she saying?
“Trauma layers upon itself,” Sarah says quietly. “If he…responded like this to trauma before he was taken, then it’s… then it makes sense he would do it now, too.”
Back in March, that delirious-frightened-confused Peter had barely lasted a few hours. That was it. And Tony hadn’t seen it re-emerge for months. Now, he’s doing it every couple hours, just disappearing into his mind.
God, he’s so sorry. He’s so, so sorry.
And Tony just keeps thinking.
He keeps thinking about all the different ways this could have gone.
What if Charlie had taken him instead? What if Peter had been able to fight them off the day they took him? What if Pepper had found him after one month instead of five? What if he hadn’t hit her—what if he’d given her a sign? What if Riri had broken him out? What if Peter had managed to escape on his own?
What if Charlie had killed him?
Or what if… What if… What if he’d never met Peter at all?
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 9 — 8:10 AM
A couple more days of rest, a couple more days of calm. They’ve managed to get him to eat a little bit—Jim and Maggie Paxton mentioned the food-in-a-can system they’ve been using for Cassie, and once Cho thinks it’s safe, they transfer some food into a can for him. It’s the plainest food they can find: a clear chicken broth that they fill with extra nutrients.
When they set it next to his bed, he doesn’t touch it—not until everyone leaves the room. And when they return, the can is empty, and Peter is lying on his side, his white-bandaged arm curled around his scarred stomach.
Sarah’s suggested many different treatments for Peter and Cassie—ways she thinks they’ll get better. Together, they all work on it—Dr. Cho, Pepper, Steve Rogers. The girl’s stepfather, and psychiatrist, too. Neither of the main parents are there: Tony is with Peter, and Maggie is with her daughter. “But what I think would be the best option,” Sarah says, “is to bring Cassie and Peter back together.”
“Out of the question,” says Pepper, turning to her. “You remember what happened the last time they were together—he wrecked his knee, he threw himself down a flight of stairs— ”
“But he was there, ” says Sarah. “Tony mentioned that Peter touched his hand, right? Figured out who Tony was in minutes—instead of days. That’s important, Pepper. For Peter to be lucid, he needs that little girl—”
“Look,” says Jim Paxton, black-haired, bushy eyebrows narrowing, “I don’t care how much trauma this kid’s got—I’m not putting my daughter in danger just ‘cause we’re trying to get some kid to wake up.”
“That kid,” says Steve Rogers, with a pointed look, “protected yours, so watch how you talk about him—”
“Protected? Take one look at Cassie—she’s hasn’t been protected, she’s been tortured —”
“He did the best he could!” snaps the supersoldier.
“We don’t know what he did!”
“Gentlemen,” says Sarah, “let’s try to find some common ground here—Jim, you’ve seen Peter with Cassie. He’s never hurt her, has he?”
Jim makes a small noise—a huff of discontent. “Nothing we’ve seen.”
“In my professional opinion,” she says, “from what I’ve seen so far, Peter is not a threat to Cassie. Would you agree?” She nods to the child psychiatrist, the one in the pink scrubs, who nods back. “It seems like whenever Cassie perceives a threat, she turns to Peter for safety—and I’ve never seen him express any harmful behavior towards her—”
“You weren’t there,” spits Jim, “how would you know about his behavior? He’s a teenage boy, I know teenage boys, they’re no angels— ”
“You weren’t there, either,” says Sarah firmly, “so how do you know he hurt her?”
Jim scowls.
“I’m just using my experience,” says the woman, “and what I’ve seen of them both—and I don’t think Peter is a threat to Cassie. To himself, to others, maybe. But not to Cassie.”
Pepper would agree. She’s seen the way Peter touches the teddy bear—gingerly, tenderly, like he’s afraid one wrong move will cause it pain. The way he curls around it whenever a door opens, the way he whispers to it that everything’s gonna be okay.
“So just because this kid’s got some post-traumatic bullshit, we’ve gotta put my kid in danger?” says Jim. “How is that right?”
“It’s not PTSD,” says Sarah, with a sincere frown. “Neither of them have PTSD, Mr. Paxton—in fact, helping them now could help them avoid more extreme symptoms of PTSD in the future.”
Dr. Miranda nods beside her.
“What they’re experiencing,” she says calmly, “is called acute stress disorder—we talked about this, Mr. Paxton. It’s common after a traumatic event—you could just call it shock, really.”
The child psychiatrist—Dr. Alexis Miranda—speaks then, adding,“Mr. Paxton, I need you to understand—your child is in distress. And it is my honest, professional opinion, that allowing her to be with Peter would help her significantly. She’s a child, and it’s clear to me that Peter acted as some kind of guardian while she was in there. She feels safe with him—and I think it’ll help alleviate a lot of her symptoms.”
Jim Paxton is clearly not entirely with the program—but he’s not heartless. He rubs his chin, and then he says, “Fine. Fine. But I need to be there—just in case.”
Sarah nods. “Tony and Ms. Paxton are already on board, so if we want to take a quick vote?”
Most of the hands in the room raise.
Dr. Cho, hesitant, looks around the room. She’s been quiet this whole time. “I still don’t think it’s a good idea,” she admits, “but Sarah, if you think we should…”
The woman nods. “It’s the best thing for them both.”
“Alright,” Dr. Cho says, with a nod to both psychiatrists. “Tomorrow, then.”