Seriously
The Architecture of Ruin
The trailer smelled of burnt garlic and impending rain.
Izzie had tried. She had come home early after her shift with a paper bag of groceries from the Pike Place market—fresh basil, plum tomatoes, fresh mozzarella, and a crusty baguette. She had wanted to fill the small, cramped kitchen with warmth. She had wanted to bake something that didn't taste like hospital cafeteria grease, to light the lavender candles Derek had given them as an ironic housewarming gift, to create an illusion of domesticity thick enough to smother the silence that had grown between them like mold.
Instead, the pan had scorched. The tomatoes had reduced to a bitter, blackened sludge because her mind kept wandering down a terrifying rabbit hole of cellular biology, calculating the half-life of systemic alkylating agents and the cytotoxic legacy of high-dose interleukin-2.
When the front door of the trailer swung open and slammed against the wooden frame with a crack like a pistol shot, Izzie dropped the wooden spoon into the sink.
Alex stood on the threshold.
He hadn't taken off his navy scrub jacket. His hair was damp from the relentless Seattle mist, plastered in dark, spiky tufts against his forehead. But it wasn't his fatigue that made the hair on the back of Izzie’s neck stand up; it was his eyes. They were dark, bloodshot, and rimmed with a terrible, vibrating fury that made the small kitchen feel microscopic.
"Alex?" she said softly, wiping her trembling hands on the front of her apron. "You're back. I was making dinner. The sauce got away from me a little, but I can make more—"
"Save it," Alex rasped.
The sound of his voice was like gravel scraping against iron. He kicked the door shut with the heel of his boot. The whole trailer shuddered. He didn't drop his keys onto the ceramic dish by the door; he threw his badge and lanyard onto the laminate counter, where they skidded and knocked over a salt shaker.
Izzie froze. Her heart fluttered against her ribs—a fast, erratic flutter that made her slightly breathless. "What happened? Did something happen in Peds? Did a kid—"
"Don't play the saint with me, Izzie. Don't you dare stand there in that damn apron and play the worried little wife." Alex crossed the kitchen in two long, aggressive strides, stopping just shy of the counter island that separated them. He leaned forward, bracing his hands on the laminate, his veins standing out like cords on the backs of his forearms. "How long?"
Izzie blinked, her brow furrowing. "How long what?"
"How long have you been sleeping with Sloan?"
The air in the trailer seemed to turn into dry ice. Izzie’s breath hitched in her throat, the accusation hitting her with the force of a physical blow. She actually took a step back, her hips bumping against the edge of the stove.
"What?" she breathed.
"You heard me!" Alex shouted, his voice cracking with a raw, agonizing strain that tore the silence apart. "How long has it been going on? A week? A month? Did it start the second he took you into his plastics service, or were you screwing him back when you were supposed to be recovering from brain surgery?"
"Alex, are you insane?" Izzie gasped, her voice trembling between outrage and sheer disbelief. "Mark? Are you talking about Mark? He’s my mentor! He’s the only attending in that entire building who doesn't look at me like I'm a walking corpse waiting to keel over!"
"Don't give me that garbage!" Alex roared, slamming his open palm down onto the counter. The sound echoed off the thin aluminum walls. "I saw you! I came up to his office today, Izzie! I went up there to apologize to you. I bought you tea. I was going to tell you I was sorry for being an ass this morning, for being scared, for being... for being everything that's broken about me! And what did I see?"
He shoved his face closer, his jaw working violently, tears of pure, humiliated rage shimmering in his dark eyes.
"I saw him holding you. I saw you wrapped around his neck, crying into his chest like he was the only thing in the universe keeping you alive. The same way you used to hold me before you got sick. And then he locked the damn door, pulled out needles, and started touching you like you belonged to him."
Izzie’s blood went ice-cold.
*He saw.*
He had seen the embrace. He had seen the phlebotomy kit. He had seen the intimate, desperate terror in that office, but his mind—poisoned by years of abandonment, by Iowa trailer parks, by crazy mothers and runaway fathers—had assembled the pieces into the only picture he knew how to understand: betrayal.
"Alex, no," Izzie pleaded, stepping toward him, her hands reaching out instinctively. "It’s not what you think. It isn't like that. Mark was—"
"Don't lie to me!" Alex snarled, recoiling from her outstretched hands as if her skin were dipped in poison. "Don't you dare stand there and lie to my face! You flinch when I try to kiss you! You lie in bed stiff as a board, and every time I touch you, you look at me like you’re waiting for me to hurt you! But Sloan? You bake him artisan bread! You spend twelve hours a day tucking yourself under his arm, and then you let him lock you in his office so you can do whatever the hell you do when nobody's looking!"
"He was drawing my blood!" Izzie screamed, the words tearing out of her throat before she could stop them.
Alex let out a harsh, barking, ugly laugh. "Oh, that’s rich. He was drawing your blood? What, Sloan's a vampire now? You're going to tell me the hospital's biggest man-whore is giving you private medical exams behind locked doors? Why? Because your husband isn't allowed to know? Because you trust him more than the guy who held your hair while you puked up your own stomach lining?"
"Because you can't handle it!" Izzie shrieked back, tears suddenly bursting from her eyes, hot and scalding against her cheeks. "Because you look at me and all you see is cancer! All you see is a dead girl! Every time you look at me, you're terrified I’m going to stop breathing, and I couldn't... I couldn't put another thing on you until I knew for sure!"
Alex went entirely still. The silence that fell between them was heavier than the storm outside.
"Knew what?" Alex whispered. The rage had drained from his face, replaced by a gray, hollow void of absolute suspicion. "Knew what for sure, Izzie? What are you hiding from me?"
Izzie’s mouth opened, but no sound came out.
*Tell him,* the voice in her head whispered. *Tell him you might be pregnant. Tell him your ovaries miraculously woke up. Tell him you might have a baby.*
And then the cold, merciless training of an MD slammed the door shut.
*Tell him what?* she thought hysterically. *Tell him you have four weeks of embryonic development swimming in tissue saturated with dacarbazine and IL-2? Tell him you might be carrying a fetus with severe neural tube defects, missing limbs, or anencephaly? Tell him he might have to watch you undergo an emergency medical abortion, or watch you bleed to death from an ectopic implantation on scarred uterine tissue?*
Alex had barely survived her melanoma. If she gave him hope—if she gave him a dream of a child, of a future, of a family—and then ripped it away with a pathology report, it would finish him. It would shatter the fragile, jagged pieces of him that were currently holding together with spit and adrenaline.
"I had a dizzy spell," she choked out, the lie tasting like ashes on her tongue. "In the OR. I almost passed out into the field. Mark thought... Mark was worried the melanoma had recurred in my brain. He drew a panel to check for paraneoplastic markers. He didn't want me to panic until the lab came back."
Alex stared at her.
He didn't blink. He didn't move. He stood there, looking into her eyes, looking for the truth. And because Izzie Stevens was an open book, because she had never been able to conceal a secret in her life, Alex saw the deception. He didn't see the pregnancy—he couldn't conceive of it—but he saw the shifting of her eyes, the stiffness in her throat, the calculated omission.
He saw that she was lying to him.
"You're full of crap," Alex said, his voice dropping into a register so quiet, so deadly, that it frightened her far more than his screaming had.
"Alex—"
"You're lying. I can see it on your face." He took a step back, toward the door. "You're screwing him. Or you want to. Or you're letting him play doctor in all the ways you won't let me touch you."
"Alex, stop! Please, look at me! I love you!" She reached for him across the island, sobbing openly now, her face streaked with tears. "I love you, only you! Please don't walk out of here!"
"You know what's funny?" Alex said, reaching behind him to grasp the brass doorknob. His hand was trembling, but his expression was a stone wall of pure, unadulterated bitterness. "I almost died for you. I sat by that bed every night. I gave up my life, I gave up my pride, I let them cut you open and I waited for you. And the minute you're breathing again, you run to the first guy who has better hair and a smoother tongue."
"Alex, no!"
"Don't wait up," he spat.
He wrenched the door open. The freezing night air and the roar of the rain swept inside, snuffing out the candle on the table. The door slammed shut behind him with the force of an executioner's axe.
Izzie stood in the middle of the dark, cold kitchen, the smell of burnt garlic thick in her lungs, her chest heaving as she dropped to her knees on the linoleum floor and wept until she had no air left.
***
Joe’s Bar smelled like damp wool, stale draft beer, and decades of spilled bourbon.
It was packed with the usual post-shift hospital crowd, but Alex Karev was sitting at the far end of the scarred wooden counter, creating a five-foot radius of pure, hostile radiation that kept everyone away.
There were four empty shot glasses lined up neatly beside his elbow. A fifth, filled to the brim with amber rye, sat between his hands.
"You're going to tear your liver apart, Karev," a sharp, slightly nasal voice cut through the hum of the jukebox.
Alex didn't turn his head. He stared into the amber liquid. "Get lost, Adamson."
Reed Adamson didn't get lost. In fact, she pulled out the empty vinyl-topped stool next to him and sat down, tossing her wet jacket onto the bar. Her pixie-cut hair was damp, sticking to her cheekbones, and her sharp brown eyes scanned his face with the ruthless efficiency of a Mercy West transplant who had clawed her way into Seattle Grace through pure grit and spite.
"Nice attitude," Reed said, raising an eyebrow at Joe, who was wiping down taps down the bar. "Joe, give me a gin and tonic. And get this Neanderthal a glass of water before he pukes on your floor."
"I don't need water," Alex growled, lifting the shot glass and throwing the rye down his throat in one burning gulp. The alcohol hit his empty stomach like liquid fire, scorching away the edges of his mind, but it wasn't enough. It wasn't nearly enough to erase the image of Izzie clutching Mark Sloan's coat.
"Rough day?" Reed asked, leaning her chin on her hand, watching him. "Kepner said you ripped an intern's head off in Peds for misplacing a feeding tube."
"Intern was an idiot," Alex muttered, slamming the empty glass back onto the wood. "Everybody's an idiot."
"Right. Very profound." Reed took her drink from Joe and took a long sip through the straw. "You look like someone ran over your dog, Karev. Or did your sainted cancer-survivor wife finally realize she married a thug?"
Alex’s head snapped toward her so fast his neck popped. His dark eyes flared with murder. "Shut your mouth about Izzie."
Reed didn't flinch. She was tough, sharp around the edges, and entirely unimpressed by his chest-puffing. "Hit a nerve. Good to know you have them."
"You don't know anything about her," Alex said, his voice dropping into a slurry, dangerous growl. "You don't know anything about what we went through. You came here from your fancy little hospital with your clipboards and your brown-nosing, and you think you know how this place works."
"I know how people work," Reed countered, turning on her stool to face him directly, her knee brushing against his thigh. She didn't move away. "I know that you've been walking around the halls like a ghost for three months. I know you look like you haven't slept since the merger. And I know that whatever is going on between you and Barbie, it's eating you alive."
Alex stared at her. The alcohol was buzzing loudly in his ears, stripping away his defenses, leaving only the raw, bleeding meat of his pride.
"She’s screwing Sloan," Alex blurted out.
The words felt toxic leaving his lips. It was the first time he had said it out loud to an outsider, and hearing them in the ambient noise of the bar made it feel sickeningly real.
Reed’s eyes widened slightly in genuine surprise. "Mark Sloan? Your wife? Little Miss Muffet who cries over deer?"
"Yeah," Alex laughed—a sound that was half-sob, half-strangle. "Yeah. Sloan. She flinches when I try to touch her. Can't even look at me. But she lets him hold her. She lies to my face to protect him."
Reed looked at him for a long, quiet moment. The snark faded from her eyes, replaced by something cooler, more pragmatic, and distinctly predatory. She leaned closer, the scent of her citrus perfume cutting through the reek of stale beer.
"Then she’s an idiot," Reed said softly.
Alex blinked, his drunken brain trying to process the shift in her tone. "What?"
"I said she's an idiot." Reed reached out and put her fingers on his forearm, right over the dark hair, her touch cool and deliberate. "You practically dragged her through the gates of hell, Karev. Everyone in the surgical wing knows it. You broke yourself for her. And if she doesn't want what you have to give..."
She trailed off, her dark eyes locking onto his mouth.
Alex felt a cold, jagged snap inside his chest. The grief, the humiliation, the months of celibacy, the terror of waking up every morning wondering if his wife was about to die—it all collapsed into a violent, reckless urge to destroy something. To destroy himself. To prove that he was still a man, that he wasn't just an orderly in his own marriage, that he was capable of being wanted without being pity-fuck material for a dying woman.
"Reed," he warned, his voice thick and rough.
"Shut up, Karev," she murmured, leaning in until her breath brushed his ear. "My apartment is three blocks away. Let's get out of here."
Alex didn't think about Izzie’s blue eyes. He didn't think about the vows they had taken in that sunlit church while she sat in a wheelchair. He grabbed Reed’s chin, pulled her face to his, and kissed her—hard, brutal, and completely devoid of love.
***
At three o'clock in the morning, the lights in the maternal-fetal medicine clinic on the fourth floor of Seattle Grace Hospital were turned off.
Only a single examination room was illuminated, glowing with the muted, bluish radiance of a high-resolution ultrasound monitor.
Izzie sat on the edge of the examination table, the white paper crinkling loudly beneath her thighs. She had her scrub top pulled up, exposing her pale, flat stomach to the cool air of the room. Her skin was covered in a thick layer of clear acoustic gel.
Beside her, Mark Sloan sat on a rolling stool.
His face was drawn with exhaustion, shadows carved deeply under his eyes, but his hands were rock-steady. He was holding the curvilinear ultrasound probe, angling it gently against Izzie’s lower abdomen, his eyes fixed on the gray-scale snow swirling across the monitor.
On the metal tray beside them lay the paper printout of the lab results he had picked up from the basement lab forty minutes ago.
*Patient: DOE, JANE.* *Quantitative Serum Beta-hCG: 14,850 mIU/mL.* *Progesterone: 22.4 ng/mL.*
Positive. Indisputably, undeniably positive. Approximately five to six weeks gestation.
Izzie wasn't looking at the monitor. She was staring at her own knuckles, which were clutched so tightly around the vinyl edge of the table that the skin had turned waxy and translucent.
"See that?" Mark murmured, his deep voice keeping a slow, measured cadence to keep the room grounded. He reached out with the tip of his finger and touched the dark, circular pocket on the screen. "That’s a gestational sac. Well-implanted in the fundus. Completely intrauterine. It’s not ectopic, Stevens. That’s hurdle number one cleared."
Izzie let out a shaky, strangled breath, but no relief followed. Only dread. "Is there... is there a pole?"
Mark adjusted the probe, pressing slightly deeper. A tiny, grain-of-rice-shaped flicker appeared within the dark circle of fluid.
"Fetal pole is present," Mark said. He tapped a key on the console, zooming in. A tiny, rhythmic fluttering showed on the screen—a microscopic pulse of motion, flickering like a firefly trapped under ice. "And there’s your cardiac activity. It's early, but it's there. Brisk. Around one-ten bpm."
The sound of her own child’s heartbeat filled the silent room through the machine’s Doppler audio: *thump-thump-thump-thump-thump.*
It should have been the most miraculous sound Izzie Stevens had ever heard. She had spent her entire adult life wanting to be a mother. Even after giving up her daughter at sixteen, the maternal ache had never left her marrow. It was why she baked; it was why she held the hands of dying patients; it was why she fought for every lost cause that walked through the hospital doors.
Now, a life was growing inside her. A life created with the man she loved.
And all she could feel was a profound, suffocating horror.
"Turn it off," Izzie whispered, her voice cracking down the middle.
Mark paused, glancing at her. "Izzie—"
"Turn it off, Mark! Please!" she choked out, hot tears instantly spilling over her eyelashes, cascading down her cheeks and dripping onto her bare chest. "Turn the sound off!"
Mark hit the mute button. The rhythmic galloping ceased, leaving only the dull hum of the machine’s cooling fan. He took a handful of paper towels from the dispenser, wiped the cold gel from her stomach with surprisingly gentle strokes, and tossed the towels into the bin.
"Look at me," Mark commanded softly.
Izzie shook her head, burying her face in her hands, her shoulders heaving with silent, violent sobs. "It’s not viable. It can't be viable. You know the pharmacology, Mark! You know what I was given!"
"Izzie, we don't know that yet—"
"Stop lying to me!" she wailed, lifting her head, her face red, blotchy, and contorted in pure, agonizing grief. "Don't treat me like a patient you have to comfort! Treat me like a doctor! High-dose dacarbazine is a known Category D teratogen! It cross-links DNA strands! It causes fatal skeletal dysplasias, microcephaly, major cardiac malformations, and lethal chromosomal deletions! And the IL-2... it causes massive inflammatory cytokine storms! My immune system was weaponized to murder rapidly dividing cells! How can a blastocyst survive in that toxic dump?"
She pounded her fist against her own thigh in sheer, helpless fury.
"My body was poisoned, Mark! For six months, they pumped biological weapons into my veins! The half-life in the fat stores alone means this embryo has been marinating in alkylating agents since the moment of fertilization! It’s going to be deformed. Or it’s going to develop anencephaly. Or its heart is going to give out at twelve weeks and I'm going to miscarry in some dirty hospital toilet!"
"Izzie," Mark said, his voice rising, firm and unyielding. He stood up from the stool, reached out, and grabbed both of her wrists, pulling her hands away from her lap, forcing her to look at him. "Listen to me. Stop spiraling."
"I am not spiraling! I'm doing the math!"
"Then do all the math!" Mark snapped, his blue eyes intense, cutting through the fog of her hysteria. "Yes, the risks are high. Yes, the literature says to wait twelve months after cytokine clearance before attempting conception. But biology isn't a textbook, Stevens. You survived a five-percent brain met! The embryo is implanted in the optimal site. The heart is beating at a normal rate for six weeks. There is no subchorionic hematoma. There is no fluid in the cul-de-sac. Right now, at this exact minute, that fetus is viable."
"It's a ticking time bomb," she sobbed, her strength suddenly giving out entirely. Her head dropped forward, her forehead coming to rest against the firm, broad expanse of Mark’s chest.
She wept with an agony so pure and primal that Mark felt the vibration of it in his own ribs. He didn't pull away. He didn't offer empty platitudes. He simply wrapped his arms around her, pulling her close against him, his large, warm hand cupping the back of her head, his fingers tangled in her short, golden curls.
"I can't lose another baby," she whispered into the cotton of his scrub top, her voice breaking into tiny, jagged shards. "I gave my daughter away when I was a child. I had to let her go to give her a life. And now... now when I finally have a home, when I finally have a husband, my body is a graveyard. My body is poison. I’m going to kill my own baby with the poison they used to save me."
"You don't know that," Mark whispered into her hair, his own throat tightening with an unexpected, heavy ache.
Underneath the swagger, beneath the reputation of the reckless New York playboy, Mark Sloan possessed an enormous, often hidden capacity for devotion. He had held Addison when she was bleeding out from an ectopic pregnancy in a Manhattan apartment while Derek was away at a conference. He had watched women break under the weight of their own biology. But watching Izzie—this sunny, stubborn, brilliant girl who had fought her way back from the edge of the grave through sheer, radiant will—being broken by the very miracle she had dreamed of was almost more than he could bear.
"We wait for the cell-free DNA screen," Mark told her, rocking her slightly as she shook. "We do the maternal blood draw next week. We look for fetal microchimerism. We test for Trisomy 13, 18, 21, and sex chromosome aneuploidies. If that comes back clear, we do a high-resolution nuchal translucency scan at eleven weeks. We take it one hurdle at a time, Izzie. We don't jump off the bridge until we see if the bridge is burning."
"And if it is?" she whispered against his neck. "If the scan shows the brain didn't develop? If the kidneys didn't form?"
Mark closed his eyes, his jaw tightening. "Then we handle it. Together. I will be in the room. I will hold your hand, and we will do whatever has to be done to keep you alive. But until that data comes back, you don't mourn a child that is still fighting for a heartbeat."
Izzie sniffled, clinging to the lapels of his white coat with desperate, white-knuckled intensity. The fabric was soaked with her tears, but Mark didn't seem to care. He simply stood there in the darkened clinic, a solitary fortress keeping the terror at bay.
Slowly, her breathing began to slow, the jagged gasps smoothing out into deep, exhausted shudders.
"Alex knows," she murmured into his chest.
Mark went completely still. "What?"
"He came home tonight. He was screaming." Izzie pulled back slightly, looking up at him with swollen, bloodshot eyes. "He saw us. He saw you holding me in your office yesterday. He saw the needles."
Mark swore under his breath, a sharp, ugly curse. "Did you tell him?"
"No!" she said immediately, her eyes widening in fresh panic. "No, I couldn't! Mark, look at him. He’s hanging on by a thread. He spent months watching me die. He has nightmares where he’s doing chest compressions on me! If I tell him I’m pregnant, he’ll think we have a miracle. He’ll start looking at cribs, and he’ll start talking about names, and then... and then when the chromosomal test comes back abnormal, or when I have to terminate because the fetus is incompatible with life... it will kill him. It will destroy whatever sanity he has left."
"Izzie, he’s your husband," Mark said gently, though his expression was grim. "If he thinks you and I are—"
"He thinks I’m cheating on him with you," she whispered, the shame turning her voice entirely hollow.
Mark’s eyebrows shot up. "He what?"
"He thinks we're having an affair. He accused me of sleeping with you. He said... he said I was letting you touch me when I won't let him near me." A bitter, broken sob escaped her lips. "I told him you were running paraneoplastic labs to check for cancer recurrence. I lied to him to throw him off. But he knew I was lying. He walked out."
"Jesus Christ," Mark muttered, rubbing the bridge of his nose. "He’s an even bigger idiot than I gave him credit for."
"He’s not an idiot! He’s terrified!" Izzie defended fiercely, her maternal, protective instincts flaring up even in the midst of her own destruction. "He’s a boy who was beaten by his dad and abandoned by his mom, and then his wife got stage four cancer! He’s allowed to be crazy! But I cannot give him this burden until I know if this baby is going to live."
She reached out, grabbing Mark’s forearms, her gaze boring into his with absolute, desperate gravity.
"Promise me, Mark. Swear to me on your life. You will not tell him. You will not say a word about the pregnancy, or the ultrasound, or the labs. Not until we get the genetic results. Not until I know if I have a baby, or if I have a tragedy."
Mark looked down at her. He saw the terror, the fierce maternal devotion already wrapping itself around a cluster of cells that might not survive the month, and the deep, abiding love she still carried for a man who had just screamed in her face.
He hated it. He hated lying to Karev. He hated keeping secrets that could blow a marriage to smithereens.
But looking into Izzie’s shattered, hopeful face, he knew he didn't have a choice.
"I swear," Mark said quietly. "Nobody knows. Just you and me."
Izzie let out a long, ragged exhale, collapsing back against his shoulder. "Thank you."
"Come on," Mark said, gently pulling her up from the examination table. He reached over and grabbed her scrub top, helping her pull it down over her abdomen, smoothing the fabric with brotherly care. "Let’s get you cleaned up. I have a couch in my office. You’re going to sleep for four hours, and then you’re going to eat a real breakfast."
"I have to find Alex—"
"Alex is a grown man having a tantrum," Mark interrupted firmly, his tone brook no argument. "You have a fragile six-week gestation and a cortisol level that could melt steel. Right now, your only job is keeping your heart rate down. Karev will still be miserable and angry tomorrow. He isn't going anywhere."
Izzie nodded weakly, allowing Mark to wrap an arm around her shoulders and guide her toward the clinic door.
***
Five miles away, in a cramped, generic apartment on the edge of Queen Anne, the gray morning light was just beginning to seep through the plastic horizontal blinds.
Alex Karev lay on his back on an unfamiliar mattress, staring up at a water stain on the acoustic ceiling tiles.
The room smelled of stale gin, cheap vanilla body spray, and the unmistakable, suffocating musk of recent, soulless sex.
Beside him, Reed Adamson was fast asleep, her back turned to him, the white duvet pulled up to her bare shoulder. Her breathing was slow, rhythmic, and peaceful.
Alex didn't move. He couldn't.
His head pounded with a brutal, sickening hangover, but the physical pain was nothing compared to the absolute, suffocating horror settling into his chest.
He looked down at his right hand, resting limp on the sheets.
The gold wedding band on his fourth finger caught a sliver of the morning light. It looked bright. Untouched. Pristine.
A wave of nausea so profound, so violent, surged through his gut that he had to roll over and press his fist against his mouth to keep from vomiting on the floor.
*What have you done?* the silence screamed in his ears. *What the hell did you just do?*
He had wanted to hurt Izzie. He had wanted to break something because he felt broken. He had wanted to strike back at the ghost of Mark Sloan, to prove that he wasn't weak, that he wasn't the pathetic little boy waiting by the hospital bed for his wife to die.
And now, lying in another woman's bed while his wife was alone in that cold, rain-soaked trailer, Alex Karev knew the truth.
He hadn't hurt Sloan. He hadn't saved his pride.
He had just burned down the only good thing he had ever had in his entire life, and there wasn't enough rain in the entire sky of Seattle to put the fire out.