Grey's Anatomy Fic | What Do You Go Home To? | Cristina Yang | PG-13 | 2,300 words
What Do You Go Home To?
Cristina Yang | PG-13 | 2,200 words
It’s only the aftermath after it’s done.
Spoilers for the Season 7 finale, but nothing from the trailers for Season 8. Many thanks to the lovely octette for the beta!
“You can’t bring Zola with me to get an abortion,” Cristina hisses in spite of herself. Zola’s not speaking yet, let alone speaking English, and anyway, Cristina doesn’t believe in coddling children. It won’t set them up well for adulthood.
“It’s a doctor’s office,” Meredith says. “I’m just bringing her to a doctor’s office. It’s not like she’ll know.”
“It’s morbid,” Cristina says. “Even for us.”
“Oh, and now we can’t do morbid?”
“You’re carrying your daughter around in a dead baby’s basket.” Cristina uses her palm to push her hair away from her face. “I think we might have reached the threshold for morbid.”
“You need someone to drive you back,” Meredith says.
“I’ve got someone, it’s okay. It’s not for another week, anyway. I don’t know why we’re talking about this.”
Meredith gives Cristina a hard look, her mouth pinching together as she stares, but Zola’s starting to fuss and Cristina can see as Meredith’s attention shifts away. She wonders if Meredith cares that she would terminate a pregnancy when Meredith spent months with hormone injections.
They’ve each lost one child on the floor of an operating room already.
--
She makes a lateral incision across the right ventricle and it’s just her and the scalpel and the body on the table in front of her. It was easier than she ever would have thought it would be to walk away from surgery, and then easier than she could have imagined to come back.
--
Cristina’s shift ends. She takes a thirty minute nap and then heads down to the pit, and even though Bailey huffs and presses her lips together, she doesn’t send Cristina home.
--
“Is McDreamy coming back?” Cristina asks, looking at Meredith upside down as she stretches out on the couch. She was on her feet for eight hours straight after a 38 hour shift, and the ride back to Meredith’s place felt impossibly long. She misses living with Callie across from the hospital, but that’s another just another sanctuary invaded by new offspring now. “I thought he was excited about the McBaby.”
“He doesn’t know about her,” Meredith says. “I think. I don’t know what he knows. He’s not answering my calls.”
“This is how it goes, you know. It’s their dream, and baby baby baby, someone give me a baby, and then all of the sudden they’re nowhere to be seen.”
Cristina should probably be apartment hunting instead of lying on Meredith’s couch, but when she isn’t at the hospital, she’s tired.
Meredith’s tired too, but because of the raising-an-infant situation. Some of the extra shifts Cristina has been covering are Meredith’s.
“Mark followed Callie around the whole time she was pregnant,” says Meredith.
“Well,” Cristina says. “Mark.”
“Mark,” Meredith agrees.
“At least you don't have to worry about Little Grey getting down with the manwhore anymore.”
Meredith snorts, the prelude to that stupid squicky laugh thing she does, and Cristina feels the corners of her mouth twitch reflexively.
“And also Callie nearly died,” Meredith says.
“Also that.”
“Are you getting divorced?”
Cristina looks up at the ceilings and hisses. “I guess so. I guess I’m getting divorced. That’s what comes next. One day I’m going to answer the door and someone is going to serve me with the papers and it’s going to say, Reason for separation: baby killer.”
“You could sue for damages,” Meredith says. “Unwanted invasion of uterus.”
“My mother is going to have a breakdown,” Cristina says. “I will never be able to tell her. Ten years from now, I’ll be paying for gingers to come home with me at Christmas. ‘Don’t you remember Owen, Mom? You saw him last year.’”
“My mother would be happy to hear I was getting divorced.”
“Well,” Cristina says, because the less said about Meredith’s mother the better.
Meredith folds her hands on her lap. She’s got bony wrists and the fingers of a second generation surgeon. “Do you think we pick the wrong men?”
“I definitely don’t think we pick the right men,” Cristina says, laughing. It’s so silly to be talking about this. Men, like they’re this thing to be discussed, this common subject of conversation because remember when Owen kicked her out and Derek told Meredith she would make a bad mother?
“I don’t want to get divorced,” Meredith says easily, and it’s almost enough to make it seem like she hasn’t been debating this, talking to Zola as she puts her down for the night. But Cristina’s heard her.
Cristina knows that Meredith is just waiting for Derek to finally answer his phone, so she says, “Derek’s okay, I guess. We went fishing. I was excellent.”
“An excellent fisherwoman. It’s probably us,” Meredith says. “With the choosing the wrong men. I don’t think that everyone feels like this.”
“It’s. Something,” Cristina says. “You’re the one who spent all the time in therapy -- shouldn’t you have a little more self-awareness?”
“Hey!” Meredith says. “I’m here. Do you see me running away? I’m in the corner of light now. No more dark and twisty Meredith. It’s just that other guy.”
“Men,” Cristina says. That unknowable them, because maybe they are all the same after all. She’s done with men. Not like she’s going to follow Callie and exalt vagina now, but she’s definitely done with men. She’ll pull out her own damn icicle next time.
“He was really good at getting her to stop crying,” Meredith says. “I really thought there would be someone here who knew how to get her to stop crying. Things would be easier if she weren’t always crying.”
“Don’t look at me,” Cristina says, and pinches the bridge of her nose.
--
Karev’s room stays empty, and Cristina sleeps with Meredith and Zola in the master bedroom. She wears earplugs, but she can still hear the baby cry through the night. Can trace the sound of Meredith’s footsteps as she walks up and down the house. Cristina goes to work and when she comes home, she goes to bed. Wakes up every hour with Meredith and the baby and wonders how all the women in the world bear this, the ache of being shredded slowly from the inside out every time the baby starts screaming. Or whatever this raw feeling that goes along with the sleep deprivation is. It’s not like staying awake to study or to perform a surgery. There’s no end in sight, no reward following completion. Zola’s always going to want another bottle.
Cristina rolls over and stares at the wall on the other side of the empty room. How could Owen think I would want this?
--
“45 year old male, vitals stable, lost a lot of blood after a head on collision with an SUV, lacerations to the head and chest.”
Karev is reaching for the chart and his stethoscope at the same time, so he’s not able to fight back when Cristina darts in to grab the board from the paramedic.
“Hey,” he says, pivoting toward Cristina, but she’s already circled over to the other side of the gurney. “Mine.”
“Really?” Cristina says, shaking the chart in her hand pointedly. “Start a bag of O -- does anyone know his blood type?”
“I got the page,” Karev says. His face is doing that blockhead thing, where his eyes disappear under a mountain of forehead. It’s not that he left without a word so much as the whole thing where he nearly got Meredith fired that Cristina will never forgive.
“Back off, devil spawn,” Cristina says. “The abdomen is distended, let’s get him to surgery. No one wants you here.” One of the hovering nurses takes a half step backwards and Cristina snaps, “Not you,” and then they’re moving down the hall and Cristina loses sight of Karev.
--
The baby never sleeps and Meredith walks around all day talking in this voice This voice like, Hey, I love you, and I’m going to give you this bottle now, please drink it.
Sometimes when the baby cries, Cristina’s breasts leak and she thinks, This isn’t fair, but mostly she just doesn’t think about it. It’s her own fault for not diagnosing the pregnancy sooner.
--
She almost leaves it too long and gets stuck with the pregnancy after everything. Almost, but not quite, because she’s got her legs in the stirrups while Dr. Field’s replacement extracts the fetus. They’ve put postcards on the ceiling and Cristina stares at a zebra in the safari while the new gyno terminates the pregnancy. It’s easier than bleeding out on the operating floor while she’s supposed to be assisting Burke. Last she heard, Burke’s new wife was pregnant.
They’re lined up in chairs, her and all of the other women with recently evacuated uteri. Cristina thinks this part is pointless -- she’s a doctor twice over and if she starts hemorrhaging, she can get herself to the damn ER. Stupid IV-drip saline bag.
She walks out of the room and thinks, Sorry, Owen. Holds back the hysterical laughter bubbling up in her chest. It feels like panic and it feels like relief.
Bailey’s sitting outside in the waiting room, even though Cristina didn’t tell her about the appointment.
“I’ll take you home,” she says.
“I’m just going to sleep it off in the on-call room,” Cristina says. “I’m on shift in six hours anyway.”
Bailey drops her brow and looks up at Cristina, clicks her tongue.
“Did Meredith tell you to come here?” Cristina asks. “Because I’m fine.”
Except that something’s happening behind her eyes, like she’s going to vomit or pass out or.
She feels her ankles go wobbly and presses her hand to the wall, steadying herself.
“I’ll take you home,” Bailey says, wrapping her hand around Cristina’s elbow so all Cristina has to do is put one foot in front of the other and let Bailey lead her down the hallway, out the door, into the passenger seat of the car.
“I don’t regret it,” Cristina says.
Bailey’s leaning over as she buckles her seatbelt, and she looks up at Cristina. Says, “I know you don’t.” There’s a little metallic click and then Bailey straightens up.
“Because of how I’m -- it’s not because I regret it.”
“I didn’t think it was,” Bailey says. She’s short behind the wheel, even though she’s got the seat up as far as it will go. She seems like a mother in this way that makes Cristina want to cry. Not because of -- whatever -- but because of how much of a relief it is to be sitting beside her. Tomorrow she’ll be a hardass again, but right now it’s okay for Cristina to sit silently and let Bailey drive her home.
--
Derek comes back. He takes the couch in the living room and Cristina sleeps in the bed with Meredith.
Sometimes she wakes up in the night and the baby’s gone and Meredith’s gone and there are voices downstairs. Cristina’s going to keep living here long enough to make Derek uncomfortable, continue sleeping on his side of the bed with his wife long enough to make a point, and then she’s going to have to go somewhere else. Callie’s married now, too. Cristina can’t go back to her old apartment. Stupid Owen with his stupid face. Cristina picked out that damn loft, she should get to keep it. At least Burke left her the apartment.
But she doesn’t really want to go back.
--
“Is this what you wanted?” Cristina asks when Meredith comes down the stairs after putting Zola to bed. Derek is still upstairs; Cristina can hear the squeak of the rocking chair against the hardwood floors.
“I guess so,” Meredith says. She lifts her head and shakes her hair away from her face. She hasn’t showered in a couple of days and she still needs to find a better conditioner.
“You’re raising a child in your mother’s house.”
“I’m raising a child in my mother’s house,” Meredith agrees.
“You’re fucked up,” says Cristina. “This is as dark and twisty as it gets.”
“Are you ever going to call Owen?” Meredith asks.
“I’m good at being alone,” Cristina says.
“Really?” Meredith says, blunt in the mean way she gets sometimes, where she doesn’t realize what she’s doing and says something a little too close to the truth.
“I think I was,” Cristina says. “I think that once I was excellent at being alone.”
“Me, too,” Meredith says. “Excellent.”
“And now the husband and baby.”
“Yeah,” Meredith says. “Whoops.”
“You love it,” Cristina says, rolling toward the edge of the couch.
Stupid Meredith, Cristina thinks as she walks upstairs to the bathroom. She turns on the shower and sits down on the ledge of the bathtub, holding her chin in her hand.
Cristina spent the last six months hating Meredith for everything that happened on the day of the shooting, and now she can feel it rising up again. Stupid Meredith, who managed to put her marriage back together. Stupid Cristina, who used to be focused and sure and -- it used to be easier. Now she can feel Owen’s hands inside of her chest, his fingers pressing behind her ribs. Burke’s. She thinks, I used to know how to do this. She remembers being nine and holding her father’s heart when it stopped beating. The wreckage of his body and the feeling of helplessness as she waited for the ambulance to arrive.
She remembers thinking that by the time she was this age, she would know how to put a heart back together again.
Cristina Yang | PG-13 | 2,200 words
It’s only the aftermath after it’s done.
Spoilers for the Season 7 finale, but nothing from the trailers for Season 8. Many thanks to the lovely octette for the beta!
“You can’t bring Zola with me to get an abortion,” Cristina hisses in spite of herself. Zola’s not speaking yet, let alone speaking English, and anyway, Cristina doesn’t believe in coddling children. It won’t set them up well for adulthood.
“It’s a doctor’s office,” Meredith says. “I’m just bringing her to a doctor’s office. It’s not like she’ll know.”
“It’s morbid,” Cristina says. “Even for us.”
“Oh, and now we can’t do morbid?”
“You’re carrying your daughter around in a dead baby’s basket.” Cristina uses her palm to push her hair away from her face. “I think we might have reached the threshold for morbid.”
“You need someone to drive you back,” Meredith says.
“I’ve got someone, it’s okay. It’s not for another week, anyway. I don’t know why we’re talking about this.”
Meredith gives Cristina a hard look, her mouth pinching together as she stares, but Zola’s starting to fuss and Cristina can see as Meredith’s attention shifts away. She wonders if Meredith cares that she would terminate a pregnancy when Meredith spent months with hormone injections.
They’ve each lost one child on the floor of an operating room already.
--
She makes a lateral incision across the right ventricle and it’s just her and the scalpel and the body on the table in front of her. It was easier than she ever would have thought it would be to walk away from surgery, and then easier than she could have imagined to come back.
--
Cristina’s shift ends. She takes a thirty minute nap and then heads down to the pit, and even though Bailey huffs and presses her lips together, she doesn’t send Cristina home.
--
“Is McDreamy coming back?” Cristina asks, looking at Meredith upside down as she stretches out on the couch. She was on her feet for eight hours straight after a 38 hour shift, and the ride back to Meredith’s place felt impossibly long. She misses living with Callie across from the hospital, but that’s another just another sanctuary invaded by new offspring now. “I thought he was excited about the McBaby.”
“He doesn’t know about her,” Meredith says. “I think. I don’t know what he knows. He’s not answering my calls.”
“This is how it goes, you know. It’s their dream, and baby baby baby, someone give me a baby, and then all of the sudden they’re nowhere to be seen.”
Cristina should probably be apartment hunting instead of lying on Meredith’s couch, but when she isn’t at the hospital, she’s tired.
Meredith’s tired too, but because of the raising-an-infant situation. Some of the extra shifts Cristina has been covering are Meredith’s.
“Mark followed Callie around the whole time she was pregnant,” says Meredith.
“Well,” Cristina says. “Mark.”
“Mark,” Meredith agrees.
“At least you don't have to worry about Little Grey getting down with the manwhore anymore.”
Meredith snorts, the prelude to that stupid squicky laugh thing she does, and Cristina feels the corners of her mouth twitch reflexively.
“And also Callie nearly died,” Meredith says.
“Also that.”
“Are you getting divorced?”
Cristina looks up at the ceilings and hisses. “I guess so. I guess I’m getting divorced. That’s what comes next. One day I’m going to answer the door and someone is going to serve me with the papers and it’s going to say, Reason for separation: baby killer.”
“You could sue for damages,” Meredith says. “Unwanted invasion of uterus.”
“My mother is going to have a breakdown,” Cristina says. “I will never be able to tell her. Ten years from now, I’ll be paying for gingers to come home with me at Christmas. ‘Don’t you remember Owen, Mom? You saw him last year.’”
“My mother would be happy to hear I was getting divorced.”
“Well,” Cristina says, because the less said about Meredith’s mother the better.
Meredith folds her hands on her lap. She’s got bony wrists and the fingers of a second generation surgeon. “Do you think we pick the wrong men?”
“I definitely don’t think we pick the right men,” Cristina says, laughing. It’s so silly to be talking about this. Men, like they’re this thing to be discussed, this common subject of conversation because remember when Owen kicked her out and Derek told Meredith she would make a bad mother?
“I don’t want to get divorced,” Meredith says easily, and it’s almost enough to make it seem like she hasn’t been debating this, talking to Zola as she puts her down for the night. But Cristina’s heard her.
Cristina knows that Meredith is just waiting for Derek to finally answer his phone, so she says, “Derek’s okay, I guess. We went fishing. I was excellent.”
“An excellent fisherwoman. It’s probably us,” Meredith says. “With the choosing the wrong men. I don’t think that everyone feels like this.”
“It’s. Something,” Cristina says. “You’re the one who spent all the time in therapy -- shouldn’t you have a little more self-awareness?”
“Hey!” Meredith says. “I’m here. Do you see me running away? I’m in the corner of light now. No more dark and twisty Meredith. It’s just that other guy.”
“Men,” Cristina says. That unknowable them, because maybe they are all the same after all. She’s done with men. Not like she’s going to follow Callie and exalt vagina now, but she’s definitely done with men. She’ll pull out her own damn icicle next time.
“He was really good at getting her to stop crying,” Meredith says. “I really thought there would be someone here who knew how to get her to stop crying. Things would be easier if she weren’t always crying.”
“Don’t look at me,” Cristina says, and pinches the bridge of her nose.
--
Karev’s room stays empty, and Cristina sleeps with Meredith and Zola in the master bedroom. She wears earplugs, but she can still hear the baby cry through the night. Can trace the sound of Meredith’s footsteps as she walks up and down the house. Cristina goes to work and when she comes home, she goes to bed. Wakes up every hour with Meredith and the baby and wonders how all the women in the world bear this, the ache of being shredded slowly from the inside out every time the baby starts screaming. Or whatever this raw feeling that goes along with the sleep deprivation is. It’s not like staying awake to study or to perform a surgery. There’s no end in sight, no reward following completion. Zola’s always going to want another bottle.
Cristina rolls over and stares at the wall on the other side of the empty room. How could Owen think I would want this?
--
“45 year old male, vitals stable, lost a lot of blood after a head on collision with an SUV, lacerations to the head and chest.”
Karev is reaching for the chart and his stethoscope at the same time, so he’s not able to fight back when Cristina darts in to grab the board from the paramedic.
“Hey,” he says, pivoting toward Cristina, but she’s already circled over to the other side of the gurney. “Mine.”
“Really?” Cristina says, shaking the chart in her hand pointedly. “Start a bag of O -- does anyone know his blood type?”
“I got the page,” Karev says. His face is doing that blockhead thing, where his eyes disappear under a mountain of forehead. It’s not that he left without a word so much as the whole thing where he nearly got Meredith fired that Cristina will never forgive.
“Back off, devil spawn,” Cristina says. “The abdomen is distended, let’s get him to surgery. No one wants you here.” One of the hovering nurses takes a half step backwards and Cristina snaps, “Not you,” and then they’re moving down the hall and Cristina loses sight of Karev.
--
The baby never sleeps and Meredith walks around all day talking in this voice This voice like, Hey, I love you, and I’m going to give you this bottle now, please drink it.
Sometimes when the baby cries, Cristina’s breasts leak and she thinks, This isn’t fair, but mostly she just doesn’t think about it. It’s her own fault for not diagnosing the pregnancy sooner.
--
She almost leaves it too long and gets stuck with the pregnancy after everything. Almost, but not quite, because she’s got her legs in the stirrups while Dr. Field’s replacement extracts the fetus. They’ve put postcards on the ceiling and Cristina stares at a zebra in the safari while the new gyno terminates the pregnancy. It’s easier than bleeding out on the operating floor while she’s supposed to be assisting Burke. Last she heard, Burke’s new wife was pregnant.
They’re lined up in chairs, her and all of the other women with recently evacuated uteri. Cristina thinks this part is pointless -- she’s a doctor twice over and if she starts hemorrhaging, she can get herself to the damn ER. Stupid IV-drip saline bag.
She walks out of the room and thinks, Sorry, Owen. Holds back the hysterical laughter bubbling up in her chest. It feels like panic and it feels like relief.
Bailey’s sitting outside in the waiting room, even though Cristina didn’t tell her about the appointment.
“I’ll take you home,” she says.
“I’m just going to sleep it off in the on-call room,” Cristina says. “I’m on shift in six hours anyway.”
Bailey drops her brow and looks up at Cristina, clicks her tongue.
“Did Meredith tell you to come here?” Cristina asks. “Because I’m fine.”
Except that something’s happening behind her eyes, like she’s going to vomit or pass out or.
She feels her ankles go wobbly and presses her hand to the wall, steadying herself.
“I’ll take you home,” Bailey says, wrapping her hand around Cristina’s elbow so all Cristina has to do is put one foot in front of the other and let Bailey lead her down the hallway, out the door, into the passenger seat of the car.
“I don’t regret it,” Cristina says.
Bailey’s leaning over as she buckles her seatbelt, and she looks up at Cristina. Says, “I know you don’t.” There’s a little metallic click and then Bailey straightens up.
“Because of how I’m -- it’s not because I regret it.”
“I didn’t think it was,” Bailey says. She’s short behind the wheel, even though she’s got the seat up as far as it will go. She seems like a mother in this way that makes Cristina want to cry. Not because of -- whatever -- but because of how much of a relief it is to be sitting beside her. Tomorrow she’ll be a hardass again, but right now it’s okay for Cristina to sit silently and let Bailey drive her home.
--
Derek comes back. He takes the couch in the living room and Cristina sleeps in the bed with Meredith.
Sometimes she wakes up in the night and the baby’s gone and Meredith’s gone and there are voices downstairs. Cristina’s going to keep living here long enough to make Derek uncomfortable, continue sleeping on his side of the bed with his wife long enough to make a point, and then she’s going to have to go somewhere else. Callie’s married now, too. Cristina can’t go back to her old apartment. Stupid Owen with his stupid face. Cristina picked out that damn loft, she should get to keep it. At least Burke left her the apartment.
But she doesn’t really want to go back.
--
“Is this what you wanted?” Cristina asks when Meredith comes down the stairs after putting Zola to bed. Derek is still upstairs; Cristina can hear the squeak of the rocking chair against the hardwood floors.
“I guess so,” Meredith says. She lifts her head and shakes her hair away from her face. She hasn’t showered in a couple of days and she still needs to find a better conditioner.
“You’re raising a child in your mother’s house.”
“I’m raising a child in my mother’s house,” Meredith agrees.
“You’re fucked up,” says Cristina. “This is as dark and twisty as it gets.”
“Are you ever going to call Owen?” Meredith asks.
“I’m good at being alone,” Cristina says.
“Really?” Meredith says, blunt in the mean way she gets sometimes, where she doesn’t realize what she’s doing and says something a little too close to the truth.
“I think I was,” Cristina says. “I think that once I was excellent at being alone.”
“Me, too,” Meredith says. “Excellent.”
“And now the husband and baby.”
“Yeah,” Meredith says. “Whoops.”
“You love it,” Cristina says, rolling toward the edge of the couch.
Stupid Meredith, Cristina thinks as she walks upstairs to the bathroom. She turns on the shower and sits down on the ledge of the bathtub, holding her chin in her hand.
Cristina spent the last six months hating Meredith for everything that happened on the day of the shooting, and now she can feel it rising up again. Stupid Meredith, who managed to put her marriage back together. Stupid Cristina, who used to be focused and sure and -- it used to be easier. Now she can feel Owen’s hands inside of her chest, his fingers pressing behind her ribs. Burke’s. She thinks, I used to know how to do this. She remembers being nine and holding her father’s heart when it stopped beating. The wreckage of his body and the feeling of helplessness as she waited for the ambulance to arrive.
She remembers thinking that by the time she was this age, she would know how to put a heart back together again.