Half Blast- Chapter 1
Disclaimer: Erica Hahn, Callie Torres and George O'Malley belong to ABC/Shondaland. No profit intended.
Rating: PG. At least for now. There's bound to be some language and some adult situations.
Pairing: Callie/Erica
Summary: Erica is talked into letting a documentary television crew descend on Seattle Grace. While in her personal life, she's realizing a deepening emotional dependence on her girlfriend that isn't sitting well.
Story aside: This picks up approximately six months after the end of my first story, Bulletproof (I Wish I Was). You don't have to read that one for this one to make sense, but you do need to know that Erica is now the Chief of Surgery at Seattle Grace and that Callie finished her residency and is now an attending at Seattle Presbyterian. They are still very much a couple.
Title note: Half Blast is a nice little ditty by the band Throwing Muses. And by nice little ditty, I mean a raucous, kick ass 6 minute journey into total and complete awesomeness. Yes, awesomeness.
Now on with the show...
Half Blast
Chapter 1
Erica pinched the bridge of her nose and closed her eyes, feeling the beginning of another tension headache coming on. Her first six months as Seattle Grace's Chief of Surgery felt more like six years, because while the surgical staff now under her charge was undeniably talented, they were also a collection of careless flakes who seemed to revel in finding new and obnoxious ways of trying her patience. There were days, more days than not recently, when she seriously regretted the decision to take this damn job. Today was definitely one of those.
She opened her eyes and looked down at the manilla file folder, an incident report was sitting on top. She shook her head as she read it for the third time, then she looked up to pin the two residents sitting before her with an icy stare. "Do one of you idiots care to explain how Delores Evers, a 62 year old woman who was admitted for high blood pressure, made it all the way into an OR for an operation to remove a bowel obstruction? Are we just making stuff up as we go along now? When a patient comes in, are we randomly throwing darts at a list of diagnoses and treatments? What in the hell can you people possibly be doing to screw up this badly?" She looked from Dr. Japrata, a lanky female Indonesian-born resident, to Dr. O'Malley, hunched in his chair looking as boyish as ever. The sight of him and his big, watery blue eyes only infuriated her more. "Well?" She demanded.
"I'm not sure," O'Malley admitted.
"You're not sure?" She could hear the bite to her own voice. "Are you incompetent, Dr. O'Malley, or simply stupid?"
"I don't actually think I'm either, Dr. Hahn," he stated, squirming a little in his chair.
"You wouldn't," she snapped then turned her attention to Japrata, who was specializing in Emergency Medicine. "So what's your excuse? You were the initial senior resident on Mrs. Evers case. How did she get from your ER to O'Malley's OR?"
"It wasn't really my OR," O'Malley interjected, then seemed to shrink a little at the angry glance Erica gave him.
She turned her scowl back to the female resident. "Are you going to explain, Japrata?"
"I do not know precisely," the woman said.
"And why is that? Do you make a practice of signing off on charts without reading them?"
"The intern-"
Erica slammed her hand on the desk. "No! You were the senior resident! Don't you dare try to blame this on an intern. If a mistake happened on your watch, the least you can do is own it."
"Well, clearly a mistake has been made," Japrata admitted, barely flinching at Erica's outburst, but the anger was clear in her dark eyes. "Mrs. Evers was in an OR to have an obstruction removed that she did not have. This is a grave mistake. But I can not explain it. Not at this moment."
That was not a great answer and it certainly wasn't what she wanted to hear, but Erica couldn't argue with honesty. "What about you, O'Malley? Didn't you even speak to the patient? Did you look at her chart? Did you do anything to verify that this was the right diagnosis, that you actually had the right chart for the right patient?"
"I picked up her chart and it said bowel obstruction so I scheduled an OR. I didn't tag the charts or the patients. If someone mixed them up, it happened way before it got up to me."
She stared at O'Malley as she fought down the urge to reach across her desk and slap him. She never could look at the squirrely little man without wondering what Callie had seen in him. All she saw was weakness. It was written all over him, in the way he sat, the way he walked, the stammering and halting way he talked. Of course, all that could be an act. She'd seen it too many times before, usually with women. The pretty woman who acts defenseless and weak in an effort to manipulate the others around them to do the things they don't want to do or to take the fall for things they screwed up. That correlation did not make her feel any more charitable. "I don't want excuses, O'Malley. I want answers."
"Of course, Dr. Hahn, and I wish I had answers but I don't."
"Then you need to find some," Erica told him, then heaved a sigh. She planted her elbows on her desk and steepled her fingers together, tapping them against her lips. She was frustrated and disappointed and sickened by the entire affair. "I can't believe I have to actually tell you people this, but interns are useless. They are walking, talking mistakes, they are liablity lawsuits begging to happen and it's your job to catch their screw-ups and to teach them how to not be screw-ups. You both failed, and because of this, a high risk patient almost had an unnecessary surgery and this hospital almost got slapped with a huge negligence lawsuit. I can't let that drop as some kooky thing that happens in busy hospitals. It might happen in other hospitals, but not mine. You guys need to figure out what went wrong and correct it."
"I am sorry, Dr. Hahn," Japrata said. "I will make sure that it does not happen again."
"It had better not happened again. As it is I'm putting you both on six month's probation." She ignored their outraged looks. They could be as outraged as they wanted, they could never reach her levels of indignation. "If any screw up of this magnitude happens on your watch again, you'll be suspended. Is that clear enough?" They both stated that it was and she had then sign off on the incident report before dismissing them.
Alone in her office, she sat back in her chair and checked the clock. It was almost three in the afternoon. Like too many other days, she'd had to put out one fire after another and didn't have time to even think of scrubbing in on a surgery. She hated days like that. She'd never wanted a desk job. She didn't go into medicine to become an administrator, she'd gone into medicine to save lives. And while, yes, it could be argued that she was saving more lives by watching over the collection of stooges in her surgical ward, it wasn't the same as being elbow deep in a thoracic cavity. There was nothing like that moment when a repaired or transplanted heart beat for the first time. Some called it a god complex, that thrill heart surgeons got from their jobs, but it was different for her. For Erica, it was an affirmation. It was validation that she was doing something worthwhile with her life. Every heart that beat because of her, justified her existence. She sighed out loud at her dramatics, she was getting depressed and melancholic sitting in this stupid office day after day, like some prisoner to her own success.
She wrestled with the sudden urge to call Callie. That was turning into a pattern she wasn't entirely comfortable with. More and more, she was starting to wonder if she wasn't using their relationship as a crutch. When things were particularly crappy she would turn to Callie and expect her to make it more bearable. The sad thing was, she usually did. Erica wasn't certain she liked the emotional dependence she was acquiring. She was like a junkie and Callie was her fix. She couldn't help but think that maybe, just maybe she was setting herself up for a fall.
She was already deeper in this thing than she ever imagined being, ever consciously wanted to be. Now she couldn't stop thinking about what would happen if Callie were to decide that emotionally Erica just didn't have enough to offer. Erica knew her limitations, or at least she did. She was in unchartered territory here and because of the that, the doubt, the anxiety was almost always floating right below the surface. What if Callie left her? How would she cope? It wasn't a fair question, for herself or for her lover, but it was a reality. People changed their minds, people left each other. She couldn't help but think back to the day her father sat her down and told her he was moving out. She remembered the angry tears, the feeling of betrayal, the confusion of trying to comprehend something a ten year old's mind simply couldn't process. He'd said all the right things, told her it wasn't her fault and that he was sorry and that he loved her and would see her regularly. None of it made the hurting less, and even thirty plus years later, that wound still bled. It didn't help that two years after that fateful day, before she could reconcile things with him or with herself, he was dead.
The interoffice phone system beeped and, relieved to have something else to focus on, she pressed the button to see what her secretary had for her. "Yes, Cynthia."
"Dr. Albright would like to see you immediately in her office."
When it rained, it blew up a tornado that shredded everything in it's path. "Did she say what she wanted?"
"Does she ever?"
Good point. "Thanks. If she calls again, tell her I'm on my way," she said, feeling the apprehension wash over her. As chair of the hospital's board Cornelia Albright's cut-throat ambition served a purpose, too bad it so rarely meshed with Erica's. She spent a moment gathering her stuff and wondering what the woman could possibly want this late on a Friday afternoon.
Albright's office was on the eighth floor, the top floor of the administration building and four floors above her own. Her assistant greeted Erica as she strode into the exterior office. "Dr. Albright is in the conference room, Dr. Hahn. Go right in," the effecient young man said, barely glancing up from his computer.
The executive conference room was one of the most lavish rooms in the entire facility. The main feature was the huge, oval shaped mahogany table, polished to a glossy shimmer. High- backed leather chairs encirlecd the table and a large flat screen television drew the eye to the far side of the room. Against the wall and to the right of the table, was a full wet bar, it's exterior paneling the same rich mahogany as the table. Erica hated this room with it's richly painted blue walls and the unabashed avarice that hung inside like stale perfume. Inside this room, the last thing people cared about was medicine, they cared only about rankings and the funding and prestige that came with it. And while she understood that was part of the package, the seedy underbelly of every hospital, she didn't have to like it.
"Ah, Dr. Hahn, so good of you to join us," Albright said, looking up from some papers she was looking over. She was sitting at the head of the table and two men Erica didn't recognize were sitting in the chairs immediately to her left. The man closest to Cornelia was older, silver-haired and sharp-eyed. He was wearing an expensive dark suit and red tie. Something about him raised Erica's hackles. The other man was considerably younger and dressed more casually, in a brown Western-style button down shirt.
Erica stopped at the table but didn't sit, instead she rested her hands on the table top and pinned Cornelia with a look. "Can we cut the formalities and get down to business? I'm too busy today for bullshit."
Cornelia laughed with delight as she turned to the man in the suit. "Didn't I tell you she was tough?"
The man gave his own chuckle and Erica's eyes narrowed. "I didn't doubt you for a second, Cornelia," he said, heedless of the look he was receiving from Erica.
"Come," Albright beckoned, using a hand to push out the chair to her right. "Sit, Dr. Hahn, we have some exciting news."
Erica took a deep breath and moved to the chair, sitting and crossing her arms. "So?"
"This is Irving Rosen and Jason Shea from TMN. You've heard of it, haven't you?"
"The Medical Network, basic cable. Of course I've heard of it. They love to exploit rare or traumatic conditions, fixate an inordinate amount of time on gender reassignment surgeries and, when they do focus on hospitals, instead of showing real honest medicine, they sensationalize every case into a tear-jerky medical drama or a chaotic freakshow. They're the worst thing to happen to modern medicine since ambulance chasers."
There was a thick silence, then Rosen threw his head back and gave a belly laugh. "Nice to see you're a fan, Dr. Hahn. May I call you, Erica?"
"No."
"Fair enough," he easily conceded. "I suppose if I'd spent all that time and money going to school to be a hotshot doctor, I'd make people use my title too." He leaned forward and lowered his voice. "Truth is, I make a lot of people use my title anyway."
Erica stared at him for a second, unmoved by his attempts at charm. She turned back to Albright. "What are we doing here?"
The older woman's cheerful expression was faltering. "These gentlemen and their network have been looking for a hospital to start a new weekly television program. They think Seattle Grace could be that hospital."
"Do they? Well, as far as I'm concerned they can keep looking," Erica said. "I have no interest in this."
Cornelia picked up a pitcher of water and topped of her glass. "Why am I not surprised? Must everything be an uphill battle with you, Dr. Hahn?"
"When it's something I think is going to be detrimental to my staff, then, yes."
"We understand your concerns, Dr. Hahn-" Rosen started to speak but she cut him off.
"I don't think you do. This isn't a game. What we do here isn't done for entertainment value. We're trying to save lives and one second of distraction could be the difference between life and death. If I let my surgical ward turn into a sideshow for the cameras and just one patient isn't given the best care possible because of it, that's unacceptable for my staff and for me."
"Yes, and that's very noble," Albright stated, "but, as usual, you're missing the big picture. Hospitals need funding to function. With a number twelve ranking coupled with the downturn in our economy, unless we find another stream of revenue, we are going to have to do some serious belt tightening. Perhaps staff cuts. Perhaps we might have to close down the clinic or at least drastically cut hours. Our accounting staff are still crunching the numbers but things don't look good. Dr. Hahn- Erica, TMN is handing us a golden opportunity here. With their initial proposal, we can continue to operate in the black, there won't be one single budgetary cut. Are you really prepared to stand in the way of that?"
Erica understood the predicament the hospital was in, it was the same financial crunch most companies in the country were feeling and while she'd love for this to be as easy as Albright said it was, she had grave concerns. She could barely get her staff to understand the level of care she expected of them as it was. This was an unneeded and unwanted distraction. Erica held her ground. "I don't think it's in the best interest of the hospital."
"Your concerns are totally valid," Shea chimed in. "They're the same concerns every other chief has had in every hospital I've ever shot. But by the end, they always say the same thing, that we were way less intrusive than they'd anticipated, that they got used to the cameras and that after a while, it was like we weren't even there. Our team is good, Dr. Hahn. Actually we're the best. We know when to film and when to get the hell out of the way and the second a member of your staff says to stop filming, we stop. No questions, no argument. We're not here to make your life miserable, we're here to document. That's all."
"I still don't like it," Erica told them, not in the least bit swayed.
"Well, how about this?" Albright took another crack. "Seattle Grace Cardiothoracic Care Center."
Erica scowled, thrown by the change of subject. "I don't know what that means."
"It means that these gentlemen and their network are not only looking to find a hospital to film one season, they're looking to find a hospital to film several seasons."
"Pending the ratings of the first season, of course," Rosen added.
Erica scoffed. "Then I can't say no with enough emphasis."
"And if we get renewed for multiple seasons," Albright said as if neither of them had spoken, "that will allow us to fund a new state-of-the-art cardiothoracic research and treatment facility."
Erica pursed her lips, eyes going distant as she thought about the prospects of having a facility dedicated soley to the research and treatment of cardiothoracics. It was at the top of her wish list, something that she knew was nothing more than a pipe dream. A research and treatment center the way she envisioned it would put Grace not only on the national map, it'd put them on the international map. They'd be one of the premier programs in the world. It would be a tempting offer, if she thought it could actually happen. Too bad she didn't. Not for a second.
"So you're asking me to ignore my concerns and reservations so we can build a cardiac center? And I'm supposed to base this on the vague hope that: A) we can advance our rating and increase our revenue through actual medicine," Erica deduced aloud, ticking off the points on her fingers. "B) television viewers are going to find anything we do here even remotely interesting, C) TMN signs on for a few seasons, D) people care about this crappy show after a couple of seasons and E) you aren't just blowing smoke up my ass. I'm not stupid, Cornelia. I know the board is going to have to sign off on something that big. That's not a promise you can make."
Cornelia slid one of the papers across the table. "They signed off on it this morning, pending available funding. How exactly can I put this? We have decided that you're our gravy train, Dr. Hahn, and we intend to ride you to the top of the medical world."
Erica had no response to that. None.
"That's what I thought," Cornelia stated before turning back to Rosen and Shea. "So, now that Dr. Hahn is on board, what is the next step?"
They talked around her, but Erica didn't listen to a word of it. She couldn't muster another dissent and she felt dirty for it. It was ego, it was her own deep-seated ambition over-ruling her better judgement. She was going to get burned by this decision, she just knew it, she could feel it, yet she wasn't strong enough to stop it. She wasn't strong enough to ignore her own self-interest. This was going to end badly.