Using Her Head by Sashile, Rated PG, Thing-A-Thon VIII
Title: Using Her Head
Rating: PG
Category: Character Study
Genre: Gen
Character: Jeanne; Jeanne/Tony pairing in past tense
Summary: She knew something was off about him, but didn't want to confront it when she already had so much on her plate
Prompt: Jeanne Benoit - internship, cramming
Disclaimer: The characters herein belong to DPB, CBS, Paramount, et al. No copyright infringement is intended
Notes: I'm not a Tony/Jeanne fan at all (nor a Jeanne fan), and this isn't a Tony/Jeanne story. I just can't stand how ridiculously unobservant TPTB made Dr. Jeanne Benoit in regards to 'Tony DiNardo', so this is my attempt to redeem that. I don't like the idea of them making a medical school graduate so flaky. And I wrote the whole thing in about half an hour while watching TV after a longish day of internship orientation, so it's probably riddled with errors (which are entirely my fault) and may or may not make sense.
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Dr. Jeanne Benoit may have been working eighty hours a week-okay, let’s be honest, there were some weeks it was closer to ninety, but legally speaking, we’ll stick to eighty-during her internship, but she wasn’t an idiot, and she wasn’t unobservant. She was just too… happy, to be worried about the way nothing seemed to add up in her life.
Everything had been dictated to her by her parents, and considering they had never gotten along, that didn’t make her life easy. Boarding school in France had been her father’s idea; undergrad at Brown had been her mother’s. Then it was a master’s degree at the Sorbonne-father’s idea-and medical school back in the States, at Georgetown University-that was all her mother.
Dating John, now, that had been Jeanne’s idea, and for once, she had done something that neither parent approved of. He didn’t come from money, which made her father frown, and his job as a Metro PD officer didn’t please her mother. But she didn’t care. They met in her first year at Georgetown, when she was speeding through Rock Creek Park to get to a study session on time. She knew it had been cliché, but she had turned on the waterworks and the French accent that was still fresh from her years at the Sorbonne, and ended up with a phone number instead of a ticket. And for awhile, they were happy; so happy that she hadn’t been paying attention to how much his drinking had increased while she was cramming for the USMLE Step 1 and he was supposed to be studying for the detective’s exam. Somehow, they both passed, and the next thing she knew, she was going through her third year clerkships with an engagement ring on her finger.
She realized how much of a problem the drinking really was when she caught him in bed with Michelle. In retrospect, maybe it was a good thing: John and Jeanne? It was so cutesy it made her nauseated. Or maybe that was just the smells of the Gastroenterology ward after she threw herself into her rotations to try to forget. If she had been willing to speak to John at that point, she would have thanked him for helping her graduate from medical school with honors.
Maybe she was just a glutton for punishment, or maybe it was again her mother’s influence, but she chose to stay in DC for her internship. In retrospect, she should have left, the further away, the better. Harvard, Johns Hopkins-hell, maybe even Mayo Clinic or Stanford-would have been a better plan. Away from DC, away from John and the memories of when she had been so busy that she was blissfully ignorant of his extracurricular activities, things would have been different. But she hadn’t, and when an incredibly good-looking and charming ‘film professor’ ‘accidently’ took her coffee one morning, she found herself hooked before she could stop herself, which was why when things started to not add up, she tried not to think too much about it.
What on-line film professor gets called into work for emergencies? What kind of emergency could an on-line film professor possibly have? Why did he always visit her at work, instead of vise-versa? Why did he never introduce her to his friends, his co-workers?
But internship sucked enough without having to add relationship problems into the mix, so she tried to ignore those questions and just focus on the fact that Tony was attractive and charming and attentive, that he brought her dinner to the hospital and served it to her on a folding table by the parking lot, that he never tried to make their relationship something it wasn’t, that he was as comfortable with an evening in to watch movies as he was with going out dancing. She had listened to her fellow interns complain about the things their husbands or boyfriends had done or said and was just thankful that Tony never acted like that.
Maybe she should have suspected something when her friends started to comment that he was too good to be true.
No, that wasn’t fair to herself; she had suspected something, but didn’t let herself think about it. With her resources, it would have been so easy to find out if he was someone other than who he wanted to believe he was. She could have very easily hired a private investigator, and the way he was always coming and going from work-his real work-it would have only taken a few hours for said private investigator to get back to her and let her in on his secret-that Tony DiNardo wasn’t Tony DiNardo at all, but NCIS Special Agent Anthony DiNozzo.
For just once in her entire life, she wanted to put aside her head, to stop thinking about something and just let herself feel. She had been trained to think things to pieces. Although at twenty-seven, she was hardly over-the-hill, she was seeing her friends get married off and start having children, and had started to wonder if that would ever be her, or if she was destined to be single forever, watching relationships fall apart because she couldn’t stop herself from being so damned intimidatingly smart and overeducated. So with Tony, she had done everything differently than she had done with John. She didn’t question anything; she practically made it a point not to imply that her work was more important than his; and although it almost killed her due to sleep deprivation, she tried to always be available when he was, instead of locking herself in the library with Robbins Pathology or Harrison’s Internal Medicine like she had done when she was dating John.
And all she learned from the experience was that maybe using her head every once in awhile in a relationship wasn’t such a bad thing. If she had just confronted Tony at the first hint that he was lying to her-which was pretty early in the relationship-she wouldn’t have gotten so damned involved and could have just cut the ties then. She could have gone through internship spending her rare free Sundays enjoying champagne brunch with her fellow interns at Ardeo, using her off-hours sleeping instead of waiting for a table at restaurants she didn’t really care for. And maybe when her internship was over, she would have found herself back in that hospital as a second-year resident, instead of taking care of sick children in Uganda. And maybe she would have been available for a relationship with someone who didn’t feel the need to lie to her about every damned thing in his life.
Rating: PG
Category: Character Study
Genre: Gen
Character: Jeanne; Jeanne/Tony pairing in past tense
Summary: She knew something was off about him, but didn't want to confront it when she already had so much on her plate
Prompt: Jeanne Benoit - internship, cramming
Disclaimer: The characters herein belong to DPB, CBS, Paramount, et al. No copyright infringement is intended
Notes: I'm not a Tony/Jeanne fan at all (nor a Jeanne fan), and this isn't a Tony/Jeanne story. I just can't stand how ridiculously unobservant TPTB made Dr. Jeanne Benoit in regards to 'Tony DiNardo', so this is my attempt to redeem that. I don't like the idea of them making a medical school graduate so flaky. And I wrote the whole thing in about half an hour while watching TV after a longish day of internship orientation, so it's probably riddled with errors (which are entirely my fault) and may or may not make sense.
---
Dr. Jeanne Benoit may have been working eighty hours a week-okay, let’s be honest, there were some weeks it was closer to ninety, but legally speaking, we’ll stick to eighty-during her internship, but she wasn’t an idiot, and she wasn’t unobservant. She was just too… happy, to be worried about the way nothing seemed to add up in her life.
Everything had been dictated to her by her parents, and considering they had never gotten along, that didn’t make her life easy. Boarding school in France had been her father’s idea; undergrad at Brown had been her mother’s. Then it was a master’s degree at the Sorbonne-father’s idea-and medical school back in the States, at Georgetown University-that was all her mother.
Dating John, now, that had been Jeanne’s idea, and for once, she had done something that neither parent approved of. He didn’t come from money, which made her father frown, and his job as a Metro PD officer didn’t please her mother. But she didn’t care. They met in her first year at Georgetown, when she was speeding through Rock Creek Park to get to a study session on time. She knew it had been cliché, but she had turned on the waterworks and the French accent that was still fresh from her years at the Sorbonne, and ended up with a phone number instead of a ticket. And for awhile, they were happy; so happy that she hadn’t been paying attention to how much his drinking had increased while she was cramming for the USMLE Step 1 and he was supposed to be studying for the detective’s exam. Somehow, they both passed, and the next thing she knew, she was going through her third year clerkships with an engagement ring on her finger.
She realized how much of a problem the drinking really was when she caught him in bed with Michelle. In retrospect, maybe it was a good thing: John and Jeanne? It was so cutesy it made her nauseated. Or maybe that was just the smells of the Gastroenterology ward after she threw herself into her rotations to try to forget. If she had been willing to speak to John at that point, she would have thanked him for helping her graduate from medical school with honors.
Maybe she was just a glutton for punishment, or maybe it was again her mother’s influence, but she chose to stay in DC for her internship. In retrospect, she should have left, the further away, the better. Harvard, Johns Hopkins-hell, maybe even Mayo Clinic or Stanford-would have been a better plan. Away from DC, away from John and the memories of when she had been so busy that she was blissfully ignorant of his extracurricular activities, things would have been different. But she hadn’t, and when an incredibly good-looking and charming ‘film professor’ ‘accidently’ took her coffee one morning, she found herself hooked before she could stop herself, which was why when things started to not add up, she tried not to think too much about it.
What on-line film professor gets called into work for emergencies? What kind of emergency could an on-line film professor possibly have? Why did he always visit her at work, instead of vise-versa? Why did he never introduce her to his friends, his co-workers?
But internship sucked enough without having to add relationship problems into the mix, so she tried to ignore those questions and just focus on the fact that Tony was attractive and charming and attentive, that he brought her dinner to the hospital and served it to her on a folding table by the parking lot, that he never tried to make their relationship something it wasn’t, that he was as comfortable with an evening in to watch movies as he was with going out dancing. She had listened to her fellow interns complain about the things their husbands or boyfriends had done or said and was just thankful that Tony never acted like that.
Maybe she should have suspected something when her friends started to comment that he was too good to be true.
No, that wasn’t fair to herself; she had suspected something, but didn’t let herself think about it. With her resources, it would have been so easy to find out if he was someone other than who he wanted to believe he was. She could have very easily hired a private investigator, and the way he was always coming and going from work-his real work-it would have only taken a few hours for said private investigator to get back to her and let her in on his secret-that Tony DiNardo wasn’t Tony DiNardo at all, but NCIS Special Agent Anthony DiNozzo.
For just once in her entire life, she wanted to put aside her head, to stop thinking about something and just let herself feel. She had been trained to think things to pieces. Although at twenty-seven, she was hardly over-the-hill, she was seeing her friends get married off and start having children, and had started to wonder if that would ever be her, or if she was destined to be single forever, watching relationships fall apart because she couldn’t stop herself from being so damned intimidatingly smart and overeducated. So with Tony, she had done everything differently than she had done with John. She didn’t question anything; she practically made it a point not to imply that her work was more important than his; and although it almost killed her due to sleep deprivation, she tried to always be available when he was, instead of locking herself in the library with Robbins Pathology or Harrison’s Internal Medicine like she had done when she was dating John.
And all she learned from the experience was that maybe using her head every once in awhile in a relationship wasn’t such a bad thing. If she had just confronted Tony at the first hint that he was lying to her-which was pretty early in the relationship-she wouldn’t have gotten so damned involved and could have just cut the ties then. She could have gone through internship spending her rare free Sundays enjoying champagne brunch with her fellow interns at Ardeo, using her off-hours sleeping instead of waiting for a table at restaurants she didn’t really care for. And maybe when her internship was over, she would have found herself back in that hospital as a second-year resident, instead of taking care of sick children in Uganda. And maybe she would have been available for a relationship with someone who didn’t feel the need to lie to her about every damned thing in his life.