(no subject)
Title: A Waiting Room Of A Different Sort
Fandom: Grey's Anatomy
Characters/Pairings: Meredith, Denny, Dylan.
Prompt: #30 - Death for
fanfic100
Word Count: 2,088
Rating: PG-13
Progress: 8/100
Summary: Takes place immediatly after "Drowning On Dry Land". Meredith's got a long list of places you might end up when you die. This is not one of them.
Meredith’s got a long list of things that might happen after you die. Not an actual list of course (she’s never been that bored) but just something she keeps in the back of her mind. Heaven, hell - the religious concepts she was taught at a young age - and variations on both, as well as the idea that it all just stops. Which isn’t a half bad idea because she doesn’t really want to spend her days frolicking with puppies in a meadow somewhere for all eternity, and she hasn’t really done anything bad enough to be heading to hell. She doesn’t even really believe either place exists, but it’s a nice thought to go back to, not that she thought about it a lot normally. Until now.
They say your life, the people that matter, the things you’ve done, flash before your eyes. Meredith doesn’t recall any flashing. There was the frantic attempt to swim upwards, the panic as she sunk back down, and then…an odd sense of acceptance. She wasn’t going to get back up to the surface of her own accord. The water was too cold, and she wasn’t much of a swimmer. As she went down, as things started getting fuzzy, started getting dark, the only thing she could think of was ‘what next?’. It was ridiculous, that she had just given up and given in but Meredith knew a lost cause and right now this was one. So for those seconds or minutes that felt like hours or days she tried to conjure up an image of where she was going to end up. Then everything went black.
The next time she’s conscious, or at least aware of something happening it’s the burning feeling she’s gotten before when she inhales water by mistake and it ends up in your lungs. It makes your nose and throat hurt and it makes you cough a hell of a lot. Which Meredith does at the same time as her eyes snap open and she sees where she is for the first time. The hospital. A wave of relief comes over her, because that has to mean she’s not dead and someone saved her somehow, but she makes assumptions much too soon before she’s finished taking stock of the room and realized that she isn’t alone.
The uniform is what catches her eye first. Bomb squad. They don’t call in the bomb squad because someone drowns. That’s her first clue that something is up. That maybe she isn’t fine, saved, or still alive. And if that’s true then the person wearing that uniform can only be Dylan. It makes her not want to look at his face. He blew up, and she doesn’t know if you revert to form after death in this…whatever it is, or if he’s going to be bloody and, well, blown up and missing things. He looks pretty clean at least, so she summons up the courage and finds his face. Not only is he not bloody and disfigured but he’s actually smiling.
She sits up, spooked, because this is not a happy occasion, and he should definitely not be smiling. This is not one of her scenarios, this is bad. Not bad as in hell fires and brimstone but bad in a freaky, unprepared for this, sense. She almost has to ask. “Am I…” she stops, her mind working quicker and not quite in sync with her mouth. Meredith mouths the word the first time, and on her second try it actually comes out. “Dead?”
Dylan is just going to keep smiling, and ignore her question apparently. She wonders if she reaches out to touch him all she’ll find is air and a mirage. Maybe this is a dream. If it is then this is the most realistic dream she’s ever had.
“Damn right you are.”
That voice. It’s an oddly familiar drawl that she can’t quite place. She turns her head to the other side of her, slowly, and finds him at the same moment as her brain registers the owner of that voice. Denny.
She looks back at Dylan, who’s still there, then Denny, then straight ahead, speaking the only words that come to mind. “Holy shit.”
Now they both look at each other, sharing a glance that means something to them but absolutely nothing to her. Neither of them is saying anything, nothing creepy and foreboding, nothing comforting, nothing at all. She wants answers. Where is she? What are they doing here? Why does this look the hospital, and does the fact that they both died in said hospital mean that they’re stuck here? Does that mean she’s stuck here?
Of course the fact that she is apparently dead, and so are they does not mean that they have developed mind reading powers and she hasn’t really asked any of these questions, so expecting answers is a tad unrealistic she’ll admit. Honestly though she wouldn’t even know where to start. What to ask first. She was just informed by her friend’s dead ex-fiancé that she is in fact dead, and she needs time to figure out what all this means. Time, she thinks, is probably something she has a lot of.
“I remember you being a lot more talkative than this. Prone to babbling even.” Dylan finally speaks, and that smile fades which is only slightly less disconcerting. At least someone is talking. “Then again you had your hand on a bomb so it was kind of expected of you to be a little out of it.”
Meredith regards him with a strange kind of fascination because he’s acting this is normal. This can not be normal. Then, “You blew up.” This she aims at Dylan, before looking to Denny, “You had a blood clot that caused a stroke.”
“Yes, and you drowned.” Denny tells her, which is something she had more or less figured out. If it wasn’t the drowning thing, then it would’ve been the hypothermia. She notices, with some degree of relief that she isn’t blue. “Good, now that we got that cleared up.”
“No, it’s not cleared up. Nothing is cleared up. You’re dead, I’m dead. Why are we still at the hospital?” The rules of sentence structure and coherency had left her thought process upon waking and that had, not surprisingly, carried over into her speech. It didn’t really help that there were no words for this kind of situation. They don’t prep you for this, no one ever tells you what to do or say when you’re dead. She doesn’t know which questions are the right ones, the ones she should be asking, so she starts with that.
“It’s not really the hospital. Or maybe it is. I’m not sure.” This from Denny, who only looks more confused when he says it. That’s not a good sign.
“You don’t know?” She asks, in a voice that seems shrill, even to her ears, as it rises in pitch. Both men flinch. Well what did they expect? She just died and they were either playing dumb or quite possibly didn’t even know what the hell was going on.
“It’s not like we’ve ever done this before.” Dylan replies, glancing at Denny like he has to check and make sure he can speak for the both of them. “They don’t send out memos on these things or anything. We just play it by ear.”
“Play it by ear…” she mutters, incredulously, and that’s got to be the stupidest thing she has ever heard. He’s bugging her more now than he did when he was alive. “What the hell is going on?”
“Would you just calm down, and look at this rationally.” Dylan begins, in that same tone that he took when he was ordering people in the OR around like he was the chief himself. He probably would say more if she gave him the chance, but Meredith is getting fairly impatient.
“Calm down? Think rationally?” She mimics because both those statements are absolutely foreign to her right now. “Are you kidding? I just died and now I’m talking to two people I barely knew when they were both alive, both of whom claim to not know what’s going on and you’re telling me to calm down and be rational. Seriously?”
“And you were so eager to get her to talk,” Denny says to Dylan, who isn’t smiling anymore, just looking annoyed and a bit worried. Worry is the last thing she wants to see right now.
Dylan ignores the statement, instead choosing to address her, which she finds herself extremely thankful for as she would really, truly, like some answers. “Actually you’re not technically dead.”
Her head snaps in his direction, a sudden rush of hope and confusion hitting her. “What?”
“Oh good, false hope. That worked so well for me.” Denny seems slightly bitter with this whole situation and really she would think it would be out of character for him. Maybe it’s just being around Dylan that’s getting to him. He did have the tendency to bring out the worst in people, or at least in her because if she hadn’t been so scared about that bomb she would’ve really liked to hit him.
“Would you please…” Dylan trails, leaves the rest of the sentence blank for Denny to fill in himself. Wasn’t too hard to do. “You’re not really dead.” He was back to talking to her. “At least not yet. The temperature your body was at means there’s a chance that you could still come back.”
Coming back. That was good news, that was something to start with. And hey if she did she’d have a real amusing, if not creepy, story to tell. You can’t make this stuff up. “Okay, okay, so this is only temporary.”
“Possibly temporary,” Dylan reminds her, warning in his voice, a subtle sign to not get her hopes up.
“Alright, so where exactly are we?” She asks, feeling the gurney beneath her just to make sure she could still feel things, that things were still tangible. They are and she feels like throwing herself back down on it and closing her eyes, hoping to wake up and find out that none of this had happened. Or at least forget it was happening.
“There’s not really a word for it. It’s just an in-between.” Denny starts.
“Like a limbo?” She interjects, before he can continue.
“Yeah, limbo. Normally you don’t end up here but you could really go either way at this point.”
She gapes at the accusation. “Heaven or hell?”
“Living or dead.” He corrects.
That makes her feel a little better at least. “And what are you guys?” She asks, her mind swimming with this new information. “You aren’t like angels or something right? This isn’t going to be like some cheesy made for television movie.”
Denny laughs and she’s still not seeing the funny in this. At all. It’s Dylan who ends up answering. “No, we’re not angels. We’re just supposed to keep you company. It’s something and someone familiar to make the transition easier. Hence the hospital.”
“So you’re the welcoming committee assigned to wait with me until I’m either a member of the living again or really dead?” It’s weird, and not at all what she’s expecting. But she hadn’t been expecting to die - or almost die as the case may be - either.
“Something like that.” The former bomb squad leader confirms, and it’s the non yes or no answer that bugs her most. It’s the air of mystery, of the unknown that makes her uncomfortable with this whole set up.
“So I wait?” She replies.
“You wait,” he repeats.
Meredith lays back then because she’s starting to feel dizzy, but at least she’s feeling something. Waiting is not something she is especially good at. The men don’t say anything else to her and she starts to forget they’re even there. Really she should be asking them all kinds of questions because, assuming this is actually happening, which she kind is, this is a one time opportunity. There’s a part of Meredith though that just doesn’t want to know. She doesn’t fear the answers, she’d just prefer not shaking her world up more should she go back. She’d prefer to think this was all a drug induced hallucination. Some things are better left unknown. So she doesn’t ask questions, and she doesn’t get any answers, she just lays there hoping that whoever is currently trying to save her is doing their best.
Fandom: Grey's Anatomy
Characters/Pairings: Meredith, Denny, Dylan.
Prompt: #30 - Death for
fanfic100
Word Count: 2,088
Rating: PG-13
Progress: 8/100
Summary: Takes place immediatly after "Drowning On Dry Land". Meredith's got a long list of places you might end up when you die. This is not one of them.
Meredith’s got a long list of things that might happen after you die. Not an actual list of course (she’s never been that bored) but just something she keeps in the back of her mind. Heaven, hell - the religious concepts she was taught at a young age - and variations on both, as well as the idea that it all just stops. Which isn’t a half bad idea because she doesn’t really want to spend her days frolicking with puppies in a meadow somewhere for all eternity, and she hasn’t really done anything bad enough to be heading to hell. She doesn’t even really believe either place exists, but it’s a nice thought to go back to, not that she thought about it a lot normally. Until now.
They say your life, the people that matter, the things you’ve done, flash before your eyes. Meredith doesn’t recall any flashing. There was the frantic attempt to swim upwards, the panic as she sunk back down, and then…an odd sense of acceptance. She wasn’t going to get back up to the surface of her own accord. The water was too cold, and she wasn’t much of a swimmer. As she went down, as things started getting fuzzy, started getting dark, the only thing she could think of was ‘what next?’. It was ridiculous, that she had just given up and given in but Meredith knew a lost cause and right now this was one. So for those seconds or minutes that felt like hours or days she tried to conjure up an image of where she was going to end up. Then everything went black.
The next time she’s conscious, or at least aware of something happening it’s the burning feeling she’s gotten before when she inhales water by mistake and it ends up in your lungs. It makes your nose and throat hurt and it makes you cough a hell of a lot. Which Meredith does at the same time as her eyes snap open and she sees where she is for the first time. The hospital. A wave of relief comes over her, because that has to mean she’s not dead and someone saved her somehow, but she makes assumptions much too soon before she’s finished taking stock of the room and realized that she isn’t alone.
The uniform is what catches her eye first. Bomb squad. They don’t call in the bomb squad because someone drowns. That’s her first clue that something is up. That maybe she isn’t fine, saved, or still alive. And if that’s true then the person wearing that uniform can only be Dylan. It makes her not want to look at his face. He blew up, and she doesn’t know if you revert to form after death in this…whatever it is, or if he’s going to be bloody and, well, blown up and missing things. He looks pretty clean at least, so she summons up the courage and finds his face. Not only is he not bloody and disfigured but he’s actually smiling.
She sits up, spooked, because this is not a happy occasion, and he should definitely not be smiling. This is not one of her scenarios, this is bad. Not bad as in hell fires and brimstone but bad in a freaky, unprepared for this, sense. She almost has to ask. “Am I…” she stops, her mind working quicker and not quite in sync with her mouth. Meredith mouths the word the first time, and on her second try it actually comes out. “Dead?”
Dylan is just going to keep smiling, and ignore her question apparently. She wonders if she reaches out to touch him all she’ll find is air and a mirage. Maybe this is a dream. If it is then this is the most realistic dream she’s ever had.
“Damn right you are.”
That voice. It’s an oddly familiar drawl that she can’t quite place. She turns her head to the other side of her, slowly, and finds him at the same moment as her brain registers the owner of that voice. Denny.
She looks back at Dylan, who’s still there, then Denny, then straight ahead, speaking the only words that come to mind. “Holy shit.”
Now they both look at each other, sharing a glance that means something to them but absolutely nothing to her. Neither of them is saying anything, nothing creepy and foreboding, nothing comforting, nothing at all. She wants answers. Where is she? What are they doing here? Why does this look the hospital, and does the fact that they both died in said hospital mean that they’re stuck here? Does that mean she’s stuck here?
Of course the fact that she is apparently dead, and so are they does not mean that they have developed mind reading powers and she hasn’t really asked any of these questions, so expecting answers is a tad unrealistic she’ll admit. Honestly though she wouldn’t even know where to start. What to ask first. She was just informed by her friend’s dead ex-fiancé that she is in fact dead, and she needs time to figure out what all this means. Time, she thinks, is probably something she has a lot of.
“I remember you being a lot more talkative than this. Prone to babbling even.” Dylan finally speaks, and that smile fades which is only slightly less disconcerting. At least someone is talking. “Then again you had your hand on a bomb so it was kind of expected of you to be a little out of it.”
Meredith regards him with a strange kind of fascination because he’s acting this is normal. This can not be normal. Then, “You blew up.” This she aims at Dylan, before looking to Denny, “You had a blood clot that caused a stroke.”
“Yes, and you drowned.” Denny tells her, which is something she had more or less figured out. If it wasn’t the drowning thing, then it would’ve been the hypothermia. She notices, with some degree of relief that she isn’t blue. “Good, now that we got that cleared up.”
“No, it’s not cleared up. Nothing is cleared up. You’re dead, I’m dead. Why are we still at the hospital?” The rules of sentence structure and coherency had left her thought process upon waking and that had, not surprisingly, carried over into her speech. It didn’t really help that there were no words for this kind of situation. They don’t prep you for this, no one ever tells you what to do or say when you’re dead. She doesn’t know which questions are the right ones, the ones she should be asking, so she starts with that.
“It’s not really the hospital. Or maybe it is. I’m not sure.” This from Denny, who only looks more confused when he says it. That’s not a good sign.
“You don’t know?” She asks, in a voice that seems shrill, even to her ears, as it rises in pitch. Both men flinch. Well what did they expect? She just died and they were either playing dumb or quite possibly didn’t even know what the hell was going on.
“It’s not like we’ve ever done this before.” Dylan replies, glancing at Denny like he has to check and make sure he can speak for the both of them. “They don’t send out memos on these things or anything. We just play it by ear.”
“Play it by ear…” she mutters, incredulously, and that’s got to be the stupidest thing she has ever heard. He’s bugging her more now than he did when he was alive. “What the hell is going on?”
“Would you just calm down, and look at this rationally.” Dylan begins, in that same tone that he took when he was ordering people in the OR around like he was the chief himself. He probably would say more if she gave him the chance, but Meredith is getting fairly impatient.
“Calm down? Think rationally?” She mimics because both those statements are absolutely foreign to her right now. “Are you kidding? I just died and now I’m talking to two people I barely knew when they were both alive, both of whom claim to not know what’s going on and you’re telling me to calm down and be rational. Seriously?”
“And you were so eager to get her to talk,” Denny says to Dylan, who isn’t smiling anymore, just looking annoyed and a bit worried. Worry is the last thing she wants to see right now.
Dylan ignores the statement, instead choosing to address her, which she finds herself extremely thankful for as she would really, truly, like some answers. “Actually you’re not technically dead.”
Her head snaps in his direction, a sudden rush of hope and confusion hitting her. “What?”
“Oh good, false hope. That worked so well for me.” Denny seems slightly bitter with this whole situation and really she would think it would be out of character for him. Maybe it’s just being around Dylan that’s getting to him. He did have the tendency to bring out the worst in people, or at least in her because if she hadn’t been so scared about that bomb she would’ve really liked to hit him.
“Would you please…” Dylan trails, leaves the rest of the sentence blank for Denny to fill in himself. Wasn’t too hard to do. “You’re not really dead.” He was back to talking to her. “At least not yet. The temperature your body was at means there’s a chance that you could still come back.”
Coming back. That was good news, that was something to start with. And hey if she did she’d have a real amusing, if not creepy, story to tell. You can’t make this stuff up. “Okay, okay, so this is only temporary.”
“Possibly temporary,” Dylan reminds her, warning in his voice, a subtle sign to not get her hopes up.
“Alright, so where exactly are we?” She asks, feeling the gurney beneath her just to make sure she could still feel things, that things were still tangible. They are and she feels like throwing herself back down on it and closing her eyes, hoping to wake up and find out that none of this had happened. Or at least forget it was happening.
“There’s not really a word for it. It’s just an in-between.” Denny starts.
“Like a limbo?” She interjects, before he can continue.
“Yeah, limbo. Normally you don’t end up here but you could really go either way at this point.”
She gapes at the accusation. “Heaven or hell?”
“Living or dead.” He corrects.
That makes her feel a little better at least. “And what are you guys?” She asks, her mind swimming with this new information. “You aren’t like angels or something right? This isn’t going to be like some cheesy made for television movie.”
Denny laughs and she’s still not seeing the funny in this. At all. It’s Dylan who ends up answering. “No, we’re not angels. We’re just supposed to keep you company. It’s something and someone familiar to make the transition easier. Hence the hospital.”
“So you’re the welcoming committee assigned to wait with me until I’m either a member of the living again or really dead?” It’s weird, and not at all what she’s expecting. But she hadn’t been expecting to die - or almost die as the case may be - either.
“Something like that.” The former bomb squad leader confirms, and it’s the non yes or no answer that bugs her most. It’s the air of mystery, of the unknown that makes her uncomfortable with this whole set up.
“So I wait?” She replies.
“You wait,” he repeats.
Meredith lays back then because she’s starting to feel dizzy, but at least she’s feeling something. Waiting is not something she is especially good at. The men don’t say anything else to her and she starts to forget they’re even there. Really she should be asking them all kinds of questions because, assuming this is actually happening, which she kind is, this is a one time opportunity. There’s a part of Meredith though that just doesn’t want to know. She doesn’t fear the answers, she’d just prefer not shaking her world up more should she go back. She’d prefer to think this was all a drug induced hallucination. Some things are better left unknown. So she doesn’t ask questions, and she doesn’t get any answers, she just lays there hoping that whoever is currently trying to save her is doing their best.