day two-thousand, one-hundred and ninety {ensemble}
Title: Day Two Thousand, One Hundred And Ninety
Fandom: Grey's Anatomy
Characters/Pairings: Ensemble. Meredith/Derek, Mark/Lexie, Cristina/Owen, Callie/Sadie, past Alex/Izzie
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 12,145
Author's Note: This is my baby, guys, and I'm a little afraid of posting it, but here we go.
Summary: Spoilers for Season 5, spec after that. Character death (if you've Season 5 you can figure that one out). Six years later. Six unhappy anniversaries later. You thought it would get easier.
He hits the snooze button on the alarm clock three times without even looking at it. By the fourth time he sits there blinking at the fuzzy edges of the red numbers on the digital display, bare feet on the chilly wooden floor.
It’s only after he’s been standing under the spray of the shower for five minutes that he realizes today marks another year. Two thousand one hundred and ninety days -- he can recite the number from memory and too much time spent inside his own head.
He wipes a hand over the fogged up mirror, a semi-circle reflection of himself that he only recognizes half of the time, and makes coffee, glancing at the calendar in between his cereal and the newspaper he’s really only pretending to read, all for an audience of one.
Six years ago, he never really thought he’d end up here. That’s how great his foresight is.
---
“Normal day, normal day, normal day,” Meredith chants, over the sink, toothbrush in hand, foot tapping against the tile.
Derek looks at her strangely. He wouldn’t understand, and she doesn’t feel like repeating it anyways.
---
“We’re out of coffee,” Lexie murmurs, and he feels the bed shift as she slips back under the covers, curling herself around him, her feet tangling with his, her head resting on his shoulder.
He groans, mumbles a reply that he’s not even sure the meaning of, and keeps his eyes closed. Mark’s only been asleep for a good three hours, and he’s nowhere near ready to get up no matter how late it probably is.
“Mark, I can’t get through today without coffee,” she whines, directly into his ear. “My interns are going to make me crazy, and I know I wasn’t this bad when I was one.” He still doesn’t give her a coherent response, and so she squeezes his hand, forcefully. “Right?”
“Sleep,” he says, finally, because he’s of the opinion that at this point he really has no one to answer to if he shows up an hour late and neither does she. One of the perks that he guesses comes with being Chief.
And then just as he thinks she might actually listen, just as she seems to relax into him, there’s a crash from the spare bedroom down the hall.
His eyes shot open, awake and alert now, with a marginally clearer, “Fuck,” that rolls of his lips.
“Sadie!” Lexie yells, as she sits up in bed, and he winces at the volume of that one single word.
“Sorry,” they both hear, a few seconds later. “You didn’t care about that lamp next to the bed right?”
He shoots Lexie a look. “That’s an antique,” he reminds her.
“Shh,” she hisses, yells back to Sadie, “No, it’s fine, don’t worry about it.”
“You had to let her live here,” he chides. “That girl has more money than she knows what to do with, it’s not like she would be out on the street.”
“People should not have to live in hotels,” she says, starting in on a familiar conversation that they generally have at least twice a month, for the past three months that she’s been living here. “And what are we going to do with a spare bedroom anyways? It’s not like she’s taking up space that we’re going to do something with.”
“She breaks everything,” he points out, watching her rise and pull her tank over her head, going searching for a sweater to wear. “She has more sex than we do, which is saying something - not that I would mind if half the time you didn’t leave me here with her.”
“Missing your glory days of having a different woman for every day of the week?” Lexie asks, sorting through a pile of clothes on the chair in the far corner of the room, determining whether they are clean or dirty.
“I’m the Chief, and you get home later than I do. And leave me with a hot blonde. That’s all I’m saying.”
“Okay, and what about when Callie was living here? Despite the fact that you two actually slept together, I didn’t worry then, and I’m not going to worry now.”
“That’s different,” he insists. “She plays for the other team.”
“No, she plays for both teams. Which is probably your dream.” She stops in her tracks, then whirls around, and he can see in her eyes exactly where he messed up. “And you were the one who said she could stay here, despite the fact that she is beyond loaded too, okay, so don’t even pull that about Sadie.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because George knew that, and he told me everything back then.”
Mark contemplates that statement, thinks about whether or not to add the thing that’s been lingering in the back of his mind for a few weeks, and decides that he’s just not quite awake enough to really care whether this is a good time or not. “Rumor has it that George got married two weeks ago.”
There’s a pause, for a moment, and then she nods, and goes back to what she was doing. Over it, just like that, and he smiles when she isn’t looking. “Good for him. And stop trying to change the subject.”
“Hey,” Sadie sticks her head in the door, half dressed, hair disheveled, not even bothering to knock or give them any warning, despite the fact that for all she knew they could’ve been having sex right now. At the very least naked (Mark is, but he’s still under the sheets, and it’s not something she hasn’t walked in on in the shower a few too many times). “Where’s the coffee?”
Lexie levels her gaze with his, and he has a feeling he’s going to have to go grocery shopping when he gets off work if he wants to live through tomorrow morning.
---
“And how does this make you feel?”
This would be the fifth time she’s heard that phrase repeated this morning, and being that this is still all before seven in the morning, her tolerance for it is exactly zero. Cristina rolls her eyes, sits up a little straighter, and says, “Okay, for the amount we’re paying you I think we’d really rather hear how that makes you feel.”
The shrink does a wonderful job of not glaring at her, instead keeping that plastic smile in place, and Cristina knows that has exactly as much to do with how much she’s getting paid. “This is really less about me and more about getting in touch with your own feelings.”
That warrants another eye roll, and this time Owen nudges her. She has no problem glaring at him. “Are you kidding with this? We’ve been doing this for, what, three weeks? The only difference I’ve noticed is that I now have three hours less free time in my week.”
Across from her, the woman, in the perfectly tailored black suit jacket and skirt, flips her pen back and forth between her thumb and her index finger and cracks her neck. “Ms. Yang, if you are unhappy here, perhaps you should try the hospital’s psychiatrist - I’m sure she would be more than happy to assist you.”
“We’ve tried that. That didn’t work either.” She replies. Not that she had really tried to make it work. If it were up to her, they wouldn’t be going at all, but Owen was mildly insistent about how this wasn’t normal, and how maybe if he, and by extension she, talked to someone then he wouldn’t wake up yelling and trying to hit things. Six years of dealing with this, however, and Cristina had gotten pretty good about getting the hell out of the way.
“Try is a loose term.” It’s the first thing Owen’s said in a few minutes, and she can’t help the feeling of ill-will that crop up as soon as he does speak. Whose side is he on anyway?
“Alright, you want to do this touchy feeling emotional stuff? Then you do it. I’m leaving.” Cristina says, grabbing her jacket and her bag, without an ounce of remorse for just giving up. She had tried here, was trying, and if he couldn’t see that then that was his problem.
“Ms. Yang,” the woman calls.
“Cristina,” Owen pleads.
She doesn’t turn around for either of them, just tells Owen, “I’ll see you at work.”
The hospital’s a ten minute walk from here, and she takes it as an opportunity to breathe fresh air, something other than that stuffy office that’s quickly becoming her own personal hell.
---
Meredith takes a detour from the hospital. Ends up driving the extra five minutes it takes to get to Alex’s apartment, climbing the four flights of stairs because she can’t wait for the elevator, and shoving the spare key in the door without knocking.
All because she has a gut feeling. She just doesn’t know what that feeling is yet. She just knows she needs to.
He’s sitting at his kitchen counter with his breakfast, the television on mute behind her, and he only glances her way casually, like this is nothing out of the ordinary. Not even a greeting.
She throws her stuff down on the counter and takes a seat next to him. “Are you going in today?”
“It’s just another day,” he replies, after a moment, even though it’s clearly not, for either of them. She nods, has been telling herself the exact same thing since she woke up. Denial works well for people like them. “I’ve got back to back surgeries anyway. Who knows what else will come into the ER.”
“Right.” And if he’s marginally okay, at least okay enough to show up and move, fairly mechanically, through two surgeries, maybe more, than so is she. She takes a deep breath, “Right, okay. No big deal. It’s just - whatever.”
He nods, says, “I did this earlier.”
She lets that breath out, slumping in her seat a little, words coming out in one long, endless rush, “Oh thank god I’m not the only one.”
If he could still smile today, he probably would have.
---
“Did you just run down the hallway?” Mark asks, arms crossed, leaning against the nurse’s station with raised eyebrows.
“Shut up,” Callie tells him, deliberately taking carefully measured steps the rest of the way towards him. “It wasn’t running, it was walking very fast. Power walking. And this is your fault.”
The smirk on his face turns into a frown. “How the hell is it my fault?”
“Because ever since you two let her move in with you, she’s been getting to work earlier because she rides in with you half the time. So now she’s here an hour earlier than she used to be which means there’s more chance of me running into her.” She’s really far too old and mature to be doing this high school crap - and yet.
“If I had my way,” he starts, a familiar rant just below the surface.
“Yeah, yeah, but Lexie’s turned you into her little lapdog, and you no longer have any say, I know.” She cuts him off, before she has to hear all about it again. He glares. Callie doesn’t particularly care.
“So she’s hitting on you again.” It’s not even a question, merely a statement of a fact they are both very, very aware of.
“Only constantly. Have you seen the looks she gives people?” She lowers her voice, suddenly hyper aware of who might overhear her, especially considering that Lexie was no less than thirty feet away with a set of very wet behind the ears interns. “Like they’re a piece of meat she can’t wait to get her hands on. Like you want her to get her hands on you.”
It doesn’t do much to remove the frown from his face. “Pick a different analogy next time, Torres. And of course I’ve seen those looks, I live with her, remember.”
“Does she talk about me? At all?”
“Yes, in between the constant parade of men, and the occasional woman, she has.” He pauses, and in that few seconds she allows herself to get her hopes up that maybe she’s getting somewhere. Bad idea. “As in Dr. Torres did this. You’re her superior; do you really think she’s going to talk to me about who she wants to have sex with?”
She tries not to glare. Really tries. “It’s just an innocent question.”
“Right. I’m sure this whole thing is completely innocent.” He shakes his head, and she watches him turn and start walking down the hall.
“Wait a minute, where are you going?”
“To do Chiefly things,” he says, making so gesture she isn’t familiar with as he ventures down the hallway and disappears, leaving her anxious and chatty without anyone to be chatty with.
---
Lexie finds herself actually having to stop what she’s saying, mid-sentence, as she watches Mark walk by, headed down the hallway, and the eyes of the first-week interns, both men and women, follow him. She isn’t sure if it’s because he’s the Chief, or if it’s because he’s Mark Sloan, formerly, maybe still, known as McSteamy for very, very good reasons.
She clears her throat, once, twice, three times before she’s able to draw the majority of their eyes away from him. “It’s not polite to stare people,” she says, in her best authoritative voice that she has saved up especially for this situation. They do it with every attending they see too, especially the attractive ones, and it’s starting to be more than a little irritating. Lexie knows, without a doubt, there is no way that she was this bad as an intern.
From out of the corner of her eye she watches Sadie stroll down the hallway, making eye contact with Callie, and then watches Callie make a break for it, down the same hallway Mark had gone. She makes note of that, reminds herself that she really needs to talk to Sadie at some point today, and then tries to remember what she was going to say before all her interns decided there were more important things to pay attention to.
“Katy, Tony, you two are going to help out in the clinic today.” She can see their faces fall, but doesn’t pay any mind to it. There’s a method to this, because she understands how interns learn because of how she was taught, a lot of that from the things Izzie taught her, she thinks, with a tinge of sadness, and so she knows you can’t just delegate them to the pit for sutures or to the clinic for the common cold and various venereal diseases. But this is their first week, and she’s still got her own surgeries and cases to deal with too. “TJ and Maria you guys are going to go assist in trauma, and Jennifer you did such a good job with the research on that neuro case yesterday that Dr. Shepherd says you can come help him today.”
Four frowns and a smile, she decides, as she watches them scatter, is better than all frowns. And then she sets her sights on Sadie, who is still there thankfully, talking to one of Ryan’s interns, and heads in her direction.
There’s a second long beat between the intern leaving and Sadie turning to her, speaking up before Lexie can even figure out precisely what she wants to say here. “Is she single?”
“That’s a…he. You know that right?”
Sadie fixes her with a look that’s halfway between a glare and the facial equivalent of the word ‘duh’. “Not him. Dr. Torres,” she clarifies, making Lexie feel very dense suddenly.
“She was with Dr. Robbins - Arizona, but she’s been gone awhile so…” she frowns, thinking she’s probably the wrong person to be asking this.
Lexie tries to keep away from the gossip mill these days, mostly because it fills your head with lies and rumors about people you either don’t know a thing about or know far too closely to believe any of it. And also because every now and then it’ll be about who Mark is sleeping with, other than her, because people don’t know what they’re talking about. Half of the time it’s Sadie anyway.
“Mark would probably know - not that I’m suggesting you ask him because I don’t even think he’d tell you and that would just be awkward.” One of the problems with talking to Sadie is that, despite the fact that’s she’s older than Lexie, she never quite grew up, so all the professionalism and maturity that’s seeped into Lexie by now, the kind of qualities that generally keep her from rambling like a college student who’s had a little too much to drink, kind of just dissolves and she reverts back to twenty-four. “That’s not the point. I need to talk to you.”
“About?” Sadie seems marginally less interested in the conversation now that her part of it is, for the most part, done. At least the fun part is.
“Could you just be a little more…careful? I mean I understand that lamp was probably on the edge and that glasses are very easy to just knock off the table.”
“Actually that glass wasn’t my fault,” Sadie cuts in.
Lexie is very glad for all the patience she’s acquired. “Okay, I’m not here to place blame - “
Unfortunately, Sadie does not have the same level of patience, and instead continues to talk right over her. “It was that British guy from the bar last Thursday. Didn’t quite make it to the bedroom, and it was dark and so he kind of just pushed everything off the table and I guess there was a glass.”
“Wait,” Lexie takes the opportunity to let her brain catch up with Sadie’s little expose, and then balks when she realizes what exactly she’s saying. “You had sex on my kitchen table?”
Sadie shrugs. Shrugs.
“On the off chance you have this conversation with Mark, please don’t tell him this.” She tries to make it sound like he’ll kill her if he finds out. In reality she’s not sure if he’d kill her, laugh, or get turned on, and she really does not want to find out.
---
Part 2
Fandom: Grey's Anatomy
Characters/Pairings: Ensemble. Meredith/Derek, Mark/Lexie, Cristina/Owen, Callie/Sadie, past Alex/Izzie
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 12,145
Author's Note: This is my baby, guys, and I'm a little afraid of posting it, but here we go.
Summary: Spoilers for Season 5, spec after that. Character death (if you've Season 5 you can figure that one out). Six years later. Six unhappy anniversaries later. You thought it would get easier.
He hits the snooze button on the alarm clock three times without even looking at it. By the fourth time he sits there blinking at the fuzzy edges of the red numbers on the digital display, bare feet on the chilly wooden floor.
It’s only after he’s been standing under the spray of the shower for five minutes that he realizes today marks another year. Two thousand one hundred and ninety days -- he can recite the number from memory and too much time spent inside his own head.
He wipes a hand over the fogged up mirror, a semi-circle reflection of himself that he only recognizes half of the time, and makes coffee, glancing at the calendar in between his cereal and the newspaper he’s really only pretending to read, all for an audience of one.
Six years ago, he never really thought he’d end up here. That’s how great his foresight is.
---
“Normal day, normal day, normal day,” Meredith chants, over the sink, toothbrush in hand, foot tapping against the tile.
Derek looks at her strangely. He wouldn’t understand, and she doesn’t feel like repeating it anyways.
---
“We’re out of coffee,” Lexie murmurs, and he feels the bed shift as she slips back under the covers, curling herself around him, her feet tangling with his, her head resting on his shoulder.
He groans, mumbles a reply that he’s not even sure the meaning of, and keeps his eyes closed. Mark’s only been asleep for a good three hours, and he’s nowhere near ready to get up no matter how late it probably is.
“Mark, I can’t get through today without coffee,” she whines, directly into his ear. “My interns are going to make me crazy, and I know I wasn’t this bad when I was one.” He still doesn’t give her a coherent response, and so she squeezes his hand, forcefully. “Right?”
“Sleep,” he says, finally, because he’s of the opinion that at this point he really has no one to answer to if he shows up an hour late and neither does she. One of the perks that he guesses comes with being Chief.
And then just as he thinks she might actually listen, just as she seems to relax into him, there’s a crash from the spare bedroom down the hall.
His eyes shot open, awake and alert now, with a marginally clearer, “Fuck,” that rolls of his lips.
“Sadie!” Lexie yells, as she sits up in bed, and he winces at the volume of that one single word.
“Sorry,” they both hear, a few seconds later. “You didn’t care about that lamp next to the bed right?”
He shoots Lexie a look. “That’s an antique,” he reminds her.
“Shh,” she hisses, yells back to Sadie, “No, it’s fine, don’t worry about it.”
“You had to let her live here,” he chides. “That girl has more money than she knows what to do with, it’s not like she would be out on the street.”
“People should not have to live in hotels,” she says, starting in on a familiar conversation that they generally have at least twice a month, for the past three months that she’s been living here. “And what are we going to do with a spare bedroom anyways? It’s not like she’s taking up space that we’re going to do something with.”
“She breaks everything,” he points out, watching her rise and pull her tank over her head, going searching for a sweater to wear. “She has more sex than we do, which is saying something - not that I would mind if half the time you didn’t leave me here with her.”
“Missing your glory days of having a different woman for every day of the week?” Lexie asks, sorting through a pile of clothes on the chair in the far corner of the room, determining whether they are clean or dirty.
“I’m the Chief, and you get home later than I do. And leave me with a hot blonde. That’s all I’m saying.”
“Okay, and what about when Callie was living here? Despite the fact that you two actually slept together, I didn’t worry then, and I’m not going to worry now.”
“That’s different,” he insists. “She plays for the other team.”
“No, she plays for both teams. Which is probably your dream.” She stops in her tracks, then whirls around, and he can see in her eyes exactly where he messed up. “And you were the one who said she could stay here, despite the fact that she is beyond loaded too, okay, so don’t even pull that about Sadie.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because George knew that, and he told me everything back then.”
Mark contemplates that statement, thinks about whether or not to add the thing that’s been lingering in the back of his mind for a few weeks, and decides that he’s just not quite awake enough to really care whether this is a good time or not. “Rumor has it that George got married two weeks ago.”
There’s a pause, for a moment, and then she nods, and goes back to what she was doing. Over it, just like that, and he smiles when she isn’t looking. “Good for him. And stop trying to change the subject.”
“Hey,” Sadie sticks her head in the door, half dressed, hair disheveled, not even bothering to knock or give them any warning, despite the fact that for all she knew they could’ve been having sex right now. At the very least naked (Mark is, but he’s still under the sheets, and it’s not something she hasn’t walked in on in the shower a few too many times). “Where’s the coffee?”
Lexie levels her gaze with his, and he has a feeling he’s going to have to go grocery shopping when he gets off work if he wants to live through tomorrow morning.
---
“And how does this make you feel?”
This would be the fifth time she’s heard that phrase repeated this morning, and being that this is still all before seven in the morning, her tolerance for it is exactly zero. Cristina rolls her eyes, sits up a little straighter, and says, “Okay, for the amount we’re paying you I think we’d really rather hear how that makes you feel.”
The shrink does a wonderful job of not glaring at her, instead keeping that plastic smile in place, and Cristina knows that has exactly as much to do with how much she’s getting paid. “This is really less about me and more about getting in touch with your own feelings.”
That warrants another eye roll, and this time Owen nudges her. She has no problem glaring at him. “Are you kidding with this? We’ve been doing this for, what, three weeks? The only difference I’ve noticed is that I now have three hours less free time in my week.”
Across from her, the woman, in the perfectly tailored black suit jacket and skirt, flips her pen back and forth between her thumb and her index finger and cracks her neck. “Ms. Yang, if you are unhappy here, perhaps you should try the hospital’s psychiatrist - I’m sure she would be more than happy to assist you.”
“We’ve tried that. That didn’t work either.” She replies. Not that she had really tried to make it work. If it were up to her, they wouldn’t be going at all, but Owen was mildly insistent about how this wasn’t normal, and how maybe if he, and by extension she, talked to someone then he wouldn’t wake up yelling and trying to hit things. Six years of dealing with this, however, and Cristina had gotten pretty good about getting the hell out of the way.
“Try is a loose term.” It’s the first thing Owen’s said in a few minutes, and she can’t help the feeling of ill-will that crop up as soon as he does speak. Whose side is he on anyway?
“Alright, you want to do this touchy feeling emotional stuff? Then you do it. I’m leaving.” Cristina says, grabbing her jacket and her bag, without an ounce of remorse for just giving up. She had tried here, was trying, and if he couldn’t see that then that was his problem.
“Ms. Yang,” the woman calls.
“Cristina,” Owen pleads.
She doesn’t turn around for either of them, just tells Owen, “I’ll see you at work.”
The hospital’s a ten minute walk from here, and she takes it as an opportunity to breathe fresh air, something other than that stuffy office that’s quickly becoming her own personal hell.
---
Meredith takes a detour from the hospital. Ends up driving the extra five minutes it takes to get to Alex’s apartment, climbing the four flights of stairs because she can’t wait for the elevator, and shoving the spare key in the door without knocking.
All because she has a gut feeling. She just doesn’t know what that feeling is yet. She just knows she needs to.
He’s sitting at his kitchen counter with his breakfast, the television on mute behind her, and he only glances her way casually, like this is nothing out of the ordinary. Not even a greeting.
She throws her stuff down on the counter and takes a seat next to him. “Are you going in today?”
“It’s just another day,” he replies, after a moment, even though it’s clearly not, for either of them. She nods, has been telling herself the exact same thing since she woke up. Denial works well for people like them. “I’ve got back to back surgeries anyway. Who knows what else will come into the ER.”
“Right.” And if he’s marginally okay, at least okay enough to show up and move, fairly mechanically, through two surgeries, maybe more, than so is she. She takes a deep breath, “Right, okay. No big deal. It’s just - whatever.”
He nods, says, “I did this earlier.”
She lets that breath out, slumping in her seat a little, words coming out in one long, endless rush, “Oh thank god I’m not the only one.”
If he could still smile today, he probably would have.
---
“Did you just run down the hallway?” Mark asks, arms crossed, leaning against the nurse’s station with raised eyebrows.
“Shut up,” Callie tells him, deliberately taking carefully measured steps the rest of the way towards him. “It wasn’t running, it was walking very fast. Power walking. And this is your fault.”
The smirk on his face turns into a frown. “How the hell is it my fault?”
“Because ever since you two let her move in with you, she’s been getting to work earlier because she rides in with you half the time. So now she’s here an hour earlier than she used to be which means there’s more chance of me running into her.” She’s really far too old and mature to be doing this high school crap - and yet.
“If I had my way,” he starts, a familiar rant just below the surface.
“Yeah, yeah, but Lexie’s turned you into her little lapdog, and you no longer have any say, I know.” She cuts him off, before she has to hear all about it again. He glares. Callie doesn’t particularly care.
“So she’s hitting on you again.” It’s not even a question, merely a statement of a fact they are both very, very aware of.
“Only constantly. Have you seen the looks she gives people?” She lowers her voice, suddenly hyper aware of who might overhear her, especially considering that Lexie was no less than thirty feet away with a set of very wet behind the ears interns. “Like they’re a piece of meat she can’t wait to get her hands on. Like you want her to get her hands on you.”
It doesn’t do much to remove the frown from his face. “Pick a different analogy next time, Torres. And of course I’ve seen those looks, I live with her, remember.”
“Does she talk about me? At all?”
“Yes, in between the constant parade of men, and the occasional woman, she has.” He pauses, and in that few seconds she allows herself to get her hopes up that maybe she’s getting somewhere. Bad idea. “As in Dr. Torres did this. You’re her superior; do you really think she’s going to talk to me about who she wants to have sex with?”
She tries not to glare. Really tries. “It’s just an innocent question.”
“Right. I’m sure this whole thing is completely innocent.” He shakes his head, and she watches him turn and start walking down the hall.
“Wait a minute, where are you going?”
“To do Chiefly things,” he says, making so gesture she isn’t familiar with as he ventures down the hallway and disappears, leaving her anxious and chatty without anyone to be chatty with.
---
Lexie finds herself actually having to stop what she’s saying, mid-sentence, as she watches Mark walk by, headed down the hallway, and the eyes of the first-week interns, both men and women, follow him. She isn’t sure if it’s because he’s the Chief, or if it’s because he’s Mark Sloan, formerly, maybe still, known as McSteamy for very, very good reasons.
She clears her throat, once, twice, three times before she’s able to draw the majority of their eyes away from him. “It’s not polite to stare people,” she says, in her best authoritative voice that she has saved up especially for this situation. They do it with every attending they see too, especially the attractive ones, and it’s starting to be more than a little irritating. Lexie knows, without a doubt, there is no way that she was this bad as an intern.
From out of the corner of her eye she watches Sadie stroll down the hallway, making eye contact with Callie, and then watches Callie make a break for it, down the same hallway Mark had gone. She makes note of that, reminds herself that she really needs to talk to Sadie at some point today, and then tries to remember what she was going to say before all her interns decided there were more important things to pay attention to.
“Katy, Tony, you two are going to help out in the clinic today.” She can see their faces fall, but doesn’t pay any mind to it. There’s a method to this, because she understands how interns learn because of how she was taught, a lot of that from the things Izzie taught her, she thinks, with a tinge of sadness, and so she knows you can’t just delegate them to the pit for sutures or to the clinic for the common cold and various venereal diseases. But this is their first week, and she’s still got her own surgeries and cases to deal with too. “TJ and Maria you guys are going to go assist in trauma, and Jennifer you did such a good job with the research on that neuro case yesterday that Dr. Shepherd says you can come help him today.”
Four frowns and a smile, she decides, as she watches them scatter, is better than all frowns. And then she sets her sights on Sadie, who is still there thankfully, talking to one of Ryan’s interns, and heads in her direction.
There’s a second long beat between the intern leaving and Sadie turning to her, speaking up before Lexie can even figure out precisely what she wants to say here. “Is she single?”
“That’s a…he. You know that right?”
Sadie fixes her with a look that’s halfway between a glare and the facial equivalent of the word ‘duh’. “Not him. Dr. Torres,” she clarifies, making Lexie feel very dense suddenly.
“She was with Dr. Robbins - Arizona, but she’s been gone awhile so…” she frowns, thinking she’s probably the wrong person to be asking this.
Lexie tries to keep away from the gossip mill these days, mostly because it fills your head with lies and rumors about people you either don’t know a thing about or know far too closely to believe any of it. And also because every now and then it’ll be about who Mark is sleeping with, other than her, because people don’t know what they’re talking about. Half of the time it’s Sadie anyway.
“Mark would probably know - not that I’m suggesting you ask him because I don’t even think he’d tell you and that would just be awkward.” One of the problems with talking to Sadie is that, despite the fact that’s she’s older than Lexie, she never quite grew up, so all the professionalism and maturity that’s seeped into Lexie by now, the kind of qualities that generally keep her from rambling like a college student who’s had a little too much to drink, kind of just dissolves and she reverts back to twenty-four. “That’s not the point. I need to talk to you.”
“About?” Sadie seems marginally less interested in the conversation now that her part of it is, for the most part, done. At least the fun part is.
“Could you just be a little more…careful? I mean I understand that lamp was probably on the edge and that glasses are very easy to just knock off the table.”
“Actually that glass wasn’t my fault,” Sadie cuts in.
Lexie is very glad for all the patience she’s acquired. “Okay, I’m not here to place blame - “
Unfortunately, Sadie does not have the same level of patience, and instead continues to talk right over her. “It was that British guy from the bar last Thursday. Didn’t quite make it to the bedroom, and it was dark and so he kind of just pushed everything off the table and I guess there was a glass.”
“Wait,” Lexie takes the opportunity to let her brain catch up with Sadie’s little expose, and then balks when she realizes what exactly she’s saying. “You had sex on my kitchen table?”
Sadie shrugs. Shrugs.
“On the off chance you have this conversation with Mark, please don’t tell him this.” She tries to make it sound like he’ll kill her if he finds out. In reality she’s not sure if he’d kill her, laugh, or get turned on, and she really does not want to find out.
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Part 2