Sometimes You Wonder
Rating: PG-13 for language
Summary: How has your life come to this? An introspection of the remaining four of the fab five.
A/N: Thanks to slybrunette for the encouragement. I'd dedicate this piece to you but I'm not sure that it's worthy of that kind of dedication. ♥
Sometimes you wonder what it would be like if he were here with you now.
Then you realize there are a lot of ‘he’s that could be in the cold and empty space next to you. So many warm bodies that could curl around yours, hold you and keep you safe at night. There are so many men that failed you when you needed them the most.
Denny always lingers in the forefront of your mind.
Face it, you’re a romantic.
There is such thing as love at first sight, a man and woman can fall in love with each other without ever really knowing the other. You know because you were- you’ve spent countless hours imagining the children, the house, the baking and the holidays and meeting his family.
You have it all pictured in your head but then it blurs into another family, another man at your side.
George.
Thinking his name still causes the lingering ache in your heart to increase, to crush inwards on your ventricles and the emotion crushes your trachea until the tears start to spill. What if you had stayed with him?
He could still be here.
There would have been no stupid idea to run off to the army because he would have had a purpose, some sort of meaning if you had shared your life with him. There wouldn’t be some emptiness that he felt so much that he had to run off to join some stupid military mission. There wouldn’t have been busses and ventilators and swelling brains and all of that.
A bitter chord resonates through your thoughts when you think about Callie playing into all of it. If she had stayed away from him in the first place, none of it would have ever happened and George could still be here too.
You need him and he left you.
Just like Alex.
If only he had just quit worrying about you. There was nothing wrong, the cancer thing wasn’t an issue. You were fine, you were eating and sleeping and doing all the stuff you were supposed to. You were trying to be a surgeon too though and he ruined that. He opened his big fat trap and got you fired.
You tried to forgive him for it, tried to let it go.
Instead he claimed that he deserved better than you.
After all that you’d done for him, after all that you’d been there for and he left just like that. In the middle of a fight with cancer and when you were trying to form this life that you’d had pictured in your head. Kids and a yard and a giant airy house with the scent of freshly baked cinnamon rolls and coffee in the morning, you were going to have it all with Alex.
You think you wanted it all with Alex but he obviously didn’t want it as much as you.
If anybody deserves better, it certainly isn’t him.
Sometimes you wonder what it is that you did to deserve the things that you’ve put up with in your life. You’re a pretty girl, you’re smart and determined, talented and cutthroat when you need to be.
How is it that your life has come to empty beds and broken hearts when the only thing you've ever dreamt of is completely the opposite?
x-x-x-x-x
Sometimes you wonder what it would be like if he hadn’t walked away.
You want to pretend that you don’t think of him as frequently as you do but then you’d only be lying to yourself and people who lie to themselves are just pathetic, really. It’s like your left brain trying to keep a secret from your right brain which makes absolutely no sense because it already knows.
Instead you just think because thinking is what you do.
The vows would have been a mess but knowing him, he would have found it charming. His brown eyes would have sparkled with that hint of amusement and his lips would have twitched upwards at the corners into that little smirk that you always found so fucking hot. The sex would have been even better because it’s Burke and he’s a retarded romantic like that.
You’ve never believed in true love or romance or any of that crap. It’s not your thing, not what you’ve pictured for your life.
Sometimes you wonder how the hell it is that you’ve managed to find all of these men that are all about getting married and settling down.
Marlow. Burke. Owen.
They all demanded things from you that you simply didn’t want or need in your life. You see nothing wrong with a lifetime of living together having hot sex and drinking wine and doing all of the other things that married people do (minus having kids, because let’s face it, you would ruin them) without having to have it on paper.
Without the white dress and the shoes and the no eyebrows.
Who the hell shaves off eyebrows anyway?
You know that you’ve told Owen that you loved him more than Burke, that it scares you how much you love him. What you didn’t tell him is that you simply cannot picture spending the rest of your life with him. For some reason, with Burke, there was this image in your head. You pictured waking up next to him in the morning, you can still clearly see it in your head.
You’re an attending, he’s picked up Chief of Surgery. He does his ridiculous jogging thing and you drink coffee and look out at the mist falling over the city and wonder what the hell is wrong with him. He comes home and there’s sex in the shower which results in a missed breakfast and disheveled hair when you make it to the hospital just in time for your first big case. He always has this way of keeping your schedule stacked with the best cases, comes in from time to time for what you like to call surgical foreplay. He always has this sense of pride about your work too, more than just being the surgeon who trained you, though. When you get home, there’s an open bottle of wine waiting along with paella, just because he knows it’s your favorite (even though you’ve already had it twice in the past ten days) and then there’s more sex, more touching, more hushed talking and asking about little details you would never care to divulge.
Or maybe you would divulge them one at a time, just because you like how it pleases his inner four year old.
With Owen, you only see Teddy. You see torture and sadness and fighting to rediscover something that he lost in Iraq, something that he’s never to likely find. You see a man who claims to be in love with you but who looks at your mentor the way that Burke used to look at you.
You know that you love Owen but you also know that it should bother you when you see him looking at another woman like that.
Sometimes you wonder what exactly is keeping you in Seattle and away from living the life you have pictured in your head. Meredith is all married by office supplies, Alex is sleeping with Lexie and Owen is clearly in love with Teddy and yet you stay.
How has your life come to the point where you all you do is daydream about what you want, rather than going for it?
x-x-x-x-x
Sometimes you wonder what it would be like to just say ‘fuck it all’ and burn it to the ground. You’ve never really been a violent person like that, though. Yeah, there’s been a few fist fights or whatever but it’s not like you’re a felon or something.
With the way you grew up, you know that you easily could have been.
There was a time that you remember one of your friends telling you exactly that- there was one of two ways that you could have come out, a drug-dealing, bitch-beating, crack-sniffing son of a bitch or a fucking physicist.
Science was never really your thing so you went for plastic surgeon instead.
They’ve got the life, women and cars and more money than they know what to do with.
Except somehow, you got sucked into kids and babies and Peds and now life has you second guessing again. And again, and again, and again.
You wouldn’t have married Izzie if it weren’t for the cancer. Or at least you don’t think you would have. Marriage is definitely something that you never had in mind, it was one of those things that interferes with the whole plastic surgeon lifestyle. Mark Sloan used to be your idol and now you’re pretty sure that you have more women under your belt and a divorce to add to it.
In some walk of life, that should make you pretty fucking awesome but really you just feel like shit.
There’s this little voice in the back of your head and it sounds like your old man but not. It’s always telling you how much of a fuck up you are, how you could have done better, how you should have done this instead of that and how you should have never let the one decent chick that you’ve dated walk out of your life.
That same voice was the one yelling at you whenever you told Izzie you deserved better, when you told her that you’re a good guy.
It said that you were full of shit, that you didn’t deserve the bacteria that grows on pond scum.
Your heart said differently.
You’ve never really realized that you had a heart until you came to Seattle, until you held a one pound, nine ounce preemie in your hands. Until you’ve breathed for a twenty-six week gestational age infant torn from its mother’s uterus, you’ve never felt it beat in your chest until you rattled off some stupid boxing match commentary to an unborn child to calm it down.
Slowly, you’ve started listening to it more and while the voice is still there in the back of your head, while it’s still telling you how much of a moron you are and how you’re never going to be worth anything, you finally know better.
Your heart is telling you that the best is yet to come, you just wait for it.
How has your life come to listening to your heart and considering a career in peds when the only thing you ever wanted was a bunch of bitches, a scalpel and a couple million in the bank?
x-x-x-x-
Sometimes you wonder what it would have been like if they couldn’t resuscitate you.
Would Derek have moved on? Had he moved on before you tried to do it and the only reason he stuck around was because you did? You don’t really think that’s it because then he went all asshole after that and did the dating thing with the psycho nurse and no, that doesn’t make sense.
You’d like to believe that Derek would be in some big dark oblivion without you but you know better. He’s just not like that. You managed to find Mr. Optimism when the only thing you’ve ever been is Miss Dark and Twisty and an exact replica of the one person you never wanted to be.
There’s no logical reason why you went to medical school. You weren’t even remotely interested in medicine or surgery, it was just shoved down your throat for the entirety of your life. You remember having an anatomically correct doll when you were three years old and mediastinum was in your vocabulary by the time you were four.
You remember your mother sending you to the corner because you couldn’t pronounce it correctly.
Surgery doesn’t really hold the appeal to you that it should, you don’t have a passion for it like Cristina or the drive to become something great like Alex. You’re just there, existing. You’re a good surgeon and you know that you could be great, you know that you probably will- if only because you’re carrying on the legacy of the Ellis Grey.
Honestly, you know that you could be mediocre and everybody would still give you awards and attention that you don’t deserve.
Maybe at first you had a passion for it but really now, you’re kind of bored with it. There are other things to life, you’re sure and there’s this desire burning inside you to discover what they are. It’s why you did the backpacking through Europe thing- of course your mother had to go and get Alzheimer’s and kind of ruin that.
When you stop to think about things for a moment, you realize that you’ve never really done anything in your life that didn’t revolve around medicine in one way or another. Your existence has been so small, so one-track, that you don’t even really think that this thing your living could be called a life.
You’re more like a science experiment in a petri dish. Some weird genetic breeding experiment to see what happens to the human mind when you expose them to one thing and one thing only for your whole freakin’ life.
Sometimes you think that letting Finn have his plans wouldn’t have been such a bad idea. Yes, he was in medicine but it was different medicine. It was animal medicine and it’s so not the same as cutting into somebody’s brain or stomach or whatever other malfunctioning body part that they have. Seeing horses being birthed has been the highlight of your life.
Derek though, Derek is…he’s painfully perfect. He’s got the rugged all-American good looks, the smug grin and the nice eyes and the soft and soothing voice. He’s got the career and the car and the money and he’s the one thing that every girl ever dreams of.
He’s yours.
Maybe you’re not as in love with Derek so much as you’re in love with the fact that somebody as messed up as you can snatch McDreamy and make him fall somewhat hopelessly in love with you. After all, he’s spent years sniffing your hair and saying things to you in elevators so it’s clearly not just some sort of infatuation. He really really loves you.
Normal non-scientific experiment women would have married him for real, would have done the whole princess bride crap and the whole nine yards. The only thing you think of when you see a wedding dress is peeling your person out of one and listening to the sound of her sobbing and the very thought of it still leaves a pit in your stomach.
Really, the only reason you’ll never have a real wedding with McDreamy is because you don’t want to turn out like Cristina. You don’t want to be the one standing on your white floofy princess dress and sobbing your eyes out because Prince Charming decided that you weren’t good enough for him or whatever.
It’s totally what would happen to you because that’s how your life works.
Cristina says your name and you look up from your lunch consisting of a salad, chocolate pudding and water and you smile that smile that tells her you're fine but you’re really not. You glance around the table and see the same look plastered on the two remaining people that you started your internship with and you wonder what’s happened since that first day since you came to Seattle Grace.
All of you had dreams, all of you had this fire and this passion about life and surgery and now it’s faded. It’s gone.
You’re pretty sure that it’s not coming back.
How has your lives come to this when you’re sitting with people that you consider your closest friends but none of you trust the other enough to confide how much the life you live isn’t the life you want at all? When all you do is wonder and dream about the things that could have been rather than dreaming about what could be?
Sometimes you wonder if you really know each other at all.
Summary: How has your life come to this? An introspection of the remaining four of the fab five.
A/N: Thanks to slybrunette for the encouragement. I'd dedicate this piece to you but I'm not sure that it's worthy of that kind of dedication. ♥
Sometimes you wonder what it would be like if he were here with you now.
Then you realize there are a lot of ‘he’s that could be in the cold and empty space next to you. So many warm bodies that could curl around yours, hold you and keep you safe at night. There are so many men that failed you when you needed them the most.
Denny always lingers in the forefront of your mind.
Face it, you’re a romantic.
There is such thing as love at first sight, a man and woman can fall in love with each other without ever really knowing the other. You know because you were- you’ve spent countless hours imagining the children, the house, the baking and the holidays and meeting his family.
You have it all pictured in your head but then it blurs into another family, another man at your side.
George.
Thinking his name still causes the lingering ache in your heart to increase, to crush inwards on your ventricles and the emotion crushes your trachea until the tears start to spill. What if you had stayed with him?
He could still be here.
There would have been no stupid idea to run off to the army because he would have had a purpose, some sort of meaning if you had shared your life with him. There wouldn’t be some emptiness that he felt so much that he had to run off to join some stupid military mission. There wouldn’t have been busses and ventilators and swelling brains and all of that.
A bitter chord resonates through your thoughts when you think about Callie playing into all of it. If she had stayed away from him in the first place, none of it would have ever happened and George could still be here too.
You need him and he left you.
Just like Alex.
If only he had just quit worrying about you. There was nothing wrong, the cancer thing wasn’t an issue. You were fine, you were eating and sleeping and doing all the stuff you were supposed to. You were trying to be a surgeon too though and he ruined that. He opened his big fat trap and got you fired.
You tried to forgive him for it, tried to let it go.
Instead he claimed that he deserved better than you.
After all that you’d done for him, after all that you’d been there for and he left just like that. In the middle of a fight with cancer and when you were trying to form this life that you’d had pictured in your head. Kids and a yard and a giant airy house with the scent of freshly baked cinnamon rolls and coffee in the morning, you were going to have it all with Alex.
You think you wanted it all with Alex but he obviously didn’t want it as much as you.
If anybody deserves better, it certainly isn’t him.
Sometimes you wonder what it is that you did to deserve the things that you’ve put up with in your life. You’re a pretty girl, you’re smart and determined, talented and cutthroat when you need to be.
How is it that your life has come to empty beds and broken hearts when the only thing you've ever dreamt of is completely the opposite?
x-x-x-x-x
Sometimes you wonder what it would be like if he hadn’t walked away.
You want to pretend that you don’t think of him as frequently as you do but then you’d only be lying to yourself and people who lie to themselves are just pathetic, really. It’s like your left brain trying to keep a secret from your right brain which makes absolutely no sense because it already knows.
Instead you just think because thinking is what you do.
The vows would have been a mess but knowing him, he would have found it charming. His brown eyes would have sparkled with that hint of amusement and his lips would have twitched upwards at the corners into that little smirk that you always found so fucking hot. The sex would have been even better because it’s Burke and he’s a retarded romantic like that.
You’ve never believed in true love or romance or any of that crap. It’s not your thing, not what you’ve pictured for your life.
Sometimes you wonder how the hell it is that you’ve managed to find all of these men that are all about getting married and settling down.
Marlow. Burke. Owen.
They all demanded things from you that you simply didn’t want or need in your life. You see nothing wrong with a lifetime of living together having hot sex and drinking wine and doing all of the other things that married people do (minus having kids, because let’s face it, you would ruin them) without having to have it on paper.
Without the white dress and the shoes and the no eyebrows.
Who the hell shaves off eyebrows anyway?
You know that you’ve told Owen that you loved him more than Burke, that it scares you how much you love him. What you didn’t tell him is that you simply cannot picture spending the rest of your life with him. For some reason, with Burke, there was this image in your head. You pictured waking up next to him in the morning, you can still clearly see it in your head.
You’re an attending, he’s picked up Chief of Surgery. He does his ridiculous jogging thing and you drink coffee and look out at the mist falling over the city and wonder what the hell is wrong with him. He comes home and there’s sex in the shower which results in a missed breakfast and disheveled hair when you make it to the hospital just in time for your first big case. He always has this way of keeping your schedule stacked with the best cases, comes in from time to time for what you like to call surgical foreplay. He always has this sense of pride about your work too, more than just being the surgeon who trained you, though. When you get home, there’s an open bottle of wine waiting along with paella, just because he knows it’s your favorite (even though you’ve already had it twice in the past ten days) and then there’s more sex, more touching, more hushed talking and asking about little details you would never care to divulge.
Or maybe you would divulge them one at a time, just because you like how it pleases his inner four year old.
With Owen, you only see Teddy. You see torture and sadness and fighting to rediscover something that he lost in Iraq, something that he’s never to likely find. You see a man who claims to be in love with you but who looks at your mentor the way that Burke used to look at you.
You know that you love Owen but you also know that it should bother you when you see him looking at another woman like that.
Sometimes you wonder what exactly is keeping you in Seattle and away from living the life you have pictured in your head. Meredith is all married by office supplies, Alex is sleeping with Lexie and Owen is clearly in love with Teddy and yet you stay.
How has your life come to the point where you all you do is daydream about what you want, rather than going for it?
x-x-x-x-x
Sometimes you wonder what it would be like to just say ‘fuck it all’ and burn it to the ground. You’ve never really been a violent person like that, though. Yeah, there’s been a few fist fights or whatever but it’s not like you’re a felon or something.
With the way you grew up, you know that you easily could have been.
There was a time that you remember one of your friends telling you exactly that- there was one of two ways that you could have come out, a drug-dealing, bitch-beating, crack-sniffing son of a bitch or a fucking physicist.
Science was never really your thing so you went for plastic surgeon instead.
They’ve got the life, women and cars and more money than they know what to do with.
Except somehow, you got sucked into kids and babies and Peds and now life has you second guessing again. And again, and again, and again.
You wouldn’t have married Izzie if it weren’t for the cancer. Or at least you don’t think you would have. Marriage is definitely something that you never had in mind, it was one of those things that interferes with the whole plastic surgeon lifestyle. Mark Sloan used to be your idol and now you’re pretty sure that you have more women under your belt and a divorce to add to it.
In some walk of life, that should make you pretty fucking awesome but really you just feel like shit.
There’s this little voice in the back of your head and it sounds like your old man but not. It’s always telling you how much of a fuck up you are, how you could have done better, how you should have done this instead of that and how you should have never let the one decent chick that you’ve dated walk out of your life.
That same voice was the one yelling at you whenever you told Izzie you deserved better, when you told her that you’re a good guy.
It said that you were full of shit, that you didn’t deserve the bacteria that grows on pond scum.
Your heart said differently.
You’ve never really realized that you had a heart until you came to Seattle, until you held a one pound, nine ounce preemie in your hands. Until you’ve breathed for a twenty-six week gestational age infant torn from its mother’s uterus, you’ve never felt it beat in your chest until you rattled off some stupid boxing match commentary to an unborn child to calm it down.
Slowly, you’ve started listening to it more and while the voice is still there in the back of your head, while it’s still telling you how much of a moron you are and how you’re never going to be worth anything, you finally know better.
Your heart is telling you that the best is yet to come, you just wait for it.
How has your life come to listening to your heart and considering a career in peds when the only thing you ever wanted was a bunch of bitches, a scalpel and a couple million in the bank?
x-x-x-x-
Sometimes you wonder what it would have been like if they couldn’t resuscitate you.
Would Derek have moved on? Had he moved on before you tried to do it and the only reason he stuck around was because you did? You don’t really think that’s it because then he went all asshole after that and did the dating thing with the psycho nurse and no, that doesn’t make sense.
You’d like to believe that Derek would be in some big dark oblivion without you but you know better. He’s just not like that. You managed to find Mr. Optimism when the only thing you’ve ever been is Miss Dark and Twisty and an exact replica of the one person you never wanted to be.
There’s no logical reason why you went to medical school. You weren’t even remotely interested in medicine or surgery, it was just shoved down your throat for the entirety of your life. You remember having an anatomically correct doll when you were three years old and mediastinum was in your vocabulary by the time you were four.
You remember your mother sending you to the corner because you couldn’t pronounce it correctly.
Surgery doesn’t really hold the appeal to you that it should, you don’t have a passion for it like Cristina or the drive to become something great like Alex. You’re just there, existing. You’re a good surgeon and you know that you could be great, you know that you probably will- if only because you’re carrying on the legacy of the Ellis Grey.
Honestly, you know that you could be mediocre and everybody would still give you awards and attention that you don’t deserve.
Maybe at first you had a passion for it but really now, you’re kind of bored with it. There are other things to life, you’re sure and there’s this desire burning inside you to discover what they are. It’s why you did the backpacking through Europe thing- of course your mother had to go and get Alzheimer’s and kind of ruin that.
When you stop to think about things for a moment, you realize that you’ve never really done anything in your life that didn’t revolve around medicine in one way or another. Your existence has been so small, so one-track, that you don’t even really think that this thing your living could be called a life.
You’re more like a science experiment in a petri dish. Some weird genetic breeding experiment to see what happens to the human mind when you expose them to one thing and one thing only for your whole freakin’ life.
Sometimes you think that letting Finn have his plans wouldn’t have been such a bad idea. Yes, he was in medicine but it was different medicine. It was animal medicine and it’s so not the same as cutting into somebody’s brain or stomach or whatever other malfunctioning body part that they have. Seeing horses being birthed has been the highlight of your life.
Derek though, Derek is…he’s painfully perfect. He’s got the rugged all-American good looks, the smug grin and the nice eyes and the soft and soothing voice. He’s got the career and the car and the money and he’s the one thing that every girl ever dreams of.
He’s yours.
Maybe you’re not as in love with Derek so much as you’re in love with the fact that somebody as messed up as you can snatch McDreamy and make him fall somewhat hopelessly in love with you. After all, he’s spent years sniffing your hair and saying things to you in elevators so it’s clearly not just some sort of infatuation. He really really loves you.
Normal non-scientific experiment women would have married him for real, would have done the whole princess bride crap and the whole nine yards. The only thing you think of when you see a wedding dress is peeling your person out of one and listening to the sound of her sobbing and the very thought of it still leaves a pit in your stomach.
Really, the only reason you’ll never have a real wedding with McDreamy is because you don’t want to turn out like Cristina. You don’t want to be the one standing on your white floofy princess dress and sobbing your eyes out because Prince Charming decided that you weren’t good enough for him or whatever.
It’s totally what would happen to you because that’s how your life works.
Cristina says your name and you look up from your lunch consisting of a salad, chocolate pudding and water and you smile that smile that tells her you're fine but you’re really not. You glance around the table and see the same look plastered on the two remaining people that you started your internship with and you wonder what’s happened since that first day since you came to Seattle Grace.
All of you had dreams, all of you had this fire and this passion about life and surgery and now it’s faded. It’s gone.
You’re pretty sure that it’s not coming back.
How has your lives come to this when you’re sitting with people that you consider your closest friends but none of you trust the other enough to confide how much the life you live isn’t the life you want at all? When all you do is wonder and dream about the things that could have been rather than dreaming about what could be?
Sometimes you wonder if you really know each other at all.