day two-thousand, one-hundred and ninety {ensemble} (cont'd)
“Dr. Tiersen,” he watches the pretty brunette’s eyes flick to him, Mrs. Schumann’s chart pressed tight to her chest, and he can’t help but smile at her enthusiasm. That’s the great thing about interns, always so eager, so new at this, everything’s exciting to them. And then all of that wears off after about the first month and it’s nothing but cutthroat competition for only the best and most complicated surgeries. It’s a shame, he thinks some days. “Would you prep Mrs. Schumann for surgery?”
“Of course,” she replies, cheerful, which in turn seems to also be rubbing off on his patient and there really isn’t anything wrong with that at all.
Derek nods and walks out, slipping his pen back in his pocket and looking up only to find Meredith dashing down the hallway a few feet ahead of him. “Meredith,” he calls out, perhaps a little too quietly since she doesn’t stop or turn around. He walks quickly, catching up with her seconds later, and she stops when he comes up next to her.
“Oh hey,” she says, a smile that doesn’t quite reach her eyes, just doesn’t feel quite genuine despite obvious efforts on her part. She peers back down the hallway, through the window into the room he just left. “Is that one of Lexie’s interns?”
“Yes, surprisingly. She seems fairly capable; in fact I’m letting her scrub in.” Meredith nods her approval, and at least that feels real. “So where were you this morning?”
“I just decided to come to work early.” She replies, with a shrug, and he frowns, studying her, half waiting for her to change her answer. She doesn’t.
Derek nods, decides to show his hand. “Except you came in after I did. And I was late.”
She looks down, caught, and he gets a bad feeling in the pit of his stomach that he’s missing something completely. He’s been feeling that since this morning when she stood in front of the bathroom mirror for five straight minutes, muttering some unintelligible phrase over and over again. “I went to see Alex.”
It’s a little strange, he thinks, considering she could’ve just waited half an hour and seen him at work. Leads him to believe it was a little more than your everyday social call. “Is something wrong?”
“No,” she says, accompanies it with vigorous headshaking and a smile that he’s sure is at least an attempt at being reassuring. “Why would anything be wrong?”
Rather than going the direct route and listing off all of the reasons why it doesn’t make sense for her to just drop by on a whim, he goes with a different, less confrontational, tactic. “You know if there’s anything you want to talk about, I’m here for you.”
“I know.” Meredith looks at him strangely, a frown knitting her brows together. “Everything’s fine though.”
She’s down the hallway before he can contest that.
---
Cristina manages a whole four hour span of time where she is never even within shouting distance of Owen, and, honestly, it’s quite a feet considering he’s gotten pretty good at tracking her down when he sets his mind to it. This is a big hospital, but in the end it’s still encased in four walls, and so is she, and so is he. So really, it was only a matter of time before they either crossed paths by accident or he found her (there was a third option, for those ten minutes it took to walk here this morning - hide in the supply closet all day, but that would mean missing out on surgeries, and no man is going to make her do that).
She’s fairly confident that it does in fact end up being the first one, but she doesn’t have all that much time to think, because Owen’s got her arm in a death grip and then he’s pulling her towards the first door they happen to come upon.
It’s a supply closet. Of course it is.
The lock clicks into place, and he’s still got her arm, and she wonders if he’s even aware of that because there’s something in his eyes that says he’s just not completely…there. It’s not unfamiliar. “Why did you walk out this morning?”
She sighs. This again. She would have thought he could’ve figured that one out all by himself by now. “I told you before, this isn’t doing anything, and I’m not going to sit there and listen to that woman repeat the exact same ten phrases over and over again, just to call it psychology and collect her paycheck.”
“You have to be patient,” he starts, and really she’s had enough of that phrase these past few months.
“No. No, I don’t have to be patient. Not with her. Especially not with her.” His shoulders slump a little, breaking his usual rigid posture, and she doesn’t know enough to tell if he’s exhausted with her or just exhausted. “Look, if it helps you to see these people then fine. But it’s you who wants it, not me.”
“Cristina,” and he just isn’t getting that this still isn’t really his turn to talk, keeps trying to cut in, and she finally gets her arm out of his grasp and puts one flat palm against his chest, with the intent of both stopping him and subconsciously regaining control. They have issues with that, predictably, but no matter how big their issues are, she can guarantee that the only thing that shrink is doing is adding onto them.
“You keep trying to fix something that isn’t broken, and eventually it’s going to actually break. We are fine. You…may not be fine, but we, as a couple,” she hates that word, and she thinks he knows that because his eyebrows rise, just barely detectable, “are fine. We’re dealing with it, we’ve been dealing with it for five years before you decided counseling was the way to go.”
“You shouldn’t have to deal with it.”
“Yeah?” She isn’t actually asking; wisely he doesn’t answer. “Yeah, well, that’s not really your decision to make now is it?”
Owen doesn’t manage to stop her from leaving this time either. Difference is he just doesn’t try.
---
He looks down. Not down as in towards the floor, or in this case as in towards the sinks, though he is doing that, but down as in…sad almost. Alex isn’t exactly someone that Lexie would normally label as sad. Jerk, asshole, hypocrite - a lot of those kind of words come to mind when she’s thinking about him, even if she knows for a fact that it’s just a mask he wears in order to survive, in order to deal with things on his own terms, but sad just isn’t one of them. It sounds too innocent, weak, helpless; qualities she can’t associate with him. Qualities he probably wouldn’t let her associate with him.
So she’s going with down. In that kind of way where if he was someone that dealt well with hugs she would hug him. But he isn’t, and it would be awkward, so she just keeps watching her hands underneath the faucet, rinses the lather off them, and thinks of things that might make people like him cheer up, or at the very least look like they were cheered up.
He’s drying his hands by the time she thinks she’s got something. “You know all the interns keep calling you the hot shot surgeon. You’ve got quite a reputation.”
“Always have,” he tells her, like he’s proud of that, and she knows he has, and he is, just not always for the same thing she’s talking about. There’s nothing to gain from pointing that out though and since the whole purpose of this conversation, on her end anyways, is to lift his spirits so he stops looking like a child who just had his favorite toy taken away, she weighs the pros and cons of pretty much every word that comes out of her mouth. It’s a fine art, talking to him and not winding up with him on the defensive when you’re as far outside of his life as she is, but it’s something she’s fairly skilled at.
“I mean you’re so good at peds of all things. A guy like you being good at something like that,” she exhales, losing her sentence somewhere in her own head. She’s not just speaking for the sake of it; there’s meaning there. The ex-wrestler, the guy with the heart of stone, who had wanted to go into plastics, one of the coldest fields (and yes, she understands that’s Mark’s area of expertise but there’s plastics and then there’s the kind of plastics you find in Hollywood, all boob jobs and nose jobs and tummy tucks, and what Mark does isn’t that, it’s a freaking art form, so he’s exempt from this as far as she’s concerned), ends up working with babies and kids and there’s something intriguing about that. There’s something telling about people and layers there. She shakes her head. “Who would’ve thought you’d be the one to watch.”
There’s nostalgia in his smile, but it’s a smile all the same, small and sad as it is. She gets the same rush from that as she does sewing someone up after four hours of surgery, and there’s a lightness to her footsteps as she leaves.
---
She’s doing his errands. And while that wasn’t an entirely unusual sight a few years ago, she does have her own things to be doing. Labs, various tests, MRIs, those things are understandable. Generally they get thrown to the interns, but still they make sense in the context of the hospital and a professional relationship.
And then he tells her to go talk to Mark about why the hell his surgery got pushed back. Which is not really her problem, and Mark was never really her best friend either - he was Derek’s, emphasis on the past tense - so really this shouldn’t fall to her. Except she’s really too busy trying to smile and saying things like ‘everything is fine’ and mean it, so she doesn’t argue the point further, and just climbs stairs and meanders through hallways, around stray gurneys and crash carts, until she ends up outside of the right office.
“Dr. Grey,” he says, answering her second knock, and holding the door open for her to slip inside. She listens to it close, a soft click, stops a few feet in front of his desk and doesn’t turn, waits for him to come to her. It’s her way of saying that she will not be turned away easily, and he must understand that because he asks, “Is there something I can do for you?”
Meredith gets right to the point. “Why did Derek’s surgery get pushed back?”
His face falls in exactly the same way she thought it would, like he was afraid of that, but he recovers after a moment with, “Surgeries get pushed back all the time. Even for the head of neuro.”
“You said that two weeks ago,” she challenges.
“And I meant it two weeks ago.” Mark abandons his post by the door, instead settling into the chair in front of his desk, crossing ankle over knee and leaning back, the picture of comfort and easygoing. It’s a subtle way of reminding her that she’s in his territory and, whether he’s dating her half-sister or not, whether they have some history there, he’s still her boss, their boss, everyone’s boss. It’s not that power’s gone to his head - he was never that kind of man - it’s just that he’s always been a bastard when it serves him. “We’re overbooked today, two weeks ago, pretty regularly now that we aren’t number twelve anymore, and Derek’s just going to have to wait a few hours. If he’s got a problem with that maybe he should deal with it himself instead of wasting your time.”
“With all due respect, Dr. Sloan,” she doesn’t mean a single word of that sentence and she doesn’t bother to hide that fact either, “it was pushed back for an elective surgery.”
“Dr. Shepherd’s surgery wasn’t urgent. It can wait.” His tone matches her own formality, and she hates this man right here, this person he can turn into on a whim. And when she looks at him she can’t stop herself from thinking that Richard Webber made his biggest mistake by handing over his title to Mark, how much better suited Derek would be for this job. That’s her heart talking. Her head, however, knows what her heart refuses to acknowledge and that’s that this right here is exactly why Richard made him Chief. Because he can talk you in straight circles until you just give up and remain mildly courteous while doing it. Even if his reasons aren’t at all logical, even if they’re personal.
The way she looks at it she has two options: she can either walk out of here with a nod and a smile that’s fake at the upturned corners, or she can speak her mind and see what happens. She knows he won’t fire her, she knows there won’t be any repercussions other than maybe a glare or two and getting kicked out of the office for the moment. This doesn’t have anything to do with her and they both know it and that’s what protects her here. So she’ll go with the last one. “You know I’m not really sure why you two decided to spend the past six years hating each other’s guts, but don’t you think it’s getting a little old by now? Don’t you think we’re all getting a little old for this?”
“Age is just a number Grey,” he replies, with a smirk, taking the most superficial part of it out and running with it, completely on purpose. She thinks, if she squints just the right way, she can see him internalize the rest of it, the real meaning, watch the way his eyes don’t necessarily correspond with his devil-may-care grin. It gives her some small amount of hope.
“Right,” she sighs, anyways, sounding devoid of that hope and most everything else. “Of course it is.”
There’s a change in his posture once she leaves. That much she can see through plate glass windows.
---
Lexie had run off from the on-call room, clambering off of the top bunk in answer to a page with nothing more than a “Mark needs me” thrown over her shoulder. They hadn’t been sleeping, or at least Lexie hadn’t been sleeping. Then again, Lexie wasn’t the one who was trying to function on two hours or so of sleep. Point is, she’d run off and, apparently left most of her stuff here, because she isn’t gone for ten minutes before something starts ringing above her.
Sadie glares at the bottom of the mattress above her, willing it to stop, for whoever was on the other end to simply hang up. When it hasn’t by the fourth ring she determines that it’s simply easier to get up and answer it than to sit here and try to ignore it.
“Hello,” she says, a second later, harsh and unapologetic for it. There is no answer other than someone’s breath catching in their throat and so she says again, voice growing in impatience, “Hello?”
“Sadie?” The male voice on the other end asks, and she frowns. It’s familiar enough, but distantly so, and she already knows trying to place a name and a face to it is more than a little hopeless. “What are you doing with Lexie’s cell phone?”
She falls back onto the bunk with a sigh, intrigued and confused, and she ignores his question for one of her own. “Who is this?”
There’s a pause, like he expected her to instantly recognize his voice. “George.” She still remains silent, and he adds, “George O’Malley.”
That clicks, in all of the worst ways. “I heard you got married,” she tells him, ideas forming in her head. To say that she used to sometimes contemplate various revenge scenarios towards him would be an understatement. She would’ve been perfectly fine, if he hadn’t of been watching her so closely, hadn’t stuck his nose where it didn’t belong. A thing like that, whether it all worked out in the end or not, tends to stick in the back of her mind. “Shouldn’t you be on your honeymoon or running labs, doing surgeries? Instead of calling the girl who used to have a thing for you, I mean.”
He’s not going to know how to deal with any of the accusation in her voice. Sadie’s aware of this; in fact that’s why she says it. She listens to him process this, rolling onto her stomach and keeping an eye on the door, her ears perking up as she picks up the muffled sound of voices not far outside of the door. It’s far more interesting than listening to him breathe, and start and stop sentences, and she taps the fingers of her free hand against the metal supports of the bed as she catches bits here and there.
“…it’s just because of today,” sighs out a female voice.
A mildly familiar male voice asks, “What’s today?”
“You mean, you don’t remember?” There’s a scoff. “Not even the part where Jesse ended up slammed into a wall because he had the nerve to say something negative about poor Izzie Stevens within earshot of, like, everyone, including her boyfriend.”
“Oh yeah. Wait does that mean - “
“Duh.”
“…are you still there?”
Sadie jerks back with a sharp inhale, with fairly little idea of how long George had been talking to her again, or what he’d been saying. “Of course I am.” She starts, trying to figure out just how to spin this; it doesn’t take her very long. “I am. But you’re not, and she’s happy, so why don’t you go call your wife or someone else who needs to hear from you today.”
Later, weeks later, when Lexie finds out that Sadie pressed the end button on the call, effectively hanging up on him, before going through and deleting it on her list of received calls, covering her tracks, Sadie will tell her she was just doing what she thought was best for her. Thinking of Lexie’s feelings, and that’s really not something Sadie often does, so Lexie will sigh and smile.
But that’s later, when the weight of the small cell phone isn’t so heavy in her hand.
---
“Derek keeps looking at me like I need to go back and see Dr. Wyatt.”
“Owen took me to Dr. Wyatt. And then two other shrinks. Like it’s going to help anything.”
“And it’s just, I know that he’s concerned, but he’s been asking me questions all morning.”
“I told him it’s not going to help anything, and he didn’t listen. So I left, and now he’s acting like that automatically means that I’m not up for this relationship or whatever, like I can’t deal with him.”
“I told him I came into work early, except he beat me there apparently, and then I told him to see Alex. Which, I don’t know, I think he’s reading into in all the wrong ways. Like he expects me to be cheating or something.”
“He acts like I’ve got ‘fragile’ written on my forehead or something.”
“And then Mark’s acting like a kid who got sand thrown in his eye on the playground, so now he’s withholding the shovel or the…”
“That’s an inept metaphor.” Cristina replies, breaking them both out of their own individual rants. It’s the first time since they ran into each other in the hallway minutes ago that one of them has said anything to the other instead of merely at the other. “Also, wait a minute, what about Mark? Isn’t he Lexie’s problem?”
“Yes. Well, no.” Cristina frowns, and Meredith is reminded, not for the first time, just how intertwined the love lives of everyone in this damn hospital are. “Mark keeps pushing Derek’s surgeries back. For electives. Because they can’t get over whatever it is that made them so mad at each other in the first place.”
“I don’t get people like that.” They match each other’s pace as they move down the hallway, towards the elevator. “They should just get over it.”
Meredith’s eyebrows knit together, and she slows, breaks stride, and Cristina’s five steps ahead of her before she even realizes it. Off Cristina’s look, she tells her, “That was almost us once.”
Cristina’s only tell that lets Meredith know her sentence had any effect at all, is the way her eyes drop to the linoleum under her feet. Just as quickly they flick back up, towards her, and she replies, “Yeah, but it wasn’t. I don’t understand why everyone is so preoccupied by the ‘what if’s’. It doesn’t matter what could be - it matters what is.”
Because that’s way life is, because you have to wonder, because they’re all always waiting for the other shoe to drop, she doesn’t say. Meredith thinks it would sound far too sad.
---
Part 3