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sunandsilence) wrote2006-08-10 08:00 pm
The One Where the Heroine Yells
Author:
lala_lady_rDisclaimer: The only anatomy I own is definitely not Grey's.
Rating: Pg-13
Pairing/Characters: Mer/Der, ensemble
Word Count: 2010
Summary: Post-LMR. Chapter Three. Meredith deals with a patient and a confrontation with Derek.
Author's Notes: This is the semi-sequel to my fic, Happily Ever After. Title comes from The Veronicas' song. Slow start. Cross-posted at http://fanficga.5.forumer.com/index.php?
The One Where the Heroine Yells
For the rest of the day, I am in a daze. I know I am, I can tell, but that doesn’t stop me from wanting to tell everyone, which I can’t, because they’d probably call me crazy (as opposed to just thinking it) and ship me off to psych. And, really, I can’t handle that, because I need surgery. Sure, I know you don’t think it’s a good idea to put me an OR, with the being dazed an all, but trust me, I work my best when I have emotional issues. Well, that’s not exactly true, but I work really well when my emotions are screwed up, which is basically all the time, anyway, so you can clearly see that I can practice good medicine when I feel like going home and crying.
I mean, I’m Meredith Grey, and while I might not admit it that often (denial can be an extremely comforting friend) I am Ellis Grey’s daughter. And my mother? She was the queen of repression, at least until she got into an OR. The second she got into an OR, it’s like it all disappeared, and the only thing she had to do was cut. Simple. Scalpel, meet Body. And I’m like that, too, even the Chief has seen it.
So why doesn’t Dr. Bailey?
She took one look at me (I was in an empty patient room again – one far, far away from where Derek Shepherd is) and said, “No OR time, Grey.”
I gaped at her, and still am, but all she says is, “No OR time, I’m serious. You look like hell, Grey, I’m not letting you into an OR.”
“But, what about Dr. Shepherd’s surgery?” I ask. “I’m supposed to scrub in on that.”
Which isn’t technically true. He hasn’t asked me to, or anything, but it’s kind of accepted that I would scrub in on his surgery. After all, I’m the intern on this case. I’m the one doing the research, checking on the patient, kissing my McMarried boss…Okay, maybe those aren’t the examples I should use when trying to convince Dr. Bailey.
She gives me a look. It’s one of those looks that is totally unique to her. It’s like her Nazi Death Glare, or something. Seriously, she could have worked for Hitler. I bet she would’ve had loads of fun torturing and murdering people. Or maybe she just bottles it all up for when she’s at the hospital. Who knows? But back to my impending crisis.
Eventually she snorts and goes back to giving me her normal (read: only mildly intimidating) look.
“You can scrub in on Shepherd’s surgery,” she allows. “But whatever it is you’re doing needs to stop.” On my look, (ha! I can give looks, too. With all the Meredith-directed looks/glares/longing glances/McDreamy eyes there’ve been today, I almost forgot how to), she elaborates. “Like I said, you look like hell. You came in looking bad enough, and now you look even worse. Now I know all of you have some hefty stuff to be dealing with right now, but when my interns start looking like they should be patients, I draw the line.”
“I don’t look like a patient!” I protest.
A snort. That is her response. I just got snorted at.
“Grey, I have been a doctor for how long? Seventeen years. Seventeen years, I have been a doctor, and that means I have had many, many, many ass-kissing interns. Now, I may not like you, or be nice to you, but I expect my interns to not embarrass me, and when the Chief of Surgery is asking me if it isn’t a good idea to get the lot of you in for psych evaluations, I know something in that plan is going wrong. So until you stop looking like the poster child for sick interns, I’m keeping you away from the OR, got it?”
I nod. Really, what else can I do? It’s Bailey, the same person who splattered someone’s half-digested food all over me the last time I didn’t do as she said.
“And, Meredith,” she says. I look up, prepared for the worst. “Tell Stevens to get her ass back here as soon as possible.”
Seriously? Seriously?! She thinks Izzie can just waltz back in here? After nearly killing Denny in an illegal (as in, jail time with Bertha and Hildi) attempt to save his life? After nearly killing us with an overflow of baked goods? She thinks Izzie’s just going to get over that, and that the Chief will?
“Yes, I really do,” Bailey says. She’s raising an eyebrow at me, but she’s smiling.
What is she- I just said that? I seriously just said that out loud?
“You seriously said that out loud,” she agrees. “And if all those, uh, “baked goods” worry you so much, bring them in. Lord only knows we haven’t had time for breakfast in my house since the baby was born.”
“Uh, yeah,” I say.
Bailey leaves for a surgery, and I am left to stare after her with my mouth open.
I sit like that for at least a minute before I get back to work. Mrs. Collins doesn’t have a particularly interesting patient history. She had her tonsils removed when she was twelve (East Mercy), broke her leg when she was 15 (Mercy West), fractured her wrist and collarbone (Mercy West, again), and came in last year for an appendectomy. Still, I’m a surgeon (or an intern, anyway) so I should do the right thing and ask her questions about her medical history.
She’s sitting up when I get to her room. Her husband has pulled a chair up to the side of the bed so they can talk, and her daughter is sitting on the edge of the bed, swinging her feet. From what I’ve heard, she hasn’t mentioned the accident (or her role in it, anyway) to them.
“Good afternoon, Mrs. Collins,” I smile brightly. “Where’s your son?”
“Oh, he’s off buying snacks in the cafeteria,” she laughs. “He’s always eating, you know. He never seems to “fill up”.”
“Teenage boys,” I agree, still smiling.
Her husband laughs, too, and her daughter rolls her eyes, but when I catch Mrs. Collins’s eye, something passes between us. I know you’re hiding something, it says. That’s alright, though, because we all hide things, and I, better than most people, can figure out people’s dirty little secrets.
Maybe that’s because you have so many, a little voice whispers in my head.
I ignore it, and turn my attention back to the patient.
“So, Mrs. Collins, I have to ask you a few questions,” I explain. “It’s nothing major, don’t worry. We just need to get to the bottom of what’s causing your problem.”
“Okay,” she agrees readily enough, but the change is palpable. She doesn’t want to talk about this.
“Well, it says here on your chart that you were admitted here last year for an appendectomy,” I begin. “Did you know if you had syphilis before that?”
Mrs. Collins pales so fast that I almost call for a blood transfusion.
“No,” she says. “No, I didn’t have syphilis before that.”
“Are you sure?” I press, “Because if the syphilis was in an early enough stage, you could have had it for days before it was advanced enough to show up in a lab result.”
“I’m sure,” she says.
I look around the room. Her husband is shooting her some very worried glances. Of course. That must be why she doesn’t want to talk about this. She must have gotten the syphilis from someone else, and passed it onto him.
Unbidden,
I turn my attention to the patient again.
“Do you know when you contracted the syphilis?” I ask.
Out of the corner of my eye, I notice her daughter slip off the bed and out the door. Interesting.
“Yes,” she says. “It was after.” Softer, almost to soft to hear, she repeats, “It was after.”
She isn’t looking at me as she says it, but past me, to something I can’t see. I turn around and spot her husband, who is studiously avoiding eye contact with anyone.
My eyes narrow, and I make a decision.
“That’s all for now, Mrs. Collins,” I tell her. She looks relieved. “Mr. Collins, can I speak with you in the hall?”
His head snaps up. He looks downright terrified, which would be funny under any other circumstances, since he is a six foot tall, imposing man, and I’m, well…not. I keep smiling at him, and he finally nods and gets off the bed. He follows me out of the room, but not before giving his wife another look – this one is very, very apologetic.
Once we’re in the hall, I face him.
“Mr. Collins, do you know how you’re wife got syphilis?” I ask.
He doesn’t meet my eye.
“Yes.”
I wait.
“While she was here to get her appendix out, I…Well, I’m a man,” he tells me. His voice is pleading, and when he looks up at me, I can tell he is begging me to understand. “The nurse – She was…wow, she was something.
He trails off, but I get the gist of it. A year ago. The syphilis outbreak in the hospital started then, and so were Der-. No, I can’t think about that right now, I’m working.
“So what you’re telling me is you had an affair with a nurse while your wife was undergoing surgery?” I ask. I don’t need to watch him wince to know my voice is harsh.
“Yes, but, it was just so hard. The kids were fighting, and
I cut him off.
“Did you tell her?” I interrupt him. “Did the nurse even know you were married, or was she just some random girl you screwed for the hell of it? And your poor wife…you know, you gave her that syphilis. The syphilis that caused a serious aortic aneurysm to develop. The syphilis that caused a freaking car accident! People died because, what was it? Oh yeah, because “you’re a man”.”
He opens his mouth to defend himself, but I don’t let him. My voice is rising. Some part of me knows that other people can here this, but I don’t care.
“Seriously? That’s it? That’s your defense? How pathetic is that? How would you like it if your wife went and had sex with some person off the street because she’s a woman? How would you feel if your kids died because someone had to go be a man?”
After that, everything is kind of hazy. All I remember is shouting more things at Mr. Collins, who tried to say things back, but got cut off by me shouting some more. Then I feel someone’s arms tightening around my waist, and I am being lifted off my feet. Someone carries me backward, and I know who it is by the tightening in my stomach and the faint, clean smell of his soap and trees that lingers underneath the usual hospital smells – blood and cleaning solution.
“Put me down,” I grind out.
He doesn’t. His arms tighten around me, and my stomach gives another lurch. His breath tickles the inside of my ear as he whispers, “Dr. Grey, you need to calm down.”
“No,” I say stubbornly.
He chuckles at that. I still feel angry, but it’s ebbing away, even as I try to keep the feeling. Instead, it’s being replaced by an entirely different type of feeling. The kind that’s making my heart start beating faster.
I hate myself for this. I hate that I’m leaning into him, trying to get as close as possible, even while I’m supposed to be married. I hate that I’m turning into a whore for him. And I hate that I’m so numb that I don’t really mind.
“Mr. Collins,” Derek says – because he is Derek and not Dr. Shepherd, and I will never be able to think he isn’t – “Dr. Grey here is finished.”
One of his hands claps over my mouth before I can say anything to that.
“She was out of line for speaking to you that way, and you have her sincerest apologies.”
I curse at that. A lot. And occasionally in French or Spanish (one of the good things I learned from my nannies). Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on which way you look at it) Derek’s hand is still covering my mouth, so the only thing anyone can hear is a bunch of muffled grunting.
Derek says a bunch of other things to Mr. Collins, but I don’t really pay attention, because suddenly I see something out of the corner of my eye. Mrs. Collins is sitting up in bed, and she’s looking right at us through the window in her door.
She heard everything, I realize.
She looks at me for a moment, and then she nods. Thank you.
I nod back. You’re welcome.
Derek is finished talking, and Mr. Collins doesn’t look noticeably angry. Now, maybe that was because Derek was just being very persuasive, but I can’t help thinking that he just doesn’t care. It’s like he knows that he was horrible, but he’s reached the point where he doesn’t care. And, really, haven’t we all been like that before? Haven’t we all gotten to the point where we are so afraid of what we will do next, that we just give up?
I suppose I should pity Mr. Collins, or at least feel some empathy with him, but I can’t. I just can’t. I think of Mrs. Collins crying because she couldn’t stop, and of the pigtailed girl and her sister in the van, and I can’t feel anything but anger towards him.
I guess that makes me a bad person, but I’ve already done and been so many things, that one more check against me won’t really matter much.
Mr. Collins looks through the door at his wife, who is now staring at him. Without a word, a gesture, anything for the man she obviously loves, she turns her head away from him. He stares at her for another second, and then he, too, leaves. Halfway down the hall, he turns back, and looks at me.
“Tell her that the kids will be back tomorrow,” he says.
I nod, and he leaves. As soon as he is gone, Derek puts me down, turns me around, and says, “Well, Dr. Grey, what do you have to say for yourself?”
I glare at him. I know I’m veering into dangerous territory (“You’re my boss.” “I’m your boss’s boss.”), but I can’t seem to care. This entire hospital knows our history. They know that things can never be “just business” between us. So if I’m having a bad day because of my ex-something, there had better not be any complaints.
I can feel Bailey chopping me into tiny pieces even as I say,
“He was a cheating ass.”
Derek chuckles again, and I find myself staring at him. His eyes are crinkled again. I love it when they do that. Maybe it’s because it means he’s happy, or maybe because it’s for more selfish reasons, like because it means his eyes will sparkle and he’ll smile and say things that make me just a little more in love with him.
“You know, I could take you off of this case for that little display,” he says. “Some people might even say I should.”
“But you won’t,” I say. It isn’t a question.
“I won’t,” he agrees.
“You should. If –,” I never got a chance to finish.
“I’m keeping you on this case because you are obviously working hard on it,” he tells me. “So you have no other reason to keep me on this case,” I say.
“Of course not.”
It’s a lie, and we both know it. Before I can say anything else, I see Bailey coming down the hall. It definitely isn’t a good idea to be seen talking (if that’s what she would call it – I’m sure a few other words will come to mind) to Derek for too long in front of her.
“I have a patient to get back to,” I say. “And so do you.”
He nods. “I booked an OR for tomorrow morning to remove the aneurysm.”
“Okay.” I linger. I don’t want to leave him just yet.
He nods again and turns to go. Before he does, he leans down and whispers in my ear, “And Meredith, you aren’t my dirty mistress. I signed the papers this morning.”
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“You seriously said that out loud,” she agrees. “And if all those, uh, “baked goods” worry you so much, bring them in. Lord only knows we haven’t had time for breakfast in my house since the baby was born.”
Hah!
The last sentence made me actually shout, "YES!"
I really love this story. :)
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