Disclaimer – I own absolutely zero rights to the story or characters of Grey's Anatomy and am making no money off of what I've written.
Defining Moments
In everyone's life there are defining moments. Some that you see approaching and other that sneak up and hit you so hard you no longer know up from down. My time at Seattle Grace has been filled with both amazingly good moments and horribly bad moments changing my life and forcing me to evolve beyond what I thought I could be.
Two weeks ago I lost control of my mouth and epically rambled out my feelings to Mark after promising myself I'd keep quiet for the sake of his happiness with Julia. A week ago he told me he still needed time to think about everything I'd revealed. And then five days ago the flight to Boise we were both supposed to be on crashed in the Wallowa-Whitman National forest outside La Grande, Oregon with six of our co-workers and friends aboard. Teddy, Derek, Arizona, Alex, Richard and Jackson had been on the plane destined for Boise Memorial Hospital to help their surgical staff separate conjoined twins and had it not been for an adolescent burn victim Mark and I would have been on the flight with them instead of planning on catching a red eye and getting there just before the surgery. When Owen received the call from Boise Memorial saying that the plane had never landed, the expression "hell on earth" became a reality for all of us left in Seattle.
For me the six hours following the news in that phone call were worse even than facing Mr. Clark and having him point a gun at me and tell me he had come to the hospital to kill me. Trying to be there Meredith and Mark thankfully took most of my attention initially. But then the nursing home had called for Dr. Webber with concerns about Adele and no one had known what answer to give them. Then Mark had gotten a page from the Day Care, thankfully Sofia just seemed to have come down with the same type of stomach bug Zola suffered through during Mer's boards, but oddly they'd tried to reach Callie first but received no answer. Sofia's cries restored some of Mark's cognitive ability but not enough to question me when I urged him and Meredith across to the street to his apartment while at the same time taking possession of Meredith's phone to leave a message for Izzie. Divorced or not I knew for a fact he still listed her as an emergency contact. I debated calling Mrs. Shepherd but without knowing if and when then plane would be found couldn't decide if it was my place or not to make such a call.
Sometime around hour four the phone call had come that had provided a small amount of relief while at the same time bringing everyone's anxiety to a new level of hell. Of the six who had departed Seattle Grace that morning for Boise, one they were told was found to have died before rescuers could reach the crash site, another had arrested on the helicopter flight to a trauma center and was now comatose, two other had career threatening injuries, one was facing the possibility of never walking unassisted again and the sixth surgeon while physically was relatively unharmed seemed to have suffered a mental break caused by the trauma of the crash. But beyond those facts of their conditions we weren't given any other news or names, so as much as Mark and Meredith were hoping for the best there was no way to know if Derek was alive despite being found.
Needless to say Meredith bolted back to the hospital to await further word, while Mark received another phone call. When I heard his phone crash to the floor I knew that whatever news he had received it was nothing good. And it turned out I was right. The moment Callie had heard that the plane hadn't reached Boise, she's used her family's connections to charter a flight there, hoping to be there either to find that the plane was only delayed due to landing somewhere else for something like weather or that in the event of a crash everyone had been transported to Boise for treatment. In her haste to get to the private airport to meet the pilot she's run a red light straight into the side of a Semi. And having been going well over the speed limit she's been killed instantly. Bringing the known fatalities of the day to two, making the tragedy that much more tragic and leaving Mark to raise the daughter that he felt had come between us alone. I tried to comfort Mark, but he was so deeply in shock I couldn't help but worry. He barely made a sound when I pulled together a bag for Sofia, picked up the very unhappy little girl and pulled him out of the apartment and back towards the Hospital, hoping they would have more news by then that wasn't all bad. We found Meredith in the conference room with Christina, Owen, and Dr. Bailey. Since Meredith wasn't clutching Zola and didn't appear to be crying or having cried I could only hope that Derek was relatively ok. Pushing Mark to sit next to her I tried to use the stroller to create a motion that would lull Sofia to sleep, with moderate success, all the while trying to not to come out and ask who had died.
The events of that day two days ago bought us all here. Dressed in black we all sit in the Church celebrating the lives of Jackson Avery, Callie Torres and Richard Webber. Waiting that night in the conference room it hadn't even occurred to me that Jackson could be the one who had died, just because I was so worried for Meredith and Mark that it was Derek. Looking back over the last two days I can honestly say that I'm not sure if the shock of this has worn off but I know clearly that Mark is who I want to spend my life with. Even the thought of raising Sofia isn't enough to scare me knowing that he and I could have been on that plane. As for the rest of our colleagues, Arizona is expected to recover 95% mobility in her hand once all the breaks heal and she has a chance to go through extensive physical Therapy. Teddy survived Iraq only to suffer a break down as a result of the stress of the plane crash combined with the death of Henry, Doctors are hopeful that in time she'll be able to return to her position as a surgeon. Derek is slowly regaining full feeling in his legs and is hopeful that by the time all the spinal swelling goes away he'll have full mobility to chase Zola around the back yard of the finished dream house. And Alex woke from surgery to repair the tears in his lungs causes by broken ribs to find Izzie sitting next to him holding his hand.
As for Mark and I, I'm hopeful for the future. As soon as he knew that Derek was going to live he turned to me and told me he loved me and that he'd left Julia the morning after I'd confessed my love for him. So even as I sit here in a church celebrating those we lost this week and holding another woman's child with the man I love, for every tear that falls in sadness there is one that falls out of amazement that I've been giving this chance. That this defining moment for all that it knocked me over so hard I couldn't figure out which way was up for a few moments brought about the biggest moment of evolution in my life so far.
Author's Note – This will more than likely be the only story you ever see me right for Grey's Anatomy but I couldn't help but try to make the wait for the season finale a bit more bearable. I apologize for any slips in the narrative, I don't normally write in first person so I've tried to find and correct any of the spots where I absent mindedly reverted to third person.