Fixing What Can Be Fixed
A Lost-Grey's Anatomy Crossover (Yes, Again)
By DavidB226Morris
Summary: It's been about six months since Home is Where The Heart Is ended. Jack Shephard has settled back into his new life at Seattle Grace, and many of the other survivors are starting to feel back to normal as well. But now, Jack is faced with a new mess of problems. Fortunately, once you've dealt with foraging for food and dodging a smoke monster on a tropical island, a hospital bureaucracy is practically child's play. Right?
Disclaimer: Haven't we been through this before? Okay, for the record. Jack, Hurley, Kate, and just about everybody here connected with Oceanic 815 doesn't belong to me. They're the property of J.J. Abrams, Darlton, and just about everyone else at Bad Robot. (But they're happier here! Please, can I keep them?) Similarly, Derek Shepherd, Meredith, Christina, and the rest of Seattle Grace belong to The Dark One - I mean, Shonda Rhimes and the rest of the people at Shondaland. (I look at McDreamy and the others and say: "Come with me if you want to live.")
Author's Note: So, about a year ago I wrote my last words on Home is Where the Heart Is, and figured I was done. It was, unlike so many other stories I write, just going to be a one-shot. But then, I started rewatching Lost again, and the plot bunnies came to me in my sleep. Some part of me must've thought: "You built a happy ending for just about all the survivors of Oceanic 815. Maybe you can do the same for some of the people in Grey's Anatomy. It'll be harder work, but its never stopped you before." So, much like the writers and cast of Big Little Lies, I decided that there was another story to be told, and that, well, "I have to go baack!"
I feel I should write a few disclaimers. The survivors are not going back to the island. Jacob isn't going to pull them back in. The conflicts that everybody will face will be more every day, though no less challenge. Secondly, the story will take mostly within the boundaries of the fifth season of Grey's Anatomy, which is where the series went off the rails, and not coincidentally, when I stopped watching the show. It's going to focus more on Jack and hospital business, but be patient, most of the people who survived Season 3 will be making appearances. There will be major revisions here, and what may seem like character bashing, but which, in reality, is actually bad storyline bashing.
That's all I have. Be gentle. And try to review as often as you did for my last story in this world.
PROLOGUE
SANTA MONICA MINIMUM SECURITY
Kate Austen had spent the better part of five years running from the law. She had been all over the country, had gone as far off as Melbourne, and had even spent four months on an island in the Pacific. Like any fugitive, she had never stayed at any place very long and had never put down deep roots anywhere. Even on the island, she had always been trying to rescued, when any other person would've counted their blessings. She had never been able to explain to anyone - not even Sawyer, who would've been likely to understand best - why she had needed to keep moving, particularly as all she ever seemed to do was come back. Hell, that was the whole reason the marshal's caught her in the first place.
Now, six months into her sentence, she honestly found herself wondering why she had fought it so damn much. After all, as prisons went, this wasn't a bad one.
Admittedly, it was one for 'high class' criminals - rich people who had been high on painkillers when they went through a stoplight and ran over old women, college kids who had been caught holding the bag when someone OD's on prescription drugs, madams who had catered in high level 'escort services'. And it was pretty clear that whoever designed this facility had modeled it after so much of Southern California's other architecture. There weren't even any bars on the windows or cells, rather each room was designed with Plexiglas doors that wouldn't break no matter how much force was put against them. This wasn't Oz. They were allowed to wear street clothes. The television in the main room was bigger than the ones than had been in most of Kate's motel rooms. The cafeteria served better cuisine that the ones then could be found in the diners her mother had worked at - there was an irony writ large. There were searches of their cells for contraband, but they seemed a lot more perfunctory than the ones that had been done when Kate had been in holding. She was allowed access to a cell phone for half an hour a day - she hadn't even owned a cell phone until she had gotten back to civilization.
Perhaps the best thing about her time were the visiting hours. Every Thursday afternoon, people from her life would come to see her. And considering how close they had gotten over the last year, the people from Oceanic tended to come in packs.
Hurley, of course, was there every week, as did Jin and Sun, who had moved nearby after Ji Yeon had been born. They always came and talked about their lives, and how much they missed Kate.
Sayid and Nadia didn't come quite as often - given what Kate had learned about Nadia's time being held as a prisoner by the Republican Guard, it was understandable that she wouldn't want to be here - but they still came fairly frequently.
Ever since Claire had learned that she was Jack's half-sister, she and her mother moved to Seattle to be closer to their actual family along with their spiritual one. Claire came with Aaron every two weeks, like clockwork. It was clear she still had some residual guilt in her why Kate was in prison in the first place, no matter how many time Kate had told her that it wasn't her fault. She was still, however, very close to Kate and brought Aaron every time. She had even been there when Aaron had taken his first step.
Paradoxically, one of the people she had hoped to see the most came the least often. She knew that James was living with Juliet in Miami almost since they had gotten back to civilization. She also knew that, given his history, a prison, no matter how nice it looked inside and out, was still the last place that James Ford ever wanted to visit again. And considering that his actions were more directly related to her being caught than anybody among the Oceanics, it was understandable there was a very strong sense of residual guilt here. Still, the fact that James had only visited her four times in the six months she'd been in prison still hurt a little.
However, she couldn't argue that she was out of contact within him, because every week, almost religiously, Kate received a letter from him. Nor was this just a few lines scratched on paper - they were usually two to three pages, typed, single-spaced. In it, James opened up in ways that he had never done even on the island. He told her about what life had been like for him after his parents had died, how he had been bent on finding the man who killed him, and what he had done. He knew that prisons checked all incoming mail, so he coded his confessions as the 'new adventures of Tom Sawyer'. They were still pretty unsettling, even for a 'hardened criminal' like Kate. The unsavory characters he had dealt with in his cons - he saved special venom for a man called Hibbs - the con that had landed him in a Phoenix prison, the fact that he had a daughter named Clementine. For all the darkness in them, though, she had a feeling that she was still only scratching the surface - he had yet to get to the story as to why he had been in Australia in the first place.
That was the solemn stuff - the rest of the letters usually contained recommendations for reading material (not much of a shock; Sawyer had read some pretty heady literature when they were on the beach) and asking for comparisons about her 'jail' ("You never know what lies in the future, Freckles", he would say.), and quips about offers for book and movie deals that he was still getting. "I'll never have to do my old job again, thank God," he told her. "Not that I was ever very good at it."
But, of course, the part that made her look forward to visiting day was that every week, Jack would show up. He had to be one of the most recognized surgeons in the world now, but every week, he would clear his schedule, and come to Santa Monica. There were always at least four or five other people coming to see her, but everybody was more than willing to give her and Jack some alone time at beginning or end of each visit. And he was always smiling when he saw her - indeed, he tended to smile more in each visit than Kate had ever seen him do the entire three months plus they were on the island together. They knew that he was more relaxed in general, but he seemed genuinely at peace with himself in a way he had never been.
But even now, Kate was able to tell when something, however subtle, was troubling him. It had become pretty clear in this particular session about five months into her stay. It was a pretty crowded visit - Jin, Sun, Sayid and Hurley were all there - but as always, Kate had a pretty solid read that he was a little concerned about something.
Sayid, who had been pretty good at gauging Jack's mood on the island as well, was picking up on it too. "Something appears to be troubling you," he asked him about half an hour in.
Jack finally owned it - he was getting better at being called on his bullshit. "I'm sorry, I know how important this is, it's just -" he shrugged. "Stuff at home."
"Is Claire okay?" Sun asked quickly. They had all been a little concerned when she and Aaron hadn't shown up on the trip.
"Oh, God no," Jack quickly reassured her "Aaron had the croup, that's all. Not exactly conducive to a four-hundred mile train ride. No, it's just some stuff at work."
"Well, now you have to tell me." Kate said. "You tell me a five minute story from Seattle Grace, I own the gossip mill for a month."
There was a certain measure of truth in that. Apparently, when Jack had switched hospitals he had landed himself right in the middle of a damn soap opera. There was so much sex going on behind the scenes, and people swapped beds more often than they did surgeries, that it seemed like one of the stories that many of Kate's fellow inmates were watching on TV. At least one convict - a producer who had gotten caught in a coke sting - after she heard the stories for a month straight told Kate flat out that she'd give her a million dollar finder's fee for the rights. And she couldn't tell how serious she was.
Hurley was caught up in it, too. "Yeah. Have Addison and McSteamy gotten back together yet?"
Jack shook his head, still smiling. "You know, James would be ashamed of the lack of effort the residents put into nicknames." He gave a small sigh. "No, its nothing as important as that. Honestly, its stupid the things people at the hospital get worked up about."
"I like boring. After spending all that time, running around the jungle, boring is soothing." Kate said.
"All right, but you're gonna laugh." Jack shook his head. "Seattle Grace went from the third best hospital in the country to the twelfth best hospital in the country."
There was a long silence as everybody considered this trivia. Hurley, in typical fashion, reacted first. "Dude, do they still make the playoffs or do they have to hope for a wild card?"
Jack actually chuckled at that. "They take it seriously although, frankly, I don't know why. Seriously, we're in the middle of working a major trauma, and all anyone wants to talk about is the damn rankings from the AMA. I may have been the only doctor in the entire hospital who wasn't appalled or alarmed by this news, which, naturally made everybody believe something was wrong with me."
They all considered this for a moment. "You're not worried about your job, are you?" Sun asked.
"Any hospital in the world is still going to want to hire me, and even if they weren't, I still have enough money in the bank from the settlement so that I could just give up surgery altogether if I wanted, " Jack reminded them. "No, I just guess I still have perspective on this that I wouldn't have had. Before -" he waved his hand in the air "everything, if something had happened at St. Sebastian like this, I'd probably have gone into full-flown panic mode, trying to do something to help the hospital. I'd have acted like the worst possible thing that could've happened had happened."
"And now you know better." Sayid reminded him.
"Yeah, but I can't exactly tell everybody on staff to get on a plane and hope that it crashes." Jack replied. "And the thing of it is, some of them have been through similar trauma. Meredith Grey apparently held an active rocket in her hand, while someone was trying to defuse it for five hours. It detonated just five minutes after they were able to extract it. Three months later, there was some kind of crash at the ferry, she got knocked into the water, and was clinically dead for half an hour. Her boyfriend..."
"The other Dr. Shepherd?" Hurley asked. You really couldn't tell some of the players without a scorecard.
"Broke up with for a while because she seemed borderline suicidal. Of course, this being Seattle Grace, they were still hooking up for much of that time." Jack shook his head. "In retrospect, she'd probably have been dealing with the shit on the island then the rest of us did."
"So I'm guessing that when I got caught trying to see Claire..." Kate started.
"Was another day at the office for them." Jack looked at Hurley. "You told once my bedside manner sucked. Compared to some of the residents in this hospital, I'm Albert Schweitzer."
"They don't, like, rank you on how nice you treat your patients, do they?" Hurley asked.
"My guess is, that's not a factor. If it was, I'm pretty sure Seattle Grace would rank even lower. I may be exaggerating a bit, there are some interns and residents who treat their patients with compassion. They're considered the weak ones by the hospital." Jack blinked a couple of times. "I'm sorry, Kate, I didn't mean to turn the visit into something all about me."
"Believe me, Jack, this is a welcome distraction from everything else going on." Kate almost laughed. "Besides, who knows? Keep telling me these stories, and you could end up with your own network pilot in a couple years."
After the visit at Santa Monica was over, the rest of the people who had visited Kate's traditionally went to Hurley's place to have dinner. The mansion was generally big enough to hold all of them, Carmen Reyes was a good hostess, and some of the other people who didn't usually come would show up.
"Hey, Jack." Walt was looking a lot better these days. Hurley had essentially put him up in the mansion, while Michael was still serving his time, and he was still seeing a therapist every week. He seemed in a better place than he'd been in awhile, though he was still trying to get a handle on his 'gift'. "How's Kate doing?" Walt was still having trouble with confined spaces, and visited Kate the least of the group.
"Pretty good." Jack told him. "At least, as good as anyone in that situation probably could be."
Walt stared at him for a moment. "Have you asked her yet?"
Jack looked at the young boy. Even knowing what he did, it was still uncanny how quickly Walt could pick up on these things. "The two of us have an understanding." he told him. "The day she gets out, we are going over to the nearest church, and I'm putting the ring on her finger. She wants to have something to look forward to."
"Hurley's going to want to perform a big wedding."
"Hurley's not the one getting married." Jack paused. "Besides, the first time I got married, I really, really rushed things, and a result, it was pretty much doomed before it began. I don't want history to repeat itself."
"I get it." Walt told him. It was only then that Jack realized that he had just told the story of his first marriage to a twelve-year old. Then again, given everything he had been through, Walt probably deserved to be treated like an adult. It's not like Jack had done such a bang up job when they had been on the island together.
"How have you been doing?" Jack immediately felt like an idiot. He had asked the exact same question of Walt a week ago. So much for his bedside manner improving.
"Better, actually. I only dreamed about the island once." Walt was generally a lot cheerier these days.
"That's better than I do," Jack admitted. "I'm glad you're doing better. I truly am."
"Hurley's a big help. And I see everybody else pretty often. I'm going to be starting school again in a couple weeks. I'm actually looking forward to it."
Jack had been dancing around the last part of their time together for a little while. Even knowing everything that Juliet and Walt himself had told him, he was still reluctant to believe that the kid really was 'special.' It didn't seem like it much of the time, but he was still a bit wary of him.
He wasn't sure why he decided to ask him - maybe to put Walt at ease, maybe to test his curiosity - but he decided to ask him directly. "Have you had any of those dreams about us?" he finally asked.
"You know they're not dreams." Walt spoke so casually about something so strange.
"You know who I was," Jack pointed out. "You know I have trouble dealing with this stuff."
Walt nodded. "Go ahead and ask what you want to ask. You know I'm not going to hurt you."
Jack hesitated again. "There's been a lot of chaos at the hospital. Programs are being cut, last week the place flooded, its been getting messy."
"You'll be fine." Walt said quickly.
He was a little surprised the answer came back that quickly. "Things are going to be okay?" Jack asked.
"Oh, no. Seattle Grace is going to be in a messy place for awhile. But you, you'll be fine." Walt got up. "Come on. It's time to eat."
Walt didn't mention their encounter again for the next few months. But considering the hell that was going to rain down at the hospital, Jack had many times to remember that remark.
Had he ever had a chance to think about Locke - a man he had almost completely managed to forget over the past year - he might have done well to remember a remark that he had made to him once about Walt.
Of course, he couldn't have known that had to do with something far more important. Walt didn't picture events in his head that had already happened.
He caused them to happen.