Author's Note- This story is set in Season 5 and will definitely be a multi-chapter fic. I am still not sure how soon I will be uploading the next one but I'll try my best to make it as soon as I possibly can. Please review, I'd love to hear your thoughts.
Does it really happen? Does someone just come into your life and change you? Change the way you live? Change the way you thought about things? Can someone have such an influence? And is a gaze or kiss enough for them to change you? Can someone change the very core of you?
Another rainy day dawned in Seattle as Cristina slapped the alarm clock. She always awoke suddenly and swiftly. Her years as an intern and now as a resident had taught her to be up and on her feet within seconds. Her body was adjusted to going without sleep or food for many hours on end. When she slept, she slept deeply. And awoke promptly.
Mornings had always been her least favorite time of the day. They were too quiet and much too cold for her liking. Especially in Seattle, the mornings tended to be damp. But she didn't mind the rain. She quite liked it in fact, even when the rain made her curly hair curlier than ever.
Cristina Yang was a lot of things, but she was not the kind of woman who complained about her hair.
Yes, Cristina Yang was a lot of things.
She was ambitious, talented, intelligent, surprisingly perceptive at times, wild and witty.
If you asked anyone about her, they would tell you that she was always on top of her game. Her professors, friends, peers, supervisors, attendings, hell even her kindergarten teachers could tell you that.
She was extremely proud of the women she had turned out to be. She was even more proud of the surgeon she had turning into. She was better than everyone in her program. That didn't surprise her. She was almost always better than most people in her classes. It only seemed natural she would be better than others at surgery.
The day she had started her internship at Seattle Grace Hospital, she knew she was in the right place. She could remember the day she walked into the hospital and took her surroundings in. It was like arriving.
Arriving home.
Sure, it was a lot of grunt work in the beginning but she was prepared for that. They don't let you cut on your first day out of medical school. She was even making friends. Well, friend. Just Meredith. She only considered Meredith her friend in the beginning.
Then Burke happened. And it was amazing. For a while. The sex was great, the learning was great, the surgeries were even better.
But then it all turned, very suddenly into something else. It was like she was falling down an abyss. And she couldn't do anything. She didn't want to do anything about it. Falling into that abyss, at that moment seemed like something she could not resist.
But its not always fairy tale endings is it? Life is never really how you expect it to be.
She made her peace with it. Peace with the fact that he left her in a poofy wedding dress no less, without a proper real goodbye, sent his mother to get his things, which she had to admit was quite a cowardly move. It still stung when she would catch his name in the middle of a someone's conversation and it would almost always be accompanied by "Harper Avery Award". After the stinging would disappear, she would take a deep breath knowing that she was better for it.
For being left. And she would swallow the lump that almost always accompanied these encounters.
But on this cold rainy morning, Burke was not the man she was thinking of. Her thoughts were occupied with a Major Owen Hunt, or otherwise known as" the guy who pulled out my icicle without permission after I was karmically impaled for telling Meredith what I thought about her and Derek moving in together".
Its not like she didn't think about him. When a man like that just pops out of nowhere and kisses you like that, you think about. You think about it often.
But she had seen him the night before and he mentioned something about work. He looked good in civilian clothing. Maybe he was coming to work in Seattle Grace?
No, Cristina scoffed at her thoughts as she poured coffee into a flask. Definitely not. He had turned down the chief's offer.
And since when do I care whether he is coming to work at Seattle Grace? She thought, as she shrugged on her jacket and opened her front door ready to brace the cold.
By the time she had walked into the hospital she had already forgotten about Major Owen Hunt. Her thoughts were all blood and whether Hahn would let her scrub in on anything. She spotted Meredith and was soon entrapped in the stories of Ellis Grey giving her daughter an Anatomy Jane doll.
Everything seemed like it always was.
Except it wasn't.
Because as she and Meredith turned a corner, he was there. Mid conversation with Sloan, Shepherd and the Chief.
He was wearing dark blue scrubs, attending scrubs, and a lab coat over it. He was going to work here after all.
And before she could register anything else, she grabbed Meredith and ran.
Because now, she was the kind of women who ran.
Owen was certain he had heard a voice exclaim "Run!" and he was even more certain that a curly haired woman was running away, with another blonde haired woman accompanying her.
It couldn't be her. Or could it? And more importantly, was she running away from him?
Don't blame her, Owen thought to himself. That was an encounter he was anxious to get over with. He was equally anxious to not see her. But how was that even possible? He knew she would be here when he had called up Dr Webber in hopes that the job offer from several months ago was still open. And he would be lying if he said that she was not partly the reason he wanted to come and work here.
Of course, he had told himself for a while that it was nothing. He had kissed other women before and she obviously must kissed other men before too. A woman with lips like that and a wit like that.. well... anyone would want to kiss her.
But the closer he was to actually starting his first day, she started taking up more space in his mind. He did not take this job for her. He had no intention of wooing her or even kissing her couldn't even if he wanted to. Maybe she has forgotten about me, Owen told himself all day long.
She probably has a boyfriend, Owen thought to himself. He hadn't even bothered to ask her the night he met her. He had known in his heart that she was not involved with anyone. Women who were happily in love or in a relationship did not look at men the way she had that night.
He was happy to be here. Although it might seem monotonous to work in a hospital after serving in Iraq, Owen knew that this is what he needed. Not that he had any other options. He had been discharged.
Those words felt like venom in his mouth every time he thought or spoke about it.
Yes, the hospital was exactly what he needed.
As the rest of the day when on, he got a confirmation that she had definitely run away from him this morning. During the skills labs, she was trying her best to hide behind the pretty, dark haired intern. Grey, was it? Cristina probably thought he hadn't noticed, oh but he had.
He decided to play it cool then, if she didn't want to be fraternizing with him. And then he did the stupidest thing ever. He called her "Cristine." As if, he did not know her name. It felt stupider still after she grabbed his arm and asked him if he really didn't remember his name and he confessed to her that he had remembered her name.
And before he knew it, he was telling her about his unit, the R.P.G. ambush, his discharge, the before and the after. She listened to him without saying a word.
He left as soon as he had said what he had wanted to. He headed back to the ER. He needed to work. To do anything other than think about the way a wispy curl had escaped her braid. And the way her hands had rubbed her forehead and rested at the side of her face.
It was only his first day and he had already spilled his guts to her. Damn,it was just something about her that made him do it. He felt that he needed to give an explanation as to why he didn't supposedly know her name anymore. He needed her to understand so that maybe he might get closer to understanding.
How was he going to get through the rest of the day, week or months if he felt like this on his first day?