A/N: I've never read any Grey's Anatomy fanfiction before. I have no idea if this plotline has been done before (I assume it has been), so let me know in a review if it has, and what you think of this rather rushed attempt at exploring that storyline. Before or after reading this, I'd recommend rewatching the pilot. Most of the dialogue here is borrowed from the pilot, and I own none of it. But there are subtle things I've added and subtracted that will be important in how the story develops. If you guys like the idea, I'll continue.
Chapter I: This Head I Hold
She wakes up on the cold tile floor of a bathroom. Her mouth tastes like a mixture of cheap liquors and there's vomit in her hair. Left foot asleep, right arm folded uncomfortably under her head. Meredith uses the dusty lid of the toilet as a lever and pulls herself up, finding the mirror. A shivering girl with one hell of a hangover looks back at her. It's bright outside, the sunlight reflects off the mirror. It's her first day of work. Day one, and she wants to play hooky. Meredith gives the half-empty bottle by the bathtub a baleful glance, then looks back to the mirror, squares her shoulders. The light reflects off and hits her in the eye, cueing a throbbing headache.
Tequila sunrise.
Seattle looks alarmingly cheerful this morning. She preferred the city last night, dark and cold and wet. There's the view she thought she'd forgotten, there's the Space Needle, there's the bay. A perfect welcome home, Meredith thinks as she drives to work. Hungover and tired already. The hospital comes into view as she changes lanes and a rush of adrenaline thrills up her spine.
And terrified, don't forget terrified.
Meredith vaguely remembers some of these faces from the mixer they'd all gone to the week before. In the locker room the tall, lanky guy who'd nervously asked her out after consuming three glasses of cheap wine has his scrub top on inside out. The girl that has the extra two inches of height she'd kill for is carefully arranging her long brown hair over the stethoscope draped around her neck.
"O'Malley, Yang, Grey, Stevens!"
Day one of being a doctor. A hungover doctor who looks like she just stepped out of the ninth grade.
She's screwed.
"You're a doctor?" Katie Bryce asks skeptically, giving Meredith the once-over as she wheels her out of the room and down the hallway.
It comes out more easily than she thought it would. "Yes." Katie purses her lips. "I'm going to take you to do some tests, okay?"
"Why do I have to have all those dumb tests anyway? I've done them all before at the other hospital," Katie asks. "If you're a doctor, why can't you just fix it?"
"We have to find out what's wrong with you first," Meredith explains, pressing the button for the fifth floor and hoping for the best. "That's what these tests are about." Katie looks at her again.
"There's no way you're a doctor. You look like my cousin, Amber. She's a nurse, but she doesn't actually do anything. She, like, makes sure babies don't die during the night." Katie rolls her eyes as Meredith scans the list of floors posted inside the elevator again, looking for Radiology. They reach level five and the elevator doors open. "You're lost."
Meredith looks down at her. "I'm not lost. How are you feeling?"
"How do you think I'm feeling? I'm missing my pageant!"
Meredith raises one eyebrow. "You're missing your pageant?"
"The Spokane Teen Miss." She rolls her eyes again like this is common knowledge. "I was in the top ten after the first two rounds. I could have won!"
Meredith wheels Katie down the hallway, her feet already sore. She shouldn't have worn the new tennis shoes. Meredith turns the gurney around, heading back towards the elevator.
"Hello!" Katie says, annoyed. "You're so lost. What are you, like, new?" Meredith bites her tongue, thinking, 'Yeah, I'm lost as hell, and you're not making it any easier'.
Second floor now, and Katie is still going strong. "I twisted my ankle in talent rehearsal. I do rhythmic gymnastics," she explains, "which is, like, really cool. Nobody else does it. And I tripped over my ribbon." Meredith is scanning her brain trying to figure out what 'rhythmic gymnastics' is, and how it would involve a ribbon. "And I didn't get stuck with someone this clueless, and that was, like, a nurse." She breaks off to smile sarcastically. "And you're a doctor." Katie sinks back into her pillows and crosses her arms over her chest, sighing. "You're so lost. This is taking forever."
After Katie's C.T scan (third floor) and a rushed lunch, Meredith is back with her patient, Miss 'Pain in the Ass'. Katie's still asleep in the bed next to her, and Meredith is close to joining her in dreamland. The silence in the hospital room, punctured by the beep of the heart monitor, is strange to her. Beep beep. The sound of a life. She glances at Katie, sleeping so peacefully. This young girl with her own brain working against her. Meredith stands and begins to walk to the door, hoping to find a vending machine down the hall, when Katie's parents walk in.
A woman with the same shade of pale blonde hair as her daughter hurries to Katie, her heels clicking against the floor. "Katie, honey, Mom and Dad are here," she comforts. Katie dozes on.
"They gave her a sedative for the C.T scan, so she's a little groggy," Meredith explains. Mrs. Bryce pulls her eyes away from her daughter and fixes them on Meredith. The look of worry and trust in those brown eyes momentarily throws her. What would it be like, Meredith wonders, to be cared for so much?
"Our doctor at home said she might need some operation," Katie's father says, looking at Meredith with little faith. Katie is her father's daughter. "Is that true?"
"What kind of operation?" Mrs. Bryce asks.
Meredith begins to move away from them. Her appetite is gone, and her mind scrambles to come up with something that might give them some answers. "She's, um —well, you know what? I'm not the doctor. I'm a doctor, but I'm not Katie's doctor, so I'll go get him for you." They nod at her, and Meredith flees for the door.
A few minutes of 'where the hell am I?' later, she runs into Dr. Bailey. The resident looks at her in annoyance.
"What?"
"Katie's parents have questions. Do you talk to them, or do I ask Burke?" Meredith asks, unsure. Dr. Bailey waves her question away.
"No, Burke's off the case," she explains. "Katie belongs to the new attending now, Dr. Shepherd. He's over there." She points in a general direction, walks away, and Meredith scans the floor for Dr. Shepherd.
Holy. Shit.
In front of her is a handsome, tall attending with dark hair. All that hair to cover up a brain full of neurological terminology that's slipping out of Meredith's brain with every passing hour. The medical texts she'd been reading over on Juvenile Myoclonic Epilepsy while waiting for Katie to wake up were, in addition to simple exhaustion, what had been making her fall asleep in a chair beside Katie's bed in the first place.
The neuro surgeon looks up from the file in his hands, sees her frozen in front of him, and smiles curiously. As if shoved by a force of air, Meredith moves forward. His colleagues leave them, their post-lunch conversation evidently having coming to a close. "Yes?"
"Dr. Shepherd?" Meredith asks, hoping her cheeks aren't flushed, although they feel warm. He's still smiling at her. She knows she looks every bit the nervous intern. He nods.
"Doctor…?" he prompts.
"Grey, I'm Doctor Grey," Meredith explains, gaining some footing in her ill-fitting tennis shoes. "I have a case, well, it's not my case, but it's this teenager," she explains. "Katie Bryce. She's been having seizures with no known cause, and her parents have some questions. I…Dr. Bailey said I should ask you, that you were the new attending on the case."
Dr. Shepherd nods again, serious now. "Okay, do you have her chart?" Meredith freezes again. The attending sighs, turns her with a touch of his hand, and leads her to the door she'd just come out of. "I'll take a look at her chart, then maybe I can answer some of their questions." She nods, walking with purpose and embarrassment from her rambling. "No known cause?" he asks, walking beside her.
Meredith shakes her head, keeping her eyes ahead of her. "Her doctor in Spokane diagnosed her with Juvenile Myoclonic Epilepsy."
"Which is a pretty broad diagnosis," Shepherd says. "Patients with JME can have varying types of seizures, ranging from simple myoclonic jerks, atonic drops, absence, all the way to tonic clonic. What types is she presenting?"
The image of Katie as they'd unloaded her from the chopper, her limbs thrashing, her eyes rolled back, flashed in her mind. 'A fish on dry land', Burke had called her. In the moment, Meredith had thought the expression somewhat funny. After knowing Katie for the past few hours, though, she finds she doesn't think of it as amusing. Katie may be a pain in the ass, a teen with not much upstairs, but she was a girl with two parents who obviously cared about her, about her troubled brain. About the seizures she couldn't control.
"She was airlifted here," Meredith responds, more confidence behind her words. "Arrived in the middle of a five minute long tonic clonic. Since then she's been stable, I've been monitoring her."
They reach the Pediatric Neurology wing and Shepherd opens the door, letting her go first. "Well, let's get her chart and look at her labs. It could be a simple change in medication or an increase in dosage that would get the seizures under control." They reach the nurses station, and he asks for a copy of the chart.
No answers and one overripe apple later, Meredith is sitting on a gurney on the ground floor along with her fellow interns, cursing her tennis shoes and the lingering hangover from her ill-fated decision that a few shots of tequila sitting alone in her mother's empty house would ease the stress of beginning her first day as a surgical intern. She moves her fingertips over the pressure points near her temples and thinks about the potential benefits of giving up alcohol altogether. George O'Malley is talking about his failed appendectomy and subsequent nickname.
"No one's calling you '007'", she and Izzie assure him. Next to her, Izzie is doing some sort of bizarre yoga move involving stretching her arms over her head. Just looking at her is making Meredith's body ache.
"I was on the elevator and Murphy whispered, '007'," George says, wheeling himself around in a forgotten wheelchair. As unfortunate as it is that his first surgery had gone wrong, Meredith knows that, were any of them in his position, standing over that operating table, a life in their hands, they'd be scared shitless. Probably would have cracked, too. She can feel her eyes drooping again, but then Cristina springs to her feet, heading toward the vending machine. Meredith's arches protest just watching her.
"How many times do we have to go through this, George," Cristina asks, annoyed. "Five, ten? Give me a number, or else I'm gonna hit you." Meredith smiles sleepily.
"Murphy whispered, '007', and everyone laughed," George insists. Puppy dog eyes.
Izzie continues her strange stretch, leaning to the other side. "He wasn't talking about you."
George looks up. "Are you sure?"
Half asleep by now, Meredith asks, "Would we lie to you?" There's rain falling against the glass behind her head. There's the Seattle she remembers.
"Yes!" George says.
"007 is a state of mind," Cristina calls from the vending machine.
George rolls his eyes. "Oh, says the girl who finished first in her class at Stanford!"
Their pagers all beep. Meredith opens her eyes (when had she closed them?) and squints at her pager. "Oh, man. It's 911 for Katie Bryce," she shifts her legs and moves off the gurney with as much strength as she can muster. Her feet scream. Forty-five bucks wasted on a pair of New Balance tennis shoes? Never again. "I gotta go."
Remembering Dr. Bailey's words, Meredith rushes up the stairs back to Pediatric Neurology, trying to remember exactly where Katie's room is located. When she finally makes it to the girl's room, Katie flops her magazine on her lap.
"Took you long enough!" she complains, flopping her magazine on her lap. Meredith tries to catch her breath.
"You're okay? The nurse paged me '911'!"
Katie sighs. "I had to go all 'Exorcist' to get her to even pick up the phone." Meredith's headache rages. She's surprised Katie's even seen 'The Exorcist', now that she thinks about it.
"Wait. There's nothing wrong with you?" Meredith clarifies.
"I'm bored."
She wonders if abandoning a patient is considered bad form.
The next time she's paged '911' for Katie Bryce, it's a blessing in disguise. Alex Karev, a fellow intern, is another pain in the ass. Misdiagnosing a patient in front of her eyes. Meredith takes a slow walk up the stairs as if hiking a mountain. Maybe she can use Katie as an excuse to sit down this time, 'monitor' her. If she closes the door maybe she can even sneak in a quick nap.
Chaos greets her when she reaches Katie's room. Nurses in green scrubs are scrambling to turn Katie on her left side as the girl flails again. Tonic clonic. Grand mal. A fish on dry land. Not funny at all.
"What took you so long?" a nurse asks as Meredith enters the room. Her heart is racing, she suddenly misses the white coat she'd left downstairs, its perceived weight. Without it she feels naked and cold. Katie continues to seize. Another nurse gives Meredith a quick update.
"She's been having multiple grand mal seizures," he says. "Now, how do you want to proceed?"
She's going to faint, that's all there is to it. The nurses have successfully turned Katie on her side. The girl Meredith has been cursing for hours needs her help, needs it now.
"Dr. Grey, are you listening to me?!"
I'm a doctor, I'm a doctor, I'm a doctor, I'm a doctor, Meredith chants, her mind spinning. The nurse tells her the drugs he's administered to Katie. Two drugs used to combat seizures.
"Dr. Grey, you need to tell us what you want to do!" The nurse insists. His tone conveys both urgency and a reminder of her responsibility in the situation. "Dr. Grey!"
Katie continues to seize with no sign of the seizure ending. Like this she could reach Status Epilepticus and never wake up. Another drug, another drug, what's another Anti-Epileptic Drug? Feeling lightheaded and out of her league, Meredith pretends she's wearing her white coat. A weight, something to ground her.
"Okay, she's full on Lorazepam?" she asks.
"She's had four milligrams," a nurse confirms.
"You've paged Dr. Bailey and Dr. Shepherd?" Meredith asks urgently.
A nurse stands up. "Lorazepam's not working," he says. Katie thrashes on the bed, her heart racing faster than Meredith's.
"Phenobarbital," she says. "Load her with Phenobarbital." Another AED, a common one. A nurse grabs the drug and injects it into Katie's I.V.
"Pheno's in," a nurse confirms.
"No change!"
Meredith scrambles. "Dr. Grey, you need to tell us what you want to do!"
I'm a doctor, I'm a doctor, I'm a doctor, I'm a doctor.
The next moments pass in a collection of flashes. A mess of fireworks on New Year's Eve. Loud, too bright, exhilarating, terrifying. She's trained for this, but nothing has prepared Meredith for what it would feel like to make someone's heart beat again. Beep, beep, beep. The sound of a life.
Amidst the bustle of nurses clearing away all the equipment used to save Katie, Dr. Shepherd arrives, his face serious. No curious smile in Meredith's direction this time. "What the hell happened?" he asks no one in particular.
"She had a seizure, and her heart stopped," Meredith relays.
He shoots her a look that makes her imaginary white coat, all that was grounding her in the situation, fall to the floor. "You were supposed to be monitoring her!"
"I couldn't have stopped the onset of a grand mal seizure!" Meredith counters. Shepherd listens to the girl's heart, not looking at Meredith. One of the nurses clears their throat as the team filters out awkwardly. Shepherd looks up, brow furrowed. Meredith continues. "I checked on her, and —"
"I got her," he says, waving Meredith away. "Just —just go."
She stays for a moment, feeling like she might cry, then leaves the room. Is this what George had felt when he'd frozen in the operating room? Only she can't hold it as well as he seemed to. Meredith runs into the nearest bathroom, followed by a concerned Cristina, and upchucks adrenaline and shame into the nearest trashcan. Looking up at Cristina, wiping vomit from her chin with the back of her hand, Meredith croaks out, "You tell anyone ever —" Cristina nods.
Although Meredith had tried her best to look anywhere but at Dr. Shepherd, he'd caught her eye in the boardroom earlier as he'd asked the interns for help with Katie's case. A flicker of something had passed between them, and Meredith looked at her hands, listening to his incentive of scrubbing in to Katie's surgery, whatever that turned out to be.
Cristina perks up when they cross paths in the I.C.U an hour later, moving to walk beside her. No trace of judgement from the night before in her voice when she proposes they work together on trying to find the cause of Katie's seizures.
"If we find the answer we have a fifty-fifty chance of scrubbing in."
Meredith nods. "I'll work with you, but I don't want in on the surgery. You can have it."
Cristina looks shocked. "Are you kidding? It's the biggest opportunity any intern will ever get!"
"I almost let that girl die last night," Meredith reminds her. "I'm the last person that should be on Shepherd's surgery. I wish I wasn't even on the case." Once inside the elevator, she presses '4' for the research library.
"What, because you ran your first code and froze up? I could see from the hallway. You did better than O'Malley."
"And Shepherd keeps giving me this look," Meredith confides as the elevator descends. "Like he's undressing me with his eyes, but he also wants me to pull my act together."
Cristina snorts. "Well, pull your act together. Find out what causes Katie's seizures, then tell Shepherd to undress someone else with his eyes."
Meredith grants her an amused smile, but her stomach turns in a knot.
The library is blissfully silent. She's heard enough beeping and blood pressure cuffs deflating in the past day to power a small army. Other interns are poring over journals and textbooks, the prospect of scrubbing in shining like a far-off prize ahead of them. The guy who'd asked her out at the mixer is sleeping in the next aisle, using his bunched up coat as a pillow. In front of her, Cristina continues to flip pages, Meredith can almost see her mind jumping from one possible explanation to another.
"Okay, so she doesn't have anoxia, chronic renal failure, or acidosis," Cristina says absently. "It's not a tumor, because her C.T's clean."
"What about infection?" Meredith proposes, grasping at straws now.
Cristina flips through Katie's chart. "No," she says. "There's no white count, and she has no C.T lesions, no fevers, nothing in her spinal tap." Meredith remembers the spinal tap well. It was the second one Katie had had to undergo, a repeat of the test done at the hospital in Spokane. Meredith had discovered just how colorful Katie's vocabulary could get when she was in pain. "What about an aneurism?"
Meredith shakes her head. "No blood on the C.T, and no headaches." Although Katie herself was one hell of a headache.
Cristina sighed. "Okay. There's no drug use, no pregnancy, no trauma."
"We're out of answers," Meredith says, standing to put a medical journal back on the shelf. "What if no one comes up with anything?"
"You mean what if she dies?"
"Yeah!" Meredith sits down and twists her fingers together nervously.
"Well, this is gonna sound really bad, but I really wanted that surgery," Cristina says.
A moment passes, and Meredith looks out the window. Another sunny day in Seattle. Only she doesn't feel too sunny. She feels like her feet are about to fall off, and she could really use a shower. "She's just never gonna get the chance to turn into a person. The sum total of her existence will be winning 'Miss Teen Whatever'. You know what her pageant talent is?"
Cristina raises her eyebrows. "They have talent?"
She hides a smile. "Rhythmic gymnastics."
Cristina snorts. "Oh, come on."
"What is rhythmic gymnastics?" Meredith asks, the words coming out in a jumble. "I can't even say it, I don't know what it is." She thinks back to what Katie had said about the ribbon. Tripping over her ribbon.
"I think it's something with a ball, and —" Meredith isn't listening. She stands up, excited. She's not going to find the answer to this question inside a medical journal or a textbook. "What? Meredith, what?"
"Get up. Come on. I have an idea," Meredith says, her mind spinning with the possibility. "We need to find Shepherd."
Hurrying around the hospital in search of Dr. Shepherd, Meredith relays Katie's fall to Cristina, who begins to share her excitement. This could be the answer. It's a stretch, but it's not impossible. They finally find him walking into an elevator on the third floor. Cristina rushes forward while Meredith hangs back.
"Dr. Shepherd, just one moment," Cristina calls. He turns, and there's that look again, that instant where their eyes meet and Meredith can't tell what he's thinking. Shepherd focuses on Cristina. "Katie competes in beauty pageants," she begins.
"I know that," Shepherd says, "but we have to save her life, anyway."
Cristina plows on. "She has no headaches, no neck pain, her C.T is clean." The elevator doors begin to close, and she pushes them back. "There's no medical proof of an aneurism, but what if she has an aneurism, anyway."
Shepherd shakes his head. "There are no indicators."
"She twisted her ankle practicing for the pageant," Cristina persists, pushing the doors back again.
"Okay, I appreciate you trying to help," Shepherd says, "but —"
Meredith stepped forward. "She fell," she says calmly. Shepherd looks at her. "When she twisted her ankle, she fell."
"It was no big deal, not even a bump on the head," Cristina continued. "She iced her ankle, got right back up, and everything was fine. It was a fall so minor, that her doctor didn't even think to mention it when I was taking her history, but she did fall."
Shepherd smiles indulgently. "You know what the chance is that a minor fall could burst an aneurism?" he asks. "One in a million. Literally!" The elevator doors close, and Meredith and Cristina turn away, deterred but not defeated. Suddenly, the elevator dings and the doors open. He looks from one to the other. "Let's go," Shepherd says, stepping out of the elevator.
Cristina and Meredith, surprised, look to him. "Go where?"
"To find out if Katie's one in a million."
They turn and follow him, exchanging an excited look.
They all watch the screen intently as Katie's brain is scanned yet again, the results coming back slowly. The nerves in her brain look like thin snakes, or a child's wavy scribble. Meredith sneaks a look at Shepherd while he leans in to inspect the scan, then pushes down the feeling rising in her chest, squashes it with one aching foot.
"I'll be damned," he says softly.
The technician points to a fuzzy patch to the left of the screen. "There it is." Meredith and Cristina lean forward slightly, both unfamiliar with reading an angiogram.
"It's minute, but it's there," Shepherd continues. "It's a subarachnoid hemorrhage." She knows what that means. "She's bleeding into her brain." He straightens up, quiet pride showing in his eyes. The interns look at each other, almost unable to believe it. "Let's go tell the parents."
He walks through them, and they follow behind down to the first floor. "She could have gone through her entire life without it ever being a problem. One tap in the right spot…"
"And it exploded," Cristina interjects.
"Exactly. And now I can fix it," he pauses, and Meredith feels the slight pressure of his palm on her back. "You two did great work. I would love to stay and kiss your asses, but I've got to tell Katie's parents she's having surgery," he asks for Katie's chart and is handed it by a woman in purple scrubs sitting behind a rounded desk. Cristina moves forward.
"Uh, Dr. Shepherd, you said that you'd pick someone to scrub in if we helped?" she reminds, the want clear in her voice.
He nods. "Oh. Yes. Right," he looks over the chart. "I'm sorry, I can't take you both. It's gonna be a full house," he looks to Meredith. "Grey, I'll see you in O.R this afternoon."
There is a pause, and Meredith knows she should step forward, give the surgery to Cristina, but something stops her. It's not the surgery, it's not about the opportunity. It's Katie Bryce, the silly young pageant queen. Thrashing in bed, pushing in drugs, watching the heart monitor flatline and then begin again. She'd helped save this young girl's life. Meredith looks at Shepherd and finds that despite the rush in her chest, the strange feeling she gets when he looks at her, this is someone she trusts. He'll fix Katie. And this afternoon maybe, just maybe, standing in that O.R, Meredith will feel like a real doctor. I am a doctor, I am a doctor, I am a doctor.
Cristina looks at her, disbelief clouding her large, dark eyes.
Meredith walks into Katie's room to find Dr. Shepherd shaving the girl's head. "I promised I'd make her look cool," he explains. "Apparently being a bald beauty queen is the worst thing that happened in the history of the world." He turns the razor off and the room falls quiet. He looks up at Meredith.
"You should ask Cristina to do the surgery. She really wants it," Meredith says, her hands hiding in the pockets of her coat.
Shepherd looks at her seriously. "You're Katie's doctor. And on your first day, with very little training, you helped save her life," he says. "You earned the right to follow her case through to the finish."
Meredith dips her eyes to her shoes. "I owe you an apology," Shepherd says, and she looks up. "You did everything you could when Katie coded on that table last night. It was textbook," he looks her directly in the eyes. "Every time a patient codes there's a moment when you freeze. It's terrifying every single time. They don't tell you that in med school. You find out for yourself."
She feels tears creeping up behind her eyes, but she schools them. Her eyes shine green, rimmed with red. "I had just lost a patient in surgery when they paged me," he continues, not looking at her. "Simple procedure, but we lost him." He pauses, choosing his next words carefully. "Nothing can prepare you for that, either. For losing a patient. I took it out on you, and I'm sorry."
Meredith doesn't say anything, but she feels her shoulders relax. Shepherd looks up at her and smiles, turning on the razor again. "See you in surgery, Grey."
After pulling her hair up and scrubbing her arms up to the elbows, Meredith walks into the O.R. It feels like a stage, like she's won a front row seat to the opening night of a play. She sees Katie, already asleep and prepped for the surgery. No idea of the performances about to take place around her.
"All right, everybody," Dr. Shepherd says in his confident voice. "It's a beautiful night to save lives." He looks at the team of assembled people he'll be working with and Meredith can see the crinkles at the corners of his eyes as he smiles behind his mask. "Let's have some fun."
Meredith hangs back, sneaking peeks when she can, the pain in her feet gone and forgotten when she stands on tip-toe to try and get a closer look. Hours pass, and they move with quiet efficiency. Shepherd narrates his work, and Meredith sees the two residents absorbing the surgery and assisting when asked. It is all carefully orchestrated, but there's always the potential for something to go wrong.
When he says, "Come over here, Grey. Take a look," Meredith thinks he's kidding. She's been standing practically glued to the wall for the past four hours, so when he motions with a nod of his head for her to come stand and watch him clip the aneurism, Meredith feels a bit undeserving. She looks up at Cristina, sitting in the gallery with her arms crossed, and something passes between them. Go on. You earned this.
Meredith moves through the assisting surgeons and scrub nurses. He nods to the magnifier and she approaches it, looking through into Katie's brain. It is humbling, she realizes with a lurch, and the wonder of it all fills her up to bursting. Forty-eight hours ago she had woken up on the floor of her bathroom. Now she is staring into a brain, the very essence of what makes us a person. How incredible, she thinks, inhaling sharply. Shepherd looks at her, at her grey-green eyes, wide with wonder. He turns back to finish clipping the aneurism, and Meredith looks at him with a gaze full of trust. Masks hide their mouths, but they can see each other's smiles.
Sitting down feels wrong, somehow. She has aged a hundred years since she entered that operating room six hours earlier, feels older and wiser. Cristina finds Meredith slouched in an uncomfortable chair by the door to the surgical floor, probably still looking dazed.
"It was good surgery," she says as a peace offering.
Meredith nods tiredly. "Yeah."
Cristina takes a seat beside her, splaying her legs out and sighing. "We don't have to do that thing where I say something, and then you say something, and somebody cries, and there's, like, a moment."
"Yuck," Meredith agrees with a lighthearted smile.
"Good." Cristina looks at her. "You should get some sleep. You look like crap."
Meredith smiles again. "I look better than you."
Her friend shakes her head. "That's not possible." Cristina gets up and walks down the hallway at a slow pace, their first shift over.
As she walks away the door opens again and Meredith looks to see Dr. Shepherd walk out, looking exhausted but pleased. A successful surgery, this time. He removes his scrub cap and reaches behind the nurses desk to grab a pencil. Meredith watches him openly.
"That was amazing," she says, awe running through her veins.
Shepherd looks at her, smiles. He remembers observing his first surgery, the way he'd felt after. It had been a kidney transplant, one person giving life to another. She looks tired but beautiful in a secret way. So much hidden in her delicate features.
"You practice on cadavers, you observe, and you think you know what you're gonna feel like, standing over that table, but…" Meredith searches for the right word, and uses the first one that comes into her head, "that was such a high." Shepherd looks again at the small girl in front of him, a mind ready and eager to be sculpted. "I don't know why anybody does drugs," she says in her slightly scratchy, exhausted intern voice.
He nods. "Yeah."
Meredith dips her eyes and strawberry-blonde hair falls around her head. "Yeah."
As he walks away to tell Katie's parents the outcome of the surgery, Shepherd thinks about the small intern in her light blue scrubs sitting in that hard chair made for worried parents. He doesn't know her first name, but her last name holds all he needs in its four letters. The color of her eyes looking at him, the precious shade that occurs when green meets grey, ocean in winter.
A/N 2: So, should I keep going with this whacky idea? Is it boring?