A/N: Hello all. This is my first Grey's Anatomy fanfiction, and I hope you all like it, but first there is some warnings that come along with it. First, note that it's set in kind of early season 6, before the merger. Another important, probably the most important, thing is that in my fic, all pairings are the same except that Meredith and Derek are not together. The reason for this will become apparent later. And I should point out that it is set around an OC. Another thing is the whole age-gap romance, if that offends you I advise you to leave now. Ok then, that's it for now, on with the story!
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Tori didn't know where she was as she woke up. She could hear sounds, lots of them. Machines bleeping. Voices; lots of unfamiliar voices saying words she couldn't quite hear. There was one sound she recognized though. Her dad was there, talking to the other voices, telling them something. His Irish accent stood out in the mess of American ones. It came as a relief in the confusion, an incentive for Tori to try and wake up. She heard another voice, a man's voice. It was clearer than the other sounds, closer to her.
"Tori, can you hear me?" the voice asked. She tried to open her eyes, but the sudden, blinding torchlight made her recoil.
"She's waking up," the voice said. Tori heard her dad's sigh of relief. She tried again to open her eyes, and, finding the torch to be pointed away from her now, saw the owner of the voice for the first time. The man leaning over her was dressed in light blue scrubs, a white lab coat, and had a stethescope around his neck, so Tori took him to be a doctor. He had short brown hair and brown eyes. While she was trying to figure out why there was a doctor there, the pain in her side registered, and she became aware that she was bleeding. Why was she bleeding?
As Tori tried to sit up, she felt another dart of pain in her chest. Looking around, she noticed that the room she was in seemed to be a hospital ward, which would certainly explain the doctor, along with the several other doctors and nurses she could see scattered around the large room. Looking at her dad, she asked "What happened?"
It was the doctor, who was now writing something down, that answered. "You don't remember?" He looked a slight bit concerned.
Tori tried to think back. Her and her dad had been going somewhere, but they had been late. She remembered rushing back up to their apartment, she'd forgotten her phone. She had run back out, and had been attempting to lock the door when her dad had yelled to hurry up. She'd turned to run down the stairs, the lifts weren't working. The stairs of the apartment building were concrete, with windows at every floor. One of the windows a floor or two down had been smashed a few days ago. She had started down the stairs, but that was as far as she could remember.
"I remember being upstairs, then dad calling me, then nothing." She sighed as she realised what had happened. "Bugger. I fell down the bloody stairs didn't I?"
"Well, seen as your father found you unconscious and bleeding at the bottom, we could assume that's what happened," the doctor sighed. "You have some pieces of glass in your abdomen, so we're going to remove them and stitch you up. You don't seem to have a concussion but it'd be best to do a head CT, just to be sure, and a chest x-ray, you might have some broken ribs."
"Ok," she said, not really knowing what else there was to say. Her dad moved over beside her. "You are a clumsy eejit child, did you know that?" he sounded relieved. "I was worried about you."
"Ah Da, I'm grand. Just a cut. And some glass. And a broken bone or two," she joked. "Guess we never made it to that show then?"
He pretended to smack her. "I mean it chick, you need to be more careful." Tori rolled her eyes at his use of her old nickname.
"So does this sort of thing happen to you a lot?" Dr. Karev asked.
"I fall a bit, nothing serious, just bumps and bruises," she told him. "I'm a bit clumsy."
"So I see. Now stay still, this will hurt a bit." Tori gritted her teeth as she felt him pull out the first shard of glass.
"Bleedin' Hell doc, can you not just leave it in there?" she joked, wincing.
"Sure, and give you some lovely complications to deal with. Now quiet, I want to get this over with."
An hour later, Tori was stitched up and waiting to hear from the doctor about that CT scan he had mentioned earlier. She looked around what her dad had told her earlier was the ER, or as it was called back home the A&E. It was a busy place, there were doctors and nurses everywhere, attending to patients, checking charts, writing things down. Her dad had also told her that this hospital was called Seattle Grace, and was in the middle of the Washington city that they had moved to a little over eleven months ago for her father's job. Tori had grown up in Dublin, Ireland, and was taking a gap year before starting college. At seventeen, she had been young finishing her Leaving Certificate Examination, so she had decided to move with her dad for his year long job in Seattle, instead of staying at home with her mother.
Dr. Karev came over, looking slightly distracted and very busy. "I'm sorry Tori, CT's backed up and it could be a couple of hours before you get down there." He smiled at her and left to answer a page. Tori sighed, and resigned herself to the fact that this would be a long day.
