All the Befores and Afters
I'd like to preface this by reminding everyone that I do not live in Seattle, and therefore do not have an intimate knowledge of the streets, byways, and roads associated with that metro. I also don't own Owen, Cristina, or any other characters you recognize.
This was originally going to be more than one chapter, but no one likes reading two page chapters, so I decided it could stand to be condensed to a very long one-shot.
By all accounts, it looked like it was going to be a good day to be in the pit. The sun was not shining, the clouds were out, and there was a steady sheet of rain falling ceaselessly onto the concrete pad outside Seattle Grace's large red EMERGENCY sign. Underneath the sign, Doctors Yang, Stevens, and Hunt were standing with their arms crossed, trying to keep out the chill that comes with Seattle rain. Yang and Hunt were trying very hard not to make Stevens feel uncomfortable by standing on either side of her, as far away from each other as they could manage – and Stevens was feeling uncomfortable anyway.
The relationship between Cristina and Owen transcended the traditional phrases for such things. Most of the people who saw the two of them on a daily basis knew that something was either very wrong or very right between the two, but that was about it. They weren't dating, per se, in the going out on dates sense (unless going to the vent counted) but they weren't just two people working in the same hospital, either. Normally both reserved by nature but known to be forthright when they needed to be, they had both gotten into the habit of shutting up entirely when they came into each other's presence and managing to converse using a motley collection of yeses, nos, terse nods and anxious smiles. But two is a pair, and three is a crowd, and Izzie Stevens was definitely feeling like a crowd right now.
"We've got incoming!" Bailey announced cheerfully, pulling on her yellow plastic smock over her scrubs. The familiar siren of the ambulance was a long time coming, and Hunt looked at Bailey in confusion.
"Where are these guys coming from?"
"Hobson and Quentin – there was a faulty brake and someone ran through a red light with the rain. They just told me we have three patients, two females, one male."
"Hobson and Quentin? Why did they come all the way over here?" Izzie wondered aloud. "That's closer to Mercy West."
"Are you going to complain?" Hunt asked, looking at Izzie with his trademark take-no-prisoners expression. Izzie quickly shook her head no.
The ambulances finally rolled up under the canopy and the EMT jumped out of the cab of the first to help them unload. "Front on collision – One male, forty, broken radius, and one female, thirty seven, broken fibula and tibia, protrusion," the driver summarized. "The driver of the other vehicle's in the next one."
"You had a broken leg protrusion and you didn't take her to Mercy? She could have bled out!" Hunt berated the EMT, unlocking the ambulance doors.
" Look, I didn't make the call, she wanted to come here. Said she knew someone in Trauma she trusted with her life, never mind the broken leg," the EMT said, swinging the door wide and helping the gurney out of the ambulance.
The head of trauma surgery looked confused as he examined the woman's face, which was leaking blood from a cut on her forehead. "Joss?" Owen asked, standing up and looking even more confused than before as he and Cristina wheeled the gurney inside, the EMT helping the man with the broken arm while Stevens and Bailey stayed to see to the other ambulance.
"Hi, Owen," the woman on the gurney said laboredly, trying to crack a smile. "You want to give me a hand with this leg?"
"Joss, you're going to be fine," Owen assured her, his usually steady voice shaking just a little, "We've got an excellent orthopedic here who's going to take good care of you."
Cristina was now very confused, both by the way her boyfriend (was he her boyfriend? She didn't even know what Owen was) referred to the patient as Joss and the familiar way in which he did it. "Dr. Hunt, do you know this woman?" she asked, trying to maintain a professional calm.
"She's…" Owen, for once, was a bit short on words.
"I'm the ex girlfriend," Joss said shakily. "Nice to meet you, too," she added with a smile as the trauma nurses swept around the gurney, taking Owen and this Joss woman off to a diagnostic room, shouting for an immediate x-ray and Doctor Torres for a consult on a broken leg and a dozen other things, a deathly and pressing dance.
For a moment, the mad whirl of the Trauma Center seemed to stop and eddy around Cristina, trying to take in the retreating face of Owen's last girlfriend and the sentimental, concerned way he had looked at her, and remember that this was right here, right now, and she, Cristina, was not going to be displaced, especially not by some former girlfriend who showed up in an ambulance and threatened to bring back the before.
---
Cristina made a decision early on that she would not try and talk to Owen about this reappearing girlfriend until after everything else had been cleaned up, and when Bailey asked for her help setting the arm of the man who had come in with Jocelyn Kirby, Wilson or whatever his name was, she was more than happy to oblige.
"Sir, can you tell me your name, your age, anything about the accident you were just in?" Bailey asked in her calm, reassuring voice, the one she used for children, though the man she was talking to was probably older than her by a few years.
"My name is Doctor James Wilson, I'm forty years old, I was just in a head-on collision on my way home from a convention. The other driver was trying to turn left and drove into our front end."
"What convention?" Yang asked, just a little interested. Bailey looked disapproving, but said nothing. James Wilson looked at Cristina while Bailey sponged at the bruise on his forehead.
"American Society for Clinical Oncologists, at the Deertree Center. I was presenting research there with my partner, Jocelyn Kirby, who is currently in your OR for her broken leg."
"So you're visiting Seattle?" Bailey asked kindly, beginning her work on his arm and cutting off the bloody arm of his shirt. James winced as the scissors touched a bruise, but he kept his arm steady, clearly used to being the one giving the directions rather than obeying them. An oncologist? Cristina thought to herself. Owen was dating an oncologist? How boring is that?
"From New Jersey. Some trip, right?" the patient quipped. "Could someone tell me how Jocelyn is?" he asked, looking at both doctors, a little more concerned than he probably should have been, considering the circumstances.
"Sir, we're going to tell you when she gets out of surgery and is able to talk to you, but for right now, you're going to have to be patient and wait until we can repair your arm before you can go talk to her," Bailey assured him. "You know how it works in hospitals," she added with a smile. James smiled nervously and nodded. "Yang, I need films on this man's arm before he goes into to surgery," Bailey began, all business once again. Cristina nodded and with an imperious wave sent one of her interns for a portable x-ray. She began to leave the room herself when Doctor Wilson reached up with his good arm and grabbed the edge of her scrub smock.
"Doctor Yang –"
Cristina turned around, surprised and just a little hurt that a patient would do something as intimate as try to reach out for her. "Doctor, you're going to have to try not moving," she snapped quickly.
Doctor Wilson sat back down, his good arm falling back to his side, but his eyes remained fixed on Cristina. "I know it's hard when you have to see people you'd rather never have met in the first place, and I know it's really hard when you have something you want to say and you're the kind of person who normally won't say it."
"What are you talking about?" Cristina asked.
Wilson took a breath and considered for a moment before rephrasing himself. "In my line of work you get really good at reading people and their reactions, and I just wanted to let you know that you don't have to be jealous of Jocelyn or angry at Owen," Wilson explained. "It's my understanding that they've both been through a lot and this is going to be harder for them than it is for you or for me. All you have to do is be there at the end of it for them."
Cristina nodded tersely and left, taking the films down to radiology to be developed. She took a detour through the OR corridor before returning with the developed films, glancing at the OR board and letting her eyes linger on the latest entry – OR 3, thirty six yr female, broken tibia, Dr. Torres, Stevens assisting. That was all that remained visible of this Jocelyn Kirby -- Owen's name was nowhere to be found. That, at least, should have counted as a good thing – but the competitive part of Cristina's brain reminded her enviously that he had probably not scrubbed in because he didn't think he could handle the pressure of treating someone close to him. And that thought, of his…closeness, made her angry again.
She didn't know where all this anger was coming from. It was hard for her to break down, analyze, interpret. With anger one normally didn't have to. But this was different anger. In fact, she realized, waiting in Radiology for the x-rays, it wasn't anger. It was fear. She was afraid of Jocelyn Kirby, because she liked Owen, and she wanted to keep him, and she didn't want the before coming back to tempt him away. They weren't dating, as much as she felt like they were: She was unsure about where she stood with Owen, and because of that, she was unsure of how she felt about having Jocelyn Kirby around.
When she came back with the films, she found the missing head of trauma, examining the broken arm and chatting amiably with James Wilson.
"Doctor Hunt, what are you doing here?" she asked, pulling up a little short, a smaller wave of panic welling up in her throat.
"I'm resetting Doctor Wilson's arm," Owen said as though this was the most obvious thing in the world. "Doctor Bailey had to see to another patient. Is there somewhere else I should else I should be, Doctor Yang?"
"I…I just thought you'd be in surgery fixing our other patient's leg," Cristina explained, suddenly feeling very stupid. Sometimes Owen had that effect, especially when he was angry. Was he angry at her? She handed over the films as though she were once more a student handing over a report card to her mother, not particularly enthusiastic about hearing the results. Dr. Hunt took them and stuck the films up on the light box, examining the break with a thoughtful eye while he answered.
"Doctor Torres was free and is much better at resetting legs than I am," Owen said, his voice strangely stretched. "I handed over Doctor Kirby's surgery to her and went to see my other patient. Is there a problem with that?" he asked pointedly, looking at her. Cristina noticed that he referred to her as Doctor Kirby, not as Joss or Jocelyn.
"No," Cristina said quickly, trying to recover.
"Seattle's a little ways away from New Jersey, isn't it, Doctor Wilson? It is New Jersey, isn't it? " Owen asked, turning his attention back to his patient.
"I was in town for the ASCO convention," Wilson re-iterated. "Presenting the results of the drug trial I conducted with Jocelyn."
"How'd you meet her? Chicago's not exactly right down the street from you, either," Owen asked kindly, not exactly the sort of question the current boyfriend relishes answering for the former. The examining doctor set the film aside and surveyed the arm in question once more.
"I was on leave from Princeton Plainsboro for …health reasons and was invited to collaborate on a drug trial with an old friend from college who was at UC," the oncologist explained. "I met Jocelyn through him. She was one of the researchers on our team. A few trips to Chicago… and here we are presenting our findings," Wilson shrugged. Owen nodded, a non-committal, non-judgmental masculine sort of nod, not indicative of either jealousy or praise.
"Well, we can reset the arm and cast it here, we'll give you a sling, and you'll be ready to go by tomorrow," Owen said. "I'm just going to slide the bone back in – you're going to feel a little bit of a pinch and then Doctor Yang will help me cast it for you."
"I am?" Cristina asked, surprised that he wanted to keep her around any longer than necessary.
Owen gave her the all-business, slightly annoyed look. "This is a teaching hospital, Doctor Yang, and as your teacher, I need to be sure you've learned how to set something as simple as a broken arm. Doctor Wilson will be an excellent practice patient because he is well past the age to cry when you reset it."
Cristina nodded. "Of course."
Owen gave her the last of the look and focused on the waiting doctor's arm, taking firm hold of the wrist and pulling slightly forward. The contour of the arm moved and Wilson gave a surprised shout of pain, grimacing and trying to recover. "That's back in," he assessed through gritted teeth.
"Where do you practice in New Jersey, Doctor?" Cristina asked, wanting to fill in the silence somehow, finding it awkward for reasons she couldn't explain, wrapping the arm in the cushioning cotton gauze and then covering it over in the warm, fast setting fiberglass strips while Owen held the arm in place above the surgical tray. Their hands were close, but somehow cold, and even to bump his hand now seemed awkward. Perhaps that was because there was another person in the room, or perhaps it was because of who that person was. Cristina didn't know. This was turning into a night without answers.
"Princeton Plainsboro Teaching Hospital," the patient supplied. "I'd love to get a tour of your program here if we have time."
"Princeton Plainsboro?" Cristina asked, interested. "Do you know Greg House?"
Wilson nodded, but Owen looked at her, confused and distracted from the patient's arm. "What's so special about this House fellow?"
"He's only the most brilliant diagnostician in the United States. He's supposed to be very hard to work for," Cristina elaborated. "And he only accepts residents when the old ones leave. But if you serve a residency with him you can get a job anywhere in the country."
"You don't do a lot of surgery, though, Doctor Yang, and his fellows are the most overworked and underappreciated doctors in the hospital. Greg House is one of my good friends, and please take me seriously when I say that you should be very happy here. From what I have heard of Doctor Hunt from Jocelyn, you have a far more capable teacher here in Seattle than you would in New Jersey," Wilson assured her. Owen smiled (was he blushing? It looked a lot like it) and rolled his eyes.
"Joss has been known to exaggerate," he said by way of an acknowledgement. "Well, we'll just let that set and you should be all ready to go," Dr. Hunt finished, wiping his hands on a paper towel and leaving the room rather quickly.
Cristina tried her hardest to avoid Jocelyn Kirby's room, but the door was open and for some reason she just kept passing it. Maybe if she could just sit there and vent all this fear while the woman was coming out of sedation that would work. But by the time she had made up her mind, Doctor Jocelyn Kirby was wide awake.
"Cristina Yang," Jocelyn said when the other doctor paused at her door, trying to decide whether to go in and strike up a conversation, holding a chart as pretense for her presence there. Cristina started – how did she know who she was? She'd seen dozens of doctors since she'd come through Seattle Grace's doors on an ambulance gurney. "You look like a woman with a lot on your mind. Want to come in and sit a spell? There's plenty of room and I swear the sedatives are almost all gone."
"How did you know my name?" Cristina asked, entering cautiously.
"I asked Owen. You looked pretty traumatized when I came in, and I should know, seeing as how I was the traumatized one," the oncologist quipped.
Jocelyn Kirby was not the stereotypical former girlfriend used ceaselessly in sappy romantic comedies, the drop-dead gorgeous bombshell whose memory the new girlfriend must overwhelm in order to keep her man in line. And even if she had been, she certainly didn't look it now – with a large bruise over part of her face and a thick cotton pad holding a nasty cut at bay, she looked like the thing she was, a woman who has just been in a car accident. But she was a certain kind of pretty underneath all that, with a kind face, warm eyes and dark hair that waved just a little bit to frame out her face. She didn't look like the sort of woman Cristina imagined Owen dating, but maybe the hospital gown hid that. (In her mind's eye, Cristina always saw before-Owen dating intense, strong women who climbed mountains and ran marathons for a living, not oncologists who were basically like her except that their line of work involved less stress.)
She was so warm, so open and inviting and calm about all this. How could one be calm about showing up in your ex-boyfriend's hospital and then meeting his current girlfriend?
"I'd love to say that Owen's told me all about you, but we haven't spoken much since he left Chicago," Jocelyn apologized, gesturing to a chair.
"You're from Chicago?" Cristina asked, trying to maintain a tone of only mild, conversational interest while the rest of her brain wanted to know every little detail about this woman – she almost mentally called her competition– and her life.
"Born and raised," Kirby confirmed. "I teach at the University of Chicago. Oncology, as you've probably already heard."
"And…ah…how did you meet Owen?" Cristina asked with the faintest of shrugs, sitting down gingerly in a chair, perching at the edge, as though not really committing to sitting through a serious conversation.
"We met while we were both in med school, but didn't speak much then. He went to do his residency in Kansas at Fort Leavenworth and then came back to Chicago to set up house. His parents live in Oak Park," she explained. "We met up again in the city at a bar and got to talking and didn't stop until it was closing time. We figured we might have something and started dating after that." She smiled reminiscently, remembering what must have been a much happier, less pain-filled time. "How did you meet him?" she asked, jarring herself from the memories.
Cristina chuckled, remembering a very hard fall and a pair of blue eyes jarring her from the shock. "He came into our hospital after being in a car accident and then he pulled an impaled icicle out of my side."
Jocelyn smiled, nodding. "That sounds like Owen: adrenaline junkie and knight in shining armor. I seem to have a thing for guys who have a thing for damsels in distress," she mused. "Not that I have ever considered myself a damsel in distress," she added with a grin. "That would have been last winter, right? He was on leave visiting his brother in Bothell."
Yang nodded, wondering exactly how much of that visit Kirby had heard about. She remembered a few things besides the icicle she wasn't quite sure she wanted shared now. "How did you two break up?" Cristina asked, unable to hold the question back any longer.
Jocelyn considered this for a moment, and her smile fell, giving way to a much more pensive, saddened look. "Well, when the normally stoic man you loved comes back from a war zone before he's supposed to and refuses to do a lot of the things he loved doing before he left and won't tell you why until you hear a message from his psychologist on the answering machine, you know something's wrong. And when he explains about the message from the psychologist and tells you that it's the shrink's opinion that he should leave you and go to this job in Seattle because you're part of the before and he needs to move on to the after, you… well, it's not so much breaking up as letting him go."
She said this last line so powerlessly that Cristina wondered whether she was speaking to the same woman or not. Jocelyn Kirby seemed like someone who knew where she was going, even if it was at an easy pace, and not at the breakneck, take-no-prisoners speed with which Cristina attacked her own life.
"Why? Why do you let him go?" Cristina asked, still very confused. It was, to her, such a simple question – the way this woman smiled, the way she knew she smiled when she thought about Owen and all the things he meant to her, made her wonder what would make anyone give someone like him up.
"Because you love him, and you know, deep down, that if he's going to heal he's going to need to be with someone else who doesn't remind him of all parties he went to with the buddies who are now dead. And because you love him you want him to heal. And so you let him go to Seattle even if it breaks your heart to do it," Jocelyn finished. "Then you try and avoid Seattle," she added, and Cristina realized that Wilson was right – this was a lot harder for the both of them than it was for her.
"What was he like?" Cristina wondered aloud, wanting and not wanting to know the answer at the same time.
The oncologist shook her head. "You don't want to know that. You don't need to know that," she elaborated. "I'd tell you, and then you'd want that Owen even while knowing that you can never know that part of him. You don't need to know about that …just the same as I don't need to know about James before he was with Amber," she said, looking down at her hand and making a study of the IV jutting into her skin. "Amber was his girlfriend before me – she died in a very complicated chain of events involving his best friend and a car accident…" she trailed off. "And that's in the before," she reminded herself, not looking at Cristina while she did it, lost in her own thoughts. "I'm his after, just like you're Owen's. And it's a good after," She reminded herself. She looked up at Cristina from her hands, folded against the colorless hospital sheets. "We don't really need to know about the before, just …how they got to the place where they needed an after." Jocelyn gave a sort of lopsided smile. "Then we can be there for them. Did any of that make sense?"
Cristina nodded. "Yeah, a lot of it did."
For a few moments the two women sat in silence, basking in the shared knowledge of playing a parallel part in a great and terrible performance of a tragedy with few intermittent comic tones.
"He kissed me, you know, when he was in Seattle… before," Cristina offered, feeling a lot more apologetic about it than she had ever felt before.
"I know," Jocelyn offered.
"And you're not angry about it?" Cristina wondered, amazed that she could be so cool about it.
"I feel that it was a bit like…like hydroplaning through a red light," Jocelyn explained. "Sometimes it just happens. He's a passionate guy, and he already apologized for it to me. You don't need to apologize, too. Was I angry when he told me he'd kissed a random doctor in Seattle?" she asked, trying to answer Cristina's unanswered question. "Yes, I was. But I can't own him. No one can. And the hydroplaning car didn't hit anyone. At least," she amended wryly, "not hard enough to break a leg."
Cristina smiled in spite of herself.
"I should be the one apologizing to you," Kirby continued. "I shouldn't have assumed that this wouldn't be hard for Owen…and for whoever he was seeing now. I just wanted to make sure that he was okay. That he wasn't…" she searched for a word. "Alone. I see now that he's in very good hands here," Jocelyn said with a smile.
"Oh, we're not…seeing…each other," Cristina corrected awkwardly. "Well, what I mean is, it's…not…" Jocelyn smiled.
"Could have fooled me. I could tell he cares about you, and I can tell you care A LOT about him. And that's good enough for me," Kirby said with a fond smile. "Just don't hurt him. He's gotten hurt too much already."
Cristina nodded, agreeing with this and remembering the terse, scared man who had confessed to something like survivor guilt on his first day at Seattle Grace.
"The other thing you do," Jocelyn began, glancing at the window out onto the corridor, "when you're part of the before, is when you're stuck in a hospital bed with a broken leg talking to the woman who's part of the after and see the man in question coming down the hall you say so, because she can escape an awkward conversation and you can't," Jocelyn said with a bit of a silly smile, pointing to the steadily growing figure of Doctor Hunt coming down the hall. Cristina started a little and then ducked out of the room, smiling in goodbye at Jocelyn Kirby and beating a hasty retreat to go sort all of this new information out.
She paused across the hall a safe distance away, watching Owen escort Wilson into Jocelyn's room. The effect of the meeting on Wilson was immediate and obvious – he practically ran to Jocelyn's side, kissing her forehead and brushing a phantom hair off her forehead, so incredibly happy that she was, indeed, still alive. Owen hung back, smiling in a relived but somewhat awkward fashion, happy to see that Joss was doing well and unsure what his part in this scene should be. He patted her hand, and Jocelyn smiled at him, clasping hands and then nodding across the corridor before resting her head on James', pillowed in her side. Owen glanced at Cristina's not-so-secret hiding place, and a thin smile spread onto his lips. He left Jocelyn with her oncologist boyfriend and walked silently but surely across the hall to where Cristina sat waiting behind the wall and the nurses' station.
"Hi," He said shortly, sitting down.
"Hi," Cristina responded, staring at the floor, her hands laced on her lap. "So," she began, leaving the word in between them.
"So," Owen repeated, without his customary mischief behind it. "I owe you an apology," he said, somewhat decisively. "When Joss came back, I should have explained who she was. I didn't, and that was unfair to you."
"I can see why you liked her," Cristina said by way of a reply, neither accepting nor denying his apology. "She's strong, and confident, and very…steady, and pretty--"
"And I liked all of those things before," Owen said, cutting her off mid-list, "But my needs changed. You're something that Joss will never be, something that I need now."
"Yeah?" Cristina asked, looking at Owen with interest.
"Adventurous," Owen said with a smile. "Joss can be a rock in a stormy sea most days, but you – you're the boat who won't take shit from anyone, trying to get out to the stranded sailor."
"And where exactly are that boat and that rock right now?" Cristina asked tersely. Owen looked at her with confusion in those wonderfully expressive blue eyes of his. "Because I don't know myself, and I think we need to work that out before we take off anywhere. I know we need to work that out before we go anywhere," she rephrased.
Owen considered this. "Where do you want the boat to be?" he asked finally.
"Well, I'd like the boat and the guy in it to be a kind of permanent thing, but if that's not what the guy's looking for right now, the boat understands," Cristina offered.
"I need the boat," Owen admitted. "Owner can't have it back."
Cristina nodded, feeling warmed inside. "And is the guy okay with going ashore and letting the whole world know about the boat?" she asked. "Because piracy's kind of a public thing," she added, going along with their metaphor, silly as it was.
Owen hesitated. "He's not sure quite what he wants to do yet. He's having a hard time…committing to things at the moment."
"The boat just wanted to know," Cristina said bluntly, looking down the hallway and sighing. "And the rock seemed to think it was a good idea to ask." Doctor Kirby might not have said it, but she had certainly implied it – If she thought Owen needed stability, then Cristina was going to try and work that out.
"The rock has been known to have a good idea like that now and then," Owen commented. "Now she can be that rock for someone else," he said with a little smile, glancing back at James and Jocelyn, still cuddling.
"He seems like a nice guy," Cristina offered.
"He said you weren't bad, either," Owen responded with characteristic aplomb. Cristina lightly punched him in the arm. "All the befores and afters, huh?" he asked with a chuckle, getting up from the bench and waiting for her.
"Yeah," Cristina said, lifting herself up and taking one last glance at Jocelyn Kirby before walking down the hallway in the opposite direction. "About them. Let's try thinking about the present for the time being."
Owen nodded with a wide smile. "That's exactly what I was thinking."
Eh, not the best thing I've ever written. But it was fun while it lasted.
Yes, it was a crossover with House. But such a small crossover you really didn't need to know about it. I love Wilson, and I realized that he'd be a perfect example of another guy who needed an after, and his character is known for liking women who need help. A normally very strong Jocelyn who just had to break up with her boyfriend for reasons even she doesn't understand would be exactly who he'd go after. And a situation like this one, involving a car accident, would be hard for him because of all the drama with Amber at the end of season four. Maybe I'll write his side of this shenanigans when I have time...