Author's note: Hihi! This is a rewrite of the story previously titled, "So Much For Happy Endings". I read through it and found some mistakes in them so I thought it would rewrite it and see how it would feel. This is how I think Grey's Season 4 should happen (I haven't actually watched it yet though!) Please drop me a review and tell me what you think about this version!!
Song of the Chappie: Jack Johnson – Banana Pancakes, Stacey Kent – So Many Stars (does it make sense? I know, me too.)
Chapter 1: Weary Blues
When we were at that age when we had snot running down from our noses and cried every time we were denied a cookie, we turned to our comfort objects for, well, comfort. As we get older, these comfort objects progressed from teddy bears to hot chocolate and to alcohol. They make us feel better, but they aren't necessarily good for us. Teddy bear fur makes you sneeze, hot chocolate makes you fat and alcohol destroys your liver and kidneys.
But at moments of extreme distress, who cares, right? We'll fix ourselves up later.
They sat in the kitchen of Meredith's house, around the kitchen island. A bottle of tequila was passed around as Meredith and Cristina merely sat, drank, and watched Izzie mix yet another batter for yet another batch of muffins, the flavour of which was not clear.
"Chocolate," pronounced Meredith, taking a swig from the bottle and handing it to Cristina. She paused before drinking, staring at Izzie's muffin batter. "Vanilla wedding strawberry," she mumbled out and gulped some of the tequila.
Izzie grabbed the bottle and drank a few gulps. "Orange freaking poppyseed."
"Really?" said Meredith, taking the bottle from her and downing her share. "I hate organic food."
A giggle escaped Cristina's lips. "Oooo, Meredith's face is red. Like carrots."
"Oooo, Cristina giggles like a five-year-old… goat," replied Meredith, and they laughed hysterically. Izzie banged her wooden spoon on the ceramic bowl containing the muffin batter. "This – is – a – bad – idea."
"I don't wanna be a goat," moaned Cristina, pressing the tequila bottle against her forehead. Some of the liquor spilled out. "Please let me be a doctor. Please."
"Don't waste!" Meredith quickly yanked the bottle out of her hands and took several more swigs from it. "Oooh, I know what sucks. Men."
" 'Suck'," corrected Izzie, going back to mixing her murky grey muffin batter.
"Suck," echoed Meredith. "Men. Suck. Men suck."
"I hate them," said Cristina with a burp.
"And they have dumb ideas about love," said Izzie fiercely, suddenly pummeling her muffin batter with furious mixing. " 'Oh, I think I love you. But I'm married. I don't wanna split up with my obnoxious wife for you. You might be the only one who can understand me and be with me and accept my shortcomings and even share your toothbrush but it's – just – not – right'. Screw the marriage, George! And screw yourself!" she flung the spoon so hard on the opposite wall that it bounced off and missed Meredith's head by mere centimeters, leaving a splat of sticky batter on the wall.
"Woah, Iz's freaking out," commented Cristina bluntly.
"That was Derek half a year ago," Meredith pointed out for no reason at all. "Now's he's all 'I love you so much and I will never stop loving you but for some strange reason I can't be with you because you are incapable of reaching out to me' And it's not that I don't want to and I can't," she turned to stare blankly at Cristina, "I can actually make a human connection to people you know. I'm not a robot. I'm a doctor. I talk to people every day. I'm almost a freaking PR exec."
"That ain't nothing compared to mine," croaked Cristina, the bottle of tequila clutched tightly in her hand. "I put on make up, I dressed up in a fancy dress that made me look like a wedding cake, went eyebrowless, and then my boyfriend-who's-also-my-boss decided that he changed me and he'd rather have the old me." She scoffed. "And I did all that in the middle of our penultimate, all-important, life-deciding exams! I mean, what the hell was he playing at? I could have failed and get myself humiliated. And I could have gotten stuck in the ruts with George."
"We're undesirable," said Izzie mournfully. "Unlovable. Un-wantable. Un-needable."
"I don't think it had anything to do with the sex," offered Meredith.
"I'm supposed to be happy, right?" Cristina persisted.
"We'll all die lonely," said Izzie, sniffling. Meredith snatched wads of kitchen towel paper and blew her nose.
"I'm happy," announced Cristina steadily after swallowing some tequila. "I'm free, I don't have to worry about combined income taxes, I won't have to go through divorce, and I won't have to think about anniversaries. Now that, that will ruin me. All that marriage – crap."
"If you're so happy, then why are you drinking our tequila?" said Meredith, recovering from her sobs, but her eyes were red.
"Y-y-eah!" slurred Izzie, snatching the bottle of tequila out of Cristina's unprepared hands. She upended it and they watched as the tequila was emptied into the muffin batter. Izzie, her cheeks as red as Meredith's eyes, held up a finger and announced, "We will make the groundbreaking, irresistible, dr-r-rinkable tequila orange popp-p-pyseed muffin."
"Yeah," mumbled Meredith, and her head fell to the table, out cold.
Derek fingered his shot glass of whiskey gingerly. He had ordered the drink about – say, an hour? Two? ago – anyway it had been some time since he had entered the Emerald City Bar, got himself some alcohol and decided to get drunk.
Its bartender and owner, Joe, had been up and down the bar serving drinks and snacks but he noticed that the surgeon, the one that they called 'McDreamy' and the one he called 'Doc' hadn't touched his drink. So he approached him. Carefully.
"Hey, Doc," he said tentatively. Derek didn't look up, but merely replied, "Hi, Joe."
Silence fell between them until Joe cleared his throat. "So, Doc, everything okay with the drink?"
"Everything's fine, thanks," said Derek, looking up at last with a smile. Joe nodded and smiled back but before he could move away, Derek spoke up: "But if I am to come back down to Earth I'll see that it isn't. Nothing's okay. I'm a mess. I'm a train wreck. But I can't show that I'm going through all of that, can I? So I'll just drink this down, get three, maybe five more glasses then go for a reckless drive. Maybe get myself killed. How does that sound?"
Joe stared back at him. "I, er, I didn't mean it that – "
Derek shook his head and laughed dryly. "I'm sorry for snapping at you. It's just that – it's just been a long… year." He looked back at Joe. "Has it really been that long since I've came? A year?"
Joe shrugged apologetically.
Derek nodded. Another customer raised his hand and Joe went to wait on him and Derek was left alone with his thoughts. And with the untouched shot of whiskey. He stared at it some more, studying the texture of the glass, the fine meniscus of the liquid barely lapping the side of the glass, the quality of sheen the dim light threw off it –
"Excuse me, but is anyone sitting here?" came a female voice from behind Derek. He looked behind to find a female stranger smiling at him. Had he been through this situation before? Yes, he had.
"No," he said at once, and smiled. She sighed in relief. "Thanks." She sat on the barstool beside him and placed a felt briefcase and a beige trench coat on her lap. Derek returned to his drink, finally willing himself to take a gulp. When he was done, he noticed her staring at him. For a while, his heart skipped a beat, but then he realized that her eyes were fixed on the glass he had just emptied.
"Is it any good?" she asked.
"Jack Daniels," he replied hoarsely as the liquid fired up his throat. He placed the glass back on the bar counter and signaled for Joe to come over.
"Is that what you would recommend me to drink?"
"If you're down and out of luck with love and don't know what to do about it, then yeah, this one's for you," he replied dryly.
"Ouch," she said, "you wanna talk about it?"
Derek laughed. "At the moment, I don't feel like discussing my disastrous love life with total strangers."
"Then I'm Ellie," she held out a hand.
He merely stared at it. What should he do? Take it, make a friend, spill out his troubles to her, and get home in one piece, or shut her out, move to another barstool and get wasted?
He shook her hand. "Derek."
"Derek," she repeated with a nod. "Are you from around here?"
"Yeah, I am. You?" He took in her plain long-sleeved maroon top and dark jeans, which contrasted heavily with the serious-looking trench coat and the even more serious-looking briefcase and decided that she was from California.
"Chicago," she said, as if she had heard his thoughts. "I just moved from Chicago for a job offer." She patted her briefcase. "I don't mean to ruin your night of angst and brooding but I just went in to see my boss to confirm my position."
"So you were looking for a celebratory drink," said Derek.
"Yeah, kind of," she said almost apologetically. "I start work tomorrow."
"Then you shouldn't be joining me. You don't wanna get yourself on the wrong side of your boss on your first day of work."
"Well, fortunately for me, I plan on restricting myself to just one," she pointed at his empty shot glass, "or two. What's your story then, despite the obvious?"
"I just moved to Seattle a year ago, actually. Same story: job offer, fresh start, new life. But ended up as an emotional wreck."
"What a coincidence, I'm here for a new start too," she said. "But I hope to remain emotionally stable of course, for the rest of my life, though that probably isn't possible realistically speaking but is of course plausible given that I am careful enough to – "
"Stop, you're rambling," said Derek jokingly. She laughed and Derek found that he actually liked to hear her laugh. It was a different laugh than Meredith's, it wasn't as infectious as hers, but it was genuine and careless, like it belonged to someone who laughs in the face of danger.
"Now I want to hear you ramble," she said. "And, of course, make yourself feel better by releasing all the pent-up grief and heartbreak though by the way you're smiling now that probably won't be necessary, but still."
"How about if I buy you a drink?"
A moment of silence hung between them as she merely gazed at him smilingly, contemplating if that drink was a call to preliminary commitment or just a friendly offer.
"Okay," she replied. "But I'm having mango juice."
When Meredith awoke the next morning, her head was pounding like those huge drums the Chinese played in Chinatown on some Chinese public holiday. She lifted it, which took some effort as it was ten times its usual weight, and found herself in the kitchen. And it was a mess.
What the hell am I doing in here? she wondered hazily. She would rather be in a thousand other places than the kitchen, quicksand bogs included, but she saw an empty bottle of tequila on the kitchen island. There was a tray of sick ginger-coloured muffins beside it, and, feeling hungry, Meredith took a sniff of it. It smelt good. She dug a cold one out from the tray and bit into it.
"Urrgh! Eeew!" she spat out the muffin at once.
"Horrible, right?" said Izzie suddenly and Meredith whirled around in her chair. Izzie stood in the doorway kitchen, her hair in a just-got-out-of-bed ponytail. She folded her arms and sniffed. "I've never made such lousy muffins before."
Meredith accidentally swallowed bits of that bite of muffin. "Maybe it's the tequila."
"Or the poppyseed."
"Or the orange."
Izzie shook her head. "Orange is always the best part of orange poppyseed muffins."
Meredith shrugged. She looked around, still feeling a bit groggy. "Where's Cristina?"
"Bathroom," said Izzie, yawning. "Puking." She walked into the kitchen and started the coffee-maker. Meredith glanced at her watch, and her heart sank.
30 minutes till doomsday, aka late-for-work-on-first-day-of-residency.
"We're gonna be so damn late," she threw the muffin into the sink and dashed out of the kitchen, clutching her headache, which was threatening to grow into a migraine. Izzie shook her head and picked up the tray of disgusting muffins. It was really too bad, because they looked really promising and smelt even better when they had just left the oven during the night.
Just like men, she concluded with a scrunch of her nose and tossed them all into the trash can.
Derek jolted awake at the shrill beep of the alarm clock. Disorientation delayed him from turning it off right away. He merely pushed himself up and rubbed his eyes. A headache was festering in his temples, but it was barely there and it was caused by the incessant beeping of the clock.
What the hell happened? he asked himself, trying hard to remember what happened the night before because the sheets were tangled and he could smell a faint whiff of juice.
Mango juice.
The sweet and thick taste still lingered, despite having drunk whiskey the night before, which he remembered clearly because Joe had stopped by and asked about his drink and Derek had told him about his plan to self-destruct. But his plan had been foiled.
Foiled by what? Or who?
"Ellie," he said, then he smiled. And he remembered that he didn't sleep with her, even though that thought had been playing in his mind the entire night as she had regaled to him about her misadventures in bars, the exotic origins of the fruit, and how mango juice had saved her from sex that she would regret.
He remembered something else as well: he had kissed her too. The feel of his lips meeting hers, barely touching, the briefest of kisses, rushed back to him. It had happened so naturally and unexpectedly and it had lasted so briefly that he was surprised he could remember it. And it was her who initiated it when he had offered to give her a ride home outside the bar. She had smiled, declined the offer but just as he was about to turn away, she had tugged him gently towards her and pressed her lips softly, quickly to his own. Then, leaving Derek in a tumble of confusion and happiness, she had waved goodbye and started off in the opposite direction.
What could it mean? Was this the start to something new?
He shook his head as he leaned over to shut the alarm. Don't get ahead of yourself, Shepherd, he thought with a smile he couldn't resist.