I don't own Grey's Anatomy, although Owen and Cristina have become stuck in my head as of late.
This is my first try at Grey's anatomy fic, not sure if I'm pleased with it or not as Cristina and Owen are so incredibly hard to write and other people write them so much better than I ever could. So let me know what you think and how I could improve my characterisation.
The basic summary is Owen goes to tell his mom that he is back in Seattle after 5x15
Rewritten after a number of very appropriate and helpful reviews about the reaction of Owen's mom to his news. Looking back I agree that it was way too extreme and definitely not the suitable reaction of the mother of a so obviously war ravaged man. I hope this is more fitting.
Owen had never really understood the saying 'once you leave home you can never go back'. Even years after he had moved out of his childhood home and into an apartment of his own the minute he walked up the porch steps of his parents house he would feel an overwhelming sense of calm and belonging wash over him; the sense of being truly home. But stood now on the very same porch he had helped his father to build when he was ten years old he understood the saying very very well. Owen could feel the blood rushing between his ears and the pounding of his heart in his chest. If it was not for the gentle pressure of her fingers against his own grounding him to the present Owen would not have made it this far. She saw him; she saw behind the carefully constructed mask that he wore and truly saw the man that he is now and the man that he could become. Others at the hospital saw him as a cocky slightly aloof army badass who had no qualms about slicking pens in people's throats, stealing patients and stabbing pigs. It was only Cristina who truly saw him, she saw the mess that he was and instead of running she stood by him through the hot and cold, through drunken ramblings in showers and through panic attacks never asking for anything in return but always seeming to know what to do.
Cristina gave his hand a gentle squeeze once again drawing him back into the present. He took a deep breath to try and calm his racing heart and then using the hand that wasn't entwined with Cristina's knocked on the door. Stood on the porch waiting for the occupant to open the door Owen knew that he should not be feeling like this; this house should have been the one place on earth that he felt most at home as after all it had been just that since he was ten years old.
"Don't worry, she will be so pleased to see you that she won't even think to get angry." Cristina said hoping to calm Owen down. "Well at least not straight away anyway." She added as an afterthought.
Owen let out a strangled chuckle and looked Cristina in the eye for the first time since they had gotten out of the car. "Is that supposed to make me feel better?"
Cristina gave him a small half smile and squeezed his hand again before giving him a more serious expression. "I'm not sure you deserve to feel better after what you've put your mother through but I know that this is a big step for you so yeah that's supposed to make you feel better. Now be grateful, I don't do warm and fuzzy for just anyone you know."
Owen cocked his eyebrow at her in surprise; glad to have this banter between them as a way of distracting him from what they had come here to do. "You call that warm and fuzzy? I think you've got a lot to learn about warm and fuzzy Dr. Yang."
"Well..." Cristina's reply was stopped by the front door opening. Owen felt his stomach drop to his feet and his mouth go dry at the sight of his mother. His fight or flight instincts went straight into flight mode and once again it was only the pressure from Cristina's hand in his own stopping him from listening to those instincts.
"Sorry about that, I was out in the back gar... Owen?" Owen was unable to move, frozen in fear as his Before dropped the pruning shears she'd been holding onto the floor and engulfed him in a crushing hug, almost making him lose his grip on his After and with it his grounding in the Now.
Cristina had never been good with mothers; whether it was her own or anyone else's it didn't seem to matter. The woman stood before her, however, was definitely not what she had been expecting. Mid 50's but dressed in an old boiler suit that seemed much too big for her petite frame and 5 foot four stature with the sleeves and legs rolled up and her hands encased in weeding gloves Owen's mom looked more like a child dressed up in their father's clothes than a mother to a grown up son. Cristina could see from the look on Owen's face that he was not handling this well and would have liked nothing better than to push his mother away from him and instantly felt bad that she had been the one to talk him into coming here when he so obviously wasn't ready to face his past yet.
After what felt like a lifetime to Owen his mother pulled away and held his face in her hands, forcing him to make eye contact with her. He could see the unshed tears of joy in her blue eyes and felt terrible for not feeling the same way. Instead he felt like there was a wild animal struggling to break out of him as he fought his instinct to run like the coward he thought he was. In a few seconds his mother would know that he was not the same man she had said goodbye to months earlier, by looking into his eyes she would realise that that man was dead and a stranger now inhabited her son's body.
"Owen, I can't believe it's you. I just talked to you the other day. You're not supposed to be back for another 3 months." Owen's mother rambled, still processing the fact that her eldest son was back.
Owen couldn't deal with all of his mother's questions and looked to Cristina for support, pleading with her silently to help him. Owen's mother followed the path of her sons gaze and seemed surprised to see Cristina stood there.
"Oh I'm sorry I didn't see you there," She then glanced at their joined hands and asked uncertainly, "are you in the Army as well?"
"Um...Mom...this is Cristina Yang...we...um...we work together." Owen managed to spit out, amazed that he was able to get his voice to work at all.
"Mrs Hunt" Cristina said by way of greeting, "perhaps we could go inside and talk?" She asked, aware that the conversation that was about to happen was not one that Owen would want broadcast in full view of his childhood neighbourhood.
"Yes of course, come on in." She said ushering them both into the house. Cristina didn't get much time to look at the house as Owen led her quickly and purposefully through the entrance hallway and through a door that led to the lounge. The lounge was comfortably decorated with plush leather sofas and real oak flooring, a picture of the Hunt family was hung on the wall above the open fireplace. Mrs Hunt followed them through and had at some point lost her pruning gloves.
"Would you like some tea or coffee? Oh and I think I've got some of those nice chocolate biscuits that you like?" She said, a hint of concern at Owen's unusual behaviour creeping into her voice. "Or do you want me to warm up some left over lasagne, it must have been months since you had home cooked meals."
"I've already eaten, and Cristina'll get the coffee mom, I need to talk to you." Owen said looking at Cristina; he willed her to understand that he desperately wanted her there for support and would not have made it this far without her but this was something he needed to do alone. He let out a sigh of relief when she gave and almost unnoticeable nod and got up from her position next to him on the couch. "Kitchen's the second door on the left, all the things for making tea should be in the cupboard above the kettle." Cristina nodded and left the room, closing the door behind her to give them some privacy.
Whilst the kettle was boiling Cristina took the opportunity to study the pictures hung in the hallway, a red headed boy that was unmistakably Owen, a red headed girl and a strawberry blonde haired boy that must be his younger siblings grinned back at her. A picture of Owen in his camouflage gear caught her eye, the man in the picture looked so different from the man currently sat downstairs; in the picture he looked so young and idealistic even though Cristina was sure that this picture could not have been more than a year or two old. On the drive over here Cristina had been surprised to find that Owen's parents house overlooked a park that Meredith and she had gone jogging in during the week that they felt jogging was the answer to all of life's problems. She wondered if she had met the Owen in the picture then and got to know him properly rather than just sharing one crazy day with the Owen from the Before, if she would care for the Owen from the After as much as she did. It seemed the Owen from before was happy with perky blondes who called their fathers 'Daddy' and needed a man to remove a spider; her Owen could barely hold himself together let alone another person.
From the hallway Cristina could also listen to the conversation that Owen was having with his mother; enabling her to jump in at any sign of Owen starting to lose it and need backup.
Owen didn't know how to go about telling his mother that he was broken; that he could no longer be the son that she deserved, that instead he was a disappointment. When Cristina had left she had come to sit next to him on the couch and was now looking at him with concern.
"Owen, son, what's wrong? You seem different. Why are you back? You haven't gone and got that girl pregnant have you, if you work together that would make her Army too; you're not getting court marshalled are you?" She asked, her voice now sounding very worried and Owen found himself unable to meet her eyes for fear of what he would see in them.
'If only it was that simple' Owen thought. "No mom, Cristina works at Seattle Grace...I work at Seattle Grace." He said eventually and felt his heart rip in two as he saw the look of understanding and pain that overtook his mom's face.
"How long?" His mom asked, the sound of pain and betrayal obvious in her voice.
"A few months." Owen muttered, staring at the keys he had placed on the coffee table in front of him when they came in so that he did not have to look into his mother's eyes. Owen felt his mother's hands cup his face and force his chin up so that their eyes met. Owen saw pain and fear and even a touch of the same anger that he had been on the receiving end of as a kid when he had lied.
"Why Owen? Why didn't you tell me? What happened over there to change you like this?" she begged with a hint of fear in her voice due to the ravaged and almost defeated look he was giving her. "We raised you to be a good man, there has to be a good reason."
Owen was silent for the longest time as he tried to find the words to express what had happened to him. Telling Cristina had been far from easy but at the time he had hardly known her so her opinion of him and her reaction to his news had not mattered as much, but this was his mother and as much as he tried to deny it her reaction to him in the After mattered more than anything. "There was an ambush...and then they were all gone...Tommy, Skip, Dan, everyone gone, even the damn dog," he laughed humourlessly, "and then I got discharged."
Owen saw the look of realisation dawn on his mom's face and as she drew him into a hug he saw the two things that he had been most afraid of; sadness and pity. Owen wished that she would get angry and shout and scream about how she never wanted to see him again. Anger he could deal with, her pity he could not. This is why he hadn't told her he was back until now, he was barely holding himself together when he was being selfish and only thinking of himself, he had no idea how he was going to cope trying to prove to his family that they had no need to pity him. His mother's hug felt nothing like the one Cristina had given him only a day ago, instead of feeling his heart rate decrease and his breathing come easier he again began to feel claustrophobic, his heart pulsated in his chest and he felt unable to breathe.
He pulled his mother off of him and muttered, "I can't do this...I'm sorry...I just can't..." as he fled the room, straight past Cristina and out of the front door. His mother followed seconds later, obviously shocked and with a look of utter devastation clouding her features at the way her eldest child had been returned back to her, as a ghost of his former self.
Cristina held up her hand to stop the older woman, "I'll go. You should sit down and drink some tea or something. Or knit, mother's like to knit when they're upset don't they?"
Cristina found Owen slumped on the sidewalk, his back against his SUV, head in his hands. He looked up when she sat down next to him. His eyes were stormy and pained but seemed to clear slightly as he brought one hand up to her cup her cheek and buried the other in her hair to play with her curls, trying to ground himself in the now.
"I did a terrible thing and instead of getting angry she feels sorry for me. I just...I can't go back in there." He said struggling to verbalise what he was feeling.
"Yeah you did do a terrible thing, but it was for all the right reasons. She's your mother; of course she's going to be concerned about your welfare." They sat in silence for a few minutes, allowing Owen to clear his head a little and mull over what Cristina had just said. When Cristina felt that he was ready she asked; "So are going back in or are we just going to sit here all day, because as much as I enjoy sitting here with you brooding I have to go home at some point?"
"I can't go back in there. I can't deal with her pitying me. I know it's selfish but I just can't...not yet."
"Fine you can pay for lunch on the way back then." She said making a move to get up, only to be stopped by Owen's hand on her arm. "I left the car keys on the coffee table."
Cristina snorted with laughter. "Seriously?" Owen nodded, "And how exactly were you planning on getting home after you made your oh so dramatic exit?"
A smile tugged at his lips at the irony of it, "I didn't really think that far ahead."
She rolled her eyes at him and sighed. "Fine, I'll go and get them, but I expect first pick on any cool trauma's that come in as well as you buying me lunch on the way back." She said getting up and earning a chuckle from Owen.
Cristina didn't really know the etiquette for retrieving one's keys from your kind of boyfriend's mother's house after said kind of boyfriend had basically ran away so decided to just walk straight in. She found Mrs Hunt sat on the couch sobbing slightly, holding the very picture of Owen in his uniform that Cristina had looked at earlier.
"He's not coming back is he?" Cristina was unable to decide whether she meant metaphorically the Owen from the Before or the Owen from the After that had just fled her house.
"No ma'am, I've just come for the car keys. Today was a big step for him, he's not up to any more today." Cristina said picking up the discarded keys from the coffee table. Cristina knew that she should just bite her tongue and leave as she had only come for moral support, not to fight Owen's battles for him but she couldn't leave without informing his mom of Owen in the After.
"Look Mrs Hunt, Owen did a terrible terrible thing in not telling you he was back and I know you probably won't understand this but he was only doing what he thought was best. It may not seem like it right now but you and your husband raised a good man. He is a good man, he didn't tell you he was back because he didn't want to upset you, in his own screwed up way he was trying to protect you. He witnessed things you and I can't even begin to imagine; the deaths of his entire unit in one ambush, it changed him but he is still your son. He has his good day and he has his bad days but the Owen you know and love is there somewhere and when he's ready he will come back to you, just give him time." Cristina said looking straight into the devastated eyes of the woman in front of her, then turning to leave she was stopped however when Mrs Hunt called out her name.
"Cristina, could you tell Owen that I've grown to look quite forward to our weekly updates?"
Cristina nodded without turning around, "Yes ma'am."
"And look after him for me?" This time Cristina did turn round and made eye contact with the older woman, she nodded slightly. Cristina would look after Owen, not because his mother had asked her too but because she saw him, sometimes when even he couldn't see himself. She would guide him through the fog and help him come out the other side because he thought she was beautiful and because he had given her the vent and because he had asked for second chance and because he had gone to see his mother for her but above all because he also saw her.
I hope this is more true to the characters and would love to hear your views and opinions.