A/N Ok. So I know I promised y'all the rest of "Boy's Club." And you're going to get it. But this one jumped into my head at the end of "Only Connect" and wouldn't go away until I wrote it. (Though it did take me a couple of weeks to figure out exactly what was going to happen.) Looks to be about 5 chapters or so. TPTB have given Jane NO background, so I got the fun of creating a backstory for her. Why she is the way she is.

(Oops. Almost forgot the disclaimers. I don't own anyone. Not even Jane. I DO own this particular arrangement of words so please ask my permission before doing anything except reading it/printing it out for your own enjoyment.)

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"Are you leaving?" Abby asked.

"Yeah ... in a minute."

"We can wait," said Neela cheerfully. "We can all walk to the el together."

"No, you don't have to wait for me. I need to ... umm ... ask Dr. Pratt something before I go. I may be a while."

"Ok then. We'll see you tomorrow then?" Without waiting for an answer, they opened the ambulance bay doors and went on their way.

She stood in the doorway a moment longer, then sighed and pulled her mittens from her pocket. The wool was starting to fray, but they'd last through the winter. She rubbed her thumb over the snowflake pattern knitted into the back of the mitten and smiled a little. They'd been a Christmas gift from her mother. Four years ago. The last gift she'd received from her. She didn't quite believe the note in the card that had said, "I made these myself. I hope you like them." Her mother had never made anything for her in her life, and she doubted the woman knew how to knit. Still, it was the thought that counted. A peace offering, perhaps, but when she'd tried to call home the next day to thank her for the gift, she'd gotten a recording. "The number you have dialed has been disconnected." Not a surprise. How often had they moved in the 18 years she'd lived at home?

A warm, accented voice startled her. "Everything ok, Jane?"

"Yeah, everything's fine, Dr. Kovač. I'm just leaving." A shrug. "It's cold out, you know. I hate going out there."

"You can walk with us to the el," Sam said brightly.

"No, I ... I''m fine, really."

"Ok. We'll see you tomorrow, then."

"I'll be here, like always." Jane watched them walk, hand in hand, across the ambulance bay. She saw them stop for a moment and speak to Abby and Neela. Were they laughing together? It was hard to tell?

When they'd started climbing the stairs to the el station, she pulled on her mittens and stepped outside.

Jane had been there for months, she worked with these doctors and nurses almost every day. And none of them had ever noticed that she didn't take the el. None of them knew that she lived in a tiny campus dorm room two blocks from the hospital. None of them knew a damn thing about her.

She felt a tightness in her stomach, and her mittened hands clenched into fists. What she wouldn't give ... would she ever have what they had? The easy friendship between Abby and Neela. She knew there were tensions between them, but they were still, so obviously, good friends. They confided in each other, laughed with each other. And Sam and Luka ... Dr. Kovač. Neela had just blown her off when she'd mentioned that Dr. Kovač was hot. Looked at her like she'd just grown two heads. Why should Neela notice that sort of thing? Neela was beautiful. She could have any guy she wanted. There were plenty of good looking men around the ER. Maybe Luka just wasn't quite her type. But for Jane it was all just a dream anyway ... a fantasy. And if you're going to dream, you might as well dream big. She could never have a guy like Luka. Luka and Sam were together, and Sam was everything she wasn't. Beautiful, clever, confident, skilled. She was none of those things, and never could be. She just just a piece of furniture. Nobody ever noticed her. Maybe she'd be better off with two heads. At least then she'd be a fascinating teaching case ...

Their offers had been genuine enough, polite enough. If she had been walking to the el she could could have walked with Abby and Neela, or with Dr. Kovač and Sam. But she would have just been a fifth wheel. She wouldn't have been able to think of anything to say, and anything they'd said to her would have just been polite small talk. They didn't really want her there. Two's company, three's a crowd.

And one. One is the loneliest number. One singular sensation. One Jane Figler, fourth year medical student who would be, in four months, a doctor.

Jane checked her mailbox, empty of course, then headed up the stairs to her room. She put water to boil in the electric kettle for ramen noodles. Beef flavor today. She opened her pathology book. Might as well study while dinner cooked, she had a test tomorrow. She'd look over the chapter. Not that she was worried. A's came easy to her. Getting good grades was easy, always had been. But nothing else about this came easy.

The patients. The doctors. She never knew what to say to any of them. When she tried, she always said the wrong thing, always ended up with her foot firmly in her mouth. She remembered her first day in the ER. She was determined to make it work, determined that this rotation would be different. And she'd made a fool of herself in the first five minutes.Why had she asked Neela about her previous residency? Of all the stupid questions to ask ...God, it was a miracle that Neela didn't hate her. She just settled for ignoring her most of the time, which really was fine with Jane. It was nothing new, anyway.

So she'd just stopped trying, gone back to being invisible. Being invisible was easy too, if only because she'd had a lot of practice. She'd learned how to be invisible a long time ago. She was a pro. You fade into the woodwork, you survive. You get noticed ... you pay the price. You get pushed down the stairs at Bloomfield Rd. Elementary school and get worms put into your lunch tray. You find methelyn blue poured all over your lab notes in 10th grade chemistry class. You get called Plain-Jane-the-Brain by the boys in junior high - boys who would never ever ask you out on a date, but did unhook the back of your bra in English class and whisper in your ear 'You don't need it anyway, Jane. Too bad you've got it all in your head and not down lower where it really counts.'

God .… she hated her name. She'd been named after her great aunt, not that she'd ever met the woman. She longed for an interesting name, a glamorous one. Or at least one that didn't lend itself quite so handily to teasing and name calling. For a time in 4th grade she'd taken to spelling her name 'Jayne.' She told the girls at the lunch table that she'd been named for Jayne Mansfield, a beautiful actress from a long time ago. Jayne Marie Figler. Marie she'd just made up ... it sounded rather elegant to her ears, better, anyway, than Ann. But it hadn't lasted. The girls in the class still teased her and called her names. And the teacher, a woman possessed of little imagination and even less compassion had started marking all her papers with F's. "I can't grade these papers if the headings aren't correct, Jane. You must put your true, legal name on all your papers." So it was back to being just Jane again. Invisible Jane.

If being noticed at school was bad, being noticed by your stepfather was worse. The first two hadn't beentoo bad. She'd been young, and they'd settled for knocking her around a little, slapping her face when she'd 'sassed' them. But the last two ... she might not have had enough for the boys in junior high, but she had plenty for Roger, and Tim hadn't complained either. Oh, they'd never really done anything to her, not really. It was hard to do much when her bed was usually a pull-out, or sometimes just a cot in the living room of whatever crappy apartment they were living in that year. She was probably the only virgin in her med school class. But the quick feel as they brushed against her, the 'accidental' walking into the bathroom when she was in the shower. And, sometimes, the large hand grabbing hers and guiding it. "Come on, Janie, help a guy out, would'ja? Your mom's dead to the world and I'm in a sorry state here."

Her mother. She'd tried complaining to her. "I don't like Roger, Ma. He ... takes advantage of me. He ... does things ..."

"Aw, you're imagining things. He's a great guy. Takes good care of us. You just don't want me to be happy, do you?" Not that Mom had been happy either. None of her husbands had stuck around for more than a couple of years.

She'd discovered the local public library early. Heaven. Here she could escape the hell at home, and lose herself in books. She never checked anything out, she didn't have a library card was too ashamed to give the library her home address. But she would sit and read for hours, often staying from the end of the school day until the library closed for the evening. She read anything. Everything. Fiction, non-fiction, the encyclopedia from cover to cover. When the library had gotten an internet hook-up her junior year, it was an entrance into yet another level of bliss.

The library and school. As long as she could avoid the attention of her peers, school was heaven too. A's on every test, every paper, every report card. She would show her report cards to her mother who would glance at them and say, "That's great, Janie. I'm real proud of you. I always knew you had brains. Lord knows where you got 'em from though. I'm as dumb as a rock, and as for your daddy ... well ... the less said about him the better."

Midway through her junior year, her counselor had called her down. "You need to start thinking about college, Jane. You need to get your applications in soon." And at the startled look on Jane's face, she'd said, "You are planning to go to college, aren't you?"

"I ... I'd like to go ... but ... we don't have much money ... even a state school ..."

"With your grades I'm sure you can get a scholarship. I can help you with that."

"But that would just cover tuition, wouldn't it? There's still room and board, and books."

"There are some good colleges right here in the area, Jane. I'm positive you could get a full scholarship, and if you live at home ..."

"No!" Jane was shocked at the vehemence in her own voice. "I can't live at home, Mrs. Conrad. I'll join the Navy, I'll wait tables or flip burgers to help pay my way ... but I can't live at home."

And Mrs. Conrad had looked at her for a long moment, and Jane knew she was seeing the bruises on her arms, the ones she always kept covered with long sleeved shirts. Seeing the pain in her eyes that nothing could ever hide. But she'd only smiled and said, "Ok, I'm sure we can find a way. Between grants and loans and work-study, you can probably go to any college you choose. Have you thought about what you'll want to study? What would you like to be?"

Jane opened her mouth to answer. She hadn't thought about it. She'd never let herself think about college. But what came out was, "Maybe a doctor?"

"You'd make a good one, I'm sure. But medical school is a graduate program. Let's focus on your undergrad stuff first."

Compared to life at home, college was paradise. No-one beat her. No-one abused her. She slept on a real bed and no longer showered in her underwear, for fear that Roger would walk in on her. But she was still Plain-Jane. She'd been too alone for too long. She didn't know how to talk to people, how to make friends. No boys ever asked her out and the one night she'd joined one of the dorm parties, she'd gotten drunk and sick after only two beers. Everyone had laughed at her, everyone except Dean Applegate. He'd assured her that it didn't matter, that he liked a girl who couldn't hold her liquor. And then, drunk himself, he'd started pawing at her .. awakening memories of Tim and Roger .. and she'd fled back to her room, to the safety of her books and her locked door. The next morning her roommate had stopped by to grab a shower and her books for class. Ellie didn't often sleep in their room. She had a boyfriend with an apartment in town.

"What happened last night? Weren't you having fun?"

"No, I wasn't. I don't like parties."

"Hey, I saw what happened. I'm not blind. But boy, you must be. Dean is so hot, and I've heard great stuff about him ... if you know what I mean. You could do a lot worse."

"He was drunk, Ellie. He wasn't interested in me. He just wanted ..."

And Ellie had laughed. "Of course he did. Want some advice, Jane? You're a nice girl, and I like you. But being nice doesn't get you very far in this world. And neither does being smart. Guys don't care about your grades. They want a pretty face and a naked body. You're no beauty, sweetie, so if someone's interested in the bod ... don't play hard to get or you'll be sleeping alone for a long time." Ellie had laughed again and headed out to class. And Jane had whispered, "I'm 19, Ellie. I've got my whole life ahead of me."

But she wasn't 19 anymore. She was 24, and still sleeping alone. Still waiting for a guy who liked her for who she was, was interested in more than her body. Who didn't assume that being plain meant being desperate.

Taking a heavy course load and staying for summer sessions (not that she'd had a home to go back to), she had graduated in 3 years and then scraped together enough loans and grants to pay for medical school, and her tiny dorm room and enough ramen noodles to keep body and soul together for four years.

In medical school everyone was smart. Brains were no longer a liability, her worth was no longer measured in the number of shots she could down in an hour, or the number of guys she could screw in a weekend. But she'd been invisible for too long. She knew no other way to live. Her efforts to be bright and witty rang so false in her own ears that she knew everyone else could see through them as well. No-one was cruel to her here. Everyone was pointedly polite, or painfully professional - or they looked right through her. When she graduated and moved on to where-ever she matched, she would be forgotten. And none of it had ever really mattered to her .. until today.

Today someone else had suffered. 'No one listens to me. No-one even remembered that I was in the room.' Could she have spared that poor grandmother unnecessary grief? Could she have kept Neela was making her terrible mistake?

But she had done the right thing! She'd posted the names on the board, but apparently her ink was as invisible as the rest of her. No-one had noticed, no-one had asked her about it. It wasn't her fault. But could she have done more? If she'd spoken up, would they have listened this time? Would they listen next time?

She had been in school for 6 1/2 years, studying to be a doctor, so she could make a positive difference in someone's life. And she'd yet to do that. Even once.

The smell of ozone startled her. She'd been daydreaming, her head on her open pathology text. The kettle had boiled dry, filling with room with the sharp smell of overheated metal. "Damn it!" Jane pulled the plug and anxiously examined the pot. Had she ruined it? She couldn't afford to buy herself another.