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Cristina Yang tended to make her mind up about people fairly quickly. She had worked out weather or not she wanted to try to like Meredith Grey just as fast as she normally did. At the beginning she was at least bearable.
Grey at least seemed to have half a brain, and she hadn't worn annoyingly bright pastels in to the hospital, or used an over application of perky happiness like Dr. Model Izzie Stevens. Grey wasn't Bambi eyed or fumbling like O'Malley either. Plus, she had grumbled about how few women had been accepted in to the program, expressed violence over Patient Beauty Patient, and had Ellis Grey for a mother. Besides, she seemed at least a bit stubborn and gutsy.
Bearable. That was the judgment Cristina had first passed on Meredith Grey.
When they had all been gathered together in a conference room without an explanation, Cristina had found a seat perched on a side table and hadn't complained when Meredith had hopped up next to her.
"What are you doing?" she asked.
"Suturing a banana," Cristina answered. "In the vague hope that it wakes up my brain."
Meredith had gone up another half a notch in her good books by simply nodding and leaning over to examine her stitches. In the same moment O'Malley dropped a spot by letting out a strangely high pitched chuckle. "What are you smiling at Double-O-Seven?" she snared. Then she sighed. "Sorry, I get mean when I'm tired."
"You know what?" O'Malley said, sounding deliriously happy and tired. "I don't even care. I got to comfort a family and hang out in the OR today. All is right with the world."
Cristina ignored the non-important comment and moved to what she felt was the main issue at hand. "Whatever. Does anyone know why we're here?"
Right on cue Dr. Shepherd walked in. "Good morning," he greeted. Cristina mumbled a reply like everyone else in the room. A tiny piece of her brain made a side note that Grey had stayed silent and ducked her head a bit.
"I'm going to do something pretty rare for a surgeon," Shepherd started. Cristina leaned forward eagerly, this was going to be good she could tell. "I'm going to ask interns for help."
At those words Cristina threw her banana and suture kit aside. Help meant maybe getting in on a maybe procedure. It was exactly what she needed to start this internship off right.
"I've got this kid Katie Bryce," Shepherd continued, naming the girl they had greeted on the helipad that morning. "She's a mystery. She doesn't respond to our meds. The labs are clean, and the scans are pure... but she's having seizures. Gran Malts seizure with no apparent cause. She's a ticking clock, and she's going to die if I don't make a diagnosis. Which is where you come in."
Every eye in the room was on Shepherd now as he leaned against the white board. Cristina blocked out everyone else and focused on the attending's words. Surgery was competitive, and she was one of the most competitive people on the planet. She thrived on it.
"I need your extra minds, extra eyes," Shepherd stressed. "I need you to play detective. I need you to find out why Katie is having seizures."
Everyone began shifting around to take notes and start working, or simply stared blankly at their schedules for the day hoping something would magically rearrange it's self. "Now I know your tired, your busy, and you've got more work than you could possible handle. I understand so I'm going to offer an incentive."
If anyone hadn't been paying attention before they sure as hell were now. "Whoever finds out what's wrong with Katie rides with me. You get to do what no interns get to do, scrub in to assist on an advanced procedure."
Dr. Shepherd seemed to throw a glance towards where Cristina and Meredith were sitting before letting his gaze pan around the room. "Dr. Bailey has Katie's chart. The clock is ticking fast people. If we're going to save Katie's life we have to do it now."
Everyone scrambled for Katie's chart, and by the time Cristina emerged with her copy Dr. Grey had vanished from the room.
Cristina hunted the skinny blonde down with determination. Grey had been the intern on Katie when she was admitted, and it was possible she had noticed something no one else had. She found her in the pit. "I want in on Shepherd's surgery," she said without preamble. "You've been the intern since Katie from the start, do you want to work together? We find the answer we have a fifty-fifty chance of scrubbing in."
The two made their way out of the Pit and down a hospital hallway in the direction of the library. "I'll work with you but I don't want in on the surgery," Grey said, surprising Cristina completely. "You can have it," Grey continued.
"Are you kidding?" Cristina asked incredulously. "It's the biggest opportunity any intern will ever get!"
"I don't want to spend anymore time with Shepherd than I have to," Meredith said with a surprising level of vehemence.
She frowned. What would make an intern hate a fairly decent, incredibly skilled seeming attending on the first day on the job. "What do you have against Shepherd?"
Meredith Grey ignored her question. "If we find the answer the surgery is yours," she stated. "Now do you want to work together or not?"
Cristina couldn't stop the grin from creeping across her face as Meredith pulled ahead of her. "Deal."
_
An hour later the two of them were neck deep in the research library and had yet to find anything. "Well she doesn't have anoxia, chronic renal failure, or acidosis," she rattled off. "It's not a tumor because her CT is clean. Are you seriously not going to tell me why you won't work with Shepherd?" she tacked on to the end.
"No," Meredith answered automatically. "What about infection?"
"No," Cristina replied, double checking the chart to be sure. "There's no white count. She has no CT lesions, no fevers, nothing in her spinal tap. Just tell me." It probably didn't really matter, but the very fact that Grey was refusing to tell her something made Cristina want to know every detail she could get.
Meredith huffed. "You can't comment," she said, laying down rules. "Make a face or react in anyway. Cristina looked at her, making her face purposefully blank, and waited. "We had sex," Grey said plainly.
Cristina nodded, processing that information. It really didn't matter she decided. Shepherd was a hot neurosurgeon with hair that seemed to stay magically coiffed. Why not hit that if you had the opportunity? Plus, Cristina was confident enough in her surgical skills to know that it probably wouldn't matter in the end.
"What about and aneurism?" she asked, switching back to the topic at hand.
Grey shook her head, ponytail bouncing a bit. "No blood on the CT, and no headaches."
Cristina sighed. "Well there's no drug use, no pregnancy, no trauma..." she trailed off for a moment but couldn't help her next question. "So was it good? I mean he looks like he'd be good. Was it good?"
Grey stood without answering the question and re-shelved the research materials they had been pouring over. "No one has answers," she concluded. "What happens if no one finds anything?"
"You mean what if she dies?" Cristina asked, a little bit startled. She hadn't even bothered considering that it was possible that they wouldn't figure anything out. Medicine almost always had an answer to her.
"Yeah!" Meredith said worriedly, crouching down to her level.
Cristina sighed again. "Well this is going to sound bad but I really want in on that surgery."
Grey ticked up another notch in the standings when she didn't immediately start spewing some kind of sensitivity crap. "She's just never going to have the chance to turn in to a person," she said. "The sum total of her existence will be almost winning Miss Teen Whatever. Do you now what her pageant talent is?"
"They have talent?" Cristina asked dryly.
"Rhythmic gymnastics," Grey pronounced around a smile.
Cristina burst out laughing. "Oh come on!" she said, glancing back down at the chart with her pen.
"What is rhythmic gymnastics?" Grey asked, still laughing. "I can't even say it. I don't know what it is."
"Um..." Cristina wracked her brains and managed to come up with a fragment of a memory of some weird thing on TV that her mother had watched. Sparkles, a ball, ribbons, and leotards had been all she had needed to see before leaving the room. "I think it's something with a ball-" she cut herself off at the look of realization on the blonde's face. "What? Meredith what?"
She sprang to her feet and held a hand out to her. "Get up!" she commanded, a bright light in her eyes. "Get up come on!"
The blonde explained her realization as she ran through the hospital to track down Dr. Shepherd. They finally found him as he was stepping in to an elevator making notes on a medical pad. "Katie competes in beauty pageants!" Cristina gasped out.
"I know that but we have to save her life anyway," Shepherd said with a dry tone and straight face.
He wasn't paying too much attention but Cristina soldiered on. "She's had no headaches, no neck pain, the CT was clean," she stepped in front of the elevator door to keep it from closing. "There's no medical proof of an aneurism..."
"Right," Shepherd prompted. The message was clear in his tone. Get to the point please.
"What if she has an aneurism anyway?" she finished.
Shepherd tucked his pen in to the front pocket of his lab coat and shook his head. "There are no indicators."
"She twisted her ankle a few weeks ago when she was practicing for the pageant!" Cristina added. She stepped in front of the door again and completely ignore the slight jarring the impact sent up her spine. She said a silent prayer of thanks to whatever higher power had led Meredith to sharing that detail with her on the run over.
"Look I appreciate you trying to help-" Shepherd started leaning his head in to the newly opening gap formed by the door.
"She fell!" Meredith threw in, popping up at Cristina's shoulder. "When she twisted her ankle she fell."
Shepherd turned halfway around to give a quick apology to everyone else in the elevator who were all looking more and more irritated and confused by the minute. "It was no bug deal," Cristina went on. "Not even a bump on the head. She got right back up, iced her ankle, and everything was fine. It was a fall so minor her doctor didn't even think to mention it when I was taking her history but she did fall!"
"Well you know what the chance is of a fall that minor bursting an aneurism?" Shepherd called through the rapidly closing metal doors. "One in a million literally."
Cristina and Meredith exchanged a glance and had begun to walk away when the elevator dinged and the doors slid back open.
Shepherd heaved a deep breath and stepped out, walking quickly passed them. "Let's go."
"Where?" Meredith asked.
"To find out if Katie is one in a million," Shepherd called back.
They followed him.
They sat watching the scans resolve themselves in to pictures on the screens. "Well I'll be damned," Shepherd said quietly. "it's minor but it's there. A sub-arachnoid hemorrhage. She's bleeding in to her brain."
They made their way back up to the nurses station as Dr. Shepherd kept talking. "She could have gone her whole life with out it ever being a problem. Just one tap in the right spot and..."
"It exploded," Cristina filled in.
"Exactly," Shepherd said. There was a sort of gleam in his eyes as he said it. Cristina could recognize that look, it was the look that all great surgeons had when they were about to be able to do the thing they loved best. "You two did great work," he praised.
They reached the nurses station and he leaned over. "I'd love to stay here and kiss your asses but I have to go tell Katie's parents that she's headed in to surgery. Katie Bryce's chart please." The nurse handed it over and he began to flip through it intently.
"Uh, Dr. Shepherd?" Cristina piped in. She hadn't spent over an hour in the library researching for nothing. "You said that you would pick someone to scrub in with you if we helped."
"Oh, yes right," he remembered. "Um, I'm sorry I can't take you both but it's going to be a full house. His eyes flicked past her and settled on Meredith happily. "Meredith I'll see you in the OR."
Meredith gaped at him, then at her. Cristina was half in agreement with her. Grey had given almost no sign that she had done anything at all to contribute to the discovery. She had set Cristina up for the opportunity and then silently stepped back.
A certain part of her knew that, but the other, more competitive part of her saw it as blatant favoritism. That part of her was jealous, indignant, and just all together royally pissed off. It was that part of her that led her to storm away, ignoring Meredith calling her name.
It was also that part of her that led her to be a royal bitch to Grey later, venting everything in her system that could be said in front of Izzie. For reasons she didn't quite understand herself, she left out Shepherd and Grey sleeping together. For some reason, bringing that up just felt like a dirty, undeserved, violation of privacy.
Meredith took it all in silence, and then turned away.
Cristina didn't know why she went up to the OR gallery to watch the procedure. But she did it.
She watched as Shepherd used his head to gesture Grey to come over to watch him repair the aneurism through the microscope. She could see as Shepherd's hands moved with light sure movements to manipulate his instruments.
Strangely, it almost seemed like he worked even more smoothly and quickly when Meredith came closer. Showing off to impress the girl.
The thought drew Cristina up short. Blatant favoritism for the intern you screwed was one thing, wanting to do better work to save a teenager's life to impress them was different. The attendings were supposed to be pushing the interns, not the other way around.
For some reason, those thoughts and realizations made it incredibly hard for Cristina to dislike Meredith Grey. When she passed the Doctor in question out side of the OR she stopped. "It was a good surgery," she acknowledged.
"Yeah," Meredith agreed with a tired smile.
Cristina let out a breath and sagged in to the chair next to her. According to the clock on the wall, their first forty-eight hour shift was now officially over. Slowly she said, "we don't have to do that thing where I say something, and then you say something, and then somebody cries, and there's like a moment..."
"Yuck," Meredith interjected tonelessly.
"Good," Cristina said fervently. She glanced at Meredith. "You should get some sleep, you look like crap."
Meredith met her gaze with a teasing expression. "I look better than you."
"Not possible," Cristina stated lightly. She pulled herself up from her seat and moved away down the hall towards the scrub room. She paused and looked back around the corner as the OR door opened again.
Dr. Shepherd was learning against the nurses station with his eyes on Meredith. They were talking quietly, like the hospital around them had been put on pause for a second. From her position, Cristina could just see Meredith smile, and hear Shepherd's parting words.
"I should uh, go do this." He didn't sound so completely convinced that that was what he wanted to do.
Cristina smiled tiredly and walked off down the hall. She had survived her first shift, and from what she could tell, Meredith Grey just might have become her knew best friend.
Who really gave a crap if she was all lovey dovey with Dr. McDreamy anyway?
A/N: So how did I do? I thought it was only right to give Meredith's person one of the first chapters. She's been able to watch MerDer right from the beginning. Sorry about any bad grammar. It is something I'm working on. I'll try to update often but I am in school right now so it might take a little bit of time between some chapters. Review for me! xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo
