First Time
The new interns will be arriving today; a whole new bunch of surgery obsessed, eager to please, overachievers. If he was the man he was a year ago, he would be there picking out the weakest link in order to torture them. But he's not, he's not the man he was a year ago, and for torturing interns, all he sees now is his arrogance in the act.
Cristina was far from being the weakest link; he had seen her application before hand. She was the top of her class, even had a PhD; plus she was way too eager to perform her first surgery. No the Preston Burke of a year ago had to show the interns who was boss.
He was in charge of the OR today and he was definitely walking around like he owned the place. But what did he care, the opinions of others in this hospital didn't matter to him because 9 times out of 10 they only cared about the gossip, a waste of time in his opinion.
He had already looked over the interns applications when he picked one: George O'Malley, who barely even made it into the program. This would be fun, Preston thought, to watch him tremble and quake through the entire surgery, O'Malley would definitely mess up at some point and then he, Preston Burke, would swoop in and save the day. So he approached the intern table, picked O'Malley, watched the disappointed looks on the other interns and walked away. He was ready to teach these interns a lesson that they would not forget anytime soon.
Yet he noticed her right away, the one with the curly hair and deep brown eyes. She seemed so disappointed when he didn't pick her, which seems normal now, considering her extreme competitiveness. Cristina caught his attention like no other intern before; there was the harvest surgery, disturbing him when he was in the men's room. She was persistent; she was like no other intern who would've cowered under the look he gave her. Cristina was bold, brash, and definitely surgery hungry. It wasn't until the Liz Fallon case that changed his perspective on her; when he saw past her cold, hard exterior for the first time.
He wasn't going to do the surgery; Cristina was just another inter to torture, in his long history of torturing interns. And boy did he have her going, running all around the hospital getting tests and labs done. All in hopes of getting in on the Whipple. Liz and him were in on this together initiation of the new intern.
But right at this moment, he feels a little guilty. He has spent all of his years as an attending torturing interns and it had never really bother him until this very moment, when this hard, tough, intern was threatening to break down. He doesn't understand why he didn't see it before, her attachment to the old scrub nurse. All he thought she wanted was the surgery. But here he is now, in the stairwell, a little to close for professional contact, telling this intern, Cristina Yang, that she has to let go of the nurse. There is something in her eyes that he sees maybe a little bit of him when he started out; he feels a connection, something that he has never shared with an intern before, or maybe anyone else in his life.
Preston believes that was when it all started to change, that moment in the stairwell. Because it only takes one moment to change everything in your life. Looking into her eyes and seeing her for the first time, was what started the course for the year to come.
A/N: I want to thank you for the reviews, and I'm not sure if I write Burke the best, but I'm trying.