The last time Cass was in the office of the chief of surgery, Richard Webber was in charge and she was being chastised, alongside a few of the other junior residents that she worked with, after being caught sleeping in the tunnels with their pagers off during a particularly slow night shift. It looked completely different now, and in a good way. It may have been that she wasn't a young, inexperienced doctor any more, or that she wasn't in there because she had done something reckless, but it was more than likely that the person behind the desk was what made it so different. Miranda Bailey, who was a senior resident when Cass herself had left Seattle all those years ago, looked good sitting there. She looked like she belonged.

She knocked on the open door lightly, to which Bailey glanced up from the stack of papers she was reading and motioned for her to come in and take a seat.

"Good morning, Dr. Bailey", Cass said as she sat down.

"Dr. Wise", she greeted without looking up again, "I hear you're already ruffling some feathers. On your first day."

Cass could hardly believe it; it had to have been no more than 30 minutes since she had talked to Maggie Pierce, and it had somehow already gotten to the chief of surgery? As much as she said she wouldn't miss the sand and heat of the Middle East, she had to admit that the distinct lack of drama was something she would miss; there were some advantages to being one of the very few female surgeons there. It hadn't even taken her one day of returning to the civilian surgical world before she was remembering just how bad it could get.

"Are you seri… How did you hear about that already?"

Bailey smirked; Cass may have worked at Grey-Sloan before, but she clearly didn't work there long enough to get into the dynamics of how the hospital really worked. Or just how fast the gossip could travel.

"Word travels fast around here, Wise." The chief smirked again, and finally closed the folder with the paper she had been going over before looking up. There was no point in telling her that she had heard Wilson and Edwards gossiping about the encounter as they walked by her door just before Cass had gotten there. "Do you want to tell me about it?"

"With all due respect, chief, it's okay. I had to perform an emergency pericardiocentesis on a boy and Dr. Pierce walked in just as I was inserting the needle. She had no idea who I was, and was rightfully concerned. If the roles were reversed, I probably would have reacted the same."

Bailey would be lying if she said she wasn't a little shocked; she didn't want to assume that her new hire would immediately delve into talking about her fellow surgeons once prompted, but she definitely would not have been surprised if that's how the conversation had gone.

"Well okay. That incident aside then, how's the first day going? How do you like the ER?"

"I love it", Cass smiled broadly, happy for the subject being dropped for the time being. "This hospital, what I've seen of it so far, is amazing. Much more amazing than I remember. It's been so long since I've worked in a place that's stocked, or has modern equipment in it. Or, you know, was not in the desert. I'm honestly just so happy that I won't be needing to dump the sand out of my shoes before I go to bed tonight."

Laughing, Bailey nodded in agreement.

"I'm glad. We do our best to keep the sand out of our emergency room." Cass smiled at her again, and Bailey returned it. "I just wanted to make sure that you were doing alright. If you've got any questions, you know where to find me."

After a few more minutes of small talk – Cass was of course unaware that Bailey had a baby, or had gotten divorced and remarried, in the years since she left Seattle – Cass was dismissed. She called down to the ER to see if Owen needed her for anything, but he simply dismissed her by telling her that he would page her if he did, and that she should take some time to explore the hospital. Reluctantly, she took his advice, deciding to first head down to the cafeteria and grab some lunch.

The cafeteria, as it turned out, was swamped. Making a mental note to avoid this area of the hospital around 1130 in the future, as it was clearly lunch time for the entire staff, Cass made herself a small salad. She meandered her way between crowded tables with her trey, looking for a place to sit, but the only open table had Pierce, Shepherd, and Grey huddled closely around it. They appeared to be in a heated conversation, so Cass attempted to slide by with full intentions of taking her food back up to the attendings' longue and eating in there. Alone.

She had not felt more like a kid on the first day of school than she did just then, in the moment. If she really wanted to complete the feeling, she decided, she should just take her food to the bathroom and eat it in a stall there.

Grimacing, she started towards the upstairs longue. Cass didn't make it far, however, before someone grabbed the sleeve of her lab coat and halted her movements. Looking down, she was met with the blue eyes of Meredith Grey – the head of general surgery, she remembered from their introduction that morning, and the woman who had shown her around before her shift had started.

"Cass! Where are you going?"

"Oh, I was just… going upstairs. It's crowded down here, and I've got some journals I wanted to go over before-"

"Nonsense!", Meredith interrupted, smiling, "Come sit with us."

Cass didn't see a way around it, not without seeming rude. So, despite the less than friendly look on Pierce's face, she forced a smile and sat down between Meredith and Amelia. Amelia extended her hand to her as soon as she did so.

"Amelia Shepherd. I know I met you earlier, but I don't remember your name, I'm sorry."

"Cass Wise", she said as she shook the hand offered to her. "You had a busy morning. I won't take it personally."

The newest surgeon at the table waited a little awkwardly for someone to say something else to her, but no one did. The three other women began their conversation seemingly from where it left off, paying no mind to Cass sitting among them. She started to eat her salad, thinking with every bite that eating alone in the longue might not have been that bad after all. Almost half way through the salad, and just before Cass was about to feign an emergency and excuse herself from the terribly uncomfortable lunch she was having, Meredith cleared her throat and turned her attention to the newcomer.

"So I hear you met my sister this morning", Grey eyed her, still smiling. "How did that go?"

Cass looked up, confused. The only people that she had had anything even remotely resembling a conversation with, outside of the chief, were Hunt and Pierce. Neither of which seemed very much like they could be Meredith's sister.

"Sister?", she said, carefully chewing around a mouthful of lettuce.

"Dr. Pierce. Maggie."

Maggie then turned and looked at Meredith seriously, as if it was explicitly decided before Cass' arrival that this particular conversation would not be happening. Clearly not having any desire to avoid what had happened in the ER earlier, however, Meredith brought it up anyways.

"Oh…", Cass dragged out, looking at each of the women individually with wide eyes before looking back down at her salad. Of course Maggie is Meredith's sister, she thought. Just when she thought she might have the chance to make a new friend. "Yes. I did. It went… fine."

"Fine?", Amelia parroted back. "Fine is an interesting word to use."

"Amy", Maggie said to her in warning.

"What?", Meredith answered for her, somehow still smiling despite the terrible awkwardness of the conversation.

Cass was just getting more and more confused at that point, and decided to interrupt the three other surgeons before she fell even further behind.

"I'm sorry, did I… miss something?"

Smiling at each other, Amelia and Meredith looked at Cass before turning their attention back to Maggie.

"Yes, Maggie", Amelia said, "did she miss something?"

Defeated, the cardio surgeon hung her head. Cass, still not sure what the hell was going on, just set her fork down and waited for this ridiculous lunch to finally come to an end. She had never hoped so badly in her life for a trauma, and only felt a little guilty for thinking that. A little blood might just distract her from how awful this day had been so far.

"They're trying to force me to apologize", Maggie finally ground out, and with what appeared to be a great deal of difficulty. "Because I was a total bitch to you earlier and it wasn't your fault. I was having some… guy troubles… and I may or may not have taken it out on you. So I'm sorry. For that."

Meredith and Amelia looked rather pleased with themselves, while Maggie looked downright miserable. It was nice of her to apologize, though, Cass decided. Even though she clearly did not want to.

"Hey, it's okay", Cass responded sincerely. "No hard feelings. I was a stranger stabbing a kid with a needle. Guy troubles or not, I can't say I wouldn't have done the same thing if I was you."

The awkward lunch then turned much less awkward, the four of them chatting casually for a while until the conversation naturally took a turn towards their newcomer. Meredith was happy to find someone else that had grown up in Seattle, and was surprised to hear that Cass' mom lived just a few blocks from Ellis' old house. Amelia expertly answered Cass' delicately worded questions about her brother – Cass had, of course, done neuro rotations with him when she was a resident, and had no idea that he had passed. She also had no idea that Meredith was his wife, but Meredith handled the questions with just as much finesse. Maggie actually had a lot of questions about Cass' experiences overseas, but that lead to how she ended up in the military in the first place, and Meredith was surprised to hear that part of the other surgeon's residency was at done Seattle Grace.

"I had no idea!", she exclaimed. "What years were you here?"

"Well my internship was in 2001 and 2002, and I left during my third year of residency in 2005. Right before the new intern class started."

Smiling, Grey nodded, seeing no point in adding that the new intern class had been hers, but still finding it funny how long ago that had been.

"So when you were here, Bailey…?"

"Was a fifth year, I think. Her class was a few years ahead of mine. I almost didn't believe it when Webber called to set up my interview with the chief of surgery, and when I showed up it was Bailey. She looks the same as she did 10 years ago, I don't know how she does it."

"She always said it was the blood of her residents", Meredith mumbled, a grin still on her face.

"Did you know Torres?", Amelia asked, Callie being the only other resident from around that time that she knew still worked at the hospital. "She's the head of ortho here now."

Cass knew exactly who Torres was, and was surprised to hear that she was still at Grey-Sloan. The two of them had never really crossed paths during either her internship or residency, outside of the normal running into one another that generally happened at the hospital. But she had always liked her, because she was usually smiling or dancing, or both. Back then, before the military and the traumas – both the ones she had seen to and the ones she had lived through – Callie Torres was the kind of surgeon Cass herself wanted to be. Replace the orthopedic specialty with a one in pediatrics, keep the badass attitude and that confident attitude, and without the military, that's who Cass had wanted to be. That's the life Cass wanted. She had been so bumbling and awkward as an intern and resident, and Callie was the perfect peer role model. She wouldn't change the career that she had or the person that she became for anything, but it was interesting to think about the kind of person she might be if her life had gone a little differently.

She was curious to see if Callie still had all that badassery.

"I wouldn't say I knew her, but I knew of her. I actually sort of looked up to her back there", Cass admitted. "She was a few years ahead of me, too. I had no idea she was still here."

They chatted for a few more minutes, about Callie and the fate of the other residents that had been at the hospital around that time – Cass was surprised to find out that Torres had been married, twice, and once to a woman. The ortho surgeon had a reputation for being a bit of a boy crazy surgeon back in her day, so that was definitely surprising news. She almost didn't believe it when Meredith said her ex-wife was a surgeon at the hospital as well; in addition to having that boy crazy reputation, she was also known for being the type of person that could hold a grudge. Cass found it hard to imagine her being able to work amicably with her ex like that.

It was nice to see that the two residents she knew from her time at the hospital over a decade ago had changed so much – Bailey was chief of surgery, for god's sake, and Torres had climbed her way to the head of the orthopedic surgery department, in addition to apparently changing a great deal as a person.

The whole conversation made Cass feel a tad bit introspective, thinking about the changes she herself had gone through since leaving Seattle Grace, but the surgeon didn't have too long to dwell on it: her pager went off, a 911 from Hunt down in the ER, and she quickly excused herself. Tossing out the rest of her half eaten salad, Cass sprinted down the halls towards the ambulance bay.

By the time Cass made it down to the emergency room, they were already moving the patients through the pit and sorting them into the trauma rooms. Owen yelled at her to take trauma 2 as he himself was running into trauma 3, so she threw her lab coat over the back of a chair and grabbed a gown before rushing in. The man on the table was screaming in agony, flailing so much that the resident – this time an attractive older African American man – was having a very difficult time getting an IV placed. The man's midsection was covered with already bled through gauze pads and bandages, and he actively swung at anyone that tried to examine the area. Every other person in the room was skirting around him, trying to do what they needed to do without getting within swinging distance, which was quite obviously ineffective.

As terrible as it may sound, and she knew that it sounded terrible the second that she thought it, this was where Cassandra Wise shined.

Taking only a second to breathe deeply and clear her mind, Cass finished tying up her gown and took charge of the room.

"Sir, my name is Dr. Wise. We're here to help, okay? I'm going to need you to calm down so I can examine your abdomen."

Her soft spoken words did nothing to soothe the man on the table, however. He used big hands to continue to swing at her, and the other doctors in the room, and it was only when he just narrowly missed actually making contact with a nurse that was trying to pass by that Cass started to get annoyed.

"You two", she pointed to the terrified looking interns hiding behind the resident, who was still trying to get an IV placed, "grab his arms, and hold them tight, so he can get this IV placed. And you", she motioned to the resident, "push 30 of Fentanyl and 5 of Midazolam the second you get it in."

The three men moved as soon as the orders were given, the interns only hesitating for a moment; they moved quickly, though, once they saw that Cass herself was moving to help them hold him still. The patient was strong, as to be expected when a man that size had that much adrenaline rushing through his body, but with a little effort they were able to get the IV placed and the medications Cass requested put in. With the man's sedation in, and the pain meds pushed, she moved around his now relaxed body as she shouted out orders to the other doctors in the room.

One of the interns ran to fetch an ultrasound, while the other called cardio and made sure to reserve an OR. The resident helped her remove the lap pads and bandages, tossing the bloody gauze on the ground with secretly satisfying splats, and revealed the very exposed midsection of the man on the table; almost the entirety of his intestines were hanging out, but there wasn't much else Cass could tell with all the bleeding. His heart rate was tachycardic, his vitals unstable, and everyone in the room knew that if they didn't get him to the OR soon, there was no way this man was going to survive the onslaught of his injuries.

"Hang 2 units of O neg, and someone call the OR! Tell Pierce to meet us there!"

Cass wasn't sure how to keep this man from bleeding out while they transported him; she knew what she would do if she was in the field still, but-

And then it hit her. Why do anything different? That in mind, Cass grabbed as many lap pads as she could hold and climbed on top of the man, using not just her hands but her body weight to apply 140 lbs of pressure right on to the wound. It wasn't always the best course of action – it wasn't the most sanitary, and it was difficult to avoid kneeling on exposed intestines or any other organs that may be hanging out – but it was the best way to control the bleeding while they got him up to the OR, where they could really get to work saving him. She had done it literally hundreds of times while she was in the military, however, and would personally swear by it as an incredibly useful life-saving technique.

The resident was gaping at her as he moved the IV lines around to prep him for transport.

"What are you waiting for?", Cass barked at no one in particular. "Move out!"

Owen was working on his patient in the room next door – he had gotten from the young man, who had to be no more than 20 years old, that he and his friend were playing around with some 'authentic' samurai swords a friend from Japan had sent them when a bet was raised on who would win in a sword fight. His patient, Rudy, had only suffered a through-and-through puncture wound to the shoulder that, though it was bleeding a worrying amount when he came in, had amazingly avoided hitting anything major. Rudy's friend Tommy, however, had not been nearly as lucky; a broad stroke of the sword resulted in Rudy more or less cutting is friend in half. Hunt was in the middle of trying to find out more information about the man in the other room when he looked up – just in time to see Dr. Wise practically sitting on Tom as they rushed him from the emergency room and towards the elevators. Leaving Rudy with Wilson, who was more than capable of finishing the sutures Owen had started, he walked out of the room to see the dwindling trail of blood in the wake of Cass' patient.

When things settled in the emergency room – Rudy was about ready to be discharged, only waiting for the pharmacy to fill is prescriptions, and Kepner had come in to run the night shift after getting a proper pass down – Owen made his way to the gallery of OR 2, where Cass and Warren were fighting diligently to save their patient's life. He was surprised to see Bailey up there was well, watching carefully from a seat in the back row.

"Chief", Owen greeted politely as he walked in. Both the doctors below were wrist deep in Tom, running his intestines and fixing perforations as they found them; it seemed to be going well. "How are you?"

"After having a small heart attack when I saw one of my surgeons kneeling on a man, almost slipping in a puddle of blood in my hallway, and then being kicked off of an elevator by said surgeon and my husband, I would be lying if I said I haven't had better days", Bailey said. She looked up to Owen then and smiled, the only indication that she was messing with him.

"It's a thing we do, overseas. Sometimes you just don't have what you need to stop the bleeding. Sometimes, the only thing you have to cover that open abdomen, or stop that sucking chest wound, or to keep some poor guy's leg attached, is yourself."

"I will never understand how you do it."

Owen looked away from the window for a second with an eyebrow raised.

"How you serve like that", Bailey elaborated. "I'm a surgeon, and I'm a good surgeon, but I can't imagine trying to operate with half the equipment, a third of the medicine, and none of the comfort of an actual hospital. You, Altman, Riggs, Kepner, now Wise…"

She shook her head, looking back down as her husband helped Dr. Wise carefully place the intestines back into their patient's body.

"She was excited that there was no sand in the ER. No sand. Who even thinks about something like that?"

Smiling, Hunt shrugged at her.

"It was all I thought about when I first got here. Teddy, too – one of the things we talked about when she first came to Seattle was how there was just no damn sand."

He looked back down to surgery going on below them – they were close to finishing up, with what appeared to be very few complications. All in all, it had been a good day in the ER, if at all a little hectic.

"It's an adjustment", he added.

Just over an hour later, Cass and Warren were scrubbing out.

"Good work today, Warren", she said to the resident as she was rinsing off her hands

Ben finished up before her and nodded, thanking the attending before excusing himself – he had a wife to get home to, after all, and his 24 hour shift was over about 20 minutes into their 4 hour surgery. He was happy for the experience though, and expressed as much before finally walking out.

With Warren gone, Cass let out a shuddering breath she was unaware she had been holding. She took a step backwards, tripping on her own feet when she did so and hitting the wall roughly with her back. Then she slid to the floor, taking in huge gulps of air as she ripped off her scrub cap and threw is under the sinks. Cass buried her fingers in shortly cropped brown curls and tightly grabbed the hair she found there; if she could just get a grip on something, on anything, then she would be able to breathe again and the panic attack would stop. Hopefully.

That was how Owen found her when he walked down to congratulate her on a successful first day and return the lab coat she had left in the ER – sitting on the floor of the scrub room with her hands in her hair, breathing erratically with her eyes fixed on the wall across from her. Hunt knew all the signs of a panic attack, of course, having had more than he could count when he himself had first gotten out of the Army.

"Cass", he said quietly, kneeling down next to her. He placed a solid hand on her shoulder and attempted to ground her. "Cass, look at me."

With another deep breath, she did – her eyes met his and, it took a moment, but she remembered where she was. Cass released the breath then, and looked around the room.

"How long have I been sitting here?", she asked him shakily, after a beat.

He shrugged, and smiled softly at his fellow trauma surgeon.

"Maybe 30 minutes. Not too long." Owen shifted then, and sat down on the floor next to Cass. "Do you want to talk about it?"

Cass wiped the tears from her cheeks; she didn't have the energy to feel embarrassed, and was honestly just glad that it was Hunt that found her and not literally any of the other doctors in the hospital. At the very least, if anyone understood it, it would be him.

"That was just intense, you know? I mean, I know I was in this clean fucking operating room with all this new equipment and with trained doctors assisting me, but…"

"But when you climbed on to that patient", Owen finished for her, "it felt like you were back."

All she could think about was her one of her last days in the field, where she had had to do something similar to one of the patients that she was treating there. The setting was different, the people were different, the patient was different, and the situation was definitively different, but she couldn't seem to keep her mind from slipping back there. Suddenly there was sand whipping by her face, and a squirming Marine with his chest squared off by her knees, where she was kneeling atop him to attempt to keep him from bleeding out from the gaping wound on his right side. She could smell the charred flesh of the man in the next bed, who was hit with a projectile and died in the explosion, she could hear the agony filling the tent, she could even feel the miserable desert heat on her cheeks.

"It didn't even hit me until it was all over. The entire procedure I felt fine, but as soon as I was alone…", Cass looked at Owen with wide eyes. "Is that crazy? Am I crazy?"

Hunt shook his head – he may not know the story behind why Cass came back to the states, and he definitely was not going to ask her about it now, but if anyone understood the complexities of PTSD, it was him. If it wasn't for Cristina, there was no telling if Hunt would even be sitting here next to Cass today – Owen had no idea if Cass had someone like that in her life, and it was a troubling thought. If she was having panic attacks, he thought, there was no telling what other symptoms she may be having.

"Not at all", he answered seriously, turning his head to catch Cass' gaze. "That's not crazy at all. And you are not crazy."

The two surgeons sat silently on the floor for another half an hour, until a surgical team came in to prep the room for another procedure. Without a parting word, Cass smiled graciously at Owen before exiting.

In the attendings' longue, Cass was going through the motions of changing out of her scrubs and back into the jeans and hoodie she wore to the hospital almost 14 hours ago. She was exhausted, her episode in the OR draining what little energy she had left; Cass was in the middle of struggling to pull her jeans on without falling over when she heard none other than Calliope Torres come in. She was talking to someone, though Cass couldn't make out what about or to whom from inside the bathroom stall. The talking stopped just a few moments later, so Cass assumed the other doctors in the longue must have left already. As she made her way out of the stall, however, she immediately brought her hands up to her eyes with a startled gasp.

"Holy fuck, I'm so sorry", Cass said as she peaked through her fingers, just in time to see Callie and the woman she had been making out with scramble away from each other.

The other woman, a little taller than Cass and slender, with her dark red hair pulled back into a ponytail, was adjusting a light blue scrub top as she blushed and continued to move further away from Torres – who was standing dumbly against the couch, stuttering apologies.

"No, no, I'm sorry", Torres said when she found her words. "I didn't know any one was in here and-"

"And I was just leaving", her friend finished for her.

The red head then made a bee line for the door. Cass actually felt guilty. Torres had her own scrubs in her hand, and if Cass was reading the situation correctly, she was just trying to get a little something in before she started what was sure to be a grueling night shift. She herself had just had one hell of a day, especially for a first day – from fighting with a fellow surgeon to making friends with said surgeon, to a couple of interesting traumas, and ending the day with a solid panic attack – and if she knew that a day like today was coming for her tomorrow, she might go out to find someone nice to make out with to take the edge off, too.

"Stop, wait", Cass called out. The other woman stopped in her tracks, her hand already on the door knob. "Listen, just… pretend I was never here, okay? I'm heading out. Let me grab my stuff out of my locker and I'll be out of your hair. This never happened."

The woman at the door smiled at her – and Callie smiled, too, the same big smile that Cass remembered from a decade ago. It made her smile back at the two of them, although with much less luster.

"It's okay, I'm going to be late for rounds anyways." She said, then looked to Callie, who still leaning on the couch. "I'll catch up with you later?"

Torres nodded at her with another small smile before turning her attention back to Cass.

"I really am sorry about that. I guess the least I could do after all of that is introduce myself", she said as she approached Cass and extended a hand. "Callie Torres, ortho."

The shorter woman shook her hand, grinning despite her exhaustion – Callie didn't recognize her, Cass realized. She didn't know whether she should be glad, or offended.

"Cass Wise. Today was my first day. We've actually met", Cass added quickly before Callie could ask her how her day had gone, as that was the customary response to finding out it was someone's first day on the job. And it wasn't like Cass was at all eager to actually talk about it. "We were residents together here, a million years ago. Before I joined the Navy."

Callie studied her seriously, an eyebrow raised as she looked over her face. She finally dropped Cass' hand with a small gasp.

"Holy crap! Cass Wise! I remember you! You were the peds chick, right? Like, what, 2 years behind me?"

"3, actually", she corrected with a smile.

"I'm so sorry I didn't recognize you sooner! You look… different. In a good way!"

And Callie meant it; the surgeon she had remembered was a small young woman – barely more than a girl, really – with unruly brown curls that stuck out in all directions and dark blue eyes that were always hidden behind the frames of thick glasses. She was pale and had freckles, spoke quietly and only when spoken to, and always insisted on wearing the most ridiculous sneakers with her scrubs. That Cassandra was the kind of girl older residents would make fun of behind her back, often placing bets when they saw her name on the surgery board. That Cassandra was nothing like the one standing in front of her today – this Cassandra was no longer scrawny and awkward, but toned and confident. This Cassandra had her brown curls neatly cropped, trimmed closely on the sides and longer on the top, and had ditched her glasses, letting her eyes pop against her skin, which was still freckled but had been obviously tanned during all the time she had spent in the desert. She spoke clearly, loudly, even appeared to cuss casually when Callie couldn't remember her so much as saying damn during their residency years together. She still wore the ridiculous sneakers, Callie noted as she spotted the bright colors sticking out from the bundle of scrubs Cass had under her arm, but at least now it seemed like she could rock them without anyone so much as thinking twice about them. Or the surgeon that was wearing them.

Cass herself laughed at that – she decided to be glad that Callie didn't recognize her earlier.

"Well thank you", she replied, still laughing. "No hard feelings, though – it's been a long time. I recognized you right away, though. You look the same. Also in a good way."

They got off track for a moment, Callie apologizing again for the situation Cass walked in on. It turned out that she had indeed called the situation correctly earlier – Penny, Callie's girlfriend, had just snuck away to the attendings' longue to see her before their long night shifts started. Cass apologized profusely, but was met with mostly laughter from Callie.

"So how was it working for Alex?", Callie asked a little later, as she was tying up her sneakers.

"Alex?"

"Karev? The peds guy."

Cass shook her head with a smirk – she probably should have cleared up her specialty when Callie called her 'the peds chick'.

"I met him earlier, but I don't work for him. I'm in trauma. They hired me as an attending here to work under Owen Hunt."

"Trauma?", the other surgeon asked, clearly a little confused. "What happened to peds? I remember how you used to almost literally fight the other residents for their rotations with Kinley."

"Well, I ended up spending most of my career in the Middle East working with the Army and Marines, and there's not a lot of need for a pediatric surgeon over there. Thank god, right? So, I trained as a trauma surgeon and ended up loving it."

As Callie finished up getting ready for her shift, Cass attempted to casually shift the conversation to the other surgeon; what Shepherd, Grey, and Pierce had told her early had been pulling at the back of her mind since she got Callie alone, and she wanted to see how much of it was true. Thankfully, she was more than happy to answer the questions Cass had, if at all a little vague. She did have a ton of pictures of her daughter, Sofia, all of which Cass was more than happy look at as the proud mother gushed about her. Callie glossed over how she met her ex, the mysterious head of both the pediatric and fetal surgery departments at Grey-Sloan that no one she had met seemed overly eager to talk about, over the terrible car crash she had been in, over the plane crash that took the life of her best friend and the father of her daughter, and over the various other serious dramas that had taken place in or adjacent to the hospital. She even talked about how she met Penny, all with a big smile on her face. When Cass ventured to ask why Callie and her ex-wife had decided to get divorced, she was met with the cliché, "it's complicated".

"Well", she said in response as Callie pulled her hair up and looked about ready to head out for her shift, "let's grab drinks some time. Penny can even join us, if I didn't traumatize her already by walking in on you guys. If I trust anyone to give me the inside scoop on this place, it's you."

With the tentative promise of a night out in the near future, Callie went off to work. Cass gathered up her belongings from her locker and finally – just after 2200 – made her way to the parking lot and used the very last vestiges of her energy to climb up into her Jeep.

Her first day back at Grey-Sloan would be one for the history books, she thought to herself as she started the car. There was no telling what day two might bring.