Here's part 3! Thanks so much for all the feedback! I should be able to finish up the piece sometime next week. Keep an eye out.
2026
One of her mothers might be one of Teddy's closest friends, but she is going to kill Sofia Torres. Absolutely murder. Stuff the body in a nice thick box and … she should really stop. Before she gets too descriptive and people got suspicious. Besides, she has her own daughter to kill right about now.
"Explain again," she says in her best patient-mentor-surgeon, best-nonjudgmental-mother voice, "Why exactly you thought this was a good idea?"
Hannah squirms under her mother's deadly gaze. "Well," she starts. "I mean, like, so many other girls in my grade got one and I asked and…"
"What happened when you asked, Hannah?"
"You said not yet," Hannah admits, defeated.
"We said notyet," Teddy repeats. "We said not until you were a freshman in college. We said eighth grade was too young."
"Right. But then I was talking to Sofia and she told me that she was friends with the guy that did hers, and that he wouldn't care that I wasn't 18 because she would say we were cousins, and he was completely safe and she didn't get an infection and that since it's December and I won't be in a swimsuit forever it would be fine and," Hannah starts bawling, tears streaming down her face, "and so she and Zola drove me and I just, I really wanted one, Mom, and everyone else has one — "
"Wait. Zola drove?" Of course Meredith Grey's daughter is somehow involved.
Hannah nods. "When she was back for fall break, since Sofia doesn't have a car, you know."
"So Zola andSofia were both in on this?"
"Mom! Come on! It's not like it's a tattoo!"
"No, it's just a pierced, infectedbelly button, that your father and I told you specifically that you couldnotget!" She throws up her arms. She might be able to repair a completely shredded aorta or build a heart out of stem cells and pig valves and glue (literally!), but she can't take tears and she can't take her teenaged daughter's faux-rebellion. She is the nervous, neurotic parent when it comes to anything, especially teenager-stuff; Henry handles situations like these. Wherethehellishe?
Max and Sam are doing their absolute best not to laugh at their sister, and failing miserably, which only makes Hannah cry more. Teddy sighs. "Boys, go play the Wii," she lifts a hand and gestured anywherebuthere.
"But we're not done with our homework! We can't play the Wii until we're done with our homework!" Max tries. His face is almost earnest, but she could have seen through his protestations anyways
She sighs. "Yeah, suddenly, the night that your sister gets groundeduntilhersixteenthbirthday is the night you suddenly care about your homework. Go."
Thankfully, the boys flutter out to the living room, leaving her with Hannah. "Sixteenth birthday?" Hannah whines. "Mom, come on, I'm sorry…"
Henry walks in just then. "Hey babe," he smiles at her, before getting a better look at the situation. "Uh, whoa. Hey, Banana. Did you have a good day today? Cause I'm gonna guess not really."
"There is a God," Teddy mutters, eyes skyward, before turning to her daughter. "Hannah, do you want to explain to your father what I discovered today when I was picking you up from basketball?"
That of course only sets her off more, and she starts whimpering, "I know — Sofia said — she promised it wouldn't — I'm sorry, Daddy, I know you're mad."
"What happened, Hannah?"
Teddy cocks her head to say ohyouareforsuretheoneexplainingthis. Hannah shakes her head vehemently. Teddy stares her down. Hannah finally relents. " …"
"Banana. Slow down. We'll work whatever this is out, but you need to start explaining it to me in a calm voice." Teddy takes a good look at Henry, and realized how tired he looks, then remembers (duh, of course, it's been on the calendar for six month) that his big fundraiser next week, so he had probably stayed late to wrangle donors and work on speeches and seating arrangements, and now she just feels like hell for losing her cool and not being able to outwit an almost-14-year-old.
Hannah nods and takes a deep breath. "So I know you and Mom said not until I was 18 and in college, but, like, allthe girls on the basketball team have their bellybuttons pierced, and Sofia does, and she's not 18, and so she told me that she could talk to the guy that did hers and he'd do mine too, and I said OK, so when Zola was in town we all went over and I got my bellybutton pierced, and I was taking really good care of it, but it got infected and I didn't want to tell you and Mom and so …" Instead of finishing her story (and Teddy knew, at least, that her daughter must be pretty damn remorseful, because she didn't babble like that) Hannah lifts her shirt, revealing a swollen, yellow-green bruise ringing her belly button, with a dense cluster of clots directly over the actual piercing.
"Oh, Hannah," Henry says, then asks, "When did this start? Does it hurt?"
"The Doctor already asked the questions, Daddy," Hannah replies, clearly relieved not to be getting a second ass-kicking. Teddy rolls her eyes at the derisive nickname, which her kids had given her after one too many overprotective spells. "She figured it out when I wiped the sweat off my face with my shirt."
"She needs to go in," Teddy interjects. She doesn't really, of course, Teddy can very well ask just about anyone to write her the scrip for a strong antibiotic, but she's just so irritated with Hannah right now. She said no, and Hannah did it anyways.
"Alright," Henry says, "Ted, why don't you call Arizona and Callie to let them know that their daughter's aiding and abetting in delinquency, and I'll talk to Hannah about how she's probably not leaving the house until she's 16 years old, and then we'll take her to the hospital?"
Hannah slumps, pouty again, and asks, "How do you do that?"
"Do what?" Henry quizzes.
"Mom said I was grounded till I was 16 too," she mutters.
They looked at each other and shrugged. "Parent thing," Henry says, before kissing Teddy's forehead, muttering "It'll be fine," and leading Hannah out of the kitchen.
Sitting down for a second, she lets herself zone out to the sound of the boys on the Wii before picking up her cell phone and haphazardly dialing the Robbins-Torres home. Topher answers before she realizes she does not know how she will phrase this, and Arizona is on the line within seconds.
"Hey, Arizona, how are you? How was that surgery?" Small talk. Yes. Good.
"It went pretty well. The kid was doing great in post-op, then we hit up Topher's school play. You'd be surprised at how well sixth-graders can pull off Rent. Anyways. What's up? You sound tense."
"Yeah, I guess … Hannah did something idiotic, and she got Sofia to help her out in her idiocy, and so I wanted to tell you, and let you know that while I kind of am ticked at Sofia because she's older and she could probably convince Hannah to try and bicycle to the moon, I'm totally pissed at Hannah and she's being grounded by Henry right now until she's, like sixteen, so I am absolutely not passing off any …"
"Teddy. Sofia's been smoking in locker rooms at school lately. We get it; she's not a saint. We're working on it. What'd she get Hannah to do?"
"Hannah wanted her bellybutton pierced, and we talked and said no, and so she went to Sofia, who has this friend, and Sofia helped her get one done. And apparently Zola drove, because of course this couldn't just involve one kid, you know? And so of course the damn thing got infected, but she didn't want to tell us because we'd get mad, so now my 13-year-old daughter's stomach is swollen and covered in bruises, because she's a teenager so she's going to do stupid stuff."
"Whoa. Back up. Our kid took your kid to some shady undergrad bellybutton-piercer and convinced him that it was totally OK to give an eighth-grader a bellybutton ring without her parents' consent? Did you get an address out of Hannah? Because I can totally get an address out of Sofia. We can go there. I have a baseball bat."
She laughs, relieved. "I think we're fine dealing with this in-house. Believe me, disappointing Henry will be punishment enough for this one. Well, that, and grounding her until the thing has healed over."
"Teddy, I am so, so sorry. We'll talk to her. And take away lots of cool stuff. And you should probably call Derek too. He'll probably have a conniption when he hears that Zola drove them."
She sighs, because Arizona is right, and hangs up. Before she has a chance to dial Shepherd, though, Henry and Hannah come back in, and Hannah, now no longer crying, says, "Mom, I know what I did was wrong and that you said no and I totally didn't listen. This is like karmic retribution. So I'm really sorry, I should have listened to you."
"Hannah — thank you, first off, that's very mature of you — but the piercing wasn't why I was so mad. Hannah, you got an infection. This could have ended really, really badly. Please don't — I know I kind of … yell … sometimes, that I'm like the annoying mom, but if there's a possibility you might be hurt, or sick … Please, for my sake, please don't ever hide it from me again. I need … I need to know when you're not feeling well, so that we can make decisions. All of us, together."
A type of realization crosses Hannah's face. "Oh. Right. Of course. Again, Mom, I'm really sorry."
"Thank you, baby," Teddy said, crossing her arms tightly around her daughter's shoulders and holding her tight. "Now, let's call Mark and get a scrip for that infection. I'm really not feeling a four-hour wait in Seattle Grace's ED right now."
She smiles at Henry and he smiles back, and she feels triumphant: Team-parenting at its finest. They're good at this — parenting, family, kids. Together he's their rock-solid foundation, the calm, the quiet voice of reason who really runs everything, and she's the organized go-go-go one who remembers permission slips and signs everyone up for soccer and keeps their daily momentum going. It works. They work.
Later — after they've filled the scrip at CVS and taken Hannah's laptop out of her room and checked over the boys' homework and talked to Derek and made a few phone calls for work (that was Henry. And they accused her of being the workaholic parent) and they're in bed and she's reading a journal and he's still reviewing stuff for the fundraiser — he says, "Babe," in a questioning voice, but not looking at her.
"Mmmm?" she replies, because she is really interested in the article.
"Hannah's infection … there's no way that's genetic, right?" Henry does that, worried sometimes that whatever the kids got might be somehow related to his VHL, no matter how many times she assured him that it wasn't and he admitted it was irrational. He was especially prone to it with Hannah, their tempting-fate baby. The boys had been planned and genes screened appropriately; Hannah had been a "yes-let's-do-it-and-have-a-family" whim and thus her genes hadn't received the same careful scrutiny pre-pregnancy.
So she knows by now that the best response is to put the journal aside and slide down sideways to look at his profile. "No. She just has sensitive skin. Remember how many rashes she got when she was in diapers? And we always buy her hypoallergenic earrings; she just didn't know to tell the guy to give her a hypoallergenic ring. And then she was scared to tell us so it got worse."
"Yeah, she does have a pretty scary mom," he says noncommittally, and she can tell it's kind of bugging him still.
"Henry," she says, pulling herself close to him and running her fingers down his arm. "Come on. You know it's irrational. She has sensitive skin. How exactly is this related to your chronic tumor condition, even a little?" She strokes his cheek before resting her own on his shoulder. "It's not. If anything I should have picked up on it quicker. And if I can't blame myself any time one of them gets sick for not preventing it, and you can't blame yourself for causing it. Deal?"
He finally relents, putting his work aside and turning so that their bodies are aligned, his head propped up on his shoulder and their noses inches apart. He is strong and (relatively) healthy for 58: He's going gray, of course, and his scarred body is getting a little lax, but the VHL has been under control for years, more or less, regulated with regular checkups and an imposingly high pile of pills he takes daily that suppresses tumor growth and keeps his body from rejecting his donated organs and prevents him from becoming a diabetic.
She is a vigilant wife: She finds new procedures and keeps in contact with basically any and every genetics researcher and makes him go to checkups more frequently than his doctors recommend to stay abreast of the Whack-a-Tumor game fate seems to be playing with his body. Every eight or ten months something inevitably crops up that low-dose radiation can't take care of and he has to go into surgery, and she usually schedules a longer, more complicated procedure concurrent to it so she can keep the freak-outs at bay, because the five times she has not she has burst into the OR, every time, "just to see how it's going." The kids are fine with it; they don't see the disease as menacing. It is a fact of life, just like the fact that Henry will always be their soccer coach is a fact. Henry is typically as accepting as the kids are; she's the only one whose mind always hums whatifwhatifwhatif.
"Deal," he finally says, inhaling deeply.
"Arizona offered me the use of her baseball bat, you know," she says, resting her head on the pillow and laughing lightly. "So that we can go after the guy. And I'm pretty sure Derek booked a plane ticket down to San Francisco to yell at Zola."
He laughs. "Glad that we aren't the only ones still trying to get the hang of this parenting thing."
"I don't know we'll ever have it 100% down," she says, laughing and rolling ont her back. "But god, Henry … we are doing well. We really, really are."
"Minus the delinquent belly-button-piercing 13-year-old," Henry replies, smirking.
She starts laughing heartily then. It's been a long day, and she suspects there are many more to come as Hannah becomes a full-blown teenager, followed way too closely by the boys. But they're here, together, 16 years later, and it's enough. There are the daily struggles, like Hannah today, and there's the long-term ones, like the hours she works and his VHL.
"Minus the delinquent belly-button-piercing 13-year-old," she agrees. "You know what they call the belly-button-piercing? The gateway piercing." It was true. Lexie Sloan had told her. How the hell Lexie Sloan knew, she didn't know, but it was apparently common knowledge.
"God. How many years ago was it that she was playing with American Girl dolls? Oh, wait, that was last month," he says, his tone light but biting. "Thank God she has the pain tolerance of a baby seal. Otherwise the next thing would be one of those ear things." He pantomimes a gauged-out ear.
She laughs too, because it's true. Although her father has more scars than a surgical student's cross-stitch pillow and her mother is the one constantly doing the stitching, Hannah barely survived getting three stitches above her eye from Mark last year when she got a basketball to the face. Mark had come to their house so she wouldn't even have to go in, but she'd still spent at least 45 minutes crying before Mark had even put the needle within an inch of her face. "Yeah, I bet you've never been more grateful she got my high-maintenance personality."
"I'm actually pretty happy most days with how much of you she got," he confesses.
She kisses him, lightly, without tongue. It's not passionless, but it's certainly not an opening act to something more tonight. It's affectionate. They're old, and kind of tired, and mostly just happy to have each other and their kids, and it's exactly that type of kiss: Enough.
"Good night," she says, rolling over onto her stomach. He wraps an arm around her waist, kisses her hair, mutters good night. Within minutes, they're both dreamlessly asleep.
