Summary: Mari, Meredith's sister, convinces Meredith to stay at the intern mixer, and plops down on a barstool at Jo's to see if she'll run out. Mari meets Derek.
Another Ellis Grey baby. No Webber/Grey baby. No Merder. Early Seasons fun. The MAGIC interns.
Mari with an 'i' instead of a 'y' is the Welsh spelling. Because Ellis and Meredith are Welsh names.
This is mostly connected interludes.
House crossover. Another doctor show favorite of mine also referenced as the baby daddy.
Ellis Grey
Ellis knows the statistics; what's more, she knows that Richard knows them.
Men have more deaths, but women have more attempts. With men it's rope and firearms; with women it's pills and razorblades.
But she's a surgeon, not a housewife - and surgeons use scalpels.
She's too intoxicated to realize, the whole point of a non-serious attempt, is having someone get to you in time. She calls out to Richard, as if he's not out of reach, in a different house, with a different woman.
Only Meredith hears her.
Meredith placing washrags around her wrists, using the phone to call 911.
Meredith who's five. Meredith who Thatcher drags to the hospital, oblivious to what it does to her standing, needling her to work less when she has to work more. He doesn't understand mommies that stay home never get to the top, have the gates close on them if they retreat. She can't kiss make believe injuries when she has real injuries, real surgeries, real problems with real solutions, to deal with. Can't he do that? Isn't that what they agreed? Doesn't he realize what she's up against?
A father and son were in a car accident where the father was killed. The ambulance brought the son to the hospital. He needed immediate surgery. In the operating room, a doctor came in and looked at the little boy and said I can't operate on him he is my son.
Who is the doctor?
She wants Meredith to be proud, to say I'm Ellis Grey's daughter the way people rarely mention, rarely consider, their mothers. In a way no one will ever speak of Adele Webber.
She gets her Harper Avery.
Thatch leaves.
Richard is gone.
And Meredith is left to remember her like this.
The U.N. is better work than Seattle Grace can ever hope to be.
Half the doctors are bleeding hearts, of course. All at the front, wading into humanitarian disaster, have a savior complex. It's with the war-weary that she finds her like, the ones who compartmentalize, the ones who stay in the game, instead of accepting something less back home, or succumbing when they let themselves be used up, when the wars are through with them. Reduced to handing out suckers to mundane people with mundane problems.
She learns techniques city hospitals haven't seen yet, without a damn to who thought of it first, just who can utilize it better. It's about survival. It's always been about survival.
No one brings Meredith to come see her at every inconvenient moment. No one sits up, waiting to lecture her for the long hours, the promises she couldn't keep.
She gets to come home, to sleep, to drink, in silence. Even Meredith's disappointments, are silent.
He's tall, older, steely eyed. A trauma surgeon who can't let go of the tiger's tail after conscription. She doesn't ask which war. Doesn't care. He gripes about meatball surgery but patented more than a few instruments and techniques that let's boys keep their limbs a little longer, que back to the front of the assembly line of war.
He's old fashioned, and not in a gentlemanly way, the kind who patted a nurse's ass, and covered callous, libertine ways with a charming grin. The kind of a man who broke every promise he made to a woman.
He's canny enough to know she enjoys the flirtation, takes her caustic remarks as banter. Under the ice, she enjoys being pursued, being reminded that she's still flesh and blood, that it's not a bad thing, being a woman. Not always an obstacle to overcome.
She watches the equipment lose power, watches him never skip a step, perform an arterial transplant without pledgets, under the flicker of a flashlight.
She doesn't swoon. But -
He's devastatingly competent, with genius behind those blue eyes, in the strength of his hands.
In this moment she believes he can have anything. And so, just for a moment, she has him.
She had sabotaged her birth control, with Richard. Had her IUD removed, kept Thatcher away. For nothing, in the end. She didn't get pregnant, with Richard.
At first, she has no intention in going through with it. Who could, who would, expect her to?
What name could she give this tiny little thing?
It might have been Thatcher's name, but Grey was her own, she made it her own, made her career with it, made more of it.
The divorce isn't even finalized. It could look like Thatcher's, like an attempt at reconciliation. She doesn't care what it would look like to Thatcher.
It wouldn't be Thatcher's, wouldn't be Richard's.
But Grey isn't enough. Adams-Oliver. Addison. Anders. She makes her way through genetic and infectious eponymous diseases the way she used to study for her boards. What's the most hideous disease she can think of, that no child would want, as no child would want her.
And then she performs her own ultrasound, in a quiet, locked room, hears the baby's heartbeat. 156 BPM. No more reliable than a pin on a string, or where the pregnant woman holds the weight, but –
Some would say, it's a girl.
A girl who hasn't seen her at her worse, hasn't yet learned the limits of love.
A girl that was just hers.
Mari Grey
The closest her mother gets to attending her recitals is when she spreads her paperwork on the dining room table next to the living room, where Mari sits at the piano.
It's such an anomaly, that first time, that Mari halts her practice, instinctively seizes the chance to show what she can do with the music her mother weaned her on from the cradle – Wagner, and Beethoven, and Bizet, the romantic greats.
Her name had almost been Isolde. The tale of the adulterous, doomed love. Instead, her mom chose Mari, common Mari, just not in spelling. A name that means drop in the sea. Bitter and beloved.
Ellis Grey keeps translating her shorthand into in-depth surgical notes, writes her ideas into her daily, wine-stained journal. She responds more to her younger child's expectation than any engagement in the music. "Is there a point in paying for piano lessons if you haven't advanced past simple pieces by now?"
Mari's grips the piano bench, looks down at the tips of her toes skating the floor.
She's watched Ellis berate or ignore Meredith. Seen how Meredith huddles, gets quieter, says no mom, and yes mom, and sinks into the hurt.
If Meredith were here, she would take a seat next to her, would lean their shoulders against each other, and wouldn't say a word.
But Meredith is fifteen, hair newly pink, and she's always somewhere else, even when she's home. She listens to lyrics that batter company away, pounding through a locked door.
She doesn't smile anymore when Mari plays showtunes, or Charlie Brown, or bangs on the piano like a herd of elephants when Meredith runs down the stairs.
Mari thinks about having her piano lessons taken away, having Mr. Weisman who compliments her in Russian, and German, and Italian, so she'll know all the best words when her mother is called somewhere else with the U.N., and corrects her in the same languages so she'll know the bad words too. She rather her mother never come out of her office at all, than lose this.
She pulls out all of her recitals sheet music from the past year, and plays them, starting with those simple tunes. She's never tried practicing the pieces she hasn't mastered when her mother is home and doesn't yet know why.
Mr. Weisman says she has a habit of cringing when she makes a mistake, of losing her posture, of waiting for the headsman's axe.
But it doesn't matter, she realizes. It isn't medicine. Her mother won't know the difference.
It's disjointed, fast and slow, somber, and upbeat. She turns her own pages, develops her own rhythm, plays past raw, aching, cramping, flicks white pages to float to the floor.
She doesn't have the energy for pithy anger, for slamming the cover closed when she isn't even sure her mother is still there, if she even understands.
Her finger trembles, holding the final note into silence.
Ellis Grey, perhaps for the first time, listens. She doesn't leave, when she always leaves, doesn't ignore when she always ignores.
Instead, she leaves the medicine, and she moves towards her youngest daughter.
She gently take her wrists, right above her swollen hands, and leads her to the kitchen table, sits her down, and starts to bandage her hands. It's the first hurt in a long while that she's ever used her healing hands to sooth.
Mari's eyes are hot.
"I wouldn't take this away from you," her mother says, firm like with everything else, the self-inflected wounds between them.
She smoothes the bandage, makes it perfect, turns over her own strong, plain hands to share her own stories of past blisters, past cramps. She makes medicine sound painful, and real, and human.
She makes it sound like music.
A teacher tells her she needs to pick an instrument. One thing to master, to devote hours a day to, if she wants Julliard or Berklee or symphonies in her future. Someone she knows, at 11, is composing pieces that could draw tears from stone.
Mari can't compose anything on that level. She's not good enough, for just one thing.
Music becomes, muted in her.
She throws her full focus into trying to learn a knuckleball instead.
Baseball is a thing, with the American expatriate kids, a patriotic stand against the universal soccer. Their coach has them test reflexes and do eye exams. The best hitters (and the best surgeons) have great vision, The kid, Ted Williams, had 20/10 at his enlistment.
Her vision is 20/30. Not the eyes of one of the greats.
Coach Rogers tells her it's nothing to be devastated about, life is more than innate ability.
Tells her it's not about keeping your eye on the ball. Watch that and you're swinging at air. Connection is reacting to the pitcher. A schema masquerading as instinct. She sees it in action, in her mother's continuous study, the brute force she wields to master it all behind closed doors, so she can be poised and untouchable under the lights.
Maybe it's performance anxiety. About messing up a chord and losing the ability to get it right. About dropping the ball. About how one of the doctors she likes had to retire because the arthritis got bad. How he raged that he deserved more respect and her mom said, 'what did he expect?' as if he's no good now, used up his usefulness. The hunter being sent out on the ice.
Maybe it's about how her mom's hands shake sometimes before she has that first drink when she gets home, how she puts a shot, more than a shot, of vodka in her water bottles before she leaves.
Maybe it's how she learned to be rough, too rough, with her clothes, so that seams and fabric would tear, so she had a reason to ask 'hey Mom, what stitch should I use? What's a new one I could learn?'
She dreams, nightmares throughout her childhood, that she's one of those creepy, homunculus creatures, with it's too big, too sensitive, too exposed hands.
The idea of being a surgeon, and being a lackluster one, or an amazing one who suddenly suffers an injury that rips it away, is enough to wake her with cold sweat.
To Ellis Grey, there's no business-like show business. And show business is surgery. Doctors who aren't surgeons are like extras, close to magic but not able to cut it. They're background. Unmemorable. As Robert Mitchem said, you either have it or you don't, and if you don't have it, you can't learn it.
When Meredith took a gap year that turned into two, Ellis wrote Meredith off as one of the extras. The real actors are the ones who want it, who are passionate about this and only this, who cut their teeth, and bleed, and shred their skin for it.
When Meredith visits and talks about med school Ellis dismisses it as a flight of fancy, or worse, a quest for approval, of doing what she thinks Ellis wants her to do.
And Meredith fumbles her defense, doesn't advocate for why she wants it, but hurt that Ellis doesn't want it for her.
Don't you want to share this with me? Can't you be happy that we'll finally have something in common?
Happy? Ellis parrots, mocking amusement fitting the lines of her face. In her mouth, happy sounds like an insult.
Mari sits silently, a long-failed mediator, an unwanted interpreter for the both of them. Her presents are unopened on the table.
Ellis scoffs. Is that what you think, that I'm keeping it from you? That I could stop you if you had what it takes? Grow up Meredith, I can't give you the respect of your peers, of my peers, anymore than I can hand you talent.
Meredith deflates. Mari looks out the window, over the faces of the spying patrons. She digs her nails into her palms.
And you think, what, I'll tarnish your legacy?
Ellis scoffs, dismissing it all.
You won't make it that far.
A young, blonde, candy striper follows a group of interns into the blood labs.
Someone asks if that's allowed, another corrects that it definitely isn't, and the candy striper diverts them by leaning over one of their shoulders and correcting the intern's lab with an imitated buzzing sound from Operation.
The grackles turn to make fun of their own. In under a minute, without even trying to blend in, they forget to shoo her out.
House watches her quick eyes dancing over the lab before they land on him, performing his own experiment, in a blue, wrinkled shirt with a Rolling Stones tee underneath, and his lab coat left behind in med school. She's intrigued, but she stops herself from moving closer, her daring just short from pursuing the other anomaly in the lab.
She gets a note, asking her to bring a pile of candy from her cart to an office on the fourth floor.
It's tied around the neck of one of the teddy-bears, and the 'Or Else' is made of mismatched letters cut from a glossy magazine.
It's funny. Ridiculous. And ridiculous in a hospital, where too many take themselves too seriously, has an enticing charm.
If they could leave this note, they could have pilfered the supply themselves. So it's an instruction solely for her. And the only reason to single her out is because they caught her doing something she shouldn't. Which means it could be any number of things.
It shouldn't matter anyway, if she loses this spot.
Her mother calls these places St. Elsewheres. They survive off grant money. The equipment is rarely new. They always stay shy of understaffed. The dean is too young for her position. Her mother would scoff that it's 'an obvious ploy to entice investors'. The youth, the attractiveness, the attitude, the way she dresses. They're skating somewhere in the top 20 teaching hospitals – which does the work for drawing talent that would otherwise go somewhere else. You'll be paid less, but if you're quick, you jump straight into the deep end. Go-getters like the deep end.
Not that she'd know, really, doing this.
Having someone threaten to turn her in for being in unauthorized areas with a kidnapper note and a demand for candy is the most interesting thing to happen to her, here.
Said kidnapper is the guy from the lab. Long face, intelligent blue eyes, irreverent demeanor. 'Gregory House, M.D. Infectious Diseases' is stenciled on the door.
His legs are stretched out over his desk, one of the teddy-bears from her cart resting against his chest as he lifts his head and turns the teddy to face her at the same time, like they're both watching her entrance. The affected air tells her he likes the performance. How quickly she jumped to respond likely tells him just as much about her.
She makes her steps slower, lazier, as she glances around his office.
His records outnumber the books. Medical indexes at that, like a writer surrounded by dictionaries. Some of the titles are Latin and Greek. The pile of articles in his inbox are in a variety of fonts, colors, and type that are obviously non-English. None are fanned out, like a catalogue to impress, more lazily looked through, perhaps as easily discarded as a tabloid. Mandarin. Hindi. Greek. Spanish. The more recent, with a pair of reading glasses on top, is in Italian.
There's a burst on nostalgia, just seeing the titles, trying to improve her foreign languages with the articles her mother took home.
He shifts the teddy to sit up on his desk, turned to face her.
"The Grey Method," he ponders aloud, easily rattling off the laparoscopic technique like he's reading it aloud.
She shifts back, something deflating in her, and trying not to show it.
"I've heard of it."
"Was that a secret?" He rocks back in his chair. "Because it's interesting that the daughter of a famous doctor would choose the only Ivy league without a medical school. And yet, contrary to a music major she's then taking bio, biochemistry, organic chem... classes that sound like pre-med."
She fakes thoughtfulness as she scrunches her brow. "I don't remember filling out that much paperwork for the volunteer form."
He answers quickly. "Unvoluntary volunteering. Otherwise known as academic probation. For sending a student to the morgue."
"To sleep off a drunken stupor."
"In a body bag."
"It wasn't zipped up all the way."
"Four students in the pathology class dropped out."
"Dropped out of the program, not the school," she defends quickly, and then immediately regrets it as it breaks the affected aloofness.
He turns the bear towards him, shakes his head meaningfully, like can you believe her?
She returns the look, to him, not the bear.
He drops his legs from the desk and shuffles to lean forward. "Yet you choose to take your volunteering at a hospital. You got in trouble for sneaking into the med school on another campus. There seems to be a pattern here," he mock-muses.
She bites the inside of her cheek.
"Twice is only a coincidence," she murmurs.
"Nope," he pops the 'p'. "Dr. Mommy makes it three. That's enemy action, Mr. Bond," he finishes with an upper-crust British accent.
Dr. Mommy. She dares him to say that to Ellis Grey's face.
"You want to do something more useful than handling out teddy bears to babies and lollipops to the cancer kids?"
She stares down at the glassy eyes of the blue teddy bear, away from his very direct, challenging stare. A part of her can't believe the way he says cancer kids with disregard. "Like?"
He waves his hand. "Make coffee, filter emails, filter calls. Be my barely-legal Moneypenny."
She raises her brows, waiting for the enticing part.
"Also..." he grumbles, like it's grudging "you could figure out if you're going to stop flirting and commit to the dirty mistress you call medicine."
She blinks.
It should be serious; isn't it supposed to be serious? Taking the Hippocratic Oath. Joining the higher calling – sacrificing all else. Do no harm.
Instead, she mouths dirty mistress, and laughs.
Mari tells her family she's going into medicine by sending two postcards from the school gift shop, a month after she's already in. She hasn't a clue where her mother, or sister, think she is.
Surprise!
Love,
Mari.
Two years later, Meredith sends her own postcard from the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth.
You're not really surprised.
Love,
Meredith
Her mother forgets her graduation.
"Don't be silly," she dismisses, while Mari stands at the phonebooth, watching other families smile and hug and take pictures while Meredith watches her through the glass, with commiserating eyes and bitten lip. "Your graduation is weeks away."
She grows frustrated when Mari tells her, no, actually, it's happening right now.
She's used to her mother breaking promises, making things sound unworthy of her time, but to not be here? It isn't one of her concerts, or games, or triathlons, all those other things that never seemed important. This is graduating from medical school.
People are loud and cheering around her. She has to plug her ear, huddle closer to the phone as her mother long-sufferingly and impatiently goes to her desk to find the calendar. She almost misses, may even have imagined the hitch in breath. Her mother's voice is very far away as she says, "It seems I was..."
Mari tries to listen, as the feeling of something being very wrong, grows. Graduates passing by, future doctors, bang on the glass, hooting and hollering. Whatever else her mother says, if she says anything at all, is lost in noise, lost in silence.
It takes two years before she has enough to write symptoms on a white board.
It isn't a definitive diagnosis. There's no way to get a definitive diagnosis. That, they save for autopsy.
House nudges her dropped luggage out of the doorway, limps into the dark, quiet room, where she's sitting in front of the white board, a day before she was meant to return, hours after the rest of the floor have gone home.
"You're looking for an alternative diagnosis," he intuits, after a long moment.
She doesn't turn to face him. Her eyes are red and scratchy from not blinking, and if she turns her head even slightly, she's afraid of the torrent to start spilling over.
"Your mother," he guesses.
She closes her eyes.
Don't say this is pointless, that the answer is obvious, that it's done. Accept, move on, next case. Don't...
"You never want it to be auto-immune," she murmurs quietly. "Because then there's nothing you can do. Not everything has a cure, but you always want something that at least has a treatment."
You do it too, she's trying to say, so let me.
"There are...trials..." he shifts, like his leg is bothering him. It's more a question to what the intended course is, instead of there being a great Hail-Mary treatment to consider.
"No." She doubts there's a trial for this happening that Ellis Grey hasn't looked into and thus rejected. Her mother had kept the show going, while she could keep the mistakes out of the OR. And then she couldn't. And then the plan changed. She pulls her legs in, rests her chin against her knee, and wraps her arms around herself. Everything is catching up to her. She realizes she doesn't even remember the flight, the cab from the airport to House's office. "She had me sign an NDA."
And isn't that just...defining. A label on their relationship that makes everything hollower.
"She wants to put herself in a nursing home in Seattle. At 'home'," Her brows furrow, as she mimics her mother's voice, but with her own confusion. "What home? The one they lived in before I was born? The place that's been rented out longer than she ever lived there? She actually said, don't be obtuse, like I should know what the hell home means. Then it's 'let's move on'. This is the care facility I've chosen, and the rules for when you visit, and what to say when people start asking questions."
Like it was a business transaction. And usually, she can tell when her mother is pushing logic over emotion, but this time? She couldn't tell if there was anything below the surface. If her mother really is that cold.
House says, "You have a sister."
Maybe she's too sensitive, too reactive from realizing she's spent her life interpreting her mother as more human and attached than she should, and that she should take people, relationships at face value. She hears the uncomfortableness in House's voice, and she hears you have a sister, when he knows she hardly talks to Meredith, and she hears I'm not the person you should come to. There's no comfort here, on offer. The man she looked up to like – well, it doesn't matter how she did, it's not like she has much to compare it to.
She hugs herself tighter, eyes tightly shut before she breathes.
"Right," she answers, lifting her chin. "I have a sister."
But it feels like she has nothing at all.
She wasn't here when it happened. Hadn't seen the immediate aftermath, the violation of it, the rejected physical therapy, of Stacy leaving him.
What she did see, was him unbridling on another doctor who unprompted, unwanted, advised he was using his cane wrong. The rule, for most people, is it's supposed to be on the opposite side of the injury. Only, not when you suffer a vascular infarction to the quadricep muscle. House isn't using his cane as an aid; he's using it to lessen the weight he has to bear on his limb. Every step, every contraction of the muscle, is pain. The cane is, essentially, his leg.
She met a new House. One who was so much more reclusive. Sharper in his sarcasm. Diagnostician at the head of his title instead of the back. An understanding of nephrology that's now unparalleled. (It was the kidneys that pointed to muscle death. The kidneys that proved the pain wasn't imagined.)
She doesn't regret coming back for her internship, but –
She wonders. If she met this version of House, would he have offered her the same opportunity, or would he have figured out why the candy striper was loitering in the labs, and said something cutting, in passing, just because he was bored in-between cases.
What's her mother to become, with a disease that strips, and takes, and erodes.
And is there even foundation there, to break?
House starts screening applicates for fellowships, and Wilson takes her to lunch.
What specialties is she interested in?
She feels that creeping awkwardness that ensures when someone asks you what direction you're going in, and you have no idea. She names a few, the way you tell a career counselor that maybe you'll be fighter pilot, or an actress, or an astronaut – just drawing things out of a hat that sound good. She loves pathology, but who knows. Maybe she'll focus in on infectious diseases, or nephrology, or internal medicine.
She doesn't realize it – it's so automatic – that she's only naming House's specialties. Wilson sucks the air between his teeth.
"You know...assuming patients are all...liars or idiots...that's not how doctors usually go about things..." he hesitates, and she wonders if he's conflicted on what he's going to say, or how he's going to say it. He sighs. "You're about to stop being an intern and there are great programs out there. I know House has a way of making the rules seem irrelevant, but they aren't. Not all of them anyway. And if you keep spending your career with House, I'm worried you're not going to be able to work anywhere else."
It's not like she hasn't heard versions of this.
By be able he could mean House will make her un-hirable. That any other hospital, and their in-house counsel, would consider her a rogue agent. A liability. House's brilliance lets him be the anomaly. Let's him bend when he wants and refuse when he doesn't.
She used to bristle, when other doctors told her House would supplement his own morals onto her, as if prophesizing her ruin. But through experience, she's learned how hard it is to not say yes when someone charismatic, someone you admire, wants you to. And then, to not say no to counteract it, like there's a scorecard where you're either the winner or the loser. Especially when the other person is keeping a scorecard, is constantly testing what they can get away with.
House has never been easy. He's thrown her into moral quandaries with uneasy answers, with half-answers, with no answers. He's taught her the value in knowing right, in trying to fight for right when others settle for wrong. Won't be able to work anywhere else, could, at the heart of it, mean she won't want to work anywhere else.
She touches the condensation on her water glass, as it sweats in a beam of sunlight.
"You're not angry," he observes, trying to read her, guilty for having to say it at all. "You're...pensive?"
She rubs the beads of water on the tips of her fingers, and wonders what House has said, for Wilson to get this all wrong.
"You know I've looked at the applications for House's fellowship, right? Even if I had put mine in...these people are...published, top of their class, went to the best med schools, have multiple specialties..."
"That's not –" the matter-of-fact tone, the weak smile, punches him in the gut.
"If he wanted me, he'd be needling me right now. The way he did when I was on other attendings rotations. He'd disparage other hospitals programs. Tell me other specialties are lame." Like he did when she was considering medical schools other than his original alma mater.
"Sometimes House sabotages what he wants," Wilson offers quietly.
She shrugs. "He hasn't interrupted, Wilson." When has House not interrupted their lunch? "And he knows I already accepted a residency at Seattle Grace."
Wilson looks gob smacked. He might have attempted to offer genuinely meant advice, and recommendations, and a cushion to what he thought was an upcoming blow in House's rejection, but he didn't consider that she was already leaving.
And he thinks: House saw this coming. And he wonders at the timing, for House to start a fellowship.
"And we both know he hired the first fellow today. The kid of some successful, international, surgeon."
Hence, Wilson taking her to lunch. Hence, her agreement to put off talking to House. Because House is going to draw the comparison. Maybe he'll try to get her to make the comparison first and say, don't you think that's a little egotistical?
Maybe he'll needle her, talk about the guy's credentials, say he's upgrading. Say I need a blond around the office and ask people to vote on who's the better eye candy.
"I suppose that's...flattering, in a way," Wilson struggles with, always trying to interpret House for others in the most human light.
"In a way," she agrees.
"You look contemplative," says the bartender as he slides over a ceramic with extra cherries.
"I guess you don't get too many people contemplating a Shirley temple?"
"Eh," he shrugs.
Right. He probably does see people contemplating ginger ale and club soda and sparkling water and a drink kids get excited about. People who settle into a barstool to hold their hands close to the flame they know they shouldn't touch.
Sitting at the bar, alone, is as boring as suntanning. Nothing to see, with her back to the room, no time for deep thoughts with a forgettable pop song in her ears. She could take a seat at the window, but all she'd see is the lights from the hospital across the street. She tries not to look in that direction at all.
"I dropped my sister off at this orientation mixer," she confesses. "Now I'm...here."
He hums without sound. "And you're waiting until it's time to pick her up?"
She tries to make her words seem less than what they are. "Waiting to see whether or not I need to tell the nice bartender my name and number so he knows who to call when a dirty blonde shows up asking for a dozen shots of tequila."
"Ah."
It feels like she's testing Meredith unfairly. It was in the way she said, 'so you'll be my designated driver?' when Mari offered to drop her off. It was probably harmless, but it gave her the wrong thing to think about.
Vodka was Mom's – you could never smell it on her breath, or when it sweated through her pores. Meredith likes tequila. How well did she like tequila, and how did tequila like her?
She is testing her sister, and it's an unfair metric. So, what if Meredith shows up? Does that mean anything? What is she measuring here, how quickly, as if that will correlate to a level of dependence? How avoidant is she, after being forced to be social? How self-destructive if she gets drunk the night before her internship?
Hence: the Shirley Temple. She's offering it to the universe, to please don't let Meredith, don't let either of them, inherit the disease(s) of their mother.
"I feel kind of like the parent waiting up in the dark. Waiting to see if the teenager is going to tiptoe in, and just when they think they got away with it, click, the lamp comes on." She tells him, plucking a cherry to drop in her glass. "I don't want to be that person. That person wears a ratty house robe and gets a groove in their forehead from frowning too much. They spend their life always worrying if the people around them are having too much fun."
The bartender wipes his hand on a rag, brow furrowed. "Your sister is old enough to drink right?"
"Older sister," she answers promptly, dunking the rest of the cherries into her glass one at a time.
He nods, very much the quintessential bartender, listening and judgment-free. She hopes her patients see her, will see her, the same way. "Okay. Maybe you're the non-frowning concerned party that's just looking out. And maybe you don't have anything to worry about," he gestures to the bar, the lack of sister in the vicinity with a touch of optimism.
"So, this isn't me sitting under the lamp, waiting to turn it on?"
He shakes his head, smiles like he's been there.
Joe gets her another glass, with extra cherries, and with the no show of Meredith, Mari is feeling a measure of easement, of relaxation. She rolls her shoulders, figures she only has another hour until Meredith is done, and her sister will never have to know that she did this.
Joe passes her a worn deck of cards, and seeing how it barely fits in the package, and most lay on the bar top like pringles, she starts on a house of cards. She's on her third layer, with unwavering focus, when Joe drops off two more decks.
"That seems ambitious."
"Maybe someone will offer to help you with it," he teases.
She looks to the empty seats to the left and right of her. She raises her brows at him. "Yeah, I'm filtering offers."
"You never know," he shrugs.
She exaggerates her look to include more of the room, on this slow Sunday night, a bemused smile quirking her lips. Her eyes catch at the window, not at the hospital's reflection, but the man haloed beneath it.
A flush thrums under her skin. She stares as he stares, drops her eyes to the slight smile on his lips. She turns to her cards, struck in a way that doesn't shake off.
She's not forward enough to look over as he moves closer, her fingers carefully fidgeting with her next card.
"Double scotch, single malt please," he tells Joe, with just a hint of his cologne drifting to her as he leans both hands on the bar. He clears his throat slightly, and for a second, she wonders if she hears nerves in it as he turns his head and smiles towards her. "Hi."
She lifts her eyes, spies dark blue eyes, a slight curl to his dark, wavy hair.
His smile widens, charming and maybe shy.
She laughs off the nerves. "Do you always look at girls in bars that way?"
He laughs too, open in his embarrassment. Open in general, in a way people usually aren't. "In what way?" he teases.
She gives him a look without answering. His eyes crinkle when he smiles. He takes the seat without turning away from her.
"Do you come here often?"
It sounds close enough to a line, that it actually puts her at ease, like the moment isn't as weighted.
"First time."
"Really?" He looks at her house of cards and at the bartender. Joe lifts his hand in a brief wave, pretending not to watch.
"Me too. I'm new to Seattle. Just got here."
She leans towards him. What was meant as a quip temporarily stalls her, their breathes catching in near mirror. Maybe she just wanted an excuse to lean closer. "Well then," she murmurs "welcome to the Emerald City."
He laughs under his breath while in the background Joe groans, probably at the joke he's heard a million times, here at the 'Emerald City' bar.
They both look at him, cheeks almost touching as they turn their heads.
Joe rolls his eyes. "Bust my buttons," he quotes, like he was the doorkeeper at Oz.
She laughs, light and easy, and feels his laugh, this stranger who's name she doesn't know, as if it were against her lips.
"Mari," she offers.
"Derek."