Chapter Three
Sweet Cristina
A hill above Main Street, Seattle, Washington - February 2022
Cristina stood with a smirk on her face as she shielded her eyes from the blazing morning sun, thankfully and for once - it wasn't actually raining. She tugged on the straps of her backpack and set off for the ferryboat city of Seattle. She'd woken up one morning in her apartment in Ohio, and on a very ordinary trip to the grocery store, she'd noticed the sudden graffiti that had appeared on the freeway signs, 'ALIVE IN SEATTLE' screaming at her. Granted it had taken her a few weeks to jump on the alive bandwagon and get in a car to go there, but she had eventually, and soon she would see people again. A little bit of her resented that she'd come here at all - she was a quiet person, a person who liked her own company. She'd spent two years driving around the wonders of Ohio just to insult them out loud to prove a point. She thought patriotism was stupid and she thought being nice and friendly was pointless. She was blunt to the point of almost heartlessness, and she'd never really had a best friend before. And she was the type of person who slept with her college professors because she was attracted to knowledge. Knowledge is power.
On proceeding into the town she'd felt it a prolonging of her freedom from society - however small - if she walked. So she set off down the hill and into a main street of the city. Which she'd covered most of in her car, and the last few blocks were her own to explore. Her feet almost danced across the chiselled concrete of the sidewalk, she was determined but also reluctant, and a whole host of other things concocted into a nervous feeling of anticipation.
It was early evening by the time she saw the lights, a day of slow walking had tired her aching feet and as the sun had begun to set there was a dawning crescent over the horizon. A peach wave of golden hue was the only thing left to entice her to keep on moving, but then she saw it. The warm kitchen light of somebody actually home. A sight she hadn't seen for two years now. She wasn't alone anymore, and neither were they.
Derek and Meredith were washing up after dinner together, McDreamy on washing, his wife on drying up and putting away. A ritual they often sorted themselves into these days. Three months of marriage had served them well, they'd gotten into a slick routine after finding the perfect little four bedroom cottage on the edge of town, not too far from Meredith's tomato patch so she still had access to her vegetable garden. Which she was planning to move as soon as the first warm day came in, but for the moment they were snug where they were.
The couple were happily discussing the events of the day and the hopeful plans for the next when the doorbell rang. It was a sound that made Meredith jump, Derek leapt up right away to see to the door and pulled it to open, all before stopping his autopilot moves and realised what had just happened. He didn't even notice Cristina standing at the door until Meredith appeared at his shoulder and was furiously tapping him. Well, the tapping started out friendly but rapidly turned into something much more resembling a harsh poke to the upper arm. "Derek!" She snipped, shaking a little and pointing out in front of her to wear Cristina was standing, wearing a baseball cap on backwards and a backpack that may or may not have looked pretty suspicious.
"Cristina Yang." She said bluntly, sticking out her hand to shaken rather abruptly and without warning. "I thought I was the last person on Earth, but it seems I am mistaken. I take that you're Derek?" Cristina said far too quickly, inviting herself inside, the words falling out of her mouth because it'd been so long since she'd had the opportunity for conversation that she couldn't help but let everything spill out at once. She walked through the house, peering at every ornament and photo frame like she hadn't seen society before. The place was littered, it was full. It wasn't the shell of an apartment like hers had been, these were family people. Part of her was grateful that they were friendly, because these people would take care of her, but the other part of her yearned to go home. That these people would be too clingy and she might learn to love them; commitment frightened Cristina.
She walked into the kitchen, squinting at the fact they were washing the dishes by hand and hadn't figured out yet how to hook up a dishwasher to a generator. She looked back at them with a puzzled look and then sat herself down at their kitchen island. "Come in?" Derek whispered to himself letting Meredith go ahead and follow the new person into their house.
"Nice place you got here." Cristina said, swinging her backpack off her shoulders. Her nerves bit a little at her otherwise she would've been aware of her blunt and obvious intrusion, but as it happened, that was not in her current state of mind and so she stayed oblivious. Derek and Meredith stood in front of her at the island, Mer gripping his side with excitement that they weren't alone. Part of her thanking whatever god was up there - something she'd actually come to believe in since the virus, but that's for another time - that she might, at last, have someone to talk about Derek's annoying habits with. She needed a girlie friend, and now that it appeared one had turned up on her doorstep she wasn't going to hesitate on making friends.
"Yes it is, anyway, this is Derek, and I'm Meredith, Grey-" Derek gave out a little cough of correction, "ok Grey-Shepherd." Meredith continued, rolling her eyes and holding up her left hand in demonstration of her wedding band. "We're Seattle's first post-virus love story." She said, making Cristina scoff and shake her head. "Sorry, is something funny?" She asked, but Cristina didn't raise her eyes, she glared down at the counter and gradually up at Derek.
"You guys don't get out much do you?" She eventually replied, still concerned that Derek hadn't said anything yet, his face oddly contorted into a confused wavy line. Meredith wanted to reply honestly that 'no in fact they did not' but something stopped her. The gentle tugging at her side that came from her husband ordering her to stay silent. Not that he was the domineering type.
"So, who exactly, are you?" He asked after some thought, not as immediately welcoming as his wife, he prodded her for answers, pulled at her every smile and tug of her lips. He peered into her creasing cheeks and said "you know, like how do we know you're not a murderer or something?"
And so she explained...
*Flashback* Akron, Ohio - 2018 (before the virus)
Cristina slumped out of her bed with a start, her scrubs from the night before were piled up and bloodied in the corner. She strolled to the kitchen in little to no clothes whatsoever and proceeded to make herself a pot of coffee. Stretching out her shoulders she sighed and arched her back, it'd been a long day yesterday and last night she'd well and truly made up for her spectacular failings by bringing home a rather drunk boy from the bar across the street from the hospital.
Cristina was a nurse, top of her field, but she didn't want to be. She wanted to be a surgeon, she wanted to be the best surgeon in the whole world if she could. But it didn't exactly seem like it was going to happen to she kept screwing up. Also, that screwing up she'd done on her exams that lead her to the now pointless excursion of nursing. She might as well have been an OB/GYN. Either way, her failings in academia had lead her to this very apartment as to which she was drinking rather uninspiring coffee and shrugging on a pair of jeans.
She wasn't a woman who had many hobbies outside of work (except that of baseball) and therefore that many dear friends. She wasn't the type to make friends; born and raised in Beverly Hills, she knew that Ohio would be far away enough from her mother to be able to successfully avoid her invites to Thanksgiving and Hanukah, but also still in the current and in a place so in the middle of nowhere that no one would need ask her where she was from originally. And the anonymity suited her.
Strolling into the kitchen mid-slurp of coffee was the man she'd bedded the night before. He was a handsome young thing, clearly a man that went to the gym but the not the kind to shave his chest, but decent enough to wait around for breakfast in the morning. In all honesty he wasn't half bad, and Cristina wouldn't have minded sleeping with him again had he not walked into her kitchen that morning and begun tidying up.
By nature, Cristina was also not a tidy person, she had piles of piles littered around her two-roomed apartment and she liked it that way. Any maid she'd attempted to employ in the last few years has almost all but quit after an hour at the job. Especially with her screaming that nothing must be moved and that she could no longer find anything because it wasn't in the exact spot on the floor she'd left it. She might not have been tidy but she was a perfectionist. But she was also lazy, and the thought of washing up by hand was well out of her remit - something she never would have even bothered to find the time for - let alone use it.
Seattle, Washington - February 2022 (a few days later)
After the explanations and introductions of that first night, Cristina had settled herself in a modest apartment across the way from the McDreamys. She was, at least, a little happier than she had been alone. Meredith had shown her around the local stores and they'd taken a trip the mall to get her some new clothes - the old ones having been leftovers from her old life and in all honesty she missed her scrubs. They were so impersonal, perfect and identical in every way as ordinary clothes anyway. Cristina had always had a bit of a knack for managing to dress up nicely (and hotly) for any such occasion that were to arise. But at present she was asking for some normality.
Her and Meredith sat down one evening to talk, a ritual they'd started since her arrival as a way of 'bonding' as Mer had called it. They always sat on the back porch - something Derek had been building and was working on in his spare time from the general 'food growing problem.' He was something of a handyman, a hobby he'd acquired in his past life when his ex-wife demanded all kinds of extravagant styles of decking and even a summer house at one point. As they sat, or rather slumped, down for the day, it was a while before either of them spoke. Cristina just sat and dazed as the sun bridged over the horizon and held off the rain for some time. Meredith watched Derek working away in their new vegetable patch - watering and collecting, cleaning away old soil and planting new seeds as the spring rang in.
And Cristina Yang decided that if she couldn't be a surgeon in this new world, she could at least try to be happy, and this seemed like the last shot she was going to get.
