Visiting Physicians

A Lost/Grey's Anatomy Crossover

Sixth in the Series

By David Morris

Summary: The Survivors of Oceanic 815 have settled into a normal life in Los Angeles and Seattle. Even Ben Linus seems to have found something close to normal. So now that they've found peace in their own lives, can they help find the doctors they've let in to their confidence – and maybe help repair Seattle Grace's reputation?

Disclaimer: Here we go again boys and girls. By now, we all know better but in case you don't: Jack, Kate, Hurley, and everybody from the cast of Lost belong to Darlton and our Frenemies at Bad Robot. (Given the finale of the series, we may never truly love them.) Derek Shepherd, Meredith, Alex and Izzie (and as we shall see, some characters from another series) are the property of Shondaland. (Though I'm not certain: is Rhimes even in charge any more?) Spoiler alert: There will be some characters from some other hospital dramas making appearances in this series. Some will be familiar, some more obscure. I'll identify them when they come up.

Remember when I said I had an idea for a lighter idea for the fifth story in the saga? This is going to be the one where it pays out. In other words, there won't be so much island trauma as there was in the last one. It's going to be closer to being medically based and character based then some of the others in this series. Those of you just joining in might very well want to (at the very least) read the fifth story in the saga to know where we are. (Of course, if you want to track down all five and review them, please do so.) Also I should tell you in advance that there may very well be some points where you may have trouble telling the difference between two characters in this story. This is pre-planned, and I'll try to make it painless as possible.

Here we go boys and girls.

PROLOGUE

Sara had been sitting in the cafeteria for a little more than twenty minutes and she still couldn't figure out what it was about the man sitting three tables down that irked her so much.

She had spent much of her childhood and indeed her adolescence in so many hospital that she after awhile she had gotten a pretty good idea about most of the people who sat in them. It was obvious who the doctors and staff were; the scrubs and white jackets were a dead giveaway. That eliminated ninety percent of the people who were there. Those who remained were rarely patients – most of the ones in hospitals would have their meals in their rooms, even if they were ambulatory. The remainder were usually families and friends of patients and Sara was pretty good at identifying most of them sight. They would have trays of food on them, and would at best be picking at it, if not ignoring it altogether. Her mother acknowledged this was probably for the best; almost none of the hospitals she'd been involved with were known for gourmet cuisine. Even there, few people stayed long – if you were going to see a loved one, it would be quicker to do so in the waiting room or outside their rooms.

Honestly, most of the ones who were in the cafeterias were relatives of the doomed. The ones who were dying long, slow, painful deaths, and the families and friends were in the cafeteria not to eat but because while being a clock-watcher was bad enough, knowing or being the loved one of a clock-watcher was even worse. You had to spend as much time as possible talking with someone you cared about on every single subject except the one thing that they both knew was coming. And eventually, even the most loving spouse or the most caring child ran out of things to say. They wouldn't be able to leave – they felt too much guilt – so they would come here to hide at the excuse of getting lukewarm coffee or a two-day old sandwich. It was a stall because they knew at some point they'd have to come back and face death. As someone who'd been on so many variations on it, Sara could understand every angle.

That was the reason the man her attention was drawn to – well, bothered her so much. Half an hour, he had practically strolled into the cafeteria, greeted the cashier and some of the nurses by name, and had engaged in what seemed to be friendly banter with one of the doctors. No one had objected to this; they all treated him like he was a frequent flyer. But this man seemed – cheerful. He walked up to the chef, who also seemed to know him by face, and asked him for a sandwich and coffee. Then he had gone to a table, and taken out a book.

None of this was unfamiliar behavior to Sara either. In fact, she'd been happily engaged in a novel until the man had shown up. She also knew that, quite a few of the frequent fliers would take paperbacks, usually purchased from the gift shop and try to read them. The difference was the operative word was 'try'. Most of them would stare at the same page for several minutes, unable to concentrate. This man, by contrast, was clearly reading. She even recognized the book – Everything That Rises Must Converge. Short stories, but not exactly light reading.

All of this was irritating Sara enough. What was driving her up the wall was that somehow this man, who she had never met before, looked – familiar. And she couldn't figure out how. He had the face of some kind of movie star – a cross between Matt Damon and Brad Pitt, if either had never gotten a haircut –but he had a distinctive drawl. It was the kind of tone that would, as her mother had once put, 'charm the habit off a nun'. And yet, it clearly seemed like this was for play – she could see the wedding band on his hand.

"Business or pleasure?"

Sara was not a particularly anxious woman, but when she realized that the tall, blonde stranger was talking to her, she almost jumped out of her seat.

"That's…not exactly the best phrase to use around here," she said smartly.

The man had the good grace to look abashed. "Sorry," he said. "I've spent so much time around here I tend to forget that almost everybody else isn't here for a happy occasion. I can't imagine someone your age is."

"Well, in this case, it's not a bad one," Sara admitted. "My mother she's in the process of getting a job here."

The man seemed impressed. "What's her specialty?"

"Cardiothoracic surgery." Then, not entirely sure why she said it: "She's one of the top heart surgeons in the country."

The man took this in. "Good," he said. "Seattle Grace has been having trouble holding on to good heart surgeons these days."

Now Sara was doubly curious. "You know somebody on staff?"

"A couple of people. My wife is the co-head of neonatology and one of my closest friends is the top spinal surgeon on staff." He nodded. "I'm friends with a quite a few of the attendings and residents and practically half the staff here."

That explained a lot. "And you're in the cafeteria waiting for your wife to get done with work?"

"Well, it ain't for the gourmet cuisine," the man acknowledged. He turned to the cook "Don't get wrong, Sam, you do your best, but I can't imagine your budget is high on the list of priorities for this hospital."

"They say make do with less," Sam acknowledged. "But that has nothing to do with the MRI they just bought."

The man nodded. "I could talk with Hugo about that." He turned back to Sara. "But my uncle would be upset at not using my Southern gentility." He stuck out his hand. "James Ford."

The name again tickled at the back of her memory. "Sara Wilmette," she said, shaking it.

"Now to get back to the purpose of my original question," James said. "The book. Business or pleasure?"

Sara looked at her copy of The Grapes of Wrath. "I assume you mean am I reading for school or not?"

"I'm a pretty big Steinbeck fan, but even I admit that's not one you normally read unless it's assigned reading," James said.

"It's July," she pointed out.

"You strike me as the kind of woman who'd get a jump on her fall curriculum." James acknowledged.

"Under other circumstances that might be construed as hitting on me" Sara said, half in jest.

"Again. My wife is a surgeon. Which means if I were to stray, she has the skills to spay or neuter or me." James was clearly speaking half in jest. "Besides, even when I was single, there were lines that I never crossed. One of which was to make sure to only hit on women who were old enough to drink in the state I was in."

"A good philosophy."

"You still in high school or are you on your way to college, if you don't mind me asking?"

"Next fall, I start at the University of Washington," Sara acknowledged. "That's part of the reason my mother's signing a contract here. She wants to stay close to me at least for a few more years."

James clearly wanted to follow up on this, but changed course. "So that means Grapes of Wrath is…"

"One of my favorite reads," she said.

"I'm preferential to Of Mice and Men, but that's a hell of a read," He hesitated. "Offhand you know if Steinbeck got the Nobel?"

Sara gave it some thought. "I don't think so. He is the only man to win the Pulitzer for nonfiction as well as fiction, so that's impressive in its own way."

"I have read my share of the three titans of American literature, and I think Steinbeck holds up to all of them," James said. "Of course, I always thought Fitzgerald was too flighty. Hemingway knew how to turn a phrase and he was good at the short novel and the long one."

"And Faulkner?" Sara asked.

"I'm of two minds," James said. "He's a great writer and he clearly has a very good gift of what it's like to write in the South. I've read quite a few authors in my life, and even the ones of that time never treat them with the same kind of respect that Faulkner does. I've known my share of Snopes' over the years, even if I didn't know there was a name for them before I read him."

"And the other?"

"I think you know," James said. "Now, I'm from Alabama, and I won't lie and say I've never used the n-word more than once. But when I grew up, I managed to put it aside. I won't say my racial views are – the most enlightened, as even my best friends would testify – but even growing up, that was one word I shied away from, even though kids on the schoolyard had no problem using as punctuation. Now I acknowledge that this is a different era, and I also acknowledge that in that era, if you didn't use that word as punctuation, your life could often be made as difficult as theirs. I'm even willing to acknowledge that some of the best African-American writers of their time did use it frequently. But it's still a hell of a shock to have to come across it two or three times a page."

"Does that make Steinbeck better than Faulkner?" Sara asked.

"Not necessarily better, but a bit more respectful," James said. "He understood the poor and the downtrodden as well as Faulkner did, and I won't lie and say he thought they would necessarily have better fates in the Depression – or hell, in life – but in a funny way, I think he believed that poverty makes all people equal."

"Steinbeck wasn't from the South. Faulkner was." Sara reminded him.

"Good point," James admitted. "And given my personal preferences, maybe my most recent choice in reading wasn't an improvement."

"O'Connor's a hell of a writer," Sara reminded him. "And she might have been more enlightened than Faulkner."

"Can't argue with you on the first part," James agreed. "And she is from my neck of the woods."

"She actually had a harder road than Faulkner," Sara said. "Apparently, O'Connor was diagnosed with lupus when she was only a teenager."

"I may spend a lot of time in hospitals, but

I'm not a doctor," James pointed out. "How serious is it?"

"Many cases it's fatal. It killed O'Connor by the time she was forty."

James winced. "I'm guessing there were fewer treatments in the forties and the fifties than there are now."

"Her father was wealthy, and his connections helped her get access to experimental medicine." Sara told him "It kept her alive for decades and it helped her have the career she did."

"You learn that in school or did your mother point it out as a lesson in the annals of medicine?"

"Actually, it was an argument for universal health care. She has very fixed political views."

James nodded. "Almost makes me wish I could vote in the next election."

There was a story.

"Now I'm going to do you a favor. You've been spending the last twenty minutes trying to figure out where you know me from, right?"

Sara was not the kind of girl to blush, but she was considering.

"Not your fault. I get that a lot. A little than usual these days, but it still happens." He looked at her. "I'm the James Ford who knows Jack Shephard."

And Sara finally made the connection. "I'm such an idiot. My mother's signing with this hospital, and I forgot that one of the Oceanics is an attending here."

"It's been more than three years. I'm pretty sure our collective fifteen minutes had to have expired at some point," James acknowledged.

"It's actually worse than that. You are not going to believe this."

James raised an eyebrow. "You'd be shocked at what I believe."

"My mother's name is Kate Austin."

That did cause James to blink, and then smile. "You're shitting me."

"Well, she spells her first name with a 'ryn' at the end, and Austin with an 'I', but still..."

James shook his head. "Jack's going to flip his lid when he learns that he's going to be working with an actual Kate Austin." He hesitated. "But you said your last name…"

"My father. They divorced when I was five." She paused. "He died last year. Pancreatic cancer."

"Shit, I'm sorry," James said. "I know how tough that is for a kid."

"I hear people say that, but I think it's just something they said."

James stiffened a little. "My father killed my mother when I was eight, and then he shot himself."

Now Sara stiffened. "I can put my foot it sometimes."

"It messed me up pretty bad," James acknowledged. "I put so much time and energy into being angry as to why it happened rather than mourning them that it screwed me up for the rest of my childhood and most of my adulthood. I know it's not the same as what happened to your pop."

"My parent's divorce wasn't a picnic," Sara admitted. "My father sued for custody and my mom lost. At one point, she panicked and took me out of the country. My father filed a police report. He dropped the charges when she came back, but the judges weren't inclined to see things his way. My mother didn't get custody back for awhile."

"Divorce isn't easy either," James said. "My wife – Juliet – her parents divorced when she was ten and she spent a long time trying to figure out why, even if two people love each other, they can't stay together. She'll be the first to admit she had a lot of deeply flawed relationships for much of her life. Sometimes I joke that she's still not through with them having married me. I had a reputation for being – what they charitably call around here as being a 'man-whore' for much of my adult life."

"Are you trying to give me psych advice for my future?" Sara joshed.

James shrugged. "Your mom works here now. That means you'll be showing up at the hospital a fair amount of the time. I know most of the doctors here, and trust me, all of the interns and med students, male and quite a few of the lesbians are going to at the very least hit on you at one point."

"And the fact that I'm underage?" Sara raised an eyebrow.

"I would like to think that would cause some of them to at least hesitate, but I've heard some stories, and I'm not optimistic," James told her seriously. "I got a lot of action when I was single, but I had some standards. The people at this hospital – I'd say they'd sleep with anything with a pulse, but given what I hear about some of the doctors who work her, I'm not even sure if the lack of one would necessarily be a disqualifier."

"Please tell me you're kidding," Sara was actually starting to get worried.

"A few weeks after Jack started working here, he found out that a group of the residents had their lunches in the rooms of a comatose patient," James said solemnly. "They would discuss every personal issue in the world, which at the time focused on who they were sleeping with. He put a stop to it because of their utter callousness towards a patient who could very well hear them and was no doubt getting an earful. Those same doctors are now in charge of med students who just last year spent their spare time practicing on solo surgery first by cutting up cadavers and when they ran out of those, on each other. They don't have much respect for the dead, and little for the living."

"That part's not that unusual," Sara actually eased up a little. "One of the doctors at the hospital my mom worked the longest at, he used to test out the working model of his artificial heart on the recently deceased. And doctors do seem to have a tendency to ask each other out over surgeries; it's not like they have much time to mingle outside of work."

"I'm not sure whether to be comforted or alarmed by that fact," James said. "I mean, the experimental stuff doesn't shock me that much any more; my wife has done some interesting stuff in her own research." He leaned close. "Do me a favor; tell your mom to ask Juliet how she managed to get a male mouse pregnant as part of her research. I've never been able to work up the guts to ask."

"My mom's always said if men could get pregnant, maternity leave would be mandatory and birth control free; I'd actually wonder why she never try to go any further in that research," Sara said dryly.

"She had a very specific goal with it," James said slowly. "Once the potentials were realized, the people she worked for tried to corrupt it. Only recently has she considered trying to work on it again." He narrowed his eyes. "Unless she herself ends up telling you, don't let her know I did. This is a sore spot with her."

"Of course," Sara said. "If you'll do me a similar courtesy."

"If I can."

"My mom, she's getting up there by the standards of doctors anyway, and she's at the point in her life where she's starting to have regrets about choosing her career so much over being a mother," Sara said sincerely. "When I got the scholarship out here, she was more than willing to get a job so she could be nearby. She knew that in the past couple of years Seattle Grace's reputation has been, you know, sketchy, but she decided to work here anyway. And in her eagerness to make up for lost time, I'm not sure she's made the best decision as to where to work."

"She thinks she sacrificed you for her career, now you're worried she's sacrificing her career for you," James summed up. "Just the fact that you're saying this shows that she raised you right."

Sara took pride in this, even coming from a total stranger.

"Seattle Grace has had its issues, even someone like me who dropped out of high school can tell that," James told her. "But ever since Jack and my wife got here, they have gone out of their way to make it a better hospital. Some of the residents may not have appreciated it, and some of the attendings are still working through it, but I think at this point none of them would disagree that it hasn't been worth it. If your mother is willing to follow as much as she is to lead, I think she'll fit in."

"My mother's never been much of a follower," Sara confessed.

"Neither was Jack at first. He got better at it. And if nothing else, there are fringe benefits."

Sara would regret asking the next question. "Such as?"

James waggled his eyebrows. "She'll have absolutely no problem getting laid around here."

AUTHOR'S NOTES

Ok, this explanation will take a bit more effort than usual.

In the 1990s Chicago Hope debuted. It is known in TV history as the other Chicago medical drama that debuted opposite ER in the fall of 1994. That's not fair to Chicago Hope which in its own right was a brilliant series, nominated for Best Drama three straight seasons and winning five Emmys over its six year run and featured Emmy winning performances by Mandy Patinkin, Christine Lahti and Hector Elizondo, had critical roles by such great actors as Adam Arkin and Mark Harmon, and introduced the world to Thomas Gibson and Peter Berg. In many ways, I would actually consider it far superior to Grey's Anatomy; there was more medical drama than that series has ever been.

Anyone Christine Lahti was introduced in the second season as cardiac surgeon Kathryn Austin. A prickly, feminist character; she was one of the first characters in any drama that I remember who went out of her way not to make you like her. She butted heads with every major male character, even her superiors, and tried to be an ally to women even though most of the female regulars actively disliked her. The moment I learned Evangeline Lilly's full name the first time, I honestly thought it was an homage. Considering that – and the fact that Lahti's character is a direct influence of so many of the female surgeons in Grey's Anatomy – I always planned for the characters to meet in this series. She's going to be important in this fanfic.

Sara was a recurring character in Chicago Hope played by a very young Mae Whitman, who has been dazzling me ever since, most recently in Parenthood and Good Girls. She was around seven when she first appeared on the series, which means the timeline for her being in college would be roughly around now in the timeline for this fanfic (2007). I wanted to put her in the prologue because I always loved Whitman as an actress and because I wanted her to serve as the best introduction to the other Dr. Austin.

During Chicago Hope's run Christine Lahti's ex-husband was played by the late Ron Silver. Silver passed away a few years in real life in 2009, and I still miss his presence greatly. I could have used his character in this story, but I don't want to taint his memory.

The custody fight between Sara's parents pretty much unfolded as she describes to Sawyer in this story, and even after Lahti's character gained full custody, she never stood out as a great mother. I figured it made sense that as her daughter got older, she would want to make up for lost time and would try to move a town to be near here when her daughter goes to college. This will not be a troubled parent-child relationship by the way; there were enough of them on both Lost and Grey's and honestly, it was never got that troubled.

More Lost Related:

Three years after the fact I think the Oceanics would be less instantly recognizable than they were at this same point in canon.

We all know how much James loved Steinbeck, and I think his opinions of him being better than the three most famous novelists of that era might be genuine. James wasn't a literary critic but he was a big reader, and given the heady literature he read on the island, it's not much of a stretch to think that he'd have read them and developed opinions.

I might be stretching it to say James has a problem with the n-word, given his unenlightened attitudes towards Sayid and Jin in particular in the first three seasons, but he never went in that direction with his nicknames toward Michael or Walt. Maybe I'm giving him too much credit, but James' nicknames were mainly pop culture derivative than anything else.

Yes, James is apparently on Jacob's book club (this is the book Jacob was reading right before Cooper pushed Locke out the window) but I don't think its out of the question he'd read her. O'Connor is, after all, a great Southern writer. (The story about her affliction and how she managed to live so long is true by the way.)

Next chapter, the other Kate Austen gets the dirt from Jack and Juliet about her new hospital. And she will have connections to some of the other Grey's characters, btw. She's not going to meet her namesake yet, though I do have it planned.

Back in the groove everybody. Read and Review.