Chapter 1
ONE WEEK LATER
"You really should let one of us pick up the check," Jack said to the woman who had invited them to lunch.
"I've spent my life striving for equality, Jack, but given the menu I'm almost inclined to let you," Dr. Kathryn Austin said with a smile. "That said; you can't beat the view."
Juliet smiled in return. "You know, we've been in Seattle the last two years; I think we've only been in the Space Needle twice."
"Too busy a schedule?" Dr. Austin asked.
"No, honestly I think none of us like heights that much." Juliet thought for a moment. "At least James doesn't."
"After everything we've been through, I think we're all tapped out on dangerous situations." Jack said carefully.
"You don't really think there's a danger of the place collapsing, do you?" Austin asked.
"Oceanic Airlines famously advertised as never having a plane crash. We all saw how that ended up," Jack said with a smile.
"Frankly, I'm kind of astonished you're able to joke about it even now, "Austin said. "I'll admit to having been to operating under circumstances which are beyond the pale, but I don't think they could hold a candle to what you and your friends must have gone through."
Jack and Juliet exchanged a glance. "That why you asked us to this expensive lunch? To grill Jack on why he and his friends haven't told the media what happened after three years?" Juliet asked.
Dr. Austin waved this off. "I won't pretend, like the rest of the world, I'm not curious as to know what happened all that time you were missing, but I figure if you get comfortable enough, you'll tell me if you feel like it. No, the reason I asked the two of you for lunch is so that I can finally get a handle on Seattle Grace."
Both Jack and Juliet relaxed at this. "James told me he had an interesting conversation with your daughter while you were signing your contract," Juliet said slowly.
"I guess you and your husband don't keep secrets from each other," Dr. Austin actually seemed impressed by this.
"Your name is a homonym of a woman he once loved," Juliet said in that blunt way she had. "Different turn in the road, they might have gotten married."
Austin actually looked a little surprised, both at this revelation and how calm Jack seemed to be about hearing this.
Jack shrugged. "Another turn in the road, the two of us might have married."
Now Austin was genuinely staggered. "Did you two – meet at this hospital?"
Jack and Juliet couldn't help but laugh at this for quite a few moments. "We don't blame you for thinking that, given what James must have told your daughter about this place," Jack said after he recovered his composure. "Honestly when I started working there, I tried to make a flow chart figuring out who had slept with whom, just so I could try and figure out what mine field I might be stepping into every time I walked into an OR."
"You don't…still have that flow chart?"
"I gave up trying to keep an accurate one after a month," Jack admitted. "They just kept getting too messy. If that's your main concern about Seattle Grace, I'd try not to worry about it too much."
"I wish I could say I didn't care about one way or another, but I do," Austin admitted. "It's so hypocritical of me. I spent so much of my career, crusading so that women in my profession wouldn't be defined by who they sleep with. If you do your job well, your personal life should be irrelevant. And I had hoped that now as I enter – well, let's say late middle-age – I could work as a mentor, helping younger doctors – and I won't lie I was expecting more female doctors – learn to be defined by theirs skills as surgeons ahead of anything else."
"And you're changing your lifelong credo now because…" Juliet asked.
Austin actually sighed. "Richard and I went to med school together. We were allies in ways because of who we were. Back then, if you were a woman or African-American in medicine, you had to work twice as hard to get half as much. His career path took him west; mine went east. We kept in touch through mail, we saw each other at the occasional medical conference, and we toasted each others successes which were hard-earned but well-deserved. That being said, I'm not sure either of us knew each other's darkest secrets."
Jack and Juliet were stoic. "We're not sharing our hole cards unless you show us yours."
Austin took a breath. "Like every other female doctor my age, Ellis Grey was a role model as an adult. I never got a chance to meet her, much less work with her, and that is one of my greatest regrets. Richard told me that he knew her and that he worked with her." She put her head in her hands. "I never knew their relationship was anything other than platonic."
This both of them were willing to talk about. "Both of us came to Seattle Grace after she died," Jack said slowly. "But I was here close enough to that to know about the fallout, which was considerable."
"We're all in close enough proximity to Alzheimer's to know how horrible it can be," Austin said. "One of my colleagues in Chicago, his father developed it when he was only fifty-eight, and he felt it incumbent upon himself to take responsibility. Only person he ever gave the full details to was the woman who became his wife. I didn't find out about it until I left Chicago."
Jack sighed. "From what her daughter tells me, it was incredibly sudden and the progression was rapid. Six months after being diagnosed, she had no cognitive awareness of reality. Meredith respected her mothers' wishes and didn't tell anybody when she began working here. But like all good intentions, it got shot to sunshine when her mother developed a mass and they had to operate. Guess which hospital they took her to."
"Richard tells me that when he found out. And according to him, that's also when Meredith found out about the affair and just how long it had been going on." Austin said. "I'm a little surprised she was able to forgive him. I'm stunned his wife was."
Jack hesitated, and then plunged. "You know who my father was."
"Only by reputation, but yes," Austin acknowledged.
"And what was that reputation?" When the older doctor hesitated, Jack gave a small smile. "My father's dead. There's nothing you can tell me that's worse than the truth."
"He was a brilliant surgeon, but one of the worst kept secrets at the time was that he was pretty close to a full-blown alcoholic," Austin confessed.
"He'd have been shocked at that," Jack said sadly. "He spent his entirely life doing his best to make sure that it was entirely secret. When," he hesitated, "when I finally revealed it, I honestly thought I was the only one who knew how bad it was."
"That's the ugly thing about being a surgeon," Austin said. "We don't rat on each other, even when it might help the patient. But I'm guessing it isn't the part about the drinking that you wanted to tell me about."
"My father – after I ratted him out – he went to Australia. That's why I was on the plane." Jack said. "We didn't know what he was doing there, and I couldn't figure it out even after I got back. It was not until nearly a year that I learned the truth." He thought about taking Juliet's hand, and then decided just to plunge.
"About twenty-five years ago, my father had an affair with a woman in Sydney. It went on for awhile, and he had a child with her. The woman's sister didn't like it, and eventually he stopped seeing her. I'm not certain, but I think he went to Sydney because thinking he'd screwed up his relationship with his son, he wanted to see if he could repair it with his daughter."
"And it didn't work."
Jack shook his head. "According to her aunt, he showed up roaring drunk at four am demanding to be let in the house. The next day, he went on the biggest and what turned out be the last bender of his life."
Austin knew there was more to this. "How did you find out all this?"
"Because his daughter was on the plane with me," Jack said bluntly.
Austin kept her face neutral, but both Jack and Juliet could tell she was shocked by this.
"She survived the crash. At the time she was nearly eight months pregnant. She was going to LA to give up her baby up for adoption." Jack figured that was enough mystical details. "The irony is, neither of us learned about our connection until after we got back to civilization. Claire – that's my sister's name – only met her father once, and their meeting took place under such hostile circumstances that she didn't even ask his name. Her mother probably wouldn't have told us, but she was about to undergo surgery that might have killed her, and she thought we deserved to know."
Austin shook her head. "And I thought there was drama at the last couple of places I worked."
"My mother was hurt about the affair, but in a way she wasn't entirely shocked," Jack decided to go a little further. "Given who he was, she wouldn't have been surprised if there had been one-night stands, but the fact that he was close to a woman he fathered a child with her, that stung. She's been able to get over it – she cares very much for Claire and Aaron – but I can't imagine how hard it is. Similarly, I can't imagine how much harder it was for Adele."
"When she learned about the affair," Austin guessed.
"She knew about it when it was happening," Juliet told her. "Richard and Ellis had an affair for more than a decade after Richard and Adele got married. And apparently they didn't even consider separation until three years ago. From what I understand, that had more to do with the fact Richard refused to consider retiring than anything about his infidelities."
Dr. Austin took this in. "If Tommy had been cheating on me, I would have kicked him to the curb as soon as I found out. But then again, I never would have been the kind of woman to be a mistress either." She shook her head. "I know all of this pre-dates both of your arrivals at the hospital, but when Ellis Grey left her husband..."
"Neither of us knows the details," Juliet said. "And there's a good chance Meredith herself doesn't know. For the record, when her husband found out, he left her. Which she didn't care about. From what I understand, I'm not sure if Ellis Grey ever cared for anyone but Richard. Certainly not her husband and I'm pretty sure her relationship with Meredith was strained at best. So just for the record, you're already way ahead of her on being a good mother."
"Based on what you've told me that's a pretty low bar," Austin mentioned. "I love Sara more than life itself, but when my husband fought so hard for custody, I didn't put my best foot forward. He was willing to work fewer hours to spend more time with her. I wasn't willing to do that. So I tried to manipulate Sara into saying what I wanted the judge to hear. He was pissed, but when he told me he was changing custody, it was because I wasn't willing to give up my dreams in favor of my daughter. It mattered more being chief of surgery than a mother to my seven year old daughter at that time. What does that say about me?"
"That you were a surgeon," Jack said simply. "And the fact is you're willing to be there for your daughter now. My father and I had such a messy relationship that I spent much of my adulthood thinking he didn't believe in me and that he had no respect for me. Hell, when I was going through my divorce, I was such a hot mess that I honestly thought my father was capable of having an affair with my ex-wife. It wasn't until after he was dead that I learned that he loved me: he just couldn't find a way to tell me."
Austin knew there was more to the story, but considering what Jack had just shared with her, it would have been petty to ask for more.
"The people on the plane – my closest friends in the world – we've found on that most of the problems in our lives mostly came from two sources," Jack said. "The inability to share our secrets with the people we cared about it and problems with our parents. In the latter case, I was one of the lucky ones. My family was merely dysfunctional. A lot of the rest of them they were either psychological broken or downright evil."
"If they were even there at all," Juliet added. "In some cases, that did make things a lot worse."
Austin assumed that Juliet was referring to her husband. Based on what she'd seen on the news, Jack's wife was one of the most obvious examples of the former. "From the other side of it, is there any advice you can give on how you can be a good parent?"
Jack considered this. "Has Sara shown interest in following in your footsteps?"
"She hasn't really shown any interest in being a doctor," Austin said. "I haven't tried to push her one way or the other."
"I spent so much of my life trying to earn my father's respect. That's why I became a spinal surgeon. Meredith almost certainly is in this hospital because she spent her whole life trying to earn her mother's respect." Jack told them. "I can't speak for her, but in my case all of that pressure really messed me up, and based on what I know before I started working here; it did a lot of damage to her psyche as well."
"I understand she's done exemplary work here," Austin said carefully. "She hasn't finished her residency and her names' already connected with two ground-breaking clinical trials."
"Jack doesn't mean as a surgeon." Juliet said. "She's almost certainly going to be a brilliant one. But until fairly recently, there was a good chance she was broken so badly that all the social aspects of her were damaged beyond repair."
"I hate to say it, but that may come with the territory." Austen paused. "Do you know who Jeffrey Geiger is?"
"He's one of the most brilliant cardiac surgeons in the country, if not the world," Jack said.
"I worked with him when I first came to Chicago. And he is as gifted a surgeon as I've ever met. He is also an impossible human being. There was a phrase going around the hospital when I started there. 'It's rumored God has a Geiger complex.'"
"Everybody's trash-talks surgeons," Juliet said carefully.
"The man who said may have been his only friend," Austin said. "I've met doctors who have parts of them that are missing. I don't think Jeffrey Geiger was capable of functioning outside the OR. And even then, I once saw him have a breakdown inside it."
Now Jack and Juliet exchanged glances. "I don't think even Sloane was that bad," Juliet said.
"The head of plastics?" Austin asked. "How arrogant is he?"
"It's not so much the arrogance as the sleeping around," Jack said. "Derek Shepherd was his best friend. One day Derek comes home to find he and his wife are having sex."
"And all of three of them work here now," Austin shook her head.
"I know, it's a soap opera," Jack said.
"No, I think it's just how hospitals work," Austin disagreed. "The head of the ER at my hospital had a similar role until he resigned. Two of the doctors there did get married, and I had a thing with a couple of the surgeons there, neither of which ended well."
Juliet considered this. "My first marriage was to a man who I worked with all the time," she admitted.
"We may all think the idea of the workplace romance is bad for the office, but when you spend more time at the hospital then your home, it's almost inevitable than you end up involved with them. It might be a marriage or it might just be scratching an itch, but it's going to happen. Does Seattle Grace have this problem magnified more than Chicago Hope did? It might very well be the case, but ultimately I don't care that much."
"What do you care about?" Jack asked.
"I need to know if this problem is what's hurting the hospital's reputation," Austin said. "Now I don't give a damn about which doctor is sleeping with which resident, but when two years after so many of them arrive, Seattle Grace drops from third in the country to twelfth…" She waved her hands. "I'm aware correlation may not equal causation, but…"
Austin actually lowered her voice. "Last year, I'm at a convention in New York. I meet a former colleague of mine named Erica Hahn who'd been working in Seattle. She tells me she's looking for work. And I ask her why."
Jack knew what was coming. "How much did she tell you?"
"Enough for me to be genuinely alarmed," Austin admitted. "There have been some risky procedures and corners cut at any hospital I've worked at. Hell, I've even been a party to a few. But any hospital that was even remotely party to what Hahn told me about shouldn't be practicing medicine any more. She told me she resigned as a matter of principle. I don't why her patient hasn't sued given what I know."
Jack had a feeling this may have been the real reason Austin had asked them here. She knew that both he and Juliet had started working her after Denny Duquette had died, and that they might know more than rumor than anything else. He knew that it was in his interest to continue to maintain the fiction that Seattle Grace had built over the past two years. But maybe he was tired about the secrets he kept for good reasons rather than this particular one.
"I suppose this is where I ask you if there's any doctor without sin. And I suppose I could argue that the line that Stevens crossed to save Denny was a breach of every ethic we're supposed to practice. But…" Jack paused. "Six years, a woman came into my ER. Car crash, paralysis below the waist. She was going to get married. Just before she passes out, she says she wants to dance at her wedding. Her fiancée, when he learns about what her condition will be like after she's paralyzed, has little interest in being involved. I decided to perform an experimental procedure that has the possibility of full recover, but even I don't think it will work. I'm completely convinced of that when I walk into her room when she's coming out of anesthesia. I'm convinced of that until she starts wiggling her toes." Jack paused. "She was my first wife."
Austin looked a little flabbergasted at this.
"You'd think when I learned about the full details of why Izzy Stevens did what she did, I would be inclined to be understanding, perhaps sympathetic," Jack continued. "Two weeks after I learned the full details I brought Stevens and the four residents – one of whom was Meredith Grey - that had conspired with her to cover up this deception into a separate room and read them pages one through four of the riot act. I am accused, on my worst days of being self-righteous to a fault, and on that day, all five of them felt my wrath. I convinced their attending for me to take over their supervision, and I put them on a level of scrutiny so strict that some of them no doubt could have been forgiven for thinking my specialty was proctology. "
Juliet suppressed a smirk. "Jack has always had a hidden desire to want to fix everything," she told him. "In this case, he was trying to fix Seattle Grace rather than the doctors who he thought broke it. What he hasn't mentioned so far is that Stevens may be one of his closest friends in this hospital now and she and her fiancée, also one of the doctors he chewed out, are among the people we trust the most at this hospital with our secrets."
"There's a lot more to it than that," Jack said, "but I have a feeling that's the part you wanted to ask me about. I was angry at Stevens when I learned the truth of what she did. And I wouldn't bother to disagree that what she didn't wasn't a very serious violation of the Hippocratic Oath. But there's something that I learned – something that I didn't even fully process until after me and my returned to civilization – and that is you can't keep holding the same mistakes over a person for the rest of your life. None of us are without flaws; some of us just do a better job of hiding it. You've had a much longer career than I have. Are you going to tell me that you didn't make a mistake in judgment as bad as Stevens at some point?"
Austin blinked a few times. "You have been refreshingly candid, Jack. Far more than I expected you to be regarding my questions. So, in return I will tell you the biggest stain on my professional career. It's less of a secret because it's a matter of public record, but careers have been destroyed by far less."
Jack and Juliet nodded.
Austin looked a little ashamed. "I have been at Chicago Hope for about three months. We've just finished a surgery on a seventeen year old girl with a leaky heart valve. It's taken nine hours, but we're finally done. I close her up, they wheel her into recovery. One hour later she flatlines. I am, at this point in my career, as arrogant as any great surgeon. I start blaming the nurses and one of the physicians for shoddy after care. Then when they start doing the X-rays, they find I left a surgical clamp on when I closed her up.
Jack and Juliet blinked. "I'll admit that's bad, but you made a mistake. It's hardly one that could kill your career."
"Except that I felt so guilty about what had happened I wanted to confess my actions to the parents. Both the chief of staff and legal tell me in the sharpest possible terms about liability issues. I still go to the parents intending to unburden myself, but chicken out." Austin shook her head. "Roughly a year later, when I am at my professional, personal and emotional nadir, I finally tell the parents what I did. And three weeks later, they sue me, my fellow doctors and the entire hospital."
"Confession may be good for the soul, but it also helps keep the lawyers busy," Juliet said sadly.
"So I guess sharing your guilt about a mistake doesn't really help the hospital any more than covering it up," Austin said. "I don't agree what Stevens did, but in a funny way both of us violated the oath we took as physicians: first do no harm. And we each compounded the damage to the institutions we worked for. She did it by covering up her actions; I did so by telling the truth about mind, but since in both cases our hospitals suffered, it's hypocritical of me to consider one set of actions worse than the other."
"Juliet and I both like working here," Jack told Austin. "Do we have issues with how so many doctors at Seattle Grace do things? Of course. But given the problems we've had in our careers and our personal lives, we have the benefit of perspective. We know the career is not the be-all and end-all."
"We're probably the only attendings in this hospital who take fewer shifts when we have the chance," Juliet added. "And we're definitely the only ones in the hospital who don't care about moving up the ladder."
"And you want to know if I share a similar mindset?" Austin said with a smile.
"Both of us remember the big deal it was when you became one of only three female chiefs of surgery in the country," Juliet said with an answering smile. "Now you tell us you've come here to try and keep closer ties with your daughter. But you also have to know that Richard had announced his retirement not long before either Jack or I joined the staff. The fact that he changed his mind doesn't mean he won't again."
"I'm not going to lie. It would be pretty big for me to finish my career as Chief of Staff of this hospital," Austin admitted. "But I know that a lot of the people who work her are marquis names."
"To be clear both of us have made it clear to Richard that we don't his job. Not when he officially retires, not a decade after the fact," Jack said. "I saw what being chief of surgery did to my father. I've been close to following in my father's footsteps in too many bad ways to want to follow in that one."
"However, in the interest of full disclosure, both of us have promised our votes to the person who doesn't have anywhere near the biggest name but is by far the most qualified," Juliet said. "Did Richard introduce to you to Miranda Bailey when he took you around the hospital?"
"She wasn't in rotation that day," Austin admitted. "But he spoke highly enough of her for me to know she's his favorite attending here."
"Bailey will be chief of staff one day even without our support," Jack said simply. "She's a brilliant surgeon, she has the ability to command respect among attendings, she's a superb teacher and she has the perfect balance of forcefulness and compassion. The only thing she lacks is experience. I honestly believe that if she'd been an attending a few years longer, Richard would have retired without a second thought. He'd know the hospital would be in good hands, and so would everybody else."
"Wow," Austin said. "No one would have ever said that about me when I was in charge. Then again, a lot of people called me too aggressive."
"Miranda's nickname was the Nazi," Jack said flatly. "It's not because she was white, tall and Nordic."
Everybody chuckled at this. "Honestly, I worry about her," Jack continued. "Miranda is a great surgeon – hell, she's a great person in every respect. But she can be incredibly, almost relentlessly stubborn. And coming from me that says a lot. She came to the hospital in labor and nearly risked damaging her life and that of her son because she couldn't be convinced to give birth without her husband being there."
"The fact that he was in that hospital under anesthesia didn't seem to matter," Juliet added.
"That was before I came here. Since I've been here, her marriage has been on the rocks." Jack said. "That's not news; the hours we work will almost certainly drown out anything else. It killed my first marriage; it nearly killed Webber's. And I've seen enough evidence at this hospital alone to know that marrying another doctor is no guarantee of marital stability or faithfulness."
"But there's more to it with Miranda," Austin posited.
"She and her husband are at an impasse," Jack said. "What exactly that impasse is no one at this hospital knows; none of us are prepared to ask. What I am relatively sure of is that Miranda is too determined to save her marriage but too focused on her career to give up on that. "
"Which means at some point her husband will force the issue," Juliet said sadly. "And it's going to happen sooner rather than later. She's been on the night shift for the past three days. "
Dr. Austin got it. "She doesn't want to go home. I did the same thing in the last year of my marriage. By that point, Tommy and I weren't even in the same city half the time."
"There are people here who need mentoring," Jack said. "Juliet and I have done our best over the last year or so and we've helped in some cases, but there are some people here neither of us have the ability to reach. Miranda will listen to what we have to say…"
"…but it would probably register with someone who's actually been there," Austin agreed.
"And to be honest, there's someone else who you are uniquely qualified to give advice too," Juliet said. "God knows, you might be the one person on Earth who she'd take seriously."
"You don't know Yang like I do," Jack said harshly. "She'd say anything just to be able to scrub in on a surgery."
Jack had been remarkably calm discussing the lows of Seattle Grace. But a bit of the old self-righteousness had reentered his voice when Christina Yang came up. Then again, Juliet had to admit she was one of those doctors who seemed to go out of her way to make you not like her.
"Richard mentioned her in relations to cardiac surgery," Austin said. "He said she had enormous potential."
Jack clearly wanted to say something derogatory, and then he seemed to change subjects. "How arrogant was Jeffrey Geiger?"
"It was the only tone on his palate," Austin said bluntly. "I realize that you don't make it to the top of the mountain without having an ego to match, and I also realize he had more than his share of demons but even Philip Waters – his boss, who kept having to bail him out of his problems – knew just how much of a monster he was."
"That's the thing about Yang," Jack said. "She has all of the arrogance of a great surgeon, but all I've seen so far is the potential to be a great one and the willingness to crawl over anyone who gets in her way."
"I haven't had the pleasure of scrubbing in with her that often, but she's not exactly doing female surgeons a service," Juliet said.
"I'm a little surprised to hear you say that," Austin said to Juliet.
"You said that at your old hospital you tried to be an ally to women, but that they didn't like you much," Juliet said. "Yang won't even pretend to do the former. For all intents and purposes, she has one friend at this hospital, but I have absolutely no doubt that if a donor was needed for a procedure, she would slice her open and look for a spare kidney without thinking twice."
"Yang views everything as a competition," Jack said. "The end goal for her is probably the same as Geiger's was: to be the absolute best. The difference is she's already more than demonstrated that she has no moral compass when it comes to getting there."
Austin sighed. "What did Richard leave out this time?"
This time Jack did hesitate. "I can't speak to the details because I didn't know about them. All I know for certain is the aftermath." He then gave a brief retelling about Preston Burke, the previous head of cardiac surgery, who Christina had an off-and-on affair with, how Burke had ended up getting shot and suffering a tremor in his hand, and that Yang had taken over the role of operating in his place on every surgery he scrubbed in on.
This time Austin was genuinely outraged. "All right, I don't agree with what Stevens did or how she managed to drag the entire hospital into her quagmire with Denny Duquette. But at least she was willing to take responsibility and throw herself on her sword. The fact that this hospital was remarkably forgiving is another issue, but you seem to have been dealing with it. This…how is Yang still working here?"
"Neither of us have had much interaction with her, so I don't think either of us is qualified to answer," Juliet said. "I also know that Yang has shown no real remorse for the danger she could have put this hospital in."
"Remorse? Hell!" Jack was now openly scornful. "Six months after I join the staff, she has a long conversation with Hahn where she does everything short of claim credit for all the work she did with Preston Burke. It's not enough she got away with murder; she seems to want us to give her points not leaving fingerprints on the knife when she did it."
"This violates every code I have as a doctor, a feminist, a woman, pretty much as a member of the human race," Austin said. "I'm a little shocked you haven't tried to do anything about it, considering how invested you are in this hospital's future."
"Believe me, it's not for lack of trying," Jack confided. "Yang was one of the five residents whose training I took over last year. All of them bitched and moaned while it was going, but at the end of the day they were all willing to learn from it. Except Yang. I wish I could say I was stunned but I'm not. Yang is the only one of those five – practically the only person in this entire hospital – who has never asked me what happened when our plane crashed. Most of her friends and colleagues now know many of the details. Not only has she still not asked she hasn't even bothered to ask them about it. For someone who is so interested in the workings of the heart, I'm not a hundred percent sure she actually has one."
"And to be clear, this also pertains to bedside manner," Juliet added. "I don't know what kind of person Jeffrey Geiger was to work with, but I'm willing to bet he at least treated his patients with respect. Yang is three years into her residency, and she still views every patient she meets as a surgical case first. She only cares about what's wrong with them physically, and has no interest in small talk or assuring them about their fears. Honestly, I think the only reason she cares if a patient dies is whether or not it affects the next surgery she gets."
Austin was shaking her head. "Is there any chance this is just symptomatic of her generation?" she asked. "I understand that there are some residents and interns who have the same approach."
"There are a few here and there, but most of them have evolved well beyond it," Jack said. "Hell, we actually have a couple of residents who may care far too much for their patients' wellbeing. No Yang is…how do I put this, 'special'. And indeed she may be live up to being truly remarkable: the first surgical humanoid robot, capable of operating perfectly without making a mistake or showing an ounce of compassion when she's finished." He sighed. "I confess that I have gotten past the point where I need to fix everything. But that doesn't mean I'm not capable of recognizing people that need fixing and who I am incapable of helping. Which brings us, messily, back to you."
"You think there's a chance I can reach her," Austin said.
"Honestly, you might be one of the people on this planet she'd listen too," Juliet said earnestly. "Based on your reputation and what you've been through in your career – especially why you're here now – you could probably be the equivalent of the Ghost of Christmas Past, Present and Future, all rolled into one."
"That's putting a bit of pressure on me."
"It's not an inaccurate metaphor, though," Jack admitted. "Yang wants to be a great surgeon. When you start working here, she will instantly gravitate to you without anyone even having to nudge her. She will want to learn from you, she will want to be you, and at some point she will want to usurp you. As someone who no doubt has done all three – though I'm guessing not all to the same person - I have a feeling you know where she's coming from."
Austin considered this. "It takes two to swing dance, and from what you're telling me, Yang's education will only go so far as what surgeries I can teach her."
"That we'll leave to your judgment," Jack said. "There's never been a person exactly like Christina Yang, but I have to believe you've been dealing with variations on them throughout your career."
"I've been called impossible to deal with a lot in my career; it'll be interesting to deal with it from the other side of the looking glass," Austin said. "All right. I'll talk to them both. But I do have a minor precondition."
"Name it," Juliet said.
"How soon can I meet your wife?" Austin asked Jack.
Jack smiled. "I was wondering when you were going to ask that particular question."
"Hey, no matter how you spell it, we Kate Austins have to stick together," Austin said impishly.
"She was kind of impressed to know that one of the greatest cardiac surgeons in the country had her name," Jack said, with a thoughtful smile. "It means a lot to her, especially considering she was lucky to get through college."
"Well, even if I hadn't known who she was for other reason, I'd still have wanted to meet her," Austin said a little more seriously.
Jack considered this. "This weekend, we're going to Los Angeles to visit the rest of our friends from the plane. Every weekend, we come to them or they come to us."
"I'm impressed you put up the effort," Austin said. "As someone's who's been to her share of mass traumas, most times the survivors never want to see each other again."
Neither Jack nor Juliet was sure if the older woman was probing, and neither cared that much – given that her entire conversation had been about the hospital, she was entitled to curiosity. That said, despite her honesty, neither was prepared to share the secrets of the island just yet. "I'll have to talk with her, but my guess is she'd be more than willing to have coffee before we take the train down on Friday," Jack said. "She might even be willing to treat out of fairness."
Austin nodded, and then blinked. "The train?"
Juliet gave a broader smile. "I think all of them could go the rest of their lives without visiting an airport, much less getting on a plane again."
"Oh, I get that. I'm just a little shocked you're willing to go along with it."
Juliet gave another of those cryptic smiles. "Let's just say I have some of my own quirks when it comes to going to airports."
AUTHOR'S NOTES
I feel slightly more obligated to those of you (which is likely to be almost all of you parse the references to Chicago Hope and this Kate Austin because all of it refers to storylines on the series (and by extension some of the Grey's Anatomy ones.)
Lahti's character was in her early forties during the show's run which means she'd be in her early fifties now and therefore a contemporary of both Richard Weber and Ellis Grey. I think therefore the possibility of her having gone to med school with Weber not out of the common.
One of the characters on Chicago Hope Billy Kronk (played by a very young Peter Berg) did have a father who suffered from Alzheimer's. He was the sole caregiver as his artist mother had abandoned both of them at a very young age.
Dr. Austin's custody battle unfolded pretty much as she describes it here. The storyline when a patient died after leaving a clamp in her also unfolded around the same time, and her confession came not long after she had been suspended from the hospital and her father had passed away. (I'll actually come back to that storyline.) Like far too many Chicago Hope storylines, it disappeared rather than the show resolved it.
The head of the ER at Chicago Hope was Daniel Nyland, played by a young Thomas Gibson, and he was the hospital lothario. Kronk ended up marrying a co-worker in a relatively normal romance and Austin did have affairs with two of the surgeons there, both of which did end in disaster because of her own ambitions.
Jeffrey Geiger was played by Mandy Patinkin in the first season in one of the greatest character portrayals in his career and in television history in general. Shortly after winning an Emmy for Best Actor, Patinkin departed the series though he was a recurring guest star for years to come. Geiger was an extraordinary surgeon and as arrogant as they said, though he had demons so great Meredith Grey would be inclined to sympathize. I have not ruled out the possibility of him making a cameo in this story.
Based on Austin's personality, I think there's a very real possibility that Christina Yang (the only character from Grey's who hasn't really appeared in this series yet) might listen to her. Yang will appear at some point in this story. And for the record, the comparison between how Geiger and Yang treated their patients is accurate.
Given all of the chaos that went on Chicago Hope (which had all of the experimental surgery of Grey's Anatomy but almost none of the sex) I have a feeling that this Kate Austin could handle the shenanigans that went on with Denny Duquette was some equanimity. Considering what Yang did (and for those who haven't watched Grey's, it's basically accurate) I can understand why she'd be appalled.
And sadly, I am kind of sticking to canon when it comes to the fate of Bailey's first marriage. I may not agree with why it did, but I know given her character and the way the series was running, it was a dead letter.
I admit there has so been little reference to Lost for a fanfic in this category that you might think I've mislabeled it. Well, I needed some exposition for a character I intend to use quite a bit (she'll be Dr. Austin going forward, so my readers won't get confused) and this was the easiest way to do it. Rest assured, this is going to be a primary Lost fanfic, as you will find in the next chapter.
Please read and review. And if you happen to have seen Chicago Hope (unlikely as I mentioned in the Prologue) let me know what you think!
