I had an idea on playing around with the timeline when I decided to return to this story. I compared story maps, trimmed the idea down to be less convoluted, and viola! It helps me stay out of the episode-by-episode formula and gives a peek at what's to come. The original chapter two and three isn't scraped, the scenes are just dispersed out.
This is dealing with episode 2x16 It's the End of the World. The time jump is a 4 parter, with 2x18 Yesterday. Also, there's a few lines, as Mari is remembering them, from 1x9 Who's Zoomin Who? Some lines taken from the episodes.
Chapter also has cameos from NCIS. If you're entirely unfamiliar, the show started around the same time as Grey's and House, which is why I like Mari interacting in the three universes. Just know that Mari worked with the medical examiner, Ducky, while she was in med school, learning forensics, enjoying the investigative nature, and conducting autopsies. Gibbs is the lead investigator, a cowboy like House (someone who isn't a team player), Abby was/is a good quirky friend and forensic expert, and Tony is…hmmm.
chapter two: entry wound
Chief Webber
He has a blank board, a deserted surgical floor, empty rooms and empty halls.
He had to close the ER. Send his patients to other hospitals. Decide, case by case, who needs attention, who can be pushed back, who is stable enough for transport.
His day isn't in surgery. It's with a board that wants the staff furloughed. Insurance, and lawyers, and HR. Surgeons who want everything. Nurses who want their demands from the strike honored. Patients who want reassurance.
He gets away from his inconvenienced staff to visit the hollowed out OR, to see the smoke damage in the hall, flamed outside the corded-off area under clamoring construction.
He's rebuilding. Very few out of the complaining staff even know what that - what this - looks like.
The only bright spot is his marriage isn't suffering under the weight. He hasn't had to argue, in moments he didn't have, with Adele. Expected retreaded arguments, sweet cajoling, resigned disappointment, at-her-limit demands.
He expected, Delegate Richard. Come home.
He expected, The hospital can stand without you.
Needing her, when he had his panic attack, has changed something in their marriage, reminded them what it was when he leaned on her. She hums soothingly, instead of prompting, advises him to be thankful. Stay grounded. Hold perspective.
Like Bailey being a mother. A husband who almost died. A baby that avoided complications.
Bailey stands it for all of two minutes before tucking little William George Bailey Jones back into her arms. "And have you visited any other bedsides?" she asks pointedly.
He didn't expect it to come from Bailey. Bailey who repeatedly insists she was responsible for only one Grey, and the other was not her problem.
"I'm a - a busy man, Dr. Bailey. Learning to delegate."
He nods with his excuse.
Isn't that what everyone tells him to do, to delegate?
"Dr. Wyatt, would you be willing to conduct psych evaluations?"
Dr. Wyatt is nonplussed at the lack of pleasantries, the order formed as a question. It's the danger of falling in the Chief's eyeline.
"For personnel involved in the bombing?" She supposes.
"Just...two. Meredith and Mari Grey."
She lets others out of the elevator before her, and then for them to go on ahead, as she steps off to the side.
It validates part of the rumors, that both Dr. Greys were there when it exploded, had stayed when others evacuated. She still expects more than two would appreciate counseling after working under a bomb threat.
"Dr. Webber," she pauses, considers the scope of his request, why he chose to frame it as evaluations when they weren't, as far as she knew, mandatory. "In your opinion, how do you think both Dr. Greys will approach that evaluation?"
Dr. Webber hesitates. "Meredith will be…reserved."
She waits, but he does not elaborate on the other.
"And Mari Grey?"
Dr. Wyatt watches his rumination with neutral green eyes, sees his reluctance.
"You've probably heard some rumors…"
It's as if he expects her to interrupt, so he doesn't have to continue a defense, doesn't have to give voice to whichever rumors have floated around about Mari Grey. Dr. Webber is too used to surgeons. Posturing, and challenges, and interruptions. Pushing the envelope, trying to run the ship. He isn't used to trailing off, not having another personality to battle.
He is not used to blurring the lines here, with a staff that keeps to their boundaries.
Dr. Wyatt doesn't, however, call him out on that. She aims her scalpel somewhere else.
"Which Dr. Grey was the one who put their hand on the bomb?"
Richard felt very different things, for the two Grey sisters. He shouldn't, but he does.
He had completely missed Mari Grey.
Twenty-six years he kept himself severed from Ellis.
Richard. Let's do it. Leave your wife and I'll leave my husband, and we'll be so gloriously happy. Richard this is the time.
He remembers the fever in her eyes, being the youngest recipient, the only resident to ever be nominated for a Harper Avery. She was more beautiful, and more passionate, and more present than she's ever been in her life. She had the world spinning beneath her feet, and joy crowding her throat, and the certainty that Queens must feel, when they're newly crowned.
She had asked before, for him to leave Adele, had promised to leave Thatcher as easily, as dismissively, as brushing lint off her clothes. This time she didn't ask, she envisioned it.
But he didn't see the same thing she did. He didn't see a life of victory. He saw a spotlight directed solely at her. He pictured a life of a thousand cuts.
It wasn't duty, that made him stay with Adele. It wasn't love or the lack.
It was pride.
Repentance came when he published in different journals, stopped himself from aiming for the same awards at the same times, when he stayed out of the same conferences, the same cities as Ellis. When he bought her book and read it in piecemeal, in a quiet cafe, so he wouldn't bring it home. Ellis stayed in a far peripheral, a shadow more than an image. An echo.
He knew when she left the U.N. He knew when she joined Mayo. He tallied her accomplishments, not as her partner, not as the man waiting in the wings, but as someone faceless in the audience. Or perhaps, standing even further back, looking up at the marquee.
What he misses in all that, is that Ellis had another daughter. Ellis had Meredith. Ellis got divorced. Ellis never re-married. He didn't look deeper into her life because Ellis's life was surgery, was medicine.
Meredith lingered, as a regret, as a ghost, a child he could have provided for, could have given his care when she had so little in her life. Her choosing Seattle Grace is a chance, an opportunity, not peek at what could have been, but to be something substantial now. A mentor. A teacher.
With Mari…
She strode towards him, uncertainty in her brow, but challenge in her eyes. Eyes that saw, and moved, and deduced as quickly as Ellis.
I don't want surgery.
He realizes then, why, when he learned of her, he avoided her file, her picture, her date of birth.
Ellis had no reason to keep this from him.
Mari Grey was Ellis's daughter. Hers alone.
Mari
It takes her six months, and an explosion, before they get her in with a psychiatrist.
Six months to lose and establish nothing. She was shuffled off to Mercy West after a neural exam from a doctor she's never met.
She knows it wasn't –
She had gained consciousness in the witching hour. Because of the bomb threat, and the explosion, the hospital was still -
No visitors. Less patients. Less staff.
And they had to move people who weren't of immediate concern.
Mercy West didn't know her tricks, didn't know that she knew the answers. Her discharge could have been timed by a stopwatch.
She slinks back to the house, and finds no one there, overwhelmed, and realigned, that she could have died.
That's her cue, isn't it? The conductor is waving his baton. She needs to stop listening for the shift, the key change.
She's underwater and she keeps holding her breath.
"Before we get started, are you comfortable seeing me, knowing I'm the psychiatrist seeing Meredith?"
Mari tilts her head, adopting the thoughtful mien of the psychiatrist sitting across from her. She expects the question. Standard, rhetorical, testing.
Why Dr. Wyatt, she wonders. Why would a psychiatrist, who didn't often delve into clinical psychology, take on new patients? Fulfill a banal eval? Someone who publishes in abnormal psychology, and neurology, and noticeably, never, in trauma care. Her career is too prolific for chance, too specialized to be bothered with a bureaucratic totem pole.
This is practically moonlighting.
So, is it because she's an intelligent powerhouse, and the Grey sisters were less likely to run roughshod on her? Because, to delve into Freud, Chief Webber pushed his weight, and picked a woman who looked like their mother?
Did he realize he was doing it? Was he blind enough to think it was a favor?
Neither would readily open up to Mommy dearest's knockoff clone.
And anyway, Mari prefers the conflict of interest, wants to see what Dr. Wyatt comes up with, yo-yoing between the two sisters.
"Isn't it better that way? Like a prisoner's dilemma. Meredith and I keeping each other honest."
Dr. Wyatt brow furrows, just slightly. "I don't consider this an interrogation."
Mari looks at Dr. Wyatt through her rarely worn black frames. Imaging what could have happened, had her eyes been open, her contacts meeting the heat of the blast makes her…reluctant to put them in. "But isn't 'and how do you feel about that' an interrogative statement?"
Dr. Wyatt doesn't rise to the bait. "Do you find therapy cliched? Too predictable?"
Mari's lips twitch. She reclines, minutely, to see if she can relax against the cushion. If her ribs will allow. "Do you find it boring, knowing you're going to listen to the same story twice?"
Dr. Wyatt doesn't move her pen against her yellow legal pad, but her fingers change grip, as if she's noted something.
"Should, you both care to share it with me, I don't think your stories will align that closely."
Mari brows furrow. Her mischief recedes like a change in tide. "And why is that?"
"Because you could have had nearly the same experience and processed it very differently."
Mari doesn't mean to show her attentiveness, but casual nonchalance has always been a mask that needs to be held up with both hands. She falters, it falls.
It took years and an Alzheimer's diagnosis, for Mari to even begin to understand that was the source of her and Meredith's problem.
She understood it, but didn't know how to solve it.
Would it be easier if she pretended to hate their childhood? Indulge Meredith's angst? So it had it's sharp edges. That didn't mean it should be dismissed, discarded, and resented.
How did Wyatt see it that quickly, that easily, with one session with Meredith and five minutes with her when everyone else expected them to act the same, react the same?
"Did Meredith say anything when she was with you, or did she sit in silence?"
Dr. Wyatt doesn't answer.
Mari snorts, easing into the diversion.
"Four sessions, right? That's not nearly enough time to get her to stop freezing you out." Mari quirks her eyebrows. "You should say something, at the end of the next appointment, some assessment that will bother her. Let her stew. She'll either need to correct you or demand to know what you meant."
Because she knew Meredith could sit in silence for four hours, staring someone down, easily.
It would be boring if Dr. Wyatt gathered nothing.
"Is it the same for me?" she continues, mindful of the silence. "I wasn't sure if that was mandatory, or your assessment."
"Would you have preferred more, or less?"
Have preferred. So, it's already determined.
Mari puckers her mouth. "She is older. She's had more time to collect her trauma."
"You were hurt."
Mari doesn't shift her back, gingerly, against the cushions. Doesn't move her hands on top of the cushion. Doesn't scratch or touch her bandages. She can ignore a leading statement, without feeling the itch to pick it up.
So they're getting right into the explosion. Forget the development years, the past six months. No lead-up.
"Is the tinnitus still bothering you?"
"I've been medically cleared," she says very evenly.
Dr. Wyatt's face doesn't move. "I'm glad to hear that. I heard you experienced hearing loss."
Did. She.
"It passed."
The silence, where Dr. Wyatt doesn't say anything, is ringing.
In her head, Mari is playing the bittersweet Die Moldau, and wondering what Bedrich Smetana would have thought of his work, had he been able to hear it.
"Would you like to tell me what happened?"
Meredith was lying spread eagle across her bed with the covers thrown off. George and Izzie are whispering at her open door, looking in like they're wondering why the creature in the zoo isn't doing anything.
They tap on the glass, sotto-voice as they say heyyyy Meredith...want some coffee Meredith...uh, what's going on Mere...?
When Mari gets back from the farmers market, George takes the groceries from her hand, Izzie takes her rain jacket off her shoulders, and they both herald her up the stairs because 'something is wrong with Meredith.'
Mari sees Meredith languishing and turns to her roommates at their obvious overreaction.
"Remember how Cousin Hilda would call when Mom was taking a new post, and tell us which route to take?" Meredith muses, voice especially raspy like it's the first thing she's said all morning.
Mari leans against the doorway as George and Izzie peek over her shoulder.
"Yes…" she prompts, wondering why Meredith is talking about Cousin Hilda.
"She always knew. And when Mom didn't listen, something always went horribly wrong, didn't it?"
Mari's brows lift, taken with amusement. She always enjoyed the 'horribly wrong' a little too much, and Mom's insistence that it was a coincidence, and Cousin Hilda was ridiculous, while she bit back curses as if Cousin Hilda had orchestrated the chaos. If someone told Ellis Grey to go left, she was more determined to go right.
"Or how Grampa Jac said Gran collapsed when Uncle Elis's plane went down?"
"I've...never heard Meredith talk about these people," Izzie whispers to George.
"Well, it's…family?" George defends lamely. They're both surprised that Mari and Meredith even have family outside of their mother. Are these people dead?
"Should we call Cristina?" Izzie whispers.
"Or," and the only sign Meredith shows that can hear the whispering is the subtle uptick in volume "how Nain said she knew she was pregnant after conception and she would have the names stitched on their baby blankets before it was even confirmed."
"Please," Izzie murmurs, inherently skeptical.
"Meredith…" George clears his throat, shooting his eyes at Izzie. "I didn't know you were…superstitious."
Meredith sits up on her elbows, frowning at them both, hair perhaps a little messier and more tangled from a bad night's sleep. "Everyone's superstitious about something. You know, you get...feelings."
Mari turns to raise her brows at the roommates, wondering if George will backtrack, pathologically unable to disagree with Meredith, or if Izzie will scoff, like she did with her psychic patient.
"Okay," Izzie draws out, "are you feeling like you're going to get out of bed…?"
"I thought you said you were more open-minded when the psychic fixed your cupcake recipe!" Meredith accuses.
"Yeah, a tinsy-bit more open-minded, not whatever you're doing."
"So, what's your feeling?" Mari interrupts, curious at the buildup.
Izzie exhales through her nose, unsurprised Mari is going along.
Meredith sighs, elbows giving out as she flops back onto the bed. "Like…" she flounders for words, stops.
The seconds tick by, and Izzie can't help herself. "Like we're not going to make it to work on time?"
Mari glances at her watch, and the fact that everyone else is in pajamas. "Maybe you should start getting ready then?"
Izzie takes the hint, says finneee, and heads for the bathroom, while George dithers.
"No Cristina?" George checks.
Mari looks at Meredith, waiting for her verdict. It feels like, with Meredith talking about their family, their preternatural feelings, that she wants to talk to Mari about this, but…
She's realistic.
She waits for her cue to leave.
How would Cristina approach this maudlinness? Kick Meredith out of bed, dunk her in cold water? Yell. Bombard. Laugh. Dance.
She doubts any of it will have the same result, through her hands. With Mari it's a mess of inconsistencies, of further retreats.
"No Cristina," Meredith determines, sounding faintly unsure.
George nods, "okay, I'll…" He points his thumb, moves to softly close the door behind him.
Mari's brows furrow, peeking over inquisitively.
"What feeling?" she wonders how serious it is, how peculiar, to keep it between them.
Meredith's blue-green eyes blink up at the ceiling, slow, and worried.
"Like I'm going to die."
"Dr. Hudson was overseeing the ER," Mari starts. "So that meant he was no-where to be found, and the surgical interns, particularly Bailey's interns, since she was on bedrest for the past two weeks, were a nightmare, given first dibs to any trauma patients."
She pulls the cushion in tighter to her side. "A man came in with a paramedic attached. Large sucking chest wound. The other paramedic was berating her for sticking her hand inside the patient's chest as they were rushed into trauma room one. The patient's wife was blood splattered, screaming her head off. Cristina ran off with the preliminaries, to find Burke, to get him, and her, on the surgery. Meredith was listening for breath sounds. Alex was left to check out the wife.
"You'd think he'd grumble, but do you remember when the Amtrak from Vancouver to Seattle derailed? There was a woman with her friend who was getting stitched up, and she was on the phone with everyone she knew, telling them what happened, gabbing away, right? When she finally stopped, after hours of being there, people were probably thankful that there was less noise. That they didn't have to hear the same conversation over and over again. They hadn't realized she was bleeding internally, until her phone started ringing and she didn't answer it."
"Were you there?" Dr. Wyatt asks.
"Uh, no," she clears her throat, realizes, why talk about a derailment when Dr. Wyatt is only here for an explosion. She only meant to show...the scope. That the OR would have blown up, if Alex didn't take that woman seriously, didn't write her off. That Meredith's feeling was hanging over everything. "I was wadding through the wreckage then."
"Ma'am. Ma'am. Mrs. Carlson. Are you injured?"
Alex's attempt at being professional is warring hard on his patience.
"Photo Hobbit to Disco on Wheels?" she murmurs at his shoulder, looking over the screaming woman with vacant, shock-y eyes.
"New winner, maybe," he grumbles back.
"What does the scale signify?"
She cracks a smile, distancing herself from the pooling dread of her memories.
"Just something we started, working in the ER together. The Photo Hobbit was this guy who was doing a clay animation of the Hobbit book. One of the lights exploded. Luckily when he looked up, he was wearing goggles, but he had at least ten lacerations in his face and hands, one piece 72 by 28 millimeters embedded in his cheek. He was calm. Drove himself. Walked in, sat in the waiting room. He said it was 'quite painful' as he was swallowing blood." She laughs at the absurbity. "Disco on Wheels was this guy in roller-skates sobbing that he had been murdered, because he tripped and slightly skinned his knee. So...scale of 1 to 10. The eerily calm and serious verses the hysterically trivial."
And Mrs. Carlson had been neither.
"You wanna work your magic, help calm her down?"
She looks over the blood-spatter, trying to envision what happened. None of it looks like the wife anyway.
"No thanks," she shrugs, sharing an amused look with Nurse Tyler.
She hides her grin as his exasperation is rerouted to the patient.
"I need you to try and calm down. Mrs. Carlson-"
She screams and screams and screams.
"Dr. Grey," Olivia calls her, blithely ignoring the volume. "The patient in bed six is ready for x-ray."
"Can you hear me? Can you hear me?" Alex starts to shout.
"Thanks," she takes the chart from Olivia when Alex gives a battle cry, right in the woman's face.
She stops screaming, face drawing up like a startled meerkat. Alex nods, with only a second to believe this is going to go well for him before the woman presses her face into his chest and starts sobbing.
"You know how to examine someone in shock?" she checks before she leaves.
"Yeah, I got it," he makes a face, arms reluctantly patting the woman's back.
There's a kind of stillness that comes, when you're used to sound. A reason sailors and healers hold to their superstitions, that they look up, in quiet.
She's pulling up the chart to the patient in bed two, when she glances over at Alex's patient. Still a little wide-eyed, grumbling under her breath, cross-legged in a bed, outfitted in a hospital gown.
Alex is handling off the clothes to Tyler, and the woman is coming out of it, blisteringly angry, and cursing unimaginatively at a man in an outfit he might have scrounged up in a surplus store, shuffling in, defensively cowed, in a way that speaks of worry and guilt.
"I can't believe I touched it with my bare hands like an idiot," her patient tells her, wincing as she examines him.
"The girl of the ambulance put her hand inside of him! That's how he's doing!"
"Well, you've got second degree burns instead of third or fourth, so at least you were smart enough to drop it," she says to her patient, writing down the % TBSA on his chart. She's mostly ignoring the interplay in her peripheral, but it's easier to not look at it than not hear it.
"We don't play. We re-enact."
"You play! You put on your costumes and build your stupid toys and you play!"
She asks Olivia for dressing and verifies the patient doesn't have any allergies before she prescribes the antibiotics.
"Exactly what happened?" Alex interjects the wife's berating.
"You wanna know what happened? What happened is my husband and his moron best-friend –"
"It feels numb," the patient looks down at the cream penetrating his burns, the tension starting to recede at the sensation.
"Numb is good," she declares.
"Decided to build some kind of big gun!"
"It's an exact replica of the finest allied tank weapon of World War Two. The M9A1 bazooka."
Mari's chair rolls back before she gets her feet to stop.
"Were you using live ammunition?" she interrupts, voice coming out of nowhere to the people caught in their loud drama.
Her eyes are on the costume wearer, and Alex, who has dawning suspicion tightening his shoulders as he too turns to the friend.
She tries to remember the patient's chest, but he already had an occlusive dressing by then, was being prepped for the OR. Before that, wide, white, hairy, bloody. No scraps of shrapnel.
The blood-splatter, created with force. The sucking chest wound. The entry point…
No burns.
"They tried to shoot the stupid thing like the mor-ons they are! And when it doesn't work my idiot husband stands in front of the thing to see what went wrong. That's when the stupid toy works."
"Whoa, whoa, whoa. He shot himself with a bazooka?"
Even with the wife's pointed agreement, Alex can't help but repeat himself, each word with a different emphasis, disbelieving. "He shot himself with a bazooka?"
Mari is heading to the phone on the wall.
"Like I said, morons! The pair of them!"
"Was there an explosion?"
"What?"
Alex enunciates loudly, "Was there an explosion?"
"No. Why?"
Alex takes off running.
"Gibbs." He picks up on the second ring, erringly reliable like no one else.
"There's live unexploded ammunition in a chest cavity in our OR, being held steady by a greenhorn paramedic who had tried to stop the bleeding by putting her hand in his chest." She doesn't know how else to start but to rattle off the facts, tucked under the stairwell, staring at the OR board. "The guy tried to recreate a M9A1 bazooka. Tell me you know someone or can find someone who's an expert in defusing World War Two ammunition because I – I doubt whoever they send out here will."
He doesn't have jurisdiction, she knows that. And she knows what she should say, that her sister is in that OR. She can't get the words out, hear them spoken.
"I'll do what I can Mari."
Somehow, and not the promise, never the promise, with Gibbs, who would walk through hell for a stranger if they needed aid, but remembering her voice, surprises her. It feels like a very long time ago, that team, that belonging.
She sits the re-enactor in the conference room, pulls up the satellite TV, and sees the team she used to be a part of.
Gibbs. Tony. Ducky behind his shoulder. There are two agents she doesn't recognize. McGee the MIT grad that made Tony quietly improve his computer skills to make the yawning gap less distinct, and Kate, who Abby especially likes.
'It's nice to have another girl on the team again.'
Mari wonders what they see. If she looks very small, in the picture. She probes the re-enactor to start reciting the specifications on his gun, of his bomb, quivering under the impact of Gibbs glare, coming to the realization that creating this thing, homemade, has made this very hard to extract or to anticipate.
He shifts, uncomfortable in his costume, in his dress-up, eroding under the professional disdain of those he tried to imitate.
Ducky, as is his wont, tries to fill the silence with anecdotes. His attempt at assurance that maybe the bomb won't explode, of course, turning into...
"…That's when they discovered that the cost of ensuring every bomb was perfect was enormous and time-consuming, and realized the occasional dud would still be capable of great psychological damage. As you can imagine, seeing an unexploded shell right outside your trench, and even as a boy, you know, there was still a great deal of concern with the bombs that didn't detonate during the Blitz. We had –"
Tony comes up and pats Ducky's arm. "I think Mari is quite aware, Ducky."
Mari tries to smile, her eyes darting from the conference room windows, the hustle picking up outside. Her beeper has yet to warn her of a Code Black, but it's coming.
Alex had made it to the OR in time.
She had warned the Chief. Had then commandeered the conference room before he realized it's where he would need to be.
Ducky remarks that, unfortunately, all the surgeons who operated in WW2, who might have seen this shell in a chest cavity, are likely dead. Sixty years was a long time, for a surgeon's eyes and skill to live on.
"Will they attempt it, to remove the bomb?" Kate questions.
Ducky considers it, logistically.
Mari says that they will. She knows they will. She knows, also, that Meredith will be one of the ones who won't leave. One surgeon won't be able to do it alone. Meredith won't be able to look the paramedic in the eye, and leave.
"Gibbs, not to interrupt, but this is a bit outside of NCIS jurisdiction. When the bomb squad arrives, no matter who you get to share their expertise, all they need to do on their end is walk away and ignore us." Kate interjects.
"Then I'll put a boot in their ass."
"...which would sound more threatening…if we weren't on the other side of the country…"
"Do you doubt my ability to inspire fear, Agent Todd?"
Tony jumps in, either to smooth feathers or redirect the heat. Loyalty disguised under a charming smile that makes Mari ache to remember misdirection and shouldered defense on a team that counted her as their own.
"Definitely not, Gibbs. I think what Kate meant was..."
Meredith looks calm, for only being twenty yards from the OR door, still in blast radius.
"How's the paramedic?" Mari asks, catching her breath.
Meredith answers ruefully, still prepped for the OR, swishy with the long paper robe. "Hannah. She's probably going out of her mind."
Mari nods absently, getting her breath back. She thinks...
That isn't what they should have said. Relief, or concern, or protective anger at both of them being at risk. Deep instead of distanced.
It's as if nothing is different, nothing is changed.
"Remember that game we played as children…who could be still the longest?" Mari asks, grasping for something. Past if not present.
Meredith's face twitches. They usually played that game in the morgue when they snuck up on the pathologists. "I remember I usually won."
"I guess it's like that game," Mari holds her hand out, like she's holding it still, in a chest cavity. She wonders if Hannah's fingers are numb. If numb is better.
A team comes out of the stairwell, in khaki pants and matching navy-blue polos. Mari had only just beat them, climbing the stairs two at a time, as she fitted a scrub cap to her hair. It wouldn't fool anyone on the surgical floor, but a bomb squad might not see the difference.
She can't tell if the lack of vests mean they aren't taking this seriously yet, or if it was a show of confidence, as they went through the lobby. Why didn't the Chief coordinate to bring them through the basement entrance that way they could have avoided the artifice?
"Dylan Young," the leader introduces, eyes sharp and surveying. The cast of his features, his slightly curly dark hair shoots a pang through her. He's too familiar for a stranger. "Are you the surgical team?"
"Yes," Mari answers before Meredith can, feeling her sister's quick glance.
When Dylan Young asks if the rest of the floor has been evacuated, Mari corrects Meredith's yes, knows the name on the OR board by heart.
"No," she winces, tension a live wire under her skin. "OR Two hasn't."
They both swing to her.
"Who didn't leave?" Meredith asks, eyes narrowing.
"We've got people over here!" one of the team calls out.
"Hey, back up!" Cristina's angry voice barks down the hall.
Meredith immediately swivels, keeping pace with the bomb squad leader.
Mari follows slowly. By the time she turns, the door to the OR is swinging shut before she can see in.
Cristina is saying "oh lucky," that Meredith got the bomb in a body cavity. "All I got is Bailey's husband's open brain."
Had it been a stranger, she could have indulged the fantasy.
It being Bailey's husband means no matter the rising circumstances, he wouldn't.
She'd never be able to curse his nobility. His sense of duty. He salvaged where others watched give way to destruction. Tried where others gave up.
'It's a beautiful night to save lives.'
Meredith and Cristina shift closer to each other, in tune, comfortable like they aren't taking any of this seriously.
She's left behind. Too far, too slow, to see in.
The gap widens, for all its a few steps.
"Did you have a feeling, that the bomb would go off?" Dr. Wyatt asks her.
"A feeling?" she asks, mutely. Mari glances at the clock, sees that her time has run out.
Mari. I –
He was looking at her like a wave was about to crash, yank them into an undertow and he knew he wouldn't be able to hold on.
Something in her responds to that look, sinks. Tastes the salt that will come with that wave. She falls back on her heels, mouth still soft from an almost kiss.
Mari, he repeated her name like a prayer. I'm so sorry.
And you must be the woman screwing my -
She stares at Dr. Wyatt blankly.
Did she have a feeling that the bomb would go off?
...Didn't they always?
Notes: Nain is a Welsh name for grandma.
OR Two was the one Derek was in in the bomb episode, if that wasn't clear.