Again, this episode is 2x17-2x19. Bomb episodes and Yesterday. It jumps around in segments, including snapshots of what happened before Meredith and Mari moved to Seattle, and two scenes from 1x02 The First Cut is the Deepest.
chapter three: hold fast
Mari hears what they're not saying. That patients usually bled out, before this point. That the front line knew better than to stick their hand in a chest cavity and wrap their fingers around an explosive.
There is no standard operating procedure. This is new, dangerous, unstable ground, and Mari doesn't have anything else to offer.
Where is it in the chest cavity? Is it whole? Fragmented? Where is the paramedic holding it? Is it sensitive to temperature, to pressure, to vibration? Is it just chance, that it hasn't blown? Is the paramedic stabilizing it? How long can they wait to extract?
She envisions the hospital swelling around her. Evacuating the OR right above her. Burke, learning about the bomb. Burke needing a plan of action, to see the X-rays. Trying to keep the paramedic calm by doing it out of the room. His soothing, natural authority leaving, and the paramedic watching a full OR empty, being told to stay very still, being encompassed in silence.
Meredith – what would Meredith do?
Would she stay with the paramedic, or would she follow Burke out, needing to know the plan, not wanting to stay in the dark?
What would Derek do, right next door, with his patient's skullcap open on the table, being told to abandon them, to preserve his own life?
'Have you seen the pre-op x-rays, Dr. Grey?'
Her pager blares.
In that clearing, clarifying alarm, Mari receives her Code Black.
March
Before Seattle
She's relearning Meredith's voice. The adopted inflections picked up in boarding school, a fallen indistinct murmur, like she can't decide if she wants to be heard, if she wants to continue.
Each conversation opens as a run-off, a vent of frustration, distract me, let me distract myself, guess what Mom's asking, guess what she's doing, have you noticed she's –
(Declining?)
Meredith is hoping into a cab, making sure she hasn't left anything behind, talking about what she needs to sign with the attorney, what Michigan weather is going to be like, when she trails off, confused Mari isn't running through a litany of her own last minute prep. They used to do this, every time they moved, kept up a running commentary of what they were packing, what they needed, what the other was responsible for.
'You're not coming?'
'Why would I?'
She has nothing to sign.
Not since the NDA, not since the diagnosis was composed and locked away.
No one asked for her presence for when their Mother turned her sabbatical at Mayo into a quiet resignation.
Why would she assume, when - just look at the state of their relationship the past ten years.
What opportunities were left, if not this one, for Mom and Meredith to reconcile? And didn't Meredith prefer her visits seldom and one-on-one?
Her rebutal is on the tip of her tongue, ready to overwhelm any quailing excuses now that Meredith realizes she's embarking on a weekend without a buffer.
But Meredith goes silent.
Silent in a way Mari can feel; with the sting of dispirited surprise.
Mari's defenses unravel, sink in quicksand.
Had Meredith...actually wanted her there?
Was she the one, who hadn't been listening?
And how many opportunities were left?
April
"Seattle Grace?" She parrots. "You're applying to Seattle Grace? I thought…didn't you want Boston?"
"Yeah, maybe," Meredith answers, noncommittally, the receiver crackling like she keeps shifting her grip. "What about you? Your residency, are you enjoying it?"
Mari squints. "Sure," she dismisses, drawling it out to show she isn't falling for the subject change.
The date their mother chose, for her compartment, just happens to align with the end of the rental agreement on the Seattle house. So, they'll fly out, watch their mother shelter behind barricades, watch her things moved into the house for storage, and pretend they're going to see the Space Needle or something. They'll save the real clearing and bequeathment until, well until it comes the way it's supposed to.
That was the plan.
"So, you would…live in the house?"
Meredith blows out a breath, the way she does when Mari digs in when she rather be aloof. "If I'm accepted, maybe. Or I could…move Mom's things into storage and get an apartment…sell the house. It's too big anyway. I don't know, I haven't thought about it."
This conversation is throwing her for enough loops to be dizzying.
Why would Meredith move to Seattle and then sell the house?
"Sell it to whom? Uncle Rhys?" Did any of their family even live on the West Coast?
"I can't sell it to family without telling them why I'm selling it," Meredith retorts.
Mari bites her tongue.
The Seattle house was built by Grampa Jac. Presented as a grand gesture of his marriage proposal. It was the family home once. Gifted to Mom at her wedding reception. It belonged to Mom because she was the oldest. Mom should have given it to one of her sisters, or her brother, when she decided to leave Seattle, but she was never the type to concede anything.
Now it was Meredith's, to accept or discard. To the oldest, again.
Somehow, Mari hadn't considered Meredith would do either. She thought it would continue to be ignored. Gather dust. Stay suspended indefinitely.
She wonders if Meredith is hinting at –
"Would you stay there if - it wasn't just you?"
She doesn't want to leave Princeton, so what is she -
"- doing here?" Burke murmurs very quietly, as he sees Cristina, and Meredith, and her, with the head of the bomb squad. He focuses on Mari, and she knows it's because he can't stay objective if he looks behind her. Can't look at Meredith either, because her and Cristina are a packaged deal.
"Is she not part of your surgical team?" The bomb guy reads that erringlyquickly.
"No," Dr. Burke intones slowly. "She is not."
"A drowning man will catch at a straw?" she offers.
"I'd like to avoid grasping at straws, Dr. Grey."
"Well," she projects a smile under both of their weighing stares, lifts on her toes just slightly to shake off the nerves. "Good thing I can offer more than a straw."
Meredith wasn't where she expected her to be. Burke wasn't where she expected him to be.
She wonders, absently, how Hannah is holding up, given she's the one buying them all time.
Time for Burke and Dylan to look over the x-rays, for Mari to regurgitate what she's learned, to shield herself in an expertise that isn't her own. It stops Burke from shutting her out, as he does with Meredith and Cristina. Keeps her in the room. He's pragmatic, even in disapproval.
Mari can feel their eyes behind her, looking through the blinds. Impotently jealous, as always.
She doesn't care, given the optimism-sinking x-rays.
Hannah's hand, if it's live, is what's keeping this thing steady. Curled around the nose, horizontal to the floor. She remembers Meredith's feeling this morning, and wonders at the premonition. If it's clouding Mari's choices now.
"…homemade which means it's unstable and very unreliable. It could be a dud but we have no way of knowing. Add to the fact you've gotta surgeon in the OR next door refusing to leave-"
Burke draws back in surprise. He hadn't known. Mari keeps her whole body forward.
"-and a nervous paramedic's hand in the body cavity, keeping this thing the closest it gets to stable."
Burke's cool breaks, eyes unconsciously moving back to the window, where Meredith and Cristina once were.
"It's…definitely as bad as it seems."
"That's what I'm saying," Dylan drawls, eyes still studying the x-ray, not noticing Burke, or her, sudden inattention.
"Hey, somebody help! Help here!"
"I think – I think I'm going to take it out now."
Mari comes in behind Dylan, behind Burke. Almost prevented as both men widen their stance at the scene, as Dylan raises his arms, in a universal sign for calm, for peace. He shifts, keeping her back.
Cristina has her head down, focused on steadily pumping the ambu bag the anesthesiologist is supposed to operate.
Hannah had been here alone, with Mr. Carlson's silent, exposed body bleeding out, and a bomb under her fingertips.
'It's definitely as bad as it seems.'
"Ok we're almost to the finish line. You can do this." Meredith tries to encourage, so close to Hannah's side she could brush against her.
"No, no. No, I just want to take it out and be done with it," Hannah pleads, head shaking back and forth rapidly.
"Hannah," Burke tries, just as conscious of how precarious Hannah moving will be. "It won't be much longer. Remember you're keeping him from bleeding out."
"No!" Hannah gasps, gritting the words out like she's shivering, panting without air. "I am 22 years old! I should not even be in here! This is some kind of mistake!"
"She's panicking," Dylan murmurs for Burke's ear, alert and serious. "We need to clear the room."
Meredith's green eyes beseech. "I'm not leaving." Her hand lays over Hannah's, hovering over her wrist, trying to anchor, just trying. She's seen Mari pull patients out of shock, out of despair. Convince them to calm, to be brave, to focus wholly on her.
Meredith imitation falls short. Her voice is rougher, inscrutable somehow. She's never inspired the same connection.
Right now, she needs Mari to be Mari.
"Grey, let's move!" Burke orders.
"I'm not leaving her."
"Get everyone out now Dr. Burke."
"She's my intern. I am responsible for her."
"No, it's gotta come out! It needs to come out!"
"Yang, go with Dylan!"
Cristina turns her eyes, but not enough to glance away from Hannah and Meredith. "You go with Dylan."
There's a pause. Minuscule in the cacophony, in the spiral, that gives Mari her opportunity.
"Hannah," Mari says, soft and ringing.
Burke has pulled Cristina aside. Said something profound enough, vulnerable enough, to get her to leave both Meredith and him behind.
Mari wonders what it was. What would you want to hear from someone you loved, in a moment like this.
She glances into Dylan's almost-familiar face as he pats down the velcro, secures the bomb vest around her torso with tense disapproval.
"You both don't need to be here," Dylan murmurs.
Mari almost says…what exactly.
A joke. A rebuttal. A confession?
Meredith frowns, eyes shiny as sea glass, voice quiet and hoarse. "I told you I'm not leaving."
His lips purse.
"You're sisters."
Meredith gives him such a look of 'what's your point' that his frown deepens.
Mari looks between the two. It's, easier, to focus on this, instead of figuring out what she should -
What she wants. Expunged or reciprocated, or said for the universe to hear.
"He's a navy man." That observation gifts her a quick, surprised glance. She isn't going to tell him what gave it away, other than her familiarity. Let her keep some magic for herself. "They're taught not to put siblings on the same ship."
The ambu bag compresses. Slow and repetitive, like a metronome.
She stops herself from getting lost in it, unable to voice the rest.
In case it sinks.
"Who was with you, when you woke up?"
Mari blinks.
She isn't sure what Dr. Wyatt is asking at first, and then doesn't understand why it matters.
In her story, the bomb hadn't gone off yet.
"I…don't remember. Maybe the night nurse."
"I hear my sister has a pen-is," she sings, finding Meredith sitting under the windows of the front entrance.
"Yeah," she jokes blandly, in her tired, gravelly voice, the cooler sitting in its own seat beside her. "It's a conversation starter."
Mari wonders at the mood, given the circumstances is at least a little funny.
She sits on the wooden armrest, across from her, her feet settling on the cushion. "What's up?"
Meredith is silent for a long moment, looking at her hands.
"She was wearing my shoes."
Mari sets her chin on her fist, nods like that makes sense.
"Allison." Meredith pauses again, tangled in something. "She just moved here, and she doesn't have…anyone. No one who knows her knows what happened to her. If something happened to," she pauses, twisting her mouth "would that be us? Would anyone know to call?"
"Well…." She shifts, sitting up straighter, rubbing her palms against her knees. "Who is your emergency contact?"
Meredith slumps. "It was…Mom. And then…I, changed it to Sadie. You remember her?"
"The friend who was in love with you? Yeah."
Meredith whips her blue-green eyes at her. "She wasn't in love with me."
"Yeah, okay," she placates, not buying it. Honestly, she thought that was what their falling out was about, that she wanted more than Meredith wanted to give.
Meredith crosses her arms, blowing the hair out of her eyes. It's still pulled back in a lazy bun, but she noticed Meredith has updated her conditioner to something that gives it a nicer shine. In increments, her sister is growing out of her rebellion of trying not to look anything like their mother. Letting go of the affected sloppy, uncaring, irreverence. Finally.
"So, who's yours?" Meredith returns, grumpily.
Mari thinks over the many people who have once fitted that space. Unlike Meredith, she hasn't had Mom as her emergency contact since she was eight.
"Wilson." She realizes she might need to clarify, as Meredith never seemed to pay attention when she mentioned Princeton, had always checked out. "He's the Head of Oncology at Princeton-Plainsboro."
Meredith frowns, looking at her lax hands in her lap, turning them to pick at her nails.
Mari hesitates, not sure of the reason for the withdraw, wondering if Meredith wasn't hinting at something. If she only wanted to be sad in sympathy.
She wets her lips, prepares to go out on the limb.
I'll change it to you?
How about we change it to each other?
Cristina knocks on the glass, and Meredith sits up, so patently relieved, at the interruption.
Mari's words die on her tongue.
Derek is camped out outside Allison's ICU room. Has been, off and on, since her surgery, when the 72-hour window to see if she'll wake up, started ticking down.
She saw him briefly to see how the surgery went, but otherwise stayed focused on the ER until her shift was over.
Derek isn't like Meredith, who she can check up on in a spare five minutes as they split off in separate directions. She's used to short bursts with Meredith. Derek makes her never want to leave. It's dangerous.
"Tea?" she offers, finding him exactly where she expected.
He blinks, bleary with sleepiness, as if she's a sudden mirage. He brushes his fingers against hers as he takes the steaming cup, looking at her burgundy blouse, and her fitted jeans, and realizing that she's delayed leaving to visit him. His face softens. "Thank you," he says quietly, as if not to disturb Allison.
"Any change?"
He shakes his head. The heart monitor quietly beeps.
"Do you remember me telling you I had four sisters?"
She nods, wry at the reminder that she had left shortly after, chasing after her own.
"They're…" he pauses, thinking of his sisters "a hassle. Very girly. Tons of kids. Loud. Annoying the way sisters can be." She raises her brow at that. He smiles slightly. "I'd want them here. If I was in a coma. They'd be here. Having no one?" He shakes his head. "I can't imagine that."
She bites at the corner of her lip, looking at Allison's still figure. Fighting for her life without anyone from that life aware. Here.
If she knows she' s alone, if she sleeps through it much longer…
This is why Derek stays.
"It's not always a bad thing, being alone. You get used to it. It's just on the really bad days when you realize what's missing."
He watches her softly.
She takes a small step closer, until her thighs are against the arm of his chair. She can hear the machines. Hear his quiet breaths as she slides her hand along his shoulder, feather-light, before sliding her fingertips, warm from holding the tea, up the back of his neck, into his curls. He shivers, his head tilting back, his eyes closed as she cards through his curls the way she's always wanted someone to do for her. To sooth.
"Do you wish you were still in New York?" she murmurs, wondering if he, like Meredith, sees something similar in Allison. If he feels a sympathetic loneliness.
Is that all this is, recognizing someone else unanchored? Is that why meeting him feels like -
He blinks his eyes open, staring up at the ceiling, looks like he's considering the question deeply.
"No," he murmurs softly.
She leans down, slow to take in the curve of his throat, the colors in his eyes, his long, dark lashes. His fingertips slide against the curve of her cheek as she brushes the tip of his long nose to hers. He waits for her, waits for her, with shared breath, as she delicately presses her lips to his.
It's different from kissing him in the rain, held against him.
It's soft, and resonating.
She sees Meredith, loitering at the nurses' desk in the lobby, smack in Mari's path from Wyatt's office to the elevator she needs to take down.
It's the kind of coincidence she didn't use to believe in. In practicality, Meredith probably doesn't know where she was coming from, where she was going, or what she does any given day when she's not crossing paths with surgery.
Meredith fits here. In the sunlight of the atrium, in her white lab coat, in her new confidence.
She fits in surgery.
She doesn't look like a nervous intern anymore. Doesn't look like she's effected by the bombing.
Mari feels lackluster, and washed out, and sloppily patched in comparison.
Meredith glances up at Mari intends to walk past, in her new, careful stride, surprised and non-plussed that Mari doesn't take the opportunity to talk to her first, to slide up to her at the desk.
She doesn't look Mari's form up and down, hoodie, to jeans, to trainers, with any of the disapproval Mari had bestowed when Meredith has dressed down for work.
Maybe Meredith hadn't been rebelling all this time. Maybe she never really cared about her appearance's utility. Maybe Mari had always been the problem. Reading in to something that wasn't there.
"Did you know the average time to prep OR is 42 minutes?" Meredith broaches.
Mari briefly eyes the elevators, debating if she should play along. She assumes this non-sequitur is a complaint. Surgery, surgery, surgery. "Wow. You guys must chomp at the bit."
Meredith's brows wrinkle. She isn't used to Mari being sardonic and bland.
"There...are less surgeries," she excuses. "OR Five only started running yesterday."
Mari blinks, stunned at the casual reference. That's how Meredith wants to bring that up? To complain about less surgeries? As if the blown out OR was an annoyance?
Mari is too wrung out for casualness. She bites her cheek, whirling on her toes as she chooses the safest course in leaving.
Meredith swivels the screen so abruptly, it squeaks. "What do you think?"
She hates that she looks, that even hackles raised, even in hurt and disdain, she can't help the impulse.
"I guess he can christen OR Five," she declares pithily. "Be the first death since the remodel."
Meredith's lips press into a tight line. She holds Mari back with a tight grip around her elbow as she twists around to grab a pile of charts, and drops them in front of Mari with a clatter.
"Cristina, George, Izzie, Alex, and I tried to find the most interesting cases for you. Sooo, we can talk about that. Or" she smiles her freaked-out smile, her pitch rising "we could talk about my visit with Mom this morning that you bailed on, where she told me about the Affair in the on-call room with someone who wasn't our father." At Mari's wide eyes Meredith bobbles her head, vindicated in seeing Mari as stunned as she was. "Yeah. So take your pick. Cases, or you get to hear the details I had to listen to."
It's not the affair part that has Mari frozen, though admittedly, what, and what, and what?
It's Meredith saying, 'our father'.
What?
Meredith grimaces. "And I really don't want to talk about Mom purring."
The words trip out of her mouth. She can't even begin to unravel the second. "So, your, resection?"
In her hands, is a pile of patient charts, hand selected for her perusal.
All of them surgical, of course.
She's worked surgical cases before but that's usually to diagnose or to give her patient the best odds. To fight, to steal, to slip in the ones who wouldn't have a chance otherwise.
She isn't surprised, that the interns stayed in their own wheelhouse. That they didn't know where else to venture. She imagines half the hospital is still foreign to them.
She knows the lionitis is Alex's, if for nothing else then the post-it note he slipped in saying, 'Come on, you know this is awesome'.
It's the clear winner, in terms of rarity, but, for one, it's Derek's, and two, his diagnosis is pretty in line with his disease. Unless the MRI is clear of tumors, it's a no-go.
She gets through the stack, peeling off Alex's post-it so Bailey or Derek won't accidentally see it.
Meredith brings up her case again. The guy with the 25% chance.
He's scheduled for OR Five.
Their OR.
Her spiteful remark held a ring of truth.
Meredith glances at her as Mari looks over the chart, gauging her reaction, wanting, for some reason, for Mari to connect with this one too.
"He said he's going to roll the dice. Better than a slow death." Meredith likes repeating patient's phrases when she finds them profound, wants to debate them like an adopted new philosophy she can slip into the lens of her own life.
Mari hums in the back of her throat.
"So, what do you think?"
Was she in the Twilight Zone?
"Are you…asking me to tag along on a surgical case?"
Meredith pursed her lips, realizing she's been reluctant in the past. "Yeah. I mean, maybe we could…pull for Chuck or…whatever." She wrinkles her nose by the end, hearing her own lackluster pitch.
"Or whatever," she repeats, absently.
Burke, very carefully, tells them they need to move to another OR, because this one has the main oxygen line running beneath it.
'Do you think we're cursed?' Meredith murmurs.
"Good luck Chuck, huh?" she says, searching Meredith's eyes.
Meredith blows out her breath. "Yeah, I don't buy into the whole," she waves her hand flippantly "karma crap like Izzie, but what the hell. Good luck Chuck."
Mari wraps her arms around her waist, her palm running up and down her bandaged ribs.
"Alright," she agrees slowly, the words like molasses on her tongue. "Sure?"
"I'll go tell Burke."
And Meredith surprised her again, in doing just that. In trying, instead of chalking a half-hearted offer as something out of her hands.
She's too stunned to ask how she thinks Burke is going to allow this.
Her, Meredith, and Burke again.
She sucks on her lip, looking over the case with a closer eye, adjusting her reading glasses.
Is this a good idea, or a really bad idea?
Someone comes up behind her left shoulder, slightly startling her when his finger comes around her to point at the screen. "Invasive non-small cell with a history of COPD?" he drawls. She turns her head, and then tilts her neck up, to look at him. He waits before shrugging broad shoulders incased in butter-smooth black leather. A black sheep among a sea of white lab coats. "Guys pretty much a goner, huh?"
She raises her brows. "Well, he doesn't have a homemade bomb in his chest, so he's doing better than the last guy."
He cants his head, trying to figure out if she's kidding. "You get a lot of that around here? In Seattle?"
'I wasn't planning on liking it here. I'm genetically engineered to dislike everywhere, except Manhattan.'
She tries to shake off the memory, the voice. Derek had said it self-deprecatingly. This man is the stereotype of East Coast snobbery.
"You'd be surprised," she muses, feeling her wounds acutely.
"What else would surprise me?" he returns, insinuating.
"Rejection?" She guesses, moving down the desk to grab Meredith's chart.
He chuckles, languorously following as he passes behind her, coming to her other side in a slow, smooth spin. "If you prefer," he drawls, with rolling cadence. "We could talk about the weather instead."
She tilts her head, just waiting for the line.
"Like getting out the rain. Spending a day curled up in bed."
She's startled enough to laugh. She hadn't expected a proposition that blatant.
He grins with feline satisfaction.
Casanova, she thinks, looking at him anew, more fully. She sees it in the way he moves, the way he speaks, the way he focuses. Draw their ear, their eye, their imagination. Thrive on attention, on chase.
He thinks he's half-won, by getting a positive reaction, preens with it.
She's challenged to switch the roles he thinks they're playing, instead of just laughing. Had he been more a gentleman and less a cad, she would have been more flustered.
She lets her fingertips brush the line of her clavicle. His eyes drop, heated and lazy, as they watch her nails lightly run along the lacy top of her white camisole, following an invisible line down her sternum as she breaths deep and steadily. Beneath her breasts she pinches the zipper to her hoodie, lets the teeth drag to her belly bottom. "It was the red hoodie, wasn't it?" she murmurs.
He blinks, lifting his blue eyes back to her own, to see her sparkling amusement. He's not all lust then. Prefers the attention more than the aesthetic.
"A bullseye in a sea of white," she muses, knowing any other woman, positioned well enough, would have elicited an approach.
She's making fun of his appraising eye finding her, landing on the brightest color. Part Cheshire, part tomcat, and part whatever deficiency makes cats crazy for a laser pointer.
He leans closer, voice lowering conspiratorially. "Is that wrong?" She reads off of his lips.
She smiles closed mouth, pulling the zipper up noisily. "As long as you don't mistake me for a target, I think we're fine."
He straightens slightly, getting the message, and still grinning.
That, she appreciates.
She's curious, if he's a new hire, what devastating effect he'll have on the female staff.
"Mari Grey," she offers, holding out her hand.
His hand almost grazes hers when he's punched in the face.
"What the hell," she startles, hissing then, at the pull to her ribs. Her palm curls against her side, rubbing at the ache as she looks between the stranger laid out on the linoleum and Derek, hissing in tandem with her, as he shakes out his hand.
"That was Mark," he explains, like he's pointing out someone on the street instead of taking a running leap to punch them square in the face. He slides back, so close their shoulders nearly brush, as he turns his gaze to her, his glare softening instantly, as blue eyes glance over her tight brow and her retreating hand. He stops shaking out his fingers, stops Ahhing at the split knuckles and asks, in a way that makes her ache, "are you okay?"
She clenches her jaw, nods without looking at him, angry at herself for the prickling in the back of her eyes.
"Mari –"
"What the hell is going on here?!" Chief Webber shouts.
Derek sighs.
"I'd offer my hand…" she tells the man with his elbows on his spread, bent knees, in no hurry to rise to his feet.
Derek, Addison, and Chief Webber have already sequestered themselves in the conference room. Anyone who is supposed to help has scattered.
"…but it didn't work out the last time, so why chance it?"
Mark looks up at her in disbelief.
"Derek and I always did have the same taste in women," he says, after wordlessly following her into the trauma room.
She looks away from the laceration, brows quirking. "Sounds like that would cause some problems, for best friends." She widens her eyes. "Oh, wait."
"Funny," he deadpans. "You're the dirty mistress, right? I wasn't sure if it was naughty nurse, or lusty intern?" he gives her another once over, tone still conversational, but with inflection that shows he's digging. "The details were pretty sparse after hot young blonde."
"Med student actually," she says earnestly, withdrawing the needle of lidocaine. Addison had said something similar. Obviously the rumors were vague enough to only focus on the tawdry. Hot, young, blonde. She's heard worse from people who knew her better. "That's why they won't let me have a lab coat. This is the closest I've been to a real patient."
His shoulders bunch, drawing his face back instinctively.
"Well, that answers that question." If he determined to peel her layers with his gaze, she can return the favor.
"What question?" He asks slowly, relaxing again as he realizes she was kidding, eyes on her ease with the instruments.
"What kind of medicine you were in."
"Did Derek tell you?" he wonders.
She gestures for him to move his head back as she cleans the cut. He follows, eyes trying to track her out of the corner of his eye.
She affects a confused, casualness to weaken the poison, watching for the involuntary muscles in his face.
"What makes you think he talked about you at all?"
Minutely, his face tightens. There and smoothed out. Forcing himself to relax.
'I'm not just going to see that my wife is cheating on me. I'm going to see that my wife is cheating on me with Mark, who happened to be my best friend.
It's just so…pedestrian, common, and dirty, and cruel. Mostly just cruel.'
There was a reason, beyond the initial pain, that he stayed down that long.
Guilt. Repentance.
Something more complicated than cruelty.
"You know, my four-hundred dollar an hour shrink says that behind this rugged, and confident exterior, I'm self-destructive and self-loathing to an almost pathological degree."
She pauses, briefly thinking of the irony that she's coming from a psych eval, and wondering what Wyatt would label her with. "You'd have to be, blowing four-hundred dollars an hour, for such lazy diagnosis."
He snorts. She compensates the shifting of his face, as she paints the cut with iodine. "Yeah? What do you think I got, Doc?" There's wry resignation to his humor, like he knows the verdict will be unflattering.
Wide open again, for someone to get in another jab.
She sets the Q-tip down carefully. "Something curable."
He clears his throat. "Yeah?"
She gathers up the waste, leaving only the towel on his shoulder behind.
He watches her, able to turn now with the cut prepped, his eyes thoughtful.
"You know, it's funny. Derek walks in on my naked with his wife actually in the throes, and he just…turns and walks away." He lowers his voice. "But he sees me so much as talking to you, and I'm on the ground bleeding. Interesting, don't you think?"
Her shoulders tighten. She pulls out the suture kit by rote.
You're wrong.
It sits on her tongue, bitter and hard to swallow.
If she says it, she'll hear it's truth.
Derek was trying, with Addison. Trying to bandage his own marriage and keep the precious sanctuary he found here. To have both.
He didn't want to go back to New York, but New York brought itself to him.
Delayed reaction.
The simplest answer. Horses, not zebras.
She breathes shallowly, turning around with new, distant composure. In her passing gaze, she can see the nurse's desk outside the trauma room where Bailey's full roster of interns are watching. "Do you want me to call a surgeon?"
He frowns, quickly scanning her face, conscious at the shift in mood. "What?"
She pinches her badge at her belt, flashing the laminated plastic. "Non-surgical resident. Not sure what the porn-star alliteration is for that, but I figured a plastics guy wouldn't want a non-surgeon to suture his face, so…" she nods to the phone on the wall.
He blinks, expression dropping. "I can suture my own face," he declares, gesturing for the kit. "Bring it here."
She nods, accepting the breach in procedure without batting an eye.
"You're good with your hands you know," he murmurs, looking away from the mirror she holds steady without complaint, to meet her eyes. There's a hesitation there, like he isn't sure how badly he misstepped. "For a non-surgeon."
She quirks a smile when it isn't followed by an insinuation, hears instead its apology.
She wasn't offended, just...bruised. And, tit for tat, as they both tried for reactions.
"Did you suture Derek's face when he ran into a tree on the motorcycle?" She wonders, watching the neat, expert stitches.
"He told you about that?" he asks, taken back and reminiscent.
"Noo," she draws out, dramatizing it, ignoring that hearing about Derek's life will sting "but maybe you can."
His eyes crinkle.
"Not my finest work," he admits, needing only a raised, attentive brow, to start. "We were second-year med students..."