The following evening, after work, Derek bursts into the house, causing Meredith to jump up from her spot on the couch where she had been sitting with Bella. The dog runs to greet Derek as Meredith braces herself on the cushions, heart pounding so hard she's afraid she might pass out.
"Sorry, it's just me." He says, moving to the kitchen, oblivious to her distress. His arms are full of brown paper bags. Meredith nods, giving herself a minute to calm down before entering the kitchen slowly.
"Is this all for tonight?" Her eyes widen when she looks at the counter, where he's unpacked everything he carried in.
"Don't underestimate how much the surgeons at Seattle Grace can drink." He replies, raising an eyebrow. On the counter sit a few six-packs of beer, as well as bottles of scotch, tequila, and whiskey. "I already had the scotch."
"Single-malt scotch, I remember." She smirks. He pushes the unopened bottle of tequila towards her.
"You and Yang are some of the only people I know who drink tequila."
She scoffs. "You only know because I've told you. You've never actually seen me drink it."
"Yang downs it like water."
"Where do you think she learned to do that?" Meredith gives him a pointed look, mischief in her eyes.
"Colonel Dr. Meredith Grey drinks tequila like it's water?" Derek pulls back with feigned shock. "I can't believe it."
"Oh, just you wait." She bites her lip and leans against the counter, ignoring the twinge in her stomach. She hasn't taken any painkillers in over a week because of alcohol from the ball, and it's showing. "What kind of games are we playing? I haven't seen any board games anywhere here. Not even a deck of cards."
The gleam in Derek's eye concerns her and he pulls out a stack of video games, causing her to burst out laughing.
She stops after a minute, wrapping an arm around her stomach and trying to keep the pain off her face. She recovers quickly though, before Derek can say anything. She covers with a teasing smile, "How old are you again?"
"Don't underestimate the competitiveness of video games either."
She nods, humming disbelievingly.
A few hours of preparation later, the door swings open, and Meredith jumps again. She's used to knocking, and always knowing who's on the other side, as they announce themself and wait for permission to enter.
Meredith sighs, frustrated at her inability to feel safe and stay calm. It's extremely embarrassing how her body refuses to relax.
"It's Mark." Derek touches her shoulder gently before getting up to greet his best friend.
"Fair warning, I'm already a little tipsy!" Mark announces loudly as he walks into the living room. He and Derek shake hands and embrace quickly before the plastic surgeon collapses onto the couch next to Meredith.
"How's it going, GI Jane?" He asks Meredith next to him, and she can already smell the liquor on his breath.
"Great until you walked in, Mark." She pats his shoulder lightly, listening as Mark demands that Derek get the game set up.
She's been around both Mark Sloan and Derek Shepherd enough to understand the dynamic of their relationship, so she doesn't feel the need to play polite hostess.
Not long after, Cristina and Alex walk in together with a bottle of tequila.
"You can put that on the counter," Derek says as they walk in. Cristina smirks at him, bringing the glass to her lips and taking multiple gulps.
"Nope."
Both Cristina and Alex greet Meredith warmly. Derek chuckles at Cristina's antics as she sits on the couch near Meredith. Callie Torres soon shows up on the arm of Arizona Robbins, followed by Jackson Avery.
"Is this everyone?" Meredith asks Derek, the two of them alone in the kitchen. Meredith slowly drinks a beer while Derek nurses his scotch, the loud voices of their friends coming from the living room.
"One more person."
As if on cue, there's a knock on the door and Derek opens it to reveal a tall blonde.
"Die?" Meredith greets her friend instantly, smiling and bringing her in for a hug. She glances between Derek and Teddy, confusion swirling in her gaze.
"I figured you'd want one of your friends here too. And we'll all be working together soon enough anyway, it's a good opportunity to get to know each other." Derek shrugs, kissing Meredith's cheek before leaving the two women alone.
"How are you feeling?" Teddy asks, glancing towards Meredith's abdomen subconsciously.
"I'm okay. I can move around pretty well now, but it still hurts. It's getting better."
Teddy nods, and Meredith gets her a beer and the two veterans squish into an armchair together.
"What is this game?" Meredith frowns, studying the screen of the TV.
"Great question." Cristina snorts.
"Grand Theft Auto!" Alex replies, not taking his eyes off the split-screen graphics either.
Cristina is perched on the arm of the couch near Meredith, a bottle of tequila in hand. Derek, Mark, and Alex all sit on the couch, each with a game controller. Callie is on the floor with Arizona, both already drinking their second beers with a game controller and Jackson is in the last open armchair across the room from Meredith.
"Karev, you need to learn how to drive!" Callie yells from the floor, leading to a heated argument between multiple people about the game.
"Mark, are you picking up a hooker?" Arizona laughs, eyes on the screen.
"Manwhore!" Cristina says through a cough.
"It boosts your health!" The plastic surgeon defends himself, though his dirty smirk says it all.
The doorbell rings and Derek hands his controller to Jackson with strict orders not to ruin his progress.
"Pizza!" He announces a few minutes later, dropping five boxes onto the coffee table with a thud.
"Oh my god!" Meredith breaks into a huge, shocked smile, Teddy's expression mirroring her own. "How long has it been?"
"God, probably like, three years now," Teddy replies, pulling an entire box towards the two of them.
"Wait, what?" Cristina frowns at the Marines.
Meredith grabs two slices and hands one to Teddy, both melting as the flavor fills their mouths. Oh, how they have missed the taste of this greasy, delicious food.
"It's been so long since we've had pizza," Meredith says through a mouth full of cheese.
"We lived off of pizza in our residency, what the hell did you eat overseas?" Cristina is taken aback.
"Um, a lot of beef stew and spaghetti. Rice, corn, potatoes, peanut butter and jelly." Teddy shrugs. "This is incredible."
"This is the best thing I've had in forever," Meredith mumbles, practically shoving the pizza into her mouth. The veterans get a few shocked looks, as the other surgeons live off of the take-out foods that Teddy and Meredith have been deprived of for so long.
But things soon heat up again, conversation and banter flowing easily as the controllers are passed around between everyone. Each person drinks more, causing an escalation in arguments and shouting at each other about the game.
"Another hooker!" Jackson pumps his fists, and Mark gives him a high five.
"Is this what you do in your free time? Video games and booze?" Meredith asks no one in particular.
Derek shrugs. "We're pretty much college kids with better-paying jobs."
"And besides having unprotected sex in the back of stolen vehicles, the point of this game is...?"
"Blow shit up and run from the cops." Alex's words come off as more of a question, and it appears that no one knows exactly what they're doing.
"You try." Derek offers Meredith the controller as the surgeons begin howling with alcohol-induced laughter.
"I'm content to watch."
"C'mon, if you can drive a tank you can drive a virtual car!" Cristina butts in.
"Tanks? What the hell do you think happens over there?" Meredith laughs but takes the controller, turning her attention to the screen. "This is not going to end well." She grumbles to herself as she hits the accelerator, running straight off a bridge. "Oh, fuck."
After her turn, Meredith stays relatively quiet, listening to grown men and women lose their shit over a game on the TV is quite entertaining.
"This is boring, what else you got, Shep?" Mark tosses his controller on the table and leans back into the couch after two hours of the action-adventure driving game. At this point, almost everyone is hammered.
"Um," Derek shifts through the stack of games he brought home earlier, "Call of Duty?"
"Hell yeah!"
Meredith and Teddy exchange a quick look, but both remain quiet as the game starts.
Far beyond tipsy, Mark has the volume on full blast, meaning everyone is shouting to hear each other. Multiple roast battles and trash talk are being thrown around the room.
"Karev, you idiot! Have you never played Call of Duty before?" Jackson shouts, fingers moving furiously over his controller.
"Well excuse me, I didn't grow up with the time or money to play video games all day like some of us!" The peds surgeon shouts back, tossing his controller after his character dies towards Cristina who gladly takes it, also beyond tipsy, and begins to play.
"What's the point of this game, exactly?" Teddy asks.
"Not sure, I'm just shooting things," Callie replies through laughter, ramming her car on the screen straight into a building, then getting locked in the middle of a gunfight with Arizona.
"Hey, Grey. What did it feel like?" Mark slurs, handing his controller off to Derek.
"What?" Meredith studies him. She and Teddy have mad much less to drink than everyone else, so Meredith is barely intoxicated.
"Getting blown up. Did you feel the pain or just-"
"Mark, you shouldn't..." Derek cuts his friend off, a pregnant silence falling over the room despite the sounds coming from the TV.
"Um," she shifts uncomfortably, debating her answer, "I was in the middle of a surgery. I don't really, uh, remember..."
"It was terrifying." Teddy cuts in softly. "I felt the power of the blast, I flew probably ten feet, got up and saw her on the ground about a hundred yards away from where I left her. Somehow I managed to escape with only a few bruises and scrapes."
"Everyone thought I was a goner." Meredith licks her lips and swallows thickly. "Teddy saved my life."
There's a long moment of silence, everyone's attention momentarily diverted from the game.
"What do you even do in a situation like that?" Arizona chimes in hesitantly, looking at Teddy.
"Stay calm. After years of doing it, it's surprisingly easy enough to focus. I did damage control before she was evacuated. Didn't hear for a week if she had even lived or not." Teddy replies.
"Are you okay to be talking about this?" Derek lowers his voice to Meredith. He's torn between telling the others to shut it and wanting to hear more. This is the most Meredith and Teddy have said about that day.
"It's fine." Meredith glances back at the screen. "We're just both happy to be back in a city that rains."
"And in a hospital with a DaVinci machine." Teddy agrees as the surgeons return to their game.
"Yeah, we definitely didn't have one of those in our tents." Meredith nods, thinking back to all the times where more advanced medical technologies would have saved lives.
"I'll stick to a real hospital. You don't do piggyback transplants in a sandbox. Trauma surgeons just slap things together." Cristina shrugs, very drunk.
"Slap things together? Have you ever pulled a piece of shrapnel the size of your fingernail out from the inside of the vena cava without severing it?" Teddy challenges.
"Or seen someone that's stepped on a landmine and lost both of their legs? You have less than thirty seconds to stop the bleeding or they're dead." Meredith continues, sharing a knowing look with Teddy. "Oh, once I removed four broken ribs and repaired the lungs of a guy that was twenty feet from a grenade. He survived."
"Don't forget the time you performed an emergency craniotomy in a bunker in the middle of a deadly sandstorm with no trained help." Teddy cocks an eyebrow.
"If you have a prettier way of doing those, let us know." Meredith snorts.
Cristina flushes slightly. "Well, no, but if I was given the opportunity I would kick ass."
"How about in one-hundred-twenty degree heat with helicopters flying overhead, while inside of a tent that smells like shit and sand falling out of crevices that you didn't even know you had."
The doctors are stunned, and Teddy and Meredith clink glasses.
"Why do you do it? You make it sound so horrible." Callie asks.
"Sometimes, yes, it is horrible. But it's also incredible. The people you save are true heroes, men and women who are sacrificing themselves for their country. The feeling of sending them home alive instead of dead is..." Teddy trails off, her eyes unfocused.
"You can literally see the difference you're making as you work. So many lives depend on the surgeons over there, and I like to think we have a little something to do with innocent Americans being able to sleep safely in their beds at night, even if we weren't literally fighting on the front lines." Meredith continues.
"Thank you," Someone murmurs, and the words are chorused around. The two veterans smile graciously until a loud siren on the TV causes everyone's attention to return to the game.
Meredith has had two beers, and a loud explosion from the game causes her to flinch. Though no one else catches it, Teddy, sitting right next to her notices.
"I'm hungry, can you help me find something in the kitchen? You have popcorn or chips?" She asks Meredith.
The sound is blasting, filling the room with not only the laughter and yelling of the surgeons but gunfire and alarms from the game.
Meredith nods and gets up, leaving the room with Teddy and entering the kitchen, where the noises are muffled.
"Uh, popcorn, right?" Her voice wavers slightly as she opens the cabinets for a bag and places it in the microwave and begins to clean up some of the garbage now littering the place.
"Yes." The major leans against the counter, studying Meredith's still movements. "Are you having a good time?"
"Yeah, tonight's great. It's nice to see Derek's coworkers and friends all hanging out and having fun together."
A loud bang, followed by an explosion echos through the house, making both of the Marines flinch. Meredith crouches slightly, taking shelter behind the counter as Teddy grips the edges tightly.
"Just when you thought you'd never hear that again," Meredith says humorlessly. "You okay?"
"I should be asking you the same thing." Teddy breathes as Meredith straightens up again.
"Fine." She's been caught off-guard by the bombardment of the noise. It was probably just the alcohol going to her head, but the familiar sounds made her very uncomfortable, even if it was just a video game.
Talking about their past is one thing, but neither of them are exactly keen on reliving it.
Another loud noise makes it harder for Meredith to collect her thoughts and she places a hand on either side of the sink, hanging her head and squeezing her eyes shut. She has to fight the urge to curl into a ball like she would in a bomb shelter.
Teddy glances back to the screen, unaware of Meredith following her gaze. The game is close combat, and they watch as someone launches an RPG, then turns around and blows a hole in the head of another character with an M4.
To Meredith's horror, it's Derek who raises a fist and pumps it in victory.
Meredith's heart skips in her chest, picturing the dead character as Corey Adams, the young soldier who took his own life right in front of her.
"I have to pee," Meredith says abruptly, leaving Teddy without a response and making her way to the bathroom, shutting the door behind her.
Nausea rolls as she sinks to the floor, ignoring the throbbing from her midsection, and leans against the bathtub next to the toilet. Dizziness has overcome her, making the urge to throw up stronger, so she sits in silence with her eyes closed, trying to control her breathing.