Title: A Tale Of Two Cities
Authors: Sara and Lizzie
Rating: T for language, sex, you know.
Disclaimer: We happen to own our personal anatomies, not Grey's. Or Patrick Dempsey's. Sadly.
Summary: Another shot at Post Prom. It's going to be a little silly. It will be our version of what happens post prom, and then jump a few months in the future when uh, some bicoastal high jinx ensue. So we'll start right after the prom.
Author's Note: Thoughts that go in first person inside a characters head are in italics. For those interested in more about us (Sara and Lizzie), we hail from New York City, and attend the University Of Pennsylvania in Philly. Our parents encouraged us to a) attend an Ivy League and b) get out of the city for a few years, and UPenn was the only one that wasnt in some cold, New England town. So that clears that up.
ALSO, many a reviewer was asking for McSteamy. We had originally planned to bring him in later, but we decided to give you guys what you asked for. So, here you are.
The reviews for all of our fics have been amazing. We love you all. Keep reviewing!
"You've been such a positive influence on my mental frame." -Motion City Soundtrack
Addison bit her lip. Why is he calling me? Why now? So the phone call had been Mark. It didn't mean anything. He was three thousand miles and a world away. She was in Seattle. Things were going well with Derek. So he left the trailer to clear his head.
He was smiling at her and talking to her, and everything was going to be just fine. He loves you. He's your husband. It had to be fine. Mark sounded drunk. He had probably just gotten the boot from another Park Avenue trophy wife and drunk dialed her.
I will not give Mark a second thought. I won't.
She ordered one more drink. Trauma patient. She would just see about that.
"Saved by the trauma guy." Meredith said as she and Derek strode into the hospital. Derek smiled at her. A full on, cocky McDreamy smile. He leaned in and whispered to her, so she could feel his breath on her cheek.
"I needed some saving. The bathroom at Joe's isn't the best place to take you against the wall." She stopped walking and raised her eyebrows.
"Dr. Shepherd. If I didn't know any better, I'd think you were trying to seduce me."
"Is it working?"
It was her turn to lean in close to him. He could smell her shampoo, her lavender conditioner, her perfume, her lip gloss. It was intoxicating. "Absolutely." She told him.
She pulled away from him, locking eyes with Bailey, whose expression seemed to flitter back and forth between irate and bemused. "Grey, prep Shepherd's OR, okay?"
She nodded, a small smile gracing her delicate features, exchanged a private look with Derek, then headed for the surgical floor. Bailey crossed her arms over her chest and stared down Dr. Shepherd.
"Planning on taking her right here in the lobby, Doc?" She asked, her voice dripping with sarcasm.
Derek smiled and walked over to her. "My charm doesn't work on you." He said.
"No, your so called charm does not work on me, Shepherd. But it clearly works on my intern." She glanced down at his hands. "And you're clearly still married." She said, looking at his wedding ring. He slipped it off and put it in his pocket.
"Miranda, she's…. she's Meredith Grey. And she's got faith in me. In me." He smiled with a far away look on his face. Bailey shot him a look of disgust.
"I don't care if she's nominating you for a Nobel Prize. You have a patient with head trauma. OR three, and I swear to God, if I find you copping feels during surgery…."
Derek smiled. "Quite the selective memory you've got Dr. Bailey. I'm your boss, if you'll recall." She walked away shaking her head.
"Hospital is full of freaking crazy people." She muttered.
Derek breezed into the scrub in room and washed his hands. He held them out to Meredith who got to work pulling his gloves on. She stopped at his second hand. It looked different somehow.
"Problem, Dr. Grey?" he asked. She didn't even look at his face, because she could hear the smile in his voice.
"You're missing something." She said, working too keep her tone light.
"Twelve days, eight hours and four minutes." He said. "I figured it wouldn't hurt to see the hand without the ring." He smiled with adoration as her face melted into the same sweet look he had seen at the bar.
Addison sat in the gallery, and paged Dr. Yang, whom she knew was on call. She looked down to see her husband and his intern setting up the OR. They were fully scrubbed in, and it looked like they were just waiting for the patient to finish getting prepped. Addison's jaw set.
Since when did Derek prep his own OR for surgery? What the hell was going on here? She watched in sick fascination as Meredith gazed at him, her doe eyes shining. For God's sake, her own husband was staring at her with a gooey eyed adoration that made her feel nauseous.
But they weren't sleeping together. They weren't doing anything wrong. She could not just charge in there and make a scene because they were looking at each other.
"You paged?" she heard from behind her. Yang walked into the gallery and sat down tow chairs away from Addison and looked. "You brought me to a gallery to watch Meredith prep the OR?"
She squinted and looked down again. "Is that Shepherd? God, since when do famous neurosurgeons prep their own operating tables?" Addison looked at her pointedly, and Cristina realized that she had just articulated the redhead's thoughts.
"So you paged?" she asked again.
"How are the charts coming?"
"Finished."
Addison raised her eyebrows, impressed. She's was efficient. Going to be a great doctor. She looked down again. So is Meredith. She turned back to the intern assigned to her. "Check the babies still in intensive care. Then get some sleep."
Cristina nodded. "Look, I can't like bond with you or anything, cause you kind of ruined my best friend's life. But, just so you know, obsessing isn't going to help."
Addison shook her head as the intern disappeared. She looked down into the gallery again, to see the patient being wheeled in on a stretcher. She watched as they moved him onto the operating table, and did a double take and felt her heart sink.
The patient, covered in dirt, bruises, scratches and blood, with a chunk of plastic sticking out of his head, was none other than her former knight in not so shining armor, Mark Sloan.
Meredith's breath caught in her throat when she caught a glimpse of the face attached to the body. Scratched and bloody, it was none other than the perfectly sculpted face of Mark. And he had what looked like a piece of windshield sticking out of his forehead. She looked at Derek, who was just staring.
"That's Mark." He said, his tone hushed.
Meredith put a protective hand on his arm. "Derek, are you…?"
"He's clotting in the forebrain doctor." The head scrub nurse said. "Aside from the obvious."
"We need to operate now." Derek said to himself, more than anyone else. "God, what is he doing here?"
"Derek?" Meredith asked, throwing the rule of the OR out the window. Several of the scrub nurses raised their eyebrows. He stared at Mark, blinking. "Derek." She said, her tone commanding this time. It snapped him to attention and he cut into Mark's head.
Meredith was just feeling like everything was going to be okay, when she saw Derek freezing up. Maybe it was fear, because he'd wished for this to happen and he didn't want to kill Mark. Maybe he didn't want to operate because of what the man on the table had done.
She didn't wait for the answer. She simply closed her hand over his instrument, and he stepped back, and mumbled instructions to her.
Cristina burst back into the gallery. "I heard Shepherd was removing a hunk of windshield from some dude's head." She said. She saw the look on Addison's face and looked down into the OR. "Isn't that….?"
"Yes." Addison said quietly.
"And Meredith is doing the surgery!" Cristina exclaimed suddenly. "What? Oh, this is great. Bambi gets to do triple bypasses with my boyfriend and Meredith is taking windshields out of foreheads."
Addison lifted her head from her hands. "Dr. Yang, since your current sole purpose at this hospital is to do what I tell you, so please, just shut up."
Meredith lowered her hands from Mark's head and looked at the scrub nurses. "Close him up." She said. She followed Derek out of the OR. They took off their bloodied scrub sheets in silence, and it was only outside in the deserted corridor that he looked at her.
"Thank you." He said.
She smiled tentatively at him. "I should be thanking you." She said. "Are you okay?"
"I don't know. I just, I saw him, and I couldn't…" he swallowed hard and looked at her. "When I found him and Addison, I wanted something like this to happen, but God, when I saw him bleeding in my OR…."
She closed a hand over his. "I get it." She told him gently. "You did well, Meredith. Really, really well."
She laughed. "I had a great teacher."
"You could have a future with neuro."
"Don't you mean in neuro?"
Blue lightning pierced grey steel as they stared at each other. "In neuro." He corrected softly. "With me." She squeezed his hand in response before releasing it. Together, they started walking down the hallway.