I was rewatching S2 a while back, and then there was a lightbulb moment: What has Thatcher been doing all this time?
So I decided to play around with the factors (Thatcher and incomprehensible emotional cruelty) and, well, Give Me the Colors Grey was born. Each chapter is between 300 to 1000 words (so far, as of Part 4) and I've been told it's cathartic and also enraging, so I hope you... enjoy?
Part 1
Thatcher Grey has three daughters.
The first, the eldest, is descended from surgical royalty, the heir apparent of the supreme Ellis Grey. Ellis had been his wife, his first wife, and sometimes he felt like she was always destined to end up being just his first wife even when they were still married.
Ellis had come upon surgery like its long-lost child, mastering the trade secrets easily and refusing to quit. Soon she had surgery in the palm of her hand, running the show.
Their marriage became a tangled web of whispered promises and hidden glances. She would want to stay late at the hospital, he would wager their child and their marriage in return for her appearance at dinner, just once. She would play the selfless doctor, operating for the good of the world; she didn't see him saving any lives, so couldn't he make dinner?
Neither of them was good enough for the other.
Not one for defeat, Ellis took their child from Seattle and Thatcher knew he had lost that round.
Where Ellis was hard planes and narrow angles, the crease of a brow and the flick of a wrist, Susan was warm and cheerful, an overflowing heart and a comforting smile.
She gave him twice what Ellis had. Twice the attention, twice the affection, twice as many daughters. Their household had twice as much love and twice as many occupants, and as the few years he spent with Ellis grew further away, it seemed like his first daughter had been…
Not a figment of his imagination, exactly, but he was beginning to doubt his memory. Had they really been happy? Had she captured his heart so fully? Surely such a thing was impossible; this edition came complete with two more daughters who evoked love that so eclipsed his previous emotions. (After all, if she had so much of his heart, how could there be enough left so that he can love these girls like he does?
No, is the only logical answer. He must be wrong.)
And his first daughter receded into the recesses of his mind, preserved as a very small child in the back of his memory.
'Preserved' is nearly literal. She is a memory drowned in alcohol.
He had been doing fine, once Molly was born, and their life was simple, putt-putt-putting along easily in a gentle, suburban rhythm. Everybody was home for dinner each night and nobody followed a tiny gadget to the other side of the city on Christmas Day. Everything was simple and normal, with his two children and motherly wife. He went to PTA meetings, he was in the first row of their plays—with his wife by his side.
And then more than two decades later, she appears on his doorstep.
And everything is shot to hell.
Her round face has grown into an echo of Ellis, her hair longer and her eyes glinting. She stands on his step with her coat wrapped around her, a bag over one shoulder.
She has driven to his house. She has come from work.
These are things Thatcher knows.
And this girl—his little girl—is… a woman now. Honey-blonde. Ambitious. Willowy. Surgeon.
A woman living a continuation of Ellis's life.
She stares at him accusatorily, asking questions she knows the answers to, and waiting for him to fail.
Waiting for him to fail her.
These Grey women—two of them—waited for him to fail them. And Thatcher is torn between the space/time continuum as he feels himself slipping back to the man he used to be.
The man he used to be takes over, looking into her eyes and seeing the child she had been, warm and light in his arms.
(But then Ellis would take her, out of his arms and into the nanny's, and drive to the hospital. He would go to work and convince himself that there was nothing wrong with this situation.)
But now, all these years later, it is much too late for that. It is too late to change what has happened. She had grown up following Ellis's footsteps; an independent, strong, blonde surgeon, as if he can't have one without reinstating both into his life.
He has nothing left to offer her, his absence speaking enough for both his guilt and his wishes.
She turns from his porch with shattered hope in her eyes.
He stands there for a moment, watching the woman his little girl had become, watching as she strode down his front path to where she has parked down the street. A few seconds later he hears the low rumble of an engine—good heavens, she's old enough to drive—and as he stands in the dark, in the damp Seattle weather, he watches her taillights disappear.
Her appearance brings more hurt, more apology. I don't need anything from you.
Well, that's the kicker, isn't it?
Ellis had been self-sufficient, and he was her tagalong babysitter. She had never needed anything from him.
And now neither does her daughter.
Her car lights fade away down the street and he's blinking after her, remembering a time before she was poisoned against him by her traitorous mother. Back when he was still weak and spineless, the lone caretaker of their child but prohibited from actually raising her.
So he does the only thing he can.
He pretends everything that happened… hasn't. Goes inside, where there are three women who need him, where there is a Scrabble game in play and two more daughters—a brunette and a redhead, looking nothing like the surgeons that have stolen his name—waiting for him to take his turn, and he counts himself thankful for second chances.
He suspects he does not deserve one.