Author's Note: Thank you guys so much for the reviews on the last chapter! They were very supportive. Again, I encourage readers to leave comments and/or constructive criticism. If it's too long, too short, boring, starting to stray from the world of Grey's Anatomy, etc., don't hesitate to let me know. This is my first time writing fan fiction, so who knows what will happen!
Also, I wanted to intersperse a little medicine with the main storyline, so I apologize in advance to any disappointed readers who were expecting a lot of progress on Izzie's quest. I feel like this chapter isn't as exciting for that reason, but I hope you guys won't feel the same way. Don't worry--the next chapter will definitely have some development as far as Izzie's riddles are concerned. Anyway, enough of me rambling. Hope you like it! :)
P.S. I decided to copy off the show and make each chapter title a song title. You get a cookie if you can figure out the artists. ;)
Izzie walked to the third bed in the row of makeshift rooms that were lined up against the windowed wall of the Denny Duquette Memorial Clinic. Lying down with his head against the pillow was a young boy with tousled, chestnut-brown hair, a slightly freckled nose, and strikingly deep blue eyes. Standing next to the bed was a woman with similarly colored hair and the same barely freckled nose as the boy, but her eyes were a pretty hazel. She was staring down at the boy, and Izzie instantly assumed the woman was the boy's mother, for she had a look of concern on her face that only a mom could possess.
As Izzie approached, the woman looked up.
"Are you the doctor?" she asked pleadingly.
"Yes, hi, I'm Dr. Stevens," Izzie answered, smiling. She put the patient's chart at the foot of the bed and turned to look at the boy. "And what's your name?"
"Jared," the boy replied without looking at Izzie.
"Jared Anderson. I'm his mother, Melissa Anderson," the woman said to Izzie.
"Can we go home now? I'm fine, Mom. Nothing is wrong with me!" Jared said loudly. Izzie ignored his apparent irritation for now, but she was surprised at how he had called Mrs. Anderson "Mom." Izzie knew from reading his chart that the boy was only seven years old, and she thought that kids generally reached the double digits in age before they ceased calling their parents "Mommy" and "Daddy." Still, she managed to hide her astonishment and continue with the examination that four years of medical school and a year of training with the Nazi had taught her how to do so proficiently.
"Well, Jared, I'm sure your mom brought you in here for a pretty good reason. Can you tell me why she did?" Izzie asked. She also knew from reading Jared's chart that Melissa had brought him to the clinic for bleeding on his knee, but that simple description was never enough to make a diagnosis. Plus, she liked talking to people, and it came as no surprise that she was known around the hospital as the doctor who always "gets too involved with the patients."
Suddenly, she involuntarily conjured an image of Denny Duquette—her former fiancé whom she had unintentionally killed by cutting his LVAD wire—in her head. Izzie fought back the dull stab of pain she felt in her stomach at the thought of him and forced herself to brush it aside. Though she was certain that the heartache would never completely disappear, it had diminished enough that she managed not to cry on every occasion where she envisioned his handsome countenance in her mind. This time, she quickly began focusing all her attention on Jared and kicked Denny off her proverbial thought train, waiting for the boy's answer to her question.
A few seconds passed before he replied. "No! I'm fine! I just want to go home," Jared huffed.
"His knee is bleeding, and it won't stop," Melissa said. "I mean, it stopped, you know, for a while. But, it started again. He fell this past Friday. He was at school, playing with the other kids on the swings, and he jumped off the swing, and he landed on his knee. Well, not fully on his knee, because I guess it would be broken or something, but he hit his knee really hard, and it was on gravel, so it was scraped up pretty bad."
"Did the school nurse take care of it?" Izzie inquired, glancing at Jared, who was still refusing to look at the doctor.
"Yeah, of course. I mean, they called me and told me what had happened, but I was at work. I work at a restaurant, and I couldn't leave, and they said it wasn't that serious, that they would just clean it up and give him a big bandage and that I didn't have to pick him up or anything."
"Okay. So he was fine until this morning?"
"Well, yeah. I put a new bandage on his knee on Saturday and Sunday because they were getting really wet every time he took a bath, so I gave him new ones, and it seemed like it was healing all right, I guess. But, then, this morning, I went to give him another one and put some Neosporin on it, and I noticed that he was bleeding again, and the blood had soaked through the old bandage, and I thought it was kind of weird and that maybe he needed stitches or something, so I brought him here." As she rambled, the concerned mother's eyes deepened with worry.
"Yeah, and it's stupid, because I'm fine," Jared repeated.
"He's pretty smart, for a seven-year-old, I mean. They put him in the third grade, a year ahead, and he's always surprising the teachers at cool with how smart he is. They think he might be able to skip another grade!" Melissa exclaimed fondly.
Izzie smiled at the proud mother and then turned to Jared.
"Jared, I know you really don't want to be here, but do you mind if I just take a quick peek at your knee? I promise I'm not going to hurt you."
Jared finally turned his head to look at the physician with a look on his face that Izzie couldn't decipher.
"Fine," he answered tersely. He moved the jacket that had been covering his legs to hold it against his chest. When he did so, Izzie instantly noticed the somewhat circular blood stain the left knee of his blue jeans, about two inches in diameter.
Damn, she thought. After taking two gloves out of the box that was on top of the stand next to the bed and putting them on, she rolled up the leg of Jared's jeans past his knee, exposing a large piece of white gauze taped to it that was covering the wound. The gauze may as well have been nonexistent, however, for it was completely soaked through with blood. And he said nothing was wrong with him…
"Okay, I'm going to pull the bandage off as carefully as I can. This might hurt a little, but try and be still, all right?" Izzie politely ordered the young boy.
"Yes," Jared responded, watching the doctor closely as she began slowly pulling at the tape. He failed to hide a grimace at the deep cut that showed itself when Izzie lifted up the gauze. It was fairly ovular, about an inch and a half long, but Izzie couldn't tell if it was still bleeding freely because of the amount of already-dried blood that had hardened onto the boy's skin. She took a small white cloth off of the stand and commenced wiping the knee, and Jared continued closely examining her movements.
"Does that hurt, Jared?" Izzie questioned.
"No," Jared replied listlessly.
Izzie put a small amount of pressure on the wound, and the child yelled, "OW!" His fingers clenched onto the jacket he was holding, and Izzie felt his leg tense up in pain.
I knew he was lying, she thought. When she finished wiping off the dried blood, she inspected the cut more thoroughly and watched with interest as fresh blood began gradually reddening the skin she had just cleaned.
"Mrs. Anderson, has this ever happened before?" she asked the mother.
"No, I mean, he's gotten cut before, but never this bad. He plays around a lot, you know, but he's never fallen like that, not that hard, anyway. He gets bumps and bruises, but never anything this bad," Melissa answered.
"Jared, are you feeling dizzy at all?"
"No, I'm not. Look, can you just stitch me up so that I can go home?" The child was staring at her intensely, and Izzie had the fleeting feeling that he was gazing straight into her soul.
Oh, God. He's seven years old. I need to get over myself, she mentally chided herself.
"I'm going to stitch up your knee for you, Jared, but I want to make sure there's nothing else wrong with you before you go home. Is that okay?" Izzie felt completely silly asking him for permission, but she had been educated to make kids feel like they were in control. They were more amenable that way.
He gave her a quick nod before laying his head back onto the pillow and fixing his eyes on the ceiling, obviously not wanting to observe the ordeal.
Izzie walked to the supply closet and came back carrying a medium-sized bottle of saline and a #2-0 atraumatic needle with suture. She then took another small white cloth off the stand next to the bed and began alternating between dabbing the excess blood off the child's knee and washing it with the saline solution. Melissa had sat down in the chair that was placed against the wall and was watching Izzie in silence. After she was done cleaning the cut as best she could, annoyed that it would not stop bleeding but unable to prevent it until she finished stitching, she opened the suture package, took out the needle, and began working.
As she effortlessly started on the simple procedure, Izzie's mind began to wander to the two pieces of paper that were sitting idly in her lab coat pocket. She had forcibly pushed them out of her brain until now, wanting to return to "work mode" and not contemplate ridiculous notes that somebody was leaving for her. Still, she couldn't help but think about them now, especially when she was carrying out something as perfunctory as stitching a cut.
After she had found the second one in the gallery above O.R. Two, her pager had gone off, and she had made a beeline for the nurse's station, where her Chief Resident was waiting for her, looking more annoyed than usual.
"Dr. Stevens. Where have you been?" Dr. Bailey had asked impatiently.
"Sorry, Dr. Bailey. I was—" Izzie didn't have the chance to finish her apology before Dr. Bailey went off on one of her usual tirades that she and her fellow residents had grown so accustomed to.
"You do know that you have two of your interns running your clinic right now? Two pathetic, just-got-out-of-med-school-and-really-have-no-idea-what-they're-doing interns who think way too highly of themselves and thus make way too many mistakes? I know I didn't spend a year training you to be an idiot, so why on earth did you do something as idiotic as let two interns take over your clinic?"
"Right. Idiotic. Sorry about that, Dr. Bailey. Never going to be idiotic like that again." Izzie smiled, knowing that apologies were pretty useless with the Nazi, but she never failed to craft one anyway. She shuffled off towards the clinic and had immediately been greeted by one of the nurses at the station who proceeded to hand her the chart for the young boy whose knee she was currently stitching.
Izzie was on her third stitch, about halfway up the wound, when the message written on the second piece of paper she'd found started playing on repeat in her head.
First: Where do cows live?
Second: Where do ships live?
Put it together.
At first, she had been somewhat curious as to why the author had written three lines of non-rhyming sentences instead of another miniature poem, but then she decided that it really wasn't as important as both figuring out what this new riddle meant and who was the Joker behind them.
Izzie's problem with this one wasn't discerning the answers to the questions; rather, it was putting those answers together to form something coherent. She'd contemplated farm, barn, shed, and field as the solution to where cows live, but trying to combine any of those with something like port, harbor or dock—where ships "live"—just didn't make any sense. As far as she knew, farmport, sheddock, and barnharbor were not listed entries in the English dictionary.
"Jared? Are you asleep? Jared, wake up!"
Izzie was on her fifth stitch when she glanced up to see Melissa standing over her apparently asleep son, an expression of pure panic on her face.