I had an idea on playing around with the timeline when I decided to return to this story. I compared story maps, trimmed the idea down to be less convoluted, and viola! It helps me stay out of the episode-by-episode formula and gives a peek at what's to come. The original chapter two and three isn't scraped, the scenes are just dispersed out.
This is dealing with episode 2x16 It's the End of the World. The time jump is a 4 parter, with 2x18 Yesterday. Also, there's a few lines, as Mari is remembering them, from 1x9 Who's Zoomin Who? Some lines taken from the episodes.
Chapter also has cameos from NCIS. If you're entirely unfamiliar, the show started around the same time as Grey's and House, which is why I like Mari interacting in the three universes. Just know that Mari worked with the medical examiner, Ducky, while she was in med school, learning forensics, enjoying the investigative nature, and conducting autopsies. Gibbs is the lead investigator, a cowboy like House (someone who isn't a team player), Abby was/is a good quirky friend and forensic expert, and Tony is…hmmm.
chapter two: entry wound
Chief Webber
He has a blank board and a deserted surgical floor. A hospital of empty rooms and empty halls.
The Board wants the staff furloughed. He's tied to insurance, and lawyers, and HR. Stopped by nurses who want their demands from the strike - the strike of a week ago, honored, lest he forget.
He's rebuilding. Very few out of the complaining staff even know what that - what this - looks like. An OR wrecked. Smoke damage. His surgical floor under clamoring construction. No ER, his patients scattered to Presbyterian and Mercy West.
The only bright spot is his marriage isn't suffering under this weight. He hasn't had to argue, in moments he didn't have, with Adele.
He expected, Delegate Richard. Come home Richard.
The hospital can stand without you.
When his hospital was falling apart, he leaned on her, and Adele had saved him from spiraling.
It meant something to her, that she was his pillar. Reminded them of the way their marriage used to be, how it should be. She hums soothingly, instead of prompting, advises him to be thankful, stay grounded, hold perspective. Like, Bailey being a mother. Her husband living. Her baby healthy.
Bailey can stand his relieved, smiling, hovering, for all of two minutes before tucking little William George Bailey Jones back into her arms. "And have you visited any other bedsides?" she asks pointedly.
He didn't expect that to come from Bailey. Bailey who repeatedly insists she was responsible for only one Grey.
He wanted to focus on this, this relief, this bright spot in the wreckage, not...
"I'm a - a busy man, Dr. Bailey." And he draws on the excuse, what the Chief of a busy metropolitan hospital is supposed to say. "Learning to delegate."
"Dr. Wyatt, would you be willing to conduct psych evaluations?"
Dr. Wyatt is nonplussed at the lack of pleasantries, the question entire. Requests and additional work is the danger of falling in the Chief's eye line.
"For personnel involved in the bombing?" She supposes.
"Just...two. Meredith and Mari Grey."
The only censure she gives, too subtle for the Chief to catch on, is letting others off the elevator before her, waiting for them to carry ahead.
The Chief giving those names, will be enough gossip fodder as it is. Validating part of the rumors, that a Dr. Grey was there when it exploded, had stayed when others evacuated.
"Dr. Webber," she pauses, considers the scope of his request, why he chose to frame it as evaluations when they weren't, as far as she knew, mandatory. "In your opinion, how do you think both Dr. Greys will approach that evaluation?"
Dr. Webber hesitates. "Meredith will be…reserved."
She waits, but he does not elaborate on the other.
"And Mari Grey?"
"You've probably heard some rumors…"
He expects, or hopes, for her to fill in the blanks, his defense falling flat.
She notes Dr. Webber is too used to surgeons. Posturing, and challenges, and interruptions. Pushing the envelope, trying to run the ship. He isn't used to trailing off, not having another personality to battle.
And he's not used to blurring the lines here, with a staff that keeps to their boundaries, who's patient in pursuit.
Dr. Wyatt employs a different scalpel, even and calm, and wondering why Dr. Webber has a more than professional attachment to the Grey sisters, but is only open in acknowledging one of them.
"Dr. Webber, which Dr. Grey was the one who put their hand on the bomb?"
Richard felt very different things, for the two Grey sisters. He shouldn't, but he does.
He had completely missed Mari Grey.
Twenty-six years he kept himself severed from Ellis.
Richard. Let's do it. Leave your wife and I'll leave my husband, and we'll be so gloriously happy. Richard this is the time.
He remembers the fever in her eyes, being the youngest recipient, the only resident to ever be nominated for a Harper Avery. She was more beautiful, and more passionate, and more present than she's ever been in her life. She had the world spinning beneath her feet, and joy crowding her throat, and the certainty that Queens must feel, when they're newly crowned.
She had asked before, for him to leave Adele, had promised to leave Thatcher as easily, as dismissively, as brushing lint off her clothes. This time she didn't ask, she envisioned it.
But he didn't see the same thing she did. He didn't see a life of victory. He saw a spotlight directed solely at her. He pictured a life of a thousand cuts.
It wasn't duty, that made him stay with Adele. It wasn't love or the lack.
It was pride.
Repentance came when he published in different journals, stopped himself from aiming for the same awards at the same times, when he stayed out of the same conferences, the same cities as Ellis. When he bought her book and read it in piecemeal, in a quiet cafe, so he wouldn't bring it home. Ellis stayed in a far peripheral, a shadow more than an image. An echo.
He knew when she left the U.N. He knew when she joined Mayo. He tallied her accomplishments, not as her partner, not as the man waiting in the wings, but as someone faceless in the audience. Or perhaps, standing even further back, looking up at the marquee.
What he misses in all that, is that Ellis had another daughter. Ellis had Meredith. Ellis got divorced. Ellis never re-married. He didn't look deeper into her life because Ellis's life was surgery, was medicine.
Meredith lingered, as a regret, as a ghost, a child he could have provided for, could have given his care when she had so little in her life. Her choosing Seattle Grace is a chance, an opportunity, not peek at what could have been, but to be something substantial now. A mentor. A teacher.
With Mari…
She strode towards him, uncertainty in her brow, but challenge in her eyes. Eyes that saw, and moved, and deduced as quickly as Ellis.
I don't want surgery.
He realizes then, why, when he learned of her, he avoided her file, her picture, her date of birth.
Ellis had no reason to keep this from him.
Mari Grey was Ellis's daughter.
Seemingly, hers alone.
"Before we get started, are you comfortable seeing me, knowing I'm the psychiatrist seeing Meredith?"
Mari tilts her head, adopting the thoughtful mien of the psychiatrist sitting across from her. She expects the question. Standard, rhetorical, testing.
Why Dr. Wyatt, she wonders. Why would a psychiatrist, who didn't often delve into clinical psychology, take on new patients? Fulfill a banal eval? Someone who publishes in abnormal psychology, and neurology, and noticeably, never, in trauma care. Her career is too prolific for chance, too specialized to be bothered with a bureaucratic totem pole. She doesn't need to pay her dues with the mundane.
This is practically moonlighting. The touch of hand chosen, hand assigned.
Is it because she's an intelligent powerhouse, and the Grey sisters were less likely to run roughshod on her? Or, to delve into the Freud of it all, Chief Webber pushed his weight, and picked a woman who looked like their mother?
Did he realize he was doing it? Was he socially blind enough to think it was a favor?
It's not like either Grey would readily embrace opening up to Mommy dearest's knockoff clone.
"Isn't it better that way? Like a prisoner's dilemma. Meredith and I keeping each other honest."
Dr. Wyatt brow furrows, just slightly. "I don't consider this an interrogation."
Mari looks at Dr. Wyatt through her rarely worn black frames, fiddling with them to give the good doc a challenging stare. Imaging what could have happened, had her eyes been open, her contacts meeting the heat of the blast makes her…reluctant to put them in. "But isn't 'and how do you feel about that' an interrogative statement?"
Dr. Wyatt doesn't rise to the bait. "Do you find therapy cliched? Too predictable?"
Mari's lips twitch. She reclines, minutely, to see if she can relax against the cushion. If her ribs will allow. "Do you find it boring, knowing you're going to listen to the same story twice?"
Dr. Wyatt doesn't move her pen against her yellow legal pad, but her fingers change grip, as if she's noted something.
"Should you both care to share it with me, I don't think your stories will align that closely."
Mari's mischief recedes, a change in tide. "And why is that?"
"Because you could have had nearly the same experience and processed it very differently," she observes somberly.
Well, that one hit.
Mari doesn't mean to show her attentiveness, but casual and nonchalance has always been a mask that needs to be held up with both hands. She falters, and it falls.
It took years and an Alzheimer's diagnosis, for Mari to understand that was the source of all of her and Meredith's problems.
But she didn't know how to solve it.
Would it be easier if she pretended to hate their childhood? Indulge Meredith's angst?
So it had it's sharp edges. That didn't mean it should be dismissed, discarded, completely and wholly and blithely resented.
How did Wyatt see it that quickly, that easily, with one session with Meredith and five minutes with her when everyone else expected them to act the same, react the same?
"Did Meredith say anything -" but she stops herself, shields her interest, her need to peek at Wyatt's notes. She changes course. "Or did she sit in silence?"
Dr. Wyatt doesn't answer.
Typical.
"Four sessions, right? That's not nearly enough time to get her to stop freezing you out." Mari quirks her eyebrows. "You should say something, at the end of the next appointment, some assessment that will bother her. Let her stew. She'll either need to correct you or demand to know what you meant."
Because she knew Meredith could sit in silence for four hours, staring someone down, easily. Better to provoke her. Better if Mari can get someone else to do the provoking.
It would be boring if Dr. Wyatt gathered nothing.
"Is it the same for me?" she continues, mindful of the silence. "I wasn't sure if that was mandatory, or your assessment."
"Would you have preferred more, or less?"
Have preferred. So, it's already determined.
Mari puckers her mouth. "She is older. She's had more time to collect her trauma."
"You were hurt."
Mari doesn't shift her back, gingerly, against the cushions. Doesn't move her hands on top of the cushion. Doesn't scratch or touch her bandages. She can ignore a leading statement, without feeling the itch to pick it up.
They're getting right into the explosion. Forget the development years, the past six months. No lead-up.
"Is the tinnitus still bothering you?"
"I've been medically cleared," she says very evenly.
Dr. Wyatt's face doesn't move. "I'm glad to hear that. I heard you experienced hearing loss."
"It passed."
The silence, where Dr. Wyatt doesn't say anything, where her mouth doesn't form any telegaphed words, is ringing.
In her head, Mari is playing the bittersweet Die Moldau, and wondering what Bedrich Smetana would have thought of his work, had he been able to hear it.
"Would you like to tell me what happened?"
Meredith was lying spread eagle across her bed with the covers thrown off. George and Izzie whisper from her open door, looking in like they're wondering why the creature in the zoo isn't doing anything.
They tap on the glass, sotto-voice as they say heyyyy Meredith...want some coffee Meredith...uh, what's going on Mere...?
Mari gets back from the farmers market, and George is there to take the groceries from her hand, Izzie to take her rain jacket off her shoulders, and both herald her up the stairs because 'something is wrong with Meredith.'
Mari sees Meredith languishing and turns to her roommates at their complete overreaction.
"Remember how Cousin Hilda would call when Mom was taking a new post, and tell us which route to take?" Meredith muses, voice especially raspy like it's the first thing she's said all morning.
"Yes…" she prompts, wondering why Meredith is talking about Cousin Hilda.
"When Mom didn't listen, something always went horribly wrong, remember?"
Mari smiles to herself. She always enjoyed the 'horribly wrong' and Mom's insistence that it was a coincidence, and Cousin Hilda was ridiculous.
If someone told Ellis Grey to go left, she was more determined to go right. If Ellis Grey said don't listen to any of the stories and old wives tales, miracles, and hands of fate, while scoffing at her superstitious family, and highly superstitious colleagues, Mari and Meredith were liable to entertain it all.
"Or how Grampa Jac said Gran collapsed when Uncle Elis's plane went down?"
"I've...never heard Meredith talk about these people," Izzie whispers to George.
"Well, it's…family?" George defends lamely. They're both surprised that Mari and Meredith even have family outside of their mother.
"Should we call Cristina?" Izzie whispers.
"Or," and the only sign Meredith shows that can hear the whispering is the subtle uptick in volume "how Nain said she knew she was pregnant after conception and she would have the names stitched on their baby blankets before it was even confirmed."
"Please," Izzie murmurs.
"Meredith…" George clears his throat, shooting a chiding look to Izzie. "I didn't know you were…superstitious."
Meredith sits up on her elbows, frowning at them both, hair perhaps a little messier and more tangled from a bad night's sleep. "Everyone's superstitious about something. You know, you get...feelings."
Mari turns to raise her brows at the roommates, wondering if George will backtrack, pathologically unable to disagree with Meredith, or if Izzie will scoff, like she did with her psychic patient.
"Okay," Izzie draws out, "are you feeling like you're going to get out of bed…?"
"I thought you said you were more open-minded when the psychic fixed your cupcake recipe!" Meredith accuses.
"Yeah, a tinsy-bit more open-minded, not whatever you're doing."
"So, what's your feeling?" Mari interrupts blithely, curious at the buildup.
Izzie exhales through her nose, unsurprised Mari is going along.
Meredith sighs, elbows giving out as she flops back onto the bed. "Like…" she flounders for words, stops.
The seconds tick by, and Izzie can't help herself. "Like we're not going to make it to work on time?"
Mari glances at her watch, and the fact that everyone else is in pajamas. "Maybe you should start getting ready then?" she says sarcastically.
Izzie takes the hint (because a free bathroom in this house is a luxury), says finneee, and heads for the bathroom, while George dithers.
"No Cristina?" George checks.
Mari looks at Meredith, waiting for her verdict. It feels like, with Meredith talking about their family, their preternatural feelings, that she wants to talk to Mari about this, but…
She's realistic.
She waits for her cue to leave, wondering how Cristina will approach this maudlinness. Kick Meredith out of bed, dunk her in cold water? Yell. Bombard. Laugh. Dance?
She doubts any of it will have the same result, through her hands. With Mari it's a mess of inconsistencies, of further retreats. Sisterly, then strangers, and back again.
"No Cristina," Meredith determines, sounding faintly unsure.
George nods, "okay, I'll…" He points his thumb, moves to softly close the door behind him.
Mari's brows furrow, peeking over inquisitively.
"What feeling?" she wonders how serious it is, how peculiar, to keep it between them.
Meredith's blue-green eyes blink up at the ceiling.
"Like I'm going to die."
"Dr. Hudson was overseeing the ER," Mari starts there, and not before. "So that meant he was no-where to be found, and the surgical interns, particularly Bailey's interns, since she was on bedrest for the past two weeks, were a nightmare, given first dibs to any trauma patients."
She pulls the cushion in tighter to her side. "A man came in with a paramedic attached. Large sucking chest wound. The other paramedic was berating her for sticking her hand inside the patient's chest as they were rushed into trauma room one. The patient's wife was blood splattered, screaming her head off. Cristina ran off with the preliminaries, to find Burke, to get him, and her, on the surgery. Meredith was listening for breath sounds. Alex was left to check out the wife.
"You'd think he'd grumble, but do you remember when the Amtrak from Vancouver to Seattle derailed? There was a woman with her friend who was getting stitched up, and she was on the phone with everyone she knew, telling them what happened, gabbing away, right? When she finally stopped, after hours of being there, people were probably thankful that there was less noise. That they didn't have to hear the same conversation over and over again. They hadn't realized she was bleeding internally, until her phone started ringing and she didn't answer it."
"Were you there?" Dr. Wyatt asks.
"No," she shakes her head, realizing, why talk about a derailment when Dr. Wyatt is only here for an explosion. She only meant to show the scope.
Maybe, without that patient, without that derailment, Alex wouldn't have taken this patient as seriously, would have written her off, pushed her off to a nurse.
Maybe, without Meredith telling her her feeling, Mari wouldn't have acted the way she did. "I was wadding through the wreckage then."
"Ma'am. Ma'am. Mrs. Carlson. Are you injured?"
Alex's attempt at being professional is warring hard on his patience.
"Photo Hobbit to Disco on Wheels?" she murmurs at his shoulder, looking over the screaming woman with vacant, shock-y eyes. For a least a second, it relieves some of his tension.
"New winner, maybe," he grumbles back.
"What does the scale signify?"
"Just something we started, working in the ER together. The Photo Hobbit was this guy who was doing a clay animation of the Hobbit book. One of the lights exploded. Luckily when he looked up, he was wearing goggles, but he had at least ten lacerations in his face and hands, one piece 72 by 28 millimeters embedded in his cheek. He was calm. Drove himself. Walked in, sat in the waiting room. He said it was 'quite painful' as he was swallowing blood." She laughs at the absurbity. "Disco on Wheels was this guy in roller-skates sobbing that he had been murdered, because he tripped and slightly skinned his knee. So...scale of 1 to 10. The eerily calm and serious verses the hysterically trivial."
And Mrs. Carlson had been neither.
"You wanna work your magic, help calm her down?"
She looks over the blood-spatter, trying to envision what happened. None of it looks like the wife anyway.
"No thanks," she shrugs, sharing an amused look with Nurse Tyler, hiding her grin as Alex's exasperation is rerouted to the patient.
"I need you to try and calm down. Mrs. Carlson-"
She screams and screams and screams.
"Dr. Grey," Olivia calls her, blithely ignoring the volume. "The patient in bed six is ready for x-ray."
"Can you hear me? Can you hear me?" Alex starts to shout.
"Thanks," she takes the chart from Olivia when Alex gives a battle cry, right in the woman's face.
She stops screaming, face drawing up like a startled meerkat. Alex nods, with only a second to believe this is going to go well for him before the woman presses her face into his chest and starts sobbing.
"You know how to examine someone in shock?" she checks before she leaves.
"Yeah, I got it," he makes a face, arms reluctantly patting the woman's back.
There's a kind of stillness that comes, when you're used to sound. A reason sailors and healers hold to their superstitions, that they look up, in quiet.
She's pulling up the chart to the patient in bed two, when she glances over at Alex's patient. Still a little wide-eyed, grumbling under her breath, cross-legged in a bed, outfitted in a hospital gown.
Alex is handling off the clothes to Tyler, and the woman is coming out of it, sparked by the sudden arrival of a man in an outfit he might have scrounged up in a surplus store, shuffling in, defensively cowed, in a way that speaks of worry and guilt.
"I can't believe I touched it with my bare hands like an idiot," her patient tells her, wincing as she examines him.
Mrs. Carlson's quiet mumbling turns into enraged shouting,
"The girl of the ambulance put her hand inside of him! That's how he's doing!"
"Well, you've got second degree burns instead of third or fourth, so at least you were smart enough to drop it," she says to her patient, writing down the % TBSA on his chart. She's mostly ignoring the interplay in her peripheral, but it's easier to not look at it than not hear it.
"We don't play. We re-enact."
"You play! You put on your costumes and build your stupid toys and you play!"
She asks Olivia for dressing and verifies the patient doesn't have any allergies before she prescribes the antibiotics.
"Exactly what happened?" Alex interjects the wife's berating.
"You wanna know what happened? What happened is my husband and his moron best-friend –"
"It feels numb," the patient looks down at the cream penetrating his burns, the tension starting to recede at the sensation.
"Numb is good," she declares.
"Decided to build some kind of big gun!"
"It's an exact replica of the finest allied tank weapon of World War Two. The M9A1 bazooka."
Mari's chair rolls back before she gets her feet to stop.
"Were you using live ammunition?" she interrupts, voice coming out of nowhere to the people caught in their loud drama.
Her eyes are on the costume wearer, and Alex, who has dawning suspicion tightening his shoulders as he too turns to the friend.
She tries to remember the patient's chest, but he already had an occlusive dressing by then, was being prepped for the OR. Before that, wide, white, hairy, bloody. No scraps of shrapnel.
The blood-splatter, created with force. The sucking chest wound. The entry point…
No burns.
"They tried to shoot the stupid thing like the mor-ons they are! And when it doesn't work my idiot husband stands in front of the thing to see what went wrong. That's when the stupid toy works."
"Whoa, whoa, whoa. He shot himself with a bazooka?"
Even with the wife's pointed agreement, Alex can't help but repeat himself, each word with a different emphasis, disbelieving. "He shot himself with a bazooka?"
Mari is heading to the phone on the wall.
"Like I said, morons! The pair of them!"
"Was there an explosion?"
"What?"
Alex enunciates loudly, "Was there an explosion?"
"No. Why?"
Alex takes off running.
"Gibbs." He picks up on the second ring, erringly reliable like no one else.
"There's live unexploded ammunition in a chest cavity in our OR, being held steady by a greenhorn paramedic who had tried to stop the bleeding by putting her hand in his chest." She doesn't know how else to start but to rattle off the facts, tucked under the stairwell, staring at the OR board. "The guy tried to recreate a M9A1 bazooka. Tell me you know someone or can find someone who's an expert in defusing World War Two ammunition because I – I doubt whoever they send out here will."
He doesn't have jurisdiction, she knows that. And she knows what she should say, that her sister is in that OR. She can't get the words out.
"I'll do what I can Mari."
She sits the re-enactor in the conference room, pulls up the satellite TV, and sees the team she used to be a part of.
Gibbs. Tony. Ducky behind his shoulder. There are two agents she doesn't recognize. McGee the MIT grad that made Tony quietly improve his computer skills to make the yawning gap less distinct, and Kate, who Abby especially likes.
'It's nice to have another girl on the team again.'
She ignores the pang, and probes the re-enactor to start reciting the specifications on his gun, of his bomb, quivering under the impact of Gibbs glare, coming to the realization that creating this thing, homemade, has made this very hard to extract or to anticipate.
He shifts, uncomfortable in his costume, in his dress-up, eroding under the professional disdain of those he tried to imitate.
Ducky, as is his wont, tries to fill the silence with anecdotes. His attempt at assurance that maybe the bomb won't explode, of course, turning into...
"…That's when they discovered that the cost of ensuring every bomb was perfect was enormous and time-consuming, and realized the occasional dud would still be capable of great psychological damage. As you can imagine, seeing an unexploded shell right outside your trench, and even as a boy, you know, there was still a great deal of concern with the bombs that didn't detonate during the Blitz. We had –"
Tony comes up and pats Ducky's arm. "I think Mari is quite aware, Ducky."
Mari's eyes are on the conference room window, on the hustle picking up outside. Her beeper has yet to warn her of a Code Black, but it's coming.
Alex had made it to the OR in time. She had warned the Chief. Had commandeered the conference room before he realized it's where he would need to be.
Ducky remarks that, unfortunately, all the surgeons who operated in WW2, who might have seen this shell in a chest cavity, are likely dead. Sixty years was a long time, for a surgeon's eyes and skill to live on.
"Will they attempt it, to remove the bomb?" Kate questions.
Ducky considers it, logistically.
Mari knows they will. She knows, also, that Meredith will be one of the ones who won't leave. Knows without knowing.
"Gibbs, not to interrupt, but this is a bit outside of NCIS jurisdiction. When the bomb squad arrives, no matter who you get to share their expertise, all they need to do on their end is walk away and ignore us." Kate interjects.
"Then I'll put a boot in their ass."
"...which would sound more threatening…if we weren't on the other side of the country…"
"Do you doubt my ability to inspire fear, Agent Todd?"
Tony jumps in, either to smooth feathers or redirect the heat. Loyalty disguised under a charming smile, a learned cavalierness to fool the best of them. It makes Mari ache to remember misdirection and shouldered defense, a team that counted her as their own.
"Definitely not, Gibbs. I think what Kate meant was..."
Meredith looks calm, for only being twenty yards from the OR door, still in blast radius.
"How's the paramedic?" Mari asks, catching her breath.
"Hannah. She's probably going out of her mind." Meredith answers ruefully, still prepped for the OR, swishy with the long paper robe.
Mari breathes deep, tries to center after running full tilt, and realizes, latently, that isn't what they should have said.
It's as if nothing is different, nothing is changed. No relief, no concern, no anger.
She searches for something to say, draws back something familiar, their connection before the fraying, a memory.
"Remember that game we played as children…who could be still the longest?"
Meredith's face twitches. They usually played that game in the morgue when they snuck up on the pathologists. "I remember I usually won."
"I guess it's like that game," Mari holds her hand out, like she's holding it still, in a chest cavity. She wonders if Hannah's fingers are numb. If numb is better.
A team comes out of the stairwell, in khaki pants and matching navy-blue polos. Mari had only just beat them, climbing the stairs two at a time, as she fitted a scrub cap to her hair. It wouldn't fool anyone on the surgical floor, but a bomb squad might not see the difference.
She can't tell if the lack of vests mean they aren't taking this seriously yet, or if it was a show of confidence, as they went through the lobby. Artifice to hide what's under the surface.
"Dylan Young," the leader introduces, eyes sharp and surveying. The cast of his features, his slightly curly dark hair shoots a pang through her. He's not Derek, but he looks like him. "Are you the surgical team?"
"Yes," Mari answers before Meredith can, feeling her sister's quick glance.
When Dylan Young asks if the rest of the floor has been evacuated, Mari corrects Meredith's yes, knows the name on the OR board by heart.
"No," she murmurs. "OR Two hasn't."
They both swing to her.
"Who didn't leave?" Meredith asks, eyes narrowing.
"We've got people over here!" one of the team calls out.
"Hey, back up!" Cristina's angry voice barks down the hall.
Meredith immediately swivels, keeping pace with the bomb squad leader.
Mari follows slowly. By the time she turns, the door to the OR is swinging shut before her.
Cristina is saying "oh lucky," that Meredith got the bomb in a body cavity. "All I got is Bailey's husband's open brain."
Bailey's husband's open brain.
It's a fantasy, to... to think he would for anyone. But for Bailey's husband?
He salvaged where others watched give way to destruction. Tried where others gave up.
'It's a beautiful night to save lives.'
Meredith and Cristina shift closer to each other, in tune, comfortable like they aren't taking any of this seriously.
She's left behind. Too far, too slow, to see in.
The gap wide, for all its a few steps.
"Did you have a feeling, that the bomb would go off?" Dr. Wyatt asks her.
"A feeling?" she asks, mutely. Mari glances at the clock, sees that her time has run out.
Mari. I –
He was looking at her like a wave was about to crash, yank them into an undertow and he knew he wouldn't be able to hold on.
Something in her responds to that look, sinks. Tastes the salt that will come with that wave. She falls back on her heels, mouth still soft from an almost kiss.
Mari, he repeated her name like a prayer. I'm so sorry.
And you must be the woman screwing my -
She stares at Dr. Wyatt blankly.
Did she have a feeling that the bomb would go off?
...Didn't they always?
Notes: Nain is a Welsh name for grandma.
OR Two was the one Derek was in in the bomb episode. Dylan Young had quite the passing resemblance to Derek.