Again, this episode is 2x17-2x19. Bomb episodes and Yesterday. It jumps around in segments, including snapshots of what happened before Meredith and Mari moved to Seattle, and two scenes from 1x02 The First Cut is the Deepest.

chapter three: hold fast

Mari hears what they're not saying.

That patients usually bled out, before this point. The front line knew better than to stick their hand in a chest cavity and wrap their fingers around an explosive.

There is no standard operating procedure. This is new ground, unstable beneath their feet.

Where is it in the chest cavity? Is it whole? Fragmented? Where is the paramedic holding it? Is it sensitive to temperature, to pressure, to vibration? Is it just chance, that it hasn't blown? Is the paramedic stabilizing it? How long can they wait to extract?

She envisions the hospital swelling around her. Evacuating the OR right above her. Burke, learning about the bomb. Burke needing a plan of action, to see the X-rays. Trying to keep the paramedic calm by doing it out of the room. His soothing, natural authority leaving, and the paramedic watching a full OR empty, being told to stay very still, being encompassed in silence.

Meredith – what would Meredith do?

Would she stay with the paramedic, or would she follow Burke out, needing to know the plan, not wanting to stay in the dark?

What would Derek do, right next door, with his patient's skullcap open on the table, being told to abandon them, to preserve his own life?

"Have you seen the pre-op x-rays, Dr. Grey?"

Pre-op x-rays, right next to the OR...

Her pager blares.

In that clearing, clarifying alarm, Mari receives her Code Black.

Before Seattle

She's relearning Meredith's voice. The adopted inflections picked up in boarding school. The fade to indistinct murmur, like she can't decide if she wants to be heard, if she wants to continue. Like she can't figure out how to talk to Mari at all.

Each conversation opens as a run-off, a vent of frustration, distract me, let me distract myself, guess what Mom's asking, guess what she's doing, have you noticed she's –

(Declining?)

Meredith is hoping into a cab, making sure she hasn't left anything behind, talking about what she needs to sign with the attorney, what Michigan weather is going to be like, when she trails off, confused Mari isn't running through a litany of her own last minute prep. They used to do this, every time they moved, kept up a running commentary of what they were packing, what they needed, what the other was responsible for.

'You're not coming?'

'... Why would I?'

No one had asked for her presence, for when their Mother turned her sabbatical at Mayo into a quiet resignation.

She has nothing to sign.

(Not since the NDA, not since the diagnosis was composed and locked away.

She hasn't forgiven her mother yet, for that, and of course she can't talk to Meredith about it.)

It's so typical of Meredith to assume. But, she hears that paused breath, that oh of dispirited surprise.

And it dawns on her, with a flutter that she thought she outgrew, that withered with too many disappointments, that maybe Meredith had...wanted her there.

"Seattle Grace?" She parrots. "You're applying to Seattle Grace? Didn't you want Boston?"

"Yeah, maybe," Meredith answers, noncommittally, the receiver crackling like she keeps shifting her grip. "What about you? Your residency, are you enjoying it?"

Mari doesn't even humor the appeal to a change the subject.

The date their mother chose, for her compartment, just happens to align with the end of the rental agreement on the Seattle house. So, they'll fly out, watch their mother shelter behind barricades, watch her things moved into the house for storage, and pretend to their friends they're going to see the Space Needle or something. They'll save the real clearing and bequeathment until, well, until it comes the way it's supposed to.

That was the plan.

"So, you would…live in the house?"

Meredith blows out a breath, the way she does when Mari digs in when she rather be aloof. "If I'm accepted, maybe. Or I could…move Mom's things into storage and get an apartment…sell the house. It's too big anyway, so..."

Mari feels the type of pulsing headache only family can inspire.

Meredith in Seattle? With Mom. For Mom?

But then, now she's selling the house?

Why was Meredith like this? Pretending to go along with the plan, staying quiet, and then doing her own thing?

"Sell it to whom? Uncle Rhys?"

Did Meredith need the money? What was the state of her trust fund, honestly?

"I can't sell it to family without telling them why I'm selling it," Meredith retorts. She blows out a breath again, frustrated. "Forget it. I'll - we'll, keep it. Even if it's too big, and mostly empty...it's probably better to keep it, as like an investment, or whatever."

Mari rubs between her eyes.

Of course, keep it for the investment, not the fact that the house, surprising to Mari who hardly knew about it a year ago, was built by Grampa Jac. Presented as a grand gesture of his marriage proposal. It was the family home once. Gifted to Mom at her wedding reception. It belonged to Mom because she was the oldest. Mom should have given it to one of her sisters, or her brother, when she decided to leave Seattle, but she was never the type to concede anything.

Now it was Meredith's, to accept or discard. To the oldest, again.

Somehow, Mari hadn't considered Meredith would do either. She thought it would gather dust. Stay suspended indefinitely. Stay ignored. Not given up on so quickly.

She blinks, following a train of thought even she can't believe.

"Would you stay there if - it wasn't just you?"

She doesn't want to leave Princeton, so what is she -

"- doing here?" Burke murmurs very quietly, as he sees Cristina, and Meredith, and her, with the head of the bomb squad. He focuses on Mari, and she knows it's because he can't stay objective if he looks behind her. Can't look at Meredith either, because her and Cristina are a packaged deal.

"Is she not part of your surgical team?" The bomb guy reads that erringlyquickly.

"No," Dr. Burke intones slowly. "She is not."

"A drowning man will catch at a straw?" she offers.

"I'd like to avoid grasping at straws, Dr. Grey."

"Well," she projects a smile under both of their weighing stares, lifts on her toes just slightly to shake off the nerves. "Good thing I can offer more than a straw then."

She wonders, absently, how Hannah is holding up, given she's the one buying them all time.

Time for Burke and Dylan to look over the x-rays, for Mari to regurgitate what she's learned, to shield herself in an expertise that isn't her own. It stops Burke from shutting her out, as he does with Meredith and Cristina. Keeps her in the room. He's pragmatic, even in disapproval.

Mari can feel their eyes at her back, through the blinds. She knows what they're saying to each other, because she's heard it before. Why her over them?

The x-rays...

Hannah's hand, if it's live, is what's keeping this thing steady. Curled around the nose, horizontal to the floor. She remembers Meredith's feeling this morning, and wonders at the premonition.

"…homemade which means it's unstable and very unreliable. It could be a dud but we have no way of knowing. Add to the fact you've gotta surgeon in the OR next door refusing to leave-"

Burke draws back in surprise. He hadn't known. Mari keeps forward.

"-and a nervous paramedic's hand in the body cavity, keeping this thing the closest it gets to stable."

Burke's cool breaks, eyes unconsciously moving back to the window, where Meredith and Cristina are. No, once were.

"It's…definitely as bad as it seems."

"That's what I'm saying," Dylan drawls, eyes still studying the x-ray, not noticing Burke, or her, sudden inattention.

"Hey, somebody help! Help here!"

"I think – I think I'm going to take it out now."

Mari comes in behind Dylan, behind Burke. Almost prevented as both men widen their stance at the scene, as Dylan raises his arms, in a universal sign for calm, for peace. He shifts, keeping her back, that stance protective as well.

Cristina has her head down, focused on steadily pumping the ambu bag the anesthesiologist is supposed to be operating.

Hannah had been here alone, with Mr. Carlson's silent, exposed body bleeding out, and a bomb under her fingertips.

'It's definitely as bad as it seems.'

"Ok we're almost to the finish line. You can do this." Meredith tries to encourage, filled with her own nerves, so close to Hannah's side she could brush against her.

"No, no. No, I just want to take it out and be done with it," Hannah pleads, head shaking back and forth rapidly.

"Hannah," Burke tries, very conscious of how precarious Hannah moving will be. "It won't be much longer. Remember you're keeping him from bleeding out."

"No!" Hannah gasps, gritting the words out, still trying not to move with a tremor trying to break through her skin. She's panting without air. "I am 22 years old! I should not even be in here! This is some kind of mistake!"

"She's panicking," Dylan murmurs for Burke's ear, alert and serious. "We need to clear the room."

Meredith's green eyes beseech. "I'm not leaving." Her hand lays over Hannah's, hovering over her wrist, trying to anchor, too close.

Mari tries not to move, but her heart drums. Meredith, you -

"Grey, let's move!" Burke orders.

"I'm not leaving her."

"Get everyone out now Dr. Burke."

"She's my intern. I am responsible for her."

"No, it's gotta come out! It needs to come out!"

"Yang, go with Dylan!"

Cristina turns her eyes, but not enough to glance away from Hannah and Meredith. "You go with Dylan."

There's a pause. Minuscule in the cacophony, in the spiral, that gives Mari her opportunity.

"Hannah-"

Burke has pulled Cristina aside. Said something profound enough to get her to leave both Meredith and him behind.

Mari wonders what it was. What would you need to hear in a moment like this?

She glances into Dylan's almost-familiar face as he pats down the velcro, secures the bomb vest around her torso with tense disapproval.

"You both don't need to be here," Dylan murmurs.

Mari is torn between something quippy and meaningless, like she actually belongs here, and something confessional, like the newly enlisted thrown to the front lines.

'Hey, you kinda look like that surgeon next door, who you think is a stubborn ass. Funny thing about that guy, I'm suddenly realizing I have too much to say to him, and I thought I lost my chance, but this, this is really losing, isn't it?'

Meredith frowns, eyes shiny as sea glass, voice quiet and hoarse. "I told you I'm not leaving."

His lips purse.

"You're sisters."

Meredith gives him such a look of 'what's your point?' that his frown deepens.

Mari looks between the two. It's, easier, to focus on this, instead of figuring out what she should say, wants to say, wants expunged or reciprocated, and given to the universe to hear.

"He's a navy man." That observation gifts her a quick, surprised glance. She isn't going to tell him what gave it away, other than her familiarity. Let her keep some magic for herself. "They're taught not to put siblings on the same ship."

The ambu bag compresses. Slow and repetitive, like a hiss.

She stops herself from getting lost in it, stops herself from saying the rest:

In case it sinks.

"Who was with you, when you woke up?"

Mari blinks out of her reflection, confused on where she is, and who's across from her.

When she was twelve, Dr. Friedman, the eminent psychiatrist and the man to teach her poker, told her her nearly eidetic tonal memory could have interesting effects on her psychological development. That she might be able to put herself in a state of hypnosis. That the remembered sounds might make trauma more difficult to process.

Her eyes feel dry, like she's been staring, unseeing. She swallows, as if that will tell her if she's continued to talk, or if she had stopped.

"With me?" she repeats, trying to figure out what Dr. Wyatt means.

"When you woke up, after the bomb exploded, who was with you?"

No one was with her.

Steady, and shrugging, and as easy as lying, she says, "I don't remember."

First Week at Seattle Grace

"I hear my sister has a pen-is," she sings, finding Meredith sitting under the windows of the front entrance.

"Yeah," she jokes blandly, in her tired, gravelly voice, the cooler sitting in its own seat beside her. "It's a conversation starter."

Mari wonders at the mood, given the circumstances is at least a little funny.

She sits on the wooden armrest, across from her, her feet settling on the cushion. "What's up?"

Meredith is silent for a long moment, looking at her hands.

"She was wearing my shoes. Allison." Meredith pauses again. "She just moved here, and she doesn't have…anyone. No one who knows her knows what happened to her."

So her freezing up in the ER wasn't about treating a rape victim for the first time, but about shoes. A superficial similarity.

She knows what Mom would say, the scoff drawn from memory.

'This is why you won't make it.'

Somehow, playing her mother's hypothetical, but 99% likely reaction makes Mari shake off her own criticism, which runs the pace of, wow, Meredith, you've harnessed your empathy for self-centeredness, what a surprise.

But, that's not fair, and she's really trying to be fair. Meredith has officially been a doctor for less than a month. Crazy childhood accreditation aside, she's also out of practice, being in hospitals. She left them behind, when Mari didn't. She wishes she could talk to her like a peer, that she could give meaningful advice as a once-intern. But oh, has Meredith made it abundantly clear how much she doesn't want it. How little Mari can offer, as she isn't a surgeon.

"Are those the leopard print ones you were wearing today?"

"Yeah."

"...Wow, who knew they would sell two pairs?"

Meredith glares, sliding further in her seat, and titling her head back to stare up at the ceiling.

Merde. Strike one.

Meredith is the patient. What does she want? What does Allison need?

"Who's your emergency contact?" she tries again, clasping her hands between her knees.

Meredith tilts her head back down, looks at her blankly, like the question is obvious.

"Mom. Before. I changed it to Sadie."

Mari crinkles her nose.

"Sadie Harris?"

Meredith thinks that's who should be notified first? Not family, not a family friend, not someone in the medical industry that she trusts, but her tweaker party girl best friend/maybe-girlfriend? "Isn't she passed out on a bar in Paris where you left her?"

Meredith scowls. "She's in her third year, in Miami."

Mari snorts. The fact that Meredith and Sadie both followed in their parent's footsteps after years of saying 'fuck you' and pretending not to be rich trust fund kids while they partied and backpacked across hostels in Southern Europe, is just perfect.

She remembers Sadie as a girl who jumped into bed with strangers when Meredith didn't give her attention, remembers their first meeting where she was so out of it that being within 10 meters of her was enough to give a contact high. Remembers her squishing Mari's cheeks, smirking about how Meredith had told her all about her little overachieving-Mommy's-girl little sister.

"I'll pray for her patients, if she even gets that far."

Meredith tightens her arms, face shutting down like Mari was directing that statement at her instead.

"So, who's yours?" Meredith returns, wanting to stop talking about it.

Unlike Meredith, she hasn't had Mom as her emergency contact since she was eight and sat in a hospital by herself for three days.

"Wilson." She realizes she might need to clarify, as it's not like Meredith ever came to visit. "He's the Head of Oncology at Princeton-Plainsboro."

Hers is also on the East Coast, and out of reach, but at least reliable.

Meredith frowns, looking at her lax hands in her lap, turning them to pick at her nails.

Mari thinks about it, her sister and her, and the cooler next to Meredith with a severed penis inside that Mererdith is forced to carry. Her mouth twitches.

"Sorry," she chuckles, waving her hand to try to stop it, as Meredith lifts a questioning brow. Some people look over, but the great thing about Meredith is she's never cared how she comes across in public. In that, she's never been self-conscious. Mari's never been able to get the imitation quite right.

"It's just funny, that we didn't change it to each other."

Meredith blinks, like the thought didn't occur to her either.

"Should we-" Meredith starts to say, when there's a bang! on the glass window. Meredith twists around, seeing Cristina behind her. Mari only gives her a short glance, turning back to Meredith.

But Meredith stays turned away, gesturing for Cristina to join her. Body relaxing, with a new ease, no sign of her maudlin spirits.

And Mari doesn't feel like laughing anymore.

Derek is camped out near Allison's ICU room. Has been, off and on, since her surgery, when the 72-hour window to see if she'll wake up, started ticking down.

What she knows about the case is what she saw when she came in, and what rumors floated through after three surgeries, and no signs of consciousness. She's neuro now, and the new Head of Neuro, it's been said, is surprisingly attentive.

More than one person has called him McDreamy, which made Mari's cheeks hurt from holding in the embarrassed laugh that wants to escape. It's not like she's saying it, but god, McDreamy, really?

She debates if she should seek him out, when every encounter so far as been coincidence, chance.

('Once is happenstance, twice is a coincidence, three times is...')

'I don't date doctors.'

'I'll change your mind.'

'You definitely won't.' She laughed, sensing the dangerous, dizzying pull.

He hummed, with a smile in his eyes. 'Okay, I won't date you.' And then with barely a pause. 'Change my mind.'

She's tried to talk about the patient with Meredith, and obviously misstepped. But, the Mari that Meredith knows, that Meredith has asked her to be, isn't professional, wears a facade of dismissive humor to pretend to be unbothered by rebuffs.

Can it be any worse with Derek?

Is she truly as dismissive as her mother, as caustic as Dr. House?

What is her genuine reaction, when she's not playing peacekeeper, or know-it-all, or the always-student, when she's not the daughter of Dr. Ellis Grey, the sister to the surgical intern, not fighting for a place here where it feels there isn't one?

Why does it feel like she'll find out, with Derek? Derek who makes her respond without playacting, without parroting, or mimicry. Who sparked something that feels like composition, with one kiss.

But, Derek from the bar became Derek Shepherd, the neurosurgeon, and she's hesitated, questioning how she can be both that Mari, and Dr. Mari Grey, who conducts performances.

How could he possibly like both, when they diverge so sharply?

East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.

She's not ready for deliberate action until she's sure this feeling won't disappear.

"Tea?" she offers, finding him exactly where she expected.

He blinks, bleary with sleepiness, as if she's a sudden mirage. He brushes his fingers against hers as he takes the steaming cup, looking at her street clothes, and realizing that she's delayed leaving to visit him. His face softens. "Thank you," he says quietly, as if not to disturb Allison.

"Any change?"

He shakes his head. The heart monitor quietly beeps.

"Do you remember me telling you I had four sisters?"

She nods, wry at the reminder that she had left shortly after, chasing after her own.

"They're…" he pauses, with something real and relatable, between fondness and exasperation "a hassle. Very girly. Tons of kids. Loud. Annoying the way sisters can be." She raises her brow at that. He smiles slightly. "I'd want them here. If I was in a coma. They'd be here. Having no one?" He shakes his head. "I can't imagine that."

She hadn't thought of it that way. Had taken it for granted that people weren't meant to fight alone.

She's seen too many empty bed sides.

So, is this how Meredith saw it, that her connection to Allison was both of them having no one? That it could have been Meredith, and she'd be exactly here, exactly the same?

(Did Meredith not know that Mari would do whatever she could to be here? Did that matter, when it's just as true that Mari probably wouldn't have known to come?)

Mari looks at Allison, not as a prognosis, but as the girl who might choose to sleep.

(What would Meredith choose? What would their Mother?)

She touches the back of Allison's hand, squeezing it to show her someone is there, while avoiding pressing against bandaged knuckles. The heart monitor doesn't change.

"It's not always a bad thing, being alone," she murmurs, hoping that it's true, that after fighting so viciously for life and dignity, that loneliness wouldn't be that pervasive. "It's just on the really bad days when you realize what's missing."

As a very young girl, she used to pretend that her mother would come home after Mari was asleep, would check on her and tuck her in, and whisper good night. It's with that same heart, that she leans down, infusing her words with secret promise, a whisper to seep into the layers of her dreams. "Today might be the worst day of your life, but tomorrow will be kinder. Fight for it. Ne perds jamais espoir. Lorsque le soleil se couche, les étoiles apparaissent."

She gently turns Allison's wrist, the fall of her fingers, so they'll ache less, and when she has it sorted, she looks up to find Derek staring.

She smiles, quick and unsure as neuro guys, and surgeons, can be hard nosed about telling you what coma patients can hear, what's a waste of time, what the patient is capable of overcoming on their own.

But that isn't his look at all. She's not sure anyone has looked at her like that.

She takes a step, and another, until her thighs are against the arm of his chair. She can hear the machines. Hear his quiet breaths as she slides her hand along his shoulder, feather-light, before sliding her fingertips, warm from holding the tea, up the back of his neck, into his curls. He shivers, his head tilting back, his eyes closed as she cards through his curls the way she's always wanted someone to do for her.

"Do you wish you were still in New York?" she murmurs.

Is that all this is, recognizing someone else unanchored? Someone who came here because they felt they had to, but weren't sure they wanted to?

He blinks his eyes open, staring up at the ceiling, looks like he's considering the question deeply.

"No," he murmurs softly.

Me either.

She leans down, slow to take in the curve of his throat, the colors in his eyes, his long, dark lashes. His fingertips slide against the curve of her cheek as she brushes the tip of his long nose to hers. He waits for her, waits for her, with shared breath, as she delicately presses her lips to his.

It's different from the spontaneity of before, kissing him in the rain.

Soft.

A perfect second kiss, that resonates with a hopeful, and real possibility.

She sees Meredith, loitering at the nurses' desk in the lobby, smack in Mari's path from Wyatt's office to the elevator she needs to take down.

It's the kind of coincidence she didn't use to believe in.

She used to think everyone did everything with motive, with thought.

In practicality, Meredith probably doesn't know where she was coming from, where she was going, or what she does any given day when she's not crossing paths with surgery.

So, she sees Meredith, in the sunlight of the atrium, in her white lab coat, in new confidence. Unaffected by the bombing.

Meredith glances up at Mari intends to walk past, in her new, careful stride, surprised that Mari doesn't take the opportunity to talk to her first.

"Did you know the average time to prep OR is 42 minutes?" Meredith broaches, before she loses her.

Mari assumes this non-sequitur is a complaint. Surgery, surgery, surgery. "Wow. You guys must chomp at the bit."

Meredith's brows wrinkle.

"There...are less surgeries," she excuses. "OR Five only started running yesterday."

That's how Meredith brings it up? To complain about less surgeries? As if the blown out OR was an inconvenience?

Mari bites her cheek, continuing to just leave. She rather take a cab, find some aspirin, and sleep the day away.

Meredith swivels her screen so abruptly, it squeaks. "Mari, wait. I - what do you think?"

She hates that she looks, that even hackles raised, she can't help it.

"I guess he can christen OR Five," she declares pithily. "Be the first death since the remodel."

Meredith's lips press into a tight line. She holds Mari back with a tight grip around her elbow as she twists around to grab a pile of charts, and drops them in front of Mari with a clatter.

"Cristina, George, Izzie, Alex, and I tried to find the most interesting cases for you. Sooo, we can talk about that. Or" she smiles her freaked-out smile, her pitch rising "we could talk about my visit with Mom this morning that you bailed on, where she told me about the Affair in the on-call room with someone who wasn't our father." At Mari's wide eyes Meredith bobbles her head, vindicated in seeing Mari as stunned as she was. "Yeah. So take your pick. Cases, or you get to hear the details I had to listen to."

It's not the affair part that has Mari frozen, though admittedly, what?

It's Meredith saying, 'our father'.

What?

Meredith grimaces. "And I really don't want to talk about Mom purring."

The words trip out of her mouth. "So, your, resection?"

In her hands, is a pile of patient charts, hand selected for her perusal.

All of them surgical, of course.

She's worked surgical cases before but that's usually to diagnose or to give her patient the best odds. To fight, to steal, to slip in the ones who wouldn't have a chance otherwise.

She isn't surprised, that the interns stayed in their own wheelhouse. That they didn't know where else to venture.

She knows the lionitis is Alex's, if for nothing else then the post-it note he slipped in saying, 'Come on, you know this is awesome'.

It's the clear winner, in terms of rarity, but, for one, it's Derek's, and two, his diagnosis is pretty in line with his disease. Unless the MRI is clear of tumors...but, nope.

She gets through the stack, peeling off Alex's post-it so Bailey or Derek won't accidentally see it.

Meredith brings up her case again. The guy with the 25% chance.

He's scheduled for OR Five.

The OR.

So, her spiteful remark held a ring of truth.

Meredith glances at her as Mari looks over the chart, gauging her reaction, wanting, for some reason, for Mari to connect with this one too.

She doesn't even look Mari's form up and down, hoodie, to jeans, to trainers, with any of the disapproval Mari had bestowed when Meredith has dressed down for work. So maybe Meredith hadn't been rebelling all this time. Maybe she never really cared about her appearance's utility. Maybe Mari had always been the problem. Reading in to something, and making a comment, that wasn't needed.

"He said he's going to roll the dice. Better than a slow death." Meredith likes repeating patient's phrases when she finds them profound, like an adopted new philosophy she can slip into the lens of her own life.

Mari hums in the back of her throat.

"So, what do you think?"

Was she in the Twilight Zone?

"Are you…asking me to tag along on a surgical case?"

Meredith pursed her lips. "Yeah. I mean, maybe we could…pull for Chuck or…whatever." She wrinkles her nose by the end, hearing her own lackluster pitch.

"Or whatever," she repeats, absently.

Burke, very carefully, tells them they need to move to another OR, because this one has the main oxygen line running beneath it.

'Do you think we're cursed?' Meredith murmurs.

"Good luck Chuck, huh?" she says, searching Meredith's eyes.

Meredith blows out her breath. "Yeah, I don't buy into the whole," she waves her hand flippantly "karma crap like Izzie, but what the hell. Good luck Chuck."

Mari wraps her arms around her waist, her palm running up and down her bandaged ribs.

"Alright," she agrees slowly, the words like molasses on her tongue. "Sure?"

"I'll go tell Burke."

And Meredith surprises her again. She's going to actually try, instead of chalking a half-hearted offer as something out of her hands?

She's too stunned to ask how she thinks Burke is going to allow this.

Her, Meredith, and Burke again.

She sucks on her lip, looking over the case with a closer eye, adjusting her reading glasses.

Is this a good idea, or a really bad idea?

Someone comes up behind her left shoulder, slightly startling her when his finger comes around her to point at the screen. They're just close enough to her ear to be both a little inappropriate, and luckily in range so she can hear it, with her current...problem. "Invasive non-small cell with a history of COPD?" he drawls. She turns her head, and then tilts her neck up, to look at him. He waits before shrugging broad shoulders incased in butter-smooth black leather. A black sheep among a sea of white lab coats. "Guys pretty much a goner, huh?"

She raises her brows. "Well, he doesn't have a homemade bomb in his chest, so he's doing better than the last guy."

He cants his head, trying to figure out if she's kidding. "You get a lot of that around here? In Seattle?"

'I wasn't planning on liking it here. I'm genetically engineered to dislike everywhere, except Manhattan.'

She tries to shake off the memory, the voice. Derek had said it self-deprecatingly. He hadn't sounded that arrogant.

"You'd be surprised," she muses, feeling her wounds acutely.

"What else would surprise me?" he returns, insinuating.

"Rejection?" She guesses, moving down the desk to grab Meredith's chart.

He chuckles, languorously following as he passes behind her. "If you prefer," he drawls, with rolling cadence. "We could talk about the weather instead."

She tilts her head, just waiting for the line.

"Like getting out of the rain. Spending a day curled up in bed."

Her lips twitch as she shakes her head.

He grins with feline satisfaction.

Casanova, she thinks, looking at him more fully. She sees it in the way he moves, the way he speaks, the way he focuses. Draw their ear, their eye, their imagination. Thrive on attention, on the chase. He thinks he's half-won, by getting a positive reaction, preens with it.

She's challenged to switch the roles he thinks they're playing, instead of just laughing in a way that will only encourage him.

She lets her fingertips brush the line of her clavicle. His eyes drop, heated and lazy, as they watch her nails lightly run along the lacy top of her white camisole, following an invisible line down her sternum as she breaths deep and steadily. Beneath her breasts she pinches the zipper to her hoodie, lets the teeth drag to her belly bottom. "It was the red hoodie, wasn't it?" she murmurs.

He blinks, lifting his blue eyes back to her own, to see her sparkling amusement. He's not all lust then. Prefers the attention more than the aesthetic.

"A bullseye in a sea of white," she muses, knowing any other woman, positioned well enough, would have elicited an approach.

She's making fun of his appraising eye finding her, definitely not at her best, his eyes landing on the brightest color. Part Cheshire, part tomcat, and part whatever deficiency makes cats crazy for a laser pointer.

He leans closer, voice lowering conspiratorially. "Is that wrong?" She reads off of his lips.

She smiles closed mouth, pulling the zipper up noisily. "As long as you don't mistake me for a target, I think we're fine."

He straightens slightly, getting the message, and still grinning.

That, she appreciates.

She's curious, if he's a new hire, what devastating effect he'll have on the female staff.

"Mari Grey," she offers, holding out her hand.

His hand almost grazes hers when he's punched in the face.

"What the hell," she startles, hissing then, at the pull to her ribs. Her palm curls against her side, rubbing at the ache as she looks between the stranger laid out on the linoleum and Derek, hissing in tandem with her, as he shakes out his hand.

"That was Mark," he explains, like he's pointing out someone on the street instead of taking a running leap to punch them square in the face. He slides back, so close their shoulders nearly brush, as he turns his gaze to her, his glare softening instantly, as blue eyes glance over her tight brow and her retreating hand. He stops shaking out his fingers, stops Ahhing at the split knuckles and asks, in a way that makes her ache, "are you okay?"

She clenches her jaw, nods without looking at him, angry at herself for the prickling in the back of her eyes.

"Mari –"

"What the hell is going on here?!" Chief Webber shouts.

Derek sighs.

"I'd offer my hand…" she tells the man with his elbows on his spread, bent knees, in no hurry to rise to his feet. Like he's a tragic painting.

Derek, Addison, and Chief Webber have already sequestered themselves in the conference room. Anyone who is supposed to help has scattered.

"…but it didn't work out the last time, so why chance it?"

Mark looks up at her, brows ticked like he can't believe that's her response.

"Derek and I always did have the same taste in women," he says, after wordlessly following her into the trauma room.

She looks away from the laceration, brows quirking. "Sounds like that would cause some problems, for best friends." She widens her eyes. "Oh, wait."

"Funny," he deadpans. "You're the dirty mistress, right? I wasn't sure if it was naughty nurse, or lusty intern?" he gives her another once over, tone still conversational, but with inflection that shows he's digging. "The details were pretty sparse after hot young blonde."

"Med student actually," she says earnestly, withdrawing the needle of lidocaine. Addison had said something similar. Obviously the rumors were vague enough to only focus on the tawdry. Hot, young, blonde. She's heard worse from people who knew her better. "That's why they won't let me have a lab coat. This is the closest I've been to a real patient."

His shoulders bunch, drawing his face back instinctively.

"Well, that answers that question." If he determined to peel her layers with his gaze, she can return the favor.

"What question?" He asks slowly, relaxing again as he realizes she was kidding, eyes on her ease with the instruments.

"What kind of medicine you were in."

"Did Derek tell you?" he wonders.

She gestures for him to move his head back as she cleans the cut. He follows, eyes trying to track her out of the corner of his eye.

She affects a confused, casualness to weaken the poison, watching for the involuntary muscles in his face.

"What makes you think he talked about you at all?"

Minutely, his face tightens. There and smoothed out. Forcing himself to relax.

'I'm not just going to see that my wife is cheating on me. I'm going to see that my wife is cheating on me with Mark, who happened to be my best friend.

It's just so…pedestrian, common, and dirty, and cruel. Mostly just cruel.'

There was a reason, beyond the initial pain, that he stayed down that long.

Something a little more complicated than cruelty.

"You know, my four-hundred dollar an hour shrink says that behind this rugged, and confident exterior, I'm self-destructive and self-loathing to an almost pathological degree."

She pauses, briefly thinking of the irony that she's coming from a psych eval, and wondering what Wyatt would label her with. "You'd have to be, blowing four-hundred dollars an hour, for such lazy diagnosis."

He snorts. She compensates the shifting of his face, as she paints the cut with iodine. "Yeah? What do you think I got, Doc?" There's wry resignation to his humor, like he knows the verdict will be unflattering.

Wide open again, for someone to get in another jab.

She sets the Q-tip down carefully. "Something curable."

He clears his throat. "Yeah?"

She gathers up the waste, leaving only the towel on his shoulder behind.

He watches her, able to turn now with the cut prepped, his eyes thoughtful.

"You know, it's funny. Derek walks in on my naked with his wife actually in the throes, and he just…turns and walks away." He lowers his voice. "But he sees me so much as talking to you, and I'm on the ground bleeding. Interesting, don't you think?"

She does nothing, for a moment, wondering why he said that to her.

She looks up from the suture kit, with distant composure, and shuttered eyes, as unfeeling as she can ever manage. "Delayed reaction," she diagnoses, guessing the thing he's intentionally leaving out is this is the first time Derek has seen him since. "Horses. Not zebras."

In her passing gaze, she can see the nurse's desk outside the trauma room where Bailey's full roster of interns are watching. "Do you want me to call a surgeon?"

He frowns. "What?"

She pinches her badge at her belt, flashing the laminated plastic. "Non-surgical resident. Not sure what the porn-star alliteration is for that, but I figured a plastics guy wouldn't want a non-surgeon to suture his face, so…" she nods to the phone on the wall.

He blinks, expression dropping. "I can suture my own face," he declares, gesturing for the kit. "Bring it here."

She nods, accepting the breach in procedure without batting an eye.

"You're good with your hands you know," he murmurs, looking away from the mirror she holds steady without complaint, to meet her eyes. There's a hesitation there, like he isn't sure how badly he misstepped. "For a non-surgeon."

She quirks a smile when it isn't followed by an insinuation, hears instead its apology.

She wasn't offended, just...bruised. And, tit for tat, as they both tried for reactions.

"Did you suture Derek's face when he ran into a tree on the motorcycle?" She wonders, watching the neat, expert stitches.

"He told you about that?" he asks, taken back and reminiscent.

"Noo," she draws out, dramatizing it, ignoring that hearing about Derek's life will sting "but maybe you can."

His eyes crinkle.

"Not my finest work," he admits, needing only a raised, attentive brow, to start. "We were second-year med students..."

Notes:

"Ne perds jamais espoir.
Lorsque le soleil se couche, les étoiles apparaissent."
is French for: Never lose hope.
When the sun goes down, the stars come out.

Also, unbeknownst to Mari, Derek speaks French. (It's canon, the Shepherd siblings went to French daycare.)

Last edited: Dec 4.