They Blinded Me With Science

Seventh In My Lost/Grey's Anatomy et al Crossover

By DavidB226Morris

Summary: The survivors of Oceanic 815 are fully into the 'Live Together' phase when it comes to telling the staff of Seattle Grace about what happened after the crash. Now as they begin to let more people enter the circle of trust what boundaries – in science and relationships – will end up growing?

Disclaimer: Once more into the breach, my fellow readers. Jack, Kate, Sawyer and everybody who made it back from the island belongs to J.J. Abrams, Darlton and everybody at Bad Robot. (I've heard stories about what happened behind the scenes at Lost; I still love their work.) Meredith, Christina and everyone at Seattle Grace belong to Shondaland. (Just out of curiosity, how member people from the original cast are still at Grey's after twenty years?) I'm also going to be including most of the cast from my favorite Shondaland series Private Practice and possibly some characters from other fandoms that have shown up in my previous fic. Again, I borrow them with no intent of foul play, though few who have read these fic can say that I have treated any of them badly.

This is going to start out as mainly fluff though conflict does seem to worm its way into these stories somehow. I don't intend to add stress but one never knows.

Anyway, namaste and have fun

Prologue

GREY RESIDENCE

9:30 PM

"All right Yang would you mind telling us why you asked us all here on our one night off?"

Christina Yang raised the glare that was usually a signal of death that usually brooked no argument. It had lost its power over the last three years. Alex referred to it as 'resting Yang face.'

"What? I can't just ask to hang out with my friends without raising an inquisition?"

George nearly doubled over. "Christina are you admitting that we're your friends? Because in three years, you've called me my first name twice."

"Did hell freeze over and we didn't notice?" Alex asked Iz.

"They're outside Seattle Grace borders when it comes to mass casualties, so it's not like we pay attention." Izzy said just as causally.

"Mer, are you going to defend me or not?"

Meredith pretended to take it seriously. "You've been calling your interns by their names, you've reduced your effort to get every procedure by a full ten percent, I actually saw you make eye contact with the people in the cafeteria the last three days. There's been a pool going as to whether you've gone completely nuts among the nurses."

"Which ones? If that…" Yang looked at Meredith. "Ha ha, very funny."

Joking aside Meredith had an idea what might be going on with her person. She'd given Christina some business when she'd asked if she could ask for those who had been Miranda Bailey's five interns when they'd all come to Seattle Grace three years ago. Inside, however, she hadn't felt this warm since she and Derek had gotten married via Post-It. She had an idea what Christina was working up to by asking for this meeting, which was why she'd asked Derek to clear out for the night and let this be a meeting of the interns.

"Besides, you haven't exactly made an effort to reach out the last year," George said seriously. "I mean, it's not like you were ever compassion and warmth."

"O'Malley, you were carrying that burden for all five of us," Alex wasn't exactly kidding.

"I have been working through some shit," This was pretty close to soul-bearing as Christina Yang got. "You know that I've never been the heart on my sleeve type. Make one joke about my specialty, Karev, I dare you."

"Coming from me that's the pot calling the kettle," Karev was being sincere. "I think burying my feelings is the one specialty I'm better at you then."

"I've been giving you a run for your money the last year or so.." That was even bigger. "Not like you haven't had your reason. Any of you. Which is in part why I asked for us to get together in the first place."

Meredith wasn't sure how her friend wasn't going to put this.

"I've been talking with Jack Shephard the last few days." She took a deep breath. "Who here has absolutely no clue how to deal with what he told you?"

Everybody smiled as their hands all went up at the same time.

Christina gave a huge sigh of relief. "Thanks for at least lying on that one."

"Trust me, we're not lying," Izzie assured Christina. "Alex and I have known it longer than anyone here and we probably know more details than about what exactly happened after the crash and all the fallout, but there are parts of it I still can't wrap my head around."

"I was the last to find out the details until you did," George told Christina.

"Does that have anything to do with why you went on that road trip four months you still haven't given any explanation about?" Christina asked.

George paused. "How much has Jack told you about what happened to them so far?"

"He got to the point when his sister – who he didn't know was his sister until he got back – was taken by some native of the island," Christina replied. "That was today, and I figured I needed a break."

"Get through that story. Then we'll deal with the rest," Meredith said.

"I think you understand why we weren't exactly eager to share once Jack finished telling us everything," Izzie said. "It's the kind of thing that might cause your brain to start to leak out of your ears the more you hear, and considering how close I came to that happening it's kind of remarkable I handled it as well as I did."

"I have a feeling it gets weirder from there," Christina said sarcastically. "And to be clear, it's already screwing with my entire world view."

"Which I guess gets us to the obvious." Karev asked. "Why did you never ask us what we knew? I get why you wouldn't ask Shephard or the rest of them, but we were hanging out with his friends more than we were with you. "

Christina hesitated. "Okay. We all read our share of science fiction when we were younger. With me it was more Michael Crichton than Robert Heinlein, but you don't have science fiction without science."

Everybody nodded along with this. "How many times did you rent Contact after it hit VHS?" Izzie asked.

"I think I saw it thirteen times before I went to college," Christina said.

"My mother thought that Ellie Arroway and Dana Scully led to a lot of women going into science in the 90s," Meredith said.

"My guess is, we'll be seeing the effect for years to come," Christina agreed. "The thing is, and I think we're all agreed on this, it's easier to deal with things like aliens existing or time travel or mutants living in the sewer when you can see them from the comfort of your living room TV or read them late at night. But I think at the end of the day, we're all more Dana Scully than we are Mulder."

Everyone was nodding. "You know, a lot of people must have pissed that all those years Scully just kept insisting there was a scientific explanation for everything." Christina said. "And honestly, I think it would have been a better show if she'd been right maybe two or three times a season."

They considered this. "You've got a point," Alex said. "Not just, you know, from a feminist perspective, but just the law of averages."

"They tried to give her some points on scientific explanations, but yeah," George said. "I would have liked it if just once the lights in the sky had been Aurora Borealis."

"Thanks for the support, but that was actually secondary," Christina said.

"No, we do get it," Izzie said. "You accept Scully's point of view, then everything that happened on the series is just a scientific anomaly, something that can be written off. You see things from Mulder's, and the ground you've built your life on isn't there anymore. That's more terrifying than any alien conspiracy."

"From a rational point of view Scully had to know that Mulder's way of thinking was the right one," Christina said. "There was too much scientific evidence. You think about it too hard; you begin to question everything and that leads you down on a rabbit hole you may never be able to climb out of. "

"Such as when forty three people come back from a plane crash with almost no injuries after their plane goes down over the Pacific," Meredith said.

"I mean we all have the excuse of being knee deep in our second year of our residency," Izzie said. "Forgetting all of the personal crap we were all dealing with back then, we were all so occupied with our jobs that when a survivor of one of the biggest news stories this century shows up at our hospital, none of us bothered to care about anything other than what kind of surgeon he is."

George could have pointed out he had been held back, but Izzie's point did still hold and he didn't want to kill her momentum. "In our defense, Jack didn't exactly go out of his way to share the first few months he was here," he reminded Izzie. "We didn't find out until the news crews showed up on the first anniversary."

"Still even if we had no idea of the – nonscientific aspect of his survival," Christina was still trying to wrap her head around this, "we're surgeons at a trauma hospital. We know too much. Such as the fact forty three men and woman survived a plane crash, and not only did most of they have little more than cuts and bruises when they were rescued, they seemed in pretty good health for people who had been stranded on an island for over a hundred days."

George nodded. "After I got back from the little trip, I called the FAA to see if I could get any medical reports after the survivors came back to Hawaii."

"Double O seven in nature and name," Alex said with a salute.

"Not really, by that point I could have gotten them with a Freedom of Information request," George said. "I had to go through some red tape though, and it's obvious why."

Christina wanted confirmation. "What did the doctors find?"

"Nothing. Which should have sent alarm bells off immediately." George said. "This plane crashed and 281 people died on impact. But the forty four people who came back had some scratches and bruises but that's it. No broken bones, no organ damage. Forty four people walked away from a crash and most of them didn't have anything more severe than a paper cut."

"Night Shyamalan would never get away of that," Alex muttered.

"It's more amazing. For people who had been stranded on an island for a hundred days, there were no signs of malnutrition or dehydration." George said. "Nothing against Hurley, but somebody should have asked why after being on an island with no access to a regular diet, he lost a grand total of four pounds."

Izzie and Alex knew the story better than anyone hear and they couldn't believe it. "Did they even have sunburns after all that time?" Izzie asked.

"O'Malley visit to the beach when I'm eleven. I doze off while reading and forget the sunscreen. I wake up, I'm burned so badly it takes a week for my skin to get back to normal." George shook his head. "I grant you that there's a fair array of different races and nationalities but they were in the sun for over a hundred days, There should have been at least one case of skin cancer. Not even the smallest of melanomas."

"And that's all before you consider the fact that all of the survivors didn't even seem to have gotten sick in that period," Izzie said.

"Are you giving a spoiler?" Yang asked.

"Sort of, but it's one of those things that should have stood out to anybody," Alex said. "It sure as hell would have been ringing through Jack's mind after the marshal's wound went septic."

Christina had heard that part. "Let me guess. Even the people who suffered cuts and bruises never got anything resembling blood poisoning."

"Those guys were walking through jungle, animals they'd have to hunt and kill themselves, food they'd have no idea whether it was poisonous or not," George told them. "I may not have liked being in the woods, but that's because I know all the things that can go wrong there even if you have the proper gear and supplies. These guys didn't, and somehow they didn't even have scars from the injuries they should have gotten."

Now Christina was baffled. "A first year med student would have known something was off when everybody came back," she said.

"Somehow I don't think anyone was asking Sanjay Gupta for a doctor's report on CNN," Meredith said. ""Besides it's not like even Bailey could have given an accurate report in a thirty second spot."

"Sixty, maybe, but they'd be cutting to footage of the survivors by then," George agreed.

Christina looked at her friends. "There has to be chatter about this in some corner of the Internet," she asked. "That's one of the only things it's good for."

"It's not like any of us have the time and energy to look, but you're definitely right," Alex agreed. "Though I doubt they bother to get medical experts to reason it out, and I doubt that is any part of their thinking."

"Assuming they think at all," Christina acquiesced. She looked at Stevens and Alex. "You know them better than anyone here. Do any of them traffic this kind of stuff?"

"Why would they?" Meredith asked. "It's not like any of them are going to come close to reality."

Christina was pretty sure that was true even only a few days in. "It's not the nuts that bother me, though let's not kid ourselves those might be a problem for them down the line. I'm just worried that someone might try to come at them from some not-too-reputable blog, make just enough reasonable sounding theories to come without shouting distance, and then cause them all sorts of trouble."

The thought had crossed Izzie's and Alex's mind more than once ever since they'd learned the full truth. Neither of them in their wildest dreams thought anyone would come close to figuring out what had actually happened to them on the island. They agreed at the end of the day, no one wanted to go that deeply into the supernatural to make a public accusation and come out sounding like a lunatic. And for all the arguments about what might have really happened to the survivors, no one was arguing terrorism or some global conspiracy.

The problem was this was the dictionary definition of a conspiracy. It wasn't done for evil intent and no national interest was being helped by the coverup. But the people who had come back from the crash were engaged in a lie to not reveal exactly what had happened to Oceanic 815 on September 22, 2004. That the lie was hurting no one and the truth more unbelievable than the lie did not change that fact, and there were more than enough people out there who were determined to find the truth. Oliver Stone had actually gone on CNN more than once in the weeks after the return arguing that there was some kind of deception, but everyone thought it was just an attempt to get publicity for his next film.

There was also the financial payout everyone had received after the crash. Alex had actually checked YouTube not long after Jack had told them about the wreckage that had been discovered in the Sunda Trench less than a month before they were rescued. Indeed, there had been some talk - on public access and talk radio – that Oceanic had bought all the survivors silence for some reason. Did it have to do with the fact that prior to 815 they had advertised themselves as never have had a crash in their decades of service? Had the survivor's plane been shot down by a foreign government? Was the crash at the bottom of the ocean another Oceanic plane altogether and in fact 815 had never crashed at all?

The most interesting one of these had involved a call that had come to the National Hotline in the days after the crash when someone had said that the footage they were showing was, not in fact, Oceanic 815. That had come the closest to the truth, but the only source was an operator and Frank Lapidus had only given his name to her supervisor. For reasons that were more than understandable, that man had never talked but a diligent reporter – or a determined crank – could track him down and try to get him to give answers.

"The media's forgotten them since the first anniversary," Izzie finally answered. "And there haven't exactly been a lot of reporters showing up around here in regards to the crash. But you're right, this is one of the things that could slip under the radar."

"Which one of us should tell them?" Meredith asked.

"I'll do it," George said. "I was able to dig this up without even trying that hard. They need to know what to prepare for." He looked at Yang. "You want to be there when I break the news?"

"If they want help later on, I'll do it. That's the other reason I wanted to talk to you guys." Christina said. "Jack is a great guy and he's been more than willing to fill in the blanks, but I've been thinking that I've got to do this my own way."

"Could you translate that in to something us mere mortals can understand?" Karev asked playfully.

"I think I need to hear this story from someone else's perspective." There was a silence. "I'm sorry, did I break some rule?"

"No actually it makes perfect sense," Meredith said. "Aside from Izzie and Alex, who probably know as complete a version as possible, everybody else has been learning the truth from someone else. I've gotten it mostly from Claire and a couple of other people. Callie got most of it from Hurley and I imagine George got a fair share from Kate and Locke over the last few weeks."

Yang looked puzzled. "Locke, the bald guy who showed up the year after everybody had come back and who you all mysteriously performed spinal surgery on."

Everybody was a little stunned at that. "I may not have paid much attention to the island, but I always remember when you scrub in on a surgery I'm not privy too."

"Trust me, Yang, this is one you should count your blessings you weren't a part of," Alex said. "Do yourself a favor. Hold off as long as you can about hearing Locke's part of the story."

Everybody nodded at this. "You really don't think I could handle it?" Christina asked.

"Not without a lot of prep work," George agreed. "Even with that, I could see you hearing it, giving up your residency, and deciding to devote your life to the church when you get there."

Christina was twenty percent intrigued by this and eighty percent terrified. "Even asking this question goes against every bit of who I am, but I think I need to know. I'm starting to get the impression that this island goes against quite a bit of what I consider science. That's difficult enough to deal with. But…"

Even the usually fearless Yang seemed unable to put this in the words. Izzie decided to take her off the hook.

"No. God was not on the island. Of that everyone is certain. But…" Izzie paused. "Jack admitted the major problem he had with being on the island was that so much of what he saw made him question how he saw the world. Even now, he and his friends are trying to come to grips with it, and they still don't have an answer. There are a few people who came back who believed in a higher power. That there was some larger force guiding them. The reason so many people followed Jack, even though he freely admitted he was a terrible leader was because he was the voice of rationality when everything seemed crazy."

"In other words, he was like us," Christina said. "I don't deal with the bigger questions of the universe; they're above my paygrade. But in the past three years, we've all seen our share of patients who are facing death. And a lot of them ask for some kind of spiritual guidance before I wheel them in." She looked at her friends. "I suck at that, and I'm pretty sure most of you aren't any better."

They all nodded at that.

"That's the other reason I've been dodging this so long." Christina said. "Because O'Malley's right. What happened to the survivors of Oceanic 815 defies scientific explanation. None of them should have survived the crash, and most of those who did shouldn't have come back whole. The odds of it are so astronomical I'm not sure there's a number big enough to calculate it."

"You know what a famous doctor once said about that in his fictional writings," Izzie said.

"Sherlock Holmes never had to prove the existence of ghosts," Christina countered. "From what I've read, he proved that they had a scientific explanation. Doyle believed in the supernatural, to his detriment. Which doesn't make me feel any better considering this."

"So what you're trying to ask without actually asking it is if some other force - a higher power for the lack of a better word - helped save everybody who came back?" Meredith asked.

Christina didn't answer directly. "You were dead for an hour," she told her. "We were all standing over your body when it happened. We saw them warm you up from hypothermia, we saw you flatline. I stood over your body, begging you to come back to tell you that Burke had proposed to me. Praying wasn't something I could do, even then, and at a scientific level, I knew you were gone. Everything I had been taught, everything I believed, told me that you were gone. I was stunned when you woke up because it was impossible."

Meredith didn't bother to argue. She'd seen the charts. She knew what happened.

"When the three of you started the project you've been working on the past few months," Christina said. "I thought you were all going through some kind of insane therapy. I get why you were doing it – given everything that happened to you the last couple of years, I thought you were trying to make sense of something you couldn't explain and try give a scientific explanation to it."

"As I recall, you yelled at me for trying to make superstition science," Meredith knew this was shaky ground for more than one reason.

"I did," Yang said. "And from a strictly scientific perspective, my opinion has not changed. Neither has the fact that you were clinically dead for more than forty-five minutes and you opened your eyes and you knew that something had happened to your mother." Yang paused. "Five minutes before McDreamy came into your room and told us that she was dead."

They knew that too.

"We all moved on to other things after that," Christina said. "We did what we did best, compartmentalized and dealt with our own personal shit. We didn't do a very good job of that either, certainly not me."

This was as close as Yang had come to admitting her own flaws in her personality, particularly when it came to her personal life.

"Is this you asking if that's why I'm doing this?" Meredith asked.

"It's me saying that I get why you think you have to," Christina said. "Professional advice, however. Whatever you find out, one way or the other, never make it public. And I'm not just saying this because of the shitstorm that will come down on you professionally if you do. I'm saying it because we're scientists and we know that there are some things the world doesn't want an explanation for."

"Derek tells me there's this team of neurologists who have a theory that every decision we make is determined by a synapse in our brain and not any choice of our own," Meredith said.

"In other words, they think that anything we consider free will is just brain chemistry," Izzie figured. "Please tell me they haven't gotten to the testing phase."

"They've never tried to go beyond the theoretical. Even that has gotten some of them death threats," Meredith said.

George looked at Christina. "Maybe science shouldn't explain everything. I kind of get the feeling if it did our lives might be even be more miserable."

"That's the real reason I didn't want you to go that far," Christina said. "I might think that God and the afterlife are completely ridiculous and that religion is a crock. I might not be comfortable with people who think otherwise. But somehow I don't think I'd get much satisfaction if someone told me that I'd been right or that I'd been wrong."

None of them had ever considered this. Doctors were accused of having God complexes; if they prove one way or another that God didn't exist…

"You think we should junk what we're doing?" Izzie asked. "I mean, we're still in the data collection phase. We haven't done any experimentation one way or the other."

"Dan and Charlotte will be back from London in a few days," Meredith said. "We'll ask them."

"Do they have any connection to this crash?"

No one had any problem giving Christina an answer. "The crash, no. But they do have a connection," Izzie said. "Beyond that, it's not our story to tell."

Everyone held their breath for a moment. Christina had never been good at letting things go. "All right. If they give you permission you can tell me."

They all exhaled.

"But that does get me back to my original point," Christina said. "I think I need to learn this story from someone whose point of view is not as rigid as Jack's is." She held up a hand. "At least based on how he saw things at the time. What's the schedule for the people from LA?"

"Jack and everyone else will be going down this weekend. They'll be up here next week." Izzie said. "You want to talk to someone from LA?"

"The man I want to lives there. But I shouldn't drop it on him when he shows up." Christina looked at them. "You and Alex, you're still the closest with the entire group?"

"I'd say that's accurate." Alex agreed.

"Do you have Sayid Jarrah's phone number? Tomorrow I'd like to give him a heads up."

AUTHOR'S NOTES

I wanted to start this story from the perspective of the characters from Grey's Anatomy for an outsiders look.

The scene where everyone raises their hands is a callback to the Pilot of Grey's when the original five interns are sitting together and George asks: "Who here has absolutely no idea what they're doing?" and they all raise their hands.

The X-Files talk as well as the science fiction talk was deliberate (it was going to be more protracted in this chapter, but I didn't want to overextend). I think the reason that Scully stood by her point of view as long as she did is a legitimate one (and it makes her look better than the fact the formula of the series basically forced it on her far longer than it would have in real life, something Karev notes.)

I've dealt with how the fact the staff at Seattle Grace would have picked up on the fact that so many people survived the crash intact (something that Locke himself told Jack at the end of Season 1 and he refused to accept). This part gives a medical perspective to what was happening on the island and how it might look to the outside world.

The reasons Christina state for not asking about the crash are a parallel to Jack's reaction. I'm also having her confront something the show denied after Meredith drowned in Season Three and the show never talked about. The spiritual has never been something Rhimes handles well (among many, many things) so I wanted to deal with it here.

That's it for the prologue. We're back in business. Read and Review!