Previously: Everyone at Seattle Grace has a bar story.
chapter six: stranger in a strange land
Drunken hookups should warrant some curtesy.
Like texting your sister you'll make it home on your own, so she doesn't loiter around a bar, waiting for a call.
Mari walks down the stairs with the enthusiasm of an execution, and finds Meredith around the corner.
Face down, sprawled out, and naked on the couch. The one-night stand has a pillow and blanket scattered around him on the floor. He's heavy-lidded from a hangover, crudely zipping up his slacks, and when he sees Mari, nothing about his expression changes. He glances at Meredith's body with no recognition or interest, and continues to grab his clothes.
No embarrassment, no attempt at awkward greetings or apologies. Just, transactional. Like he's going to leave money on the table, or ask for money himself.
This feels like Paris, when Mari and Sadie shared an instinctive, sniping dislike of each other, and Meredith had stayed quiet until she brought someone home that night and had sex on the couch Mari was meant to sleep on. Meredith wouldn't say she was trying to get her sister to leave, but that was the point of it, wasn't it?
Meredith's face, when she realized Mari didn't like watching her drink straight tequila, was her warning.
She throws a blanket over Meredith's body, and lets it flutter over her, as she continues straight to the kitchen.
The one-night stand follows, kitchen door swinging shut and then open behind her, as he wraps his tie around his neck, his shirt completely unbuttoned against his chest.
"You know the name of a cab company?"
Midwest. Rural, probably. Blunt.
"I do not."
He presses his lips, eyes hooded like he's trying to figure out if she's being unhelpful on purpose. "I need to get to work. I start my surgical internship today."
She purses her lips, eyes steady on the brewing percolator. She wants him to say no, say he's going to Mercy West or Seattle Presbyterian, as she asks, "Seattle Grace?"
His answer is short. "Yeah?"
Of all the gin joints in all the world, she had to take home a man from that one.
She rubs her fingers together, to stop from rubbing at her eyes. Is this acquaintance likely to continue? Drunken nights and awkward mornings, and her sister in flagrante delicto?
"Coffee?" she offers politely, turning over a third cup. It's one of Meredith's or one of Mom's. The kitchen is still a mess, with nothing truly put up, and three households worth of kitchenware, and odds and ends, and separation. Coffee cups were easy to collect, from school, from conferences, charity drives, and pharmaceutical promotions.
She slides it across the island, and he eyes it, and the other cups, warily.
Okay...
"You have about an hour until you need to be there. You can take a shower and ride in with us."
His narrowed brown eyes glance up.
"You workin' at the hospital too? As what, a nurse?"
She blinks at the caustic, misogynist appraisal, coming from a man who still has the imprint of her sister's sweat on his skin.
('Never date a man who works in the hospital. God forbid, you should date a doctor.' Ellis Grey warned a hundred times. 'They'll never take you seriously.')
Is he that type? To knock down, to mention his hook-up with Meredith to his peers, to score points and have ammunition. Conquest and no consideration? The type of man who doesn't think to cover his one-night stand's exposed body or wake her up for a shift they might both be late to?
"The nurses are going to love you," she croons sweetly, sipping her beverage and making plans. Hopefully the nurses will make a few of his shifts difficult until he checks the bulk of his attitude.
He gives her a long once over, the short-sleeved, starched, fitted blue button-down tucked into creamy slacks. He would be dressed nice too if he wasn't obviously wearing last night's wrinkled clothes from the orientation. His are unfitted, so she guesses he's a graduate with a lot of debt. "So not a nurse…Don't tell me you're a surgical intern."
No wonder Meredith didn't want to sleep next to him. He's like a cactus, ready to skewer on his spikes.
She tilts her head, still smiling. "You want the shower or no?"
His eyes flicker like he's trying to read her, glancing down at the coffee she offered him.
"Shouldn't you wake whoever that is on the couch first?"
She touches Meredith's blanketed shoulder loosely, crouched but well out of range of a flailing arm, making sure the coffee cup she's brought her is set out of reach. The one-night stand followed her at a distance, buttoning his shirt finally once Mari was no longer looking at him. He keeps his head down as he continues to dress but watches her in side-glances, fiddling with his phone like he hasn't decided yet, on that cab company.
"This isn't happening," Meredith complains hoarsely, curling in on herself with the blanket wrapping tighter.
Mari balances her elbow on her knee, resting her chin on her fist. Ignores the nauseating smell of sweated booze. "Afraid so," she remarks pointedly.
Meredith groans.
At least her embarrassment seems genuine. It this was spitefully motivated, it seems to have been liquor-inspired, and forgotten.
Mari was already convinced that Meredith planned this so Mari would leave without her, her non-confrontational way of brushing Mari off.
"This is humiliating. On sooo many levels..."
"We need to leave in an hour," Mari announces, accepting this as a new normal.
Meredith scrunches her face.
"A whole hour? Can't you just...wake me up five minutes before we have to go?"
That, finally, makes Mari narrow her eyes.
"...Are you kidding?"
"…Ten minutes?" she negotiates, wincing at the light streaming in through the blinds.
"You smell," Mari counts off her fingers. "You need to shower. You need to eat before your first 48-hour shift. And," she turns her hand to look at her thin gold watch "that shift starts in an hour and twenty minutes."
She was dead on her feet and starved by the time her first shift of her internship ended, too wired from coffee to even come down. She made the very bad decision of not sleeping the night before because she couldn't. For every one of those missteps, she at least wasn't cavalier about her career and a step in the grave of self-sabotage.
They still need to get to the hospital, and see how bad the morning traffic is.
Mari thinks about yanking the blanket off Meredith and pushing her up the stairs to jolt her into awareness. Her fingers twitch.
"Also," she adds, like an afterthought, "your guest is still here."
Meredith follow the direction of Mari's pointed thumb, and she sinks into the couch with a groan like she wants the couch to swallow her whole.
Her sister is pretty, even with minimal effort.
But this?
A wrinkled white button down with oversized beige slacks that look like they have been pulled out of a laundry pile, and have never seen a iron...and Meredith isn't even wearing an undershirt so the thin, worn material shows the outline of her utilitarian white bra. Her hair is wheat dry like she doesn't know what to do with it.
Mari had taken a half hour on her hair alone, pulled into an elegant chignon that pulls her curls away from her face, but teased to show off their volume. She has a ten-step skin care routine to give her a dewy glow, a hint of pink stain to her lips, eyelashes curled and fanned out without weighing them with mascara. Parisian more than American. She'll consider darker eyeliner or a bolder lip after gauging the landscape. See what fits in.
Ellis Grey had abhorred expected femininity, but she still wielded it in her arsenal. Aimed for untouchable to men and and enviable to women. Joan Crawford. Bette Davis. She'd rather drop dead then let her colleagues see her the way Meredith is about to, even as an intern.
Maybe Meredith is...downplaying her beauty on purpose? Maybe she's worried what the one-night stand will say, and wants to look as unassuming as possible so the fellow interns won't believe him?
Mari bites her tongue on her opinions. She's tried to give advice, and as Einstein warned, it was the definition of insanity.
Meredith skips past the music, in bursts of cacophony and static, until she finds something, Mari assumes, that they can equally not enjoy, since their taste in music was so different.
Hello Seattle. This is Dr. Frasier Crane. I have a very special guest with me today. My brother, the eminent psychiatrist Dr. Niles Crane.
Hell-o Emerald City. What's doin'? What's happenin'?
*click* *the smooth, baritone voice turns exasperated, slightly muted* What in the hell do you think you're doing?
*Hushed* That was my radio persona. Every great radio personality has one.
I don't.
That's my point ex-actly.
*ruffled huff* Just try to be yourself, will you. *Voice smooths again* Our topic today is siblings. What makes you love them. What makes you hate them. What-
-what little things do they do that especially annoy you. These could be things from your childhood, OR they could be things from your adolescence, OR they could be things from your young adulthood, OR-
-or they could be things that are going on right now!
The smell of the glutaraldehyde, formaldehyde, hydrogen peroxide, and ethylene oxide that was used to sterilize the room was prominent enough from the hallway.
She knew what an OR smelled like, so why has she been led to one?
"Each of you comes in hopeful. Wanting in on the game. A month ago, you were in med school, being taught by doctors. Today, you are the doctors. The seven years you spend here as a surgical resident will be the best and worst of your life-"
She heads out the double doors in the middle of the Chief of Surgery's speech.
They did not accidentally enter her into the surgical program.
Maybe they errored with her and Meredith's files? Expected the younger one was an intern too?
She waits for the interns to file out, to head to the locker room to change before their first shift. Her focus is on the Chief who exits last.
"Chief Webber," she calls, pushing off the wall. She doesn't mince words, as his instinct to hearing his name from a stranger is probably to say that he's busy. "I need to find out how I'm employed in this hospital."
That pauses his step. "Excuse me?"
"I'm Mari Grey," she gives her name just enough pause for etiquette, before unfolding the problem. "I was told to follow along to your intern speech, but my employment is for a non-surgical residency."
"Ah," he clears his throat. He's uncommonly slow, to turn his head, like there's a weighted suspense to it. Like he expects something different, when he turns to look at her. She quirks her brow, wondering if he expected something more demanding, a tantrum, or if he has a problem with his peripheral vision.
He blinks first, giving her his back, with a clearing of his throat. "Our, um, surgical hospital is second in the country. It's a very prestigious program."
"Then...I hope I have not taken an opportunity away from someone who wanted it," she says, watching him carefully.
"You're not interested in surgery?"
"Nooo," she draws out, half-a question if this is actually happening. "I'm here to focus on internal medicine."
Which is the best thing a surgical hospital can offer her.
"That involves a lot of pre and post op..."
He does not sound, or look, like he believes there was a clerical error. He looks like he already knows who she is, that he knows this is untoward, but he's reforming it into a sales pitch.
Mari looks up at the ceiling, shaking her head in realization. "You knew my mother," she sighs. Of course. This is the place Ellis Grey made her career. The hospital she liked best. Maybe he just knows her by reputation. She won the Harper Avery when she was a resident here. The first, and only, resident to win it.
His shoulders twitch. "Yes. I...did."
She forgot, what it was like, being around surgeons who knew her mother, and didn't know her. Realizing that her employment here might have less to do with Mari Grey's résumé, and more to do with Ellis Grey's.
"Chief Webber, surgery...isn't for me. I want more."
He looks at her like he's forcing himself to.
She bites the corner of her lip, trying not to let his reactions dishearten her. Was this it, if she wasn't in the surgery program...? If she wasn't following a paint-by-numbers of her mother's career? "I believe beginning residents are not supposed to specialize?"
"They tend to, anyway," he mutters.
She tries to smile. "I want everything. Then I can find out where I fit."
"That's…different, than how we do things."
He could have said she could find that in surgery, that she should try it first, but he didn't. She takes the concession, feels some of the tension shake out.
She parallels it with his own specialty, her mother's specialty, tries to overcome any lingering resistance. "Why did you go into general surgery?"
Wasn't the drive the same? To see everything? Learn everything?
Were they friends? she wonders. Did he know Ellis Grey well enough not to buy the excuse of traveling, of retiring from the OR? Was this move more than professional admiration and getting a feather in his cap? Was he less conniving and more blinded thinking her daughters should continue the legacy?
"Alright," Chief Webber acquiesces, slowly, eyes darting away. "I…see your point."
Dr. Bearden is the Head of Immunology. She's completely caught up on his publications, and the literature in the field, and would no doubt have made a great impression if she wasn't 20 minutes late.
He's watching one of his fellows conduct orientation to the half a dozen residents that are starting on his service, and when she slides in, he interrupts to call her out.
The room goes silent. She did not want to interrupt the orientation, so she had planned to bring up the issue later, in private.
"I'm sorry, Dr. Bearden, there was a mistake –"
"I don't appreciate residents dropping my service to try for an opening in surgical internship, Dr. Grey. Just because they didn't take you, doesn't mean you have a spot left here."
"Dr. Bearden," she tries again, bearing the weight of his disdain and the eyes of everyone else, watching her like she's a trapped specimen under a microscope.
"I'm not going to waste time training a girl who can't make up her mind," he dismisses. "Complain to your mother, and I'm sure she can pull strings to get you onto someone else's service -"
She tightens to withhold a flinch. That, she knows, has damned her in front of her peers, painted her spoiled and undeserving and will beg the question, 'just who is her mother?'
"But not this department. I'm not going to make allowances. I only care about follow through, and you, Dr. Grey, don't have it."
"Chief Webber is in surgery," his secretary tells her, completely expressionless.
"And when will Chief Webber be out of surgery?"
She glances at the computer, moving her mouse and then typing something, but it's obvious she isn't consulting a schedule.
"Soon perhaps. He has a bowel resurrection at 9."
Mari looks at her watch and sees that it's 8:47.
She tightens her fist as she drops her hand. Her hair is now out of her chignon, and loose, and she feels the overwhelming urge to take off her lab coat and throw it somewhere. "Okay. Is there an Undersecretary I could speak to?"
The secretary tilts her head in mild, dispassionate confusion. "Undersecretary?"
She wonders if they don't have those in America. The other hospitals had Deans of Medicine, not Chiefs of Surgery handling everything. The chain of command here makes no sense, so she's drawn to her government civics course when she was in England.
"An Assistant Chief?" she translates.
The secretary stops typing, her head tilting. "Don't I wish."
"There's no one who takes command when he's in surgery?" she asks, baffled.
She waves a disinterested hand. "He's shopping around for a number two. Maybeee that's why he's hired a new Head of Neuro. That one was definitely hit with a pretty stick."
She rubs her fingers together to avoid reaching up and pulling on her hair.
He has, at minimum, 40 new hires today, and he spends it in surgery instead of handling the adjustment?
Just where did he find the time to take her out of her program and mess with her career?
Mari sighs out her frustration, and puts on a polite, engaging smile instead.
"I'm sorry, I didn't ask for your name," she apologizes to the secretary.
The secretary looks bemused. "Patricia."
Mom's voice is in her ear, scoffing. 'Always introduce yourself with your full name, Mari. Do you want to be remembered as a professional or a cocktail waitress?'
"Patricia," Mari nods to her. "Have you heard of Dr. Ellis Grey?" She continues at the slight eye twitch. "Because Dr. Webber has, and he was under the misconception that both of her daughters would jump at the chance to join a surgical internship. I now have no idea where I'm supposed to be, because Dr. Bearden, who was supposed to be my attending, has made it clear I'm not welcome under his service, because of my inconsistency."
"Ah," Patricia nods.
Ah, indeed.
"Is there any way you and I can figure this out, so I don't have to wait for Chief Webber to finally be finished with surgery?"
Because that answer just might be never. Maybe that's why he avoided looking at her. He realized his overstepping had cost her, her spot.
Was he even going to try to fix it? Was it a tactic to force her into surgery? Was getting both Dr. Ellis Grey's children in his program something he thought would get the attention of award committees? Donor funding?
Patricia wheels back in her chair, heading towards the filing cabinet. "Which one are you?"
"Mari Grey," she introduces herself, again.
Derek looks up from his chart, absently, and then blinks, looks again with his mouth parting.
He traverses the distance quickly, while Mari slumps against the wall, eyes cast upward. This day was unreal.
"You work here," he greets with a delighted surprise. "You're a doctor?"
"You're…" she looks over the attending scrubs painfully slow. His badge. "A…neuro…surgeon."
His brows lift. "You know, I don't think anyone has ever said that to me in quite that tone before."
She bets they haven't.
"Interns started today," he seems to realize, blue, blue eyes dancing over her shifting expressions, her pouting disgruntlement. "Does this mean you're…"
That knocks her back into focus. She slides a step off the wall, hand protectively hiding her badge from sight. "No."
"That's not fair," he directs towards her covering hand.
Mari straightens, fixing her expression coolly. "Dr. Shepherd," she says professionally, moving to pass him.
He follows, backwards, without looking where he's going. "What is it then? Obviously, it's something where neurosurgeons have a bad name."
"Yes," she lies. "From ancient grudge break to new mutiny - "
"Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean," he finishes the quote. He laughs at the dramatics of Shakespeare, of Romeo and Juliet while she tries not to notice that he understood her that quickly. "Don't say you're a neurologist, I might agree to this feud," he jokes.
She wonders if neurology will even take her on their service. She's ex-communicated, and about to be further outcast when the surgeons find out the daughter of Ellis Grey turned down a surgical internship at Seattle Grace -
She knows how hospitals operate.
This, finding out Derek from the bar is the Head of Neuro, here, is too much to think about.
"Mari," he says, softer, wondering what he's missing. He touches the outside of her elbow, not to lead but to gently beseech her to stop trying to walk away.
Nonsensically she says, "You're not allowed to be a surgeon."
His face twitches. "Not…allowed?"
She presses her lips, daring him to laugh.
He holds up his other hand for peace, but keeps his left still around the curve of her elbow.
"Okay, okay, no sudden movements," he says barely moving his lips, staying perfectly still. His blue eyes are the only thing to move, taking in the loose blonde curls around her face. For the first time, seeing her in morning light. He's...devastatingly attractive in a way that smacks in the face. She didn't notice it, last night, which is a strange realization in itself.
"We'll pretend I'm not a neurosurgeon. I'll be Derek, just Derek, not Dr. Shepherd."
He's patient, in waiting for her to reciprocate, while her plastic badge digs into her palm, and Ellis Grey is in her head.
'Never date a doctor. They'll never take you seriously'.
'One affair, of the heart or the body, and it will ruin you. They'll try to ruin you.'
They're already trying Mom, and I haven't done anything wrong.
She closes her eyes so she can focus.
"Oh," Derek inhales. "This...really, bothers you."
His hand is still around her elbow, tucked into her side, just barely touching her, his fingers a light brush. He leans toward her. "You take advantage of me and now you want to cancel our date because I'm a neurosurgeon."
Her eyes open in a squint.
"I took advantage?"
"Didn't you? I remember being drunk, and good looking, and you kissing me."
He's teasing her. Provoking her. She's already a step closer, balanced on her toes to be closer, before she realizes. The back of his fingers brush her waist, flex at the touch. "I remember you kissing me."
His eyes dance. "I remember that too. Would you like to do it again," he pauses intentionally, like he'll kiss her now, "Friday night?"
Has the situation, the coincidence, not thrown him at all?
Why not?
What was this to him?
She narrows her eyes, "if I really was an intern, how would you have reacted?"
He shrugs, smile becoming less flirty, silver-blue eyes becoming more serious. "It wouldn't have changed anything."
She doesn't look away. "There's an age difference." She doesn't know how much, but he's certainly older than Meredith. The oldest man she's ever kissed romantically.
He shakes his head wryly. "Yeah," he agrees, tilting his head in slight embarrassment. "And yet…"
She waits, and yet, and yet…
Her mouth tingles with a remembered kiss.
"So, why?" he asks, wanting to know the precise cause of her hesitation, not ready to let go of their kiss.
"It's not…neurosurgeons, particularly."
He waits, knows that underneath the flirting, he needs to.
"Dr. Shepherd," a nurse calls his attention. They both blink, pulled out of each other's orbit. She shakes her head to reorient, realizing they're still in the hallway, hadn't moved to somewhere private.
He turns to address the nurse, to ask for a moment, and Mari, for the third time, slips out of his grasp.
Mari looks over the food selection, listens to Meredith vent about the 'teen princess' who paged 911 because she was bored. Mari doesn't say Meredith sounds entitled for an intern on her first day. That Katie is probably upset to be in a hospital, alone, missing out on her life. That seizures can be traumatic. That scuffing at 'rhythmic gymnastics' reminds her of the Meredith who dropped out of ballet even though she was great, because 'she didn't want to be like the other prima-donna ballerinas'.
Why does Meredith always want to be on the outside, making fun of the people who take pride in their hobbies, their appearance, their achievements?
Why is she still like this, years later?
'If she wasn't a beauty contestant, would you dislike her this much?' Mari knows she won't get anywhere asking that question, but it burns on her tongue.
Meredith goes to an intern table with only one chair left. Mari debates diverting, but where? She's marooned. Her only touchstone is Meredith.
She hooks her own chair around her ankle and drags it with her, choosing not to look at Meredith as she sits down, so she doesn't feel like the pathetic little sister tagging along.
She's only just taken her seat when a tall attending approaches the table for a speech.
"Good afternoon interns. It's posted, but I thought I'd share the good news personally. As you know, the honor of performing the first surgery is reserved for the intern that shows the most promise. As I'm running the OR today, I get to make that choice." He claps one of the intern's shoulders, the youngest as far as she can tell. The intern jolts. "George O'Malley. You'll scrub in for an appendectomy this afternoon. Congratulations."
George stutters, "me?"
The attending smiles coolly. "Enjoy."
The rest of the interns bounce their eyes from the attending's back to George's face, as warm as a pile of snakes.
"Did he say me?" George blinks quickly.
"That's rough," Mari whistles, since no one else has said anything, as she opens her bottle of water.
The rest blink out of their stupor.
"You're the one with the most promise?" The Korean intern with the big hair scoffs.
Meredith tilts her head at her sister. "Isn't that good thing? Being picked?"
The rest of the interns look at her to hear her answer.
"You're interns," she shrugs, giving them an absent attention, examining the edibility of her sandwich. Seattle Grace's food looks to be another strike below the hospital she left. "Gophers –"
"Grunts," the blonde with the brown eyes interrupts. "Yeah, bottom of the food chain, we heard the speech."
"Are you saying you're not an intern?" The intern with the curly black hair questions.
She continues undaunted. "You're not going to be performing surgery anytime soon. You'll be in pre-op and post-op, learning to take patient histories, comforting families, explaining surgeries to patients, lab work, fetching things, sutures. Dangling lead on a supervised surgery on your first day isn't a reward. It's hazing. They want to take you down a peg, temper your cockiness. By doing it to one of you they're doing it to all of you."
George swallows hard, blue eyes wide and guileless. The other interns have mixed reactions. Meredith watches, her thoughts easily hidden behind her eyes.
"Or maybe they're trying to motivate us, to be competitive, to be our best," the blonde intern tilts her chin, optimistic. Like she thinks a highly competitive environment can only be a good thing, instead of what it really is: a place to tear others down.
"This is the best surgical program in the country, it makes sense that they let their interns actually do something," one of the male interns agrees.
Mari swallows her bite of her sandwich, before primly correcting him. "Second best." Mass Gen is the best, and she highly doubts these little scalpel junkies didn't know that. Didn't compulsively check the rankings. Even the Chief, may every scalpel rust in his hands, knows it.
"So, you don't think O'Malley here has the most promise?" The other woman intern needles, aiming the hit at George. She's the one most bothered by not being picked. If the blonde wants a highly competitive adversary to sharpen her scalpel with, there's her best bet.
"Look," Mari directs at George, softer, seeing he needs encouragement. "Everyone runs the gauntlet. You're the first. So, you get to be the example."
"Not helping," he mutters, dropping his chin to his chest.
She keeps her smile, a little amused, but mostly sympathetic. Dr. House, as much as she admired and got along with him, was a nightmare for weeks.
"Find someone to quiz you on the procedure. Remember to breathe when something goes wrong."
"When something," he repeats, slightly hysterical, shaking his head like a dog coming out of the rain. "No. Okay. I'll- I'm just going to –" he picks up his tray and leaves, dodging the hand of the blonde intern who tries to pat his shoulder, still muttering under his breath.
None of the other interns speak, as they watch him go, like he's an exhibit in the zoo. Like they're already taking bets.
"So," the blonde interjects peppily. "Who are you anyway?"
Mari looks to Meredith, thinking she might introduce her, but as she's returned to stabbing her salad, Mari shrugs at the question. "I suppose, I'm the other Dr. Grey."
Notes:
Guess what else is in Seattle? Dr. Fraiser Crane's radio show. I thought it would be funny to add a little sibling squabble from another TV universe.