"Zo-Zo, are you feeling shy? Aunt Lexie's missed you very much!" Meredith wondered who was less convinced by her tone: the toddler whose suspicious face was half-buried in her neck, or her sister whose hand was flexing around the leg of the bear Zola had handed her dutifully, without lifting her head.

"Sweetie, we visited when Aunt Lexie was sleeping, remember?"

"Grover visit."

"That's right. In your book, Grover goes to visit the hospital. Hospitals are for…?"

"Work."

"Okay, yes. What else?" Zola didn't respond. "Getting better. Aunt Lexie has a hurt like—"

"Daddy!"

"Yes—"

"Daddy!" Zolarepeated at a screech, plunging across Meredith.

Derek caught her. "Hey, sunshine."

"More like cloudy and being a meatball."

"Are you a meatball? Did a meatball come to visit Aunt Lexie?"

"No me-ball. Z pizza."

It was becoming a problem that this small being was so hard to stay annoyed at. Meredith sighed. "She knows her story."

"It's a good one, huh, princess?" Derek asked, shifting her onto his hip. "Can you tell Aunt Lexie who's on your shirt?" He tugged down the hem.

Meredith gave Lexie a quick look, and she asked "who is that?" with decent enthusiasm. The nurses said she'd had a bad night, but they'd gotten Zola prepped, and she hadn't wanted to put off the actual interaction.

"Zoe," Zola replied, puffing her shirt out.

"Zoe…?" Derek prompted, tickling her. She batted at his hand, giggling.

"Monster!"

"And Zoe Monster is a…?"

"Lion!"

That got a laugh from Lexie. She even followed up, "Does that mean Rawr is a monster?"

Zola's face pinched in consideration, q look Meredith was sure she'd picked up from Derek. "Rawr lion," she determined.

"Not all lions are monsters, but some monsters are lions," Derek summarized.

"Maybe Zoe and Rawr are cousins?" Meredith suggested.

"Sofi?"

"Like you and Sofia, that's right. Yikes, speaking of, we gotta go. Director Wench—"

"Welch," Derek corrected.

"—will lock us out. We'd better—"

"Dr. Grey?" Leah Murphy, who Meredith now thought of as Crown Molding grabbed the threshold of Lexie's door to skid to a stop.

"Yes?" Meredith said, automatically turning toward her, and then looking back at Lexie who'd also responded.

"It is my name," her sister said.

It was, but considering how blank she'd gone any time Meredith mentioned her career, she suspected that she was purposefully fucking with the intern. Meredith couldn't blame her.

"There's a patient vomiting blood. I need general."

"Okay, um," she turned to Derek, already shrugging the diaper-bag off her shoulder. "Can you…?"

"I'll take her down, yeah."

"What's going on? I checked for E.R. pages—" she'd been doing that obsessively while she was on-call.

"It's a patient on the floor."

"Post-op?"

"Observation. It's, um…." Murphy looked over Meredith's shoulder.

"Dr. Grey is employed here," Derek said.

"You've got great benefits Murphy," Lexie said. "You should keep that in mind." Yeah. Definitely fucking with the intern. Did she know about Murphy and Alex? She could be jealous even loving someone else. Was that an unsisterly thing to think?

"Uh, I will. It's Larkin Peterson."

"Dammit," Meredith and Derek both swore.

Murphy's eyes double in width and darted to Zola, who paid her no attention. "Silly grown-up do?"

"Oh, honey," Meredith put her hand to one of the little girl's cheeks as she kissed the other. "Sometimes people do things when they're mad or sad that seem silly to other people. Like when Sofi gets out her pinchers."

"Mean."

"It can be. And the ones they're meanest to are themselves." She looked up at Derek. His face was weird, but his name was in the patient's record. "I'll update you."

"If she doesn't know what the words mean, and how they're used, she'll just repeat them for shock value." he said to the gaping resident.

"Oh…That's…It's smart."

"It's self-preservation," Meredith snapped. "Kid's a sponge." She kissed Derek, and then put her hand on Lexie's arm, where she knew she'd feel it. "I'll be by later. Listen to Rhys."

Lexie rolled her eyes. Better than nothing. Meredith led Murphy briskly out the door, making a beeline for the attendings lounge. The intern lingered in the hall, as though there was a red line at the threshold.

"Get in here, and give me the rundown."

"Uh, but you…you're her—"

"I last saw her yesterday afternoon, at which point she was not vomiting blood."

"R-Right…uh, Larkin Peterson, twenty-five. History of Tourette syndrome. Post-op eight months for anterior discectomy and spinal fusion due to myelopathy caused by motor tics. X-Brought in to the E.R. two days ago after ingesting caustic chemicals in a suicide attempt. EMTs reported household cleaner on site. rays show ceramics have been displaced. Ortho plans to go in once she's more stable."

"Alkaline or acidic cleaner?"

"Alkaline. A pH higher than seven and leads to liquefactive necrosis. Consistent with burns on mucosa of the oral cavity. Clinically reported dysphagia, showed drooling, erythema around the mouth. Endoscopic grading done fourteen hours post-admittance resulted in esophagitis and gastritis with forming gastric ulcers. Underwent—" the intern hesitated "—esophagogastroduodenoscopy."

"EGD, Murphy, we don't have forever here."

"Of course. You—You diagnosed her with Zarga Grade-III damage in the esophagus and stomach. Imaging suggested possible danger of perforation, but no free air. Put on intravenous proton pump inhibitors and gastric acid blockers to promote m ucosal healing. She was intubated nasally with endoscopic guidance and admitted for observation, with repeat CT—"

"Why CT?"

"Caustic ingestion injuries can continue to worsen for several weeks. EGD becomes counter-indicated between the fifth and fifteenth day post-ingestion." She looked up, waiting for a nod of acknowledgement. Meredith held her gaze. "She's scheduled for a jejeuneostomy…a feeding tube—J-tube!—insertion, because of structures which can continue to occur several months after initial exposure."

Meredith pulled her shirt on and almost scraped the skin of her wrist trying to hook her hair elastic, not the rubber band she'd taken to keeping there. "Let's walk. Keep going. What do we do if that narrowing occurs in the esophagus?"

"The NG tube could behave as a stent, which helps keep it open. Actual stents have been tried, but are usually ejected by the GI tract. You applied Mitomycin C to reduce scaring, and minimize the need for endoscopic bougie dilation, but, uh, statistically…statistically, she's in for a long recovery, and a lot of endoscopy," Murphy finished, sounding for the first time like she was talking about a person.

"Yeah," Meredith touched her badge to open a set of doors before the intern collided with them. "She is. Any history of suicide attempts or ideation?"

"N-No…..Well, the mother said they never know when she's saying 'I'll just kill myself' as a tic, or if it's sincere."

"Once, we could've assumed she might not know what she'd be in for if she survived. But with the internet…." Meredith grimaced. "It's highly unlikely that this was a call for help."

She'd spent a lot of time with her mother's textbooks; they were more likely to have hand-colored medical illustrations than black-and-white photos, but even those skilled facsimiles of gray and brown-ish focal lesions weren't as impactful as what you'd get Googling.

"Dr. Grey?"

"Open the door, Murphy." She let out a long breath behind the interns back. A month ago, the room they were going into had been Mark's.

Inside, the commotion was more like Lexie's room on a bad night. The woman in the autumnal mohair-knit shawl was Mrs. Peterson. She didn't share much more than eye color with the pallid, dark-haired young woman on the bed, but as they started the preliminaries, Larkin's shoulders jolted several times. Meredith couldn't tell any difference between the manifestations of a tic, and the precursor to an expulsion of blood, but Mrs. Peterson didn't twitch toward the emesis basin until it was necessary.

"Sorry, Mom," the patient gasped. "I didn't want you to have to deal with blood." She looked up at Meredith, missing the momentary crumpling of her mother's face. "I couldn't do what you do, Dr. Grey. I don't…yikes, yikes, yikes…I don't like blood, or gore. We think that's why…it's cum whippets!…my coprolalia is usually suh-sup nasty."

"Well, that's relative. I repair bowels all day, but my toddler can still gross me out."

"They do that," Mrs Peterson said, her free hand combing through her daughter's hair.

"We're supposed to stop! They saidit would stop, and I wouldn't…punt the baby, twenty points!…Finished junior high, and high school, and my developed brain is still defective as fuck."

"Lark—" The anguished appeal cut off while her daughter tilted her head back, rolling her eyes to the ceiling. "You're going to have to take her back?"

"As soon as Dr. Murphy can get us an O.R." She waited for the intern to react. "Likely one of the ulcers we saw has perforated. I'll go in laparoscopically and perform a resection, and we'll keep her on antibiotics to prevent peritonitis. There's a slight chance there's an esophageal perforation, in which case, we'd remove the segment—"

"You can't—sorry, but you can't just close the hole?"

"Caustic ingestion at that level has been known to cause cancer decades after the injury." Meredith paused to let the mother process this.

"It wouldn't be all that different, Mom. Tics are invasive, they multiply, they take over my body. Blue punch-buggy! Blue-yellow-blue-red-blue…They'd pray for me at church, not make me watch the livefeed 'cause I yell about demon splooge. They already think I'm possessed. Imagine if they saw this." Larkin gestured at the basin, and then turned to Meredith, her fingers still flicking. "Can Dr. Warren knock me out? He did a good job last time."

"He's actually not here anymore. He's doing a surgical internship in L.A."

"Figures. Even the doctors are moving forward in their lives."

Not all of them, Meredith thought. Then, Larkin jerked almost fully upright, and she leaned in to help Mrs. Peterson with the basin.

She'd never appreciated the O.R. board as much as she did when she found Derek waiting for her outside the scrub room. "The ulcers?" he asked.

She nodded. "It's early. May've been more freaking drain cleaner than her mom thought. Maybe just shitty luck. How did it go after I left?"

"I told Zola to say good-bye to Ecksy, and it was like the last piece clicked. I was going to encourage her to blow a kiss, but she was about to dive out of my arms to get a hug."

"Maybe Sofia's not the only one who she can peer pressure."

She fiddled with the rubber band on her wrist until he laughed, saying, "Surgeons thrive on competition."

"I don't mean to infantilize her or whatever. I'm just…I'm honestly not sure how to motivate her. Shouldn't I know that? I can hardly talk to her about anything but medicine. Am I that one-dimensional?"

"You are not, and neither is she. Once my sisters and I started studying medicine, it was a crutch. It gave you and Lexie a map. You're in territory that's new for both of you. That's been good for us, having Zola."

"Oh. Yeah, it has….

"I truly don't buy into sheltering kids, but…she doesn't know monsters or lions are supposed to be scary. I'd love it if her world could stay like that."

"Me too." He brought his forehead down to hers. "I don't think she'd thank us for not preparing her. You did a great job with that this morning."

"She did great by herself. I was a meatball."

"Oh?"

"I couldn't find the Lexie picture we've been showing her, so I just pulled up the first one I could find, and somehow it was of both of them."

"Lexie and Zo—?" He grimaced as he put together what she'd actually meant. "We've been talking about him, too."

"But she didn't associate them. She's never…. They broke up before we met her. It's not like I said, 'Uncle Mark and Aunt Lexie might've been destined for each other, but February-December romances are complicated, and they couldn't manage to get it together until they were both on the brink of death,' but I went through the whole Where Uncle Mark Is thing. She really engaged, and I was terrified she'd go in saying, 'hey Ecks, Unca Mark dead. Him no wake up. Lova much!'"

"Ah. It's the last line that really sells that." Love you much was what Derek's mom said getting off of the phone, and both Zola and Sofia had adapted it. That Zola would bring up the situation at an inopportune moment wasn't a new concern, but Sofia did know 'Daddy die.' What that meant to her was more uncertain than Zola's understanding, and that seemed to waiver with every discussion.

Maybe it was better, to never have the idea of death be a shock. Or maybe that was how you became Meredith. She didn't remember not understanding the concept. The difference would be that no one would let Zola or Sofia think they weren't worth living for. (Did Lexie think that now? Was it new, or had it been brewing since Susan died?)

"That she didn't make that declaration makes it a win for you," Derek insisted.

"I guess. She was more nervous than I expected. She loves stories about Baby Zola in the hospital…."

There'd been a month where all their free time had been spent with Zola, but Meredith's mind went to that miserable day last year when people who weren't them had brought Zola to the hospital and left her. That was her last actual hospital experience. Mark was dead, Lexie was paralyzed, Derek's hand was ruined, and Meredith—

The door to the stair-well next to them opened. "Dr. Grey? Transport is bringing her up." Murphy again, hanging onto another doorway. Meredith wanted to quote her mother at her. "People who linger in doorways are coming from nothing and going nowhere." But why? She was doing it for the same reason Meredith had, weighing the consequences of interrupting. She'd been the one to run off to tag Meredith, and she wanted to be told she was It. If she'd been looking an hour later, she'd likely have let her.

"I need you to round on my post-ops," she told the intern. "And push my schedule." Murphy's disappointment wasn't as obvious as Ross's would've been, and it didn't become anger like Wilson's. It was a sudden, visible dulling. "If you can handle all that, pick something to scrub in on later."

"Yes, Dr. Grey!" Murphy snapped to attention, and Meredith noticed her start to raise her arm before she turned and ran.

"Was she about to salute me?"

"Seemed like it," Derek said. "I don't remember being saluted for surgeries."

"You weren't." she said, and then tipped her head up to his ear. "You were the one to rise to the occasion."

"I don't know about that," he teased. "You certainly perk up in some places."

"You're awful."

"Full of awe, that's me."

She shook her head, toying with the hairs at the back of his neck. "This kid…not a kid…. I thought twenty-five was a magic number, too. It's not, usually you're just out of excuses, but with Tourette syndrome…most patients do grow out of it. Why has no one suggested DBS? It's not common, but the studies…."—"It is not my job to push him into anything and it's definitely not yours."—"Never mind." She kissed him quickly and ducked into the scrub room.

"Hey, hold—" he called, but once the door was shut, he let her get away with her version of a Yankee Dodge.

Stupid. So stupid. She wasn't a neurosurgeon, and while she probably didn't need a tumor patsy anymore, Larkin was his patient. If he hadn't suggested DBS, who was she to question that? True, he hadn't done as many of those procedures lately. Maybe there were newer studies—Not that she was totally up-to-date, either. She just flipped through the journals that came to the house, or she found lying around his office. Occasionally, she'd rerun PubMed searches, to check on advancements.

Before this summer, she'd relied on regularly asking Lexie what she'd read lately. Lately, she'd been getting Lexipedia entries about movies and TV. Nothing picked up from the cases she'd worked with Derek, or reading most of the research library. Nothing from her PT. Callie had tapped Rhys specifically because they were a gossip who knew almost all the goings on in the hospital. Lexie never tried to engage them. She'd beat the Jeopardy! contestants to their answers, and recap the plot of Passions, but she wasn't invested in them. (Was Keredith pushing her? Was she pushing Derek?)

Through the scrub-room window, she watched Dr. Knox work. When she'd suggested he get in touch with Ben, since patients with TS could be difficult to sedate, he'd asked, "Who do you think advised him in the first place?" He'd meant to be reassuring. She'd felt like an intern.

"Since you're clearly uncomfortable with my decision in this case, it's probably best you don't scrub in."

She'd been an attending surgeon for six weeks. The transition had been more marked than it might've been due to the time off she'd taken, and staying at Seattle Grace Mercy West was always going to worsen the imposter syndrome. She was prepared to run an O.R. So far that hadn't eliminated the moments of strangeness that came from seeing her name everywhere, and being looked to for all decisions. It wasn't unlike returning to Dartmouth as a med student; except then she'd longed for the life of an undergrad, where she'd been balancing class and parties, not clinicals and care-attendant interviews. She didn't want to go back to being a resident. The idea that she could one day believe she was there again was one of those things that occurred to her while she was trying to sleep at night and made her skin crawl because her brain didn't have anything else to do with the horror.

She preferred her current life, a fact that came with its own unsettling truths. But sometimes, finding herself in navy scrubs with a room full of nurses, residents, and techs, all answering to her, she expected to jolt awake.

What happened next must've been a function of that uncanniness. The dissonant threads in her life weaving together momentarily in her consciousness.

It didn't feel like that.

She stepped out of the scrub room and turned to be gowned and gloved. That burst of cold wasn't the sterile air of the operating room. It smelled like dirt and smoke. She blinked and a looming figure stood next to the table. The metal of his gun glinted, so robust compared to precise blades fashioned to avoid causing pain.

"Dr. Grey?"

The patient sedated with a nasal oxygen tube was not Derek. BokHee stood where Gary Clark had been, and Meredith held her whole body tense to keep her hands from shaking while she inserted them into the gloves being held for her. She snapped the bottom edge, focusing in on the bite of it as she approached the table slowly, ready for each step to crackle with leaves and branches. Her bootie-encased shoes shuffled normally on the floor. She was in her second month as an attending. Most people in the room would remember that a year ago she'd been resident non grata until she started moonlighting in OB. She couldn't show anything but complete competence in her O.R.

Maleficent. She didn't love the nickname. Being cast as the villain in the interns' minds wouldn't help her teach them, and being seen as a tyrant would only encourage defiance—"the Nazi" had never been "das Fuhrer," — But the image in her mind was of the dark fairy sweeping her cape around her. Meredith had never denied her darkness, and she deeply resented feeling like she'd attempted the move and was being suffocated.

Definitely not fine, she thought, while she made the first incision. It was almost a relief.

Going into that O.R. again later that day, she braced for a return to the woods, or something else; maybe holding a bomb steady in the same room. Nothing. Her brain didn't mistranslate the strange scent particles in the air—sterile had a smell she'd known her whole life, but couldn't adequately describe.—She stayed fully in the present while removing the abscess she discovered on the patient's liver—Karl Mendlov, thirty-eight, single father of the two girls whose deep-set eyes studied Meredith carefully while she outlined the procedure for culturing to ensure they found the correct antibiotic regimen. All the experience in the world hadn't made her stop wanting to say yes in response to any variant of "but he'll be okay?"

Having that procedure go smoothly made her more anxious about her third, even though a lipoma removal was a simple, frequent procedure. She definitely hadn't expected Murphy to pick it to scrub in on it. In a month or so the interns would be vying for easy surgeries, hoping to be given an opportunity to wield a scalpel, but this crew was still going wide-eyed over being asked to hold a retractor. When she checked the board to confirm she'd been put in OR-4 and noticed that Callie was doing a shoulder ligament reconstruction while she was scheduled to assist Dr. Webber on a hernia repair. That gave her an explanation for why she had an intern scrubbing in beside her. It did nothing to ease the awkwardness of those minutes.

"Um, Al—Dr. Karev says you're selling the house?"

"Yes, he is done squatting on my property."

"You might want to update the washer-dryer. It's…It's not bad—better than the one in my building, which is why Dr. Karev let…. Um, my college roommate flips houses, and anything that old…." Murphy's cheeks went pink, and she stared at the stream coming from the faucet like she wanted to make it curve with the powers of her mind. "He, uh, he said you all lived there as residents. That must've been nice."

"Must it?" she countered. Murphy's shoulders tensed. She closed her eyes for a beat and added, "Would you want to live with your cohort, Murphy?"

She didn't get the sense that the group was all that close, but she could have missed something. Two months in, and there were interns whose names she didn't know.

"Heather and I ended up living together via Facebook and Craigslist. It's a two-bedroom that started life as a studio. We have a curtain? She…She gets kind of…reclusive? I'm introverted too, just…. I wouldn't mind."

Last year, she'd had a vague thought of passing the house on to Lexie; keeping it in the Grey family. It'd been her mother's, passed on from her grandmother, which must've been why Thatcher had let Ellis keep it. Maybe one, or both of them, had seen it as a trade-off. By waiving rights to her, he'd been freed from child support payments, and it was nice to imagine that he'd considered that she'd benefit whether Ellis sold or kept it. Most likely, he'd wanted to never have to hear from Ellis again.

Derek had said selling it to Alex would still be keeping it in the family, and it was big for him to admit that. Holding onto it until it could go to Zola didn't seem practical, and she didn't want to saddle her daughter with a responsibility she didn't want.

The interns in Murphy's group hadn't had an easy time of it, arriving to the hospital a little over a month after the plane crash. Their chief resident had been tapped last minute due to the original front-runner being comatose, and several departments were short-staffed. Meredith didn't doubt some of the blame lay with her; having returned to a sudden influx of incompetence had not made her her best self.

"Whoa!" she snapped, and Murphy jumped, her hand narrowly missing the handle she'd been about to turn. "Elbow."

"Oh my God, I can't believe I—! I'm such an idiot."

"You're an intern. Scrub in again."

"But…But…I didn't touch—"

"Scrub in again!"

While they worked, Meredith would explain why she'd made her do it over, and threaten to make her spend the duration of a procedure repeating the process. Interns were like toddlers: they had to be taught that a certain tone meant "do it, now," for their safety and others'.

Maybe renting the house out to a few interns would help improve morale, but Meredith couldn't handle being their landlord. She didn't wantto be anyone's landlord. Having Lexie move back in with them was different.

She turned her faucet off with her elbow and left Murphy scrubbing furiously. Again, cold air hit her wet hands. Often, she found the moment refreshing, but today it made her skin clammy. She curled her fingers in against her palms as soon as her gloves were on. The patient, Yvonne Freedman, fifty-three, was still being put under, and showing her capability took priority over Meredith's lingering unease. If it wasn't going to happen again, what had made it happen in the first place

After closing, she sent Murphy to take Yvonne's husband to recovery; he be able to take her home in a few hours. Rather than going down to the cafeteria, where a text informed her Derek would be with Zola for another fifteen minutes or so. Meredith headed for the lounge. She didn't know Ramsey was the last person she wanted to see until she saw her filling out a chart at the corner of the O.R-floor nurses station. Their eyes met before Meredith could dodge—was Ramsey a Yankee? Not as much as Derek, that was certain...what the fuck, Grey?—and then she got the strained smile that meant she'd been staring too long. There was no chance of getting away clean.

"Hey, just the neurosurgeon I was hoping to see."

The other woman raised her eyebrows. "I find that specious, Dr. Grey."

"Most people would. Seriously, I have this patient. She's twenty-five, with a thirteen year history of Tourette syndrome. Motor, complex vocal tics, coprolalia, which actually happens in, what, ten percent of cases? She's been on clonidine patches, that's an alpha-adrenergic, three dopamine antagonists, tetrabenezine, clonzepam. She was still ticking on the haloperidol we gave her…. She's a great candidate for DBS is what I'm saying."

Ramsey's stare reminded her a lot of the one Derek had given her after she told him to push Mr. Levangie. the difference in their approaches had been there from the start; he needed to be challenged, but not by underlings, not in front of people. His wife, not his resident.

"It'll be a while before she's strong enough for it. I know guidelines say it shouldn't be done within six months of a suic—"

"You know more than I do."

"What?"

"Dr. Shepherd is the first surgeon I've trained under who takes on DBS patients. That is, unless Dr. Nelson…?"

Meredith snorted. Nelson didn't take on anything remotely experimental, and she'd seen the medley of pride and social justice related pins next to the I HAVE TOURETTE'S button on Larkin's bag. She didn't need to have awake brain surgery done by a guy who didn't have an excuse for being offensive. Judging by her expression, Ramsey had been around long enough to catch that. The rest of the department focused on nerves, the spine, tumors—Derek had been the most well-trained in DBS by a lot.

"I'm sorry. I've read about Dr. Shepherd's work, particularly with Parkinson's patients. There is a specialist at Seattle Pres. Maybe not his caliber, but I'm sure they'll take the referral."

They would, but she'd have to arm Mrs. Peterson with the right research. Without someone to advocate for her, she doubted they'd see Larkin as the candidate she did. Derek would've.

"Tell you what, Blondie, if you don't marry him, I will."

She grabbed a yogurt out of the fridge and retreated to the familiarity of the hallway. Her sister had been transferred from her bed to the recliner, where she sat with her lunch tray sitting in front of her. The occupational therapists had set her up with silverware that was easier to grip, but it was resting to the side of her untouched food.

"You know if you're done, you're supposed to put those vertically across your plate," Meredith said, sitting on the bed.

Lexie blinked, and Meredith got the sense that she hadn't registered that she was there before she'd spoken. "Always thought you were more Dickinson than Post."

"'Surgeons must be very careful

When they take the knife!

Underneath their fine incisions.

Stirs the Culprit - Life!'" Meredith recited.

"Number one fifty-six," Lexie returned. "That's the only one I know. Not a poetry encyclopedia."

"Ask me next time we're drinking, I can manage a couple more. We got three separate units on her at my K-12. Massachusetts loves its hermits." She licked the lid of her yogurt and used it as an excuse to slide to the edge of the bed. She deposited the lid on the edge of he tray, and then casually picked up the silverware, cutting the chicken, having to focus on making adult-bite sized pieces. She stole one once she'd finished, flipped the fork and held it out to Lexie. Watching her sister's hand tremble as she took it, she remembered seeing Burke's tremor for the first time, and now Derek's. How many fixes would they get? Whose talent would be preserved?

Lexie stopped focusing on her food enough that Meredith had turned around to the TV. It wasn't on.

"Whenever you're in here at night, you've been reading JoN and JNS. I figured it was for Derek, but Wilson brought an article by after you left this morning. It was a study on tendon transfers. That's for me?"

Meredith hesitated, again hearing Derek that day five years ago. Her job wasn't to push, but she could encourage. "Yeah. Derek has the contacts, but, you know, he's kind of behind on the research. All the tumors."

"And?"

"If there's a chance, why not take it?" Meredith said. "If you don't want to be a test subject, I get that. Nothing's an instant fix; you'll have to work for it. But you have some of the best surgeons in the country on your side, and a very stubborn sister who's not afraid to use the name of Grey."

In the three months since she'd seen it, Meredith had forgotten how contagious Lexie's smile was—before she could spend too much time worrying that she hadn't appreciated it enough in the first place—her sister sat up just a little straighter and asked, "What happened with the hemoemesis?"

"The patient…. No, actually, hold on. First, when I was an intern…actually, almost exactly five years ago, we had this patient whose daughter wanted him to walk her down the aisle." She paused, and could hear Mr. Levangie telling her that if anything went wrong, he'd blame her. Possibly, that was the only time a parent had expressed that, and she hadn't believed it. Lexie's raised eyebrow dared her to go on. "We ended up doing DBS," she continued. "The patient from this morning has Tourette Syndrome."

"Oh. You could publish with that! I mean, most of what's out there are case reports. A review of the literature came out of Mayo in '09. In…June, I think? I read it on PubMed, no cover. They're doing it, or have done it." That would be a good excuse to call Cristina. "Something was supposed to be coming up in the June Stereotactical Functional Neurosurgery about target selection, but...you…." The spark that had appeared in Lexie's eyes dulled slightly. "Who's gonna do it?"

"I don't know," Meredith admitted. "That's why I need all the citations you can give me." Her sister's continued stare reminded her of Cristina's whenever she was seeing straight through her. Then, she nodded.

"The best review on Tourette Syndrome overall is probably from Practical Neurology, October of last year. In March, BRAIN had a actual double-blind trial from Belgium, maybe? Neurology has a case report from a patient with both—Parkinson's and Tourette—Do you want to write this stuff down?"

"Eventually. Run me through it first."

The quizzical look Lexie gave her was better than a smile.

A/N If you missed it, last weekend I posted a fluffy season six one-shot called Not Just Anybody. Find it in my profile, and follow me for future one-shots!

Next week, there will be a new chapter. The 21st I'm having a procedure done to fix my eye issues, so I may post early, but I'm thinking I may take it off. It would be a good opportunity for people to catch up and share.