A/N: this chapter takes place not long after "snowblind" in s16.

2. champagne problems

you had a speech / you're speechless

It happened so fast that her brain couldn't even process what was going on before it was over. Meredith was in surgery with Hayes-a little girl, seven-years-old, who had been pulled out of a horrific car accident-when she started crashing.

Hayes had all but shoved her to the side, his voice nearly cracking when he shouted, "Move!"

Meredith's first instinct was to bite his head off. How dare he treat her like that in her O.R. and just when they were starting to get along.

But then, her vitals stabilized, and everything was back on track. She met Hayes' eyes, brows raised, but fury dropping off into confusion. Meredith hadn't even been able to begin to assess the situation to figure out what was wrong before he had pushed her aside.

Hayes blinked at her once, twice, before realizing what exactly he had done in the moment. He had the sense to look a smidge sheepish when he spoke, "Sorry, I had a similar case during my fellowship, and the same thing happened and-"

"It's okay," Meredith said, finding her voice again as she stepped back up to the table. "We've all had moments like that. Why don't you fill me in on what happened, so I know what to look out for in the future?"

"It's rare, but…"

Meredith let out a long breath as she made her way towards one of the storage closets. Amazingly, all the patients from the car crash had survived their surgeries with the recovery odds in their favor. Part of her felt a little ashamed for how fast she had wanted to jump down Hayes' throat in the O.R., but she knew that was just an emotional reaction in the heat of the moment. He figured out what was going on before she did and acted how he needed to save the girl's life.

There was no time for explanations or trying not to step on anyone's toes. Every surgeon she knew had been in a similar spot at one point or another.

He was good. Well, she knew, in theory, that he was. They didn't just hire anybody at Grey-Sloan, and he came with the Crisitina Yang stamp of approval, which said enough right there. Seeing Hayes in that O.R., though, she was grateful he was on their team.

Meredith opened the door to the storage closet, making a b-line for the I.V. kits; they were running low in the E.R., and she needed a reason to step away from the chaos for a moment. She hadn't even grabbed two when she heard a sniffle from behind the shelves. Putting the kits down, she peaked around to the other side.

"Hayes?"

Cormac was sitting pressed against the lower shelves, legs bent towards his chest and elbows resting on his knees. His head was dropped low, only being propped up by one of his hands on his forehead. It took him a moment to respond, but slowly he looked up. He stared at Meredith for a moment before it registered that someone was even in front of him. Cormac took in a sharp breath before straightening his posture and wiping at his eyes, "Grey, I was just-"

"What happened?" Meredith stepped out fully in front of him, drawing a few feet closer. His eyes were rimmed with red and still a bit glassy; she could see the exhaustion swimming in them.

"Nothing, really, just our case with the little girl got to me a tad."

"But she's okay. I just checked on her not an hour ago; she's going to make a full recovery. You saved her life, Hayes."

Cormac chuckled, "Well, I didn't exactly do that alone." He went quiet for a few moments, and Meredith just watched him as he collected his thoughts.

"The, uh, similar case from my fellowship years that I mentioned earlier. It was the little girl who came in with an aggressive form of cancer when she was five. Her name was, uh," he cleared his throat. "Her name was Imogen. I was on her case for the two years they were in and out of the hospital. She was a little firecracker and despised it when anyone would get sad for her. Even on the days she was feeling her worst, she would find the will to smile and crack a joke or two.

"She was officially declared in remission about a month after her seventh birthday. Everyone was so excited and proud we threw her a little celebration, but she refused to take any of the sweets or gifts. Instead, choosing to deliver them to the other kids on the floor who were sicker than she was. Her parents loaded Imogen and her things into their car. She finally got to go home."

Cormac stopped, looking up towards the ceiling as he tried to keep his breathing under control, "It wasn't even two hours later that we got the call that a major trauma was coming in. There had been a bridge collapse about twenty minutes out. Imogen and her parents got caught in it. Suddenly, she was in our O.R. again with, uh, pretty extensive damage.

"And the same thing that happened today happened then, but we didn't catch it in time. Imogen didn't even make it an hour into surgery. Both her parents survived, though, so, then we had to tell them that their little girl, who they were taking home that morning, was dead."

He closed his eyes, taking in slow and deliberate breaths. Meredith lowered herself to sit next to him, placing a hand on his ankle, squeezing gently. She sat there next to him until his breathing quieted down, and he turned to look at her. The smile she gave was one of a kindred spirit, rubbing his ankle with her thumb a few times before standing up. Reaching out her hand to help him up, which he gratefully took, she got him to his feet.

Meredith let go of his hand, moving to touch his shoulder to guide him toward the door, "C'mon."

They ended up in one corner of the tunnels, where Meredith pulled out an empty coffee cup filled with rocks and a half-used roll of tape that was tucked along the wall behind a spare gurney. Cormac watched with curiosity as she taped the cup to the wall after pouring out the rocks into her hand, then coming to stand next to him on the other side of the hallway.

She held out half of the rocks for him to take, "Here."

He took the stones, looking down at them, back up to Meredith, before glancing at them again. She rolled her eyes with a smile, shaking her head at his confusion, "You're supposed to throw them."

"The rocks?"

"Yeah, the rocks, try to get them into the cup," she said, pointing to the one she had just taped on the opposite wall.

" Why ?"

"Just do it."

Cormac watched her out of the corner of his eyes as she began throwing her rocks, aiming to get them into the cup. She missed the first one, but the second one got in. He looked down at the stones in his hand, tightening his grip around them before relenting with a sigh. Why the hell not?

Meredith's laugh echoed in the empty tunnels when his first rock bounced off the wall way off target and came shooting back towards him. He sent a mock-glare her way, but she caught his eyes with hers and grinned so hard it was contagious.

One by one, their rocks made it into the cup, until even the ones they missed with at first landed with the rest. Cormac got the final one in with a satisfying click. Meredith crossed over to unstick the cup from the wall before coming to stand next to him again.

"So," he hoisted himself up on one of the gurneys that sat directly behind them. "Mind telling me what the point of all of that was?"

She settled next to him, leaning back against the wall, their shoulders close enough that he could bump hers without really moving much. The rocks tapped against each other as she poured a few into her hand and started messing with them. "It's this silly game Alex taught me years ago when I was having a rough go with Derek, during those moments where the emotions were so heightened my usual tricks for collecting myself weren't working. You're supposed to get so focused on trying to get the rocks in the cup that you hopefully have a bit more distance between you and the emotions by the end. Sometimes it takes more than one round. He said he picked it up from one of his foster brothers or something."

"Well, I think it worked," Cormac said. "So, thank you."

Meredith looked up at him and smiled, "Anytime."

Her eyes went back down to the rocks that she was rolling between her fingers. He could see how there was an uncharacteristic dip in her posture. Looking towards the wall in front of him, he cleared his throat, "Alex… that's Karev, right? He was supposed to be my co-chief, but not so much anymore, apparently."

"Yup," she replied, popping the 'p.' Cormac could sense that a lot was going unsaid, so he let the quiet takeover until she decided she wanted to break it.

It didn't take terribly long.

"He's in Kansas," her voice was droll and monotone, like it's the most lifeless fact in the world, but it caught a bit at the end, telling him it was anything but. She rolled her lips inwards, biting the edges and looking anywhere else but at him.

"He's in Kansas, and we found out through a fucking letter. " Meredith pulled her legs onto the gurney, shifting to sit cross-legged, so her knee was now brushing against his thigh. She clenched her fist around the rocks before taking one and launching it at the wall with a pathetic clack.

"He left his job."

Clack.

"He left his wife."

Clack.

"He left his patients."

Clack.

"He left Bailey."

Clack.

"He left Webber."

Clack.

"And…" her voice trailed off as she looked at the leftover stones in her palm.

"He left you," Cormac said, voice soft but without a hint of pity, which Meredith appreciated.

"Yeah, he left me too." She paused before letting out a bitter laugh, "Part of me wants to hate him, but most of me can't. That is what is so infuriating. I understand completely why he did it."

"You were close." It wasn't a question.

Meredith finally turned and met his eyes; she scanned them for a moment before nodding. "There were five of us as Bailey's interns. We didn't always get along, but they became family. Then, George died, and Izzie left, and suddenly it was me and Cristina and Alex. And it stayed like that for a while, until Burke offered the Klausman Institute to Cristina, and I knew she had to leave. We talk all the damn time, but my Person was physically gone, and it was just the two of us.

"Derek died, and I left, but then I had a baby, and Alex was my emergency contact, and then I was home. He wasn't just my best friend anymore; he became my rock. My kids' favorite uncle. My other Person. And then he gives me all this bullshit about how I'm my own damn person, and I know I am, doesn't mean I wanna be alone.

"Amelia and Maggie are here, and they're wonderful. Jo too. Who I have no idea how to be there for because while I want to strangle Alex for putting her through this, he found out he had kids. Twins, with Izzie-they were married before she left him. And knowing Alex, I completely get why he moved to Kansas."

"That doesn't mean this entire situation doesn't suck and that you don't miss him."

Meredith chuckled, her throat feeling thicker by the second. She took a breath, "Yeah, I, uh, I'm really gonna miss him."

Cormac put his hand on the part of her thigh that rests just above her knee. The warmth of his hands surprised her. It seeped past the thin fabric of her scrubs, melting the chill that had settled into her skin. Her eyes slipped closed as she stopped trying to ignore the reality of the situation that part of her was always afraid of happening.

"Eight of you will switch to an easier specialty. Five of you will crack under the pressure. Two of you will be asked to leave."

And at some point, only one will remain.

She doesn't know if it was the physical exhaustion of the day getting to her, the emotional fatigue catching up, maybe a little bit of both; or the fact that she was lonely and he was next to her, and his company was a bit of a salve for her current state. Her arm pressed into his, and she let her head drop onto his shoulder.

There was a split-second of muscle tension at the sudden contact, but it drifted away just as quickly. Meredith sunk deeper with a breath, her head rolling forward, so her nose met the edge of his collarbone. No one else was in the tunnels; no one was being paged. No one was leaving, and no one was dying.

So, Cormac gave her leg a gentle squeeze and rested his head against hers.

A small voice in the back of his head asked what this was, and at that moment, he didn't bloody well care. It didn't matter because he was tired of feeling alone. And he wasn't alone-maybe it was time to give himself permission to embrace that. Slowly.

He could start right now in the tunnels on a spare gurney, surrounded by rocks on the floor and the knowledge that the little girl upstairs was alive. They could both try to be a little less lonely together.

thank you for reading! a favorite and any comments you have to offer are much appreciated!