Archive of Our Own

The game. They say a person either has what it takes to play, or they don’t. My mother was one of the greats. Me, on the other hand? I’m kinda screwed.

It was the light, filtering in through her mom’s old curtains, that woke her up. She was cold, she realized, and that was because she was naked.
Shit. She was too old to be sleeping on the couch. What time was it?

Meredith reached down to pull the blanket off the man on her floor, and then hesitated. He was still sleeping, and it wasn’t like she could just leave him here.

She picked up one of the pillows and threw it at him.

He woke with a grunt. He actually was almost as good looking as he had seemed through the haze of tequila. That never happened.

The guy sat up and lifted a hand. Her bra, he had found her bra. “This is—“

She grabbed it from him. “This is humiliating on so many levels.” She couldn’t seem to locate the rest of her clothes, so she wrapped herself in the blanket as best she could. “You have to go.”

He grinned at her. It was a very charming grin, which was unspeakably annoying in the light of day. “Come back down here,” he said. “We’ll pick up where we left off—“

“You have to go,” she said. “I’m late.” Was she? She still hadn’t checked the time, but that seemed to be a good bet. “Which isn’t what you want to be on your first day of work so… you have to go.”

His pants were half underneath the couch. She tossed them at him.

He stopped looking curiously around the room and caught them. “You actually live here?”

Meredith still didn’t know how to answer that question. It certainly didn’t look lived in. She’d cleaned the kitchen and one of the bedrooms, but that was about it. They’d uncovered the couch at some point last night, but the armchair still had a sheet thrown over it. Half-unpacked cardboard boxes filled the space in front of the window.

“No.”

“Oh.”

“Yes, kind of.”

He looked puzzled by this answer. “Oh,” he said again. “It’s nice. A little dusty, odd, but it’s nice.” He stood to pull his pants on. “So, how do you kind of live here?”

She really didn’t want to get into this. “I moved two weeks ago from Boston,” she said, very aware that she was still naked under her blanket. “It was my mother’s house. I’m selling it.”

Something softened in his face. “Oh, I’m sorry.”

Meredith went back over what she’d just said. “For what?”

“You said ‘was’.”

Right. She had. “My mother’s not dead. She’s…” No, she was absolutely not getting into this was a complete stranger. “You know what? We don’t have to do the thing.”

There was that charming grin again. “Oh, we can do anything you want.”

“No, the thing,” she said. “Exchange the details, pretend we care. Look, I’m gonna go upstairs and take a shower, okay? And when I get back down, you won’t be here. So, goodbye…” She paused. They had exchanged names, right, before she had brought him home?

God, she was never drinking tequila again.

He looked amused. “Derek,” he said.

“Derek, right,” she said. “Meredith.”

“Meredith.”

“Yeah.” If she stood here for one more second, she was going to lose it.

“Nice meeting you,” he said. He actually seemed to mean it.

“Bye, Derek.” She turned around and took the stairs at a run without looking back.

***

Meredith was not, in fact, late, although she was cutting it close. Luckily, she hadn’t been dumb enough to get drunk before her real first day. Today was orientation, which she imagined would involve a lot of paperwork, awkward small talk with her co-interns, and absolutely no patient care.

Seattle Grace, like most hospitals, had been laid out by an idiot. The first room she found matching the number in the email was a storage closet. It took her thirty seconds of futilely juggling the handle to realize that.

Shit. Now she really was going to be late. She turned, looking for any clue as to where this conference room was. She had followed the numbers down a small hallway to the right of the elevators. Most of the doors seemed to lead to offices. It was quiet compared to the hallways of patient rooms.

There were voices coming from an open door a little further along. She stepped into what looked like a small auditorium, with a dozen rows of cushioned seats on a slant. This had to be it, even if she didn’t recognize a single one of those faces.

Meredith slid into one of the seats on the end just as someone stepped up onto the raised platform at the front of the room.

Dr. Richard Webber, Chief of Surgery. She’d seen him on interview day, although he hadn’t been one of her interviewers. He had trained here at the same time as her mother.

“Each of you comes here today hopeful,” he said. He had a commanding voice. “A month ago you were in med school being taught by doctors. Now, you are the doctors.”

Meredith’s mouth felt suddenly dry. It was an obvious statement, but no one had put it quite like that before. And there was a big difference between walking across the stage in those velvet-trimmed robes and actually putting a scalpel to a patient.

“The five years you spend as a surgical resident will be the best and worst of your life. You will be pushed to your breaking point. Some of you may crack under the pressure, or decide to switch to an easier specialty.”

He stepped down, looking across the rows of interns. “This is the starting line. The operating room is your arena. How well you play,” he said, “it’s up to you.”

Like I said, I’m screwed.

Orientation was, as she had expected, a blur of filling out forms and slideshows about repleting electrolytes and when to call for help (the answer being, as far as she could tell, both never and always). The only time for awkward small talk was at lunch. A bored-looking administrator handed out boxed sandwiches and set them free for the next thirty minutes.

Meredith wandered out to the courtyard and sat down next to a small Asian woman with long dark curls. She looked vaguely familiar, as most of the women did. Theirs were the faces Meredith remembered from the email, since there were so few of them.

“Only six woman,” Meredith said. “Out of 20.”

The other woman rolled her eyes. “Yeah. And I heard one of them is a model. Seriously. That’s gonna help with the respect thing.”

“You’re Cristina, right?”

The other woman—Cristina—nodded. “What’s your first rotation? I’m on Trauma.”

“Me too.” She wouldn’t call Cristina a friendly face, exactly, but at least she would be with someone she knew.

One of the guys stepped towards them, gesturing with his sandwich. He was average height, with dark hair that looked like his mom had cut it for him. “You’re on Trauma?” he said. “So am I. Hey, at least we’ll be tortured together, right?”

The two of them stared blankly at him.

This seemed to have no effect on his rambling. “I’m George? O’Malley?” Meredith hoped he didn’t end every sentence with a question when he talked to patients. “We met at the mixer? You had on a black dress, slit up the side, strappy sandals…”

She could feel her eyebrows going up.

“And now you think I’m a stalker. I’m not, it’s just, you were really…”

Meredith looked down at her watch. “Thirty minutes is almost up,” she said. “We should go back in.”

***

The morning of July 1st, Meredith did not wake up to sun streaming in her bedroom window. In fact, the sun was nowhere to be seen.

She groaned and rolled over to face the clock on her bedside table. Four am. Sounded about right. It wasn’t like she had never done this in medical school, but it had been a few months.

By the time she dragged herself into the locker room, coffee in hand, she was only slightly more awake. She left her cup on the bench with her bag and typed her code into the machine in the corner. The scrubs that came out had been washed so many times they were worn soft, the hems fraying, but at least they looked like they’d fit.

She changed quickly. When she closed her locker, Cristina was standing next to her.

“We better hurry up,” she said. “I don’t know about our chief, but I hear Bailey’s a hardass.”

Meredith vaguely recognized the name from her schedule. Bailey was the third year on the service, in charge of fielding consults and also keeping the interns out of the way of the chief and the attendings. “Do you know where the Trauma work room is?”

Cristina gave her a look. “I scoped it out yesterday, you didn’t?”

She hadn’t even thought about it. Maybe it was because she had spent so much time in this hospital. But that had been when she was a kid. It wasn’t like she actually knew her way around.

“You guys are on Trauma too?”

Meredith turned to see a tall blonde woman wearing a painfully earnest smile. When their eyes met, the other woman stuck out a hand. “I’m Isobel Stevens. Everyone calls me Izzie.”

And that was too much energy for this time of morning. “Meredith,” she said. She waved a hand towards Cristina. “Cristina.”

They started walked. Izzie, at least, didn’t seem to know where she was going either.

“I know they say Trauma is the worst,” she said. “But I bet it’s not that bad. I mean, think about how much we’re going to learn, right?”

“Let me guess,” Cristina said, without turning around. “You’re the model.”

The work room wasn’t far from the conference room where they had been yesterday. The only occupant at the moment was an exhausted-looking guy in wrinkled scrubs. He looked like he wanted to be enthused to see them, but couldn’t quite muster up the energy.

“New interns?” he said. “I’m just updating the list for conference. Then this dumpster fire will be all yours.”

He went back to his computer, where he was methodically clicking into patient charts, hitting a button on the right-hand side of the screen, and exiting out of them again. After a moment, she realized he was refreshing the smart phrases in the handoff so that they would display each patient’s most recent vitals and labs.

They had just finishing stapling the printed lists into packets when the door slammed open.

The woman who stood there did not look in the least intimidating. She was a head shorter even than Meredith, with dark hair cropped just under her ears. When she came closer, freckles were visible across the bridge of her nose, faint against her dark skin.

“Hey, Bailey,” the guy said. He handed her a packet and three pagers. “This service is a nightmare, good luck.”

Meredith and Cristina exchanged a look. This was Bailey?

Bailey looked over the four of them (George had caught up on the walk over from the locker room; he seemed to be compensating for his awkwardness the previous day by not speaking at all).

Izzie smiled. “Hi,” she said, just as she had several minutes earlier. “I’m Isobel Stevens but everyone calls me Izzie.”

Bailey looked distinctly unimpressed.

“Don’t bother sucking up,” she said finally. “I already hate you, that’s not gonna change.”

She turned around, pushing through the door again. They scrambled to follow. The overnight intern—now a second year—trailed along at a more leisurely pace.

“Trauma conference is every morning at six. You will have a list ready for every person on this service with updated numbers, and you will know everything that happened to these patients overnight.”

She led them into a large room with a long table. At one end, a projector screen showed a slide show of nature photos. There was a cluster of chairs at the other end, for anyone who couldn’t fit at the actual table. Meredith didn’t need prompting to know that was where the interns sat.
The overnight resident—she still hadn’t gotten his name—dumped the remaining lists on the table and took a seat. He crossed his arms over his chest and closed his eyes. “Wake me up when an attending gets here.”

Well, they did say “sleep when you can”.

Bailey shoved one of the pagers into her hands. “Trauma floor pager,” she said. The next she gave to Cristina. “Trauma ICU pager. That one’s specifically for SICU to reach us about our patients. I don’t care who carries what, as long as someone’s answering pages.” She patted the one clipped to her waistband. “I’ll keep the consult pager for now, but if I go to the OR, I’ll need one of you to take that one too.”

Meredith clipped hers to her waistband. It was heavy enough that it seemed to strain the tie keeping her pants up.

“No matter how stupid the page sounds, you take it seriously. The nurses taking care of those patients have been doing this a whole lot longer than you.”

There were something like ten trauma surgeons on staff, if she remembered correctly, but only three of them showed up that morning. They all gave a brief nod to the new faces, and then sat down to listen to the overnight resident give report.

Meredith tried her best to follow along with the list. A good third of the patients didn’t even have real names, just the Trauma names they were assigned when they came in. She scribbled down notes so quickly that they were almost illegible.

They made it through the whole list before all of the pagers went off at once.

Meredith jumped in her seat, scrambling to pull hers out of its plastic holster. The screen was list up neon green. LEVEL 1 NO VITALS IN FIELD. She hit the button to stop the beeping.

“Go ahead,” one of the attendings said. “I’ll round without you for a while.”

Bailey was already on her feet. “Izzie, George, you stay with Dr. Anders. Meredith, Cristina, you’re with me.”

One of the other attendings—Dr. Harris—strode off, Bailey close behind him. Meredith and Cristina followed, the latter wearing an expression as close to a smile as Meredith had seen from her so far.

“Do you think they’ll need a thoracotomy?” she whispered.

Meredith had to admit that doing an ED thoracotomy on day one of residency would be pretty incredible. She’d practiced the procedure on cadavers in medical school, but had never even seen one in a real patient.

“If they do,” Bailey said. “You won’t be the one doing it.”

“We’re going to put a probe on the heart,” Dr. Harris said. He was one of the younger attendings, maybe in his early 40s, tall and lanky with sharp dark eyes. He seemed remarkably calm about this.

“If there’s electrical activity but no pulse, then we’ll think about a thoracotomy. If there’s none, we’ll pronounce.”

Pronounce what? she wanted to ask, for the split second before she realized what he meant.

It should have been obvious from the page, really. There was a good chance that they wouldn’t be able to do anything for this patient.

The ED was slow this time of day, mostly patients from overnight waiting to be moved to a room upstairs or discharged. They headed for one of the rooms closest to the ambulance bay.

It was a large room, but made smaller by the shelves and carts that lined the walls. There was a wheeled computer in the doorway, showing the same cycle of nature photos as the projector screen in the conference room. Boxes drawn on the floor around the clean stretcher marked out where various team members should stand.

“Kenny went to the OR to relieve Sandra,” Dr. Harris said. Kenny was the chief on the service. One of the overnight traumas had a diaphragmatic rupture, which he and the overnight attending were in the process of fixing. “You want to lead this one, Bailey?”

She stepped up to the box for the designated trauma leader. “Meredith, gown up, I want you on exam. Cristina, orders.”

Cristina did not look pleased with this assignment, but she moved over to the computer.

Meredith followed one of the nurses outside to grab a blue plastic gown and a mask with a face shield. Once she had tied the strings twice around her waist, she found her box on what would be the patient’s right.

“Is the ultrasound ready?” Dr. Harris asked.

It took her a moment to realize that he was asking her. She turned to the machine, skimming her fingers over the mousepad. The screen flared to life. “Yes.”

She got another second to breathe and prepare herself. Then the EMTs rolled into the room and the chaos began.

No, it wasn’t actually chaos. There was a structure to it. Everyone (except for Meredith) seemed to know their roles, and despite all of the overlapping activity, everything proceeded in a more or less orderly fashion.

“Seventeen year old female, ground level fall. According to witnesses, she lost her balance and fell chin-first into a table. Heart rate 65, unable to get a pressure. We couldn’t get an IV in the field.”

“Alright,” Bailey said. “Let’s get her onto the stretcher and on the monitors.”

Their patient was a teenage girl with long, white-blonde hair. Her eyes were closed. She was strapped to a bright yellow backboard and had a foam collar around her neck.

“On my count. One, two, three.”

On three, they lifted her over to the bed.

“Can you tell us your name?” Bailey said.

The girl groaned and mumbled something unintelligible.

“Airway seems clear.” That was one of the ED residents, standing at the head of the bed.

Bailey turned on Meredith. Right. She fumbled for her stethoscope. “I’ve got bilateral breath sounds.” She reached to press her fingers to the girl’s groin, over the thin cotton shorts that she wore. “Strong right femoral pulse.”

“So much for no vital signs.”

Bailey shot Cristina a look.

“I don’t think she’s protecting her airway,” the ED resident said. “I think we have to intubate her.”

“Please don’t.”

They all paused for a moment. It was the patient who had spoken, despite being apparently unconscious.

“Don’t want a tube.”

Meredith had never been good at calculating GCS scores off the top of her head, but that seemed high enough.

“BP is dropping,” Bailey said, looking up at the monitor. Meredith turned to look too. The cuff had just finished cycling for the second time: 85/49.

“Do we have an IV yet?”

“16 in the right AC,” the nurse next to Meredith said.

“Give a liter,” Bailey said. “And prep a unit of O neg. Did we send off the blood?”

Meredith did the secondary survey while the fluid went in. The only obvious injuries were some bruising on her chin and a swollen, tender right ankle. More concerning was the fact that she could barely move her arms.

“Can you wiggle your toes for me?” Meredith asked.

The girl whimpered, but her toes did move. It was looking more and more likely that she had a spinal cord injury. Meredith’s stomach dropped.

She was only seventeen.

Bailey was still watching the monitor. The pressure had briefly responded to the fluid, but was dropping again.

“Heart rate is normal,” Bailey said. She turned to Dr. Harris. “No signs of external hemorrhage, FAST is negative, and she has deficits. I think this is neurogenic shock.”

Dr. Harris nodded. ‘What do you want to do?”

“Start levo, for the blood pressure. C spine x-rays, and she’ll probably need an MRI. Keep her in that collar and on that board for now.”

“Good.”

“Cristina,” Bailey said. “Call x-ray, tell them we’re coming. And then call Neurosurg, let them know we have a probable C spine injury.”

***

Izzie stepped into the room. “Ms. Conrad?”

“Honey, I have to go,” the woman said into her phone. “My nurse is here.”

Izzie fought the urge to roll her eyes. Very few patients seemed to notice that doctors and nurses were color-coded; the nurses wore green. Although they had no trouble recognizing the men as doctors. “Hi, Ms. Conrad. I’m Dr. Stevens, I’m here to change your wound vac.”

Ms. Conrad was a woman in her seventies, with long pale grey hair and wide blue eyes behind her glasses. She smiled warmly. “Hello, dear. You must be new.”

“I am,” Izzie said. “Actually, it’s my first day.”

Wait, maybe she shouldn’t be advertising that.

Ms. Conrad didn’t seem alarmed by that statement, though. “Ah, and I’m your guinea pig, am I?”

Izzie smiled her most winning smile. “I can assure you, I’ve done this before.” Three times before, actually, and all of them today. Wound vac rounds were her responsibility, and the Trauma service had a lot of patients with wound vacs.

Ms. Conrad’s was on her lower leg. Izzie spread out a chuck to protect the sheets and dumped the rest of her supplies—sponge, scissors, extra tegaderms, scalpel—on the empty table. It was comforting to realize that this was already becoming second nature. It was hardly surgery, but it was something.

“You have a gentle touch, dear,” the woman told her as she carefully peeled off the old dressing.

“Thank you,” Izzie said. “This is healing very nicely.” It was. The wound bed wasn’t very deep at all, and covered with pink granulation tissue.

Once the new sponge was in place and secured with clear plastic, she connected the dressing to the vacuum. “This might sting a bit,” she warned Ms. Conrad.

“Oh, I’m old hat at this by now.”

Izzie pressed the button. It would never not be satisfying, she thought, to watch the sponge crinkle up and the dressing seal down flat. The monitor on the machine flashed green; no leak.

If only they were all this easy.

***

George wound the blue rubber tourniquet around Mr. Wallace’s arm.

“Your surgery will be in a few hours,” he said. “We just need a little more blood from you.”

Mr. Wallace laid back against his pillow with a groan. “I thought they finished poking me downstairs.”

“Sorry.” Apparently type and screens weren’t usually required for cholecystectomies, but the OR had been cracking down lately. Dr. Anders had told him to draw one just in case. They didn’t have time for delayed cases on this service.

Mr. Wallace’s wife, in the chair next to the bed, frowned. “You’ve done this before, haven’t you?”

“Of course,” George said, hoping his doubt didn’t show on his face. He had drawn blood before, just not very often. At his med school, nurses had done most of the blood draws, but here that was apparently not the case.

And this guy was pretty young and healthy. He should have good veins, right?

After his third attempt, George wasn’t so sure.

“Need some help with that?”

Mr. Wallace’s nurse was standing in the doorway. She was younger than George, with bright red hair and freckles across the bridge of her nose.

George sighed, and stepped back. “Yeah, I think I do.”

Of course, she got it on the first try.

“Don’t worry about it,” she said, in an undertone. “Just takes practice.”

He had to be the most miserable failure in this program. “Thanks,” he said. He stepped back up to the bed. “Alright, Mr. Wallace. We’ll see you in a little while, alright?”

“He’s going to be alright, right?” Mrs. Wallace asked.

“This is a very common procedure,” George said. Soothing, he could at least be soothing, right?

“I’ll be fine,” Mr. Wallace said. “And just think, no more horrible pain every time we order pizza.”

His wife still looked worried, but she smiled.

“Well,” George said. “We do advise you to avoid fatty foods for the first month or so after surgery. Just to give your body a chance to adjust to not having a gallbladder.”

“Kill me now.”

George smiled at that. “I wish I could,” he said. “But I’m a healer.”

***

Cristina paused by the OR doors. The two women at the front desk were both on the phone; one was scribbling something on a piece of paper, the other was frowning at her computer. Across from them, the board took up most of the wall. There were cases going in most of the rooms, but she was looking for something specific.

There. Burke, P. One of the most brilliant cardiothoracic surgeons in the world, and she would have the chance to learn from him. But her cardiac rotation wasn’t for months.

She wasn’t going to wait that long to see him in action.

No one looked at her as she grabbed a bouffant from the rack by the door and pulled it over her head. The numbering was backwards, but it still didn’t take her long to find OR 16.

She peered through the small window in the door. The bypass machine was on, dark red blood circulating through a number of clear plastic tubes. Beyond that, the patient was draped all in blue. Burke was easily identifiable by his height; he had his back to her. The fellow, on the other side of the table, held the suction in one hand.

“Cristina!”

She spun away from the door. Bailey was standing there, arms crossed over her chest.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

“I was… looking for you,” she invented. “The labs are back on that trauma patient—Trauma Root—and I thought you’d want to know, there are no abnormalities.”

“Okay,” Bailey said.

Cristina didn’t move. “I heard that interns get to scrub in,” she said. “When there are cases that need coverage.” She’d been pissed to get one of the least operative rotations as her first, but that didn’t mean she planned to spend the whole month on the floor.

Bailey just looked at her.

“I’m just saying… it’s what I heard.”

“Go away,” Bailey said. “Now.”

Momentarily thwarted, Cristina made her way back to the work room. Izzie and George were there, both typing furiously.

“Cristina, thank God,” Izzie said. “You have to help us with these notes.”

Notes, really? “Isn’t there a template for that?” She took one of the empty seats. Her stomach growled. “Hey, do either of you have any food?”

“You still have to write something,” Izzie said.

“Izzie has granola bars.” George held up the half-eaten one in his hand as proof.

“George.”

He reached for the box, on the table between two of the computers, and tossed one to Cristina. “What?” he said to Izzie. “She needs to eat.”

“Fine,” Izzie said. She signed the note she was working on, then paused to mark something down on her list. “Someone might as well enjoy them. I don’t think I can ever eat again. That last wound vac smelled awful.”

Cristina unwrapped the bar. It didn’t look particularly appetizing, but it was something. “Wound vac?” she prompted.

“I changed, like, six today,” Izzie said. “And the last one was a pancreatic fistula. One of the nurses gave me mastisol to put in my mask and I could still smell it.”

“You’re lucky you didn’t glue it to your nose,” Cristina said. Mastisol was the adhesive they used to make dressings stick. It was made out of pine resin, or something, so it also smelled like Christmas. Izzie seemed like the type who would appreciate that kind of thing.

George spun around in his chair. “At least you didn’t poke your patient full of holes,” he said. “His nurse had to bail me out.”

Cristina laughed.

He glared at her, and then slumped back in his seat.

“Hey,” she said. “You know Meredith is inbred?” She’d gone back to look at the list of interns last night. ‘Grey’ was a common enough last name, but surgery was a small world.

“Like it’s uncommon around here to be a doctor’s kid,” George said.

“No, I mean royally inbred. Her mother is Ellis Grey.”

Izzie stopped typing and turned around. “Shut up, the Ellis Grey?”

“Uh-huh.”

George looked from Cristina to Izzie. “Who’s Ellis Grey?”

He had to be kidding. “The Grey method? Where’d you go to med school, Mexico?”

Izzie’s eyes were shining. “She was one of the first big chick surgeons, she practically invented—“

If George wanted to know so bad, he could look it up himself. “She’s a living legend,” Cristina summarized. “She won the Harper Avery. Twice.”

George went back to his computer, grumbling. “So I didn’t know one thing.”

“Talk about parental pressure,” Izzie said.

If you couldn’t take pressure, you shouldn’t be a doctor. And you definitely shouldn’t be a surgeon. “I would kill to have Ellis Grey as a mother. I would kill to be Ellis Grey.” She sighed. “All I need is one good case…”

The door slammed open. Meredith stomped in, looking considerably more frazzled than she had earlier, fair hair falling loose from her ponytail.
“The MRI techs are the biggest idiots in this hospital,” she said.

Izzie looked at her with alarm. Cristina just kicked out another chair.

Meredith sat. “They tried to kill my patient,” she said. She was fuming. “That girl, Katie Bryce?”

“Who?”

“The trauma,” Meredith said, waving a hand. “The one with the neurogenic shock.”

Right. The EMTs hadn’t given her real name, but Meredith must have gotten it at some point in the last few hours.

“Neurogenic shock?” George said. “Wait, why is she on our service?”

“Because she came in as a Trauma,” Cristina said. The duh was implied.

“Neurosurg is looking at her scans,” Meredith said. “If she needs surgery, then they’ll take her, but until then she’s ours.”

Izzie handed her a granola bar. “So how did they try to kill her?”

Meredith shook her head. “Well first, when she said she had to throw up, I asked them to help me turn her. And they told her to just ‘turn her head a little’. She’s on a backboard! She has a spinal cord injury!”

One of the residents Cristina had worked with in medical school had given her the advice ‘Act like everyone else is trying to kill your patient.’ She had taken it for hyperbole at the time, but maybe he had been serious.

“And then when she was on the table they waited until the last possible second to reconnect her levo. Just watched her blood pressure drop…” she shook her head.

One of the phones rang, making them all jump. George was the closest; he reached over the computer next to him to pick it up.

“Trauma surgery,” he said. “Oh, hi Dr. Anders.” His eyes went wide. “You want me? Uh, okay. Yes, sure. I mean, of course.”

He put the phone down and turned to the rest of them.

“They just added on an appy,” he said. “Dr. Anders wants me to scrub in.”

Damn it.

***

When Meredith got to the ICU, there was a middle-aged couple talking to the man at the desk.

“Katie Bryce,” the woman said. “1104?”

Meredith hurried down the hall ahead of them. She’d been paged because Katie’s parents were on their way, but she thought she would have a little more time.

The ICU had larger, brighter rooms than the rest of the hospital, with windows that looked out on the city. The view must have been some small consolation to the patients here—at least, the ones who were awake—but Katie Bryce wasn’t allowed to lift her head to see it. Her hair was spread out underneath her head, almost white against the neon yellow of the back board.

“It’s Dr. Grey,” Meredith said. “How are you feeling?”

The girl let out a soft noise. It sounded like she had been crying. “O-okay,” she said, shakily. “No one will tell me what’s wrong.”

Meredith wished she had a better answer for her. “We’re working on figuring that out,” she said. “Some of the other doctors are looking at the MRI pictures right now, okay?”

Before the girl could answer, her mother ran into the room.

“Katie, honey, mom and dad are here.”

Katie’s right hand twitched where it rested on the bed. “Mommy,” she sobbed.

Her mother rushed over to take her hand and squeezed it, while her father looked to Meredith.

“What’s going on? Is she going to be alright?”

“The doctor on the phone, he said she might need surgery?”

“What kind of surgery?”

Meredith opened her mouth to answer and then closed it again. “You know what,” she said. “I’m not… I’m not the doctor. I mean I am a doctor, but I’m not Katie’s doctor. I’ll go get him for you.”

She left the room as quickly as possible. She couldn’t tell this family that their daughter might never be able to give them a hug again. She didn’t even know if that was true. This was way above her head.

Bailey was at the nursing station, scowling at an open chart.

“What,” she said, without looking up.

“Katie’s parents have questions,” she said. “Do you talk to them, or should I find Dr. Harris?”

Bailey did look up then. “MRI showed swelling,” she said. “Neurosurgery is taking her. The attending was just there.” She gestured down the hallway. “Dr. Shepherd.”

Meredith stepped around the desk. A few feet ahead of her, a man in a white coat was talking to one of the nurses. He was tall, with dark curly hair that fell just to his collar.

It couldn’t be.

He finished his conversation and turned in her direction.

Shit.

It was him, the man from the other night. Only now, instead of a rumpled button up, he wore scrubs and a neat white coat. He was walking straight at her, headed towards Katie’s room. Maybe he wouldn’t see her at all.

That was too much to hope for. He glanced her way, then did a very obvious double take.

Shit.

She wanted to flee, but he jerked his head towards Katie Bryce’s room. She followed him in.

“Hello,” he told Katie’s parents. “I’m Dr. Shepherd, I’m with neurosurgery. We’re going to take good care of you, alright?”

“What’s wrong with her?” Katie’s father asked.

Derek—Dr. Shepherd—pulled over the extra chair, so that he was sitting opposite them. “When we did the MRI, we saw some swelling in the spinal cord, up here.” He ran a finger along the back of his neck. “We think that she bruised her spinal cord when she fell, and now the swelling is causing her low blood pressure, and the trouble moving her arms.”

“Is she going to be okay?”

He turned a little in his seat, facing Katie’s mother. “If it’s okay with you, we’d like to take her to surgery to relieve that pressure.”

“And that will make her better?”

“It’s her best chance,” he said, very earnestly. Patients must love him.

Katie’s mother was tearing up, but she nodded.

Derek squeezed her hand. “In a little while, someone from my team will come talk to you in a little more detail about the surgery. And then we’ll get started, as soon as possible.” He stood. “Excuse me.”

Meredith slipped out of the room ahead of him. If she could only make it to the elevators…

He caught up to her easily. Taking her by the elbow, he led her into the closest stairwell. It was deserted. No one took the stairs, unless they were trying to keep themselves awake on a night shift.

“Dr. Shepherd,” she said.

“Dr. Shepherd?” he said. He seemed amused by this situation. As if there was anything amusing about this. “Yesterday morning it was Derek, now it’s Dr. Shepherd.”

Would it help to point out that she hadn’t known his first name this morning, let alone his last? “Dr. Shepherd, we should pretend it never happened.” She couldn’t be the intern sleeping with an attending, even if he wasn’t her attending.

Her grinned at her. Just as annoying as she remembered. “What never happened?” he asked. “You sleeping with me the other night? Or you throwing me out the next morning? Because both are fond memories I’d like to hold onto.”

“No,” she said. “There will be no memories. I’m not the girl in the bar anymore, and you’re not the guy. This can’t exist. You get that, right?”

He was still grinning. “You took advantage of me, and now you want to forget about it?”

This was ridiculous. “I did not—“

“I was drunk, vulnerable, and good-looking, and you took advantage.”

In spite of herself, she smiled. “Okay, I was the one who was drunk,” she said. Her fuzzy memories of the evening could attest to that. “And you are not that good-looking.”

He was, though. She wished he wasn’t.

“Well,” he conceded. “Maybe not today. The other night I was very good-looking. I had my red shirt on, my good-looking shirt. You took advantage.”

“I did not take—“

He stepped closer. “You want to take advantage again?” he asked. “Say, Friday night?”

Her heart seemed to be beating in her ears. “No,” she said, ignoring that. “You’re an attending. And I’m an intern.”

He didn’t move.

“Stop looking at me like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like you’ve seen me naked.”

His grin widened.

“Dr. Shepherd.” She had to regain some control of this situation. Maybe this was all a horrible, tequila-induced nightmare. “This is inappropriate. Has that occurred to you?”

***

George forced himself to breathe. That was the benefit of scrubbing. It gave you some time to settle yourself.

Through the window above the sinks, the OR was waiting for him. The patient—a young man in Seattle for vacation who was unfortunate enough to get appendicitis on day one—was strapped to the table across his chest and thighs, covered with blankets except for his abdomen, which had been painted with orange soap. The scrub nurse stood ready in the corner, her table laid out with gleaming instruments.

Dr. Anders stepped up next to him, pulling a mask off the shelf above the sinks. “So, how much laparoscopy have you done?”

“A lot of camera driving,” he admitted. “And the residents took us to the skills lab, sometimes, when we extra time.” He wasn’t sure moving blocks from one set of pegs to another with a grasper was actually translatable into removing someone’s appendix.

Dr. Anders didn’t seem surprised by this answer. “Well, everyone has to start somewhere.”

It felt wrong to finish scrubbing before his attending, but she had started over a minute after he had. He stepped back from the sink, arms dripping. There were wet spots all down the front of his scrubs, which made him look like someone who had never done this before.

He pushed open the door with his back and made a wide loop around the table. The scrub nurse, looking bored, handed him a towel.

Scrub nurses seemed to believe that every medical student was a breath away from contaminating themselves or the field. Now that he was a resident, he was apparently exempt from that kind of scrutiny. He was also expected to know how to drape the patient, which he only realized when she passed him a folded blue sheet.

He took it carefully. “I—“

She rolled her eyes and took one end of it back from him. Following her lead, he stepped back to stretch out the sheet over the patient’s legs and then let it settle down.

By the time Dr. Anders was gowned and gloved, the patient was more or less ready. Dr. Anders stepped up opposite him and nodded. “Very good,” she said. “Alright, can we get the camera up?”

George had spent the past half hour frantically reviewing the textbook chapter on appendectomies. Now he recited in his head. Identify the appendix. Grasp the tip of the appendix and elevate. Find the base where it enters the cecum. Divide the mesoappendix. Staple across the base.

Dr. Anders was obviously used to operating with day 1 interns. Once the time out was done, she took a marker and drew a curving line just under the umbilicus. “Make an incision here.”

He took another deep breath. “Scalpel,” he said, hoping that no one could hear his voice shaking.

The scrub nurse held out a basin. He took the scalpel from it.

“Hold it like a pencil,” Dr. Anders said. “This is a 15 blade, not a 10.”

He shifted his grip. At some point he should probably figure out the different types of scalpels. He paused again before the blade met skin, waiting for more criticism, but evidently he was doing it right.

For now.

From there, he mainly pulled opposite Dr. Anders as she divided down to the fascia and opened it with a pair of scissors. Once she had a large enough hole, she slid in the first trocar and connected the gas. The patient’s abdomen blew up like a balloon as the CO2 was pumped in through the trocar, stopping only when the set pressure was reached.

Dr. Anders cleaned the camera lens with a soft cloth and then placed it through the trocar.

Even after seeing a good number of laparoscopic surgeries, the view of the abdomen from the inside always struck him as incredible. A blanket of yellow fat, gleaming under the camera light, lay atop pink intestines. So far, there was no sign of a ruptured appendix.

“Have you placed a trocar before?” she asked him.

He nodded, and then took the scalpel again to make a small incision where she indicated. The smaller trocars had sharp-tipped inserts so that they could breach the fascia.

“Twist, don’t push,” she said. And make sure you’re bracing a finger on the abdominal wall, so you can’t go too far.”

He had a sudden image of himself shoving the trocar straight into bowel. Sure, it wouldn’t be a big hole, but it would make a pretty awful first impression.

She held the camera steady as he popped the trocar through the fascia, stopping well short of any important organs. He withdrew the insert and pushed the trocar in a little further.

Dr. Anders handed the camera back to him as she put in the third trocar. “Alright,” she said. “What do you want to do now?”

He visualized that textbook page. “Trendelenburg,” he said, loud enough for the anesthesiologist to hear him. He was the one with the bed controls. “And right side up.”

The bed tilted so that the patient’s feet were higher than his head, and his right side was higher than his left. They both watched as loops of bowel fell away from the pelvis. Dr. Anders came to his side of the table and took the camera.

“Good,” she said. “Now what?”

“Can I get two graspers?” The scrub nurse handed them over and he slid them through the trocars.

“Alright,” Dr. Anders said. “Now sweep some of that bowel out of the way, and let’s see if we can find the appendix.”

Either his hands were shaking or the whole world was vibrating slightly. It was hard to tell. Using the laparoscopic instruments was harder than he remembered. Every time he moved one, it seemed to go in the opposite direction from where he wanted it to go. Finally, he managed to sweep away the remaining loop of bowel, revealing a worm-like structure with a bubble of pus at the tip.

“There you go. Now grab it—not the pus, grab below that—and lift it up.”

Once he pulled the appendix straight up, he could see where it met the bulbous cecum.

“Give him a Maryland,” Dr. Anders said. “George, you’re going to make a window in the meso so we can get a stapler across the base, alright?”

He handed back the grasper in his right hand and took the Maryland. It had shorter jaws than the grasper, slightly pointed at the tips. He put them in the space she indicated and spread the jaws wide.

“Good,” she said. “Now, again.”

Getting his instrument back to the same space was difficult. He ended up just a little bit lower than he intended.

“You’ve got the appendiceal artery there,” Dr. Anders said. “Make sure you don’t—”

Even as his brain acknowledged her words, his fingers spread the jaws. There was a spray of bright red blood.

Now his hands were definitely shaking.

“Give him the ligasure,” Dr. Anders said. “It’s okay. Remember, it’s magnified. There’s not as much blood as you think there is.”

He handed the Maryland back to the scrub nurse and took the instrument she handed him. Dr. Anders steadied the trocar for him.

“You just need to grab the artery and burn it.”

He moved his ligasure towards the artery. Or, he thought he did. Instead, it veered off towards the pelvis.

“Come on, George. Grab the artery. Remember: all bleeding stops eventually.”

That may have been so, but it didn’t seem close to stopping now. There was so much blood, all of it pooling in the space below the appendix. This time, when he moved his hand, he overshot by several inches.

Dr. Anders put her hand on the ligasure, steadying it. “Take the camera,” she told him.

He had been right, earlier. He was definitely the most miserable failure here.

***

Izzie was the one who discovered the basement hallway.

She had been looking for a vending machine, figuring chocolate would cheer George up. And if it didn’t, it would definitely make her feel better.

She didn’t find a vending machine, but she did find this. No attendings, no chiefs, no Bailey. Just them.

When she’d gone back to the work room to get George, Meredith and Cristina had been there also. Now they were all hiding out here. Normally she would have appreciated the bonding moment, but Cristina was definitely making it harder to comfort George.

“007,” George said. He was slumped in one of the blue plastic hospital wheelchairs. “They’re calling me 007, aren’t they?”

Izzie laced her fingers together and stretched her arms over her head. Meredith, next to her on the stripped stretcher, leaned back against the brick wall.

“No one’s calling you 007,” they both said.

“I was on the elevator and Murphy whispered 007,” George said.

After his case, he’d come to Izzie to wallow about his failure. She wasn’t sure how everyone else had found out about him getting into the artery on his first attempt at an appy, but apparently word spread quickly here.

“Oh, how many times do we have to go through this, George.” To be fair, this probably was Cristina’s version of supportive. “Give me a number or else I’m going to hit you.”

“Murphy whispered 007,” George said, “and everyone laughed.”

Dr. Anders, George said, had been very nice about it. Maybe it was the scrub nurse, or the circulator. The ones at her med school had hated everyone except each other, and loved gossip.

“He wasn’t talking about you,” she said.

“You sure?”

“Would we lie to you?” Meredith asked.

He thought about this. “Yes.”

“007 is a state of mind,” Cristina said. She was tying a series of knots in the silk thread looped around the tie on her pants. Izzie couldn’t see from here, but she’d bet anything they were perfect. Cristina didn’t seem like the type to settle for any less.

Case in point. “So says the girl who finished top of her class at Stanford,” George said.

Izzie’s pager went off. She reached for the phone on the wall. That was the other benefit to this spot. They’d never be able to sit here for long if they couldn’t answer pages.

“Maybe I should’ve gone into palliative care,” George said. “Then everyone’s already dying.”

Cristina looked up, even as she kept tying. “Surgery is hot,” she said. “It’s the Marines, it’s macho, it’s hostile, it’s hardcore. Palliative is for freaks who live with their mothers and never have sex.”

The latter wasn’t a particular stereotype that Izzie had heard before. Palliative mostly sounded depressing to her. She rested the phone on her shoulder as it rang. Some nurses liked to page and then immediately walk away from the number they provided. It was quickly becoming one of her pet peeves.

George sighed. “I have got to get my own place.”

“Is this Trauma?”

Izzie grabbed the phone before it fell. “Yes, it is. You paged?”

She nodded as he detailed the issue, even though he couldn’t see her. “Alright, I’ll be right there.”

“What was that?” Meredith asked.

Izzie hung up the phone. “A problem,” she said. “Anyone know where to find Bailey?”

Bailey ended up being fairly easy to find. She was in the third year resident call room, lying flat on her back and staring fixedly up at the bottom of the bunk above her.

Well, at least Izzie didn’t have to wake her up.

“Bailey?” she said. “I don’t want to bother you—“

“Then don’t,” Bailey said.

“It’s Mr. Jones.”

“Is he dying?”

“No.”

“Then stop talking to me.”

Izzie sighed and looked at the work room door across the hallway. If only there were any other more senior residents around. Some of them seemed friendly enough. To be fair, though, there had been alcohol involved when she met them.

Bailey sighed and sat up. “What is it?”

“Mr. Jones lost his IV,” she said. “No one’s been able to get a new one, not even the ICU nurses, and he’s overdue for his next dose of antibiotics.”

“So he needs a central line.”

Izzie nodded. “And I watched a resident do one in med school, but I’ve never done one myself.”

Bailey let out another sigh.

Maybe she had been basically an attending when she was an intern, and hadn’t needed help from anyone.

“Come on then,” Bailey said. “Let’s go.”

Twenty minutes later, Izzie was sweating through her plastic gown and wishing she hadn’t asked to try this herself.

“Keep the ultrasound steady,” Bailey told her. It was not the first time she had said this, but it was easier said than done. The probe kept slipping in the copious jelly they had squeezed onto Mr. Jones’ neck.

“Are you done yet?” Mr. Jones asked.

Izzie felt for him. It couldn’t have been comfortable to lay there with your head down and a drape over your face while someone poked at your neck, even with lidocaine involved. “Almost there, Mr. Jones,” she said with false cheer. “Just keep very still for us, alright?”

She shifted the probe until the dark circle of the jugular vein was in the middle of the screen.

“Good,” Bailey said. “Now keep it there and insert your needle.” Maybe she did know it was easier said than done, because she reached out with one hand to steady the probe.

Mr. Jones didn’t react when the needle pierced his skin. At least the lidocaine was working.

“Follow your needle into the vein,” Bailey said. She kept her hand over Izzie’s, and together they shifted the probe to see a streak of white extending to just outside that circle. “Now pop into the vein, pulling back on the syringe while you do.”

Izzie nearly dropping the syringe when she adjusted her fingers, but she managed to push forward and pull the plunger back as she did. There was resistance, and then a give. The syringe started to fill with dark red blood.

“Very good,” Bailey said.

Izzie grinned behind her mask. Praise from the notorious Bailey. How many of her fellow interns could say that?

***

“You’re acting weird.”

She had dragged Meredith along with her to do post-op checks. Not that she needed the help, of course, but she was bored. And Meredith was acting weird.

“You just met me,” Meredith pointed out. “How would you know?”

She pulled the curtain back on George’s appy. Despite 007’s best effort, he looked very comfortable.

“Hi, Mr. Troy,” Meredith said. “I’m Dr. Grey, this is Dr. Yang, we’re from your surgery team. We just came to see how you’re doing.”

“I can’t feel a thing,” he said cheerfully. “They’ve got me on the good drugs.”

And also, Cristina didn’t say, you have only three incisions barely the size of your pinky nail. “Any nausea?” she asked.

He shook his head. There was a sandwich and a cup of water on the table in front of him, so he was probably even telling the truth.

“We’re going to get you out of here as soon as PACU clears you,” Meredith told him. “Do you have someone to come pick you up?”

“My sister,” he said. “So much for a family vacation, huh?”

“We sent a few more pills of oxycodone to the pharmacy downstairs,” Cristina said. “But after the first day or so, most patients do fine with just tylenol and ibuprofen.”

“We recommend switching over as soon as you can,” Meredith said. “The oxy can make you constipated.”

They moved on to the next patient, the chole that Bailey had done with Dr. Harris.

“I don’t need to know you that well to know you’re acting weird,” Cristina said. They walked down the row of curtained beds. Someone just ahead was moaning in pain. On the other side of the aisle, a resident was giving report. Cristina didn’t recognize him; maybe he was one of the surgical subspecialties.

When they passed the supply closet behind the nursing station. Meredith looked quickly from side to side and then dragged Cristina in.

“You can’t say anything,” she said seriously. “Don’t even react.”

This had to be good. Not ‘getting to scrub in’ good, but at least more entertaining than anything that had happened so far today. Cristina made a show of turning to one of the shelves.

“I took a guy home, the night before last,” she said. “I just found out he works here. He’s an attending.”

Cristina blinked at the rows of bedpans and emesis basins.in front of her and then turned. “One of our attendings?”

“Neurosurgery,” Meredith said. “He took over Katie Bryce, he’s taking her to the OR.”

“For a decompression?” Cristina asked. She’d never been particularly interested in neurosurgery, but it was still surgery.

Meredith gave her a look.

“Sorry,” she said. “I mean, at least he’s not one of our attendings? Technically, there’s no conflict.”

“It’s humiliating,” Meredith said.

Cristina didn’t really have anything to offer in response to that. “Are you going to do it again?”

“No!”

She shrugged. “Alright then. It will be fine. It’s not like we even work that closely with them. You’ll probably barely see him.”

Meredith sighed and pushed open the door. “Just… don’t tell anyone, okay?”

“I won’t.”

Mr. Wallace, the chole, was slightly more uncomfortable than Mr. Troy had been, but still looked like he would be fine to go home.

“Great,” Meredith said, once they’d left. “There are already way too many people on this list.”

They ran into a harried-looking Bailey on the way out of the PACU.

“Meredith,” she said. “We’ve got a patient in the ED with a bad SBO, he needs the OR. I need you to take the consult pager.”

Meredith looked a little like a deer in headlights at that.

“You’ll be fine,” Bailey said. “Take the call, find out what they want. If someone looks like they’re dying, come get me, alright?” She turned to Cristina. “Dr. Webber has a colon, and there’s no one on his team free to cover it. I need you to scrub in.”

Yes!

“Thank you, Dr. Bailey,” she said. “When—?”

“Look at the board, figure it out,” Bailey said. “I have to go.”

Meredith was looking down at the consult pager like it was going to bite her.

“You’ll be fine,” Cristina said. She was feeling magnanimous, now that she got to scrub in. “The ED residents are idiots, all you have to do is be smarter than them.”

Meredith smiled a little, and clipped the pager to her waistband. She’d handed off the floor pager to Izzie, so she still only had one.

The PACU was across the hall from the OR suite. Meredith trailed her as she walked towards the board.

Dr. Webber was standing at the front desk, chatting with the woman working there. He was wearing scrubs and a navy blue scrub cap instead of the shirt and tie that he’d worn to talk to them yesterday.

He looked up as they approached. His eyes flicked right over Cristina and then landed on Meredith. He grinned.

“Meredith Grey,” he said. “I’d know you anywhere. You’re the spitting image of your mother.”

Meredith, next to her, gave him a pained smile. “Dr. Webber,” she said.

“Dr. Grey, tell me. I have a patient with a cancer in the right colon. What operation does she need?”

Meredith blinked at him for a moment. Cristina bit her tongue. She knew the answer—of course she did—but he hadn’t asked her.

“A-a right hemicolectomy,” she said.

“Very good. And what vessels do I need to take?”

She sounded more sure of herself now. “The right colic and the ileocolic?”

“Which are branches of the…?”

“SMA.”

“Excellent. I told Dr. Bailey I needed to borrow one of the interns from your service. The case is scheduled for 2:30, I’ll see you then.”

Cristina looked at Meredith. The other woman said nothing.

Oh this was such bullshit.

***

Cristina wouldn’t even look at her. Meredith followed her down to that basement hallway, and Cristina didn’t look back once.

Izzie was sitting on the stretcher, a textbook open in her lap.

“Izzie!” Cristina said.

Izzie looked up. She was smiling. “Guys!” she said. “I got to—“

Cristina interrupted her. “Meredith stole my surgery.”

“I didn’t—“

“You knew Bailey told me to scrub with the chief,” Cristina said. “But you stood there and just let him give it to you instead.”

“I’ll tell him I can’t do it,” Meredith said. She’d meant to do it in the moment, but she’d frozen.

She had made one sort of friend here, and already she’d ruined it.

Well, no one had ever liked her mother very much either. Maybe that was the key to being great at this.

Izzie was looking between the two of them. She seemed like the peacemaker type, but Cristina didn’t give her a chance to open her mouth.

“No, no,” she said. “Don’t do me any favors, it’s fine.”

“Cristina—“

Cristina turned on her. “You know what? You did a cutthroat thing. Deal with it. Don’t come to me for absolution. You want to be a shark? Be a shark.”

“I’m not—“

“Oh yes you are,” Cristina said. “Only it makes you feel all bad in your warm, gooey places. No, screw you. I don’t get picked for surgeries because I had a famous mother. You know some of us? Have to earn what we get.”

She stormed away. Meredith collapsed on the stretcher next to Izzie.

“The chief worked with my mom,” she told Izzie. “I know that’s the only reason he wants me to scrub with him. But what was I supposed to do, say no?”

“Yes,” Izzie said. She pushed herself off the stretcher and walked away. Hopefully she just had something to do, but maybe she hated Meredith now too.

Meredith slumped against the wall, just as George rounded the corner. He sat down in the wheelchair again.

“I wish I wanted to be a chef,” she said. “Or a ski instructor. Or a kindergarten teacher.”

“You know, I would’ve been a really good postal worker,” George said. “I’m dependable.” He shook his head. “My parents tell everyone thy meet that their son’s a surgeon. As if it’s a big accomplishment. A superhero or something. If only they could see me now…”

“When I told my mother I wanted to go to medical school, she tried to talk me out of it,” Meredith told him. “Said I didn’t have what it takes to be a surgeon. That I’d never make it. So the way I see it? Superhero sounds pretty damn good.”

“We’re going to survive this, right?”

Honestly? She wasn’t sure.

I can’t think of any one reason why I want to be a surgeon, but I can think of a thousand reasons why I should quit. They make it hard on purpose. There are lives in our hands.

There comes a moment when it’s more than just a game. And you either take that step forward, or turn around and walk away.

I could quit. But here’s the thing. I love the playing field.

When she got out of the OR, after Dr. Webber’s case, it had long since gotten dark. She dropped the patient off in PACU (the nurse had stared at her for almost a minute before she remembered that she was the one who had to give report) and then leaned back against the wall next to the desk for a minute, sipping from the ginger ale that she’d stolen from the patient fridge. She should have grabbed some graham crackers too; she was starving.

Derek—Dr. Shepperd—was standing there, writing something on a piece of paper. He’d tamed his curly hair enough to fit it under a scrub cap. His was patterned with little sailboats.

“Is Katie going to be okay?” Meredith asked him.

He looked up, and then smiled when he saw her. “You know, I think she is.” His eyes went to the mask hanging around her neck. “Did you get to scrub?”

She nodded. “It was… amazing,” she said. And it had been. “You practice on cadavers, you observe, you get to hold retractors, and you think you know what you’re going to feel like, when you’re really one of the surgeons but… that was such a high.”

His lips quirked up.

“I don’t know why anybody does drugs,” she said.

He laughed. “Yeah.”

“Yeah,” she said.

“I should go do this.” He indicated the paper.

She had no idea what that meant. “You should,” she said.

“I’ll see you around.”

“See you around,” she repeated.

The others were all in the workroom when she got back, finishing up notes. Their night intern, whoever that was, was already gone, maybe at a trauma or maybe just answering a page.

“How was it?” Cristina asked. Her face was unreadable.

“Good,” Meredith admitted. “Great. The vasculature was weird, so we ended up having to open.” Laparoscopy was important and all, but there was nothing like actually holding someone’s insides in your hands.

Izzie and George were deep in conversation about something. She took the seat next to Cristina.

“We don’t have to do that thing,” Cristina said. “Where I say something, and then you say something, and then somebody cries and there’s, like, a moment.”

A weight seemed to lift off her shoulders. “Yuck,” she said.

“Good. Come on, we have like three more notes and then we can all get out of here.” She pushed her list towards Meredith. “And you look like crap.”

“I look better than you,” Meredith shot back.

“It’s not possible.”

***

It was Friday before she got out of work early enough to go to the nursing home. Izzie had taken one look at the driving rain outside the window and handed over her umbrella.

“I’m on a 24,” she said. “It’s not like I need it for anything.”

When she got there, her mom was sitting in what had become her favorite chair. The upholstery was an ugly blue pattern that reminding Meredith of the curtains in the PACU.

Maybe that was why her mom liked it.

She sat down in the chair next to her. “Hi, mom.”

Ellis Grey looked at her without recognition, and then back at the rain outside.

It was that kind of day, then.

“I made it through my first week,” she said. She wasn’t sure if her mom was even listening. “We all did. The other interns are all good people. You’d like them.” Would she? She would probably like Cristina, at least. Maybe Izzie. She’d have no patience for George. “Maybe. I like them.”

Her mom gave no indication of having heard her.

“Oh, and I changed my mind,” she said. “I’m not going to sell the house. I’m going to keep it.” Maybe it was just because the thought of apartment hunting on her one day off a week sounded exhausting, but there was something comforting about going from the chaos of the hospital to the place where she had grown up. “I’ll have to get a couple of roommates but it’s home, you know?”

Her mom turned. For a second, Meredith thought she had gotten through to her. But no, there was still no recognition in her eyes.

“Are you the doctor?”

“No,” Meredith said, as gently as she could. She didn’t want to be gentle. She wanted her mom. What good was it proving her wrong if she didn’t even remember what she had been wrong about? “I’m not your doctor. But I am a doctor.”

“What’s your name?”

One of the aides was nearby, looking at her with pity. She ignored him. “It’s me, mom. Meredith.”

“All right.” Her mother fidgeted with her watch. “I used to be a doctor, I think.”

Meredith took her hand, smoothing it flat. “You were a doctor, mom. You were a surgeon.”