TRIAGE | grey's anatomy (ON HOLD INDEFINITELY)

023: "water or concrete"

(hi if you guys wanna check out my new mark sloan fanfic "BASELINE" that would be just swell i think you'll like it!!)

CLEMENTINE, LAYING FLAT ON THE SMALL GRASS PATCH OUTSIDE THE BACK OF SEATTLE GRACE, LET THE MIDDAY DRIZZLE SOAK HER SCRUBS THROUGH PEACEFULLY. She had grown up in consistently sunny climate, with palm trees and cacti and sand that scoured every worry clean. Moving to Seattle, after eight years of inhabiting a separate coast, Clementine had met what should have been the familiar Pacific Ocean of her childhood in a directly opposite sort of climate. The waves somehow colder, the islands not tropical but forested, the clouds omnipresent and invoking an unnaturally beautiful green. With no dunes of sticky sand to buff and polish her worries into harmless little stones, Clementine had turned to thunderstorms and rain as the homeopathic meditative remedy.

Clem knew she looked slightly psychotic, splayed like a dead person next to the dumpsters in the torrential downpour. But her normal spot of the second bench to the right next of the entrance seemed to always attract one certain plastic surgeon, one whose deludingly inviting smell of evergreen and mint permeated every damn crevice of her cerebrum and whose big fat mouth she desperately wanted to avoid.

She shouldn't have needed to ruin her hair, not today. She was scheduled to scrub in on a separation surgery for conjoined twins, one that required a small army of skilled surgeons and was complicated and chaotic and utterly perfect. It was a dreamy day, filled with little to no scut and amusement in the form of the messy lives of the conjoined twin brothers, Jake and Pete. And yet, Clem found herself unable to breathe in the face of the fact that she hadn't been able to tell any of her friends about Johnny.

Maybe it was because a melodramatic part of her felt like the announcement should be a spectacle. She should wear all black and force her friends to sit in a row on the couch as she stood and read one of the sensationalized poems she'd written (drunk) about meeting Johnny that were hidden in a dusty box under her bed. Clem would wait an appropriate time after the recitation, receive the smattering of applause humbly, and ask for questions about their three-year-long relationship before effectively putting the topic of her failed engagement to rest eternally.

Her deluded fantasy was quite obviously never going to happen, but still, she'd balked at every available moment to blurt it out and run for cover. It wasn't like her failed engagement was a necessarily big secret, something illegal and unforgiving. But it would lead to questions about why they'd broken up, which in turn brought up a tangled mess of legal affairs and horrible nightmares and funerals that stretched back until she was fifteen. There had been so many opportunities to finally fess up, before Mark Sloan and his gossipy habits exposed the Marigold situation, and yet each time Clementine had frozen solid.

There had been yesterday morning, when she'd crawled into Meredith's bed-- sleepily relieved that her friend and attending weren't naked-- and had answered Derek's crossword puzzle for him. Or the five minutes after that, when Cristina had conjured a giant metaphor that included robbing banks but hadn't bothered to explain the mystery behind it. She could've told George, who had taken the day off to help his father after the shocking diagnosis of stage three metastatic esophageal cancer and a leaking aortic valve, to take his mind off of all his own issues. Clem had been in and out of trauma rooms and OR's the entire day after an elderly man had crashed into a fish market, and she could've whispered it casually to Izzie or Alex. There certainly was enough awkward silence the previous night or even during rounds that morning, once they all had realized that Cristina was performing Burke's surgeries for him because of a leftover tremor from his bullet wound. All the interns besides Meredith and Clementine were refusing to speak to her, and Cristina was accepting no help from the two in getting the others to forgive her. And surely Meredith would've appreciated a distraction when it came to the fact her half-sister Molly was back in the hospital, and she was assigned to the case.