Chapter Text
Permanence
"He's more myself than I am; whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same." - Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights.
Fever
...
Koracick's PPE blunder ripples throughout the hospital and for a time the camaraderie and spirit at GSM nosedives. Fighting sentiments bleed into fear and soon the staff are scrapping over reused face masks and respirators.
Bailey and Webber's ultraviolet disinfectant room is only a band-aid on disintegrating polypropylene; after Grey, the virus picks them off one by one. The wards and ORs function on a skeleton staff, buoyed by temps and students snatched from the cradle. Protocols and CDC guidelines can only bear so much under the strain of the hospital's Covid influx.
The day Hayes discovers a breach in his N95 is the day the fever starts.
It follows at the heels of an unsuccessful, thirty-five-minute resuscitation attempt on a Covid patient.
The fifth call he's made in the last forty-seven hours.
"Time of death, 8:52 am."
Resentment and ire buoy underneath the surface while he signs the patient chart, only an ounce shy of launching it across the Pit in a fit of temper. Containment and promises to flatten the curve are mere political gambits three months into the outbreak, and the hospital is sinking under the strain.
"What are we doing wrong?" he scoffs in indignation, speaking to no one and everyone at the same time. He's afforded only a short, woeful shrug from one of the crash team before they begin the process of patient aftercare. No visitation. A limited funeral with a Zoom link attached. That will be this patient's ending.
"Doctor Hayes?" Nurse Bates turns to him, wide-eyed with worry.
It happens then, the detection of a small tear along the lower circumference of his breathing valve. The discovery rouses a flurry of panic and his ire strips to dismay as he traces the breach with the pad of his index finger.
Fuck.
In all honesty, he had resolved himself to the inevitability of transmission the moment he'd handed over his replacement mask to an ICU nurse. It hadn't seemed prudent or fair to accept PPE when he wasn't the one intubating patients on the Covid front-line. Although, the pandemic had drawn him in anyway, drying up the Peds cases and stirring up a sense of duty that called him to the trenches.
Now here he is, burning up a temperature of 102.2, a jack-hammer throb firing from temple to crown. Schmidt proffers a quiet apology as the thermal scanner bleeps in consternation, cementing his removal from the Pit. He tries not to lash out in irritation, but it shows in his marching retreat and the sharp clang of the biohazard receptacle lid after he dunks his gown for incineration.
As one of the testing team jabs him with a nasal swab, his mind flits to the boys. He hasn't seen them in almost a month, in what feels like a lifetime since Andrea volunteered to put her life on pause in LA and take over his parental responsibilities. He'd left his sons climbing the walls and begging to go on the Rainier hike they'd been planning since the New Year.
Saturday, he'd promised - work's got me running ragged, I'm knackered.
That was three Saturdays ago, back when he wasn't living at the Hotel Executive Pacific and subsisting on fragments of sleep in between endless emergency pages.
He never dreamed of being that shitty father, but he'd never forgive himself if he brought the virus into his home.
These are the moments when Abigail's death rears its ugly head and takes his guilt for a spin. The selfishness of on-call schedules and his surgical speciality separates him from the kids substantially more than Abigail's artistry ever could. Tack on a bout of Covid-19 isolation and his remote possibility for Father of the Year goes up in flames.
I miss Zurich, Da.
It was almost the straw that broke the camel's back when his son dropped that bombshell on him over Facetime one idle Tuesday night. Along with a few hard shots and a wrestling match with his conscience, he'd just stopped himself shy of repacking their suitcases and jetting them back to the safe haven of Enge.
But he'd stayed. Selfish bastard.
"Doctor Hayes?"
The room drags him back from that cesspit of self-loathing.
"- we can ask for a fast-track but the influx has set back pathology - it could be anywhere up to 48 hours before the results come through."
He knows the drill.
"Thanks, Helen," he nods, side-stepping an offering of CDC pamphlets.
He makes quick work of gathering his belongings and snags a strip of Leukoplast tape to seal the tear in his mask. Hunt passes him on the catwalk and the disbelief from behind the trauma surgeon's mask is palpable - soon there will be no one left.
"Be safe, Hayes."
"Aye," he nods, shrugging off the concern, "I'll be right as rain."
An apology is all he can offer as Hunt's pager vibrates from his hip and sends him jogging towards the ER.
All they know right now is chaos.
He hears the same rumblings from Ireland via his mother and mainland Europe from the news, but it does nothing to take the edge off the storm they're in at GSM.
The din of medical machines and overhead pages dies as he steps out into the fresh air. Free from the fluorescent, artificial light of the hospital the sharp throbbing in his temple tapers off to a dull ache. He tamps down the unease over the tell-tale symptoms and tries to mediate other possibilities - even if the pool is shallow.
Either way, rules are rules and his duty switches from curative to preventative. It's a bitter pill to swallow knowing how badly the hospital and his co-workers are being battered by the virus.
Especially Grey.
The hospital community had collapsed to its knees when the rumours of her coma had been verified. It had pissed him off. Whisperings in halls and the downtrodden stares through her treatment room window had sealed a fate for her before she'd even had the chance to fight.
Meredith will die warm in her bed at 93.
Yang's cold comfort was the only twisted hope amongst the sea of naysayers, and not the first source of comfort he expected to relish during those tumultuous days.
For Hayes, it only solidified the notion that these people - the ones who had seen Grey's rise to surgical royalty - still underestimated her mettle and grit. Not that he couldn't admit to feeling the same gravitational pull the night he'd visited Grey to rag on her choice of POA.
Only...they'd come to find a certain affinity for each other's company. An understanding, from one widow to another that the everyday person sits blind to from behind their guard rails of pity and ignorance. For damaged people like Grey and himself, they are already preset to survival mode.
He is vindicated on that front when Grey has the hospital eating their prayers within a week.
Atta girl, he'd quietly cheered from the sidelines, wary of Dr Jo's keen eye for his relationship with the general surgeon.
A smirk unfurls at the corner of his mouth at the memory of Grey's latest violation of Altman's orders. She hasn't been exactly exemplary since she grumbled back into consciousness.
...
"You could finish with the Halstead suture; don't be lazy."
"Did you hear something, Bokhee?" he asks the scrub nurse, eliciting a shake of her head and complicity in his theatrics.
"No, Doctor."
"Only, it sounded like a patient in the gallery."
The intercom crackles for only a millisecond before her razor-sharp quip filters through to the OR.
"Infection rates reduce by 7% if you use Halstead."
"Infection rates also reduce if the patient isolates in their hermetically sealed room."
She lets him think he's won, if only for a moment.
"Infection rates also reduce when a patient tests negative before assimilating back into the community."
Negative . Maybe now Webber and her sisters will ease up on the restrictions and her remandment.
"Congratulations, Dr Grey," he offers with sincerity, knowing the itch she must feel to dive back into the fray. Bokhee gifts her a subtle thumbs up from his side and the world seemingly starts to tilt back in their favour.
"Which intern is facing Altman's firing squad once they realise you're gone?"
There is a restrained edge to her voice and "Pollock" makes its way through the mic before she relinquishes the intercom button to stifle a coughing fit.
The residual effects of Covid will haunt her for a while longer.
She lingers despite her chest, eagerly anticipating his next choice of suture.
He uses Halstead.
...
Now the hospital has its hands full keeping the lithe, slip of a surgeon from barrelling out of her room and into an OR. If rumours are to be believed, they'll release her soon if her oxygen saturation keeps above bar. It's the silver lining the hospital needs right now and the Grey effect sweeps the halls - an effect he's told is not entirely uncommon.
He flicks through his phone back to her last text on the way to his car.
Break me out of here.
The two am time-stamp reeks of boredom and a part of him is tempted to aid her in The Great Escape.
But riling her up is his favourite pastime as of late.
Take your medicine, Covid-Cathy.
His drive to the hotel takes more concentration than he anticipates. He calls Andrea and updates her on the situation, pulling out every reserve of energy he has left to assuage her fears.
Who is looking after you? What if something happens? Do you have food? Should we tell the boys?
It's all peripheral business until he can see and think straight again. He downs a pint of water and some Tylenol and flops against the distressed hotel bed sheets, haphazardly tossed aside from an emergent page.
The onslaught of the fever hides behind a dam until the last drop of tension evaporates from his body. Only then does it come at him like a head-on collision, eviscerating any semblance of wellbeing.
Who is looking after you?
Andrea's words filter through the torrent of delirium.
That never used to be a question.
Now? He doesn't know. Running away from Ireland and Switzerland leaves him with no village or home. Since Abigail's death he's walked a fine line between grieving widowhood and self-imposed exile, often to the detriment of his sons.
If not for Liam and Austin, he wonders if he'd have anyone at all.
Right now though, he has no real will to care.
Later, he'll have a vague recollection of his cell vibrating against the mattress and grimacing at the screen through the height of his fever. Whether that grimace perks to a smirk is up for debate, but he remembers the ID and the weary guffaw it draws from him.
Grey.
Are you dead?
...
Electric Fences
...
First days back are lousy.
Having survived an unprecedented amount of cataclysmic, million-to-one tragedies, Meredith knows exactly what to expect from the Welfare Brigade; short lists, paper-work and clerical board duties that are designed to keep her fifteen feet from an OR at any given time.
Like she said - lousy.
Non-compliance is expected from her - planned for, even - but if there is anything she's inherited from Ellis, it's the innate ability to contravene any imposition placed in her path. Three fleeting kisses to her children's foreheads at 3:47 am is the only risk she takes before slinking out of the house, a duffle bag and one of Link's energy drinks in hand.
The universe gifts her a Lap Choley and a Nissen Fundoplication before Bailey catches wind of her surgical escapades.
"Who was it?" she interrogates her former mentor, itching for but not daring enough to reach for the Albuterol inhaler in her surgical coat pocket. Helm is like a guard dog at her heels and she can feel the defensiveness emanating off her.
"Your name on the board not enough?"
Tracking.
So it begins.
Despite a month out of the surgical field, the hospital is in the same state of emergency that she'd left it in the night she collapsed in the parking lot. Staffing is at an all-time low and the usual faces are far and few in between, replaced by green-gilled interns and retirees who haven't placed a central line since 2002.
Board requisitions and departmental budget sheets for the upcoming quarter keep her at bay for an hour before Helm comes barrelling into her office.
"Partial colectomy! Bay 5!"
Even she can't hide the devious triumph that carves itself into her jaw.
"Not assigned?"
Helm struggles for a breath, "no...Kar-Wilson, Kinneman and Fincher...swamped with lung resections...if you swoop in now they won't have time to work up and page Lechler."
She's out of her chair and snatching her coat from the table before Helm can blink. "We need to get the chart before someone in scut trolls the floor."
Helm's face bursts with pride, seemingly one step ahead, and produces the clipboard from behind her back.
"Remind me to nominate you for Chief Resident when you're due," she praises the resident, deftly prising the chart from Helm's hand.
To her chagrin, the emergency colectomy and in-op complications take a toll on her stamina. The residual effects of Covid ravage her reserves, resulting in each hour feeling like a ten-mile sprint. The scrub team is gracious each time she needs to break the sterile field for the Albutamol, but it's the personal sense of weakness that grates on her nerves.
The sand isn't real, Meredith.
And then there's that.
The ghost of her dead husband infiltrating every spare chasm of thought.
She'd hoped for that to tail off after Altman pulled her off a vent, chalking it down to the barbiturates, but it lingers in her periphery throughout her recovery.
Live for you, Meredith.
Seventeen hours later and she grudgingly admits to biting off more than she can chew. Helm's Pit theft case monopolises the rest of her day and she slips off her scrub cap under Bailey's disapproving watch.
"Go home, Meredith, before I have another attending scraping you off the floor."
Her lips flatline at the admonishment and she trudges to her office, though her mind flits elsewhere. Dead husband exhortations and the weight of exhaustion sideline for a moment as the echoes of Amelia and Maggie's teasing prick at her resolve.
The obnoxious Irishman saved your life.
For someone in Peds, it took him a long time to defer to Altman.
She'd be a liar if she said the Pediatric surgeon didn't intrigue her. Well, not until after he stopped peeing all over the place and asserting his authority over her domain. He'd been quick to retract his insolence when she met him toe-to-toe and for that she was glad, because behind the frank coarseness he hid a common shadow.
It was a little on-the-nose for Cristina, but somehow she'd managed to slot in a piece of something she didn't know she was missing, not until it was snatching her gallstone surgery on the Peds floor.
"Lost?"
She's brought out of her reverie by an unfamiliar nurse, presumably a temp, and shakes her head; Hayes' office is locked down for the night and any hope of snagging some of his fancy Irish whiskey to take off the edge goes down the drain.
The nurse seems to catch on.
"He's still out with the virus."
"Still?" Her tone hitches unexpectedly.
"Took another turn according to the Chief. Might not be back until next week," the nurse explains, then excuses herself as a faint alarm trills from the adjacent ward.
Now she feels like an ass. She left him on read a few days ago, a little out of something to say. It's a thing she doesn't have with anyone else, not with Maggie or Amelia, definitely not Cristina or Andrew.
Something she can't put a name on, a little more than friendship, but less than a person or...well, that.
It's whiskey drams after complicated days and widowhood without pity. When she dares to think about it she worries that she's latched onto an Alex replacement to fill a void, the next best thing after the actual thing moved to Iowa.
But that feels like a cheap excuse and she knows it.
She types it out before the overthinking takes an axe to her bravado.
Still not dead?
She's been doing the widow thing a little longer than Hayes has and she knows how hard it can get, juggling kids and work at the expense of your own health. Luckily, with a lot of persistence and a village effort, she'd found her people to help see her through. Sisters, strays and frat boys turned uncles - none of it would have been remotely possible without the motley crew of people that made sure the fridge was stocked and that the kids weren't sticking knives in the electrical sockets. Some might not call it ideal parenting, and she's not winning any awards, but her kids are loved and safe.
Does he have people? Or is she just that incompetent at being alone?
Hayes' reply comes as she traipses across the parking lot, mediating between two hotel options for essential workers on her phone.
When they ask for my cause of death, tell them it was the sewage water that this hotel calls tea.
Whatever it is or isn't, she at least owes him for the countless tokens of unreciprocated tea and whiskey offerings.
She ignores Cristina's gloating in her head.
Outside Room 204 at the HEP she leaves a half-cocked attempt at a care package. It feels a little too Izzie or Maggie of her as she leaves the Trader Joe's chicken broth and Twinings tea behind. Her intention isn't to stay, but by the time she's there she can't be bothered to drive across town to her first choice of hotel.
She barely drops her duffel bag onto her hotel room floor before her phone illuminates again.
Incoming Facetime: Hayes.
"You still look like crap," she insists once the hotel wifi stabilises enough to reduce the pixelation.
She's being truthful - he does look like crap and not in that post-forty-eight-hour shift kind of way. He looks like he's only a few rounds away from where she was after being admitted. A twinge of guilt stirs in her gut, but she's had her own crap, hasn't she?
Anyway, he's not her responsibility.
"Did you manage to stay awake longer than my preemie today?" he quips back, clearing his throat in the same breath.
"Big talk for someone who was already supposed to be back running his department."
"To some that might be construed as keeping tabs. Missed me, Grey?"
She rolls her eyes, "not you - your whiskey. You locked it up."
He manages a splintered chuckle only for it to be cut short by a spasmodic cough.
"Aye," he finally breathes, "to keep it safe from freeloading Americans - thanks by the way," he hitches the handle of the grocery bag into frame, "the kitchen closed after a breakout."
Her brows knit together, "so what've you been eating?"
It can't be worse than the hospital meatloaf served to her on Tuesdays and Saturdays. The smell still makes her gag when she gets a whiff in a patient room.
"Pollo's on 3rd."
Oh. Much worse.
"Slim pickings out there, Grey. Some of us don't have the luxury of being related to half the hospital staff."
She scoffs at that. "You think Amelia and Maggie can cook?"
He balks at her through the screen.
"A brain surgeon and the youngest cardio chief can't cook?"
Hiding her own bewilderment is near impossible.
"None of us can. We're surgeons; we've lived off vending machine Cheetos and cafeteria pizza since we got a licence to cut."
It clicks for him then.
"So the tortellini they snuck in while you were admitted?"
"Pinnochio's. Giorgio has a sister-wives discount," she explains off-handedly, deliberating between two miniature spirit bottles from the mini-bar.
"Raving mad, the lot of you."
Despite her exhaustion, there is something invigorating about the conversation that drifts between them. Part of her assumes it's because she gets to talk about Derek without fear of reproach, just as he can bask in the memory of Abigail.
A lot happened to her after Derek, some of which still follows her in the hospital halls. Hell, there are still nurses and orderlies that attended to her the day she almost sank to the bottom of Elliot Bay. Hayes is the ultimate reset button, disconnected from all of that chaos and tragedy. He gets it without knowing it, or at least the sordid, endless string of tragedy that prefaced and preceded Derek dying.
In some way or another, the ghosts of their spouses find their ways through the cracks, though the more time passes the less it becomes about them and more about life after the fact.
Trading numbers in his office hadn't even felt like a big deal the night he managed to snag her for that drink. Hayes has an enviable way of playing things off so casually that it almost threatens her infamous predilection for indifference.
Same cloth and a whatever the rest of the phrase is.
She does little to make it known to her sisters, partially out of respect for Andrew and whatever they are now and partially because she doesn't want to validate her best-friend's onerous matchmaking. Since when had she become so responsible?
She shots both of her miniatures in spite of that fact.
"Bad day?" Hayes's Irish lilt softens a touch, as though he's back behind her visitation window on the ward. She affords him the ghost of a smile, barely tracing the curve of her lip.
"I should be asking you that."
"But you didn't."
"No," she relents, releasing a pent up sigh, "I didn't."
The sand isn't real, Meredith.
"You want to talk about it?"
Does she? Nothing seems off-limits with Hayes, courtesy of their Widow Club membership. She decides she doesn't, more so out of her own sense of self-preservation and willingness to keep afloat.
"It's just that time of year."
He's pensive in response, but the pity doesn't flow like she's used to from the rest of her circle.
"Do you think it was harder for your sons? Being older?"
She doesn't quite know why she wants to spear him with that thorn, but he takes the hit and wrestles with it until he has an answer.
"They know exactly what they're missing. What her hugs felt like, her laugh...things that can set anyone alight with grief. But that's also the gift, they have their own versions of their mum that I don't have to build or shape for them."
His answer is like brushing up against an electric fence.
"My youngest daughter never knew Derek, she was born after he passed. She's...the one I worry about the most."
The honesty sits like silt in her throat and for a moment she can't look at the screen, half-expecting to find that elusive pity suddenly written all over his face. Part of the problem of never having known someone like herself, someone widowed so young, it's hard to believe in an even keel. Of utter, unadulterated and bone-deep understanding.
Hayes eyes her for only a moment, the clench of reticence settling along the underside of his jaw.
"It's a different kind of pain," he finally speaks, "not better or worse, just different."
There's a story there, a thread of something that she'll leave unpicked. She's had enough for the time being.
"Do I know you well enough now?" she changes the subject, an air of impishness drowning out the sobriety of the moment.
"For what?" he asks, confused.
"The story of the electric fence."
Her change of subject near enough gives him whiplash.
"I told you Grey...the littlest bloody things. Aye, you know me well enough - but there's a condition."
"What?"
"Just a bit of tit for tat."
She narrows her eyes, suddenly feeling defensive.
"Yang warned me about you and morphine, something about ensuring I protect your dignity."
She didn't.
"I'm gonna kill her."
"Air restrictions might make that a bit tricky."
"You know I can hang up on you."
It's not a threat, she has - multiple times.
But she doesn't.
Hello Richard Flood/Cormac Hayes - you brought some old fans back into the fray. Kudos, mate.