Work Text:
Lim greets Andrews with a hug, “glad you could make it.”
“You’re the first and last person I’ve bossed around and then worked for. And lasted for a while too. So clearly, you and the then residents are quite something special.”
“In preparation for today’s reunion, I went to look for our old photos, and look what I found!” Claire merrily says as she spreads the photos on the table.
“Oh my god we look so young here!” Morgan exclaims, snatching one from the table, taken shortly after she and Park has transferred to Melendez’s team after the Coyle incident.
“Well that was many many years ago,” Park soothes.
“You were so annoying back then,” Claire spits, wrinkling her nose in disgust at the memories, “so competitive. And to be clear that’s at Morgan.”
“Auntie Claire! Auntie Morgan!” a girl enthusiastically greets as she’s running down the stairs.
“Hi dear.”
“Darling, you have to greet the uncles too?” Lim gently chides.
“Uncle Andrews. Uncle Park.”
“That difference in enthusiasm though,” Park comments after acknowledging the greeting with a nod.
The girl is unbothered, now drawn to the photos on the table.
“Can I see?” She asks Claire, and gets a nod in return.
“Do you want me to bring her out? Occupy her?” the girl’s father whispers to Lim with his eyes still fixed on his daughter seated at the dining table looking at the photos.
“Nah, it’s fine, I think. But I’ll let you know if I change my mind.”
“Okay. Let me know if you need anything.”
The girl is looking at a photo, taken at a gala, “this is mommy. Auntie Claire. Auntie Morgan. Uncle Park. Uncle Andrews. Uncle Shaun,” she observes pointing at the faces on the photo.
“Uncle Kalu,” Claire helps, moving her finger to Kalu.
“I’ve never met him?”
“He left the hospital to go to Denver Memorial,” Morgan chimes in, “shortly after the photo was taken.”
“I see.”
Claire attempts to distract the child with other photos, looking for an innocent photo.
“Here, you see, Uncle Shaun threw a birthday party for Aunty Lea.”
“Where’s Uncle Shaun? Is he coming today?”
“He said he’s coming,” Lim tells the girl.
“He’s held up at the hospital, I think, but he’s coming,” Claire informs both of them.
The girl is sitting in Lim’s lap now, eating ice cream, a reward for being a good girl the entire night.
The photos have found their way back onto the table as the then residents reminisce about the good old days.
“Oh that was really a happening trip,” Claire mumbles under her breath, “I don’t think any of us knew what was coming for us.”
“Please Morgan and Park?” Lim asks, incredulously.
“Okay, maybe not that,” Claire concedes.
“I’m not blind.”
“I’m surprised you even had capacity to pay attention to anything or shall I say anyone else,” Claire lobs back.
“That was below the belt,” Lim states firmly, hinting to Claire to drop it. Definitely not while she was still eating ice cream peacefully on her lap.
The girl has gone on an endeavour of her own, rifling through the photos at the bottom of the stack.
“Who’s this?” The girl asks her mother.
“That’s Uncle Asher. Auntie Jordan. Uncle Enrique. Auntie Summer.” Lim replies, smiling, moving her finger over the photos.
“I don’t know who these two are.”
“Auntie Summer decided that she didn’t really want to be a surgeon so she left to pursue her dreams. Uncle Enrique wanted to help people around the world so he went to another programme.”
By now most of them know that that isn’t quite the truth - but eventually a version closer to the truth did emerge. Andrews told her that she didn’t want to be a surgeon so she leaked the information to burn the bridge to stop her from looking back, ever.
“It was a rough time,” Lim continues, looking at Claire, “and I’m sorry.”
Claire grins, “we’ve come a long way since then. Water under the bridge.”
“What did Mommy do?”
“I was mean to Auntie Claire, when I shouldn’t have been.”
The girl frowns, as far as she is aware, her Mommy is a very nice person.
Morgan plops herself into an available chair, “yeah, most of the time your Mommy is good boss and a nice person. But not all the time. We all have our low moments.”
The girl squirms out of Lim’s lap, having demolished the ice cream, to put the cup into the sink.
“I wanted to say that, it was an eventual trip, your mother lost her luggage, but I guess it didn’t really matter that much after all. Don’t think the clothes were missed.”
“Claire Browne!” Lim hisses, glancing nervously in the direction of the kitchen.
“It’s the truth though,” Claire states, flipping her hair deliberately, “don’t worry, we haven’t done you out in front of your daughter yet, and we won’t.”
“But you can still pass snide comments about me and Park,” Morgan continues.
“All I said was that it was a long time coming, you’ll getting together.”
The girl returns to the table, and takes her place in Lim’s lap again, and continues browsing through the photos.
“Who is this?” she pipes up, pointing to a photo with most of them in it, and Melendez in the centre.
Morgan looks at Claire, and Claire looks at Lim, trying to see what they should be telling her daughter. Morgan is on the verge of trying to distract the girl again with something else, looking for an interesting photo for such use.
“Why have I never seen him?” the girl pulls out some more photos from the pile, “he’s also in these photos, but I don’t know who this is.”
“Uncle Melendez.”
Both Morgan and Claire snap their heads in Lim’s direction, surprised that she didn’t try to distract her daughter. As far as they are aware, she’s never addressed his existence to her daughter.
“There’s many photos with Uncle Melendez, but I’ve never met him. Mommy also never talks about him.”
Lim draws in a particularly sharp breath, “that’s because Uncle Melendez is no longer around.”
“Did he go overseas?”
“No, he went to heaven.”
The daughter blinks a few times, surprised by this answer, “how do you know?”
Lim shrugs, pressing a kiss into her scalp, “because Uncle Melendez believed in heaven, and I think, no, I’m sure that he would’ve gone to heaven. He’s a good person. A good doctor.”
“What was Uncle Melendez like?”
“He’s a very talented surgeon. One of the top cardiothoracic surgeons in the country when he was alive.”
The girl fishes out a photo of Melendez with his arm slung around Lim’s shoulder casually, at what Lim believes to be some end year party, “was he Mommy’s friend?”
“Yes. He was Mommy’s good friend. We were interns, residents, fellows and attendings together.”
“Your Mommy leaves out that she then got promoted to chief of surgery later on, so she became Dr. Melendez’s boss.” Despite knowing that this is likely a sensitive conversation, Morgan can’t help but feel a need to get the facts straight.
“But Melendez backed me. I never knew exactly what he told Andrews.”
“He’s just there, you can ask him,” Claire points at Andrews who is comfortable stretched out on the couch watching football in television together with Park and Shaun.
“No. I don’t think I was supposed to know. I don’t-”
“Dr. Andrews!” Claire calls, defying Lim, “back in the day, what did Melendez tell you before you picked Lim to be chief of surgery?”
“What’s important is that I already picked you, whatever Melendez said afterwards about being happy if it went to you was irrelevant. By the way, Glassman would’ve picked you as chief too.”
Claire claps her hands together in victory, “you see. I knew it.”
“You don’t have to lie to me.”
Andrews controls his urge to roll his eyes, “I’m not. But yes, Melendez thought you deserved it.”
At this, Lim brings the cup of water to her mouth and takes a sip of water.
“Uncle Melendez was Auntie Morgan’s and Auntie Claire’s attending back in the day. If you’ll happen to care to share.”
Claire recognises that Lim is trying to deflect attention from her because this is a revelation that she somewhat forced upon Lim, so she starts sharing stories of surgeries that they pulled off, starting with 3D printing a titanium femur, and ending with doing an emergency operation in the aftermath of the earthquake. She leaves out the detail that it was this same earthquake that forcefully evicted him.
Claire isn’t sure that the girl is understanding too much of this, but shares anyway - the number of times that she and Lim have openly and frankly talked about Melendez since the PTSD can be counted on one hand. But the girl listens, enthralled.
“She’s really your daughter,” Morgan informs Lim, as she runs her fingers gently through the girl’s hair, “how could she listen to Claire go on and on about surgeries, and still not lose interest?”
“Surgical procedures happen to be a frequent topic of dinner time conversation, to be honest. And we’re really talking technical terms here, I don’t have the capacity that Claire does to try and make it comprehensible when I need to vent.”
“Mommy,” the girl asks, “does Uncle Melendez have any children? Can I make friends with them?”
Morgan nearly spits out her drink.
“I’m friends with Uncle Shaun’s children-“
“No,” Morgan cuts in, “Uncle Melendez doesn’t have any children.”
“Does Uncle Melendez not like children?”
Morgan actually spits her drink back into her cup.
“Uncle Melendez loves children. But he went to heaven young, so he never had the chance to have children of his own,” Lim replies.
“Oh.”
“But…” Lim hesitates for a moment, “I think if Uncle Melendez got a chance to meet you, he would really like you.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, I think so.”