DISCLAIMER: I own none of the characters from Grey's Anatomy and I'm making no money off of this.
SPOILERS: Possible spoilers for future Season 3 episodes.
ARCHIVING: Only with the permission of the author.

Free Fall
By Jaina

 

She was in over her head.

When she thinks back, she can almost remember when she fell in this ever deepening hole. It probably all started when she made the decision to move to Seattle.

She'd screwed her life up so badly, it could only go up from there right? If only she'd known...

But then there had been Meredith. Meredith Grey, daughter of the renowned Ellis Grey, and also the woman who had been sleeping with her husband.

She'd been a bitch - to Meredith, to Derek. She'd freely admit it.

So maybe she'd started falling when she'd insisted on working her first case with Meredith. Because Meredith wasn't what she'd expected. She was flawed and she was broken. Meredith wasn't bright and shiny and easy to loathe. In fact, she'd almost felt sorry for Meredith. She probably should have left then.

She'd stayed instead, and she and Meredith had become friends. At first it had been fake, forced and merely a show for Derek's benefit. After going through the motions though, she'd discovered that maybe she and Meredith were really friends. Not easy friends, not buddies that hung out and partied together, but the kind of friends that understood and respected each other.

Of all the things that she can't quite remember exactly, the one thing that she can remember is the moment when she realized that she liked her ex-husband's intern. Really liked her, as in wanted to get to know Meredith better, wanted Meredith not to be kissing Derek anymore.

She and Karev had just had their last fight - publicly and loudly - in the middle the floor. She had made it to a deserted stairwell before she let herself cry. It was Meredith who had followed her in there, gingerly, carefully and with just a hint of hesitation. Meredith hadn't comforted her or tried to touch her or any other nonsense, just sat with her. It had been enough to hold her together until Callie had found them both and took her to Joe's to get her drunk.

So now, here she was, standing in front of Meredith in the lobby of Seattle Grace, and she realized that they were only a few feet away from where they'd met, where she'd knocked Meredith's world out from underneath her. She supposed it was apropos since Meredith had just done the same thing to her.

Friends who respected and understood one another didn't ask one another out for dinner and drinks. They respected and understood one another from an appropriate distance. Meredith had always had this way of getting under her skin and getting closer than what was expected.

So when she said yes that was when she realized just how deep she'd fallen.

The End

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