DISCLAIMER: Watch out, this is femslash (lite). Don't read it if you're not into this sort of thing. I own nothing of Grey's Anatomy. I'm only having fun with the characters I'm fast becoming obsessed with.
AUTHOR'S NOTE: Hooray for re-runs! Seeing this episode again inspired me to write one more. This is my seventh Grey's Anatomy story. Many thanks to Brenda S., Mighty Editor Goddess, and to Jules68, who guides me through the details of GA. Written August, 2008.
ARCHIVING: Only with the permission of the author.
Here's the Thing
By DianeB
Dr. Hahn hadn't planned it. It just happened. Upon reflection, Hahn realized the best things in life often occurred without planning. Then again, upon further reflection, she admitted there may have been a little, spur-of-the-moment planning involved.
At Joe's a good while later, a second glass of ruby wine in her hand, Hahn settled on there was no pre-meditation, fully aware she didn't need to settle on anything, but doing so gleefully – if uncharacteristically – just because the wine was very good and everything was working out so darned well.
Reaching the main corridor, slapping her tote umbrella into her palm, Erica Hahn cast her eyes around for the person she was to meet, her eyes instead falling on the person she wanted least to meet.
Mark Sloan was at the elevator. Watching him, she came to a sudden decision about her next move, based entirely on the way he'd been speaking to her all day and much of the previous evening at the bar with Callie.
Actually, the way he'd been speaking to her since she'd first arrived as a full-time member of the Seattle Grace staff.
Hahn originally thought beating Shepherd, Webber, and Sloan at Monopoly after her first day at the hospital had cleared up any "Gentlemen's Evening" confusion about the glass ceiling and appropriate behavior in the workplace, but she quickly learned that would not be the case with Sloan. He was relentless in his alpha dog sniffing around her, to the point where she'd finally been forced to give it to him both barrels that very afternoon. "Why don't you get that I just don't like you? That I think you are a crass, predatory, ape of a man, who just happens to be, she'd grudgingly conceded, a decent surgeon?"
Any clearer and she'd've been glass, but he'd been completely unfazed by her biting assessment. In fact, he had seemed almost pleased by it. Which did nothing to endear her to him – as if anything ever could.
Now, as his eye caught hers, she pointed the umbrella at him and marched in his direction. "Here's the thing," she started, ignoring his lascivious smirk. "You're too pretty."
"Aw, c'mon—," he began, his tone loudly conveying how unfair she was being to his poor, pretty self.
Erica cut him off, as the ideal words came to her. "No. So pretty, in fact, that if we didn't work together, we would probably be. . ." She drew out the last word and nodded in a "you-can-easily-fill-in-the-blank" kind of way, very careful not to actually say anything that would be untrue, instead allowing Sloan to come to his own magnificent misunderstanding, which he quickly did, judging by his predictably detestable leer.
"But the point is," she continued before he could get in yet another unoriginal, vulgar remark, "we do work together. And in order for me to do my job, I need to have who I am outside the doors of this hospital. So." She shook her head in finality, biting her tongue against the temptation to say too much and ruin the moment.
At that exact second, the elevator doors slid open, revealing Callie Torres, who spoke up brightly to Erica. "Oh, hey! Ready?"
Erica's sturdy heart skipped a beat at having Callie's fifty-megawatt smile directed at her, and she felt a brief flare of guilt over what she had just said to Sloan. But in the sunshine of Callie's smile, she concluded that the cosmos would have to be satisfied there was any guilt at all. "I am," she said to Callie, sighing heavily at the immaculate timing of it all, and glad – oh so very glad – to be leaving with this extraordinary woman.
As Callie moved to her left out of the elevator, Erica turned with her and walked at Callie's side toward the exit, noting with unaccustomed pleasure the buoyancy in her step.
Sloan yelled after them, plainly trying to get himself invited along. "Where you guys goin'? You goin' to Joe's?"
Half-turning to look back at him (and noticing Callie had turned completely around and was walking backwards, shrugging her shoulders at Sloan), Erica wondered if he'd ever get that it was she and Callie alone, not she and Callie and Doctor Crass Ape-Man, who were now going outside the doors of the hospital.
Probably not.
Erica called to him, just to be sure he understood he was definitely not invited, "Goodnight, Doctor Sloan."
The End
Life crouches at the knees of Chance
And takes what falls to her.
---Elsa Gidlow, 1898-1986