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CHAPTER ONE!

the invaders

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Grief is a funny thing.

Funny in the way that it can look different on everyone. It can consume a person, making them burn on the inside so violently that it feels like their chest has been sliced open and their heart ripped right out. Grief follows them, like a shadow that swallows them whole. Losing someone you love can almost make you lose yourself: trying to fathom how to continue in the world without someone who used to make it better. Grief is something that can kill you.

Or it can make you laugh.

The latter applied to the group of six residents when they had sat for their friend, George O'Malley's, funeral.

Everything in their lives had been going fine. Fine until Izzie got cancer. Fine until a bus crashed. Fine until their friend died.

So now nothing was really fine, but they had to be. Especially since now that Seattle Grace was merging with their rival hospital, Mercy West, and all their jobs were now in jeopardy to some douches with orange scrubs – one of whom was now putting their things in their dead friend's cubby.

"I said take it out."

Noah Peters looked up from his own cubby at the sound of one his best friend's demanding tone. A girl with a red pixie cut was the orange scrub douche who was placing her things in George's cubby. His own heart stung as he saw the cubby being filled with unfamiliar things, but said nothing. He knew Izzie could handle herself.

"Great. I get the crazy one next to me." Pixie cut girl said to her friend in an irritated tone, and it set Izzie off.

"Oh, you want to fight? 'Cause I will," Izzie began, standing up, and Noah thought that this was the best time to intervene.

"Izzie," he said, walking forward, placing his hand on her shoulder. Izzie shook it off.

"I will fight you. You're pretty tiny." Izzie ignored Noah, but thankfully, Izzie's husband, Alex, walked in at that very moment and began holding her back. Everyone had stopped to stare at them.

"I could take you down in just a couple of seconds. Come on!"

Alex pulled Izzie away and out of the room, leaving the pixie cut girl and her friend to laugh in surprise in her wake.

This time, it was Noah who walked towards the two orange scrub girls, but since he was a lot taller than them, he towered over them with his arms folded when he began to speak.

"Just so you're aware, and know this while you're laughing at 'the crazy one' – that cubby belonged to our friend, who died a month ago. He should be here today with us, but he's not. It should've been his things in there instead of yours. So yeah, there's a reason we kept this cubby empty, if you'd have had enough decency to ask. But you didn't, so we now know what that says about you."

Noah felt satisfaction rise through his chest when the two girls' mouths both fell open slightly and embarrassed looks washed over their faces. Something about Noah Peters was that he was going to always defend his friends, through thick and thin. Knowing he had gotten the better of them made him feel slightly about everything, and he walked away without another word.

❧——✭——☙

"They're locusts. Comfortable locusts, feeding on our surgeries." Meredith said bitterly in her hospital bed. She had been stuck there ever since she had donated part of her liver to her alcoholic father. And now everyone was gathered in her room eyeing the new Mercy Westers with distaste.

"It's rude." Izzie added, "There should be at least a couple of days where they act like guests before they put up their feet on the coffee table."

"They're dicks, at least three have pushed me out the way without an apology already." Emma grumbled, laying in Meredith's bed beside her, even though she wasn't the one who had gone through surgery.

"You do that to me everyday, Emma." Cristina deadpanned, swatting Emma out of Meredith's bed so she could examine her. Emma begrudgingly left the bed and rolled her eyes at her.

"And what's with the orange scrubs? Ours aren't good enough for them?" Lexie asked while peering through the blinds at them.

"We ran out. They're on back order. Randall from the supply company says they'll be here in a week." Meredith explained, and everyone stared at her.

"That's what you learn when you lie here all day."

"Why bother with new ones, we can just give these to our replacements," One of the residents said.

"We're not going to be replaced by anybody," Alex said.

The resident named Steve wasn't convinced. "If I have to become a coroner–"

"Who's becoming a coroner?" Noah asked, walking in at that very moment.

"No one is becoming a coroner!" Meredith said indignantly, "Cristina, tell him."

"Tell him what? They're here. It's over." Cristina said, sounding oddly defeated.

"Hey! We are not some stupid hosts. They can't invade us. They can't attach themselves to our faces and then while we're eating spaghetti, explode out of our chests and skitter across the floor. This is our ship. This is our ship."

Everyone just looked at Meredith bemused.

"Excuse me, are you quoting a Sigourney Weaver movie?" Lexie asked her.

"Haha! She totally is!" Noah said laughing and taking a bite out of his apple. Lexie looked at him with a grin and he almost choked.

"Shut up." Meredith said.

"That's what happens when you live here. You watch a lot of TV." Izzie said, remembering her previous stay when she had been diagnosed with cancer.

"We own this hospital. We were born in this hospital. And we will hold this hospital with our last gasping breath." Meredith said defiantly.

"I really don't want to be a coroner," Steve said nervously, "I don't like dead people."

Meredith huffed. "Go out there and go get surgeries before they take them."

Everyone began to leave, not wanting to mess with an irritated Meredith.

'Go! And I want a full report by the end of the day!"

Emma nodded and blew Meredith a big kiss on her way out, ready to steal surgeries from under the new orange douches.

❧——✭——☙

"Where do you want us, Dr. Hunt?" Emma asked, putting her hair up in a ponytail, when her, Cristina, and a gang of their fellow residents walked into the very very busy ER.

"Uh, at this point, anywhere is good." Hunt told them, looking up from his chart.

"At Mercy West we do zones." A mercy wester spoke, and everyone turned to look at him. "When it's super busy we just give everyone a zone, a space. The nurses put a person in that space, you know it's your patient. Helps get you to 'em quicker."

Emma scoffed, not for any particular reason but literally just because he was a Mercy Wester and he was speaking, which was good enough reason for her.

"Yeah, well, this is the ER, not a school yard. We're not playing four square." Cristina said bluntly and everyone around them began snickering.

"I like it." Dr. Hunt said, which shut them all up.

"What?"

"It's a good idea. Let's try it. What's your name?" Hunt asked the mercy wester.

"Jackson Avery."

"Dr. Avery. Dr. Hunt." Hunt introduced himself, "It's all yours, zone away."

Emma and the other residents were left speechless as they all walked into the ER. It was clearly going to be a long day.

❧——✭——☙

"She's not a baby, she's nineteen years old. There ain't a scrap of baby left there!" Emma heard a man yell as he was wheeled through. She was suturing a twenty year old guy's arm he had accidentally sliced open from a fall.

"Okay, okay, we've got a bleeder here." Cristina said as blood spurted at her. She ordered the nurse to get her lidocaine and a laceration tray, leaving no room for Dr. Avery to help and instead stand dumbly in front of them.

"Need any help?" he said irritably, and Emma couldn't help but smirk at the scene.

"Ugh! He came at me with a carving knife. He tried to cut off my–!" the patient yelled again.

"Come on! I was gesturing! You ran into the knife." the other man yelling said. Emma had finished with the sutures and shot up to go help the other guy, pushing him back onto the bed.

"You're an idiot! And a pervert!"

Emma tried to guide the man with the nurses and paramedic back to the bed.

"Sir, if you could just calm down and–"

"She used to babysit your brats. I can't believe I ever let her in your house!"

"I love her, Don. And she loves me." the patient told Don. Emma's eyes just widened and she continued pushing him onto the bed, but the patient was not tolerating it.

"I'm gonna kill him!" he yelled, getting back up. Emma tried to push him firmly but Dr. Avery had beaten her to it.

"Easy, all right?" he told the patient, catching Emma rolling her eyes at him again.

"Let him die! Just let him die!" the patient just continued, and Emma laid him down to examine him, "It's what he deserves!"

"Sure it is. I'm just going to check your heartbeat." Emma said.

Dr. Avery turned back to Cristina, completely abandoning the patient in front of him and Emma had to physically stop herself from rolling her eyes.

"Are you sure there's nothing I can–"

"There! You know what? That's how we do it on our side of town." Cristina told him, finishing up with the patient at that exact moment.

"Hell yeah it is!" Emma said, clapping Dr. Avery on the shoulder.

The two doctors left Dr. Avery standing there with nothing else to say.

❧——✭——☙

Noah was examining a patient's back and chest when Lexie and the pixie cut girl's friend walked over to them. The girl was taken slightly aback at the sight of the guy who put her friend in her place earlier, but recovered quickly.

"Hi! I'm Dr. Kepner. Oh handcuffs." Dr. Kepner said, noticing the patient was tied to the bed.

"Hello, Dr. Kepner, Dr. Grey." Noah said to them with a smile, seeing that Dr. Kepner still looked uncomfortable from their previous interaction, but she didn't meet his eyes.

"I'm not an ax murderer. I just broke into someone's house. Dude came after me with a golf club, beat the crap out of me." the patient told them in a defeated voice, "Look, you don't need the cop, I can barely move."

"We'll keep the cop," said Dr. Kepner. Noah and Lexie looked at each other.

"He's got multiple contusions and ecchymosis over his back." Noah told the other two after pressing down on the guy's back.

"He's going to need lumbar and thoracic films." Lexie confirmed, "Okay, and by the way, it was one organ. An appendix. It wasn't a psycho cabal."

Noah just looked at her oddly, not knowing what she was talking about.

"Oh. Good to know."

It wasn't long before Dr. Shepherd joined them to consult their patient's spinal injuries.

"T&L spine films showed a burst fracture at T-12." Lexie told him.

"Here you can see evidence of instability because the vertebral height loss is more than fifty percent, which implies both ALL and PLL are disrupted." Noah added, pointing to the respective problems.

"What's that mean? I got a broken back? I'll still be able to walk right?" the guy asked them in a concerned voice.

"You will still be able to walk, burgle, have a full life." Derek told the patient before turning the the three doctors, "Ideas?"

Lexie was on it faster than Noah could think.

"Decompression via corpectomy and reconstruction with strut graft and interior instrumentation."

"Wow, I might be out of my league here." Dr. Kepner gushed and Lexie smiled at her.

"Well, she has a photographic memory, we're all out of that league." Dr. Shepherd told her, also smiling.

"Here I was thinking you could do transpedicle screws with a posterior approach."

Dr. Shepherd looked taken aback by Dr. Kepner's idea and examined the scans again.

"Seemed like a good idea, but, you know, maybe not." she added nonchalantly.

"Let's go with the pedicle screws," Dr. Shepherd decided, smiling at Kepner, and Noah's eyebrows rose at him while Lexie gave him an incredulous look, "Okay, get him into pre-op, and let me know when the lab results come back."

"I'm on it," Dr. Kepner said, following Dr. Shepherd out of the room, leaving Noah and Lexie dumb-founded in their wake.

"She definitely knew what she was doing, come on," Noah said.

"Right! You read my mind, Noah," Lexie said exasperated but giving Noah a small grin as she walked away; Noah's heart fluttering like it did every time she looked at him.

❧——✭——☙

Emma was helping Cristina with her patient when a young girl ran in and kissed him – she must've been the daughter the two men had been arguing about.

"Honey, are you okay?" she asked him.

"I'll be fine, sweetheart," the patient told her, making Emma gag internally.

"Get off her you perv!" the girl's father shouted, abruptly pushing the curtains around his bed back.

"Daddy!"

Suddenly, the man had stood up and had grabbed a hammer.

"I will kill you, you son of a bitch!" he yelled, rushing forward.

"Security!" Cristina yelped, Emma just looking at him with her mouth wide open.

But before the man had a chance to hammer his friend's prized possessions, Dr. Avery had leaped and tackled him to the ground.

"Nice work," Dr. Hunt told him.

"Thanks," Dr. Avery replied: everyone seemed to be in awe at his brave save and he earned himself an applause from everyone in the ER.

People began congratulating him, and Emma and Cristina were just looking at each other incredulously. Had Dr. Avery really saved everyone from a serious disaster?

❧——✭——☙

"This blows." Alex said, taking a bite out of his sandwich.

"Getting your ass kicked?" Cristina asked him monotonously, sitting down with her own lunch.

"Shut up." Alex smirked before saying, "I heard yours got a standing ovation in the ER,"

"Yours is the one who saved the whole ER from the maniac with the hammer?" Lexie asked, eyes wide.

"Yeah, Dr. Ninja Leap really saved us from the mortal peril of a guy's balls getting bashed in," Emma said sarcastically, rolling her eyes – she began to believe that she was going to seize from the amount of times she had rolled her eyes today.

"Doing the hero's work he is," Alex said seriously, earning himself a glare from Emma, which didn't last long before she grinned.

"Okay, he didn't actually save anyone, he just leaped and tripped the guy. I used actual medicine to stop a person from dying." Cristina said irritably.

"Well, mine has a notebook that she takes notes in, notes of a very personal nature, and I stole it." Lexie said, guilt laced in her tone.

"You what?" Cristina said.

"Well, that's very rebellious of you, Grey," Emma told her.

"Give it." Alex said.

"No," Lexie said, "I, I am not sinking to their level. They are vindictive and they are aggressive and-and they are not team players. And if we're not careful, that spirit is going to infect our hospital. We have to fight it."

"Which is why you stole her notebook?" Cristina asked her with a smirk.

"And read it." Alex added, his mouth full of sandwich.

"Well, she's not a very nice person."

Emma laughed, and at the same time, Izzie walked over with two coffees in her hands.

"Hey," she said.

"Oh, score, you rock," Alex told her, making to grab one of the coffees.

"Oh, no, that's not for you." Izzie said.

"Who's it for?" Emma asked her.

"Charles." she replied.

"Your Mercy West guy?" Cristina asked, disbelief all over her face.

"They're handing our asses on a plate and you're serving them coffee?" Alex said, outraged at his wife's behaviour.

"Charles is actually kind of awesome. And if you all could get past your sad, little egos, you would realise you can't off all the Mercy West residents just 'cause you feel threatened," Izzie told them, grabbing the coffee out of Alex's hand and walking away.

"Oh, Izzie, curse your good nature," Emma called after her, and Izzie turned to give Emma one last smile.

"We don't feel threatened!" Cristina added.

"Yeah, we feel pretty threatened," Lexie said.

The four residents continued eating and Alex began looking around the cafeteria.

"Dudes, they're not here." he said.

"Hallelujah." Cristina said, not grasping what Alex was trying to say.

"They're not eating. They're working."

Cristina, Lexie, and Emma looked around to see Alex was right and panic filled the four of them and they all scrambled out of their seats.

"Oh my God, they don't eat lunch."

"Oh, God,"

"Shit!"

❧——✭——☙

"Where are we at with Billy Sheehan?" Dr. Shepherd asked Dr. Kepner, Lexie, and Noah as they walked through the hallway.

"He's ready. Dr. Peters helped me put him under. He's prepped and positioned." Dr. Kepner told Shepherd.

"I thought we said I was handling that," Lexie asked Kepner, looking at Noah with a slightly betrayed expression on her face.

"Oh, yeah, we did. I just wanted to make absolutely everything was ready for Dr. Shepherd." Kepner said, and Noah just tried to plead an apology with his eyes.

"Well, your first day here and already you're making my life easier." Shepherd told the three of them with a humoured smile.

"Yeah, Dr. Kepner, no, she's not just a good doctor. She-she's a great doctor." Lexie said, and Shepherd nodded.

"In fact, if you ask me, she's the future of medicine." Lexie continued with a wide smile.

"Oh," said Dr. Shepherd looking at Kepner, who's smile had faltered slightly.

"Only you can keep yourself down, right?" Lexie said, her smile staying wide as ever. Noah just gave her an odd look, having no idea what she was trying to do, but just followed Dr. Shepherd into the scrub room. Lexie walked in soon after but Kepner stayed outside.

"D-Dr. Shepherd, I just need a moment," she told them, walking away. Noah watched Lexie stare after her with a guilty look on her face.

❧——✭——☙

"I'm horrible," Lexie said, as she and Noah walked through the hospital, having finished their surgery a couple hours prior.

"What?" Noah asked, confused.

"That girl, Kepner? You know that little red notebook she was writing in the whole day?"

"Oh, yeah, she was looking for that earlier,"

"I stole it,"

"You what?"

"Well, technically the patient stole it for me but... I read it,"

"You read it?" Noah stopped in his tracks, looking at her in disbelief.

"Hey! Don't look at me like that – you went behind my back and handled the patient with her," Lexie said, pointing her finger at him and they continued walking.

"She asked me to, and I didn't want to say no because she was trying to be nice,"

"Oh, God, I'm terrible," she said rubbing her hands down her face, "I apologised and gave her it back but I still read it and threw it in her face."

"Oh..." Noah said, drawing out the 'oh', "That's what you were doing, I had no idea why you were saying those things outside the scrub room,"

"It was terrible, I'm a terrible terrible person,"

"You're not a terrible person, Lex. She was making you look like an idiot all day and you bit back, you just... bit back a little bit too hard."

Noah grinned at her and placed his hand on her shoulder, giving it a reassuring squeeze and Lexie gave him a weak smile. They had reached the lobby now, where Mark Sloan, Lexie's boyfriend, was waiting for her. She waved goodbye at Noah and ran to Mark, smiling ten times harder than she had been moments before with Noah. His chest tightened at the sight, but there was nothing he could do about it: as long as Lexie was happy, Noah couldn't do anything about it.

All he could do was watch.

❧——✭——☙

Emma was sprawled over the armchair next to Meredith and Cristina, who were laid in Meredith's hospital bed. The three of them were watching Meredith scrolling through the channels on the TV when Alex walked in slowly, an unusually solemn look on his face.

"Tell me everything. Did you beat them? Did you kick their asses?" Meredith asked Alex, smiling expectantly, turning off the TV, "Come on, I want a full report. Everything that happened. Emma didn't even scrub in at all today."

Emma flicked Meredith at the dig, and the three of them all looked at Alex, waiting for an answer.

"Izzie left me."

"What?" Emma said, louder than she had intended.

"She wrote a note and she left me. I..." he said, looking as if he was going to cry, "I don't... I don't... I don't know if she's coming back."

The other three exchanged surprised and disbelieving looks.

"Wh-what do you mean, she left?" Meredith asked, "Where did she go?"

Alex smiled, but it didn't really meet his eyes. It was like he was saying, 'your guess is as good as mine'. He looked down, his chin wobbling. The other three said nothing.

"Go hug him." Meredith whispered to Cristina.

"What?" she whispered back.

"Go hug him." Meredith repeated.

Cristina nodded and got out of the bed and took two steps toward Alex, who took two steps back and sniffled.

Despite all their history, Emma couldn't bear to see Alex so heartbroken, and gingerly rose from her seat and took a couple of steps toward Alex. This time, he didn't move away – so Emma wove her arms around him and hugged him, resting her chin on his shoulder.

For a few moments, Alex stood rigid, and Emma had began to let go when she felt Alex's arms wrapping around her, his face burying in her neck as he sobbed. Emma held him so tight she feared that she wouldn't be able to let go.

And they just stood like that, just for a little while, to try and pretend that things were okay.

Even if they weren't.

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authors note!
it's finally published!!

I hope you liked it and don't be afraid to vote and comment and point out the things you like or dislike, anything is appreciated!

hopefully I'll be able to get regular updates out but please bear with me if I don't, I'm a very busy person and this is just for fun!!

lots of love x