What We Are

Prologue

    Ben Warren had heard about the infamous Miranda Bailey before he had even seen or met her.
She and a few others had been the topic of the Mercy Westers during the first few weeks of the merger. Apparently the surgical department was like a live soap opera.
Ben had heard so many different perspectives about the force of nature that was Dr Bailey. The rumors had ranged from:

"She's as blunt as they get."

"She makes her interns cry."

"Her nickname is the nazi and it's certainly not because she has ice blue eyes."

"Dr Bailey's an amazingly talented surgeon."

"She made a whole speech about Mark Sloan being a whore.

"She and anyone else associated with her former interns are basically cursed. Everything that could happen to someone, has happened to them."

"Dr Bailey is the person who keeps this hospital" afloat.

"She's having an affair with the chief."

The last rumor in particular has confused Ben. Based on the other rumors, he'd heard about the woman, she didn't sound like the type of person to wreck a home.
But maybe he was wrong. Either way Ben had never been one to condone gossip or judge persons based on other people's words. He liked to base his opinions and judgements on observations, facts and those things alone.

But out of all of the people and rumors, Ben had become somewhat intrigued by the surgeon. He wanted to solve the puzzle which was Dr Bailey.

    Dr Thomas Knox, an anesthesiologist of Seattle Grace hospital pre merger, and an old friend of Ben's, had been happy to share every and anything Ben wanted to know about his new place of work.
Thomas, or Tom for short, met and eventually became good friends with Ben somewhere in the middle of the first year of their internship.

Tom had been the oldest intern in their year and had therefore had to endure the constant insensitive and tasteless jabs from their fellow colleagues.
One night after a particularly stressful shift, Ben felt sorry for Tom and invited the man for drinks along with Ben's best friend and fellow anesthesiologist Christian Payne.

The rest was history.

The three men braved the struggle of being at the bottom of the anesthesiology food chain; until, Tom moved away with his wife for her new job promotion. He'd switched hospitals and began his residency at Seattle Grace, while Chris and Ben completed their residency at Mercy West.

   Eventhough Tom had, had prior knowledge of Seattle Grace before the merger, he hadn't been much help with Ben's secret quest of finding out more about Dr Bailey.

The most information his friend was able to confirm about her was, the soap opera aspect, her positive abilities as a surgeon and her vaugely insensitive nickname.

Tom had shared plenty of dramatic and quite frankly borderline unbelievable stories including the hospital and it's staff. And if he'd thought that Dr Bailey's rumor mill had been something, the stories Tom shared with him would knock hers into another dimension.

Still none of them had caught Ben's attention like Dr Bailey had.

Thoughout Tom's gossip Ben noticed that her name had come up plenty of times during the drama; but, never as the person causing it, neither was she actually involved in them.
She just seemed to be dragged into the situations as an innocent bystander.

The more Ben thought about it the more he realized that none of the facts that he'd actually managed to learn about the woman had included her private life, which the anesthesiologist was pretty sure wasn't an easy feat.