Genesis ► GREY'S ANATOMY [1]

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

PEOPLE WERE COMING in and going out of the hospital. Each and every one of them passed two very bored and sleep deprived interns in the waiting room. Their shift had ended maybe an hour or two ago, so they were allowed to go home. At first they had wanted to go home, but after seeing that their next shift would start again in a couple of hours, they agreed to stay until their next shift. In retrospect that had been a bad idea, since they really needed to sleep. As a result, people were greeted with two surgical interns who looked like they could fall asleep any minute. Not exactly a sight that let people feel at ease.

Courtney was slouching in a chair as she drank her third cup of coffee, trying to stay awake. She had always been the kind of girl that needed her sleep and was prone to being very tired if she had a bad night or didn't have that much sleep. Not the most easy thing to have when you're a doctor. Her best friend, Alex, sat right next to her and was reading some random magazine, which he had found somewhere. Alex was flipping through its pages and let out a laugh, when looking at a certain page. "Hey, Courtney, do you want to know what Disney princess you are?"

Courtney let out a chuckle. Alex was about to flip to the next page, when the magazine was ripped out of his hands. He gave her a look. "Don't look at me like that. The 10-year-old Courtney inside me would want to know which princess she is, so I'm not going to give up the opportunity to finally figure out if I'm Ariel or Aurora just because you think it's weird." Alex shook his head in amusement and watched her take a pen out of the breast pocket of her white medical coat and fill in the answers.

"Didn't know you were such a Disney fan."

"Ever since I was a little girl. Whenever my mother would go to work, she would hire a babysitter for me and my sister when we were younger. She – I think her name was Beatrice – always read us fairytales and watched Disney movies with us, since they made us calm. She was there most of my childhood, now that I think of it, so I think she infected me with the Disney love," Courtney chuckled as she reminisced about her babysitter. "Because of her, I actually babysat for the families in my street when I was older."

"I don't understand how you can still care about your mother even though she practically abandoned you and Meredith. I would have run away and never looked back."

"Everyone's different, Karev. That's maybe what you would've done, but that isn't me. I don't give up on my family so easily. I know that my mother isn't the best mom in the world, but she's still the woman who birthed me and – sort of – took care of me. She put a roof over my head, fed me, sent me school, bought me clothes – well gave me money to buy them on my own – and all that sort of stuff. No matter what she did or does, she's still my mother and that will always mean something to me." Courtney explained without looking away from her test. Alex was silent after that and thought back to his family and the hell he went through. "Now, let's talk about something else, something more uplifting. Talking about my messed up family isn't something that makes one happy."