CHAPTER ONE.
a hard day's night

Vienna breathed out, blonde curtain bangs that needed a trim flying out of her face as she tapped her short manicured fingers against the leather steering wheel of her 2005 Dodge Charger. She stared out of the windshield, looking at the large building in front of her ━━ Seattle Grace Hospital.

The blonde twisted the key in the ignition, the car shutting off as she finally decided to head inside. Entering through large glass doors, her short black pumps clicked against the tile floor of the hospital as she searched for the nearest elevator. Her face contorted in slight pain as she rubbed the back of her neck. As it turns out, one night in an actual bed didn't get rid of the aching feeling of nights on a small sofa.

Derek had gone home with some woman, so she decided to take his bed for the night. After the two left New York six weeks ago, Vienna stayed with her parents for five of those weeks. The last week was spent on Derek's trailer sofa ━━ one of the most uncomfortable things. The two enjoyed spending time together ━━ despite the circumstances. He'd even taken the younger girl fishing at one point.

Not paying attention to where she was going, her head shot up when felt a larger body bump into her, hands grabbing her upper arms to steady her. "Oh! Vienna Clark, as I live and breathe," Seattle Grace's Chief of Surgery ━━ Richard Webber beamed, seeing the younger woman in front of her. "Look at you, all grown up now. Glad to see you back from the Big Apple. How's your mother?"

Her mother had been diagnosed with cancer a long time ago, back when she was in high school. The family of three came to Seattle Grace where she'd had some surgeries, where they'd successfully removed the cancer after she started college.

"She's great, still in remission," Vienna laughed lightly, "All thanks to you guys."

The black male smiled fondly, "Only the best for your family. It's great to see you," He paused. "I was overjoyed when I'd gotten the news that you wanted to complete your surgical residency here."

"I'm surprised to see you still here," She smiled, "I thought you would've retired by now," Vienna confessed, almost immediately regretting her words.

Webber's face tightened slightly, "You know, we would want you to be late. you should get going." He deadpanned, patting the girl on the shoulder, Vienna wanting nothing more than to sink into the floor.

The blonde walked through the long halls of the hospital until she found the correct room where she and the rest of the interns were to meet. After a few minutes of waiting, Dr. Webber began his speech.

"Each of you comes here hopeful. Wanting in on the game. A month ago you were in med school being taught by doctors."

"Today, you are the doctors," he said in slight dramatics. "The seven years you spend here as a surgical resident will be the best and worst of your life. You will be pushed to the breaking point. Look around you. Say hello to your competition."

Everyone looked around at each other, eyeing up the competition. Vienna folded her arms, raising an eyebrow as other interns attempted to intimidate each other.

"Eight of you will switch to an easier specialty. Five of you will crack under the pressure. Two of you will be asked to leave. This is your starting line. This is your arena. How well you play? That's up to you."

After the small tour of the OR, the interns were sent to get changed into their new scrubs. Vienna spotted an empty locker next to a blonde woman and an Asian woman and decided to take that one.

"Only six women out of twenty," the other blonde stated as Vienna swiftly removed her purple top, folding it up neatly and placing it in her locker.

"Yeah, I heard one of them is a model," the Asian woman laughed ironically, before looking toward the blonde next to her, "Are you the model?" She asked, eyes trailing down to the small tattoo slightly above her hip.

"No," Vienna laughed, pulling her scrub top on. "Why? Do I have the looks for it?"

"Totally. You're Cristina and Vienna, right? I'm Meredith," The blonde said. "Which resident are you assigned to? I have Bailey."

"I got Bailey," Cristina said.

"Yep, me too." Vienna agreed, sitting on the bench to lace up her black and white sneakers.

"You got the Nazi?" A male voice was heard from behind the three women, "So did I. At least we'll be tortured together, right? I'm George O'Malley," he said, "We, uh, we met at the mixer. You had on that black dress with the slit up the slide, and the strappy sandals ━━ "

"Oh, wow," Vienna laughed with raised eyebrows, sharing a look with Cristina.

" ━━ Now you think I'm gay." George sighed.

"There's nothing wrong with that," Vienna shrugged.

"Clark, O'Malley, Yang, Grey, Stevens."

"I'm not. . . gay," George trailed off, his sentence going unheard as the women left the room. They moved toward the man that called their names, who pointed them down the hall to where their resident was standing; and to their surprise, the Nazi was a short black woman.

"That's the Nazi?" Cristina quizzed.

George tilted his head, "I thought the Nazi would be a guy,"

"I thought the Nazi would be. . . a Nazi," Meredith said.

Vienna shook her head, "We're going to make her life a living hell."

"Maybe it's professional jealousy. Maybe she's brilliant, and they call her Nazi because they're jealous! Maybe she's nice," A tall blonde suggested loudly from behind them, Vienna jumping slightly, causing her to bump into Meredith.

"Let me guess, you're the model?" Cristina asked which earned herself a glare from the model.

Vienna turned toward the slightly taller woman with a light smile, "I'm Vienna Clark."

"Izzie Stevens," She returned the smile before walking up to the resident with an overly sweet smile on her face. "Hi! I'm Isobel Stevens, but everyone calls me Izzie." Bailey looked her up and down with judgmental eyes, ignoring Izzie's outstretched hand, causing Vienna to look elsewhere in slight second-hand embarrassment.

"I have five rules. Memorize them," Bailey began sternly. "Rule number one, don't bother sucking up, I already hate you, that's not gonna change."

"Trauma protocol, phone lists, pagers. Nurses will page you, you answer every page at a run. A run, that's rule number two." The interns grabbed their pagers off of the desk before quickly following her down the hall. "Your first shift starts now and lasts 48 hours. You're interns, grunts, nobodies ━━ bottom of the surgical food chain. You run labs, write orders, work every night till you drop, and don't complain."

"On-call rooms. Attendings hog them. Sleep when you can, where you can. Which brings me to rule number three, if I'm sleeping, don't wake me, unless your patient is actually dying. Rule number four, the dying patient better not be dead when I get there. Not only would you have killed someone, but you would have also woken me for no good reason. Are we clear?"

Meredith's hand rose shyly, "You said five rules, that was only four."

Bailey stared at her for a second until her pager began to beep, "Rule number five. When I move, you move!" The resident said as she began down the hall, going into a quick sprint leaving the interns to clumsily follow after her.

"Katie Bryce," A paramedic informed the group, "Fifteen-year-old female, new onset seizures, intermittent for the past week, ID lost en route, started grand mal seizing as we descended."

"All right, get her on her side," Bailey instructed when the patient began seizing again.

"Izzie, ten milligrams Diazepam." The blonde looked completely lost. "No, no, the white lead is on the right, righty whitey, smoke over fire, a large bore l.V. Don't let the blood haemolyse, let's go!"

Vienna noticed Izzie still standing confused, so she moved in front of the girl, injecting her with the right medicine, Katie's seizing coming to an end. Bailey looked at her with a slightly impressed look before it was quickly covered up by her hard demeanor again.

"So I heard we've got a wet fish on dry land?" A deep voice rang through the room, Vienna looked up to see two dark-skinned males in navy scrubs entering.

"Absolutely Dr. Burke," Bailey nodded.

"Dr. Bailey, we're gonna shotgun her." The slightly shorter male informed.

"Got it, Dr. Warren. That means every test in the book, CT, CBC, chem seven, and a tox screen," Bailey informed the interns. "Cristina, you're on labs. Vienna, the pit. George, patient workups. Meredith, get Katie for a CT. She's your responsibility now."

"Wait, what about me?" Izzie asked as the resident turned to walk away.

"Honey, you get to do rectal exams," Bailey smirked.

♱

Several hours into their shift, the interns were all gathered around at one of the cafeteria tables. "This shift is a marathon, not a sprint. You should eat." George told Izzie who only stared down at her untouched food.

"I can't." She sighed, "You try eating something after performing 17 rectal exams. The Nazi hates me."

Vienna scoffed, pushing her salad away. "You had to say that in front of my salad? Thanks for that, Izzie."

The taller blonde mumbled a sorry as George spoke, "The Nazi's a resident. I've got attendings hating me," He pointed a finger toward himself.

"Come on, you guys are probably being dramatic," Vienna rolled her eyes. "I doubt they hate you."

"Yeah, they don't hate us ━━ they despise us."

Cristina slammed her tray on the table as she joined the three, "Did you guys know Meredith is inbred?"

"Like it's uncommon here to have doctors for parents." George brushed it off as he shoved a spoonful of food into his mouth.

"No, like royally inbred." Cristina corrected. "Her mother is Ellis Grey."

Vienna dropped her fork into her salad, "Shut up!"

"Who's Ellis Grey?" George asked nonchalantly.

The three women turned to look at him with baffled looks on their faces, "Have you been living under a rock? Ellis Grey! The Grey Method!"

"I'd kill to have Ellis Grey as a mother," Cristina thought out loud, leaning back in her chair, "I'd kill to be Ellis Grey ━━ "

"Shut up," George murmured to the girls after seeing Meredith making his way toward the interns.

"Katie Bryce is a pain in the ass. If I hadn't taken the Hippocratic oath, I'd Kevorkian her with my bare hands." Meredith grumbled as slammed her tray on the table, gaining weird looks from the interns.

"Good afternoon, interns." Burke soon approached their table, "It's posted, but I thought I'd share the good news personally. As you know, the honor of performing the first surgery is reserved for the intern who shows the most promise. As I'm running the OR today, I get to make that choice. George O'Malley."

George looked at him like a confused puppy. "Me?"

"You'll scrub in for an appendectomy this afternoon. Congratulations. Enjoy it."

As Burke walked away, George asked again, "Did he say me?"

"No, he meant the other George O'Malley," Vienna said sarcastically.

As Vienna was making her way toward the conference room they'd been paged to, she felt someone grab her arm. The girl quickly went to punch whoever it was ━━ the other person grabbing her first quickly.

"What is wrong with you?" Derek whispered in slight amusement and disbelief as he led her into a stairwell.

"Me?! You can't just go around grabbing women like that!" Vienna defended. "Why did you bring me in here? This is creepy."

"Do you know Meredith Grey?"

The short blonde nodded in confusion, "Yeah. . . We're in the same intern group, why?"

Derek turned away from the door, looking at Vienna sheepishly before blurting out, "She's the one I slept with last night."

The blonde stared at him for a few seconds before laughing, "Oh. Oh, my God." She laughed harder, holding onto one of the railings for balance. "You slept with an intern."

Derek stared at her unamusedly, "Vee," He groaned. "This is not ━━ stop laughing!"

"Derek, this is bad. You're her boss," Vienna snorted as she leaned over, Derek pushing her shoulder lightly, the girl falling backward onto the stairs. "Not cool."

"If I remember correctly, you dated your boss while you were still a student."

Vienna glared, "He who shall not be named was not my boss, we didn't work together. And if I remember correctly, he slept with your wife."

"Yeah, well. Anyway, it's fine," Derek changed the subject. "It was a one time thing."

"Are you sure about that?" The blonde asked skeptically.

"Why wouldn't I be?"

"No reason."

♱

After leaving Derek, she found herself among a large group of interns all gathered in an OR viewing room to watch George's surgery. A few interns were talking amongst themselves, doubting the boy's ability to successfully complete the surgery. Meredith cut them off, "He's gonna pull it off." George pulled the appendix out, causing the other interns to cheer him on.

"Oh, he's fucked," Vienna grimaced as he started to freeze up, earning a nudge from Meredith.

After it was clear that George couldn't finish, Dr. Burke had to take over.  "Yep, he's a total 007." One of the other interns called him.

Izzie was confused and asked, "What does 007 mean?"

"License to kill."

Nineteen hours into the shift, Bailey's group of interns sat in a tunnel on spare beds. "They're calling me 007, aren't they?" George asked frantically.

"They're calling you 007," Vienna answered, at the same time Izzie and Meredith said, "No one's calling you 007," Causing the three women to share looks.

"See!" George said as he pointed at the, "And, I was on the elevator and Murphy whispered 007."

"Who the hell's Murphy?" Vienna snorted as she got a bag of gummy bears from the vending machine.

"Oh, how many times do we have to go through this, George?" Cristina rolled her eyes, "Five? Ten? Give me a number or else I'm going to hit you."

"Do it, I dare you." Vienna grinned as she sat next to the Asian woman, George giving her a look of betrayal.

"Murphy whispered 007 and everyone laughed."

Izzie sighed, "He wasn't talking about you."

"You sure?" George asked.

"Would we lie to you?" Meredith retorted.

"Yes."

Vienna snorted. "I would. We just met."

"007 is a state of mind."

George scoffed, "Says the girl who finished top of her class at Stanford."

Before Cristina gets a chance to respond, Meredith's pager beeped, "Oh man. It's 911 for Katie Bryce. I gotta go," She says before she takes off in a sprint.

♱

Early the next morning, the interns were called into a conference room by Derek. He'd given a speech about Katie Bryce, informing the interns that her scans were clear and there was no telling what was causing her seizures. He gave the interns a proposition, whoever found out what was wrong with her would get the chance to scrub in with him. After that, Vienna, Meredith, and Cristina headed straight to the library where they'd found out that she'd had a brain bleed from taking a fall during her rhythmic gymnastics ━━ where she'd hit her head. After the three girls confronted him with their findings, Derek chose Meredith and Vienna to scrub in with him.

Vienna had just driven home ━━ back to Derek's trailer ━━ and was going through her clothing, when she came across a leather jacket. The woman sat down on the sofa, sighing as her fingertips trailed along the material.

The door to the trailer opened, and Derek stepped through before shrugging off his bag. He took a seat next to the younger blonde, "Is that the one he got you?" Vienna nodded wordlessly, Derek wrapping an arm around her shoulder. "We'll be okay."

The blonde smiled slightly, her head falling onto Derek's shoulder. "We'll be alright."

♱ word count, 2690