"The game. They say a person either has what it takes to play, or they don't. My mother was one of the greats. Me on the other hand, I'm kinda screwed. Like I said, I'm screwed. I can't think of any one reason why I want to be a surgeon. But I can think of a thousand reasons why I should quit. They make it hard on purpose. There are lives on our hands. There comes a moment when it's more than just a game. And you either take that step forward or turn around and walk away. I could quit, but here's the thing. I love the playing field". 

"and i'm so scared of losing all control"

Lucy Shepherd ran into Seattle Grace Hospital just in time for the tour with the chief. "Each of you comes here today hopeful, wanting in on the game. A month ago, you were in med school being taught by doctors. Today you are the doctors. 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. Eight of you will switch to an easier specialty. Five 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". 

"I heard one of them is a model. Like that's gonna help with the respect thing", Cristina Yang said, as they changed into their scrubs in the locker room. "Great", Meredith and Lucy said sarcastically. They laughed afterwards. "I'm Cristina". "Meredith". "Lucy".

"Who're you with? I'm with the Nazi"

"Me too"

"Same"

Holly Kepner and George O'Malley, who were standing not too far away overheard the conversation. "I'm with the Nazi, too", Holly said, smiling. "You guys with the Nazi?", George stuttered out. "Me too".

"I'm George O'Malley. You're Meredith, right? We met last night. You wore a black dress with strappy heels and... now you think I'm gay. I'm not". Holly patted him on the back sympathetically. "Grey, Yang, Stevens, Shepherd, O'Malley, Kepner", a voice said from the top of the room. The interns gathered before the small woman who had called out their names. "You're with me for the time you will be interns here", Bailey said, eyeing them all judgmentally. "The Nazi's a woman?" Cristina questioned as they walked out of the locker room. "Why do they call her the Nazi?" Lucy asked as they stood by the nurses station. "Maybe it's professional jealousy", a bubbly blonde appeared beside them. "Let me guess, you're the model", Cristina said. Lucy snorted. "Hi, I'm Isobel Stevens but everyone calls me Izzie", the blonde said, introducing herself to Bailey. Bailey looked at her hand like it was dirt on her shoe. "I have five rules, memorise them...", she said, walking away and they quickly followed her. "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. Your first shift starts now and lasts forty-eight hours. You're interns, grunts, nobodies, bottom of the surgical food chain, you run labs, write orders, work every second night until 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, you would have also woke me for no good reason, we clear?" Meredith raised her hand. "You said five rules, that was only four", she said. Bailey's pager went off. "When I love, you move", she said, and started running. They ran after her. They stood on the roof as the chopper landed on the helipad. "Katie Bryce, continuous seizures", the paramedic explained, exiting the chopper.

A nurse injected Katie Bryce and she finally stopped seizing. Dr Preston Burke, cardiothoracic surgeon at Seattle Grace walked in. "Fish on dry land", he simply stated. "Do all the basic tests. MRI, CT, you know the drill".

"O'Malley, Kepner, workups, Yang, labs, Grey, Shepherd, you're Katie's doctors, take good care of her and get her up to CT, and Stevens, you're doing rectal exams", Bailey smiled and walked away.

Izzie performed a rectal exam and Cristina got the test results despite really wanting to do a surgery. George, Holly and Dr Preston Burke were in a room as George tried to intubate a patient. Holly winced as he failed miserably to do it. After many failed attempts, Taylor eventually got tiresome and pushed him out of the way to do it himself. "You probably messed it up a lot too your first time", George said jokingly to Dr Burke. Burke smiled through gritted teeth. "I'm going to have a lot of fun with you, O'Malley", he said. George gulped.

"I was amazing at beauty pageants. This isn't fair. I was the best of the best. Then I had my fall and twisted my ankle during rhythmic gymnastics and then the seizures. I think God literally hates my guts", Katie Bryce complained as she stared at a televised pageant. Meredith groaned. "Katie, we get it. You've told us ten thousand times. We don't care", Lucy said, picking at her fingernails.

The interns sat at the cafeteria after 7 hours of their shift. "I'm screwed, a resident already hates me", Izzie said, picking at her salad with her fork. "Well, at least yours is just residents. I have attendings hating me", George said putting his head in his hands. "I thought I would come in here and be confident and know what to do, but I'm too scared to touch anything and I'm scared I'm going to fall behind", Holly said, staring at her food. "Did you know that Meredith's mother is Ellis Grey. Like performed wonderful surgeries, wrote books and won the Harper Avery award twice", Cristina interrupted. "No way", Izzie said, shocked. "I hate Katie Bryce. She's unbearable", Meredith said, as her and Lucy sat down with their fellow interns. Dr Burke approached the table. "I have been asked to choose an intern to assist me in surgery. I have picked Dr O'Malley to assist on an appendectomy later today".

Lucy went to the nurses station to get an updated chart for Katie Bryce when she bumped into someone. She looked up to see her brother Derek Shepherd. Before she could say anything, he pulled her into an empty scan room. "I don't want to talk, Derek"

"Fine, you can listen. You can't just go off to college in a different state, ghost your family and expect them to be fine with it"

"You don't understand. You have a different family to the one I have. No one in our family doubts your potential. They believe in you and they never stop because you've always been perfect. Me, I got in trouble in school and I struggled so everyone doubted me and stopped believing in me and my potential. Then you met Addison and I finally had someone who believed in me, who saw me, not as your sister but someone who has a dream and an aspiration and wants it from herself, not her family. So I left"

"Lucy-"

"Why are you here? Where's Addison? What happened to your practice?"

"I got offered a job as Head of Neurosurgery here"

"Addison?"

"We have separated. She slept with Mark"

"Mark Sloan?"

"Yes"

"Well, that's too bad. This is staying professional. I'm no longer your sister. I am Dr Lucy Shepherd, surgical intern. We tell no one we are related. We just have the same last name. Got it?"

"Lucy-"

"Okay, then. See you around, Dr Shepherd"

"20 bucks says he tanks it", Cristina said, looking down at OR 1 from the gallery.

"Definitely gonna tank it", Lucy replied.

"I say it goes well", Holly said, quietly smiling at George.

"Me too", Izzie replied, smiling at Holly.

"Guys, that's one of us down there. We shouldn't be making bets. We should be supporting him", Meredith said, defensively. The procedure began and everything was going well but everything went downhill when George accidentally pulled the purse strings too hard and broke them. She started to bleed and George didn't know what to do so Burke had to push him aside and finish the procedure. "Total 007", Lucy scoffed. Cristina snorted. "What's 007?", Izzie asked from behind them. "License to kill", Meredith replied.

"Everyone's calling me 007", George whined, as he sat on a wheelchair. "It's gonna be fine", Holly spoke softly to him. "Who cares? We're interns. We're nobodies. You should've expected to be treated this bad. This isn't even bad. It's a name. It's gonna get way worse from here", Lucy said from a gurney where her head lay on Meredith's lap and her feet on Cristina's. The conversation is interrupted by Meredith and Lucy's pagers going off. "What is it?" Lucy said, getting up. "911 for Katie Bryce", Meredith said and they both ran off. "I should've gone into geriatrics", George said. Holly snorted. "No, geriatrics is for losers who never have sex and live with their mothers", Cristina replied. "I really need to get a new place", George muttered to Izzie and Holly.

Meredith and Lucy ran through the hospital and finally made it to Katie Bryce's room. She sat up in her bed totally fine. "What the hell?" Lucy panted. "Finally, I need you to call someone", Katie said. "No!" Lucy half-yelled. Annoyed, her and Meredith left the room.

"Pneumonia. Definitely pneumonia. Start the antibiotics", Alex Karev, a fellow surgical intern, said to a nurse. "Are you sure?" the nurse replies. "Did you go through 4 years of medical school?" he questioned sarcastically. He then walked over to Lucy who was charting nearby. "I have Jeremy, you're with the Nazi, right?" he said, standing next to her. "You know it might not be pneumonia. Your patient may be splinting", she said, looking up from her charts. "I hate nurses", he replied, smirking. "Oh, you're such an asshole", she said, rolling her eyes. Her pager then went off. "911, Katie Bryce", she muttered to herself as she read her pager and ran off. "She's hot", Alex said to a fellow intern. "Is she seeing anybody?" "I'm friends with her", George blurted out from behind them. "Dude, shut up".

Lucy and Meredith catch up with each other before running to Katie Bryce's room to find her having multiple seizures. "Have you administered any drugs?" Lucy asked a nurse. "Yes, but they're not doing anything", the nurse replied. "Page Bailey and Shepherd", Meredith told the nurse. "The drugs are still having no effect, Meredith. We're gonna have to charge the paddles", Lucy said, grabbing them from a nearby crash cart. "Charge to 200! Clear!" Meredith yelled. No change. "Charge to 220! Clear!" No change. "Charge to 240! Clear!" No change. "Damn it! Charge to 260! Clear!" Katie's heartbeat and blood flow finally came back to normal. Dr Shepherd arrived in the room. "Grey, Shepherd, leave", he said with authority. Meredith left. Lucy rolled her eyes at her brother but followed after Meredith. "Grey, Shepherd, I-", Bailey began to lecture them but Meredith walked briskly away with Lucy following behind. Meredith walked out of the hospital doors with Lucy still trailing behind. This caught the attention of a worried Cristina who followed the two out the doors. She came out just in time to see Lucy hold back Meredith's hair as she threw up against a tree. "Don't tell anyone", Meredith said to the two before walking back into the hospital. "This place is freakin' cursed", Lucy said, staring at the tree with disgust.

"Alright, Tony, I'm just going to do a simple explanation so you understand the procedure. I will put you on bypass, fix your heart and then it's all done. Simple as that", Burke explained to his patient. "Do I need to worry?" Gloria (Tony's wife) asked Dr Taylor. "I assure you m'am, I am very good at what I do but it is surgery and it will always involve risks", he replied. Dr Burke then walked off leaving George and Holly with the patient and his wife. The worried look on Gloria's face concerned George. "It will be okay, m'am", George reassured her. "Yes, Tony will sail through surgery, I assure you", Holly agreed.

Cristina sutured a banana while she waited impatiently for Dr Shepherd. George and Holly began to laugh at the fact that she was suturing a banana. "007 and can't even touch a scalpel", Cristina said. "Sorry, I get mean when I'm tired". Shepherd then walked in. "Katie Bryce is having seizures with no visible cause. She is a ticking clock", he said. "The intern who finds out the cause will get to scrub in on the advanced surgery". All the interns took a copy of the chart and ran off to get started.

Alex Karev walked up to a nurse. "Did you page me?" he asked her. "Yes, the patient in 4B isn't responding to the antibiotics and should be by now", she said. "The patient is old. Don't page me again", he said. Cristina and Lucy ran up to Meredith. "We have decided we should work together on this so we all get equal chances of scrubbing in", Cristina said. Lucy nodded along. "I'll help but I don't want the surgery. I want to spend as little time with Dr Shepherd as possible", Meredith replied. In the hospital library, the three girls try to figure out the problem. "So why won't you spend time with Derek?" Cristina asked Meredith. "Because he's an asshole", Lucy scoffed from behind her book. "You've got a problem too?" "I slept with him", Meredith blurted out. Cristina gawked at her. Lucy dropped her book and gagged. "I'm gonna be sick", she muttered. "Back to Katie, please", Lucy said calmly. "Oh my god", Meredith said as she realised what was wrong with Katie. "Get up. We have to find Shepherd".

"Although we have no proof, we think Katie might've had an aneurysm", Meredith explained to Derek. "She fell doing rhythmic gymnastics but the fall was so minor, her doctor didn't even mention it".

"You were right. I checked it out. She's one in a million. She's got bleeding in her brain", Derek said, coming back to them with scans. "Katie could've gone through her entire life without it being a problem. Congratulations". "Whatever", Lucy replied, staring at the floor. "Meredith, you can join me in the OR". "Typical", Lucy scoffed before walking away. Cristina glared at Meredith before storming off.

George and Holly waited outside the OR for Dr Burke to be done operating on Tony Savitch. After a while, he came out of the OR. "That was very fast", George said. "Did he make it, Dr Burke?" Holly asked. "I'm afraid not, Kepner. His heart had too much damage. Tony died". Holly's eyes filled with tears. George's heart sunk to his stomach. "I promised Gloria- We promised Gloria Tony would be okay", George stuttered out. "That is incredibly irresponsible of you two. The only person who has that kind of control is God. I'm not God, O'Malley. I'm a surgeon", Burke snapped. "You can both go tell Gloria her husband died and you made a promise you couldn't keep".

"Maybe it wasn't Meredith's fault-", Izzie started but Cristina shushed her as Meredith entered the room. "Look guys, I'm sorry-", she started. "No, you don't get to come to us for absolution. I didn't get into this program because of my mom or because I slept with my boss", Cristina said angrily. Meredith stormed off.

George and Holly made their way to tell Gloria in the waiting area. "Mrs Savitch, I'm very sorry but Tony died in surgery today", Holly said, her hands shaking like they always did. George saw and took her hand and it stopped shaking immediately which shocked her. "I am so sorry, Mrs Savitch", George said. "Leave, Dr O'Malley. Please leave, both of you", she replied tearfully before collapsing into a chair.

Meredith, George and Holly sat on a window sill looking out at Seattle. "I wish I had chosen a different career", Meredith said. George murmured in agreement. "I'm too much of a coward to be a surgeon", Holly said. "My parents tell everyone I'm a surgeon as if it's a big accomplishment", George said. "My mom and dad told me to do something else because they thought I was copying my sister", Holly said. "You shouldn't feel so bad, when I told my mother I was going to medical school, she tried to talk me out of it because she didn't think I had what it takes so don't feel so bad", Meredith replied quietly.

"What are the common causes of post-op fever, Karev?" Dr Webber asked Alex. Alex stayed silent. "Anyone?" Meredith raised her hand and listed the causes. "What do you think is wrong with the patient, Dr Grey?" he asked her. "I assume patient 4B is a prime candidate for pulmonary embolism", she replied.

"How would you diagnose?"

Meredith diagnosed the patient correctly.

"Karev, do what Dr Grey just said. And then, you're off the case".

The chief pulled Meredith aside. "Dr Grey?" he said. "Yes?" she replied.

"I would know you anywhere. You look exactly like your mother. Good work today".

"Thanks, sir"

Meredith arrived at the OR where Katie was being prepped. "Take a look", Derek said, smiling at her. Meredith looked and was amazed. At that exact moment in time, Meredith realised it is more than a game and that they make it hard on purpose. They have lives on their hands.

Once the surgery was finished, Meredith left the OR to find Cristina and Lucy waiting for her. "You were good", Cristina said. "You were amazing in there", Lucy said, smiling. After they made up, Cristina and Lucy walked away just as Derek approached Meredith. "That surgery was amazing. It was such a high", Meredith said enthusiastically. For just a moment, maybe even a millisecond, the world stopped when they looked into each other's eyes but just like it never began reality surrounded them once again. "I'll see you around", Derek said before walking away.

Meredith,Cristina,Izzie,George, Holly and Lucy left the hospital smiling and laughing. The start of a very powerful friendship, bonded for life.

Holly opened her apartment door to find her sister April and their roommate Reed talking in the kitchen. "How's your first day?" April asked her sister. "Good. My anxiety didn't let me touch anything but, I made some friends and I might ask out this guy I like", Holly replied.

"What's his name?"

"George O'Malley"

"So, how was it?" Addison's voice said through the phone.

"It was fine. Derek being an asshat trying to reconcile but I'm not falling for it, Addie. Not this time", Lucy said lying on her hotel room bed.

"Are you sure?"

"Positive"

thanks for reading chapter one. i couldn't change it. sorry but enjoy! song is hard to sleep by gracie abrams