I started to post this fic back last winter, and realize that I never
finished. I'll repost the first two chapters, then put up the rest of
it. It's a "Jane" fic, the only one I've ever seen. Jane, and, of
course, Luka! It's set just after "Only Connect."
TITLE: Invisible (1)
AUTHOR: Naomi (2)
GENRE: LK/JF
RATING: PG-13 (mostly for some stuff implied in the first chapter)
TIMELINE: Mid-S11
DISCLAIMERS: They own it, I don't.
Are you leaving?" Abby asked.
"Yeah ... in a minute."
"We can wait," said Neela cheerfully. "We can all walk to the el
together."
"No, you don't have to wait for me. I need to ... umm ... ask Dr. Pratt
something before I go. I may be a while."
"Ok then. We'll see you tomorrow then?" Without waiting for an answer,
they opened the ambulance bay doors and went on their way.
She stood in the doorway a moment longer, then sighed and pulled her
mittens from her pocket. The wool was starting to fray, but they'd last
through the winter. She rubbed her thumb over the snowflake pattern
knitted into the back of the mitten and smiled a little. They'd been a
Christmas gift from her mother. Four years ago. The last gift she'd
received from her. She didn't quite believe the note in the card that
had said, "I made these myself. I hope you like them." Her mother had
never made anything for her in her life, and she doubted the woman knew
how to knit. Still, it was the thought that counted. A peace offering,
perhaps, but when she'd tried to call home the next day to thank her
for the gift, she'd gotten a recording. "The number you have dialed has
been disconnected." Not a surprise. How often had they moved in the 18
years she'd lived at home?
A warm, accented voice startled her. "Everything ok, Jane?"
"Yeah, everything's fine, Dr. Kovac. I'm just leaving." A shrug. "It's
cold out, you know. I hate going out there."
"You can walk with us to the el," Sam said brightly.
"No, I ... I''m fine, really."
"Ok. We'll see you tomorrow, then."
"I'll be here, like always." Jane watched them walk, hand in hand,
across the ambulance bay. She saw them stop for a moment and speak to
Abby and Neela. Were they laughing together? It was hard to tell?
When they'd started climbing the stairs to the el station, she pulled
on her mittens and stepped outside.
Jane had been there for months, she worked with these doctors and
nurses almost every day. And none of them had ever noticed that she
didn't take the el. None of them knew that she lived in a tiny campus
dorm room two blocks from the hospital. None of them knew a damn thing
about her.
She felt a tightness in her stomach, and her mittened hands clenched
into fists. What she wouldn't give ... would she ever have what they
had? The easy friendship between Abby and Neela. She knew there were
tensions between them, but they were still, so obviously, good friends.
They confided in each other, laughed with each other. And Sam and Luka
.... Dr. Kovac. Neela had just blown her off when she'd mentioned that
Dr. Kovac was hot. Looked at her like she'd just grown two heads. Why
should Neela notice that sort of thing? Neela was beautiful. She could
have any guy she wanted. There were plenty of good looking men around
the ER. Maybe Luka just wasn't quite her type. But for Jane it was all
just a dream anyway ... a fantasy. And if you're going to dream, you
might as well dream big. She could neverhave a guy likeLuka. Luka and
Sam were together, and Sam was everything she wasn't. Beautiful,
clever, confident, skilled. She was none of those things, and never
could be. She just just a piece of furniture. Nobody ever noticed her.
Maybe she'd be better off with two heads. At least then she'd be a
fascinating teaching case ...
Their offers had been genuine enough, polite enough. If she had been
walking to the el she could could have walked with Abby and Neela, or
with Dr. Kovac and Sam. But she would have just been a fifth wheel. She
wouldn't have been able to think of anything to say, and anything
they'd said to her would have just been polite small talk. They didn't
really want her there. Two's company, three's a crowd.
And one. One is the loneliest number. One singular sensation. One Jane
Figler, fourth year medical student who would be, in four months, a
doctor.
-
Jane checked her mailbox, empty of course, then headed up the stairs to
her room. She put water to boil in the electric kettle for ramen
noodles. Beef flavor today. She opened her pathology book. Might as
well study while dinner cooked, she had a test tomorrow. She'd look
over the chapter. Not that she was worried. A's came easy to her.
Getting good grades was easy, always had been. But nothing else about
this came easy.
The patients. The doctors. She never knew what to say to any of them.
When she tried, she always said the wrong thing, always ended up with
her foot firmly in her mouth. She remembered her first day in the ER.
She was determined to make it work, determined that this rotation would
be different. And she'd made a fool of herself in the first five
minutes.Why had she asked Neela about her previous residency? Of all
the stupid questions to ask ...God, it was a miracle that Neela didn't
hate her. She just settled for ignoring her most of the time, which
really was fine with Jane. It was nothing new, anyway.
So she'd just stopped trying, gone back to being invisible. Being
invisible was easy too, if only because she'd had a lot of practice.
She'd learned how to be invisible a long time ago. She was a pro. You
fade into the woodwork, you survive. You get noticed ... you pay the
price. You get pushed down the stairs at Bloomfield Rd. Elementary
school and get worms put into your lunch tray. You find methelyn blue
poured all over your lab notes in 10th grade chemistry class. You get
called Plain-Jane-the-Brain by the boys in junior high - boys who would
never ever ask you out on a date, but did unhook the back of your bra
in English class and whisper in your ear 'You don't need it anyway,
Jane. Too bad you've got it all in your head and not down lower where
it really counts.'
God .... she hated her name. She'd been named after her great aunt, not
that she'd ever met the woman. She longed for an interesting name, a
glamorous one. Or at least one that didn't lend itself quite so handily
to teasing and name calling. For a time in 4th grade she'd taken to
spelling her name 'Jayne.' She told the girls at the lunch table that
she'd been named for Jayne Mansfield, a beautiful actress from a long
time ago. Jayne Marie Figler. Marie she'd just made up ... it sounded
rather elegant to her ears, better, anyway, than Ann. But it hadn't
lasted. The girls in the class still teased her and called her names.
And the teacher, a woman possessed of little imagination and even less
compassion had started marking all her papers with F's. "I can't grade
these papers if the headings aren't correct, Jane. You must put your
true, legal name on all your papers." So it was back to being just Jane
again. Invisible Jane.
If being noticed at school was bad, being noticed by your stepfather
was worse. The first two hadn't beentoo bad. She'd been young, and
they'd settled for knocking her around a little, slapping her face when
she'd 'sassed' them. But the last two ... she might not have had enough
for the boys in junior high, but she had plenty for Roger, and Tim
hadn't complained either. Oh, they'd never really done anything to her,
not really. It was hard to do much when her bed was usually a pull-out,
or sometimes just a cot in the living room of whatever crappy apartment
they were living in that year. She was probably the only virgin in her
med school class. But the quick feel as they brushed against her, the
'accidental' walking into the bathroom when she was in the shower. And,
sometimes, the large hand grabbing hers and guiding it. "Come on,
Janie, help a guy out, would'ja? Your mom's dead to the world and I'm
in a sorry state here."
Her mother. She'd tried complaining to her. "I don't like Roger, Ma. He
.... takes advantage of me. He ... does things ..."
"Aw, you're imagining things. He's a great guy. Takes good care of us.
You just don't want me to be happy, do you?" Not that Mom had been
happy either. None of her husbands had stuck around for more than a
couple of years.
She'd discovered the local public library early. Heaven. Here she could
escape the hell at home, and lose herself in books. She never checked
anything out, she didn't have a library card -.she was too ashamed to
give the library her home address. But she would sit and read for
hours, often staying from the end of the school day until the library
closed for the evening. She read anything. Everything. Fiction,
non-fiction, the encyclopedia from cover to cover. When the library had
gotten an internet hook-up her junior year, it was an entrance into yet
another level of bliss.
The library and school. As long as she could avoid the attention of her
peers, school was heaven too. A's on every test, every paper, every
report card. She would show her report cards to her mother who would
glance at them and say, "That's great, Janie. I'm real proud of you. I
always knew you had brains. Lord knows where you got 'em from though.
I'm as dumb as a rock, and as for your daddy ... well ... the less said
about him the better."
Midway through her junior year, her counselor had called her down. "You
need to start thinking about college, Jane. You need to get your
applications in soon." And at the startled look on Jane's face, she'd
said, "You are planning to go to college, aren't you?"
"I ... I'd like to go ... but ... we don't have much money ... even a
state school ..."
"With your grades I'm sure you can get a scholarship. I can help you
with that."
"But that would just cover tuition, wouldn't it? There's still room and
board, and books."
"There are some good colleges right here in the area, Jane. I'm
positive you could get a full scholarship, and if you live at home ..."
"No!" Jane was shocked at the vehemence in her own voice. "I can't live
at home, Mrs. Conrad. I'll join the Navy, I'll wait tables or flip
burgers to help pay my way ... but I can't live at home."
And Mrs. Conrad had looked at her for a long moment, and Jane knew she
was seeing the bruises on her arms, the ones she always kept covered
with long sleeved shirts. Seeing the pain in her eyes that nothing
could ever hide. But she'd only smiled and said, "Ok, I'm sure we can
find a way. Between grants and loans and work-study, you can probably
go to any college you choose. Have you thought about what you'll want
to study? What would you like to be?"
Jane opened her mouth to answer. She hadn't thought about it. She'd
never let herself think about college. But what came out was, "Maybe a
doctor?"
"You'd make a good one, I'm sure. But medical school is a graduate
program. Let's focus on your undergrad stuff first."
Compared to life at home, college was paradise. No-one beat her. No-one
abused her. She slept on a real bed and no longer showered in her
underwear, for fear that Roger would walk in on her. But she was still
Plain-Jane. She'd been too alone for too long. She didn't know how to
talk to people, how to make friends. No boys ever asked her out and the
one night she'd joined one of the dorm parties, she'd gotten drunk and
sick after only two beers. Everyone had laughed at her, everyone except
Dean Applegate. He'd assured her that it didn't matter, that he liked a
girl who couldn't hold her liquor. And then, drunk himself, he'd
started pawing at her .. awakening memories of Tim and Roger .. and
she'd fled back to her room, to the safety of her books and her locked
door. The next morning her roommate had stopped by to grab a shower and
her books for class. Ellie didn't often sleep in their room. She had a
boyfriend with an apartment in town.
"What happened last night? Weren't you having fun?"
"No, I wasn't. I don't like parties."
"Hey, I saw what happened. I'm not blind. But boy, you must be. Dean is
so hot, and I've heard great stuff about him ... if you know what I
mean. You could do a lot worse."
"He was drunk, Ellie. He wasn't interested in me. He just wanted ..."
And Ellie had laughed. "Of course he did. Want some advice, Jane?
You're a nice girl, and I like you. But being nice doesn't get you very
far in this world. And neither does being smart. Guys don't care about
your grades. They want a pretty face and a naked body. You're no
beauty, sweetie, so if someone's interested in the bod ... don't play
hard to get or you'll be sleeping alone for a long time." Ellie had
laughed again and headed out to class. And Jane had whispered, "I'm 19,
Ellie. I've got my whole life ahead of me."
But she wasn't 19 anymore. She was 24, and still sleeping alone. Still
waiting for a guy who liked her for who she was, was interested in more
than her body. Who didn't assume that being plain meant being
desperate.
Taking a heavy course load and staying for summer sessions (not that
she'd had a home to go back to), she had graduated in 3 years and then
scraped together enough loans and grants to pay for medical school, and
her tiny dorm room and enough ramen noodles to keep body and soul
together for four years.
In medical school everyone was smart. Brains were no longer a
liability, her worth was no longer measured in the number of shots she
could down in an hour, or the number of guys she could screw in a
weekend. But she'd been invisible for too long. She knew no other way
to live. Her efforts to be bright and witty rang so false in her own
ears that she knew everyone else could see through them as well. No-one
was cruel to her here. Everyone was pointedly polite, or painfully
professional - or they looked right through her. When she graduated and
moved on to where-ever she matched, she would be forgotten. And none of
it had ever really mattered to her .. until today.
Today someone else had suffered. 'No one listens to me. No-one even
remembered that I was in the room.' Could she have spared that poor
grandmother unnecessary grief? Could she have kept Neela was making her
terrible mistake?
But she had done the right thing! She'd posted the names on the board,
but apparently her ink was as invisible as the rest of her. No-one had
noticed, no-one had asked her about it. Itwasn't her fault. But could
she have done more? If she'd spoken up, would they have listened this
time? Would they listen next time?
She had been in school for 6 1/2 years, studying to be a doctor, so she
could make a positive difference in someone's life. And she'd yet to do
that. Even once.
-
The smell of ozone startled her. She'd been daydreaming, her head on
her open pathology text. The kettle had boiled dry, filling with room
with the sharp smell of overheated metal. "Damn it!" Jane pulled the
plug and anxiously examined the pot. Had she ruined it? She couldn't
afford to buy herself another.
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