(A/N: I know, I know, the next chapter of my fic lies... 1/5th written, but I was listening to this song 'Alexandra' by Dave Yaden and well- this oneshot got created in my brain, because it's a perfect Owen/Cristina song. I hope you guys enjoy my attempt at something a little different to the usual mer/der. ;)
Meredith felt like sometime yesterday, she had said her series of goodbyes. Her goodbyes to parents who didn't fulfil their titles, by accepting Thatcher's rehearsed and generic apology, and by taping up her mother's diaries, by standing up for that little girl, hopefully providing her with a life that she deserved. If her mother loathed mediocrity, why did Ellis settle to be a less than mediocre mother?
One thing she couldn't do was lie. She couldn't tell Thatcher she would forgive him, because there was so much more that he had to apologise for than just the fact he was a recovering alcoholic- like why he left her alone with her mother, how he slapped her in his grief for losing Susan, for never being there for her. She was like the abused little kid, and he stood back and let it happen and for that- Meredith wasn't quite sure a 'sorry' was enough.
Maybe, by taping up that box full of her mother's diaries and secrets of her residency and unarticulated reasons why she couldn't be a mother to Meredith, Meredith had laid those ghosts of her past to rest. It didn't have to be about what happened to her, but about preventing it from happening to someone else. What was in that box wasn't her story- and it didn't change her story either, and while Meredith could only imagine Ellis's reasoning, she'd never really understand it. She had a future of her own, a chance to create her own past with Derek, and she fully intended on doing so. She was going to be married, and sooner than she would ever have thought. In a horrible way, it was better that everything was dependent on Izzie, because then it was less about herself, and it gave her less time to freak out about it- the spotlight was off her, and so was the onus. If Izzie decided everything, all Meredith would have to do was put a ring on Derek's finger and sign the piece of paper, and that was all that mattered to her.
What mattered to her was that she was next to Derek, his body next to hers, hopefully forever. She wouldn't have to kick anyone out of her bed with lame excuses anymore. She could feel his breath hit her neck in even strokes as he slept, his arm limply hanging around her. She had someone, not someone who was there because they had to be, but he was there because he wanted to be. Meredith tried to make the thoughts stop running in her head and enjoy the last hour in bed with Derek before the alarm went off. She snuggled deeper into the sheets, waiting out the next sixty minutes before she suggested the morning quickie.
The phone rang.
"Mer? It's me."
It was Cristina.
In those three words, Meredith's sleep was broken. There was a tone in her voice that sounded so tortured, Meredith sat up in bed, Derek's hand falling off her body as she held the phone to her ear. Cristina was close to the edge of something, her voice sounding tortured and flat at the same time. Meredith felt Derek move beside her, groaning slightly as he woke up, his eyes squinting as he rubbed them sleepily, looking over to her.
"Cristina?" Meredith asked, the end of the question left hanging in the space of nowhere.
"Get your sweats on. We're jogging." Cristina replied to the question mark.
We don't jog.
No good ever came of jogging. Fallopian tubes were bursting, boyfriends had surprise wives, and yet, Cristina was at that disastrous place yet again. And so, without thinking, Meredith wrenched off the covers, pulling off her pants as she rifled through her dresser drawers trying to find those elusive sweatpants.
"What happened?" Derek asked, his voice rough and gravelly with sleep.
"Don't know. Cristina… she's… I don't know." Meredith stammered.
Meredith gathered her mis-matched pile of jogging gear and stumbled to the bathroom, when Derek reached out and caught her arm. "I love you." He whispered as he kissed her on the lips.
By the time Meredith got to the parking lot of the park, Cristina was there, leaning on her motorbike as she waited for her friend.
"Hey there, now." Cristina greeted, before she descended into a fit of uncontrollable rueful laughter.
"Cristina?" Meredith said helplessly as her friend held onto her arm as she doubled over in giggles. "What's going on?"
She may have been laughing, but Meredith could see tears in Cristina's eyes. The big ones, that seemed to save themselves up for a particularly sad day, the ones that burned as the rolled ever so slowly down your cheeks. The smile fell off her face like dripping paint, and turned upside down into a frown as she looked into her friend's green eyes with a deep sadness. Cristina's tears remained unshed, and her fingers uncurled from Meredith's forearm, and she turned her back to her, jogging away without another word.
"Cristina!" Meredith called after her, jogging quickly to catch up. "Is it about Owen?" She fell into the same stride as Cristina. "Did he hit you again?"
Meredith looked at any flinch in Cristina's face, any hint of why Cristina looked so… broken. But Cristina's eyes stayed fixed ahead of her at some non-existent object, and her face was hard. But then the façade began to fade. She swallowed hard, and she licked her lips as she ran the words through her head.
Cristina stopped suddenly, seemingly to catch her breath. "What did you do, when you loved Derek, but you knew you couldn't?"
Meredith froze, even though she had stopped running. She didn't know how she survived that time when Derek was trying with Addison, and when she had to see the man she loved leave the hospital with his wife every single day. Meredith knew what she did. She hurt. She hurt so much, such a deep pain in her heart that sometimes she thought it would have been easier if it stopped beating. But Meredith couldn't lie to Cristina and tell her it was ok, because Cristina had been there when Meredith was barely holding it together, she had kicked her out of the bed, for God's sake. "I loved him anyway." Meredith said plainly.
"What did you do when Derek loved you, but he couldn't say it?" Cristina pushed.
How did Cristina manage to put herself in a similar position of a push-and-pull hopeless love story that Meredith found herself in a year ago? Cristina was the most rational person she knew. "He said it in every other way but those three words I needed to hear."
'I miss you.' Those three words whispered during clandestine spontaneous elevator rides that skated so close to the line of inappropriate, if Meredith thought about it, it made her feel guilty. There was the way he held her as she hyperventilated in the closet as she came to the realization she didn't want her mother to die alone.
"You know before…before, I thought you were stupid for loving Shepherd. This man hurt you and you took him back, but now I know what that's like- knowing you shouldn't love someone but not being able to help it."
There was no logic to loving Major Owen Hunt. This man was so destroyed by his experiences in Iraq, he choked her, and yet he loved her. She could still feel his hands around her neck squeezing as if she were the enemy, as if he wanted her dead. She was able to recall the feeling of gasping for air as her throat burned, hearing Owen sob. That hurt more than the strangling.
"I know…" Meredith said sadly, putting her hand on Cristina's shoulder as they both sank to the damp grass.
Cristina lay on the grass, feeling the wetness seep through her sweater cooling her back. She looked up to the grey Seattle sky, wondering when it would brighten up. It wasn't supposed to be like this- reduced to only three worded generic meaningless sentences when there was so much more they had to say to each other. She felt suffocated in this stalemate situation where she knew how she felt about him, but couldn't show it. He wasn't in any condition to be who they both wanted him to be, but knowing what it felt like being marginalized all day, she wanted whatever she could take of him, no matter how much it hurt, no matter how much it damaged them. She wanted more than 'Nice work, Yang' – even if she knew what the meaning behind it was. She wanted those three words, and all the replacement phrases he had created just weren't enough.
Love isn't enough.
Meredith knew that all too well- how love was everything but nothing all at the same time. She knew that although it was love that brought you back together, it couldn't always be the glue that stuck you to each other, it just made it harder to break apart when you needed to. Just like how she needed to fix herself in therapy with Dr. Wyatt so she could love Derek the way they both deserved, Owen needed to do it too. But that waiting game was tough. Knowing you weren't healthy enough to be the person you needed to be was hard, working with them and silently speaking those words you wished you could say, but instead filling the gaps with surgeries, attaching the emotions you felt to the patients you worked together on, hoping that the other person understood. It wasn't right. But she wouldn't lie.
"He's going to therapy, Meredith. He's trying to sort out what's going on in his head, and I swear, this hurts so much more than the hands around my neck, because at least then he's there…"
This is what her grief had reduced her to- pouring out her feelings to her best friend, and she had never been so candid before. Cristina Yang didn't cry- and even if she did, there were no words attached to the tears- she knew her friend knew her well enough to understand what they meant. But talking was supposed to be cathartic- and hey, it worked for Meredith, right? She made a go with it with Shepherd, and that was because of her shrink. If she wanted Owen there in forty years time, maybe it was better this way.
Meredith remained silent, because right now, words seemed hollow- she knew, she could have written a book about it- or volumes and volumes of diaries just like her mother- only for them to be discovered after she died. At least he's there- that's what the sex and mockery was about. He's there, beside you, there for you, even though you don't deserve him to be. Even if you didn't know whether you could cope with the lifetime, you could indulge in the present. It would have been so easy for Cristina to do that with Owen, and to try as hard as she could to pretend that underlying pain didn't exist.
Cristina's eyes followed the grey cloud as it floated along her field of vision, slow, rumbling, ready to burst at any moment. She felt a fat drop of rain plop onto her hand that rested on the grass, at the same time as she felt a hot tear escape her eye. A tear that meant so much- love, hate, acceptance, denial. Full of oxymorons. The slutty mistress and pregnant whore that jogged at this very park had managed to evolve so much, and yet, Cristina felt like she was in a different kind of stuck. This solution wasn't as easy as an abortion- she couldn't hope this feeling of anger and hurt would go away so easily.
This was why she wanted to be a surgeon. You have a tumor? You cut it out. By the end of the surgery, you had cured them. But these emotional malignancies seemed never-ending, there was no cutting this out, there was no certainty with Owen. What if he didn't manage to work it out? She couldn't sleep beside him, yet all she wanted to do was touch him, to look into his blue eyes and know that his words matched them.
When she pushed him as he turned her back to her yesterday, Cristina couldn't ignore that spark that jolted through her body. All day, she wanted him to acknowledge her as something more than a second year intern,because he was so much more than just an attending to her. Even though she knew she couldn't be with him, she wanted to know that he was as tortured as she was by their separation- a separation that they had to go through involuntarily. And maybe, if she wasn't so consumed with rage and hurt of being ignored all day, she would have seen it too- that look of surprise as she touched him, even if it was angry and not tender, it was still contact, and it still affected him. That image, after the event was burned in her head- his sad eyes staring at her as she vented to him, wanting to be more to her than he was able to be, knowing exactly what would fix everything but …he couldn't.
"Feelings don't go away, no matter how much you want them to." Meredith's voice pierced Cristina's thoughts. "I know that's not what you want to hear. But I won't lie to you."
And at certain points, Meredith really wanted them to. There were about three real times she could have chosen Finn over Derek, and all three times, she chose Derek, because really, there wasn't any other option. It was always going to be Derek, even when she couldn't be with anyone else. He was the only person she would ever consider marrying, having the house and the dog and the children with. She wouldn't stand at the altar of a church and wear a white dress for anyone else. It didn't matter who hurt who in the past, what mattered to her was that he understood when her friend was in trouble without her having to say it, and he still said those three words she wanted to hear.
I love you.
Cristina could still feel the paper in between her fingers, as if Owen was handing those generic phrases to her in real time, the way he shakily pulled them out of his pocket. He couldn't lie. He owed her the truth. People lied everyday- they said 'I love you' when they didn't mean it, and yet Cristina was stuck in this moment where Owen meant it but couldn't say it- but those three word phrases said everything other than what she needed to hear.
Those three words…that are killing me.
It was killing him?! It was killing her too. It hurt so much, that maybe it was crueller not to say it. She understood the logic behind what he was trying to do, that he was broken inside, but everyone was broken by things that happened in their lives, it defined who they were. Cristina loved Owen for the person he changed into once he came back from Iraq, not the person he was before, and he loved the person she had become after Burke.
What happened if she didn't want to be let off the hook? What happened if she wanted to change her mind, and she wanted to take the risk of him wrapping his fingers around her neck again just to feel the touch of his bare body on hers? She didn't have the answers to these rhetorical questions that rolled through her head all day, and that unnerved her. Cristina Yang always had the answers.
"He loves me." Cristina whispered.
Meredith turned her head towards her friend quickly, not believing the words that came out of her mouth.
Cristina stood up from her place on the ground, looking towards that same heavy cloud she had been watching. "He loves me!" She screamed at the top of her lungs.
Cristina already had her fair share of cruel. Cruel was watching your father die in front of you, bleeding to death when you were only nine years old. Cruel was being dressed up in a pink frilly dress by your mother for a Bat Mitzvah you didn't even want. Cruel was being left at the altar by your fiancé after you shaved your eyebrows off for him. This was more than cruel. Telling her he couldn't say it, but he meant it hurt so much more than that.
I wanna spend the rest of my life with you.
That was the proposal Meredith wanted. A mutual decision to be together, and Cristina deserved that chance too. "Owen- he needs time, you know, to get 'whole and healed' and whatever else. You might not think he needs to, but if I didn't, I would never have been getting married right now. Do you want a long term solution or a short term quick fix?" Meredith asked her friend candidly.
Cristina looked down, her shoulders sagging in resolution. She already knew what the answer to Meredith's question was last night- but that didn't make it any easier to deal with. It was so tempting for her hand to graze his cheek last night, look into his eyes and make it all better for that second, for that minute, for that hour. But then, she'd be lying next to him, and the nightmares would begin again- for the both of them.
Make it right.
He was trying. And she couldn't grudge him that. And that's why she swallowed her tears, tasting the salt run down the back of her throat as she folded the paper that told her so much as she handed it back to him- because she knew he'd need it for tomorrow as they met each other in the hallway, and she'd take all these meaningless three word phrases, because now she knew what they were meant, and she'd take that loaded meaning because that's all she had. He was trying to let her off the hook, and now she was trying to do the same for him. And that's why- if he couldn't say those three words, he probably wouldn't be able to hear them either. So she used the same phrase he came up with, so he'd know what it meant.
Take care now.
Meredith hugged her friend, just like the time she cut her out of the wedding dress and shared in that grief with her, watching her cry for her loss. Meredith let the tears escape from her lower lids as she cried for her person's helplessness a second time. Meredith had faith that Cristina's love story with Owen didn't end here, it couldn't.
As they jogged back to the parking lot in silence, Cristina felt better. Meredith didn't judge, she just ran along with her. She knew exactly what it was like to be in a tortured relationship, and now she was there for Cristina when she needed to be. It would have been easier if Cristina could walk away from this, and yet she couldn't.
She would wait.
Because she wanted to be there when he could say those three words for real, when he'd say goodbye to her with an 'I love you', not just some other substitute phrase.
I won't lie.
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I don't know if it's not that way
I don't know if it's not too late
To change my way, yeah
It just goes to show,
I never say the things I ought to
Now look what I've done, I wish I could run
I won't lie, I must be out of my mind
'Cause I won't say that,
No I won't go let you down inside
So I guess this is goodbye, well I try
But I won't lie…
I don't know if I'm not to blame
But I know that you know that it's not that way
Never been that way, yeah
And it just goes to show,
You should have left me long ago, now
What will become of you if I run?
I won't lie, I must be out of my mind
'Cause I won't say that,
No I won't go let you down inside
So I guess this is goodbye, well I try
You won't cry, you must be out of your mind
'Cause I won't say that,
No I won't go let you down inside
So I guess this is goodbye, well I try
But I won't lie…
Dave Yaden-Alexandra.