The Scars From Tomorrow
Part I
Now don't you wish you could go back?
"You didn't swim. You didn't swim, and you know how to."
That's what it all boils down to in the end. That moment when she chose to die. Let the water pull her under because it came easier than breathing, because what was the point in living if she would only ever be ordinary, and hadn't Ellis made it perfectly clear that she could never be anything else?
Except now there is this moment: Derek standing at the foot of her hospital bed, indigo eyes slick with salt, white-knuckled hands clenching the railing – and there's a painful irony in that old ripple metaphor about actions having consequences because it's sink or swim all over again, let him see how dark the dark and twisty really is, or lose him and let it fester in the space his absence will carve from her chest.
"Please, Mere," Derek says, and his eyes are open wounds that plead for her to tell him everything that hurts and let him take it all away. Let him fix her. "I want to help you. But you need to talk to me."
And there it is, the reason she and Derek never really had a chance of surviving, because he doesn't understand that there are some things you just can't say out loud.
Sometimes, I feel like dying is one of them.
So Meredith stays silent, watches Derek's world collapse beneath the weight of her failures, watches him shake his head and walk away, leave her lying there bruised and broken with the shards of an apology and please, I need you to help me clogged in her throat.
The words never make it to her tongue but the tears do. They soak into her pillow and make her chest throb with more than just the muscle memory of a thousand plus compressions, and Meredith wonders why Derek pulled her out of the water, fought so hard to breathe life back into her lungs if he was only ever going to give up and leave her to drown again anyway.
/
(But then it could have gone like this.)
"Wait."
Meredith's voice is whisper-thin and riddled with holes but Derek hears her. He shuffles back into the room, and his face is so raw, so wounded with hope, like she could make or break him with her words and she thinks, maybe. Maybe he'll still love me.
She thinks of how he'd held her in the days since she drowned, curled around her body with his fingers pressed to the pulse at her wrist just to be sure it was still there. The tremor in his hands as he'd helped her shower, the precision with which he'd dried every last drop of water from her skin afterwards. He'd been joking that morning, about being her knight in shining whatever, but he'd saved her anyway, and now he's petrified about when he'll have to do it again. If Meredith's being honest with herself, so is she.
(And then there's this: the memory of being five years old and covered in blood on her kitchen floor; of being pink-haired and angry years later, hell-bent on doing whatever she could to not turn out like her mother. Meredith thinks that this is probably as good a place to start as any.)
"I wanted to die," she says. Derek's face pinches, but he doesn't move. Doesn't leave. It's enough to keep her talking. "Sometimes I want to die."
Meredith tries to say more – I love you, please don't leave me, I'm less than ordinary without you – but painful sobs choke the rest of her words into silence. But then Derek's moving, towards her, not away, and he pulls her into his arms and holds her tight to his chest and there are tears from both of them, but that's exactly it, it's both of them crying and if they can cry together they can laugh together, someday, once they've fixed everything between them that's broken, and Meredith thinks that together, they just might be able to manage it.
/
Derek stumbles away from Meredith's hospital room, halfway to collapsing from grief, and what Addison was going to say to Mark, something about sixty days and the promise of the two of them finally trying to forge a real relationship out of the ruins of a myriad of failed ventures, dies in her throat.
She recognises the pain on Derek's face. She's put it there before with adulterous sex on his favourite sheets. She's worn it herself on several occasions; back in New York, staring at the naked back of whatever floor nurse Mark had decided to fuck instead of her; when the ultrasound tech had confirmed that the termination had been successful; when she'd found a pair of black panties in the pocket of her husband's tuxedo on prom night. It makes her think of something her Psychology professor had said in medical school about the definition of insanity: making the same mistakes over and over again and expecting different results.
"Addie?" Mark calls when she's been silent too long, transfixed by the broken form of Meredith Grey in her hospital bed, counting similarities that terrify her purely on the basis that they exist.
"I'm sorry, Mark," she says, watching Meredith cry and feeling her own eyes start to sting inexplicably. "We'd never make it."
Addison walks away before Mark can craft a series of pretty little lies that she'll accept as truth if he smiles at her the right way, that smile that always makes her wonder if Ella would have been just like her dad in that Addison would have always given in to her eventually.
She ends up at Meredith's bedside with nothing to offer besides, "I told him not to hurt you again."
Meredith just blinks at her. "Thanks for trying."
/
"How's Meredith?"
It's been a week since the ferry crash but today is Derek's first day back at work, and Addison hadn't wanted to disturb the two of them by visiting and so this is the first chance she's had to ask, in a conference room over scans of Mrs. Dancy's baby's brain. Derek looks up from the MRI in his hands, startled for a second, before his expression turns wary, like he's not quite sure how he's supposed to answer that question.
"She's okay," he finally settles on, nodding slightly to himself. "Bailey says she can go home in a couple of days."
"That's not what I meant, Derek."
Addison says it as gently as she can manage but Derek still looks at her as though she's tried to gut him with the handle end of a scalpel. He starts to tell her that he doesn't know what she's talking about but his hands and his voice are shaking and Addison just looks at him because they both remember what he told her that day and avoiding it isn't going to do anyone any favours.
(Also, she knows from Callie's non-stop bitching that George took the day off to stay with Meredith in her hospital room, and Addison thinks that keeping-an-eye-on-her might be a poorly disguised euphemism for suicide watch, and she knows that Derek never would have agreed to come in if Meredith had been left alone purely on the number of times he's checked on her in the last hour.)
"I don't know," he says quietly, dropping the scan to run his hands over his face and then through his hair. "She told me that she…" He pauses and blinks fiercely, coughing to clear the tears from his throat. "She told me how she was feeling. She agreed to a psych consult and they made her an appointment for next week. Which is good. It's good."
It sounds kind of like a question and Addison has never seen Derek less sure of anything in his life and so she smiles at him, squeezes his hand and chirps, "That's great, Derek. She'll get the help she needs."
"Yeah," he breathes, and a smile twitches across his lips like he can't quite believe his luck that that might actually be true. And God, it used to hurt, that look he gets whenever he talks about Meredith, or sees her, or gets on a goddamn elevator regardless of whether or not she's on it too, but now Addison is thankful for it, how much Derek loves Meredith, how much they love each other. If they can make it work even after secret wives and adultery and depression, then maybe she and Mark are a possibility after all.
Later, after she and Derek have finished the Dancy surgery and the baby is sleeping soundly in the NICU, Addison goes to find Mark in his office. He's poring over a mountain of paperwork at his desk and frowning, but he grins at her when she knocks and drops into the seat across from him, and the last of her second thoughts evaporate.
"Well, well, well. To what do I owe this pleasure?"
"I've been thinking," Addison says, "about this sixty days thing."
"Only fifty-three more to go," Mark winks, and then his face falls. "You don't want to make it longer do you?"
"No," she says, smiling. "I was actually thinking about scrapping it altogether." Mark frowns, and her smile slips into a grin. "What are you doing tonight?"
/
Meredith signs herself out AMA three days before Bailey had planned to release her, and Cristina has to drive her home because Meredith can't move her arms without her sternum throbbing sharply in protest. Cristina wants to ask about Derek, to be a good person and call him McNames and make fun of his hair when they're drunk enough later to find that funny, but Meredith spends the car ride staring out of the window with eyes that don't blink and yet see nothing and Cristina can't find the stomach to bring it up.
Cristina knows, though. Why Derek left. It's why she's been feeling sick all week, why she can't look Meredith in the eye, why she stays at the house until Alex and Izzie get off shift, curled into Meredith's side on her bed, listening carefully for the soft sighs of her breathing just in case she decides to stop again. Izzie and Alex bring George, and the five of them pile into Meredith's bed like the scared children they still are sometimes, and there's no room but no one says anything and Meredith doesn't ask them what they're doing because she knows they'd tell her, and then she'd have to watch their faces twist with all the ugly things she's done that everyone's so afraid she'll do again.
"Sorry about Shepherd," Alex says after an hour of silence, and Cristina elbows him in the shin because her feet are trapped under George's thighs and trying to kick him would take too much effort. The four of them wait for some kind of response, but there's nothing, and Cristina thinks Meredith might have fallen asleep until she says, "Nothing good ever stays with me. Absolutely nothing."
Cristina doesn't stay for long after that. She leaves Meredith with Izzie and George and Alex and drives back to the apartment she shares with Burke, blinking every other second to clear her blurred vision. She's coping again, like she did when Meredith died, because even though they brought her back Cristina feels like they only did half a job. Like a part of her person is still dead. She can't just sit around and watch that part take over while Meredith lets it happen like she let herself drown.
Burke is browsing a wedding catalogue on the couch when she gets in, and he stands to greet her, corners her in the kitchen while she's grabbing a beer from the fridge.
"What do you think of these centrepieces?" he asks, thrusting the catalogue in front of her as she downs half the bottle in one swallow. "I'm leaning towards peonies, but roses are a classic for a reason."
"I don't care."
Cristina has finished her first bottle and moved on to a second before Burke recovers enough to reply. "This is our wedding, Cristina. It should matter to you."
"Well right now it doesn't." Not when she'd had to spend twenty minutes emptying Meredith's bathroom cabinets of razor blades and scissors and medication before she'd left. "Right now other things are more important."
Burke just stares at her, and Cristina would understand if he was hurt, but he just looks disappointed, so she doesn't apologise, doesn't follow him when he strides into their bedroom and shuts the door behind him. She pulls another two beers from the fridge and collapses on the couch, shoving a pile of wedding magazines to the floor with her feet. She glances at the closed bedroom door, thinks about how easily Derek gave up on Meredith and prays it isn't some kind of omen.
Then she gets drunk.
/
"You had a psych consult."
Meredith freezes, a spoonful of lime jello halfway to her mouth. Izzie looks like she hadn't meant to speak at all, but she doesn't retract her statement, and Alex and George suddenly can't seem to look at anything besides the ground, and Meredith feels Cristina tense beside her on the hospital bed and she thinks that they've probably been wondering about it for a while. Meredith lowers her spoon and jello cup onto the bed tray and pushes it away from her, fighting for some kind of composure, because even though she'd known this would come up eventually it's still hard as fuck to talk about.
"We weren't snooping," Izzie blurts out, pacing across the tile at the foot of Meredith's hospital bed. "It's just, we were worried, and your chart was right there, and… why did you need a psych consult?"
Meredith considers lying: something about the Chief being overbearing and insisting on it before clearing her for surgery. She considers it, but Izzie's wide eyes, Alex's clenched jaw, George's never-idle hands and Cristina's pinched expression tell her that they already know the truth. They deserve it at any rate, and Meredith is trying to be better, and she thinks they'll probably want to help like Derek does, so she doesn't lie. Takes a deep breath and says, "I drowned myself on purpose," instead.
Izzie makes a sound like Meredith has physically struck her and the only reason Meredith doesn't dissolve into tears herself is the warmth of Cristina's hand at her back, stationary between her shoulder blades yet soothing all the same. "I'm so sorry," she says, and means it viscerally, but it does nothing to alleviate the heartbroken look on her friends' faces or the guilt curling between her ribs.
"I don't understand," Izzie declares, "why would you do that?"
"It was a bad day – "
"Everyone has bad days, Mere," Alex interrupts. "Most people don't try to kill themselves because of it."
"I know that," Meredith says, and her voice is just barely there, full of shame and other dark things. "But it wasn't just a bad day. It's been a bad few years. And my mother, she said things. She's been saying things my whole life. And Thatcher…" Meredith breaks off, lets out a shaky breath. "Sometimes, I just can't see the point."
"In living?" George asks.
Meredith nods, and the indignity of admitting it makes her skin burn. Cristina wraps an arm around her waist, even though Cristina Yang Does Not Hug, and it helps to know that her person doesn't think any less of her. Meredith leans into the embrace in lieu of verbal thanks. She knows Cristina will understand.
"What – " George clears his throat of tears, tries again. "What happens now?"
Meredith tries a smile. "I get help."
"Like… a psychiatrist?"
"Yeah. I have an appointment for next week, and I guess we just… see where it goes from there."
"And what about in the meantime? You know, if you decide to get scalpel-happy with your wrists or wrap your car around a pole?"
"Can it, Evil Spawn," Cristina snaps.
Alex's face softens. "Sorry. I just – it sucked enough the first time round, and what with the bomb and everything, you can't have that many lives left. And if you died…"
Meredith bites her lip to keep the tears at bay. "That's not going to happen."
"We're not going to let it."
George nods. "Cristina's right. We're all here for you, Mere. Whatever you need."
Meredith offers him a watery smile, mindful of her precarious handle on composure, but when Izzie clambers onto the bed and hugs her, shoulders shivering with sobs, it all goes to shit and she's soaking Izzie's scrub shirt with tears she can no longer hold in. Meredith feels Cristina tuck her head into her shoulder from behind as Alex kisses her forehead; George's voice a gentle hush of sound at her ear as he tangles their fingers together. All five of them are crying, piled on the bed in an awkward crush of limbs, but they're clutching at each other with a grip that Meredith thinks might just be strong enough to hold everything together.
/
Hey Mere, where are you? Alex and I just got back and you're not here and there's no note so… Did you have some errands to run or something? Call me and let me know when you'll be back, we'll order pizza, okay? See you soon.
Sorry to pester you, but it's been hours and you're still not back. Is everything okay? Call me.
Meredith, please call. We're worried about you.
Mere? Izzie said you're missing. I don't know how much of that is true and how much of it is her being crazy and overreacting, but could you give one of us a call? We just want to know that you're safe. Okay, thanks. Bye.
If you're not home within the hour, I'm calling the police. I mean it.
Hey, it's me again. Look, Izzie's really freaking out, and so am I. Where are you? Did something happen? Do you need me to come get you? Just… call someone, okay?
Grey, answer your goddamn phone. George won't shut up about you and it's really starting to piss me off. Quit being such a child.
You'd better not be dead again. Call me when you get this.
Don't do it. Shepherd's not worth your life. Come home. We love you.
Grey. Go home. Right now. Your friends haven't stopped whining to me about how worried they are, and they're not the only ones. Don't make me come find you. I'll do it if I have to, but you know you won't like it. I hope you're safe.
Meredith… where are you? Everyone's worried. Please don't do anything stupid. Go home, okay? Just… wherever you are and whatever you're doing, stop it and go home. I understand if you don't want to talk to me, but please… let someone know you're safe. I love you.
Meredith turns her phone off then, even though there are at least six more messages in her voicemail. It hurts to hear Derek's voice. The pain is dulled somewhat by her blood alcohol content but the tequila ran out thirty minutes ago and the evening air is as stinging as it is sobering, so it won't be long before it sharpens into something solid and vengeful, sticking between her ribs.
Ten minutes ago she probably would have thrown her phone overboard, but she's not quite drunk enough for that kind of melodrama anymore, and it seems out of place with the gentle waves rolling in across the bay. It's been long enough since the accident that the site has been cleared of wreckage. The darkness renders the water a darker blue than Meredith remembers – it is absent of orange flames and sheets of silver metal, and the sky is clear and smokeless once more. The ferryboats are even in service again. Meredith watches them chug through the water from the dock, rolling an empty bottle of Cuervo between her palms. There isn't a trace of the disaster to be found.
Meredith sets the bottle beside her on the dock. She takes off her shoes and socks. The water is cold – so very, very cold – but she's already numb all over and she doesn't even blink as it soaks into the hem of her jeans, laps up and over her ankles, swells to her knees as she lowers herself into the bay, hands braced behind her on the dock. Meredith lets her hands slip over the edge when the water ghosts over her ribs. She sinks in up to her neck, starts treading water before she is pulled under completely, but she can feel it – the weight of the water tugging at her ankles, the frigid sting of it biting into her muscles, locking them tight.
Meredith isn't sure how long she stays like that, suspended in the water, fighting to stay afloat, but it's long enough that when she finally pulls herself out, walks home soaking wet and shivering so hard she can't catch her breath, Izzie outright screams when Meredith stumbles into the living room, dripping all over the hardwood.
"Jesus," Alex says, before he disappears upstairs when Cristina shouts at him to go and grab some fucking towels already. She turns to Meredith, grips either side of her face with both hands as George and Izzie watch on from the couch, pale-skinned and wide-eyed. "What the hell did you do?"
Meredith blinks at her. "Nothing."
"Nothing? You're drenched! It's not even raining! Christ, you're probably hypothermic. What the hell did you do, Meredith?"
"I swam."
Cristina's face blanches. Her hands drop to her sides. "You what?"
"I swam," Meredith says, eyes flashing, "I fought. You're all mopey-faced and pissed at me because I didn't swim, so I went and did it. Okay? Are you satisfied now? Am I forgiven?"
Cristina just stares at her, open-mouthed, and when Alex comes back and wraps a towel around her shoulders as though handling sugar glass, Meredith can't hold back the tears.
She's still crying nearly an hour later, the noise dulled by the roar of the hot shower Cristina forced her into while Izzie phoned the police station to call off the search Meredith never thought they'd never actually instigate. Her ribs hurt, from the still-recent compressions or the sobbing she doesn't know, and the muscles in her arms and legs are raw and fraying, and collapsing to the floor of the bathtub takes far less effort than fighting to stay upright.
Meredith hears Cristina slide the shower door back, feels her climb into the tub and wrap her arms around her from behind. Meredith leans back into the embrace and buries her head in Cristina's shoulder, sobbing so hard her stomach churns with nausea.
"I didn't want to swim," she cries, and feels Cristina's arms tighten around her in response. "I wanted to drown again."
"I know."
"I just want it to stop. When is it going to stop?"
Cristina has no answer for her besides tears of her own, and Meredith wonders how long she can keep delaying the inevitable.
/
It turns out that Alex is a God with a grill and no one is bothered by the lack of alcohol and the conversation steers well clear of any of Meredith's psychiatric problems and she'd spent the day worrying for nothing.
"Told you so," Derek says softly, smiling and kissing her temple, "everything's fine."
"Yeah," Meredith sighs. She leans further back into his chest and hums contentedly when his arms wrap around her, careful to avoid the bruises on her ribs. Cristina and Burke are bickering on the other side of the table, something about the pros and cons of writing their own vows as Callie and George observe them amusedly. They intermittently mutter what Meredith assumes to be hilarious commentary to each other given by how hard they are trying not to openly laugh at Cristina's wild gesticulations and Burke's exasperated head shaking, and Meredith finds herself smiling easily without a second thought.
She had thought things would be weird – and they were, a little bit, because homecoming parties for suicide survivors are rarely smooth-sailing occasions – but for the most part things were going okay. They'd talked surgery over prawn cocktail, mocked George's Star Wars impressions through mouthfuls of grilled steak and even engaged Cristina in conversation about bridesmaids' dresses and bouquets (with only moderately strong resistance) over slices of Izzie's homemade peach cobbler. Hell, Izzie and Callie were even getting along, discussing the finer points of off-white versus ivory and whether corset-only embroidery was too last season.
And then there was Derek. Derek, who was being perfect, who had shown up (although that was a given really, since he lived with her) and had said things (perfect things about how pretty she looked and that he loved her and that he was so, so proud) and not once showed any sign of wanting to be anywhere but wherever Meredith was. She had worried about that. That he'd avoid her once he knew, once she'd told him all the dark things she thought and felt, but it had been over a week since then and he was still here, all the time, saying things, and she did love it, she loved him, and nothing was fixed, but they weren't exactly broken, either. Meredith thinks this is acceptable for now.
"I'm not sure who I feel worse for, the O'Malleys or Karev," Derek chuckles lowly, his breath tickling her ear. He nods towards the grill, where a stern-faced Doctor Bailey is keeping a close eye on Alex's banana grilling. She appears to be in full lecture mode, hand gestures and all, and Alex alternates between nodding intently at her directions and glaring at Izzie (who is laughing at his predicament even as she tries to stop her Welcome Home, Meredith! banner from parting ways with the patio doors) when Bailey isn't looking.
Meredith smiles, letting her head drop to Derek's shoulder as his arms tighten around her. "Alex has my sympathy for now, but the second Cristina asks them to take sides, George and Callie win by a pretty considerable margin."
Derek hums in agreement. He tilts her chin upwards and smiles as he kisses her. Pulling back, he asks, "This is okay, right? Having people here? You're okay?"
"Yeah," Meredith breathes, curling her fingers into the soft warmth of Derek's sweater. There are parts of her that aren't okay, that are panicking about her appointment with Dr. Wyatt and what if someone asks about her drowning and is taking time off work to heal an ordinary thing to do. There are parts that want to cry for no reason and think that trying to be better is pointless because the darkness will never fully go away, how could it possibly – but for the most part, she's okay. Meredith thinks that saying it might feel good, might make Derek smile, so she says it, and it does feel good, and Derek looks like she gift-wrapped the world and gave it to him, and that makes her feel even better.
"The only heartfelt speech I ever plan to pen myself is the one I'll give when I win my Harper Avery awards, and that's the end of it," Cristina proclaims, punctuating the statement with a sip of coke. Burke holds up his hands in surrender as Bailey and Alex return to the party with grilled goods in tow, Izzie trailing behind them.
"Nice humility, Yang," Alex gripes, setting a serving plate lined with gooey, golden brown bananas glazed with melted chocolate in the centre of the table and taking his seat next to Cristina. "So refreshing."
"It's called honesty, and you'd do well to take a leaf, Syph-boy."
Izzie laughs. "Like a dirty, diseased sidekick."
"With the power to repulse the masses."
"Whatever. I'm eating both your bananas."
"Children – behave," Bailey glares from the head of the table. "I put up with enough of your foolishness at the hospital, I do not need to deal with it off the clock."
"Yes ma'am."
And that's how they spend the rest of the evening – engaged in semi-abusive banter over various food items they find in Meredith's fridge that might make for excellent grilling. It's nearing midnight when Alex goes in to look for doughnuts and comes back out with two litre bottles of soda and a cherry tomato, strides over to Cristina and declares, "Root beer pong."
Cristina nods. "Prepare to be destroyed."
Later, when Cristina's victory dancing has everyone in stitches (besides Alex, who sulks by the grill, poking angrily at some avocado slices), Meredith turns to Derek and kisses him, high on life and love and the candy apples George had found in the freezer.
"I love you," she tells him, and feels a thrill at the way Derek's whole face changes at her words. "I know I don't always… but I can tell you that. That's always true."
"Meredith," he breathes, "I love you, too."
And he kisses her again, while her friends shriek with laughter in the background, and Meredith feels a little less dark and a little more happy and she can't help but think, finally.