Before you get started, I'll just remind everyone that I don't own Grey's Anatomy (unfortunately) and am in no way connected with it. This is set four years after the current serries and in an AU (Meredith has moved to New York). Oh, and please review, because this is my first Grey's Anatomy fic, but I'd love some comments...
Look Through My Window
And the rain beats on my roof
And it does not ask for proof
It's not that lovers are unkind
She always said there'd come a time
When one would leave and one stay behind
DEREK
Derek Shepherd brushed the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. He hated nights like this: a never ending shift filled with carnage he couldn't even comprehend. all around him, people seemed to be bleeding, limbs missing, tears and terror filled the air like some suffocating stench.
Izzy Steavens stood in the middle of it all patiently helping a hysterical woman onto a gurney. Even from this distance, it didn't look good. The woman was clearly in the mid to late term of a pregnancy, and if the blood caked to the side of her head was anything to go by, she'd been in for a rough ride.
Tonight it was a train crash. It could just have easily have been a pile up on the freeway or a plane crash at Seattle Airport, but tonight it was a train crash, and as Derek stood there, he couldn't help but remember that night, so many years ago, on a similar night, when he had told the woman he loved he had to leave her.
Meredith. Why did it always come back to her? No matter where he went, or what happened to him, it was almost as though his life had ended that night with those track victims.
Sometimes he wondered if a person could die and not notice. It had taken him months to understand what had happened. After that, when he had gone back to Addison, it wasn't that he hated her, he didn't even resent her, he just didn't care at all. He didn't blame her for getting fed up with him, he would have hated himself too, if he'd still been able to hate.
Perhaps, if he'd gone back to Meredith then, while the pain of separation was still sharp, he would have a chance, but she'd already moved to New York and now he lived each day like a zombie and the pain was nothing but a constant and incurable numbness.
We both knew people sometimes change
And lovers sometimes rearrange
And nothing's quite as sure as change
And the rain beats on my roof
MEREDITH
Meredith Grey straightened the table cloth for the twelfth time that afternoon. It was an important night, and she was nervous. She had carefully lain out the best cutlery and placed two thin stemmed cream candles in the centre of the table – romantic.
Meredith hadn't actually risked cooking herself, but she had an arrangement with John, the chief at a classy Italian restaurant down the street. All she needed now was for Carlos to come home.
Sitting down to wait on the couch, she let her eyes wander over all they had together. The apartment was filled with life, graduation certificates, pieces of art Carlos had collected over the years, and photographs of the three of them at the beach, in the park, moving into the new apartment: Her, Carlos and Ella.
They had so much.
It just made tonight even more important, there was no way she would let their life here fall apart. Things had become difficult, especially since her promotion. She had had less time to spend with her family, and most awkwardly of all, she was her own husband's boss.
For most people this wouldn't have been an issue. When she had first taken the position, the two of them had even joked about it. She could hear him now,
"Hope you won't forget to give me preferential treatment!" But as the weeks had turned to months, it became awkward and difficult. At every decision, there seemed to be some danger lurking until she couldn't tell if she was treating Carlos better or worse than everyone else, slowly losing all confidence in her judgement.
Tonight would be when they put everything back together. Tonight was their anniversary, the anniversary of the day when Meredith, one month pregnant and newly arrived from Seattle started her new life.
They just had so much.
Look through my window to the street below
See the people hurryin' by
With someone to meet, some place to go
And I know I should let go
DEREK
Derek saw his hand holding the scalpel as it sliced through the thin skin on the top of Matt Henderson's newly shaved head. Safely clothed in white gloves his fingers moved dexterously inside the incision.
Matt Henderson had suffered massive trauma on impact and they needed to work quickly to stem the internal bleeding within the brain, decreasing the pressure on the already fractured skull.
Derek felt that old rush of adrenalin as the blood pumped over his fingers, the tension of holding another person's life in your hands, and in the case of brain surgery, their sanity. It was only afterwards, when he sat by himself in the hall, he returned to the shell that had become his life.
He barely noticed when Izzy sat down next to him. She had grown, if possible, more confident over the past four years. As a resident, she was capable and efficient, but she had also become a friend. Perhaps, once again, it was because of Meredith. He and Izzy had been the most affected when she moved away, and somehow, it had drawn them together.
"I miss her Izzy," He didn't need to say her name. He rarely mentioned it these days, but she knew who he was talking about. "Even now, after all this time, I find myself here, missing her."
"I haven't heard from her since the letter she sent when she first arrived," Izzy chose her words carefully, it was true she hadn't heard from Meredith in three four years, but she couldn't bring herself to tell Derek about Carlos and the life her friend had described.
"I was thinking," Derek leant his head forward into his hands, "maybe it's time I transferred." He grinned at her stunned expression, "I was thinking New York".
She always said "I'm not like you"
"When love is dead for me it's through"
"And I will find and love someone new"
MEREDITH
Meredith stated out of her reverie when the apartment door swung open. She swung towards it just in time to see Carlos' double take at her preparations.
"Happy anniversary honey," She smiled, trying to sound reassuring, and not show the terror she felt inside.
"Merry," His smile grew and soon he was laughing with a joy they hadn't shared in so long. He dropped his bag and drew her into his arms. "Merry," he repeated her pet name, "you didn't have to go to all this trouble. How did you ever get the time to prepare all this," And there it was again. Neither of them had meant it, but every little conversation seemed to come down to work.
Meredith stood there biting her lip, she couldn't very well tell him, that she had been able to shift around the surgeries, to redistribute tasks. Instead, she shrugged, drawing him to the table in a hollow attempt at distraction.
"I missed our dinners together. Ever since Ella was born, we never seem to quite manage it anymore, and now she's old enough to stay the night at Mrs. McKenzy's…" She trailed off as she caught him staring at her. Another bumpy issue – Ella's birth. It wasn't that Carlos didn't love the little girl, she meant the world to him, but there was always something, perhaps something crushing to his pride, about raising another man's child. "We never have quite enough time to ourselves," Meredith tried again, the conversation rapidly slipping out of her control.
Carlos' humour from moments before seemed to have evaporated with Meredith's smile and suddenly the apartment felt very big and cold.
"Not that Ella isn't very lucky to have a Daddy like you," This was obviously not the right thing to say. Even as she heard the words leaving her lips she tried to stifle them, covering her mouth with her hands, but she was too late.
Carlos quietly put down the glass he'd been about to drink from. They faced each other over the table, candle light playing like a comedy of errors across their faces. If he hadn't been so tanned, Meredith fancied the colour would have drained from him then and the wavering flame seemed to darken the ridges along his borough and between his eyes.
"You're lucky I took you in Meredith. You might think you're better than me now, but not too many men would take in a pregnant woman and raise someone else's brat," He seemed to cough up the last word, like even he didn't really mean it, but he had hit a nerve and there was no going back.
"Carlos, I never said I was better than you. I stayed with you because I loved you, and I thought you loved me too. Anyway," she added, the pain of his words hitting her with full force, "Ella's dad would have looked after her, any decent man would!"
Afterwards, she would never remember how it happened, but she felt the cool metal of the candle holder slam into her cheek and the side of her head. She bit her lip and the salty taste of blood filled her mouth.
They had so much, but there was no way she could save it now.
For days after, Meredith had tried to convince herself that the night of the anniversary had been a one off. It wasn't real until it happened again.
A couple of weeks later, she had come in late from work. Ella was in bed and Carlos was drinking on the couch, his eyes glazed in the direction of the television. That time, it had been a surgery. She had taken over control on the operating table, in front of all the nurses and an intern. Didn't she know how that made him feel, what people said about him?
That night, as she cradled her bruises, she didn't remember the fists as they hammered the body they had once caressed, but her mind filled with his eyes, those big beautiful brown eyes, so full of confusion and hurt, she could almost believe he was the one cowering there before her.
Look through my window, yeah, to the street below
See the people hurryin' by
With someone to meet, some place to go
And I know I should let go
I must admit she knew her mind
And it will not take her long to find
Another place where the sun will shine