And after the storm,
I run and run as the rains come
And I look up, I look up,
On my knees and out of luck,
I look up.

It takes them both awhile to fall asleep. It seems like Zola can't get comfortable; she settles into Derek's arms so much more easily than she does Meredith's and now, even though it's late, she won't settle. It's all happened so quickly; it seems like they just started this process, and now this baby's here and they aren't ready for her.

It troubles her that she can't think of a single lullaby. Maybe that would help Zola. As far as she knows, nobody has been singing to her lately, but maybe they used to, and now she's in a new place and she can't sleep because there's no song. She won't stay in her porta-crib. Meredith tries a few times, holding her until she falls asleep before she puts her in there, but without fail, it doesn't take her long to wake up again.

She thinks it's probably because of the lullaby thing, until she feels the mattress of the porta-crib. It's plastic and thin, and it's no wonder Zola can't sleep. When she realizes that Derek isn't coming home, she changes into her pajamas, and holds Zola in bed with her. She doesn't know any lullabies, but she shushes her and pats her back, and that seems to work well enough. Zola finally falls asleep with her head on Meredith's shoulder, holding her hair.

She hopes it won't take her long to figure out what Zola needs. The nurse must have expected her to know already, because she gave her diapers, pacifiers, and a crib, but no advice on what to do with the actual baby. She tells herself that not knowing what to do does not mean she's a bad mother, it just means that she honestly does not know right now. If Zola is clean and sleeping peacefully, that must be a good start. But she'd be lying if she said that what Derek said earlier didn't get in her head.

Resting against the headboard, all she can think about is what's literally hanging over her. There's a post-it with their signatures on it, where he wrote in his own scrawled longhand, "Love each other even when we hate each other. No running." She's not the kind of person who makes promises lightly. She didn't think he was either. She doesn't want to spend much time dwelling on it, but she can't decide if whether or not she's surprised that he's the one who broke the vow first, not her. She's not worried about the loving each other part, not really. But up until now, she thought that a big part of living up to the loving each other part was showing up.

In the dark, alone, she starts making plans. Part of being a good mother is keeping your promises; she knows that much. And she promised Zola that she would get it together, so she makes a mental list: a real crib, clothes, toys, more diapers, and books about adoption and raising kids with spina bifida. She will start tomorrow. Hopefully Derek will come home by then.

Cristina never comes upstairs. Derek doesn't come home. And Lexie's quite surprised when a crying baby wakes her at one o'clock in the morning, but she goes downstairs and makes a bottle for Zola anyway. Lexie looks like she has a lot of questions when she brings the bottle upstairs, but fortunately, Zola falls back to sleep and, in the interest of not waking her, Meredith doesn't have to answer any of them.

It starts raining at around two o'clock in the morning. He's not sure why he's surprised; it is Seattle, after all. But it does mean that this evening's sleeping arrangement is about to get much more uncomfortable. Karev took the trailer somewhere, and this house is, despite all their plans, still nothing more than a frame. He only lets himself stand in the rain for a few minutes before he throws his sleeping bag into his car and drives back to the hospital.

When he gets there, Meredith's gone, of course. Being here just reminds him of everything that's transpired in the past 24 hours, and when he thinks about it, the fury and the frustration come back all over again. He's blindsided, but it's not about the trial itself, at least not really. What is he supposed to do now? He knows he said that he didn't care, that he'd always take care of her, but he does care. He wants her here with him.

They're having a baby. In twenty years, Zola won't even be out of college. She has to be here for that. He knows that this was just a clinical trial, that he had a one in a million chance of curing Alzheimer's, but at least he would have been able to try. Now he doesn't even have that. Just when he thought that everything was all right, that she was all right, she consciously decided to self-destruct. He never saw it coming, and yet somehow, all of it feels very familiar.

He's not on duty and it's a quiet night, so there's no work for him here, at least not until morning. He's got to figure things out with Meredith. They just got married; it shouldn't be like this. She keeps calling, but he needs to get himself together, to not be so angry when he looks at her, before he says more things that he's not even sure if he means.

Before he tries to go back to sleep in an empty on-call room, he goes upstairs to visit Zola. When he gets to her room, though, she's not there. He feels like a brick has dropped into his stomach when he looks at the empty crib. Fear chokes him, paralyzes him for a second. He runs through everything in his mind: her incisions from the hernia surgery were healing well, her pain was under control, and the shunt he put in last month was successfully draining the fluid from her head. They've been up here with her every day for weeks. She was fine. Surely somebody would have paged him if she wasn't.

They know all of Zola's nurses now. He turns to the nurses' station and asks Bonnie, "Where's Zola?"

Bonnie frowns. "Zola was discharged earlier tonight. Your wife took her home a few hours ago."

The book says to expect sleepless nights for weeks after bringing your baby home, but Meredith doesn't think they meant that those nights would be quite like this. Zola's asleep, nestled in bed next to her with a clean diaper and a full belly. She's the one who's still awake. She's trying to come up with a plan, to get it together, but her head is way too full right now. She's got a pregnant best friend sleeping downstairs, and a jilted friend and a pissed off husband sleeping who knows where. She gets tired of the frat house sometimes—lately, she's been pushing Derek to get on their contractor to finally finish their house in the woods—but with so many people missing, this house feels emptier than she thought it could. She won't let herself imagine a scenario in which she has to do this alone, but she can't see far enough ahead to see how they all recover from this.

She's afraid to turn the lamp on so she can read more from Your Baby's First Year, she's afraid to make one more phone call that Derek won't answer, and she's afraid to leave Zola to go downstairs and wake Cristina. So between laying a hand gently on Zola's back, just to make sure she's breathing well, and trying to figure out how to check her diaper without waking her, she keeps on thinking.

What she keeps coming back to is that it's weird how history repeats itself; how, twenty five years later, she's taken a page right out of her mother's book. Somehow, she made the decision to cheat. Richard Webber all but asked her to, and now she's frayed her career and her marriage, pulling threads and breaking oaths. And worst of all, there's a little girl in the middle. Somehow, all of it feels very familiar.

She thought she knew. It took her twenty-five years, but she thought that she finally had it figured out.

Do you think we're like them? Our mothers?

Be extraordinary. She wasn't talking about surgery at all.

It's Meredith. Not Ellis.

I'm hoping to be your mama.

She has lived under the shadow that Ellis Grey cast over this hospital for five years. People expect things from her because of it. People think they know her, and who she will be, when they hear her name. And for a long time, she thought her name determined those things too. For five years—for her whole life, really—it's been a balancing act; keep the good and try to push away the bad. She's been trying. She thought she almost had it right. She was trying to lean into the fear and get a happy ending, or whatever psychobabble crap she used to tell herself. But now he's in her head. He thinks that maybe she is her mother's daughter after all.

When she hears the front door open at three AM, she's not sure who it's less likely to be, Derek or Alex. But when their bedroom door opens a moment later, Derek stands before her.

He's soaked. She can't be sure whether he came home to get clothes, or he came home because he wanted to see her.

"Why didn't you tell me?" he asks.

She stares at him for a second. He looks around at all of Zola's things in their room, at the baby in their bed. He starts to say more, but before he can, she shushes him. She can't tell if he is shocked, or angry, but Zola's not going to find out at the same time she is. As quietly as she can, she eases herself off the bed and ushers him out of the room, pulling their door almost all the way closed behind her.

Across the hall, in Alex's empty room, he asks again, "Why didn't you tell me?"

"I called you five times, Derek. Would you have preferred a singing telegram? Sky-writing?"

She knows she's being a bitch, but she's been up all night, and when she thinks about it, bad mother or not, she's the one who is here with the baby, not him.

"Meredith."

"I told you to call me. I told you it was important. What did you want me to say?"

"Tell me that you had the baby with you!"

It takes a lot for him to yell; he hisses through pursed lips sometimes when they fight, or when he's angry with an intern. But it takes a lot for him to yell. She can tell it's taking everything out of him not to yell right now; he catches himself when his volume escalates. She rarely yells either. She knows they don't need to, that they hurt each other well enough without it.

"Why? Are you afraid I would mess her up that quickly? Did you think that my bad mother vibes would screw up her ethical compass on the first night?"

"Meredith, stop."

"No, I mean I can see how you would be concerned," she says. "Obviously if I'm screwed up enough to destroy your clinical trial, then I'm way too screwed up to raise a kid. Of course it would be disconcerting to you to think that I could take care of her without you."

He can't control himself this time.

"No, what was disconcerting to me was walking into the hospital at two in the morning to find that Zola's gone," he yells, before he catches himself. "Don't put this on me."

Meredith hears a mattress groan and the floorboards creak under the weight of bare feet a few paces down the hall. Somebody's bedroom door opens and then closes again. She listens for Zola too, but hears nothing.

It's not the first middle-of-the-night fight that's been had in this house, and something tells her that it won't be the last. But Zola's father can't deal with her screwed up mother (She doesn't feel like her mother yet. Does that mean she's a bad one?), and so they are fighting. If this was going to happen again, she didn't think it would happen this time on the first freaking day. That has to be some kind of record, even for a Grey.

"Derek, I'm not putting anything on you. I'm repeating, practically verbatim, what you said earlier." As much as she wants to put on a strong face, to prove him wrong, she can't keep the hurt out of her voice. "I'm going to be a bad mother. Zola shouldn't be with me."

Most of the time he gets upset when she cries, but not this time. "That's not what I said."

"Really? Because that's what it sounded like."

It's exactly what he said, but that's not the point. What hurts almost more than the words themselves is the sentiment behind them: that once again she has disappointed him, that she's not what he thought she was, that he was stupid to ever trust her in the first place and somehow that's her fault. Just when he thought she was whole and healed, he gets the unpleasant surprise that maybe she is still as fucked up as she ever was.

A part of her knows that it's backwards when he thinks that. The thing he's never understood—and maybe she's thinking this now because they're both so angry that they don't know what to do with themselves—is that when their relationship gets fucked up, it always hurts her more than it hurts him. Somehow he always gets to feel like he's the sane one and she's the damaged one. She remembers a diamond glittering in the grass, and she knows that's all bullshit. It's not that simple.

"I said I don't know. That's what I said. I said I don't know."

"Well, I didn't have time to not know," she says. "Because Zola was ready to go home, and we have temporary custody, and you went completely AWOL. I called you five times. A lot of good that did. You should have answered your phone."

He looks around for the first time at the empty room, at the mattress with no sheets. She's already going for the door when he asks, "Where is Alex?"

"I have no idea."

She can't think about all of that right now. It's already too much with the baby, and with Derek, and with wondering if he thinks she even has a right to be angry with him. She can't add in Alex, who is probably drinking himself under the table at Joe's right now. Not tonight. She didn't know what she was expecting when she told him to get his crap out of her house, but she is surprised that he's gone so quickly. He cleared the way for Zola to come home; he should come home too. She doesn't know if he ever will. That's too much for one night.

She starts to leave, but he doesn't move. She really is exhausted, and if Zola's still asleep, maybe she can get some rest too. They can't solve this now; there's no point in trying.

"Meredith."

She turns around. "What?"

"That's it?"

"Yeah, Derek," she sighs. She's embarrassed not because there are tears in her eyes but because she feels like she has to hide them. "That's it. You walked out. That wasn't part of the deal. So for tonight, that's it. Come get some clothes, and see the baby."

He follows her into their bedroom, pulls a t-shirt and sweats out of his top drawer, and leans over his side of the bed to look at Zola's face. Her pacifier has fallen out of her mouth, leaving a small damp ring on the sheets, but she's still asleep.

"Don't wake her up," she says as she eases herself as carefully as she can into bed next to the baby.

"I won't."

"Sleep in Alex's room," she says. He looks a little shocked at first, but he goes anyway.

A/N: So after that finale, I needed to create a four- or (maybe) five-part catharsis (kind of like what I did last year). This is part one. I was going to write a review of the episode, but I would rather do this instead. I can see it from both sides, so you can expect an exploration of both perspectives. I hope you'll come along for the ride, I hope you'll get some enjoyment out of it as I have so far, and most of all, I hope you all are well!