A/N: This is a WIP and I'll try to update every chance I get but right now I'm kinda busy and really shouldn't be doing this but it's just that I was left so heartbroken by the finale I figured I had to write anything that could take my mind away from what happened.

I. The Breakdown:

I asked Meredith to wait for me in the car while I went upstairs and talked to him. When I got out I could feel the questioning gazes upon me but somehow they didn't made me realize how odd it must be to see a "bride" entering an apartment building without the groom. I was numbed to the unfamiliar gazes, I was numbed to everything surrounding me. My movements weren't my own. I felt like my body was moving in automatic motion driving me somewhere I knew, somewhere in my clouded mind, I wanted to get but I don't remember how exactly I had traveled from the car to the door of our apartment.

I know my body took the key under the carpet, where we used to keep it just in case anyone forgot their own. Because yes, I had a key he left for me in my cup of coffee once. And yes, it was the key to his apartment that suddenly became our apartment. I know right, me? Sharing an apartment with a man that I actually loved? Yes, and I had my doubts at first but it wasn't as near as bad an idea as I thought it was. In fact, it was a great idea. In our apartment we spend moments I would've never spend living in mine. Alone. Without him.

I walked in but something wasn't right. I looked inside our bedroom and the bed was unmade, the same way I had left it in the morning. I thought he had just gotten there because he wouldn't be able to be there for more that 5 minutes and not do the bed. Then I saw his nightstand and his grandmother's picture was gone. I distinctly remembered seen it that morning before leaving to Seattle Grace and asked myself if maybe the choker I was wearing today had been used by the woman in the picture in her wedding day. I also wondered if she had felt the same way I did when Mamma put it around my neck.

I turned my head to see if it was there. It wasn't. The day before I'd asked Burke to give me back the lucky scrub cap I had given him months ago. He asked me why and I just said I wanted it back, but really I felt like I needed it. It always served me well when I felt I wasn't focused enough. It reminded me of who I wanted to be and what I was here for. And lately I felt like I had forgotten all about that. I had lost track of who I was or what I wanted. Somehow what I wanted stopped being important. What he wanted was what mattered the most. What would make him happy without thinking about what made me happy, because in the end, if he was happy so was I. A mistake I don't intent to make ever again.

I took my eyes away from the doorknob to see if something else was missing. And suddenly the empty places started popping out like if they had been highlighted by some kind of glowing gloom, if that's even possible. He's trumpet was gone. I walked to the empty place where it used to be and my eyes rested their gaze there without blinking, but what they were actually seeing was pictures of memories my mind had chosen to play. My body was responding in ways I did not control. My eyes were watching that day when he told me everything about playing in his school marching band and I remembered teasing him for being such a dork. Also came to my mind the day he finally understood why there were rules about attendings dating interns and then how he taught me I wasn't always right and how when that happened I had to apologize. I had arrived to our relationship sure I was always right but he made me see otherwise.

At last there it was. That big, hollow, empty place where all his Eugene Foote collection used to be. Vinyl's and CD's. Vanished. Totally empty. There still remained some pictures he asked me to take out of an old box of mine. He said everybody deserved to have memories and pictures helped remind us of them. In that moment I wished I didn't had memories at all and the last thing I needed to remember of those memories I so desperately wanted to erase were pictures. They were lucid in my mind as if they were happening right then and there. He locked himself in an on-call room and I knew he was there. So I came there to find him distraught after operating on Eugene Foote who'd died on the table. I listened to him saying how he wasn't the brightest like me but he was the best because, as Eugene Foote, he always practiced. He was disciplined and determined. He is. That day I got to see another side of him. Something I had never seen before. He allowed me to see him vulnerable. He let me know that he wasn't always strong and I learn that I could be strong for him and that if I was ever as weak as he was then I could let him see it. Because he trusted me. Because I trusted him.

I looked out the window wondering where he was because I knew he was gone. Somewhere in my brain the message had been received but for some strange reason it didn't seem real. He was no longer there nor the things that mattered the most to him. He had only left behind what he wouldn't need. What wouldn't help him through the day. What he could spare from his life. And I was among those things. Where had I gone wrong? I did everything according to the plan. I did everything that I was supposed to do to make him happy. But maybe all I could do wasn't enough. Maybe I wasn't enough.

I heard the door opening and I turned around as fast as that damn dress let me. It was Meredith. She's been always so loyal. She's been always there. But in that moment it really didn't made me feel any better that she was the one opening the door and not him.

"He's gone" I said out loud for the first time and the statement was made a little bit more real. I felt like someone had ripped off my arm.

"I don't think he's gone. His stuff is still here." How couldn't she see it? He's absence was as obvious as it was painful. I explained to her how every item that was an essential part of him was missing. Those items that made him who he was and that had become part of myself. Whoever the hell I was now. Now that he wasn't there, now that they only belonged to him. I looked out the window one last time and I turned to look at Meredith.

"He's gone" And it was real. The pain I felt before was nothing compare to what I was feeling at that moment. "I'm free" Was I ever really trapped? Was it his fault or mine? "Damn it" It hit me the first time. It was like a low blow to my underbelly. If I had only stood my ground and stick to the things I wanted instead of always giving in. "Damn it" Another hard blow. All this time I had felt like I wasn't myself, like if the things I was doing weren't the things I would ordinarily do. But I knew that when he smiled at me all the effort in the world was worth it, because he was worth it but was I? The necklace became a chain and it started to enclose around my neck. I needed to get it off of me. It was a reminder of what I would never be. What I would never have. What I never really wanted until I met him and he made me want all those things I had catalogued as idiotic and made for the weak. Meredith helped me take it off but the dress felt like fingers around my body squeezing hard and the pain was unbearable. I needed to get out of it. It was eating me alive. It was consuming that last shred that was left of me. Because I didn't do the white dress, or the flowers, or the maids of honor and sure as hell didn't do the family necklace tradition. Me. The person Burke had walk out on.

And then, when I was finally out of that dress all that was left was this huge gaping hole full of emptiness. I remember holding onto Meredith because I couldn't stand on my legs. I couldn't. The air felt like tiny pieces of glass cutting through my nostrils to my throat and from there down to my lungs. This was the second time since I had arrived to Seattle that I felt like this and the third time in my whole life. In all of that pain and emptiness I found an answer. He had saved me. He hadn't only taught me how to do an EKG, how to be a person and how to think about others instead of only myself; he had also saved me. He had saved me from destroying myself and at the same time from being left without me. All at the expense of his dream to finally have it all. The dream he made me want as well. The dream I thought we could make real together.