Author's Notes:
Hello, all! This is a follow-up/companion piece to my short story, Recover. Reclaim is meant to slide into (ie elaborate on) the "rekindling the romance" section between month 12-19 in Recover. If you haven't read Recover, you might be a little confused by this narrative. Detail-oriented readers will probably notice a whole host of tiny continuity errors between Recover and Reclaim. The simple fact of the matter is that I wrote Recover as a means for catharsis and never had any intention to extend that story universe. My muse, however, had other ideas. I came up with the idea for this story about three days after I finished Recover, and I've been doing nothing but writing in my free time ever since. Since Reclaim was a much larger, much more ambitious project, I ended up doing a lot more research, planning, and meticulous editing for this story, which is how the continuity problems resulted.
Reclaim is BIG. This story is 28 chapters plus an epilogue. It's 190k words (this equates to a 760 page paperback). The story is complete from start to finish as I type this author's note, so no need to worry about an AATW situation where chapters take months to write. I will try to post a few chapters a week (at most 3) as I get them edited. Expect the usual Aria staples. Angst, fluff, porn-y goodness, humor, drama, romance, and a world you can immerse yourself in.
This story was a labor of love. I put my heart and soul into this. I think it's one of the best things I've ever written, and I hope you will think so, too.
WARNING! This story is a follow-up & fix-it for Shonda's crap. Derek is permanently disabled. There is no magic fix. If this bothers you, DO NOT READ RECLAIM.
Week one.
Meredith has never been an optimist, but for some reason, her head got stuck on the idea that once she brought Derek home from the rehab center, the complicated part of his recovery process would be over. When he kisses her in the living room after apologizing for nearly dying, this mistaken conclusion is bolstered. After a few minutes, he's blushing, and breathing hard, and she feels alive in a way she hasn't in months. She thinks, finally, the universe isn't picking on her anymore. Finally.
He seems to remember bits and pieces of their home, but not everything, so she gives him a slow tour. She shows him around the kitchen, making sure he knows where to find everything important. She shows him where the bathrooms are and where to find the linen closet. She shows him his office, her office, the kids' rooms. The introduction to every room is a slow one. He stops to look at everything. If it's not glued down or too big to lift, he picks it up, as if his hands have memories, too.
He doesn't talk much – he can't – but by dinner time, her heart already feels … less weighted down. She's been so lonely. Even seeing him almost every day, even with the kids demanding most of her time, she's been lonely. She loves her children, but the children aren't him. Derek's her best friend. She's not sure when it happened. He didn't used to be. Not when they first dated. Not even when they first married. By the time his car got smashed with him inside, though .… She swallows against a lump in her throat.
Visiting him for an hour a day hasn't been enough. She's wanted her best friend back. She's wanted her husband. And now she has them both again. She's been given a gift.
Derek is home.
The first inkling she gets that the complicated part of his recovery is only beginning, though, is when she takes him to their bedroom. Not long after dinner, his energy flags, and he stops making as much sense, and he has a harder time understanding her. After she puts their dishes in the dishwasher, he confesses, "T-tired," with a dull expression and drooping eyelids.
"In here," she says. He follows her into the room, his limp, which is worsening with tiredness, making his strides jerky. "We sleep here," she says.
He freezes when he gets a look at the bed. "Both … here?" His grip tightens around his cane.
She blinks, confused. He looks … unsettled. And then she feels like a freaking idiot. He's slept alone for a year, and she doesn't even know if he remembers sleeping next to her before that. Of course, he's unsettled. "Is that … okay?" she says.
"Yes," he says, the word soft, but he sounds … far, far from okay.
She's imagined their first night together so many times, imagined closing her eyes to the sound of his breathing while she rests her cheek on his chest. She misses sleeping to the sound of his breathing so much that the act of missing him makes her insides ache. But .…
"Do you want to sleep in another room?" she says, heart sinking.
His mouth opens and closes, but he says nothing.
She bites her lip. "Derek, if you're not comfortable here, it's okay," she says, though she's dying inside. "You can sleep in the guest room." She walks over to him, pressing up against his side. She wraps her arms around him. Kisses his shoulder through his t-shirt. "Just … say no if this is bad."
He swallows. "We … sleep." He takes a short breath, wincing. "Sleeped. We sleeped … here?"
"Yes," she says. "Do you remember that at all?"
He doesn't answer. He stares at the bed for another long moment. He limps away from her to the left side of the bed, though she hasn't told him that's the side he sleeps on, and she wonders .… Maybe, he does remember a little?
He pulls back the comforter, and he sits on the lip of the mattress, which moans as his weight sinks into it. He rests his cane against the nightstand. He stares out the window into the darkness, not that there's anything to see right now. The clouds have blotted out all the stars, and all she can see is murky black.
"Derek, are you okay?" she says.
"Yes," he says, but he doesn't look at her.
She frowns. "You're sure?"
"Yes," he repeats.
Her frown deepens. "Okay," she says slowly. Something is off. She knows he's lying. But she has no idea what to say or how to fix … whatever it is.
It's not until she starts changing into her sleepwear that she has a light bulb moment. Well, possibly. The second she takes off her shirt, the hairs on the back of her neck prickle and stand up, and she looks over her shoulder to see him turning away from her. He puts his elbows on his knees and curls in on himself as his breaths tighten in his chest. He does remember. That has to be the problem. Maybe, he doesn't have words for any of it. Maybe, he doesn't understand what he's looking at in his mind's eye. But he remembers. And, now, she's standing here half-naked, and he's looking at a fixed nowhere that's in the exact opposite direction from her, and of course that's what he's thinking.
She puts on a t-shirt as quickly as she can and slides into the bed on her side. He sits, rigid and hunched on his side of the bed, unmoving, and he doesn't look at her. She scoots over to him, and she puts a hand on his shoulder. The way he shrinks away from her touch confirms her fears. Seeing the bed must have triggered a whole slew of memories, and he doesn't like them. Of course, he's not ready for anything like that.
She pulls her hand back, giving him a wide bubble of space, and tries to think of what to say. She doubts the rehab center gave him any sex education. When would it have come up if he doesn't know how to ask about it? And she's not sure how to explain any of this to him in words he can understand.
"I don't want sex," she says, settling on blunt. They can work from there, she hopes.
He looks at her. His face and lips are pale, and she realizes he's trembling. He blinks. "What …?"
"Are you remembering us … touching a lot?" she says, tone gentle. "In this bed?"
He swallows, and his eyes pinch shut. He rubs his temples.
"That's sex," she says. "What you're remembering. I don't want that." Which is a lie. She does. She does want that if it's ever something he's emotionally capable of, and now that he's kissed her, she suspects it might be. Maybe not now, not yet, but someday. But she doesn't want to muddy this already-confusing conversation with conditionals, so she leaves that on her mental back burner. Now. She needs to deal with the now.
And the now is that he won't look at her.
Emotion wells up like a tidal wave. "Derek, I never want you to do anything with me that you're not comfortable with. Never. Not ever."
He doesn't speak. She tries to gauge his expression, tries to figure out if she's lost him. The longer her sentences run, the more likely she is to confuse him, and she needs him to get this. She needs him to know this.
"Do you understand me?" she says.
He presses his face into his hands. "I … don't. I .…" He rocks back and forth, agitated. "Sorry," he says, the words raw and upset.
"Don't say that," she says. "None of this is your fault."
"I know I'm. I'm. I'm," he says like a stuck record. He takes a breath and thinks. "I'm .…" His mouth opens and closes and he gets that looking-for-a-word expression that breaks her heart. He looks at her, helpless. "I know I'm .…" He swallows. "I'm not … not same."
She risks the bubble she's allowed him, and she touches him, touches his shoulder. His muscles are like steel underneath her fingertips. She gives him a squeeze. "I know you're not," Meredith says, the words soft. "I don't expect you to be." She rubs his back. "You can always say no. Say no if something is bad. Do you understand?"
She watches him churn on that for a moment. She wants to jump in, and she wants to add more words, something to make things better like the flip of a switch, and she expends gargantuan effort clenching her jaw and waiting, instead. Giving him a moment to think. He takes a while to think, even when he's not upset.
"I …," he begins. He struggles for words. "No. No, this .… I don't want … here .… Here."
"That's okay," she says. "Really, it's okay."
"I don't want here," he says again, more resolute, now that he's mapped out what to say.
She wipes tears from her eyes. Her throat hurts. For a minute, she can't speak, but she clears her throat. "It's okay. You can sleep in the guest room, instead." She climbs out of bed.
"Guest …?" he says, frowning.
She's fighting not to fall apart. "Someone who … visits."
He mouths the word visits.
"Someone … who doesn't live here but … stays," she clarifies.
"Oh," he says. "I'm … guest?"
"No," she says. "You live here, now. This is your home. You're not a guest."
"But …," he says. A sound loiters deep in his throat. Kind of a growl. He's getting frustrated, just like she is. She wishes she hadn't used the word guest, now. She wishes a lot of things about this conversation that are pipe dreams.
"It's not a guest room," she says. "I used the wrong word."
Comprehension dawns on his face, and her heart squeezes. He knows all about using the wrong words. He's trying to learn as many as he can, but he still has so far to go.
"Come on," she says. She takes his hand, urging him to follow. "It's your room. Not a guest room."
"My room?" he says, and the relief in his tone crushes her.
"Yes," she says, nodding. She wipes fresh tears away from her eyes. "All yours."
He struggles to his feet. He's tired enough that his cane barely seems to be enough support for him. She leads him down the hall to the empty guest room, cringing at how badly he's limping. She didn't show him the guest room on the tour of the house earlier, since she deemed it one of the least important places in the house for him to know. She pushes open the door to show him the room, now.
A queen-sized bed covered with an indigo bedspread sits against the back wall, which is a panorama of windows. Nightstands hug both sides of the bed, each with a small lamp on top. A chest of drawers sits left of the closet, and a door to a private bathroom interrupts the wall to the right of the closet door. Other than that, though, the room is bare.
She hasn't put fresh sheets on the bed since Derek's mother visited a few weeks ago, but Derek drops his cane by the bed and collapses onto the mattress before she can tell him to wait a moment while she gets new bed linens. His eyes are wet and rimmed with red. He pulls the covers over himself like a shield, until she can barely see more than a few wisps of raven-brown hair. He used to do that before the accident when he felt sick or upset, and she hurts. She hurts for him, knowing he feels sick or upset right now.
"We can move your things into here tomorrow, okay?" she says.
He rasps, "Okay."
"I love you," she whispers, but he doesn't respond except to burrow deeper, like he wants to hide.
Like he wants her to go away and give him space.
She turns out the lights in the room, closes the door, and pads back to their bedroom. She feels like she has a golf ball stuck in her throat when she crawls back into their bed, alone. In her entire year of fantasizing what it would be like to have him home again, she never pictured … this. Never imagined the wonderful memories that make this bed so important to her also make it anathema for him. But now that her eyes are opened to his reaction, she can't fathom how this all must feel to him, being able to remember pieces of a previous life while only being able to view them through a limited lens of comprehension. Her chest hurts, thinking about that, and she feels stupid for not considering it before.
She wishes she could rewind and approach things differently. Maybe, he wouldn't have balked if she did, and she'd be sleeping beside her husband, now. But she's not. She's alone.
And she has no idea what to do.
She's not sure how she fell asleep, but she did.
She wakes up to birdsongs and daylight and a quiet house, and it's strange. As a busy surgeon and, for the past year, a single mother, she's used to her schedule being monopolized by work and by her children. She can't remember the last time she slept in late enough for the sun to peek over the horizon, let alone for it to climb high enough in the sky that sharp, hot light striking her eyelids is what wakes her up. She squints at the clock. Nearly 10 a.m.
She doesn't get up right away. Instead, she enjoys the luxury of sleeping in, and she lets herself sigh and sink into the pillow. She's booked off three weeks from work, and Derek's first rehab appointment isn't scheduled until her first day back at the hospital. Maggie is keeping the kids for a week while Derek adjusts to being home, and then Meredith will have two weeks off with her whole family. A lump forms in her throat just thinking about it. She's missed her family being together.
When she leaves her bedroom at 11 a.m., she discovers that Derek's bedroom door is closed. She can't tell for sure whether he woke up and went back to bed, or never got out of bed in the first place. The pristine kitchen and its lack of dirty dishes anywhere suggests he hasn't emerged since last night, though.
She doesn't worry. Not yet.
As superficially fine as Derek looks, he has a traumatic brain injury, and one of the common side-effects of those is fatigue. Mental. Physical. Psychological. Any subset or all three. His physical therapist told Meredith that Derek likes to sleep late, and that sometimes he takes a nap in the afternoon when he's stressed. He didn't nap, yesterday, and yesterday was a stressful day. In light of that, and in light of how the previous night ended, she opts to give him his privacy, for now.
When he hasn't emerged from his room by 1 p.m., though, she's concerned enough to check on him. She knocks on the door with the backs of her knuckles. "Derek?" she says. "Is it okay to come in?"
She waits.
He doesn't tell her no. He doesn't tell her yes, either. He doesn't speak at all.
She waits a full sixty seconds, giving him every opportunity to deny her entry, but only silence hovers in her ears.
When she pushes the door open, she bites her lip. Sunlight slants into the room, bathing the mattress in bright light. He's lying under a pile of covers, and she can't see more than a few tufts of his hair. She would think he hadn't moved since last night save for the fact that he's favoring the left side of the bed, and last night, he collapsed on the right.
"Derek, are you okay?" she says, clutching the doorknob.
The covers move, and he makes an upset noise. "Yes," he mumbles from somewhere in the lump of blankets, but he doesn't sound okay. He sounds far from okay.
"Are you hungry?" she says.
"No," he says.
She licks her lips. He suffers migraines. She has his codeine prescription in her purse. "Does your head hurt?"
"No," he says. Silence stretches. After what feels like eternity, he adds, "I want stay here."
She frowns, not sure how to react to that, but she doesn't press him. "Okay," she says. "Let me know if you need anything."
He says nothing.
She's reluctant to leave him alone, but she does. She forces herself to close the door and give him space. She's not sure what to do. She calls the rehab center. One of the counselors thinks Derek might be having trouble adjusting to living in a new place, thinks he might just be scared.
The idea that he might be scared of living in his own home breaks her heart, and it seems so incongruous with his curiosity during the tour yesterday. Plus, he kissed her. And she can't count the number of times he smiled.
Until the end.
She has a sinking suspicion that, if anything made him scared, it wasn't the new place. It was her. Trying to get him to sleep in the same bed with her.
She pinches the bridge of her nose.
She wants him to be comfortable. She wants to perpetuate an environment where he feels like he can move at his own pace without worrying about what she wants. She doesn't want him to be scared.
She has to stop, she decides. Kissing him. Telling him she loves him. She has to stop all that unless he initiates it. With his sex drive kicking in again, he might be seeing all of her affectionate gestures, what she meant to be platonic, in a different light, now. Might be seeing it as pressure, which is the last thing she intends.
She has to stop, and she has to figure out how to get him to understand that she doesn't expect anything from him. She can do the former. She has no idea how to do the latter, yet.
Say hi to McDreamy for me. Have lots of welcome home sex.
That's how Cristina signs her latest e-mail, a sluggish, two-weeks-later reply to Meredith's last message, and Meredith sits on the couch for a long moment, gaping at her laptop. Thanks to the literal night and day time zone difference, Cristina's tendency toward workaholism, and Derek's accident creating a single mom situation, phone calls have gotten impossible to coordinate. Meredith hasn't heard Cristina's voice in over nine months. Meredith remembers the last phone call verbatim, because Derek just woke up, and Meredith, desperate to talk to her person, stayed up until 3 a.m. to match up a call with Cristina's lunch break. Meredith remembers how high she felt. She remembers how pleased Cristina sounded on Meredith's behalf. But … after that … nothing. Even e-mails have taken a downturn toward sporadic. And, now … this. Irrefutable proof that Cristina's over five-thousand miles away, off in her own oblivious world.
Meredith knew e-mail was no substitute for a flesh-and-blood friendship, but she's never been knocked in the face with that fact like it's a baseball bat, before. She bites her lip, going back through her last few e-mails, re-reading what she's said about her and Derek's situation. To Meredith, it's clear as day from her narrative that McDreamy is gone, and there will be no welcome home sex. Maybe, Cristina was joking? It's so hard to tell with nothing to look at but text.
Meredith chooses to believe it's a joke. That Cristina's not being flippant to be a jerk, or because she's that clueless.
Derek slept in the guest room, and now he won't come out. I think I scared him. I have no idea how to fix it, Meredith types with a lump in her throat. A sinking feeling overrides any hope that Cristina will have an idea about how to fix things. A sinking feeling that this isn't even the beginning of an end, anymore. The end happened, and Meredith was too freaking busy to notice.
Other than when she checked on him, she doesn't see him at all his second day home. She does her best to leave him be, and she goes to bed alone for the second night in a row. On his third day, she can tell he at least came out of his room, because he's eaten every single one of the bananas in the bunch she left on the countertop. There's no evidence that he's been through the fridge or the pantry. Just the bananas are gone. She frowns at that. Derek liked bananas before, but … not enough to make an entire meal out of them. He avoided carb-loading like the plague, and a bunch of bananas has enough carbs to lay a diabetic flat in a coma.
His bedroom door is open. The bed is made, and the room is empty. Dust motes float lazily in the bright haze of sunshine. "Derek?" she calls with a voice meant to carry, not sure where in the house he's wandered to. She waits a few moments for a response, but he doesn't reply. She checks rooms systematically, ignoring the flutter of worry that builds with each empty room.
The worry is almost ready to explode into panic.
He's not in the living room or in a bathroom or on the deck or in the backyard. He's not in his office. He's not … anywhere? But then she finds him, sitting on the edge of Zola's little bed.
He clutches the stuffed lion he bought for her years ago, staring into space like he's in some sort of fugue. His cane lies on the floor at his feet, inches from his right sock. She sits down beside him, watching as he pets the soft fur on the little lion. He doesn't greet her. Doesn't look at her.
"Hey," she says, the word soft. He blinks, and his gaze shifts to her knee, though he doesn't turn his head, and then his attention flicks back to the lion in his hands. "What are you doing in here?"
"I buyed this," he says, looking at the lion. He frowns, and he glances at her. "Buyed?"
"Bought," she says, since he's asking. She makes a habit of not correcting him unless he asks. Correcting a person with aphasia anytime he says something wrong is a fast way to turn a calm exchange into an ugly, resentful frustration pit, and she has a hard time figuring out which of his grammatical slips are aphasia, and which of them are him not knowing the right thing to say because he hasn't learned it yet. She errs on the side of assuming aphasia, which she leaves for his speech therapist to help him sort out. "Bought is the past tense of buy."
When his aphasia is causing an issue with his speech or comprehension, the problem Derek has is two-pronged. What he hears isn't necessarily what's been said, and what he says isn't necessarily what he means, which creates one hell of a game of telephone when he's having problems. Luckily, when he's well-rested and relaxed, though he's not immune, he's a lot less issue prone.
If he's tired or upset or not focused, though, things like, "I baked a cake," and, "I bake a cake," can become the same sentence, to him. That kind of misinterpretation isn't usually mission critical, but, "I yelled at my friend," and, "I was yelled at by my friend," can also sound identical to him, which might result in him hearing the opposite of the speaker's intended message. This is because he has a hard time hearing verb tenses and small function words, like "to," "is," "the," "a," "an," et cetera. His brain strips what he hears of its grammar, tosses him a pared-down bucket of major nouns and verbs, and he's left to piece the meaning together like a puzzle, which is why it's so much damned work for him to understand people, and why compound sentences, run-on sentences, passive voice, and Meredith's tendency to babble endlessly all serve to confuse the crap out of him. And that's just incoming messages.
For outgoing messages, when he's tired or upset or not focused, he has the same kinds of problems with function words and verb tenses and conjugations as he does when he's listening. He tends to drop them when he speaks. Sometimes, he knows what he wants to say, but a wrong-but-related word pops out. Like, in his specific case, he can think "memory" over and over and over, but what he says is "remember." In the worst cases, though, he can't say something at all. He knows what he wants to say. He can recognize the word when he hears it said by someone else. But he can't get his lips, tongue, and vocal cords to cooperate with him.
"I … buyed. I b-buyed." He pauses to collect himself. "I bought. I bought this."
She nods, smiling at the memory. She can still hear his throaty growl against her ear, can feel his breaths against her throat, can feel his stubble rasping against her skin. "You did," she says, blinking the memory away. "You got it for Zola." She touches the lion's fur. Her fingertips brush with Derek's. He doesn't pull away. "Do you know what this is?"
He thinks for a moment, staring at the lion. "Stuffed animal?"
She grins. "Yes, that's right," she says. "Do you know what kind of animal it is?"
"Cat," he answers with no hesitation.
She remembers the animal flashcards his speech therapist uses. She's seen him churn through a lot of the basics. Cat, dog, mouse, bird, rabbit, et cetera. But she doesn't recall exotic animals in the deck. "Close," she says, giving him an encouraging smile. "It's a type of cat. It's called a lion."
"This lion," he says.
"Yes," she says. He doesn't respond to that, seems content to sit here, thinking. She wonders why he's sitting alone in Zola's room, and she wonders how long he's been here. "Do you miss the kids?"
He looks at her. "I like them."
"I know you do," she says.
His lips twitch as he stares into space, and his flat expression stretches into a smile. The skin around his eyes crinkles as the smile deepens. He's such a handsome man when he smiles, and she loves to see it. She loves to see him happy.
"What are you thinking?" she asks.
He puts the lion down by his hip. "Zola called me Dada."
"That was her first word."
"I remember," Derek says.
She bites her lip. She still hasn't figured out if he understands that Zola and Bailey are his children, or if he thinks they're tiny friends she brings to visit him once or twice a week. Zola calls him Daddy, now. Bailey calls him Dada. She is liberal with the use of the word "our" when she calls Zola a daughter or Bailey a son. Our daughter. Our son. A healthy person would be able to figure out what this stuff means from context, but Derek's ability to make logical inferences is stunted. Worse still, his ability to describe the logical inferences he does make is stunted as well. She has no idea what he's managed to glean.
"Do you know why Zola called you Dada?" Meredith says.
He looks up at her. His gaze searches her face. Her heart squeezes when she sees no comprehension in his eyes, though.
"Do you know why she calls you Daddy?" she prods, though she's pretty sure he doesn't, based on the blank look pasted on his face. After another long silence, she asks, "Do you know what a dad is?" to be sure.
His lips part, and a hitching syllable of sound with no meaning escapes. He looks at her. Just for a moment. And then he looks away. He closes his eyes, and he thinks. And he thinks.
"I know .…" His eyes crease, and he makes a frustrated noise. "I knew … my dad," he says, the words halting.
"But do you know why he was your dad?" she presses. "Do you know what that means?"
He thinks for a long moment. He shakes his head. "No."
She swallows, nodding. Their positions are reversed as she thinks and thinks and thinks, and he watches her with a curious expression. This is .… She's not even sure what to say. How does one explain children to someone who doesn't understand reproduction? She's not sure. But she thinks Zola isn't the right example to start with.
"We made Bailey together," she says slowly. He processes that for a moment. She can see the exact moment comprehension clicks in, because all amusement drips out of his expression, and he stills. She takes a deep breath, and she plunges onward. "That's what … sex does." She looks at him, eyebrows raised. "Do you remember that word?"
His doesn't seem disturbed when he says, "Yes," which strikes her as odd, given how upset he was about it the first day. Or … was he? His stunted ability to communicate puts a large portion of the effort in establishing shared meaning between them on her. Has she flubbed something? She reviews what happened on the first day. He was tired. He seemed upset by the idea of sharing a bed with her. He recoiled from her touch. He wanted to sleep in another room, away from her. If it's not about sex … then what?
"Meredith?" he says, pulling her back into the conversation at hand, rather than the conversations they've had in the past few days. His confused expression squeezes her heart. His hands worry at the bedspread, and he scoops up the lion again, like he needs something to do with his hands.
She shakes her head. Focus, Grey, she thinks. "I'm trying to tell you we had sex, and when we did that, we made Bailey."
He stares at her for a long moment. She can almost see the wheels turning behind his eyes. He looks like he wants to ask a question. His mouth opens. Closes.
"We had sex," she repeats. "And when we did that, we made Bailey."
The moments stretch. "… Okay," he says.
One obstacle toward understanding down. She takes a deep breath, and she continues onward. "Sometimes, sex takes a piece of you and a piece of me and sticks them together. That's what made Bailey."
He frowns. "Like … puzzle."
"Sort of like a puzzle, yes. But only sometimes."
"When does it do this?" he says.
"Only when we both want it to," she says. "We decide beforehand."
"Oh," he says. He's squeezing the lion, and he's not looking at her. His body shifts, agitated. "Why did we … had?"
She raises her eyebrows. "You mean why did we have sex?"
"I .…" He swallows. He looks away. "Yes."
"Because it feels good," she says. She puts her hand on his forearm, but then she second guesses herself and pulls away. And then she hates that she's second guessing herself over touching his freaking arm. It's his arm. She's been touching his arm for a year, now, and he's never had an issue with it. There's nothing sexy about touching an arm. She puts her hand back again, relishing the warm feel of his skin against her fingertips, and the soft peppering of fine hairs. She needs to touch him for this. "Do you remember that part? That sex feels good?"
He looks at her for an interminable moment. She meets his blue gaze with an unblinking stare. She doesn't move. "Do you remember?" she prods.
He looks at her hand. Touching his arm. His eyes narrow. And then his eyelids slip shut. The soft sound of his breathing fills the silence. She gives him all the time he needs. To think. When a smile tugs at his lips, she lets loose a breath she didn't realize she held. When he looks at her again, his face is … more open.
"I was … happy," he admits, and again she's struck with the idea that what she thinks happened on day one isn't what actually happened.
"Me, too," she says, meeting his grin. She puts her head on his shoulder and sighs. She rubs his arm with her palm, but she limits herself to that. Her hand. On his arm. "Sex is a way to show how we love each other."
"You … love me," he says. "You say lots."
She nods. "I do," she says. Her throat tightens. He initiated this, so she thinks it's okay to say, "I love you very much."
She doesn't expect him to say it back – this is already a metric ton of stuff for him to grasp, and all at once – but it still hurts to hear him say, "Okay," in that flat, wary tone that says he understands, but he's struggling. The Derek she knows is one of the most affectionate people she's ever met. The idea that he's confused by the idea of love, now, is … painful. But she swallows, and she presses onward.
"Since we made Bailey together with sex, we keep him safe," she says, continuing her explanation. "Until he's big like you and me."
More struggling, but he nods after a moment. "Okay."
"That's why Bailey calls you Dada," she says.
He swallows. "We maked Bailey."
She nods. "That's right. So, he calls you Dada."
Confusion creases his face again. He squeezes the lion like a little stress ball. "Zola is .…" He searches for a word, staring into space, expression sinking further into helplessness as the moments stretch. "Zola is … not."
"That's right," she says, understanding what he's trying to get at. "Another mom and dad made Zola. They couldn't keep her safe. She needs someone else to keep her safe."
He processes that. She waits. "We … do this," he says. "Keep her safe."
She nods, her throat filling up with a painful lump. He's getting this. It's slow, but he's trying so hard, and he's getting it. "Yes, we do," she says.
"My dad …," he says.
She squeezes his arm. "He and your mom made you."
"They keeped me safe," he says.
God, he's really getting it. He's making connections, and that's … amazing. Her eyes prick. She resists the urge to jump. Or hug him. Or do something else stupid that will make her look like an idiot. "That's right."
The silence stretches. He thinks, rubbing his temples. His eyes are getting wet, and his lower lip trembles. She wants to kiss him through his shirt. She wants to hug him. She wants to hug him so much that her chest hurts. But she doesn't. She doesn't want to create another first night. She wants him to feel safe and not pressured.
"Are you okay?" she says.
He looks at her. He takes a quick, gasping breath. "This … so much."
"I know," she says. "I know this is a lot. But you're doing so great."
"I wish I'm … same," he says. He blinks. Tears spill and slash his cheeks. "I wish .…"
"It's okay that you're not," she says. "Really, it is."
He doesn't reply to that. He's back to fixating on the lion. He strokes the fur with his thumb as he stares at it without an expression on his face, though his eyes are dripping. She hates that she's overwhelmed him so much. She hates the fact that she's so happy he comprehends. She hates … all of this. She swallows against the lump in her throat.
"Derek, I really want you to try to understand something," she says. Just one more thing, she thinks. Just one more, and she'll leave him alone to process.
He looks up at her. He wipes his face with the backs of his hands. He sniffs. "What?"
"I don't expect you to do anything you don't want to do," she says.
That trips him up. For a long, long moment. And she wants to cry. Why can't she get him to understand this one thing? But then he nods. "Say no if it's bad."
She sniffs and rubs her eyes, relief deflating her. "Right. That's right. Say no if it's bad."
"Okay," he says.
"That means sex, too, Derek."
He blinks. Swallows.
"Do you understand?" she says. For a split second, she loses her patience. "Please, do you understand?"
He looks at her, and then he looks away. "If … I want?" he asks the window, not her.
She stares at him, speechless. She's definitely read this all freaking wrong. This is not a man who's balking over sex. But … what then?
He looks at the window for almost thirty seconds. His gaze flicks back to her. And then again. And then he turns to her with a hesitant frown. "Did I … said … wrong thing?"
"No!" she blurts, and he flinches. She takes a breath and lets it out. "No, you didn't say anything wrong. Not at all." She considers for a long moment what to do. How to show him …. She wraps her arms around him, refusing to second guess her first impulse. He doesn't stiffen. Doesn't jerk away. Doesn't look sick. His body is warm, and solid, and she presses her nose against his shoulder, inhaling. "If you want to have sex, then we will," she says, trying to keep the hope from spilling into her tone. She smiles as her eyes prick. "But not until then, okay?"
"Okay." He nods. He swallows. He wipes his face with his hands. "I … okay."
She rests against him, and they sit, a tangle of limbs, for minutes upon minutes, reconnected, and in this moment … she can't think of a single thing in the world that's wrong. The problem is she doesn't understand how in the hell this went right.
She's embarrassed to admit it takes her four days to figure out Derek doesn't know how to prepare food. He doesn't understand microwaves or stoves or can openers anymore, or how mixing different things can make something new. Worse, though, is that realizing cooking is Greek to him takes her an alarming amount of hints before she has her 2+2=4 moment. The first thing that should have clued her in is the fact that he eats whatever she's having – and therefore whatever she gives him – without complaint or offering alternative suggestions. This is weird in and of itself, because the Derek Shepherd she knows hates almost all the food that she likes, health nut that he is. She misses that neon sign, though, and by the time things click, he's eaten all the bananas, all the apples, an entire box of Crispix cereal, and a container full of mixed nuts – every last piece of ready-to-eat food sitting free-to-grab on the countertops – and he's standing in the kitchen with a growling stomach and a lost look on his face because she's slept late again and hasn't fed him.
She swallows as she lines up all the items they'll need to make pancakes while he watches over her shoulder. The pancake mix, milk, eggs, vegetable oil, honey, syrup, pan, cooking spray, whisk, mixing bowl, measuring cups, spatula, plates, and utensils all sit in a haphazard pile on the countertop next to the stove. It's a lot of junk. Junk she doesn't normally use. Well, she uses plates and utensils, so she's two for fourteen.
She takes a deep breath. Maybe, she should have started with something small. Like toast. It's hard to screw up toast, though she's managed to do so on more than one occasion. What possessed her to cook something as ambitious as pancakes, she doesn't know. The buckwheat pancake mix isn't hers. It's a leftover from when Amelia lived in the house. Amelia likes the same kind of pancakes Derek does.
Okay, okay, she does know. She does know what possessed her, and it's stupid, but Derek made the best pancakes. Meredith remembers one time after her liver transplant surgery, he brought a plate of pancakes up to her on a tray. He chopped up a banana and a strawberry to make a wide banana smile and two red berry eyes.
One plate of sugar coma for my dearest wife, he said with a goofy flourish, and she laughed-winced as he set the tray over her lap and leaned to give her a kiss with a mouth that tasted like syrup.
I think you sampled the goods, she said.
He gave her an innocent look. Merely taste-tested.
No, I think you fell off the health-food wagon.
He winked. I may not have kept my hands and arms inside the vehicle, at the very least.
The memory makes her smile, and she admits, though it's selfish, that she wants that again. She wants that so much.
"How is this be …?" Derek says beside her before verbally stumbling to a halt, and she blinks away the old image to focus on the now. His mouth opens and closes in that familiar expression she's grown to recognize, where he's struggling to turn a picture in his head into a word spoken from his mouth, and the fight's not going so well. He closes his eyes and thinks, but when he opens his eyes, he has no further words to offer, other than a halting, frustrated, "How …?"
"How does this make pancakes?" she offers.
He nods. "Yes." He looks at her for a moment and then his gaze shifts back to the bowl. "How does … this … make pancakes?" he echoes, filing that diction away in his mental cabinet for future use.
"Well, first we have to mix everything."
She points to the back of the pancake mix box. The instructions are written using helpful pictures, with only a smattering of words separating each picture, words to specify measurements and a few hard-to-illustrate verbs. The whole pancake-making process should be easy for someone to follow. Even her. Maybe, even him, though she thinks this might still be a little too advanced for him.
He takes the box from her and looks at it. "This shows how," he says.
"Yes, it does." She doesn't think he can, but she still asks, "Can you read that, yet?"
He's only just mastered the alphabet and numbers, and reading aloud is difficult for him. Even when he understands what he reads, he struggles to convert the text he sees into words he says. Another awful product of his aphasia. He points to the first picture in the directions. "This is …." His lips move as he tries to sound it out. "One." One cup of pancake mix. He moves to the next picture. "Two." Two tablespoons of vegetable oil. "And .…" The third picture flummoxes him. He frowns, thinking for a long march of moments. "Twenty … three?"
"No," she says. "That's two-thirds. The slash mark means it's a fraction. It's asking for two-thirds of a cup of milk."
She's lost him with that, to the point that he doesn't ask for clarification because he's so lost he's not sure what to get clarified. She puts her hand on his shoulder and squeezes. "You read the number symbols right," she tells him, giving him a smile, and he smiles back. She continues, "That's a two, and that's a three," while pointing at the numbers. She thinks about elaborating for him, but she doesn't want breakfast to become a complicated math lesson. "It just doesn't mean twenty-three, here."
"… What?" he says.
"This means two-thirds," she says. She picks up the 2/3 cup measure and shows him the same two-slash-three on the handle. "See? It matches."
Comprehension dawns as he compares them. He thinks for a long moment. "Okay," he says.
She takes the box back from him to dump out one cup of mix into the mixing bowl, and she proceeds down the list of ingredients. She hands him the whisk and lets him stir after showing him what to do, and then she sets up the pan on the stove and turns the burner to medium-high heat. He watches her while he stirs, and she makes a point of telling him the stove needs to be off whenever he's done making something. She shows him what all the knobs look like when the oven and burners are off.
She thinks back to when she's seen Derek make these pancakes. He always dipped his fingers under the faucet and flicked water onto the pan to see if it was hot enough to start. Sizzling water means the pan is good to go. She copies the motion from memory.
Derek watches, fascinated. He flinches when the water sizzles. If he has any memory of doing this, he's not showing it. "You used to make pancakes all the time," Meredith says. She dumps the first dollop of batter onto the pan and picks up the spatula. She's watched Amelia do this any number of times. She's watched Derek do it. Surely, this can't be that hard. She waits for the batter to bubble. "Do you remember that?"
He thinks for a moment, but his face is blank when he shakes his head.
"We let it cook on one side," she says. "Then we flip it over." She demonstrates, sliding the spatula under the pancake and imitating the Derek in her mind's eye. He made flipping pancakes look so easy. Amelia made flipping pancakes look so easy. But it's not easy. Not one bit. The pancake tears in half and lands in a messy, semi-flipped heap in the pan, and she bites her lip. Crap.
"You breaked it," Derek says.
"I didn't break it," she snaps. "It's … a work in progress. It's .…"
Derek looks at the picture of the perfect, round pancakes on the mix box, and then his gaze wanders back to the mess in the pan. She doesn't miss his snicker. "Breaked," he finishes for her, and the teasing look on his face is such a familiar one that it makes her heart squeeze, and she wants to stop, and forget about the pancakes, and just look at him. Her Derek. The Derek she knew. Every time he drifts to the surface of this new Derek, he takes her breath away. Her Derek is alive. He's hurt, but he's alive.
"What?" he says when he realizes she's staring.
She forces the stupid grin off her face with effort, and she shakes her head. "Nothing. Sorry."
She nudges the unflipped part of the pancake with the spatula and manages to get everything wet-side-down, but she no longer has a circle anymore. She has a mangled … panlump. Not a pancake. A panlump. She moves the panlump to the plate and pours a new dollop of batter onto the hot pan. The next pancake turns out much like the first one. A broken, unevenly-cooked panlump. Whatever. They'll still be edible.
"May I do this?" Derek says, reaching for the spatula with his good hand.
"You want to try?" she says.
"Yes," he says.
She bites her lip and watches as he copies her, pouring a dollop of batter onto the pan a little larger than the ones she's been pouring. He glances up at her. "When do I flip?" he says.
"See the bubbles?" she says, pointing at the pancake. He nods. "When those are everywhere, you flip it."
He nods, and he waits. She feels somewhat vindicated when his pancake turns into a panlump, too. Not quite as bad as hers, but, still, it's a pretty crappy pancake, and it's, for sure, the worst pancake she's ever seen Derek make. He frowns at the mess.
"Hah!" she says. "Not so easy, is it?"
He snorts. "I have brain … damage," he says slowly. He looks at her. His eyes are twinkling. "Do you?"
Her jaw drops at his humor. Only Derek Shepherd would be using his own brain damage as a tool to prove his innate superiority. The smirky, haughty look on his face decimates her logical thought, and she laughs as amusement smashes her with a huge wave. And then she laughs again. And then she's giggling, and he's staring at her with a warm look on his face.
This is the first time she's laughed so hard in over a year. Since before his accident. And she feels lighter for it. Lighter, and bubbly, and wonderful, and a zillion watts of bright-and-shiny. She barely clamps down on an, "I love you," before she can blurt it, almost biting her tongue in the process, but she's still thinking it. I love you. I love you. I love you. Those three words are a shouting chorus in her head. Because he's playing with her, again. Really playing, and she wasn't sure until this moment that she would ever see this side of him again.
He pours the last bit of batter into the pan for the fourth and final pancake while she comes down off her high. After a minute, he edges the spatula underneath the cooking pancake, and with a quick flick of his wrist, he gets the pancake turned over onto the other side. He has a perfect circle of golden-brown face-up in the pan. Which … isn't fair. It isn't fair in the slightest.
She gapes, looking down into the pan. "How did you do that?" she says. He's not even using his dominant hand. The right side of his body is weak, and he's not good at gripping things with his right hand anymore.
He shrugs, but he's smiling a cat-caught-the-canary grin, like he's pleased with himself. She imagines this might be a monumental moment for him. Even if he's just making pancakes, knowing he can do something better than she can, after the year he's had, must be a treat for him. She lets him have his moment without further complaint.