Author's Note: So, um, it's been awhile, huh? I know I should be working on the serial stories, and I have no plans to abandon them, but life got crazy and then the show got crazy, and I started this one-shot mid-season last year. After watching this week's episode, I was finally inspired to finish it. I hope you all are doing well and enjoying the show! Hopefully, "Step By Step" and "Dignity" will see updates next. ;) As always, thanks for sticking around.
Something Good
Take me in into your darkest hour
And I'll never desert you
(The Pretenders)
On the way home, she stops by the liquor store and grabs a bottle of his favorite scotch. She's never been a big scotch drinker, and he's never been a big drinker, but after the day from hell, she figures he could use a tumblerful. At least.
She trails her fingertips along the bottles, marveling at the smoothness of the glass. She lingers by the tequila, fondling the cork until she can taste its sweet tang on her lips and feel the burning in her throat. She closes her eyes and, for a brief moment, she can feel shot after shot going down.
A year ago, she would've grabbed the bottle and drained it on her way to the counter, but things are different now.
She is different now.
And yet, as she sets the bottle gently on the counter and watches the cashier impatiently, she can't help but think that she hasn't changed that much.
She's still drowning her sorrows. She's just receiving them secondhand now.
When she gets home, he is sitting on the couch with his collar unbuttoned and his head in his hands. She sets the bottle on the coffee table with a decisive thud, and he looks up expectantly.
"Look," she begins quietly, "I know alcohol isn't the answer. I get that. It's just…the only answer I know, really. And you might have one hell of a headache in the morning, but tonight, you'll feel better. For a little while, anyway."
He glances doubtfully at the unopened bottle and arches an eyebrow when she lays two tumblers face-up beside it.
"I'm sorry about Jen," she says softly and means it.
He heaves a sigh and pats the space beside him. Twenty minutes and four tumblers later, he says her name.
"Meredith."
She glances at him through the amber liquid in her glass.
"Meredith," he says again, slowly, tasting each syllable as it leaves his mouth.
She knows from the gentle slur of his "d" that, tonight at least, her first glass will also be her last.
He runs a hand through his curls and exhales painfully.
"I don't have all the answers."
The words linger, lost and disconnected.
"I don't have any answers. I used to think I had all of 'em, but…"
He trails off and stares unblinkingly at the coffee table, absentmindedly swirling the liquid around in his glass. "I have no answers," he concludes thickly.
She lays a hand on his shoulder and toys gently with the hair at the nape of his neck as he pitches forward, head in his hands.
"I don't have a wife," he laments quietly. "Or a house. I don't have kids or a yard or…or a dog."
Her thoughts move briefly to Doc, and she is surprised by how little the memory pains her.
"You know," he mumbles, "two years ago, I was on top of the fucking world. I was making three million a year in one of New York City's best hospitals. My best friend was the head of plastics, and my wife was the head of ob…ob…" He swallows slowly and shakes his head. "Of babies," he finishes loosely. "We had a brownstone overlooking Central fucking Park and a house in the Hamptons. We were like…like something out of a movie, you know?" He scrubs his face with a tired hand and meets her gaze with glassy eyes. "It was like the kind of perfect that people dream about, and…and I…"
His eyes begin to water, and she wants to look away, but she doesn't. Instead, she inhales sharply and continues to run her fingers through his thick, curly hair.
"I never stopped to think about it," he whispers. "I was living a big city dream, and I never…took pause. I never…" He swallows again, slowly and painfully. "I wasn't grateful. I wasn't anything. I thought I deserved it, because my dad died and I grew up in a house full of women and I busted my ass all through med school. I thought the wife and the brownstone and the best friend and the career…I thought they were givens. Good things come to those who wait, or whatever."
She sighs heavily and bites her tongue. She knows all about the absence of sense and justice. She knows that life is cruel, that people are fallible and dreams are demanding and, more often than not, good things come as frequently as Godot.
Yet she realizes with a twinge of irony that, for the past two years, the hopeful little girl inside of her has been convinced that Derek is her good thing.
"When I walked into that townhouse and found Addison and Mark…together, in our bed…I thought I'd lost everything. Then the chief called and essentially offered me chief, and I remembered that I had a career. A life." He pauses to drain his glass and emits a single snort of disbelief. "And, when the job led me to you, I started believing in good things again. I thought fate had dealt me a new thing, or whatever."
She cannot help but think, as she basks in the afterglow of his simple compliment, that he has picked a hell of a time to start using her words.
"It sounds so fucking pedestrian," he murmurs bitterly, "but I didn't realize what a dream I had in the city until I lost it. And when Addison came to Seattle, I thought that was a sign that I was supposed to take it back. You know, claim the life I had lost. I thought I could get the wife and the job and the best friend again. Like I'd gone hiding, and my old life had come to find me. I took her back, because I thought that was the answer." He scoffs and shakily pours himself another glass. "It was supposed to be a good thing. The right thing. I just…I couldn't fucking get rid of you."
She closes her eyes and forces herself to breathe. In and out until the air muffles the roar of her blood in her ears and the distant strains of her mother's voice reminding her in no uncertain terms that she is not and will never be a good thing.
"I'd close my eyes and smell lavender. I'd fuck Addison in the shower, and I'd get angry when she didn't tease me about the bendy thing. I went out and bought a bottle of tequila and, when she wasn't there, I'd sip it." He pauses for a moment before the words rush out again, tumbling into each other in their haste to emerge. "Not because I was so miserable that I needed to get smashed, but just because I…wanted to taste you."
She stares at the crease between his eyebrows and mirrors his frown. She does not think to mention the nights that she spent hugging his t-shirt to her chest or the long string of nameless, faceless bodies that crossed her sheets in her search for someone who made her feel half as safe as Derek.
"I couldn't even be alone in the O.R. It was like every time I bent over an open brain, I could feel your eyes on me. I tried to fight it. I tried to do the right thing. I'd go home and run my fingers through Addison's hair and tell myself that I didn't care that it wasn't honey-colored. But then she'd ask me how my day was, and I'd hear your name in every word I said."
His rough palm finds purchase against her small shoulder, and he tugs her sloppily towards him, pulling her tightly into his side as if to reassure himself that she is, in fact, still there.
"It was the same way with Rose," he all but whispers. "It was…cruel, what I did to her. I'm not that guy, Mere. The guy that throws you ultimatums on blue prints and goes after unsuspecting brunettes…that's not me. That's not who I am."
He sighs, and his shoulders collapse as his wet, red-rimmed eyes meet hers for a brief, fleeting moment.
"That guy that stood at the table and nicked the aneurysm…that's not who I am either. I don't make fatal mistakes."
Two renegade tears slide slowly down his stubbled cheek, and her heart breaks for him as he struggles to bring the tumbler to his lips.
"I'm Derek fucking Shepherd," he hisses angrily. "I'm the fucking head of neurosurgery. I'm supposed to have all the answers. I'm not supposed to…to…"
Immediately, she reaches for his hand, lacing her fingers through his in an unspoken show of support.
I'm here, she wants to say. I'm here, and I'm not leaving.
He presses the pads of his fingers between her knuckles and brings her hand to his lips. He leans his cheek against the back of her hand and closes his eyes for a moment, inhaling sharply.
"You are the only thing that makes sense to me anymore," he admits in a low, tortured whisper. "You're the only answer I know. I used to walk into the O.R. and feel like a god, but now…now, I pick up a scalpel, and I feel like a teenager with a pocketknife. I used to be sure of my movements, sure of where to cut and when, but now…"
His eyebrows pinch the skin above his nose in despair. He meets her gaze with lost little boy eyes, and her heart aches for him.
"I don't know who I am anymore, Mere," he breathes painfully. "I don't know anything. I have no answers." His eyes drift gratefully down to their hands, still entwined in the nonexistent space between their bodies. His teeth rake violently across his lower lip, and the movement reminds her of herself, once. The Meredith that drank tequila like water and sought her answers at the bottom of Elliott Bay. The Meredith she used to be.
"I didn't used to fail, Meredith. I didn't used to…" He swallows thickly, and she can feel the tears he refuses to cry settling in a knot between his shoulder blades. "I used to be good. I was good for Addison, and good for the department, and good for…but I failed her. Somehow, I stopped being good enough for her. And then I stopped being good enough for…everybody." He sniffles as he turns to her with wide, pleading eyes, and his lost little boy countenance breaks her heart.
"I just…I want…"
His face falls.
"I just want to be something good," he whispers. "For you. For Jen. For…" His lower lip begins to tremble, and he squeezes her hands in search of strength.
"I was a prince in a brownstone castle, and I buried it. Not Addison. I. And Jen. She had her whole fucking sunset in front of her, and I…I knicked the aneurysm, and I…"
Meredith cradles his head against her chest and runs her fingers gently through his hair as he finally—finally—surrenders his walls to consequence and breaks down.
She closes her eyes and breathes.
Nothing is permanent. Nothing is certain. Nothing gold can stay.
The truths that are breaking him are things she has known forever. Things that are burned into the backs of her eyelids and tattooed along her skin in all of the places her mother couldn't—wouldn't—touch. Life is fleeting and luck is fleeting and good things are hard to come by and harder to secure.
But the only thing Meredith knows with more certainty than impermanence is survival, and she knows this: they will survive. Because he may have a dead dad, but she has buried two mothers. Because he may not know all the answers, but she has never known them, and she thinks that might be okay. Because he may feel like drowning, but she has seen the bottom of Elliott Bay and the inside of a stark, dreamlike O.R.
Because he may feel like dying, and she might have actually died, but she remembers what it's like to want to live.
And she thinks that, this time, she can breathe for him. She can wipe his tears with steady thumbs and catch the heart that he has dropped so willingly into her tiny, ineffectual fists.
"I love you," she whispers, and means it.
He swallows, and his Adam's apple bobs against her left breast. When he speaks, his voice is a raspy, hollow, broken thing. "Why?"
Because she knows things now. She knows that there is a light at the end of the tunnel. She knows that, even after everything—the secret wife and the dead dog and the vet and the adulterous sex and the walking away and the drowning and the girl in the bar and the disastrous confrontation at the not-wedding and the sex-and-mockery and the wayward proposal and the blueprints and the brighter, shinier flower girl—they can still meet each other in a house of candles and solemnly utter words like "forever."
"Because…"
Her gaze drifts to the carpet, and a small smile graces her delicate features as she contemplates how they started. How she started.
Green eyes meet blue in a blaze that is solid and steady and sure.
"Because you made me believe that I could be something good."
He sets the tumbler down and buries his face in her hair.
He breathes.
She gathers his pieces in her arms and tugs them tightly to her chest.
Tomorrow will be a day of rebuilding something extraordinary, but tonight, they are something real, something imperfect and unfinished and full of questions without answers.
She thinks that might be okay.