Cristina came over the week before Meredith's due date, which was good, because she went into labor the day after she picked Cristina up from the airport. Cristina was pretty good, actually, at the whole helping Meredith through labor thing. She didn't do the soothing and all that too well, but she understood how to help Meredith fight through pain. And when Meredith started crying uncontrollably six centimeters in, she knew that it didn't really have anything to do with the pain at all.

Derek was actually supposed to fly up on the day the baby was due, but his flight got delayed and Meredith went into labor early anyway. It turned out to be for the best. If he had been there, for it all, with his smile and his soothing voice, she probably would have gotten on the plane back to Seattle with him, sure that she couldn't do it by herself. As it was, he arrived three days after Hannah's due date, a week after she was born, and she and Meredith were situated in their new apartment, with Cristina sleeping on the couch.

When Derek held Hannah in his arms for the first time, the look on his face was enough to make Meredith wish that she hadn't done the stupid thing where she took Derek's baby away and moved across the country. She was so close to telling him that, and then he looked at her.

"Meredith, she's so beautiful…. I just can't believe it."

"I know I--."

"Before…. Anything…. There's something I should tell you," Derek said, staring down at Hannah again. "I'm seeing someone, in Seattle. I just thought you should know… or whatever. It's not… I just…"

"No… I understand." Meredith said, and hoped that it was only Cristina who heard her voice catch.

He stayed for a week, showing up at their apartment every morning, but there was a coolness in his voice when he spoke to Meredith. She realized, too late, how much she had hurt him. Only Hannah's coos could make them warm around each other, and so they rallied around her, until he had to leave.

Cristina flew out on the same flight, leaving Meredith alone, with a baby. "Whose idea was that?" she asked the baby as they headed out of the airport. "I can't even take care of myself, kid. I'm telling you that now." She looked around, to see if people were looking at her strangely, as if she were talking to herself, but they only smiled. One woman stopped to tell her what pretty baby she had.

"Well, that's one bonus," Meredith said dryly, "People don't notice when you—Did you poop again, kid?" she asked, wrinkling her nose, and darting into a bathroom that promised a baby changing station. "You know, if you weren't so cute, I'd have a problem with the constantly pooping thing," Meredith told the baby, who was looking at her solemnly.

After she was changed, they left the airport and went back to their apartment. And time passed. Meredith had to go back to work. She'd transferred to Boston General and had only been there three months before she had to go on maternity leave. The consequences of this were that she worked long and hard hours. She reluctantly found a nanny, feeling the terror of turning into her mother starting to act up.

It seemed to be going okay, though. She spent as much time as she could with Hannah, without letting her work falter. She thought she was managing fine. Before she could blink Hannah had passed her first birthday.

And then, one night, Meredith came home just as the nanny was putting Hannah to bed.

"How's my girl?" Meredith asked, taking the baby out of the nanny's arms. Hannah studied her with big green eyes, put a finger to her mouth and then turned back ot the nanny.

"Mommy!" she cooed, reaching out for the other woman.

Meredith was so shocked she honestly thought she might drop Hannah for a minute.

The nanny was trying to play it off. "Silly girl!" she said.

Meredith ignored her, and walked over to the rocking chair, settling Hannah on her knee. "Hannah, pigeon, who am I?"

The little girl looked at her, puzzled for a minute and then exclaimed, triumphantly, "Mer-if!"

"Dr. Grey, little kids sometimes do that, if they hear someone call their parents by their--."

Meredith tore her gaze away from the baby, and looked back up at the nanny, who was standing nervously by the crib. She was quite young, maybe twenty-four, and playful. It was why Meredith had hired her. She looked like a mother.

"Please, go," Meredith said. "Go. I—I'm sorry. But…. Don't come back next week. I'll send your check on. I can't… I can't be my mother."

The nanny didn't seem to understand, but she nodded and left the room. Meredith heard the door close behind her, and relaxed into the rocking chair, closing her eyes for a minute.

"Okay?" Hannah asked, her chubby hand patting Meredith's arm. "Okay?"

"No," Meredith said quietly, truthfully. "But we'll make it okay? All right, baby? We're going to make it okay, you and me. No more of this fake-Mommy business."

"Mommy!" Hannah said, happily, and grabbed Meredith's nose.

Meredith gently detached her fist, and smiled. "That's right, sweetie. Mommy's here."

She put Hannah in the hospital day-care, and worked up her courage to go to the chief to talk to him about her hours. Since she'd done so well in making up hours she'd missed, and he regarded her as one of the best in the program, he'd helped her come up with a plan. She worked almost every day, but few nights. On the nights she did work, and she could never thank him enough for this, he allowed her to put Hannah to sleep in an on-call room and ask a nurse to help Meredith monitor her. It wasn't perfect, but she knew that there was less of a danger of her daughter forgetting who she was.

Things were better from then on. There wasn't the gnawing guilt every day that she had felt when she left Hannah with the nanny, first of all. At lunch, she'd collect her baby from the daycare and take her to the cafeteria. Interns were always surprised when they could come get Dr. Grey, tell her about some emergency and she'd take Hannah back to the nursery and be scrubbed in before they could get back to the OR floor.

Some time around Hannah's third birthday one of the patients she had been following moved to Cambridge. They begged her to keep them on consult, and she'd agreed. After a few visits, though, it became evident that the commute, short as it was, wasn't going well for the young man, who couldn't drive.

Once again, she went to the chief with an odd request. She wasn't sure when she'd become the one to get so involved with a patient, but there was also the interesting prospect of investigating a new hospital, even if it was only for one consult.

After she'd operated on the man, the hospital in Cambridge, whose head of Neurosurgery had taken a leave of absence, was asking her to come consult on other patients, and the chief liked the good name it gave Boston General, to have produced her. Before she really knew what was happening, other hospitals without strong neurosurgery departments or patients who had heard of her, were asking her to come to them. So she did.

It was just her and Hannah, driving down the highway. Hannah, surprisingly, never got fussy on these trips. She liked the "vroom vroom car". She sat happily in her car-seat asking questions that Meredith thought she probably ought to find annoying. For some reason, though, she liked being asked what cows ate, and why, because those questions she could answer.

"Can you believe in a few months she'll start kindergarten?" Derek asked, as he and Meredith sat on the steps of his newly-built house and watched Hannah run around the yard. Kathleen was mercifully out of the house, but Meredith still found that she disliked seeing another woman's things around Derek. It was too reminiscent of the Addison days.

Meredith froze. Visions flooded her mind. Buses wouldn't drop Hannah off at the hospital, and she'd have to hire a sitter or a housekeeper. Memories of her own childhood, 'Mommy when will we have a weekend?', 'Will you be home before or after bedtime?. What about her traveling? It was pretty steady by then, part of her reputation, and she couldn't take Hannah out of school for days at a time.

"Meredith?"

She bit her lip, and turned to Derek, forcing a smile. "Yeah. Hannah, sweetie, it's time to go back to Aunt Izzie's!" Hannah came running up to her, her black curls bouncing, a wide grin on her face.

"I climbded the tree, Mommy!" she announced, proudly, holding her arms up. Meredith picked her up, running a finger along her chubby cheek. Hannah planted a kiss on Meredith's cheek, and then whispered, "I gots to say bye-bye to Daddy," in her ear. Dutifully, Meredith passed the little girl into Derek's arms and then walked to the car, giving them their time.

As she walked, though, she thought. What would it be like? To give up her little girl to teachers and only see her at intervals. Of course, it wasn't that drastic, she tried to reason. But in the back of her mind she was trying to calculate the number of full days she'd spent with her mother as a little girl. The sum wasn't promising.

That night, as Hannah slept in Meredith's old bed in the townhouse Meredith got online and started researching.

"Meredith, you can't be everything for the kid," Alex told her. He had come up from Providence for the Fourth of July, and they were sitting on a park bench waiting for fireworks to start, Hannah was squeezed between them, her attention focused on a hot dog. "I mean, I know your mom was a work-a-holic, but there are other doctors that do it. Bailey--."

"Had her husband. Didn't travel all of the time," Meredith defended.

Alex took a long drink of his soda.

"Want me to ask you what Shepard will ask?"

Meredith shrugged.

"Are you doing it for her, or for you?"

"I've thought about that," Meredith said, honestly, running her hand over Hannah's curls. "Believe me. I'd be lying if I told you it wasn't a little selfish. But Alex, I want her to know me. I want her to be able to talk to me. Any other mother is home at five or earlier, when her kids have only been home a few hours. She has weekends with them, vacations. You know as well as I do that you're not guaranteed any of that with surgery."

"Aren't you worried about her making friends her own age?"

"She already has some friends whose parents work at the hospital, and there are loads of opportunities around here for home-schooled kids. If it doesn't seem to be working I'll have her in school faster than Izzie can say 'seriously', but… I'd like to try."

Alex nodded slowly. "Well…. I say go for it, Mer. I mean, it was a risk going this far on your own, so…. So why not take another?"

Meredith nodded. "Yeah. Yeah."

A second later the first big red explosion appeared in the darkening sky. Meredith expected Hannah to be scared, but she sat forward on the bench and clapped her hands.

"Pretty!" she exclaimed. Meredith, who had once thought fireworks were just stupid noisemakers looked down at her daughter's sparkling eyes and had to agree. There was something pretty about those lights against the night sky.

"She's poisoned you," Cristina commented dryly as Hannah ran back to the skating rink. Meredith had just bandaged a skinned knee and kissed her daughters tears away.

"Oh shut up," Meredith said. "So what if she has?"

Cristina raised an eyebrow. "Oh, I didn't say it was a bad thing. You're a lot less dark and twisty now, Mer. Not so much scary tequila overdosing and damage."

Meredith sighed, watching her daughter. They'd met Cristina in New York for Thanksgiving. Or, rather, to blow off Thanksgiving. They'd watched the balloons being inflated and then done other, much more fun things with their time, than stand in a crowd to watch floats. Like watching Hannah skate and commiserating with her best friend.

"Oh, I'm still damaged," Meredith said. "I've just had eight years of hiding it from a very perceptive kid."

"Mmm," Cristina said, taking a sip of coffee. "Okay, I'm only going to say this once, so listen. I'm proud of you. We weren't sure, you know, you moving to Boston with a kid…. I mean, let's face it Mer, you never screamed 'the motherly type', but you've definitely made it. I mean… home schooling? That came out of left field. But it looks like it's working."

Meredith was silent for a moment, sipping her own coffee in thought. "Sometimes I wonder what the hell I'm doing," she admitted. "If I'd stayed, Derek and I would have been able to switch off shifts. We would have both been there for her. She'd go to school like a normal kid, have two parents, not spend half of her life in a car or at a hospital… but then she applies something I taught her six months ago and thought she forgot. Or she tells me that she wishes I'd get another consult in Virginia so we could go to Williamsburg again when the British are invading--- it's a thing they do every year—and I think, she'd never get that in school.

"She'd probably have less of an attitude too," Cristina pointed out.

"Nah, I think it's genetic. And she really is a sweet kid….Last week… last week she told me that she wouldn't trade our trips for anything, even a puppy. Trust me, that's a big thing. It's… she loves me, Cristina. She doesn't expect what I can't give, but I'd give the world to her." Meredith paused, watching Hannah. She'd almost lost her balance again, making Meredith's heart jump into her throat, but she regained it and kept skating. "It was about not being my mother at first, you know, but now? Now it's about being me, being the best me I can be. For her."

Cristina nodded, and then reached out, squeezing Meredith's arm. "For the record? You've always been a pretty good you, Mer."

"Mom, do you think Dad and Kathleen are ever going to get married?" Hannah asked, as she jumped into the passenger seat of the car. Derek was waving good bye from his porch, the tiny brunette woman, with whom Meredith rarely exchanged even pleasantries, had her arm around his waist.

Meredith wasn't sure why this question, so off handed, made her eyes sting. "I couldn't tell you," she said.

From the corner of her eye she saw the twelve year old look at her with something resembling concern.

"You don't like her, do you?"

"I don't really know her, to be honest. Your dad seems to like her, so I assume she's a nice woman."

"Did you love him, Mom? Even when you left? George said that you thought you guys just wouldn't work. But that doesn't mean you didn't love him, does it?"

Meredith wondered when her daughter had gotten old enough that she asked questions that Meredith couldn't answer. With a pang, she wanted to go back to 'why do people have tongues?' and 'But why can't eat candy for dinner?'.

She did not answer for a few minutes, winding the car down the roads that she had once driven with Derek.

"I… I don't know, kid," she lied. "It's… something that happened a long time ago. Your dad and I just couldn't seem to stay happy together. We both love you," she added, wondering if this had anything to do with Hannah's concern.

"Oh I know. I just… wondered."

Well, you don't have the crazy self-esteem issues I did, Meredith thought wryly.

"Dad said he may be in Boston in a few months for a conference. I can't wait to show him things."

"That'll be fun," Meredith commented, thinking back to the last time Derek had been in Boston. After Hannah's birth. They went to Seattle every Christmas and a week in the summer. Hannah flew there on her own once or twice a year and talked to her father on the phone nearly every night, and it would be nice for her to spend time with her father in her territory.

Meredith made a mental note to find out when he'd be in town and work extra shifts that week.

They'd been in Seattle for a month and a half before Meredith could actually believe they were there. She felt sure that one day she'd wake up in her bed in Boston, Hannah's music blaring from the stereo and another message from Dr. Gregory on her cellphone asking her out. (His face when he found out she was moving had kept Hannah amused for days).

Instead she woke up with Derek's arms around her waist, Hannah's stereo blaring and a message from Bailey asking her to please tell her daughter that she was not to convince Bailey's son William that it was a good idea to sneak into OR balconies when no one was looking.

Hannah seemed to be thriving in the new environment, although there had been the arguments that arose from Derek having different ideas than Meredith. Hannah had been so used to only taking permission and discipline from one person that it took her a long time to take her father's word as law.

Meredith had been worried when Hannah's teachers called her in for a meeting, but they were full of praise rather than criticism. They told her over and over again how smart her daughter was, asked how she'd managed to balance it all, and then suggested the plan that had eventually worked, dual-enrollment at Wash-U, with Meredith continuing the home-schooling and the extracurricular activities that Derek insisted on.

If Meredith had ever worried about Hannah making friends it was quickly forgotten after the first Friday night that had Derek's house crawling with sixteen-year-old girls

No, Hannah's adjustment didn't worry Meredith so much. Her own adjustment was more worrisome. She was so afraid of dong something to upset the balance.

One night, when Hannah was spending the night at a friend's, Derek came into the locker room where Meredith was pulling on a clean pair of scrub pants.

"Forget something?" he asked, into her ear.

"Huh?" she said absentmindedly.

"We're going out to watch the sunrise with a bottle of wine," he reminded her.

She whirled around. "Oh, Derek," she said softly. "I'm so sorry, I forgot, I'm on call. Erikson asked for the night off and I—oh my God. I'll go call Bailey and tell her there was a mix-up I--."

Derek put a finger to her lips. "Mer, calm down. It happens. Come on, let's go."

He took her hand, and pulled her to the stairs, where they went up to the hospital roof.

"So, going to tell me why you freaked out over mixing up your schedule once?" he asked; when they'd settled up there, her head on his knee.

"I…." she bit her lip.

"You know what I think? I think you're terrified of losing this. Losing us. I'll let you in on a secret. I am too. I keep thinking you and Hannah are going to decide that you don't want to deal with a man who forgets to put down the toilet seat and hightail yourselves back to Boston."

"We wouldn't--."

"Exactly. And I won't. We can be us, Mer. We're not going to fall apart. You can tell me when something bothers you. In fact, I want you to. If you keep it bottled up we will fall apart. And I won't abandon you because of a mix-up or because you forget to tell me something or because you let Hannah stay up until way too late. We'll work together and compromise. Like now. This isn't sunrise and wine, but it's nice anyway."

"Yeah, it is," Meredith agreed. "You promise?"

"I promise," Derek said, leaning down to kiss her hairline.

"Okay. In that case, you can stop the leaving the toilet seat up thing. And the letting Hannah drive your car at night thing."

"Noted," Derek said. "I love you, Mer."

"I love you too." It was the first time she'd said it. In a month and a half, she'd thought it, but hadn't worked up the nerve to say it.

A moment later, her pager went off, and she had to go check it.

"Go," Derek said. "I'll be around when you're done."

She nodded, knowing that it might take her a while to accept that, but knowing too that he'd waited nearly seventeen years. He'd be patient with her.

Being back with him, she really wasn't sure how she'd managed all of those years without him. But she had. He'd told her, that night when she and Hannah came back with Izzie. Told her that he loved her for so many things, but most of all for how well she'd raised their daughter.

Despite it all. In spite of the Mommy issues, and the dark-and-twisty. She'd done it. And now… she had her happily ever after. Not as expected, maybe. But it was there. She had a beautiful, intelligent daughter who she only occasionally wanted to strangle, she had her career and she had Derek.

Some people, who weren't still a little bit glass-half-empty, might even call that perfect or well-deserved. Meredith called it unbelievable and a fluke.

But what ever it was, she thought as she quickly ran to the patient's room, she liked it.

A/N So that's it. Mer's side of things, kind of a justification for how Hannah was raised. I've really loved writing their story. And now we wait for Season Four (although I do have another one-shot that may go up here, not Meredith and Hannah)

Sorry for the wait no this, by the way. School ate me.