Chapter One
Meredith realized that she had often been found in odd positions and had conversations in awkward places. Emotional breakdowns in supply closets, naughty sex in exam rooms and just about every morning that she woke up next to a guy she picked up at Joe's qualified. This moment would probably also qualify later on, she thought, as she sat against the wall of the stall in the handicapped bathroom on the surgical floor. Cristina sat across from her, staring at her.
Meredith sighed and rested her head in her hands, wishing her body would settle down long enough for her to get up and go do the pre-op rounds that she should have started fifteen minutes ago. But no. She had woken up feeling sick, but managed to get to the hospital and into her scrubs before the nausea really hit, and she was attempting to just keep going until she realized that she couldn't. She'd ducked out of the early-morning residents 'meeting and barely even noticed that Cristina followed her in. Ten minutes later, she was sitting on the bathroom floor wishing that her friend would shut up so she could focus on making her body cooperate
"You could just take a freaking pregnancy test and get it over with," Cristina pointed out.
Meredith looked up over her arms just long enough to glare at her. "I'm not pregnant," she replied, and then closed her eyes again.
"Oh really? So this is just something that you're doing for fun? Because I'm not into it. I've watched you throw up far too many times. Really, it's not one of your best skills."
"Then why did you follow me in here?" Meredith demanded, leaning her head back against the wall again and crossing her legs.
"Because you looked horrible," Cristina said bluntly. "Someone had to make sure you weren't dying or something."
Meredith laughed, bitterly. "Comforting. You're great at that, you know that right?"
"Do you want me to go down to the pharmacy and get you a pregnancy test? I won't even complain about it." Cristina offered.
"I'm not pregnant," Meredith insisted, while doing the math in her head. She was never exactly regular so… no. She was definitely not pregnant.
"You know what? I'll take that as a 'yes because I care," Cristina said, hoisting herself up and leaving before Meredith could 'protest more vehemently.
Alone, Meredith let out a long, slow breath. She felt miserable. If she was not so aware of how dirty the floor would be—even in a hospital bathroom—she would have lain down. Instead she sat there, staring at the blue and white tiled wall across from her.
I cannot be pregnant, she thought. But that was not true. She knew how babies were made, and since the house was finished she and Derek had maybe been a little less careful. They weren't trying. Definitely not trying, but they were both aware that they did want kids eventually so… so they weren't as careful. Derek was so excited about the idea of kids, and it scared her, but deep down she did know that she wanted his children. Just not now.
"Damn it," she swore to the wall. She should have been on the floor. She had pre-ops to do, and she had a craniotomy scheduled for that afternoon, that would be her first really flying solo. Derek would be watching, but she would be the one operating. She needed to get up and go. Cristina could find her later, or not. She would probably prefer the not, actually.
She pulled herself up on the cold metal bar that spanned the wall of the bathroom and used it to steady herself for a moment. To her relief she had finally begun to feel that she could at least function without getting sick again. That was good. Maybe she had just caught a bug or… or something.
/ / / /
"Alex, no."
"Oh come on, Iz. It's just a few days. It's the perfect excuse to get out of here for a while, relax. It'll be great. You can wear a pretty dress. You like pretty dresses; right?" he asked this cautiously, and Izzie wondered if the same memory ran through his head when he thought of her in a dress. You do still like pretty dresses, she reminded herself. But that did not change her answer.
"I am not going to your cousin's wedding with you!" Izzie protested, as she grabbed a handful of charts to deliver to the nurses 'station. "I have to run the clinic, and besides don't you have some other woman to take? What's that nurse's name? Elizabeth?"
"Liza. But I can't take her. If I take her she'll think that there is actually something there. And there's not. She looks like a jack-o-lantern."
Izzie snorted with laughter, even though she was trying to be aloof, so he did not think he had a chance. She was tired of Alex coming back to her whenever he needed anything. He knew she would be there if it were something actually important. Unlike this. "What ever happened to the compassionate side you've been displaying?" she asked.
Alex leaned against the nurses' station and leaned close to her ear. "I save that for you, Iz."
She shivered at his breath on her neck and hoping he did not notice, she smiled, though she was still trying to hold out. "The answer is still no, Alex. If you need a platonic date, take Meredith."
"Take me where?"
Both Izzie and Alex turned. Meredith was standing against the counter next to them, and neither of them had noticed her come up.
"To his cousin's wedding," Izzie replied, folding her hands under her chin. "Although I doubt he could get Shepherd to let you go."
"Probably true," Meredith agreed. She smiled, but Izzie thought it looked strained. She examined Meredith's face as the other woman rearranged the charts she had stacked in front of her. She had not looked well that morning and had left the chief's meeting in a hurry.
"You okay?" she asked, as Meredith opened the chart on the top of her pile and pulled a pen out of her lab coat pocket.
"Huh? Yeah, fine. Just a little off today, tired. You know, from all the moving."
"All the moving, yet you and Shepherd slept at the townhouse last night?" Alex asked. Izzie elbowed him.
"Seriously, though, Mer, are you feeling okay?" Meredith nodded, but Izzie was going to pursue the subject, until Alex's pager went off and she was distracted by his hand on her shoulder. "Gotta go scrub in with Sloan. Think about it, okay?"
Izzie shook her head, but could not help watching him as he hurried off. She then turned back to Meredith who seemed to be staring at the same spot in the chart.
"So speaking of weddings, when are you and Shepherd going to tie the knot?" Izzie asked, distractedly. The whole hospital had a betting pool going on for that date. Izzie's date had already passed, but even she thought she was being optimistic. She had not deigned to place money in the "When will Derek and Meredith break up again" pool, because they had not had the late-night conversations with Meredith over wallpaper samples. She knew that this time at least, it was for good. "I mean, you have a house. One would hope you'd get married before kids start showing up."
Meredith's pen fell to the floor and she bent over to pick it up. Izzie just raised an eyebrow in amusement. "Touchy subject?" she asked, as Meredith stood up again.
"No.. .no… it's not. Just… we haven't decided. We're both so busy. And there's no hurry, really, so… we haven't thought about it." Meredith bit her lip and flipped the chart closed, clicking her pen off. Izzie was not sure that she had even made a mark on the chart.
"Okay… Are you sure you're okay?"
Meredith looked up, flipping her bangs out of her eyes and met Izzie's eyes. "I'm fine, okay? Fine….Shit Cristina's coming. You didn't see me." Then she was gone as quietly as she had arrived, and just stood there, shaking her head. Whatever was bothering Meredith, it would surface sooner or later. She grabbed the chart she had set down on the table before Alex started to bug her about the wedding and headed down the hall to the elevator. She had a post-up to check on in the NICU.
Over the past couple of months, she had decided that she did miss neonatal. She was not sure why, but somewhere in the back of her mind there was still Addison's voice telling her that she had a gift for that specialty. No one had ever really told her that she had a gift for anything surgical before. Yes, she could run the clinic; but as far as anyone on the surgical floor in general knew, the thing that Izzie Stevens was best at was making cardio-patients fall in love with her and then going crazy. She very much wanted to escape that particular stigma.
When she entered the room, the neonatal intern looked up at her, slightly fearfully as the tended to do towards surgical staff. Izzie never understood why; they were all doctors after all, but there was a hierarchy and a kind of legend attached to those who wielded scalpels, she supposed.
"How's she doing?" Izzie asked, as she walked over to the incubator where the two-day old baby girl was laying. Her eyes were closed and her breathing was regular, all good signs.
"Her vitals have been stable. She's looking less jaundiced. The social worker was in this morning and was wondering when she would be released. There is an adoptive family lined up, but they seem to be…worried about her condition." The intern wrinkled her nose in distaste.
"Seriously?" Izzie asked, taking the stethoscope from around her neck to check the baby's heart rate. "Don't they realize that a premature baby could happen even if the mother had given birth herself? It has nothing to do with the fact that they're adopting." To herself she wondered if the seventeen year old girl who had delivered this baby had interviewed the parents, or if she had let the social worker handle it. Izzie had not met the girl; she had been called in on consult after she had signed her rights away.
"Yeah. But they seem to think that they should have a choice in the matter."
Izzie sighed and ran a finger over the tiny arm. "If I did not know that you would probably end up in foster care for a long time, baby, I'd hope that you didn't get those parents." She turned to the intern, "Page me if anything changes."
The intern nodded and Izzie went out and walked down the hall to the elevator. When the doors open, she was face to face with George, who was leaning against the back rail of the car, staring at a poster for a new museum opening that weekend.
"Hey," Izzie said, checking to see that the button for the surgical floor was pushed and then leaning against the wall herself.
"Hey," George replied, quietly.
Izzie looked at him. He looked tired, but otherwise okay. He had been working more since he had been promoted and become a resident with the rest of them, but she had also seen less of him.
She wanted to say something. She missed George. When Meredith had moved out of the townhouse, she had secretly hoped that George would come back, particularly because (though he did not see it) Lexie was still acting oddly around him, even after he had told her that he just wanted to be friends. Izzie had overheard that conversation, because they had apparently thought that they could get privacy in the resident's break room. George had said he was not ready for another relationship, and for some reason that hurt Izzie a little to hear.
But, still, he had stayed in the apartment, and Meredith had not bothered to fill the room. Some nights, she and Shepherd still ended up back there. Izzie was not really sure why.
All the thinking had brought them up to the third floor. She bit her lip, knowing that she was going to lose her chance. Finally, she turned to George and blurted out, "Would you like to go to Joe's with me tonight? Just to…catch up?"
"I'm on call tonight," he answered immediately, and the elevator doors whished open. Izzie nodded and walked out of the elevator. "Izzie?" she turned, and George caught up with her. "Maybe tomorrow night?" he asked, with a small smile.
Izzie nodded. "Yeah. Tomorrow sounds great."
"Great." George went off in the opposite direction and Izzie paused for a moment, smiling to herself.
/ / / /
Meredith walked out of the OR and into the scrub room feeling exhausted and exhilarated. She had not known that those emotions could occur in the same person at the same time, but apparently they could. She had preformed the surgery, her patient was stable. It was five o'clock in the afternoon and she felt as if she could curl up in her bed and sleep for the next day in a half.
Still, she told herself, count your blessings you're not sick any more. She went to the sink and turned the water on, beginning to scrub her hands methodically. A second later she felt someone's arms around her waist.
"Derek," she murmured. "We talked about this."
"I know," he whispered in her ear. "Not at work. But I'm too proud of you right now to obey that particular rule. Sorry."
Meredith giggled and put her wet hands over his, gently breaking his grasp around her and turning so that she was facing him with her hands in his. His eyes sparkled as he looked at her and his smile made her amend her earlier wish. She wanted to be at home in bed, with him lying near her, his arms around her, making her feel safe and warm.
"You were great in there," Derek continued. "We should celebrate tonight. I was thinking Mexican?"
Meredith wrinkled her nose. She was not sure if Mexican would sit well with her at the moment. "Um… not tonight. Maybe tomorrow? Let's eat at home tonight, okay? I'll even let you cook. I really want your pasta sauce."
Derek raised an eyebrow. "Well okay. If you want."
"I do. Definitely. Good. It's a date, I'm going to go talk to the patient's family" she said. Then she slipped her hands from his and left him standing in the scrub room. Cristina was waiting outside the door to the gallery.
"I have a patient's family to talk to," Meredith told her, not even letting her friend speak. "Besides I don't think I could even generate enough pee to—"
"Shut up. You've been in surgery three hours. I'm not buying that. Go talk to the family, I can wait."
Meredith glared at her, but Cristina met her gaze, and it was Meredith who had to look away first. She hurried off to the surgical waiting room, determined to push everything else out of her head while she talked to the family.
The patient was a middle-aged father of four. Meredith had only seen the older to, but it seemed that the grandmother who had been watching the two toddlers had decided to come up to the hospital and wait instead of sitting by the phone.
Meredith stepped into the room and watched for a minute before clearing her throat. The mother had both children, two-year-old twins, on her lap and they were holding a copy of Green Eggs and Ham between them. The woman was pale, but as she read her children snuggled close to her, and a smile flickered across her face, amidst the lines of worry. The two older kids, eight and ten, were sitting in chairs to either side of her, trying and failing to look as if they were not listening to their mother read the story as well.
Finally, Meredith stepped closer and cleared her throat. The mother's gaze quickly shot up to meet hers, and the relief was evident as soon as her eyes met Meredith's.
"Paul?" she asked, seeking confirmation.
"He's stable, and the pressure is down significantly. We'll know more in the next day or so, but for now it looks as if he is going to have a smooth recovery. He should be fine."
The older children grinned widely, and the mother's face lit up. "Thank you," she said. "Can I see him?"
"Soon. Someone will come get you when he is awake. I'll be by to check on him in the morning, and he should be ready for discharge in the next few days."
"That's… that's wonderful. Thank you again."
Meredith nodded and left the waiting room, to see Cristina leaning against the wall.
Meredith stared at her. "You're not going to leave me alone, are you?"
"Meredith, you're about to have to deal with something that will not leave you alone for the next eighteen years at the least. You can learn to put up with me".
"Okay, you know what? Fine. Just to appease you. Give it to me." Cristina pulled the cardboard box out from her lab-coat pocket and Meredith grabbed it.
Fifteen minute later, she stood over the sink in the bathroom, staring at the two pink lines that had appeared on the window of the test. Cristina was banging on the door, but all that Meredith could do was stand there, shocked and staring for several more minutes. Slowly, she tore her eyes away from the test and met her own gaze in the mirror. She looked haggard, and small. She suddenly felt, even at twenty-nine, much too young to be dealing with this.
"Meredith Anne Grey, open this damn door!" Cristina hissed. Meredith vaguely registered that she was glad that she was not yelling. That was one false belief they did not need wrongly spread all over the hospital.
"I don't want to talk about it," Meredith said, as she emerged, having thrown away the box and instructions and stuck the stick far into her pocket, to be thought about later.. "Not until I've had time to…figure things out. I need to go. Post-ops. And Derek will be expecting me."
Cristina opened her mouth, but Meredith just held up a hand.
"Not now, okay?" Her friend nodded.
Meredith somehow managed to make it through the rest of her shift, pausing only once or twice to force rambling, scary thoughts out of her mind. Eventually, she was back in the locker room, pulling out her street clothes. She stripped off her scrub top and put on her sweater, and then kicked off her pants. She had both legs in her jeans and was about to button them, when her hand lingered on her belly. She had memories of films from med school, classes on biological development. She knew what the fetus would look like inside her at this stage, what it would look like in two weeks… in three.
The thought was actually pretty scary.
Derek's voice (when had he come into the room?), snapped her out of her thoughts. "Ready to go?" he asked, and she hastily buttoned her pants and grabbed her tote from her locker and slammed it closed. "Yeah," she said, smiling and taking his hand. "Let's go."
They did not talk much on the drive home, and Derek took the bridge instead of the ferry. When they got to the house, he teased her about staying out of the kitchen, and she welcomed the reason to sit by herself in the living room. She curled up on the couch and stared at the empty fireplace.
She should not be feeling this uncertain, should she? She and Derek were together; they were in love. They had been working over the hard parts, figuring out where their lives were going together. They wanted kids. They could make it work. But it all seemed so sudden. The issues with her mother's death still felt fresh, the hurt her mother had done stabbed. Even though she knew her mother loved her, her mother wanted her to love and be loved, she worried about becoming the shrieking shrew whose face dominated her worst childhood memories. She worried about falling behind in her job. And a part of her worried that Derek would think that they were not ready. They had only been together, seriously together, for a little less than five months, after all. That was too soon, wasn't it?
"Do you want me to open one of the bottles of wine your friends gave us?" Derek asked, appearing in the doorway between the living room and kitchen.
Meredith bit her lip, thinking of studies she had read stating that moderate amounts of wine was probably not actually dangerous for babies in utero, but then her doctor-sensibilities won over and she shook her head.
"Not tonight," she said, quietly.
Derek's forehead wrinkled and he came over to sit on the sofa next to her. He put an arm around her. "You okay?" he asked, kissing her temple.
"Fine," she responded hurriedly. "Just tired. Shouldn't you be doing that cooking thing? The pasta sauce smells amazing."
'I didn't even know you liked it that much. I'll have to make it more often."
Meredith nodded, and as an afterthought when he stood to go back into the kitchen, she added, "And put in extra olives, okay?"
"Okay!" he replied. Meredith wondered when, exactly, she had even decided that she liked olives.
A few moments later, wanting to get as far away from her thoughts as possible, Meredith stood up and went into the kitchen to set the table. Not really paying attention to what she was doing, Meredith almost got out three plates.
When they sat down to eat, Meredith stared at her plate. The pasta smelled good, really good, and she was hungry, but the thoughts gnawing at the back of her brain made it harder to wrap the noodles around her fork and eat them.
"So, I have news," Derek said.
Meredith's head shot up, and she hesitantly said, "That's funny… so do I . You go first."
"I got a call today from a neurosurgeon I knew in New York. He's part of the organization committee for a conference there next month, and he wants us to present the results of the clinical trial."
Meredith's jaw dropped. The article on the trial had come out in the peer-reviewed journals several months ago, and she and Derek had had several patients come for the treatment. They had only lost one due to other complications since Beth's surgery. Some Neurosurgeons were planning on coming out to Seattle Grace in the next few months to see it done in the flesh, but that all still seemed surreal to her.
"Wow…. I can't believe it. That's fantastic!" she said, leaning over to take Derek's hand.
"I know. And it's all thanks to you, Meredith. Everyone's amazed that a second-year resident pulled this off."
"You pulled it off," Meredith insisted, "I just had the weird idea."
Derek shook his head. They had had this conversation before. "Well, whatever you think, they want both of us there."
""Wow," Meredith said again, she was pretty sure even her mother had not been presenting at conferences this early.
"And, it's in New York so… if you want of course… we could maybe… go see my family. They all really want to meet you."
Meredith felt her smile falter, but she tried to to let it show. Derek was always trying to think of a way for them to go meet his family, but they had all been so busy. She knew he felt guilty for having not spoke ot them for so long, after Addison.
"That sounds great," Meredith said, finally, then took a bite of her pasta.
"Are you sure?"
"Definitely. I want to see where you came from."
"Okay. But only if you want to. Mom will love you, you know."
Meredith laughed. "Like Nancy loved me?"
Derek shrugged. "Well, my mom's nicer. And if things don't go well, we don't have to go back any time soon."
Until your mother insists on seeing her grandchild.
"Now, what was your news?"
Meredith paused, mid-bite. "Um… you know what? I don't even remember. It must not have been too important."
A/N Review please! I was really excited by the amount of reviews for the first chapter. Are you guys just in Grey's withdrawal like I am? How many times have you watched the finale? Be honest!
I know, pregnancy is done a lot. Blame Meredith and Derek for planting this story in my head. I promise, it'll be different than others. Meredith and Derek still aren't all healed and I plan to deal with that.