Author's Notes: Thank you SO much for all the lovely feedback - you guys have made my day :) I also wanted to say thanks to my beta readers, my editor, and everyone else who's helped me get this story into fine fighting form. Seriously, you all rock!
Week two.
When Maggie brings the kids home in the early evening on day seven, a Sunday, Derek is sitting on the couch in plain view of the doorway, resting his weak leg while he looks at the pictures in an issue of National Geographic, though he's blinking, and he seems like he's having trouble focusing his eyes. Meredith doesn't draw attention to him, because she thinks having two excited children bouncing all over him might be a bit too overwhelming for him to process when he's already a little tired.
Bailey turned two years old only weeks before the accident, and though he knows his dad from visiting the rehab center every week, and he calls Derek Dada by rote, he doesn't have the kind of bond with Derek that Meredith wishes he had. He doesn't seem to care much that his father is home, and he toddles off to play with his blocks and his cars.
Zola, though, was four, and she's always been a daddy's girl. The second she's over the threshold, she freezes. Her eyes widen.
She looks up at Meredith, who grins, and says, "Oh, boy, who's that?" in a soft voice.
Zola gives Meredith a bright smile full of baby teeth, and before Meredith can impress upon her daughter the need for quiet, Zola's off like a rocket. "Daddy!" she shouts as she runs as fast as her little legs will carry her. Derek even doesn't have time to put his magazine down before he has an armful of, "Daddy! Daddy!" wriggling in his lap, and the magazine gets smashed and wrinkled between them. Meredith gets a lump in her throat watching the reunion.
"Hello, Zo," Derek says. He doesn't seem disturbed. He gives his daughter a tight hug and a wobbly grin, and then he looks at her like she's his world in that moment. "How … day?"
"Aunt Maggie took us to the zoo!" Zola says. "We saw lions. And tigers! And bears! And!"
Maggie laughs from the threshold. "And The Wizard of Oz."
Derek looks like a lot of this has flown over his head, but he gives Zola a hesitant smile nonetheless, and he says, "I like lions. They … f-favorite … animal." Meredith thinks Derek might be lying, considering he didn't know what a lion was before last week. Or … maybe he isn't. Maybe, the stuffed animal triggered a memory. Meredith's not sure what Derek's favorite animal was before the accident – it's something that never came up in conversation. She makes a mental note to ask Carolyn for the sake of sheer curiosity. But that doesn't matter, now. What matters is that he's perpetuating this maybe-lie to have a conversation with his bubbly, bouncing, excited daughter, and that's … everything. "What your fav … favorite?" he says.
"Ponies!" Zola says. "Ponies. I like ponies. I have a lot. Wanna see?"
Meredith winces. Zola isn't underestimating. She has a lot of ponies. What feels like a truckload, even. She watches My Little Pony like it's her favorite must-see soap opera, and she collects all the toys. She has as many ponies as Bailey has Matchbox cars.
"You have … ponies?" Derek says, sounding a little bewildered.
"They're toys," Meredith interjects before he can imagine they have a stable full of livestock in the backyard that she hasn't shown him, yet. "Little ones."
"Oh," he says. He grins. "Yes," he says to Zola. "Show me."
Zola climbs off him and tugs on his pant leg. He gets the hint. He grabs his cane and struggles to his feet. He's tired, and he's limping more than usual, but he follows Zola to her room with an excited, bright look that Meredith loves to see.
Maggie visits for a while before she leaves. They drink coffee in the living room and talk while Bailey plays obliviously on the rug at their feet. After about an hour, neither Derek nor Zola has come back to the living room. After Maggie departs, Meredith puts Bailey to bed, and she finds Derek and their daughter in Zola's room. Their backs face the door. Derek is lying on his belly on the rug next to Zola, cane resting beside him at his hip, and they're playing some sort of game with the ponies.
Zola is a bit of a bossy playmate, and Meredith hears a, "No! You gotta rescue Pinky Pie!"
A pause follows. Derek parrots, "Rescue?" Meredith can tell he has no idea what this means, but Zola seems happy to have any kind of response, happy just to have Daddy.
"Yeah, we gotta save her," Zola specifies.
"Oh," Derek says. "Which … which …?"
"That one," Zola says, pointing to a pink pony dangling off the side of the bed by a hairband.
She gallops her purple pony in that direction. Derek copies her and chases with his orange one. He seems to be doing well with mimicry, even if he doesn't necessarily get what's going on.
Meredith wishes she had a camera, but she settles on pulling her phone from her pocket and snapping a few shots, until she has to stop and wipe her face with her hands because things are getting blurry. Her chest is tight, and the smile tugging at her lips refuses to be tamped. Because she has her family. All of them. And all of them are okay.
The door to Derek's bedroom stays shut all the next morning, and Meredith keeps catching Zola hovering by it, looking like she's debating walking into the room despite the barrier. The fourth time Meredith catches her, this debate has graduated into execution, and Zola's hand is on the doorknob when Meredith sweeps her up and carries her back to the living room, where Bailey is playing. Meredith sighs as she sits down on one of the chairs, cuddling Zola in her arms. "Zola, when the door's shut, you need to leave Daddy alone. Okay?"
"But why?" she says.
"He gets tired," Meredith says. He was tired last night before Zola came home, and then he spent more than an hour playing with her, which took a lot of intense focus on his part. By the time he wandered to bed, he was monosyllabic and just about dead on his feet. "You need to let him sleep."
"Why?" Zola says.
"He hurt his head," Meredith says. "Remember? We've talked about this."
But Derek enters the room before Zola can reply. Meredith glances at the clock. He's slept until a little after noon. His eyes are bright, and he looks refreshed. His limp is almost gone again, and he smiles when he sees them all in the living room. "Good morning," he says.
"It's not morning," Zola says.
Derek takes this correction in stride and says, "You're right."
Bailey, who's been pushing blocks around on the floor, looks up and smiles. He toddles to his feet, wanders to Derek, and raises his little hands in the air. "Dada, pick up?" he says.
Derek grins. He shifts his cane to his weaker side – his right side. He bends down and swipes Bailey up with his left arm – his strong arm – to settle Bailey against his waist. Bailey giggles at the sudden elevation change and surveys the room from his higher vantage point. Derek doesn't try to walk like that. He holds the kid in his left arm and clutches his cane with his right hand. Meredith suspects he can't support his weight to do anything other than what's needed for balance like that, but Bailey seems more than happy.
"How are you?" Derek says to his son.
Bailey grins. "Payin' bocks. Wanna pay bocks?"
Derek stares blankly for a moment. "… What?" he says.
Bailey starts to wriggle, and Derek puts him down. Bailey moves back to the messy pile of blocks in the middle of the floor. "Pay bocks!" Bailey demonstrates. He starts stacking.
Derek looks down to the rug, a grin spreading across his face. "Sure." He drops to his knees, and then sits on the floor to play with his son.
Bailey's down for a nap, and Zola, who doesn't take naps anymore, but is still over-excited by the Daddy's home, Daddy's home, Daddy's home of it all, managed to run herself into exhaustion and conk out on the floor in the living room between rounds of hide-and-seek. The house is quiet for the first time since Derek woke up at lunchtime, and Derek seems to be relishing the fact that it's just the two of them for a few minutes. Him and Meredith. He hasn't gotten a play break until now, and she thinks he might not make it much past sunset before he crashes for the night.
Since the pancakes, Meredith has been teaching Derek how to make things. She's taught him how to make soup. And toast. And spaghetti. And macaroni and cheese. And Hot Pockets. She's going against the health-food grain kind of like a hammer smashes nails, but she doesn't know any healthy foods to teach him beyond one chicken and green beans thing, and he's gobbling up her entire recipe repertoire as fast as she can regurgitate it to him.
He's good at cooking, which is when she realizes that, while the accident almost decimated his language center, he's still good at doing things. His spatial IQ seems almost unaffected. She doesn't know why she never noticed before, given that he figured out how to use a television remote before he could speak in full sentences, and he was flipping pancakes like a pro after one bad try, even with his non-dominant hand. All he needs is one or two demonstrations on how to do or use something foreign to him, and he's fine.
"How this?" he says as he puts a steaming plate down in front of her.
The plate is covered in nachos, over which he dumped a can of chili and grated cheese, and then microwaved it until the chili and cheese were all warm and gooey. All she did was hand him chips, a can of chili, and a bag of cheese, and he did the rest by himself. She picks up a messy chip. A stringy, stretching trail of cheddar narrows to a hair's width before it snaps. She takes a bite, and the crunch is marvelous.
"This is great!" she says, and she sighs, enjoying this dietary sin for all it's worth.
He sits across from her. He rests his chin on his hands, and he stares at her, a small grin twitching at the edges of his lips.
She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. A reddish streak of chili is pasted on her skin when she pulls her hand away. He's still watching. "What?" she says. She grabs another chip.
He shrugs. "You're pretty."
Her eyes widen as her teeth sink into a layer of cheese and chili and pulverize the chip underneath. She rushes to chew the rest and swallow. "What?" she says, dumbfounded. "I'm what, now?"
Which is the wrong thing to say, because he blushes, and he looks away, and, well, crap. He pays her a compliment, and she acts like he's not speaking English. Which he runs with as truth all the way to Mortification Land. Her mind races as she thinks of how to fix this. She thinks she's okay, since he's the one who started it.
She lets her sexiest grin slide into place, and she stares at him through her eyelashes. "I like the way you look, too," she says. "You're handsome, you know."
He meets her gaze with his blue, blue eyes, and she lets herself admire the view. His eyes narrow in a sly way, and his easy smile stretches wide again. He seems very cat-caught-the-canary. If this were before the accident, she would swear she was looking at a classic Derek, I'm stripping you naked in my head, and I like it, look. But that was before, and he hasn't kissed her since that first time, and she doesn't want to hope, yet. She won't let herself.
Instead, she basks, enjoying the moment for what it is. Another piece of her second chance with a man who, by all rights, should be dead. A chance she really doesn't want to screw up.
"Daddy, look at this!" Zola says.
It's just after lunch, on the second full day with the kids, and Derek and Bailey have been exerting their artistry with crayons for about fifteen minutes. Bailey is making an absolute mess of a Tyrannosaurus rex. He's scribbling across the page with bright red slash marks, and he's not even trying to keep the color inside the lines. Derek's drawing of an elephant is a lot more neat, not one stray scribble of color in the wrong place, and he's chosen colors that are appropriate – gray for the elephant, green for the grass, blue for the sky, and yellow for the sun.
"Daddy!" Zola repeats, a bit more impatient this time. "Daddy, look."
Though it takes him a moment, Derek pulls his focus away from the coloring book Bailey has given him. Zola has posed her dolls amidst an array of blocks. Meredith's not sure what Zola's pile of whatevers is supposed to be. A fashion show, maybe? She has no idea, and from the way Derek's eyes are narrowing, he's got no clue, either.
"Dada, gray crayon, peas," Bailey says.
But Derek's still trying to figure out the doll thing.
"Dada!" Bailey says, louder this time. "Crayon, peas!"
And Derek blinks. He shifts back and forth like he's getting agitated. He swallows. He tears his gaze from Zola's mystery thing and looks back at Bailey. Derek gives his head a little shake. "… What?"
Bailey holds out his hand. "Gray crayon, peas!"
Derek glances at the crayon in his hand. And then he looks around at the table like he's trying to find something, but it isn't there. He shifts. Opens his mouth. Closes. Opens. Closes. "What …?" he says.
"Daddy, look at this one!" Zola calls.
Bailey stands up and leans forward, sounding more insistent. "Gray. Crayon. Peas!"
"I don't .…" Derek's breaths are tightening in his chest. "I don't .…" He looks around. Everywhere. Meredith can't figure out what he's trying to find, or she'd help. "I don't .…"
"Derek, are you okay?" Meredith says, but all her interjection seems to do is make it worse. He pulls his focus away from the crayons. He's shaking. Dissolving. Right before her eyes, and she's got no idea what's going on or what's causing it; Bailey's request was simple.
"Daddy, Daddy, look at this one!" Zola calls again.
"Zola, stop," Meredith says, biting her lip as Derek drops the crayon and folds in on himself like he's trying to block out all the noise. Maybe, it's the double-teaming, she thinks. He can't handle two separate things at once. "Stop for a second."
"Peas, I want crayon," Bailey says.
"Bailey, shh," Meredith says as she slides off the couch onto the rug where Derek's sitting, hunched and hiding his face in a tangle of his arms. She puts her hand on his back. He's trembling. "Derek, can you tell me what's wrong?" she says in a soft voice, but he flinches away from her and doesn't speak.
"Guys," Meredith says, looking at Bailey and Zola in turn. "Why don't you go play in Zola's room for a minute, okay?"
The kids grumble a bit, but Bailey grabs the gray crayon he wanted from Derek, scoops up his coloring book, and toddles off. Zola leaves her dolls behind, presumably because she has something else she'd rather do right now. With their departure, the room gets quiet like a wet blanket of snow has fallen everywhere.
Meredith doesn't speak. She waits, hoping Derek will snap out of whatever the hell this is. It's like … his circuits have just … overloaded or something. Too much confusing input, and kerplooey.
Derek takes almost ten minutes to unwind, but he's still shaky and frail-looking as he grabs his cane and gets to his feet. "You okay?" she says, frowning. "Can you tell me what happened?"
He blinks, and he looks at her for a long, long moment. An upset look crosses his face. "I don't .…" He swallows. "What …? What … is …?"
"What is what?" Meredith says. "Crayons?"
"Gray … crayon … peas."
Meredith blinks. Crap. Crap, crap, crap. She sees where this imploded, now. The double-teaming combined with a confusing language mishap. He thought peas meant literal peas. And the only way to parse that sentence would be to make "gray crayon" an adjective, or a noun in a series of nouns, which … makes no freaking sense, even to a person without brain damage, and tack on two impatient children bombarding him with requests, and god, damn it. Damn it. She didn't even think of that, or she would have stepped in sooner. She needs to be a better referee.
"When Bailey says peas, he means please," she says. She pauses. Lets Derek absorb. "He can't say the letter el very well yet."
"Oh," Derek says.
She watches him mouth the sentence again. He thinks for a moment. His face reddens as his look darkens with frustration and understanding in equal measure. He pulls a hand through his hair, his cane digging into the carpet as he shifts his weight back and forth in agitation. But he seems to be out of words right now. He doesn't say anything.
She has no idea how to help him.
Meredith closes her eyes as the spray from the shower tumbles down around her. She lets the warm curtain engulf her. Listens to the thunder in her ears as her hair soaks through. Inhales wet, steamy air. Exhales like a balloon losing air through a pinhole, slow and steady. Inhales. Exhales.
She tries to stay calm. Tries to stay ahead of the flood threatening to suck her into its undertow. Everybody's asleep, and she has the master suite all to herself because Derek's sleeping in his own room down the hall where he shouldn't freaking be, except for the fact that she messed up something not-about-sex, and she still doesn't know what, no matter how many times she reviews day one in her head, and none of this is going like she thought it would.
And then her lower lip quivers. Her eyes prick. A lump clogs her throat. Her chest aches. And her last attempt at holding everything in falls to ruin. This is her first time alone all day, her first time to breathe, and she crumbles. Hidden by the rush of the water, she sheds her grief undetected.
Being a referee for two children under six and a brain-damaged husband is exhausting. It's only been three days, and it's freaking exhausting trying to pay attention at every possible moment to what everybody is doing and how it relates to how Derek is acting, and then trying to determine whether to let things continue, or step in. She doesn't want to step in unless she has to, because she wants Derek and the kids to figure each other out and bond, but she's found she can't do anything else but sit nearby, watch like a hawk, and referee. She's afraid to leave them alone together.
Derek's already demonstrated that he'll let the kids steamroll him into overload, and they keep bombarding him with information that he can't interpret fast enough. He has a terrible time understanding Bailey, who still drops letters or adds new ones here and there in his pronunciations. And over the course of the day, confusion makes a downhill slide into frustration. By the evenings, he cringes at every shriek and giggle and loud noise. He's always had more trouble with words at night as mental fatigue slips in, but with the kids adding heaping piles to his mental strain, he's gets much worse as the hours in the day stretch, sometimes to the point that he's almost impossible to understand, and that frustrates him even more than he's already frustrated by that point.
It's a mother lode of a negative feedback loop.
She thinks this might have been a mistake. Trying to get him to live with the kids. He was so even-keeled the week before, when it was just him and her. And, now, he can't get through more than an hour or two without having a meltdown. He's trying so freaking hard. She can see it, she can see him trying to keep up with all the sensory input, trying to figure out what the hell Bailey is saying, and it's heartbreaking to watch as he slides toward a cliff inch by inch and then, wham. Off the edge. It's too much, and he shuts down.
This can't be healthy for him. It can't. And she has no idea how to freaking fix it. How does one explain to a three-year-old that his dad needs to be handled with care? Hell, how does one even explain it to a five-year-old? And nothing will fix the Bailey-Derek language barrier except time.
"Shh," she imagines Derek saying as he steps up behind her and into the spray. "It's okay. Everything will be okay."
She chokes on tears. Her throat hurts. "I miss you," she confesses.
"I know," he says. He pulls her into his arms, and he kisses her. "I'm here. We can get through this. I'm not going anywhere. I love you."
But then he dissolves, and she's left with nothing.
The kids have been home all of four days, and Meredith feels like she's sitting on a nuclear time bomb. Her head is fuzzy, and she's stressed. And Derek is stressed. And she'll try anything at this point. Anything to get the bomb to stop ticking.
She pulls the covers up to Zola's chin and leans down to kiss her forehead. Zola hugs the little stuffed lion Derek gave her. The nightlight gives the room a soft glow, even with all the lights off.
"Zola, we need to talk about something important, okay?"
Zola looks up with wide brown eyes. "What's wrong, Mommy?"
Meredith sits on the bed. The mattress sinks with her weight. She rubs her hand on Zola's chest. "Remember how I told you Daddy hurt his head?"
The lion shrinks as Zola squeezes it. "Yes."
"Remember how he didn't say anything for a really long time?"
Zola nods.
"He's had to learn how to talk all over again," Meredith says. "He has a lot of trouble figuring out what words mean, sometimes."
Zola doesn't seem to get where Meredith is going with this, and Meredith sighs. She squeezes Zola's arm. "If he doesn't answer a question right away, try to wait before you ask him something else, okay? I know it's hard, but, please, try. Give him some time to think."
Zola looks dubious.
Maybe, if Meredith dangles a possible reward for good behavior like a carrot .… "It'll really help him, and then maybe he'll be able to play more with you," she says.
"Okay, Mommy," Zola says. Her eyelids start to dip.
Meredith smiles. "Night, Zozo." She kisses her daughter, and she leaves the room.
Derek sleeps until around lunchtime again. After everybody's eaten, he and Zola watch an episode of Dinosaur Train. Zola sings along, loud and off key, and she fudges a lot of the lyrics with nonsense, but whatever. She has fun. Derek doesn't sing. He stares at the colorful spectacle with a kind of whoa-what-is-this awe that Meredith finds charming. He winces a little at some parts, but Meredith can't discern the cause, and he seems okay for the most part right now. Bailey has disappeared, though, which is odd, because Bailey loves this show, too. Meredith bites her lip. Zola's busy watching the television, so she's not likely to send Derek into a tailspin right now. Meredith thinks it's safe to go check on Bailey for a few minutes.
She finds him playing with his plastic dinosaurs, alone in his room. "Bailey," she says, "you're missing your dinosaur show. Don't you want to see the dinosaur show?" He shrugs and doesn't look up from marching his Triceratops across the rug. She strides into the room and sits next to him on the floor. She picks up the Stegosaurus, hoping to engage him a little. "Bailey, are you okay?"
He looks up at her. "When we go back to drum pace?"
Bailey and Zola are both enrolled in Gymboree classes, which Bailey calls the drum place. "We're taking a little break from that," Meredith says. "Just a little one."
"But I want drum pace."
Meredith brainstormed this with Melody, the nanny, for hours before bringing Derek home, and has everything worked out. Melody offered to look after Derek in addition to the kids, which Meredith has thanked her for profusely, since, while he needs much less supervision than a kid does, he can't quite be by himself right now, either. In order to make things easier on everyone, the kids are scheduled for all the fun out-of-the-house stuff when Derek will be at rehab. Meredith will be Derek's rehab shuttle, so Melody won't have to worry about him on the days she's already worried about driving the kids all over creation. Melody agreed it was a nice solution.
"When Melody comes back, she'll take you and Zola to the drum place," Meredith says.
Bailey looks up at her, a hopeful expression on his face. "And the curtoise pace?"
Meredith nods. Both he and Zola love the tumble-for-tots sessions offered by the local gym, which has turquoise-painted walls. "Yep, she'll take you to the turquoise place, too, when Daddy's in rehab."
Bailey frowns. "What's rehab?"
"Remember the hospital we've been visiting Daddy at?" Meredith says. "That's rehab."
"Oh," Bailey says. He sighs. "I miss drum and curtoise."
Meredith prances the little Stegosaurus after Bailey's Triceratops. "I know, but don't you want to spend time with Daddy, too?"
"Dada don't wike me."
"Of course, he likes you," Meredith says. "He loves you."
"He don't wisten to me."
A lump forms in her throat. "He listens to you, Bailey."
Bailey looks up at her with an upset expression. "But he don't answer me."
She sets down the dinosaur and pulls Bailey into her arms. "He has trouble understanding you. That's all."
Bailey sniffs. "Why?"
"Because he's learning to talk, just like you are, and he doesn't know a lot of words." She pulls her fingers through Bailey's hair.
"Oh," Bailey says.
"I know it's hard, but Daddy's trying," Meredith says. Her throat hurts, and she fights not to lose it in front of Bailey. "Daddy's trying so hard. You need to keep trying, too. Okay?"
"Mommy, I miss Medody," Bailey says.
"I know you miss Melody," Meredith says. "She'll be back in a couple weeks, after you get a chance to spend some time with Daddy."
Bailey sighs. "Okay."
"Why don't you go watch your dinosaur show with Daddy?" Meredith suggests, setting him on his feet and giving him a little nudge. "Or see if he'll play dinosaurs with you. I bet he'd love to play dinosaurs."
Bailey doesn't seem convinced, but he trudges out to the living room. Meredith lingers a moment, alone, fighting back a deluge. Her throat hurts. Her chest hurts. She takes three slow, deep breaths, and blows them out, forcing her composure back into place, but like a square peg in a round hole, nothing fits right. God, damn it, why is this so freaking hard?
Her talk with Zola about giving Derek a chance to think seems to help a little, but on day six with the kids, Derek gets so frustrated he throws a block. Not at the kids or anything, but it does leave a mark on the wall and Bailey in tears. Derek's panting, and he has his eyes closed, and he's rubbing his temples like he hurts.
"Sorry," he says. "I don't .… I don't .…" And then he grabs his cane and hobbles away to the refuge of his bedroom.
It's like … he's pushing himself too hard to be normal, and the children are happy to keep on pulling until he breaks, and Meredith's not sure how to fix this situation. It's not like there's a freaking guidebook. Is there?
She does a lot of Googling, trying to figure out what to do. Unfortunately, there is no easy answer, and the statistics she finds for families falling apart after one parent receives a brain injury are … frightening. Not frightening. Terrifying. The 20%-50% divorce rate pops out at her like a billboard, and she swallows. The uninjured spouse often feels neither single nor married, she reads, and gets frustrated the longer his or her emotional needs aren't met.
But that won't be her, she decides. That can't be her. She can't have survived all this freaking crap, Derek can't have survived all this freaking crap, only to have their well-deserved happily-ever-after fall apart on them. She won't let it. She shoves away the niggling worry that Derek hasn't kissed her again since she tried to get him to sleep in the same bed with her. She focuses on the nuclear bomb in her hands. The one she needs to defuse right now.