A/N: Ok, wow, here we are at chapter 4! First off, I want to thank all of you who've left such nice reviews for my story. They really make me feel good. For those of you who haven't reviewed, I encourage you to do so. It only takes a minute, and we authors appreciate it so much! I'd also like to thank my betas, samsolace and AriaAdagio, for all their help. You guys are the best! Also, those of you who've read Aria's story Lightning Strikes Twice may notice a few details in this chapter that are similar. I assure you, I didn't steal them. I just have read the story so many times, I guess a few of the smaller details kind of migrated to my brain through sheer repetition. Any duplication is unintentional, but since it is there, all credit for them belongs to her. Everyone go read and review her stories, and Sam's!!! Ok, enough babble.
Disclaimer: If I owned them, would I be working two jobs? I think not. I just like to play with them; I'll put them back when I'm done, honest!!! Ok, on with the story!!!
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Testing the Water, chapter 4
"Shep, what are you still doing here?"
Derek's head snapped up as soon as the voice spoke, but it took him several minutes to focus on the figure standing in his office doorway. Richard Webber stood there, his coat on and a hat in hand, clearly on his way home.
"What?" Derek stopped and cleared his throat; it felt like he hadn't spoken in hours. Maybe he hadn't; he couldn't remember. "What time is it?"
"It's after 11," Richard told him. "And I know you were in early this morning. You should have gone home hours ago; why are you still here?"
Derek rubbed a hand over his eyes, not even bothering to stifle the yawn that overtook him. "I'm just finishing up the last of the paperwork on my cases from the interstate pileup yesterday morning." Scrawling his name across the last of the forms, he put them in an envelope for delivery in the morning and lurched to his feet. "I need to get home," he muttered, grabbing his briefcase and fishing for his car keys. The Chief followed him out of the office and waited while he locked the door behind him.
"So, how's Meredith doing?" Richard asked, a note of hesitancy in his voice, as they walked down the hall toward the elevator.
Derek frowned, shaking his head as he recalled the events of the last few days. "She says she's fine, but I'm not so sure," he admitted, the words coming easily in the comforting presence of his old professor. "I tried to get her to talk about things two nights ago, but she shut down before I could get very far. She had a really bad nightmare the same night, and then another one last night. She won't talk about them; she won't talk about her mother or the . . . the drowning, at all. I'm really getting worried, Chief."
"Well, if it were anyone else, I would say give her time," Richard mused as they boarded the elevator. "But I don't have to tell you that Grey women are stubborn, and Meredith having the childhood she did . . . she's not big on sharing."
"God, what did Ellis do to her?" Derek wondered aloud, watching the numbers blink down to the lobby. "How can one woman damage her own child so badly?"
"You have to understand, Derek; Ellis was a brilliant surgeon, but as a mother, she made a lot of mistakes," Richard explained. "Being a surgeon is easy; you're taught what you need to know, given a basic framework of techniques that you can improvise on when you need to. A child doesn't come with an instruction manual. Ellis did try, but it was just easier, a lot of the time, for her to hide in her work. Unfortunately, Meredith was the one to suffer; she learned early not to rely on anyone but herself, and that allowing herself to need someone or show vulnerability was a sign of weakness."
Derek was silent for a long time, letting Richard's words sink in. "So what do I do?" he asked finally, as they exited the hospital. It was one of Seattle's rare clear nights, and he let the twinkling stars soothe his jangled nerves. "How can I get Meredith to open up to me?"
"You're going to have to push her," Richard said with a heavy sigh. "It won't be easy; she's going to fight you pretty hard. I know you don't want to hurt her any more than she's already been hurt, but she needs this – in more ways than one – if she's ever going to start to heal. I would take her somewhere private where she can't run from you, and keep at it until you get through to her. It may be the only way to help her. Once she realizes that you aren't going anywhere, that you'll be there for the long haul, she'll be able to tell you what's wrong."
"Thanks, Chief." Derek smiled as he turned away, searching for the familiar shape of his car in the parking lot.
"One more thing, Shep," Richard suggested. "You might want to spend some time working out your own issues before you try to help Meredith with hers." Derek turned around, a puzzled look spreading over his face, but the Chief was already walking away, weaving through the few cars still left in the parking lot at that hour. Derek sighed as he turned back to finding his own car. Richard's last words whirled through his brain, again and again, and he was out of the parking lot and halfway to the ferryboat docks before he realized that he'd been moving on autopilot. He briefly considered turning back and heading home to Meredith, but his hands wouldn't turn the steering wheel in the right direction, so he kept going. Once he arrived at the docks, he got out, and sat down on a bench near the water's edge. The water was still and dark, broken only in the distance by a ferryboat moving across the far side of the bay.
My own issues . . . I have to deal with my own issues before I can help Meredith with hers. It made sense, but Derek had no idea where to start. He wasn't arrogant enough to think he didn't have any; he knew he did. Having one's girlfriend drown tended to create a whole boatload of issues, and he felt their weight in his heart. I can't move forward with this weight, he realized. I'm no good to my patients, to Meredith, and especially to myself, unless I can get rid of it. He tried to think, to lay all the issues out on the table, but his brain refused to cooperate. It kept circling around one word, one question, no matter how he tried to force it to do what he wanted. Why? Why didn't she swim? He suspected it had something to do with Ellis, and whatever she'd said to Meredith while she'd been lucid. Meredith had refused to say what that was, but it had to have had an impact on her actions that day. Maybe she gave something away, Derek thought. Maybe if I think back, I might remember something she said, or did, that might tell me what Ellis said to her. But where should I start from? When I got to the scene – no, there was more to the day than that.
"The beginning's as good a place as any, I guess," he said out loud, and forced himself to go back in time, back to the day of the ferry disaster, when it had all started. He thought about pulling Meredith out of the tub, trying to get her to talk about her mother, telling her he was her knight in shining whatever. He remembered going to work, hearing about the disaster, riding to the scene in the back of an ambulance. The sirens were so loud, he remembered. I'd wondered how the paramedics were able to stand the noise, and whether they even noticed when they had a patient in the back. I wish I'd never had to find out . . . He pulled his thoughts away from that track, and back to the accident scene.
The ferry had been so broken; it had hurt his heart to see it lying there, wounded, smoke and fire marring the graceful lines that had captured his imagination the first time he'd seen one. He'd moved through the mass of people quickly, triaging almost automatically, sending the worst of the wounded back to Seattle Grace. He remembered running into Meredith, a little blond girl clinging to her hand. Something about the look on Meredith's face as she'd helped him with one of the injured had brought the events of the morning back to him, and he'd tossed out the question without even thinking about it. Do you want to get married? And I haven't asked, and now we have a problem?
He'd been relieved when she'd frowned at him and said no, she didn't want to get married. It wasn't that he didn't want to marry her; he did. But they'd only known each other for less than a year, and with all the obstacles that had been thrown in their way – most of his own making, he knew – they had a lot of things to work through and overcome before he started thinking seriously about marriage. She'd said something about needing to get the little girl to the triage center, and then they had disappeared, before he'd been able to get anything more out of her. He'd stared after her as they had disappeared into the crowd, wondering for a moment. Then someone had called out to him, drawing his attention to another patient, and he'd been back in the thick of things.
How long until I noticed she was missing? Derek mused, staring at the water. How long was she in the water, all alone? There was so much going on, but I should have kept track of her. I should have remembered the bathtub; maybe if I had, things would have been different. Even as the thoughts crossed his mind, though, he knew better. The scene had been so chaotic, there had been no way for one person to keep track of another. You couldn't have known, he told himself firmly. Even with the bathtub, there was no way to predict what happened. No one could have known . . .
He hadn't known how much time had passed, but all of a sudden the crowds parted, and there she'd been. The little girl who'd been with Meredith, clinging to her like Meredith had been the only sane thing in a world gone mad, had been standing all alone in the middle of everything. As soon as their eyes had locked, he'd known something was wrong. After a bit of prodding, she'd taken off, and he had followed. As they'd drawn nearer to the edge of the pier, his bad feeling had only increased. Finally, they had been standing by the water, and he'd asked for the final time: Where is Meredith? The girl's hand had risen, ever so slowly, to point out into the water, and Derek had felt his breath stop in his throat.
He couldn't remember shedding his jacket and diving into the water. The shock of the utter cold slamming into him had been the first thing his mind had registered, but he had shrugged it aside as unimportant as he'd gone deeper, struggling to peer through the murky waters, searching for any sign, any hint, that would have led him to Meredith. It hadn't been until his third time down that he had finally seen it: a splotch of pale blue, almost lost in the darkness. He'd had to force his muscles to work, to propel himself down, close enough to grab onto her hand. He'd forced himself not to recognize how limp her arm was in his grasp, how her hand had never moved to grab onto his arm or even twitched at all, as he towed her back to the surface. Even as waterlogged as she'd been, she'd weighed almost nothing in his arms as he ran for the nearest ambulance, amazed that he could run at all after the repeated dives in such cold water.
The ambulance ride had been a blur; the sirens that had seemed so loud on the way out became nothing more than background white noise. All he'd been able to focus on had been compressing Meredith's chest, trying to get her heart beating, trying to get air into her lungs. The feel of her cold lips as they'd met his in the hollow kiss of mouth-to-mouth contrasted so sharply with their usual warm response that it had made him nauseous, but he'd forced it down, focused on nothing but the need to save her life. But then they'd arrived at Grace, and he'd been pushed aside, thrown out of her trauma room, and she'd still shown not even a flicker of life. Three hours later, after countless rounds of drugs and procedures and the attentions of practically every surgeon at Grace, she'd finally come back.
How did it get to that point? he wondered. Why didn't she swim? He knew she could; they'd gone swimming several times in his lake, and she'd beaten the pants off him every time he'd talked her into a race. She was an excellent swimmer; he could still remember the conversation they'd had after one of those races, just after they'd finally gotten back together . . .
"Ok, fess up," Derek said, hoisting himself up onto the dock where Meredith waited with two towels in hand. "You're part mermaid, aren't you?"
Meredith laughed as she handed him his towel. "Not exactly," she said as she pulled her hair over her shoulder and worked briskly at it with her own towel. "Don't tell me you're a sore loser," she teased.
"Not at all," Derek protested. "I've been beaten before – mostly by Mark." He allowed the fond memory of horsing around with his best friend in the community pool to overwhelm the bitterness that still surfaced whenever he thought of Mark, and continued. "But you'd put even him to shame; where on Earth did you learn to swim like that?"
"I didn't have any kind of special teacher," Meredith shrugged. Sitting down on the dock, she draped her towel around her shoulders and dangled her feet in the water. She was silent for a long time, long enough that Derek began to worry. He sat down next to her and watched the emotions play over her face. "My dad used to take me swimming all the time," she said finally, her voice so quiet he could barely hear her. "I barely remember, but there were lots of pictures in a photo album that my mother had hidden away in a closet. I found it just after we moved to Boston; I was exploring the new house while my mother was at the hospital – again. Swimming became a way for me to remember him, to keep him close in my heart, even if he was far away physically. So I kept swimming, and I guess I've just gotten better over the years."
"She knows how to swim; she's a good swimmer," Derek mused to himself, recalling his words to Addison, just after she'd pulled him out of Ellis Grey's hospital room. "So, why didn't she?" This was it, he realized; this was what it all came down to. If he was ever going to put his issues to rest over Meredith's drowning, he needed to hear the answer to that question, and there was only one person who could give him that answer. Getting up off the bench, he was turning toward his car when his phone rang.
"Dr. Shepherd, thank God!" The panic in Izzie's voice stopped Derek in his tracks. "It's Meredith. She's having another nightmare, and we can't wake her. We've tried everything, and she just won't come out of it. She's screaming for you; you need to come home now!"
"I'm on my way, Izzie." Derek ran for his car, barely registering his actions as he headed back for Meredith's house. "Keep trying to wake her; I'll be there soon."