July brought a heatwave to San Fransisco. At 32 weeks, Meredith was huge, uncomfortable, and couldn't stop sweating despite the air conditioning in the house and the hospital. All she wanted to do was bathe in a bath full of ice, or go swimming in an ice cold pool. Hell, the beach would be cold enough, but there was no way pregnant Meredith could manage to get two kids and herself down to the beach.
The depression had lasted longer than she had wanted it to, but Mere was glad that she hadn't needed to take either of the pills at any point. It had been tough – more like one of the more difficult things in her life – to pull herself out of the depression, but she had been able to do it. She was strong. She was a survivor. She endured. She kept repeating those three things to herself every day, every moment she felt her hard exterior cracking. She absolutely did not want to go back to that dark and twisty depressive phase, and yet part of it still clung on to her, like a leech; a parasite that was slowly sucking her life-sustaining blood supply and sending her into a cold, paralyzing void of nothingness.
She threw herself back into surgery, despite the fact that she was in her third trimester and starting to get extremely uncomfortable doing daily things. Surgery was getting harder, with her baby bump making it a bit difficult to get as close to the patient as possible but she managed somehow. The high of fixing someone's brain, of removing inoperable tumors, of giving hope where there once was none – that was what she lived for these days, Derek always on her mind. She had fallen in love with a Neuro god, and she had fallen in love with Neuro. Derek's legacy. It had to be carried on. She was only a fellow in Neuro but she already had ideas to pick up where he left off. She had all of his medical journals and hundreds of notebooks of his research, and she knew exactly what to do – it just had to wait until Baby Shepherd was born.
As the days grew hotter, Meredith grew more and more miserable. She was tired, she was pregnant, she wanted to be snuggled up to Derek with Zola and Bailey watching Zola's latest favorite movie. Instead she was pushing herself to her limits, having Braxton-Hicks contractions every few days, but she felt like wonder woman. No patient had died under her watch in weeks, and she was damn proud of that.
One day, however, the dam finally broke. The kids had been difficult that day, on one of her only days off in who knew how long, and she was at the end of her rope. All she wanted to do was scream at the top of her lungs as both children pushed her over the edge. It wasn't just a big thing, more like a million small things that just kept piling up throughout the day. By dinnertime, while Meredith was making homemade mac and cheese, the kids were whining and begging for things. Meredith was slamming around pots and pans, before finally serving herself and the kids, who of course whined that they didn't like mac and cheese,and could Zola please have pizza, oh and Bailey wanted peanut butter and jelly? Meredith tried not to let how grumpy and angry at the kids she was, but as soon as they were finished she hauled them up to the bath, and quickly tucked them into bed before returning downstairs to the mess she made.
She wasn't sure of how much longer she could do this by herself. Two kids and another one coming in eight weeks, give or take. That was…a lot. More than a lot. Dammit, Derek was supposed to be here with her for this!
Their house was close to the bay and she could hear the fog horns off the ferry boats and it brought a smile to her face. She unlocked the door to the back deck which gave off a great view of the bay, where she could watch the sun setting and the ferries go back and forth. But for once this week, there was no sun, but instead grey clouds hanging slow and she smiled even more. A big, fat raindrop fell on her cheek and she looked up at the sky, longing for the clouds to open up and just wash everything away.
And that they did. Meredith stood on the deck until her clothes were clinging to her slender, pregnant form, her face tipped up to the sky with a smile. She couldn't explain it but she felt so close to Derek in this moment. The ferry boats, the rain…normally she would be depressed, curled up in her bed in a fit of misery, but she wasn't. It was almost as if the rain was cleansing, and washing away the pain and hurt of the past eight months, as if he was telling her that it was okay to live her life and be happy, because she deserved to be happy. This evening was perfect with the rain, the ferry boats a backdrop and she couldn't help the smile that spread across her face, remembering her last words to him. "It's okay, Derek. You can go now. I love you." In this moment she truly felt the weight and meaning of her words. He was gone. She knew that. He wasn't going to come back. She knew that as well. The best thing she could do from this point on was to move forward, one step at a time.
It was okay if those steps were baby steps, right? That was all she could handle right now, plus she couldn't move all that fast. Baby steps. Putting one foot in front of the other every day. No looking back and dwelling on the past. She had a huge future in front of her, albeit not the one she and Derek had originally planned, but she had a future. It was up to her to make something out of it, it was up to her to become the person she wanted to be.
That night on the deck in the pouring rain, watching the ferry boats blinking in the bay, she felt something that she hadn't felt in nearly eight months. Hope.
Acceptance was the very thing that saved Meredith Grey from herself.
