One good night of sleep wasn't going to fix this, and she knew it. His entire posture said it. The way he ate said it. He took small bites of his food, picked at the lettuce with the tines of his plastic fork. Every swallow looked like a feat fit for a gladiator. There was no pleasure in his eyes as he popped a cherry tomato into his mouth and chewed slowly. And tomatoes were the best part of the salad. He'd always saved the tomatoes for last before, but now they were just another obstacle on the way to an empty plate.
Meredith sighed. She'd been trying so hard since her discussion with Dr. Prahbu. She'd gone to him after Cristina had suggested it. The talk had been helpful, and she had been comforted to find out that in a lot of instances, the best solution really was just giving it time. Derek's reaction wasn't even considered post-traumatic stress disorder yet. What Derek had was acute traumatic stress. Acute. As warped as it seemed, it comforted her. Because acute was so much less scary to her than something that often ended up chronic. Acute was something you could work at, something that didn't keep dogging its way back into the picture, something you could whittle away and it wouldn't come back, because acute meant there was a definitive length to it, an end. Acute headache, give pain medication, it goes away. Acute fever, apply ice, it goes down.
She'd attacked the problem with that in mind, and it seemed so much less overwhelming to think of things in small steps. Small improvements. Small things she could do to help him begin coping normally.
And she had made progress. Some. With the apple. The actually sleeping thing. But two little steps of progress weren't necessarily the first in a long line of victories, and she didn't want to get overconfident.
Things were not okay yet.
Okay was a freakin' island in the Bahamas compared to this. And she ached, utterly ached for him. If she had been able to pull her life back through time, to rewind, reshape, she would have. If she could have traded with him, let him be the one to give up for a second, and her be the one to suffer afterward, she would have, she would have gladly traded. If she could have just made herself swim, made herself believe in the happy ending when she'd actually had one... Well, it was all a fantasy now.
Every time she looked at him, the pain confirmed to her how much she loved him. And at that very moment, love sucked. It crushed her, clawed her, pounded on her shoulders, made every waking thought an instrument of torture. She loved him, and just watching him, watching him eat like he'd lost all pleasure from his life, like he was just existing... It was a rack for her to hang from.
Derek's gaze shifted to something past her shoulder. His eyes narrowed, halting her thoughts. She started to turn to see what the big deal was, but a rush of motion out of the corner of her eye made her flinch away. The whole table shook as someone slammed an object down in front of them. Meredith blinked, surprised, and then took the sight in. Her mother's ugly gray urn sat there, right in the middle of the table, a foot from Derek's half-eaten salad.
She looked up. Izzie stood there, panting, a sprawling red blush across her face, her light blue scrubs and light pink undershirt totally incongruous with the fiery blaze in her expression. The whole cafeteria grew deathly silent. Meredith found herself not moving, frozen, and Derek sat there, his fork paused mid-fish for a lettuce piece.
"You two need to talk," Izzie said. "And you suck at it, so I'm helping."
She pointed at the urn and looked at Derek. "Dr. Shepherd, Meredith hid this from you, probably because she's so worried about you she doesn't want you to worry about her problems. But Meredith is a person. She deserves some consideration. She deserves to have her boyfriend there when she spreads her mother's ashes on the roof. Because Meredith is a very annoying person to be around when she mopes. And you're making her mope. Yes, she died. But you need to deal with it. She's back. You're getting a second chance, a second chance that some people would kill for, and you're screwing it up."
Then she turned and looked at Meredith, folded her arms over her chest and continued, "So talk already. Deal. Have lots more noisy, gross, naked sex. Whatever you have to do. But fix it."
Silence spread out around them in a noxious, wafting cloud.
Izzie stared at them, silent for a few moments more as her words sank in, and then she turned and walked away, steady, sure of herself, like she was positive what she was doing was so, so right, and couldn't possibly be found fallible in any way. For several moments, Meredith was too stunned to think, too stunned to do more than watch Izzie depart.
A pin could have dropped and everyone in the room would have heard it. The severity of what had just happened registered as though someone had stuck a note on a pike and jammed it through her ear. Meredith felt her stomach dropping into her shoes, and a sickening coil of dread took its place. Derek stared at her, his face an utter mask. "Meredith," he said. "What..."
She took one look at the crowd of gossipmongers in the room, nurses, doctors, other interns, orderlies, custodial workers, all over the place, all of them listening but pretending not to be. A well of rage boiled in her heart, snarling, straining to get out, to pour out of her with words. She stared at the direction Izzie had darted off, finally able to think again, but Izzie was already gone, and the door that had been her exit strategy swung shut with a thud, leaving Meredith behind to deal with the mess. How... How could Izzie... When... What! Words abandoned her entirely.
She stood, her chair shrieking backward along the floor like a banshee, and grabbed the urn so tightly she thought she might break it, but she was beyond caring about stupid little details like that. With her other hand she clutched Derek's wrist, yanked on him. "Not here," she hissed. He dropped his fork and stumbled up from his chair just in time for her to drag him along as she stalked out of the cafeteria.
They passed through the halls, and everyone parted like the red sea before them as if they could sense her dripping fury. She pulled him into the on-call room and locked the door behind them, jerking the lock so harshly it protested at first.
Derek stared. His eyes darted to the ugly gray bundle still clutched between her white knuckles. Meredith stood there panting, trying to calm down, trying so hard but failing. Derek didn't need to deal with this right now. She didn't need to deal with this right now. She'd been okay, waiting for the right time to talk. Really, she had been. And this, this thing Izzie had done, this stupid urn that Meredith had stupidly hidden, they had conspired together, taken all her careful plans about small steps and torched them in an angry blaze. She'd been making progress, just a little, but she had been! She was going to flay Izzie alive when she got her hands on- Why had she done this! Even better, why had she done this at work in front of a hundred people?
But when she looked at Derek, she kind of had her answer. They'd fled to the on-call room to get away from the stares, the whispers. But now they were stuck, chained here, locked in this little room. And talking was going to happen, whether they were ready for it or not. The crowd had forced them into it, corralled them. There was no crowd at home. And they could have easily just done the denial thing like always. But not now. And even if they somehow didn't talk, everyone in the hospital would be whispering, whispering, whispering, and it would be impossible to ignore for long. It was rather ingenious, using the hospital's gossip network as a weapon. Ingenious and infuriating and nosey and unforgivable and, quite possibly, catastrophically damaging. She gritted her teeth.
"When did you..." Derek said, awkward, crumbling. His voice petered off and he never finished the question.
She closed her eyes, leaned back against the wall, breathed in, breathed out as she hugged the little urn. She could do calm. She could. Caaaalm. "Earlier this week," she finally said, her voice icy. She expected the yelling to start soon. He was Derek. He yelled. Their fights were always shouty, when they managed to talk enough to have them, but what she got instead broke her heart even more.
"You didn't trust me?" he asked. He sat down on the closest bed, which squeaked under his weight. But he didn't yell. Didn't particularly inflect much of anything.
"It has nothing to do with trust, Derek," she said. "It's about me thinking you might already have enough angst on your plate." The fight still hovered there, back in the corner of her mind, waiting to be let out if he changed his mind, but he remained this strange, beaten-down Derek, one that wasn't yelling or passionate. It scared her more deeply than any shouting ever could, and she felt her chest begin to pound with it, that quaking, strange fear.
"But you didn't even tell me," he protested. "Didn't let me decide."
"Look who's talking, Derek," she said, unable to stop herself from snapping, just that once. She sat down next to him on the bed and set the urn on the small, fluffy pillow. She leaned against him. He didn't protest, at least. "You can't sleep. You barely eat. I know it's because of me, but only because I'm not blind."
"That's not fair," he whispered.
She shrugged. "When is anything about us ever fair?"
"I would have been there for you, Meredith. When did you get her ashes? I would have... Are you... Are you okay? I thought you were okay. With your mother dying. You said..." His voice trailed away and for one precious moment, she read everything, all of his thoughts, stuck up there on his face like books on a dime store rack for her to pick and choose from. Why had he believed her? How could he have been so stupid? And why hadn't he been there? Yet another failure. Why, why, why.
"I'm fine, Derek," she said, wanting so badly to reassure him, and yet at the same time so overwhelmed with anger, frustration, and other things that she couldn't bring herself to stick with the mask. "Mostly. Okay, I'm not completely okay. But it's done. She's dead. She's dead, Derek, but you're sitting there still alive but dying by degrees, and I can't do much to help you if you won't talk. Don't make this about my mother when you're still here, still breathing. You're more important."
He looked at her like she'd sucker-punched him. He blinked. Frowned. Surrendered his face to his hands for a moment. Sighed. Looked back up at her. "I am not more important than you and your feelings, Meredith. I'm not. You could have... you could have talked. To me."
She shook, shook as sudden tension gripped her. She wanted to reach out and throttle him, to yell at him, to moan and scream and whine and ask why he was so utterly fucking dense. A sudden, lancing headache settled behind her eyes as she yanked it all inside and settled for a bitter snap, "That's a load of crap coming from you, Derek, and you know it."
"God, I'm just so tired," he replied. And he wilted. He dropped his face into his hands, propped his elbows on his knees, and sighed so heavily his entire torso ratcheted into an arc and then flat again with the effort of it.
"Why, Derek?" she asked, her fury gushing out of her like blood from a jagged, ugly wound, disappearing. She put her hand on his back, just to feel him there, to assure herself that they somehow weren't fighting, somehow weren't yelling about all of this like she had envisioned only moments ago. The warmth of his skin seeped through the back of his scrubs, and she let her palm soak it in. The throb in her head slowly leaked away. "Just talk to me. Please. You need it."
He laughed, a bitter, wretched sound like breaking glass. "I need it?"
"Yes!" she said. Her tongue pulled back in her mouth, and the back of her throat was agony as she tried not to start crying. She swallowed. "Do you think this is fun for me? Watching you torture yourself? Just let it out! Put it out on the table so we can look at this mess for what it is and maybe start cleaning it up."
"You think..." he began, but his voice fell away into silence, as though he'd lost his thoughts. He sighed again, and under her palm she felt him start to tremble. "You think that's all this is? A mess?" he asked.
"I don't know what it is, Derek," she said. "Because you won't tell me-"
He cut her off. "It's a fucking landfill, Meredith. I can't... I can't close my eyes," he said, his words tapering off into a tortured, wispy sob that made her want to fall apart right along with him.
"Talk to me!" she prodded. They stood there, together, together on the edge of the cliff, hands intertwined. Finally, he was peeling open, inch by slow inch at a time, and she wanted to jump and shout and cry all at once, but she settled for breathing in, breathing out, breathing in, breathing out, trying to stay calm while he found his voice, anything to not spook him out of it. She forced her anxiety away, stuffed it in the back of her thoughts like a forgotten leftover in the fridge, left behind to grow moldy and never be consumed.
He shook his head, back and forth, back and forth like some wounded animal getting ready to bolt. His eyes squeezed shut. And he started to pant, hyperventilate. She rubbed his back. Whispered shushing noises to him, tried to keep him calm enough to talk. Anything to get the words out. He just needed to get the words out, she thought, frantic.
The very first thing Dr. Prahbu had suggested when she'd gone to him and asked for tips was to get the victim to start the sharing process. Because once an event was shared, it started to lose some of its power to terrorize individually, started to become an element of a controlled environment that the victim could pick apart and analyze, safe, and warm, and knowingly away from harm. If Derek would only just...
"Every time I close my eyes I see you," he said, his voice dropping off into an abyss of silence. His lower lip began to quiver. He leaned forward, clenched his knees with his fingers with such ferocity that his hands shook and his knuckles leaked their fleshy tone. "Lying there... Dead. And I just..." The panting resumed. His muscles tensed in a rigid lock of sinew and flesh.
She touched his arm, gave him contact, leaned into him with her voice. "You just..." she prodded. Talk, talk, talk, talk, she sent through her stare, glared the words at him, as if it would help, as if it would beam the compulsion into his brain. She thought so hard that the stream of words became a roar, a pounding roar.
For a moment, time stretched to a torturous eon. Everything seemed to pause. Derek's grief hitched up into a sigh, and for that moment, that one elongated moment, he almost looked like he'd recollected himself, decided that talking wasn't going to work, that he wanted to bottle everything up some more. And then time constricted. He fell to pieces and began to rock, back and forth.
"I feel so powerless," he said between sucking, gasping, heaving sobs. "I get... I get why you did... what you did. I do. But... I keep... The way your hair floated... in the water... And I couldn't... God." He panted. Ran his hands through his hair in a worried, repetitive motion. "I just want... to be able to close my eyes again and not worry about the seconds I'm not there. I just want..."
She swallowed thickly against the pain, his pain, her pain. "You just want..." she said, taking his hand and squeezing it, trying to remind him that she was there, listening, that he wasn't alone, even as she sat there shaking, trying to figure out how to deal with the deluge herself.
His Adam's apple rolled down his throat as he swallowed, gasped, soaked his face in tears. "To not be reminded... of the one second I wasn't there... and never ever could be..."
She wrapped her arms around him and hugged him so tightly he grunted and her arms ached with the effort. He stared off into space, eyes red, skin puffy and blemished, face streaked with tears. He blinked and more tears spilled over.
"I'm just so tired," he said. He reached up with a shaky grasp and hooked his hands around her arms, began to rub the skin back and forth with the warm pads of his thumbs.
"I know," she whispered, and she started to cry right along with him. She released her grip and reached her palm up to his ear. She swept his head down onto her lap. He didn't protest, gratefully collapsed with her encouragement, lay there in a semi-fetal position. He gripped her other arm like a security blanket while she ran her fingers through his hair with the free one. "I know." She sniffled. "We'll work through this."
"Help me..."
The words nearly broke her. Broke her into little pieces of herself. A fresh well of tears stabbed the backs of her eyes and she wanted to break right along with him.
"I will, Derek," she said. "I'm here. I'm okay. I'm alive. We can deal with this. We just need-"
Derek's beeper went off. She pumped her fists at the air. "God damn it," she yelled, the words raking her throat with their guttural harshness, and her esophagus was suddenly a wasteland of sore and torn.
He groaned as he sat up. Then he pulled the beeper off his belt, looked at it, sniffling, wiping his face with his hands, blinking. "I have to take this," he said, his voice dull and rough and bleached of life. "It's a 911 page from OR 7."
"You can't, Derek. You can't go," she said, shocked that he would even consider it when just moments ago he'd been curled in her arms, his grief flooding out of him in a torrent. "You're a wreck. I'm a wreck. There's wreckage here."
He stood, swallowed, swallowed again as he raised his fist to his mouth and squeezed his eyes shut. He stumbled, only to catch himself on the wall. He panted, took in deep, cleansing breaths.
"I'll manage," he said, even as he stood there shaking. He brushed the back of his palm across his cheeks, smearing the wet mess of tears away, only to have more leak out. He grunted, coughed, a curdled little sound came from his throat, and he wiped the new tears away.
"Derek..."
"No," he said. He collected himself, swallowed several more times. He breathed in and out, and before her eyes, he slowly transformed himself into the cold mask he'd been walking around with for the past few weeks, the cold, tired, deadened mask. The only remnants of their talk were his eyes, which were swollen and red with pain that wouldn't just go away with carefully practiced breathing, no matter how good he was at hiding things away in a box.
"Just let me do this, Meredith," he said, his voice flat and dull and dangerous. He flexed his hands, his scalpel hand in particular. "I need to do something right now. I need to..."
Not feel powerless. The words were left unspoken, but she heard them nonetheless.
"You're not God, Derek," she said, the words bitter. She sniffled and wiped at her own eyes.
He crumpled just a little. "I still need to do this," he said.
And then he left.