CH 25 His Greatest Fear

Two weeks. Two weeks had gone by since Meredith Grey had come back into his life, and Derek had no idea what the hell he should do.

From a certain angle, he supposed it was simple enough. He was madly in love with her. She was the love of his life. He wanted to marry her, have children with her, and ultimately, when they were both old and grey, die peacefully in her arms at the age of one hundred and ten.

But then, things got much more complicated.

It wasn't even that she didn't love him. Because apparently, that she did was blatantly obvious. For Mark anyway. But in this case Derek was going to decide to trust his friend, because things were complicated enough without him doubting that.

Oh, things were complicated all right. And it didn't help that Meredith had apparently become an expert in avoiding during her five years in the army, a feat that she had not been without talent in before. Sure, there was only so much she could manage to avoid him considering they both worked in neuro, and he was head of the department, but she managed pretty well all the same. It had only taken her a day to switch all her shifts in Trauma to coincide with his schedule, so that she was in neuro when he was free.

When she was on-call, even if he wasn't able to see her too much -unless by chance they were on the same case-, things weren't as bad, because he at least knew where she was, and her operating in neuro during his free time enabled him a lot of opportunities to watch her operate.
But the rest of the time, Meredith might as well have been a ghost, or never come back to Seattle in the first place.

This was facilitated for her by the fact she was also no longer an intern, which made it harder to request her, and to expect her to have to answer his every page.
If she was busy, or pretending to be, she could easily send someone else, with the only exception of 911 pages. But these usually meant there was no room for social hour anyway, as they signified there was an emergency to run.

Having modified her schedule, it had only taken her one more day to grasp the initiative of not eating in the cafeteria, and when she had seen him circling her it, her office as well. He made it a point to leave steaming cups of coffee there every morning, just the way she liked it, but usually ended up seeing it half an hour later, almost empty, in Miranda Bailey's hand, sharing the fate of all the other cups of coffee that had preceded it.

Derek was spent, anguished and at a loss of what to do now. Their encounters, painfully scarce, were all too brief and yet of such intensity that each second of them left him reeling for hours afterwards, unable to collect himself and focus on his mission to get her back.
Even now they haunted his memory, every detail etched permenantly on the walls of his troubled mind, each sensation experienced amplified tenfold in the confines of his brain…

FLASHBACK

Derek sighed as he entered the elevator.

He had a rather challenging surgery to prepare for in about an hour, but his thoughts were entirely elsewhere. He had only seen her twice in the last few days, once being only a glimpse of her from afar as she rushed an emergent patient to the O.R. The second had lasted a bit longer, but had not gone well, her eyes avoiding his own, her voice quavering slightly, her responses short and detached, ignoring any attempt from him to establish that connection that came so naturally between them.

He stood there shaking his head in exasperation and anguish at her blatant desire of disassociation from him, watching absentmindedly in his meditaion the elevator door starting to slide shut. Just then, an arm slid through blocking the closure of the elevator car, and a voice, the voice that was music to his ears, rang in the small space

"Hold up!"

Barely seconds passed, and he heard her breath hitch, no doubt at the realisation of who she would be sharing the ride with, the atmosphere at once stifling and tense.

As their looks crossed for the briefest of moments, he caught, amid her watery exhausted eyes the regret at it being too late for her to exist the elevator. He had wanted to resist, contain himself, offer her one moment of peace from his inexhaustible attempts to get through to her. But he couldn't. She was there, in front of him, gorgeous despite her pain, despite her obvious emotional fragility. Her messy pony tail, the slightly stained dark blue of her scrubs- probably from the exertion of the morning in the ER-, her slightly sagging limbs...all lent to her an ethereal beauty, like she was about to disintegrate altogether, blown away in a wisp of smoke.

But even with that, she was as intoxicating as ever.

He could not stop himself. From behind where she had settled in the middle of the car, he advanced to stand at her shoulder, barely the breadth of a hair between them; the warmth of his unsteady breath tickling her neck. He was so close; he could hear the pound of their hearts, seemingly in sync, adrenaline more than blood pulsating through their veins.

So close yet so far away.

He couldn't take her in his arms as he ached to do so. He couldn't wrap himself around her and huddle her to his chest, tracing soothing circles on the smooth plane of her back. He couldn't turn her around with a firm and gentle hand, and lean over to cover her mouth with his own, letting his tongue sensually explore the inviting moist cavern behind her soft lips. The physical proximity yet invisible barrier between them tortured him; unable to feel her soft warm skin under his palm; the frantic vibration of her rapid pulse resonating throughout her being as he held her.

Unable to stop himself, he leaned his mouth down near her neck, and in the low husky voice that had always been his for her, spoke gently in her ear.

"I miss you."

Her breath, already significantly altered, had constricted, and he had felt the shiver of her discomfort spread to him. He couldn't see her face, and he knew she would not turn, but he did not doubt she was crying. His own eyes were misty with unformed tears.

"I can't"

The statement, spoken in a slightly wavering voice, was followed by a deep exhale of equally wavering air, as if just getting those two words out had cost her unimagable effort.

And then almost as abruptly as it had begun; the endless elevator ride came to an end, the fateful ding of the door opening interrupting the bewitching tension of the parallel plane of existence they had just been in.

END OF FLASHBACK

He hadn't been surprised since then, to remark her absence in the elevators, or even to glimpse her hurried entrances and exits in the the stairwells all day long, their having evidently been integrated to the long list of places she was now avoiding.
But it was different with the elevators. They somehow made the apparent gulf between them seem all the more insurmountable.
Elevators, which in his mind, and he was certain, in hers, had always been a part of them. Of who they had been together.

Mark frowned at his friend's face etched with worry. Already knowing the answer, he still asked

"What is it man?"

Derek looked at Mark Sloan as if from afar, tone distant and weary when he replied half heartedly, yet in a voice full of aching emotion

"Meredith."

It was always Meredith.

Mark gave him a sad smile. "You can't give up man. You can't."

The reformed man-whore had lost track of the number of times he had repeated those words to Derek in the last few days. But he himself was starting to despair at the situation. Derek was, if possible, even more broken than during her disappearance. He knew he had to do something but couldn't think what, especially since Derek, the main party concerned, was at a complete loss himself.

"I'm not" Derek answered, voice still weary. "I can't. I need her."

He sighed dejectedly, his breath revealing mixed anguish, sadness, love, and vulnerability. Derek might be turning Meredith into a mess, but the situation was reversed as well.

There was her mysterious recovery, for one. He didn't know what to think about that. What it could mean. What could have happened. Before, when the military transfer had been a nameless face, it had hit him professionally as a threat to his department, taking on a surgeon that clearly wasn't on the top of his game. But when it was Meredith, it hit him personally. To his very core.

Then, there was the fact, inevitable, that having come to recover, she would eventually leave. Whether or not he managed to reconcile with her, he was set to lose her all over again. He didn't think he had the strength for that. But he knew there was no point going against that, nothing could stop him from waiting for her, even if she left, if it all came to nothing. And then, lastly, irrevocable, there lay the third concern. His third fear, his greatest fear.

He would wait for her. But could he really expect her to wait for him?

He shook his head.

"What?" asked Mark again, sensing the resurge of active torture in his brother's agitated mind.

"I'm scared, Mark" he said honestly, after a while.

Mark looked at him, startled. "Scared, of what?"

"That it's too late. That I'll be too late."

He shook his head again and downed the last of his scotch, mourning his glass' emptiness. She wasn't even here at Joe's. A part of him felt that would have been too easy, but it felt wrong. Joe's was where she went when Derek screwed up. Or was in the past anyway.

"I'm not giving up. Never will. I'll wait forever if I have to. But..."

His voice stilled, still hesitant to admit the thought to his friend, to himself even, afraid that voicing it out loud would hit him with a fatal blow.
Mark was patient, and gently encouraged his friend on, seeing the difficulty yet absolute need to confide his troubles to someone.

"But?"

Derek sighed, half addressing Mark, half ranting to himself, asking questions with no answers.

"I mean, what if;…I'm ready to wait. All my life if I have to. But…" he struggled with his next words "what if while I'm waiting, someone else comes along?" he shuddered at the thought, finally letting it out, letting Mark know his deepest fear; the fear that had driven him to want to get drunk.

Mark looked at his brother as if he had grown two heads.

"That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. And my job constitutes in teaching interns."

Derek glared. "I'm serious Mark." He thought back t that picture he'd seen in her office, her and Rivers, laughing. The jealousy raged in him again, a violent heat tearing at every inch of him, amplified by the alcohol he had just ingested. "What is there's already someone else?"

The bile seemed to rise to his mouth, the thought of any other man with her. Kissing her, touching her…his face contorted in disgust and he felt sick to his stomach at the thought. "I can't stand it Mark, and the worst part is, there's absolutely nothing I can do about it."

He laughed bitterly. "I can't do anything, because I have no right. I broke her. If I can't fix this, if I'm too late, it's my fault. I'm scared to death that she'll move on and it'll be my fault." His voice once more filled with anguish as he concluded "And I don't know if I can live with that"

"Man you can't think about it right now. You have a lot to make up for, yes. She's a complete mess and she doesn't want to love you right now, but she does. She wouldn't be trying so hard if she didn't. But I can assure you Grey isn't looking anywhere else. However much she won't admit it, she only has eyes for you."