Author's notes: Well, here it is. Part 35. This is only half of the original stuff I had planned for it, but it's huge. And I hope you agree it was worth the wait :) I know everyone is probably busy waiting in line for Harry Potter, but, well, hope you enjoy this in your spare moments :)
Four minutes and thirty-seven seconds.
Meredith had allowed herself four minutes and thirty-seven seconds to freak out in the car after she'd slid into the seat, panting, out of breath from the rush and race of getting out of the building. She hadn't stopped to change. She hadn't stopped to tell anyone where she was going. She hadn't stopped. Period. But, when she'd finally settled behind the steering wheel and started fumbling to put the keys in the ignition, the relative pause had been enough to make her sniffling become sobbing.
For four minutes and thirty-seven seconds.
Derek was sick. Derek was not just PCS sick. He was dying sick. Imminently dying sick. And, if he hadn't had that appointment, she'd wondered how long things would have gone before they'd realized. Probably when he would have started falling into a stupor, or started seizing, collapsed into a pile of brain damaged scariness and out-of-control, spastic twitching. She'd tried not to imagine Derek having a seizure. Tonic-clonic seizures were scary enough to watch when it was someone you didn't know. No. Derek was sick, but he was fine. He was fine, she'd told herself. He was fine. They'd caught it. They'd caught the bleed while it was an emergency, but not yet an EMERGENCY. He was dying sick. But he wasn't going to die. Because they'd caught it.
They'd caught it.
Dr. Weller had caught it.
And Derek was going to get a craniotomy as soon as one of the non-galleried ORs cleared out for use. He wasn't going to die. Not then. Not right then. Not for years. Many years that would, with hope, be happy and fun-filled and long.
Fine. It was fine. He was fine. Would be fine. Fine.
She'd said she'd live with the fear, that she'd deal, and damn it, she was doing it. She was going to do it. She'd breathed, and breathed, and breathed, sucking back up her tumbling upset in rapid, chest-wrenching gulps.
Four minutes and thirty-seven seconds had ended quickly.
She'd wiped away her tears, blinked, blinked, blinked, started the car, and driven home to pack his things. Four minutes and thirty-seven seconds. Because if she'd taken any longer than that, she probably wouldn't have made it back in an hour without breaking laws. And she'd promised him she'd be back in less than an hour.
He'd looked so scared and… Lost. Lost, he'd looked… She wasn't used to seeing him anything less than cocksure and confident. Sure, he'd gotten upset a lot in the last week or so. But he'd never looked… Like that. Not when he'd had his first anxiety attack, which had been more about confusion and guilt interwoven in a crush of ugliness than terror. Not even on the plane. The plane thing… That had been a manufactured fear, exaggerated from a natural jumble of annoying but relatively harmless nerves. Manufactured by the freaking clots of blood collecting in his skull, expanding every second they waited to fix him. But the scared look he'd had when she'd forced him to face the reality of his MRI films had advertised something real. A real, deep-seated terror that had nothing to do with falsely generated anxiety in a normally easy-going person, and had everything to do with the fact that Derek apparently hated hospitals as a patient, hated being… Surrendered to other people. At other people's mercy.
Do you trust me, Der?
Yes.
And, yet again, something he'd done, something he'd done recently, given real context, context in all the brilliant colors of a rainbow, seemed so much more… More. She'd felt like an idiot for not having let it sweep her off her feet when it had actually happened, though, in that instance, that might have been bad for the sex, since she would have been busy gibbering at him self-consciously instead of taking him into a series of orgasms that'd left him nonsensical and, in the end, sated to the point of not being able to move. Whatever. Anyway. Slow. Sometimes. On the uptake. She was. He really loved her. She knew it. But being constantly smacked with little details like that, little details that proved it with the severity of a two-by-four wielded by some muscle-bound mafia hit man named Clyde or Cliff while he beat her in the face with it… That was something else.
And the promise. The promise of less than an hour that she'd given him. That had suddenly seemed like an important one to keep.
She'd managed to stay relatively calm, even while she'd packed his things into his slightly torn duffel bag. She'd thought about using his suitcase from the Connecticut trip, but it'd been put away in the basement and would have taken time to dig out again. The duffel bag had been sitting in a crumpled up pile at the bottom of their closet. He used it for trips where he had to fly out on an overnight consult, and he'd tossed it there after his last one. Just a few weeks before, in the uncomfortable, unsettled void between the ferry disaster and their vacation. He'd assisted with a spinal repair somewhere in… Nevada, if she wasn't mistaken. The worn leather nametag that wrapped around the shoulder strap bore his name in neat, tight print, which would make things a ton easier for the orderlies who had to sort out where his stuff would go when they moved Derek from room to room depending on the level of care he needed. And the bag would fit a week's worth of sleepwear and odds and ends toiletries without trouble. She'd hoped.
It had.
She'd packed plenty of pajama type things and loose, comfortable daywear. Warm things. Cooler things. She hadn't been really sure what he would want. What did you pack for brain surgery? Brain… Craniotomy. A swell of bad stuff had caught her for a moment. Just a moment before she'd yanked everything into her very own personal brain clot where it pressed on her skull, started the gentle throbbing of a headache. She'd shaken her head and breathed, long and slow and calming. Her head had started aching, but at least she hadn't been falling apart with every item of clothing she packed.
He hadn't seemed to care much about the details of what she'd bring for him, just that he have something that was his. His and no one else's. Something to give him identity. She'd known his Harley accident was a deep wound on his psyche just from the fact that he wouldn't normally discuss it, but she'd assumed the jagged scar of memory had come from the accident itself, not the aftercare. It had become clear to her at that moment, that moment when he'd looked between her and his films, terrified, that lying on the pavement trying to breathe hadn't been what he considered the worst of it, or at least not the end of it. She would ask him. Later. After all this was over and it was okay again to talk about things that weren't rosy and perfect and fine. Because she wanted to know. Know him. Deeply know him. Every time she discovered one of those two-by-four details, it was a shock. But it was also a treat. A treasure hunt.
She'd sighed and continued packing.
Boxers. His battered pair of slippers. He didn't wear slippers very often and was actually more of a barefoot or socks person, which made it odd that he'd managed to beat the hell out of them so badly. But whatever. She'd thrown his aftershave, shaving cream, and his razor into the bag with everything else. Shampoo. He didn't really have a favorite like she did. Soap. Again, no real favorites. He just used whatever ended up in the shower. Toothpaste. Toothbrush. Wait. She'd backed up and pulled the shampoo out of the jumble. Why the hell would he need shampoo? She'd blinked while the tears had resettled back into pinpricks against the backs of her eyes, and the stupid rivulets of salty water streaming down her cheeks had tapered off again. Stupid, Meredith. She'd almost committed a horrible faux pas. If she'd shown up to the hospital with shampoo… She was sure he would have loved that. Just… Great.
Books. She'd pulled a few off his shelf, and then she'd thought better of it. Books. After a craniotomy, focusing and concentrating were usually very difficult for at least few weeks. She hadn't wanted to remind him of that, so she'd put them back. The books. The faint hint of panic had slapped her. What the hell was she supposed to give him to entertain himself with? Even crossword puzzles might be… challenging. He would be sleeping a lot. Bedridden for the most part. Walking down the hall would probably be a feat for him. What could she…? She'd yanked his iPod and charger off his dresser. That was something, at least. Audiobooks? She would buy some later when she had a chance. Maybe while he was napping. But not then.
Because she'd promised him less than an hour.
She'd been on her way out the door when she'd realized she'd skipped socks. Socks. By accident. He'd need socks. She had run back upstairs with the duffel bag, hot, rebellious tears jagging down her face despite her fierce initiative to not freak out anymore. Socks.
It had been his sock drawer that had finally broken her. The four minutes and thirty-seven seconds of sniffling in the car had been nothing compared to the heaving, jerking, awful distress that had happened over his sock drawer. Two minutes and fifty-three seconds. She'd collapsed onto the bed, holding a tangled mess of white fluffy socks between her clenching fingers, clutched against her chest like a teddy bear. She'd let herself fall apart for two minutes and fifty-three seconds, because, through the blur of crying, she'd checked her watch. She'd been ahead of schedule. Just a little. And two minutes and fifty-three seconds was all right to spend crying. It was all right.
Trying to pick up the pieces of herself from that volcanic eruption of sobbing had been difficult, but not impossible. She'd taken breath after calming breath, and forced herself back inside a bubble of false, shivery calm. Fine. Fine. Everything would be fine. She'd uncurled herself, picked herself up off the bed, and walked back to his sock drawer to finish packing.
She'd made it back to the hospital in forty-five miraculous minutes. Two light cycles that she normally would have caught red had let her through with the barest hint of yellow, giving her a solid argument that entering the intersection had been safe, and because of those two gifts, she'd managed to get back early.
She wiped her hands at her face. Dry. She looked in the rearview mirror and saw her scary, bloodshot eyes staring back. Her skin was blotched. Not crying, but definitely not okay. She dropped her hand to the pocket at her hip. The pocket of her scrubs. She rubbed it almost lovingly.
Fine. Fine. Everything was and would be fine.
She made a small effort to clean herself up, but after about thirty seconds, she realized it was going to be a futile effort. And she'd promised. Less than an hour. She'd promised. She slid out of the car and weakly grabbed at his duffel bag. It was a stupid thing to get upset over, she knew, but she snarled anyway when the handle caught on the parking brake. Fighting an exaggerated, unnecessary war, she growled and untangled it, giving the strap much more hurt and strangling pulling than was necessary. She threw the strap over her shoulder and locked the car. The alarm chirped as she hit the lock button on the keychain, and then she was back to the running thing.
Running.
She'd promised. Less than an hour.
It was the only thing keeping her afloat. The promise.
It had been forty-seven minutes by the time she tore through the main entryway. It had been forty-seven minutes and ten seconds when she jarred to a halt in front of the withering gaze of Dr. Bailey, who, really, shouldn't have been anywhere near the front doors to the hospital. What the hell? Not fair… Meredith clutched at the duffel bag and swallowed.
Dr. Bailey glared, her eyes wide and unblinking and… Naziish. Her fingers clenched around the bundle of papers and plastic baggies piled on top of her clipboard. The plastic crinkled. "Care to explain to me why my intern, my intern who should be running labs for my post-ops so that I can perhaps get home at a reasonable hour, is walking in from the parking lot with a damned suitcase, of all things?" she said. Her eyebrows lowered into a scowl. "Why am I carrying my own labs, Dr. Grey?"
"Dr. Bailey, I'm sorry," Meredith stammered. "I had. I was. I promised I'd be back in less than an hour. I had to. Derek is. I'm sorry." The tears she'd tried so hard to stop in the car, at the house… they spilled down over her face in an embarrassing testament to her state of mind. She wiped at her face, frantic, sniveling, but they wouldn't stop. They just wouldn't.
"Try again in English," Dr. Bailey snapped, though her face had lost its harsh edge as Meredith had started to cry in earnest.
"They're admitting Derek," Meredith managed to explain. "He needs a craniotomy to repair a sub—" she sniffled. "Subdural hematoma."
Dr. Bailey's face froze into a look of something… unreadable. Meredith sniffled and wiped at her face again. Damn it. Stop. Fine. Everything was fine… She ran her fingers down to her pocket. Fine.
"Acute?" Dr. Bailey asked, her voice low and cautious.
Acute hematomas usually meant death. Mortality rates were… Bad. Majority. The majority of patients diagnosed with acute subdural hematomas died. Bleeding for an acute hematoma… more like a flashflood than a leak. Hard to get under control. The patient would be fine, completely asymptomatic, and then he or she would blow a pupil, go into respiratory distress, seize, and die. Very little window of opportunity for a fix if the bleed wasn't detected early. And even the ones that got fixed… Brain damage usually happened to some degree.
Derek. Subacute. Less dangerous. Wider window. Detected early enough. Fine. Would be. Fine. Fine. Fine.
"Subacute," she replied, her voice wavering as she sniffed again. "Almost slow enough to present as chronic. Leftover from the accident. I'm sorry I left mid-shift. I'm sorry. I'm. He wanted his things, and he's so—" Scared. So scared. So scared.
Who was scared, exactly?
"Dr. Grey," Dr. Bailey said after she had regarded Meredith for a painful, long set of moments. "Your exam is in less than two weeks."
Meredith blinked as she felt the floor falling out from under her. Surely, Dr. Bailey couldn't be serious? Surely? She'd quit. If Dr. Bailey made her work during this. She couldn't work. Not while Derek was being admitted for being imminently dying sick. She'd quit. No job was worth not being there while her fiancé maybe died. Maybe. Freaking. Died.
"I know," she said, her voice inflating into something stronger as she breathed and breathed again. "But--"
Dr. Bailey's eyes narrowed as she said with definitive, point-making slowness, "I expect you to study for your exams."
"But Derek--"
"Dr. Shepherd will be sleeping a lot," Dr. Bailey said, protracting each syllable into its own pronounced entity, as if she were trying to get a point across to somebody who was… Slow. "You'll need a quiet place to study."
"But…"
"People recovering from anesthesia are quiet, Grey," Dr. Bailey said, enunciating even more slowly. "People recovering from major surgery are quiet."
The panic and distress and tears all faded away as Meredith finally got it. Finally understood. "All week?" she asked.
Dr. Bailey shrugged. "Studying is very important right now. Way more important than labs, I'd say."
"Thank you, Dr. Bailey," Meredith gushed, unable to stop herself as the building fight bled back out of her. "Thank… Thank you."
She took off for the admitting nurse. Fifty-two minutes by the time she got there. She asked for Derek Shepherd. Room 402. He'd been admitted already. One of the private, VIP rooms. Private. That was good. Derek wouldn't want… He'd want private.
She ran for the elevators. Their elevators. The elevator arrived with tormenting slowness. She launched herself inside and jammed her index finger down on the button for the fourth floor. The doors trundled shut. The trip was slow. Maddening. She hopped from foot to foot, back and forth, back and forth.
Fine, fine, fine. Everything would be fine. He wasn't going to die. That was… He wasn't. She rubbed her pocket. She still had time. They wouldn't have been able to prep him in less than an hour. She…
Skidded to a halt on a situation that seemed inversely calm to the tumbling jumble in her head. Mark sat in the room on the couch, working on his laptop, his fingers tap, tap, tapping across the keys. Otherwise, the room, the bed where she had expected to find Derek, was empty. The blinds against the window were open, revealing a pool of sunlight bathing the empty bed in light. The sheets hadn't even been disturbed yet. Empty.
"They didn't take him already, did they? I still had three minutes before I broke my promise!" she said frantically as she entered the room and glanced around. "I still had…" Time.
Mark looked up from his work. "He's in the bathroom. They just admitted him. We're waiting for OR 2 to clear out."
"Just admitted?"
"He had to talk to the Chief about long term disability leave, then he had to talk to Dr. Weller and sign the release forms, then he had to get some blood drawn for the anesthesiologist. We just came up from the hematology lab. They're rushing his tests. Relax, Meredith. It's a slow bleed. Two or three hours won't kill him. It's when we start going past that that we start really taking risks."
"But…"
The door to the bathroom opened. Derek stepped out. Slowly. He gripped the doorframe with shaky hands. One of those flimsy hospital gowns, tied in the back, not covering much, loosely gripped his thin frame. The gown was crisp and still had iron-lines in a large square pattern from where it had been folded. It stopped at mid-thigh. Skid-resistant hospital socks rose to his ankle joints. His hair, wet, but towel-dried to the point where a lot of it was frizzed and not dripping, stuck out every which way in a torrent of curls and mess. Dark circles of tiredness hugged his eyes, and his skin was a few shades too pale. He looked… miserable. And scared. And all sorts of other bad things.
"I'll go tell Kate you're ready, man," Mark said. "I have to check on some patients quickly, too. I'll be back in a few minutes." He flipped his laptop shut, stood, and left.
"Hey," she said as Derek slowly crossed the floor, trying to slather a smile on her face and failing dismally. She didn't offer to help. She didn't think he'd want it. But the whole sight of him like that, shuffling, unsure, scared, made her lip quiver. Made her eyes water up again. "I brought your stuff," she added as she set the duffel bag next to the bed.
He eased onto the bed with care, as if the movement was an effort. The sunlight soaked the foot of the bed, but his head was far away from it. He didn't have to squint, didn't look like it caused him pain. He gave her a weak, shaky smile that did nothing to hide his paleness or the subtle shivers racing along his skin, but his whole face brightened as he looked at her, and a twinkle returned to eyes that had, seconds before, been hazed with a dull sort of surrender. She rubbed her face again. She probably looked like hellspawn, all blotchy and bloodshot and sticky with evaporated tears. But she seemed to cheer him up just the same, and that was… That was good.
"Hey," he said back, his voice low and quiet. Almost breathy. "My stuff is in the bathroom. They made me take a shower with antibacterial soap. Can you…?"
She smiled, sniffling. "Sure." She retrieved his clothes from the bathroom where they sat folded on the edge of the sink and stuffed them in his duffel bag with his other things. He hadn't been wearing them for long. They were still clean.
She pulled up a chair and sat down beside the bed. Alone. They were alone. Possibly for the last time in a while. She stared at him. Scared. She was. He was. But he didn't look like he was in pain at the moment, or suffering from much more than just exhaustion. "Derek, I—"
Someone rapped on the door, making her jump, startled. The door swung open as a nurse stepped into the room. She was a tall, slender woman with curly black hair tied back into a small ponytail, but the color was a fakish black, too black, the kind that resulted from a dye job, possibly to cover up some gray. Crow's feet, subtle spots of age, and general demeanor put her somewhere in her later forties or early fifties. "Hello, Dr. Shepherd," the nurse said cheerfully in a saccharine, too sweet tone that advertised its fakeness. As she trotted closer in the hurried gate typical of so many nurses and interns, Meredith was able to read her nametag. Kate. "Dr. Sloane told me you're ready."
Derek sighed. "Yeah."
"You've used the bathroom, removed all your clothes, and taken the shower?" the nurse clarified. Procedure. It was all just procedure to her. A whole big list of things that took away the humanity of it and made it a business. Disinfect the skin, empty the bladder and the bowels. Procedure.
"Yes," Derek answered. His voice had dropped in pitch. He blinked quickly, like he was trying to stave off tears as fiercely as Meredith was.
"Okay," Kate replied with a wide, heavy-wattage smile that was supposed to be cheerful, but Meredith found herself wanting to smack it off the woman's face. Couldn't she see how… Couldn't she understand?
Meredith reached across the bed and gripped Derek's free hand. His fingers were cold. And everything shivered. His little plastic wristband said Derek Shepherd in tiny print, and the band was color-coded to show he couldn't have sulfa drugs.
Derek looked away from Kate as she pulled up a tray, and he turned to Meredith, turned and stared at her like she was some sort of blotchy, teary-eyed lifeline. In that moment, in that split second where he was grasping for something, and she was sitting there, almost but not really crying, sitting there quivering and terrified right along with him, she felt, somehow, inadequate. How could she help him when all she wanted was for him to take her in his arms and tell her this was all a stupid, stupid nightmare brought on by bad chicken marsala? She really wanted that. Really. Anything.
He wasn't going to die, she told herself. He was going to be fine. These pathetic, shaky moments? Weren't the last ones she'd ever experience with him. They'd be… a funny thing to look back on later. Hah, hah, hah. See how scared we were over something silly? She just needed a moment alone with him. Just a moment.
Meredith glanced away from the crush of his pleading gaze. Kate was getting ready to set up an intravenous line. Okay. She swallowed. She could wait a few minutes until Kate had to step out. Yeah. Just a few more minutes, and then they would be alone again, and she would have her chance. She glanced back, and his gaze wrapped around her like a lariat and pulled her in.
She rubbed her fingers against his shivering, cold skin. His eyelids drooped. Subtly. Barely. But enough to show her she really did make a difference. She wanted to… talk to him. Verbally reassure him. But she wasn't sure how much he wanted Nurse Kate to be a participant in a conversation so intimate. Derek Shepherd, Head of Neurosurgery was sharp, collected, calm under pressure, and he certainly wasn't afraid. Certainly not. He didn't need his little slip of an intern telling him it would be all right. No, Derek Shepherd, the man he was when he was at home, when he was in the privacy of their bedroom, when he fished on the dock at his trailer, when he confided in her that Mark was the reason he was upset over the cheating, and not so much because of Addison, when he was a sexy tour guide in New York, when he read her parts of his books at night before the lights went out just to whisper his sexy voice at her because he knew it made her quiver, that Derek was the one who needed comforting. Needed it.
"Did you call Mom?" Derek asked, pointedly ignoring Kate as she tied off his arm and started searching for a vein.
"No, not yet," Meredith replied. "I was going to call her after they… take you."
"Oh," he said. He pulled his hand away from her and ran it through his hair. Then he pulled his hand away from his hair like he'd been scorched and stared at it funnily. A breathy, hitching chuckle fell from his lips, but his face… Far from amused. He ran his hand through his hair again, deliberate, not a nervous gesture, and his scowl deepened.
"All done," Kate said with a smile as she scooted back. Derek's gaze snapped to the intravenous line sticking out of his arm and he sat, silent, staring at it like it was poison, or a snake, or something else detestable. He closed his eyes, flexed his fingers, and leaned back against the pillow as Kate finished taping things up and turned on the saline drip.
"Hello everyone," Dr. Weller said as he stepped into the room.
"Dr. Weller," Derek said.
"It looks like it will be another thirty minutes at least before OR 2 is cleared and prepped again. Then we're good to go," Dr. Weller explained as he listened to Derek's heart and lungs, checked his blood pressure, and did a cursory physical examination. Derek endured it, silent, swallowing, staring ahead, not looking at either Dr. Weller or Meredith. Dr. Weller looked up and smiled before turning to Kate, who stood waiting by Dr. Weller's side. "Kate, would you get some lorazepam when you gather up the rest of his prescriptions? We'll start pushing them in a few minutes."
That yanked Derek out of his stupor of denial. "I don't need it," he said. "Please," he added, in a very unconfident, non-Derek way.
Dr. Weller frowned. "Derek, your body is under tremendous stress. The more stress it's under, the worse your recovery could potentially be. We need to get you relaxed, and I just don't see you doing that on your own. Not if what I'm seeing now is any indication."
Derek swallowed and didn't reply, looking rebuffed and small and… unsettled. It was hard to fake being fine when your entire body was on display and under a microscope of scrutiny. Dr. Weller frowned and left. "Don't worry, Dr. Shepherd. Everything will be fine," he said as he paused in the doorway. "Kate will be back in a few minutes."
Alone. Alone. Alone. And Kate would be back soon. A few minutes. Just a few.
"Derek," Meredith began as the door clicked shut, leaving them in silence.
He turned to stare at her. She took his hand up into her grasp again, and he relaxed. Just a little. "Meredith, it'll be fine," he said, flashing a beautiful smile at her. A beautiful smile that cracked around the edges and faded quickly like a sun flare dying out. "I'm fine. It's… fine," he assured her, even as he went back to shaking subtly.
She snorted at the sudden absurdity. "Okay, Der, trying to comfort me right now? Seriously? You're white as a freaking sheet, shaking, and totally lying, so don't bother. I'm fine. In a vaguely terrified sense, but fine. It's a craniotomy, Derek. It's just a… You'll be fine, and then we'll get married."
"I'm sorry, Mere. I'm—"
"Seriously, stop it," she snapped. "Just stop, you stupid, stupid man. Stop worrying about whether I'm freaking out, which I am, just a little, like I said, just a teensy…" Her breath hitched. She jarred her words to a halt. Arooga, arooga the inner siren moaned, for once warning her, for once shutting her up without outside intervention. Babbly, self-pitying rant ahead! Turn the ship about! She recollected the bits of her thoughts and tried again. "It's not your job right now. Okay? Making me feel better is not your job right now. I just…. You are going to be fine. And I will be here. The whole time. It's okay, Derek. It's… It's okay. And you don't need to try to comfort me. I know you're scared. I know you won't ever say it because of some stupid man code thing that I'll never understand, but I know it."
He sighed. "Mere..."
"Shut up," she said. "I'm building up to something here."
He chuckled lightly, though his face was still clipped with fear and other badness. "Okay," he said quietly. She rubbed his palm, grasping it in both hands. His eyelids drooped, and he visibly relaxed against the pillows.
"I love you," she said. "I love you a lot. More than… I just… I love you, and I know you're terrified. So, today? Today, your only job is to work on you. Not me. And I'm not going to spout a bunch of medical crap at you about how there's nothing to worry about, because even if the odds are excellent, you're a surgeon, you know the odds by rote, and you're going to focus on that one percent of badness anyway, because this is you on the table and not some patient, who you might care about, but you really don't know."
The relaxation she'd been building up in his features melted away as she reminded him. Reminded him of everything outside the realm of her face, which he refused to break his stare away from. "Mere…"
"Stop. Talking," she said. "I'm speechifying."
An amused expression pilfered his newfound worry away. "Speechifying," he said, his tone flat. His eyes did the laughing for him.
"Yes," she said, her voice snapping with something defensive. Speechifying was so a word! Just because he knew words like occipital and hemolyze and meninges didn't make him the expert on English. Half that crap wasn't English anyway. Seriously. "In the process of making a speech," she clarified.
"Mere..."
"Shh!" she hissed. "What was I saying?"
He grinned sheepishly at her. "Something about me wallowing in the bad part of good odds."
"Right," she said. She breathed. This was it. "So. Derek. The knee thing."
His tired but happy features degenerated into something pained and regretting. "Meredith, I'm so, so—"
"I don't want you to do it," she snapped before he managed to send the whole apology tumbling off his lips in a freefall of regret. She wished he would stop apologizing. He had nothing to be guilty about. Nothing. She rubbed his fingers, his hand, trying to reassure him, but he took the meaning of her words and ran the opposite direction with it. The direction that took him about as far from what she had meant as possible.
The look on his face collapsed into misery. His grip clenched around her fingers painfully. His breath caught. The little bit of color still clinging desperately to his cheeks seeped away and left behind a pale, unhealthy alabaster. He looked awful. Like she'd just killed his dog. Or ripped his heart out, fed it to his dog, and then killed it. She swallowed back the lump in her throat when she realized what that last bit must have sounded like to him. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
"What?" he said, his voice weak, almost as if he'd been punched in the gut. He blinked, and a pair of fat tears streaked down his face. "No. Mere, please," he said. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry I'm sick, I—"
Guilt struck her to the core. He thought she was running away because of… Because he was sick? Hell, he thought she was running away. Period. Why did she always have to be so fucking flighty when things got rough?
"Will you shut up and leave your guilt complex at the door!" she snapped, horrified at how this had gone so badly already, horrified, and snapping and nasty because… This was her fault, and... She rushed to continue, "I love you. I'm not breaking up with you. I still want to get married. I just don't want you to do the knee thing. It was silly, and…" she said. Hurry, hurry. Before he freaks out even more. "And I…"
Maybe it was her own guilt complex. Not his. This was not going as picture perfect as she had imagined in her head. In the moment in her head, she'd only needed a few seconds to gather her thoughts and explain everything. But this was. Big. For her. For them. Big. She felt like every word spilling out of her mouth was shoving at a boulder the size of her house. And it would take more than a few pushes to roll the thing off the cliff.
"Mere," he whispered into the tense silence, his voice racked with emotion.
"Let. Me. Finish," she said. "I just. Bear with me here. I'm trying, Derek. I'm trying to do a thing here. But it's a good thing. I swear."
"Okay," he whispered. His upset had halted, but his face remained frozen in curious misery. Relief had him panting. She really didn't want to know what a heart monitor would sound like were it attached to him. Kate hadn't hooked one up yet. He looked, after the yo-yo of good to bad to neutral, like she'd steamrolled him and dragged him for a mile.
God.
She hadn't meant to make it look like she was breaking up with him. Before his surgery. His brain was bleeding, he was having surgery that he was terrified about, and she'd gone and… Made it worse. This was to fix it. Not to make it worse. Not to... Hurry, hurry. She probably could have worded things better… but she… She was… Damn it, she deserved to have a moment of inarticulate stupidness when she was about to do something so…
Huge.
She took a deep, cleansing breath, and bolstered herself to continue, sense or no sense, she had to speak. Preferably with words and not strange, inarticulate moaning and gestures. Those would, with luck, come later. After he could… do stuff. Again.
"I don't want to be one of those people who looks back on a moment and regrets not taking what she wants," she said as she caressed his fingers. He'd stopped shaking for a moment. He didn't look so… sick. "And I freaking want you. I want you more than anything in my whole entire life."
She reached into her pocket and pulled out the little velveteen box that had been sitting there since she'd found it in his sock drawer. It shook in her hands. The creak that sliced the air as she opened it up seemed like a burst of thunder in the sudden quiet. She stood up, released his hand, and sat down on the edge of the bed next to him. Her hip brushed up against his thigh, which jerked as though a zap of electricity had passed between them. The mattress dipped under her slight weight. The chair she'd evacuated trundled back on the wheels in a slow reaction to the force of her departure.
"So, Derek Shepherd…" she said. She inhaled deeply as she held the little ring box out to him in a shaky offering. "Will you marry me?"
He blinked. Once, twice. His gaze went down to the ring, back up to her, down to the ring, back up to her. Silence. The ring sparkled under the bath of sunlight, which suddenly felt hot against her back, against her arms. Hotter than before. His eyes widened a little in a subtle revelation of his surprise, though the rest of him stayed still as stone. She really didn't want to hear a heart monitor now. She didn't want to know how close she'd probably come to killing him in this moment that should have been perfect. She didn't want to know.
For a march of five seconds, maybe ten, though it seemed like hours, he just stared. Back and forth and back and forth. Like he'd been slapped into a stupor and wasn't quite connecting the dots yet. The cartoon stars were still circling. Meredith. Ring. Words. Meredith. Ring. Words.
What?
Does not compute.
It would have been comical if the situation hadn't been so… Bad.
He cleared his throat, and a smile slowly pulled his lips up. The twinkle that she'd sucked out of his eyes with her faux breakup speech came roaring back as he blinked again and everything sunk in. The confusion waned into nothing. He breathed. Cleared his throat again.
"I…" he began, but everything jittered to a wheezy halt, and Derek Shepherd remained in the grips of uncharacteristic speechlessness. He swallowed and tried again. "Well, the ring is kind of girly, Mere," he managed. "A princess cut? I don't know if I'd be able to live that down."
He smirked.
Actually. Freaking. Smirked.
Her mouth fell open. "You're such an ass!" she said, but she couldn't help the grin that seeped across her features like a healing water. Heat flushed her cheeks, but it was neither a nervous heat, nor an embarrassed one. She slapped his arm, playful, careful not to be too rough.
"You love me, though," he said as he clutched at the ring box and she relinquished it into his keeping.
"I do," she agreed. "I really, really do."
She pulled her legs up from the floor. Not caring. Not caring what it would look like to anyone who stepped in. Not caring that she shouldn't because he was going to get taken away soon. Not caring that it was completely against protocol. She settled on top of the blankets against him and laid her head against his shoulder. His left hand snaked around her waist and gripped her tightly against him. The ring box rested against her abdomen, clutched in the hand of the arm that was wrapped around her.
"I love you, too," he said. The sheets rustled and settled as she stilled. He leaned down to kiss the top of her head.
"That's a yes, right?" she asked as she rubbed her palm in soothing circles against his chest. His whole frame seemed to melt as the tension bled away. "I mean, not to be a paranoid, abandonment-fearing freak or anything, but…"
She pulled away to stare at him. Sparkling blue met her gaze. He raised his right hand, the intravenous drip followed the movement of his arm, and he gripped her chin softly, pulling her up into a quick, light kiss against his lips. He dipped his tongue into her, tasted her. She moaned. It ended in seconds, but it was a good kiss. A strong kiss. A perfect one.
A kiss that said, yes. Yes. Yes!
He reached across her torso with his free right hand as she resettled against him and pulled the ring from the box clutched in his left. He withdrew his arm from its position around her waist and pushed against her. He reached out in front of her with the little ring in hand. She raised her left hand, and he slipped the tiny platinum band down over the first knuckle of her ring finger and then the second. It settled at the base of her finger, and it fit… perfectly. His fingers brushed her skin, and then he squeezed her palm in a loving gesture.
"Fiancé," he said as she held her hand out in front of them, and they stared. "Officially?"
"Fiancé," she agreed. "Officially."
The moment hadn't seemed perfect at first, not with her stumbling, stupid, calamitous start, but it had recovered from its flaws into something... resplendent. Sort of like her diamond ring. The gem sparkled in its setting as she shifted her hand back and forth in the light.
"Fits," she observed.
"Yep," he agreed.
They stared.
A harsh knock jerked them out of the sudden peace. Nurse Kate barged in at a trot. "Dr. Shepherd…" she began, breathless, a whole pile of medications clutched in her hands. She made it all of five steps before realization widened her eyes. Her gaze darted to the sparkly ring that hadn't been there before, to the relaxed, intimate pose of the bed's occupants, her breath caught, and then she looked back to the pile of crap she held in her hands. "Oh."
"Just another few minutes?" Meredith begged. A few minutes wouldn't… Hurt. They wouldn't. She needed… A few.
"Shhhi," Kate hissed before she managed to stop herself from saying something not professional, something gushy and profoundly appropriate despite how inappropriate it was. "I mean," she stuttered. "Sure."
The door closed again behind her as she stumbled out.
"So, Mere," Derek said, his light chuckle rumbling in the quiet.
"Yeah?" she answered lazily as she let her hand fall down into his lap, dangerously near sex-related territory, though the gesture wasn't… Sexed. Just intimate.
"Not that I'm knocking your speechifying or anything," he said, rubbing her back. "More speechifying, I say. But…"
"What?"
"You made kind of a logical leap there. You're not going to die on the table to please, marry me?"
"Huh?" she said stupidly, blinking. And then she realized, to an outsider looking in on the rambly bits of her brain that had escaped into words, all that stuff really probably had seemed random. Even to someone who was a bit more used to interpreting. She'd tried. She had tried to make it coherent. But. When the proposal had been perceived as a Dear John speech, it had become obvious that the whole coherency thing had been blown to babbly, syllabic pieces of junk. "Oh, that," she said, waving her hand in a haughty, dismissive gesture, like she had totally meant for herself to come off as speechifically challenged. "There was totally a connection. I'm telling karma to fuck off."
He blinked. "What?"
"There's nothing to regret now," she explained. "There aren't any moments to look back on and say, I should have. So, there's absolutely no way you're going to… You'll be fine. You should just relax and enjoy the six to eight weeks of coddling."
"Okay, I can usually get the gist, Mere, but… Brain. Bleeding. I'm at a disadvantage today." He stared at her helplessly, but he had an air of good humor about him, and she was glad he could joke about it.
"Karma and I have this whole hate, hate thing going on," she said. "Something would only go wrong if there was something I could regret for all eternity. I've sealed your fate, buster. You're waking up, complication free, and I get to drag you home to heal and do my laundry. Or something. Do you mow lawns? After your head is fixed, I mean."
"Your laundry," he replied flatly, but a smile stole his serious expression away.
"Yeah, it's a thing I was wondering before… Er, nevermind. Anyway. Fine. You. Me. Us. All fine. There's much fineness here. Behold the fine."
He chuckled. "Well, I guess I'm good then. Does this coddling you mentioned involve kissing?"
She grinned, leaning into him, clutching at his shoulders. "Maybe," she whispered, sultry, seductive, millimeters from his lips. He shoved forward through the extra space between them and captured her in a kiss that left her head spinning, left her with a burning need that she was unable to slake with mental admonishments. "Okay, I guess it does," she answered, panting as she lowered her head back down to his chest, trying to recover. "That was… Yeah."
Meanie. He knew they weren't going to be having sex for at least a week.
A whole week.
A whole. Week. At least.
Stupid surgery.
"You can't make me want sex now," she pouted. "That's mean."
"Just trying to ensure good anesthesia dreams," he said as he resumed his idle, reassuring strokes up and down her back with his palm. "Speaking of sex, though, if you feel like running your fingers through my sexy, but at the moment, disastrous locks, I hear now's the time," he said. She pulled back and looked up at him. He was grinning. And he winked at her when she met his eyes.
She reached up and swept her fingers through his hair. It did look rather disastrous at the moment, all dried frizzy, uncombed, and jutting out at freakish angles that defied the laws of gravity. She would miss it. The hair. Definitely one of her favorite features, not that he had a whole lot of features she ranked below at least great. "We should save it in a bag or something in case I get the shakes," she joked.
He snorted. "Cheating on me with a bag of my ex-hair. Shameful. Just shameful. It's not even combed."
"I hear bald is beautiful, you know," she whispered, rubbing her nails against his scalp, through his hair, petting, carefully working around a few tangles, not pulling, because he liked it, and she loved the way he just… Flattened out into a sedate, Derek-y puddle whenever she did it.
For a moment, he was fine. He was fine, they were engaged, they were joking, and petting, and it was all right. But then, like someone had flicked a switch, his features shifted, and he remembered. She saw it on his face.
He remembered that they were sitting in a hospital bed and he was going to get dragged off to the prep area soon, where they'd finish getting him ready. They'd put him in compression stockings to promote blood flow in his legs, because he'd be immobile for a prolonged period. Immobile. They'd finish checking his vitals, they'd hook him up to monitors that displayed everything about him to anyone who bothered to read them, they'd put a mask over his face and tell him to take deep breaths, deep breaths, to think of something happy, which, really, was a ludicrous thing to say. And then he'd be out. Sleeping, but not really. Just… gone. Derek Shepherd would be a body. They'd shave off his hair, push a tube down his throat, pull back his flimsy gown and insert a Foley catheter to collect his urine because he wouldn't be able to get up and take care of it himself, and then, after all that, they'd drill his skull open. When he would wake up, he'd be sick all over again, just from the sheer amount of drugs in his system, let alone the fact that his body would have to heal the hurting mess left behind in his head, the mess left behind by a bunch of strangers. He'd be sick and literally attached to the bed because of all the wires and things. Not that he would care much about walking at that point.
But, at least, he wouldn't be dying anymore. The hurting mess would be a fixed hurting mess.
In that moment, though, she understood just how fiercely he was dreading this experience. Because he was Derek Shepherd. Derek Shepherd could walk when he wanted. He could pee when he wanted. He could breathe when he wanted. He could style his hair with whatever product made him McDreamy and come to work all smiley, smirky perfect. He was fine, and healthy, and energetic. And, despite his arrogant, bantering, confident demeanor about his sexuality and his self, he was an intensely private person when it came down to it. Sure, he'd joke about noisy sex. Sure, he'd jokingly wished aloud to tell everyone he was boinking an intern, back when she hadn't wanted anyone to know. But that was what it was to him. Joking.
Just joking.
And this wasn't.
"I am scared, Mere," he whispered, so softly she almost thought she might have imagined it. "Not about dying, just…" His words drifted off into silence, and he breathed to wash their remnants away.
She paused. Her breath caught. He'd told her before that he'd been scared when she'd died. But it had been a past tense sort of thing. He'd been able to look back on it and admit it. He'd never told her before in the act of it. In the act of being scared. Naturally, not the time when she'd been dead, because, well, duh. But other times. He wasn't made of stone. Things scared him. He was finally telling her in the moment. Scared. He was scared, and he'd admitted it. Out loud. And that was something so desperately intimate that it made her heart hurt.
She ran her fingers over him, everywhere, touching, reassuring, hoping she could be what he needed. Because when she was like this… When she was scared or crying or lonely or something else bad, he was always what she needed. He was perfect for her. And she wanted it to be something mutual.
"It's okay," she said. "I'll be here."
"I don't want to do this," he said, his voice small. "They're going to knock me out. They're going to…"
"I know. I'll still be here."
"I know this is… I know you're freaking out, too."
She stopped her soothing petting. "I told you, Derek. You don't get to worry about me right now. Besides. Only a little. I'm only freaking out a little. In an extremely non-mobile fashion. See?" she said, gesturing to herself, unable to stop the smile that gripped her face as her ring flickered in the light. She was very happy right then, just lying against him, enjoying his warmth, his closeness. "Non. Mobile. I'll be here. And you'll be fine. You'll be back to cutting in no time."
She didn't want to think about epilepsy right then. Or any of the other potential complications. She didn't. They would deal with that stuff when it happened. If it happened. The risks were… necessary. And… She just…
No.
She was wearing a ring. She was happy. Life was perfect, mostly. Derek would get this surgery done, and he would be fine. And they would be fine. And then they'd get married. Someday. On some mystery date that, at some point, would probably seem right to her, though nothing was jumping out right that moment as the date destined for their marriage. But they would get married. Just like they were supposed to.
It was official now.
Nurse Kate barged back in. "Okay. I'm really sorry, you two, but I need to…" She jiggled her bundle in a vague attempt at emphasis. Bottles clinked, and she struggled to rebalance and make sure none fell.
Kate pulled up a chair and set all the little bottles of things down on the table. Bottles of things that would be racing through Derek's circulatory system in just a few minutes. Meredith sighed and stood up from the bed, relinquishing the warm comfort of his body and his breathing and the rumbles of his voice against her torso to the stupid wheeled chair that she'd been sitting in before the whole proposal thing.
She took his hand back up into her grasp, and he watched her while Kate pushed drug after drug down into the intravenous line. Drugs that he needed to prevent his intracranial pressure from spiking up to a level that would cause damage. Painkillers. They were switching him to a non-pill form since he would be off solid food for a while. The lorazepam went last. That would keep him from seizing, but it would also melt him down into a falsely relaxed pile of muscles that didn't really care if Derek was going to get cut open in just a short hour or two.
At first, it was like nothing had happened. At first. He blinked once a few minutes after the lorazepam went in, like he was under some sort of crush. His eyelids came back up really slowly, almost like they had weights attached to them. He blinked again. Everything about him just… Loosened. He let out a disgusted-sounding moan, like he knew what was happening, didn't want it to, and couldn't stop it. Then he laughed, strange, euphoric, weird. Then he sighed.
What little that remained of his worrying bled out of his face, and he was so busy adjusting to all the narcotics in his system that he didn't even blink when Mark finally returned, sat down without word, and flipped his laptop back open. Mark's gaze darted to Meredith's hand and fell on the sparkle of her ring. Just for a moment. He winked at her and resettled into whatever work he'd been doing before he'd left. Derek lay on the bed, passive, sedate, and staring dully as Kate hooked up a heart monitor to the middle finger of his right hand and a slow, steady march of beats started bleeping for them all to hear.
He rolled his head to the side to look at Meredith. He inhaled, slow and sucking and lackadaisical. His shoulders rose as his chest filled. Then he let it all out in a long, raspy exhalation that puffed his cheeks up like he was blowing into a trumpet or a balloon or something. The next breath he took was more reasonable.
"You proposed," he said, his voice thick with all the relaxants. A lazy smile pulled at his lips. And he looked… goofy. Positively goofy.
"Yeah, I kind of did," she replied as she rubbed his hand. There was no grip to it. He didn't do anything back to her. It was like holding something inanimate. "How was it?"
She imagined if she were to drop his hand, he wouldn't catch it. It'd just fall to the bed. Not because he was weak. Just because he didn't care at all. That was… good. Comforting. At least he wasn't worrying anymore. At least he wasn't frightened.
"Best one I ever received," he replied happily. A twitch ran through his body, and he resettled, even more loose than he had been a moment before.
"Derek…" Meredith replied. "Unless you've got a closet full of ex-fiancés I don't know about…"
He laughed. It was a rolling, ill-defined sound that ended in a tired, sleepy, slur of syllables, "Perfect. S'nice." He paused. Blinked. Slow. Almost as if he wasn't going to open his eyes again, but he managed after a few seconds of struggling. "You're not running."
Her heart fluttered. He was really, really out of it. Somehow, she hadn't expected it to happen so fast. She hadn't expected her Derek to be gone yet. But this was… Weird. And stupid, because she'd seen it all before. She knew what all the crap in his veins did to a person. And she knew why he hated it so much.
"Nope," she said. "I'm not going anywhere."
He laughed like it was something funny. His breath hitched. "I wouldn't blame you. This is kind of ridiculous, you know." He pulled his hand back from hers and gestured loosely at his head before letting his hand fall back to the bed like an afterthought of flesh and bone. "Brain surgeon with a fucking brain bleed. The universe obviously has made me its joke. I wouldn't blame you. If you ran."
Her first response was something defensive. Something exasperated. Damn it, she wasn't running anymore. She wasn't.
She settled on saying, "I'm going to let all that slide since you appear to be sort of stoned." She really, really hoped the morphine hadn't done this to her. Morphine. Had Kate given him morphine in the mix? Oh, god, she really hoped the morphine hadn't done… this. She knew he'd gotten a painkiller in that cocktail.
Her face flushed. She tried to read the labels on all the little bottles Kate had taken medication from, but at least two were turned away, and of the ones she could see, there were no painkillers in the bunch. She was too afraid to ask. Because if it really was morphine, she probably had acted this dopey. Let it be the lorazepam, she thought. Yes. Lorazepam.
He grinned at her like a kid receiving a fistful Halloween candy instead of one piece, toothy, silly-looking. "'Kay," he said. He turned to Kate, who was checking over the various monitors and watching him with a studious, serious face despite the hilarity. "She's marrying me, you know," he said. His gestured at Meredith loosely with his hand.
"I saw, Dr. Shepherd," Kate said with a real smile, not a faked one. Her eyes sparkled as she happily started re-checking everything. "Congratulations. I take it the drugs are working. Can you tell me if anything doesn't feel right? Heart palpitations, tremors, anything like that?"
"Hah," Derek said. "I feel super. Sooooo-per. Yeah. So, if you saw, does this mean the whole hospital knows now?"
Kate frowned. Just a little. "I might have told Debbie."
Nurse Debbie? Meredith sighed. That meant the whole hospital would know. And fast. Derek seemed to come to the same conclusion, albeit more slowly and with a lot more serious thinking that looked positively ridiculous against his slack features.
He rolled back to face Meredith. "You might want to get on the PA, Mere, if you actually want to tell anyone yourself. I said yes, right? I meant to say yes."
"I'm good here," she said, caressing his hand, trying desperately not to laugh at him. She managed to curtail everything into a little sputtering sound, one that he didn't even appear to notice. He really was stoned. Really. She didn't know if it was the lorazepam, or the maybe-morphine, or just the whole combination of crap circulating inside him. But, really, the result was… "Yes, you said yes, Derek."
Stoned. The result was stoned.
He looked down and watched her as she pulled her thumb across his palm in slow, soothing circles. "You're good anywhere," he said matter-of-factly. "On… planes. Beds. Oh, and in on-call rooms. The exam room was pretty good, too, even though it was wrong."
Mark looked up from his laptop, a look of glee pinching at his features, and Meredith felt a blush seep across her skin in a hot flash. "Derek…" she hissed.
"Cheating is bad, y'know," he said. "What?"
She laughed nervously as Mark resettled into working. "Little chatty, there," she said.
"Hah," he said and continued in a rolling drawl, "Yeah. You're really hot." He turned back to Kate. "Isn't she hot? She's super flexible."
Mark made a choking noise, but to his credit, he continued typing.
Kate blushed. "Um," she stuttered.
"Super flex—Can you put my ex-hair in a bag after you shave it off? Mere wants it. I should get a baseball cap. I should…" he rambled, and then he turned to look at Mark, as if Derek were noticing him for the first time. "What're you still doing here?"
Mark looked up and wiped his hand down the portion of his beard covering his chin in a rustle of motion. He stared. Derek stared back, though his gaze wandered a bit as his attention was drawn elsewhere by various noises and who knew what else. Mark sighed, flipped his laptop shut, and shoved it to the side of him on the couch. He stood up from the couch and walked over to sit in a chair on the side of the bed opposite to Meredith.
"Derek," Mark began as he sat down with another heaving sigh. "I was hoping… Do you want me to close? It would minimize scarring."
"No," Derek replied.
"But…"
"Won't see it anyway after everything grows back. We're bagging my ex-hair, right? Mere wants it. I'm getting married!"
"I know," Mark said reasonably. "Congratulations, Derek."
Derek shook his head. "Don't say that. You said that the last time. You can't be my best man this time, either. You're a fucking awful best man. The bride is supposed to belong to the groom."
"Derek, let me close," Mark insisted.
"No. I hate you."
"You know," Mark said. He let his gaze fall on Meredith and the concerned look in his eyes softened. "Meredith would probably want me to close. Bald is only beautiful if your scalp isn't mangled."
"No," Derek said without hesitation, and in that moment, in that syllable, he didn't seem drugged out of his mind at all. And then he slipped away again behind the sluggish glaze of drugs. "She's my fiancé. I'm getting married, you know."
Mark frowned. "I know, man."
Derek sighed. "They're going to strip me, shave me, shove tubes into me, and drill me open," he observed, almost as if he were reading the newspaper. Nope. Nothing to see here. Nothing to worry about-- "To fix my fucking brain. How fucked up is that?" he said. Shame about the weather. Shame they overcharged me five cents. Shame. Just like that, he said it.
"Pretty fucked up," Mark agreed, and then his tone fell into something lower, softer, pleading. "Derek, please. Let me do this for you."
"Fuck off, Mark," Derek spat, but there was no anger in it, no vitriol, and his heart rate stayed steady and slow and sedate. It was a response by rote, and Derek was too far gone to be able to really care, it seemed. Meredith made shushing noises anyway.
Mark scooted his chair back. "You really hate me that much?"
"No."
"Then, why?"
"You stole everything else from me," Derek replied, his expression dipping into something dark and scowling. His words bit deep with their serrated edges, and Meredith had no doubt that this was in spite of the drugs, that the badness was seeping through the smokescreen of his enforced stupor. Real Derek breaking through. "I think I still have a scrap of dignity, though," Derek continued. "Somewhere. I think." His gaze wandered off into someplace distant again. "I said yes right? Please…"
"Derek…" Meredith whispered, practically petting him. "It's all right."
He sucked in a breath and let out a sobbing sound. Just one. And then he shuddered and moaned like he was spitting out something bad tasting and painful. When he looked up at Mark, his eyes were hooded with the same sort of frightened pleading he'd had in his eyes before the proposal, when he'd been looking at Meredith like she was his only comfort in the world. "I just want you to…" he began, his voice quiet.
Mark leaned inches closer. His eyes widened. "What?" Mark prodded, his tone gripped in a vice of anxiety. "Anything. What?"
Derek's loose gaze hardened at the sound. "Fuck off. Trusting you was the second worst mistake I ever made." He flopped back against the pillows, blinked, and was hovering back in a relaxed stupor. He looked over to Meredith. "I said yes, right?"
"Yes, Derek," she said, trying not to cry. This was starting to not be funny. Not at all. "You said yes."
"Good," he replied. "Sometimes I say no to things I really, really want."
Oh. You're staying with her.
She's my wife.
He sighed. His eyes drooped shut. "I said yes," he whispered. "This time, I said yes."
"Yes, you did, Derek," she agreed.
"I didn't screw it up."
She grinned. "Nope."
He grinned back, eyes still shut. "'Kay. That's good. Good that I didn't."
Dr. Weller knocked and re-entered the room with a wide smile. "Okay, everyone. I've been told we're good to go. The blood work we've managed to finish up looks wonderful. And since Derek hasn't eaten anyway in the last sixteen hours or so, post-op should be relatively smooth, we hope. Any last minute questions?"
Derek laughed. "I'm getting married!" he said, still sort of semi-dozing with his eyes shut. He gestured in the direction Meredith sat. Loosely. Almost like a spasm.
Dr. Weller coughed. "Right," he said, but to his credit, he only spluttered for a breath or two. "Congratulations!" he added cheerfully. And then he turned to her. "Dr. Grey, do you have any questions?"
"I'm a nervous wreck. Can I have what he's having?" she asked.
Everyone in the room had a good chuckle over that, even her. Derek laughed, but she doubted he had a clue what he was laughing at. Before she knew it, the orderlies had come to wheel Derek away. She made them wait. Just a second. One more second wouldn't hurt. Just… One. She leaned down and kissed him. She ran her fingers through his hair, slowly, reverently, soothing. He sighed at her. "I love you," she said. "I'll be here when you wake up."
He grinned lazily up at her. "I love you, too," he said. "I said yes, right?"
"Yeah, Derek. You did," she replied.
"Good," he said. "That's good."
They wheeled him away. She heard him muttering, insisting that they give her his hair in a bag. The orderlies had a fun time with that. She hoped they wouldn't tease him when he woke up. She hoped no one would tease him. She doubted he would remember any of this. And he didn't deserve to have people making fun. He didn't deserve any of this.
She stared at the empty room where his bed had been. It would be hours before she heard any news, she suspected, unless something went very badly, very quickly. Study. She could… study in the gallery, or something. She didn't know. She wouldn't check in on him, despite the fact that she easily could. Because she couldn't. She couldn't do that to him.
Tying him up was one thing. If he'd really wanted, if he'd really, really wanted, he could have kicked her, or bitten her, or done something to fight back, assuming she wouldn't have just untied him, which was a ridiculous notion. If he'd asked to be released, she would have let his hands down in a heartbeat or less.
This was different. Entirely different. Watching him in the most vulnerable hours of his life? No. Nobody was going to let him up this time. And he couldn't kick or bite or scream. Once he was out, he was out, and there would be no going back. He would be owned. And it wouldn't be mutual. It wouldn't be an exercise in trust. It would be a dehumanizing thing that he had to endure to save his life. In the moments he'd stared into her eyes before they'd taken him away, when it had been just them, waiting, she'd understood it. It had made her understand a lot of things. About Derek. About others. She understood why Dr. Bailey hadn't let her in on Cristina's surgery. She understood.
And she couldn't watch. She didn't want to.
She wanted to share everything with him. Everything. But sometimes… something wasn't shareable. And this was one of those things. Her gift. She wouldn't watch. And even if he would never say it, he'd probably be thankful for it. That was enough for her.
A rush of air swept her face. She blinked back to the present.
"Mark," she said as she watched Derek's former friend fly past her in a breeze of motion. Dread nipped at her heart. He was an attending. She couldn't really stop him… "Where are you going?"
He shrugged. "He's high as a kite, and pretty soon they'll just knock him the rest of the way out. He won't know."
Her stomach sank. She'd had a feeling… "He said no," she snapped.
"But don't you want no scarring?" Mark asked as he turned to look at her.
Not at Derek's expense, no. Derek had been right. The incision site wouldn't be visible anyway after his hair grew back in. And if he wanted to… feel empowered… What he did with his body was his prerogative.
"He said no, Mark. It's his body. He feels naked enough. Let him choose."
"But he's high. He'll regret it later."
"Mark, he's scared," Meredith said. "He thinks he's powerless. And he doesn't want you there. He doesn't—"
"I know," Mark replied, his voice low and grating. He blinked, and his eyes watered, though he kept his face a careful, expressionless mask. "I know he's scared. I was there. The last time, I was there. He wouldn't let me leave. He wouldn't. My hand. He grabbed it, and he wouldn't let go, and now I can't even stay when I beg."
"I can't really say I blame him, Mark," Meredith replied, her voice quiet.
"Addison and I, we…"
"Not that. You just don't listen to him."
"Of course, I listen to him!" Mark snapped.
"No, you don't," Meredith said. "You hear him. And that's different."
"I don't understand," he moaned gutturally. "You and him keep telling me stuff I just… I don't get it. I try but…"
"Well, figure it out, Mark. If you can't grow up enough to figure it out…" she said, letting the end of the sentence dangle in silence as she waved her hands in a helpless, frustrated gesture. Mark was painfully dense at times. She left him standing behind her, peering at her with a pleading sort of confusion as she walked down the hall toward the elevator. She sighed. She hoped Mark wouldn't try to scrub in. He looked like he'd at least thought twice.
She didn't know how she would possibly make it through the next set of slow-moving hours.
It had only been five minutes, and already the worry bit down deep like a hungry predator sinking its teeth into a meaty carcass.
She peered at her engagement ring, making no attempt to hide it as she swept her hand up to her face. She smiled at it, sighing as it caught the dim lights of the hallway and reflected them back in greater splendor. People loitering about, her co-workers, at least, stared openly at the flashy, sparkly thing. Whispers began. The whole hospital would know. Soon. Whoever Debbie didn't reach first, the torrent of gossip from this particular sighting would sweep across the ranks like a rapid brushfire.
It didn't matter. It felt good to finally shout about it, even though she wasn't opening her mouth.
She stared at the ring. She was engaged!
Everything would be fine. And then she and Derek would get married.
She hit the button on the elevator.
It was fine. So was Derek. And so was she.