Amelia and Addison talk about Derek.

"Is he alright?" Addison asked Amelia as they settled at a table in the corner of the cafeteria.

"Mmm?" Amelia hummed, looking up from her plate before shifting her eyes across the room, presuming she was talking about someone she was watching and concerned about.

"Derek." She clarified.

"Oh, right." She murmured, eyes settling back onto her. "He's- he pretends he's alright a lot. He's good at that."

She grinned a little at that before picking up her fork and stabbing at a tomato. "I was married to him, remember that? I do know the man quite well."

"And I had to grow up with him." She sighed. He wasn't all bad, as much as she hated him sometimes growing up. They were siblings. They were supposed to hate each other, that was how it worked. "He's struggled a lot, as you can imagine, but things have certainly gotten a lot better in the last month or so."

"Maybe a while ago I would have thought it was fine. People who work here seem to be put through the wringer every day and they always turn out to be just fine in the end." She said, pausing as she placed another slice of vegetable into her mouth. "When I heard…when I heard he was shot – in the heart – I thought he died. I mean, we all thought he died. But he didn't. He was fine. The plane crash shattered my ideals that people I care about here are always fine in the end. Mark-" She paused as she suddenly found something caught in her throat. "Mark wasn't. But he was. Then I got the call from Nancy."

Amelia swallowed, settling down her fork but not intruding on her tale.

"She started all nice. She asked how Henry was and how he's doing in school...how my work was going- you know, all those normal conversation things. Then she paused. Her voice slowed and she told me why she was really calling. She called again...four, maybe five months later...she said he doesn't get migraines anymore, just some mild headaches if he works too hard. She said he was discharged, home with you and Mer and that returning to surgery somewhen didn't seem completely and utterly hopeless. She said there was no damage to the dexterity and movement in his hands and his TBI wasn't causing any problems for him so no one really had any fear of that at all. She said that he was having extremely intensive PT and they were still trying hard to get him out of his wheelchair and walking but...she said he was getting there well enough. She said that he was making progress. Slow, but real progress. Well enough progress as you can expect after breaking both legs and half a pelvis...but she never mentioned the fact he broke not one, but two vertebrae in his spine."

Amelia swallowed. "She didn't lie to you. Nance didn't know."

"I know she didn't lie." She said with glistening eyes.

"He didn't want them to know. He didn't want Mom to come back and coddle him to death with reassurances and hope. So we lied. He was never very optimistic that he would walk again. Me and Mer tried to be so he didn't...you know, he needed some kind of hope. So we agreed because it wasn't supposed to matter. Because he would go back to normal and Mom and Liz and Kathleen and Nance and you and any other part of our family would have no idea that it took him so long to even just stand for the first time because by the time Thanksgiving and Christmas rolled around, he'd be a confident walker again." She said before sighing. "But you see, that plan would only ever really work if, at some point, he got to throw his chair out. And he didn't. And he's not ever going to."

"But he operates again now, right? Unless it's you that's removing the diffuse astrocytoma he was studying."

"Nope, that's his patient. His very interesting patient."

"What makes him interesting?" Addison inquired, reading her tone as anything but the good kind of 'interesting'.

"Blood tests were lost and that screwed with the toxicology report for drug and alcohol screening for the man who- hit him. Derek had to go to court and-"

"The accident was his fault?" She asked, doing her best to keep her inquiry soft. If it was, she hardly wanted to question her as if it was the most outrageous thing ever.

She swallowed. "The man who hit his car had an undiagnosed astrocytoma. Occipital and parietal."

"You mean he's going to operate on-"

"The man who almost killed him. Yeah, he is." She confirmed. "And then there's the part of the story where he just looks at Jason from across the room, while giving his own recount to a freaking judge, and just decides there is something wrong with him. He asked him about weakness and numbness and then gave him a full visual neuro exam workup in the middle of a court session cause you know, why not?" She questioned, her tone making it obvious that it most definitely was anything but the most normal thing in the world to do. "He found evidence of a brain tumour. We scanned and bingo."

"Wow." She breathed. Obviously, she knew Derek was an excellent doctor but she hadn't ever heard of anything quite so otherworldly. A third eye that could read brain tumours, perhaps? "That's…"

"Big, yeah. Scary. Ambitious. It's…insane."

She smiled a little. Derek always pushed to be the best so she was hardly surprised by the adjective 'ambitious'. "He is insanely ambitious."

"I'm just worried-" She started.

"About what will happen to him if it doesn't go his way." Addison finished for her.

"Mmm mmm." She murmured, confirming that that was the way she would have finished the sentence it she had the chance to.

"But he's...okay, you know, with the whole no-walking thing?" She asked tentatively. He didn't seem to be overly fazed by that specific aspect of himself.

"He wasn't. Then he uh- he had a post-op complication a few weeks ago and he...he's better about it now."

"A dangerous post-op complication, you mean?"

"He...he developed post-op pneumonia."

"Mark Sloan- don't leave this class." Their professor called as the class stood, shoving their books into their bags and slowly leaving the room. He sighed and made a save-me kind of eye contact with Addison. "Actually- Montgomery, stay too."

Then dread filled both of their eyes.

They waited for the class to clear out of the room before approaching their Neuroscience professor. Neither of them particularly liked him and he didn't particularly like them. But he loved Derek. Derek knew the answers, but didn't live with his hand in the air. The not-so-annoying variety of nerd. "Either of you know when Derek is going to turn up to class again?"

Addison shook her head, and Mark didn't speak.

"Well, do you at least know if he's catching up on all this missed work?" He picked up a sticky note from the desk. There were a few columns, each one containing a number and a few words. "These are the page numbers he'll need, if you could give this to him, that would be really great." Neither of them took the note. Their hands didn't even move. "What?"

"He's uh-" Addison swallowed and ignored the tears in her eyes. "-really quite ill sir."

"So ill that he can't do a little work? Read a few pages of a book? He's Derek Shepherd, he reads these books for fun." He scoffed. He had always known Derek to do the work in class, as well as outside. In fact, in his first year, he caught up on every single topic he missed when he was in physio or another medical appointment, due to his motorcycle accident. The fact he couldn't be bothered to try and do some work surprised him, if he was honest. Well, until neither of them spoke.

Addison blinked her eyes into redness, but didn't allow herself to cry. She could feel her lip physically juddering but didn't even try to stop it.

Mark stayed stoic, but the professor couldn't help but notice his upset too. He'd never seen him express that much emotion.

But it told him one thing. One crucial fact. Derek wasn't okay. Derek was anything but okay.

He swallowed at how loud the silence was. "How...how bad is it?"

"He's in hospital. High flow O2. Antibiotics. It...It's-" She couldn't stop tears from rolling down her cheeks anymore. It was horrendous. He was horrendous. The off-white sheets were closer to his regular skin colour than he was and he looked so exhausted and beaten down.

"He...collapsed last night." Mark confessed after a long second of silence. "He was unconscious for a while and we...we couldn't wake him up by ourselves."

"He...what?"

"We went to see him, ask him how he was doing. He was really struggling to breathe, threw up a few times and just..." Addison swallowed. "We called 9-1-1...he was admitted last night. He...he has pneumonia."

"God, I hope he's okay."

Addison nodded, trying not to let a tear slip. She was aware that pneumonia could be fatal, despite the fact that his doctors had reassured them he was young, fit and healthy enough to fight off the infection. "Me too, sir. Me too."

"Was he admitted or...was it mild?"

She swallowed and shook her head. "It uh- it was anything but mild."

"He was in for-" She prompted.

"-quite a long time." Amelia finished. "He was uh- really quite bad when he came in and...and then he was out of it for like two days. He slept for a really long time and then- he was a little better. Still coughing and struggling to breathe but...but better in some ways."

"How bad is 'really quite bad'?"

"He uh-" Amelia swallowed. "-his lungs collapsed."

"Both of them?"

She nodded. "He...flatlined."

Addison felt her vision cloud and a lump appear in his throat. She couldn't say anything after that word. He had died. Properly, properly died. So she chose something else to focus on. "But they...they didn't have to vent him?"

"So, I'd like to talk about what you did yesterday." Her professor stated. Addison didn't even try to leave the class when the bell went. She reported straight to his desk, knowing he would be scolding for what she did the day prior. Although, she had barely touched her pen to her notes today either so she supposed he could scold her for that too. She was much too distracted. She had been for almost three days now.

"I know, I'm sorry."

"You know our rule. If your phone rings in my class, it's no longer your phone." He reminded her, as if the reason she had ran out of the room at the start of a phone call from a teary Carolyn Shepherd was because she forgot about said rule. He had been a little too quick to invent the rule, in her opinion, instating it after just one student brought their Motorola to a class only three weeks prior.

She had answered the call, put her oversized brick of a Nokia on the desk and waited for the person on the other line to speak. She only got a cell phone so she could call in case of an emergency. And she was. She was calling.

Emergency.

Addison sniffed. "I know, I know."

"Who is Carolyn?" He asked, a little concerned about why she sniffled at that acknowledgement. All he had heard as he strided towards her was 'Hi Addison, it's Carolyn, I'm really sorry to call you in class but-" before Addison scooped up the phone and sprinted out of the room at the speed of a track runner.

She swallowed and wiped one of the patches under her eyes. Her sleeve absorbed tears. "It's uh- it's Derek's mom."

"Derek like Derek Shepherd?"

She nodded.

Concern welled in his stomach. Why on earth was she getting called by Derek's mom at eleven thirty in the morning, mid-orthopaedic class? "Addison, where did you go after you left class?"

"New York General." She answered after a second. She had ran there as, thankfully, it was rather close and hauled aching legs through the corridor to him. She was relieved when she found him in his room, not the ICU. Nancy was there too. He was asleep and on high O2. But still breathing by himself.

"That's...a hospital." He stated slowly, as if he was sure he had just misheard what was said. Derek had been absent from his classes for over a week but he was under the impression he was simply resting and recuperating at home.

"Derek...he's...god, it's really bad."

"Derek's in New York General?" His jaw dropped a little. General was a busy hospital. They didn't have the capacity to fill beds with people with illnesses unless it was serious. The possibly deadly kind of serious. "I thought he had the flu!"

"Pneumonia." She corrected.

He faltered at that. "Bad pneumonia? Like...lungs-collapsing-pneumonia or...or is it just that he needed IV antibiotics?"

"Carolyn...The reason Carolyn called because they almost had to intubate. She wanted me to know if they did, straight away. Because...he was struggling to breathe so much that his sats...they dropped. Thought it was effusion but he resolved it himself before they- before they tubed him. He's okay now. Stable again. But he was...he was so close."

He swallowed. And made a mental note to remove that phone rule.

"I mean- he had an BMV while he was having...you know, but no, not a vent-vent."

"That's...good. But, you know, not good." She responded, trying to smile a little. All she could do was make attempts at pretending everything okay because it really, really wasn't. "Did he start operating after that? Because, last time he had it, it took him a while to actually start doing stuff again."

It was different then. Everything - literally everything - had a higher mortality rate because of less advanced technology and drugs. She would have obviously been worried if she was told Derek was mid-pneumonia in 2015, but catching it in the 1990s was much, much more dangerous. So dangerous that his group of friends would sit and wonder what would happen if he needed to be intubated and never made his way out of it.

"You sure you're ready for this?"

Derek swallowed and nodded, looking over to Addison and trying to smile a little. She returned it, pushed open her car door and collected her and Derek's bag from the back seat. She passed it to him as she walked round the car, heading in the direction of their first class, which just so happened to be Neurology.

Derek wasn't quite sure what happened just before he reached the building.

He was walking.

Then he got...attacked.

By his friends. By hugs.

"Okay, okay- enough, that's enough-" He pleaded jokily through a laugh as he was released by Mark's tough grip. "I'm fine but I really don't need you squeezing my lungs, I think they've been through enough!"

Mark smirked. "We missed you."

"Aww. That's sweet." Sam joked, making a kissy face at the pair before getting a faux-dirty glare from Naomi.

Derek rolled his eyes, but still found himself smiling. He had taken three days off to do pure cramming of the multitude of lessons he had missed and, honestly, he was feeling quite a lot better. But he was also tired. Really tired. That didn't stop him heading to a class with a smile and getting an awfully proud grin from his professor as he handed in the four assignments he managed to catch up on. Addison told him that they had explained his condition to the man, as well as the fact that he had been asking for updates every couple of days.

"Hey! Shep! Nice to see you finally returned from the land of the dead." One of his classmates called, his relief anything but real.

Derek didn't reply, and took his seat between Addison and Mark.

"Riddle me this, seeing as you always seem to get the highest grade when you're in this room. How in the world do you plan to be a doctor when you take- what was it, five weeks off, for a cold? I mean how unreliable are you going to be?" Max pressed.

"Piss off, would you?" Mark requested before Derek had a chance to say anything. He exchanged a smile of thanks.

He made it about fifteen minutes into class before his illness really started to catch up with him. "Water?" Addison offered, rubbing a hand against his back as he coughed.

He shook his head, pressing his hand a little harder against his mouth in the hope it would mute more of his cough. Even his professor gave him a concerned are-you-sure-you're-suppose-to-be-here? look when he reached about twenty seconds. He managed to shove it back into his box a few seconds after that, but he knew it wasn't going to last forever.

"How in the world can you tell that that is the hippocampus?" Naomi exclaimed, squinting at the tiny printed CT scan on their worksheet.

Derek shrugged and gestured to the board. Since Derek showed his worksheet to tell them what he had got for each question, the teacher had put the answers up. Of course, he was right.

"I feel a little offended that you know all the answers to these question and we've all been here since we started the module, if I'm honest." Mark hummed, raising his eyebrows at Derek's notes. "Want to offer me some of your hippocampus?"

He smirked, but didn't say anything.

"You okay?"

He nodded.

"Can you not speak?" Addison pressed, a little concerned.

He made an expression that she couldn't quite interpret at that question before returning to his work. He knew they exchanged a worried look between themselves at his response.

"Shepherd. Figure C on the board." His professor called, interrupting their concern.

"It's uh- an oligodendroglia in the Temporal lobe." He answered, surprisingly quietly.

"Say it again." He instructed, eyebrows dropping. He was pretty sure he got it right. He just wasn't sure.

"An oligo-" He tried at a louder volume before breaking into yet another fit of coughs. This one was worse. This one left him wheezing for air as well as turning heads and raising eyebrows.

Max's hand raised, but he didn't ask to be called on. "It's an oligodendroglia of the Temporal lobe sir." He called out over Derek's choking.

"That's...correct." He agreed, although his eyes didn't even focus on the boy. "Derek, do you need to step outside?"

Max scoffed. Again. "He had the freaking flu, why's he being treated like he's suddenly some kind of prince?" The man complained, watching as Addison held her drinks bottle up to his mouth for him. "Oi, Sheps. I'll pay you twenty dollars if you teach me how to fake it like that." He offered.

Mark lost it at that. He didn't care if his teacher was listening. He didn't care if the class was listening. "You know how you get a cough like that Max?"

"No." He returned shortly. "That why I'm asking. Why, you got me a technique that's worth twenty?"

"Of course. Cash?" Mark posed. He didn't wait for him to respond before continuing. "It's simple, in technique. You start by getting pneumonia, you know, the lung disease with the super high mortality rate. Then you've got a free cough for a good month, plus a nice nine-day hospital stay for IVs and oxygen therapy because your lungs are about to collapse. Wanna try it now you know the method?"

Derek smirked through his cough at that, if he was honest, knowing how dumbstruck Max would be.

"He taught interns once a week before that. But no, no surgery. He started operating after...after he had his six-month appointment with Callie when she-" Amelia swallowed. "She basically just told him that there wasn't really a chance he'd ever be walking again."

"So...he was in a car accident. Then had post-op pneumonia. Then was told he wasn't going to be able to walk again. And now he's working? He's operating?"

"Mmm, it's been a crap year. But you know, it was actually what he needed to start accepting everything. The accident was one of those depressing kind of traumas. And that was more one of those ones where someone feels suddenly inspired to live life to the fullest."

She smiled a little, although she was still a little dumbfounded by everything her ex-husband had gone through. "I'm glad."

"Me too." She agreed. If she was frank, she had no idea what would have happened next otherwise. He still had such a deep hatred for that chair. It wasn't like he hadn't accepted that he was stuck with it. In fact, he was the only one who seemed to be able to accept that, it was more that he couldn't accept its existence in his life.

"He does seem okay." Addison observed. Other than his hatred of doors, he seemed perfectly confident in himself despite it all.

"I have no idea how he can take something like that so well. I mean...I wouldn't- I couldn't do that."

She nodded slowly. She didn't know how to react. Was she supposed to be sad for him, or just try not to mention it?

Amelia saw Addison wave to someone behind her. She turned around to see that her brother had just entered the cafeteria, probably in search of some lunch (seeing as it was midday). He didn't appear to care about the food anymore though, seeing as he instead headed straight to their table.

"Hey, speak of the devil." Addison greeted as he approached them.

"You're the devil…wait, no, Satan." He corrected after a second of searching for the name he had once dubbed her with.

"Ah yes, Satan." She murmured through a grin.

"Satan?" Amelia repeated, a little worried about what her brother was calling his ex-wife.

"Nickname." Addison clarified. "Don't worry, he's not being an ass."

"So, you were talking about me?" He said, returning to what they were originally discussing.

"Well, of course. What else do you think we'd be talking about?"

"I feel honoured to be the topic of your conversation but all anyone ever wants to do in this hospital is talk about me." He looked around the room. Someone looked away a little too purposefully. He still had no idea why people couldn't get over the fact that he was in a surgeon in a chair after all these weeks. "So, let's talk about you."

"Okay. But we're gonna talk about you later." Addison bargained.

"Fine." He sighed. "You have a husband now, right?"

"Jake Reilly." She said, confirming his question with a nod. "He's an endocrinology and fertility specialist."

"Happy?"

She smiled. "Is it awkward if I say yes?"

"Not at all. I'm glad. I'm happy with Mer too." He shook his head as he posed his next question, "And Henry, your son?"

"Yeah. He's three. Smart. Funny. Likes drawing cars. Really big on sweet potato, for some reason."

"Kids love sweet potato." He murmured, thinking about Bailey. Henry wasn't the only kid who liked the soft, orange variation on a regular spud.

"Your kids like sweet potato then? All of them?" She asked.

He raised his eyebrows at the last comment "Makes it sound like I have ten kids."

"Well, you do have a lot."

"Three – almost." He corrected. He wasn't sure whether or not that could really be considered 'a lot'. He grew up in a house with four sisters and an almost adopted brother, seeing as Mark seemed to have more sleepovers at their house than his own.

Lots of people were single children. He supposed two kids was the average in the US, but he had never looked into it. That would make his family above average, but not extremely so. "I'm sure you know some stuff about Zola. She's smart and finds the whole world so interesting and demands to know everything about every little thing. Then there's Bailey- and yes, he is named after Miranda, seeing as she helped us out massively because of a rather...uh, basically, Meredith had an extremely interesting labour. Then our third little one."

"And you all live in that little trailer of yours, do you? Eating trout for breakfast and sharing one hairdryer between the whole family." She suggested through a laugh.

He smiled but didn't quite find the dig funny enough to truly laugh. "Well, no. But it's still on the land."

She sighed. "Of course it is. But I- uh don't suppose you fish anymore, actually."

"I haven't, not in a while."

"Meredith must be upset." She remarked sarcastically, trying to cover up the hole she had just dug. Mentioning things that Derek could no longer do seemed like a really, really bad idea, even if he was supposedly okay with what had happened to him. "I'm sure she loved cooking fish every day for the, what, six years you've been married."

"I didn't make her cook fish, don't worry."

"Well at least you know the secret to a good marriage now then."

He laughed a little this time. "No fish."

"No fish." She joked, just before her pager buzzed.

It had to be the triplets, seeing as she only had one patient. Or four, depending on how she wished to look at it. Mother. Baby A. Baby B. Baby C. The parents hadn't named them yet either.

"I've got to go-" She started as she stood from her seat, picking up her knife and fork and placing them in the middle of her tray, slipping the orange of her meal into her lab coat pocket with the other hand.

"Room 3212?" Derek questioned as he pulled his own pager to his eyeline.

"Yeah, the Turner triplets, why?" She asked, not looking up from where she was packing up her food for a second.

She pulled her eyes away from her lunch only to see he was looking at his own pager. That's where he got the number from. He was on lunch; Amelia's shift was over but she was just staying to talk to Addison.

"Sorry Amy-"

She shrugged; she understood the call of a pager. "Catch up later."

She nodded, then hurried about the cafeteria.

"Tell me about the Turners."

"She's at twenty-six weeks. Two girls and a boy. The boy has a CDH and is congenitally anemic due to Rh isoimmunization. One girl has amniotic bands. And she discovered via ultrasound four weeks ago that the second girl has gastroschisis."

"And the mother?" He questioned, a little fearful of the response he was going to receive.

"Gestational diabetes." She sighed.

"This is where you tell me the fathers hit the road."

She shook her head. "Nope. He's there. He's good to them. Good at handling it."

"Thank god."

"You are good." Addison murmured as she joined him in the scrub room.

As they found out when they got to the room, the mother had collapsed in an attempt to get up, cracking her head on the floor and developing a subdural hematoma. Addison monitored the babies and mom while Derek performed his usual job. He was perfect, and there was no abrupt birth.

"What ever happened to you hating me being a neuro-god, huh?" He asked as he drew his hands away from the water and patted the moisture away with a towel.

He reached a hand over to his chair, dragging it towards himself before transferring over.

"Do you do that every surgery?" She couldn't help but ask.

He raised his eyebrows as he nodded. "It's for the sterile field. Lily, the scrub nurse who helped me today, literally, physically drags me in and out of the OR every single time I have a surgery then I just transfer back at the end after I've scrubbed out. It's uh- quite awkward. But fine."

"Sounds fun." She returned, a little sarcastically.

"You know, you're not the only one who has said that."

"Mmm." She agreed, leaving the room and holding the door open for him. She had learnt to do that from the first time, in the lab.

"If you're not busy, I would really love you to come and meet the kids. I mean, only if you want to, of course." He offered as the door closed behind them.

She smiled. "What do you mean, if I want to? I was going to invite myself in a second!"

Addison was hesitant about entering the room with him. He said it was fine, but that didn't stop her from faltering.

"You sure this isn't weird?"

"No. Of course not." He reassured her, pushing the door open.

Then, her hesitancy was replaced with surprise instantly. Before Derek even got through the entrance to the room, there was a child in his arms. Then she was thrown up into the sky before landing on his lap. "Daddy!"

"Hello Zozo." He greeted, beaming at her as she fell into his chest for a hug. She threw her hands around him and he wrapped one hand around her, while the other pushed himself forward a little so he wasn't in the way of the door.

"I did lots of drawings today." Zola said with a smile.

"Did you?" He asked with a beam. "I can't wait to see them, baby!"

"Dr Shepherd." A voice called.

He looked away from his daughter to greet the adult. "Hi Penelope. Where's Bailey?"

"Oh, he's just over there." The woman explained, gesturing across to the room. He was drawing rather aggressively with a green crayon. His son was very good at passionate scribbling.

"Can you-" He started, not even having to finish the sentence for her to know what he was asking for. With the amount of kids and toys in the way, they both knew it was a bad idea for him to collect his son.

She smiled. "Yeah."

"Thanks."

"Delivery of one very cute little boy." Penelope greeted when she turned up beside them, holding Bailey in her arms.

Derek smiled and held his arms out to the boy. Then, he had two kids squished on his lap.

Addison's smile became a smirk as they fought over space on him.

"Who is dat?" Zola asked, pointing at the woman leaning in the doorway, smiling at the pair. Derek's kids were so freaking adorable so she couldn't help the grin. It was odd, if she was honest, to watch them. He was the man that she could have had kids with, if their marriage didn't fall apart, and now he had his own family and kids. Nevertheless, she was glad that he was happy after everything that had happened recently.

"This-" Derek started before gesturing to her. They stopped then, and she was met with two pairs of extremely intrigued eyes. "-is one of my friends from a few years ago. She was also one of the people I learnt to be a doctor with."

"Hi Daddy's friend." Zola greeted with a grin.

"Her name is Addison. But you can call her Addie." Derek explained. "And she's gonna be staying for dinner tonight."