Derek is dead. Derek died. Derek will always be dead.

The litany had gotten quieter over the year, but it hadn't disappeared. Returning to Seattle had made it louder. No lapping waves or screaming gulls to drown it out, and the sky, always gray, made it hard not to engage her tendency toward pathetic fallacy. See, Mon? I did learn something in undergrad.

I suppose you must have, if the university allowed you to return.

Her mental Ellis Grey could be borderline amusing. A mix of Mom and the Ellis of the journals. I wasn't entirely sure I wouldn't be escorted off campus on day one. Like Geisel had accepted me for my name and not bothered to check my record with Student Life.

That hadn't happened. Her casual acquaintance, Yuki, the security guard, had still been around, but they had an understanding about her undergrad antics (never mention them in front of anyone, and you can mock me all you want. Yes, even about the Gummy Bear Jell-O Shots incident of Fall '98), and by the end of another four years they were properly friends. Who knew that you got to know a guy better walking from the medical library to your car than being an involuntary Safety Squad ride-along while he monitored you for alcohol poisoning symptoms?

The past never left. That more than anything supports her mother's life is a carousel theory. Whether the reminder was having her graduation from med school attended by the now middle-aged security guard who'd seen far too much, —her 1997 Halloween costume wouldn't have left much to the imagination if it had fit properly, and it didn't—or the picture of Derek that now hung below the tribute to Mark and Lexie.

It wasn't as though she hadn't expected it. She'd done all she could to prepare herself. —The thing about ghosts was that no matter how expected they were, haunting was their job. And I do my job very well.

An exaggerated boast for sure—Neurosurgeon, yes. Lover, always. Father, if he was home. Husband…mostly. She couldn't say she hadn't gone in with open eyes. Things had been improving, significantly, and she would've made sure that continued, she would've made sure of that—but he would've made the boast, regardless.

"Dr. Grey!" Meredith didn't know how long she'd spent staring at the picture. With the staff streaming in, it couldn't have been too long; she would not go unnoticed here.

"BokHee!" She held an arm out to the scrub-nurse, who accepted the hug, only a twitch of surprise on her face.

"You look good."

Meredith waited for the questions. Where? Why there? Amelia, Maggie, Alex. Cristina, Richard, hell, Carolyn Shepherd had put her through it, and she'd gotten communication.

BokHee didn't ask, and that made it easy to remember why she was Meredith's favorite scrub nurse.

"Walk me upstairs." She took BoKHee's arm, linking it with hers.

"Run interference, you mean to say."

"Potato, tomato. Don't shake your head, you missed me."

"Maybe."

"No one else throws thirty-second dance parties in the OR."

"I did not miss that."

Meredith hadn't either. Not for months. And then, one day all she wanted was to hold a scalpel. It hadn't been time to get onto the merry-go-round, but she could prepare herself for the step. It became a when, not an if. No one had to know how long it took, or think that wasn't much time at all, considering. Her grief hadn't been on display for the benefit of the whisper network. It would never belong to anyone but her, and her children. They wouldn't really understand why she'd done it —Amelia might never. It'd be nice to think someone else with the tendency to run away would have insight, but Meredith knew better. Other runawayers— runners away? No, calling herself a "runner" in any context gave marathoners the wrong idea, and "runaway" hadn't felt like the correct term when she was sixteen, much less twenty years later—Those who ran away did not cope well with being left behind. That accounted for a lot of the resentment amongst the Shepherds. It was a pity Derek and Amelia had only been on the edges of that understanding. It'd put him on the brink of so many others.

"Amy said something weird tonight."

"Pay for a new set of fancy headphones and call it her Christmas present."

"Not about that. I did get her a Christmas present. Didn't I?"

"Whatever initials it has on it, a brain-shaped paperweight is a brain-shaped paperweight. Also, now that I can be honest without it starting a whole thing, super braggadocios. I understand that word came into the world the day you were born, but I'm not a neurosurgeon, and I…."

"Mer?"

"Fine. Sorry. N-not a neurosurgeon, and it made me feel belittled on her behalf. What'd she say? Was she okay with the cops and everything today?"

"She said so. I'm putting the likelihood at about seventy-five percent. She called me a runner. Sprinter was implied. I'm not totally dense. I saw the parallels; I left New York to get away from the mess I'd made. Whenever Addison showed up here, Mom gave me pretty close to the same advice. 'Man up and fix it.'"

"As if the two of you hadn't been pulling on your marriage like a wishbone for years. Addison just happened to get the longer piece. Or the smaller one. Whatever, you get it."

"I do. That's exactly what it was. It snapped, and I snapped, and…. Well, between the two of them, Mom and Amy, I started thinking; I've always known where to find you. All the times I said you ran… you weren't hiding in the woods."

"No bathrooms. We put 'no running' on the Post-It for a reason; we both did it."

"Sure, and then I still— "

"I went on that cruise with Cristina! After...after Burke. I was trying to…to get away from what you represented. That's not the woods, but…."

"I think you retreat more than you run. You hide, sometimes. I'm the one who has actually left. This time, Mom told me to take a good, hard look at my life, and then shut up and fix what wasn't working. One run-through produced enough obvious trouble-shooting errors to get me on a red-eye, but I… If I just look, I'm not going to see it all. I've been looking at us through a filter; it labelled you as the one who's most likely to run, and that's not true. Or fair. I have no idea what the other parameters are. I know I've said things that… but you're already making a list, haven't you?"

"I'm a listing person. A lister. I might know what I need, or the steps I've taken to fix something, but if the next surgeon can't repeat my process— "

"Then it's no good to anyone. I happen to think that it is good for you and your hypothetical patient, yes, 'every surgery should be for the betterment of science,' and in the real world either of us needs to be able to get the groceries. I like the lists. I don't like that I've mentally airbrushed enough for you to make—what?"

"We're about to have visitors. Watch the monitor, she's lifting him out of the crib. But, Derek, there are things you don't…. I have things too, I'm sure, but…. Yeah, I've let you see things your way a few times. I've done it because nothing was ever worth risking this. Risking us. So-so I wish…I wish I could tell you now. and take it on faith. It's not that I don't believe you, or-or trust you…."

"You just need to be sure that you should. I understand. Really. —Come in, Zo-Zo."

"Um, it's only the baby needed to check you weren't gone again."

The baby had been sound asleep, and everyone in the room had known it. The twinge of pettiness Meredith had felt at the culpability in Derek's expression as he reassured Zola by way of proving his tangibility to twenty-two-month-old Bailey was the deeper reason why she'd been glad for the interruption.

She'd been a little indignant that he wanted to discuss his oblivious slights at a time where consequences would be minimal, but they needed to do it. She'd needed to be ready to make him see past his contrition, first. She had her own sliver of this wishbone, and she kept it sharp. Even paper cuts could get infected. He'd crafted his words into daggers intentionally, but his jabs were less precise than his surgical incisions. They didn't always close under the dressing of acknowledged intent and apology. Having him deduce that to any degree gave her hope that eventually they'd join her collection of faded scars.

His death caused some of those to reopen at the same time as a jagged-edged sword was ripped across the clean margins of the punctures. New incisions formed at the same time, until she felt like she was being clawed. All of them were raw that night, and every breathe she took in the house felt like having some small abrasive particle ground into them, glass, or rocks, or dirt—dirt, grave dirt, Derek is dead. Derek is dead, Ashes to no ashes; one day we'll all be dust, right? It doesn't matter. Shouldn't matter. This isn't how it was supposed to be.— She hated returning to those hours. The feelings were so intense that she feared being pulled into the spiral. Rationally, she was sure she wouldn't. As much as the emotions were hers, and a version of all that misery-pain-loss-anger-grief lived under her skin, the mindset wasn't. She couldn't think herself into it, not that she wanted to, and the circumstance was too unique.

Whenever she'd convinced herself of that and started delving into her memories for answers, their clarity unnerved her. Her thoughts frequently start down a path, and then diverged for a bit. It wasn't rare for that to happen multiple times before she merged with the original thought, but the points of intercept were always traceable. That night, they were jumbled, almost indecipherable to herself, at times, but they were decisive. Certain.

She wouldn't be able to breathe if she'd stayed. She would've suffocated in the house, or in the OR, or in line for the coffee cart. Did you hear about Meredith Grey? Just when her career was starting to look promising. She would've broken, and not even her army of surgeons Momma, why does he use horses and men not surgeons? would've been able to put her together by her little village, enabled by the list of babysitters approved by Doctor-Mom Extraordinaire Miranda Bailey herself, she'd lock herself away. The Ellis Grey nobody knows. She couldn't do that to her kids. She couldn't be around normal people her grief would infect them all. Turns out, she's nothing like her mother, after all! She'd be alienating her friends either way; this time she wouldn't take them with her.

It was the hardest easy choice she'd ever made.

Finding her overnight bag, always pre-packed for emergency surgeries. Getting two kids into the car. This is what she did. I won't Searching the house room-by-room for forgotten lovies. make the same mistakes. I really loved that doll. Remembering the fireproof box that held all their important documents. Hell, she gathered up the box with the Easter baskets. They'll need routine. She'd taken each step I am not doing what she did. I am paying attention. deliberately, and made herself go into I can't breathe. Can't do this. every room Derek is dead. I can't do this. I am not single mother There! Bailey's favorite teether. material. You told him Two boxes of plastic animals labeled Zola's Zoo. you could What else? Snacks. She swept a shelf of the pantry off into backpack and piled do it without him juices and milk into their largest cooler. She didn't know where they were going to go. It didn't matter, but I didn't want to. I don't want to do this they'd need to eat long before she was ready without him. I can't. I was wrong. I can't. I need everything to stop.

Both kids had been asleep when she pulled down the drive. Breathing became easier from the second her foot hit the gas. She'd kept her eyes forward, afraid to glance at the rearview. Afraid she wouldn't be able to resist the pull of memory, however likely it was to destroy her. Afraid that the break that she could feel coming had happened, and she'd see him standing in the living-room window.

From the outside, all anyone knew was Meredith Grey ran away. Runaway Grey. One of a few high-school nicknames, earned in entirely different circumstances, but apt, wasn't it? She had left. She'd gone away.

She'd gone away until she was ready to return. Until she'd healed from having one of the most important parts of her life excised. She knew better than to ignore that deep of a wound, to suppress that amount of pain. Blocking it would become blocking all emotion, blocking herself. Meredith would have disappeared. In her place would've been Dr. Grey. A shell of herself, who only cared about surgery. It might be easier for her, but she refused deprive her children of their mother the way she had been.

It almost hadn't worked. She'd almost disappeared anyway.

They wouldn't ask her about that, of course. Not explicitly. Anyone who hadn't been given the answers would try to elicit answers with poor subtlety.

"Oh, Dr. Grey! It's so good to have you back with us. I heard you were somewhere down south. Was it San Francisco?"

"San Diego, actually."

"Do you have family there?"

"Not really."

"I see."

They didn't. Of course, they didn't. They'd wait, and she might give them some elaboration. "Who doesn't love a beach, right?" "I could've kept going, but I speak Italian, not Spanish." "I did one of those online quizzes. 'Where should you get over losing the love of your life?'" What was she supposed to say to someone using her reaction to Derek's death as small talk? They didn't see it that way. Most of them had let Dr. Shepherd slip into the back of their minds long before she could spend fifteen minutes without his name overwhelming her thoughts.

The well-meaning questioners were usually nurses; she had to be amiable if not fully truthful. Residents were a different matter, and woe betide the intern who tried to suck up to her with questions about her "sabbatical." To protect them from her, and vica-versa, Jo Wilson had spread a cock-and-bull story—using a euphemism for dick to mean "bullshit" was an idiom Meredith could get behind—involving a dart board at Joe's.

"They really think I waltzed in there on the day of Derek's funeral, kids in tow, with my own damn map?"

"They're interns, eight months in. They're too exhausted to be that deep."

It wasn't the worst story. It made her seem like a risk-taker, but also decisive, in a way. Confident. All things she hadn't felt often, recently. It also wasn't true. Not in the slightest. She couldn't say what the truth was.

Once she'd left the house behind and headed for the ferry, and her thoughts weren't overwhelmed with getting away, getting out, getting air, her certainty had begun to slip. Not knowing where she was going was trivial; she was already lost. Who would she be without Derek? Meredith Grey, but who was that?

A little girl who lost her mother disembarking from a carousel.

A quiet child hiding in the shadows.

A teenager who never mattered more than a stranger's gallstones.

An adolescent thrill-seeker who rarely knew and hardly cared where she was going to sleep that night.

A med school graduate whose mother was lost disembarking from a plane.

A nameless intern seeking to drink away how much stepping into her new workplace felt like coming home.

Everything else came after—her friends, her career, her family, the person she'd become, and the one Grey + Sloan knew—All of those belonged to the amalgamate Meredith Grey, made up of all those fragments of a woman who hadn't thought herself capable of being more. She hadn't been put together by Derek—the opposite. She hadn't crafted herself for him—tried to, but it didn't work. She hadn't centered herself around him—he wasn't the sun.

It didn't matter. Whether he'd lit a spark, been the final coat of glaze outside the kiln, or revolved with her as the binary in a star system, his death had been an explosion that shattered her sense of self all over again.

The steep curve of the freeway on-ramp had woken Zola, or maybe she'd been awake, quiet, watching, waiting for a safe chance to speak.

"Momma? Where are we going?"

"I'm not sure, baby. We're just going to stay somewhere else for a while."

"Like a timeout?"

Mom would've said, "yes, be quiet now." She'd almost been able to understand why. "Not quite. No one's in trouble. It's more…more of a break."

"A break because Daddy died?"

"He did."

Meredith had merged into the far-left lane, with everyone else who wasn't exiting any time soon, and given more of her attention to the mirror reflecting the back seat. Bailey was asleep; his chin resting on the stuffed tiger tucked under one arm. Zola had her Anatomy Jane next to her. Rawr, the reminder of The Day the Lion Crossed the Street was on her lap, and she was twirling his tail, making it look like a fluffy helicopter blade in the strips of streetlight. Her eyes were on Meredith, the way they'd been on her first night, and so many times since.

"We're going to be okay, Zo. This is tough. To be honest, I don't have a big plan, right now. But you, and I, and Bailey, we're a team, right?"

"Yeah."

"We're together, and we're gonna figure it out. Okay?"

"Okay." Zola yawned, and in her face, Meredith could see the baby she'd been, not very long ago. "Mommy?"

"Yes, Zola?"

"I love you."

"I love you, too. Very much."

For a long stretch of time that was all Meredith knew. All she had. Like experience had given her just enough time to anticipate the blast, and she'd latched onto the "Zola and Bailey's mother" portion of her identity with both hands. She hadn't let go in the aftermath, knowing how much damage it could still sustain. Without Derek, that part of her wouldn't exist at all, but it hadn't been dependent on him since the first time she held Zola in her arms and let herself be "Mama."

She'd been afraid that it wouldn't be enough—not that they wouldn't, That she wouldn't. That she wouldn't be strong enough to keep even that fundamental part of herself from continuing to disintegrate.

Reconstructing herself hadn't been a clean or a pretty process. It wasn't something she wanted to put on display or rehash. But she had.

When she stopped at the fourth-floor nurses' desk to see where Bailey had her starting, Debbie caught her eye. "Dr. Grey, the rumors are true!"

"I know your source, Deb, your rumors are always true."

The nurse waved a hand and opened the drawer that held nothing but a stack of ledgers everyone pretended didn't exist. "Can you clarify a few of them for me?"

"Depends."

"On the odds?" Debbie asked, flipping through pages of numbers.

"On if I want to answer."

"Sure, sure. You had a baby?"

"I did. Ellie. Ellis. Yes, for my mother. She's blonde, has his eyes so far. Yes, I'm sure she's a Shepherd."

"Far be it from me—

"I can read upside down, Deb." Debbie slid a piece of paper over the names of those who'd bet against Derek. A wise choice. Meredith knew she had a lot left to lose, but there were moments where she could forget.

"Middle name?"

"Really?"

"Spreads the cash flow around."

"Caroline."

Debbie sat back, flicking the chain of her reading glasses. "After your sister?"

"Yes. And make sure everyone knows that. Please."

"Of course. Did the hospital where she was born know they were delivering royalty?"

"My OB knew my name. If you want to call San Diego Medical Center and tell them, be my guest."

Triumph flashed in Debbie's eyes as she marked something on her gridded paper. "San Diego? Interesting."

Meredith cleared out of the patient's chart and handed off the tablet. "What else?"

"Why San Diego?"

"How'd you work the odds on that one?"

"No bet, I'm curious. Doesn't the Harris Trust fund a clinic down there?"

"Wouldn't know." Meredith started walking away.

"Wait, hey, Dr. Grey, what about the birth? Was it—?"

"That's all you're getting, Debbie, you blew it!" You think I don't know you never settled it back then? "Pay out."

She knew why she'd gotten in the car. Why she'd started in the direction she had; why she'd made the initial turns. She'd been nearly out of her mind by the point San Diego became her destination. If there were conscious thoughts involved; she didn't remember them.

Acknowledging that hadn't stopped it from eating at her through dozens of sleepless nights, but if it hadn't been that, there would've been something else. She'd more or less come to terms with it. Let it stop mattering. Stopped blaming herself for something unworthy of blame. The thoughts she attributed to the double-takers were her own fears finding a new roost.

What kind of person…? That'd been the preamble every other time.

What kind of person screws her boss? …pursues a married man? …lets a guy like that go? …goes behind his back that way?

What kind of person takes off the night after her husband's funeral?… drags her kids across the country? … ends up in the same city as her former lover?

A Meredith Grey-type of person.

That was all she had. For now, that was sufficient. She was the only person she had to provide with answers. One day, her children would ask. Maybe Ellis first. The baby girl whose daddy didn't know about her but loved her anyway. Momma, why was I born in San Diego? The truest truth was one she'd never place directly on her child. To remind me that I wanted to live. It was true, and easy to forget.

Maybe Bailey, whose memories already took up so many of her thoughts. He already picked up toys to ask, "did my daddy brought me this?" or "did we got this at the beach?" His usually expressive face never told her which answer he preferred, and years stood between him and the words he needed to ask or answer bigger questions.

Zola, her warm-hearted, brilliant oldest child sometimes talked it. She FaceTimed with her San Diego babysitter every two weeks or so. She had pictures from the year in a 2014 album, and she loved it as much as the 2010-2011 file that held "my first year being Zola Shepherd." She already had some answers about why they left— "Seattle had too many reminders. We had to deal with all the sadness we had before adding more."—but not why they went.

Meredith imagined one of the others asking, "why San Diego?" and Zola saying, "it's not because Aunt Sadie lived there?"

It wasn't. She didn't think.

She might not have the all the whys for them, but they would know the what's, the how's, the where's. They wouldn't have to rely on their memories to piece together what happened the year their mother's second daughter was born. They wouldn't be clued into pivotal truths by her Alzheimer's-addled ramblings.

Maybe they would get insights she couldn't give them consciously.

She'd lost the love of her life, she'd fallen apart, and she'd put herself back together, piece-by-piece. The day had finally come for her to finish the puzzle, to put her name on the O.R. board. It'd taken her a year to trust herself to pick up a scalpel, to become Dr. Grey, and then to put it down and face being Meredith again, but she had. She was ready. If she'd gone to San Diego because Sadie Harris might be there, it mattered less than the fact that if she hadn't been, Meredith would not have gotten to this point within a year.

She wasn't sure she'd have gotten there at all.

A/N: Also posted on AO3, same title/username.

This story will cover Meredith's side of the year from 11x23 "She's Leaving Home." It's complete and will update on about the 15th and 30th with a few exceptions for months with more than two parts.

For reference, the timeline I created and used for this fic can be found by adding google dot docs to this address: (or PM, this site is ridiculous) spreadsheets/d/1lr_DUwiTMRvbPk5KmcBEQf_NCR-rPkz28ERjXs1gVrw/edit?usp=sharing