If you missed my latest fic because you spent the holidays with your family like a normal person (unlike me, who is scared of social interaction), I published 'Unfaithful' on Christmas day, so feel free to have a read of that after this and leave a comment as a nice Christmas gift. :)

While 'Unfaithful' is not as explosive as one might think, this chapter certainly is anything but drama-free.

"Seven. Missed. Calls. Derek, what did I say?"

"Ignore you and prepare to die, yeah, Mom, I remember what you sa-"

"So-" She interrupted. "-when you promised that, were you lying? Because, apparently, you were, seeing as you have been doing so for the last hour! I gave you half an hour incase Jason's surgery ran long but seriously, Derek? Seriously?"

"I've been a little distracted by your granddaughter Mom."

There was a second of silence. Really, with her son being her son, she should have considered the fact that he probably hadn't called because hell had broken loose. Pain and trauma and accidents stalked his entire family. "Zola? Is she okay?"

"No. Not Zola. Zola is fine." He denied with a smile. "This one fits in my hands. And cries a lot. Desperately wants Mommy but she's sleeping because giving birth to a child is very, very exhausting."

"You- you mean- Meredith, she-"

"Mmm mmm." He agreed, knowing what his mom was trying to say. He put his phone on loud speaker and lowered it to his youngest. "Say hi to grandchild number uh- like thirty, Mom."

"What you doing?" Carolyn asked, leaning in the doorway.

"Zo wants to watch the fireworks, thought Elle should join us." Derek explained. There shouldn't have been any fireworks, seeing as it was only seven o'clock but, he could only presume, they were for the younger people of the families around them. He adjusted the baby carrier on his chest before smirking at his baby. She was just about awake when he entered, floating around the border of napping. Zola was the opposite of her sleepy sister; she had run off at the sound of another boom and reached the sky before Derek could even process that she had left the room.

"You look better."

He looked up from his baby at her statement, also removing the breaks from his chair. "I discovered that sleeping, actually speaking to people and eating food is good for you." He wisecracked with a cheeky grin.

"It's uh- not really what I mean." She faltered before swallowing.

"This is the bit where you tell me what you mean." He prompted as his mother refused to elaborate.

"You just- you look less…more- I don't know." She sighed. "I kind of expected you to be a little more…lost?"

"Standing up for my chair's honour was unexpected?" He suggested, ignoring the horrendous pun. Even on the last occasion that she visited him, he was still not overly confident with it all. Now, if someone asked him to describe the process of walking and the process of wheeling, he was pretty sure he would struggle more with the former. He didn't even think about the latter but his mind's 'move' command didn't have a clue what walking was.

"I do notice it…"

"...but you also don't." He finished for her.

She smiled a little. That was exactly what she was trying to get out. The fear in her eyes as she analysed him when he had first arrived there had most definitely faded. If the whole broken glass incident was ignored – which he was pretty sure his mom knew was Kathleen's fault, not his – he most definitely showed that he was happy with his new life, seeing as he was fighting to try and prove his life was still okay.

"You're happy, minus the terrible trio. You just...you really do look better...happy."

"So do you." He returned with a soft smile.

Her brows lowered. "Me?"

"You remember 'the look', right? You are less...uh- 'look'-y now."

"You're my son. This hurts, but-"

"But?" He pressed.

"Ewan invited me to dinner about a month ago and I thought it was just us but when we got there-"

"It wasn't just you two?"

"Ewan's friend- the one he invited, obviously is-"

"In a chair?" He completed for her. She had no need to complete her story. "And you talked to him and realized that my life doesn't suck as much as you thought it did. Makes sense that you'd believe him over me, seeing as he has no reason to lie to you. If it was horrible, he'd tell you. But he didn't say that, so now you finally believe me."

"Bilateral above-the-knee. How...how did you know that?"

"Disabilitigar."

She smirked. "A what-a-gar?"

"Radar for people like me. Or, you know, maybe we were just talking about me and the chair, then you brought someone else up, and, seeing as I have a brain, I knew why you bought it up."

"Sometimes, just sometimes, I wish that accident knocked out some of your personality so you weren't like this." She sighed as she stepped out of the bedroom. With five kids, she had no choice but to have a bedroom downstairs. Since all of her children moved out, she had repurposed and cleared some of the rooms. The one he was in was, clearly, one that she used when his sisters visited with their kids.

"Mmm." He muttered, following her for only a second.

Carolyn paused and turned around when she noticed that Derek's answer was so quiet that it was if he was a couple metres down the hall, only to find that he was.

"Okay?" Carolyn asked. Then she realized where he had paused, and which picture he was looking at.

"Fine." He agreed, pushing himself a little closer to the table of frames. He picked up the one his eyes refused to leave. Although the photos were old, they had only just been framed. "How long has this been here?"

"Year or two now." She answered with a simple shrug, as if it wasn't a big deal. "You were seven in that photo."

"I remember. Well...I remember you telling me, not- not the actual memory." He murmured, a conflicted look on his face. Like he was sad, but not sad at the same time.

It wasn't anything interesting. It wasn't a pivotal moment by any stretch of the imagination. It wasn't his birthday. He didn't meet his favourite basketball player. They weren't on vacation. It wasn't even in the school holidays. They were just...together. A picnic. Amelia and Liz were colouring together in the background, but it was him and his dad in the foreground, simply smiling together, that caught his attention and made him smile.

It was intriguing to him that, after all these years, she had finally managed to put up a display to remember him by. Before that, there was one picture in the whole house that she had put up. Derek had some in his bedroom as a child, but they certainly weren't because his mother wanted them there.

"Do you-" She swallowed at the trance her son was in. It was like someone had paused the TV. His eyes didn't even move from it. "Do you want a minute?"

"No, no, it's okay." He answered as he finally pulled his eyes away. He smiled at his mom as he caught up with her before following her out into the garden.

"How do fireworks firework?" Zola pondered as she looked from the sky to her dad, turning a little on his lap.

"They contain special chemicals which make the colour. And then the boom comes from the reaction."

"How?"

"Uh- well, the noise comes from the build-up of energy via heat and gas while the colour depends on the chemical. I think red is strontium, and then orange is calcium and yellow is sodium."

"Green?" Zola pushed.

"Green is from barium and then uh- I believe blue is from copper."

"And purple?"

"Well because to get purple you mix blue and red, purple is made of strontium, which is the red one, and copper, which is the blue one."

"Can you make fireworks in the hospital?" She asked, her eyes almost brighter than the fireworks in the sky. "If it science that make fireworks, and hospitals have science?"

"No, I'm afraid we can't. But you can buy them."

"For my birthday?" Zola asked, grinning. "Coolest present ever!"

"Uh- I couldn't give them to you for your birthday-" He started; his heart being crushed by Zola's downtrodden expression for a short second. "-but I could set them off on your birthday for you, if you would like."

"That would be like...best. Birthday. Ever!"

He chuckled as he looked back to the sky, his hands snaking around his daughter's waist to hug her from behind. "Righty-o. Fireworks it is then."

"Where is Daddy?"

"Oh- he'll be back soon. Just got a little distracted-" She trailed off, but bother trying to find an ending to her sentence. She was sure that the six-year-old didn't really care where he was or what he was doing.

"Daddy distracting by?" Zola pushed.

"Oh- when she asks a question you have to answer it." Meredith explained.

"Mmm?" Carolyn asked, confused.

"She's very nosy and very inquisitive, so you've got to answer her."

"Oh. Right. Uh- your dad is inside, looking at stuff because this is where he grew up, but he hasn't been here for a while." Carolyn explained. After the early round of fireworks was done with, Derek excused himself and, she could only presume, returned to the collection of picture frames in the hall.

"So...so this is where Daddy was when small? Like my house? He live all the way here? Cause it was lots of hours in the zoomy to get here."

"Mmm. Your dad moved to where you live a few years ago. That's where he met this lovely one over here-" She explained, gesturing to Meredith with her head.

"Den they fell in love and lived happily ever after?" Zola suggested with a grin.

"Well, they certainly fell in love. But do you think this is happily ever after Zola?"

"I think if every day had fireworks, then yes. But this is close enough."

Nancy Shepherd was on the hunt for peas. Not because she wanted peas while watching the fireworks, of course, but because they were soothing after injury and Ryan had just hit his head on the table when playing with his kids.

She wasn't a neurosurgeon, but she knew it was highly unlikely that he had done any serious damage, seeing as he didn't lose consciousness and was walking and talking fine.

But, of course, she couldn't simply walk from the garden to the kitchen and back to collect the peas. Not with her brother present in the house. He had to make everything in her life so...interesting. It was like a fun, short mini-adventure, except they weren't fun, adventurous nor small-scale. The last adventure she had partaken in was when she went to Seattle after their family trip to Spain. It wasn't fun to learn that Derek was in hospital after being seriously injured in a car accident, it wasn't adventurous and it certainly wasn't small-scale or short-term, seeing as he was still suffering from a serious disability because of it. Or not-suffering, according it him.

And now, after delivering the peas, she was on another one of these adventures.

"Thought you might need this." Nancy called, pushing his chair through the threshold of the door as she spoke. The presence of his chair at the bottom of the stairs was what sparked her Hero's Journey to find her brother, the catalyst.

Derek turned around to see his sister stood in the doorway. Before that, his eyes were just floating around his old bedroom, playing a game of spot-the-difference with his eighteen-year-old self. Lots of it was the same, but Carolyn had chucked quite a few things in there that she wanted hide away from guests. "Oh, uh- thanks."

"You know most people went home, right?"

"Mmm. Mer came and said bye earlier, wanted to get the kids to bed. Just uh- you, Mom, Ewan and Ryan left here, right?"

"Lucas too."

"Why is Lucas here?" Derek asked with creased eyebrows.

"He wanted to talk to you about brain stuff, but you did your disappearing act so he asked to stay for a little longer and Ed agreed."

"Right. Makes sense."

"You know, when Liz told me you could walk, I didn't realize she meant you could go this far. Stairs as well."

"Oh- no." He disagreed. When he told Liz he could just about walk, what he really meant was that he could hobble down the parallel bars in physiotherapy with Emily by his side, his body in a harness and both of his legs, ankle to hip, in movement-constricting braces so he didn't collapse to the floor.

"No?" She echoed confused.

"I didn't walk here."

Her mouth open to speak, but all it did was hang there as her eyebrows creased further. "How...what?"

"How did I get here?" He asked as he shuffled to one side of the bed. He could only assume that that was what she was trying to say. Then he smiled. "Magic."

"Derek." She named sternly.

"I bum-shuffled." He clarified, tapping the space on the bed he had just cleared.

"What the hell is...what?"

"The kids named it. Basically, you put your hands on the floor, and drag."

She sat on the side of the bed, body turned to him. He, on the other hand, was cross legged in the middle. "And you...you do that?"

"This kind of thing forces you to do a lot of stuff just to pretend to be a normal human."

"This kind of thing being paralysis."

Derek sighed. "What do you want me to say Nance? Sorry? Because I can say sorry for the rest of the night if you want."

"I...I don't know what I want from you Derek. I know what I wanted, but it's a bit late for that now."

"You wanted-"

"The truth. For you not to treat your family like crap for once."

"Are you mad at me for not telling you, or mad at me because you excel at displacement and you hate that?" He asked, gesturing to what his sister had just carried up the stairs.

"I...you know I talked to Meredith?" She inquired.

He noted that she answered the question with a question, feeling a little like he was slipping into Kathleen-mode. "Mmm mmm."

"I just...Derek, you're Derek."

"And that means?" He pushed, head tilting a little.

"It means you...you have an ego the size of freaking Mars. You don't like second place. You try to do everything all at once and, eventually, it ends up blowing up in your face. Like, you know, when you were chief. And the one thing I know you will never, ever be able to handle is having something stopping you from being you and now-"

"You mean a disability?" He interrupted. "The thing that is stopping me from being me is a disability?"

She faltered at that word, teeth clamping her bottom lip. She really wished that he could have given her a second to process what she wanted to say before he jumped in with that word.

"It's part of me Nance. It's not stopping me from being me because it is part of me now."

"And you're okay with that?"

"Not like I can return it to the store and exchange it for some nice working legs, is it? Not quite how this whole thing works."

"Derek, this isn't a joke. Life isn't a joke."

"Okay, fine. Let me brutally, brutally honest about this then. My life really sucks sometimes. I'm not going to lie. I hate the fact that I can't do some of the things I planned for my kids like...I can't coach Bailey's afterschool soccer games, if he's still into it by the time third grade rolls around. I hate the fact that no matter how many of those stupid PT exercises I do, my legs are so freaking atrophied and how that makes me feel. I hate the fact that people think it's okay to ask where my kids came from, and if I made them in a lab, which always gets even more interesting when they know I'm a doctor. I hate the fact that no house has an elevator and the fact that I have to bum-shuffle to do what other people do so damn easily. And I hate...I hate myself because, despite the fact that I could do a TED talk on how wrong everyone is about my life, I was still too scared to go to Zola's Christmas play this year because I didn't want the other kids to make fun of her, or for other parents to ask Mer stupid questions. So I hate it too, sometimes. But you know what I do get?"

She sighed when he didn't continue. That meant she was supposed to answer. "Life?" She suggested, half-heartedly.

"Yes. Life." He agreed. "But it sounds stupid when you say it."

She smirked. "You know it sounds stupid, and also pretty cheesy, when anyone says it, right Derek? It's just a stupid, cheesy thing, full stop."

He chuckled. "Mmm. Probably. But it did make you smile."

She paused as if she had been caught cheating, a hand raising to feel her lips. She was smiling. Damn it. Stupid brother.

"Just trust me. I'm not any less 'me' than I was last year. I'm not gonna lie and say I'm not different but...I promise this new version of myself is better, not worse. I'm less of a uh- well, let's be honest, self-centred, inconsiderate complete jerk, and I'm pretty sure no one likes those so I think you would like this new me too, if you just tried."

Nancy smiled a little. "Maybe I'll have to try then."

"What do I uh-" Nancy started as she stood, eyebrows creasing as she placed a hand on the back of his chair. Unlike Derek and Amelia who worked on someone's spine at least once a day, she didn't often encounter a chair-user at work. Sure, her patients were often in wheelchairs because they'd just shoved a baby out of their bodies, but she'd be confident in saying she'd had barely half a dozen mothers since she started OB-GYN who permanently lacked the ability to walk.

"Oh, don't worry, I got it-" He muttered as he grabbed the front to position it before pushing on the breaks. "You don't have to watch if you don't want to, by the way."

"Watch?" She repeated, confused.

"When Mom visited a few months ago-" He started, grabbing his lower leg and dropping it over the side of the bed before doing the same with the other to get himself out of his cross-legged position. "-she found watching me very...she didn't like watching. So, I thought you might not want to either."

"Oh. Right." She muttered, watching him shuffle to the edge of the bed with his hands, despite his offer to look away. "That- uh- that's okay. Just...do your thing."

He didn't directly reply to that verbally or physically, but instead pulled himself over, completing the action she had approved.

"So what's it like being the shortest sibling?"

"My go!"

"Hey, hey, hey! My turn first!" Nancy shouted, ripping the tape measure out of her brother's hand.

"Five foot four!" Liz exclaimed after a few very, very tense moments.

"Four? Seriously?" Derek exclaimed.

"Oh, you scared?"

"No. I just can't believe you could be so short." He said with a cocky twitch of his eyebrow before turning around to stand against the wall.

"Mmm. Close. Almost too hard to tell." Liz murmured. She was enjoying playing with her siblings a tad too much. "But mmm- yes- maybe. I could be wrong but I'm starting to think that maybe Derek might be just a little- well, actually, I'm not sure, maybe Nancy is-"

"Liz! Stop it! Who's taller?" Nance interrupted, sick of the long winding sentences.

"Well, dear brother, I'm afraid Nance is just a tad-" She paused, as if they weren't already dying from suspension "-shorter than you!"

"Liz!" Nancy scolded angrily, pouting at her brother as he stuck is tongue out at her.

"I'm sorry! But the truth is the truth."

"Oh. Ha ha." He muttered sarcastically. That height war continued until she stopped growing and knew she would never win.

She smirked as she placed a hand on the top of his head and started patting it. "God, you really are short!"

"Stop it!" He exclaimed, only half kidding. He pushed himself backwards away from her, slamming into his old desk. Then he was trapped. Which meant one thing. He needed a weapon to escape.

"Aw man. Does little Dwewek not like being so short?" She teased, crossing her arms over her chest.

"If you do that again, I'll-"

Her eyebrows dropped. She was intrigued by the attempted threat. "You'll what?"

"I will-" He looked at the desk beside him and selected his weapon of choice. A very, very bad weapon of choice, apparently. "-throw this ball at you...which is- ah- crap- sticky and ah!"

"What the hell is that?" She asked as he finally managed to pry it off of his fingers and chucked it on the floor, letting it roll across the carpet.

"Forty-year-old bouncy ball that melted in the sun and-" He looked at his hands. "-leaks weird, disgusting plastic stuff onto your hands-" He muttered, using a nail to scrape away the odd wax-like material off his hand.

"Right...bathroom?"

He placed only his palm on the right rim of his chair, his left hand gripping it like normal. Pushing was difficult but, luckily, the bathroom was only just across the hall. His knees hit the sink, an annoyingly common occurrence, before he even got within a close proximity of it. He reached, and drenched his hands in water.

"Coming off?"

"Mmm mmm." He confirmed, taking another pump of soap and scrubbing it into his right hand. Although, physically, it was gone, he wanted to be sure that he all evidence was gone. Tap off, he reached for the towel and dried his hands as thoroughly as he had washed them.

"All good?" Nancy asked. She was planning to ask that when she was sure he was done, but changed her mind when she noticed him staring at...something.

He reached up to one of the bathroom's shelves, and picked up two toothbrushes from a cup.

"Wow. Our Mom still has teeth."

"What, 64 teeth?"

"I don't think she uses them both at the same ti-" She paused as he opened the cupboard next to the sink. "Derek, what are you doing?"

His eyebrows creased as he reached his hand into the cupboard. "If she alternates toothbrushes, do you think she also alternates women's and men's body wash?"

"What kind of question is th-" She paused when he handed her a bottle. This one was pink with flowers - because apparently everything sold to women had to be the same stereotypical colour with the same stereotypical designs - and said it smelt like 'Spring dreams'. But then he handed her another one, which had a blue and white colour scheme and was extremely minimalistic.

"How about perfume and aftershave? Or uh...do you think Mom needs one of these for her legs?" He asked, pulling out the exact same shaver that he owned to hold back his beard.

"You- do you think-" Nancy faltered, looking at the irrefusable amount of evidence that her brother had uncovered.

"I think there's a man living in our mom's house."

Their mom always said that there was no replacement for Christopher. Derek understood that; if Meredith died, he honestly didn't think he'd ever be able to love anyone else again, or at least half as much. Her children often asked her if she was placing her happiness behind theirs, knowing that they didn't want some stranger attempting to replace their dad, but she'd always refuse and state time and time again that she was happy without a partner...until now, apparently.

"She...she replaced Dad." Nancy muttered, her voice broken.

Derek would have really loved to defend his mother, but he had no idea what he could reply to that with. She'd replaced their dad with...well, they didn't even know who. To them, he was just someone who used a beard shaver; and owned shampoo that was in a blue and white container; and sprayed aftershave; and was replacing their father. And she hadn't even told them.

"She-" Nancy swallowed, forcing her voice to be stronger. "Derek, Mom replaced Dad, and didn't even tell us."

"Nance-"

"I'm going to talk to her." She said abruptly before turning around, and leaving.

"Crap-" Derek muttered as he followed Nancy down the hallway and towards the stairs. "Nancy, take a second to breathe. Please don't-"

"Don't what?" She asked as she turned so suddenly that Derek nearly hit into her, hands scrambling to stop himself.

"You know how much she loves Dad. She probably feels terrible about it already and doesn't need you coming in and-"

"Derek Shepherd: master of knowing what people need in their lives, right?" She questioned sarcastically before returning to her mission, heading down the stairs.

Derek paused there. He hated his sister. Despised her. Or rather, he hated the fact that she had decided to go on a rampage upstairs in conjunction with the fact that he was the only one who could stop her, seeing as no one else knew why they were fighting. He sighed as he pushed himself to the edge of the stairs, watching Nancy disappear out the double doors to the back garden. He'd done this before. He'd done it with steps narrower than these before. So he could do it now, right? Right? It was simple in principle. All he had to was drop one stair, and one stair only, and then grab onto the rims of his chair for dear life so he didn't fall down a whole flight. Then repeat. Again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again until he reached the floor. Nine accurate, pristine drops and nine accurate, pristine grabs. Easy...right?

One. Safe.

Two. Safe.

Three. Safe.

Four. Safe.

Five. Safe.

Six. Safe.

Seven. Safe.

Eight. Safe.

Nine. Floor.

He barely had the time to celebrate his achievement (or rather, smile at the fact he didn't slip and break his third vertebrae or sixteenth bone of the year), too focused on the situation at hand. He followed Nancy's route outside, pushing himself to the group consisting of his sister, Ewan and Carolyn. The two bottles of bodywash were on the floor by Carolyn's feet, and he had a horrible feeling that Nancy had thrown them at their mom.

"Were you ever going to tell us?" Nancy asked, voice crackling.

"Nancy-"

"Don't Nancy me, Mom. Tell me the freaking truth!" She begged. "Were you just going to keep hiding him away every single time we came and wait until what- you died and we met some weird man at your funeral, only for him to tell us that you'd been dating him for the last twenty years?"

"Nancy, I promise, it's not what you thi-"

"Not what I think? How the hell can this not be what I think it is Mom?" She questioned, her voice still elevated enough to be considered a shout. "Your bathroom has two of everything! There are two people living in this house and you...you didn't even tell us. You're not even lying and saying that you were going to!"

"Nance, don't talk to your mother like-" Ewan tried, stepping towards her.

"She's my mom - my mom - and she's replaced my dad. I have every right to be as angry as I freaking want to."

"We wanted to tell you Nancy, we really, really did but-" Ewan protested.

"You?" Derek spoke this time. He was trying to give his mother the benefit of the doubt. He didn't want to argue. He didn't want to scream at her, even if he wasn't even trying to stop Nancy. But now? "You...you're the one who...who-"

He swallowed. "Derek, it's not what it looks like-"

"It looks like you're sleeping with your dead best friend's wife!"

"No. Derek, I would never do that to Chri-"

"Well what the hell are you doing here then if you're not-"

"Platonically. Derek, we live together as friends." Carolyn interrupted, begging that her son would believe her.

"Friends?" Nancy repeated, outraged. "Lying Mom, I thought it was bad enough before but-"

"No one can replace Christopher. No one. Ever. You both know that. I told Derek that I couldn't even sleep on his side of the bed a couple years ago when I went to Seattle and that is still true. I love your dad as much as I did fifty years ago, okay? I do. And Ewan loves June as much as he did forty years ago but they're dead and we're old and...we're lonely...okay?"

"Mom-" Derek sighed, feeling his heart drop in his chest.

"We watch movies together and clean and cook and do the washing and...I like Ewan, okay? He's kind and we get along well and one day he was a little too drunk to drive home, so he stayed on the sofa. And I woke up to breakfast in bed and...I don't really know what happened but a month later, he'd moved in, and I'm a lot happier than I've been in a long time. He makes me smile...I don't love him, but he makes me smile-" She sighed out a long out-breath as she looked at Ewan, and his slight smile, before grasping his hand.

"I wouldn't ever want to replace your dad, even if, yes-" He glanced at Carolyn with a smirk. "I do often claim that my kinda-children are doctors so I look a little cooler but...Christopher was the love of your mom's life, and June was the love of mine and I...I found someone who wants company, but doesn't want to love again and that's exactly what I want too so...I took the chance, and it was the best decision I've made in a long time."

Derek couldn't help but smile a little. "So...you-"

"Derek-" A fifth voice called from behind them.

"Really Ryan?" Nancy sighed as she looked round. They were clearly in the middle of an something, and he decided to waltz in for a quick chat.

"You're the uh- uh- brain guy, right?"

"Yeah." He agreed slowly, eyebrows creasing as he examined the man. His eyes flickered back to the couple-but-not-couple behind him, then Nancy, then back to Ryan.

"Sorry for the uh- interruption but uh-" He sucked in a heavy breath. "I hit my head and...and something is...something is- it's not good. Everything is so...upside-downy and...my- my hand doesn't...my fingers don't- uh-"

"Uh...what?" Carolyn asked, looking between Derek and Ryan, praying that her son knew what the hell the man was on about.

It was always peculiar to Derek how quickly a single second could flip someone's life upside-down. If he took another second getting into his car on the day of his accident, he might still be walking today. If he took another second to observe Meredith in that bathtub all those years ago, his mind might have told him to ask her if she was okay again, and she might have never drowned. If he took another second to decide on his weapon of choice and hadn't decided to pick up the old bouncy ball, he wouldn't have ever known about Ewan moving in with his mom. If Ryan had taken a second to consider whether or not he wanted to play catch, he might have said no and never smashed his head into the table when he fell.

No one was worried about him, really.

He had no symptoms that something like this was going to happen.

But it was happening.

And his wife had already gone home with their kids, believing he was okay.

But he wasn't. He was far from okay.

"Put him on the floor-" Derek instructed as he placed his hands under his knees to move them to the ground in front of him, his mind processing everything a hundred times quicker than anyone else there.

"Do what?" Nancy breathed, confused

"On the floor. Right now!"

Lucas jumped into action, appearing from nowhere. Derek could only presume he had been watching the fight between his auntie, uncle, grandma and Ewan, but he had no reason to join in. He placed his hands around his uncle's waist as he guided him to the floor, only to find Derek besides him just a second later, chair discarded.

"What's going on?" Ewan asked, confused. "What are you doing?"

"I don't know what specifically-" Derek started as he turned his phone's flashlight on and checked his pupils. "-but it's definitely not good; he's got a blown pupil on the left."

"Which...which indicates a stroke- impending brain herniation- bleed-" Lucas listed off, eyes wide.

"Did you just say stroke?" Ewan asked, turning his own flashlight on to see what was going on and stepping towards the two men sat on the floor, and the other one who no longer had his eyes open.

"He did, and he's right, someone call 9-1-1." Derek instructed, trying to stay calm.

"Kathleen?" Carolyn suggested, pulling out her own phone. "She should know- does she want to come here? Or straight to the hospital?"

"Ambulance first, call her in the ambulance." Derek recommended. He gestured for Lucas to take Nancy's phone as she offered it, and he did.

"9-1-1, which service do you require?" A woman asked through the phone on loudspeaker, held by the youngest Shepherd still in the house.

"Uh- ambulance."

"Is the patient breathing?"

Lucas licked his lips and swallowed, but didn't reply to the woman.

"Speak Lucas." Derek instructed before looking up to him with a reaffirming look in his eye. "Please."

"Yes. 52-year-old male sustained a- uh- blow to the head approximately two hours ago, negative LOC but he-" He stopped again. He had no idea what he was doing. "He- uh- he just lost consciousness and has a blown pupil on the left. Injury was to the side of the head, by the ear, I'm guessing it's an epidural hematoma because of uh- damage to the pterion. The middle meningeal artery, right?"

Derek smiled, but just slightly, seeing as it felt so wrong to smile in such a serious situation. He would guess the exact same extra-axial injury as Lucas, although he probably wouldn't have explained the ins and outs of the injury to the very confused dispatcher. So much for him not being good. "What's the ETA?"

"Thirty-seven minutes."

Derek was sure that his ears deceived him.

That couldn't be right.

It couldn't.

"Did you just say thirty-seven minutes?"

"It's New Year's; there are accidents every like- ten seconds. I'm afraid that's the first ambulance I can send."

"His brain is probably going to have herniated enough to cause permanent brain damage in five. We need an ambulance now."

"I-" The woman sighed. "I am so sorry."