I'm so sorry everyone! I had no idea that it had been so long since I last updated this! The next chapter hopefully won't be anywhere near as long!
Chapter 15: Where are you going?
Where
are you going
With the long face pulling down
Dont hide away
like an ocean
But you can see, but you can smell and the sound
Of
your waves coming down
I am no superman not at all
But I have
no answers for you
I am no hero, and thats for sure
But I do
know one thing
Where you go, is where I want to be
For some reason, waking up in Derek's trailer wasn't so strange anymore. Not nearly as strange as it felt to wake up in her Mother's house night after night. This was beginning to feel like a habit. And as she thought that, it scared the hell out of her. She wasn't supposed to make a habit after only two nights. She wasn't supposed to be making a habit at all.
"Meredith? You awake?"
Meredith hesitated for a moment as she heard the trailer door open and close behind Derek as he walked into the trailer. She hadn't known he was gone, but she was hesitant to respond to him. He didn't make much sense to her. He wasn't like the men she'd known in her life. He was accepting. Too accepting. It was strange.
"Meredith?" Derek asked as he stood in the doorway, looking at her. "You look like you're in your own world."
"I wish," Meredith mumbled as she pulled the covers off her and got out of bed, as Derek walked back into the kitchen. She wasn't sure if he hadn't heard her comment or just ignored it. Either way, she was happy. That wasn't actually supposed to have left her lips.
"You're eating your breakfast," Derek instructed from the kitchen, "Any habit can be broken with persistence."
"I don't have persistence!" Meredith called out as she began to grab an outfit from the small bag she had had in her car from the first night.
"Well then, I'll be your persistence. I can be persistent," Derek continued.
Despite the fact that he was in another room, she rolled her eyes. "You can be annoying," she corrected.
"You know you like it," he teased. He liked this. Maybe she was going to let him in. Even if it was only for today.
"Admit it, you like it," Derek teased, "The breakfast is good."
Meredith rolled her eyes as she stabbed her eggs with her fork, "I still like cold pizza."
"Cold pizza, I don't do," Derek said quickly as he watched her eat, "But we could go out for pizza tonight after our shifts," he said hesitantly, watching as her eyes drifted up to his.
"Tonight?" she asked carefully.
Derek hesitated when he heard her voice. It was too early for her to start pulling away from him again. "Well, I figured that it would be better for us to get out instead of living in the hospital and this trailer," he said quickly, trying to make her relax, "Besides, you need to see all the wonders of Seattle."
"I'm pretty sure that New York pizza is much better than Seattle's," she said lightly, resuming her mood from before hand.
"Oh really?" he questioned jokingly.
"Yes, really," she answered as her cell phone began to ring from the bedroom.
They looked at each other strangely until she jumped up from the seat and ran to grab her phone out of her purse. "Hello?" she answered quickly, not even checking the caller-id.
"Where the hell have you been?! You move to Seattle and now you don't talk to your sister? I see how it is," Jen said in a voice lined with fake, but very well practiced anger.
"It's been like a day," Meredith answered, "And I've been in Seattle."
"How come you haven't answered the phone at Mom's house?" Jen questioned.
Meredith looked up and saw Derek watching her, but he quickly turned away. She laughed slightly under her breath.
"What are you laughing at? Hospitals and empty houses aren't things you laugh at. Where are you? And who are you with?" Jen questioned, continuing to interrogate her. Meredith couldn't do anything without her little sister finding out. It had been that way their entire lives.
"I don't know what you're talking about," Meredith answered innocently.
"Meredith Leighanne Grey, you are lying to me. Do not lie to me."
"You're talking to me like you talk to your daughters when you catch their hands in the cookie jar," Meredith responded as she walked around in small circles.
"What cookie jar has your hand been in, Ms. Meredith?"
Meredith rolled her eyes, "My hand has not been in a cookie jar."
"Sure it hasn't."
"I'm just staying with someone from the hospital because there's some electric problem at Mom's place and it's unsafe for me to be there until it's fixed. It's not big deal. I'm barely here anyways," Meredith said, trying to get Jen to drop it.
"Who exactly are you staying with?" Jen asked.
"Just someone from the hospital," Meredith answered, trying once again to just shrug it off.
Jen chuckled a little, "Does that someone happen to have the name Derek Shepherd?"
"What- No!"
"Oh my god, you're living with that Shepherd guy? The guy who felt the need to take care of you two days after you got into Seattle? Well, that's not suspicious at all," Jen said, finishing off sarcastically.
"Shut up, I'm a responsible adult. I don't need my little sister looking after me," Meredith answered.
"Enough with the little sister thing. I'm not the one living with some rich doctor that I barely know. That'd be you," Jen continued, thoroughly enjoying teasing her sister.
"Meredith? Our pagers just went off, we need to go," Derek said as he walked into the bedroom.
"Is that Derek?" Jen asked.
Meredith met Derek's eyes and looked at him for a moment, unable to respond to either one of them. It was strange. She felt strange, like she was some teenager that was hiding a secret from her mother, who had, of course, figured it out anyways.
"Meredith?" Derek asked looking at her strangely, "Are you all right?"
"Yeah…" Meredith finally answered, "I'm fine."
"Okay, we need to get going. There was a massive car accident on the highway," he explained as he grabbed a sweater to pull on.
"Uh, Jen, I… uh, need to go," Meredith stuttered as she watched Derek.
"Stop drooling," Jen answered, knowing her sister too well, "I'll talk to you later."
"Yeah, later."
They hurried into the OR where they'd been paged, finding it full and hearing ambulance sirens, meaning there was more coming in. Derek grabbed a nurse's arm, stopping her from rushing off to wherever she was going, "What happened?"
"The flu. The flu happened and then a major car wreck on the highway," she said before hastily moving back to what she was doing.
"Two more just arrived!" Another nurse called out as she made her way to the ambulance bay.
Meredith and Derek jumped into action, quickly following after her. "I got this one," Derek said as he went to the second ambulance, letting Meredith have the first.
"What've we got?" Meredith asked as a paramedic came out of the back of the ambulance.
"Severe head trauma, some serious bleeding. Blood pressure is low and pulse is faint. We've set him on an IV already," he said quickly as he began to pull out the victim.
Meredith watched as the bed came out, revealing a boy, not more than nine years old. Every sound that had been clouding her mind completely disappeared as her eyes zeroed in on that kid. There was blood surrounding his bandaged head, his eyes shut, and his face pained.
"All right, we need to get him to CT immediately. Page me the second you get the results. Then I want shotgun. Every test in the books, got it?" Derek instructed an intern as she led the patient into the hospital.
Derek looked over towards Meredith and saw the same mortified look he'd seen only days before. The paramedic was getting impatient, constantly trying to get her attention, but her she wasn't moving. She wasn't even blinking.
Derek pulled her over to the side, keeping his hands on her. He wasn't going to let her run this time. "Uh, Dr. Jansen? Take him for a CT, get his head rebandaged, contact his parents and page me the second you know anything," Derek yelled, holding on to Meredith tightly. He could feel her shaking in his arms and it was killing him to focus on anything but her in that second.
The interns took their patients and the ambulances left, making the outside quiet again. Derek sighed and looked at Meredith. She was trembling, unable to make eye contact with him. Something was terribly wrong here, but he didn't get it.
He carefully led her over to a bench, a few feet away from the ambulance bay. She sat down slowly, placing her hands in her lap as she began to nervously play with them, her eyes focused on the cement. Derek finally released her and she almost fell back without him supporting her.
"Mer, what's going on?" He was completely lost. She'd been flawless with every other patient she had besides these two kids. He didn't understand it. She was a well-known doctor who had an amazing way of connecting with her patients. Things weren't lining up.
She shook her head before she found any words to speak, "I… I'm fine. Just go… just go be a doctor, or whatever," she mumbled almost incoherently.
"Meredith, you are a doctor. You are a doctor and that kid needs you," Derek said, trying to console her in the only way he knew how. He wrapped his arm around her again, holding her close as he rubbed gentle circles in her back.
"I can't help him," she whispered.
Derek swallowed back the million questions that were floating through his mind, knowing that this was not the time. He couldn't let her fall apart in front of all of her colleagues, "Meredith, that boy needs you. You've done a million surgeries in your lifetime and he needs you to do another. You can do this."
She finally looked up at him with a look that took Derek's breath away. He couldn't describe it. It captured so many emotions in away that only she could do. He'd never been able to have a conversation without saying a word, but he knew this was one that he'd never forget. They held each others eyes for a few minutes before Meredith finally turned away, running her fingers through her hair subconsciously.
"Are you okay now?" Derek asked carefully.
Meredith sighed and looked back over at him, her eyes squinting in the slight Seattle sun, "Yeah, I'm okay."
Derek nodded and gave her a small smile before leading her back into the hospital, promising himself that he'd figure out what was going on the second they got home.
"He needs surgery," Meredith said quietly as she stepped next to Derek.
He looked up at her, his face falling when he saw the vulnerable look she held on her face. "You're a surgeon, so I'm guessing that that's a good thing."
"Derek, he's a little kid," Meredith explained desperately, "He's a little kid and that surgery is going to be hard."
Derek didn't respond at first, leaving himself to examine her words and her disposition. It worried him. She was fine this morning, but now, now she wasn't. "Let me see his scans," Derek said as she handed him the CT scans. He held them up to the light, analyzing them carefully, making sure not to miss a thing.
He pulled them away from the light and placed them back in their file before he looked back at Meredith, "It looks bad," he said, knowing he couldn't lie to her. Even if he did, it wouldn't matter. She knew just as much about neurosurgery as he did. "But, you've done surgeries likes this before," that too was an honest fact. In fact, she'd done one only a day or two ago.
"But he's just a kid," she continued, leading Derek towards a conversation he didn't want to have in the middle of the hospital.
He had questions, lots of questions for her, but he knew better. "He's a kid, but that gives him a better chance at a full recovery with less long term affects."
"If he makes it through surgery," she countered.
Derek sighed, "He'll have two of Washington's best neurosurgeons watching over him the entire time. He will have as much of a chance as any one else, if not more."
"You're going to be there?" she asked, raising her eyebrow slightly.
Derek nodded, "Yes," he hadn't decided until two minutes ago, but he was. He knew the kid didn't need him there, after all, Meredith was an amazing surgeon, but he felt like Meredith needed him. He was needed and he hadn't been needed in a long time. He wasn't going to let her down.
