She Came Along to Turn On Everyone

by Chicleeblair

Before Sadie smiled at her Meredith was starved for praise and attention. Five years after the codependent duo of Die and Death split, everyone who knows Meredith is shocked that anyone would expect her to piggyback them through residency. Only Derek knows their relationship was not the Girls Bon Wild/Eurotrip she let her friends r/Der TW: past sexual assault.

A/N: TW mentions of past sexual abuse/assault

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Meredith had been expecting Derek to come in at some point for the past half-hour, but she startled at the sound of the bedroom door opening. Probably looked like she thought she'd been caught doing something illicit. It felt a little like being caught doing something illicit.

"How's your mom?"

"Good. She said to tell you she's happy for us, since we quote, 'didn't give her the opportunity to do it in person.' The part where she said she's glad you're going to be part of the family was geniune." He closed the door and sat down on the side of the bed. She took a last pile of pictures from one of the Boston boxes and started flipping through them.

"You tell her you fungoed the ring halfway to the road?"

"Okay, it didn't— No. I assume that Lexie knows, and since Mark's no longer person non grata with her, it'll come up at the most humiliating point possible. The adult choice would be to get out ahead of that, but what can I say?"

"See? You're afraid of your mom, too"

"My mom. Not mothers as a general concept."

"Go big, or go home."

He smiled, and she let herself take in the way his eyes lit up. No more dull and dreary. "Your Eurotrip is on your computer, right? When are these from?"

She looked at him for long enough that he frowned, his hand going to her spine, hunched forward over the leg she'd drawn up against her chest. "Sorry. Just. The way you remember stuff… Um, these are from the camera before that. The film one my aunt gave me for Christmas when I was fourteen. I thought it was a stupid gift, because what'd I have to remember? But, uh, we came to Seattle that summer, and I was glad I had it.

"I went through a phase after that. Not really photography, but…pictures were a way of watching." She picked up one of the pictures she'd laid out on the comforter and placed it in front of him. Then she shuffled through the pile, pulled out another. "Summer of '93, summer of '94. Fifteen and sixteen," she added.

"Yeah, thanks, I know. Who's the other girl in this one?" He tapped the earlier photo.

"Layla."

"Ah. The one who got away."

"The one I shoved away. The one I knew I wasn't good enough for. I belonged with the other broken people." She gestured at the other picture. There was only a year between it and the one that showed Meredith sitting on the lap of the Latina girl, across a table from the two guys they'd run around with, occasionally splitting the actual couples when they started noticing too many side-eyes. She swiped that one up, smacking it down on one of the piles she'd made.

"And the others are?"

"The ones I want to burn."

"Mer—"

"I won't. I've never deleted the digital ones. I just keep flipping through them, trying to.…" She picked up the photo from ninety-three again. "See the way Layla looks at me? If I hadn't known we were leaving in August I'd have been freaked…but I looked at her...well...like that. I still had this…earnestness. I'd taken Anatomy and Physiology that year. I didn't get the grade Mom wanted, but I loved it. Layla would listen to me go on for hours about how everything was connected, and how much there that was we didn't know. Sadie always told me to shut up; that shit was for school. Being listened to was powerful."

"What about the band?"

"They came later. I'd only started going out that summer, and by the next one...I was sixteen. I hung out with people, but I was a shower, not a tell-er." Meredith rifled through the primary pile of photos. Occasionally she'd catch one with Sadie in it and pull it out.

"Chronological?" he asked. She nodded, and he took the pile, flicking through to see the dates on the bottom right corner.

"She sort of tried to blackmail me." She found a blurry picture of The Panty Hos playing a club in Northampton. Rehearsals must be coming up.

"Sadie did? Here?"

"Mmhmm. When I took her out on the land that day, after her appy. Maybe you revived some of the earnestness, because I'd thought we'd go up there, maybe stay 'til the stars come out, and really talk about…about whatever the fuck happened. She bitched the whole time, and did the nose twisting thing at the overlook, so I knew we weren't staying 'til the stars came out. That was my rule when it came to our itinerary, at least once a week, I wanted to stay somewhere where I'd be able to see the stars. Sounds like a romance thing, but really I was a city kid enchanted by wilderness weekends in junior high." His smile made the eleven-year-old she'd been feel seen, and her adult safe enough to add, "Also, it reminded me of home. Here. As much time as I was corralled in the hospital, I also spent more time outside. In Boston, I desperately wanted to be a Brownie."

"Aw. Ellis not into it?"

"You'd think she'd be all about letting someone else teach me life skills, while reinforcing the carrot-and-stick method all the time. 'The self-sufficiency you would gain would not be outweighed by the reinforcement of patriarchal values.' Meaning, it'd inconvenience her. I'm sure she assumed that a troop leader would be a stay-at-home mom who'd brainwash me. Didn't matter that the badges my classmates were getting were for 'Science and Discovery,' and 'Discovering Technology.' I started making my own for a little while. 'Transportation,' for riding the T without an adult, 'Anatomy,' for memorizing the bones of the hand. 'Career' for telling Mom I wanted a suture kit. I spent hours designing them, but it wasn't something I could tell anyone, and that's defeated the point."

"You needed a 'Bragging' badge."

"Would've been good for my confidence. If our...our kids-want to do it, I'd be onboard, as long as we talk about whatever values it's being used to promote." She wasn't sure, but it seemed likely that there would be God-talk involved. How they'd address that would be a conversation for the future. Derek put a hand on her knee. Imagining someday had been a risky bet since September, 1983, when they hadn't returned to Seattle for her to start school three blocks from here. It was nice that he appreciated that, now. "I didn't tell Sadie things like that. She doesn't like venturing too deep into the past or the future, unless it benefits her."

"What did she..?" Derek ran a hand through his hair. It'd been mussed already during his conversation with Carolyn. "And she thought it would?"

—Does he know about Prague?—

"Mmhmm. She was there for...a lot. It threw her that I'd told you as much as I have."

She handed him a picture taken in her room in Boston, and he let several others pile on his leg squinting at the flyers and posters on her walls. "You've gone through my iPod; there's nothing interesting there. Unless you count the highlights in my textbooks, which my classmates were always very surprised by."

"I was trying to see if that's the same skeletal system poster Amy had."

—"About the Somerville swingers?"—

"Sure you were. They always stared at that, too. Like they'd forgotten everything that came before high school. Creepy, freaky girl who didn't speak for a year, and then talked about guts all the time. I couldn't be the valedictorian Mom wanted, but I wasn't the who-gives-a-shit stoner they saw, either. I'd do, like, entire group projects, in case someone didn't do their shit, because 'being part of a team does not been letting yourself get pulled down by weak links,' but if they did then I'd just turn in my part, because 'others must also have an opportunity to learn.' Plus Sadie's."

"Her homework?"

"Yeah." She stared at a picture of the weeping willows in the Public Gardens until the urge to flinch faded. His what the hell voice hit differently away from the hospital. "It felt fair at the time. She did so much for me. I'd type lab reports. Write English papers. Her assigned books were better, impossible parental expectations were what we bonded over. She had it a lot worse." She didn't have to see it to know the skepticism that would be on Derek's face. "Here, everyone in this crew of losers has an industry job, and they tour every few years. Huh," she said, starting a new stack. "I could sell some of these to TMZ if I get tossed out of the program."

"Tossed?"

"Fired, asked to leave, escorted out by Jared the security guy."

About the temp company that asked you not to come back?

"Right. Just…I've only ever heard you say flunk or fail out."

"Oh. Well. I guess…the boards aren't for years, and…and it does maybe seem like I'm more likely to break a stupid rule than.…

"We used to be the same, me and Sadie. Or…not exactly. Hold on." She put the main stack of photos in the box. "Um, the losers. That's Manderly on drums. She was the inaccessible older girl who stood between me and a felony assault charge. Saw me banging the shit out of our piano teacher's Steinway; next thing I knew, I was in her dad's detached garage, and she was walking me through her drum kit. I worshipped her, of course. Wes is the dude, Misty's front, and Talya's on keys. They'd gone through a couple drummers by the summer I played with them. This is right after that, when Mander finished at Berklee and joined. So, junior year of college."

—"Have you told him about the rave you spent convinced Ellis's ghost was chasing you through the warehouse, and if you saw her, your mother would die? Didn't quiiite follow that one, but I didn't let the woman handling out bright green tabs."—

"How close did you get?"

"Very. And...not at all. Every kid with a pair of headphones feels like music is their thing but…it wasn't Mom's. Wasn't Sadie's—She went around with this one Vanilla Ice wannabe; I got so close to breaking his nose…. Anyway, I wasn't bad, but it didn't feel the way I felt watching Mom's surgical tapes. And…I liked school."

"How embarrassing for you."

"Kinda was. I wanted to want to run. I mean, I did want to run. I ran, but at the same time… I always knew what'd be at the finish line, whether I thought I'd make it or not. I'd repeat Sadie's shit about how I'd get disowned, disinherited, like that meant anything, or whatever. But at the heart of it…. I wanted to be a surgeon.

"The band knew that. I have a suspicion that they were trying to give me a landing place until I figured that out. So, maybe I would've ended up here, in the end. I'm not sure, though. Mander was the one who had the tempering influence on me. I'm sure The Panty Hos would've had to find a different drummer by now, but not if it'd be because I went to med school earlier…."—Does he know that every time you get what you want, you burn it to the ground?— "….or...or because I fell down the rabbit hole."

"That's the stuff Sadie was there for?"

"I got close," she admitted. "V-Very." She wanted to reassure him with the and not atI wonder if he ever thought a picture of Molly was you all, but it wouldn't be true. Not at all.

"If Sadie had run her mouth it wouldn't change anything between us any more than the unflattering stories Mark has told you," he said, taking the stack of photos she'd been tapping more and more forcefully against her leg. "Why would it coming from you be different?"

"Because it's not equivalent. She wasn't threatening to play you the embarrassing songs I wrote. Or even the ones that a real band sometimes performs. I've told you the good parts. Maybe not all the details, but, generally. The rest of it is…. There's stuff you're not gonna like."

—Does he know about the games we used to play?—Her eyes instinctively cut to the bedside table. She jerked them away, landing on bedspread. A rubber band that had secured one of the stacks of photographs. She plucked it up and stretched it between her index fingers. Derek's sharp inhalation was quiet, but it was enough for her to know he'd followed either her gaze or her thoughts. She'd wound and unwound the rubber band three times before he spoke.

"That day you froze when I started to pick up your vibrator—"

"I put it on the table."

"—you said no guy ever forced you into doing something you didn't want to do."

Her throat constricted around her attempt to say something dismissive. "S'true."

"Because it was her. I assumed you were taking advantage of semantics. It was obvious that you'd been hurt. That you were—"

"N-No!" She clench her fists and the twisted rubber-band dropped onto the bed again. "I'm not damaged." Her voice squeaked midway through the word.

"I didn't say that," he said, levelly. "But I was watching your face. Your eyes...went somewhere... to something she did, I assume, and they came back holding fear and pain. I don't have another way to describe that other than being hurt." He said it plaintively, as though not being able to find a synonym was letting her down, or was he disappointed that there wasn't another explanation?

"Is that…? When you said I lied about being whole and healed I-I shouldn't keep bringing it up. I know it was booze bullshit, except...except something inspired the lemon crap, so.…"

"Mer, if something's bothering you—"

"It's not! I didn't think of it until now, and it…."

"Bothered you?"

"I wondered. That's all."

"That's allowed." He took her hand, and she raised her eyes to his. "I hate that I tried to make you give up on me. I hope I never do it again. Sitting here, I can't imagine ever wanting to hurt you. But I can't promise I won't do it. Not speaking up about that…." He picked up the rubber band by one end and let it untwist itself. "It's how relationships unravel.

"I also don't want to hurt you accidentally. That's why I drive you crazy checking in with you. And...I don't want to make you talk about anything if you're not ready, but it worries me that you weren't going to say anything, then." He bumped his thumb over her knuckles, thoughtfully. "I know you don't want anyone to try to protect you, and you are incredible at defending yourself. Your offense could use some work."

"What's more selfish than wanting you to be able to hold the damn vibrator? Especially since you don't like the buzzing part

"Protecting yourself and being selfish aren't the same thing, one, and two, that's negligible. I think I could get used to it. Wouldn't make the difference on one of your pro/con lists, regardless. I get that guys have it easier, and to me, there's nothing hotter than watching you take pleasure from something."

"—Isn't this what you want, Death? For me to be here pleasuring you?"—

"Yeah, but…but I like it when you're an active participant. I mean, occasionally I want to kill you, but I'm getting better about that."

"You don't have to get better about anything though. You understand that?"

"I want to. I like not always getting all crazy-desperate. You keep blowing my mind with everything I think I've mastered, why wouldn't I want to keep that up? And when...when I tell you, this'll make more sense, but…. The girl I was with her is part of me, but I'm not her. I don't want to be limited by what she thought she deserved."

He smiled, shaking his head slightly before kissing her. She sank her relief at his reception into returning the kiss. All kinds of words were tumbling around in her head, but none of them were worth losing that connection. Eventually, he trailed his mouth down to her neck, and the heat that washed through her made the first question easiest. "I wanna tell you. If I do, can we try it?"

He sat back and combed his hand through her hair. "Talking about it might make bring the memory too close to the surface for you to be up for it. If you'd rather start there….I just need to know how to not hurt you."

Any other guy, sometimes even Derek, would've been trying to fast-forward to the sex. Derek could generally control his face, but his eyes were windows to his thoughts. That had a lot to do with why she didn't always meet them. This time, she did. Sincerity. concern, love, always, but made her breathless all the same.

"I want you to know."

He squeezed her hand, and wrapped his other arm over her shoulders. "There's nothing you could say that would make me think differently about who you are now. Okay?"

"You said that."

He kissed the top of her head. "I'll say it again, too."

"When I got that text…. I got a new phone out here. That she had the number meant she'd asked around, and for her that's a bigger deal than Matching here. It's supposed to be all on the up-and-up…. Hey, do you know the story of the failed Match algorithm? The Mullin-Stalnaker?"

"It wasn't my bedtime story," he said. "But yeah, one of my professors was at Dean Berry's lecture."

"That is so cool. Hendren had become Chief at Children's by the time Mom started at Mass Gen. I met him at a couple events, but he was just a really nice guy who got a lot of awards. I didn't know he did the first conjoined twin separation in Boston."

"You recognized a lot of names in your textbooks, huh?" She shrugged, and Derek moved his hand to circle his palm between her shoulder-blades. "I didn't mean anything by that. You put in the work, the same as anyone else. I guarantee most of the other legacies got more coaching than you did."

"Maybe…."

"Tell me the story."

"Why? You heard it...close-hand."

"Because I like listening to you talk about things you're passionate about, and medicine is one of them."

"t wasn't my bedtime story, but it was one Mom told often. It's the ultimate parable for not blindly accepting the word of your superior. As long as you're right. Which she always was."

"Oh, of course."

She snickered. "Additionally, she liked to insist that if William Hardy Hendren III had been a former WAF named Wilhelmina, no one would've listened. If Mullin or Stalnaker had been female, he wouldn't have had to start a protest at all. That was the age of women being employed as human computers."

"They were all at NASA. Maybe a few at MIT with the first wave of GIs graduating."

"Basically what I said! Harden went to Dartmouth, did you know that? Started before the War, then went back to finish and do a two-year medical program before transferring to you-know-where."

"You claim him, I assume."

"Absolutely." She grinned, and Derek brought their clasped hands up to trace the lines around her mouth. It was impossible not to think about how much Sadie hated it if she told someone one of these stories. It's like you open your mouth, and a recording of Ellis starts playing. "You know the context. Anesthetic made more complex surgery possible, and made people more likely to opt for it. There wasn't much standardized training—they called residencies 'the undergraduate repair shop.' Can you imagine going into practice after undergrad? Even if I'd had the classes…." She hesitated. This anecdote had been meant to be a break from the Annals of Meredith's Adolescence, or whatever.

"I sure wasn't ready," he said. "I can't think of anyone who was. Even Mark grew up after a decade of more school, residency, and fellowships. Or, I thought he did."

That was essentially what the American College of Surgeons had discovered. Apprenticeships were encouraged. Specialties formed boards of their own, requiring first exams and then residency training.

"Between the wars and the GI Bill, there were way more med students than residency spots. Biding offers were being made to third years, even second years, and they went from giving you weeks to make a decision to giving you twelve hours—A bunch of old-timey surgeons considered that too stressful.

"Two professors came up with an algorithm meant to solve the problem. Not long before Match Day Barry, a dean at Harvard—always Harvard—is trying to explain it to his students, including one of your professors, and William Henry Hendren III. He follows the numbers, and determines that the algorithm is fundamentally flawed. I've seen the original paper, and if I was Lexie I could draw it out for you. Being me, I can't. It boils down to them prioritizing one-to-one matches. If a student put their dream program at number one, chances were that slots their second choice would be filled by students who ranked it first—even if that program ranked those applicants below the hopeful one.

"It doesn't benefit either side, and would've led to off-the-books arrangements. Maybe of the kind that gets someone into a class with no vacancies, halfway through the year."

Berry would've been fine with that, as long as he'd gotten the money he'd invested in the Mullin-Stalnaker. He'd thrown his chalk in frustration at Hendren and claimed he didn't care if any of his students got internships. From there, Hendren had gotten representatives from half of the country's med schools together in a matter of weeks. Ninety-eight percent of all Y4 students in 1950 threatened to walk if their solution, named the Boston Pool wasn't used.

Sometimes she wondered how close she'd come to being knocked off of Seattle Grace's list. Cristina was probably a 1:1 match, and she hoped she'd ranked higher than Ol' One-Ball Alex—or maybe his interview panel had seen who he'd be in two years. She thought she'd interviewed well at OSHU; had wanted to put it as her number two, but Portland just hadn't made sense for selling the house, or getting Mom settled. Her hope had been that Seattle Pres would see snagging Ellis Grey's daughter as a coup.

"I expected I'd end up stuck in Boston; although I wasn't sure what having Mom's name would do. Lexie got MassGen, sure, but what do you bet all her recommenders were Harvard professors who made sure to mention she'd never met Ellis Grey?"

Derek snorted. "Huh. Guess I should be more grateful for the current system than I thought. Addison and I had a similar list Sinai, Lennox, Brigham…. They were ranked number one for OB-GYN, but Amelia was starting undergrad at Harvard. I would've been too overbearing. That I knew that tells you how bad it was." He'd shown the protective brother with Lexie, but it could be difficult sometimes to imagine him with four sisters pulling him in every direction. He'd arrived so solitary. Like her. But her situation had been more complicated, too.

"Urgh, yeah. You'd have met me...well, right about the age I met Sadie."

"Thirteen?"

"Uh-huh. New Year's. Some First Night-themed fundraiser. No love at first sight BS, but she did fascinate me. She seemed so elegant. Black dress, red lipstick. Shoulda seen the symbolism. Not that I would've been an angel on my own... Not that she was a demon," she added. "Mom got...probably sent an intern to Filine's…. She brought home this white dress. Not entirely. Spaghetti straps. Pushup bra. Actually took another two years—I basically went from nothing to here—but I felt so grown-up."

"Thirteen is the age measuring tapes start appearing in my sisters' sock drawers."

"Like boys don't—Oh, wait, was it a ruler?"

"Uh...we kinda eyeballed it."

Meredith scrunched her nose up, laughing. It didn't help to know that he'd been measuring against her sister's boyfriend. "Sorry I asked. What were doing in your sisters' sock drawers?"

"Planting contraband," he said, easily. "The girls were teenagers before Dad died. I was pretty content with my place as the annoying little brother."

"How old was Nancy?" she asked

"The girls…er, the older three…God, we still call Amy the baby, that's…."

"Isn't she five years older than I—mmmph." He'd planted his fingers on her lips. They weren't firm; weren't blocking her airway in any way, but she froze. He curled them into his palm, and she grabbed his hand before she could say anything. "Sorry. That…I don't like it when people do that."

He tilted his head, running through their history in his head, she imagined, and noticing how early he'd found an alternative way of doing that without knowing he should. "The older girls except were all in their teens. Kath left for college that fall, so Nan was about sixteen. Why?"

She shrugged. "Not that I know anything, but if I was sixteen and suddenly my kid brother was man of the house or whatever gross term I'm sure got bandied about…I dunno, kind of shines a light on her."

"Huh." He looked toward the window, and not for the first time, she considered how little he'd stopped since coming to Seattle. Not that she had either, but she didn't have to stop to analyze and overanalyze everything that happened to her.

"I can see how you were both," she said. "You're not so much middle as older and younger." He turned back to her and raised his eyebrows. "I paid attention as the quiet kid. Watched my classmates get siblings. Watched the siblings get older. I always tried to hang out with anyone who had a baby in the house. I've always liked the idea of how simple they are. Undamaged. Even if they're premies, or…they don't remember. Hopefully,. The research…. You ever wish you didn't know the research? About some things?"

"Many."

"Neuro and OB must've been a rough combo in one house," she observed, and she flashed to standing in the OR with Derek on one side and Addison on the other. "Crap, sorry, I didn't—"

He touched his lips to hers, and then moved away in a breath. "Is that okay?"

"Duh." She rolled her eyes, and then closed them. "You do it all the time. But I never said…I could've been masking it, you're right to check! I shouldn't be so flippant when you're being...being you."

"Yes, you should—"

"Considerate! I just...I don't expect…."

"Here, you—"

"Stop interrupting if you want me to talk!" She covered her mouth while he was still reacting to the words. The corner of his lip curled. She must look ridiculous. "Sorry, crap, I didn't mean to..."

He raised a hand like he was about to card it through his hair, and then smoothed a piece of hers behind her ear instead. "You know how you get prickly if you think I'm acting like you'll break? I'm starting to get that. I'm not upset with you," he added. "I'll tell you if you say something that bothers me, or offends me, or what-have-you. If it's the one time out of a hundred you actually have a reason to apologize, you can. Just…." He glanced away and the expression his face settled into made her stomach tighten, anticipating the guilt she knew was coming. "You'd stopped second-guessing your words with me. I'm not sure when, and I thought I was overthinking…. Maybe I am...I…. This time last year…." Yup. There it was. She swallowed back a dozen ways to make him stop, to get his mind off of pulling her out of the water." His arm tightened around her. "I'm not worried you think I want you to be someone else. But I think you're trying to be... , in some way. And you don't. In any way. Ever. I want you to be you. Isn't that…? No, it's 'I want to know you,' isn't it? Did you...you wrote them down, right? You have it in your notebook?"

"Um…." Meredith stiffened. Which was…well, he was going to be her husband, and he knew she made lists as a way to keep her life minimally organized. He been the one to start repeating the truths. The promises. The ritual had never been exclusively a sex thing. There'd been times she'd been struggling in the OR, and she'd see it in his eyes. What's true, Meredith? She could do this. He believed in her. The way he asked the question meant he didn't think it was weird for her to have written them down. Her shoulders relaxed, and then stiffened again as a blast of anger hit her. How did he know what made her anxious before she did? And why couldn't she let her fiancé see something that might be the best way to get insight into her mind.

"You know us being, well, an 'us' doesn't mean you give up a right to privacy? I just want you to copy that out for me. I need to look at it through Grey-colored glasses. Fix the loopholes.""

"Sure." She did. She thought she did. She knew she wasn't required to let him leaf through her notebook with the to-do lists, and the lists titled Why I'm Not Wife Traditional Wife Material and Things That Make Him Do the Eyelid Fluttering Thing. Most of it, he knew, or could know, or could guess. It was all embarrassing, starting with the fact that "he" and "him" had been Derek for the past five Moleskines. It made it so obvious that she was still transitioning into this world where she could have an "us." (Sadie had never been "her." That was always her mother.)

"Okay. So, for me to know you, you have to be you. I want pure Meredith, because the...whomever you're filtering for? It's not who I want to be. Not how I want you to think of me."

"I-I…." She bit her lip to stop herself from continuing to stammer meaninglessly. "Stop claiming your space in a conversation if you have nothing to add!" "I just...I-I…." She twisted away from him to slam her fist against a pillow. "Fucking tits!"

"Not ruling anything out this early."

It took all she had not to shout at him to shut up. it wasn't his fault he could quip while she stammered over her stutter. Why it always had to be times like this…. Okay, she knew why and the answer was the proverbial her with the genes of a man who hadn't been "him" even when he'd poured her cereal and pulled he wagon.

"You're such a dumbass." Sure, that she didn't stumble over.

"Exactly. The same dumbass you lured out of the woods, and the same dumbass I was before that. I weaponized your past. I'd spent months celebrating your progress, and then told you I didn't think it was real."

She shook her head, grabbing for his hand again. "It's okay! I told you, I've said worse.""

"So have I. That's not the point." He cupped her cheek. "You told me if I'd said that a year ago, it might've broken you. Somewhere, I knew that. I knew it wouldn't, but…you can need time before you trust me wi—"

. "I don't! Need time. I trust you. You know I—"

"—with another way to hurt you."

The adrenaline triggered by her need to keep him from concluding that she'd regressed disappeared in a heartbeat, leaving her cold and unsteady. "Y-You...You wouldn't—"

He cringed. "Oh God, no, that's not—"

"I know!" She did, of course, she did.

"—but I've done plenty to hurt you without touching you. And I don't want you to think I want to silence you or…. I want to hear you."

"That's true, I know—" She pressed her lips together. She hated sounding desperate like that. It wasn't how she needed to be, not with Derek. "I just...I had a moment. A couple moments. Talking about the talking thing makes it harder. I do wish for someone to shut me up, like, a lot, but the way you do it matters...Kissing me works. You've been doing it forever. When you…when you asked, I thought you must've been kidding. But your eyes weren't, and I got…."I got worried that if you could think I'd been secretly hating that…. If I hadn't made it obvious that I love that you do that, maybe I wasn't making anything obvious…." She bit her lip.

Derek kissed her. He kissed her, his tongue pushing her lip away from her teeth before he sucked on it. She felt his smile, the fond one, aimed at her and the insanely convoluted mechanisms of her mind. "If I thought you secretly hated that, I'd never do it. I love your rambling. I know several things you secretly hate, a couple you secretly love."

"Oh, yeah?" She pressed closer to him, almost deciding to let the share circle be over for the night. If the pile of pictures hadn't been there, threatening to spill she might have. She took a long breath, the kind Wyatt had been obsessed with. "You, um…you're right. You had a reason for it, but, um…youdidwannahurtme. You have. A...A few times. It's always be words, which isn't a fair fight, but you'd never...I've never thought you'd hurt me, hurt me. I trust you. Just...you left. All the times you told me to come to you with my feelings, and you left, and...weaponized your freaking mind metaphors.

"I believe you chose me, and you love me, and...and everything else that's true. You retreating wasn't about anything I did... might take me a little while to be sure it won't be, and I'm...I'm kinda...I am w—I'm afraid I won't know what I did, and, yeah, maybe that if I try to find out...you might make me wish I hadn't told you some stuff. I don't want to do that. Assuming I'm going to be too much for everyone...it makes me a lot for myself."

"You're not too much for me. You never will be. Not with your past, or with your future. I'm so sorry for that night. Whatever you need to do for it to heal, it's okay. Blanket okay."

"Rea—? No, yeah. You're a sane person; that can be it. Amazing."

"We'll probably have to talk more about…well, talking. Sometime soon. You...I teased you about it, but last year, I wasn't around all the time. You had time to roughly figure out what you wanted to say.

"I've never been good at that. But when my head's in the right place, I try to be honest. That might make it worse, but it's true. Like, I've been telling the truth whenever I tell you it's not weird to talk about Addison."

Her nascent smile wavered. Come on, Grey. Anything he can do, you can do...marginally well, considering that he's a board-certified neurosurgeon. "I wasn't thinking about her."

"No? Oh. Jen." He sighed. "That is one of those cases that will always be part of me. You already know what that's like. Part of living with those is...well...learning to live with them. If I'd been capable of sharing my feelings about it with you at the time, I might've done a better job of coping. I've learned the lesson; I need to be as open with you as I keep asking you to be with me. But you can't blame me for not wanting to put more pain on you."

She flipped the rubber band around the bedspread with her fingertip. Saying not many other people have cared sounded far too emo, but it was true.

"OB-GYN and neuro could be a rough combo, for the very reason it occurred to you: we don't know enough about neonate brains," he added, putting her back on even ground.

"Or the female anything. That'd be the only reason I could go gynny, and it'd be better to go neuro, and bring in a GYN consult."

"Already planning your next research project?"

"L. I…crap, I have to stop doing that, introducing myself in to the conversation before I have words. You're right here, listening. I've...just I got talked over a lot." In conversations remotely like this. With people who matter. "Uh, I hate that I think this, but it's practical…because it's practical. I'd wait a few years to tie myself to a different reputation. Stu—Silly when my interest predates cashing in my v-card, let alone being here, but I'd like to not get 'who better to do the sex study?' I know I shouldn't care—"

"Why not?"

"Because I'm not ashamed of being sexual."

"I'm not saying you should be. Only that the way people perceive you affects the way they interact with you. If they're judgmental, it gets heavy. Caring—wanting to lighten that load—is human. It doesn't mean you agree with them."

"You've thought about that."

"Amelia. She's unapologetic. Like you." Meredith huffed. How many times had she said I'm sorry in the past half-hour? "Unashamed," he clarified. "She openly says she was a junkie. But the relatives, and the people on the street saying it…. She said if they weren't going to treat her like she was clean, she might as well still be using."

"Wise older brother is a good look on you, even if it was less fun than 'snooping little brother.''

"I didn't feel wise at the time. I felt unequipped and controlling. Mark got to be the fun one." He grimaced, and she reached over, smoothing the line on his brow.

"I see the oldest=younger duality in Lexie, too, which is weird, 'cause we haven't known each other a year, but from the start it was like...I dunno, maybe you're just different with your second kid, and it has an effect. She and Molly aren't close. Sometimes, I can see that she had to share with, and be compared to, and to look out for someone, but she also…. They knew about me, and I... Is it stupid to say a grown woman needed a big sister? Like…was missing one? Not me necessarily. Just like she was shaped in a little sister mold."

"I think you're on the right track. It seems like Susan's gambit backfired; it made you a present absence. I wonder if he ever thought a picture of Molly was you…. I'm sure...I hope hearing people talk about his 'oldest girl' made Thatcher feel some amount of guilt. I don't think Lexie was neglected in any way.. And…think of her during rounds and put that in a classroom. She would've stood out, especially being the youngest."

"People change."

"Do you think she got more Lexie-ish as she got older? I'm not sure. I think she got used to looking up to her classmates , a mascot maybe f, but none of them stuck up for her, specifically. Now, she's here. Molly has her family. Thatcher's a mess. She can handle it, but you back her up against the bullies."

"Does it count if I brought the bully into her house?"

"That's not exactly what—"

"It's not, not what happened. Telling people to stay away from her doesn't work, but we're similar enough that telling Lexie to stay away doesn't work, either…. I shouldn't have made you the middleman. I'm hardly an example for not taking up with your boss, or…or…or...getting swept away by Sadie.

"We talked about her, you know? Me and Lexie. One of the nights you were with…at the hospital. Not…everything. That there was a thing. We were. Me and Sadie. I should've done it in the first place. Only, Lexie would've been on my side, and there weren't—I didn't want there to be sides. I wanted to give Sadie a chance. Everything we did, it was together…. Sure, she'd get pissed off if I didn't go along with a plan, but I could deal with it. I figured that she might mess with someone, but Lexie's more savvy than I thought, and—."

"Breathe." Derek pressed his hand to her heart, making her realize it was pounding, ad see nd as he held it there her ribs jerked with uneven breaths. "What do you feel?"

"Stupid. Guilty. Like I'm a crappy sister."

"Not true. What Sadie did, what Thatcher did, what anyone does that hurts you is not your fault. It's not your fault if they hurt someone else. You can't control what a patient does outside your OR…not even inside of it. And you were different when Sadie knew you. You've told me you accepted treatment you wouldn't now. She was a part of that?"

"We were assholes to each other. I wasn't a doormat."

"I don't think you were. That you could've been. I think knowing your worth has made you tell yourself it couldn't have been that bad. Then, she came here, and you thought she could do what you did. Find a reason to try for herself, not because it's expected, or because there's a bar You know you deserve more than you got in your life. You gave her a lot to look up to."

"Seriously?"

"You're a good person, Mer, fundamentally. Sadie saw that. She wanted to want what you did, but it wasn't hard it to see that eluded her.."

"She could be good. She's…. Whatever else, she was my best friend. Some of what she knows I can't imagine telling Cristina, and what I know…. Here. This is ber sixteenth birthday. Entering year three with Himself.. We never used his name. Ellis got all sorts of immature nicknames. The entity that the universe revolves around is simply Himself. That night, though, it was 'Daddy' this, and 'Daddy' that. It had to be."

Derek studied the picture like he'd taken in the one of her room. "She looks terrified. And…he's really got a grip on her arm. Doesn't seem like she's pulling away."

"She wouldn't. Not that young, in a situation like that. It'd start with a grab. On a good day that'd be all. Other times, she'd do something. Maybe accidental break an antique. Maybe he'd discover a bad grade she'd undersold. Sometimes, she'd come home from an overnight at my place, and he'd go on a tirade about her being a tramp who didn't deserve to live in his home. Other times, she'd stay with me for three weeks with no consequences. He wasn't predictable. One day he'd say he'd be proud to leave the empire to her. Other days, he'd be saying that one of her cousins was a credit to the company, and he would change the will 'post-haste.'

"I didn't do her homework because she had anything over me, or to keep her beholden to me. Nothing like that. I wanted to help her keep ahead of him. I'd go through her syllabi, try to keep track of assignments…. She says she's not book-smart, but I think she stopped trying, since what ever she did had the same result…" She snapped down a photo taken in a room at MGH. "This is three weeks after that party." Sixteen-year-old Sadie sleeping in a hospital bed. Her face was scrubbed of make-up; her freckles standing out on a girl's round cheeks. The left one was red, the eye above it purpling. A neon-green cast covered her left arm from wrist to elbow. .

"She chose the color because he wouldn't be able to ignore it. For the six-to-eight weeks it'd take her to heal, he'd have to face that bc lost control and hurt her somewhere visible. Sure, some people bought that 'she fell down the stairs, and or had other mishap, usually with me involved. She was clumsy. Only a handful of people knew. All his staff. Who knows what he had on them…

"I told Mom. I was scared I'd lose Sadie, but j knew what could happen. Fifteen years of hanging out around hospitals. I knew. She had less of that, more connections to the system. Luckily, she never knew which doctor called DCF, and she didn't get removed. No one wanted to take on Harris & Co he constrained himself more. I should've—"

"You were sixteen, Mer. You did exactly what you needed to do."

"Fifteen. Sadie's birthday's on Christmas. She lived with her mom until right around her fourteenth birthday. Then he decided she needed to be molded into a proper Harris heir—the cousins already had MDs and MBAs by the time we were in college, but by rights the company goes to her. I barely know what all they do; pharmaceutical research, hospital development, healthcare investments—they supply a lot of medical facilities on the East Coast. I don't see them out here as much. Could be why she manipulated her match to Seattle."

"It wasn't."

"Maybe why he agreed. She wanted me to pull her up into the second-story window. A lot of times, she didn't go off the rails because I was holding her back. Or we jumped off the trestle hand in hand."

"You'd have known where the rocks were." She shrugged. "You gave her the chance you give everyone. You wanted her to prove herself."

"She must've cheated her way to the MD. She could have done it, and C's get degrees. But she'd have absorbed something. Her reactions made me question the morgue claim. Seeing that many dead people should've prepped her for all the living ones. I never let her get away with anything like that. She took the tests and had to manage to keep things even It's not like I took tests for her. I would never…I would never have let her…I wouldn't have—Not if it put her in position to hurt people."

Derek kissed her, and folded his fingers over her hands that had gone from gesturing wildly to trembling slightly. That'd always been a firm line, and she knew it'd been crossed in the past, but not to that extreme.

He rested his forehead against hers. "That is something fundamentally true. I wouldn't be surprised if that's not part of why you didn't hear from her while she was doing whatever she did to get through. There's a phenomenon I've notice with new students—probably why we throw them in the deep end with the Fourth of July. No matter how recently they did their clinicals, it can take time for this to feel real. I think the more realistic virtual training gets, the worse it'll be. Sometimes, it's because it's overwhelming. Sometimes they picked medicine for the money, or got through school in the library, and the reality is paralyzing. Sometimes it's the contrast with a cadaver. The warmth, the differences. Practicing with actors and friends…. Patients don't feel like people."

"I'm not sure anyone else is a full person to Sadie," Meredith admitted, scooting away enough to cross her arms. "Except Sadie." The idea that she could've inserted Ellis in those thoughts was exhausting./

"She has her issues, and probably needed a psych eval after the appy. Six months at a morgue wouldn't have helped."

"It would've been far too dull for her. Explains how fast she jumped into corrupting the interns. She needed the rush."

"Surgery is a great rush," he said, their conversation after her first procedure playing out in his eyes.

She pulled her knees up to her chest. Why hadn't she thought to bring the tequila up here? She bit her lip hard to keep her mouth shut until she knew what words she wanted. Derek waited, showing no signs of impatience or wanting to fill her silence. This time. "It's a better high. One you earn. When I said that...I'd found the thing that worked for me. I'd tried a lot of others." She didn't let herself check his reaction. It wouldn't be fair to either of them. "We grew up with so much anti-drug propaganda. Once you realized your D.A.R.E. officer was exaggerating about one thing, it got all…slippery. Mom's lectures were more effective. She'd…I genuinely can't tell you if she was parenting or just going over cases, but I got a feel for what was overblown and what wasn't. And then there was next door."

"The…guys?"

"The queens. That was a word they gave me. It's okay. If they'd told me to use 'fag,' I'd have used it. I did, in context, if all of them were. I'd been told how that and 'fag' got used as insults. I used 'dyke' for myself, until it didn't feel right anymore. They weren't interested in shielding me. In retrospect I might've heard too much, at least for most kids, but I brought the latest research, and was very good at sitting quietly. That I hadn't hit double digits became negligible. They helped me with the homework that Mom considered the puerile basics. As I got older, they'd say, 'Sis, you're going to make stupid decisions, and if you want to survive…."

Meredith closed her mouth, but her eyes followed suit, and the memory was waiting on her eyelids. In spit of being supine on the "sick sister sofa"—one of a few given the title— recovering from a bout of pneumocystis pneumonia Antoine, who'd moved in when she was twelve, had bellowed a laugh in response to the question she'd asked the room at large. "An example of irony, Meri Beri? I'm gayer than a Mardi Gras float dancing around a maypole, and I got this shit from needles." (Antoine, who didn't come home from MGH when she was sixteen, had introduced her to Cajun spices and could use powdered sugar to draw out the bones on his blue-black arms while they made beignets.)

"Mer?" Derek's voice snapped her out of the kitchen next door. It was sharp enough that it couldn't have been the first time he'd tried.

"Sorry. 'Survive' was a bad word choice'"

He frowned and returned his hand to her back, tentative until she leaned into it. "What did your house of queens think of Sadie?"

"They didn't know her well. She wasn't into hanging out with a bunch of...with them. They didn't like her saying she was 'exMerimenting' with me, but that if she was a bad influence, I was an enabler, .Actually, it was Travis who heard me talking about some shopping trip with her sophomore year, and said, 'uh, Meri Beri? they saw enough to know You realize that you're a little in love with that girl, don' you?' I denied it, of course,"

"Of course," he echoed..

"I was cautious but I'd try everything once." When he didn't respond positively or negatively to that, she added,"Everything. Sex stuff—had a reputation for not being squeamish or judgy, even though my preferences aren't super extreme. Risk-wise. Substance-wise."

"I have a sister who's in recovery. That has nothing to do with your story," he said, massaging the nape of her neck with his thumb.

"She took pills, right?"

"Mostly. She had a real skill at sniffing out prescription pads, but it was Manhattan, anything was possible. When she OD'd, it was heroin."

"Oh." Meredith tugged her sleeves over her hands and tried to parse the intonation in the word he'd said so carefully.

"You've used," he concluded, equally tonelessly. That meant something didn't it? He hadn't looked away from her. No dark eyes of disgust.

"A few times. Usually, smack was going around, I took on harm reduction. I'd shot people up a long time before I'd been trained to do it. Mostly. bored rich kids, but we went to festivals, and I've stayed in sbitty hotels—with other people. Sadie's a five-star hotel girl. Seeing her flirt with Callie made me wonder if there was, like, rich queer magnetism. Not that she's openly—anyway, I'vedone basic wound care on abscesses, and injected into awkwardly placed veins. Started carrying Narcan ten years ago.

"Barring purloined banana bags, I avoided needles. Some of Sadie's friends were dragon-chasers, and I tried it at their place. It didn't hook me. I wanted to party that night, so if anything the distance pissed me off. Weird, since Valium was the only drug I ever...cared for, but it didn't set me apart. It let me feel okay in my skin. Sadie was almost exclusively into uppers, but she bought some off their dealer that day. Blocking the pain might not have been enough, but I didn't object to it, you know?" She let herself glance up. His eyebrows were lowered, shadowing his face, but the rest of his expression was open, not drawn in to shut her out. "The last time, I'd had lunch with Mom. That was like… if it was possible, it'd be like having my heart pinched for hours on end. A pinch is only an annoyance at the time, but by the end, she'd was squeezing a hematoma along with my heartbeat. It got worse the more I thought about what she'd said—must've been summer of '01? She'd started saying off-hand things about what she could do 'with her savings'—which she had, but we both knew she meant what was left of the money she'd put aside for my education. If I didn't use it by twenty-five, I forfeit. She'd interrogate me about my life, sniping at everything, even the stuff I was happy about. I'd had a job all summer, but it was retail, who cared? I'd read a book she might like—Why wasn't I reading journals, or studying for the MCATs? I asked about her research, and she asked what I wanted, because I surely wasn't interested in something I wouldn't understand. My clothes, my hair, my friends; all of it was a personal affront. I tried to fight her on it, but I'd done it so many times…. I'd love to hope it was all symptomatic, but…."

"That wouldn't change what you experienced," Derek said.

"No." That was the hardest part of all of this healing shit. She could understand everything she'd misunderstood at six, but it didn't retroactively change the wiring in her brain.

"There wasn't anyone who I could talk to about it. You and Cristina, you understood thatI had so many bruises, unhealed wounds, scars that no one could see, and they hurt constantly. Sadie and I used to go in circles about how I couldn't come close to understanding her life, because Mon never laid a hand on me, and DCF would never have taken me from her. She was right...mostly, but she didn't have a sense of relativity. At most, she'd try to distract me, but I could feel it wouldn't work. Turned out, she wasn't even home. I stole her stash, and as I was tapping air out of the needle, I knew even that was proof I knew more than Mom thought I did. I identified vessels to myself before I pierced an ulnar vein. Mom had always bitched about interns who couldn't do stuff like that. Did she really think she'd taught me nothing over decades of drilling me?

Right as I pushed the plunger, I knew…I knew it could be when I gave in. Wiped out. Washed out. Rabbit hole. I was a sad sack who was supposed to be in med school, and…so much of my energy went into keeping Sadie from accidentally killing herself or someone else, because I needed her, just like I'd done to Mom. I understand now that it wasn't like that," she added.

"That was the last time?"

"Yeah. I stopped hanging out with that group. Had people from the job at Newbury Comics I could call if Die went out with them. I never craved it, or got dependent. Made me afraid I wasn't—like, maybe it wasn't really paint. That could've messed me up more if I'd put much thought into it." She pressed the palms of her hand under her eye, cringing when they came back sticky. This wasn't even the worst part. (It might've been the scariest.) "Part of the trying everything was that I desperately wanteda way out. Turns out, the only way I could go was through."

"I can't say I'm sorry for that."

"Me either, now."

"You were playing with fire, but you know that. You were in pain, and I hate that no one would even give you that reassurance. I'm grateful that you made the choice that you did. That it was a choice."

"I know. It was…sort of the start of making good decisions? There were party drugs in Europe—we hit Ibiza before Amsterdam—but I had my acceptance letter to Geisel in my backpack. Sorta thought that if Mom was right about...about me not being cut out for it… it'd be better if something just happened. When it didn't...or, when what did happen was me having to go home…. As awful as that was, it was a drop of possibility."

Derek slid his hand over to her shoulder, and brought up the other, his thumbs moving down to her spine, like he might be able to keep the knots from forming. It worked with the ones that would come from worrying about how he was taking her words.

"Mom's assistant itinerary; that'd been part of the deal from the start. I called to update her every week or so. Making sure someone could say, 'no Ellis, she's not dead in a ditch,' was a habit. In Amsterdam, there was a message at the desk, asking me to call Mom's personal number.

"We'd gotten there four days later than I'd said we would, and that was a week later than we'd originally panned. Dialing all the numbers on the calling card felt like September all over again, except any time I heard the operator it was because I'd screwed it up. Finally, it connected, and she sounded ...like her, except I'd never heard her say, 'I need you to come home.' I was booking a flight when Sadie found me.

"She didn't get it. She'd saved me from Ellis, and I was going to go back? Without consulting her? What had Mom ever done, other than hurt me? I should stay with her. Take the out. But I was starting to see the cracks, and I pushed. I asked if that meant she'd come with me to Hanover in the fall. She did this...thing whn she thought she was smarter than everyone in the room. This upward sniff. That time, it wasn't intentional; it'd become a thing between us. 'Death, an out means you get out. I'm aware Ellis leaves deep prints, but I'll pull you up.' I said I'd do that myself by the time I finished med school.

"Well, if you're that determined, maybe Hanover wouldn't be so bad. She'd sold the Somerville place, anyway.. She'd go back with me, stick around while I did whatever Mom needed me to do, and we could be together. For real. And I...I called her on it. I started to book her a ticket. She practically shoved my chair across the room, claiming she was meeting up with friends from school, but if I called in a week or so to tell her what Ellis wanted, she'd decide if it was worth cancelling the last few months, or going straight to New Hampshire.

"I didn't believe her. I don't believe her. She'd never kissed me in front of people, unless she was doing it to seduce a guy. If I pointed it out, it'd be well, Death, that was just how she was made. She needed variety. Spice. I was her other half, wasn't that enough? Of course it was. That was all I wanted to hear. She always knew exactly what I wanted to hear, and she used that to get what she wanted. I'd finally stopped falling for it. On the plane, I started putting together how many times she'd made me thing delaying med school was best for me. I never called. I knew it'd be self-sabotage. I still expected her to show up in Boston every day until I went back up north."

"Had you seen her since? When she showed up here?"

"Sure." Meredith shrugged. "Breaks and stuff. I still had to get away from Mom, and our friends went to the same places. It wasn't much different than when she was here. Could almost make me sure I'd remembered it all wrong. But I didn't." She flipped through the photos again, putting teenaged Sadie in place and taking out a few pictures taken at the house in Somerville where they'd lived between college and Europe. "She didn't like my work friends. Too late grunge."—"It's just grungy now"— "Too granola."—"Where are you holding the Birkenstocks?"—"Too openly queer"—"The Indigo Girls? You're going fully dyke, Death!" (She'd been buying their albums for years.)

"But she would relax a little around them. In her mind, they weren't likely to cross paths with anyone she didn't want to know about us?" She stared at the pictures taken by one of her Newbury Comics coworkers. The expression on Sadie's face wasn't anything to like Layla's had been, or even Meredith's in the same photo, but it was more than the one underneath it, also at their place, but surrounded by a different crowd. "We were something. A tornado swept up in a hurricane is something," she said, even as she knew he looked at her the same way everywhere, with everyone.

Derek nodded, slowly. She was getting used to the concerned "v" between his brow. She was just far enough out from it to admit that she'd be concerned for her adolescent self. She'd gotten lucky. Mostly. She boxed the pictures up again and moved it onto the floor.

"I can't stop thinking about how if I was wrong about Mom, and about Sadie, what else did I miss? What else is waiting in my memory? I'm so sick of realizing that I was either stronger or weaker than I—"

"You weren't weaker for thinking you'd disobeyed as a kid, when that's what you were expected to believe. Whatever happened with Sadie doesn't make you weak. It means someone did something to you, and you don't want it to happen again. At the heart of it, that's all it is."

—"It's just sex, Death."—

"I know that's what I'd tell anyone else…I mean, Cristina... she's afraid to sleep next to Owen, and I…all I could see was that mark on her neck, but this…I…it's just sex."

"Mer—"

"It is…it's mental, and intimate, and even if I want it to only be physical that's not how the brain works. I know that, but I had sex with people who meant nothing to me. Why should it mean anything."

"But none of them hurt you," he pointed out. "None of them manipulated you from the time you were a kid. You would've been so much closer to what happened with your mother, and a lot of what you've said about grade school…."

"Trauma. Yeah. It was always there. But this…it'll always be there. Even though there's stuff that should have stuck with me more, it was all situations I knew I could escape. I would've been such an easy target for a certain type of creep, but I was careful, I really was."

"She was part of that, too, right? You looked out for each other? So for her to push past your boundaries—"

"I didn't have boundaries! There was no safe-word, or...or checking in, or after-care. We just fucked, and sometimes…" she trailed off, thinking of broken lamps and yanked-out hair. "We could be rough. Take the brawler off the playground…. We do it rough!"

"We do."

"I coulda scratched your back to fucking argyle last week but my nails were too short."

"Never thought I'd be grateful that you're being a nail biter. Would've been distracting in surgery."

"Would've reminded you you're a skilled human not a false god. I know how to keep 'em superficial. Me and Sadie…. I never minded. I gave as good as I got! She bit…and, okay, I freaked out about the infection risk. She always broke skin. I shoved, she smacked. She just initiated more. I could take it. We balanced. It was sorta like us, except this part was less talking more taunting. Freaking words almost always hurt worst. I said plenty. Took out way too much on her, and I didn't tell her things, and…. Don't...Don't you have McDreamy, judgey opinions, here?"

"Should I?" he asked, clearing her hair from the back of her neck.

"You…. I-I don't know. It was hot. Most of the time. I could stop her, even if I couldn't punt her. I just didn't, always. Like how...how you let me be intense."

"When didn't you?"

"When…? Um, sometimes she would've gone off on someone else. I could handle her, and...and hold her off. It was… she couldn't always follow cause and effect if she was worked up. She'd go off on Himself if someone didn't stop her. I took care of the bills for the same reason." She swallowed. Parted her lips. Swallowed again.

"Not just when you liked it," he pointed out.

"It's so stupid. We did a lot of stupid things. We weren't even fucking the majority of the time we knew each other.

"I dunno when I realized I…'loved' isn't right. Worshipped isn't far off, but it's not quite that. Just, I felt different about holding hands with her than the other friends who shared my neglected-kid lack of boundaries. I knew I liked girls, but with her…. It wasn't like. It was fire. And she...she'd disappear on me, but she'd always show up again. The others she stopped hanging out with, I never saw again. I felt special. Really, I was devoted. I never made her feel bad about disappearing. I'd take the risks to make her plans work. She was vibrant. Intoxicating. Stuff seemed to fall into place with her. Part privilege, part luck. Never considered consequences. She had me to do that."

Derek had once told her once that she'd never experienced a consequence in her life, when he was the one being forced to deal with his choices. What was it that made people project their self-awareness onto her?

"She'd started toying with girls, too. Experimenting, not just exMerimenting. One of the queens said I might as well die my hair green, but I didn't want to be a test subject. Our friendship was real. I wasn't going to settle for a facsimile of more. But then we were applying for college. I didn't think I have much more time. She was a Harvard legacy, not likely to go...to get in anywhere else. I was desperate to leave Massachusetts, and without in-state tuition, my best choice was to use my legacy status at Dartmouth. I figured going that far out of sight would put me out of mind. I kissed her.

"It became a cycle. She'd be with some guy, get bored, show up at Dartmouth with plans for our Spring Break. We'd go off to a beach, and for two weeks boys were for buying drinks. Sometimes sharing, but I didn't like the way they looked at us together. Like the two women were only supposed to want to service the man.

"I told myself it was enough. That I was her steady point. I wasn't hung up on her. I went out with other people. But we always came back to each other. We moved in together after college…." What's the truth, Meredith? "That's how I wanted to think of it. Really, we were roommates who screwed. Fuck. Was I the George? If he'd been...if I'd...No. No, I wanted that to work." She cringed, but Derek didn't react that she could feel. "She'd...um... she'd come to me if nothing else was on offer. She'd always leave, too, even though we'd slept in the same bed hundreds of times by then. I'd…I'd ask her to stay, and she'd tease me about just wanting to get off again.

"One day, I said something about going to med school. She accused me of wanting to leave her. I said no, I loved her. I wanted us to go together…She..she lost her shit. Shoved me against a wall, stuck her hand in my jeans and told me not to be a simpering idiot." There, she heard Derek inhale, and her twenty three-year-old self knew she wasn't crazy. That phrase had sounded like her mother. "This was all we were. What I wanted. And I…we could be rough, and she was so…firm, and demanding, and it made my brain shut up...I-I did..I'd been drinking, which was the only way I'd mention med school, much less admit that I loved her, for real, so I wasn't desperate to go upstairs, but it had occurred to me to suggest. Next thing I knew she had all four fingers on me, yanking. Took all of thirty seconds before I was on the verge— next movement, next breath. And then she just…stopped. Went out the door before I could figure out what'd happened.

"She started doing that out of nowhere. Edging me and taking off. I'd be so stunned, feel so stupid. It'd feel like I needed to be rewired for half an hour. When you're always desperate to leave your mind, being slammed back into it is miserable."

—"You're shaking like a newborn deer. Well, newborn heifer, with the noise you make."—

"It'd always be in a communal room, where getting caught together would be one thing; getting caught alone would be pathetic. But she didn't always do it. She'd keep going, but keep looking at the door, to her watch, and I'd get to what should've been it, like I'd start to come, and I'd get too wigged out. And she...she got off on it. She knew me. Knew I'd never let that go with anyone else.

"I don't know how long that went on. A few months. It might've overlapped with...with the next part, except...except I think she wanted me to ask...to beg...and I was stronger than that. At that point."

Derek's hands stopped, and the bed shifted as he moved to face her. "That had nothing to do with how strong you are, or were. That kind of power play from someone you trust screws with your basic sense of self." He held his hand out for hers. "Can I?"

"Always."

"Not always. Not if you don't want me to."

She shook her head and then rested it on her arms. "I understand the point you're making, but it hasn't happened yet. Even when it probably should. And...And it'll help." Because, sorry, don't think you're getting eye contact from here.

"That's fair."

She started barging into my room in the middle of the night. A minute later, my pants would be off, and I'd realize hers weren't. She'd have distracted me and gotten my vibrator out of the hollow book I kept it in.

"She'd do it by degrees, same as ever, and then right before I came, like, seconds, she'd jerk the speed down. That was worse than turning it off, because it'd feel like if I could just feel it a little bit more…and from then there was no predicting her. It was like…like the Milgrim experiment, where civilians watched an actor writhe in pain, and still followed the command to increase the voltage they believed was shocking them. Except, she was commanding herself, and it wasn't purely pain...was...was sorta like overstimulation, but it wasn't the same, maybe because it was all..mostly physical, and so fast, I'm not sure. She'd never have done what you did. What you do. Held me until I was ready? She'd have said we didn't do clinging. Like she'd never…. Saying it hurt the one way to get her just hold it in place, and if I screamed...it wasn't because it was good. I think she was trying to prove I'd never have enough on my own. What I said mattered less than how she heard it.

"She could be so fast. Start it dry, right at my clit on top speed." Derek hissed through his teeth. "Yeah. But, um...'oh come on, Death, you've haven't been dry around me for a decade. Isn't that what you said? You thought you loved me the first time you saw me?'"

"But you...you...did you tell her you didn't fall for her at that fundraiser?" Derek's scowl made her smile. He'd copied that detail down in permanent ink on his mental list of Meredith facts.

"Didn't matter. Maybe I did. Maybe I'd mistaken fascination for something more. What do thirteen-year-olds know about their feelings anyway? I mean, you know I suck at identifying emotions. I almost let her convince her I forgot when they happened, not just what they were."

"But she didn't," he reminded her. "Your memories are yours. Your experiences are yours." He said. She nodded, and then, before Rational Meredith could slam the lid down on the box Feeling Meredith had opened, she twisted, crossing his arms in front of her, and siting against his crossed legs. He rested his chin on the top of her head.

"I...I wish these weren' of them."

"I know, sweetheart." He kissed the crown of her head. She could call it condescending and save hereslf from this, but it would stop him from being genuine like that. She loved that he was. That meant she had to get over the thing.

"I had basically the same one. Same slider. It doesn't mark the power, but you get to know how fast it's going relatively. She'd go from ten percent to ninety-five to ten. She'd tease me for so long that a five in the right place was going to break my brain, angle it right, and jerk it up. In the right situation, it could be good, but..,yeah.

Eventually it'd get hard to tell the difference between pleasure and pain. Anything I said, she'd contradict. She'd say stuff like that was what I wanted. I demanded too much of her. I didn't want it to be over. I was insatiable. I wanted her to stay. I wanted slow, didn't I? Wasn't that what a lover did? And it wasn't…I never…I let her. Afterward, for a while, she was just Sadie. But then I'd say something about Harvard Med, or copy out MCAT dates at the library—once just borrowing some book Mom had lying around—I had to remember who I was. Who we were. I didn't want to be like Ellis, did I? Ellis was so repressed it probably took her forever, too."

Derek's scoff sent a tuft of her hair fluttering into her face. "Sorry," he said, smoothing it back. "Just—"

"Taking too long isn't my problem?"

"Definitely not. There's not a problem, but no. And no wonder you took a while to believe I wouldn't leave you hanging."

"I was fast before, too," she assured him. "The idiot guys were part of it, too. She just...took advantage of what she knew about me...in every way. And it wasn't all the time. That's why I didn't just lock my door, or whatever. We still screwed. That happened….She did it... Over the two years we lived there, maybe fifteen times, give or take? Two years out of more than a decade of knowing her. There was so much else about us…functional, dysfunctional…that it felt like it was only another thing. But...obviously not."

"It makes the Intern Cabal seems tame."

She laughed, and if it was a little hysterical at the edges, she didn't care. "That's why...I do think she's gotten better. Wasn't hard to believe she broke Mark's dick, though. I almost asked him for more details in case it wasn't accidental…. Oh. Oh my gosh."

"What?"

"Lexie."

"What?"

She leaned against his shoulder to see part of his face. "Lexie. It must've been, right? Neither Mark nor Sadie ever looked at each other again, and a month later they've got 'long-term' in their eyes? Totally.

Derek's mouth dropped open, and then a devious smile took over his face. "If you want my family to know about the ring, you're going to have to tell them. I can ensure will never come from Mark or Lexie." He paused and narrowed his eyes. "How much am I going to regret giving you carte blanche there?"

"Keep doing what you're doing, and your secret's safe with me."

"Uh-huh."

"Maybe think about it before your next few...dozen cool surgeries."

"There it is." He kissed her, bringing his hands up to her head and holding it gently when he asked, "Did she lie to you? I mean, did she tell you she was gonna let you come, and then renege?"

"No. No, but um…I think that's why you had to remind me to say I was close."

"She'd take advantage of that?"

"Uh-uh."

"But it doesn't bother when you're using a vibrator on yourself?"

"No! I've told you! That's why I didn't think it was going to be a thing!"

"Okay. Just double checking," he said. "It'd be simpler if we got to decide what stuck with us, huh? My dad's store had a bell over the door. Sometimes, I'll go in somewhere, and the bell will be at the same pitch, and I have to leave."

"That's a big thing, though."

"Mer. You've come through a lot of big things without half the scars you could have. Think about it,. Sure, you're working on open water, and you're not a huge fan of carousels. You still love ferry boats. You don't have issues with blood, or scalpels or Seattle Grace. Not this house. Sirens. OR 3. That's what I know about. And there might be things that your mind processes differently now. What sticks isn't always rational. This hurt you. The wound didn't heal. And wound care isn't always an exact, predictable thing. You don't have to get over this in one night—or ever. It doesn't say anything about you."

It did say a lot about her, in her opinion. Maybe…maybe not all of it bad, if this was the worst sexual experience that'd affected her…. Cumulatively, plenty of others had, but none quite as much as this, because...because it wasn't just sex. She'd told Mrs. Snyder that loving Romeo was a bad choice for Juliet, and ten years later, she'd been making another one; one her thirteen-year-old self would've been highly disappointed by. That'd been the worst part about the time she spent lying in her bed alone afterward; knowing that if she'd been the woman she wanted to be, claimed to be, she'd have taken off.

She'd told herself Sadie needed her. Maybe she had. She'd only been able to cut the cord once her mother needed her more—and Sadie claimed she was the one who shut people out?

"I guess it was different enough—having control was enough that it didn't affect me the same. While she was here I didn't use it..or anything else. It's just that one time, not long before we left for Europe, I thought she was gone for the night, and...she wasn't, or she came in...doesn't matter. Same result. Realizing we could all hear Izzie, and having you on-call so much…." Derek went red, and rubbed the back of his neck sheepishly. She kissed him. "You didn't know, and you've made up for it, admirably."

He grinned against her lips "I plan to keep doing that," he said, stroking her neck with the side of his thumb. The held it so lightly that it felt like her skin was rippling up to meet him. "You already put a lot of work in tonight. We could just—"

She swallowed every objection having to do with him, his preferences, his responsibilities, his work. It wasn't that late; she'd prepped for tomorrow, where she'd be on Robbins's service—which required more delicacy, than physical effort. Then the full whirlwind of a week before her mind wouldn't be half on one case or another.

"No," she said. "I want to try."

"Then we will." He ran his hand over her hair. "Okay. I've put some thought into this. I have some ideas. But we're not going to worry about that yet." He moved her hair aside to bring the warmth of his lips to the back of her neck. "Not first. Okay?"

"Uh huh."

He slipped his hand under her sweater. They were cold, in a way that was grounding. Like he could hold her in place, no matter how hard her mind wanted to slide into the past. It took him only a few minutes to notice what she wasn't wearing. She let him uncurl her. He brought them around front, His hands cupping the entirety of her breasts, and she sometimes thought he could move every joint independently with the way he managed to knead, and flick, and stroke all at the same time. While he was busy, she tugged her sweater off. Flinging it away made it flop audibly onto the floor, and she felt Derek wince.

"My sweater, my problem."

"Until I pick up the dry-cleaning, and have to tell you they couldn't get the wrinkles out."

Meredith twisted in his arms to she face him, one of his legs between hers. He bent it slightly, just enough to press against her crotch as she kissed him. His mouth was as warm as his hands had been cool. It made her think she could melt into him, and the always cold, and sometimes far too hot, room in Somerville belonged to another universe. A different Meredith. What she'd felt then had nothing to do with the feeling that flooded her every time Derek's knee bumped against her crotch.

His mouth knew hers; he knew exactly where he could flick his tongue to make her sigh, knew when she needed soft and when she needed him to be firm. His hands started on her face, dancing over the sensitive spot behind her ear, and then the backs of his fingers brushed the sides of her boobs, and down to the small of her back. It was a minuscule amount of pressure, so maybe the change was her, not with the angle of her pelvis, but whenever it was, the feeling of the seam of her jeans against her underwear was so much more than it'd been.

Derek couldn't have missed the way her incidental sliding became determined, but he could feign obliviousness until she planted herself on his knee and looped her arms around his neck. She'd just gotten a rhythm going when he eased her backward, and then popped the button of her jeans.

"Yes," she sighed, and raised her hips to let him pull the pants off. He tugged them just gar enough to press the base of his palm against the front of her vulva, massaging in slow circles. By the time her feet were free, she was humming with pleasure. Knowing where they were going, she couldn't have said why there was far more desire than reluctance fueling her. She didn't want the memories she'd have to confront...or maybe she did; maybe part of her had liked it.

Not true. She hadn't liked it. She'd liked it ending. Maybe she hadn't minded the lack of control, and she'd wanted Satie's attetion, but she had not liked the experiences. She wasn't going to judge herself based on the assumptions she'd made before she'd known that she'd find someone who paid attention to her reactions and followed up on them the way Derek did.

She squirmed out of her panties herself . Derek grinned as he intercepted them at her knees, sliding his hand down her calf with them. She jerked her leg up and kicked out of one side, then let him get down to her other ankle before repeating the trick. Tonight was not a night he'd retaliate against getting the chance to tease her with them.

He tossed the underwear into the hamper and took her knees, opening them gently. She bucked against the cool emptiness of the air. "Look at you," he said, in a reverent tone, his expression proving its sincerity, when she'd believed it had to be mockery. "Ready for just about anything."

"And I wasn't ever a Scout."

Derek smiled at her, and along the edges of his eyes, she could see he was weighing a plan. He could look for ages before touching—great in a museum, not great now.

"Hey. What do you think you're doing?" He tapped her wrist, but didn't grab it, allowing her to keep turning the embers of the heat pooling in her belly, and starting to make short leaps into her limbs..

"Taking care of the grunt work."

He hid his loss of words by kissing her, but she couldn't stop giggling over the dumbfounded face he'd made. He countered by moving down to her neck, running the top of his tongue up the curve of it to the back of her ear.

"Seriously," he said, his voice a vibration close enough to her own larynx to be strange. "Tell me, if I'm not moving fast enough. I just want to make sure you get what you should always have first, in case….""

"Derek, with you, it's not gonna be anything close to those nights.

"You were thinking. You like watching. This is a two person endeavor." Also, having her finger tracing circles around the perimeter of her clit made it easier to stop herself from trying to guess what he was thinking.

"Tonight, it's not. Tonight is all about you."

"What if I want you to fuck me?"

"Do you?"

She did, in the way that she vaguely always did; like she wanted pasta, or to be on the OR board. Having him in her was an always preference. But did she want him to fuck her, now, to remind her she was his, and safe?

"After? Unless you don't want to, but we both know how much you like watching." She let one of her knees fall to the side and smirked at him. "It's kind of a waste, isn't it? That my cunt can contract so hard with nothing there to feel it? What my be hard is staying hard for long enough to call that up again.

"There's gotta be a better word than cocky for you right now, when what I mean is the impishness that takes over wherever you feel like you don't need a cock, much less a man."

She put her other hand on the back of his neck to kiss him. "I need you. I like your cock. Not its fault it can't do nuance. S'just evolution's still got some stuff to figure out."

He laughed, his chest vibrating against her tits. Fluid collected on her clit, and that was one humiliation she wouldn't be made to suffer—one she rarely faced with Derek, but that he never tried to bypass. She changed direction with her finger, matching the designs he was tracing on her back. She'd never imagined loving the early stages, this way he'd taught her. That was more patience than nuance.

—"Death, Death, Death, a doctor with no patience has no patients."—

"Mer? Where'd your thoughts just go?"

"I'm here." Not an answer to his question, and they both acknowledged it with silence. "Something she said. I'm here."

"Yeah? Ready for me to take over?"

"Got your fill of staring at my quim?"

"Never." He touched her wrist, his hand hovering over hers. She pulled her finger up slowly, and let her hand rest on her thigh. Sge sighed as he pushed down with his thumb and found the shaft of her clit. His finger kept twitching her glans.

"You can get me off like this, easy. No need to stop, at all, ever."

"I could,. will, if you want, but I thought it might help if we did something that's a totally different feeling from the vibrator." Because he figured you'd have trouble getting it up. Like you should. Clearly this isn't a real thing, just get out the thing and let him—

—"You're hysterical in so many ways. The doctors who supposedly invented this thing did it because getting women like you off gave them carpal tunnel. You've never spent this long on me."

"I do. I would! You always…ooohhh—always want fast. You never let me let me let me come let me let me, pleeeease, Die—"

"Meredith?"

"Yeah? You wanna go down on me?"

"If you want. We can do it tomorrow if you want it, but not in this context."

"I…want, but…but…it's…. She didn't like…." Meredith bit her lip. What did Sadie like doing to her? She'd been great with a strap-on—but that'd been about her. It wasn't, for everyone, but for Sadie? Absolutely.

"I can see why you still saw other people."

"I'm…I'm easier to handle, now. Less easy."

"'Easy' in any way is never a word I'd have used for you. Ever.. You aren't… You're a challenge, in a good way. And I didn't mean…I meant because it sounds like you weren't getting anything good from her. Sexually."

"I just thought that! She could do damage with a strap-on. In...in a good way. Rough, but good, just…."

"You prefer bodies over bots?"

"When did I tell you that?"

"When you showed me your other toy. Hand me that pillow?"

She did, and he lifted her legs, put it under her ass, then hooked her knees over his shoulders.

"That comfortable? I want to be able to see your face."

Meredith blinked, hard, and then nodded. Derek's eyes were fixed on hers, and she could see him debating what he would say next.

"I'm…" She cleared her throat. "I'm not…. It's you, okay? In a good way. It's the way you have thought about this, and you're a step ahead of me about what I need, and there has never been anyone like that in my life. I know that all the time, but it'a super obvious whenever you're havin' to...to revise something someone else did, or else the wound won't ever close.

"You've had some shitty people in your life, Mer, and I hate that for you. I thought about this, because I don't want to hurt you more than they did. You have to stop thinking of yourself as broken,. You are a fully-capable, fully-functional person."

"I'll work on it. Really like it if you'd start working on me."

He took her left hand, weaving their fingers together, and was still laughingat the point where his mouth covered her.

"Shee-jus," she hissed, and that amused him all the more judging by the increased huffs of breath hitting her. "Never prepared. No preparing for that. How the hell does air—well, air and hee—oh, craaap wasn't expect—usually hafta wait—mmm." If she'd had a clue that she'd be as into having him do this, she'd have chosen her sex partners totally differently. Can you roll your tongue, and not act like going down on someone is beneath you?

—"It's not personal, doll, I don't like sucking cock either."==No. That was bullshit. They were different things, entirely, and had different significance. For reasons of patriarchy, guys had to deal with the belief that eating a girl out was emasculating. For every guy like Derek who'd end up down there before she could process it sometimes, there were more who considered it a sacrifice. Blowing a guy was expected. A lot of girls got asked—coerced, convinced,—to do it long before cashing in their v-cards, and longer before having it reciprocated. And if you weren't experienced, were young and not in tune with your partner; not in a situation where making them lose it turns you on, or makes you feel powerful, or is just fun…yeah, cocks were kinda weird looking and gross, and chances were you'd heard "balls" associated with "sweaty" way too often. Kneeling in front of a guy could make you feel small—why wasn't there a female version of emasculating?—and there was the usual "if you can do something they like you're a whore, but if you can't you're a prude" hypocrisy.

With other women, it usually didn't involve the hawing, and while she'd met a few who were most comfortable with it being a shower/post-shower thing, for the most part knowing exactly what good oral felt like made you want to give good oral. Was the clit technically closer to the body than a dick? Absolutely, but it also didn't ejaculate, and she'd heard of far more squeamishness over that. That lady-parts were inherently smelly or gross was a conspiracy by companies still trying to sell douches, and guys looking for an excuse. Women were appreciative in a way that could make you feel almost magical—and you'd think Sadie would have been into Derek's god complex needed buoying again, this would absolutely be on the to-do list. Not that she would let it become an unucual occurance..

"Y'know, kinda—ahhh—makes sense you're good at this. Suction and timing. Basiiii! That's not retaliation, so you know, more like reward. Basically the same as some tumor—mm, mm, mm, mm, mm, yes, oh ye-ee-ess, gonna...ahhh, more like that...soon, so soon…."

Soon, and then...she started to think, but she couldn't hold the thought of what would be next in her mind, couldn't hold herself still, couldn't hold any more sensation, could only hold onto Derek. Hold on, her other hand flailing, just barely grabbing the headboard, arcing her spine up, forcing her hips to stop bucking until she had to drop and stretch her legs up, sending the spark back through her until she shuddered, released-but-not-release. The kind of almost that could fool her on her own when she was desperate-straining, what's-quivering-what's-contracting, just-wanna-come; no, wasn't enough, have to keep going—definitely wasn't, was nothing compared to what was making her cross her legs against his back to keep herself more firmly in place. While her upper body could not pick a position, could not decide where her free hand should be, because anywhere was as daunting as everywhere was impossible—tits, hair, up grabbing, pulling, too much—over her eyes, no, darkness was not her friend right now—tits was good, yeah definitely the best choice, score for Meredith, all a great score for—She curled upright, Derek's arm already bent to provide resistance; her legs were on different wavelengths, one as far out as it could stretch, the other angled, her foot flat against Derek's back. They both fell back to their original places over his shoulder as she managed to lower herself to the pillow rather than just dropping. She was sure that Derek was all smirky about that while he disentangled himself, but she couldn't see his face. She didn't need to.

He stretched out next to her, flipping the pillow he'd pulled out from under her behind him. "Hey, floppy girl."

"Not done-floppy."

"But you could be. You can be done for tonight if you want. Just telling me that stuff is a big thing."

"It is, but…but it also…II think…um…sometimes it's hard for me to trust what I know if that's not what…people said before. So, med school was a lot of driving, and calling Mom, calling aides, planning stuff, Ambien to try to fix my sleep, caffeine pills for early lectures—but it was also blindly graded assignments, and things I understood innately, and really I was learning how to teach them, and not do more than was mine to do. I was asked to join study groups. Between that and…and, well, being able to tell myself that all the awful, bitchy things Mom said were about what she was going through, not me, I came out with way more confidence than I had going in. I-I mostly trust what I know, now, no matter who challenges it, but apparently not always."

He kissed her, and she slid her tongue into his mouth. A little salty, probably the sweat that covered her out of nowhere and disappeared into the air just as quickly. Nothing gross. She'd known that. Had dozens more counterexamples than the examples of Sadie shoving her off, slamming her hand flat over her mouth. Still needed this one. How could something that happened to a different version of her feel so recent?

Derek wouldn't prod her to move. She had to do that part herself. She sat on the side of the bed, and slid open the drawer. It was a mess of notebooks, pens, hair-bands, pictures, an old Seattle Grace brochure, various chargers, extra camera battery, and the electronics she used far more frequently.

Professionals would suggest coming up with steps for this. They'd used the G-spot toy before. Next would probably be handing him the silicon, egg-shaped vibrator, giving him control that didn't feel as close to the metal bullet she'd kept in her room in Sadie's "real estate investment." But he'd held it against her, while she clutched the remote. Even with his cock deep inside her, hitting everywhere that made pleasure course through her body, and the waves of it coming from her clit, she'd felt the underpinnings of unease. Ignored them, until she'd tried to let him take it, but retrospectively, yeah. She hated that vulnerability, but she wouldn't have let herself get close to it with anyone else.

She didn't fully understand it.

She didn't fully understand herself.

She plucked the vibrator out of the bed by the cord that attached the battery and switch to the cylindric oval, and then slammed the drawer shut.

Derek hadn't moved. He gave her so much agency. Respected the space she needed, if only because she'd rarely had to share. She wanted him to grab her, take the stupid thing from her hands—

No. No she really didn't want that. That was the problem. It was the whole fucking problem. She pulled her legs back onto the bed. Derek wrapped his arms around her waist, and she dug a hand into his hair.

"What's so funny?" Derek asked, looking up at her as she snickered to herself.

"Just thinking how maybe if I'd applied 'opposites attract' to my hair, my life would've been better. You. Cristina. Layla. Curly dark hair."

"I see. Not sure you would've used the information."

"Meri, Meri, quite contrary, that's me. Silver bells and cockle shells. That's gotta be a euphemism somehow. Cocks and shells? Clam is one of the words for cunt that I despise, by the way."

"If you weren't goofballed, you'd know I figured that out a long time ago.. I suppose I can only blame myself."

"Pretty sure my brain has something to do with it. One thing it does right."

"One of many. You ready to think about how we're doing this?"

She nodded.

"Talk to me, please? Just so I know if you don't, you can't."

"It doesn't mean…sometimes I just don't have words. I didn't have them five minutes ago."

"You had sound though." He stroked her side gently as he spoke. "Really, the concern is that you're hearing me. And if we do it the way I think might be best, I won't be able to see your face."

"What? Why?"

"Remember our hands-on demonstration we in the spring?"

"Vivid and fondly, why…? Oh, yeah, that could work."

"There'd be rules You're done, we're done. It's not going to help if you're pushing past your limits."

"I don't have those." He frowned. "Kidding. Obviously…. Wish I didn't, but—I don't wanna make it worse."

"Good. I don't want you to have to think about a safe-word we've barely used in the six months we've had it. 'No' and 'stop' are end game. Basic triage beyond that. 'Red,' is brakes, 'yellow' is slow, 'green' is go ahead, but I'd probably want to be sure I knew what happened there. I'm reserving the right to call them, too."

"Fair enough. Probably won't need…we haven't needed the safe word, because we talk about stuff, and you'd think that'd make it less hot, but nope."

"Yeah," Derek said, sitting up and sliding back to sit in front of a pile of all their pillows. "For the most part I think it's better to know you like what's coming than worry that you won't."

"I like your philosophy."

"You're in a giving mood."

"Mm. But, I do, though. Spontaneous is good, but mostly because I know you're not gonna do anything I don't like. Not on purpose. Guaranteed safety...it's not something to take for granted. Even if we're doing it rough, if you're mad, or I am, you aren't gonna try to hurt me for real."

"Of course not. You're a scratcher, but you keep antibiotic ointment with the lube—it's instinct for you. It should've always been reciprocal."

"Sometimes it was. Real BDSMs are very cool. I've had respectful partners. The majority, maybe, just…less long-term. And I wouldn't have…would've seen it as a waste of their time."

Derek tucked a piece of hair behind her ear. She knew he wished he'd met her earlier. She knew they wouldn't have worked earlier. "Loving you is never a waste of anything."

"Ditto."

"Goofball. Let's see what we can do before that wears off. Come here." She slid over in front of him and let him pull her onto his lap. "Good. Lying back. We've done this part before, right?"

She nodded. Words. "Uh, yup. Definitely worth repeating." She let him position her with her head pillowed on his chest. "Don't let me elbow you."

"Don't worry, I always know where the pokey parts are." He ran his fingertips over her cheekbone and tilted her slightly to kiss her, sucking on her lower lip. His hands came over her shoulders, cupping her breasts.

"Just breathe for a minute. You might be the size of a hummingbird, but your heartbeat doesn't need to be as fast."

"It's just…." No, it wasn't 'just,' and he knew the difference. "It's possible that I'm slightly anxious."

"Thank you. We're going to start off slow. You're gonna be holding onto…is there a word you don't want me to use for it? Or that you prefer?"

"Uh-uh."—"it's the only way to keep up with you. Meredith-sater masturbator, little Death/la petite mort, get it?"—"Bullet differentiates it from the egg. The other thing I think of as a wand, so. Only thing in play."

"Which is why we can avoid words you don't like."

"What about...is bullet okay for you?"

"I-... it doesn't bother me," he said, softly kissing her temple. "You're gonna hold onto it for a while, until you're ready. Like the day you showed me how you do it. Everything's up to you. You can keep your hand there while I cover it. I can hold it. Same goes for the remote. The goal here isn't doing everything at once. There's no hurry. Deal?"

"Uh-huh."

"Mer, can you tell me something true?"

"You want to know what I'm thinking."

"That's definitely true. Okay. You want to start? Or do you want me to play with you for a bit?"

"That."

"Can you open your legs for me?"

"Oh. Yeah." She hadn't realized how closely she had her knees pressed together, and she couldn't make herself let them drop the way she usually did. Not yet.

He set the heel of his hand on her mons, curving his fingers so that just the middle came down on his first stroke against the hood of her clit. "How's that, love? More pressure?"

"Not yet. Two fingers. Yeah. Oh, mmm. So nice."

"I love seeing you this way. All languid, and that pretty smile gets feline."

"Not feral."

"Nothing wrong with Feral Meredith."

"Less of this."

"True. Less of this, too." He tweaked her glans with his crooked index finger. Meredith turned her head, a high-pitched moan coming out against his chest. "Hey. We're the only ones here. I prefer you never stifle those noises, but especially not now."

"Still always surprises me. So freaking good."

He laughed, kissing the side of her head. As he kept going, she couldn't conceive holding in the "ooo"s with every few flicks, stretching, catlike in response to the sparks flashing through her. She arced upward, looping one arm around his neck. He held his other hand firmly against her chest, which was not his habit when her boobs were on offer.

"You're monitoring my vitals."

"Guilty," he acknowledged. She had no doubt in his ability to know the difference between excitement and panic. She was the one still learning. "Is that okay?"

"Uh-huh. I can't always...you know."

"I do." He nuzzled the crown of her head. "But you know, you're better than you were six months ago. At feelings stuff, and talking stuff."

"And I-I can let you edge me now. So-so, this probably won't last. It...I think it really was a game for her. And I did... when she got bored and finally...it's not...not the same as when you do it, but I did..."

"I'm sure it was a relief. Mer, I tease you about playing with you. We call anything that enhances sensation a toy. There's a lot wrapped up in sex, but for kids, there's a lot wrapped up in play. None of it is meaningless or simple because it's fun. Especially if you don't like the game. If you ever told me something didn't make your experience better, I'd reassess. It's not about how hard you come. You're not benefiting from that if getting there wasn't good."

"S'why you mess with me in other ways in between. And why I didn't like not being able to stop from going all Feral Meredith. I'm not mad, not that mad."

"Maybe scared?"

"Poss—oh fucking crap yes—possibly. Don't wanna be. 'Cause it's really good when you do that. Annoying as fuck in the mom—fuuuck yes do that again—moment, but better...better after that. You're not in it for that moment—not for makin' it worse—but you're into it, so…so it's good for both of us if I can let you."

At the end of one shuddering breath, she knew that alone, she'd have reached for the vibrator. But this was so good, and if she could stop thinking I should try now and having her chest tighten, and her hands want to clench for reasons that weren't the knowledge that coming was possible, it'd haooen soon. She could let him do this and then just sleep, and maybe when there was less going on—

There was never less. Izzie needed chemo. There would be a wedding. She'd be starting her third year. And then—Then was an unknown. A knot in her stomach that formed whenever she hoped too far into the future. How far she could go had changed, but it was always there.

"Whatever you want, sweetheart," Derek murmured into her ear. That was the problem. She wanted too much. She didn't want anything. She wanted this. Him. She wanted to absorb another part of who she'd been into who she was, and not have to face it out of nowhere.

She slid the remote toggle up, counting on her body's reaction to the sound, to the buzz of the device in her hand. It worked, to start. The wanting surged, and she squirmed against him.

She couldn't get her arm to move.

She'd done this. She'd turned it on and positioned it exactly like this, if you edited Derek out. She'd made kind of a thing of getting off in "his" spot last year, and frankly, she'd had the right to go a helluva lot more crazy stalker girl than that..

She couldn't close her eyes. Too easy to go back to the lofted bed in a different old house, blackout curtains drawn against sun only a few hours away.

She wasn't watching Derek's hands. Just feeling the soft and slow circling around the bump of her clit. Soothing at first, then faster, trying to hold her focus, to make sure the vibrator wouldn't shock her, make an easy transition.

"Derek, st—nuh—wait—words suck—red, red, just red."

He instantly stopped, but kept his hand in place. "Hey, hey, it's okay. I should've—I'll always confirm what you meant, okay? No and stops are—I'd stop, but if you didn't want that…. Words do suck."

"Mmhmm. Don't...gonna regret this...stop-stop for a minute. Need to need it. And then you can take over. Don't warn me, just do it. And, um, ….I'll-I'll put the remote down, and you can take it…."

"When you're ready."

"Uh-uh."cSavvy man took her empty hand, interlocking their fingers. His other— "Rude!" She yelped in surprise, definitely not objection, to having his fingers toying with her nipple. The surge of arousal sank downward, taken ever-so graciously on by the reservoir in her clit, waiting to transform it into pleasure if she'd just start the process. "Ugh, why, Grey?" she whined, pressing her head against Derek's firm pec.

Derek laughed. Those vibrations were soft and warm and reassuring. The vibrating in her hand was stronger, and smoother, and her hips bucked, like a separate entity that had just comprehended that it could assuage the pulsing throb in her clit.

She waited for another series of breaths; the whole time, a voice in the back of her head was telling her she was pathetic for having to go through all of this. IDerek wasn't gonna pull any of the shit Die had. She was judgmental of the judgement, knowing all she did about biology, neurology, society; appreciating her own value, not a vessel to channel someone's—

"Yeeesss," she groaned, as she got the bullet situated. That had been trickery, and her brain bought it, or managed it, depending on how you looked at it. The centralized sensation was breaking into tiny sparks, with occasional stronger surges that would become so plentiful so quickly once the speed—The speed controlled by a toggle switch she'd left at maybe ten percent. It wouldn't be enough to get her off. Derek took over the bullet from her hand in the gentle way he'd taken over surgical instruments once she'd gotten beyond the point of her ability. She glanced to the spot where she'd left the remote. Derek had his hand over it. Not holding it, and if she asked—No. She wanted to get to a point where he could be Derek with the thing. To let him tease. Because that was what he did. He didn't…he didn't….Had Sadie wanted to hurt her, or just thought it was a power play?

—"Don't tell me you can't take it. You have more stamina than that…."—

—"That might be the loudest I've heard you…."—

—"See? You can't stand taking it slow."—

"How does that feel, Mer?"

"It's good," she said. It shouldn't feel as good as it did; she was almost certain. He always said he liked how sensuous she was, how responsive, but sometimes….

—"Maybe you've always been too much for one person, and that's why your parents"==

"It seems a little weak. Do you want it turned up?"

"Um. Uh-huh, but…."

"I'll go slowly. If it's too much, we'll fix it together." He lifted the hand holding the remote up, putting it fully in her line of sight, and positioning his arm so he was holding her. She needed to find a way to let him know how correct his instincts were. "I'm not going to pull it back on you without warning."

"I'm not afraid you will, but maybe if it feels the same I'll be back there, or just that it could feel the same at all, 'cause it wasn't...but it's not…you wouldn't…it's not…not…."

Derek tightened his hold on her, rocking her slightly. "Stay with me, Mer. Listen. You don't need to put a word on it right now. You're doing so well. We're gonna turn it up, and it'll feel so much better. Want me to count it in?"

"I…I…yeah."

He kissed her, just as proud of her for speaking up as he'd been in dozens of situations that felt more meaningful—and maybe they were. But this was deeply personal, and equally difficult, if not more for her. He saw that, he accepted it, and he'd be with her when she transcended it.

"On my count, sweetheart. One…two…three…."

He was used to making minuscule movements, and the sliding switch let him take it up by degrees, almost too quickly for her breath to catch in the moments between. Almost. She managed to hold it, breathing out in a long stream to keep one catch from becoming more. Repetition would build up panic the way it built up arousal, and they could coexist.

She was watching so closely that she almost wasn't paying attention to the resultant uptick in vibration, and it would be her fault if she had to take on too much too fast. She had to just feel it. She closed her eyes.

—"You said you wanted it back where it was"—

—"This is what sleeping beside you is like. You kicking and screaming and writhing. Would you rather be having a nightmare?"—

—"If I left it'd all the way up we'd be done. You wanted me to stay with you, Death."—

"Mer? Meredith, is that too strong?"

She blinked; the light of the room suddenly too bright. "Uh-uh. I'm…I'm…It's…."

"Yellow. I'm gonna put this down right here on the bed, okay? There. I'm just holding the bullet here for you." He used his empty hand to take hers. "One thing at a time. Is that as strong as you want it for now?"

"Yeah. I think…I think… I— Ohh." Derek only needed two or three fingers to hold the bullet, and she hadn't considered that until the others were stroking her labia. It was as though that touch brought her fully into her body. "Can you roll it? Yeah, that's how— Oh yeah, press it— I— I— I need…try it faster. Oh-ah-ah-ah... yes, yes, yes, ahh—unh, crap… mm…, Der?"

"You need it stronger?"

She nodded, her forehead pressed into his shoulder.

"I've got you. Stay here with me. We're going to take you straight through. No games. Nothing for you to worry about. That's it. That a good spot?"

Shr groaned in agreement, putting her hand on his to make him press the vibrator harder against the area below her glans, the vibrations spreading up and under reaching the shaft of her clit. Derek kept it there firmly while her hips jerked.

He tipped her chin up, kissing her, and when sweat began to bead up on her skin it was as though he'd breathed the heat into her. Larger jolts overtook the small sparks flowing through her. She pulled away, letting her head fall onto his shoulder again.

"Getting there?" he suggested.

She shrugged, like there was another explanation for the way her foot was twitching; hating the urge to shrink in on herself. She'd gotten far past not letting him know—but could she have been, if she'd been partially wrong about what caused her to avoid it?

—"Where are you close to, Death? You're never close to death. You pull yourself out of the line of fire. I'm deciding this time."—

—"You're getting there, you're getting there! You really think you're getting anywhere without me?"—

"Meredith?"

"Yeah, yeah, 'm here. Think so."

"I'm going to turn it up one more time, and that'll be it. No changes from there."

"'Kay. That's good, s'real good. Keep holding the remote, okay? So…so…you're not gonna... but you could. That's—It's—"

"How about you don't say 'stupid?' It's not. I will do that. And I will hold you."

"Why can you pre...pre...predict me easier when I'm actually telling you stuff?"

"That's how language works, Mer. You tell someone something, and they know it the next time."

"That's not…I didn't…fuck, you said no games, tha's unfair. Can't words... oh yeah. Press harder. Yeah, yeah, right there, roll right theeeeere. Rub it outta me, please,. I'm gonna...oh-oh-oh-yeah, Derek don't stop, don't st—ahhh fuuuck."

This was going to be something she wanted. It was a full loss of control, the kind where couldn't imagine making it through the next second, but every additional second was better, stronger. She drooped against Derek, her chest heaving. He started to move the bullet off her. "Down," she murmured. "Just down."

He could have left it where it was, and she knew it would happen again; that it would be fast enough to feel immediate, but that was not the point of this.

"Gimme a minute. Then, use it. Like you." She was dizzy with endorphins, and one more blast like would be all she could handle for a while. She could do back to back to back and on with it held steady at the top setting. That was another thing Sadie had used to justify her game. The build up made the difference, Meredith thought. Maybe they could test that another time.

Derek was careful, though maybe not merciful. The first time few times he lowered and raised the slider, she wasn't close enough for it to cause more than frustration that blended into the need filling her. When it came at a point where her mouth had gone dry, and it felt like the device had somehow bypassed her skin to stimulate nerve fibers, she closed her eyes. She could see Sadie sitting on the end of her bed, lipstick smudged, but almost fully clothed, looking like one of the gorgeous, badass women in the posters hung up behind her.

—"That's right, you just want to come."—

—"Face it, Death, we're not made for more than this. You let her brainwash up into wanting what she wanted for you."—

—"We're hedons. We don't get happily ever afters. We suck the pleasure out of every day. You're trembling with it."—

Not true. Not true. Not true. She'd never been exactly the person Sadie believed her to be. Sadie hadn't been entirely who she saw either. Whether it was the walls they'd already had up as teenagers, or a later change that had led to their paths splitting, she might never know.

Whatever it was, it'd increased with time. Her relationship with Derek was the opposite. The questions she'd had for years about everyone else she'd had a relationship with were refrains with exact answers with him. That made the questions there were more complicated. Maybe that was the secret. She wanted the complications, not the simplicity she'd thought was all she could handle.

She imagined herself snatching the old vibrator out of Sadie's hand. What would've been better, really? She'd still have shut her out with Mom's diagnosis; it hadn't been why she couldn't tolerate Sadie's behavior this year. What was easier was to picture was the life she'd almost had as that younger woman who let herself be used to keep a toxic relationship going, let herself be punished for her dreams; something in her had told her she was worth more. Whatever made her dig her nails in at the edge of the rabbit hole had taken her out of that room to this one.

What's true?

True was the rhythm of Derek's breathing, his heartbeat between her shoulders, his chest hair brushing the skin of her back. True was that he loved her; he wanted her to feel good; he didn't want to hurt her; he didn't think he owned her. True was the way he'd thought about her fucked up—about this, with everything else going on; his ability to be careful without making her feel fragile; his willingness to follow her thoughts, and let her words tumble over each other until they were gone, and her body was all that mattered. True was...was...

"No more down, okay?"

"If that's what you want. It's not up all the way. You want more?"

"T-Try me. Yeah-oh-yeah, oh crap, Derek, Derek." She planted her feet on the bed, shoving her pelvis forward, and he rocked the vibrator against her. "Jus'a...I'm gonna...ohhh, yes, yes, now, almost now, almost now."

He squeezed her hand. "Take your time, baby. Nothing's changing from here. It's all about those nerves. Every heartbeat you've got more blood pushing more of them toward the surface."

"So much. So strong. Can't...no more. Too—so good—I gotta...Make me come, Derek. Lemme...make me...can't take—ohhhhh fuck, Der, I'm gonna...gonna explode—oh yes—right there...it's there."

"I've got you. Let it happen. Nothing's gonna stop you. That's it. That's my girl."

One of her arms was pinned against him. She looped the other around his, maybe a subconscious grab for control, but that wasn't happening. She started to press it over her mouth, but he wanted to hear, and it wouldn't help much; she was babbling, probably that exact train of thought with too many interruptions to be understood. She was coming, there was no question, but also no end, and she really really was going to fall to pieces, pink mist Meredith. She hadn't screamed then at all; a day that ended in a bomb had been so quiet after Alex shut up the woman in the ER. Meredith was screaming. Plea-to-relieved-sob-to-totally-overwhelmed screaming, that ended at the climax it'd built with, like someone had muted her. The bomb had been like that, too; the so loud sound ended, and she'd come to only able to hear her own head.

Then it'd been ringing, not her heartbeat, but there was buzzing now, too. She batted at Derek's wrist before she could take a full breath, then rolled into the crook of his arm, her legs pressed together to dissuade the residual sense of vibrations. Ripples not being her thing was probably symbolic—or...had she been bothered by that in college? Did it matter?—He reached over her to return the vibrator to its drawer.

"Officially out of play," he told her, kissing her cheek as he shifted. "I'll clean it for you tomorrow." She grabbed the arm he'd used to brace himself, holding him there, pulling him closer. "Mer, I'm crushing you."

"Only kinda. Warm."

"Let go, and I'll be warm and only kinda crush you without hurting you."

"Doesn't hurt," she insisted.

"You're not processing pain signals. Entirely different."

She loosened her hold on his arm, but didn't let go completely. He'd figure it out.

He did, moving onto his side with one arm under her shoulders and one in the usual place across her abdomen.

She was sure Wyatt would agree that there were Reasons Why she wanted his chest leaning against her side, and exhaled the slightest bit more when he draped his left leg over both of hers. He'd know it, too. They didn't have to say it. "Have to" and "should" were different, and "should haves" different again. A should have came when a "don't have to" and a "should" weren't acted on; Wyatt said not to dwell on the "should have"s, but to act on the ones you could see coming.

The psychiatrist probably wouldn't approve of any of this, but secretly Meredith thought of avoiding regrets as a way of passing on fewer mistakes to her own crappy babies. She wasn't planning to charge them with making different choices on the same path, like they were new lives in a video game; she just wanted to provide a positive example to learn from. Besides, it wasn't as though Ellis set her up to fall in love with her ex-lover's mentee. (She didn't think.)

Come to think of it, did her mother know how closely Meredith's life would follow the path she'd taken? Wasn't that supposed to be the shocking thing?

"What are you thinking about?" Derek asked, tracing the lines around her eyes; budding crow's feet that she'd never have called laugh-lines until the past couple of years. There had been laughter with Sadie. There had been. It wasn't the laughter that was different. It was the smiling. She smiled more here; here, with him, here, in Seattle.

"Wondering exactly how much manipulation went on in the twenty-eight years of my life were."

"I think you made more choices than you're probably seeing. And, we're all being manipulated all the time."

"That mean you're the next in line? Should I get the bat from under the bed?"

"I meant—you have a bat under the bed?"

"You've moved in and outta here more than anyone, you never noticed? D'you not remember that I knew about both Bundy and the GRK by five? I'm small and blonde, I bring—useta bring strangers home to fuck, yeah there's a bat. It was in the umbrella stand the day I brought you home."

Derek frowned at her, his finger tracing the hills and valleys of her face. "I know you can look out for yourself, baby."

Why did that reassure her? It should be infantilizing, or feel condescending. Was she that desperate for praise from an authority?—Did she consider him an authority, here? She told herself she didn't. She truly didn't think he did. She didn't compartmentalize as well. Hospital was to home as home was hospital. Boss was husband as husband was—but life wasn't SAT simple. He did it on purpose, reminded her he knew she was independent, but he could protect her at the same time. That was good, right? Balance? Or did she just want to be taken care of in a way she never had? Was she secretly a horrible feminist, and that was why she'd never been able to bait her mother by threatening to she'd flip her major and minor, or take the single extra class that would've given her the double?—minimal majors for maximumly mediocre matriculate Meredith!

"Okay, I have to know what you're giggling to yourself about."

"Fuck," she groaned. "Maybe I'm glad people didn't stick around to see me this way."

"They'd have to get you this way first."

"Gonna let you have that."

"Ah, add magnanimous to the list of traits that appear in clit-drunk Meredith."

She snickered. "What'd you mean about…m-m-manipulation?"Derek raised his eyebrows. "M's are a thing in my head right now. You know how some people rhyme for no reason? I alliterate. Not useful for songs. Never came up with a good band name. Occasionally missed it proofreading papers and got graded down for 'tone.'"

"That doesn't sound fair."

"Thank you. I always wanted to slip one into one of Sadie's on purpose— had to match the voice they got on in-class shit—just to see if it was a 'we cannot give mouthy, minimally-mothered Meredith the same grade as sweet, surefooted Sarah-Elizabeth.'"

"Valedictorian?"

"Senior year lab partner. 'Well, I have an uncle willing to pay for my education at Oxford, but if I truly want to broaden my horizons, Stanford would be a bigger change, don't you think, Meri? I got a full merit scholarship there!' Give it to someone who needs it, for fuck's sake!"

"Did you say that aloud?"

"Better. Yearbook. I wrote her a nice pro/con list based on what I'd gathered over the course of the year…. Has this been a purposeful deflection, or am I just being that weird?"

"You are that fascinating." He tapped the end of her nose. "Mostly not wanting to harsh your buzz. All I mean is that everything another person says has an amount of motive behind it. Given the current spin-cycle in your mind encouraging you to explain anything gives me insight into your post-coital brain, a significant amount of details I didn't know, and distracts you. See what I mean?"

"Do you think that, though? Always?"

"I don't think it's malevolent or conscious, the majority of the time, but yeah."

"So, in a way, when I didn't know it, I was fighting back. I mean…I let her do it to manipulate her. Sadie. I really thought…I thought I was in control. Didn't make her stop, didn't point out that she was…that it…that I didn't like it, and I got her to chill out for a while. Stop acting like she knew I thought I was better than her, because that was goddamn stupid.

"I wanted us to do things together. BU's a good med school, and maybe I could've gotten into the big H. We'd make the house a landing pad; turn the basement into a study room. Charts, textbooks, suture kits…. I could quiz her; I knew how to make things stick. I could've…. I wouldn't…Sometimes I might have had to type up a report, or summarize material….She's smart at adapting to new places, and she'd have had the whole class in hand—none of the cliqueiness my Dartmouth class ended up having. Lexie's cohort finally bonded, gotta give her that. I could temper the extreme things. She got that 'can feel no pain' as a fight or flight thing. If I'd realized 'make Meredith take up my slack' really was her plan, I would've tried to make sure she had a new one…I set the bar…. I...I shouldn't be..."

Meredith shot upright. Before she could decide what she was doing, Derek was next to her. He held her shoulders lightly enough that she could've shrugged him off, but hard enough to make her second guess the urge to go somewhere else, to protect him from her callow callousness.

"What's true, Mer?"

"I don't care if you want to know what I'm thinking if it's—if I'm going on and defending her, when she…when you just…. I haven't even—D'you want me to blow you? Or you can fuck me, if you want. Not gonna be Feral Meredith, but I'll make it good, I—"

"Kissing you would take us away from this point very quickly, and I think that's your goal. Is this okay?" She nodded. Aside from the discomfort of being unable to uncross eyes, having his finger on her lips wasn't an issue. "Why would I expect you not to be thinking about her? For a third of your life, she was the equivalent of your person. You lost her during an incredibly difficult transition; you had no one except your belligerent mother disappearing by the day. You've gotten through, you wanted her to see that—for someone who'd known you to be proud of you—and you want to pull everyone in through the second window. Sadie expected the third. You saw every side of her; a big part of your dynamic involved you being the one she was vulnerable around—she needed you, and punished you for it. And it was the same with your mom, wasn't it?"

She shrugged, even though he'd pulled the finger away.

"Mer, here's the thing: it all happened. The good and the bad of it. You did all you could. She's not ready for what you can offer now. For who you've become. When someone you love is self-sabotaging, you want to create a bubble-wrap world where they'll succeed. You make sacrifices that seem insane from the outside, trying to give them the right boost. It never works. You have to be firm about what you'll give. You didn't expect her to meet an impossible bar with no support. If she'd asked you to help her study? You'd have been in the skills lab all the time. You were offering her so much grace."

Meredith ducked her head. She had no idea how to react to that. He didn't always realize how different not-practicing agnostic-leaning Catholic was from grew-up-without-religion; that her reaction was an eight-year-old's "that's a God word." Her mother used to say, "Never try to reason with religion. It was once an attempt to find reason in the world. Then, science provided that, but rather than learn the nuances of truth, people take the easy comfort of myth."

That he was referring to a concept that'd probably been co-opted by religion, and at least didn't require it, took her longer. She got there. She still didn't know how to respond.

"Should I not have?" she asked. "With all she did? Shouldn't I hate her? If she comes back, do I have to...? Should I tell her to fuck off?"

"Would I? Yes, but I knew someone completely different than you did. I also know she…." He hesitated, volleying the important thing to her once again. She'd been not bad at volleyball in gym, even with a lack of gross motor coordination to match her stellar fine motor control, and better at the beach variety. It was adult hot potato. Basically made for her.

This was hers. It was hers to name. She started fidgeting with the band of her watch, and then caught the hair band under it with her finger. That didn't have a lot of give when she stretched it out, and it was too chunky. It hurt when she snapped it, far more than a sting. That didn't stop her from doing it once, occasionally. It'd become more temptation than treatment over the past year.

Derek winced, and she waited for over-the-shoulder interference, even if just for that. Just about the coping mechanism pulled out of time to deal with the past. He didn't. She held her hands out for him to take, giving him the comfort of stopping her. "I dunno how much it was…she didn't make—have me get her off, but that doesn't mean…. It was…it felt like torture. It was maybe…. I said stop. It was sexual, but..."

"But nothing. You don't have to say it, love. I understand that it feels different from what we were taught. It's okay for you to not claim that. I think you can, but you owe your story to no one. It's yours."

Meredith swallowed; the back of her throat burned. To think, last year, there'd been a tiny whisper of reassurance: She'd let you crash. She'd help you burn. She didn't want that form of help.

"Ours. This...This is part of it, and you're with me."

"I am, but I'm a secondary character at most."

Not to me. "By definition, it's sexual assault," she said, and he squeezed her hand. "But…it's not gonna come up, but if it did…. If I say I was sexually assaulted, no one would hear 'by a long-term partner, and I don't mean it as a formal way of saying raped.' Everyone would think I took up with the wrong guy, and…and it wouldn't be my fault; it's never the pati— It's the perpetrator's fault. It shouldn't enter my head to…I shouldn't have had to guard drinks, and pee in pairs, but I did—we did—and…and I'm no role model, but I made it through without that. One or two close calls, a lotta shit I wouldn't take now, but nothing I'd call assault or violence. It's amazing, unfortunately, but I did it."

She didn't look to him for anything, then. A man's approval held no weight there. He'd never know how you could be split between arousal and anxiety. How a guy could seem unassuming but then cut a glance in a certain way that made the hair on the back of your neck rise. The language of looks developed with bartenders. She liked men who could lift her, but that meant that they could loom over her arguing, "Come on, babe, I'm clean. Are you a dirty girl? Is that what you're saying? No? So, let's just have fun. I can't feel how tight and hot you are with those things…."

And she'd have to get bitchy, have to threaten that oh-so-sensitive organ, and the night wouldn't recover for her. That'd been her go-to whenever they tried to pull a stunt she hadn't agreed to—choking her, once. Grosser things, a few times—and it was a little satisfying; but more annoying that they didn't already realize they shouldn't provide motive while she had access.

"Maybe being proud of that makes me part of the problem, but I am. I don't want her taking that from me."

He looked flustered for a second, and then raised both their hands to tuck a piece of hair behind her ear. She laughed and reclaimed her hand. He flattened his on her cheek. "I love you so much. You are incredibly brave, and strong, and you have every reason not to be the kind, compassionate person that you are. You are allowed to make decisions that make it easier for you to get through a day."

"Isn't that what I was doing, then?"

"Were your days easy?"

She shrugged.

"Mer, I think you should go to Wyatt with this. I don't have comparable experience or training beyond what you've had, and more recently. I can help you with this part of things, but there was more to your relationship than sex. If there are things you don't realize you're minimizing now that could hurt you later, it'd be better to address them."

"She knows some of it. Had to, to judge if I was…suicidal." That's a crazy person word. "Kept telling myself we were so different; it'd been five years…. Four that I spent in an emotional cryogenic freeze."

"You've come so far, Mer. You see that?" She nodded. Let herself smile. That was definitely a difference. "Your eyes are sparkling blue tonight."

"Mediterranean blue?"

"Is it pure blue anywhere? I've only seen blue-green in pictures."

"If I say wait and see, can we go sooner?"

"Find me a guaranteed two weeks off. In theory, we could use this year's banked hours, and go before intern day."

"No. Not yet."

"No rush." He squeezed her shoulders. "How do you feel about this?"

"It feels…but it's not stupid, because it's not just letting you tease me without panicking, is it? Not just wanting another way to get off. It's telling you. Deciding to do it, because I want it. Trusting you. Letting myself be really fucking vulnerable. It won't be a one-time fix, either, and I'm…I'm okay with that. Because we have time."

"All that and more." He kissed her, and she wrapped her arms around his neck.

"You want me."

"That's a truth. An always true. What I don't want…I don't want us to ever be transactional. Jokes aside, that's not us. You don't owe me for anything tonight, and you're pretty spent."

"Queen of rallying."

"No kidding?" He raised an eyebrow, and she stuck her tongue out at her. "Yeah, see, too tired to lift a finger."

"Other things to do with my hands." She reached between them, and grabbed the bulge in his pajama pants. It can't have been easy for him to keep it negligible while she unravelled on top of him, but while she'd felt him several times, and maybe pointedly positioned her ass while she undulated against his hand or the vibrator, he hadn't gotten hard enough for it to be demanding. Now, he'd given up on thinking of dead puppies, or reciting the periodic table, or whatever.

"Mer…Mer-Mer-Mer, there are— I can… it's not—"

"It's not nice. Not gonna be that kind of asshole." She gave him a moment's processing time before she started massaging it. "Not gonna leave you like this. Not transactional. If it's really not what you want, I'll stop right now. Otherwise, I finish what I start."

His lip curled in a way that wasn't un-catlike. Felino. Un uomo come uno gatto. Man like a cat. She needed to workshop a joke about "come" meaning "like" even if it wasn't the "enjoy" definition of "like."

"By all me—" He cut himself off with a low groan as she freed him from his pajamas and boxers. He'd been building for a while, or gone up and back a significant amount of times, judging by the amount of precum she had to work with.

"Hmm, my wet panties might be facing competition."

He tried to make a face at her, but he'd already moved past the point of being able to hold negative expressions. She started with only her thumb and index finger around him, spreading the precum along from his balls to his head.

"When I was up there, I could feel you. Started imagining what I could be doing to you. Just in that position, you could thrust between my legs. I'd have to hold them so tightly together." While she switched to dragging her fingertips along his shaft, brushing her knuckle against his perineum, she shifted, going for a position that wouldn't remind her body that she was totally naked. "But there are other possibilities. If you'd have lowered those pants earlier, I could've slipped down and taken you in me so easily."

"Yeah. Could get deep, just the way you like."

"Really could. And…" She swallowed, pulling herself up into her knees to get herself more leverage. "Maybe…."

"It'd be a good next step," he finished for her.

"Mmm," she said, and thoughtfully tapped her fingers against the underside of his shaft.

Derek moaned. His cock was tinged purple, veins popping out. When she slid her palm underneath him and started stroking downward he sighed as audibly as he had when she took him out of his boxers in the first place. She rotated her hand as she went, and by her second time down his breath was quickening.

"Remember last time when you…when you held it for me? You liked that; when I was coming on you over and over? With you even farther in me. If you…if we do it right…could get pretty Feral Meredith." She swirled her thumb over his head. "Thoughts? Opinions?"

Chatty-chatty man took time to form words. Making that happen was one of her favorite things. "Positive thoughts. If it's your choice to…to give into the feral. You know you'll… Oh, Christ, yeah. Faster, Mer. Okay. Oh yeah—" He cut off groaning, thrusting against her hand. She wished she'd been pushier about letting him fuck her; she wouldn't have been in pain or anything if he'd done it right that second, and he would've waited. He would've made her desperate for him, and now she'd feel more than the ghost of him. It wasn't that the default diameter of her cunt was made-to-measure; it was that she loved the way he stretched her. The way he felt against her walls even before he got to the spongier tissue, much less plunged deep enough to bump her cervix.

Would he think tomorrow was too soon to take that next step? He'd wanted her to move faster when she'd tried to wait...but that wasn't the same. He hadn't understood that, and really, she hadn't either. This…this was different. Maybe she was supposed to need more time…maybe it would be weird if she didn't….

But did it matter? To Derek, would it? She stared into his eyes. Black pools of desire rimmed by shining, sparkling blue. Blue of a summer day. No ice. Only heat. Maybe if she wasn't explicit. He could be very susceptible to suggestion. Brilliant though he was, he did not come up with the idea of going down on her quite as often as he believed.

"You're so thick, Derek. Makes me wanna shove you back and mount you. Ride you 'til you squirt that river inside me. I wonder how far I'd feel it. That'll be an experiment. Get you full to bursting and see if that's enough to make me come, like one of those carnival games where you knock something down with a water gun. Always seemed suggestive to me."

"What… doesn't?" he gasped, and then his eyes opened fully, searching for hers. Her stomach clenched for a second, but she made herself focus on keeping her strokes even, letting the rhythm keep her steady as she considered his tone. He'd been teasing her about her tendency toward innuendo, and nothing beyond that. "What isn't?" he added, flashing her a quick McDreamy smile.

"Exactly! The world would be so much less prudish if everyone thought like me. We're wired to reproduce; it's one of the best feelings, of course it's gonna be a huge thing in our minds. Attaching it to shame is so stupid."

He touched her cheek. "Should know better," he murmured. "It's not adulation of life."

With that repetition, it was like he'd toggled with the sliders that controlled dozens of her emotions. She couldn't pinpoint enough of them to identify them to herself, let alone him; could only hope that acting on surge gave him a glimpse. She propelled him toward the pillow exactly as she'd threatened. It was all she could do not to straddle him—why not? On the pill. No STIs. Wants my crappy babies—but fourteen years of resisting pleas from persuasive men, and her own impulsiveness, kept her kneeling beside him.

Her eyes burned, and a voice in her head was screaming at her that that was where her focus needed to be; that she needed to get that under control. His eyes were fixed on hers, and she saw him register the glossy sheen, but he didn't tug away. He pressed his hand more firmly against her cheek. His mouth was an anesthesia mask, breathing the mix of love, admiration, acceptance, curiosity, enchantment, approbation, pride. He pressed his other hand against her back; holding her, supporting her—and in that moment, he understood her.

It should've been impossible—no, there was no such thing, there was only what was, and her body was reacting unabashedly to the way he was looking at her. The side effect of the emotions combining in her blood was desire. Purely, simply, and maybe they would just keep passing that between each other for the rest of time. That wouldn't be so bad.

As she lowered her lips to his again, she slipped her other hand between her legs. Her eyes rolling back in her head momentarily at the pressure, but from there returned her focus. She stroked his tongue with hers, then sucked his lips with the same vigor and rhythm she was using to stroke him, determined not to be thrown off by his increasingly off-beat thrusts.

His cock was jerking; any change in the pressure of her fingers made something happen; a twitching muscle in his face; his shoulder pulling back, a sound that seemed so small coming from a man with such a presence, but that he let her hear. He'd never shown a hint of self-consciousness being vulnerable with her, and while men might have less reason to be, his self-assurance impressed her more the more she knew of him. She hadn't seen the junior high picture yet—she was owed now!—but she'd heard enough. A puberty bloomer, with one person for most of his adulthood; she wouldn't have been shocked by shyness. Instead, that'd ended up being her—too used to assuming she'd never have to see a partner again had made her hyperaware about what she did with him, until he'd made it impossible for her to doubt that he found her sensuality attractive, the most she'd been able to accept.

So strange that she'd had no trouble being turned on by his staccato moans; the way he never pretended to have the power once his cock was under her control. That she could blush whenever he was clearly enchanted by something she did involuntarily, but had a Things to Try On Derek's Dick list. She hadn't thought to consult it earlier that night, but she could surprise him by mixing things up just as well.

"Mer—" His voice was choked; everything in him taut.

"I've got you." She leaned down and took him in her mouth. His eyes bugged, and the mess of syllables belonged to her name, and then his shout of relief was surrounded by small contented hums. It'd been a borderline selfish move on her part. She'd wanted to feel the strength of his orgasm; to know that even as brok—hurt as she was; she could do that.

She could make him rise before touching him; stroke and knead him rock hard and then some; straight as a rod until the jolt that shot cum down her throat like a syringe being emptied in one press of the plunger. He said her name, had his hand buried in her hair; she could leave him drained.

He was playing with the tiny hairs on the back of her neck when she sat up. The way he was looking at her had made her flinch first until recently; but something had shifted between the night at the prison and Izzie's surgery. That they needed each other became certain, even when she was the one making a mess of accepting that.

Before she could say anything, he kissed her, and the well of heat behind her eyes matched the one in her clit again. Enough. She lied. It's that simple. But it was more than that; every reminder that maybe she wasn't gross, or over-sexed, or just flat out a slut—although Izzie and George seemed pretty sold on that.

Who were they to talk, really? Her randoms didn't fuck up entire marriages.

"Mer? What are you thinking?"

"Tired. Gonna get ready for bed."

"Hey, hold on." He curled his fingers around her upper-arm, never hard enough to actually constitute grabbing her. "What's true, Mer?"

"I'm good. You're not leaving me hanging, or…I'm good."

"Okay, you're good. Can you answer the question I asked?"

Shit. "It's…There's…Um…So, so, the thing is, I had a lot of sex, right? And I took the classes, I know everything in the goddamn world is a spectrum, and there's no normal, and all that, but that was before…. I keep telling myself that's the true stuff, now that I'm seeing how much of the judgement in my head is her, but…it's not only her. Or…or you." She cringed, and she could see his jaw tense, but his eyes didn't darken. It was okay. "It's…. I want it not to matter. I want to not care. To be stronger, or…or…. I did things that were wrong. I did. And, you know, I've said it about myself, because I knew that by most standards it looked that way, but I…now I don't know what's true."

"About what?"

"Am I…? I know you don't mind about the girls, but the…the everything…. Everyone thought it the day they found out about us. Didn't matter that I didn't know when we met. That my performance while we were...How I was at my actual job. That I didn't know about your wife. That's how it's been since I used the word 'clitoris' in class, and a few weeks later, Hazel McNamara passed a Lacrosse player coming out of the library one Saturday, and saw me sitting at the back table talking to one of the baseball guys.

"I've always thought it was just an ironic thing that everyone considered the way they fucking got into the world to be gross. My mother knew it was all biology, and still judged me, but Ellis Grey was a disturbed person, so…so…. I'm wondering if maybe the people I make fun of…the Roses—and she wasn't even…I get that it's intimacy for her or whatever, but…if they're right, and I'm… I'm up for most things, but I don't need...but I can go for…. Are you sure I'm not too much?"

"No. You're going to tell me it's not that simple, and I promise I'll explain, but first, Meredith. I am so sorry that I didn't tell the whole damn hospital that you were the innocent in the whole situation—"

"Addison tried. A couple times. No one wanted to listen."

"Still. I tried to protect you in the wrong ways. By being a jealous McAss." He grinned at her until she rolled her eyes. "I can't blame my mom for being the way she was, but I think yours really did have a better handle on those things. Maybe mine didn't realize how little she'd be home to police the rules she set. I understand her caution, she had four girls in Manhattan in the late seventies, and it wasn't really sex she was strict about, so much as being out at night alone. Hypocrite. Tonight, she called while walking home from Queens."

She winced. After Dunn, he'd told her about being ten in the summer of Sam, two years before his dad died. and his sisters fitting the profile of his victims. "Sorry. I didn't mean to…."

"Don't. I want to talk to you about this, okay? It's just not something I do much. You understand that."

"It's just weird to me that…that you have those things, too."

"I do. The thing is, whatever Mom said explicitly…and what she said to my teenaged sisters were conversations I chose not to eavesdrop on as a kid, believe it or not…I do know what we got in the neighborhood, and at church, and at school. I know what Amy picked up in the eighties, because I had the joyous responsibility of having those discussions with her until she trusted Addison."

"Your mom didn't..?"

"She and Amy... It's complicated. I watched out for her." He was also seven years older. He'd been at Boudoin for the years she'd have been, what? Eleven to fifteen? How many discussions had there not been? Meredith hadn't wondered much about the youngest sister; the one who'd fallen into holes she'd avoided. Now, she felt for her.

Derek had glanced away from her. He obviously didn't want to go into that tonight. Probably needed time to process the my-wife-might've-done-more-smack-than-her thing.

"Long before that, Kate had a scandal—all I understood at the time was that it was 'known' that she'd 'done it' with two guys, and Dad had to do some fast talking to keep her from being expelled from Catholic school her senior year. If there was anything more to it than sex, I never heard, but that was enough—and it was enough for me to have questions. Kate was the best person in the world, so if she'd done something it couldn't be wrong. Kid logic.

"The thing about having my sisters was that I knew they weren't all that different from any boys. So, I knew it wasn't fair that they got in trouble for things we didn't, but…I did buy into the whole idea that it was better with the person who was right for you. That's not patently false, but there's no divine reason. People…society says shit like that because religion does, and religion…you didn't go to church at all?"

"Sure. In Italy. Two Bat Mitzvahs. Wrong religion. I know it's all…whore and the madonna. Which is Mary, not, like, Madonna. And it's…Doesn't it really go back to, like, syph? Like we talked about when I went on about not being skanky? I thought for a long time it was AIDS, and I was constantly countering any allusion to sex being 'bad' or 'nasty' with facts about condoms and blood, and…that wasn't it."

"Not exactly. It probably does trace back to that, and to the reasons it claims; paternity, making sure mothers are able to take care of their babies—but that's as two-faced as the pro-choice idiots who don't care about the kids that already exist."

Meredith gaped at him.

"Think about it like this: One of the reasons it was better for a woman to be married and settled in a household by the time she started having babies was that she was more likely to be grown enough to deliver successfully. Meanwhile, in the name of God, people were selling off their teenage daughters, and expecting them to produce heirs to the men they married. We can't cleave to that. It should be about maturity, and not even physical maturity, at this point. There's no reason not to consider the fact that sex can be purely about physicality; you have to be able to handle that. I admit to parroting Addison a little here, but there should be a way to teach that without tying it to proving you love someone. Because then even people who should know better say stupid things out of indoctrination and boneheadedness."

"We won't let our kids think that way. Right?"

"No. Never. You're not dirty, Mer. I mean; hell, I was last dating in the mid-nineties, and you're the most careful person I've slept with. I don't know why Izzie says what she does, but she's Catholic, too. Maybe that. Maybe she heard it as a kid. It can be hard to overwrite what you've heard all your life with science. As for you being too much? Never for me. Meredith, the depth of feeling you have for the world is not too much. Ever. Your mom, and Sadie, and whoever else made you think that were wrong. Emotionally, sensually, whatever. It's not wrong.

"There will be times when one of us is more up for it than the other. That's biology. But it doesn't make a fundamental difference, okay? You don't have to lie to me about being turned on. Ever. If I ever get tired of watching you get off, get me an MRI."

She laughed.

"I'm serious!"

"I know. That's the weirdest part."

He shook his head. "That's something I hope I can prove you wrong about. Starting now?" he added, sounding honestly hopeful, and she laughed again, in amazement.

"No. I really am good to go to sleep. My life would be a lot easier if female-tinted brains produced more vasopressin."

"But mine would be so much less fun."

"Probably," she allowed, sliding off the bed to dig out pajamas. "Derek?"

"Yeah, babe?"

"You knew while she was here that it was her, didn't you?"

"I assumed. You weren't with anyone else nearly as long—not a judgement, more time for her to get in your head. And you were adamant that no guy had hurt you."

"Why didn't you…I dunno, punch her in the face? Not that I'd want you to."

"Exactly. You wouldn't. You would want me to give her another chance, because to you your life here was your second chance. Not, as I would argue, your first chance to be yourself, unhindered. If she showed up again, I might let you at her, for Izzie's sake, although honestly of all the mistakes she made, that was the most classic 'dumb intern.'"

"But I'm not wrong for…?"

"You are not wrong to feel however you feel. If you don't hate her today, hate her tomorrow, and don't hate her on Sunday, that's okay. If it changes next year, or in five years, that's okay. I wouldn't give her the time of day without a whole lot of honesty and groveling on her part, and probably not even not then. The simple way to look at it might be the best. But you have a hard time with the simple way, and I'm incredibly grateful for that."

Meredith almost didn't voice her next thought. She held onto it until she'd gotten into bed beside him, the only buffer she'd ever had between her and the world. "I'm grateful for you. Sorry loving me is so complicated."

`"Remember you said that when we start going over the complexities of my family, okay?"

"Sure." She snuggled against him, melting a little when his grip on her strengthened. It'd be a while before she could reveal that while he operated she'd been getting McSteamy to tutor her on the basics in other surgeons' OR galleries, where they'd be visible to anyone except Derek. Mark was a good guy; he hadn't questioned her location choice. Maybe once he and Derek made up, she'd flip the script and let the hospital think what they wanted.

She was going to start judging herself on what mattered to her, and while some of that might take some finessing, she had the most important part figured out. The people who mattered were the ones who might not get her, but they didn't try to change her without her permission.