The door opened. Meredith's eyes snapped to the sound—no cortical deafness here!

"Pah," she voiced, more an exhalation blown at him than a word. Derek laughed.

"Finally, huh? Maggie taught me that one, sorry."

Meredith hid her triumphant smile behind her book. She'd made a sound that expressed her thoughts for someone else to understand.

"Surgery went great. Miranda said to tell you he might've been your patient, but it's her save." he reported. "Not sure anyone else could get away with sending proxy into her OR during an emergency procedure What're you reading?"

The thrill of accomplishment waned. She thrust the book at him and yanked off the "cheaters" Adriana had loaned her. They hadn't helped her get past the first chapter.

"Aw. I like the librarian look on you," Derek protested. She sneered at him. "I like the growl, too."

She did not growl.

"Oh, you do," he said, perusing the blurb on the back of the book. "Is it making your head hurt?"

She shook it firmly to emphasize her point. His eyebrows stayed drawn, and she grabbed her marker. CAN'T FOCUS.

He glanced around the still room, which held nothing to reasonably draw her focus. Her thoughts were providing the distraction, and there wasn't anything she could change by ruminating.

"Scoot." Derek sat on the bed, and then carefully but skillfully scooped up her casted leg and the pillows it sat on with one arm, holding it while she shifted the rest of her body over. "Comfortable?"

She nodded. It was as true as it could be. He flipped back through the few pages she'd managed and started to read aloud. A minute in, she positioned the cheaters on his face. At the end of a paragraph, he leaned down to kiss her.

She'd been able to hear for as long as she hadn't, but she hadn't adjusted to having his voice right there. It was one of the easiest things for her to focus on, especially like this, with her hand on his chest, and his breath brushing past her face. She wasn't sure if his idle fiddling with her shirt sleeve was explicitly to ground her in the present, but it helped regardless. She barely recognized the words she'd stared at all afternoon, and unlike their print counterparts they stayed in her head.

It'd be nice if she could switch out the book for the journal. Not just "Would you be interested in coming home sooner?"or the responses to her possible objections. She wanted to hear everything that'd led up to the question. His print was careful, not his usual loopy handwriting, but reading wasn't smooth. She either had to hold it in one hand until it got too heavy, or hunch over a tray and fiddle with paperweights. She got there, even if it meant letting sworn-to-secrecy-Alex translate a word. Hearing them all in Derek's voice, not her head's facsimile would do a lot to fix her internal narrative.

"As a thought experiment: Say you had gone straight (stop smirking) directly to med school. Class of '04. You would've been more settled here. Had different friends. You would've led that class for sur.Maybe you'd have known Thatcher and Susan by the time I got here. Your mom's progression would've been the same. If she hadn't had any medical crises; maybe you'd have been keeping the secret for years. Maybe not. I would've been attracted to you as a second year resident. I was It was never that you were a wide-eyed intern. It was that your eyes lit up. Your laugh. Your thoughtfulness. Your passion made my life bright again, and any time that light flickers, you stoke the flame."

That was reassuring in many ways. Primarily, it proved he was listening. He was putting effort into this. It wasn't like his attempt to fix things with Addison: a case of playing house until someone cried uncle. Addison had uprooted her life and lost him anyway. Meredith had resisted moving in part because she could imagine it playing out in reverse. Then, his move across the country to take a job, and burying himself in it before that, had been an attempt at treatment. This time, it was...a symptom. Maybe not the underlying cause.

Could he really be happier here, reading to her? She scrutinized his bearing, stretched out on the bed, his arm wrapped around her. It was so ordinary. Peace of a kind she associated with them, from the first late-summer Saturdays, but that they hadn't had in months. Right there, she could believe he was content. She was.

But only minutes ago, she'd been desperately shoving a marker under the Webril that poked over the edge of her cast, trying to get at an itch at mid-thigh. She'd had to break the promise she'd made to herself to be totally clear-eyed whenever the kids visited, thanks to the shoulder muscle that'd pulled last night. It'd been a muscle in her groin over the weekend. Fiberglass casts were lighter than plaster, but they were still heavy. And hot. She fantasized about solid food. Needing to sleep every six-to-eight hours wasn't a great method for passing time if you woke up from every interval gasping. All of that was compounded by not being able to speak. Could she be sure that Derek wasn't experiencing a similar mix of miseries and irritants broken up by occasional moments like this?

She watched his lips move; mentally mapping out the lines on his face and trying to determine if any of them were new. At the end of a chapter, he paused, and their eyes met. The cheaters magnified his, and she searched them for an answer.

"What?" he asked.

Awkwardly, she managed to put the fingertips of her good hand on his cheeks, brushing them against the stubble. It made her think of the dance of getting ready in the mornings; the canopy of green in front of the house, the pale remnants of dawn between the branches. His eyes were the color of the Sound on nice days. In the face of dark waters, he never forgot to take her hand across the front seat of the car.

If the wires bothered him while he kissed her, he didn't let on. They frustrated her, and she was careful, haunted by junior high tales of braces being stuck together. He was more aware of the reason for the equipment, moving his lips off of hers after a minute, his thumb resting against her temple. She'd put her hand on the back of his neck in the interim, and she tried to draw him down again. Instead he brushed his lips down lightly to her cheek, and she smiled, thinking of their baby doing the same thing.

The book and the glasses found their way to the table beside the bed. Derek kissed her face everywhere he could, including the tip of her nose. While tilting her head to give him access to the skin below her ear, she checked the nurses' station window. Someone had closed the blinds, and for once she wasn't complaining. After a moment of hesitation, she took his hand and guided it to the hem of her pajama top.

"You sure?" He nudged his nose against hers, playfully, but his eyebrows dipped downward. She tugged the fabric up an inch or so. Not much. Enough. He took over, folding it up so that the hem rested just below her breasts. He ran his fingers over the skin he'd exposed, his attention fixed on her face. He didn't need cheaters to read her.

He kissed her, and she pressed her tongue hard against the backs of her teeth. She wanted to taste him. She'd take his disgusting morning breath if it let her engage all of her senses. Hearing him breathe was something she'd never really thought about, but now she reveled in it. The smell of a hospital had always been one of those things she loved and others hated. She'd never registered how different the smells were on this side of the hospital. For weeks, Derek's scent, the mint of his aftershave, whiffs of the kids, had been her most consistent tie to the world away from this bed.

The enraptured look in his eyes had been there from the moment he'd appeared at her bedside, but she hadn't let herself acknowledge it. For six years, his gaze had made her feel like some kind of marvel. In the past six months, it'd become intermittent for the first time. His touch had always felt familiar. No matter how out of it she'd been, she'd known when his were the hands tending to her. They'd been available to her whenever he was, touching her almost as constantly.

This was entirely different. His palm slid over the unchanged expanse of skin, so smooth, and warm, and…"real" wasn't it, exactly. That didn't speak to the way having his fingers on her skin reignited the desire she'd felt with him across the country, never more than a voice and an image. Tangible. That was it. He was tangible.

She brought her hand to the back of his head, and turned hers. He brushed his knuckles over the skin of her neck. She'd need his mapping skills to pinpoint where the sensations changed, but she didn't hate it; especially not the tenderness where the edema had been. She would've flinched at that not long ago. She still would've if he'd turned his hand over. If he'd kept going...and it didn't make sense! That was where his—the scrotal sore's—hands had done actual damage, not mostly hypothetical, mostly in the past, mostly in her mind. With her fingers buried in his hair, she urged him downward. He hesitated, and she nodded before she realized there hadn't been a question.

She looked away, not wanting to see the shift on his face. He'd never paused so much as paused before trailing his lips down to her neck. They weren't back to just-them, yet, she knew that, but if she asked, or the equivalent, it'd be on her if she couldn't deal. There must be something. Maybe there was more discoloration there than she'd thought, or the skin felt different to him, too, and he did hate it.

Derek's hands, his kisses, and that look had helped her adjust to other scars, from injuries and surgeries, as well as the changes before and after a pregnancy that ended in being sliced open. They all seemed trivial in comparison to this.

"Hey, beautiful, nothing's wrong." He brought his hand up again along the same path, but it didn't read as lightto her as much as uncertain. "You liked that, but I…. Every day, everything you're doing is about pushing forward, and….you still hearing me, Mer?"

"Mm." Crap. She hadn't meant to give him her left ear. To give him her bad side. Not this time. Not ever, even if it kept happening.

"PT, Speech, food, your pain, the books, the iPad, the breathing exercises, dexterity, psych. I don't want you piling more expectations on yourself. No rushing. No pushing. Only what feels good as is for now. Okay?" He touched her cheek, the most he'd ever do to get her to meet his eyes. "We have time."

"Suppose…?" She didn't know the signs for never or doesn't change or broken. "Time same?"

"Mer. It's only been three weeks. No part of you is healed. It's progress that I'm not hurting you by touching anywhere you had a bruise."

"Suppose," she signed again.

"Then that's how it is," he said, simply. "Do you want to stop until you can tell me your side?"

Did she? The journal let her say more than she could've if she'd been able to talk. She had options; real ones, not Dr. Grey, you have to live through both of these horrible things, which one would you like to get over with first?

"No."

"Okay." He put his hand down flat on her midsection. "Here feels good. And if I keep going in this direction?"He hooked a finger over her waistband.

"I believe yes. You…." He closed his other hand around her finger.

"Uh-uh. That's not what we're doing. Not today. Definitely not until the cast on your leg comes off. If you strain it, Callie will take Liz's nerve back, or something similarly horrible. I've been warned." He drummed his fingers lightly against her belly. "The meds might affect—"

"I remember." After her liver had been sectioned, she'd been weaning off oral painkillers by the time they tried anything. She'd hardly felt him touch her, but could fill the tension build, and a release that hadn't been bad, but felt unearned. She hadn't really had words then, either. Weird was all she'd been able to come up with. "I want to-T-R-Y," she spelled. "Please."

"All right," he said. She was certain this time.

He considered his approach for a beat, and then left her shorts in place, tugging the waistband back momentarily to position his hand between her legs. His index finger found the hood of her clit. The way he watched her as he started stroking reminded her of the way he'd studied her early on in their relationship, fascinated by both her face and her quim in a way she hadn't experienced, much less expected from the bar guy who'd turned out to be her boss. He'd mastered her, but it still caught her off-guard sometimes.

"That's it, sweetheart," he murmured, the tip of his finger moving onto her glans. She pressed her good leg closer to his, giving him room to maneuver as he covered her with his middle finger, using the other two to rub the swelling tissue on either side. How could the mechanism behind this be close enough to bruising to use the same word? Expanded tissue, caused by rush of blood to an altered vessel. Broken versus expanded. Nerves sending the brain a message to avoid repetition, not to keep going. There were far more nuanced details,, and they only made it more unfathomable.

"Still feel good?"

She nodded.

"On a scale of one-to-ten…?"

She snickered and signed "Seven."

He moved his fingers closer, trapping her glans between her labia. She pressed her lips together, letting a long breath out through her nose. The corner of his lip quirked. Glaring at him would be counterproductive, and really, she could let him be smug. He could do that as much as he wanted. Nothing had felt that good for so long. In so long. For this long. Usually, he couldn't do that for long before she needed more, faster, now. That wasn't happening.

Derek paused. "What's wrong, baby?"

She took his wrist, holding it in place until he nodded, and then she moved her hand to his sightline. "Not…. Can't.…" Crap. In retrospect, there'd been so many words last time, but she hadn't needed them. What she'd felt mattered to him, yeah, but that her body had reacted as expected made itsiimpler. Finding a resource without involving Maggie was going up on her list of worthwhile uses of screen-time. She held her arm out, indicating the IV catheter and shrugged. He leaned down to kiss her, cupping her cheek.

"That's okay. Do you want to keep going?"

She nodded. Arousal and desire were different. Multiple women's and gender studies classes, followed by medical school, had taught her that. If he didn't, she wouldn't be left burning. That didn't mean she wanted him to stop. She'd definitely take this over the weird numbness, even if that'd followed a more normal trajectory.

Later, he fed her as easily as he'd fingered her. She could've managed the syringe of broth, but it would've been slow, and he'd caught onto the rhythm of it before she could sit up for long enough to try."A lot of your preferred meals can be blended, you know. I've read that the texture is too overpowering for cheeseburgers, or—what?" He tugged the tube out and caught the spurt of soup that laughing had caused, his hand knocking hers as she went to cover her mouth. "Stop it. It's been too long since I've seen you laugh food out of your nose, and it's not like it's never happened."

She tilted her head in agreement. There was just something different when that'd been…. Not totally a choice; sometimes she wished she hadn't pointedly ignored every admonition she'd been given about manners, but it'd been a lot more of one. When she couldn't clean up her own mess, it was harder to summon the I'm a woman, but also a human, deal, feeling.

"Do I want to know?" he asked.

She waved a hand, signaling she'd tell him later. It wasn't worth the rigamarole of the white board to explain the joke. No cheeseburgers for Meredith.

"I've found a lot of casseroles and pastas I could make, and just put yours through the guilt blender." She pointed to the appliance, which was set up next to the sink."Yeah, but I'm not so sure about reheating, before or after. There's only so much you can do in the staff kitchenette."

He'd thought it all through; she'd give him that, and she'd had no forewarning until last night, when she read the journal while he put the kids to bed. It made her wonder if she should be trying to get someone to slip him a sedative.

She'd expected herself to be mad that he'd already discussed it all with her care team; read the words and braced, but what she'd felt was relief. She only had to come up with one answer, and if they'd said no, she wouldn't have had to ruminate over why.

She had another why to deal with. Wasn't it more interesting for him to be here, where things were happening around them, and he could find cases to treat over someone's shoulder? She was surprised that he hadn't started stealing procedures from the Cockroach. But he hadn't.

When it was time for it, he held her hand with one hand and connected the breast pump with the other, though Ulma was back with other syringes and tubes. While she was hooked up, he talked to her about the patients Nicole Herman was transferring in for Arizona. His information was third-hand—from Amelia mostly, though enough came from Callie that she must've been snooping—but he didn't try to hide where his ability to commentate came from: freely saying, "when Addison trained…" or "I hope Addison knows…." The medicine mattered more, but he also knew her better then to think she'd want him to obfuscate about that.

Ulma left her with an Ensure, and she sipped it while he changed for bed. When the question of bedpan or commode came up, she covered her face, sure it was far redder than it'd been all day. "That bothers you, now?"

"No." She snapped her fingers shut. "Suppose I go home? You must do everything."

"I'd like to see you keep your friends from visiting, and we'll have home-health. Mer, we've done this before. I was discharged two weeks after being shot."

"More me. Hurt, hurt, hurt." She repeated the sign to indicate the scars.

He flexed his wrist, unconvinced, but he didn't argue. Maybe it wasn't a conscious thought.

"Well, there you go. I'm experienced," he said. "I miss you whenever I go home. Zola doesn't sprawl, and when Bailey does, he takes up half the space you do. The bed is too big."

"True-biz?" she signed, a term that Maggie said subbed in best for "seriously" or "for real?"

'If you're more comfortable staying, it's okay. I understand. You've got the whole nursing staff hanging out right there. Going might be way more complicated than I'm thinking, and I'm thinking it'll be complicated. But with any one of you injuries, you'd be home at this point. We'd have a system. Why can't we do that with all of them? We can handle it, I have no qualms about that. Give me yours."

"A-M-Y? Medications?"

He raised his eyebrows. "We'd have to keep them from the kids, too. It's different, since she has fine motor skills and knows what a syringe is, but I started sourcing lockboxes last night. What about you, Mer? What are you worried about for yourself?

"Suppose.…" It took her half a minute at the least to figure out phrasing the question. "If I not able, what?"

"Then we come back in here, and when you're ready, we try again."

"Always, same." She fumbled the sign, making it too fast like she blurted things she was almost afraid to say.

"Yeah," he agreed, before kissing her. "Like always."

The buzz of the saw filled the room as Callie worked. Wilson held the foot of the cast, a precaution that felt unnecessary in the face of how rigidly Meredith was holding herself, and the grip she had on his hand. He kept thinking about one of several musings in the journal that had made him want to help her ease into their life again.

"I've gone into work and ended up a patient, multiple times. The times I had even hours of warning—the appendectomy, the liver donation—things were put on pause for a few weeks. This came out of nowhere, like being knocked into the bay. Then, I went in broken and came out determined to get fixed. This…I don't want to say I went in determined and came out broken, but I for sure don't feel the way I did strolling down that hall.

When I drowned I had three things in my life: Mom, work, and you. And Cristina, but we were new, too. She was marrying Burke. Being my "person"/best friend was turning into a lot, and I was starting to think I'd lose her. Mom died. I always felt behind as an intern, and I couldn't let you be there for me, or be the girl at the bar be the girl at the bar.

This time...I have you and the kids. I know I have people on my side, but that's what's certain, and I can't get my head around the fact that you'll be there—It wasn't what I expected to go home to that day. I didn't know if I'd ever be able to expect it again.

I'm sorry I keep mentioning the day I drowned. I honestly don't think of it much, anymore. But, you know how there's stuff Mom said that I can't stop hearing? I have them for you, too. Good ones, mostly. The McDreamy speeches, the exact tone of you telling me you loved me before we were loaded onto the rescue helicopter, the silly rhymes and baby stuff you taught me while we were trying. Waiting. Out of thousands of good things, there's one not-good that's been resurfacing a lot since I woke up with a tube in my nose and another between my ribs. It's come and gone since.

What did you mean when you told me you couldn't keep 'trying to breathe for me?' Do you remember? You meant it literally, to a degree. You thought were afraid I wanted to stop. I was Amelia all over again, and you were tired of doing CPR on girls you loved. But I've learned, with you, it's never just what's obvious. Was being what was left in my life too much? Did you feel like you were putting in more effort than I was? That I wasn't doing enough for myself/you? Had you just finally realized I was too complicated? Was it the girlfriend GPS gimmick? Too immature? Should've been revived with new communication skills? Was it all the race to be Chief? Did you realize I wasn't that great of an intern, and think I was relying on you, when Mom's name wasn't helping? Was it that I was basically all you had in Seattle and you needed more to breathe for? You should never be holding on for only one person, boy howdy do I know that. I made Mom breathe. For me. Or were you thinking about that day in the supply closet. The day I told you I didn't want Mom to die alone. It wasn't my first panic attack. Obviously, not my last. Seems like I still haven't had that. It's doesn't matter, if it was any of things. I'm not going to be mad.

It's easier for me to depend on you these days. We have the kids. I am great at my job. I just I don't need you to breathe for me, but breathing might be on the list of things I need help with until I get over this occasionally, and I need to know why that you will keep trying to breathe with me."

Sometimes, he really hated the person he'd been that year. He barely knew what he'd meant; what he'd wanted from her, and it'd stuck with her for seven years. And why wouldn't it? Hadn't he just told her he'd save her—and he was already tired of it? God. Some knight in shining whatever.

"You want me to keep this in the back for you to smash?" Callie asked Meredith, as she started cutting through the cast's softer layers. "Starting work again will be frustrating. It always is. You have to consider how little the residents have learned for one thing."

"Hey!" Wilson objected. Meredith smiled. It flickered when Callie looked down, but Derek considered it to be an excellent sign.

GROSS, she wrote after Wilson helped her lift her leg free.

"That's nothing," Callie countered, using a wet cloth to clean the leg up as well as she could around the healed incision. "You've been in a clean environment for four weeks. I have seen some things with eight-week, outpatient casts."

MAGGOTS?

The way the corner of Meredith's mouth curled made long him to hear her saying it; playing an extreme card as though it was nothing. It made him imagine her first attempts at Show and Tell. Tiny Meredith going through boxes of her mother's treasures, and having no idea that the kids at her new school might be more disgusted than amazed. At some point, maybe once she'd determined what the expectations were, she'd decided that she wasn't going to pretend her normal was anything other than what it was.

Wilson made a face, as he and Callie did, but she didn't overreact. Most residents Derek had encountered would've shown some amount of disgust, unless they'd done rotations at significant wound-care centers and had seen in person how beneficial something that seemed intuitively horribifying could be.

"Mass Gen?" she asked, while Callie arranged the straps of the unit the brace shop had brought up that morning. Meredith nodded. "They're a safety net hospital for the unhoused. We are, too," she added in response to Meredith's gesture. "But it's nothing compared to Philly or Pittsburgh."

CAN'T IMAGINE.

Wilson shrugged. "Not like I hung out in the ER as a kid. You did."

in her place, Meredith would've come back with an example for sure, because she thought it was cool, but also meaningful. And you know what? Screw anyone who didn't. Wilson stuck to the social norms Meredith frequently eschewed. She'd probably always known her experiences would stand out. Meredith had her mother's example, if not her support.

Derek caught her hand as she brought it up to her mouth. Fidgeting withe the wires was vying to replace biting her lip. There were layers below the gallows humor. They'd all have a story or two like that; the horrors of a career based around the human body. Meredith had a lifetime of it; and she'd still spent the majority as an observer, understanding only the framework of what was happening.

"Okay!" Callie finished with the final strap. "We're starting at ninety-degrees. Show me what you can do on your own." She held her hand flat above Meredith's knee, moving it each time she got close. "Up, up. Come on, Grey, I'm being nice. You'll be doing reps of this with PT."

"Hnnnh," Meredith grunted, fighting against the joint that had been casted at full-extension and the stiffness of the brace itself.

He brought the back of her hand to his lips, responding to the question in Callie's eyes with a nod. Starting with voice creeping into her heavier sighs, he'd caught several instinctive sounds over the past two days. They were the best indicator for how her bronchial injury was healing. Hearing her react to her dreams had been a bittersweet thing; the hmm? in response to Zola's "Momma, do you know what Bay-Bay did?" was beautiful, outshone only by the giggle that followed. (Bailey had effectively mooned them in greeting that morning and popped up to announce: "step one, done!" referring to the way they counted off the steps of a diaper change.)

Callie let her kneecap touch her hand at about sixty degrees and helped her through the remaining thirty. "Okay, good. Push against Wilson's hand."

Derek might not have noticed the back and forth that followed if she'd been able to put weight on her other hand and face forward, but once she'd straightened her knee, Meredith angled further left, extending her hip. She slid back on the sheet slightly as Wilson retaliated. He looked between the challenge on Wilson's face, and the smirk on Meredith's, bemused. Their rivalry over Alex had become trivial for the time-being, but there was more to this than the girlfriend-of-a-friend relationship that should've left them with. More than hospital hierarchy to which he'd attributed Wilson's willingness to be Mer's errand-girl. He had no doubt that Wilson could understand Meredith's experience more than most of them. Meredith didn't pretend to have had a typical childhood, but he could see a world where she'd given out the details as slowly as Wilson had. An actual friendship would benefit them both.

"Let's get you weight-bearing," Callie said, once she'd satisfied herself with the quality of the brace, and he'd managed to unearth the mate Meredith's slipper, which he'd tucked the extra sock into weeks ago. "Wilson, grab one of those crutches."

Meredith looked up, her grip on his hand tightening. He leaned down, kissing her before moving to her good ear. "You can do this. I'll be right here."

Her smile lasted for the seconds it took her to let his hand go, grabbing the rail on the top half of the bed. Scooting forward, but also trying to deny that she wanted the reassurance. He moved to her other side. While she'd been non-weight baring, they'd gotten her up daily, but having her broken arm on the same side as her leg made weight dispersal difficult. It still wasn't optimal; the sling holding it to her body would affect her balance. It would've been easier to be able to have a crutch alongside her cast to bear the difference between partial and full.

He took her elbow, encouraging her to lean on the crutch to move her right leg, using the left mostly for balance. The three of them coached her through the first steps, and by the time they got around the bed she'd adopted the rhythm.

"Let's go to the end of nurses' station," Callie directed. "Right where Miranda was just standing." She indicated the window, and Meredith's grimace said she understood the compromise being made. She couldn't have done much to protest, other than to refuse. She'd barely be able to communicate while using the crutch, and she couldn't maneuver the wheelchair. Either way, she gave up a form of independence.

Would it help that now she'd have a choice?

"We weren't the only ones with this idea," Wilson observed, nodding at an older patient shuffling down the hall with a physical therapist. On the opposite side of the corridor, transport was wheeling a patient in from the direction of recovery; a couple of visitors were coming through, glancing at room numbers. "It's kinda busy for a Wednesday afternoon, actually, don't you think, Dr. Grey?"

Meredith shrugged her left shoulder. Derek couldn't figure out what the resident's point was, he couldn't see her face from his spot at her side, but she stopped looking around and started moving forward. They reached the corner of the nurses' station.

"Not bad," Callie said. "Take a sec, and we'll work on turning. Gotta say, I'm still not convinced you've never been on crutches. It just feels...unlikely."

Meredith's annoyed growl was low enough that he didn't think Callie heard it. A piece of hair escaped the braid he'd put in for her that morning. He'd meant to French braid it, for this reason. He'd been running behind himself all day, trying to have things ready for her at home. When he tucked it behind her ear, she turned toward him and tilted her chin. He caught onto her plan within seconds of her starting to turn in the opposite direction of her room.

"Uh, okay, if you want to keep going, that's good." Callie widened her eyes at him over Meredith's head. The look he gave her in response must not been as subtle as he tried to make it; in spite of the sling immobilizing her arm, Meredith nudged him. He winced at the idea of her bare elbow hitting him with that amount of force.

"I've told you that my sisters and I went to a French immersion preschool, right?" he asked, conversationally. He'd been planning to write out this story for her, but if she split her attention, maybe she'd be able to drown out any voice that told her this wasn't an accomplishment. "Did you know Amelia got kicked out?" Her lips quirked just enough to signal the wry expression he'd hoped for. "Dad died a couple of months before the end of the school year, but Tous Les Amis & ABCs could no longer cope with that particular Amy."

"Uh, not to interrupt," Callie interrupted. "But did your preschool name itself after a Les Miserables reference?"

"Yup. The owners were Vietnamese immigrants. Literature professors Dad met over there. He called it the Pink Preschool, so I think it was meant to signal their politics more than a preference for Hugo. I don't know that it affected their teaching. I mostly remember it from taking and picking up Amy. She firmly believed it was her school, because 'it had her name in it.' Until her Reign of Terror, she was their 'd put up with Kath when she would only eat or wear orange. We have pictures; the sheer amount of carrots made her skin change color." Meredith made a face, and he remembered Zola's steak of choosing those along with of orange smoothies and yams too late. "Uh, there was sort of a skin theme with the older girls, actually. Nan had a fascination with Dad's Navy tattoo. She drew them on herself, and all her friends, long before washable Crayolas, and yes, I brought that up when Elena came home from college with a real one on her lower back.

"Liz was a climber. Playground equipment, bookshelves, fire escapes..."

Meredith stopped again midway along that side of the desk. Before he could determine if it was how far she'd walked, or how far they'd gone, she pursed her lips, and as she took the next step, she twitched her head at him.

"Apart from being right behind Liz, I was known for insisting on taking my own toys to school. Particularly, the Fisher Price farm that exactly matched theirs. I also had to make sure I took our animals—and only ours—home, because I was a 'good Shepherd.'" Callie and Meredith scoffed at the same moment. "Amelia got to be too much overnight, Tantrums. Wearing the same pieces of Dad's clothes she wouldn't let anyone wash, even when she tripped and her skinned knees bled on them. Barging into games of house pretending to have a gun. Refusing to go to the playground.

"I didn't blame her. I didn't want to go outside, either. I could barely walk to school with Mark, and he'd talk his face off to distract me. I was sure that anyone who had a hand in their pocket was about to pull out a piece. During one of my first days back, a teacher dropped his book, and I almost broke down. I spent most of my time in the nurse's office after that, but I wouldn't let them call my mom."

They reached the corner that marked the farthest point from Meredith's room. For the first few feet beyond it, she increased her pace, each swing.

"Amelia says I taught her to read. That might be how she remembers things. The context is that Les Amis said she had to learn the last of her ABCs somewhere else. I convinced Mom that I could stay home with her until the end of the school year. I did read to her a lot, maybe that flipped the phonics switch. In June, Nan took over with her; Kath took over with me. Summer classes were at the elementary school across the street. She dragged me there, walked Mark and me home—his folks sent him just to get him out of the house I think—and taught me what I should've been learning at the kitchen table every night. Then, Kath went to college, Amelia went to kindergarten. And I went back to junior high with Liz, who'd spent six months telling everyone what a wuss I was for staying in the back while Dad got shot." He heard a scuffle as Wilson kept herself steady in spite of tripping over her sneakers. That detail had spread after the shooting; he was surprised that Amelia being here hadn't revived it.

Meredith paused again, clearly winded, but her eyes seething.

"That was a lifetime ago," he pointed out. "Specifically, your lifetime ago." She scrunched her nose at him. "We've.…" Had they really cleared it up? "Discussed it. We're family, there were invisible scratches before dad dying caused a bunch of wounds. Triage made Mom the priority. The rest of us helped each other through until the bleeding stopped, and the inflammation cleared up. Some healed. Some could be hidden. Mom was healing; we could take care of ourselves. Poor Amelia didn't understand. She kept picking scabs, opening scars. I think she just wanted someone else to acknowledge that it hurt. You're the one who showed me that you have to admit to that type of pain before you can get past it."

They moved into the open space between the desk and the patient rooms, and he was taking most of Meredith's weight on every other step. He hoped it was a sign she'd let him support her through the rest of it.

She sagged as they crossed over the threshold of her room, and let him help her support the braced leg as she swung it onto the bed. He kissed her cheek. Her skin was feverishly warm, but that wasn't the reason for the gleam in her eyes. Wilson propped the crutch to the side of the door and leaned against the wall. A glance at Callie's expression made him follow the resident's example; withdrawing to the bathroom to dampen a washcloth.

"That was impressive for your first lap," he heard over the faucet. "Did you know that tibial plateau fractures make up one percent of fractures? Monteggia fractures account for five. The probability of both of them happening at the same time is a two-thousandth of a percent, and they're not your only injuries. Maybe a statistician would make adjustments for the situation that caused them, but I'd say it makes the odds worse."

In the beat Callie took for that to land, Derek remembered Lexie's tendency to rattle off ratios and percentages. Her math major had been "proof" that she could solve problems, she'd joked, not just coast through on her memory. He'd figured it brought a degree of certainty to medicine, which she'd needed after the unpredictability of Susan's death.

"What McDreamy was saying out there about timelines? Take it in. There is no measuring stick here. You're on track for full healing, so let it take what it takes. You've been in a lot of unlikely situations, and if you're hurt, you put it aside to tend to everyone else. If you need to, forget about your leg to keep the woman who was in that trauma room from pushing herself to the edge. Distract her. Convince her she already beat the odds. Be there for yourself."

Meredith squeezed the other woman's wrist. It was reassurance as much as gratitude, and Callie's smile as she took her hand suggested that she caught that. She'd made a good argument, but Callie needed zoom out to see it the way Meredith would. She hadn't factored in the conversation they'd had about the aftermath. It wasn't just that being treated by familiar faces had affected Meredith; it was that she knew it'd affected them.

"You're a badass, Grey. Sabotaging yourself will only make you a pussy." Wilson spluttered audibly before she could clap her hand over her mouth. Both Callie and Meredith rolled their eyes. "Rest. Get used to the brace; it's your new best friend. Come on, Wilson."

"She's right about the badass part," Derek said, straightening up the covers. The fox fell from the balled up blanket, and he tucked it around the strap of her sling, letting the tail fall against her fingers. "What? No?" She shook her head, but the smile playing at her lips kept growing. "It's chic. Faux-fox-fur." Her giggle had a gurgle to it. Her mouth twisted at the sound; a pained reaction, but not a reaction of pain. "Number?"

It took her a second to determine her answer. He could forget, to both of their detriments, how she'd changed in the time he'd known her. All feelings had been difficult for her to access, then. If she sensed there were too many blanks, she tried to fill them in with sex, or some uperficial gesture she'd thought was expected. She'd always been a step from fight or flight. Always ready to assume that all criticism meant "you are not good enough," and that if she asked for help, the subtext of any reply was "you are not worth this trouble." He couldn't imagine how much progress she'd already made at that point.

"Six."

He glanced at the clock. It'd been several hours since the meds she'd gotten in preparation for Callie's exam. "Do you want me to call Adriana?' She shook her head, and then tilted it to the side. Not yet. Then, her pupils expanded, and her eyeballs flicked; her focus on debating something he wouldn't be able to see if he looked over his shoulder. He wanted to prompt her, but she'd been cajoled through enough for one day.

If he listened hard enough, he could almost understand the conversation at the nurses station. The hearing on her left side must not be able pick that up; he was sure he'd have been read into far more gossip. Did the nurses know what Amelia and Hunt were doing? She said they were friends, but he'd seen Owen in pursuit before, and it looked a lot like—Derek startled at the sensation of the fox's tail running over the back of his hand, and found Meredith smiling at him again. "You have my attention."

"Good. Okay." She sighed, making her uncertainty clear, pulled the white board off of the tray, setting it in her lap, and then continued to sign, watching his face for any and all reactions. "You need to know. Last week, A-L-E-X, and I researched boyfriend L-I-S-S-Y have. Not have."

"You and Karev looked for the Wickham?" he confirmed. Her eyebrows went up. "You haven't read Pride and Prejudice?"

"Yes, I read! They marry."

"Yeah, but Darcy paid him off the first time. With his sister."

A muscle in her jaw moved. She didn't react. "You remember. Why?"

"Kathleen's college boyfriend was not a fan favorite. I didn't have money until Amelia was dating. Not that…. I'm sure there were creeps—" He stopped, not wanting to take the conversation toward the type of person, guy in particular, Amelia might've been encountering while she'd been using. At the time, he'd told himself she didn't take shit; she could defend herself. It had been true, but it put the onus on her.

Before he could reel the topic back, he remembered the invisible dealer Maggie thought must be pulling the strings in the one case where Meredith bore any responsibility. Amelia had been clean by 1995, but she'd been at college in Cambridge. He'd visited her. They could all have been in Boston, then. Meredith snapped her fingers. "Sorry, just….What'd you find?"

"Zero. Nothing. I don't-think…." She reached past him for her notebook, flipping the bookmark to secure a different set of pages, and then handing it to him.

He perused the lists she'd made, and the notes in Karev's handwriting. It was a detailed recounting of everything from Meredith's tenth grade class schedule, which overlapped Felicia's, to visiting hours for the periods the youngest O'Grady had been hospitalized, both at MGH and Boston Children's. He could tell they'd pulled up every possible article, and he hoped Karev had taken as many as she'd let him for the team. Candidates had been Googled, Facebooked, and searched on Twitter—Twittered?—He wasn't sure how well you could rule out a possible secret-relationship from twenty years ago, but they'd found shadows of doubt for most of them. They also made good arguments for her brother.

"So much for the Westermarck effect. The hypothesis that people aren't attracted to someone they lived with as a sibling above the age of six," he clarified in response to Meredith's expression. "Mark didn't start sleeping over that much until he was seven. He used to cite it all the time."

Meredith made a sound halfway between a growl and a gurgle. "He always there. Didn't like our music, books, TV." She popped the cap of her marker. I WAS SO USED TO MOM'S NEGATIVITY

ALL BOYS WERE SEXIST

THEY DIDN'T HANG OUT W/THEIR SISTERS

HE WAS SO POSSESSIVE.

CNTB LIEVE HE LIKED ME

DIDNT JUST PULL MY PIGTAILS

(METAPHORICAL. NO PIGTAILS BY 7TH GRADE)

ONLY 1 WHO'D STILL FIGHT ME

I CAN'T PROVE ANYTHING

B/ I MIGHT HAVE MORE INFO.

"Where?"

She set the marker down. Her hands were trembling like they'd been when she'd let go of the crutch. "Home. I need…Don't want…." She closed her fingers against her palm, and he realized why she'd been switching communication methods. It wasn't that she didn't know the signs. It was using words at all.

"You have something at the house. Something of Lissy's?" She nodded, and then shrugged. "Sort of. And you want me to check it out?" She nodded again, followed by the fist-bob that meant "yes." Proof that she was serious. He didn't need it. She might have.

"Not want," she repeated. "Hear him."

"Hear him? You have…." He considered it. 1993. The picture of two girls huddled over a Walkman. "You have a tape."

Her head turned sharply, and before he could catch her she'd surged up to kiss him, pinning her casted arm between them, the rest of her body sagging with relief. If he'd been concerned at all about not being challenged once he'd let the NIH go, it stopped then.