First, Do No Harm

by Chicleeblair

While Derek is at the NIH, an attack in the ER leaves Meredith with broken limbs, temporary deafness, and a wired jaw. She fears he feels obligated to be with her. He confronts the damage he's done to her. Is this a truce that will end before she can voice a protest, or will their skill at non-verbal conversation keep their marriage from shattering with the silence? CH6 FIXED!

18. Days Thirty-Five & Thirty-Six

"Yung," Bailey said, pointing to his chest.

"Lungs," Zola said, emphasizing the L. "Here, here, Mommy!" she added, waving Anatomy Joanne's attached pair of them. "Aunt Cristina. And Aunt Maggie."

"Good. Kidney."

"Keenee. Aunt Meya!" Bailey added, struggling to arch his legs over Meredith's and the edge of the porch bench.

"No, that's Mommy! Mommy surgeries kidneys, and you're gonna hurt her!" Leaving Joanne open on the table, Zola grabbed the hood of her brother's sweater, and he threw himself forward. Meredith had a second's fear that she might snap her other wrist trying to sign "okay" to Zola while hooking her arm around the toddler's waist.

"Aunt Meya!"

"That is one of my names, yes." The tray Amelia was carrying clattered onto the wooden picnic table, and she grabbed her nephew. Zola stretched out immediately, cramming herself in between the back of the bench and Meredith's shoulder. Meredith kissed the top of her head.

"Go eat."

Zola frowned.

"Your momma's going to eat, too," Amelia said, holding a glass out to Meredith.

"I don't think Mommy wants that,"

Noted, she needed to find more of a balance between getting her point across and controlling her face around the kids.

"It looks like slime."

Meredith took the smoothie to free her sister-in-law to hold her hands out to Zola, who took them, stood up, stepped over Meredith's legs, and jumped to the ground.

"Too-daa!" Bailey declared for her, his face already sticky with the quarter of an almond-butter and jelly sandwich he'd taken from the tray. This time Zola giggled holding her arms up, her fingers still laced with her aunt's.

"All right, little leapfrog," Amelia said, pulling her higher as she jumped in place. "Would you do that without a grownup?"

If that was in response to Meredith's face, she'd take it.

"No, 'acause if I bust my head open, all the good ner-surgeons are my family." She kept bouncing, her sneakers smacking against the porch.

The shoes were new; one of the strange small things that made Meredith think about the time that'd passed while she was in limbo. In January, Zola had only almost outgrown the pair she'd gotten in September, and then last Thursday she'd marched into Meredith's hospital room, proudly announcing she'd gone up a whole size. "They're velcro like you got on your leg," she'd said. "I have to be a big help putting them on myself, so Daddy says tying can wait 'til next."

Next, when Meredith's arm had healed, and Zola wouldn't pass that milestone with the first pair of shoes she hadn't helped her pick out. She'd looked up at Derek while Zola told her about the exact shade of purple she'd chosen, and known he understood what she was thinking.

"Good," Amelia said. "Get your lunch before your brother downs it all. What's on the fruit plate is in your mom's drink."

Meredith looked over at the tray and back at the gloop in her cup. It did make her think of Saturday mornings watching game shows on Nickelodeon.

Amelia sat down next to her and picked up the file she'd put there before going in to fix lunch. "I didn't say that's all that's in it."

Meredith sighed and tipped the edge of the cup against her lips. "Not bad," she admitted once she'd put it down on the arm of the bench. "Thanks," she added, and then snapped for the kids' attention.

That was something she'd once put firmly on the "interns" side of the "interns vs. kids" list, thinking it was too sharp. The first times she'd done it, she'd had Derek remind them she couldn't say their names, or clap the way their teachers did. They hadn't reacted except to turn to her.

When they looked up from their food, she repeated the sign.

"Thank you, Aunt Amelia."

"T'ank 'oo."

"You're welcome. Feeding little Shepherds is one of my most polished skills. Seriously," she added to Meredith. "Being able to leave the room every time one of the kids wanted string cheese or a bottle? It's how I got through family gatherings in the nineties." She tapped a highlighter against the article she'd printed, looking out over the backyard. "And it gave me a chance to get to know them. I wasn't ever the go-to babysitter. Derek wouldn't have let me near them a few years ago. If they'd existed. You get it. I worried my last…accident would make that truer. You've changed him."

Meredith winced. She'd reacted badly, the last time.

But had that been about Amelia, or Derek using Amelia to get what he wanted?

She grabbed the white board, leaving the eraser. Zola had magnanimously started allowing her brother to carry the eraser, which he did with both hands, aligning it carefully with the edge of the board.

UR GOOD W/THEM

"And? He let me show him that. It's been thirteen years to grow up since the last kid was born, and he would've held on to the one time I arranged a hand-off at the park with Carly and Elena."

U DID THAT

Amelia grimaced, but before she could speak, Meredith tapped her marker on the board.

W/ NANCY'S KIDS?

BRASS OVARIES

"Yeah, it was before she finished residency and left NYC. They saw nothing. I didn't use it until I took them home. I'd heard horror stories. No one found out until the ninth step, but any time I spent with the niblings after that was supervised. And he had no problem holding the great Mustang grudge long into the new millennium."

Meredith remembered. It'd been the visit that made her realize that he consciously contrasted her with Amy, along with comparing them—consciously or not.

When you totaled your mother's car, were you high on pain pills? Did you steal your mother's prescription pad…?

There'd been people who'd suggested it. Who'd said things like, damn, I bet you get all kinds of shit for free.

She'd countered with just Naloxone to save your junkie ass.

Tara had looked at her with those deep green eyes glistening and said, "my brain is, like, my worst enemy," and "you're such a good friend. I've never known you to let anyone down."

"He's meant to be a dad. They started saying he'd would be next to have a baby before Kath had," Amelia said. "Since Reid came with the older two, and she's never been super baby-crazy. Their youngest was absolutely an accident. You don't have a baby like Stevie and decide to do it again. She wasn't bad or even particularly active, just curious enough to try to figure out the laws of physics the hard way."

"So, no one thought Kate would have another. Liz had triplets; Nan had Tyson to keep up, and Derek was starting his fellowship. Everyone thought, okay, Addison's turn, but if they said anything in front of her, she'd get that look. The evil eye. Assume you've gotten it?"

Meredith almost choked on her slime.

WHEN I DESERVED IT

NOT ALWAYS THEN

"Hmm. That makes one of us," Amelia drawled. "She got bold at some point. Slapped me when I showed up after my twelve-day bender. She'd always been more passive-aggressive, glare and then make you miserable in tiny ways for a week. I sort of wondered if you were when she went full aggressive."

Meredith shook her head. Other than the panties, there'd been almost no retaliation or meanness from Addison. Meredith didn't know if she thought she'd been lied to when she asked if Meredith was having an affair with Derek. If Meredith been familiar with the concept of an emotional affair before Wyatt mentioned it, months later, she might've been.

I WANTED 2 SLAP U THEN 2

Amelia gave her a side long look. Did she think they hadn't been alerted? It'd torn Derek up, worrying that something had happened; that going down would jeopardize Zola's adoption, or just make him miss another first night home. Before she could decide how to convey his reaction to what had come next,Amelia shrugged the topic away.

"I don't actually know what she wanted at that point. She just resented the nosiness. The expectation, too. If she wanted to focus on her career, that was her business. And Derek's, although I wonder if that never…. This makes place so much more sense for him."

HIM BACK THEN?

"Him that I knew."

Meredith had always separated the Derek she fell for from the man he'd been in Manhattan; even knowing that he'd wanted to move more quickly than she had. He'd bought the land before her, but did he know how well it would suit him, or was buying something so antithetical to a brownstone in Manhattan vindictiveness? Had he seen the potential the day he closed on it? He had when he'd shown it to her. She'd turned out to be suited for it and would still describe herself as a city person.

Amelia watched the kids, and probably hoping they'd need something. Meredith had used them to escape conversations plenty of times. "Derek is arrogant about his abilities. That comes from the way he and Liz used to compete, I think. If you ask me, Irish twins are the worst gap between kids. They're almost the same age, never getting a chance to really figure out the world before there's another baby who needs more attention. That he was the boy didn't make that any better. But he's Derek, so he saw the things that weren't fair, and he'd try to make up for it.

"We were taught that putting aside what you wanted, to some degree, was what you did for someone you loved even before Dad died. We all knew Mom didn't want the store. She'd joined up hoping to travel, but once they'd been to 'Nam and back, Dad was ready to settle, so she stayed stateside from there.

"Being as selfish as he was last year? Anomalous behavior, and I…I thought it was good for him. I can't think of anything else he's done solely for himself, because he wanted to, not because he thought he was supposed to. I'm sorry he hurt you so much in the process, but sometimes you have to get what you want to know it's not what you need."

Meredith wanted to contradict her. She thought of him reporting Richard. Of him leaving her when he'd found out about her ensuring Adele got the Alzheimer's drug. Rose. That qualified, didn't it? Did it? If he'd really wanted Meredith? She rocked her hand between them. "Maybe."

"He didn't do it back then. I know how appealing neurosurgeon money was to me, and he wasn't immune to that. Derek…the Hamptons, the brownstone? It was as close as he could get to lifestyle Addison grew up with, the one that put him on level to keep up the life-long pissing contest he had with Mark."

Meredith smiled. That she knew.

"Turns out, she did want a baby, eventually, and maybe putting it off was a mutual thing." Amelia eyed her, looking for confirmation. Meredith kept her face still. She had every excuse not to answer a question that hadn't been posed, though she could only as far as Derek could, and he wasn't sure intentional putting kids off had been. "Whether or not they were on the same page, Addison had made it clear that my family needed to lay off whenever she could hear them. If they kept asking Derek, I wasn't around. They never moved on to me. It was everyone's worst fear that I was going to fall of the wagon and get myself knocked up. That it happened when it did is almost as ironic as the neurosurgeon's baby having anencephaly."

Meredith held her facial muscles taut as shock washed over her. She'd never mentioned Christopher. Not around what would've been his birthday. Thought she'd been haggard and gone to daily meetings. Not when they'd discussed April's situation, and Meredith had been honest about the way hope and terror had warred in her during her pregnancy with Bailey.

Amelia didn't say anything further, which meant she wanted Meredith to do so.

HE'D BE 3 N MAY?

Amelia nodded. "Had him right before you guys disappeared. Not that…. Mom didn't call me until they'd found you. I didn't put together that your sister died until Mark…and I am talking to you about a plane crash while Derek is on a plane, I'm such an idiot."

MEDICATED 4 A REASON.

Amelia snorted, which was a relief, and before her expression could twist into anything probing, Bailey spoke at Meredith's shoulder, startling her; she hadn't noticed him get up from the table. "Daddy eed-yot."

Meredith hadn't felt the strange tightening of her mouth trying to fall open in a few weeks; it was reassuring that it didn't hurt. Amelia's jaw wasn't wired, and it took her a moment to stop gaping and catch Meredith's eye. "What'd you say, brilliant kiddo?"

"Daddy eed-yot," he repeated,"Funny, Mama?" She booped his nose in reply, making him giggle.

"He's been saying that for ages," Zola said. "I said it's mean, but he only says it about Daddy, and Daddy doesn't put him in trouble."

"It's not super nice," Amelia agreed. "Did he hear it from your dad?"

"Prob'ly, 'acause Momma can't talk, and she only can be mean to him. Sometimes you live with someone and they bug you even if you love them, which is why you say sorry for your words."

Amelia glanced again at Meredith, who sipped her slime. "Well, it's Daddy's feelings he'd hurt, and if they're not, he doesn't need to say sorry"

Zola's brow wrinkled. "Why are they not? Is it a cute baby thing?'

"Most likely."

The cute baby pulled on Meredith's arm. "I try doos?"

Zola leapt up. "That's Mommy's special drink!"

The trouble with only being able to make a few sounds was that it could be really hard to hold them back. Meredith barely managed not to snort. When Zola was old enough to know Mommy's special drinks were all locked in a cabinet neither child could reach, she was going to hear all about the cute preschooler things.

Amelia intercepted her before she could grab Bailey's hoodie again. "Whoa, whoa, hey. You are being so good at looking out for your mom, but that is her drink. She decides."

Meredith raised her eyebrows at Amelia, and looked toward the sippy cup Bailey haft left on the table. Amelia got the message and crouched, putting her hand under Bailey's chin while Meredith tilted it enough for him to stick his tongue into the liquid.

The face he made was absolutely worth the effort. When Meredith and Amelia laughed, he made it again, exaggerating the scrunched up lips, and widening his eyes.

"I wanna try!" Zola rushed over, almost bowling her brother over. Amelia picked him up for her to stand in his place. She put her hands on either side of the cup, carefully. Meredith held onto it anyway, which turned out to be the right call. Zola instinctively shoved it away the second the green smoothie touched her mouth. "Ew! That's like medicine! Daddy said you get the medicine in the ivy tube!" She narrowed her eyes at Meredith like she'd been betrayed. It was reassuring, really, that she wasn't pretending otherwise.

"Correct. This is juice."

"That's not juice. This is juice," Zola waved her cup, before taking a long drink from the color-changing straw she'd gotten at a restaurant and insisted on using even though it'd been stuck on blue for a year.

"Not doos," Bailey agreed. "Go play?"

Meredith met her eyes before finishing the smoothie. It wasn't possible to chug in her situation, but she got it drained fast enough to make her daughter shriek with disgust.

"Let's go in and get you cleaned up first," Amelia said.

It was incredibly quiet once the glass door was closed behind them. She wasn't sure when she'd be used to quiet; the breeze rustling the few budding trees over their backyard was nothing compared to the noises she'd heard while physically deaf, and the hospital was never silent. She could barely remember wanting to sit and do nothing. She clicked the rest of Joanne's organs into place, and set her on the end table. Then, she reached for Amelia's notes. She'd begged Derek to take over for her three nights ago; she wasn't going to object.

It'd been over a week since Meredith had seen Herman's scans, and Amelia's sketches of the astrocytoma suggested that she didn't have nearly as much time as originally estimated—which meant neither did Amelia.

She could see decisions that Derek wouldn't have made. Some of them she'd already covered in her lectures. She'd chosen a bilateral subfrontal approach to the anterior commissure, over her original bifrontal plan, and the more common pterional approach. This would give her a better operative corridor to follow; exposing the internal carotids and the optic nerve. It avoided having to split the Sylvian fissure or else have the temporal lobe dragged out of place. She might have to cut down the falx cerebri, and close off sinuses. The question of gyrus rectus resection had been answered for her by the extent of the tumor—

"Aw scrubbed!" Bailey announced. Yanking the door open took him both hands, but he'd only been able to move it a little the last time he'd gotten there with her behind him.

"If only you weren't about to break it." Amelia lamented.

"I would stay clean if I stayed up here with Momma," Zola offered.

"How about you play with Bailey, and I'll stay with your mom?"

"Then I'll get dirty."

"Sound logic."

"Brains." Bailey pointed at the notebook like it was a picture book.

"Your brain, where?" Meredith signed. He tapped his head. "Correct! Colon?"

Zola giggled. "That's in the tushy."

"Tushy, tooty booty, bum," Bailey sing-songed. "Play, bye." He smacked his lips on Meredith's cheek and countered the hurried farewell by easing down the steps.

Amelia shook her head. "They say tushy. All the anatomy these two know, and they say tushy."

"They know important words," Meredith signed, frowning. She'd been adamant on that. Too many of the adult women they saw in the ER could only speak in euphemisms.

"That's not my point. Hey, buddy?" Amelia called once both his feet had plunked down on the ground. "What's another way to say tush? The doctor way?"

"Goots mackahma."

"Gluteus maxima," Zola corrected, although her brother was already running off again. "But he's not a toddler, yet, and those are big words."

"Can you list the four lobes of the brain?"

"That's a trick, Aunt Amelia, there's five! The insult one is on the inside. Frontal, parrotal, ox-sippytal, and temper-real like a tantrum."

"Acceptable. What are the organs in the digestive system?"

"Um, the mouth, the, um, it's not Snuffleupagus," Zola turned to Meredith, and her lip stuck out as she realized her mom couldn't help her. Meredith nodded toward Amelia reassuringly, but Zola kept staring at her, looking stricken.

She was barely starting to sound out letters. If this didn't work, it might upset her more, but not giving her a chance had been the wrong choice over the past month. "E," Meredith signed, the same way she would've prompted her vocally. "S-O—"

"E…S…esophalgus?"

"Oh, you're so close. It's esophagus.'

The grin Zola gave Meredith showed all of her teeth. "Esoph-ugh-us," she repeated. "Stomach. Intertestines, which are the bowls and colon, then the rectum, and the nanus. That's where the poop comes out. Usually, it's from your tush."

"Uh, usually?"

"Yup," Zola said, leaning up against Meredith's right leg. "Mommy has to move poopholes sometimes if a booty parts get a hurt or a cancer. Get it, Mommy? Booty parts?"

Meredith held her hand up for Zola to high-five. Amelia tilted her head the way Derek did whenever he was reconsidering her. They'd been basically raising BeeZ together since November, but that had meant trading them off a lot more than it had with Derek. Had she assumed all their silliness came from him? Or that anyone he'd marry was the type who didn't fart in front of him until they were engaged?

Zola lingered, and not for the first or sixth or twentieth time that week Meredith wondered about what she remembered from the turmoil of her first six months in America. Her hope that babies came tabula rasa didn't matter that far in; not when her baby had been taken from her arms, spent weeks in foster care, and returned hardly crying. She'd been more emotive after six months in an orphanage, which said so much about the American system—the one Jo went into as a baby, and never left.

Maybe Zola's history should reassure her that she would bounce back from her being gone for less than a month, but being left by her biological family, the Nambozi clinic caretakers, then being taken from her and Derek, him leaving, her leaving—when was it too much? It was more than Meredith had gone through as a child, but she hadn't exactly gotten long hugs and kisses on either side of things.

Zola freed herself from Meredith's arm and run down more quickly than she would've on Saturday, and there'd only been three days in between. Home felt so right that she forgot that.

"See us, Momma?" Zola said, shoving one of their big Tonka trucks up a hill on the sand table Amelia had filled. Their swing-set sat on mulch. If sand in a neighborhood attracted cat poop, Meredith hadn't wanted to think much what they'd get out here.

"So, what do you think?" Amelia asked. Meredith turned to her a little reluctantly. Just sitting there was tedious, but she could watch the kids for hours upon end.

SHE'LL B OK

DAYCARE — A FIGHT 2MRW

"Yeah, you're all shining a lot brighter. I meant this." She held up her notebook.

SRY MOM SURGEON LATELY

Neither more than that, she thought, but she didn't want to pull the conversation back to her again. She was tired of doing that.

"Switch gears. Give the other Dr. Shepherd your thoughts. Unless you're gonna tell me I'm the wrong Dr. Shepherd. That, I've thought for I'm the other-other Dr. Shepherd, and be his tumor muse."

DEREK SA

Shestopped and swiped her hand over the board. Over her shoulder, Amelia snickered.

"Yup, Derek said that when I asked about that monstrosity on your wall. You were on bedrest and didn't have your own surgeries to think about, so you helped him obsess over his. My turn." Meredith pointed to the other handwriting in the notebook."I know Edwards's thoughts. I taught her. She doesn't like how I've been practicing for this, but—" Meredith tapped the page. "Hm?"

"You know L-O-U-I-S X-I-V?"

"I've heard of him, yeah."

Meredith sighed. This was what she got for having a mother who pulled from medical history instead of reading her The Little Engine That Could. She didn't have to use the white-board, at least. She snatched the notebook and pen, then dropped them back on Amelia's lap when she tried to refuse to take them back.

Mr. Supposedly-Chosen-by-God got a crotch tumor. Treatments were worse than living with it. Pain, leaking pus, having the royal garments changed all the time. (Not all that weird. Henry VIII had some rank sores.) Abscess became anal fistula. No king wants to be leaking shi crap (you show this to residents?), especially in Versailles. This is when physicians & surgeons were different. We were BUTCHERS! (Actually, barbers. My theory: Not enough opportunities to cut. Gotta do what you gotta do.) But there's no other choice, he calls one in. Guy doesn't have a choice; he's gotta figure it out. He practices for six months. Cadavers weren't easy to come by, but they'd barely started opening bodies to understand how they worked, not just guessing based on pigs. The commoners he operated on probably died a lot, and couldn't really say no. It's not great, but hopefully they got some relief. Yours had a choice. Continuing to live with a fistula? Probably better than dying. Living with a GBM? Not gonna happen.

We've gotten better at operating and at ethics, but we haven't figured out how to make fake bodies. Derek & I lost more than a dozen patients in our first trial. We got number seventeen right. We gave the others all we could. Hope. I can tell you their names. Their families stories. But all of them said they wanted ppl with their tumor to have a better chance. They do now. We get Christmas cards from our successes. The first is applying to med school.

Sorry. Kind of a tangent.

Pre-anesthesia, operating on the Divine Ruler, this guy pulls it off. (And the king suffers through it. That gets him more points than his genetics IMO). You did what we have to do sometimes. And you helped more people than you might've otherwise. Not like a blind You're operating on a v. important personage, but not the King of France. If he'd just gone in cold? Or not tried? We might still be outlawed or something. XIV promoted surgeons. Paris became a hub of medical education. He lived a couple more decades. Revolution took another hundred years, but who knows? We could be British.

"Speak for yourself," Amelia muttered as her eyes reached the end of Meredith's scrawled story. "My family would've gone somewhere else entirely to get away from British rule. They made the whole famine thing happen." She tapped her pen on the paper. "Somehow this is more reassuring than Derek telling me I'm not J. Marion Sims."

Meredith knocked her shoulder against Amelia's. She smiled, and then her eyebrows lowered. Meredith tensed. She wasn't sure she wanted to hear something a Shepherd was reluctant to say.

"You went through more pain than that without an anesthetic."

She shrugged. There'd been morphine before a scalpel touched her skin, and she'd been in and out of consciousness. If she meant the attack, she maybe had a point. It was far more brutal and disorganized, but Meredith couldn't compare the two. She was too grateful that there hadn't been sharps involved.

"If you have that many thoughts about my prep, you have to have them about my plan. You spent how many hours in my brother's OR? And how many more talking studies and techniques at the dinner table? I have a strong suspicion you share surgeries as pillow talk. Please don't confirm or deny that. You were trained by him, but the way he tells it, you have more than that. I think he wishes you'd done neuro. I'll take a scalpel to Edwards if she doesn't, and I've only had her tailing me for a year."

It was warm for late February, especially in the Bodowin hoodie Meredith had taken from a drawer with the excuse that it was easier to get over her cast than anything of hers, but she felt like the slime smoothie had been poured down her spine. I chose. I decided. It was the same as Derek giving up the NIH job, she told herself, looking at the baby girl she'd still sacrifice every part of her career for. It was the same: trading what she'd been working toward for their family, her idea, and they'd tried the alternative. Hadn't they?

Except…there wasn't an except. There hadn't been. Not then. He'd been trained; he'd had a career. She was a resident who hadn't chosen a specialty, whatever her plans had been. But they'd been in a plane crash, and she was the one who'd talked him into not letting that career go because he didn't want to deal with his sisters.

I could take on somewhere like Dillard, or the clinic out here.

He couldn't have done that three years ago. They hadn't bought a hospital, yet. He had been running a neuro department. He could've improved any of them, but not if it hadn't been immediately more stimulating than being an attending at a minimum. It wasn't like she was unhappy. She was a badass, tumor-finding miracle worker. She'd had a fifty-one surgery streak. That could happen in neuro, if you didn't take risks. But she wasn't the cockroach.

She hadn't wanted to be in Derek's shadow. She hadn't want to be in her mother's, and she hadn't. She didn't want him to see her as the intern mooning after him, but hadn't she proved she wasn't? Wasn't she the surgeon that intern had dreamed of being?

Not quite. She was someone she hadn't imagined. Cristina had been right about that. But if he wasn't the sun…. She couldn't exclude him from the equation, any more than she could've done it then. The question was, what if she reintegrated all the variables she'd factored out?

What was she thinking? The meds were making her crazy. He'd pointed out that they fought over the table while they were operating on entirely different services—But did that count? They'd been fighting about everything.

She was taking the questioning too far. It was difficult to imagine returning to the life they'd had pre-Obama job, because she was having a hard time imagining going into work at all.

What she had left out of her tale of the Sun King's ass was that the surgeon's name had been Félix. Her mother had said it was a reminder that there was always an about of luck involved in an operation. Your skill determined how much. The irony made Meredith think of two things: First, her luck had gotten her here; it'd saved her so many times. It had to run out eventually. Second, she was never going to get away from this. It would be one of the horrors that followed her into the OR, and the only one that lingered once she'd made the incision.

Having no idea where Meredith's thoughts had gone, Amelia continued, "Herman's surprisingly good with kids, have you heard that? She seems so…Yang-like, but she had this whole Thomas saga going on with Bailey. And...Jesus, would it be his first?"

"Hunh?"

"His first death. Zola knew your sister. She was, what, eighteen months?"

"Mmhmm."

"And then Mark died when she was Bailey's age. It wouldn't be the same, but…he's another little baby. All the babies…. You lose a baby, you know what you've lost. You know why it hurts. A baby losing a mother doesn't know, but it hurts them. And she does all these life or death surgeries that save both.…

"I don't dread killing hermost of all. If I violate the fornix, I could screw up her recall. The next time she sees Bailey, she might be able to remember where they left off, but not keep going. That hurts him, too. Hurts her, too. Every radiation appointment she skips is another case she doesn't get to take on with Robbins, but she put them in my hands.

"She says she doesn't want hope, but she knowswhat her own death could take from the world. I'm an abortionist, here. I'm taking this parasitical thing out to give a woman the rest of her life. Her hope is the hope for every fetus that could become a wanted baby with a little help. She's kept working for months to pass that on. She is letting this go to the point where I am as likely to end her life as I am to kill her. This is not what an abortionist signs up in our world of Roe!

"She's waiting to be too blind to see what Robbins is doing wrong, but if it goes further into the corpus, or invades the hypothalamus n the meantime, we're back on the road to 'everything goes boom!'"

Meredith snapped her fingers. In her periphery she caught two faces looking up from the sand table. She waved her hand at them, and then signaled for the pen before letting Amelia help her arrange the notebook on her bent leg

Again staring at the sketches of Herman's brain, she considered her own. The concussion was gone; she filled most of her days with activities she hadn't been able to do three weeks ago. She trusted her mind less than ever, but the mental trauma would heal too. Intellectually, she was a surgeon, and she would be, until the connections in her brain were permanently altered by Alzheimer's or something else she couldn't foresee.

Derek has taken on a lot of impossible cases. This one isn't for him. The thing I did with the 3D printed tumor? It's the hemangioblastoma, updated. He stared at it for twenty hours without cutting, then did it on faith. It was a little bit of a miracle, but that's Derek. He knows where things should be, and he knows what he knows. For a case that involves considering every contingency, and still possibly facing something entirely unexpected? You're the right Shepherd.

So, what I'd tell him:

You have to approach this like a general surgeon. Sort of. For all the quotes I can give you about how our brain is influenced by gut bacteria, Zola's right, I can move the poophole. That's not an option you have. You can't pack; you can't pause; you can't reroute. Not everything will be where you expect it to be, no matter how recently you've scanned. You're looking at a tumor the size of a baseball, compressing almost every structure beyond the cerebellum. The paths you planned to take will be blocked. You'll have to be ready to totally reconceptualize an anatomy you've memorized. One complication thirteen hours in could invalidate everything you've done to that point. That's life, right? One mistake can unravel everything. You know that. Forget it in that room.

Divide the procedure up in your head. The optic cavity, the hypothalamus, the thalamus, the fornix. Let yourself feel triumph when the CO2 dye is in, and once you put the laser down. Not as an endpoint, but as a refresh. You have to take it one step at a time. You're the right Shepherd.

Herman is a force. She's independent. She knows more than anyone in her field. She is going to lose something. Her sight, her humor, her dignity. It might be because of you, it might be an unforeseeable complication, it might just be having to have a coworker put a catheter in. You don't have to plan her future. Plan to the point where she can have one.

As for that plan, currently…

"Hey, Meredith."

"Hmm?" She looked up from the page where she was organizing the possible approaches in a flowchart to see that Amelia was standing in front of her with the wheelchair, and the sun had moved down past the edges of the tree canopy.

"PT time. Will texted; he's getting off the ferry."

Meredith made a less vehement version of the bullish sound she'd made at Alex. Amelia just gestured at the seat of the wheelchair and reached for her notebook.

"Wait, Momma!" Zola darted around the wheelchair; setting the brakes was her task in lieu of carrying the board.

"Okay," she signed, watching Amelia's lip curl as she flipped through her notes. Whatever. She might've said the wrong thing, but she wasn't wrong. Amelia was seeing the forest; she needed to look at the trees.

Once she transferred, Zola repeated her lever yanking, and took the crutch that was leaning against the side of the house. Bailey appeared in the doorway, and Amelia handed him her notebook, instructing him to put it on the kitchen table. "They're better than interns."

I'D HOPE SO.

Amelia snorted. "You miss it don't you?"

SURGERY?

She jerked the chair over the threshold. "That was obvious when you started practicing one-handed stitches."

Meredith shrugged. They only had the suture kit in the bedroom because Derek had done the same thing.

U SHLD TRY

U NEED ALL THE DEXTERITY U CAN GET 4 SEEDS.

DONE IT IN OTHER ORGANS

30MIN ISN'T LONG

"I meant neurosurgery."

I—

Meredith blinked at the curved line from her hand slipping. It wavered.

DONT SAY THAT AROUND DEREK.

"I won't. You should, but it's not in my best interest. Competing with both of you? No me guesta."

Meredith huffed amusement, but thinking back on it, had she felt like she was competing with Lexie more than any other resident? Would that have changed if all three of them had been attendings? Maybe. But back when that'd been the plan, professional jealousy had been a worst-case scenario. What actually happened had been unimaginable.

Derek jerked up at the buzzer sounding through the apartment. His first thought was Meredith; although the noise was nothing like the electronic bell he didn't think she'd ever used. She'd had a kid by her side most of the time, and it wasn't hard to cue them to yell "Daddy!" The hope was they wouldn't discover what the button did. If they had to move the temptation out of their reach, it would be out of hers too..

The buzz came again.

"Okay, coming, yes!" he responded, digging out a pair of suit pants that hopefully hadn't gotten dusty. For the time being, he left on the Dartmouth shirt Meredith had given him for a birthday, and proceeded to wear more than he did. A glance at his phone made him wince. He didn't think he'd had gotten any sleep.

Bzzzt.

If he hadn't been leaving, he'd be figuring out how to disconnect that. He stumbled past the shipping boxes he'd started tossing stuff in within an hour of landing, and opened the door.

"Dr. Shepherd!" Renee Collier chirped, like she hadn't expected to see him—or was a morning person, which he very much wasn't in that moment. "Good morning!"

"Er. Dr. Collier."

"Renée, please. By the end of the day, you'll be my friend, not my boss. I have your itinerary right here."

God. He wished he'd spent more time getting these kids to find a life away from the lab. They didn't even go out with each other; they had no idea what friendship looked like. "They're really looking to get me in and out if I have an escort. You draw the short straw?"

"Oh, no! I'm a voluntary Girl Wednesday!" She held up her phone. He stared at it. "Um. Because it's Wednesday? Not Friday?"

"I got it. Sorry. What's that?" He pointed to the back of her phone, and then stepped away from the door to let her in. She flipped her hand over, looking mystified. "On your phone."

"The…Popsocket? They're kind of new, but also everywhere? It's half-stand, half-tiny selfie-stick. Not that I'm that into social media. I know you're not. You've seen how much my family texts me. Makes it easier to reply while I'm doing something else."

"That's perfect. Everywhere as in: airport bookstores or kiosk at the mall?"

"Like the women always trying to make my hair even flatter?'

"Uh...did you really not have a Nokia? With the…faceplates? Jesus. I still saw those when I moved to Seattle." He indicated the second drink she was carrying. "That for me?"

"Yeah…" she said, glancing around the apartment. He'd been amazed by how much he'd left here that he hadn't needed to replace in a month's time.

"Sorry, didn't sleep much." He smiled at her over the lid of the bone dry latte she'd brought. "Starting to understand my wife saying our bed felt too big for her alone."

Had she let Amelia stay in there last night, or just decided she wouldn't need anything? Zola could've gone to get her if Mer really needed something—but she'd only send her Zola happened to be awake. And if she'd been in there, had Meredith slept?

"Are you on the couch?"

"Huh?"

"Oh, only that with those injuries, she must have massive casts," she clarified.

"Just the arm now," he said, leaving it there. The stuffed animal barrier would be a cute story, eventually, but right now it felt too personal. He put the cup on the counter and ducked into the bedroom to dig out the rest of a suit. "How's your research going?"

"Slow. I didn't realize how much I was benefiting from your input. Having someone to bounce ideas off of, someone who really gets what I'm doing…."

"Yeah, I absolutely know what you mean." he said, halfway through buttoning a shirt—Did he have the blue tie, or was it in Seattle? Mer wouldn't be up, yet. He couldn't use that as an excuse to call, and then ask how letting Amelia help her get dressed had gone; it hadn't happened yet. Same for her morning meds.

"Maybe you could come take a look at it tonight?"

He surveyed the mess of the bedroom and the two suitcases he had for everything he didn't want to ship. "I'll have to see. My wife is the one who's good at packing. She went traveling in her twenties, and now I think she could fit an outfit in a clutch."

"She seems like…something."

Huh. He'd said the same thing close to thirty-six hours ago, and meant it very differently than that had sounded. He paused at the bedroom threshold. "What have you been reading, Dr. Collier?"

She gave him a chagrined look from the sofa, and her face went red. He realized he'd paused halfway through tucking the shirt in, leaving his fly open.

"Shit, sorry." He moved back behind the door.

"No worries. You've got a lot on your mind. It was the talk of the Institute for a while. And you're my…my boss. You can't blame me for being curious.

"Must be stressful. To have to take care of her."

"I have help. More than expected, actually."

"Do you guys have a lot of family out there? I know your mom's in New York. You went to visit that time."

"I did." He'd had to make up for missing Thanksgiving. There'd been a storm, but also a storm of work to make up for a rushed trip home for Zola's birthday, one he'd have regretted if he'd only been considering his shortness with Meredith. Meanwhile, she'd faced Maggie's birthday for the first time by including her in the party. "My sister lives with us. Meredith's…most of her family is there."

"Good. That's…it's good. Is there going to be a trial? If someone did that to me, I'd want them locked up."

"The state is pressing charges. I imagine that if it isn't plead out, she'll testify, but…. She's not a vindictive person." He picked up one of the cufflinks sitting on the dresser.

"No?"

"No."

"Then, why's she making you give up your research?"

"She's not. I'm choosing to."

"But…why would you do that? I made more progress in a week with you here than I have in s month, and you were always saying you got more done here than in Seattle! Why would you go back there? For her?"

"Her, as in my wife? You know what? My personal life is really none of your business."

"Isn't it?" she asked, coming around the corner into the bedroom. The second cufflink fell into his palm. "Why did you choose me, then? Everyone wanted to work with you personally, and most of their projects have some overlap with yours. You didn't have to ask to meet me after class, or what have you, but it kept things under the radar."

"What things could you possibly mean?"

"Oh, Dr. Shepherd, you don't have to be coy with me anymore. I get it; you have to look devoted while she's recovering. That doesn't change how you looked at me."

Dr. Shepherd?

Dr. Shepherd? This morning it was Derek.

"I assure you, the only woman I'm interested in looking at is Meredith."

Stop looking at me that way.

What way?

" She's never visited; you never talked about her. Before this, you'd only been home for twenty-four hours for your little girl's birthday, and you came back from the holidays looking like she'd steamrollered you."

"Because I'd only been here for six weeks, and it was already starting to feel like a mistake!"

"Everyone knows she didn't want you to take this job, and judging by who her mother was—"

"Do not go there."

"You don't move across the country if you're not having issues. Was she the one looking?"

A source close to the couple. He'd assumed someone at Grey+Sloan had recited their history to a reporter, and they'd made assumptions. It could've been the other way around. Conclusions made and repeated to a reporter. Oblivious to his epiphany, Renee came closer.

"Was it at your sister? Seems like to her one's just as good—"

"Enough!" He put his hand out, aware that his instinct was to guide her backward not to push

Meredith had called it. He had liked being the one a wide-eyed student looked to, for a while. S he'd seen something when Renée called that day, hadn't she? Maybe it'd looked like more than it was. He hoped it had, because he hadn't thought of the woman standing in front of him since. Whenever his mind went to the research he'd left here, it was because he'd wanted to go over it with Meredith. He couldn't have pulled up the color of Renee's eyes after working with her for…for the same amount of time he'd known Meredith when he'd gone back to Addison. Jesus.

"Dr. Collier, you've gotten the wrong impression of so many things. Whatever you thought was happening was a fantasy then, and it most certainly is now."

"No! I've gone over it and over it." She looked stricken, and completely guileless. He wasn't sure which version of her was the act. "I know what I felt—what I feel."

You gonna have a crazy girl after you now? Meredith demanded, in the voice she used to say the quiet part loud. He would prefer to avoid that. "I'm sure you do, but—"

"I can read social cues! You were interested. You don't wear a ring. You were—"

Meredith's words sincere and snide about marriage tokens played on a chyron in his mind, everything from if he'd need a ring to remember she existed to it not having stopped him from taking it off before he met her. You're the one who needs to know you're off the market.

"Yeah, we don't... I was interested in your research. I am. I was uninspired when I got here. Maybe I used you for the purest definition of companionship, and I'm sorry if that gave you the wrong idea."

She stepped away, stricken turning into sneering. "You don't have to give me a line, sir. I'm an adult."

We're adults. When did that happen? And how do we make it stop?

"An adult would have known that using a crush as an excuse to spread tabloid gossip about my wife wasn't going to put you on my good side!"

"It's not like I'm the only one they contacted. A home health aide called her and her mother both 'real harpies,' did you see that one? What about the the former Seattle Grace employee who said she threatened him during her internship? Said he heard she wouldn't have gotten matched there if her mother hadn't been in the former chief's cohort."

He was obscenely grateful for Meredith and Addison. There'd been occasional snark, but he'd noticed how much the grace they'd treated each other with at the time. They'd placed the blame for the situation where it belonged: on him. This was on him.

"I'm sorry," he said again. "But Meredith is the love of my life. She's not perfect, and she doesn't expect me to be. She's seen the worst in me, and she's stayed. So I'm running back to her, and I'll be by her side as long as she'll have me.

"You don't want a line, and anything else I can say is going to sound like one. Take the day. I can get to the Institute myself. Tomorrow, go back to your research. You're on the verge of a breakthrough, and it's going to be a great one."

"And you don't want to be here for that?"

Derek gave her the benefit of thinking about it. "No," he admitted. "But I look forward to seeing what you publish."

"What every girl wants to hear." She finally turned toward the door, so he didn't point out that if anything either of them had said sounded like a line, it was that. Once it closed behind her, he sank onto the disheveled bed. He'd taken his phone from his pocket without a reason for it. There was no one he could call about this. It was too close to home for Torres; it wouldn't be fair to ask Ben not to tell Miranda; Amelia would never know, if he could help it. The only person he really talked to was Meredith. No wonder he'd thought uprooting would be easy after Mark died. He'd never really put them down.