U THINK I SHLD CALL SADIE?

Alex snickered. "You're not calling anyone right now, Ariel."

Meredith flipped him off, and he smirked. It bothered her a little that it was easy to hang out with him, knowing something that could implode his life. Hopefully, that was because it wouldn't. The biggest risk was one she was facing with Derek: that he'd go after the leaky sore. Alex didn't have the most trust in law enforcement, but overall, he prioritized protection over revenge. They both did. Hopefully.

SRSLY.

"I don't know. There's a weird way where she's the reason I got married, and therefore divorced, but I'm not the one who should really hold the grudge for that fuck-up. I didn't know she was your ex until three weeks ago. I'd say maybe not telling her about your other frien—Shit." He reached over to grab his phone from Derek's bedside table. "Pierce missed the ferry. She'll be on the next one." Meredith pointed to the door. "Nah, I can be late."

OVER AN HOUR? GO.

"It's not like I have surgery. Just some follow-ups and a night on-call. It's not that bad. Robbins is…. Yeah, okay, we're swamped. You're on the board; get me another peds surgeon."

She let her expression settle from the glare she'd been giving him.

WORK ON IT IF U GO.

"If I say you play dirty while in this room, will you let it go?"

She waggled her eyebrows. Really, he should've known better.

"I should've known better." He groaned. His phone dinged again. "Pierce is on…a boat…." It took her a moment to follow his reason for trailing off, and she grimaced. "When Webber is on his way out here, is he on a motherfucking boat?"

TOLD U 2 GO

"On a boat, motherfucka," he crooned. "Oh, man. Not getting old anytime soon."

LEAVE

"If I do head over, you'll be all right?"

YES

"You need anything before I go? Bathroom? Meds? Vanilla Ensure?"

HATE U

"She-Shepherd Jr. bringing the kids home?"

UNLESS HERMAN COLLAPSES

He stood up and came around the bed. "You hear Torres asked Robbins if they were screwing?"

Meredith flinched at the eee of surprise that escaped her. "What?"she signed, grabbing for the marker she'd dropped. He reached over and snapped it onto the white board before he ruffled her hair. She tried to grab his arm, but he moved too quickly.

"I'm leaving. You'll have to ask Pierce."

"She knows, never. Nothing!"

"Yeah, the apple hit the ground and rolled away there." Alex grinned at her and turned around. She thumped a hand against the bed, and then tried again with the white-board. He only continued toward the door, flashing deuces at her in response to her noise of fury. "Be good!" He thumped down the stairs, stomping to rub it in. He kept humming the freaking Lonely Island song, too.

Screw him. She was a grown-ass woman. With a phone. She could text Callie and find out the truth. It would be a pain, but she had forty-five minutes until Maggie got there, at a minimum, and that was more than enough time to tap out a message. Bonus, Callie was BeeZ back-up; Meredith knew her schedule. She could absolutely be an annoyance if she didn't get an immediate response. Threaten to do something stupid like go down the stairs without the brace, or jump on the….

Down the stairs. Her freaking phone was downstairs, she was upstairs, and Alex's truck was backing out of the driveway. She hadn't heard the deadbolt. You had to use the key to set it. They hadn't, always, before she'd gone all anxious over (not a) Stranger Danger. He might not even have had his key on him. He'd been there since Amelia left in the morning; he hadn't had to unlock it.

If he hadn't, that was okay. She would be fine up here. Without a phone. Crap. She'd solve both problems. Go down, get the phone; check the door; come back upstairs—because she wasn't letting Maggie find her anywhere except where Alex had left her—text Callie, She could handle that.

She slid onto the floor from the start, scooting out of the room rather than lowering herself at the staircase. It slowed her down to drag the crutch along, but without Zola there to take it, or Bailey revisiting his crawling days to race her, she let it take the time it took. From the top of the steps, she dropped it over the railing. The clatter of metal against the hardwood rang through the house. Expecting it didn't make it less startling. While she tried to catch her breath, she watched the trees from the nearest window. There was still dust in the air from Alex's retreat. It was from that. It hadn't been five minutes. It made sense for it not to have settled.

She kept staring. Puffs of dust usually appeared around the corner seconds before a car, and nothing appeared. If she could see to the side and make sure there weren't tire tracks—

Ridiculous. No one was out here, unless Alex was watching windows to make sure she—Oh, shit, could…? No. No, you could not see in the upstairs windows. Derek had been firm on that while Meredith hadn't cared. They had no neighbors. When Mom had left her alone, there had been neighbors. Neighbors who'd at least call 9-1-1 if she'd screamed loud enough, even if some of them avoided crossing her mother.

While he was here, Derek had carried her down the stairs. The first time, he'd picked her up, saying, "Skinny love, you're landing too hard for someone without any padding back there. None of us will enjoy if you break your..." and looked at the kids, waiting at the bannister, and mouthed ass, squeezing it. "Bum." The kids' laughter had given her muffled yelp cover.

Not that she needed to think of him to get through something this simple. She could get herself downstairs, boney ass or not. Something creaked as she hit the last step. It was the stairs. Had to be. She hadn't lain awake listening to people go up and down them; as she had in her old—Alex's house.

She pulled up on the bannister. Her left leg was rubbery, but the brace kept that from troubling her. She was uptight before she noticed that the crutch had landed in the middle of the floor. Crap. The PT wanted her to work on balance, right?

Home health was coming and going constantly—Okay, twice a day at the most, but there were several of them—The address and her pathetic-vulnerable condition were on record. They were based on Bainbridge; she wasn't assuming someone would come over from Seattle to watch the property, but—She was not in a Stephen King novel. Her therapists and the care coordinator had excellent credentials. So did the agency.

Get the crutch. She could sit on the stairs again, scoot over to it, backtrack…. No, she could handle a few hoppy shuffles forward and bend over…. Okay, she had to crouch a little to grab it, and holding one arm out with the sling on the other…. She pushed off on the crutch to send herself tilting the other way, landing on her tailbone—There you go, Derek!—her legs stuck out in front of her.

"Fuugh!" Propelled by frustration, she used her right leg to scoot herself to the stairs again. She considered retreating up all of them again, but that would be defeat.

It wasn't until she stood and felt herself wobbling that the stomach sinking sensation of falling hit her. She couldn't fathom why her instinct was to close her eyes at this point, but it was, and along with feeling herself hit the floor of the trauma room, she saw the face sneering at her in the moment before he stepped away.

She wrenched her eyes open and faced the sunlight shining in her foyer. The shadows along the far wall moved in her periphery. Branches, she reminded herself, shoving the crutch into place under her arm. She hadn't been this freaked out by the trees after the plane crash. What are you, three?

Would it be pathetic if she wished her four-year-old was there? She didn't exactly, because she didn't want her seeing Mommy checking the window locks in their safe, cozy house, but she wasn't like this with someone else here. Some adult. Would she be able to keep it together on the own with the kids? She'd done it for months.

Her phone was on the end table. She tried to keep it with the "write" board, but not assigning it to one of her little pack mules meant it didn't always make the trip. She'd take that over squabbles. Zola had snatched the marker from her brother the night before because it "goes with my job." Meredith had seen that, and other moments of attitude, as an indicator of her feelings about returning to day-care. She'd held her in the rocker before bed and cuddled her this morning before Bailey woke. There'd been tears when Amelia announced it was go-time, but not the tantrum she'd anticipated.

Should've just kept them with me. Zola could've come down here, and—and what would she have done if something had happened? The image came to her readily as she returned to the stairs. Zola screaming for her while she struggled to get down the hall. Bailey tumbling down the stairs because they'd taken down the baby gate for her benefit. Her stinging ass could be the least of things, and that was—Had she checked the door? She couldn't remember. She squinted at the knob, and for a second she would've sworn it was turning. Stupid.

It was just so open down here. And, mostly, she loved it; the way the sun spilled in at sunrise and sunset; the distance from the noise of the city. Knowing people were up and bustling about their business had always made her want to be a part of it. Animal noises didn't hold anything close to the same temptation.

She got her crutch upstairs by looping it over her arm. It thumped against each step, making the staircase reverberate like someone was following her up. Someone should be. Derek should be here. That was what he'd promised. If she came home, he'd be with her. He'd run—flown-back to Bethesda within a week. He'll be home tomorrow.

He was supposed to be home tomorrow. It was hard to conceive of them not trying to woo him back. Someone could be on the verge of a breakthrough that he needed to watch play out. They'd promise a really nice robot, or one of the marmosets would learn algebra—Whatever, it'd be something, and she wouldn't blame him. Why would he take being stuck in the house with his paranoid, invalid wife? He was surrounded by young, nubile minds—and plenty of nubile women—who'd be fine having his hands all over their boobs.

Stop it. That's not Derek. For him, wouldn't be the boobs. It'd be the research. Pretty women talking about brains, not rectal tumors and bile. What Amelia had said about him wishing she'd gone into neuro might not have to do with her. He wanted bright-eyed, not bushy-haired and bruise-tailed. He wanted to hear "tell me more Dr. Shepherd," and she couldn't even give him that for another week.

She hoisted herself back on the bed, and her shoulder twinged. There was no letting it rest when you only had one functioning. Her heart was thrumming against ribs that'd been shattered and now felt too solid. Sweat ran down the nape of her neck. She wanted to hear his voice telling her she was being nuts, but if she called him, he'd know something was wrong. He'd hear her freaking snorting for breath before she could get a sound out through her teeth. He'd know she couldn't handle being alone for five minutes.

You're a lemon, after all. You can live without me, but you don't want to? Bullshit. You're whole and healed? Only because you left parts out. Wasn't it true? She'd hidden parts of her past to be found years later, like Zola hiding Anatomy Joanne's spleen under the couch cushions whenever she was told Meredith had hers take out. She was missing so many parts. Someone would help her put herself her together, and she'd fall to pieces. Tape and glue. Tape and glue.

Glue that had migrated to her respiratory system. She couldn't get air. She knew what was happening, but that didn't change how desperate it made her. Where the hell were the freaking wire-cutters? She'd trained her to take full organs out of other people and sew them up again; now she couldn't keep track of her damn instruments? Miranda would be ashamed of her.

The pouch on the wheelchair. That's were they were. Meredith froze with her hand on the bedside table; her ears filling with the whistling of her own gasping wheezes. Derek had put them there before he left. What had he been thinking? She'd told him this would happen again. Did he really believe he knew better when she'd fucking told him?

Maggie was gonna show up to find Meredith panicking, in her bedroom this time. She'd have every right to turn around; to say she didn't sign up to continually deal with the fallout of Meredith coming to pieces. At least Maggie could do something, if she so chose. How many times had Meredith stood helpless when her mom wouldn't take a pill, and she was only an almost-doctor? (No matter who her mother believed her to be, she'd never vested her with authority.) She wanted Alex to come back, but he'd texted a boat emoji before she'd gotten up the stairs. She was going to suffocate alone because of freaking ferryboats.

She was a fully-licensed surgeon. She had at least half an hour; plenty of time for meds to work. It wasn't advisable to dose yourself beyond hooking up an infusion, but she'd be smart about it. She'd put it on the iPad chart; she wasn't secretly injecting benzos. Just saving Maggie trouble. She was on them every four to six. It'd been a little longer than that, because Maggie had been running late, but not long enough to waste Alex's time. It would've been fine if she could've just held it together for half a fucking hour.

Her hand shook as she entered the passcode into the lockbox, She stuffed everything she'd need in her sling, and dumped it onto the bathroom counter. The walls of the bathroom wavered while she sanitized her hands. She could picture Amelia standing behind her saying, you know what you look like.

She wouldn't say that. She'd done this for her, yesterday.

She popped open the saline, meds, and hep-lock. Getting down the band of stockingette they kept around her catheter to keep Bailey from yanking it out took some contortion—no one's mouth should be that close to an IV line—but then it slid down to her wrist, and the tube unfolded. It was shorter than she'd anticipated, reaching the bend of her elbow. Derek had changed it out after her bath to make sure the adhesive was secure. There'd been no reason to add an extension. She could unhook herself from the PPN, and a situation where she was administering her own meds wasn't supposed to emerge. It was fine. Pushing anything one-handed with the same arm wouldn't have been a simple task, regardless. But she wasn't an intern, and it wasn't as though she'd need to find a vein. She just had to twist the cap off and connect the syringe. She could use the countertop to start depressing the plunger if it didn't reach her hand.

She got the line between her fingers, but it slipped away as soon as she stretched them to pinch the cap. Second try, no dice. Bending her hand back and pinning the tube to her shoulder with her chin had the same result. After a fifth failure, she jerked the strap of her sling off of her neck and got that hand involved. With the angle of her cast, it still took two attempts to get it secured between her thumb and forefinger.

She swiped the alcohol wipe around the end of the line and the tip of the syringes. Her next goal was connecting them. The steps started cycling through her head, a refrain from an R-rated Dora the Explorer episode. Sanitize, connect, inject the drugs!—starting with the saline. The syringe flopped, the plunger between the V of her right index and middle finger. She'd never be able to hold it steady enough in that position. Bringing it close to her left hand tugged the line out of it. She switched hands, tried every approach, her mind going to the flowcharts she'd made for Amelia. Posterior, lateral, anterior. With each attempt, she felt herself getting more frantic, and she got more determined. She could do this. She could control herself enough to solve a problem of her own making.

She fisted the syringe, holding it up vertically, rising up on the balls of her right foot with the left hovering above the ground. Balls, balls, balls. She had the end of the tubing pressed against her cast. She got it to brush the tip of the saline. At this point if she just got that in it'd probably be enough of a success that the placebo—

A bird squawk breached the bathroom windows. Her heel hit the ground. The tubing slipped out from under her thumb, her cast slammed against the marble, and she lost her grip on the syringe. It rolled away, probably stopping under something. She closed her eyes. A memory of vertigo made her white-knuckle the sink, but standing straight up didn't save her from being tossed to the ground, pain radiating from her arm as she tried to break her fall. Her next heaving breaths came out as sobs, and she could stare at her red face in the mirror and seeing the screw-up who'd only been turning up in her periphery for half a decade. This was fucked up. She was fucked up. Twisted so much that it made twisty cute. She'd been trying to do something reckless; failing shouldn't make her feel this useless. She shouldn't feel any of this. Her body was healing. In a week, the wires and fiberglass would be removed, and she could get on with her life. She'd be able to push meds for her patients, and text someone whenever she wanted to.

What would Cristina say if she went through the process of hen-pecking out a message about this? She'd tell her to shake it off. That was what Meredith did. Sure, Cristina had had a few bad patches over the years, but she'd operated at gunpoint and fought off freaking wolves. Meredith had…scrabbled against him, maybe, but she'd done more damage as a child. She'd done more damage to him as a child.

Cristina would've hated this. Hated being on the hook for babysitting, or for Meredith-sitting. She'd deny it, but that was easy to do from Zurich. Did Alex hate it? Maggie? Amelia? Was resentment toward Meredith "Center of the Universe" Grey what brought people to the lunch table? They all had more important—Meredith pressed her palm against her forehead. Her inner-critic had been her mother for decades, to the point where tuning her out had gotten easy for a while. There were worse people for a young surgeon to have in her head than a Harper Avery winner. But that had led to her brain being programmed with a warped version of the advice Dylan the Bomb Guy had given her. Her default was to put criticisms in the mouths of other people she cared about, and it wasn't fair to them. It wasn't fair to her. If Derek, or Cristina, or even Amelia was actually here, they'd be talking her down. If one of them was here, she wouldn't be alone, and—and think about how much time you spent alone in an apartment as a teenager; let alone wandering the streets. You'd think you were pathetic for being beaten up by—She needed to stop this loop, but what could she do except sit somewhere waiting for Maggie, and startling at every sound? She couldn't just squirt diluted Valium into her mouth. There was unadvised and there was take my license, I've lost it. She wasn't there. She'd never be there. If she could survive a bomb, a gunman, a plane crash—

That was it.

Her fingers stayed steady while she replaced the cap on her IV catheter, and entered the combination to the safe in Derek's closet—She could stay safe in the closet, but she wasn't doing that again. She could take care of herself.

The alprazolam tablets were too big to fit between the wires. It was tempting to just cut a gap with the scissors in the basket with all the swabs and salines, but that could go wrong fast. With one option left, she tucked the bottle into her sling. The sound of the pills being jostled as it rolled against her phone made her feel like her inner-Amelia had a point; then she reached the open bedroom door and couldn't move.

She didn't want to go downstairs again. If she'd stayed up here after Alex left, she would've been able to pick up a book and pass an hour without it registering. Up here there were doors. She could just wait for her little sister to come save her again, when she'd done nothing to earn her trust, or loyalty, or care. When she'd left her last little sister to—Lexie's dead stare. "Terrible with sisters…." "She said to tell she loved you, and you're a good sister." Did she really, or—? No, no, no! She couldn't keep going, but she couldn't linger in this doorway forever. She was going somewhere.

Make it simple. She had to get out of the room . Then, throw the crutch, bump down the stairs, limp into the kitchen. Crutch...stairs...kitchen! She could do this, and then come back to the bedroom, and never leave. No one needed her; they'd handled everything for her since mid-January—She'd handledeverything without Derek, and that hadn't meant she didn't want him around. She knew that. She knew that. She. Knew. That.

It wasn't much, but the breath of certainty got her through the door. In the hallway, the walls tried to close in on her. You've had worse trips. You had worse trips last month.

The crutch landed in a more convenient spot this time. She picked the crutch up. Her legs were shakier, but she could hold onto the banister. She got it positioned and hobbled the few feet to the kitchen.

Los hicimos! she thought, leaning against the kitchen island. Dora's G-rated adventures were far more complex and interesting. If she'd been more adventurous, they'd have been living in D.C. and none of this would've—She could've been visiting and missed a flight back. She could've gotten the injuries in an MVA, and the kids could've been with her. This might be the best possible situation.

The mortar and pestle were on the windowsill. She moved them to the island and read the label on the bottle.

MEREDITH GREY 09/19/11

TAKE ONE-TWO TABLETS AS NEEDED FOR ANXIETY

NOT TO EXCEED SIX IN 24HRS

QTY: 30 Refills: 3

She dropped two tablets into the pestle, crushed them easily, and left it to go to the pantry. Applesauce wasn't the easiest for her to eat, but it would seep through, and the squeak of the cabinet door wouldn't make her flinch. She lobbed the applesauce cup underhand onto the island. It skidded, and while she was waiting for it to fall off the other side, she heard it. The front doorknob was turning. It was too early for Maggie, and she'd never checked the lock. So stupid, so stupid, so stupid. They'd joked about this being a great place for a horror movie, and then stopped locking doors.

The sunlight forced her to squint to even make out the broad-shouldered, muscular silhouette and then it glinted over ginger hair. She lost her grip on the crutch—her only means of self-defense—and it fell, clipping a stack of boxes on the way down. Thee clamor as it landed was an instrument tray toppling over. Owen's voice called a code in another room. She managed to grab a shelf and sink to the floor.

"Grey, it's all right You're safe. You're home."

Owen. Just Owen. She didn't lift her head from her knees. Felix had been just Felix.

Not the same thing. She wasn't scared of Owen. She was just...she just couldn't shake her certainty that something bad was coming.

Owen had been avoiding her for weeks for this reason, and she'd been sure it wouldn't happen again. Not when she was aware of her surroundings, let alone in her house. Left alone in her house. She needed to get ahold of herself. She needed to be able to explain. He was going to think she'd been ready to snort a bottle of Xanax—when that hadn't even occurred to her—A bottle that had been in the safe, locked up for Amelia's benefit, at her request, but she'd be taking out a butterfly glioma at any minute while her boyfriend-or-whatever walked into Meredith crushing pills with her IV hanging loose.

"Come on, you've got this. Keep it steady. This is just another symptom. You're good."

Meredith scoffed. She was far from good, but she was breathing.

"Sorry I startled you. I did text. Thought you'd be upstairs. I wasn't skulking around the house I, uh, noticed Karev leaving, and no one was around, so I called him to see if you'd want company—He said to tell you he's on a boat?" She lifted a shoulder in acknowledgment. Being teased by Alex could've happened days ago. "I was on last night, and I hung around the hospital for a while this morning. Amelia said you really helped her yesterday. She doesn't impress easily."

"S'ep'erd." Less intelligible than Bailey's pronunciations of his name. She rolled her head onto the point of her right knee, which was achy from taking most of her weight for multiple trips on the stairs hour.

"You impress both of them. And Miranda, she hasn't latched onto a resident since you. Everyone's talking about that streak of yours, right? The one you didn't know about? Must feel like a lot of pressure. A machine could have a bunch of successful surgeries. You could tell me about each person. Their families, their kids. You care. You try new techniques all the time. Take the tough cases. You inspire others to do it, too. Shepherd says you changed the game for him when he came here. He started taking patients whose conditions would challenge you." She side-eyed him, but Owen shrugged. "Simply repeating him.

"What I haven't heard anyone say is that you've been switched to oral meds. That the case?"

It would be such an easy lie. She shook her head.

"All right. Next time I'll remember to let you know that I'll be around during the day. Is everything upstairs?"

And how, buddy. She nodded.

"You want to go up, or for me to bring it down?"

She pointed downward. Going upstairs would only raise her heartbeat again, and she'd panic about it. She was pretty sure that was what had happened the first time she'd made the circuit.

"Your board up there, too?"

"Mmhmm."

"You want it?"

Seriously? Derek would've treated this as an I Love Lucy, "you've got some 'splaining to do" moment.

She'd have to tell Derek that this had happened.

She nodded. Owen could be a test run.

"Back in a second."

She considered dragging her ass off of the floor, but her knees felt like they might send her down again, a further humiliation in an hour full of them. Less than an hour. Maggie wasn't there yet.

She stared at the open pantry. it needed reorganizing. Bailey could reach the door handle, and she could see him trying to pull down the packages on the shelf above his head. That bag of rice would be a bitch to clean up. She'd have to go at it piece by piece, like a vampire. Good practice for Amelia. While she waited to hear Owen's even steps to reappear, she searched the other shelves for grains and seeds that could sub in for the tiny, radioactive ones that would be placed in Herman's brain.

Owen crouched next to her again, armed with syringes that'd already been unwrapped. She wouldn't be confronted by evidence of that failure as soon as she stepped foot in the bathroom. She heard the familiar click of her white board being put down next to her, but didn't pick it up.

"Cristina probably mentioned that I have a sister."

She nodded. She didn't know where this was going; if he was just talking to keep her calm again, or if it was more than that.

His tone didn't change. "I probably shouldn't have asked you to work right after the plant crash; every service was down a surgeon except yours until I let April leave. But I recognized the way you wanted something else to focus on—saline going in—Between my first time at Seattle Grace and accepting Richard's offer, I went back to my assignment in Fallujah. I worked with Teddy, Riggs, he's another cardio surgeon, and my sister, Megan—diazepam going in."

Diazepam didn't bring immediate rush of opioids, but it only took a few moments for her to stop feeling like Maggie needed to do a revision to loosen her ribs.

Owen flushed the line and clipped it. His fingers were delicate while he folded the tubing and secured it. While continuing his story, he moved around cleaning up that trash, and her mess. "We're three years apart, but we were closer than that. I didn't have any early memories without her. We went to med school together and that's where we met Riggs. They were off and on again. Toxic. Her took her for granted. I guess I did too. That day, he proposed to her with someone else's necklace, which she'd found in his bed."

"Eesh," she muttered. That felt beyond even her hadn't promised her anything before "you must be the woman who's screwing my husband;"and she'd ended up with much more.

"Yeah. We were treating victims of a terrorist action, and she wouldn't get on a helicopter to Green Space with him. Rode with a patient she didn't want to leave. Turned out to be the shooter. She hijacked the helicopter. Megan never showed up at base. She's been missing for six years."

That was the story he'd told himself. The words he'd put to his trauma. Meredith would've recognized that cadence long before she and Wyatt had started re-examining her panoply of them.

The thump of him sliding down the island to sit beside her inspired Meredith to sit up fully. It seemed a step too far not to make an effort to see his face while he told her something this personal. Even when he'd been married to her person, what she knew of him usually came from happenstance. She couldn't read him. Even her mother, whose thoughts were inscrutable, had showed more in her expressions. All the changes she could see in his were minute. To Cristina they would've been as simple to decode as the words in Zola's easy-readers were for Meredith.

"I blamed Riggs for it. Still do, for m ost of it. But he didn't put her on the chopper. She was pissed at me that day, too. I didn't make myself face those parts until...recently."

YOU'RE WELCOME.

Owen chuckled, chagrined. "I'd much prefer that you hadn't gone through this. I'd have figured things out on my own time. I used to imagine running into Riggs and taking all the anger I felt over what had happened out on him. But destroying him wouldn't get her back. You couldn't have done anything to save your friend. Neither could her brother, and he couldn't deal with it. Every part of that has everything to do with him.

"And it happen on my watch. In my ER. I owe you an apology for that."

"Nuh," she objected. It was the easiest method of protest.

"I do. I think denying my role in Megan's disappearance made me more aware of responsibility for other things. I'm sorry you keep getting injured on my watch."

She was going to write that it was fine, but she couldn't do it. The sudden clarity of her thinking made her shrink at the lie. She met his eyes and signed, "thank you," presuming that if he didn't understand, he'd get it from her face.

He nodded. "When you were all missing... it was like it was happening all over again. Times six."

Meredith her thumb upward, and then signed, "7."

Owen's forehead wrinkled. "Jerry seems like a great guy, and he didn't deserve what happened anymore than you all did. But he wasn't one of mine."

1 OF OURS.

Then, because the last thing she wanted to do was argue:

MUST'VE SUCKED HERE.

"Sucked worse for you."

Meredith shrugged. Her memories were mostly of the cold, the dark, and the thoughts were of Lexie under the plane, and Zola losing them all over again, but she hadn't been conscious for all of it. She'd bet he'd barely slept.

"They were long days, even without knowing I was liable. You were my people. Having Cristina come back safely was a miracle I could hardly accept. I couldn't judge her reaction to the trauma. Not the way I judged my own." He looked at her askance. "You know I should've gotten treatment sooner. It shouldn't have taken hurting her, and it should've been the first thing I did after that. When I think about it now…. I came here to reset everything. Didn't leave the city, because she might be found, but didn't tell Mom; didn't talk to Beth. Megan had said she wasn't right for me. I ping-ponged between thinking ending it would honor her, and not wanting to change anything without her. Not seeing them let me pretend it was all in stasis. You all thought it was all combat-related, but it was Megan. Flashbacks, nightmares, it was her. The guys being treated for PTSD had been through a hell of a lot more.

"Letting Shepherd do that scan helped me understand that whether I wanted to acknowledge it or not, I'd been injured, and it had to be treated. It wasn't anger, or grief, and I couldn't ignore it." He shifted, bringing one arm to rest on his knee. "I have PTSD. I handle it. Bailey has OCD. Amelia and Webber are addicts. They're three of our most prized surgeons. The more studies they do on surgeons, the more it seems that the job makes mental illness more likely, or those drawn to the field are more inclined that way."

She knew that. While she could think about it rationally, she knew that.

BEEN THRU WORSE.

"You've been through different. A lot of it. Back when they called PTSD shellshock, the main reason they had to admit it wasn't a form of malingering to get out of the trenches was that it didn't always manifest there. Those guys would be back in their parents' manor and start shaking uncontrollably during a fox-hunt. Up at the VA, they don't just have vets from Afghanistan or even the first go in Iraq coming in with new cases of PTSD. Men who went through one tour in Vietnam forty years ago encounter their first trigger. Some who've dealt with flashbacks for decades have had it become manageable as we've figured out new treatments."

He paused, and the delicate way the next few words were formed made it easy to predict where they were going. "Bearing in mind I'm not any kind of psychiatrist? The trauma isn't always from combat. The two soldiers I was closest to in the service were female, and they both dealt with some form of harassment. I had it happen under my command; I met kids who came out of bootcamp having been abused by their superiors in week one.

"Anecdotally, those are some of the worst PTSD cases, and they get the least acknowledgement. I've known folks who've seen combat at levels I've never experienced, many times, who are far more deeply affected by an assault. A lot of times, the denial they face on reporting is equally harmful, but if that's not the case, it's beyond not unheard of for someone to be less affected by one kind of trauma than another. There are as many different reasons for that as there are different people, but a good amount of them can be categorized as isolation. Feeling or being isolated.

"In every other disaster, you've had someone else to worry about, and who shared the experience. This, you had to process on your own for two weeks. No one knew the whole of it. I had four days of carrying losing six surgeons on top of the sister no one knew about. It's hell."

Meredith stared up at a picture of herself and the kids stuck to the fridge. Owen might have a point. If she told him that, would he believe she hadn't been scared of him; her brain had just turned up the wrong signal? It didn't make anything better; she couldn't never be alone again, but it did give her an answer to that question.

While she was thinking, she caught the sound of another motor, and far lighter wheels crunching the gravel. Maggie. She wasn't going to need her sister to save her this time, but she was good company.

"Ready to move?" Owen asked.

AMELIA'S BRINGING BZ HOME.

U CAN HANG OUT.

"I would, but it's better to let her seek me out." She narrowed her eyes at him as he lifted her upright, and supported her lurching to the couch. "I'm serious," he added. "If I'm here, she'll say I'm hovering. If I don't contact her at all, I'm tired of talking tumor. It's Thursday, so, I let her know she can stop by after her meeting. Sometimes she can't deal with people, afterward. I let her make the call."

UR A GOOD GUY.

THERE'S SUCH A THING AS 2 GOOD.

The door opened before she could parse his face, and Maggie barely seemed to notice him as she rushed into the living room. "I am so sorry. Who knew Bainbridge was so popular? You, probably. Hey, did Alex tell you Callie asked Arizona if she was sleeping with Herman? I get that she worries, but has she not been paying attention? They fix so many babies, I don't think they sleep, let alone together! And if they do, come on the woman has an inoperable brain tumor. Maybe inoperable. Probably not! Still, if she wants to screw her way through her fellows—Sorry, Dr. Hunt; I know there's a policy,…." Maggie shrugged. "Not my business."

Maggie usually left the world to itself, but when her paternity shone through, it was very bright. Owen didn't say anything for a moment. Meredith glanced up. His expression was clear this time. He was baffled.

"Torres did what?"

Meredith wasn't sure she'd ever cracked up in two different ways in such a short interval, but she didn't fight it this time. As she laughed at her sister's indignation, and Owen's disbelief, she noticed that the light pouring into the front of the house no longer seemed threatening,

A/N: While changing a mis-used word in She Came Along to Turn on Everyone and Kindly Stop for Me I discovered that chapter 30 of KSM had the same text as chapter 29. So, if you read KSM on here, you missed March Part IV, and it's fixed now.