One of the first rules you learned as an intern watching surgeries from the gallery was to avoid touching the window, and by no means did you tap it. Meredith, who had been in galleries since before she could reach the glass stretched forward as far as she could and banged her fist against it. Every gaze in the OR turned to her; although the scrub nurses' snapped back impressively quickly. Amelia's was the one she followed.

"D-E-R-E-K?" she signed, desperately. That had to be what she meant.

Carefully, the other woman switched the saline over to her right-hand, squeezing it against her pickups, and used the left to point directly at Meredith.

"I don't have privileges," she protested. Ben relayed the message.

"I'm granting them!" Owen replied. He arced his neck to look up at her, as calm and reassuring as he'd been a week ago—a week ago, Owen!—when he found her panicking on the kitchen floor. "We'll have a chair in here by the time you can scrub in, Grey."

"I don't…. This is…." Crazy, this was crazy. Wasn't she supposed to be the crazy one, not all of them?

"I'll take you down."

Meredith turned to April, who'd piled her purse and jacket onto the chair next to Jackson. "I…I need scrubs."

"We'll take care of it." She took charge, and soon Meredith was blinking in the light of the hall. "It'll be fine."

Fine? Fine? "I haven't been in surgery since January!"

"Me neither," she responded, not as chipper as peak-April, but too much for the moment.

"I haven't touched a brain in years!"

"You've still operated on more of them than most of us." April said. "Here." She backed into an empty on-call room and flicked on the light. "One sec."

"Wait, Kepner, don't—"

The door clicked shut, and Meredith was alone. She was alone. She was alone, as in, no one else in this very tiny room. Calm the fuck down, Grey. Her phone buzzed, and she took it out, hoping to see that someone had told Derek that his sister was having delusions, and he needed to come place a few radioactive seeds.

DEREK SHEPHERD: Great! So, in a couple hours, she'll be closing. Sure you don't want me to come up?

Yes! Yes, come, bring my babies, take me home!

The cursor blinked at her, and she held her thumb over the Y. She didn't tap it. Her hands weren't shaking. She was alone in a room at the hospital, facing away from the door—yeah, okay, she didn't like that. She transferred to the bed, just to change that. Not because it'd be easier to change clothes. That wasn't happening—but her hands weren't shaking. Her breath was tripping, like she might be about to start laughing, not hyperventilating. Because it was absurd. It was absolutely absurd. "Absurd, absurd, absurd," she signed. Sign, she'd realized, was a great way not to be heard talking to yourself.

Fifty-two good outcomes.

Not that…she wouldn't be the attending. She was filling the place of a second year resident. But she was an attending, and assuming something didn't go horribly wrong—which it could! And Amelia would blame her forever, just for being present—she thought maybe she could count it.

She wasn't a neurosurgeon. But, like she'd told Derek, this could be cardio, and it'd be cool. And, it wasn't. It was neuro. She would be watching Amelia place the seeds that would annihilate the gnarliest butterfly tumor she'd ever seen. And, okay, she'd laughed at Amelia's Wonder Woman-stance thing when she'd told her about it, late, one of the nights Derek was gone, while they'd been messing with fake seeds, and Meredith had already been hooked up to her IV; but she was from Boston. She knew a thing or two about comics, and this did feel very super-heroy.

The door opened. Meredith looked up sharply from the picture she'd pulled up on her phone. "Scrubs. Do you want me to wait in the hall?"

Meredith blinked at her, signing "For-for…?" She cleared her throat, and spoke aloud, "Why?"

"While you change?"

"Oh. Uh. No. You, and, y'know, everyone, have seen me full-frontal, at this point, so…." Meredith picked up the navy blue top, and then set it in her lap. "This is stupid, but, um, I guess…I have this…this flash sometimes of him…touching my scrubs." She gestured toward her chest. "And that's all he did, except talk, and strangle me, obviously, but, uh…."

"What can I do?"

"N-nothing. Just. If I panic, that's why."

"Okay."

"Okay." Meredith put her phone down beside her. This might be the part that unhinged her. Every time she swallowed, it was sour. This had not been a possibility when she'd been eating a meal that could've been used to stand in for brains at a haunted house—The church kind designed to show exactly how awful she was as a person—Had April ever volunteered at one of those? Maybe. They were not the people they'd been as teenagers, but the past was determined to be acknowledged.

"Is that picture with the flurescein in?" April asked.

"Uh-huh. I have one from Maggie, and I'd have thought her camera must've been expanding the glow or something, but Derek showed me that one from Ben. Those little places where it hasn't expanded are almost thumbing their nose at it." Meredith pulled off her shirt. The sports bra Maggie had finally okayed helped, and annoyance was better than the disgust and shame that made her rational self furious. "Optic nerve astrocytomas usually occur in children. They're pilocytic; they grow slowly. They recur, but generally they're treatable. Then in adults they jump to Grade IV. Glioblastomas multiforme, hard to treat, likely to come back. The seeds become a first response system the body doesn't have."

"Did Nicole panicking in the radiation mask affect Dr. Shepherd's decision to use them?" April asked.

Meredith flipped her hair out of her collar. "Say what? Amelia's been bitching for weeks about her noncompliance, but I thought it was all about having time to cram fetal surgery into Robbins."

"She told everyone that. It's claustrophobia."

"Huh." Everything about their situations was different, but Meredith couldn't help feeling something about that. All the female surgeons of the previous generation who'd made themselves appear enigmatic were as human as she was. She'd known that, her mom's breakdown being a formative memory, but the less she wanted to be aloof and disconnected, the weaker it'd made her feel.

Why should her mother be her female surgeon role model? Miranda, Addison, Amelia, and even Herman, who was older than Ellis, were right there.

"Here." April rolled up the right leg of the scrub pants, and Meredith realized she'd shucked her sweats. She looked down at her scrub shirt. Having her breasts flattened didn't make the phantom sensation of him groping her go away if she looked at the right angle; but she could look away. She didn't freeze. "Geez, lady, I feel like I'm fastening a civil war-era corset," she added, pulling the drawstring of Meredith's pants, and double knotting the bow. "Jackson's not kidding when he tells you to eat."

"All I can manage right now is pasta and bread, and I'm happy to stuff myself with both whenever, so neither of you should worry. Plus..."

Why has she almost told April about the plastic baby in her wallet? It meant jackshit about her future. With the way the universe treated her, it was more likely to mean she wasn't going to get pregnant again, ever, especially any time soon. She was thirty-six, she had a history of infertility, and a body that'd been bashed to hell and back.

If it did happen soon, she would let April know before there were rumors. It wouldn't make up for anything, especially not April being the last to know about the issues with her own pregnancy, but it would give her space to be envious. Time to prepare.

Meredith was not prepared for this.

"Do you have a hairband?" April asked.

Meredith slipped a finger under her watch and rolled out the elastic she kept there. It'd been a useless habit while her left hand was immobilized, but she hadn't wanted to break it. She'd read articles and done math for Amelia for the same reason, not because she thought she'd have anything to do with the actual procedure.

"I got this for you." April held up one of Meredith's scrub-caps. Meredith nodded. A month ago, that simple action could've caused pain, dizziness, the interminable ringing. She'd healed. She'd had two of the best neurosurgeons in the country monitoring her. Hell, they'd put her through the LODOX twice; once on day zero, and once before discharge. She was sure there'd been arguments for getting a third comparison scan for caution's sake. The head CTs had been consistent and stable before Valentine's Day. She hadn't taken permanent injury. That would've been an easier explanation for why her plans for speaking getting lost somewhere between Broca's Area and her motor complex.

"You're well within your rights to be unsure about this, but Dr. Shepherd's been preparing since…for months. I don't think she'd want you anywhere near it if she didn't think you could handle what she needs you to do. From what I could see, Edwards was squeezing saline, and telling her to stretch."

"Being her nurse. That's what Derek told Lexie she was doing when he let Jackson hold the retractor on that marathon tumor."

April smiled. "I think that was while I was fired."

"Oh, yeah. Is that what sparked the creepy crush on my husband? That he re-hired you?" Meredith asked, returning to the wheelchair. She was dressed; she might as well check on Amelia's mental state, as a member of the board. Richard and Owen were too invested. Not that she wasn't. If Amelia couldn't do the last steps, it would feel like defeat to her, too, even if she was the one who ruled that Derek had to come in.

"The creepy…?" April protested. "That wasn't…I'm respectful and appreciative with all authority figures, especially if they saved my future."

"Yeah, but you liiiiiked Derek."

"I…He…Objectively, you have to…."

Meredith pressed a hand to her mouth to hold in an amount of laughter that would require an explanation. Totally prudish April might be gone, but knowing she'd led to the christening of his desk might be a step too far.

"It's okay, Kepner, I liked like him, too. Still do, come to that."

She wanted him to be around the next hallway, leaning against a doorframe, his eyes still making her feel bubbles in her stomach, like everything was new.

The OR was at the end of the hall. A few feet from the door, she directed April to stop, and reached for the wheel-rims to enter the room on her own volition.

Richard was waiting for them in the scrub-room.

"You told them this is nuts, right? This is nuts."

"You're the attending who's most familiar with her plan. Proved that this afternoon, didn't she, Kepner?"

"Yes, sir."

"Her last lecture was standing-room only!"

"That's five hours over five weeks. One percent of the Edwards has had, give or take. More than that is more than anyone else."

"Owen—"

"Including Hunt. She needs an assist who she doesn't have to worry about."

"So, definitely not—"

"And if I remember correctly, you were this close to specializing in neuro." He held up his index finger, and to Meredith that her first thought was "G" as in "general" was evidence that she wasn't the person for this.

"I haven't been that resident in a long time," she said. And why not, Richard? That she'd given up neuro wasn't his fault, and she hadn't chosen general because of him. Those truths didn't disconnect the dots.

"Have her back. She needs to feel you're there. She'll do the rest."

Meredith glanced through the window. The room had almost cleared out, and an electric surgeon's chair had been placed in front of the second microscope. An electric chair. That felt apt.

Okay, so she could be a little dramatic. She pulled up on the sink. "I'll need help getting in there." She shouldn't have left her cane in the passenger footwell. They'd anticipated her facing mostly long distances that her knee couldn't handle, yet; not short ones that might overwhelm the rest of her. Richard nodded, and once she'd shut off the water, he took her arm. She mouthed a "thank you" at April, who nodded back, securing the wheelchair in the corner of the scrub room.

Walking—lurching—into the OR, Meredith expected to have to fight her memories. Their trauma rooms were well-stocked; they could be ORs without the level of sterilization. It was different primarily in arrangement, and in the addition of Nicole, who lessened the table's resemblance to an empty gurney. Somehow, that was enough. The strongest memory that came to her was an unexpected one. Derek, by her head, his smile belying the disbelief he'd tried to inject in his voice as he'd said, "You would be more comfortable in here."

It was true. Every time she'd been rolled down the hall, she'd felt relieved upon entering the OR. She'd attributed it to wanting to be put under and wake up with something else stabilized; a change in the pain, whether or not it represented an immediate decrease.

There weren't many surgeons who sat to operate, even in the state-of-the-art chairs, and while it did limit some movement, she could see the ableism there. It took Richard a minute to adjust it, and the urge to take over, even though it would pointlessly break her scrub, reminded her of trying to convince her mother to give her the remote whenever the VCR needed programing. Finally, he rolled her into place.

"Don't forget that's been raised," he instructed, as though she was a child in a dentist's chair.

"Good-bye, Dr. Webber," Amelia drawled. "Go rescue Sleeping Beauty before the briars start growing."

"Will do."

Huh. Richard was her nurse. Also, the woods metaphor had clearly helped her.

While he retreated to the scrub-room, Meredith adjusted the protective glove over the stiff fingers of her left hand and peered into the microscope. Through this filter, the fluorescein would make any cancerous tissue visible. In front of her was the retracted cerebellar tissue revealing the deeper brain. So much of who Nicole Herman was, exposed to open air. That always made her shiver a little to think about.

These structures had played a major part in her recent problems. The thalamus was part of the "pain matrix," and that process had informed much of what came next. It received information her senses, and now whenever that information got mistranslated by her amygdalae as danger based on episodic memory; therefore, involving the fornix. That was relayed to the command center that was the hypothalamus, causing adrenaline to do its thing, all before her visual cortex could finish processing. She didn't love her situation, but it wasn't permanent damage. Everything she could see might have repercussions for Herman, but not beyond the mass caused by her own cells compressing, invading, and injuring healthy brain tissue. To Meredith, the possibility of Alzheimer's destroying her neural pathways didn't represent as much of a betrayal as something like this. Imagining tumor cells pushing through healthy ones to grow in something that should be solid was disturbingly, abjectly wrong, and thus they had to be eliminated.

"Damn it, damn it," Amelia swore.

"I just got here. I haven't had a chance to screw anything up yet," Meredith responded, for her own benefit as much as anyone else's.

Amelia gave her a side-long look, arcing her eyes in a partial roll. "There's more intracranial shift than we mapped out. Not far from one of your more bizarre Jane Brain configurations."

"You didn't know it'd be compressing that much." Meredith ignored the "we." She hadn't done much beyond check Amelia's math and play with clay. "It's like a mud-slide, or an earthquake. Everything moves, everything pulls. It's not predictable."

"Didn't you tell me to be the Shepherd with the plan?"

"An adaptable plan. Things have been moving since you started draining cerebrospinal fluid. You have the ultrasound."

Amelia glared at her, but went to work identifying structures and measuring their location in relation to the original map. "You understand that CSF is a huge part of navigating via ultrasound? That's what makes ventricles dark. The high cell density makes a tumor hyperechoic, and thus brighter."

"And the structures are gray, I get it. You've found your way around them once already, and this time you're not violating anything. You're going through a labyrinth."

Amelia raised her eyebrow. "Like… the myth?" she asked, reminding Meredith with three words that she was a neurosurgeon, and in this field Meredith was frozen in time, still a resident who hadn't seen anything in comparison. But she was an attending in her field. She knew what she was talking about. This wasn't Theseus's maze; it was smaller, and meant for a specific person to solve.

"I meant the Henson one, built by the Goblin King—You keep talking like the tumor is a baby! It's taken you thirteen hours to get to the center, and that's how long Sarah got to save her brother." Meredith shrugged. "Arguably, the tumor is both him and the Goblin King, but that fits. Being a little in love with your adversary; hating the helpless creature that's the reason for all of this…".

"Is my brother David Bowie in this allegory?"

Jareth, Derek…it wasn't that far off. ""Might be, if the it hadn't imprinted on me long before I met him. I probably found it around the same time I got to Mom's neurosurgery text."

An amused wrinkle appeared at the corner of Amelia's eye. "You're weirder than I give you credit for. I wish been able to attend my lectures. The audience was mostly giving me 'you're insane' looks."

"So was I, twenty minutes ago," Meredith admitted.

"Up there you were talking about tumor fetuses. Not everyone can put aside how grotesque that is, let alone think it's cool. Not even all surgeons. I grew up with a mom who was only sure to pay attention to me if I was talking about something anatomical. You get to 'growing random forehead eyes' early that way."

"I used to ask mine about the grossest wounds she saw in Vietnam when we sat down at the dinner table on Thanksgiving."

"Nice!" Meredith laughed. Amelia's eyes were flicking between the screen with her pre-op map and the ultrasound monitor too quickly to be calculating. Questioning what she was seeing, or that she could see anything correctly. Afraid that she couldn't be a superhero after all.

Searching for something, anything, to say, Meredith's memory produced the case she'd thought of listening to Amelia's lectures. "Speaking of look at the crazy girl faces, did I ever tell you about the mesenteric teratoma my friends and I stole?"

"Is it in a jar like the kidney?"

"That was a gift. This patient came in with a distended abdomen and a positive pregnancy test that had very much surprised him and his pregnant wife. Psych said it was a hysteric male pregnancy."

A messed up diagnosis, considering that hysteric was the term once applied women who weren't properly feminine, and was said to be caused by a wandering uterus. How was that supposed to happen? The closest thing was maybe endometriosis, and they couldn't identify uterine tissue until the twentieth century.

"No affairs, not trans, nothing like that. Although, with the right mix of intersexuality and polyamory.…They should've started with an ultrasound is what I'm saying. But in reality, this was a nice, straight couple, who were very confused."

As Meredith told the story the comparisons with this operation piled up. The mass and its characteristic fats and calcifications—teeth, to be specific—was something usually found in children, benign, and asymptomatic. Presenting with the opposite characteristics had made a curiosity out of a man who—"Holy crap."

"What?" Amelia demanded, her hand held out toward BokHee, who'd already picked up the forceps she'd been about to ask for. "What'd you see?"

"Nothing! It's not…it's the not-a-fetus tumor. The patient. Shane. He…." Under her mask, she bit her lip. The Meredith that Amelia knew wasn't the bitter, broken-hearted intern, or the defensive, teenage riot grrrl. "I remember a lot of patients' names, for different reason. Some because of stupid nicknames. We said some offensive junk around here back then. This wasn't…I got shouty on a couple techs over this, but I should've reported them."

Meredith didn't look up to the gallery, but she hadn't noticed Ben leave. He must know what Miranda had let them call her to subvert expectations, but his sister's transition was new. He might be ultra-sensitive. She wasn't someone who censored herself, even if she hadn't spent so long having to consider her words, but she alienating someone for no reason was her mother's thing.

"His last name was the same as our patient's." Herman. Her man. Her-him….

"As…" Amelia's eyes widened. "That's unfortunate. And this was in…?"

"Oh-six. Shouldn't have mattered."

"No."

It was strange that Derek would have no reason to remember that case. If his diencephalon pulled that day from his midfrontal cortex, his amygdala would respond, but those emotions wouldn't be tied to Shane's story the way hers were.

Amelia cracked her neck. "We are at hour fifteen, and we have thirty minutes from now to place sixty-four seeds in this cavity. Let's hit it."

Through the scope, Meredith watched her move the tiny piece of radioactive metal from place to place along the genu of the corpus callosum. Deep brain stimulation to treat major depressive disorder was done in that area. It would not be a good place for damage. Nowhere was a good place for damage.

With nothing and no one in the OR moving except for Amelia's hands, and the numbers on the timer. Meredith could feel their audience, in spite of not looking away from the microscope. To keep the back of her mind from leaving the building, she kept pursuing thoughts about that case. That wasn't the first time she'd been the topic du jour; not at all. The looks and whispers and been increasing steadily, and she'd been able to ignore them; just as Shane had ignored the growth, focused on his wife. Then, there'd been a breaking point. She'd come to Seattle knowing she'd draw interest due to her name—she had not expected to be one of two Dr. Greys at the hospital within a year—but being judged against her mother hadn't been anything new. Being held up to Addison had felt far more invasive; more about who Meredith was than who Dr. Grey was expected to be.

"I had to triple check my math while you were on your way down," Amelia said, out of nowhere, transferring a fourth seed to her bipolars. Meredith pulled herself away from the memory of how the goofy guy showing off a pregnancy test had become a frightened patient, forced to admit that his body wasn't under his control. It was always frightening to come to that conclusion, no matter who you were. "There's one seed for every surgery Herman and Robbins did in the past forty days."

"Seriously?"

"They're finished down the hall?" she asked. Meredith murmured in assent. "Then, yes. They had this corkboard with everything she wanted Robbins to learn. Don't know what she'd have done if this thing hadn't sped up its invasion."

"Let her practice. Not like it's ever enough," Meredith said. Amelia hesitated with her fifth seed resting against the tumor bed. Crap. Damage control. "That puts my fifty-one in sixty-two to shame."

"Theirs weren't all saves. And the holidays were in there."

"True."

"God, I need your skinny fingers in here."

"Yeah, yeah. My mother would've given up on me earlier if I hadn't inherited the ET hands."

"No, seriously, I need your skinny fingers in here."

"Oh! Oh. Okay, see this? This is my 'she's lost it' face." Meredith pointed, glad she'd gotten used to conveying shock without anyone having to look at her mouth. "I'm not trained in neurosurgical ultrasound!"

""The ultrasound isn't helping—I haven't done enough. Either the procedure was far less complicated, or I'd have access to an intraoperative MRI. I'm working by touch and these gloves are like oven mitts. Everything feels the same, and we need to be moving. Doing procedures by feel is your thing!"

It was? Okay, it kinda was.

"When I can use both hands for it! Amelia, this is not my specialty."

"So? I need an assist; you're here to assist. I've had my fingers in here all day, and I can't ID anything! I've put in three seeds over six minutes. I need to move faster. Either you start placing, or I take off the glove."

"You need to stop jumping ahead. One seed at a time. This isn't a race."

"Except that it is!"

"Cutting your maximum exposure time in half helps?"

"It'll let me get more than ten of them placed! A new mass can form up to three centimeters in any direction from the initial origin point. That won't be covered by ten or twenty of these. It will recur, with all new symptoms, and she won't have treatment. What she's gone through will be pointless." She peeled down the top of her black glove. Over their heads, Meredith caught Owen diving for the intercom.

"Amy, stop!" she snapped.

The ferocity of Amelia's glare reminded her of Derek, both because she'd seen him give it, and his sister giving it to him. She looked up. Owen did not have on his calm, placid expression, but he didn't press the button to rattle off another plan.

"Rotate the ultrasound monitor, please?" The blobby reveal made her think of getting to eleven counting fingers on Bailey when he was a fetus. Technically, this was navigating by sound made visible; particularly ironic when it looked like a picture of what she'd been able to hear while barely capable of glancing at a screen. She squinted, which didn't help more than Adriana's cheaters had when words got blurry. Picturing where things should be from a lateral perspective, and comparing it to what she could see brought the same level of frustration the glasses had.

"Give me those." She took Amelia's bipolars, pinching them tightly between her thumb and middle finger to keep the seed in place. Her index finger, she kept free to feel for familiar shapes through a double layer of gloves, which felt quadruple.

"No different than putting them in a prostate, right? Kidding. Very much kidding. Okay. I'll find landmarks and put a couple in. You take a minute. Figuratively. Also, literally. One. Consider following the Paris protocol. Evenly spaced lines of seeds would be easier to place, and it's been successful in extreme glioblastoma resection. You gave me that article," she added, off Amelia's doubtful expression.

Looking through the scope provided an entirely different world. Initially, she'd felt a sense of removal, having an instrument between her eyes and her hands, but she'd adjusted quickly while Amelia placed. What was jarring was having to shift her attention to the monitor, which blurred together dimensions, merging layers and interweaving the fibers of fissures and commissaries.

That she hadn't touched a brain in years had been an easy way of conveying her outrage to April, but it was also true. In the days she'd spent glued to Derek's side she hadn't done all that much poking and prodding above the spinal cord. Touching the deep brain with a finger was nothing like being wrist-deep in the abdominal cavity. Yes, there were pulsing vessels and slickness mixed with squishiness. There was also sponginess and fiber clusters, all of it within a hair's breadth of each other. Messing around with clay hadn't been any kind of preparation.

"LA…CN2…corpus…? I think...yeah, that's the fornix…. prechiasmic region…So, if it didn't pass the infundibular region…five millimeters." Aligning the metal wasn't as easy as it'd gotten to be on a model that'd been seeded and smoothed out dozens of times, but she got it. She started to pull back, but Amelia had positioned another seed for her to take without having to start again. She intercepted it and continued tracing what had been the left wing of the butterfly.

As she went, she twitched the fingers of her left hand, mentally forming the ASL numbers, the way she had while practicing in the middle of the night, afraid of any significant movement. (All requiring the frontal lobe and subcortical structures. The precentral gyrus starting with the primary motor cortices, the premotor and supplementary motor areas that also covered posterior portions of the superior and middle frontal gyri, the bassl ganglia, thalamus, back to the cortices.)

Nine…ten…. Feeling her way rostrally along the lateral sulcus—to her right, toward Herman's face—Meredith ignored the ultrasound. Twelve…Thirteen…. Amelia was watching her closely, and Meredith explained her mad method as she went; focusing on measurements and proximal movements. Twenty, twenty-one. Knowing what was where on this side of the longitudinal fissure might make it harder to picture the other. No one's hemispheres were an exact match, like no identical twins had all the same scars. Now, the structures might be arranged entirely differently from their opposite halves. Twenty-five.

She was leaving a breadcrumb trail that would never be followed. The forest metaphor had been apt, but Amelia had cleared the paths. This was an abandoned hedge-maze, and to get through you had to climb under or around overgrowth without causing damage.

"Okay," she said, once she'd have to cross the longitudinal fissure to continue. "You're up, Theseus. Use the optic nerve as Ariadne's thread. Find it. Follow it."

Amelia did, and her movements were closer to what they'd been working with the model. Faster, since she'd had to do that without a microscope. She'd finished bordering the midline structures before she glanced at the clock and groaned. "There's not—"

"There will be time, if you'd quit trying to expose yourself to direct radiation. Keep placing!"

It surprised Meredith that Amelia responded to the bossiness, but independent as she was, she did have four older siblings. Twenty-eight.

"I understand," she continued, trying to mix Mom tone and dealing-with-a-rogue-intern tone to keep Amelia from rushing. Fifteen minutes left. Over half placed. "Every Friday you've wondered if this could be it, but you didn't actually think it would be." Thirty. "With more prep, you wouldn't have felt as much like you were guessing where it didn't feel like all the other tumors you've been working on." Forty. "Now you're facing the finish line, nothing disastrous has happened, and you wanna make a grand gesture. Prove that you can do something inconceivable. You don't have to. That's the point. You're good enough to let this end like any surgery. You are a superhero, but like... a Bat, not a Spider-person. Training and devices. Not radiation!"

"Okay, I got it. You read comics, too." Amelia picked up a forty-fifth seed.

"Sweet rebellion to a preteen."

Six minutes. Her speed had increased significantly. Fifty-five. she counted, opening and closing all five fingers against her downward-facing palm. Two minutes. Fifty-eight…. One minute. Come on… Sixty-three. Sixty-four.

"That's…That's it." Amelia withdrew her instruments from the cavity a millimeter at a time. "That's it." She looked up at the heart monitor, as though she expected sudden v-fib.

"You've got a whole thirty seconds left, Wonder Woman," Meredith commented. "Know what I'd do with that in my OR?"

Amelia shook her head, her wide eyes hardly moving.

"Thirty-second dance party."

That made her glance over, and Meredith didn't care how ridiculous it would look, perched on a chair in the middle of a serious procedure. Having kids made her a lot more immune to seeming ridiculous. She danced. In the last ten seconds, Amelia joined her.

"Definitely weirder than I gave you credit for. I like it."

"That's reassuring. Derek…is learning to value your opinion."

"Good save," Amelia drawled, but when she met Meredith's eyes, the sarcastic layer of her tone was ablated.

They placed a collegen sponge over the seeds, meant to keep a different kind of nasty from growing, and began the dural graft.

The work didn't fully detach Meredith from her body. She'd gotten too used to ministering to it constantly not in bursts, maybe, or using her arm made her consider the other places that were stiff. What she evaded was the fatigue. Hour-by-hour, building Herman's brain back up to the point where the bone could be placed only made her feel more awake. The time on the clock when Edwards came running in seemed impossible. She didn't remember the last time she'd been awake for seventeen hours and twenty minutes consecutively. (Well, closer to fourteen hours and twenty minutes. Thanks, Derek.)

"Dr. Shepherd, I'm here. I'm... Uh." The resident's sneakers squeaked as she skidded to a halt. Richard followed, a mask held over his exasperated expression.

"I'm going to get out of your way," Meredith said.

"No! Stay, Dr. Grey."

"You're saying that because you found me broken on the floor, and that makes you think you owe me, when it's the other way around. This spot is yours." Meredith reached down, breaking scrub to lower her chair. Richard moved it away from the table, and she didn't bother pretending she didn't need his arm to move away.

"Really? I'm not too late?"

"No, Edwards. You're just on time. You can finish closing." Amelia moved into the space Meredith had left.

"Really?"

"You started this with me. You should finish it." Edwards's awestruck expression said she understood that she'd ascended from sidekick to protegé.

As she and Richard crossed the room. Meredith's gait was worse than it'd been going in, but her steps felt lighter. At the sliding door, he paused, his chin flicking toward the gallery. There were only a few figures left, scattered around Owen's seat on the front row. Even April and Jackson were gone, she'd noticed them leave while the room was being reset again.

A single person leaned on one of the doorways, almost outside the threshold. The light put him in shadow, but she'd know Derek's silhouette anywhere. She could tell he was grinning at her from the tilt of his head.

"You should go back in," she told Richard while scrubbing out. "Convince Amelia you'll watch Edwards, make sure Herman doesn't have a big ugly scar when she looks in the mirror. Force her to get some rest before she starts sitting vigil in the ICU."

"Not a problem." He touched her lightly between the shoulders and left her alone.

"Holy crap," she said to the empty room. "That happened." Sinking into her wheelchair, she exhaled, and on the next breath she started laughing. For the first time in forty-five days of not being sure she could go back, she'd been in surgery! As a surgeon! Her hands had stayed steady—and her fingers had been in a brain. The brain of a colleague, yes, but also a brain. That was incredible, in the truest sense. Not credible. Unbelievable. Unfathomable.

Not unfamiliar.

She hadn't felt anything closer to this burst of pure accomplishment since she'd woken up on that gurney, but it'd been there every time she'd been in this room for the weeks prior to that. Finding an insulinoma where everyone else saw negligence. Figuring out how to conquer a tumor that'd taken three surgeons by surprise. Taking care of Ben's sister. Ex-laps, appys, whipples. She'd loved it. She loved her job. She wanted more.

You want a baby.

They didn't have to be mutually exclusive, did they? Not this time.

Derek would be in here any second. He'd want to hear everything. She wanted to tell him everything. She needed to be sure of what 'everything' her left hand she unset the brakes on both sides of the wheelchair (the posterior area of her right frontal lobe.) The other sent a text. Once it was written, she left the room on her own steam, and continued toward the elevator.