Derek dragged his legs through an endless clearing. If he could just pass the tree line, he'd find what he was looking for, but the brush was thick, and came up as high on his legs as Zola did. Pieces of metal the size of nuts and bolts rained down on him, hitting his skin like BBs. A tongue of lightening flashed through the sky, and the woods caught fire. He squinted through the smoke to discover another dozen rows of trees burned, extending the distance he had to walk. The husks of severed trunks twisted in front of his eyes; above them five branches from a single tree reached up to the sky. Mark would say it looked like something out of the Wizard of Oz. He'd show him. They'd come back here; if he could just get to the tree line. But every time he got close the fire was sparked again, a controlled burn controlled by an invisible source.
Backfire, he thought.
"Derek!" Amy? Or Liz? "Derek!" Couldn't be Lexie.
Why couldn't it be Lexie?
"Derek. Derek, I'm here." Meredith stood between him and the foot of Mark's bed. He held his hand out, pulling her toward his lap. She stopped when their knees touched.
"Hey. What's up?" He turned to the clock and cleared his eyes with the thumb and forefinger of his left hand. It always took a minute to remember the bulk of the bandage had been replaced."You drop off Zo?"
"Yeah."
He touched her cheek with his fingertips. "No tears?" She stuck her tongue out and turned toward his hand without care for the rough velcro of the brace. He jerked away. "Careful! You don't want new scrapes before tomorrow."
Her knuckle idly traced the tiny pink mark on her forehead. "I dunno. I could come up with some outlandish stories for the interns. I was only annoyed in the Pit because every single patient asked if I'd been in a car accident."
"The odds are—"
"Don't—" Her finger popped up onto his mouth. "Blah, blah the blah." This time, she was the one to pull away as he nipped at her. "It's like I scripted this. 'If you're that hungry, come with me to get breakfast.'"
"I just mean that it's a logical assumption. You can't say you should've been worried about this more than a car—"
"Ugh!" She exclaimed, dramatically slumping against the bed. "Would you listen if Han Solo here told you to stop?"
"I…Wait…. Are you saying Mark's Han?"
"Of the two of you? The womanizing criminal…. That sounds like you? Except for your near-felonious driving—"
"Shep's uncle… ran a…cop bar."
Meredith turned on the spot, and Derek leapt up, reaching around her to touch Mark's hand.
"Eavesdropping, Sloan?" she demanded.
"You…ruin…my lines." Mark's eyes were half-open, but he managed to wink exaggeratedly enough for it to be seen.
"I mock everything. Give it to me. Actually, give it to him." She pointed an elbow at Derek.
Mark smirked, holding Derek's gaze as he quoted, "Never tell me the odds."
He'd heard the impression thousands of times over three decades, been annoyed by maybe half of them. This time, Mark's voice was thin, hardly more than a gasp at the end, and it had never sounded as sincere.
"Don't encourage him." He brushed his left hand against Meredith's hip. Encourage him.
"How's…my girl?"
"Let's see," Meredith said. "I saw Sof a few minutes ago; she was building a 'big to'r' out of Duplo. Zola got her shirt on mostlyby herself, and then took it off while I was fixing her juice. I haven't seen Callie, but Arizona's morning labs were the same." She paused at that, and Mark's fingers pressed against Derek's hand. "They should have the newest cultures back by this afternoon.
"Nurses say Cristina slept soundly, and she seems more alert to me." She shifted to check something on Mark's infusion pump, and he met Derek's eyes over her shoulder. He shrugged. Cristina had been displaying more energy, maybe been more reactive, but they couldn't say if it was an improvement or not.
"I'm great," she added, with theatrical—though not entirely false—cheerfulness. "Derek spent the night here, so you—"
"Hold it, I'm not one of his girls."
"Debatable. He doesn't mean Owen, who's running around with his coat billowing, snapping at everyone."
That was for sure. To keep Meredith from torturing herself trying to be there for her friend, Derek had offered to spell him a couple of times. Getting him to capitulate hadn't been a matter of modeling behavior. It'd taken confrontation. He couldn't pretend it wasn't satisfying to drag him into the hall and remind him that he had a hospital to run, and if he was exhausted he'd make more mistakes. He'd snapped back about his training, and Derek had officially made himself into an asshole by asking if he thought he was stronger than Cristina, who'd spent three and a half days awake on a battlefield.
"You want to keep being a lone wolf, you do that," he'd said, thinking of something Meredith had said when howls sounded in the darkness and the firelight illuminated the fear on Cristina's face. "But Cristina has a pack. Keeping you from working yourself into the ground is something that needs to be done for her sake."
He was surprised it'd worked, and even more so when he'd seen Kepner go in there in street clothes and carrying a bag a few nights ago. He hadn't told Mer about that, yet.
"Bailey, I can't think of as anything other than a woman—"
"Gee, thanks."
"—so who does that leave?"
"All right…Big Grey. C'mon." Mark's voice was already getting weaker, and Meredith dropped the bit. On a good day, when Mark's face couldn't be described as "ashen," she'd point out he really couldn't claim Kepner, list off members of the Nurses Against Mark Sloan Club and chide him about referring to women as his. She kept him engaged, and backed off slowly, never showing a visible transition between seeing him as a patient and as a friend.
Derek wasn't as good at seeing the truth of his condition. He was Mark. He'd always been the brighter, stronger one, in spite of being two years younger. Callie was always fresh out of Arizona's room, where she was split between wife and surgeon as throughly as Jekyll was from Hyde—Shelley had had the right of it, he thought, showing the monster in the doctor. Stevenson had been writing right as ether became common, and people could begin to separate surgeons and brutality. Sometimes, he thought, they should be reminded of how thin the line was.
Meredith perched on the bed, and he moved in, both of them knowing full well who was supporting whom. Mark likely knew, too, but his focus wasn't on either of them.
"We're four weeks out. The incision on her back is healing nicely. The stitches will come out in a day or two. No new images, but Callie says all her breaks are on track. Her kidney function is improving. They've lessened her sedation to almost nothing."
"That doesn't mean she'll wake up right away," Derek added. "Her MRI doesn't suggest that there will be permanent damage, but with the amount of trauma her body withstood…. It's could take time."
"Honestly…." Meredith's shoulders rose, and her head turned enough for him to be sure she was looking at the pillow. "If she stays under a couple more weeks, it won't be the worst thing. Her spinal injuries don't mean that the casts wouldn't be burdensome. Psychologically, the faster she can go from consciousness to rehabilitative therapy, the better. Her abdominal injuries are still healing, too, and she should have thoracic feeling."
"More time, less…pain."
"That's right. You wanna see her?" Before Mark could respond, Derek had plucked her phone from her back pocket. Her smile when she took it from him made him decide he'd do everything left-handed until his next surgery.
As she held it out to Mark, Derek noticed how thin his fingers had gotten. He'd need time to get back into the OR, too. Maybe in a month or so they'd be sitting at Lexie's bedside, engaging her. Coaxing the warmth back into her eyes.
"Looks…like…Lex."
"She does," Meredith agreed. "The edema is almost completely gone, and these antibiotics are much easier on her system. Starting to wish she'd had more sore throats as a kid, so we'd have known she was allergic to more than eggs."
"New…m-m.…" Mark started coughing, and Meredith immediately leaned forward, lifting his shoulders faster than he'd have expected, even knowing her strength, and Mark's current weakness. Afterward, he didn't try to finish the word that'd been cut off. "Go." His eyes indicated the door. "Eat."
"We're fine here," Derek said.
"I can let you two have a minute," Meredith offered.
Mark seemed to be studying them, and Derek couldn't figure out what the smirk was about. "Interns?"
"Tomorrow."
Derek glanced down at the phone now back in Meredith's hand. The screen was blank, and he was not going to draw attention by looking over his shoulder at the board with the date on it.
"Plans?"
"I have them," she said, and again Derek found himself on the receiving end of two smug looks.
"Our anniversary."
"One of them, anyway," she said, lowering her head slightly, and then turning back to Mark. "We can stay. I'm not arrogant enough to have started making reservations."
"Not gonna…die today."
Meredith's reaction was as quick as the lightening in Derek's dream. He had a second to see Mark regret his flippant words, but not to stop her from grabbing the bed rail and use it to hold herself up to loom over its occupant. It wasn't easy to school his expression into empathy and not amusement. He'd been on the other side of this storm. If Mark meant what he'd said—which she was about to ensure—he'd survive it.
"Listen, McSteamy, I'm the one person who'd have still thought that was funny if you hadn't been spending the past month playing ding-dong-ditch with the Reaper.
"I'm not someone who remembers many dates for their positive associations. In case you've forgotten Arizona crying through her first anniversary, we were in those woods a year after our legal wedding. The Post-it signing was our real…thing, but it's the day one of my best friends died, and this year he was in surgery as the patient.
"So, if you try to croak, today of all days, I will bring you back if it means inventing zombies or bargaining with whatever power is actually in charge, and nothing about it will be funny. Now, I'm going to go get Callie, and tell the nurses to bring your a.m. meds. Do you want anything?"
"No, ma'am."
"Are you lying because I scare you?"
Mark shook his head, his expression taking Derek back almost forty years. "Do…though."
"Good. Practice for intern day."
Twenty minutes later, Derek and Meredith were in the car. He wasn't cleared to drive between surgeries. He didn't think the meds were a big deal. Mostly he took gabapentin and OTC painkillers, with one oxycodone at night, because he knew that if he didn't sleep, neither would Meredith. He couldn't claim he didn't tend to hold the wheel with his left hand so he could take hers on the right; that he could manage the reverse was a perk of the brace.
She reached over after she'd turned onto the dock for the Bainbridge ferry. Her phone had automatically connected to her playlist of songs with choruses Zola could repeat at daycare; "Never Had a Friend Like Me" faded into L7's "Pretend We're Dead." (That might've been an oversight.) Meredith jabbed the skip button and landed on "Monkey's Gone to Heaven" by the Pixies.
He grabbed the phone and scrolled through a moment, hitting play on a Muppet compilation.
"I officially turned the Brig down," she said. The stains of "Mah Na Mah Na" didn't make it easier to come up with an appropriate response.
"So, we're staying."
"Is that…? Not gonna hate me for losing your chance at Harvard?"
"Of course not. Neither choice was bad. I just…I wanted you to choose for the right reasons ."
"I couldn't choose my career over my sister needing me?And what about Mark?"
"He's going to—"
"He is going to be fine," she agreed. "I still don't get…. If…If I was going to have to try to finish neuro-training under Schacter and the shadow Shepherd…. But Miranda and Richard are good teachers. I'll be an attending. Does it give me more flexible hours to be with Zola and be there for Lexie? Yeah. Is it so wrong that I want that?"
She cut the engine on the Car Dock, climbing out with no discussion. He followed her up to the Sun Deck. The wound on her leg was gone, but she limped from the muscle damage—superficial, his ass—There was no trace of it on these stairs.
Her quick physical recovery was a net positive, but silver clouds could have dark linings. Until Cristina revived, she'd remain the only one without visible injuries, and tomorrow would bring an onslaught of new staff who hadn't been in Seattle to follow local news, or working at a hospital where someone was bound to know someone who knew someone who knew one of them. Mer could joke, but Derek doubted they'd ask questions. They'd make their assumptions about Dr. Grey, like that air-headed med student she'd criticized her for being self-involved while they'd been trying to get pregnant.
Hunt had let her start consulting in the pit, which Derek was't sure he'd thank him for that. She was thrilled to be doing something other than talking at unconscious people., but two days ago, she'd paged him to an on-call room and immediately gone for his clothes. He went with it. If what she wanted wasn't what she needed, he'd have some context to build on.
"I was there. I was there. Tell me I was there," she'd repeated, a mantra that gave him a pretty good idea of what was in her head if not was. A much easier beginning.
"You were there. You were right beside me. On the plane. At the camp. And when I couldn't find you? You were still with me. You got us water. You closed my wrist. Got Lexie on a backboard…." He'd kept listing as she rode him, grinding herself against his right hand. "We wouldn't have made it home without you."
She'd made a small mewling sound, and he hadn't been sure if it was desire, or if he'd really messed up by alluding to a world where she'd been here without him.
"You were with me, Mer. You were there, and you're here now. We're home."
"I-I'm…. They don't….They ask…'f I know anyone. Like I couldn't be…. I was there."
On the nights where they shared the same bed, more and more of her nightmares had been about the shooting. She'd fought so hard to be okay after that, like what she'd seen and experienced shouldn't matter because they'd survived.
"You were there, and you're allowed to be hurt. I see it. I see you, sweetheart. What anyone else sees doesn't matter. Just us. Just us, here."
She'd come with a groan, pulling him with her. In the few heartbeats it'd taken him to settle into reality again, the shutters in her eyes had begun to lower.
He'd drawn his thumbs over her eyebrows. "Stay with me here, too. Talk to me."
"It shouldn't bother me. I know I don't look like I was in a plane crash, and…and it's not like I…I sound so—"
"You sound like you were trying to do your job, and people shouldn't be prying."
"We ask a whole lotta personal questions. Payback." She'd smiled, trailing her fingers over his chest "I'm okay. I only…."
"You were there."
She'd chewed her lip as she nodded, showing she got both sides of that statement.
When he stepped aside to let a mom chase her two school-aged kids up the ferry stairs, he lost sight of her momentarily.
The unencumbered sunlight spilling out onto the deck was nothing like the rays there'd been cast on them in the woods, punishing their skin with UVs, pulling water out of their bodies, doing nothing to provide warmth. It seemed to be illuminating Meredith ,specifically.
The men who'd traversed oceans and enslaved nations in the name of glistening metal must've been inspired by hair like hers. They'd been utter fools: Gold wasn't half as precious. Not as strong, either.
In the firelight on the first night, he'd woven his fingers in it, oblivious to the bump millimeters from his hand, and mused about using it as fishing line if they found water.
"Great way to lose a hook," Cristina had offered.
"While Rumpelstiltskin's here, can he get us out?" Arizona had added.
"Suture…. your leg…with it…next," Mark. "Could… get it clean."
Meredith shook the saline tablets from the first-aid kit bitterly.
"Could we trust it?" Lexie wondered.
"I think the 'all water is poison' thing might be like peer pressure and quicksand," Meredith said. "Eighties propaganda, trying to make us think all we need is willpower. But, if there is an evil corporation dumping pollutants into the water, it's probably out here. Hope it's regenerative, Lex. You'll go from rhabdomyolysis to radioactive. Spider-Grey!"
"Stuff it, Rapunzel."
"Baby sister thinks she bites. I already survived Mother Gothel, and I could do my job with my hair. Show me a downside."
"Are we back to hair sutures?" Yang asked.
"You have clearly not hung out with the girls recently."
"Busy passing my boards."
"I had to let something occupy Zola while I studied."
"Where was Shep?" Mark asked.
"Being a brain surgeon."
Somehow that led to her giving a very Meredith—"So then, she just whacks him in the face with a frying pan, which never fails to crack Sloan's kid up. Who's surprised?"—rendition of the film, sometimes quoting whole patches of dialogue. She'd gotten to the lanterns on sunset, and in the firelight, it'd been almost beautiful out there.
At the end of her story, Meredith moved on to recording vitals in the pilot's repurposed Captain's Log. By the time she lay next to him again, the others had gone silent, or moved to smaller conversations, whispering so low he couldn't differentiate voices from the wind.
"Made you something," she murmured. The paperclip hook she dangled between them glinted in the embers, but that was nothing compared to the twisted strands of hair knotted to one end. "Gotta be prepared, right, scout?" she teased. "Like to see some glow-in-the-dark trout break this. Never say I didn't do my part."
She wrapped it around her fingers until they were white, and he grabbed for it. "Don't cut off your circulation."
"Sure, I'm the one to worry about here."
"For me, yes," he insisted, pocketing her offering.
"Careful! We can't treat tetanus out here. We can't treat anything."
That would've stayed true if she hadn't gone searching for the first-aid kit
He wasn't sure she knew he'd kept her present. The length of it had resonated the day he'd transferred it into the jewelry box with his watch and cufflinks. She had to have pulled it directly from her scalp.
Today, her hair lay smooth, except for the locks being caught by the wind. He breathed in lavender as soon as he got close. What had been the result of her grasping for something to relax the tangles, metaphorically and literally, was now a sign she wanted him there.
"Is this a good place to hang out?"
He'd first seen her smile in profile, given in spite of herself. Since then, he'd seen it from every angle. He'd memorized the points of her lips, the curve of her nose, and her eyes sparkling brighter than the water below them; it didn't matter, his eyes still found something new to land on. Today, it was the dip of her sucked-in cheek. He put his lips there, tugging the spot in the other direction, trying to get her to release the words she was holding in. He started to put his hands down on the rail on either side of her. She uncrossed hers to intercept them, silently wrapping herself in his embrace.
"We're gonna spend more time here than we do at Joe's these days," she observed. "You met Lexie there, too."
"I…did," he said. "Not my finest moment."
She leaned back to kiss the line of his jaw. "Flirting with my sister is a Markthing in your head."
"Well…yeah. He flirts with everyone's sisters. I didn't know…but even if you put that aside…. I've told his girlfriends flirting is just flirting for decades. Sometimes it's true. I shouldn't have thrown it in your face. You weren't responsible for my unhappiness, and it was a shitty way to try to get you to open up about why you weren't happy either.
"We've talked a lot about you dealing with being independent from Ellis. I can't tell you how many times Mark point-blank told me I'd missed something going on with one of my sisters, or gotten answers from one of the kids when they wouldn't talk to anyone else. I was…I was used to him being there, checking me before I fucked up too badly."
"It's easy to be the one who's there during the hard stuff when you're not on the hook for fixing anything," Meredith observed.
"That's…. Oh."
"The Brig was very understanding," she said. Not hearing him marvel at her insight, or not wanting to? "They said I could push my start date as late as January, as long as I stayed a year. That way I wouldn't be disappearing on her, unless it takes…longer. My mom started late. Fall, maybe? I was so little, I remember it feeling like she stayed home forever….
"Lexie took care of me after the liver transplant; and it never…. It could've been like, I watched her sleep for a weekend, and had this major surgery for her, she owed me. It never felt like that. She was just there, and if that meant dressing changes, or watching eighties movies….It felt natural. I want to give her that, if I can."
"It won't all be on you."
"I know. She's going to have Mark, and her family, but Thatcher…. All reports suggest he's not great at nursing, particularly the way he took off when Elena came in to help me change her dressings on Saturday."
"Molly came stayed with him post-op, didn't she?"
"Yeah, but she'd have to leave her family, for who knows how long. Even if he wasn't leaving, Alex took off when they were…screwing and she needed him. If he took on anyone's care it'd be Arizona, because Mark needs Callie. Mark will want to be Lexie's person, but he needs to…. Obviously, he's going to need….He'll be okay, long term. I'm not saying…." She took her hands off of his and rested her arms on the rail, supporting herself. He tightened his arms around her. "I…I couldn't figure out why you were willing to leave. I knew it wasn't like when you came here, leaving the mess behind."
"Did you? I don't."
"I think part of you hoped that if we left, his tendency to Single White Male you meant he'd have to get better so they could follow us. You could finish teaching Lexie…."
He thought of the articles he'd seen around the house; the books from the reference library. "If there's anyone stubborn enough to do microsurgery with a fine motor deficit, it's her," he said. "Right now, all we know is that she has an incomplete C-7 injury. Her hands might be unaffected. She might be able to use a standing frame."
"She might have minimal elbow extension and weakened breathing. She might not want my help, but I can't…. I keep thinking of that patient she had after George died. The traveling one who wouldn't call her family. Could've been me.
"I took on too much caring for my mom, but I didn't make choices based on it, really. I was already in at Dartmouth. If she'd been well, the house would've been a big motivation for coming here. That and, you know, answers.
"You made so many decisions to benefit your family. Burdens that should've been shared, or should've been someone else's entirely. You resent Amelia for it. I think you're worried about that for me, but I don't think I'm gonna regret it. I'd feel guilty—guiltier about leaving. I feel obligated to stay. But that's not all. She might want nothing to do with me—" He bit back an instance that that wasn't true. The breath he let go caused a few additional pieces of her hair to puff up. She didn't notice. "—there's always so much happening, and with me not on your service…. She and I are close, but not as…as much as I wanna be.
"I wasn't…. I tried to help her with Susan's death, Not the way a sister should've, but…."
"You hadn't started to see her through that lens. Once you did, you were there for her whenever she'd let you be a big sister. It's not an easy thing.
"Staying here because we're needed won't interfere with me starting my career. You can get your hand fixed. Mom did additional fellowships, basically any time she got annoyed that something wasn't being done laparoscopically. Do a fellowship, piss off the specialist by at least being nominated for a Harper Avery. Repeat."
"She was nominated five times?"
"In '83, '85. '88, '94 and '96. Expected it in '03, but she wasn't first on the paper and by April…it would have been rough. Everyone knew her. We were in town and since she worked with the original Dr. Avery, we attended every year. Best catering, and if she wasn't nominated she'd be less bitter while taking apart the actual nominees in the cab home.
"This is what I started dreaming of five years ago, Derek. You and me going to our house on the ferry. Having our lunch breaks at the same time. Taking the baby to the daycare in the morning. Little things like that.
"You asked me if it was Boston," she said, leaning against him again. "I think it was. Not why I didn't want to go, but why I did. I wanted the experience of being happy there. It'd prove I could, you know?
"It's gonna be different, I know. A lot of people are leaving. I could be the last one left from my cohort. That almost feels right, doesn't it? You, me, Bailey, Richard. Maybe Cristina will stay. Do you think…? You helped her the last time."
"She's not responding to me differently than anyone else. This time we're all in the same position, and you're her best friend. Not being able to help her one time—"
"It's the same thing. I broke down out there, but now I'm…. This morning, I was lying there next to Zola, listening to her talk to Rawr and Pasky the Floppy Frog, and I wasn't just okay. I was happy. How is that fair?
"Tomorrow, there will be interns who only know me as an attending, and her as a patient! That's…. It's so…twisted. I'm tired of the twisties."
He took her shoulders, turning her to face him. Her eyes widened at his smile. "The longer you have a best friend, the more unfair it gets. You can be happy they're happy, and be jealous. You can be glad you're not going through the same stuff, and hurt for them. And you can discover you were never as similar as you thought. It just makes life more interesting.
"I knew Mark as a scrawny kid, a teenage jock. We went to college together; we owned a business. I'd never seen him look like he did this morning. You'd think he'd be the whiny, man-flu type, but he once went to the E.R. with walking pneumonia without telling me, while we were roommates. I had no idea until he left the antibiotics on the bathroom counter.
"I did entertain the idea of running. Getting us set up in a different life, but… I've known him since I was seven years old. He slept with my wife, and I couldn't shut him out for a full year. But it would be so selfish. He's scared, Mer. He's never scared."
She turned and hugged him. "You can be the brave one for him, and whatever you need to be with me."
"That goes the same for you. Right now,I feel relieved that we didn't separate Zola and Sof before they're old enough to really be friends, but…I never want her to go through this."
"Me either, but one thing I know is that losing something is better than never having it."
They returned to the car a few minutes later, and he watched not the familiar Bainbridge streets, but her. This was the same woman he'd found ranting to herself and pacing a room in the house she'd mapped out with tea candles. She'd promised to try to trust him after he'd asked her to take him on faith, knowing that every word was a lie of omission. The truth had shattered the hope he'd seen in her eyes that night. He'd been so desperate to make up for it that he'd rushed her and blamed her skittishness when the cracks began to show. Not seeing the work she was doing until it was almost too late, or accepting that her complications were worth it; fhey'd made her into someone who challenged him, made him better.
In front of those flickering flames, he hadn't been sure he was worth it. Maybe that was why it'd worked. She'd doubted herself less, and he'd questioned himself more.
She parked at the curve of their drive and walked a few feet before stopping to hold her hand out exactly like the night he'd first brought her to the trailer.
"Big reveal time."
"You've seen it," he pointed out.
"Not since you were talking about giving it to Mark."
"Sell it to Mark."
She rolled her eyes and giggled. Had he heard that sound recently? He took her hand.
When their lives had interfered with his ability to put together a grand gesture, she'd taken it on herself.
He hoped she saw his pride in his face
"You and Lexie both tried to tell me who you were with details. Remember? She gave me five. You gave me fifteen," she added, softly kicking gravel to the side. He jerked his eyes back to their path. The trees were nothing like the ones in Iowa; their branches full of leaves, and letting the warmth flow through.
"One," she said, and he jerked his head up. "By junior high I had all the top ten scores on the Spider-man pinball machine at the Italian place down the street. I signed receipts Meredith Anne Grey, and the delivery guys still thought MAG was some cool dude named Magnus. Uh, one-and-a-half, the scoreboard was the same the last time I saw it, in the basement of the Somerville place."
He stopped to make sure he'd heard that right. "Sadie bought their machine?"
"She either really celebrated my birthday or totally ignored it."
And either was better than Ellis forgetting.
"Two. When I was traveling, I used scrubs as pajamas. Sometimes, I'd sneak out of wherever we were staying and wander the nearest hospital. Crossing authorized personnel lines was habit by then. In Naples, I got pulled into a room when they needed extra hands, and in a really busy E.R. in Montreal, some doctor shoved a kid at me and told me to stitch him up."
"Did you?"
"Of course! I was good, doubt he has a scar. But I wasn't doing it for that sort of thing. Hospitals were just… familiar. With the way Mom and I had fought, I wasn't sure…. They smelled like home.
"Three. On my AP lit exam, the prompt about happy endings that weren't, like weddings, or rescues. I wrote about Tess of the D'Urbervilles, and how bullshit that ending was, because she had nothing to repent for, and she should've been seething with rage, being not a martyr.
"Four. I got into a couple English-language med school programs in Italy. My Italian wasn't good enough for immersion; while I was studying there, I'd have been totally lost in the anatomy lectures I went to if I hadn't been sent to Latin classes like Jewish kids go to Hebrew school. That's actually five, I think….." She scowled, flustered for the first time in this speech.
While she mentally renumbered the next bullets on her list, Derek thought about everything else she'd given away. That Dartmouth hadn't been her only choice. That during the semester she claimed to have spent wasting her free time on Mediterranean beaches, she'd attended lectures in Italian, her third—Wait. It'd be second in fluency, but including Latin, and French in high school, fourth—language.
His Pre-K French had become middle-of-the-curve college French, thanks to a suitemate from a Francophone logging family.
"Okay, six. You know about my high school and college TV habits—"
"My So-Called Life, Buffy, and hate-watching 90210."
Something in her smile took him back to Halloween three years ago. Joe had threatened to refuse service to any hospital staff in a white coat or scrubs, and Meredith had surprised him by having a go-to: Buffy the Vampire Slayer. "I can pretty much dress however I want, if I can find something stake-shaped" she'd pointed out, twirling the "stake" she'd created at the trailer. "Once started sleeping with a bleach-blond guy in September so he'd go with me as Spike. Think I ended up stealing his leather duster."
She'd raised her head and narrowed her eyes, expecting something at the reference to an ex. They were married, but it'd been less than a year since they'd reunited for good. The flinch that had emerged after the stairwell hadn't disappeared, yet.
He hadn't been nearly as well-acquainted with the glint in her eyes when she was letting him in without compunction. it was bright, now. "Before all that, I was a latchkey dork. The Discovery Channel and I were close, and I expected high school to be like Degrassi. I saw every episode of Full House in grade school, and I don't know if I loved or hated it. I thought ending Dinosaurs with extinction was hilarious."
"Yeah, I didn't think Zola came up with 'I baby, gotta love Z,' on her own."
"No regrets." Meredith grinned. "I avoided Doogie Howser. He was what Mom wanted. She went nuts when patients tried to talk to her about E.R. or Chicago Hope. I put them on to irritate her. I might've once recorded over a lecture she kept rewatching with St. Elsewhere reruns."
"How'd that go?" he asked, mentally noting to tell Mark that one.
Meredith grimaced. "Badly. She needed to study the techniques; people would die, blah, blah, blah, grounded forever. I replaced it for her birthday. Not hard, it'd been filmed at Hopkins; I wrote to them on her stationary. She said I should've given it to her immediately on receipt.'"
He sighed. How many deaths had Ellis burdened her with, intentionally or not?
"She did…'like' is a strong word, but we'd watch Dr. Quinn sometimes. If she was home. In college, it was something to talk about that wasn't gonna get me lectured. Well, sometimes, but about medical accuracy, not my poor choices." They went around a curve and the house came into view. "Crap. That was…nine? My point was…was you can't just put the details out there, like you can't just have everything that goes in a house sitting around, because it'd be…useless. Maybe get warped. But we…we've built the house, and we can put all the pictures on the wall we want. Not literally, that gets tacky—"
Derek held his arm up, spinning her into him and catching her fingers with his other hand. "You think 'maiden' name is an archaic concept. You have two sisters. One niece. You like strawberry ice cream, you drink tequila, and you hustle guys at darts and pool. You dance whenever you can. You read the new Teresa Hobbes book every year. Favorite novel? Was The Hours until Mark gave you Wicked—but you say you're not into fantasy."
"I'm not!"
He raised an eyebrow. Maybe if you only looked at what she read as an adult: Atwood. Eugenides. Sexton. Sure, the shelves that held the books saved for Zola held well-thumbed Blumes and Clearys, with different covers than the ones that had covered the arms of his mom's furniture over two generations. There were also Pierces. De Lints. L'Engles—"That's science fiction, Derek!"—Wynne that she'd once been a little kid looking for an escape.
"Favorite band? Depends on your mood, but Teagan & Sara have a lot of your 'Most Played' slots. Favorite color is that shade of fuchsia that complements your eyes.
"If anyone needs an organ drawn, they come to you, because you learned to draw from your mom's Netters. You've watched A Knight's Tale at least ten times and it still makes you laugh." He wished he remembered how he'd tied off the list of carefully-picked details that had both been true and fit the image of a single, slightly enigmatic guy. He hadn't done a great job of taking her on faith in the past year. All he could come up with was, "Five years ago, you said you didn't have a story. That wasn't quite right. Your story is still in process, and I'm honored to be a part of it."
"Derek…." She wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him in lieu of more words. Her chin quavered slightly under his lips, and the sun through the leaves made her eyes glimmer more than most of the times they'd stood in this spot.
He'd expected emptiness, and in an open floor plan, with the majority of their furniture in the house they were using, he got plenty. But there'd been pieces they'd bookmarked for this place ages ago, and others for wherever they ended up. Their appearance made him think of the point-and-click magic of early dot-com commercials, everything appearing assembled and positioned exactly where he'd pictured it.
"You said you hadn't been here," he challenged.
"And I haven't," she said, sauntering over to the fridge and opening it confidently. "Alex has other friends. Guys from Joe's, and that youth wrestling group he got his Big Brothers kid into. Told me they'd be in to help us move for real, too. Think he's hoping he can bring them together enough to close the gap he's leaving."
"Huh. I didn't think about that. He's been doing it a while."
"Mm, he signed up for it after Aaron visited. Kid was about the age he'd been was when Alex left for college. He's graduated, now. Not that it'll make it easier." Meredith swung two L.L. Bean bags onto the counter. "Okay, we should—yeah."
She unloaded bags from the bagel place by the dock. There were containers of spreadables, but she put his usual order in front of him already fixed. She was constantly trying to the balance letting him figure out how to work with eighty percent and not making everything into OT. The challenge for him was in not taking his frustration out on her. He'd done that after the shooting, and it'd definitely made it easier for her to hide her own feelings.
The bottle of champagne made an echoing thump on the granite, and she produced orange juice and two plastic flutes along with it. "If we send your family a registry for glassware and other shit I don't wanna shop for, how much would I regret it? Furnishing the place isn't going to bankrupt us—I'd say I'd like to see what could, but that's asking for it—but even with the pity discount I can't talk Amar out of, it would've been nice if we'd known we needed wheelchair accessibility earlier."
"I'm just glad we got him back on board this quickly."
"Especially, since he's the first contractor in the universe who won't take more money."
"He can't resist you."
"Ew, he's sixty-seven! And married."
Derek raised his eyebrows, but only for a second. She could be prickly about being cast as a homewrecker, even though they both knew she wasn't. "I couldn't blame him." He placed a kiss on the side of her mouth. "You're irresistible."
She swallowed visibly, before swatting at his chest. "Pity. Discount. He told me he does a lot of access remodels pro bono. His cousin had polio as a kid. Parents brought him over from Benglidash in the eighties. Uses a vent and a puff and sip chair. He has a Ph.D in engineering. Amar said he'd never have been able to get it if he hadn't happened upon people who knew people who knew what was available, and how to fund it. Now, he's inventing what's out there, and keeping people from being priced out is half the game. The other is dealing with service providers." She sighed, turning to put her forehead on his shoulder. "If we sue, it'll take ages. If we don't, Lexie will have to deal with insurance, and pay out-of-pocket for anything more than the minimum, and I don't care how stubborn she is, she's getting my pocket, too. I can sell Mom's house; I almost never touch the residuals from the book….
"Sorry. This isn't…. It just reminds me of the research I did before we knew everything about Zo…. I'm not…I know Lexie might not be able to keep going in her residency, or might not want to, but imagine a kid thinking it's impossible because no one around them has thought to reshape a pair of pick-ups!"
He could, easily. He remembered minute increases in eye-tracking devices; the programs that put Michael last on their list because his level of function didn't allow him to make full use of their tech. Making calls parroting Mrs. Boetcher, "Doesn't that mean he needs it the most?"
"Don't be sorry," he told Meredith. "We're not gonna pretend we're not thinking about them, okay? As for pockets, tell Stan—No," he interrupted himself. "I'll tell Stan to okay anything Amar asks for. See if he'll let us fund one of his pro bono projects later on."
"Stan's gonna start sending you his therapy bills."
"I pay them already." She laughed, and it was as enchanting as it had been five years ago. "If we start asking my sisters to buy waffle-makers, they'll bring them in person. Don't worry, we're nowhere close to having to touch Zola's college fund."
"Good, because a dancer puppy doctor is going to need a lot of training."
"Is that a doctor for dancing puppies, or is she planning to transform?"
"Unclear." She wrapped a towel around the neck of the bottle, and pressed fully against him before she leaned to hold it over the sink. "Want to help me with this?"
"Mm." Derek couldn't resist putting his lips on the curve of her neck while she spoke; the light was making her freckles too distracting. "You've got it." Her laughter echoed through the front of the house, as bubbly as the foam that poured out over her hand. "Huzzah."
"Hey," she protested, as he wrangled the bottle from her. "I'm the bartender in this family." He had a hunch she'd been great behind a bar with her quick hands and empathic bedside manner.
"Not today. Today, you are Seattle Grace's most promising new talent."
"As long as you're not pulling a Cristina." It was the sort of thing she'd have said to Cristina—or would she? He'd never heard them talk about the time Yang tried to find a different vocation.
He held the orange juice out to her, and she levered the seal out of the spout. "No, I doubt mixologist is in my future."
Was there anything else that would satisfy him?
She swiped the cloth across the drops of champagne, and then tossed it over her shoulder. He grinned; if that'd once been a barmaid move, it was a mommy one now. "We can ban thinking of other jobs," she said. "We both have our first day at a new job tomorrow."
Technically, his title hadn't changed. Only his job description had been remodeled, just like the house.
He toasted her with his mimosa. "To it being as monumental as the original."
He wasn't sure he'd ever be able to describe all she'd changed that day. Making him want to teach, reminding him that he didn't know everything, that every patient was different, and you never knew when the unthinkable would happen.
He'd wanted to kiss her across that first OR table at the sight of the sparkle in her eyes, and fantasized about the smile on lips he'd had almost no chance of being able to kiss again. His imagination had nothing on the reality.
He put his flute down next to their bagels and propelled her to the nearest corner. She made a show of squawking when he hoisted her onto the counter, but had clearly read his signals, jumping for him to boost her.
"We've got food," she protested, setting her emptied flute down by the faucet. "It's got that cream cheese you like."
He reached over, running a finger along the edge of his bagel, and dotted what came off onto the tip of her nose. Her squeal at having it licked off reminded him of Zola. If she hadn't been on their porch that day, this might be a wholly different moment, but she had, and her existence had shown him more facets of Meredith.
"Great minds," she murmured.
"Hmm?"
"You think I filled two bags with bagels?" She twisted her legs behind him. "What day is it, Derek?"
"Our anniversary."
She arched her head back to the ceiling. Her shirt dipped down far enough for him to trace her clavicle with his lips, which he set about doing. "That makes tomorrow?"
"July." She tugged him up by his hair; it was getting unruly, but the barber's shop seemed like a waste of time away from the hospital. "Intern day."
"And tonight?"
"You…you're kidding."
She sighed. "Unfortunately not. Morale, bonding, I dunno, Owen put Richard in charge of it. He hasn't talked to you?"
"He may've said something," he admitted. Richard's enthusiasm for mingling was be embarrassing enough when the one time you avoided it hadn't become hospital lore. If he heard him say "mixer" he tended to tune out, and so, he'd assumed, did Meredith. "What does that have to do with us?"
"I wish I could say 'nothing,'" she said, smoothing her hands over his back. "But you're keeping your job. I have interns. Our head of plastics is in the ICU. Chief's wife is in a bed on the floor. Our most charming peds surgeon is under Callie's observation, and Callie is the ortho department, let's be real. We can't afford for the interns to apply for transfers by Friday. We're going to show up, parade Zo around, since no one thought to extend daycare hours, and tomorrow they'll have no reason to ask me personal questions. Meanwhile, there's still painters plastic upstairs, I brought our dress clothes, and I want my big reveal."
"You're…." Knees and boobs…spreadables. "Mer, how much in that bag is from Fantasy UnLtd?"
"Plenty," she said, running her tongue over the front of her teeth. "They gave me a lot of free lube. And condoms, but I think those can go to the break room bowl."
He stood enough to be fully on her level, sliding his good hand under her shirt. "Yeah?"
"Not like that means anything."
"Nothing definite," he agreed. "But it's not uncommon to get pregnant once you stop trying."
"I've never had an accidental pregnancy. Statistically—"
"Never tell me the odds." He said it without thinking, focused on getting her squirming on the counter.
She didn't flinch. The sigh she did emit was followed by, "I'm saying I can't promise."
"You're not going back on the Pill? You hate your period."
"So do billions of women. It's not that bad. I don't pass out anymore." Those two sentences weren't equivalent to him. She obviously didn't want this to be a big deal, but he couldn't pretend her willingly passing up the chance to avoid the misery she went through most months was nothing.
"It's your first year—"
"In the off, off-chance something happens, won't it be easier before I have a lot of my own patients?"
"That's a consideration."
"And I won't have any projects going on. It's not going to happen, anyway."
"If it did?" He circled his left index finger on her thigh.
"We might have Lexie downstairs for a while, which could make one bedroom your study. Cristina gets the corner mother-in-law suite. There's still…There's a lot of bedrooms left over, and we aren't putting Zola in the nursery."
That was true. Zola's room was across the hall from theirs; attached to a second bedroom via a Jack and Jill bathroom. The nursery was on the other side of the master, in the hope that a baby's cries would disturb the residents of those rooms less.
"Technically, the attached room is Sofia's" she said, her breath moving onto his neck. "But I doubt that's ever gonna be a concern."
"We'd find them asleep in the bathroom." She chuckled at that, but there was something heavy in the pull of her arms around his neck. He pulled her closer, and then kissed her for long he almost forgot what he needed to say. "There are other routes we can take to fill those bedrooms."
Meredith nodded, her eyes drifting over his shoulder, probably to a window. It was unusual not to be able to picture exactly what she was seeing. "I'm not ready for that. We shouldn't let our foster license lapse, because…because who knows? But…we can be happy like this." She kissed him as punctuation, and started unbuttoning his shirt.
He regretted deciding to start dressing for work again, and was also glad he'd done it. Without being able to see her in action as much, he took every opportunity to watch her fingers in action. A microcosm of her. With the conversation done, he let his hands go further up her torso.
"Was this part of your purchase?" he asked, working his fingers under the cups of the front clasping bra. He tested the mechanism without drawing it far enough to unhook, grazing up to her nipple with the side of his hand.
"No," she said, the denial a single huff of breath. "It's why I went shopping. Needed new ones, and the style makes it easier for you to do…that." She sighed again as he popped the clasp. "I got my dress for tonight, and a few things to give off the whole 'tending surgeon' vibe. I tried to get Callie to come. She needed a break, and she says I dress like I shopped my mom's closet. She went with Cristina that time…."
She kissed him before she'd fully trailed off, and he gentled it, slightly. Retail therapy did seem to be one of Yang's things, or she'd tried to make it one. That was what the story of her dollar-store spree while Meredith was being revived sounded like to him.
It took a minute or so for Meredith to lean back and admit, "Lexie's my shopping person."
Thinking of them pounding upstairs with their mouths colored by Orange Juliuses, he smoothed her hair back and kissed the lines between her eyes. "I know."
"I'm glad we're not running."
"Me, too," he said, and if it wasn't a hundred percent true, he believed it would be. "Gives us time for this." He disengaged the buttons on her trousers. "Get those off," he instructed. "Then, you can have your breakfast." He put her bagel down beside her and refilled her mimosa.
"What about you?"
"I have other plans."
She squirmed against the counter, and then followed his directions. "Mmm," he murmured, into her open legs. "Strawberry."
"Why is that hot?" The last word of her complaint became a moan. "It wouldn't be hot for me to say I'd put your jizz on a bagel, or it tastes like cream cheese. But— Oh, oh, yeah, that." She curled her fingers in his hair. With his hands rendered unnecessary, he'd made sure no part of her mind would be on which was where; if she was putting too much weight on him, or encouraging a motion he shouldn't repeat.
If he'd shaved, or she hadn't, he might've kept going after the second time her grip tightened as she thrust her pelvis up to him, her head thumping lightly against the cupboard. It was far too early in the day to risk giving her beard burn.
Hours later, they were in the car again, driving off the ferry into Seattle. She smiled softly at him, her cheeks still wind-kissed. "Nine-ish: When I was little, I decided that as a grown-up, I'd ride the ferry every day."
"Crossing the Charles isn't nearly as exciting, I'll give you that," he commented, and her lips started to go down. "I love our house, Mer. I can't wait to live in it with you and Zo. It wasn't ever that I wanted to leave Seattle."
"You're genetically engineered to hate anywhere that isn't Manhattan."
He crooked his left index finger to reposition the flyaways she'd left out of her updo. "I'd hate anywhere without you."
"There's probably more Boston in me than Seattle…."
"And I'd love to see it through your eyes, but if I thought it'd get some sort of magical Meredith insight, I'd have hopped a red-eye years ago."
She laughed, and his eyes were caught by late-afternoon light hitting the earrings he'd given her the morning after she'd passed the boards. Her eyes had been brighter than the diamonds, even under the glaze of fever.
"Harvard would've been a good job."
"Too good, maybe," he said, and he could almost see the cartoon question marks in her eyes. "I have two jobs no matter what. Being Zo's dad, and your husband. I don't want to let anything take away from that. I really did just want to support your future. There's more to that than work.
"Earlier, when you were talking about why we made certain choices…. The Brig would've been Addison's best choice for residency. Manhattan Gen was ranked pretty low for OB."
"And look who she'd become."
"It didn't make the list for neurology. None of the New York hospitals did. They didn't even rank neurosurgery, then."
"You surmounted that obstacle, Sent them skyrocketing up the charts all on your own."
"That's what I'll tell the interns," he agreed. "Really, we had our Match the year Amy was supposed to start college. Mom and I thought it'd be best for someone to be close to her…. Addison was the one who insisted she needed a chance to be on her own. Mom had watched her so much more closely than the four of us….it must've seemed like she was in trouble from the start, she might as well earn the attention. It didn't make sense to me, especially when she OD'd and ended up having to defer a year.
"We loved New York. She did. We spent time off with my family; it wasn't long before the girls and I rented the vacation house upstate to hold them all…. And yeah, look what she'd become."
Addison had met his high school exes, and even that hadn't felt as easy as mentioning her to Meredith. Again, he recalled the flinch. Those of her ex-or-whatevers he'd met didn't make for casual. He knew he could be blamed for a lot of that, but he wanted that ease for her. They'd gotten long past the point of her experiences before him coming up while they'd originally discussed trying something new, and he didn't know how to bring it up. "Hey, about the other guys you met at Joe's!" was cringeworthy, likely to be taken the wrong way, and only represented a few months of her sex life.
She knew about everyone he'd been with. Really, the main thing she didn't know about was Whit—God, hockey nicknames. Boetcher hadn't even been made captain when they'd started quoting that damn poem at him—and that was a completely different type of story.
"You sure you don't want to just cross the street?" he asked in the hospital parking lot. The asymmetrical cut of her skirt revealed a glimpse of her calf with every step, but when she stopped and spun to face him, he noticed that it hid the thin line on the opposite leg.
She put a hand on the hip she'd cocked under her dress. It had a deep purple with a plunging neckline, nothing like the black cocktail dress he'd last seen from across the room last year. He couldn't imagine being that close to losing her—leaving her.
"No," she said, firmly enough to surprise him. "I want to go in there, introduce myself as an attending, and show off my hot, neurosurgeon husband, and adorable baby, because I've damned well earned it."
She was gorgeous, and anyone who underestimated her they'd regret it.
He closed the distance between them, overlapping his hands on the bottom of the criss-cross back of her dress. There was still a thrill in kissing her in front of the hospital with all its windows reflecting sunlight down at them.
"Dr. Grey," he said. "You've given me the best five years of my life, and whatever the next five bring, they'll be fantastic, because I'll spend them with you. You are one of the most promising talents I've encountered. Seattle Grace is lucky to have you, but nowhere near as lucky as I am to be married to such an extraordinary woman."
She didn't contradict him, or lower her eyes, the way the intern he'd first met would have. She didn't check her smile, either, letting it take over her face. "I think you're pretty great, too," she said. "Happy anniversary." With that, she linked their hands and strode toward the door.