Light shone beyond Meredith's eyelids, and the chill she felt was the result of losing the heat of Derek's breath against her neck as he moved his chin to her shoulder. Their voices had been the only sounds in the room since the melody of Zola's music-box petered out.
Lexie was screaming. She must be. She'd screamed every night for a week. In pain. In grief. For her mom. For Mark. Meredith's initial perception of Lexie as translucent hadn't been accurate. From the time Meredith had accidentally poisoned her with breakfast food, she'd held in her emotions. It'd taken the possibility of Mark's moving on to show the cracks. Meredith thought she'd learned to be there for her. The nightmares, the psych ward, the weeks in her hospital room. It hardly mattered. Mark was gone. Lexie screamed and screamed and—
"Hey, you. Let me see your eyes."
They were home. Derek's chest was pressed to her back.
"Not that flexible."
"Shenanigans." Derek tugged a handful of her hair, and she let it pull for a second before meeting his eyes. She was fully there in her body, could feel more than the guilt-uncertainty-fear. "Boo."
"Not funny."
"Mmhmm." He pressed his nose against hers. "Zola says the same thing. I got 'no' funny, Daddy' last week. Any idea where she got that?"
"She's a smart kid."
"Mmhmm. Tells us what she's thinking," he added.
"Rude. I just—I…The debris field. It was that big?" His eyes darkened, but he kissed her before she could take the question back, and then slid his thumb onto her lower lip.
"It looked…different, without the trees. More mechanical, but I thought…if it'd been a body with that much damage…. We'd still be in that M&M."
"You thought right. I'm with you. I'm with you," she repeated, because once he'd appeared in the conference room, so sure that they should sue, she'd been sure that whatever he said, she'd be for it. She'd seen the look that meant he'd found something to fix, It wouldn't matter what some judge decided. That would be out of his control. What mattered was that he'd fight. "But I wasn't."
"Mer—"
"I wasn't. If you were that far away…and I believe you, that you heard me, because stranger freaking philosophy things, Horatio, but Lexie…. Her sensory scores are good, she knows it, and…she…she keeps saying she can't…can't feel anything…and I know…I know…." She folded her lips, and the pull of her canine tooth against her skin drew her words out of their spiral. "She means him. She can't feel him. I don't understand why we're different. I don't understand why I can talk to you. Only Owen could get through to Cristina, but then she left, and Arizona Robbins is shutting Callie out—not even April and Jackson can get it together—but we…we found each other."
"Mer…."
"I should just…just be grateful, and stop questioning, but…."
He pressed his lips the curve of her neck."You should never, ever stop asking questions," he said, his voice mostly vibrations against her skin. "There are so many answers I'd never have gotten to without your questions. I truly believe some part of me was lost until I met you. I don't believe anyone's love is less than, but it's all different. And there have been times…." She felt him swallow, and wanted to turn to him again, but he had her pinned with his chin on one shoulder and his arm over the other. "There've been times you've yelled for me, and I haven't heard. I can't tell you what made this one different, but I can promise you something.
"Can you close your eyes, just for a minute?"
"Of course I—"
"Meredith."
"With the lights on, it's okay." She squeezed her eyes shut, the colors reminding her first of the explosion, and only secondarily of Peter Pan, which she'd read not understanding why anyone wouldn't want to grow up. "Okay."
"How do you know I'm here?"
"You're inside me, it'd be hard not to…." She trailed off. She'd spiraledwhile lowering herself onto him. It'd been too much to let herself have, when she shouldn't have let him talk her into coming home—Except, he'd needed her, and Zola did, and she couldn't remember how she'd made it all work after the shooting.
"Mer, c'mon."
"You made it too easy."
"Meredith."
"Okay, okay. I can feel you."
"Open your legs a little. There you go." His fingers slid directly into place on her clit. "Did I find you?"
"Yeah. Fuck that feels…."
"Good?" he suggested, moving them slowly, but pressing down too steadily for her to get used to it.
"More."
More than. More of. Just more.
"Let's see what else I can find."
She tried to snort but it came out wrong, the sound leaving her mouth as a moan instead of a nasal exhale. It didn't matter where he was, he filled her, sliding against her with the same rhythm his fingers were using to rub her clit. He nudged her forward, angling his hand to push her closer. "Where am I, Mer?"
"Everywhere…. With me. You have me, you-ohhh." She sagged forward catching herself on his angled knees as he bumped the spot again, and pushing up. "Faster. Gotta be—Der—agh!" She came with almost no warning, and she felt him notice—she felt him. He was there. They were alive—He didn't slow his pace. She used her hold on his legs as leverage to pump him until the second orgasm left her panting shaking sweating. He was still going, teasing the edges of her clit.
"You feel so good when you come, Mer. So good I never want you to let go. I want you to hold on forever. Let me be part of you."
"Yeah. You are. Always. Always." She groaned as he thrust into her again. "Found everything."
"Too far?"
"No. Never. Derek, you're so full. D'you need somethin' else?"
"Just you sweetheart. Feel that?" He tapped her clit, almost hard enough to hurt in another context, but her nerves were too busy to relay pain. The ensuing smirk was cut but in his chuckle.
Goddamn cock ring made him so…there was a word that wasn't "cocky" but she couldn't find it; could believe he'd pushed it right out of her head.
"Yeah. You do. You've got another in ihere." The tips of the fingers on his left hand stroked her spine unexpectedly, and the sensation glided down into her cunt, a reversal that became a circuit as he brushed them up and down."We're gonna find it for you."
The rough velcro of the brace tickled the skin of her back adding an edge to the shivers that coursed through her. Derek's cock was twitching every time she clenched, and she twisted her hips trying to hit from all directions. Derek brought his left arm around to her thigh and angled the other to box her in.
"Stay with me, baby." His voice was gravelly, and the strain was in his fingers, in all the muscles under her. She planted her palms on his knees, rocking a grunt out of him.
"Don't wait, Der. Please just—please just—unh, fuck, I'm—Der, jus—"
"You're so close, Mer. Can't give in now." He pushed two fingers against her retracting clit. "There you are. I always know when you're coming. Why's that?"
"You...you...always—oh, oh fuck yes, 'Cause…c-ah-cause…I-I-I dunno. You find me. You're…with me." His next thrust made her eyes roll back even under her lids. "Fuck yes. You too. Come with me. C'mon. C'mon. Cuh—ohhhh."
They were alive. So alive she couldn't stand it. Every nerve she had was synapsing, firing contradictory neurons that blasted the tension through her body. Her back arched and her arms extended as she howled with it. Derek was coming he was there inside her coming inside her she could feel him coming for her DerekDerekDerek.
His arm came up to catch her shoulders as her muscles all let go at once, and she oozed backward onto his heaving chest.
"Think you can sleep now, love?"
She couldn't think, couldn't be sure she was breathing until he moved his hand down, tweaking her nipple. She jolted off of him, rolling into the crook of his other arm.
"Whoa, hey, let's not give me matching hands here," he joked pulling away as she slammed her legs together.
"Still not funny."
He touched the crest of her hip with exaggerated caution. She didn't acknowledge it, just breathed him in as the residual sensation in her cunt resolved. He nudged her forehead with his lips, following up by kissing her temple and then her eyelids.
"Whaaat?"
"I'm here. I love you. As long as I can, I will always find you."
It was an impossible promise to keep, but one she wanted so badly to believe that she could almost let herself. He'd pulled her out of the water; he'd survived the gunshot; he'd found her in that mess of debris and foliage. The unlikelihood of each of those made them seem less likely overall. (She would not run that by her baby sister, the math major.)
His eyes closed, but he kept messing with the hair at the back of her neck. She could tell he was close to falling asleep. The words slipped out anyway. "It's like, I hear her, but I don't know how to get to her."
She pressed her mouth against the skin of her arm. Equidistant between the elbow flexor, where Lexie had full range of motion, and the wrist, where she didn't.
"Me either," he admitted. "But she's here. Zola has her mom and dad, and her Aunt Lexie. Sofia didn't lose two parents. Cristina's doing okay."
Meredith still felt uncertain about bringing up her best friend when not even a month had passed since Mark died, but he'd introduced the topic. "She went to a mall."
"The Mall of America is a little different than Westlake," he said, smiling.
"She went on the rollercoaster." The smile slipped a little. "Yeah. She said, um, it felt similar, in some ways, but that sense that you could die that makes it a rush, was pretty much gone, because she knew she wouldn't; it wasn't designed by a multimillionaire psychopath.
"I never loved the feeling of free fall. Not without a parachute. I'm more freaked out by the idea of being alone in the woods, and I wasn't. She…."
Meredith had almost let him convince her that her cuts and bruises meant anything in comparison to how everyone else was battered; then, she'd heard it all again from the suits, and no. Limping for a week or two was nothing. A couple headaches with no signs of damage were negligible; nothing about the risk of multiple concussions changed that. If she ever got ECS dementia, they'd call it Alzheimer's.
"She's talking to Owen."
"That's…more than they were doing lasts year."
Meredith paused. She hadn't thought of that. Owen and Cristina had been having distraction-sex rather than discussing the abortion.
"What do…what do you think about him bringing Kepner back?"
"I can't cast stones."
"Yeah, but that was…. She didn't deserve to be fired for an oversight like that. And I'm not saying she deserved…just, you know what he's like. If she goes all 'Oh, Chief Hunt' on him with Cristina gone…." Derek raised an eyebrow. "Seriously! She failed her boards because she screwed Jackson, which isn't all that unlike Geo—"
"Kepner and Avery?"
"I didn't tell you? Yeah. He and I have always been weirdly parallel. Our single moms were the kind of rivals who kiss cheeks in public and comment on each other's dresses in the cab, because they couldn't actually criticize their skills—and women in similar positions can't be friends…. Anyway, that. He was Mark's guy; I was…with you. His mom banged Richard—"
That proved to be the correct order to say things in, like she'd planned it and wasn't just tossing out observations. Derek's face went through enough contortions that it almost made up for not having been in a position to see him finish.
"Wha…? How—? No, don't…. When?"
"At the boards. I don't know the exact order of things, I was having fever dreams about finding my mom in the exam room, or someone saying that I couldn't pass because I got a C in eleventh grade physics…." There'd been others while she sweated out the fluids she'd later wish she'd had in her purse on that plane. They weren't anything she wanted to revisit with Derek's thumb moving soothingly over her shoulder, and Zola sleeping soundly in her room. "Apparently, he saw something in Catherine's room that I'm sure he hoped was a fever dream, he and Kepner screwed, and—"
"I'm gonna preempt you saying he broke her by pointing out you did not break O'Malley, as that tends to slip your steal-trap mind."
"Fine, but I'm why he failed his boards. That he was too caught up in me having a parent-related breakdown…. I'm just saying, shouldn't potential trauma surgeon's ability to work well under pressure translate to exams?"
"Exams are a lot more personal," he pointed out. "I'm no trauma surgeon, and none of my sisters are, so I don't have as much insight here. That's something in itself, I think. Both Kepner and O'Malley started off with less trauma of their own. Fewer associations. That could make it easier to compartmentalize. The speed makes it harder to get wrapped up in a patient's story. For someone like Kepner, whose religion tells her to treat people equally, but whose life has left her sheltered, that's a good position. O'Malley was great at keeping patients calm, and the further from Iraqi he gets, the more even-keeled Hunt's proving to be."
"We don't know what Hunt was like before Iraq…." she acknowledged. "Only that the fiancée seemed like a weird match. But he came back messed up, and…how do you recommend that someone go through that? Someone even-keeled, and sweet, who'd just had the most traumatic year of his life?"
"I don't know, love. My dad sure as hell didn't want it for us, and I've never seen Mom as angry as she was when she found out Mark was talking to a recruiter." He was quiet for a moment, and then asked, "Do you think Jackson told him about Kepner?"
She pushed up slightly to take in the mix of emotions on his face. "No, despite Mark's best efforts, he still thinks kissing and telling his mentor is weird. I think you could totally have held lorded your knowledge over him."
"Good."
Meredith settled against him again and put her hand on his cheek. He kissed her, and the brush of his stubble against her mouth and fingers made her want to throw her leg over him again and stop the worries already cycling in her brain.
"Lexie's alone in the woods. Like Cristina was. Alone…but not. We…We have to love her enough."
Derek moved a piece of hair out of her face and toyed with the shell of her ear. "You are doing that. Just keep showing her, until she's ready to feel it."
"You have experience, huh?"
"No idea what you mean."
She laughed. "I always felt it. In the O.R…." She glanced away from his expectant expression, and her gaze went to the red lines on the monitor.
"Mer?"
"Incoming," she determined.
She was still wrangling on her pajamas when the door opened. Derek won the golden ticket by picking the toddler up right before she proclaimed, "Dirty, Daddy."
"Now she's funny," Meredith noted.
Zola blew a raspberry against her hand and giggled in confirmation.
Meredith swiped her phone off the bedside table to check on Lexie via Alex. Her screen lit up, and seeing Miranda's name above the text made the warmth flood out of her body all over again. Lexie?
MIRANDA BALEY: I don't know who or what you're doing, but I've had about enough of kepner for tonight. Check your pager.
"Huh."
"What?" Derek asked. "Oh, thank you, Zo."
"Big help," Zola agreed, unsticking the tab on the right side of her diaper, too.
"I'm losing my marbles."
"You are not."
"I'm getting brain plaque."
"I don't think—"
Meredith raked her hand through her hair, frantically scrolling through to her PDF of the rotation schedule. "Lorinda Claric was clinically diagnosed with Alzheimer's at thirty-two in '09. You're not even gonna get a journal article out of onset at thirty-three."
"Zo-Zo, can you tell Mama to back up a little?"
"Helping," Zola countered, smacking her palm down on the tab of her new diaper, and then frowning. "Hurt." Her chin quivered.
"Next time, let Pasky handle that," Derek suggested, repeating the action softly with the toy she'd brought in.
"He flipper."
"He can flipple it, sure," he agreed. Zola perched her fingertip on her lower lip and gave him a look. Yeah, baby, Meredith thought. He says the dumb stuff to distract you. Took me longer to figure that out.
Her phone buzzed in her hand.
MIRANDA BAILEY: never mind, schedule says you were here last night. guess I missed you in the multiple MVA madhouse. You can't miss the other one. Karev calls it the Kepner effect. When she's here, she's everywhere.
Love on that baby for me.
Multiple MVAs? Meredith read the text over again, trying to filter out Miranda's tone. She was always touchy when was with his dad; especially when Ben's absence had her taking forty-eights to visit more. "That's weird. I'm calling Owen."
There was still a message notification waiting for her, and thinking it could be him, she opened it to find additions to her conversation with Cristina instead.
CRISTINA YANG: pause
or wake up, whatever.
owen says ur not in surgery
r u with Lex?
ask 3 if she thinks I shld bang Parker.
that's how she makes male friends right?
PAUSE already
MEREDITH: don't.
ofc I'm not in surgery. I was on call last night. I called u after that lady w/the popping implant
Cristina.
Pause
PAUSE!
STOP BANGING PARKER
"Dammit."
Zola's chin appeared on her knee, her sleep cap smooth against her arm. "Grown-up do silly?"
"Aunt Cristina is doing someone silly," she responded. "Hooking up with the boss.… Haven't we learned you can't start over?"
"You did," Derek said, wrapping up the diaper.
"We did," she repeated, taking the bundle and putting her hand in its place. "Screwing the boss worked out for me." Well. Not the boss part. "This isn't what she wants. She wants Owen to want her. Parker…. She's not stupid, she has to see the Burke of it all, and l…. Who am I to say what she needs?" Derek moved to sit across for her, holding her wrists. "Don't!" she exclaimed in response to the trembling she could feel in his grip. "Sorry."
"You have every right to tell me not to do something unnecessary. I hear you. I'll let go in a second.
"You're Cristina's best friend. That doesn't mean she'll listen to you, any more than you always listen to her. All you can do is what you're doing; reminding her that you're there for her."
"As soon as she was capable, she took off."
"Which makes that a decision made in the midst of acute trauma. It might work out for her; she was headed for Mayo before it happened, right?"
"Does that mean you think…? When she married Owen…I thought they'd work out."
"They still might. Maybe they just need some distance."
"Maybe." Meredith looked over to Zola, who'd wiggled into her spot in their bed, Pasky serving as her pillow. She remembered the weight of her at seven months, babbling happily back at Meredith as she'd panicked about the social workers who wanted to take her. More than anything had in years, it'd put her in the mindset where all she could feel was a buzzing under her skin, and her thoughts had been moving in jumpy spirals. There'd been too much. Derek, the trial, Zola, Richard, Adele, Alex, the social worker, Zola, Zola, Zola.
The baby's watchful eyes had stayed latched on hers, and she'd grabbed Meredith's nose, her thin fingers teaching Meredith that nostril pinches could, in fact, be painful. For the next few hours, she'd kept her focus entirely on Zola. Zola rocking on all fours on the gurney, so close to crawling; Zola shrieking in delight whenever a stale snack fell down into the vending machine pick-up box; Zola grinning as Meredith voiced her giraffe. ("Waaah, don't bite me! Wow, look at those teeth coming through! Owie. You can bite me if it helps.")
It'd only been once the baby began rubbing her eyes and tossed her teething keys almost to the vending machines that the situation came back to her. She'd run to grab them, and immediately her chest had seized with panic that Zola would fall off of the gurney; they'd never determine Meredith a fit parent, and the whole marriage thing was apparently important, so Derek wouldn't be able to—Zola had yanked her hair with one hand and her wrist with the other in pursuit of her keys. Meredith had also presented her with a pacifier, and laid on the gurney with her until she went to sleep. While she watched lashes flutter, the word "storge" had come to her from some class a decade ago; the Greek concept of natural, instinctual affection, familial love. There were other connotations, but it gave her a word for something that felt stronger than "mother love."
She stroked Zola's leg under the blankets. A year ago, she'd kept herself going with memories of that day, which hurt as much as it soothed. The fear was abstract, now, had been active, and she wouldn't have hesitated to say she'd trade her job for Zola.
(She had).
She hadn't deserved this gorgeous baby. She'd unwittingly betrayed her at the same time she'd betrayed Derek, and everything in her life turned into a disaster. Zola wouldn't remember this, or her first night home, but there was no way they'd be the end of the trend. The universe might've had the right idea in keeping her barren. But Zola was her baby, and she would fight for her, openly. She wouldn't force her to be a voyeur to her mother's pain.
"I'm going to take this to the raccoon trash," she said, putting down the balled up diaper to wrap her hair into a messy twist. "And then go through that packet the social worker gave us."
"Mer—"
"I said I'd pass it on to Thatcher on Sunday. I'll bookmark the ones with webpages, and copy the others. Won't take more than half an hour."
He glanced at the clock. "If you do finish that quickly, take something, okay? It's my turn to tell you that you're going to collapse if you keep going at this pace."
"I appreciate the attempt to catch me before I fall."
He said something about not wanting it to be an attempt, but she tuned him out to kiss Zola goodnight and drink in the reality of her. Her scent of baby shampoo and body butter, the small wuffing sighs, the warmth she gave off. She melted the ice in Meredith by existing.
The house was in flux, to say the least, but she'd claimed one of the living room chairs, dragging it, and an end table to the front corner of the living room to serve as a desk. She slipped the rubber band off of the stack of information on spinal cord rehabilitation centers and slid it idly onto her wrist before she stated flipping through. Midway, she came across Roseridge.
She gasped into the silence, and almost tossed it away, frisbee style, to disappear into one of the boxes around the room. Then, she noticed the picture. It wasn't the same building. A quick skim revealed that the care home's complex had expanded, and in addition to the Home for Extended Care, now housed a rehabilitation program. Their focus was on Activities of Daily Living and occupational therapy, for the benefit of—so said their brochure—community reintegration.
Funny. That was the last thing Mom had wanted.
She'd thought she'd been hallucinating the day she'd heard her mother shouting in the Seattle Grace hallways, and as she'd pressed against the wall, it'd all been echoed by "she shouldn't be in here!" just like the when she was a child.
Mom screaming, crying, screaming. Lexie screaming, her tears dammed up. Cristina screaming, sobbing, silent, and Meredith standing there, helpless. Maybe she'd overestimated her skills at sisterhood. Eventually, everyone shut down, or cut her off. She stayed, let them call her angry and bitter, because sharp, swift slashes sometimes made it possible to feel one thing, not the all-encompassing weight of everything.
The snap of the rubber band against her wrist brought her back to the screen of her laptop, and the warm yellow lights of her house that drove away anything lurking in the dark. She finished her task without internalizing anything about the facilities. Lexie would be inpatient another few weeks until her ostomy could be reversed. Meredith would make her a spreadsheet or something when the time came.
She restacked the papers, and scanned the area for the article on tendon transfer she'd brought home. She'd started reading it in Lexie's room last night, a vibrating alarm set on the phone in her lap to shift her every two hours. It'd felt like she'd had to put it down every two minutes. Aside from the popped double-Ds, she'd touring the floor most of the night; with Murphy appearing constantly in the doorway.
She stopped plowing through her bag for the copy she'd made from the Journal of Spinal Cord Medicine and thought through the previous night. She'd gone to the pit once Derek and Zola left to catch what she could to get through a few hours, but after the implants she'd been pulled in to oversee a resident's emergency ex-lap. Alex had been leaving Lexie's room for a consult he'd said he might call her in on, but an hour later he'd said they weren't going in until morning. From that point, it'd been all Leah: pain control, a post-op fever, an emergency transfusion. She hadn't been paged downstairs again.
Bailey said the E.R. was a madhouse.
Meredith wasn't a trauma surgeon, but when she was on-call in the pit, Kepner was supposed to be running the E.R., giving marching orders; moving into the OR herself only if there was limited staff, in which case a resident would step into her place. Meredith should've have been paged.
She closed her laptop to go upstairs and find out if Derek had theories. A Post-it had been stuck to the lid.
THE RESEARCH FAIRY HAS CONFISCATED YOUR ARTICLE. GO TO BED.
She rolled her eyes. There were dozens of others she could read online, and a strain of petulance in her wanted to do that; maybe by taking her laptop and settling in one the chairs in their bedroom. If it wouldn't have woken Zola, she might have. Instead, she swiped the note, and when she got upstairs, stuck it to the prescription bottle with Miranda as the prescribing physician. 1 she wrote below his message. Total: 25.
He and Zola were both asleep on their backs with one hand above their heads, until Meredith got in bed, and Derek rolled toward her. His arm stretched out over both of them. She was facing him; he didn't wake up. He felt her.
Somewhere, people were screaming. Maybe people she loved, but she was here. She was home. She'd go back to searching through the woods in the morning.
Derek couldn't keep himself out of the galleries. At first, it was just neuro. Nelson's basic procedures, textbook to the point of being dull. Ramsey, with whom he'd had to spend hours consulting before every procedure, because trying to use techniques she hadn't been adequately taught had shaken her confidence.—Schafter had apparently had hope of taking "Interim" off of his title after all, and was making noise about leaving. Hunt kept asking if Derek didn't know anyone they could bring on. He was making reluctant calls, but no one could be convinced to come to Seattle.—Then, he'd started slipping in to watch Meredith. She'd stepped into the position of attending physician without fanfare, and she belonged there. He could spend a lifetime watching her take charge of the room. She wasn't always operating, though. There wasn't always a neuro procedure with an open gallery. So, he ended up watching Richard. Hunt. Kepner.
Not Avery. Not yet.
He was reviewing lecture notes while Miranda removed a gallbladder below him when Callie sat beside him in the otherwise empty room.
"What was it like out there?" she asked. No greeting, no Ross said he saw you come in here.
"What?"
"Yeah, what," she echoed. He stared at her, and she looked down at her hands. "I recognize that it's messed up. Everything is messed up. But I need you to tell me what it was like out there, because there's a hole. Arizona…It's like one of her stupid stress cigarettes got put out on her heart, burning something away. M-Maybe I can figure out what it was, and how to replace—or…I get that she's never gonna be…exactly the same, but right now, she's nothing, and I don't understand."
"I can't tell you—"
"It's asking a l—"
"I can't tell you what it was like for Arizona, or Mark, or Mer…. It was different for everyone.
"It was such a small plane. One second, I'm sitting next to Meredith, knowing she's freaking mom out about deciding to leave Seattle, but we're all too close together for her to talk about it. There was no warning. No turbulence. I thought to grab for her, and she was already gone. You've seen the diagrams. Arizona was in the first seat on the port side." —If any of them hadn't known nautical terminology before, they did now. —"But I could've reached over Mer and touched her. Where we ended up seems random. It's not, it's physics. It was like…in World War Two, we didn't have precision bombing, yet. They had to let out hundreds of missiles to hit a target, and they'd cover miles, because the planes were going so fast—the one hit we got on Auschwitz was part of an attack on a facility miles away. There were six of us.
"That I could end up where I did, while four of them…. If I'd managed to grab Meredith, would she have been worse off? If I'd given her the window instead of assuming she wanted to be closer to Cristina…. Her wrists are so small." He managed to turn a shudder at the image of Meredith being stuck in that moment of hell, into a shrug. "There are so many variables. If we'd found Lexie's phone sooner. Later. If she hadn't turned it off—but that was later. Um, I don't.… I didn't see Arizona for a while. Didn't see anyone…. A second earlier Meredith was closer to me than you are now, and…." He shook his head. "You asked about Arizona."
Callie turned her body toward him and put a hand on his arm, well above his wrist. "I asked an inappropriate, invasive question. I'm going to listen to whatever you want to tell me."
He smiled briefly, and then looked down to the OR where Bailey was closing. "I did what I did…There was fire and smoke, but I wasn't thinking about anything other than getting to her…. I knew I was doing something desperate. I chose to do it. I could've waited. I couldn't, because she could've been hurt, but…I could've. I knew…. I felt…. She would've found me. But I needed to find her. I had to. I knew what I was risking, knew what I could lose, and it didn't matter."
Callie nodded. "I wanted to physically go out and search for you all. Hunt was talking to the airline people about radar, and transponders, and heat seeking tech. I couldn't understand one word in four, and I was desperate to do something. I definitely wasn't considering my O.R. schedule."
"I thought of you. Figuring out the hit, knowing I'd break bones—more than what I'd already broken. You always manage to do things like that before the patient knows what's coming."
"Harder to trick yourself."
"Impossible. But I got free, and all that mattered was not giving up until I found her. I must've been solidly in shock, because as much a as it hurt, nothing mattered more than finding Meredith.
"It's not that I didn't remember the others were there. That Mark was. It just…it didn't occur to me that he could be hurt. Not until we heard Lexie scream. She could hardly speak with all the debris on her, but when he went down, she screamed. From there, everything was damage control."
He remembered Meredith begging him to pass out, and giving into the gray, knowing that he was with her, and they'd get through. They'd get out.
"Moving Arizona took a long time. I'm sure that was painful for her. I imagine that up to that point it was difficult to sit there with the…with the pilot, with no idea what was going on. Not getting to be useful."
"The good man in a storm."
"She told us about that."
"Did you…talk a lot?"
"Yes and no. Once we had water, there wasn't much else to do, until we lost the energy for it. Arizona…she…. She was pretty upset when she realized it was your anniversary."
"Would've been yours, too, right? Legally? You and Mer were together out there. Did you get to…acknowledge it?"
"Do you think we were camping, Callie? That we had a seperate tent?"
"No, no. Of course not. That was stupid." Her voice was strained, and he looked over to see her hands clasped, knuckles white. Tears had welled in her eyes, but she wasn't letting them fall. He held his hand over her shoulder, waiting for her to nod before setting it down.
"I…um…I didn't realize it," she said. "Not for hours. I'd sat with her friend Nick for a while. I'd basically given him a death sentence, and there he was comforting me. We had this whole white board going for who was traveling to Boise; pros and cons of taking the girls —fucking plane company offered to take us, did you know that?"
A flash of heat rushed through Derek, and then ice took over his spine. He couldn't imagine what he'd have done if he'd discovered they'd put Zola on one of those planes, even if she'd gotten safely through a roundtrip. His reaction would've been nothing compared to Meredith's.
"Obviously we didn't take them up on it. But, uh, the next day, I sat around the apartment until dawn, got Sofia up and dressed, gotten back to the hospital, and convinced Owen to let me book us—Kayak told me the date. And I…." She laughed, humorlessly. "I asked Bailey to take over so I could cancel our dinner reservations."
"At least you had them. I wasn't gonna try to compete with the resident dinner."
"We were going to the same place. I'd been looking for an excuse for three years. Now, I don't think I could stomach going there. Maybe that's just not feeling like there's much to celebrate." Callie wiped the back of her sleeve against her eyes, and squinted at it. "Shit, this mascara used to be waterproof. Think they changed the formula."
"My dad carried a handkerchief. I tried for a while, but I could never keep up with it."
"How many did you end up telling some crying girl to keep it?"
"Uh, plenty, but it was usually my little sister, so they ended up in the same laundry basket."
She laughed. "God, I shouldn't—I'm grateful you all made it home, and Lexie's awake, and even Mark…that I got to say good-bye. It's just…. Arizona, she's more than the bouncy, bubbly baby surgeon. With what she's seen and lost, that she manages…managed to be optimistic…. I understand how selfish it is to complain—"
"It's not. How many caretakers have you seen be just as traumatized as the patient? You've been running yourself ragged for months. You can be upset about it."
"That's not…. She told Karev it should've been him. She said that. Arizona said that."
"Technically, she's right." Would Karev have defaulted back to the bravado he'd displayed after the shooting, or ended up in the same despair as his mentor? Derek couldn't say, but he was sure Meredith would've taken on responsibility for him, too.
"She comes from a military family," he stated.
"Goes a way back. Her brother was a Ranger. Dad's a Marine Corps colonel."
"She didn't enlist."
"She knew she wanted to do pediatrics, and DADT was only repealed in December."
"Still a big decision for someone named for the ship her grandfather died on. She'd have been recruited hard."
""People…People are going to assume she served, aren't they? With her family, and her name. She'll correct them, and have to think of it, of losing her brother, and it'll remind her Nick's gone, and Mark…."
"I'd think so. She chose the route where she didn't expect to be in a plane crash. She decided to be the child her parents didn't have to worry about. You…. Mark tell you how my dad died?"
"Broadly."
"I felt guilty when I was shot, because my mom and sisters were having to go through so similar. I feel badly about the time we were missing, but it's not quite the same.
"I seriously doubt Arizona really wants Karev to have gone through that pain. She took his place because she was upset that he was leaving. She wanted to punish him. That's not a good 'why me?' And…I'd imagine part of her knows…imagines…that if things were the other way around, she'd say she wished it'd been her. Not meeting up to your conception of yourself is a hard thing to live with."
"She's not living!" Callie sighed. "What I can't….Your mom's a nurse, right? Army?"
"Navy," he corrected. "Then, the VA. Both my parents went in for Korea. Dad's family had had someone serve since they fled the famine. Mom wanted to travel. Then, they saw how 'Nam was gonna go. He demobbed to open the store, and we weren't encouraged to let the country pay off our M.D.'s. If you're wondering."
"I had wondered. She grew up on base—I don't know how to say this, so I'm just going to keep tripping over myself—Isn't that where they send all the injured veterans? Where she'd have seen them be perfectly capable? There's no reason she can't come back to work once her prosthesis is fitted! I understandthat it sucks for her right now. That not being able to get to the bathroom yourself sucks. I did that part! I have been broken! I couldn't see my baby—! I'm not comparing; her leg won't grow back….B-But I know it sucks!"
"Yeah," Derek said. "She was there for all that."
It felt like much more time should've passed since then, but he could still feel the anguish that had permeated the hospital—More of them had been injured in the plane crash, but it didn't take away from the extremity of Callie's injuries; the baby whose survival seemed impossible.
God, no wonder Mer hated "Maleficent" so much; she'd felt like the dark fairy at the party that day, wishing a curse on Callie for her fertility.
"The good man in the storm is the one who keeps going," he said. "Who sits by her wife's side in the hospital, and gets the nursery set up while the baby's in the NICU. Who's there for her parents when her brother dies. She gets a page about a gunman in the hospital, and keeps all the premies alive. No surgeon is good with helplessness, but in a situation like that….Facing the possibility of losing both of you again, after finding out her best friend was dying….
"Have you talked about that? Nick? And Mark?"
"It's all been…. For ages, I thought it was all her leg. But…she was mad at herself for losing track of him. Said that…that he knew things that only the three of thing had known—her, Nick, and Tim—so losing him would be losing that part of his memory. It'd be part of her, too, wouldn't it? Losing another part."
He thought of everything he'd shared with only Mark, starting from the first time Derek's mother had spread a sleeping bag out on his bedroom floor. Wandering Manhattan at all hours, at all ages. Rehashing every second of a concert after getting in through the back door. Sitting on the floor of a waiting room, afraid to call home before he knew Amelia would be all right.
"Yeah. It would."
"Before you left, she…she made me promise she wouldn't lose me…. She lost Nick, she thought she was losing Alex…. "
"If he had been on the plane, she would've known her role. She would've been there with you while Mark was missing, by Karev's bedside, with Sofia while you were with Mark, with her dying friend. Instead, she was on the plane.
Bailey was heading for the scrub room. Derek wished he could come up with a metaphor like she'd advised him to in the spring.
"Out there…it was…it was freezing, at night. During the day, there was nowhere to get away from the sun, even with all those trees. You could hear animals skulking around at night. Wolves. I live on a property where I've seen bobcats, cougars, coyotes…the bears have gone through our garbage. I've slept outside there. The level of fear I felt in the woods? I've never known anything like it, and I could run.
"As scared as the rest of us were, as weak as we were, Robbins must've felt like a sitting duck; especially at the beginning, when they had to leave her alone.
"She'll get a prosthesis. She'll walk. She'll be back at work. She's disciplined. But she won't be able to keep it on constantly. Amputees who run marathons have days where the residual limb is too swollen. She'll have to take it off at night. If there's an emergency, if Sofia just needs water—She'll be able to use a wheelchair or crutches for something like that. I don't know when or if that becomes as instinctive as standing up and running.
"Right now? While she's still learning to balance and pivot? It's going to seem impossible. You see amputees do amazing things all the time. I'm sure she has, too, but kids are adaptable. I've heard her talk about the magic of peds. Idealizing childhood…Mer does it, and I think it makes it harder to see how much adults can do."
Below them, the O.R. had cleared out and was being reset for the next procedure. The surgery techs moved like they were choreographed, but every time they did this the exact details were different. One more box of lap pads, one less abdominal dressing. Every body and brain was unique in some way, shaped by experience, even the newborns, affected by which ova and sperm had combined to create them, what their mother had done while pregnant, and the short time they'd been in the world. Those differences could mean that the "proper" placement of a scalpel could lead to a flatline.
"Have you been thinking about all of that because of Little Grey?" Callie asked.
"Somewhat. I consulted at a rehab hospital in New York, before the practice picked up. Someone's perspective can change from day to day. How many obstacles they're up against isn't consistent, either."
"That how things are for you?"
He shrugged. "It's frustrating, I won't pretend otherwise. Mer and I….I hate that she might have it easier if my wrist wasn't an obvious reminder, but there are always scars. If anyone knows that, it's Meredith.
"I didn't train for a decade to be a lecturer. Didn't really want to teach when I got here. Just wanted to get out of New York. Turns out, it's rewarding to watch a med student become a surgeon. I'm not as good at it in a classroom. Might just be lack of experience.
"Right now, me teaching is actually a better fit for our lives. I have more time to be with Zola and Lexie. I see Mer more than I would otherwise. This year is important for her, and she's competing with Bailey and Webber for surgeries."
"Too bad she didn't go neuro, she'd have her choice. Or cardio. She's well-rounded, I was impressed while I was getting her ready for the boards. Definitely not surprised the Brigham wanted her. Although, for the record? I'm glad you guys stayed."
"Yeah, I don't think moving…. It's easier for her to be in surgery with Lexie down the hall. I might've underestimated that."
"I grew up with my half-sister," Callie said. "We never used to say the half. She was tiny when Mom and Dad got married. Her father was in and out, mostly out. We were close as kids. Now, I get a Christmas card, and that's it. Doesn't totally surprise me that things can go the other way. Lexie's on good terms with their dad, though, isn't she?"
"I'm not sure," Derek admitted. "I met with him Sunday to explain her ASIA score, and he asked the right questions, but he didn't know she and Avery were over. That happened right when Zola came home. We started calling her the emotional support baby. She hasn't lost that title; although, we're thinking about potty-training, so…."
"Already? She's not two until November. I know she hates being wet, but…. She really hates being wet."
"Yeah. We were a little too intense about the potential of UTIs, maybe. She also thinks flushing is really funny, and it seems like we should capitalize on that before she tries to send Gigi on a ride."
"Fair enough. Maybe she can peer pressure Sofia into it.
"Thatcher didn't question not seeing Avery over the holidays, or on her birthday?"
"She spent Christmas with us. Baby's first. And, she babysat for us on Thanksgiving. I don't know about her birthday, but last year Thatcher gave her a new mommy right around then, so she might not have put much effort into seeing him."
"Shit, that's right! Are they still together?"
"He hasn't brought her with him to visit, but judging by Lexie's reaction to her, that might not be an indicator. It's…it's not as though I don't talk to her. At a few points last year, I saw her more than Mer. But it's never felt like my place to bring up Thatcher—or, at least, with Mer I overstepped too much there to know where the line is. I knew she still had feelings for Mark, because I'm not completely oblivious, and I tried, but I could've done it earlier…."
"Same. I mean…. I was still in med school at twenty-seven, and I had the sister who was married with kids. If she wasn't ready, she wasn't ready. And…." Callie was twisting her wedding ring around her finger. If Meredith wore hers, she'd have worn the skin off her knuckle doing that. "I'd already forced one woman into raising a kid with me. I know…I know Arizona loves Sof, but…. If feeling helpless is the issue, she's been facing that for longer than a few months. She applied for that grant before she knew me. I think, maybe, that was how she wanted to serve."
"But, like you just said, she made that choice before you. You changed her dream, Callie. She chose to reimagine her future for you. Now, she's having to do it again. That might take time, but she's a pretty creative person. I think she'll manage it."
"What can I do?" She looked at him like she didn't know that he'd screwed that up more than he'd gotten it right, but she must. She'd been around after the ferryboat accident. After the shooting, Meredith had been afraid he'd go around the bend—literally. And last year…last year, if he'd lost everything, it would've been his own fault.
"You stay," he said. "Whatever you do, keep that promise. Don't let her push you away. She needs to know that losing her might be the scariest thing you can imagine, but loving her is worth it."
"Feels like I've lost her already."
"You haven't," he said, snapping for the first time in the conversation. "Look, the worst you can do is let unhappiness become normal. If that happens, that's when you've both changed too much for it to work. I don't know how long you try, but it's too early for you to give up."
"I'm not planning on it. I just wish she'd talk to me. With Teddy gone…. She needed to go, but…. I really hoped that Karev staying—"
"Does she know why he stayed? Or does she think he's just picking up her slack, or trying to make up for planning to go in the first place?"
"That's…. Good point. He's buying the house, right? So, he's not going anywhere."
"Nope," Derek said. "Never thought I'd be glad for that."
"Eh. He's not so bad." She scrubbed her hands over her face. "I should go, I have a spinal fusion starting in about an hour. Gonna grab as much espresso as they'll give me. Want to join?"
"No thanks. Mer and I are going to get Zo for lunch."
"The two of you make those of us who like kid-free lunches look bad."
He didn't know how to respond to that. Every kid-present lunch had already felt like a miracle to them before the plane crash.
He intercepted his wife as she passed a chart on to one of the interns—Murphy? Brooks? He wasn't sure—wrapping an arm around her waist and guiding her into a supply closet.
"Hey, what gives?" she asked, laughter lining her voice. Derek didn't respond, other than to press his lips more firmly against her neck. She sighed, and then put her hand on his cheek, pushing him back far enough to meet his eyes. "You okay?"
"What? I can't miss you?"
"Sure, but usually it takes more than four hours."
"Maybe having you home last night made me realize what I'm missing when you're not."
She bit her lip. "Three nights in a week is a lot, I know. I can't even say for sure she does better if I stay, but reliving it all—She was actually talking to me Wednesday night, about the Boston Strangler, granted, but she was Lexie, and it'd been days…and why are you looking at me like that?"
"Callie asked me.… It doesn't matter, it just made me think…. I remember Cristina asking you how you could be fine, and…you weren't. Of course you weren't, but you…It's not that you're some bastion of dealing with trauma. You do keep going, and you're stepping up with Lexie. But you.… This summer was going to be turbulent for you anyway, and the plane crash took over, but you didn't pretend that stuff wasn't still a big deal. Our lives—They've kept going."
"They do that," she said, her hand moving up behind his ear.
"Mark's gone. For so long I saw myself in relation to him, and maybe that's why…. He died, and I could be done as a practicing surgeon, and I'm not okay with any of it, but I'm not…. I don't think I'd have been able to cope with any of it without you. At any other time of my life…I don't know what would've been left."
"What, like twenty percent function is supposed to make you less of a man?"
"Less the man you married."
"I didn't marry your career, Derek. I married you, and that…I didn't expect you to never change. There might be dealbreakers at some point, I guess, but…honestly, You could mope about this a lot more."
"I'll pencil that in."
"How about I give you a better use for your time?" she asked, her hands already removing his phone from his waistband and setting it down on a shelf behind her. He looped the index finger of his left hand in the elastic of her scrubs She pulled away, letting them snap back against her hip.
"Mer—"
She pressed her lips against his ear. "Let me show you exactly how much I appreciate the person you are, Derek Shepherd. I could lose a lot without becoming incomplete, and you are not one of those things."
He'd once had to convince her that in a relationship sex could be fair without being transactional. He didn't start planning for the next go the second her mouth touched him in order to pay her back. It was far more than that. It was having her look up at him through her eyelashes, and wondering if he ever could.
A/N Next week's post will be a one-shot, which makes this a great week to recommend this to your friends!