Her sister knew things. Lexie hadn't been there when Meredith drowned in Elliot Bay (and they almost missed each other completely), but she'd heard from a tech, who swore the nurse who'd come into Meredith's room behind Derek that day—specifically to eavesdrop, it was understood—told her that Meredith came up, came back, from wherever she'd been knowing that her mother had died. The other things she knew mostly seemed to come from her own skills at eavesdropping—"paying attention," she insisted—but sometimes Lexie wondered. She remembered everything she put her mind to, but she didn't know things the same way.

Lexie woke up. She didn't know anything. Not why everything was bleary; why what she could move obeyed her in slo-mo. Why Meredith was in dark blue scrubs, when she wasn't supposed to be stay at Seattle Grace past the end of her contract in June. June?

"Mer?"

Her sister dropped the book she'd been holding and leaned over her. The backs of her fingers were cool and soft against Lexie's cheek. "Hey, sweetie, can you tell me your name?"

"Alexandra Caroline Grey."

Meredith's eyes lit up like fireworks had gone off behind them. She bit her lip, and then Lexie felt her manipulating her arm, and heard the crunch of Velcro opening.

"Was I…?" Lexie's voice was hoarse and soft to her own ears.

"You were confused," Meredith said, taking the restraint off her other wrist. "But I think you're really with us this time."

This time? She had to concentrate to pull up flashes, like recalling parts of a frat party the next day. Some seemed real: nurses moving her between beds; Alex eating a cafeteria burrito. But she could also remember her mother lying with her, humming like she did if they were sick. People she hadn't seen since high school carrying flowers. Meredith was in a lot of them, talking to nurses, flipping through a chart, reading in the chair like she'd just been doing.

What was real, and what was wishful?

The only person who hadn't been in her dreams was Mark. That didn't make sense. Had her subconscious scraped all her memories of him over the past six months?

"Keep your eyes open for me." Her sister's eyes were firm as she shone a penlight in Lexie's. "Great."

"H-How bad?"

The corner of Meredith's mouth twitched. "You're…. You…. What do you…what do you remember?"

Stammering. Meredith only did that when she was nervous. (Drunk. Really, really, worked a forty-eight, baby-won't-stop-crying tired; the kind that showed even under make-up, which she mostly used if she had something to hide.) Lexie hadn't caused her to be flustered like that in a long time.

"Plane crashed. I couldn't... My arm... Ceviche?"

"No ceviche. Her actual name was...?"

"Clara. Ferguson."

"Good. We got press. She sent a card. Here, drink." She helped Lexie lift her head, and for all the times Lexie had seen her care for patients, this reminded her more of her interactions with Zola.

She hadn't finished the check. The neuro check. "Mer, hands."

Meredith hesitated, and then held them up. Taking them felt weird, and her grip was weak. She could barely push against her sister's hands. In her last clear memories, Meredith's hand had shaken in hers, and she'd stumbled moving around their camp. She'd totally regained her strength. How long had it been?

Instead of continuing with the check, Meredith sat on the bed, her thumbs moving gently over Lexie's fingers.

"There's a lot I-I can't feel," Lexie offered.

"You're on some good drugs." The joke fell flat, and Meredith's eyes slipped away from hers. "And…And you're a doctor. And my sister. And a patient. Giving you the rundown without one of us melting down isn't simple."

One of us. Meredith operated on her in a clearing; Lexie couldn't imagine what that must've been like. She'd saved her life, whatever that would mean long-term, but Lexie knew she'd been limited. Did she feel guilty?

In Lexie's mind, Dr. Yang said, "Take it from a different direction."

"I was crushed."

"Yes."

"Pelvic fracture. Legs. Spinal."

"Yeah. You have damage at the C-6 and C-7. It's been stabilized and decompressed, but your other injuries …."

"We don't have a prognosis," Derek finished, appearing on the other side of the bed. "Hey there, Sleeping Beauty. Thought we were going to have to go to extreme measures to wake you up."

"You're Mer's Prince Charming."

"I appreciate that you remember that," her sister said.

"My…innards? Know the words."

"Give them to him."

"The…what your doll has. Organs."

"You're on dialysis. We did everything we could to avoid crush syndrome, but once we levered the metal off. I had to…."

She noticed Derek's knuckles bulge as he squeezed Meredith's hand, and heard her sister's breathing steady. The sharp whispers in her memory must have been invented.

Lexie had never been comforted by the theory that dreams were a mix of old memories and experiences being processed. There was too much that could be pulled from her mental archive. Her dreams could hold incredibly realistic details, as they had after the shooting, but they'd never been put in the same mental drawer before, and she was already praying it wouldn't do it again.

"…it wasn't too much longer before they found us. All signs are good to wean you off over a few months. Currently you have a catheter and colostomy, but as your body heals, we can reintegrate those as well."

"My innards are ex-ards," she tried to joke, but the word sounded wrong, and Meredith cringed. "External. Not really. Is that…? What else?"

"With you conscious, we can do more tests." Derek took the hand Meredith wasn't holding. His other hand was in a brace. It must've been weeks. "You had a subdural hematoma. Cranioplasty was done at thirty days. We weren't sure about the extent of unreversable damage—There were some early signs of a TBI on your scans, but what we can see has cleared. You've been asleep a while, but sometimes that happens when there's a lot to heal."

"Told you she wouldn't wake up until she had full cognitive function." Meredith squeezed her hand.

"Not me. Mark. He…crashed. Did he…die out there?" She didn't know how it came out so evenly. She should've been panicking at the idea. Maybe the connections to her lower body weren't the only ones she'd severed.

"No." Meredith touched her cheek. "He got back here. We all did. Cristina's off in Rochester, already."

"There's a but. Tell me."

Derek and Meredith sharing a look over her prone body could've just been looking at each other. It wasn't. There were too many counter-examples in her memory.

"He came back. They took us to Boise. He was resuscitated once there. Altman went in to stop the pericardial effusion before she left for Germany. He was in the CCU on pressors, but his stamina…. It didn't improve. He was close to comatose. Then…. He woke up. He was cheerful, alert. It lasted…." Meredith reached over Lexie to take the fingers of Derek's braced hand, squeezing them softly. He kept his face turned away, but in the moment he raised his eyes to her, Lexie caught a shimmer. No. No, no, no. "About a day. Long enough to fill out an advanced directive."

"That's…." The room around Meredith and Derek was getting blurry. Lexie squeezed her eyes shut. "…it's smart. Surge?"

Meredith's lips were almost invisibly thin. "Yes. He…He allowed for thirty days, and that was…. He crashed and went into a coma six weeks ago."

Thirty days.

A month.

A month was less than six weeks. That couldn't be right.

"You…You drained all the fluid. That's what you said."

"She did." Derek's voice was firm. He was Mark's best friend. If six weeks was longer than a month, how could he just be standing there—standing at all?

"But…But no…. I would've known. I'd have…have felt. That's…That's how it works." She'd known something was off the day Mom died; she'd started thinking of going home before starting her internship, which had not been the plan. It'd pulled her to Seattle. Mark dying should've been strong enough to pull her mind back to consciousness.

"Lex, this is the first time you've fully—"

"No! That doesn't matter. I should've known. If…If we're…. He should've been…been there, or…or here. He should be somewhere."

"Oh, Lexie." Her sister wiped the tears off of Lexie's face with the back of her hands. "He tried to stay. All the times he was revived; he fought so hard. His heart just couldn't get strong enough to keep him going."

"He was…wasn't…. Why wasn't it me?" The emotion that finally flooded her was fury, and before tears made the world too blurry to make out, she saw it mirrored on her sister's face. "It should've been….We're…We're meant to be! He promised we'd be together! should be with him I-I-I love him."

"He loves you, too," Derek said. "Sometimes, that's not enough."

It should be! Lexie thought, while Meredith raised her shoulders to keep her from choking on snot. "Was…Was he tired of waiting for me?"

"No, honey. No." Meredith traced Lexie's hairline like she'd done it hundreds of times.

"If anything," Derek said, sitting on the bed with a sigh. "He didn't want any of us to slow down for him."

"Wh-What about you? When are you going? T-To Boston?"

"We're not. Of course we're not," Meredith said.

"Oh." She was grateful. She was. She didn't wish that they'd left her alone to go on with their lives.

She didn't wish that her sister or brother-in-law had died instead of the man she loved for long. She did wish it for too long to forget it was there, somewhere, deep inside of her.

A/N: I'm back! This should update about every Friday, with some breaks for unrelated one-shots. (Still don't have full vision/contact lenses back, but putting everything on high contrast makes up for it.)

I tried to be as accurate to everything medical as I could, up to and including explaiing how the heck Mark died. As Derek says, the length of Lexie's coma without a severe TBI is unlikely, but not impossible with everything she has going on. And this is fiction-land, where all comas are however long you need them to be.