Derek was Frankenstein and Lexie, his monster. The analogy got more apt every time she opened her eyes to find him sitting by her bed in a chair that had belonged to this room when it had been meant to be a study. He'd hooked her up to fluids, and even though she couldn't have moved quickly enough to evade him, it felt like a tether. Her hands were still so clumsy; there could be pills she'd dropped on the floor somewhere. She'd found one before, as recently as last Tuesday.

It was pathetic, dragging her legs or flopping all over, worried she'd end up with rug burn Meredith would notice. It had made her think of seeing Andrew Wyeth's Christina's World, in her undergrad art history class. She couldn't remember not knowing that the woman in the foreground of the painting was paralyzed. It couldn't be more obvious to her, now. She recognized the tension in the woman's arms, and the twisted position of her torso. They were the hallmarks of what Faye called "mermaid pose;" a beached mermaid dragging her tail to the water, or, more often for Lexie, reaching for the chair that gave her far more freedom than Christina had.

Had there been a point where she'd just seen a woman looking at a distant house? Her feelings toward the painted Christina had been pity. She had so far to go. But thinking of it now, Wyeth had made it clear that she'd covered a significant distance already, one that wouldn't be much easier to traverse in a manual wheelchair.

Frankenstein's monster kills his bride. How much extra work had Lexie put on Meredith's shoulders? She'd sat down at the table this morning after handing Zola off, and just said, "So?" Lexie had evaded the truth with her during the period of the Intern Cabal, but she wasn't sure how. She wasn't intimidated by her sister anymore, and so the truth flowed.

The interns had been the Frankensteins and the creatures. Hell, That had started with her stealing cadavers. The initial procedures they'd done on each other weren't a big deal. Knowing how to stitch yourself could help in a disaster; Meredith had done it out in the woods. It'd all just sort of spiraled from there.

A day or two after it exploded, Meredith had come up to Lexie's new room in the attic, and said, "I should've warned you about her."

"You don't have to teach me about peer pressure."

"It was never pressure. It was the smile. The way she made it sound like you'd be the most boring schlep in the world if you didn't go along with it. The rush of doing something daring, convinced you were going to get away with it. You don't. You get caught with the bottle; you fall through the window; you hurt someone. And somehow, Sadie's nowhere to be found. The worst part is when you do it again, sure she'll be beside you the whole time; the light comes on, and she's in the wind. That's been happening to me since I was thirteen. The whatever in the boiling pot. Trust me, you don't want to be in this water."

"I'm not. That was…harrowing." She caught something like a smirk on Meredith's face, and Lexie felt like a puppet whose strings had been pulled. "It's not like I've never broken a rule in my life, you know. When Molly was in high school, Mom and Dad would go on about how much easier I was. I just didn't get caught."

Meredith cocked her head and nodded, slowly. "Seems like your mom would've been one of those 'as long as you're safe' moms. Let you pretend a hangover was the flu."

"Was…Was Ellis even around to notice?"

Her lips curled, and Lexie was able to picture her as Sadie's other half. "Oh, she made sure I got to school. On weekends, I could come in trashed, crying, accompanied…. She never left her study—unless there'd been a call saying I missed a class. She paid for my school, the least I could do was attend."

"Well…. Truancy is illegal." Lexie was kidding, but Meredith had shrugged.

"She didn't love having attention drawn to her parenting, You know he actually gave me up? As in, his rights were signed away. I'd have gone to my bachelorette aunt, and if she didn't want me in the back bedroom…I dunno."

They wouldn't have taken you from Ellis Grey, Lexie almost said, but then she considered the story Meredith had told several of them while they were polishing off the eggnog that Christmas. She hadn't known her mother wasn't suicidal; she hadn't known it wouldn't happen again.

"Tell me what Sadie got you to do, so I feel less gullible."

"You deserve it. Accept that you were manipulated by a woman who never met a disaster she couldn't escalate, and don't let it happen again."

"I won't. I promise. What should you have been grounded for?"

"Go bug Derek. You're both nosy."

"We were relative goody two-shoes. And we lo—like you. We're family. You share your history with family."

Her sister had rolled her eyes, but eventually she'd caved. Once she'd gotten into it, Lexie had heard stories from multiple eras of Die and Death. She hadn't been told that they were more than partners-in-delinquency for another month, but it hadn't surprised her. She'd only seen Meredith's eyes get that bright, or her tone that dark, while talking about Derek.

"Hey, Mer," she'd said, when she headed for the door over an hour later. "You're from Boston. You must know that what's in the pot is a lobster."

That'd been the first time she'd had Meredith go after her with a pillow. What she'd wanted was to stop her sister's tendency to underplay her intelligence. It'd taken much longer for her to put together that most of the idioms Meredith whatevered were used in relation to relationships. Romance she was raised to not believe in. Clichés she was supposed to ignore.

"So," she'd said, this morning, and Lexie had looked around for Derek. Meredith had snapped her fingers. "Hey. You are talking to me. Do I have to tell you I'm not mad, I'm disappointed? I'm kinda mad, but mostly at myself—"

"No, Mer—"

"Don't try to tell me how I should feel. Derek hasn't managed it in years; you have ten minutes. What's going on? Did the pain increase, and it got out of hand? Is it exclusively the high? It makes a difference."

Lexie swirled her fork into the eggs Derek had insisted on. "There's pain. But it's not…it's kinda what I don't feel. What…I can't. There's too much."

"Too much pain?" Meredith asked, and when Lexie shrugged, her tone softened. "Too much that hurts."

Of course she got it. She'd gotten through far worse pain without wishing to meet a mouse who could burrow under beds until he found a pill. Her mom had read The Mouse and the Motorcycle and its sequels aloud to her and Molly; Lexie had freaked Molly out by telling her Ralph the talking mouse must've been descended from a kid turned into a mouse by one of the witches in the Roald Dahl book. She didn't think a mouse that could communicate with human kids was the most magical part of that book. She thought it was the motorcycle that was powered by Ralph saying vroom. It wasn't very practical; it relied on the stamina of the driver, sort of like a wheelchair, but it taught kids that their imaginations were valid. (She'd never been on a motorcycle. There was probably something adaptive that would let her try it, but whether it was internalized ableism or not, she knew that it wouldn't feel the same.)

She didn't have a mouse to Balto for her. (That wasn't the true story, anyway. Balto had been the lead sled-dog at the end of the relay that had condensed a thirty-day trip into five and a half. But the team that covered the most distance to get diphtheria antitoxin to Nome, Alaska, a village on the verge of epidemic, had been led by a dog named Togo).

She'd felt okay going to bed. She hadn't done much, after all, just read copy of the hospital's promotional material, and checking the time every half hour out of habit. Derek had doled out her meds, adding the over-the-counter painkillers she was allowed to alternate. (Ralph had gotten the kid a single pill, presumably an aspirin. That his fever broke because of it was probably also the power of imagination.)

He'd let her take the Valium she was prescribed for sleep and to help with pain. It didn't make her drowsy, though. It did help her stop panicking about what was ahead, and that might've been how ahead became now without her noticing.

She was sweating. She always did after taking opioids, and now it was like her body thought causing the side effects would bring on the benefits. The sheen of sweat left her shivering. Derek pulled up her quilts, and she just felt clammy.

The monster was cobbled together out of corpses; made up of grafts and transplants. Had it had patches of numbness? Places where skin felt rubbery? She'd seen failed plastic surgeries, rejected organs. So many parts of her body felt separate from the rest. It had been put together piece-by-piece, though all of them were hers.

She didn't remember the casts or the coma. She remembered being trapped under pounds and pounds of metal, unfamiliar with the sensation of not being able to make her muscles follow her direction. Trapped, she'd thought more than once, in her coffin. The memory of disconnection and pressure was different than the paralysis she'd adjusted to.

All of her thoughts about mice and dogs and monsters were attempts to keep those memories at bay. Something about the clamminess and the pain, which had improved so much since the hospital, but was constant and overwhelming, and terrifying when she didn't know when or if it would end attracted them.

The memory of claustrophobia made her stomach turn over. She thought of Dani asking her if she could feel hunger. That lunch where a forged script had burned in her pocket. She should've gotten her to fill it. The chance that anything would've happened was slim, and it would've bought her time. She wouldn't have had to go to Roseridge and—

She focused on swallowing the bile gathering in her mouth. Swallowing while prone didn't work like it should anymore, and Derek was there, raising her shoulders. He held an emesis basin for her. That shouldn't have been more humiliating than anything up to this point, but the feeling was almost as strong as the nausea. Once that faded, she threw herself back onto the bed, all too aware that the position landed in could've made her a contemporary Christina.

"This isn't all that different from what you think my dad was planning," she snapped, jerking away from the washcloth Derek had wetted to combat the return of the sweats.

"How so? Enlighten me."

"You have all the control. I don't have a choice about this. I can't leave." She hooked a finger around the tube of the IV. "What do you do if I say I don't consent. What if I take this out?"

Derek leaned forward in his chair and grabbed her wrists. "Before you rip out a needle I'll happily take out for you, let me remind you: there are no opioids left in this house. Any other prescriptions without your name on them are locked up. Even going back on your current regimen would mean you can't refill anything until a week from Thursday. I don't believe you haven't borrowed from your friends, and since they seem like good people, I'd bet they're asking questions.

"Once the opioids are out of your system, we'll start you on buphrenephrine-naloxone, and you'll feel better within the hour. You're in for a rough couple of days. Believe what you want, but I am sorry about that. We're going to do what we can to make it manageable. The point isn't for you to suffer, Lexie."

We, he said, like Meredith was there.

"Then, why can't you just give it—?"

"You know why. It'll cause opiod withdrawal syndrome."

"That's what this is!"

"In all those shifts in the Pit, have you never seen someone whose COW Scale number is above thirty? You want a lowered seizure threshold, on top of the worst virus you've ever had?"

"I've had walking pneumonia during exams."

"No comparison." Pity was evident in everything from his voice to his grip loosening. "You can choose to do this in-patient at a rehab center. But here you'll have someone with you. Someone who loves you, no matter how you feel about us.

"You can refuse, Lexie. Call J.P. We wouldn't report you for stealing controlled substances."

"How thoughtful."

"It's what you did. Whatever you told yourself, every pill you took from a bottle in that box was felony theft. I've seen enough to know your condition wouldn't mean a thing in the prison system, and I'd prefer not to lose you to an obsessed pressure sore."

"Like it matters. There's no where I can go. I can't do anything!"

"Whose fault is that?"

"The charter company! You sued them, remember?"

"They kept you from learning to use hand controls? From going to any appointment or program with job-training in the title?"

"It's a waste of time! I'd have to quit to have surgery."

"Did you imagine being evaluated for a borderline experimental procedure without someone noticing you're overusing painkillers? You know better."

"I'm tired of knowing better. Doing it right, living up to my potential, being focused. None of it did me any good!" She slammed her hand on the mattress, and then she was thrashing, gripped by something she couldn't control. She threw herself from side to side, her fists pounding the bed.

"Lex, you're going to hurt your—to get hurt. C'mon, take a deep breath, try to relax."

"I can't, I can't stop it, it's like the spasming; I can't. C-Can I take another Valium? Please? It won't stop."

"Not yet."

Lexie whimpered. Her arm muscles had strengthened over the past six months, but they felt like noodles. Derek watched her tense, trying to assuage the need to move by twitching her wrist, only to end up pumping her muscles harder than any PT had ever instructed. "I deserve it, right? That's what you're thinking? I've heard you talk about your sister."

"You're my sister," he said, and then he was moving onto the bed, wrapping his arms around her. The weight he carefully shifted onto her helped. He didn't flinch when she hit him during the the resurgences, a feeling akin to tremors that she could control, but had to give into. She didn't apologize, either.

"Amelia, she…she has pain. She's also reckless, bull-headed, and cunning. Adding drugs to the mix only accentuated all that. I'd been here with her before I even knew what was happening."

"What'm I?" she asked, half-hoping her pillow made her unintelligible. Pathetic, weak, immature.

"Independent. Resourceful. Determined,"

All things that were only any good if you had a goal to aim toward. Something that caused time to move so fast that you couldn't believe it when midnight came. The meds had made her super aware of time's relativity; the long minutes in-between doses, the hour or so she got where she could just be Lexie without the weight of loss crushing her.

She'd been crushed for so long.

She shook, and sweated, and cried. She elbowed Derek away when she got hot, and turned to him desperately when the thrashing became too much to handle.

"I want my mom," she croaked miserably as he was collecting her hair to put in a braid that she was less likely to rip out than the bun that'd been pressed against the back of her head.

"I know."

"I want Mark. He should be here. He should be alive. It's not fair. Nothing in this world is fair."

"No. It's not."

His calm made a jolt of electricity spark in her, and she yanked away, pulling her hair out of his hands to face him. "You didn't want him here! If he hadn't shown up, you'd still be shutting him out. He'd still be in New York, but at least he'd be—"

"Alive?" Derek said, crisp and loud, but not shouting and storming. He would, if she could find the right button. He'd ditch her like Frankenstein ditched his creature, his Adam, leaving him to face a new world alone. "I don't think that's true." He took hold of her hair again, pulling slightly. Her scalp protested, which was at least different than the constant flames in her back.

"What do you mean? You think he couldn't have survived without you?"

"Absolutely not. For most of our lives it was the other way around. Did you know that? I was older. More responsible. Incredibly sheltered. My world had a three-block radius. Mark started evading the nanny to explore his building at three, and once he started school they only had a housekeeper."

"Mrs. Bellemonde."

"Mrs. Bellemonde," he echoed. "She adored him, but she wasn't paid to chase after him; she was paid to clean up the mess."

"Good for her."

"Yeah. I wonder, though. He started picking up after himself to give her less work; if they'd offered her a raise…. I guess I'm glad they didn't. She had plenty of influence on him as it was. He cleaned up so many of my messes….

"When we first discovered Amy was using, I went off on her. Yelled and told her Dad would be ashamed…. She gave it right back to me. When I started going on about needles, she informed me that I didn't have to worry. She didn't share, because she'd been taking boxes of syringes from the indigent clinic where I volunteered.

"Mark was the one who told her we'd be there for her; that we'd help her tell Mom; we wanted to help, not to get her in trouble….

"I didn't see it. All the things he fixed with that easygoing smile, and the tone that could make anyone believe things would be fine. I just…benefited."

(Frankenstein is accused of a murder his monster committed: that of his best friend, the man he describes as like a brother to him. Henry Clerval serves as his friend's foil; his compassion. Described as adventurous and fearless, he follows Victor to university just in time to help him regain his sanity. He's never told about the monster, and, it's likely the book would've been shorter if he had been.)

'I'm sure what happened with Addison started that way. Him trying to fix what I was letting fall apart. Seeing what I didn't see. He told me to take this job when Richard first called."

"I thought he suggested the practice."

"He did. He…held onto it. No one in your class talked about going in together after residency?"

"No one I was close to." His neutral expression became a frown. He knew she was being evasive. Meredith's fault. She wasn't Meredith. It's like I've learned to read your face over four years.

"We started planning much earlier, based of his dad's. Following the example of the most absent parent we had." He grimaced. "We saw the money. Being able to stay in Manhattan, to pick our surgeries, to work with multiple hospitals. And we remembered my dad's speeches about owning your own business…. Initially, it was great. The headiness of being in charge got us through a year or two. The time where everything was new—Mark got bored easily, but he taught himself to stay focused by trying to do things better, or differently every time. Even if it was just how he copied down a math problem. He could've done rhinoplasties forever and not gotten tired of them, and he had more variety than that in his caseload.

"I couldn't deal with the repetition. I was taking more and more on-calls, basically praying for disaster—in New York, in 2005.

"Richard called, and Mark said it'd be good for me. That I'd only been getting stir-crazy since we left Bowdoin. I told him he didn't know what he was talking about."

"Didja move out here to prove him wrong?"

"I was letting him have the city. He wanted her? He wanted my family? He wanted my life? He could have it. And somewhere, I probably knew he was right.

"The thing is, he never wanted my life. He wanted his own family. He just didn't have a better example. Seeing him with Sofia…. That's why I'm sure he'd have ended up here."

Lexie pictured the little girl in her highchair, wearing a glittery plastic tiara, clapping and chanting, "Birt'tay cake! Birt'tay cake!" She squeezed her eyes shut and inhaled through her nose.

The monster kills a child: Victor's younger brother, described as a beautiful child with dark curls and dimples.

"He followed Addison out here. Meredith thinks that was an excuse. If she'd known our whole history, she'd have called me out on letting Addison back into my life and not Mark. If Addison had stayed in New York, too, I hope her ability to forgive would've rubbed off on me."

"She rubs off on you plenty." Lexie smirked. "Where is she?"

"She'll be here tomorrow, when you're more venom than violence."

She rolled her eyes at the ceiling. "I'm not going to hurt Mer."

"You're not planning on shoving her again? Great. You won't be holding a gun on her, either, but stress is what caused her to miscarry the first time. We're past that point, but she's still terrified of something happening to the baby. The problem is, it's sharing her body, and it's not like the liver transplant—it hasn't benched her. That's good, but she's not good at prioritizing herself. Once there is a baby…I hope that'll help her trust in the future. Zola did. You remember."

She shrugged, but obviously she did. It'd been almost impossible to sulk about Jackson dumping her for her ex-boyfriend in a house that had gone from being the dreariest house on the block to being full of laughter and excitement. The brightest smile among them had been her sister's.

"God, the difference between her going into the boards and her intern exam….She was confident. Back then, she'd been told she'd fail, been doubted so much that she accepted it as ineffable. She froze, because that was the only way for that to manifest. She had confidence in her skills and her knowledge. She couldn't make the shift to having it in herself."

"That's not what happened. Dad—" She remembered that, too, getting up the gumption to get out of the car right as Molly and Dad reappeared.

"Ellis had broken her spirit. She'd said she wouldn't so much as get into med school, but her primary refrain was that she wouldn't make it through her internship. Ellis was gone; she'd never make a different proclamation. Some part of her still saw Thatcher as the next authority,. He broke her heart the night she went to his door, and ripped into it again, twice. That confirmed what she'd believed her whole life: she couldn't be good enough.

"Richard giving her a second chance was the first sliver of the belief she has in herself, now."

His eyes did incredible things when he talked about her sister.

Mark had looked at her like he was a kid, and she was the first snowfall of the year.

Jean-Philippe's eyes were the night sky, and the sparks in them were stars. Sometimes, she noticed it when they were talking—Not that she caused it. She was too dark for that.

"You're one of the reasons she works so hard to put herself back together."

"Works? Didn't she have to be all 'whole and healed'—" She swirled one hand in the air to imitate Meredith's tendency to proclaim. "—for you to take her back?"

Derek's jaw clenched. "She came up with that. No one's perfectly whole all the time, that's the point. I….I needed her to to trust me. To believe I'd stick around for her."

"Huh."

"To stop pulling away to preempt being left.."

"Huh."

"Now she stands her—Lex?"

Lexie's next "huh" had become more of a "ha," and the next one was a "ha," and she was laughing. It hurt, but she couldn't stop. She ended up breathless and coughing. "That's….That's not…. No one's…. I'm…. Aren't I supposed to be the well-adjusted one? God…. "

"When Mer passed on The Brigham, who do you think was at the top of her list of reasons to stay?"

"We all make mistakes."

"You considered her when you came back here. Do you regret that?"

Someone heartless should've been able to say no. Staying in Boston might not have meant sacrificing her chance to know her sister. She might've avoided being iced out by her; she wouldn't have had a front row seat to their father's decline. She'd still be working. Maybe planning on doing a fellowship here.

She would've missed the joy of Zola coming home. She wouldn't know Alex, or Cristina, or George. No Jackson. No April. She'd know Meredith only as an attending who radiated confidence, and scared interns as cocky as Bug Eyes. Not a first-year resident who accepted her offering of limes, and made her breakfast because she thought it was sisterly. There'd been a significant amount of bad in it all, but there'd been bad times at Harvard, too, and those hadn't given her a family.

She wouldn't have met Mark.

She told herself that seducing him had been an erratic act, done out of grief. That she'd wanted an attending on her side. That the two residents she'd admired the most had done the same thing. She told herself that their February-November thing would never have worked out. They hadn't been able to make it more than a year in one go. But if she was really over her issues, would that have still been true?

She'd never know.

I'll never know. "I'll never know. I'll never know. I'll never know."

"I know."

"You don't!"

"I do. I know." Derek put his hands on her shoulders. She hadn't promised not to shove him. He was stronger. She grabbed his wrists. She wanted to pinch and twist, like Meredith did whenever Alex grabbed her, or slap like Alex going around testing pain thresholds. All she could do was press her palms against his forearms.

"Listen. I know," repeated Mr. Calm and Collected. "Listen to me, Lexie." Exasperated and exhausted, she met his eyes. He eased up and took her hand between his. "I know Mark loved you. I know he wanted to make things work with you.. I know he wanted you to be happy with or without him. He told me. He told me explicitly, and he told me implicitly the whole time he was with Julia. While you were with Jackson. I can tell you, he never held a torch like that for anyone."

"Your sisters—"

"The only one he actually dated was Liz. Other than that…. Mark liked them, and they were women. He liked making women feel good. Sometimes, he'd get it in his head that someone was 'the one,' but…well, he got bored. He was fascinated by people, and there'd always be someone new around the corner. His worst habit in training was getting too engaged while doing a patient's history, and getting off-track.

"He also had a tendency toward self-sabotage. I'm not a shrink. I don't know if his ability to be serious evolved in the past few years, or if no one triggered it. Almost every other time, he'd move on before things were over, without a care for his own mess. He didn't do that with you."

Lexie flinched. She hadn't been ready for Mark to move on when he'd started coming on to Altman, and that'd been an average flirtation for him. She hadn't been ready to find him hooking up with Derek's youngest sister.

But she'd been the one to leave.

It was the time she wasted that Lexie couldn't let go of. If she'd known what was coming—

She would've been terrified. She'd seen what happened to her father when he lost her mother, and she'd believed in soulmates, and finding the love of your life. She would've done all she could to distance herself from him.

God, she was stupid. Diving into impossible cases with Derek while her personal life had been at a standstill. She'd told herself she didn't want to interfere with his new relationship; that she'd waited too long. She'd been scared.

At least then she'd had an idea of how each choice would change her future. She'd believed that the frame of her life would be the same. She'd been confident that whatever she did, she'd have a positive influence on the world.

What if her certainty that she'd Leave A Mark on the World had been a mistranscription?

"Daddy, morning!" Zola flew across Lexie's room to jump on Derek. "Mama get Z up!" Meredith had hesitated before putting her down, but Derek was there, and it would be better to keep things normal. If she went off on Zola again, that would be it.

Should the first time have been it? Was she teaching Zola about second chances, or shrugging off behavior that would affect her daughter for life? Zola mattered more than anyone, but Lexie mattered, too. Meredith regretted plenty of hot-headed moments from when she was her age. Twenty-eight. An adult. But an adult who needed her big sister's support, and maybe the laughter of her niece.

That she was definitely getting. Derek had scooped Zola up and was holding her upside-down, to her absolute delight. Meredith could see the exhaustion on him just from him maneuvering her back onto his hip while she was still chanting, "Again! Again!"

She'd been as enthusiastic when Meredith had opened her door this morning. She'd popped up with a squealed, "Mama, hi-hi!" No accusatory pouting over a missed bedtime. One day, she'd face that, but the foresight made starting the day with a happy little girl made catching one of the first ferries of the day worth it. When she'd crept into the house, she'd found Derek and Lexie asleep. Zola had finished her breakfast by the time she'd heard his voice.

"Go play, princess," Derek said once he'd carried her to the door. "I'm going to say good morning to Mama."

Zola ran back into the room, pushing herself up to kiss her aunt on the cheek. "Lovamuch, Ecksy!"

Lexie responded hoarsely, and once Zola scampered off, she pulled the quilt up, blocking Meredith from making further observations. She turned her attention to the third person in her care: Derek.

"Did Zo spend the whole night in her bed?"

He hummed in affirmation, rubbing the back of his neck. "If we never go to bed, she never hears us go to bed."

"Because she's never shown up at the top of the baby-gate while we're still down here." Just last week they'd been working on hospital stuff and heard, "Al-Zo down'tairs, p'ease!"

"I had the monitor. If she'd woken up—"

"You would've gotten her back in bed. I know. I'm not…. You shouldn't have had to do both. I'm here to take my shift."

He took her wrists in his hands. She flinched, pressing her lips together. He let go abruptly, as if he'd been burned, and she turned her face away.

"Hey," he said, moving to put himself back in her eyeline. "Good morning. I missed you." He embraced her, and her arms went around his neck instinctively, and she clung on, wishing he could carry her upstairs and they could stay ensconced in their room until he'd gotten a sufficient amount of sleep. She'd be happy just to be away from it all for a day. They could let Zola in, but only Zola.

He held her for longer than he might on an ordinary day, and kept an arm around her shoulder as they walked to the kitchen.

"Do you want cereal or oatmeal?" she asked, indicating the pot on the stove. That was one thing she could make reliably, and Lexie liked it.

"Cereal's good. I can—"

"You can sit. I guarantee I got more sleep than you."

He came up behind her, his hands on her hips. "That's a good thing."

"Fetus is fine."

"I had no doubts. How was Cristina?"

She didn't answer until he'd started digging a spoon into his bowl. She automatically started to hoist herself onto the counter. He came around to boost her, and then brought a hand up to hook hair behind her ear. She picked up his bowl and held a spoonful of cereal to his mouth. He shook his head before eating it, and then took the bowl back.

"She was…fine. Don't give me that look, I don't know…. I expected Alex. It, um…it happened at the hospital." She cleared her throat to keep her voice from breaking again. The morning light fell directly on Zola, and Meredith focused on watching her her tap a pot on the stove of her play-kitchen.

"Mer." Derek put his bowl down again, and ran the back of his fingers over her cheek. In her periphery, she saw the glistening on his skin.

"You don't have to…to…. You spent all of last night dealing with a Grey's issues."

"In the nicest way possible: so did you."

Meredith laughed. "Not along with my own."

"Ah, but you see, I am issueless." He winked and took another spoonful of cereal. "Relatively."

"The more you pile on something stable the less likely it is to stay stable," she pointed out. "I'll tell you mine, you tell me yours?"

He would've had to present on Lexie regardless—but she would've had to come clean, too. Hiding and hoping that he wouldn't see would be delusional, even with Lexie's crisis distracting him, he was going to strip her for one reason or another.

To keep him eating, she made herself go first. He listened to her stumbling attempts to translate the static that had overtaken her brain without interruption. She almost wanted him to cut in while stammered, to give her the right words. He might have, if he could've. He didn't absorb guilt, or anger, or helplessness. He flung them outward. What she'd done was so much easier to impart than why she'd done it, but that didn't take words.

Changing, taking her boots on and off had disturbed the wrap around her calf. Derek hissed when she rolled her jeans up and revealed the ragged gauze, but the wound hadn't taken any additional damage. The dressing had been one of her last tasks before she'd left the supply closet behind. She'd cleaned up, shaky and wired, with the thought that next time she should put down a chuck pad.

"That much forethought would be creepy, even for me. I-I was afraid I'd get caught, but I don't think…. It didn't make me…I didn't feel paranoid or like I was rushing. I…I felt…I felt…." She knew the word she wanted, but it didn't seem possible for something she associated with a morning like this, with Derek's hand gently supporting her wrist while he examined the steri-strips.

He raised his eyes to hers. "Safe? Makes sense."

"How?" The metal shelves stacked with ice-blue gowns, drapes, and sheets that tinted the whole room was a different universe compared to the warmth of their kitchen.

"You used to play in there right? Alaskan dog-sleds?"

"That would be what you remember. I had whole worlds behind those shelves, yeah." And on them. Usually there'd been enough gaps for her to sit, and if she had to move a bin, she always put it back. Things only got disorganized if the resident, father, intern, or daycare worker she'd eluded dragged her out without letting her. Mom made sure she did.

"Mention the dog-sleds to Lexie. What about at MGH?"

"What…? Oh. Yeah, I'd play, or once I got older, hide, because I wasn't supposed to be on the floor. Sometimes not at the hospital. Mom tried not to bring me as much, so I wasn't, like, recognizable to her scrub nurses, but she couldn't stop me from hanging out in the lobby after school. Interns always started off thinking they'd get bonus points for helping me with Algebra homework.

"I used to think she didn't want me around because…because of what happened with Richard. I didn't know…didn't understand the whole story, but I got that he didn't come with us. I remembered what he said. He made her believe that. If…if she knew the truth…. Maybe I was just a distraction."

"My sisters and I got volunteer hours at the VA. Apart from that, we might've gone to work with Mom a couple of times each. Even as we each came to the conclusion that our future was in medicine, we weren't comfortable there."

"I was a weird kid, this is not news."

"But I bet it could still be overwhelming."

She thought of times she'd almost been bowled over by gurneys, voices shouting over the beeping of monitors that always made her think someone was dead before she knew how to tell them apart. Patients whose bandages did little to hide how gruesome their injuries were. More mundane encounters with men who felt entitled to say whatever came to mind to a candy-striper—and they assumed she was a candy-striper several years before she qualified.—Closing the door of a supply closet always freed her; the hall would always be different when she opened it again. Like a portal in the books she read.

The time Derek had followed her in hadn't been the first time she'd cried behind a shelf because of her mother—usually not for her.

That day. That situation had hit so close to home. In not respecting that DNR, even accidentally, she'd recommitted her original sin. The family had, for lack of a better term, given her grace, but she'd also thought it was for better. Even if Grace hadn't experienced being alone the first time, the daughter with her own life to get there. To say goodbye.

She'd believed even the fearless Ellis Grey hadn't wanted that. If you believed her verbal DNR, not wanting to die alone had seemed to be the only reason to have Meredith in that kitchen. The truth didn't change that; actually wanting to live could only have made the experience scarier.

While she'd watched Grace's last moments, she'd also pictured herself going through the same thing decades in the future, without even the daughter who'd sign the wondered, after years of Thatcher, had some part of her mother just wanted to have someone else: a husband, a doctor, a daughter, anyone, make the decisions?

"I can see that," she said to Derek, whose lips had just parted, likely to say her name and draw her out of her thoughts. "I felt safe," she repeated. Yeah. That was true.

"Wh-When it….When I….I wasn't in surgery; I'd already handed my patients off."

"It started once you thought about coming home. You've been okay in the hospital, because even with all the changes, you're most comfortable there—or at the old house. Here's still a little bit of an adjustment—and you went to a place in the hospital where you feel safe. I don't think it's a step back. Might just be sideways."

"I was being a cow—"

"You knew what you needed. That's a step forward. You remember asking me about Action Park?" She nodded. "What happened after Amy OD'd?"

"Your motorcycle accident," she acknowledged. "But Lexie didn't…I noticed the…the signs of what the interns were doing before Sadie showed up. I didn't know exactly what was happening, but I-I hardly knew her then…. I should've seen."

"And I shouldn't have? That day Zola found a pill on the counter? It didn't look like hers, but I was so wrapped up in what didn't happen…. Jesus, think of all she didn't spill."

"Her motor skills have improved. I thought she was doing better."

"She was," he said. "That might've been part of it."

Meredith bit her thumbnail. She'd definitely had moments of self-sabotage at a point where things were going well. In school, once her mother started saying she wasn't good enough…. She'd set the curve on one test, be exhilarated by the teacher's praise, go home to Where was this score two months ago? Anyone can do well in history! It's rote memorization, and go out the night before the next one. She told herself she'd bomb it regardless, but she could see in retrospect that it'd been easier to take the criticism she deserved.

And for Lexie, moving forward meant finally moving past Mark.

"I think you should tell her what you just told me."

"You what? I can't spring all this on her—"

"You don't have to." He loaded his bowl and spoon into the dishwasher, and took a tray down from the top of the cabinets. "But that's something, too. A lot of the reasons you think you should've noticed are reasons Lexie should be asking if something's going on with you.

"My parents, sisters, and I had…." He paused, and she watched his eyes move as he considered. "Eight rooms. Amy was the only one at home for a long time, but before that the girls shared. They all had secrets. Little things, like who they were dating, but also an eating disorder, an abusive boyfriend…it all came out eventually, but…. I still don't know exactly what happened with Kath her junior year, only that she almost got kicked out of Catholic school."

"You weren't helping her shower."

"No, but I was known to read diaries." He wrapped his arms around her again. "What matters now is that we've got her." He nudged her nose with his, making her smile before he kissed her. He had a point about the closets, but this was where she felt safest.

She fully meant to take her shift with both Lexie and Zola, but Derek kept insisting he'd gotten enough sleep to hang out with Zola. He took her upstairs with him to change, and Meredith had overheard something about a tea party.

Since she was a volunteer delivering ice to patient rooms, the speed at which someone's condition could change had fascinated her. Not just the incidents where an accident left someone unrecognizable to someone who'd been in the same car. Illness, blood loss, certain medications—they could all make sudden, drastic changes.

Lexie was wane. Her hair had been braided, Meredith recognized Derek's work, but lanky chunks had fallen out of it. Her cheeks already looked sunken, but maybe that was just the shadows on her face. Maybe it was something that had been happening, and Meredith had missed. The exhaustion under her eyes was more extreme than Meredith remembered seeing when she wasn't sleeping, but then, she hadn't seen her without make-up until she'd been asleep upstairs.

"We'll get you a shower later. I've gotten close to white-girl dreds. It's not a good look."

While she was arranging the tray over Lexie's legs, she realized that she'd have to let Derek take that one, or come up with an explanation for the bandage on her wrist. She held up Lexie's spoon.

"Just dump it in the emesis basin."

"The bowl keeps it warmer, and you're going to eat it. If you can't keep it down, we'll try something on the BRAT diet, but Derek said you should be safe with this. I didn't even crack an egg into it."

"Who's the brat?" Lexie slipped her hand into the velcro handle attached to the spoon. She could use one with a specialized grip on it, now, but this worked better with the way her hands were shaking. "Thanks."

"For not punishing you with anaphylaxis?" Lexie shook her head, and lifted the spoon in her direction before dunking it into the oatmeal. "I'm not your parent, Lexie. I don't even have the authority Derek wields over Amelia, because I didn't imprint on you when I was a bossy, bossy thirteen-year-old." She'd been as her way or the highway as her mother; buying Ellis's insistence that she was better than everyone—even if she didn't live up to it. How vocal she was about her judgements had changed over time, but she'd gotten herself here. She knew when she was right, because she'd gotten so much wrong. "We wouldn't be like them, because he's got the weird father thing—not the point. I know you feel like you need someone to set the limits, since you messed that up. Thing is, being an adult means trying again. I can help you, but what happens as a consequence of this…that's yours to figure out."

"Like dropping neuro was yours? How'd that go?" Lexie turned the spoon over, letting a blob of oatmeal fall off of it.

"It helped me determine what was important. Like keeping you in my life was too important for me to give into expressing ninety-nine percent of how jealous I was of you after that. You'd gotten something that was mine. You didn't take it—I made it possible, and I hope you feel the same way when I go back to it. We'll figure out talking about work. And if it doesn't work out, and your feelings about that are mixed…well, you're my sister, that's not unexpected."

"They might be. I want it to work out for you, but it's starting to sink in that it won't work out for me."

"It might."

"This is good. The cinnamon and stuff."

"How you like it. I didn't want to have to choo choo the train into the tunnel."

They'd used "airplane" so regularly with Zola that on their first night home, she was sure that Zola open her mouth for her macaroni out of confusion about where a train came into things. She only thought of Bonnie for a moment or so, most of the time.

"Why do this?" Lexie's voice was thick enough that Meredith started to reach for the basin. "Why not throw some toast my way, and let that be it? Why aren't you mad? Either of you?" She broke on the last words, and tears came rolling down her cheeks.

"First, because I've fucked up more toast than oatmeal. And…yeah, I'm pissed. Derek, too. We're also concerned about you. If he'd yelled at you last night, would you have been more compliant?"

Lexie shrugged.

"If I'd pointed out that if something had happened with that pill on the counter, we could've had Zola taken again, and you took that risk with every pill you nabbed? Think that would've gone well?

"If we'd actually done the bare minimum, what are the chances you'd tell Thatcher how mistreated you are, and get him to come save you?" Lexie didn't respond, and Meredith continued. "He'd explode at you once and that'd be it, right? Derek holds a grudge, and you've seen me in some pretty long fights."

"Not usually your fault," Lexie said.

"Eh." Meredith could see how Lexie got there. She hadn't exactly made it easy on Alex last year. She'd pushed Cristina away in that fight they'd had—hadn't she? Sadie had been the one to say that, and she'd definitely misrepresented Amsterdam to make her point. "We're not doing that. Derek's whys are his to tell you."

They were related to Amelia, to some degree. He'd had to really think about some things last year when Addison called to say she'd gone missing. Meredith had been surprised when he didn't accuse his ex-wife of not watching her closely enough. When the next call came, and it'd been Amelia, in rehab, with an explanation and a dead fiancé, he'd said, "I don't know the whole story, but Amy doesn't love easily. Deciding to say yes to the guy might've been the drugs, but that doesn't mean the feelings weren't real. With the amount of pain she must be in now…we're lucky she's in rehab and not…not…." He hadn't been able to finish the sentence. He'd expected another disaster, and she knew he was proud that it hadn't happened. Not yet, anyway. Pain could lie dormant and lash out when you least expected it.

Lexie ate about half of the oatmeal, and once she'd taken the tray to the kitchen, Meredith went back to sit on the bed. "Lex, I have no right to judge you for this. That might not always stop me, but this time, you're safe.

"I spent years trying to find something else to be beholden to. At the time, I'd say I was just having fun. I was game to try everything once, and if it helped me care less about what a failure I was, I'd do it again.

"I don't know how, or even why, I managed to hit the brakes over and over. At times, I definitely skidded. The people I hung out with were on cruise control, or like…those cars in arcade games, where you can jump other vehicles, off-road, crash, and go back to a checkpoint.

"You've floored it on an open road once or twice, but otherwise you've followed every rule. You're far from the only person who has ever gotten tired of that."

"It's more…." Lexie folded her lips back. "It's like all of a sudden I'm driving in a foreign country, and I don't know what the laws are."

"You can figure them out. You're more than just a pretty face."

Lexie laughed. "Your analogy is kind of funny, considering traffic laws might be the only ones you follow to the letter."

"If you'd ever been on an interstate with my mother, you'd be careful, too. It was like she'd never worked on an MVA in her life."

"Following the rules doesn't always protect you."

"True. Metaphorically and actually."

"You've been in an accident?"

"A couple. One that…." Meredith sighed. "Okay, if you want story-time, you need to make room for me and the potential human."

When Lexie laughed, she looked a lot more like herself. Too bad this wasn't a funny story. "Because of her driving, and because she almost never used it, I took Mom's car a lot. Spring Break sophomore year, a bunch of us went down to Florida. We drove. Too many books about the Great American Road-Trip. I did a lot of it. Control freak. Maybe I was tired. It was raining on the Turnpike, and this stupid van pulled out in front of us. I hit the brakes and yanked the wheel. The car didn't respond,

until it did. It skidded and swerved at the last possible second. No significant injuries. Lacs, a broken wrist. I hit my head on the steering wheel. My inaugural concussion. Car was totaled.

"My friends had no idea what'd happened. They were screaming along to the radio, it cut out, and we were on the median with broken glass everywhere.. Within a few hours they were all in the hotel bar toasting to being alive.

"I had to call my mom from the hospital. I don't know what I expected. Comfort? Commiseration? The way she drove, she must've had close calls.

"Psh. You didn't get to turn things around on Ellis Grey. I should've known better. I was nineteen, not nine. The fight ended with me screaming that if I'd died she'd probably have sent an intern to identify my body."

"Oh my god, you're so dramatic!"

"I was a kid!"

"If you think you've changed there, you're incredibly mistaken."

"Yeah, well, you have your moments, Fifth Grade Graduation." Lexie screwed her face up at Meredith, and when her features re-settled, she looked a little bit less miserable. "That whole ordeal could've been a brake-cutter for me. I was totally focused on something I thought I was good at, and out of nowhere, the four other lives in my hands were in danger. It wasn't my fault. Before the 'Death tried to kill us' jokes started, they tried to made sure I did too. Even the insurance ruled in my favor. Mom refusing to believe it…."

"She gaslit you."

"Maybe. I was a college kid who partied too much, had a tendency to attract catastrophes, and didn't have a great sense of self-preservation. This was my first near miss, and it was a rush better than almost any hit I'd ever taken. It led to participating in a lot of activities that required a waiver. Or should've."

"Sadie must've been thrilled."

"You could say that."

Things with Sadie had been in a latent phase. Suggesting bungee jumping over the summer had renewed her interest. Long after she'd realized that those wild adventures weren't going to fulfill her—they were just a way of reminding herself that life could be thrilling—she'd been diving in to take the controls for Sadie—for anyone—who didn't notice the crash coming, or thought she wanted it to. Twenty-five alive.

"Something Mom said on that call is actually the reason I didn't go off-track. She told me I'd never step foot in an operating room if I got hysterical over losing control in a life-or-death situation."

"Yeah…that's…really motivating."

"Right? But what she refused to hear was that I didn't gethysterical until she doubted my story. I was totally calm through all of it. The accident, talking to cops, to EMTs. Caitlin didn't have her insurance card, Dante was phobic of needles…. I handled it. For the rest of the week, I was a total disaster…."

Not the time to bring up mixing banana daiquiris with narcotics. Her mother could've shown her as many diseased livers as she wanted; at nineteen, Meredith had been convinced that that'd be a problem for the incomprehensibly far future.

If she'd known her father would go into liver failure after a year of intense alcoholism, would she have changed her behavior?

Probably not.

Lexie looked like she might be able to fall asleep, and when Meredith offered to move the pillows propping her up, she let her.

"What were you gonna say?" Lexie asked while she was doing it. "You cut yourself off while you were describing the crash."

"Oh. Um. The car wasn't responding fast enough, but I was. My brain. My body. Every tendon, every ligament. Nothing mattered other than keeping us alive, and I felt this power. And, unintentionally, Mom told me that's what surgery was like."

"Yeah, it is." Lexie closed her eyes for several seconds. "I'm not going to be able to go back, am I?"

"Do I look like a psychic?"

"You look like a realistic surgeon. Do you think I'll operate again?"

"I don't think you should give up on it, Doc Diaper."

"Because I'll improve if I keep pursuing it. But you're not sure I can improve enough."

Meredith sighed. "I'm not. But what my mother said that day was a very bitchy, roundabout way of saying that surgeons are never sure something will work until it does." She had one arm around Lexie's shoulder's already, and she brought the other up to run her fingers along Lexie's hairline.

"You did that while I was in the hospital. Did Mark tell you?"

"No, sweetie. While you were comatose, any time Thatcher was visiting, he'd pull the chair up to the bed and do this. He said it helped calm you down when you were little."

"Not just then."

"I figured that."

"I wish I could just hate him."

Meredith huffed. Trust her sister to envy the one grudge she couldn't seem to get past—not that she hated Thatcher; she thought he was pathetic. Maybe she hated that—When she thought about her mother, though, she understood.

It wasn't that she wanted to be free to hate her mother. She wished her mother had known how to accept how much Meredith loved her.