Find Love
Title: Find Love
Fandom: Grey's Anatomy
Pairing: Mer/Der
Rating: PG
Summary: Follows a week after She's Gone. Sorting out the mess and ruin.
I threw this story together in approximately two hours. It has not been beta read. I didn't plan it. I wrote it from start to finish in one sitting and did not flesh it out from barebones in my usual painstaking steps. It's essentially brain vomit based on my thoughts about the S8 premiere. It might be woefully out of character -- it's something I wish to happen a lot more than I can say for certain whether it's plausible. The premise is that there is no real premise. I needed a reason to get Meredith and Derek in a 'closet', and I didn't want to spend a lot of time on it, so I went with the first thing that came to mind. The title is based on a song by NLX.
If you're still on board, here we go:
Find Love
Meredith Grey wants to be a neurosurgeon, and so she doesn't think twice about being paged to the psych ward for a consult. She walks numbly through the halls, her gaze focused on nothing and everything at once. Shapes shift and move before her eyes, but she doesn't really see them. The world passes her by in her daze. There is an empty place inside of her. Sad detachment has become a way of life.
It doesn't occur to her to wonder until she is a mere fifteen feet away, and Mark stands in front of a thick door, his arms folded over his chest as though he's playing at being a bouncer. Alex stands close by at the reception desk, and Cristina hovers across the hall, reading a chart, but not looking up. This seems... strange.
Meredith frowns as Lexie intercepts her, wide-eyed and overly cheerful.
“Hi, Meredith!” her sister says.
“Lexie, what's--”
“Male,” Lexie states as they approach the door where Mark stands. “Forty-three.” Lexie opens the door, and they squeeze past Mark, who blocks the opening as though he expects an escapee, and then hands are on Meredith's hips, pushing, grabbing her phone and pager from her belt, and she trips into the room with a disgruntled squeak. Lexie finishes in a blur of words, “Likes crossword puzzles, fishing, and has a strong moral compass that sometimes get stuck on North.” And then the door slams shut with a resounding thud.
Meredith blinks, dumbfounded as she crawls to her feet from the cold, tiled floor. She is in a small, cube-shaped observation room, perhaps ten feet by ten feet. There is a narrow bed and a toilet in the corner. And Derek. Derek is in the corner, too.
A lump forms in her throat.
Derek sits on the bed against the wall. He wears his navy scrubs and a white lab coat. He looks at the floor, not at her. His arms are wrapped around his knees, and his gold wristwatch sparkles in the white, institutional light. Stubble carves a swath across his face. His eyes are bloodshot and his hair unkempt. His face is splotchy. She can tell he's been crying. Recently. The sight is unnerving. She's not used to him crying.
Something bubbles inside of her. Something that makes her insides feel tight and too big for her body. She doesn't like it. She turns away from him and pounds on the door, staring through the tiny meshed observation window. “An intervention?” she snaps. The words bounce around the quiet room and make her flinch. “Seriously?”
Mark smiles a toothy smile on the other side of the door, his face filling the tiny window. “Seriously,” he says. The room is soundproof. She can't hear the word, but she hears it in her head well enough when she sees his lips move.
Lexie pokes her head in the window and waves. Then she tapes black construction paper over the glass, and Meredith's world is reduced to this tiny ten-by-ten observation room with a bed and a toilet. And Derek.
She pounds on the door. It is so thick, it doesn't even rattle, and her hands hurt to the bone in moments. She knows her struggle is useless. She gives up when she hits her funny bone by accident.
“Ow!” she hisses at nothing in particular.
And then all is silence. He still doesn't speak. She turns to face him again. She wonders how they caught him. If they spun the same story about a neuro consult. She wonders how hard Mark had to wrestle with Derek to get him into the room. She wonders how long they had to wait before Derek gave up on escaping and sat in the corner, dejected and quiet like he is, now. She imagines he tried to break the door down for a while.
The bubbly feeling inside of her has hit a boil, and she stands in the middle of the room, lost. She swallows. There is nowhere in the room to sit except the toilet and the bed.
She moves to the bed. The thin mattress sinks underneath her. She wraps her arms around her body and looks to the right. She sits as far away from him as she can. The bubbly feeling makes it hard to think.
The silence stretches until she cannot stand it.
“We're locked in a freaking psych ward, and you're still going to give me the silent treatment?” she says, frustrated.
He looks at her, then. His gaze seems hopeless. “What do you want me to say?” he says.
She blinks. She doesn't know the answer to that.
“I'm sorry about Zola, okay?” she says. She hears her words. They are accusing. Thrown at him like knives. The bubbling is a frenzy inside her chest. “I'm sorry about all of it.”
He reacts to her words as though they cut, and when he blinks, tears slice his face. His lower lip quivers. He does not speak. He looks away, instead, and his body shifts as he moves to wipe his face with his hands.
She doesn't understand.
She doesn't understand any of this.
“You did it, too,” she says as the bubbling overwhelms her.
His voice is gravelly and dark when he speaks to the far wall. “Did what?”
“You wanted to break the rules for Adele, and I talked you out of it.”
He doesn't reply. She wants to scream to release the bubbles. He is so very frustrating. It has been a week since he walked away. Six days, to be precise. She feels as though it has been years. She misses him, and she misses Zola, and she doesn't understand, and she is angry beyond words at him. Why won't he talk? He is such an ass, sometimes.
“I just don't get it, Derek,” she says, frustrated. “Why is it wrong when I do it, but not when you do it?” Hypocrite! She doesn't say that part.
He is like a volcano. His jaw clenches. Unclenches. He wipes the remaining splash of tears from his eyes. He stands. Like he needs to vent energy. “It's not about Adele!” he says. It is the most definitive thing he's said to her in a long time. The most definitive thing since he called her a bad mother. But it's also the most confusing, because it contradicts what came before. “It's not about...” He jabs his fist against the cold, sterile wall. “God, damn it.” And then he turns away, pressing his hands up over his head like he is trying to push the wall away. He doesn't move.
She didn't understand before. Now, she understands less.
“You made it about Adele,” she says. “And you said I didn't know right from wrong. And you called me a bad mother.”
He doesn't reply.
She stands, too. She needs to vent energy, too. There is not much room to walk in a ten-by-ten room. She paces, anyway. She finds herself wanting to babble as the bubbles in her chest pop left and right. They are fear, she realizes. She is afraid. Terrified. But she doesn't know why.
The crushing silence bothers her.
“Maybe, I am a bad mother,” she says to fill the void. “Maybe, I am. I don't have a good example like you do. I wish I did, but I don't. And I don't know. But I'm trying, Derek. I don't know what you want from me!”
And why should she make it about what he wants when he's being so freaking obstinate?
But then he turns from the wall to look at her. His lower lip trembles, and his eyes are misty. “I'm sorry,” he says, his pitch low and dark. She is gobsmacked by the words. She did not expect them. He wipes his palm against his face. The rasping sound echoes in the silence. The expression in his eyes is one of jagged, throbbing hurt. “I'm sorry I said those things.”
But if he's sorry, then why do they fight? Why doesn't he come home? She is lost. Her understanding, what little she possessed, has waned to a single grain of sand in a desert.
“Then why are you still treating me like I'm dirt?” she asks.
He shakes his head, and she can see that this question is the true knife, and she's gutted him. She doesn't understand, and that bothers him, and she doesn't know why, and that bothers her, and both of them stand there, ruffled, and upset, and wrong. The silence is dark and cold, and bubbles pop inside. Everywhere. She doesn't know why, but she thinks the answer might be awful.
“Why?” she prods him, dreading. “Tell me why.”
He peers at her, his stark blue eyes full of dejection. “Did I even cross your mind?” he says.
“What do you mean?” she says.
He blinks. Like her answer twists the knife. “When you swapped the samples, and you threw a year of my work into the toilet. Did I cross your mind?”
Something inside her body is falling out through the floor. The bubbles are metamorphosing from simple fear to panic. “I wanted to save Adele,” she says. “I wasn't thinking--”
“You weren't thinking about me,” he snaps. “At all. You don't think, Meredith. Ever. And I'm so tired of coming in last place with you.”
Her mouth falls open. She doesn't know what to say. “But...” The word pops off her tongue, unbidden. There are no words to follow it. She feels like she has been punched in the gut.
He shakes his head and drops onto the mattress in an upset heap. “And now I'll never make a cure for you, and we lost our...” He can't finish. His words break apart. He has no more coherency than she does. “Our baby,” he manages. He shudders. His face is a mess. He hides it from her with his hands, but she knows he is dissolving, and watching it is awful.
He is not just a mad husband. He is a bereaved parent. So is she.
Their baby is gone.
Their baby.
Zola is gone, and she knows she is the reason. Her running is the reason. She cannot deny it. She ran away.
The colossal hole inside, the reason for her week of drifting, feels emptier and worse than it ever has. She has seen couples deal with the loss of a child. As a doctor, it is inevitable. But she doesn't remember any cases where the husband is in shambles, and the wife is in shambles, and neither of them touch each other or take comfort from the other. She is sure there must be some. Blame is easy to pass around. But she hasn't seen one.
This is new to her.
They are broken on so many levels.
She doesn't know how to handle this.
The bubbles are popping, and she wants to run, but she is stuck in a ten-by-ten foot room, and she can't. She can't run. She glances frantically at the door, but it does not magically open. She moves in a circle around the claustrophobic room, and then she runs out of steam. She is tired, and afraid, and she hurts. She misses him, and she misses Zola. She plops onto the bed beside him and sighs as her eyes prick with tears, but she manages to hold them in despite the burning, hurting wave.
She feels pathetic.
“You're right,” she admits softly, and he stills beside her. She rubs her tired eyes. “I didn't think about you. I was just trying to fix it.”
“Fix what?” he says through his hands.
“My mother ruined Adele's life,” she explains. “I thought I could... I wanted to...”
“Fix it,” he says.
“Yeah.”
Another long silence fills the space between them. She doesn't know what to say, and so she says nothing. A lump in her throat makes it hard to do anything but try not to cry. Her tongue feels too big in her mouth.
He moves. The whisper of his shifting body fills the room. He wraps his arms around her, and she feels like she has found her favorite lost coat, but it doesn't fit right anymore. She doesn't feel safe. The absence of security pops more bubbles. Stress makes her nauseous.
“You don't owe anybody for what your mother did,” he says, and she can't hold it in anymore.
She cries. In his arms. It's embarrassing. She hates crying.
“My mother was just like Cristina,” she says, sniffling. She said it earlier. To Owen. She feels as though she is regurgitating, but she can't help it. “I don't want to be my mother,” she says.
His arms tighten around her. She breathes into his lab coat.
He rubs her back, and it feels so nice and so incorrect all at once, because he still doesn't speak. She wants him to tell her she's not her mother, but he doesn't, and her heart breaks into pieces, because maybe, it's true, and she is. She is her mother. For a moment, there is only sadness, but then there is anger. He is supposed to understand this.
You've never done this before, he said, years ago, and she agreed with him.
I've never done this before.
Why can't he remember that?
She hits him with a tiny fist. Not hard. They sway together. The mattress frame creaks. “I don't know what to do,” she says, crying, but it's more angry tears than pathetic, now. She is okay with anger, at least. It seems less waif-y. “You're the only person I've ever gotten serious with, and I don't know what to do. I don't know anything because all I have in my head is what my mother did, and I know that's wrong, and I hate it, but I don't know anything else, and you've never said anything before. I thought I was doing okay.”
He still doesn't speak.
“You've never said anything,” she repeats, fuming. “I'm not freaking psychic.”
The silence stretches to the point of madness. She pulls away from him, rubbing her eyes. The expression on his face is... indescribable. She cannot interpret it, and the mystery frightens her. Bubbles pop.
He swallows.
“I didn't want to scare you,” he says, his voice a soft, velvet murmur that makes her shiver. Not because it is pleasant. Because the disquiet makes her feel as though her body is flying apart molecule by molecule, and it is an upsetting, terrible feeling.
He shakes his head. “Baby steps,” he says, an echo from a years ago memory stuck in her head. “No sudden moves.”
“Derek...” she begins, but she cannot finish.
He's not listening to her. He shakes his head again. “I didn't want...” His lower lip trembles. “And now we lost our baby.”
She sees where he is going with this, now. She touches his shoulder. His muscles are tense like steel.
“It's not your fault,” she says. “It's mine.” She blinks. “I have no freaking clue. And I'm a horrible mom. Like you said. I got Zola taken away.”
“You're not horrible,” he asserts. He shakes his head. Vehemently. “I didn't mean it when I--”
She interrupts him. “Derek, I don't know what I'm doing.”
“I'm sorry.”
She peers at him. “You're sorry I don't know what I'm doing?”
His mouth opens and closes. The look on his face is dark and uncertain, but there is a glint of something else. Something lighter. She thinks, if he were in a better mood, he might laugh, but she doesn't know why she thinks that.
“I don't know what I'm doing, either,” he admits. “I don't know how you need me to be.”
Silence fills the space between them.
She realizes, then, that they have a certain level of camaraderie, born out of not knowing. She doesn't understand what he needs of her, and he doesn't understand what she needs of him. She is mystified by romance, and he is used to loving veterans. The disconnect has caused so many cracks in something that should have been good.
She gives him a hesitant smile. “So, we're both clueless idiots.”
He doesn't contradict her. Though he is woefully upset, there is a spark in his gaze that wasn't there before. She folds against him like a puzzle piece completing a picture. His embrace does not feel wrong or strange anymore. He is fully participant. She basks in it. She didn't think she would have this again.
“We've been through a lot,” she says.
He nods. “We have.”
She scrunches his navy scrub shirt between her fingers. “You got shot,” she says. “Right in front of me. And I miscarried. And we couldn't have a baby, but we tried.”
“I know,” he says.
“You're not going to scare me away,” she says definitively. “I'll listen. I'll try. I don't want to be my mother.”
The silence is long, but not uncertain. “Okay,” he says at the end of it. The word is like a wave, sweeping over her and carrying them out to sea. All the bubbles inside have a place to go, now. They vent into the frothy water, popping outside instead of within, and she is home again. Fearless in his arms.
Safe.
“What are we going to do?” she wonders.
“I don't know,” he says.
There is a lot they don't seem to know.
She swallows, breathing in the musky scent of his body that is so familiar and male. “How will we get her back?” she says.
“I don't know,” he says, and he sounds angry and frustrated and hopeless and grieving all at once this time, but not at her. At the world. She understands the feeling. She grew up with it. He rubs her back in idle circles, and they sit, clueless, together.
When the door opens seconds, minutes, hours, or days later, she flinches at the intrusion. She looks to see Lexie peeking in at them. “Oops,” her half-sister says. “Carry on.” She turns to an audience Meredith can't see. “They haven't killed each other!” Lexie announces. Then the door shuts and the lock clicks, and Meredith and Derek are alone again.
Meredith doesn't mind.
Derek doesn't seem to, either.
His body starts to tremble. He rocks. Back and forth. “I'm sorry I stayed away,” he says. “I didn't know what...” His grip tightens around her. “I don't know what to do. Or to say. Or...” He presses his face into her hair and breathes her in as though it comforts him.
“I know,” she says, because she gets it, now.
She doesn't know how this will be fixed. But at least they both understand why it's all broken.
They are both at fault for different causal things.
Her breaths tighten in her chest. He crushes her in his arms. They are both grieving. She does not remember who kisses whom first, but they are lip locked and sad and tired. They take comfort in each other, warmth to warmth, skin to skin, and breath to breath. She has no idea how they will fix it, but at least she now has hope that they might.
They might fix it.
And, for the moment, hope is all she needs.
Fandom: Grey's Anatomy
Pairing: Mer/Der
Rating: PG
Summary: Follows a week after She's Gone. Sorting out the mess and ruin.
I threw this story together in approximately two hours. It has not been beta read. I didn't plan it. I wrote it from start to finish in one sitting and did not flesh it out from barebones in my usual painstaking steps. It's essentially brain vomit based on my thoughts about the S8 premiere. It might be woefully out of character -- it's something I wish to happen a lot more than I can say for certain whether it's plausible. The premise is that there is no real premise. I needed a reason to get Meredith and Derek in a 'closet', and I didn't want to spend a lot of time on it, so I went with the first thing that came to mind. The title is based on a song by NLX.
If you're still on board, here we go:
Find Love
Meredith Grey wants to be a neurosurgeon, and so she doesn't think twice about being paged to the psych ward for a consult. She walks numbly through the halls, her gaze focused on nothing and everything at once. Shapes shift and move before her eyes, but she doesn't really see them. The world passes her by in her daze. There is an empty place inside of her. Sad detachment has become a way of life.
It doesn't occur to her to wonder until she is a mere fifteen feet away, and Mark stands in front of a thick door, his arms folded over his chest as though he's playing at being a bouncer. Alex stands close by at the reception desk, and Cristina hovers across the hall, reading a chart, but not looking up. This seems... strange.
Meredith frowns as Lexie intercepts her, wide-eyed and overly cheerful.
“Hi, Meredith!” her sister says.
“Lexie, what's--”
“Male,” Lexie states as they approach the door where Mark stands. “Forty-three.” Lexie opens the door, and they squeeze past Mark, who blocks the opening as though he expects an escapee, and then hands are on Meredith's hips, pushing, grabbing her phone and pager from her belt, and she trips into the room with a disgruntled squeak. Lexie finishes in a blur of words, “Likes crossword puzzles, fishing, and has a strong moral compass that sometimes get stuck on North.” And then the door slams shut with a resounding thud.
Meredith blinks, dumbfounded as she crawls to her feet from the cold, tiled floor. She is in a small, cube-shaped observation room, perhaps ten feet by ten feet. There is a narrow bed and a toilet in the corner. And Derek. Derek is in the corner, too.
A lump forms in her throat.
Derek sits on the bed against the wall. He wears his navy scrubs and a white lab coat. He looks at the floor, not at her. His arms are wrapped around his knees, and his gold wristwatch sparkles in the white, institutional light. Stubble carves a swath across his face. His eyes are bloodshot and his hair unkempt. His face is splotchy. She can tell he's been crying. Recently. The sight is unnerving. She's not used to him crying.
Something bubbles inside of her. Something that makes her insides feel tight and too big for her body. She doesn't like it. She turns away from him and pounds on the door, staring through the tiny meshed observation window. “An intervention?” she snaps. The words bounce around the quiet room and make her flinch. “Seriously?”
Mark smiles a toothy smile on the other side of the door, his face filling the tiny window. “Seriously,” he says. The room is soundproof. She can't hear the word, but she hears it in her head well enough when she sees his lips move.
Lexie pokes her head in the window and waves. Then she tapes black construction paper over the glass, and Meredith's world is reduced to this tiny ten-by-ten observation room with a bed and a toilet. And Derek.
She pounds on the door. It is so thick, it doesn't even rattle, and her hands hurt to the bone in moments. She knows her struggle is useless. She gives up when she hits her funny bone by accident.
“Ow!” she hisses at nothing in particular.
And then all is silence. He still doesn't speak. She turns to face him again. She wonders how they caught him. If they spun the same story about a neuro consult. She wonders how hard Mark had to wrestle with Derek to get him into the room. She wonders how long they had to wait before Derek gave up on escaping and sat in the corner, dejected and quiet like he is, now. She imagines he tried to break the door down for a while.
The bubbly feeling inside of her has hit a boil, and she stands in the middle of the room, lost. She swallows. There is nowhere in the room to sit except the toilet and the bed.
She moves to the bed. The thin mattress sinks underneath her. She wraps her arms around her body and looks to the right. She sits as far away from him as she can. The bubbly feeling makes it hard to think.
The silence stretches until she cannot stand it.
“We're locked in a freaking psych ward, and you're still going to give me the silent treatment?” she says, frustrated.
He looks at her, then. His gaze seems hopeless. “What do you want me to say?” he says.
She blinks. She doesn't know the answer to that.
“I'm sorry about Zola, okay?” she says. She hears her words. They are accusing. Thrown at him like knives. The bubbling is a frenzy inside her chest. “I'm sorry about all of it.”
He reacts to her words as though they cut, and when he blinks, tears slice his face. His lower lip quivers. He does not speak. He looks away, instead, and his body shifts as he moves to wipe his face with his hands.
She doesn't understand.
She doesn't understand any of this.
“You did it, too,” she says as the bubbling overwhelms her.
His voice is gravelly and dark when he speaks to the far wall. “Did what?”
“You wanted to break the rules for Adele, and I talked you out of it.”
He doesn't reply. She wants to scream to release the bubbles. He is so very frustrating. It has been a week since he walked away. Six days, to be precise. She feels as though it has been years. She misses him, and she misses Zola, and she doesn't understand, and she is angry beyond words at him. Why won't he talk? He is such an ass, sometimes.
“I just don't get it, Derek,” she says, frustrated. “Why is it wrong when I do it, but not when you do it?” Hypocrite! She doesn't say that part.
He is like a volcano. His jaw clenches. Unclenches. He wipes the remaining splash of tears from his eyes. He stands. Like he needs to vent energy. “It's not about Adele!” he says. It is the most definitive thing he's said to her in a long time. The most definitive thing since he called her a bad mother. But it's also the most confusing, because it contradicts what came before. “It's not about...” He jabs his fist against the cold, sterile wall. “God, damn it.” And then he turns away, pressing his hands up over his head like he is trying to push the wall away. He doesn't move.
She didn't understand before. Now, she understands less.
“You made it about Adele,” she says. “And you said I didn't know right from wrong. And you called me a bad mother.”
He doesn't reply.
She stands, too. She needs to vent energy, too. There is not much room to walk in a ten-by-ten room. She paces, anyway. She finds herself wanting to babble as the bubbles in her chest pop left and right. They are fear, she realizes. She is afraid. Terrified. But she doesn't know why.
The crushing silence bothers her.
“Maybe, I am a bad mother,” she says to fill the void. “Maybe, I am. I don't have a good example like you do. I wish I did, but I don't. And I don't know. But I'm trying, Derek. I don't know what you want from me!”
And why should she make it about what he wants when he's being so freaking obstinate?
But then he turns from the wall to look at her. His lower lip trembles, and his eyes are misty. “I'm sorry,” he says, his pitch low and dark. She is gobsmacked by the words. She did not expect them. He wipes his palm against his face. The rasping sound echoes in the silence. The expression in his eyes is one of jagged, throbbing hurt. “I'm sorry I said those things.”
But if he's sorry, then why do they fight? Why doesn't he come home? She is lost. Her understanding, what little she possessed, has waned to a single grain of sand in a desert.
“Then why are you still treating me like I'm dirt?” she asks.
He shakes his head, and she can see that this question is the true knife, and she's gutted him. She doesn't understand, and that bothers him, and she doesn't know why, and that bothers her, and both of them stand there, ruffled, and upset, and wrong. The silence is dark and cold, and bubbles pop inside. Everywhere. She doesn't know why, but she thinks the answer might be awful.
“Why?” she prods him, dreading. “Tell me why.”
He peers at her, his stark blue eyes full of dejection. “Did I even cross your mind?” he says.
“What do you mean?” she says.
He blinks. Like her answer twists the knife. “When you swapped the samples, and you threw a year of my work into the toilet. Did I cross your mind?”
Something inside her body is falling out through the floor. The bubbles are metamorphosing from simple fear to panic. “I wanted to save Adele,” she says. “I wasn't thinking--”
“You weren't thinking about me,” he snaps. “At all. You don't think, Meredith. Ever. And I'm so tired of coming in last place with you.”
Her mouth falls open. She doesn't know what to say. “But...” The word pops off her tongue, unbidden. There are no words to follow it. She feels like she has been punched in the gut.
He shakes his head and drops onto the mattress in an upset heap. “And now I'll never make a cure for you, and we lost our...” He can't finish. His words break apart. He has no more coherency than she does. “Our baby,” he manages. He shudders. His face is a mess. He hides it from her with his hands, but she knows he is dissolving, and watching it is awful.
He is not just a mad husband. He is a bereaved parent. So is she.
Their baby is gone.
Their baby.
Zola is gone, and she knows she is the reason. Her running is the reason. She cannot deny it. She ran away.
The colossal hole inside, the reason for her week of drifting, feels emptier and worse than it ever has. She has seen couples deal with the loss of a child. As a doctor, it is inevitable. But she doesn't remember any cases where the husband is in shambles, and the wife is in shambles, and neither of them touch each other or take comfort from the other. She is sure there must be some. Blame is easy to pass around. But she hasn't seen one.
This is new to her.
They are broken on so many levels.
She doesn't know how to handle this.
The bubbles are popping, and she wants to run, but she is stuck in a ten-by-ten foot room, and she can't. She can't run. She glances frantically at the door, but it does not magically open. She moves in a circle around the claustrophobic room, and then she runs out of steam. She is tired, and afraid, and she hurts. She misses him, and she misses Zola. She plops onto the bed beside him and sighs as her eyes prick with tears, but she manages to hold them in despite the burning, hurting wave.
She feels pathetic.
“You're right,” she admits softly, and he stills beside her. She rubs her tired eyes. “I didn't think about you. I was just trying to fix it.”
“Fix what?” he says through his hands.
“My mother ruined Adele's life,” she explains. “I thought I could... I wanted to...”
“Fix it,” he says.
“Yeah.”
Another long silence fills the space between them. She doesn't know what to say, and so she says nothing. A lump in her throat makes it hard to do anything but try not to cry. Her tongue feels too big in her mouth.
He moves. The whisper of his shifting body fills the room. He wraps his arms around her, and she feels like she has found her favorite lost coat, but it doesn't fit right anymore. She doesn't feel safe. The absence of security pops more bubbles. Stress makes her nauseous.
“You don't owe anybody for what your mother did,” he says, and she can't hold it in anymore.
She cries. In his arms. It's embarrassing. She hates crying.
“My mother was just like Cristina,” she says, sniffling. She said it earlier. To Owen. She feels as though she is regurgitating, but she can't help it. “I don't want to be my mother,” she says.
His arms tighten around her. She breathes into his lab coat.
He rubs her back, and it feels so nice and so incorrect all at once, because he still doesn't speak. She wants him to tell her she's not her mother, but he doesn't, and her heart breaks into pieces, because maybe, it's true, and she is. She is her mother. For a moment, there is only sadness, but then there is anger. He is supposed to understand this.
You've never done this before, he said, years ago, and she agreed with him.
I've never done this before.
Why can't he remember that?
She hits him with a tiny fist. Not hard. They sway together. The mattress frame creaks. “I don't know what to do,” she says, crying, but it's more angry tears than pathetic, now. She is okay with anger, at least. It seems less waif-y. “You're the only person I've ever gotten serious with, and I don't know what to do. I don't know anything because all I have in my head is what my mother did, and I know that's wrong, and I hate it, but I don't know anything else, and you've never said anything before. I thought I was doing okay.”
He still doesn't speak.
“You've never said anything,” she repeats, fuming. “I'm not freaking psychic.”
The silence stretches to the point of madness. She pulls away from him, rubbing her eyes. The expression on his face is... indescribable. She cannot interpret it, and the mystery frightens her. Bubbles pop.
He swallows.
“I didn't want to scare you,” he says, his voice a soft, velvet murmur that makes her shiver. Not because it is pleasant. Because the disquiet makes her feel as though her body is flying apart molecule by molecule, and it is an upsetting, terrible feeling.
He shakes his head. “Baby steps,” he says, an echo from a years ago memory stuck in her head. “No sudden moves.”
“Derek...” she begins, but she cannot finish.
He's not listening to her. He shakes his head again. “I didn't want...” His lower lip trembles. “And now we lost our baby.”
She sees where he is going with this, now. She touches his shoulder. His muscles are tense like steel.
“It's not your fault,” she says. “It's mine.” She blinks. “I have no freaking clue. And I'm a horrible mom. Like you said. I got Zola taken away.”
“You're not horrible,” he asserts. He shakes his head. Vehemently. “I didn't mean it when I--”
She interrupts him. “Derek, I don't know what I'm doing.”
“I'm sorry.”
She peers at him. “You're sorry I don't know what I'm doing?”
His mouth opens and closes. The look on his face is dark and uncertain, but there is a glint of something else. Something lighter. She thinks, if he were in a better mood, he might laugh, but she doesn't know why she thinks that.
“I don't know what I'm doing, either,” he admits. “I don't know how you need me to be.”
Silence fills the space between them.
She realizes, then, that they have a certain level of camaraderie, born out of not knowing. She doesn't understand what he needs of her, and he doesn't understand what she needs of him. She is mystified by romance, and he is used to loving veterans. The disconnect has caused so many cracks in something that should have been good.
She gives him a hesitant smile. “So, we're both clueless idiots.”
He doesn't contradict her. Though he is woefully upset, there is a spark in his gaze that wasn't there before. She folds against him like a puzzle piece completing a picture. His embrace does not feel wrong or strange anymore. He is fully participant. She basks in it. She didn't think she would have this again.
“We've been through a lot,” she says.
He nods. “We have.”
She scrunches his navy scrub shirt between her fingers. “You got shot,” she says. “Right in front of me. And I miscarried. And we couldn't have a baby, but we tried.”
“I know,” he says.
“You're not going to scare me away,” she says definitively. “I'll listen. I'll try. I don't want to be my mother.”
The silence is long, but not uncertain. “Okay,” he says at the end of it. The word is like a wave, sweeping over her and carrying them out to sea. All the bubbles inside have a place to go, now. They vent into the frothy water, popping outside instead of within, and she is home again. Fearless in his arms.
Safe.
“What are we going to do?” she wonders.
“I don't know,” he says.
There is a lot they don't seem to know.
She swallows, breathing in the musky scent of his body that is so familiar and male. “How will we get her back?” she says.
“I don't know,” he says, and he sounds angry and frustrated and hopeless and grieving all at once this time, but not at her. At the world. She understands the feeling. She grew up with it. He rubs her back in idle circles, and they sit, clueless, together.
When the door opens seconds, minutes, hours, or days later, she flinches at the intrusion. She looks to see Lexie peeking in at them. “Oops,” her half-sister says. “Carry on.” She turns to an audience Meredith can't see. “They haven't killed each other!” Lexie announces. Then the door shuts and the lock clicks, and Meredith and Derek are alone again.
Meredith doesn't mind.
Derek doesn't seem to, either.
His body starts to tremble. He rocks. Back and forth. “I'm sorry I stayed away,” he says. “I didn't know what...” His grip tightens around her. “I don't know what to do. Or to say. Or...” He presses his face into her hair and breathes her in as though it comforts him.
“I know,” she says, because she gets it, now.
She doesn't know how this will be fixed. But at least they both understand why it's all broken.
They are both at fault for different causal things.
Her breaths tighten in her chest. He crushes her in his arms. They are both grieving. She does not remember who kisses whom first, but they are lip locked and sad and tired. They take comfort in each other, warmth to warmth, skin to skin, and breath to breath. She has no idea how they will fix it, but at least she now has hope that they might.
They might fix it.
And, for the moment, hope is all she needs.