All Along The Watchtower - Part 24.2
Title: All Along The Watchtower
Fandom: Grey's Anatomy
Pairing: Mer/Der
Rating: M
Summary: S6 continuation. Immediately post Sanctuary / Death and All His Friends.
After polling on Twitter, the majority of respondents seem to want this chapter in tiny chunks as fast as I can churn it out, rather than larger pieces. I'll try to get one more section, at least, posted before I leave for Maine. Hope you enjoy, and thanks as always for the feedback, and of course, you're allowed to play along! :)
All Along The Watchtower - Part 24.2 [Clue #1]
Lexie lit up at the suggestion. She looked like she wanted to start humming the freaking song, or at least whistle it, which would only cap this crappy day with more crap.
“He's talking about surgery,” Cristina said before Lexie could torture them all.
That didn't stop Meredith's brain from running away with the chorus. The first cut is the deeeeee-- Stop. Crap, crap. Stop! Meredith blinked away the song before it could hook its claws into her brain enough to repeat and repeat and repeat like “It's A Small World After All”, only worse.
“But it's a poem,” Lexie said, oblivious to Meredith's internal battle. “He wouldn't be that literal.”
“He's a guy,” Alex said, his expression placid. “He could be that literal.”
Cristina shook her head. “First cut is the deepest?” she said. I still want you by my side. “He's a surgeon. That's so about surgery. I'd bet money.”
“You would think that,” Lexie said.
Meredith tried to think. First cut. Baby, I know. First cut is the deeee-- STOP. She ground her molars. “His first surgery?”
Mark shook his head. “That was in Manhattan,” he said. “I don't think he wants you to fly three thousand miles to find--”
“What?” Meredith prodded. “To find what?”
Mark swallowed and shut his mouth. Meredith imagined him wielding a little stick, poking at them to keep them on the right path. Stay on the yellow brick road, or else! She narrowed her eyes and peered at him, but he didn't crumble under scrutiny. He returned her gaze, all knowing-eyed and annoying and unhelpful.
“He so knows something,” Lexie decided.
“Do not,” Mark replied.
“It's okay,” Lexie said. “It wouldn't be as fun if you spilled.”
Meredith wasn't quite sure she agreed, but she let the comment slide.
“What about your first solo surgery?” Alex suggested.
“Maybe,” Meredith said.
“The first surgery he did with you?” Lexie said.
“Yeah,” Alex said, nodding. “Yeah. That gymnastics chick, right?”
Meredith smiled, snapping her fingers. “Katie Bryce!” First cut is the deeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee--
“Who's that?” said Mark.
“She had an aneurysm. First cut.” Is the deepest. “Literally my first shift. Derek held a contest. He rewarded the intern who could diagnose the problem. She...” Just to help me dry the tears I've cried. “That was OR five. Maybe there's something there?”
“Can't hurt to check,” Lexie said, her eyes gleaming with excitement. “I wonder what it is?”
“Maybe another craptastic poem,” Cristina said, her tone wry, as they began moving as a group down the hall.
Meredith frowned as they approached the operating room in question in a small cluster. The little white and red plaque by the door had been slid to cover the word “available” and instead showed the phrase “in use”. She didn't want to interrupt a surgery in progress based only on her and her peanut gallery's wild guess about not only what the clue-poem meant, but that they were, in fact, supposed to be looking for something in the first place. She pushed herself onto her tiptoes and peered through the small glass window, trying to see what was going on inside the big room.
Dr. Bailey performed some sort of abdominal procedure, though Meredith couldn't tell the specifics with so many other bodies wearing blue scrubs surrounding the table, the patient buried in pile of sterile drapes, and the door being situated so far away from the table. Derek could have set something up before the surgical team had arrived.
What if, whatever he'd planned, required Meredith to be in the middle of the room? She couldn't wander into a procedure based on whimsy. That wasn't sterile or safe or... No. Derek would have looked at the OR board. Right? He wouldn't have planned this corny, romantic thing - whatever it was -- without making sure he wouldn't be foiled, which meant... whatever he wanted her to find, it had to be accessible.
If he wanted her to find something, that was.
She shook her head. The twisty, logical circles she ran in her head made her brain hurt. She backed up from the glass only to plow into Lexie, who thudded onto her heels from her tiptoes with a grunt and hopped backward two steps. Cristina rolled her eyes, and Alex snickered.
“Sorry!” Lexie blurted. “I was trying to see.”
Meredith ignored her half-sister and studied the door. Around the frame. Everywhere. Nothing seemed to be out of the ordinary.
“Should I go in?” she said. Lexie, Alex, and Cristina all shrugged in a row. Meredith bit her lip. “I shouldn't go in.”
Something compelled her to look at Mark. She gave him a pleading look, but he only shrugged, too, damn it. On the other hand, he didn't dissuade her, and that stupid, knowing twinkle had returned to his eyes. She kind of wanted to take his lab coat into her fists and shake him silly to see if some details fell out of his mouth.
“Oh, just go in,” Cristina said, her tone impatient.
Meredith sighed. “Fine.”
She covered her face with a sterile surgical mask from the dispensing bin outside, and she pushed through the door into the OR. She squinted as the bright lights of the operating room slammed into her pupils. A wave of cool air washed over her. Then the awful scent of bowel coiled around her body, and her stomach roiled in response. She swallowed, forcing down her gag reflex through sheer will as she glanced around. Frustration compounded everything. Of course she'd walk into a freaking bowel resection or something. And what was she even looking for?
Dr. Bailey looked up from her patient, her eyebrows raised expectantly. “Something I can help you with, Dr. Grey?”
Meredith swallowed. Vomiting in an OR where she wasn't even supposed to be present would be a perfect end to a perfect freaking day of perfect perfectness and stupid songs. Songs that were now thoroughly stuck in her head. That's how I know, the first cut is the deepest... Damn it. She tried not to sound sick or ready to hurl. “I don't know...” she managed before she clamped her jaws shut.
No barfing. No barfing. No barfing. Or singing.
“Then close the door,” Dr. Bailey said. “You're wrecking my sterile field.”
“Sorry,” Meredith said. Back to square one, but at least outside the door, out of the smell, she might be able to think.
“It's by your head,” Dr. Bailey said just as Meredith let the door go.
Meredith shoved it back open. “What?”
“The envelope,” Dr. Bailey said. “Turn your head.”
Dr. Bailey raised a gloved, bloody hand to point at the wall to Meredith's left, and Meredith followed the motion with her gaze. Right by her freaking ear, a mere three inches away, a small piece of surgical tape precariously held another embossed envelope, identical to the first one Mark had given her, against the wall. Derek had labeled it “For Meredith” in messy, black ink. Meredith blinked at it for two seconds, nonplussed, before she grabbed it off the wall.
Realization sank in that she'd been successful. She'd found the thing Derek had wanted her to find. She smiled despite her quivering stomach and the stupid song that wouldn't shut up in her head. “Thanks, Dr. Bailey,” Meredith said.
Dr. Bailey shook her head, but her eyes crinkled with a hint mirth as she said, “You're all a bunch of lovesick fools, if you ask me.”
Because when it comes to being lucky, she's cursed...
Meredith let the door shut, and she breathed a sigh of relief, now immersed in safe-to-breathe air, and feeling rather pleased to boot.
“Well, what is it?” Cristina demanded.
Meredith leaned against the wall, shaking her head as she dropped the surgical mask from her face. Alex backed away, his expression apprehensive. She assumed that meant she looked pasty enough to be fighting the urge to hurl without having to warn them about getting out of spew distance. She closed her eyes and breathed in and out to give her stomach a moment to settle from the smelly disruption.
Nobody said a word.
She clutched the second cream-colored envelope while she rested her eyes. Her fingers ran along the raised flowers. The tape at the top stuck to her hand. Surgical tape. Not scotch tape. Not masking tape. Derek had used surgical tape to tape the freaking thing to the wall.
That was so Derek.
He kept rolls of it at home in his desk. He wrapped his freaking Christmas presents with it before he boxed them to ship to New York. She'd watched his wrapping ritual with a weird combination of fascination and disturbed horror before their first Post-it Christmas together.
The sound of wrapping paper being sliced is an unmistakable, unique noise, but she didn't recognize it when she heard it coming from behind their closed bedroom door. She hadn't grown up around it. Her family had been tiny. Her mother hadn't shopped for nieces and nephews and sisters and cousins and every other possible label on the family tree. Not like Derek, who had everything but a brother. And a father.
Meredith frowned, standing in the dim hallway as cold needles of rain cut the air outside. Her hand rested on the doorknob as the shearing sound repeated once and again. “Derek?” she said as curiosity overwhelmed her.
“No,” he said, his voice muffled through the door. “Don't come in.”
His vehemence made her blink. She jiggled the doorknob. It wouldn't turn. He'd actually locked it. What the hell?
“Don't,” he said. “One sec.”
The slicing paper sounds stopped. Something thumped. Shuffled. Moments passed. Then the lock clicked.
He opened the door, his eyes sparkling, hair disheveled. He had slivers and bits of colored paper stuck all over his blue t-shirt. And he looked... giddy.
“Okay, now it's safe,” he said. He backed away from the door, and her jaw fell open.
A pile of wrapped presents, listing and taller than the bed, leaned against his nightstand. The blankets and pillows and top sheet had been torn off their bed and discarded in a rumpled heap by the rain-spattered window. Rolls and rolls of shiny wrapping paper, a big enough stack of colorful boxes to stock a small toy store, two rolls of white surgical tape, and a glinting set of pocket scalpels rested on top of their mattress. He'd turned their bed into a giant fire and sharps hazard.
“This is safe?” she said, incredulous.
He nodded. “Items unapproved for your viewing have been appropriately hidden.”
“What?”
“I hid your presents,” he clarified with a wink.
“Oh,” she said.
Derek climbed back onto the bed and took the top box off the giant stack on the bed. The cover of the box was made of a thick, clear plastic, like the kind on Anatomy Jane boxes, and inside, shackled with thick plastic clips like a prisoner, was a red... Muppet creature of some sort.
“Wait,” she said. “My presents?”
“Hmm,” he agreed absently, nodding. “The ones I bought for you.”
“What presents?” she said. “Presents as in plural?”
Derek eyeballed the box, ignoring her. The Muppet's googly eyes stared back at him. He shifted his scrutiny to the pile of wrapping paper. He selected a roll covered with little kittens dressed as Santa Clauses and unfurled it so that a section three feet long flattened against the fitted sheet on the bed, plain side facing the ceiling.
“It is Christmas, you know,” was his eventual answer, for all that helped her make sense of the sparkly paper mayhem sprawled on the bed.
He placed the Muppet box on top of the wrapping paper and proceeded to shift it back and forth like he was measuring something. The paper crinkled. He wore the most intent frown she'd ever seen on him outside of surgery. No, scratch that. It was exactly like the frown he wore in surgery, at least the part that reached his eyes.
She imagined him clipping off an aneurysm. Right then. Except the object of his concentration was an oblong plastic box with a Muppet in it, not a human brain, and as far as she knew, Muppets didn't get aneurysms.
She took a step into the room. The floor creaked.
“What on earth are you doing?” she said, trying to keep her tone neutral.
He looked up at her, his expression lit like a firecracker. “Wrapping!” he said cheerfully. As if that explained everything.
She raised her eyebrows. “With Santa kittens, surgical tape, and a scalpel?”
He nodded as she sat on the edge of the bed. The mattress dipped. She watched him deftly cut off the three foot piece of wrapping paper. He folded the paper with all the laser precision of a neurosurgeon, encasing the strange Muppet as though it wore a glove that fit perfectly, despite the box's odd shape.
“Finger here, please,” he said.
She bit her lip and placed her index finger along the seam at the top to hold down the fold. She flinched as he unrolled the surgical tape with a loud zip. He chased the line of tape with his scalpel. He flicked his wrist, and the tape roll fell to the bed, leaving him with a sticky, curling strip. He taped the center seam on the wrapped Muppet box with a third of the strip, taped the seam by her finger with the second, then flipped the box and taped the bottom seam with the last piece.
The finished product was gorgeous. His wrapping job eclipsed stuff she'd seen done by professionals. You know. Not counting the surgical tape, which stuck out like a beater Buick in Bellevue.
“A,” he said as he looked up from his finished masterpiece. He held up his thumb. “Mary likes kittens.” His index finger went up. “B,” he said, glancing at his pile of tape, “surgical tape sticks better than scotch, and it's way more durable.” His middle finger made three as his gaze shifted to his little pile of different-sized pocket scalpels. “C, those things are a godsend. They're so much more maneuverable than scissors.”
She stared at him, bewildered. “If you say so,” she said as he put Mary's wrapped Muppet on top of the pretty stack by his nightstand, and pressed onward to the next box in the still ginormous stack on the bed. There were a lot of presents. Derek apparently took Christmas lessons from Izzie. Or vice versa. She swallowed. “Derek...”
“I don't care,” he said.
“About what?”
He shrugged. “It's Christmas. You're getting presents. You can't say no.”
“But I didn't--”
He leaned across the bed and touched her hand before she could finish. Before she could tell him she hadn't thought about buying a present for him, let alone pluralizing it to presents. If it hadn't been for the fact that he'd set up a freaking tree in their living room, and the Christmas carols and wreathes and candles and Santa Clauses ringing bells at every street corner, she wouldn't have known or cared that it was Christmas in the first place. Plus, they hadn't even been married a year, yet. What was the protocol for-- His warm skin brushed hers, and his palm drifted to her cheek before she could finish the thought.
“I get that Christmas is my thing and not yours,” he said, his voice low. Murmuring. Understanding. He looked at her, the deep, endless blue of his eyes piercing her doubts. His navy t-shirt matched the hypnotizing shade of his gaze in the dim light. “Don't worry about it.”
“But Derek,” she said.
He kissed her before she could protest any more.
A stupid, embarrassing lump formed in her throat. She'd bought him a blue bathrobe a few days later. She'd been in the department store shopping for herself, and she'd seen it on the rack. She'd imagined how it would bring out his eyes, just like the blue shirt he'd worn when he'd been wrapping stuff, and the idea to buy it had clicked into place.
She'd wrapped it badly that night with some of the leftover paper from his wrapping extravaganza. Only the Santa kittens roll hadn't been used up. She'd felt idiotic and dumb and all sorts of silly, wrapping a stupid present for him in stupid Santa kitten paper. Plus, a bathrobe didn't exactly scream, “I love you.” It said, “I had no idea what to get you and felt guilty because you got me unknown amounts of unknown stuff.” Or maybe it didn't. She didn't know. She wasn't a Christmas expert.
She'd handed him the Santa kitten box later that night. It's progress, right? she'd said
He hadn't said a word about the Santa kittens or the shoddy wrap job. In fact, she'd gotten the impression that Santa kittens were the last thing on his mind. His whole face had creased with happiness, and his eyes had gotten misty. Yeah, he'd said, his voice rough as he'd looked at it. I love it.
She'd frowned. You haven't opened it.
He'd shrugged and smiled wider. I know. But I love you, and you gave it to me.
She opened her eyes, and the present day bled back into her view.
Alex, Lexie, Cristina, and Mark all stared at her.
Meredith wiped her face with her hands, unable to stop herself from both blushing and smiling. That would be a good replacement thought if she ever started panicking again, she decided. Derek's smile when he'd figured out she'd gotten him something, after all. He wore that bathrobe all the time.
She shook her head, blinking away the sudden flash flood. God, she missed that Derek.
The envelope in her hand crinkled as she squeezed her fingers absently. She looked down with a small sigh. She slipped her finger underneath the glued lip, more gentle with it than she'd been with the first one. Another gliding ferryboat card rested inside. She slipped it out of the flowery envelope and flipped open the card.
He'd written another poem.
If I could have loaned you a marker,
It would have been red,
For passion, and daring, and all things unsaid.
But then your arms wrapped around me, and mine around you.
All lines were forgotten,
And we kissed, instead.
Fandom: Grey's Anatomy
Pairing: Mer/Der
Rating: M
Summary: S6 continuation. Immediately post Sanctuary / Death and All His Friends.
After polling on Twitter, the majority of respondents seem to want this chapter in tiny chunks as fast as I can churn it out, rather than larger pieces. I'll try to get one more section, at least, posted before I leave for Maine. Hope you enjoy, and thanks as always for the feedback, and of course, you're allowed to play along! :)
All Along The Watchtower - Part 24.2 [Clue #1]
Lexie lit up at the suggestion. She looked like she wanted to start humming the freaking song, or at least whistle it, which would only cap this crappy day with more crap.
“He's talking about surgery,” Cristina said before Lexie could torture them all.
That didn't stop Meredith's brain from running away with the chorus. The first cut is the deeeeee-- Stop. Crap, crap. Stop! Meredith blinked away the song before it could hook its claws into her brain enough to repeat and repeat and repeat like “It's A Small World After All”, only worse.
“But it's a poem,” Lexie said, oblivious to Meredith's internal battle. “He wouldn't be that literal.”
“He's a guy,” Alex said, his expression placid. “He could be that literal.”
Cristina shook her head. “First cut is the deepest?” she said. I still want you by my side. “He's a surgeon. That's so about surgery. I'd bet money.”
“You would think that,” Lexie said.
Meredith tried to think. First cut. Baby, I know. First cut is the deeee-- STOP. She ground her molars. “His first surgery?”
Mark shook his head. “That was in Manhattan,” he said. “I don't think he wants you to fly three thousand miles to find--”
“What?” Meredith prodded. “To find what?”
Mark swallowed and shut his mouth. Meredith imagined him wielding a little stick, poking at them to keep them on the right path. Stay on the yellow brick road, or else! She narrowed her eyes and peered at him, but he didn't crumble under scrutiny. He returned her gaze, all knowing-eyed and annoying and unhelpful.
“He so knows something,” Lexie decided.
“Do not,” Mark replied.
“It's okay,” Lexie said. “It wouldn't be as fun if you spilled.”
Meredith wasn't quite sure she agreed, but she let the comment slide.
“What about your first solo surgery?” Alex suggested.
“Maybe,” Meredith said.
“The first surgery he did with you?” Lexie said.
“Yeah,” Alex said, nodding. “Yeah. That gymnastics chick, right?”
Meredith smiled, snapping her fingers. “Katie Bryce!” First cut is the deeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee--
“Who's that?” said Mark.
“She had an aneurysm. First cut.” Is the deepest. “Literally my first shift. Derek held a contest. He rewarded the intern who could diagnose the problem. She...” Just to help me dry the tears I've cried. “That was OR five. Maybe there's something there?”
“Can't hurt to check,” Lexie said, her eyes gleaming with excitement. “I wonder what it is?”
“Maybe another craptastic poem,” Cristina said, her tone wry, as they began moving as a group down the hall.
Meredith frowned as they approached the operating room in question in a small cluster. The little white and red plaque by the door had been slid to cover the word “available” and instead showed the phrase “in use”. She didn't want to interrupt a surgery in progress based only on her and her peanut gallery's wild guess about not only what the clue-poem meant, but that they were, in fact, supposed to be looking for something in the first place. She pushed herself onto her tiptoes and peered through the small glass window, trying to see what was going on inside the big room.
Dr. Bailey performed some sort of abdominal procedure, though Meredith couldn't tell the specifics with so many other bodies wearing blue scrubs surrounding the table, the patient buried in pile of sterile drapes, and the door being situated so far away from the table. Derek could have set something up before the surgical team had arrived.
What if, whatever he'd planned, required Meredith to be in the middle of the room? She couldn't wander into a procedure based on whimsy. That wasn't sterile or safe or... No. Derek would have looked at the OR board. Right? He wouldn't have planned this corny, romantic thing - whatever it was -- without making sure he wouldn't be foiled, which meant... whatever he wanted her to find, it had to be accessible.
If he wanted her to find something, that was.
She shook her head. The twisty, logical circles she ran in her head made her brain hurt. She backed up from the glass only to plow into Lexie, who thudded onto her heels from her tiptoes with a grunt and hopped backward two steps. Cristina rolled her eyes, and Alex snickered.
“Sorry!” Lexie blurted. “I was trying to see.”
Meredith ignored her half-sister and studied the door. Around the frame. Everywhere. Nothing seemed to be out of the ordinary.
“Should I go in?” she said. Lexie, Alex, and Cristina all shrugged in a row. Meredith bit her lip. “I shouldn't go in.”
Something compelled her to look at Mark. She gave him a pleading look, but he only shrugged, too, damn it. On the other hand, he didn't dissuade her, and that stupid, knowing twinkle had returned to his eyes. She kind of wanted to take his lab coat into her fists and shake him silly to see if some details fell out of his mouth.
“Oh, just go in,” Cristina said, her tone impatient.
Meredith sighed. “Fine.”
She covered her face with a sterile surgical mask from the dispensing bin outside, and she pushed through the door into the OR. She squinted as the bright lights of the operating room slammed into her pupils. A wave of cool air washed over her. Then the awful scent of bowel coiled around her body, and her stomach roiled in response. She swallowed, forcing down her gag reflex through sheer will as she glanced around. Frustration compounded everything. Of course she'd walk into a freaking bowel resection or something. And what was she even looking for?
Dr. Bailey looked up from her patient, her eyebrows raised expectantly. “Something I can help you with, Dr. Grey?”
Meredith swallowed. Vomiting in an OR where she wasn't even supposed to be present would be a perfect end to a perfect freaking day of perfect perfectness and stupid songs. Songs that were now thoroughly stuck in her head. That's how I know, the first cut is the deepest... Damn it. She tried not to sound sick or ready to hurl. “I don't know...” she managed before she clamped her jaws shut.
No barfing. No barfing. No barfing. Or singing.
“Then close the door,” Dr. Bailey said. “You're wrecking my sterile field.”
“Sorry,” Meredith said. Back to square one, but at least outside the door, out of the smell, she might be able to think.
“It's by your head,” Dr. Bailey said just as Meredith let the door go.
Meredith shoved it back open. “What?”
“The envelope,” Dr. Bailey said. “Turn your head.”
Dr. Bailey raised a gloved, bloody hand to point at the wall to Meredith's left, and Meredith followed the motion with her gaze. Right by her freaking ear, a mere three inches away, a small piece of surgical tape precariously held another embossed envelope, identical to the first one Mark had given her, against the wall. Derek had labeled it “For Meredith” in messy, black ink. Meredith blinked at it for two seconds, nonplussed, before she grabbed it off the wall.
Realization sank in that she'd been successful. She'd found the thing Derek had wanted her to find. She smiled despite her quivering stomach and the stupid song that wouldn't shut up in her head. “Thanks, Dr. Bailey,” Meredith said.
Dr. Bailey shook her head, but her eyes crinkled with a hint mirth as she said, “You're all a bunch of lovesick fools, if you ask me.”
Because when it comes to being lucky, she's cursed...
Meredith let the door shut, and she breathed a sigh of relief, now immersed in safe-to-breathe air, and feeling rather pleased to boot.
“Well, what is it?” Cristina demanded.
Meredith leaned against the wall, shaking her head as she dropped the surgical mask from her face. Alex backed away, his expression apprehensive. She assumed that meant she looked pasty enough to be fighting the urge to hurl without having to warn them about getting out of spew distance. She closed her eyes and breathed in and out to give her stomach a moment to settle from the smelly disruption.
Nobody said a word.
She clutched the second cream-colored envelope while she rested her eyes. Her fingers ran along the raised flowers. The tape at the top stuck to her hand. Surgical tape. Not scotch tape. Not masking tape. Derek had used surgical tape to tape the freaking thing to the wall.
That was so Derek.
He kept rolls of it at home in his desk. He wrapped his freaking Christmas presents with it before he boxed them to ship to New York. She'd watched his wrapping ritual with a weird combination of fascination and disturbed horror before their first Post-it Christmas together.
The sound of wrapping paper being sliced is an unmistakable, unique noise, but she didn't recognize it when she heard it coming from behind their closed bedroom door. She hadn't grown up around it. Her family had been tiny. Her mother hadn't shopped for nieces and nephews and sisters and cousins and every other possible label on the family tree. Not like Derek, who had everything but a brother. And a father.
Meredith frowned, standing in the dim hallway as cold needles of rain cut the air outside. Her hand rested on the doorknob as the shearing sound repeated once and again. “Derek?” she said as curiosity overwhelmed her.
“No,” he said, his voice muffled through the door. “Don't come in.”
His vehemence made her blink. She jiggled the doorknob. It wouldn't turn. He'd actually locked it. What the hell?
“Don't,” he said. “One sec.”
The slicing paper sounds stopped. Something thumped. Shuffled. Moments passed. Then the lock clicked.
He opened the door, his eyes sparkling, hair disheveled. He had slivers and bits of colored paper stuck all over his blue t-shirt. And he looked... giddy.
“Okay, now it's safe,” he said. He backed away from the door, and her jaw fell open.
A pile of wrapped presents, listing and taller than the bed, leaned against his nightstand. The blankets and pillows and top sheet had been torn off their bed and discarded in a rumpled heap by the rain-spattered window. Rolls and rolls of shiny wrapping paper, a big enough stack of colorful boxes to stock a small toy store, two rolls of white surgical tape, and a glinting set of pocket scalpels rested on top of their mattress. He'd turned their bed into a giant fire and sharps hazard.
“This is safe?” she said, incredulous.
He nodded. “Items unapproved for your viewing have been appropriately hidden.”
“What?”
“I hid your presents,” he clarified with a wink.
“Oh,” she said.
Derek climbed back onto the bed and took the top box off the giant stack on the bed. The cover of the box was made of a thick, clear plastic, like the kind on Anatomy Jane boxes, and inside, shackled with thick plastic clips like a prisoner, was a red... Muppet creature of some sort.
“Wait,” she said. “My presents?”
“Hmm,” he agreed absently, nodding. “The ones I bought for you.”
“What presents?” she said. “Presents as in plural?”
Derek eyeballed the box, ignoring her. The Muppet's googly eyes stared back at him. He shifted his scrutiny to the pile of wrapping paper. He selected a roll covered with little kittens dressed as Santa Clauses and unfurled it so that a section three feet long flattened against the fitted sheet on the bed, plain side facing the ceiling.
“It is Christmas, you know,” was his eventual answer, for all that helped her make sense of the sparkly paper mayhem sprawled on the bed.
He placed the Muppet box on top of the wrapping paper and proceeded to shift it back and forth like he was measuring something. The paper crinkled. He wore the most intent frown she'd ever seen on him outside of surgery. No, scratch that. It was exactly like the frown he wore in surgery, at least the part that reached his eyes.
She imagined him clipping off an aneurysm. Right then. Except the object of his concentration was an oblong plastic box with a Muppet in it, not a human brain, and as far as she knew, Muppets didn't get aneurysms.
She took a step into the room. The floor creaked.
“What on earth are you doing?” she said, trying to keep her tone neutral.
He looked up at her, his expression lit like a firecracker. “Wrapping!” he said cheerfully. As if that explained everything.
She raised her eyebrows. “With Santa kittens, surgical tape, and a scalpel?”
He nodded as she sat on the edge of the bed. The mattress dipped. She watched him deftly cut off the three foot piece of wrapping paper. He folded the paper with all the laser precision of a neurosurgeon, encasing the strange Muppet as though it wore a glove that fit perfectly, despite the box's odd shape.
“Finger here, please,” he said.
She bit her lip and placed her index finger along the seam at the top to hold down the fold. She flinched as he unrolled the surgical tape with a loud zip. He chased the line of tape with his scalpel. He flicked his wrist, and the tape roll fell to the bed, leaving him with a sticky, curling strip. He taped the center seam on the wrapped Muppet box with a third of the strip, taped the seam by her finger with the second, then flipped the box and taped the bottom seam with the last piece.
The finished product was gorgeous. His wrapping job eclipsed stuff she'd seen done by professionals. You know. Not counting the surgical tape, which stuck out like a beater Buick in Bellevue.
“A,” he said as he looked up from his finished masterpiece. He held up his thumb. “Mary likes kittens.” His index finger went up. “B,” he said, glancing at his pile of tape, “surgical tape sticks better than scotch, and it's way more durable.” His middle finger made three as his gaze shifted to his little pile of different-sized pocket scalpels. “C, those things are a godsend. They're so much more maneuverable than scissors.”
She stared at him, bewildered. “If you say so,” she said as he put Mary's wrapped Muppet on top of the pretty stack by his nightstand, and pressed onward to the next box in the still ginormous stack on the bed. There were a lot of presents. Derek apparently took Christmas lessons from Izzie. Or vice versa. She swallowed. “Derek...”
“I don't care,” he said.
“About what?”
He shrugged. “It's Christmas. You're getting presents. You can't say no.”
“But I didn't--”
He leaned across the bed and touched her hand before she could finish. Before she could tell him she hadn't thought about buying a present for him, let alone pluralizing it to presents. If it hadn't been for the fact that he'd set up a freaking tree in their living room, and the Christmas carols and wreathes and candles and Santa Clauses ringing bells at every street corner, she wouldn't have known or cared that it was Christmas in the first place. Plus, they hadn't even been married a year, yet. What was the protocol for-- His warm skin brushed hers, and his palm drifted to her cheek before she could finish the thought.
“I get that Christmas is my thing and not yours,” he said, his voice low. Murmuring. Understanding. He looked at her, the deep, endless blue of his eyes piercing her doubts. His navy t-shirt matched the hypnotizing shade of his gaze in the dim light. “Don't worry about it.”
“But Derek,” she said.
He kissed her before she could protest any more.
A stupid, embarrassing lump formed in her throat. She'd bought him a blue bathrobe a few days later. She'd been in the department store shopping for herself, and she'd seen it on the rack. She'd imagined how it would bring out his eyes, just like the blue shirt he'd worn when he'd been wrapping stuff, and the idea to buy it had clicked into place.
She'd wrapped it badly that night with some of the leftover paper from his wrapping extravaganza. Only the Santa kittens roll hadn't been used up. She'd felt idiotic and dumb and all sorts of silly, wrapping a stupid present for him in stupid Santa kitten paper. Plus, a bathrobe didn't exactly scream, “I love you.” It said, “I had no idea what to get you and felt guilty because you got me unknown amounts of unknown stuff.” Or maybe it didn't. She didn't know. She wasn't a Christmas expert.
She'd handed him the Santa kitten box later that night. It's progress, right? she'd said
He hadn't said a word about the Santa kittens or the shoddy wrap job. In fact, she'd gotten the impression that Santa kittens were the last thing on his mind. His whole face had creased with happiness, and his eyes had gotten misty. Yeah, he'd said, his voice rough as he'd looked at it. I love it.
She'd frowned. You haven't opened it.
He'd shrugged and smiled wider. I know. But I love you, and you gave it to me.
She opened her eyes, and the present day bled back into her view.
Alex, Lexie, Cristina, and Mark all stared at her.
Meredith wiped her face with her hands, unable to stop herself from both blushing and smiling. That would be a good replacement thought if she ever started panicking again, she decided. Derek's smile when he'd figured out she'd gotten him something, after all. He wore that bathrobe all the time.
She shook her head, blinking away the sudden flash flood. God, she missed that Derek.
The envelope in her hand crinkled as she squeezed her fingers absently. She looked down with a small sigh. She slipped her finger underneath the glued lip, more gentle with it than she'd been with the first one. Another gliding ferryboat card rested inside. She slipped it out of the flowery envelope and flipped open the card.
He'd written another poem.
If I could have loaned you a marker,
It would have been red,
For passion, and daring, and all things unsaid.
But then your arms wrapped around me, and mine around you.
All lines were forgotten,
And we kissed, instead.