All Along The Watchtower - Part 30A
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.
Author's Notes: Hi, everyone! Long time no see. Contrary to popular belief, this story is not abandoned, and I am not dead ;) I'm sorry it's taken so long for me to post this. I'd give you a list of RL causes, but we'd be here until next Tuesday or something, and I'd rather not bore you to death. Suffice it to say, life has been busy, and my muse took an unscheduled vacation. I've been working on this chapter on and off for about six months now. I wanted to post this part for Christmas to surprise you guys, but as you can see I didn't quite make my deadline. Nevertheless, I hope that those few of you who are still following this story enjoy this. I had a lot of fun writing it. Belated happy happy holidays and happy New Year :) Thanks in advance for any feedback!
P.S. I don't abandon my stories. Worst case scenario, I'll skip some planned chapters, but I will do everything in my power to give you a real ending. I promise.
P.P.S. LJ formatting is a nightmare. If you notice anywhere that's missing a line break that I missed fixing, let me know. Thanks!
All Along the Watchtower Part 30A
Lexie had a mushy look on her face again. It was the third time in ten minutes that Meredith had looked up from her charts to find her half-sister staring, her head tilted slightly to the side, lower lip pouting, as if she'd just finished saying, "Aww." Except there'd been no noise, so Meredith couldn't be certain.
“You're making goo-goo eyes at me,” Meredith snapped, stopping mid-pace.
Lexie's face reddened, her misty look shifting to something less schmoopy. In the world's most transparent attempt at misdirection, she looked back at her phone and started pressing buttons like she was texting somebody. The gurney she'd stretched out on squeaked as she resettled. Cristina, who hadn't even looked up, flipped a page in her book. Meredith continued pacing.
Mr. Wilson's symptoms were bizarre, and they didn't match any case Meredith had ever seen. She stared at his charts. His stats were all normal. But there was nothing normal about how he was behaving. If the MRI hadn't been clear, she would have sworn she was looking at a--
She whipped around on her heels. “What?” Meredith snapped, and Lexie blushed again. “Seriously, what is it?”
“Nothing,” Lexie rushed to say.
“What's with the gooey face, then?”
“Absolutely nothing,” Lexie said, too quickly to be innocent.
Meredith sighed with exasperation. “I've caught you staring four times!”
Lexie's words were a rush. “Noyouhaven't.”
“Yes, I--”
Cristina slammed her book onto the gurney. “Oh, for god's sake. You're waddling. Like the pregnant woman that you are. And Dr. McSappy thinks it's adorable or something equally gross.”
Meredith looked indignantly at Cristina. “What? I am not. No way. I'm not waddling.” She took a demonstrative step forward, but her attempt at a sexy sashay failed, and she moved a bit like a duck instead. Not waddling, though. Definitely not-- “Damn it!” she snapped when she saw Lexie turning to goo again.
When Derek glided through the double doors, all graceful lines and unbridled sexy, she rolled her eyes. “Do I waddle?” she asked him point blank.
He blinked as he took in the sight of her, and his features scrunched with visible affection. “Why, hello, Dr. Grey. It's so nice to see you, too.” He circled her, his step light, and closed in for a peck on the cheek.
She ignored him. “Do I waddle? They say I waddle.”
“I never said you waddle!” Lexie protested. She jabbed her thumb at Cristina. “She did. Why am I getting blamed?”
“Whatever,” said Meredith. “Your eyes have a vocabulary.”
“More like a thesaurus of the barf-worthy,” Cristina said, her tone wry.
Meredith folded her arms across her aching breasts. “So, do I waddle, now?” she said again to Derek.
Derek didn't have a chance to respond because Mark pushed through the double doors, more charts in hand, and Lexie froze. “Hey, man,” Mark said. “I need a consult on this scalp lac. There's a skull fracture underneath.”
Derek nodded. “Sure.”
“Hi!” Lexie chirped.
Mark blinked and looked back at her. “Hello, Little Grey,” he said, his voice calm and humoring. And then he turned back to Derek. “Can you come look at this, now?” They departed together.
“Don't think you're escaping my question!” Meredith called after Derek before he disappeared.
He looked over his shoulder and gave her a smirk. “I assure you, it's a very cute waddle,” he said with a wink, and then he was gone, the double doors swishing behind him.
“Oh, screw you, Dr. McDreamy,” Meredith grumbled. “I do not.”
Lexie deflated. “Hi,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Hi? Hi? What the hell is wrong with me?”
“What isn't?” Cristina said.
“Jeez, why are you always so grouchy?” Lexie said, folding her arms across her chest in a perfect imitation of Meredith. Cristina apparently deemed the question rhetorical and didn't respond. Lexie sighed, her expression glum. “Damn it. Who says hi?”
Meredith frowned. “People saying hello?”
Lexie made a growling sound of frustration, something halfway between guh and augh with a little grr thrown in. She threw her hands in the air, slammed against the swinging doors with her right shoulder, and followed Derek's route of escape, frowning all the way.
The funny thing about this whole debacle was that she had intended not to wake Derek up.
“Damn it!” she hissed at nobody in particular when she heard the alarm console by the front door chirp.
The contents of her grocery bag toppled onto the kitchen counter as she startled. The bag of apples hit the granite with a progressive series of dull thuds, and the sparkling cider bottle clanked in protest. Sunlight streamed through the frozen window panes, making the bottle glint as it rolled to an abrupt stop when it hit the faucet. A rawhide that was supposed to be a New Year's treat slid out of the bag and to the edge of the counter, and Samantha exploded off her haunches from the floor to grab it. Meredith didn't have a chance to rescue the hide from certain doom.
“No, no, no,” she whispered in a quiet litany as she gracelessly kneed the dog out of the way and made a waddling but frantic beeline for the front door. She'd been so fixated on tiptoeing past Derek, who'd been sleeping on the couch in the living room, that she'd forgotten to enter the freaking code. She had maybe a few seconds before--
The chirp turned into something much more high-pitched and abrasive just as she slid to a stop by the console, and Derek's cell phone began to shriek on the end table by the couch where he lay, a lump under several blankets. Then a clamorous crash tumbled out of the kitchen, and Meredith looked back to see the grocery bag fall to the floor. Samantha's head had disappeared inside, and Meredith barely had a chance to wail a baleful, “No!” before Derek's blankets had flipped back from his face, and he snapped upright. A notepad and a pen, which had been resting precariously on his stomach, fell to the floor beside the couch with a smack, and the pen rolled under the couch.
“What the hell?!” he barked, out of sorts and flailing, and Meredith had a brief, panicked moment of indecision about whether to turn the freaking alarm off, answer the phone, run to Derek, or save the honey-baked ham from the dog. The racket was paralyzing.
After a heartbeat, she shook herself back into action. The green LED display on the alarm was blinking at her accusingly. Code, code, code....
“What should our code be?” he asked, looking up from the little instruction booklet.
“I don't know,” she replied. “Not something simple like a birthday. The crooks always figure those out in the movies.”
A ghost of a smirk lit his tired, space-y features. “Oh, do they?” he said, his tone the barest, grumbling, haughty hint of the Derek she worried she might never see again.
She nodded and smiled, unwilling to let his dour mood stomp on her hope. “They do.”
His gaze tipped up in thought for a moment, and then he came back to earth with a small shrug. He punched a familiar string of numbers into the pad and hit enter, and then typed them in again to confirm.
She grinned as she slipped her arms around his waist. He tensed for a moment at the constricting contact, and then relaxed as she rested her chin against his shoulder blades. “That was the day I started at Seattle Grace,” she murmured against him.
A rumbling sort of laugh filled his torso and tickled her cheek. “I prefer to think of it as the day I met you,” he said. “It was a very good day.”
“We met the night before,” she countered despite the fact that her insides were melting. “You were in your sexy red shirt, and you took advantage!”
“I believe you took advantage in this story,” he said.
“Whatever,” she replied. “It was still the night before.”
He turned in her embrace to face her. He gave her a charming smile that didn't quite reach his eyes, but she could pretend for a minute that everything was fine when he looked at her like that, 75% of what he'd been before the shooting, and for that minute, she felt like she'd started to float. He wrapped his arms around her in return, and he put his stubbly chin against her forehead. He inhaled deeply, like he was breathing her in. He reached up with his right hand, and his snaked his fingers through her hair. “I distinctly remember you refusing to give me your name until I woke up naked on your living room floor.”
“Distinctly?” she murmured.
He kissed her. “Yes, distinctly.” And then he frowned. “I may have had a slight hangover, though.”
“So, not quite so distinctly, then?” she said.
He considered her for a moment. “Distinctly with a side of headache and a yearning for aspirin.”
She sighed. The heat of his body flush with hers relaxed her. Made her feel mushy and loose and boneless. She liked pretending things were okay, sometimes. “Okay,” she said as he nuzzled her. “I guess you win on a technicality.”
“I can live with that as long as I win,” he said.
They shared a laugh together. She ignored the fact that his sounded hollow and unconvinced of the humor, like he knew he'd been given a part to play and was trying hard, but he wasn't a great actor, and he couldn't sell it. Then the gap in conversation stretched, and the following silence curdled. Or, maybe she was just being silly and imagining things, because his moods had been so precarious, lately.
She traced lines down his pectoral as she clenched her fingers and ended up resting her fist against his healing heart. She bit her lip as they stared at the newly armed alarm. “So....”
“What?” he said, a little too glumly, and her insides tightened. She hated how fast his moods swung.
“Does it--” She cut that question off before she could finish it. She didn't want to hear him tell her it wasn't helping. That it wouldn't help. She took a quick breath and let it out. She smiled, looking up at him through her eyelashes. “I hope it helps you.”
His gaze softened, and some of the dark edges fell away. “Yeah,” he said in a wistful tone that made it sound like they were discussing the minute possibility of purchasing a winning lottery ticket, not the simple idea of feeling safe in one's own home. He leaned forward and pressed his lips against her forehead. “That'd be really nice.”
She jammed the code into the number pad as fast as she could, her fingers flying across the keys. The shrieking alarm stopped wailing at her, and she turned to her husband, giving up on the honey-baked ham. Derek was much more important than a honey-baked ham, which was probably half gone already, if she were to base an estimate off the horrific snarfing sounds of a carnivore delighting in dinner coming from the kitchen.
“Derek,” she began, “I'm so--” She stopped in her tracks, and her jaw fell open as he stiffly held up an index finger at her in the universal sign for, “Give me one moment,” though it had a slightly tense edge to it. Sort of a, “Give me one moment, damn it,” she amended.
“Yeah,” Derek was saying into his phone, his voice tight. His hair was mussed, and he looked bleary-eyed, but his sharp tone didn't show any sign of his quick severance from dreaming. “No, no police. We're fine,” he said, almost a snap. Derek glanced at her, then at the alarm pad, and then he flopped back down on the couch with the phone cupped to his ear. “Yeah, just a mix-up. Thank you.”
He tossed the phone onto the coffee table where it landed with a smack and skidded into a magazine. He closed his eyes for a brief moment as he pressed his palms against his face and sighed. Then his palms dropped to his sides and clutched the cushions. He sat up with a vague grimace that spoke of effort, not of pain, and looked at her with an unreadable expression.
She bit her lip. Scratch that. She could read it all right. He was pissed off. He was pissed off, and he was trying very hard to keep a lid on it, based on the grinding of his molars.
The dog made another noise in the kitchen that made her think of lions ripping up helpless gazelles on the savannah, which, of course, she'd only seen in documentaries, but it was hard to forget a sound like that. She considered the ham a lost cause, but Derek rose to his feet and trudged into the kitchen without speaking.
She felt compelled to say, “Sorry,” into the silence.
He didn't respond as he entered the kitchen. He hissed at the dog, who didn't listen, so he escalated to a barked, harsh, “Hey! Get away from that!” And then he pressed his knee against the dog's shoulder.
When that still didn't work, Derek grabbed her collar and yanked. Samantha's feet scrabbled on the floor as she struggled to keep her purchase. Her muscles bulged. She kept her muzzle stuck in the ham as long as physically possible, and pieces of torn meat came away with her jaw as Derek managed to drag her away by force.
Derek snapped again, “No.”
The dog finally seemed to listen and hopped back a step, out of Derek's grip. She looked up at Derek with a dejected expression. He glared back at her, and she slunk out of the kitchen with a veritable raincloud of guilt hanging over her head.
Samantha's behavior in the aftermath was almost funny, and Meredith would have laughed, were it not for the tension thick in the air.
Derek bent down to pick up the ham.
There was still a lot of meat left on the thing, but there were huge chunks taken out of it, their ragged edges littered with stringy bits of fat and muscle fiber. There was no doubt it was ruined - Samantha was devastating when she wanted to get into something. Bits of foil and plastic wrapping had spread over the kitchen floor as though they were confetti blasted from a canon. Rare, unfiltered winter sunlight that belied the chill in the air streamed through the window panes, making the foil gleam.
Derek dropped the ham into the sink, still silent, and still not looking at her. He bent over to pick up the fallen apples, next.
She fidgeted as she watched him, shifting her weight from foot to foot, until she finally felt compelled to fill the silence. “Can I help?” she said. She would have just butted in, but he'd monopolized the space where the disaster had occurred, and fighting over who picked up bruised apples seemed rather silly.
“I've got it,” he said flatly.
She grabbed the cider off the counter instead and put it into the fridge. “I hate that freaking alarm.”
He looked at her with a raised eyebrow. “You're the one who wanted it,” he said, not hiding the passive-aggressive accusation in his tone. The snotty passive-aggressive accusation, she thought. Derek really did know how to act piss-y.
Something inside her head snapped. She'd tried. She'd tried to get the freaking alarm turned off before it started shrieking. Before it automatically notified ADT that something was up. She'd been shopping for them to get the stupid ham and dog treats and cider and everything, because he'd said he wasn't feeling up to people today.
“For you, Derek,” she said, her voice low. “I wanted to get it for you, so you could feel safe in your own freaking home.”
“Well, it doesn't make me feel safe,” he said through gritted teeth, his tone low and throaty. He glowered. “It's just a big fucking annoyance.”
A pit hollowed out her righteous anger, and a lump formed in her throat. They hadn't really talked about this in ages. She'd just assumed, since he'd been doing better.... “You still don't feel safe at home?” she said.
He rolled his eyes. “Meredith, I feel just fine at home. The only reason that alarm was even armed was because I think Lexie forgot I was on the couch when she left for work.”
“Oh,” she said, relaxing as relief crashed through her like a wave. “Well, that's good... but....”
“But what?” he snapped.
“Why are you freaking pissed at me, then?”
He looked at her like she'd just spoken in a foreign tongue. “I'm not pissed at you...,” he said slowly.
“Well, you're acting like a piss-y jerk,” she snapped.
He blinked, and his expression softened. He breathed slowly in and out for several seconds, and Meredith realized he was doing his thing. The thing that kept him from panicking when he was feeling panicky. Except it apparently worked on temper tantrums, too.
“Meredith,” he began, his tone low and stretched and forcefully calm, “I got yanked out of a very good dream by an alarm shrieking so loud my ears are still buzzing, then I had to be coherent for a phone call asking me if I wanted the police sent out to my house, our New Year's Eve plans are in Samantha's stomach, I basically just had to choke my dog to get her to listen to me, and on top of all that I had a shitty day at work yesterday. It truly has nothing to do with you. I'm sorry if it seemed that way.”
“Oh,” she said, slightly relieved. Not relieved that he was angry. That was still bad. Her insides tightened. God, she'd gotten so used to him lashing out at her over countless months, it just felt weird when he was only a regular version of pissed.
“I'm really sorry,” Derek said again, the words stiff. He didn't make a move toward her.
“I guess I'd be a little pissed, too,” she admitted.
He swallowed, and he looked away. Out the window. Skeletons of trees danced outside in the wind. Smoke curled out of the chimney of her back neighbor. “I've been trying,” he said, his tone edging on frustrated.
“No, that was really good,” she said. “I just read it all wrong.”
She gave him a hopeful smile as she approached. He must have caught her movement out of the corner of his eye. He returned her smile, though it was somewhat forced. Like his eyes didn't quite mean it, yet. That was okay, though, she supposed. He was allowed to be pissed off. Just... not at her. Not when she didn't deserve it, and this time, she damned well didn't.
She wrapped her arms around him. His body was tense, and it took him several moments to relax, but then it was like a switch had gotten flipped, and he... melted. There was really no other word for it. He melted against her, pressing his nose into her hair. His warm palm pressed against her belly, like he was reminding himself. He heaved a colossal sigh, and then it was like all his anger had been flushed away. She much preferred this gradual, quiet release to his typical snarling explosions.
“A good dream, huh?” she murmured.
“Mmm,” he rumbled. “Yes.”
She grinned. “Was I in this dream?”
“Yes,” he said, the word unabashed.
“Clothed?” she said, quirking her eyebrow suggestively.
He pulled away to peer at her. His eyes were finally smiling along with the rest of his face. “As a matter of fact, yes.”
“Oh?” she said, surprised. “What was I doing?”
“We were in the OR,” he said. “And I wasn't scared, and it was going well, and it was just... nice.”
She grinned at him. “You were dreaming about cutting again?”
“Yeah,” he said, his tone mysterious. He cocked his head to the side, and his expression grew ponderous. “Admittedly, I think it was on a very distressed, brain-damaged grapefruit, and Cristina was riding a motorcycle in circles around the table, but still....”
Meredith burst out laughing. She kissed him. His lips were cool and soft against hers, and he tasted faintly of mint, like toothpaste. “No more unusual than being chased by a can of spermicide, I guess,” she said against his skin, remembering a nightmare she'd had months ago.
He winked at her. She rested against him as he drew his fingers through her hair. “We could get rid of the alarm,” she mused, “since we both hate the damned thing, and it doesn't help you.”
“Mmm,” he said. “I don't really seem to need help on that front anymore.”
“Did it ever help?” she asked.
He snorted and looked at her ruefully. “Not really.” He shook his head, looking off into the distance. “Before, it was just... constant. That... feeling.”
“Being scared?” Meredith said.
“Yeah,” he said, swallowing. “The only thing that changed was how loud it was. In my head.”
“And it's not loud anymore?” she said.
He shrugged. “It's not anything anymore. Not when I'm at home.”
Her heart squeezed. “That's really good, Derek.” And then she blinked. Looked at him. “Hey...”
He frowned at her. “What?”
“You didn't freak out,” she said.
“Freak out about what?” he said.
“The alarm. And the phone. And the dog. Waking you up. It was all really loud, Derek. But you woke up, and you spoke coherently on the phone, and you disciplined the dog, and you didn't freak out.”
He stared at her.
“Did you feel like freaking out?” she demanded.
He thought for a minute. “No.... I was flustered. Irritated as fuck. But not freaked out.”
“Yeah, well,” Meredith said. “Newsflash, but normal people would feel like that too, given that situation.”
“I guess I just....”
“What?”
He grinned at her. “Home is....” He shrugged. “Home is home. It's okay. It's home.”
Meredith laughed. “I guess we're moving up in the world.”
He nodded as a yawn cracked his frame, and he reached up to wipe his watering eyes with his hands. This was his first day off in a week, and he'd come home completely wrecked with exhaustion the night before. He'd collapsed into bed as soon as he'd gotten home - he hadn't spoken more than five words to her before he'd crashed - and it seemed like he still hadn't quite bounced back, yet. As the weeks had passed since he'd returned to work, he'd gotten a lot better at forcing himself to deal with work and the people at work, but the strain of that, together with the fact that heart surgery patients sometimes took over a year to feel like they were back to normal, left him enervated in the evenings. He still rarely stayed up past nine or ten, and he wasn't at all chipper in the mornings. Not like he used to be. She'd even caught him hitting the snooze button several times.
“You should go back to sleep,” she suggested. He clearly needed it. “Maybe, you can go back to that dream.”
He pinched the bridge of his nose and grunted. “Yeah, maybe,” he said, not even trying to come up with an excuse to stay awake. He ran his hands through his hair as he pulled out of her embrace. “I'll get the foil later,” he said, and he padded out of the room, said foil crunching under his bare feet, before she could tell him not to worry about it.
As she grabbed the broom in the corner, she heard the cushions squeak. He sighed. Blankets rustled. She swept up the foil refuse quickly and dumped it in the trashcan. He was already asleep by the time she went into the living room. His discarded notepad still lay on the floor by the couch, forgotten. She picked it up, frowning. He rolled away from her, presenting his back as he pressed his face into the back cushions. His deep breathing continued, and she absently pulled the slipped blanket up to his jutting shoulder as she looked at the notepad.
He'd written a number one followed by a period, as if he'd intended to write a list, but the only item on the page was number one, which said, “Pray for a miracle.” And it had been crossed out with harsh pen strokes that left dents in the paper. There was nothing written after it. The margins had some idle scribbles and squiggles, and at the bottom of the page, he'd drawn a stick figure fishing on a dock or something.
She plopped down into the easy chair, still frowning. She'd written aborted lists like this before. Usually when she was frustrated, trying to work things out, and couldn't think of what to add, just that writing a list might help organize all the stuff tangled inside her brain like spaghetti.
“Derek, what's this?” she said before she could stop herself.
For a moment he didn't move, but she heard his breathing change. “What's what?” he muttered into the cushion.
She winced at the exhaustion dragging at his words. “Sorry. Sleep. It can wait.”
He didn't comment, and his breathing evened within moments, more testimony to his need for rest. She leaned back, breathing softly. The air still smelled of spruce and wintergreen, and she found it soothing. Baby seemed to like it too, because Meredith felt her moving, rolling over like she was turning in her sleep. Meredith smiled, placed her hands on her belly to feel, and drifted.
“Meredith,” he said, snapping her out of dreams.
She twitched under the covers and groaned. It was dark. The air was cold outside the blankets. She had no idea what time it was, but it was dark and cold, and dark and cold meant time for sleeping.
“No,” she said.
The pleasant scent of cut spruce tickled her nose. The mattress dipped beside her. He slipped under the covers with her and lay parallel to her, spooning her with his endless warmth.
“No?” he replied. “I haven't said anything, yet.” His words were soft and low like velvet against her skin. “I could be telling you I won the lottery, you know.”
She could hear him smirking. Screw the idea of smirks being a facial expression; his were noisy, and they sucked to hear when she was trying to sleep, no matter how much sexy he cranked into every syllable.
“Whatever it is, no,” she said. Especially if it was sex, she thought, which, in this tired moment, would be so far from winning the lottery, Derek's lovely attributes not withstanding, that she couldn't even muster the will to be hypothetically excited for her future not-tired self if she were to take a rain check on any proposed sexy goodness. “I'm exhausted, and I don't have to pee for once, nor is Baby kicking like she's in a soccer match, and I'm sleeping.”
His nose pressed against her neck. “Okay,” he said without further comment or protest.
He made a small, pleasant sound deep in his throat, a murmur against her ear. He wasn't smirking anymore. His breath ruffled her hair. His warm arms wrapped over her body. He pressed his palm against her belly. Whether Baby was kicking or not, he loved to do that. Then he sighed, and his breaths evened out along with hers.
If she'd been more awake, she might have gotten jealous about how fast he collapsed into slumber along side her when sleeping hadn't even been his idea, but the Land of Nod took her away soon after, and she lost track of the world for a while. Until she did have to pee.
When she got up, he wasn't in the bed anymore. After she relieved herself, she waddled back into the bedroom. The curtains had been drawn, plunging the room into darkness. She opened them, squinting in surprise at the broad daylight that greeted her. The sky above was overcast with thick, frothy gray clouds, muting the effect of daytime hitting the windowpanes, but, still. Definitely freaking day.
Her gaze snapped to the clock. 2:00 pm. She made a sound. A squeak or something. Something that said surprise in less than a word. She'd slept late. Really late. Half her day off was already gone. The dark had fooled her into thinking it was still night time.
She ran her fingers through her hair, dazed, and opened the bedroom door. The faint sound of some song she knew was a Christmas carol fluttered up the stairs. She recognized the melody and the somber chorus, and the chant-y dudes singing in what sounded like Latin, but she couldn't place the name of the carol. Then she heard a loud thump and a grating curse in a very familiar timbre, and she froze. The last time she'd heard something like that, Derek had fallen in the shower and hurt himself, and less than twenty-four hours after that, her world had exploded when she'd found him in their bathroom with empty pill bottles rolling around on the floor.
“Derek?” she shouted. She scrambled down the stairs as any other potential thoughts played bumper cars and knocked themselves out of her head. “Are you okay?”
“Fine, Mere,” he called from the living room. The blasé distraction in his tone didn't speak of any serious hurt, more, I-have-a-project-I'm-thinking-about, but that didn't stop her heart from pounding.
Her socks slid along the hardwood flooring as she skidded to a halt in the archway to the living room. Derek looked up at her, and a brilliant smile scrunched up his crow's feet around his blue, blue eyes. She could lose herself in those fathoms. All her worries slipped away on quiet, cat feet, leaving her blank as she stared back at him.
“Hi,” he said in a velvet tone that made her insides tighten.
The fireplace roared with licking flames. A seven foot Christmas tree towered in their living room, and hundreds of colored lights on strings lay spread between the living room and dining room on the floor. An open box rested by the fireplace with something shiny in it, and a cloth... thing that she vaguely recognized... hung over the lip of the box. The Christmas carol she'd heard upstairs played from the speakers in the living room, albeit very softly. From the spinning turntable and the faint crackle under the music, Derek had liberated on one his many LPs from the bookshelf by the stereo.
Derek wore an old t-shirt and some loose fitting sweat pants. None of the lights had been hung on the tree, yet, but he'd wrapped a string of lights over his shoulders and behind his neck a bit like a feather boa. The end of the string was plugged into the wall, but only half of the lights seemed to be working, the ones hanging over his left shoulder. He held a square doodad in his hand, and he was touching it to the base of one of the tiny light bulb sockets at his right side. She didn't know the doodad's purpose.
Samantha sat by the couch, oblivious or maybe even happy about the floppy Santa hat she'd found herself wearing. She watched everything with rapt amusement. She barked at Meredith, the Santa hat jiggling as she moved.
“Sam says good morning,” Derek said.
Meredith wrinkled her nose. “Afternoon, you mean. What was the thump?”
He shrugged. “Oh, that? Banged my knee on the box.” He gestured at the box by the fireplace. “Wasn't paying attention.”
The box, more of a trunk, really, was made of heavy slats of wood that had been painted gray. As she moved closer, she saw tinier boxes stacked inside, each full of shiny things. Wooden things. All manner of things, really. Ornaments. Old ones. She recognized the box on the top. It contained an old set of golden wire ornaments depicting the twelve days of Christmas. The first one depicted a partridge in a pear tree.
She bent over to look more closely at the contents of the box. The cloth she thought she recognized? The red corduroy fabric was folded on top of an old tree skirt made of checkered green and white fabric with red ribbing. Each checkered box on the tree skirt framed a little embroidered tree inside, but the red corduroy on top of the tree skirt was what held her attention.
A lump formed in her throat as she picked it up. The red corduroy, stiff with lack of use, was an old stocking with a boot shaped more like a pancake than a foot. Red yarn crookedly spelled, “Meredith,” on the white lip of the stocking. The whole thing looked very amateur, but that didn't matter so much. Thatcher. Thatcher had made this for her when she'd been little. Her mother wouldn't, so he'd sewn it himself, despite not knowing how to construct more than the crudest of hole patches. She had the vaguest memory of watching him make it. An impression, really. Nothing more. But it was one of her more pleasant childhood recollections. She brushed her thumb along the coarse fabric.
“Where'd you get this?” Meredith said. She hadn't seen this in... forever. Not since she'd moved to Boston. She hadn't even realized her mother had still had it when she'd died.
Derek stepped close to her. “I found the box in the attic. It looked like it had Christmas stuff in it, so I grabbed it. I wasn't sure how much decorating you wanted to do.”
“When did you go digging around in the attic?” she said.
The ladder to the attic was a rickety, ancient thing with worn rungs and chipping paint. The ladder had to be let down through a trap door with a wooden pole... hook... thing. The whole monstrosity weighed a ton, probably more than this tree had, and the process was unwieldy enough that she refused to do it without help, for fear of the heavy ladder smashing her skull as it came down. As far as she knew, Derek was still not the best at things that involved pushing and pulling. She didn't want to speculate about how heavy that gray wooden box was, either.
“Last weekend,” Derek said. “You were on shift. Mark helped me get the ladder down. The box has been sitting here by the fireplace all week. I'm surprised you didn't notice it.”
“Oh,” Meredith said. She tipped her gaze to the heavy wooden box. He'd been a lot better, and he'd been hitting the gym with Mark, but she hadn't realized he'd graduated to heavy lifting, even with help.
She bit her lip. She hadn't been home much in a conscious state. The last few weeks since they'd gotten back from New York, she'd been working and sleeping, and that was about it. Him too, really. They were both not at their peaks. Him with his stress from work, and her with Baby's shameless yet abundant mooching.
Her hand wandered to her belly. She was getting damned tired of the mooching stealing all her available energy like a Hoover in overdrive, but she figured if anybody had an excuse to mooch, it would be Baby. At least her pregnancy was over the halfway mark. She was almost done. And then she would have Baby. Which would more than make up for it.
“I'm sorry I haven't been paying attention,” she said. “I've been really tired.”
His expression softened. “I'd be a hypocrite if I complained, Meredith. And you have a much better excuse than I do.”
She absently petted the old, barely-used stocking as she frowned at him. “Not true,” she said. “Let's just call us even.”
“Deal,” Derek said after some consideration. His gaze followed her hand as she stroked the stocking, and he twitched, like he wanted to move closer and feel, too, but he didn't move. “Did you want to hang that?” he said, the words cautious. “When I saw that in the box,” he said, continuing, “I thought you might....” He swallowed, and she watched as the possible ends to that sentence flitted across his face. I thought you might like it. Might hate it. Might want it. Might want to burn it. The conflicting tumble concluded with an audible, “I don't know.”
“Do you have one?” she said, looking up at him.
“A big, ugly box that weighs more than my car?” he said.
She let loose a chuff of laughter. “A stocking, jackass.”
His eyes sparkled. “I'm sure my mother kept it somewhere,” he said. “But, no, not here.”
“Well, we're not hanging mine without yours,” she said, putting the stocking back in the box on top of the old tree skirt. “It'd look lonely.”
She watched him process that. He glanced at the stocking and then back at her, his expression unreadable. Wary but optimistic, maybe, but he slipped into a frown when the music track changed. This song sounded... happier. And also recognizable, but not something she could peg with a title. The melody in it was still kind of slow.
“The music didn't wake you up, did it?” he said, anxiety gripping his words. “I thought the volume was low enough.”
“My bladder woke me up,” she conceded. “I didn't hear the music until I came out into the hallway.
“Oh,” he said. He stopped fidgeting, at least.
“So, you tricked me with the shades,” she added, returning to neutral territory.
He snorted. “Hey, don't look at me. They were closed when I got home from work yesterday. I didn't touch them.” She frowned. She vaguely remembered needing a nap yesterday. She vaguely remembered yanking the curtains closed. Vaguely. She didn't comment. She stepped over all the lights and other junk on the floor, closer to the tree. The air smelled lovely and fresh and like winter. The spruce she'd smelled earlier. She inhaled until it filled her lungs. “So, how did you...?”
“I went to the tree lot at the grocery store this morning.”
She gaped, noticing the distinct lack of Mark in that sentence. He'd been quick to offer up Mark for the attic adventure. “You dragged this thing home by yourself?”
He looked like he didn't know what to say to that. “Um....” His gaze looked almost... hopeful. “Surprise?”
And then it clicked. She blinked as she stepped into his space. He thought she'd changed her mind and was mad about the Christmas vomit.
She thought of the Christmas furor of last year, when he'd dragged home a tree much like this one, though about a foot shorter, and she'd watched him wrap his presents in surgical tape and Santa kitten paper. She hadn't complained about the tree last year, but she hadn't cheered him on when he'd brought it home, either, and the only reason for her silence on the matter had been because she liked the smell. The spruce.
She glanced at the floor. There hadn't been nearly this many lights involved last year. And he hadn't gone digging around in her attic for old ornaments. He seemed to have been happy she'd let him get the tree through the front door and hadn't gone much beyond hanging a few lights on it and perching a big star at the top.
But that had been last year, and, this year, she'd already decided, wasn't going to go like that. While they'd been at Lake Cushman, it had occurred to her that this was something she wanted to try. Having an actual Christmas. Baby deserved a Christmas where Derek wasn't sewing pathetic stockings like Thatcher's. A Christmas where Mom didn't view all the merrymaking as a big chore stealing valuable time from work. Even if Meredith didn't really get the whole Christmas spirit... thing, she didn't want to take that away from Baby before she'd even been born. She didn't want to be Ellis, and this holiday was a decent area to start attempting changes.
Meredith tipped up on her toes and kissed his chin. “I'm not upset, Derek.” She was befuddled, maybe. But not upset. She gestured at the tree and the lights and the everything. She pulled a pine needle out of his hair and flicked it away. “I meant, are you okay? From the whole lugging a large, sticky tree that's taller than you are thing?”
“Oh,” he said. “Yes. Fine.” He pressed the knuckles of his fist against his sternum and rubbed through his shirt along the line of his scar. “Ached a little afterward, but that was what the nap was for. I mean, you insisted.” He grinned at her. “Who was I to say no?”
She thought of him collapsing beside her without arguing. “You were trying to tell me about this stuff earlier.”
He winked. “Not every time I say hello to you is for sex, you know.” He put the thingy in his hand on the mantle and wrapped his arms around her. “Is this....” He squinted as he searched for words. “This is okay with you, right? I tried to keep it light. I mean I know you said you wanted to try... well... this... but I wasn't sure how much was too much.”
Her eyes widened as she glanced around. “This is light for you?”
Something in his gaze crumbled a bit. “Well, there's the tree,” he said, the words calm. He shifted from foot to foot, and a blush began to spread from his throat to his cheeks. “And the decorations for the tree. But that's it. I swear.” Samantha barked. “Oh, and her hat.” A tiny smirk twitched at his lips despite the worried embarrassment on his face. “I couldn't resist the hat. I'm sorry.”
“This is all for the tree?” Meredith said. “There's like a thousand lights here.” She didn't even think she was exaggerating, for once.
“Well,” he said. He swallowed. “You see. If you weave in to the trunk and out to the edge on every branch instead of just wrapping the lights around the outside, it looks better. And, yes, that takes a lot of lights. We might have to buy some more if I can't get all these strands from last year working.”
She glanced around the room as the slightly-less-somber song from before ended, and a new song started playing. One with... an actual beat. The song sounded happy, and not even begrudging about it. There were trumpets, even. Synthesized ones. No words this time, though. “What's playing?”
“Mannheim Steamroller,” Derek said.
Meredith shook her head. Mannheim Steamroller? That sounded like it should be a street name for meth or something, not the name of a band.
“What song is this?”
He glanced briefly at the stereo. “Um. Hark the Herald Angels Sing. Carols are sort of a requisite for decorating, you know.”
She peered at him. “You can't decorate without them?”
“If it's not a law, it should be,” he said with a fleeting grin, and then he sighed.
“What's wrong?” she said.
He pulled his fingers through his hair. “I thought getting the tree put up might make me feel more Christmas-y, but I'm still just....” He shrugged. “Not.”
Her heart squeezed. Christmas was his holiday. He always felt Christmas-y. Like clockwork when December hit. He was supposed to be the one locking her out of the bedroom to wrap massive piles of presents with Santa kitten wrapping paper.
She hugged him, pressing against him. He melted into her embrace with little encouragement. “You're not feeling Christmas-y this year?” she said, rubbing his back.
His sigh ruffled her hair. “I'm trying, Meredith, but....”
“Not quite there?” she said.
He didn't answer her, which was an answer by itself. Instead, he stood against her, breathing, nose pressed against her hair. She understood. He'd been through the ringer this year. So had she.
“I'm glad I'm here, alive,” he said after a long moment. “And I'm glad I have you. And my dog. And Baby. I'm glad I don't hurt anymore, at least not my chest. I'm glad I don't have to work so hard to think of good things anymore. About myself or about life in general. I'm... happy. I am. But... I'm also very tired. All the time. And I miss liking people.”
She pressed her lips against his skin. “I can understand that.” She pulled her fingers through his hair. He leaned into the touch. “You'll get there. You're getting there. Have you gone shopping, yet? Maybe buying presents would help.”
He laughed, but the sound was hollow and had very little humor in it. “Shopping malls are kind of crowded at Christmas, Mere.”
She swallowed. Oh. Oh. Damn it.
“I've gotten a couple things,” he said.
But nothing like the weekend shopping marathons she'd witnessed in the years before. She could hear a hundred words unspoken in his unhappy tone.
“Online shopping?” she suggested. Derek nodded. “That's probably what I'm going to have to resort to.” His face pinched with a frown. “It's not nearly as fun that way, though.”
She couldn't think of anything to say to that. Couldn't think of any other suggestions. He stood in her arms for a long time, not speaking. She was happy to stand there, cheek pressed against his chest, letting the moments pass. “I love you,” she said against his shirt.
“I love you, too,” he said, a soft sigh of words.
The song changed again as they stood there, sharing space and time. She liked this song. “What's this one?” she said.
“It's Carol of the Bells. You like it?”
“This is my favorite so far. It's fun.”
He grunted with laughter against her hair, and his embraced relaxed as he stepped away to look at her. “The traditional version doesn't sound like this, just so you know.”
“Well, I like this version,” she said. She stared up at him, grinning. “So, I guess you're the Christmas expert in this family.”
“As long as you don't call me a Nazi,” he said, matching her grin.
“I'd only do that if you breached the Izzie barrier that separates tastefully appropriate from a-Hallmark-store-exploded.”
He laughed again, and it made her insides warm to see him livening up a little at her interest.
She kissed him, stepped out of his arms, and sat on the sofa. Heat from the fireplace buffeted her, and she closed her eyes briefly, enjoying the feeling. She reached down to stroke Samantha, who leaned into Meredith's palm. Meredith grinned. “Well,” Meredith said. “I said I wanted practice at this for Baby.” She gestured at the lights. “So, why don't you start by explaining what the hell you're doing?”
“Untangling,” he said, shoulders slumping as he visibly relaxed at her verdict that this amount of Christmas was okay. That still didn't stop him from smirking some more, though. “It's a scientific process.”
She laughed and pointed to the mantle. “What's the thingy for?”
He followed her gaze. “Oh, that? That's testing to see where the current is failing. It helps diagnose problems.”
“Like the fact that that strand is only half working?”
“Yes,” he said. He picked up the thing. There was an LED at the bottom she hadn't noticed. “If this lights up, there's current.”
She nodded. “Okay. Can I help?”
He tilted his head and stared at her for a long moment. His smirk stretched into an easy, pleased smile. “There are a few more strands to untangle.” He pointed to the trash bag on the floor by the sofa. She'd ignored the bag before. “You can do that while I fix this if you want,” he said, pointing to the dead string in his hands. “Just stretch them out like the rest of the ones on the floor.”
She grinned. “Okay.” And she leaned down to pick through the dusty bag of lights.
Fandom: Grey's Anatomy
Pairing: Mer/Der
Rating: M
Summary: S6 continuation. Immediately post Sanctuary / Death and All His Friends.
Author's Notes: Hi, everyone! Long time no see. Contrary to popular belief, this story is not abandoned, and I am not dead ;) I'm sorry it's taken so long for me to post this. I'd give you a list of RL causes, but we'd be here until next Tuesday or something, and I'd rather not bore you to death. Suffice it to say, life has been busy, and my muse took an unscheduled vacation. I've been working on this chapter on and off for about six months now. I wanted to post this part for Christmas to surprise you guys, but as you can see I didn't quite make my deadline. Nevertheless, I hope that those few of you who are still following this story enjoy this. I had a lot of fun writing it. Belated happy happy holidays and happy New Year :) Thanks in advance for any feedback!
P.S. I don't abandon my stories. Worst case scenario, I'll skip some planned chapters, but I will do everything in my power to give you a real ending. I promise.
P.P.S. LJ formatting is a nightmare. If you notice anywhere that's missing a line break that I missed fixing, let me know. Thanks!
All Along the Watchtower Part 30A
Lexie had a mushy look on her face again. It was the third time in ten minutes that Meredith had looked up from her charts to find her half-sister staring, her head tilted slightly to the side, lower lip pouting, as if she'd just finished saying, "Aww." Except there'd been no noise, so Meredith couldn't be certain.
“You're making goo-goo eyes at me,” Meredith snapped, stopping mid-pace.
Lexie's face reddened, her misty look shifting to something less schmoopy. In the world's most transparent attempt at misdirection, she looked back at her phone and started pressing buttons like she was texting somebody. The gurney she'd stretched out on squeaked as she resettled. Cristina, who hadn't even looked up, flipped a page in her book. Meredith continued pacing.
Mr. Wilson's symptoms were bizarre, and they didn't match any case Meredith had ever seen. She stared at his charts. His stats were all normal. But there was nothing normal about how he was behaving. If the MRI hadn't been clear, she would have sworn she was looking at a--
She whipped around on her heels. “What?” Meredith snapped, and Lexie blushed again. “Seriously, what is it?”
“Nothing,” Lexie rushed to say.
“What's with the gooey face, then?”
“Absolutely nothing,” Lexie said, too quickly to be innocent.
Meredith sighed with exasperation. “I've caught you staring four times!”
Lexie's words were a rush. “Noyouhaven't.”
“Yes, I--”
Cristina slammed her book onto the gurney. “Oh, for god's sake. You're waddling. Like the pregnant woman that you are. And Dr. McSappy thinks it's adorable or something equally gross.”
Meredith looked indignantly at Cristina. “What? I am not. No way. I'm not waddling.” She took a demonstrative step forward, but her attempt at a sexy sashay failed, and she moved a bit like a duck instead. Not waddling, though. Definitely not-- “Damn it!” she snapped when she saw Lexie turning to goo again.
When Derek glided through the double doors, all graceful lines and unbridled sexy, she rolled her eyes. “Do I waddle?” she asked him point blank.
He blinked as he took in the sight of her, and his features scrunched with visible affection. “Why, hello, Dr. Grey. It's so nice to see you, too.” He circled her, his step light, and closed in for a peck on the cheek.
She ignored him. “Do I waddle? They say I waddle.”
“I never said you waddle!” Lexie protested. She jabbed her thumb at Cristina. “She did. Why am I getting blamed?”
“Whatever,” said Meredith. “Your eyes have a vocabulary.”
“More like a thesaurus of the barf-worthy,” Cristina said, her tone wry.
Meredith folded her arms across her aching breasts. “So, do I waddle, now?” she said again to Derek.
Derek didn't have a chance to respond because Mark pushed through the double doors, more charts in hand, and Lexie froze. “Hey, man,” Mark said. “I need a consult on this scalp lac. There's a skull fracture underneath.”
Derek nodded. “Sure.”
“Hi!” Lexie chirped.
Mark blinked and looked back at her. “Hello, Little Grey,” he said, his voice calm and humoring. And then he turned back to Derek. “Can you come look at this, now?” They departed together.
“Don't think you're escaping my question!” Meredith called after Derek before he disappeared.
He looked over his shoulder and gave her a smirk. “I assure you, it's a very cute waddle,” he said with a wink, and then he was gone, the double doors swishing behind him.
“Oh, screw you, Dr. McDreamy,” Meredith grumbled. “I do not.”
Lexie deflated. “Hi,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Hi? Hi? What the hell is wrong with me?”
“What isn't?” Cristina said.
“Jeez, why are you always so grouchy?” Lexie said, folding her arms across her chest in a perfect imitation of Meredith. Cristina apparently deemed the question rhetorical and didn't respond. Lexie sighed, her expression glum. “Damn it. Who says hi?”
Meredith frowned. “People saying hello?”
Lexie made a growling sound of frustration, something halfway between guh and augh with a little grr thrown in. She threw her hands in the air, slammed against the swinging doors with her right shoulder, and followed Derek's route of escape, frowning all the way.
The funny thing about this whole debacle was that she had intended not to wake Derek up.
“Damn it!” she hissed at nobody in particular when she heard the alarm console by the front door chirp.
The contents of her grocery bag toppled onto the kitchen counter as she startled. The bag of apples hit the granite with a progressive series of dull thuds, and the sparkling cider bottle clanked in protest. Sunlight streamed through the frozen window panes, making the bottle glint as it rolled to an abrupt stop when it hit the faucet. A rawhide that was supposed to be a New Year's treat slid out of the bag and to the edge of the counter, and Samantha exploded off her haunches from the floor to grab it. Meredith didn't have a chance to rescue the hide from certain doom.
“No, no, no,” she whispered in a quiet litany as she gracelessly kneed the dog out of the way and made a waddling but frantic beeline for the front door. She'd been so fixated on tiptoeing past Derek, who'd been sleeping on the couch in the living room, that she'd forgotten to enter the freaking code. She had maybe a few seconds before--
The chirp turned into something much more high-pitched and abrasive just as she slid to a stop by the console, and Derek's cell phone began to shriek on the end table by the couch where he lay, a lump under several blankets. Then a clamorous crash tumbled out of the kitchen, and Meredith looked back to see the grocery bag fall to the floor. Samantha's head had disappeared inside, and Meredith barely had a chance to wail a baleful, “No!” before Derek's blankets had flipped back from his face, and he snapped upright. A notepad and a pen, which had been resting precariously on his stomach, fell to the floor beside the couch with a smack, and the pen rolled under the couch.
“What the hell?!” he barked, out of sorts and flailing, and Meredith had a brief, panicked moment of indecision about whether to turn the freaking alarm off, answer the phone, run to Derek, or save the honey-baked ham from the dog. The racket was paralyzing.
After a heartbeat, she shook herself back into action. The green LED display on the alarm was blinking at her accusingly. Code, code, code....
“What should our code be?” he asked, looking up from the little instruction booklet.
“I don't know,” she replied. “Not something simple like a birthday. The crooks always figure those out in the movies.”
A ghost of a smirk lit his tired, space-y features. “Oh, do they?” he said, his tone the barest, grumbling, haughty hint of the Derek she worried she might never see again.
She nodded and smiled, unwilling to let his dour mood stomp on her hope. “They do.”
His gaze tipped up in thought for a moment, and then he came back to earth with a small shrug. He punched a familiar string of numbers into the pad and hit enter, and then typed them in again to confirm.
She grinned as she slipped her arms around his waist. He tensed for a moment at the constricting contact, and then relaxed as she rested her chin against his shoulder blades. “That was the day I started at Seattle Grace,” she murmured against him.
A rumbling sort of laugh filled his torso and tickled her cheek. “I prefer to think of it as the day I met you,” he said. “It was a very good day.”
“We met the night before,” she countered despite the fact that her insides were melting. “You were in your sexy red shirt, and you took advantage!”
“I believe you took advantage in this story,” he said.
“Whatever,” she replied. “It was still the night before.”
He turned in her embrace to face her. He gave her a charming smile that didn't quite reach his eyes, but she could pretend for a minute that everything was fine when he looked at her like that, 75% of what he'd been before the shooting, and for that minute, she felt like she'd started to float. He wrapped his arms around her in return, and he put his stubbly chin against her forehead. He inhaled deeply, like he was breathing her in. He reached up with his right hand, and his snaked his fingers through her hair. “I distinctly remember you refusing to give me your name until I woke up naked on your living room floor.”
“Distinctly?” she murmured.
He kissed her. “Yes, distinctly.” And then he frowned. “I may have had a slight hangover, though.”
“So, not quite so distinctly, then?” she said.
He considered her for a moment. “Distinctly with a side of headache and a yearning for aspirin.”
She sighed. The heat of his body flush with hers relaxed her. Made her feel mushy and loose and boneless. She liked pretending things were okay, sometimes. “Okay,” she said as he nuzzled her. “I guess you win on a technicality.”
“I can live with that as long as I win,” he said.
They shared a laugh together. She ignored the fact that his sounded hollow and unconvinced of the humor, like he knew he'd been given a part to play and was trying hard, but he wasn't a great actor, and he couldn't sell it. Then the gap in conversation stretched, and the following silence curdled. Or, maybe she was just being silly and imagining things, because his moods had been so precarious, lately.
She traced lines down his pectoral as she clenched her fingers and ended up resting her fist against his healing heart. She bit her lip as they stared at the newly armed alarm. “So....”
“What?” he said, a little too glumly, and her insides tightened. She hated how fast his moods swung.
“Does it--” She cut that question off before she could finish it. She didn't want to hear him tell her it wasn't helping. That it wouldn't help. She took a quick breath and let it out. She smiled, looking up at him through her eyelashes. “I hope it helps you.”
His gaze softened, and some of the dark edges fell away. “Yeah,” he said in a wistful tone that made it sound like they were discussing the minute possibility of purchasing a winning lottery ticket, not the simple idea of feeling safe in one's own home. He leaned forward and pressed his lips against her forehead. “That'd be really nice.”
She jammed the code into the number pad as fast as she could, her fingers flying across the keys. The shrieking alarm stopped wailing at her, and she turned to her husband, giving up on the honey-baked ham. Derek was much more important than a honey-baked ham, which was probably half gone already, if she were to base an estimate off the horrific snarfing sounds of a carnivore delighting in dinner coming from the kitchen.
“Derek,” she began, “I'm so--” She stopped in her tracks, and her jaw fell open as he stiffly held up an index finger at her in the universal sign for, “Give me one moment,” though it had a slightly tense edge to it. Sort of a, “Give me one moment, damn it,” she amended.
“Yeah,” Derek was saying into his phone, his voice tight. His hair was mussed, and he looked bleary-eyed, but his sharp tone didn't show any sign of his quick severance from dreaming. “No, no police. We're fine,” he said, almost a snap. Derek glanced at her, then at the alarm pad, and then he flopped back down on the couch with the phone cupped to his ear. “Yeah, just a mix-up. Thank you.”
He tossed the phone onto the coffee table where it landed with a smack and skidded into a magazine. He closed his eyes for a brief moment as he pressed his palms against his face and sighed. Then his palms dropped to his sides and clutched the cushions. He sat up with a vague grimace that spoke of effort, not of pain, and looked at her with an unreadable expression.
She bit her lip. Scratch that. She could read it all right. He was pissed off. He was pissed off, and he was trying very hard to keep a lid on it, based on the grinding of his molars.
The dog made another noise in the kitchen that made her think of lions ripping up helpless gazelles on the savannah, which, of course, she'd only seen in documentaries, but it was hard to forget a sound like that. She considered the ham a lost cause, but Derek rose to his feet and trudged into the kitchen without speaking.
She felt compelled to say, “Sorry,” into the silence.
He didn't respond as he entered the kitchen. He hissed at the dog, who didn't listen, so he escalated to a barked, harsh, “Hey! Get away from that!” And then he pressed his knee against the dog's shoulder.
When that still didn't work, Derek grabbed her collar and yanked. Samantha's feet scrabbled on the floor as she struggled to keep her purchase. Her muscles bulged. She kept her muzzle stuck in the ham as long as physically possible, and pieces of torn meat came away with her jaw as Derek managed to drag her away by force.
Derek snapped again, “No.”
The dog finally seemed to listen and hopped back a step, out of Derek's grip. She looked up at Derek with a dejected expression. He glared back at her, and she slunk out of the kitchen with a veritable raincloud of guilt hanging over her head.
Samantha's behavior in the aftermath was almost funny, and Meredith would have laughed, were it not for the tension thick in the air.
Derek bent down to pick up the ham.
There was still a lot of meat left on the thing, but there were huge chunks taken out of it, their ragged edges littered with stringy bits of fat and muscle fiber. There was no doubt it was ruined - Samantha was devastating when she wanted to get into something. Bits of foil and plastic wrapping had spread over the kitchen floor as though they were confetti blasted from a canon. Rare, unfiltered winter sunlight that belied the chill in the air streamed through the window panes, making the foil gleam.
Derek dropped the ham into the sink, still silent, and still not looking at her. He bent over to pick up the fallen apples, next.
She fidgeted as she watched him, shifting her weight from foot to foot, until she finally felt compelled to fill the silence. “Can I help?” she said. She would have just butted in, but he'd monopolized the space where the disaster had occurred, and fighting over who picked up bruised apples seemed rather silly.
“I've got it,” he said flatly.
She grabbed the cider off the counter instead and put it into the fridge. “I hate that freaking alarm.”
He looked at her with a raised eyebrow. “You're the one who wanted it,” he said, not hiding the passive-aggressive accusation in his tone. The snotty passive-aggressive accusation, she thought. Derek really did know how to act piss-y.
Something inside her head snapped. She'd tried. She'd tried to get the freaking alarm turned off before it started shrieking. Before it automatically notified ADT that something was up. She'd been shopping for them to get the stupid ham and dog treats and cider and everything, because he'd said he wasn't feeling up to people today.
“For you, Derek,” she said, her voice low. “I wanted to get it for you, so you could feel safe in your own freaking home.”
“Well, it doesn't make me feel safe,” he said through gritted teeth, his tone low and throaty. He glowered. “It's just a big fucking annoyance.”
A pit hollowed out her righteous anger, and a lump formed in her throat. They hadn't really talked about this in ages. She'd just assumed, since he'd been doing better.... “You still don't feel safe at home?” she said.
He rolled his eyes. “Meredith, I feel just fine at home. The only reason that alarm was even armed was because I think Lexie forgot I was on the couch when she left for work.”
“Oh,” she said, relaxing as relief crashed through her like a wave. “Well, that's good... but....”
“But what?” he snapped.
“Why are you freaking pissed at me, then?”
He looked at her like she'd just spoken in a foreign tongue. “I'm not pissed at you...,” he said slowly.
“Well, you're acting like a piss-y jerk,” she snapped.
He blinked, and his expression softened. He breathed slowly in and out for several seconds, and Meredith realized he was doing his thing. The thing that kept him from panicking when he was feeling panicky. Except it apparently worked on temper tantrums, too.
“Meredith,” he began, his tone low and stretched and forcefully calm, “I got yanked out of a very good dream by an alarm shrieking so loud my ears are still buzzing, then I had to be coherent for a phone call asking me if I wanted the police sent out to my house, our New Year's Eve plans are in Samantha's stomach, I basically just had to choke my dog to get her to listen to me, and on top of all that I had a shitty day at work yesterday. It truly has nothing to do with you. I'm sorry if it seemed that way.”
“Oh,” she said, slightly relieved. Not relieved that he was angry. That was still bad. Her insides tightened. God, she'd gotten so used to him lashing out at her over countless months, it just felt weird when he was only a regular version of pissed.
“I'm really sorry,” Derek said again, the words stiff. He didn't make a move toward her.
“I guess I'd be a little pissed, too,” she admitted.
He swallowed, and he looked away. Out the window. Skeletons of trees danced outside in the wind. Smoke curled out of the chimney of her back neighbor. “I've been trying,” he said, his tone edging on frustrated.
“No, that was really good,” she said. “I just read it all wrong.”
She gave him a hopeful smile as she approached. He must have caught her movement out of the corner of his eye. He returned her smile, though it was somewhat forced. Like his eyes didn't quite mean it, yet. That was okay, though, she supposed. He was allowed to be pissed off. Just... not at her. Not when she didn't deserve it, and this time, she damned well didn't.
She wrapped her arms around him. His body was tense, and it took him several moments to relax, but then it was like a switch had gotten flipped, and he... melted. There was really no other word for it. He melted against her, pressing his nose into her hair. His warm palm pressed against her belly, like he was reminding himself. He heaved a colossal sigh, and then it was like all his anger had been flushed away. She much preferred this gradual, quiet release to his typical snarling explosions.
“A good dream, huh?” she murmured.
“Mmm,” he rumbled. “Yes.”
She grinned. “Was I in this dream?”
“Yes,” he said, the word unabashed.
“Clothed?” she said, quirking her eyebrow suggestively.
He pulled away to peer at her. His eyes were finally smiling along with the rest of his face. “As a matter of fact, yes.”
“Oh?” she said, surprised. “What was I doing?”
“We were in the OR,” he said. “And I wasn't scared, and it was going well, and it was just... nice.”
She grinned at him. “You were dreaming about cutting again?”
“Yeah,” he said, his tone mysterious. He cocked his head to the side, and his expression grew ponderous. “Admittedly, I think it was on a very distressed, brain-damaged grapefruit, and Cristina was riding a motorcycle in circles around the table, but still....”
Meredith burst out laughing. She kissed him. His lips were cool and soft against hers, and he tasted faintly of mint, like toothpaste. “No more unusual than being chased by a can of spermicide, I guess,” she said against his skin, remembering a nightmare she'd had months ago.
He winked at her. She rested against him as he drew his fingers through her hair. “We could get rid of the alarm,” she mused, “since we both hate the damned thing, and it doesn't help you.”
“Mmm,” he said. “I don't really seem to need help on that front anymore.”
“Did it ever help?” she asked.
He snorted and looked at her ruefully. “Not really.” He shook his head, looking off into the distance. “Before, it was just... constant. That... feeling.”
“Being scared?” Meredith said.
“Yeah,” he said, swallowing. “The only thing that changed was how loud it was. In my head.”
“And it's not loud anymore?” she said.
He shrugged. “It's not anything anymore. Not when I'm at home.”
Her heart squeezed. “That's really good, Derek.” And then she blinked. Looked at him. “Hey...”
He frowned at her. “What?”
“You didn't freak out,” she said.
“Freak out about what?” he said.
“The alarm. And the phone. And the dog. Waking you up. It was all really loud, Derek. But you woke up, and you spoke coherently on the phone, and you disciplined the dog, and you didn't freak out.”
He stared at her.
“Did you feel like freaking out?” she demanded.
He thought for a minute. “No.... I was flustered. Irritated as fuck. But not freaked out.”
“Yeah, well,” Meredith said. “Newsflash, but normal people would feel like that too, given that situation.”
“I guess I just....”
“What?”
He grinned at her. “Home is....” He shrugged. “Home is home. It's okay. It's home.”
Meredith laughed. “I guess we're moving up in the world.”
He nodded as a yawn cracked his frame, and he reached up to wipe his watering eyes with his hands. This was his first day off in a week, and he'd come home completely wrecked with exhaustion the night before. He'd collapsed into bed as soon as he'd gotten home - he hadn't spoken more than five words to her before he'd crashed - and it seemed like he still hadn't quite bounced back, yet. As the weeks had passed since he'd returned to work, he'd gotten a lot better at forcing himself to deal with work and the people at work, but the strain of that, together with the fact that heart surgery patients sometimes took over a year to feel like they were back to normal, left him enervated in the evenings. He still rarely stayed up past nine or ten, and he wasn't at all chipper in the mornings. Not like he used to be. She'd even caught him hitting the snooze button several times.
“You should go back to sleep,” she suggested. He clearly needed it. “Maybe, you can go back to that dream.”
He pinched the bridge of his nose and grunted. “Yeah, maybe,” he said, not even trying to come up with an excuse to stay awake. He ran his hands through his hair as he pulled out of her embrace. “I'll get the foil later,” he said, and he padded out of the room, said foil crunching under his bare feet, before she could tell him not to worry about it.
As she grabbed the broom in the corner, she heard the cushions squeak. He sighed. Blankets rustled. She swept up the foil refuse quickly and dumped it in the trashcan. He was already asleep by the time she went into the living room. His discarded notepad still lay on the floor by the couch, forgotten. She picked it up, frowning. He rolled away from her, presenting his back as he pressed his face into the back cushions. His deep breathing continued, and she absently pulled the slipped blanket up to his jutting shoulder as she looked at the notepad.
He'd written a number one followed by a period, as if he'd intended to write a list, but the only item on the page was number one, which said, “Pray for a miracle.” And it had been crossed out with harsh pen strokes that left dents in the paper. There was nothing written after it. The margins had some idle scribbles and squiggles, and at the bottom of the page, he'd drawn a stick figure fishing on a dock or something.
She plopped down into the easy chair, still frowning. She'd written aborted lists like this before. Usually when she was frustrated, trying to work things out, and couldn't think of what to add, just that writing a list might help organize all the stuff tangled inside her brain like spaghetti.
“Derek, what's this?” she said before she could stop herself.
For a moment he didn't move, but she heard his breathing change. “What's what?” he muttered into the cushion.
She winced at the exhaustion dragging at his words. “Sorry. Sleep. It can wait.”
He didn't comment, and his breathing evened within moments, more testimony to his need for rest. She leaned back, breathing softly. The air still smelled of spruce and wintergreen, and she found it soothing. Baby seemed to like it too, because Meredith felt her moving, rolling over like she was turning in her sleep. Meredith smiled, placed her hands on her belly to feel, and drifted.
“Meredith,” he said, snapping her out of dreams.
She twitched under the covers and groaned. It was dark. The air was cold outside the blankets. She had no idea what time it was, but it was dark and cold, and dark and cold meant time for sleeping.
“No,” she said.
The pleasant scent of cut spruce tickled her nose. The mattress dipped beside her. He slipped under the covers with her and lay parallel to her, spooning her with his endless warmth.
“No?” he replied. “I haven't said anything, yet.” His words were soft and low like velvet against her skin. “I could be telling you I won the lottery, you know.”
She could hear him smirking. Screw the idea of smirks being a facial expression; his were noisy, and they sucked to hear when she was trying to sleep, no matter how much sexy he cranked into every syllable.
“Whatever it is, no,” she said. Especially if it was sex, she thought, which, in this tired moment, would be so far from winning the lottery, Derek's lovely attributes not withstanding, that she couldn't even muster the will to be hypothetically excited for her future not-tired self if she were to take a rain check on any proposed sexy goodness. “I'm exhausted, and I don't have to pee for once, nor is Baby kicking like she's in a soccer match, and I'm sleeping.”
His nose pressed against her neck. “Okay,” he said without further comment or protest.
He made a small, pleasant sound deep in his throat, a murmur against her ear. He wasn't smirking anymore. His breath ruffled her hair. His warm arms wrapped over her body. He pressed his palm against her belly. Whether Baby was kicking or not, he loved to do that. Then he sighed, and his breaths evened out along with hers.
If she'd been more awake, she might have gotten jealous about how fast he collapsed into slumber along side her when sleeping hadn't even been his idea, but the Land of Nod took her away soon after, and she lost track of the world for a while. Until she did have to pee.
When she got up, he wasn't in the bed anymore. After she relieved herself, she waddled back into the bedroom. The curtains had been drawn, plunging the room into darkness. She opened them, squinting in surprise at the broad daylight that greeted her. The sky above was overcast with thick, frothy gray clouds, muting the effect of daytime hitting the windowpanes, but, still. Definitely freaking day.
Her gaze snapped to the clock. 2:00 pm. She made a sound. A squeak or something. Something that said surprise in less than a word. She'd slept late. Really late. Half her day off was already gone. The dark had fooled her into thinking it was still night time.
She ran her fingers through her hair, dazed, and opened the bedroom door. The faint sound of some song she knew was a Christmas carol fluttered up the stairs. She recognized the melody and the somber chorus, and the chant-y dudes singing in what sounded like Latin, but she couldn't place the name of the carol. Then she heard a loud thump and a grating curse in a very familiar timbre, and she froze. The last time she'd heard something like that, Derek had fallen in the shower and hurt himself, and less than twenty-four hours after that, her world had exploded when she'd found him in their bathroom with empty pill bottles rolling around on the floor.
“Derek?” she shouted. She scrambled down the stairs as any other potential thoughts played bumper cars and knocked themselves out of her head. “Are you okay?”
“Fine, Mere,” he called from the living room. The blasé distraction in his tone didn't speak of any serious hurt, more, I-have-a-project-I'm-thinking-about, but that didn't stop her heart from pounding.
Her socks slid along the hardwood flooring as she skidded to a halt in the archway to the living room. Derek looked up at her, and a brilliant smile scrunched up his crow's feet around his blue, blue eyes. She could lose herself in those fathoms. All her worries slipped away on quiet, cat feet, leaving her blank as she stared back at him.
“Hi,” he said in a velvet tone that made her insides tighten.
The fireplace roared with licking flames. A seven foot Christmas tree towered in their living room, and hundreds of colored lights on strings lay spread between the living room and dining room on the floor. An open box rested by the fireplace with something shiny in it, and a cloth... thing that she vaguely recognized... hung over the lip of the box. The Christmas carol she'd heard upstairs played from the speakers in the living room, albeit very softly. From the spinning turntable and the faint crackle under the music, Derek had liberated on one his many LPs from the bookshelf by the stereo.
Derek wore an old t-shirt and some loose fitting sweat pants. None of the lights had been hung on the tree, yet, but he'd wrapped a string of lights over his shoulders and behind his neck a bit like a feather boa. The end of the string was plugged into the wall, but only half of the lights seemed to be working, the ones hanging over his left shoulder. He held a square doodad in his hand, and he was touching it to the base of one of the tiny light bulb sockets at his right side. She didn't know the doodad's purpose.
Samantha sat by the couch, oblivious or maybe even happy about the floppy Santa hat she'd found herself wearing. She watched everything with rapt amusement. She barked at Meredith, the Santa hat jiggling as she moved.
“Sam says good morning,” Derek said.
Meredith wrinkled her nose. “Afternoon, you mean. What was the thump?”
He shrugged. “Oh, that? Banged my knee on the box.” He gestured at the box by the fireplace. “Wasn't paying attention.”
The box, more of a trunk, really, was made of heavy slats of wood that had been painted gray. As she moved closer, she saw tinier boxes stacked inside, each full of shiny things. Wooden things. All manner of things, really. Ornaments. Old ones. She recognized the box on the top. It contained an old set of golden wire ornaments depicting the twelve days of Christmas. The first one depicted a partridge in a pear tree.
She bent over to look more closely at the contents of the box. The cloth she thought she recognized? The red corduroy fabric was folded on top of an old tree skirt made of checkered green and white fabric with red ribbing. Each checkered box on the tree skirt framed a little embroidered tree inside, but the red corduroy on top of the tree skirt was what held her attention.
A lump formed in her throat as she picked it up. The red corduroy, stiff with lack of use, was an old stocking with a boot shaped more like a pancake than a foot. Red yarn crookedly spelled, “Meredith,” on the white lip of the stocking. The whole thing looked very amateur, but that didn't matter so much. Thatcher. Thatcher had made this for her when she'd been little. Her mother wouldn't, so he'd sewn it himself, despite not knowing how to construct more than the crudest of hole patches. She had the vaguest memory of watching him make it. An impression, really. Nothing more. But it was one of her more pleasant childhood recollections. She brushed her thumb along the coarse fabric.
“Where'd you get this?” Meredith said. She hadn't seen this in... forever. Not since she'd moved to Boston. She hadn't even realized her mother had still had it when she'd died.
Derek stepped close to her. “I found the box in the attic. It looked like it had Christmas stuff in it, so I grabbed it. I wasn't sure how much decorating you wanted to do.”
“When did you go digging around in the attic?” she said.
The ladder to the attic was a rickety, ancient thing with worn rungs and chipping paint. The ladder had to be let down through a trap door with a wooden pole... hook... thing. The whole monstrosity weighed a ton, probably more than this tree had, and the process was unwieldy enough that she refused to do it without help, for fear of the heavy ladder smashing her skull as it came down. As far as she knew, Derek was still not the best at things that involved pushing and pulling. She didn't want to speculate about how heavy that gray wooden box was, either.
“Last weekend,” Derek said. “You were on shift. Mark helped me get the ladder down. The box has been sitting here by the fireplace all week. I'm surprised you didn't notice it.”
“Oh,” Meredith said. She tipped her gaze to the heavy wooden box. He'd been a lot better, and he'd been hitting the gym with Mark, but she hadn't realized he'd graduated to heavy lifting, even with help.
She bit her lip. She hadn't been home much in a conscious state. The last few weeks since they'd gotten back from New York, she'd been working and sleeping, and that was about it. Him too, really. They were both not at their peaks. Him with his stress from work, and her with Baby's shameless yet abundant mooching.
Her hand wandered to her belly. She was getting damned tired of the mooching stealing all her available energy like a Hoover in overdrive, but she figured if anybody had an excuse to mooch, it would be Baby. At least her pregnancy was over the halfway mark. She was almost done. And then she would have Baby. Which would more than make up for it.
“I'm sorry I haven't been paying attention,” she said. “I've been really tired.”
His expression softened. “I'd be a hypocrite if I complained, Meredith. And you have a much better excuse than I do.”
She absently petted the old, barely-used stocking as she frowned at him. “Not true,” she said. “Let's just call us even.”
“Deal,” Derek said after some consideration. His gaze followed her hand as she stroked the stocking, and he twitched, like he wanted to move closer and feel, too, but he didn't move. “Did you want to hang that?” he said, the words cautious. “When I saw that in the box,” he said, continuing, “I thought you might....” He swallowed, and she watched as the possible ends to that sentence flitted across his face. I thought you might like it. Might hate it. Might want it. Might want to burn it. The conflicting tumble concluded with an audible, “I don't know.”
“Do you have one?” she said, looking up at him.
“A big, ugly box that weighs more than my car?” he said.
She let loose a chuff of laughter. “A stocking, jackass.”
His eyes sparkled. “I'm sure my mother kept it somewhere,” he said. “But, no, not here.”
“Well, we're not hanging mine without yours,” she said, putting the stocking back in the box on top of the old tree skirt. “It'd look lonely.”
She watched him process that. He glanced at the stocking and then back at her, his expression unreadable. Wary but optimistic, maybe, but he slipped into a frown when the music track changed. This song sounded... happier. And also recognizable, but not something she could peg with a title. The melody in it was still kind of slow.
“The music didn't wake you up, did it?” he said, anxiety gripping his words. “I thought the volume was low enough.”
“My bladder woke me up,” she conceded. “I didn't hear the music until I came out into the hallway.
“Oh,” he said. He stopped fidgeting, at least.
“So, you tricked me with the shades,” she added, returning to neutral territory.
He snorted. “Hey, don't look at me. They were closed when I got home from work yesterday. I didn't touch them.” She frowned. She vaguely remembered needing a nap yesterday. She vaguely remembered yanking the curtains closed. Vaguely. She didn't comment. She stepped over all the lights and other junk on the floor, closer to the tree. The air smelled lovely and fresh and like winter. The spruce she'd smelled earlier. She inhaled until it filled her lungs. “So, how did you...?”
“I went to the tree lot at the grocery store this morning.”
She gaped, noticing the distinct lack of Mark in that sentence. He'd been quick to offer up Mark for the attic adventure. “You dragged this thing home by yourself?”
He looked like he didn't know what to say to that. “Um....” His gaze looked almost... hopeful. “Surprise?”
And then it clicked. She blinked as she stepped into his space. He thought she'd changed her mind and was mad about the Christmas vomit.
She thought of the Christmas furor of last year, when he'd dragged home a tree much like this one, though about a foot shorter, and she'd watched him wrap his presents in surgical tape and Santa kitten paper. She hadn't complained about the tree last year, but she hadn't cheered him on when he'd brought it home, either, and the only reason for her silence on the matter had been because she liked the smell. The spruce.
She glanced at the floor. There hadn't been nearly this many lights involved last year. And he hadn't gone digging around in her attic for old ornaments. He seemed to have been happy she'd let him get the tree through the front door and hadn't gone much beyond hanging a few lights on it and perching a big star at the top.
But that had been last year, and, this year, she'd already decided, wasn't going to go like that. While they'd been at Lake Cushman, it had occurred to her that this was something she wanted to try. Having an actual Christmas. Baby deserved a Christmas where Derek wasn't sewing pathetic stockings like Thatcher's. A Christmas where Mom didn't view all the merrymaking as a big chore stealing valuable time from work. Even if Meredith didn't really get the whole Christmas spirit... thing, she didn't want to take that away from Baby before she'd even been born. She didn't want to be Ellis, and this holiday was a decent area to start attempting changes.
Meredith tipped up on her toes and kissed his chin. “I'm not upset, Derek.” She was befuddled, maybe. But not upset. She gestured at the tree and the lights and the everything. She pulled a pine needle out of his hair and flicked it away. “I meant, are you okay? From the whole lugging a large, sticky tree that's taller than you are thing?”
“Oh,” he said. “Yes. Fine.” He pressed the knuckles of his fist against his sternum and rubbed through his shirt along the line of his scar. “Ached a little afterward, but that was what the nap was for. I mean, you insisted.” He grinned at her. “Who was I to say no?”
She thought of him collapsing beside her without arguing. “You were trying to tell me about this stuff earlier.”
He winked. “Not every time I say hello to you is for sex, you know.” He put the thingy in his hand on the mantle and wrapped his arms around her. “Is this....” He squinted as he searched for words. “This is okay with you, right? I tried to keep it light. I mean I know you said you wanted to try... well... this... but I wasn't sure how much was too much.”
Her eyes widened as she glanced around. “This is light for you?”
Something in his gaze crumbled a bit. “Well, there's the tree,” he said, the words calm. He shifted from foot to foot, and a blush began to spread from his throat to his cheeks. “And the decorations for the tree. But that's it. I swear.” Samantha barked. “Oh, and her hat.” A tiny smirk twitched at his lips despite the worried embarrassment on his face. “I couldn't resist the hat. I'm sorry.”
“This is all for the tree?” Meredith said. “There's like a thousand lights here.” She didn't even think she was exaggerating, for once.
“Well,” he said. He swallowed. “You see. If you weave in to the trunk and out to the edge on every branch instead of just wrapping the lights around the outside, it looks better. And, yes, that takes a lot of lights. We might have to buy some more if I can't get all these strands from last year working.”
She glanced around the room as the slightly-less-somber song from before ended, and a new song started playing. One with... an actual beat. The song sounded happy, and not even begrudging about it. There were trumpets, even. Synthesized ones. No words this time, though. “What's playing?”
“Mannheim Steamroller,” Derek said.
Meredith shook her head. Mannheim Steamroller? That sounded like it should be a street name for meth or something, not the name of a band.
“What song is this?”
He glanced briefly at the stereo. “Um. Hark the Herald Angels Sing. Carols are sort of a requisite for decorating, you know.”
She peered at him. “You can't decorate without them?”
“If it's not a law, it should be,” he said with a fleeting grin, and then he sighed.
“What's wrong?” she said.
He pulled his fingers through his hair. “I thought getting the tree put up might make me feel more Christmas-y, but I'm still just....” He shrugged. “Not.”
Her heart squeezed. Christmas was his holiday. He always felt Christmas-y. Like clockwork when December hit. He was supposed to be the one locking her out of the bedroom to wrap massive piles of presents with Santa kitten wrapping paper.
She hugged him, pressing against him. He melted into her embrace with little encouragement. “You're not feeling Christmas-y this year?” she said, rubbing his back.
His sigh ruffled her hair. “I'm trying, Meredith, but....”
“Not quite there?” she said.
He didn't answer her, which was an answer by itself. Instead, he stood against her, breathing, nose pressed against her hair. She understood. He'd been through the ringer this year. So had she.
“I'm glad I'm here, alive,” he said after a long moment. “And I'm glad I have you. And my dog. And Baby. I'm glad I don't hurt anymore, at least not my chest. I'm glad I don't have to work so hard to think of good things anymore. About myself or about life in general. I'm... happy. I am. But... I'm also very tired. All the time. And I miss liking people.”
She pressed her lips against his skin. “I can understand that.” She pulled her fingers through his hair. He leaned into the touch. “You'll get there. You're getting there. Have you gone shopping, yet? Maybe buying presents would help.”
He laughed, but the sound was hollow and had very little humor in it. “Shopping malls are kind of crowded at Christmas, Mere.”
She swallowed. Oh. Oh. Damn it.
“I've gotten a couple things,” he said.
But nothing like the weekend shopping marathons she'd witnessed in the years before. She could hear a hundred words unspoken in his unhappy tone.
“Online shopping?” she suggested. Derek nodded. “That's probably what I'm going to have to resort to.” His face pinched with a frown. “It's not nearly as fun that way, though.”
She couldn't think of anything to say to that. Couldn't think of any other suggestions. He stood in her arms for a long time, not speaking. She was happy to stand there, cheek pressed against his chest, letting the moments pass. “I love you,” she said against his shirt.
“I love you, too,” he said, a soft sigh of words.
The song changed again as they stood there, sharing space and time. She liked this song. “What's this one?” she said.
“It's Carol of the Bells. You like it?”
“This is my favorite so far. It's fun.”
He grunted with laughter against her hair, and his embraced relaxed as he stepped away to look at her. “The traditional version doesn't sound like this, just so you know.”
“Well, I like this version,” she said. She stared up at him, grinning. “So, I guess you're the Christmas expert in this family.”
“As long as you don't call me a Nazi,” he said, matching her grin.
“I'd only do that if you breached the Izzie barrier that separates tastefully appropriate from a-Hallmark-store-exploded.”
He laughed again, and it made her insides warm to see him livening up a little at her interest.
She kissed him, stepped out of his arms, and sat on the sofa. Heat from the fireplace buffeted her, and she closed her eyes briefly, enjoying the feeling. She reached down to stroke Samantha, who leaned into Meredith's palm. Meredith grinned. “Well,” Meredith said. “I said I wanted practice at this for Baby.” She gestured at the lights. “So, why don't you start by explaining what the hell you're doing?”
“Untangling,” he said, shoulders slumping as he visibly relaxed at her verdict that this amount of Christmas was okay. That still didn't stop him from smirking some more, though. “It's a scientific process.”
She laughed and pointed to the mantle. “What's the thingy for?”
He followed her gaze. “Oh, that? That's testing to see where the current is failing. It helps diagnose problems.”
“Like the fact that that strand is only half working?”
“Yes,” he said. He picked up the thing. There was an LED at the bottom she hadn't noticed. “If this lights up, there's current.”
She nodded. “Okay. Can I help?”
He tilted his head and stared at her for a long moment. His smirk stretched into an easy, pleased smile. “There are a few more strands to untangle.” He pointed to the trash bag on the floor by the sofa. She'd ignored the bag before. “You can do that while I fix this if you want,” he said, pointing to the dead string in his hands. “Just stretch them out like the rest of the ones on the floor.”
She grinned. “Okay.” And she leaned down to pick through the dusty bag of lights.