Lightning Strikes Twice - Part 43A
Title: Lightning Strikes Twice
Author: AriaAdagio
Rating: M
Pairing: Mer/Der
Summary: Post Time After Time. Derek takes Meredith to visit his family in Connecticut, but nothing goes as planned.
~~~~~
A roaring sound wrapped in a curl of shouting voices woke Derek up. He blinked once, twice, three times as a swarm of nurses and doctors pushed the crash cart past his door, but the blur was slow to resolve, and the ceiling remained an unfocused, white blur. This wasn't the first time, or the second, or the third, and he was slowly discovering that there were benefits to being drugged out of one's mind. It made light sleepers into heavy ones, for instance. He swallowed, trying to dispel the dry, cottony feeling in his mouth, but it wouldn't go away.
He tilted his head, staring at the floor for a long set of moments. Tired. Too tired. This wasn't the first time he'd been woken up, or the second, or the third, but it was the first time he'd been woken up and accompanied by the absolute lack of desire to physically get up. The constant noises and interruptions had worn him down, worn him down to the point of giving up on moving around at all. Walking all over the hospital with Meredith the day before had robbed him of everything. He hadn't had much left to wear down.
He raised his watch. 8:00AM. It had only been two hours since Abasi had forced him to sit up and take pill after pill. He'd gotten up then. That had been the last straw, apparently. Meredith had been out cold on the sofa, snoring softly over a book on organ transplant procedures. He'd used the bathroom and gone for a quick stroll up the hall and back. Except it hadn't been quick. By the time he'd gotten back to the bed, he'd been too exhausted to do anything other than surrender back into sleeping despite the racket Meredith had been creating. She'd remained asleep for the duration, despite the loud flush of the toilet and the steady rumble of the IV pole as he'd dragged it across the floor. He'd marveled at her ability to sleep through anything. Marveled. And he'd envied it.
He let his eyes fall shut and tried to let sleep take him away again. Meredith sat to his left in a chair, highlighter squeaking over the pages of some medical volume. Her soft breathing rasped in the space next to his heart monitor. The almost-inaudible bleeps seemed thunderous, and her breathing was a pelting wind more than a soft, balmy breeze. His mother sat in the red loveseat on the other side of the room. She wasn't knitting. But even she was making noise. Moving subtly. From the sound of it, she had a newspaper. The pages shivered and crinkled. Some nurses stood down the hall, gossiping about something, if their scratchy, laughing tone was any indication. He couldn't make out the words.
He gave up on sleeping then, too. For a moment, he debated forcing himself onto his feet, but the debate lasted all of five seconds. No. No more. His body was done for a while. "Mere," he whispered, "Could you get me some water, please?"
Meredith opened her mouth to reply, but the words that followed came from across the room. "I'll get it," Ellen said. The sofa squeaked.
Meredith put her book down and leaned over the railing. "Hey," she said, smiling. She kissed him, gentle, like a wave, before reaching down to grasp his hand and stroke her lithe fingers against his knuckles.
His mother pushed his tray table over his lap and set a small Dixie cup down. "Good morning, sweetheart," Ellen said, her deep, blue eyes drowning in concern, a message of doubt etched in every crease of color in her irises, every line of age on her face. Derek doesn't ask for water. He gets it himself. "How are you feeling?"
Tired. "How long have you been here?" he said.
Ellen shrugged. "I came in at 5 with Mark," she said. "But I didn't sit down until 6:30. Why?"
He sighed in reply. The tray table hung over his lap, just waiting for him to sit up, sit up and take the water, but the cup seemed like it was a marathon away. He swallowed and closed his eyes.
Ellen's weathered fingertips brushed his cheek, and the bug under a microscope feeling amplified. He'd been poked and prodded and monitored and stared at for three days, and even his family was starting to grate. He wanted to hide in a closet, curl up under a big, fluffy blanket that would disguise the fact that he was even there, and go away. A brief stab of guilt slipped between his ribs, because at the same time, he almost expected someone to be with him whenever he woke up, which was... comforting. Comforting against the nerves. The nerves over the fact that he was still essentially helpless. He could walk. He could move. But not far, and not fast. He almost preferred his hospital stay the week before, when he'd been concussed. He'd been too confused, slow, and overwhelmed to really care about anything except the hole a year of his life had drowned in.
"Sweetheart, do you want the bed up?" Ellen asked when he didn't move to drink the water she'd provided.
No. "Okay," he said.
The bed hummed, and his body folded at the waist with no effort on his part. He opened his eyes. His mother had pulled up a chair on his other side, and he was surrounded. The water came within reach. He moved his hand to take the cup, but his whole arm felt like a dead weight. Tired. Fatigue. Too much, yesterday. Just too much. He drank the contents of the cup slowly. The cool water slipped down his throat like a stream through a land cracked with drought. It touched him, deep and soothing and soft.
He put the empty cup back and stared blankly at the floor.
"Do you want to get up?" Meredith asked.
"No," he said.
A knock sounded on his open doorway, and an orderly, the one from before, Nick, brought in a tray of food. "Good morning, Dr. Shepherd," he said brightly. "Breakfast."
"Okay," said Derek as his mother took his cup away to make room for the tray of food. A steaming plate of rubbery eggs swimming in yellowish fluid, some glistening wafers of sausage, and a little travel-sized box of cheerios complete with a small carton of milk comprised the latest meal offering. The silverware sat against the napkin, dull and lusterless. He leaned back and closed his eyes on the blur of Nick's departing frame. The smell of it made his stomach turn, but the sight of it was worse. He sighed. Hospital food was...
"Derek, sweetheart, you should eat," his mother offered into the silence.
He opted not to answer, trying to let himself drift back. Back to somewhere. Sleeping. He heard his mother shuffling in her seat, probably debating whether to prod him or not. Her eyes were on him, boring into him. He could feel it. He hated that. He hated that he'd managed to bring all the bad memories back.
He knew he looked a lot like his father, from the pictures more than the memory. He had a picture that his mother had given him when he'd first moved out of the house. He wasn't a picture in a frame person. He didn't display his life behind panes of fingerprinted glass and tarnished silver for everyone to see. But he liked to look and remember. He kept the photographs he had in his bedside drawer in an envelope. Once in a while, he would pull them out and stare. And he did look like his father. He looked like his mother, too. But he favored his father. The cleft of his chin. The shape of his forehead. The dark hint of stubble that never seemed to disappear, no matter when he'd shaved. His ears. The way his hair had a tendency to frizz up the longer it grew. The lines around his mouth. And the eyes. Particularly the eyes. Elongated half-moons ending in subtle crow's feet.
Derek reminded his mother of David Shepherd.
Every time Derek looked at her since she'd arrived in Seattle, he'd seen the memories etched all across her face in deep, careworn lines of concern. The way her eyes squinted. The way she would, when she wasn't knitting, wring her hands together in a nervous flutter of worry. He wondered if she'd been knitting so much while she'd been there because it gave her hands something to do, and not so much because it was a hobby that traveled well.
He'd been at home when his mother had gotten the call from the hospital. It had been a summer day. August. Two weeks before school had been scheduled to start again. The air had been so hot that, over pavement and off the hoods of cars, it had wavered and made the world beyond the hotspots shimmer. He and Mark had just come home from T-ball practice at the park. His father had been supposed to pick them up, and they'd waited for over an hour before opting to just walk. They had been used to plans getting interrupted at times because his father had worked in the emergency room and often got held up.
His mother had received the phone call. Her face had bleached itself of color. She'd fumbled for a chair, but as soon as she'd hung up the receiver, and Derek had asked what was wrong, she'd jerked as if she'd been startled, her eyes had widened as she'd stared at Derek, and then she'd bolted. She'd locked the bedroom door behind her. Mark had stayed in the kitchen while Derek had chased after her. He'd heard the soft sound of her sobs, muffled through the door. An hour later, she'd come out, composed, called all of his sisters home, and they'd had a small meeting at the dining room table. She'd explained what had happened. And then they'd gone to the hospital. The morgue.
Another knock drew Derek's eyes open again. Dr. Weller smiled from the doorway. "Morning, Dr. Shepherd," he said, flashing a toothy grin as he moved into the room. He glanced at the untouched food tray. "Sorry to interrupt your breakfast. I'm running a little late today," he added as he closed the distance between him and the bed. He stopped at the foot and stared down. He did a quick neurological check, asking a peppering of questions, "Can you move you arms for me? Excellent. Okay, how about your feet? Good. Follow the light?"
"Looking great still, Dr. Shepherd," he said as he moved to the side of the bed and brought out his stethoscope. Ellen backed her chair away to give Dr. Weller room. "Can you lift up your shirt?" he asked, leaning over. Derek swallowed and fumbled with the hemline of his t-shirt. He got it midway up his stomach when Dr. Weller smiled, said that was fine, and slipped his hand up under the fabric. "This will be a little cold. I'm sorry," he said as he listened. It was. Derek breathed when told. Held his breath when told. "Wonderful, Dr. Shepherd," Dr. Weller said.
Temperature taking was the first act of the examination that brought a frown to Dr. Weller's face and a low, rumbling, "Hmm," to his lips instead of commentary on how super everything seemed to be going. "How are you feeling?" Dr. Weller asked as he read the gauge on the thermometer.
"Just tired," Derek said.
"He's not eating his breakfast," Ellen added.
Dr. Weller glanced at Ellen before returning his gaze to Derek. "Any trouble urinating?" said Dr. Weller.
"No," Derek said as a spike of worry hit him. Thermometer. Something was wrong with his temperature. He didn't feel hot. He didn't feel cold. Dr. Weller was checking for signs of urinary tract infection. Hot, then. Dr. Weller thought he had a fever.
"Any nausea?"
"No, except when I looked at those eggs."
Dr. Weller turned to look at the plate of cooling breakfast and chuckled. "Well, I don't think I can blame you there, Dr. Shepherd." Dr. Weller moved around to the intravenous line site and peeled the tape back, examining the skin slowly. He pressed gently on the skin around the catheter. "Any tenderness here?"
"No."
"All right, I'm going to check this incision, now," Dr. Weller said as he moved around the bed again. The tape and bandages tore, and Derek felt cool air laving his scalp.
His eyes darted to Meredith, but she wasn't staring at his scalp or the gnarled, ugly scar. She caught his gaze, her eyes twinkling. Everything's okay, her expression seemed to be saying. Everything's okay, and I love you. He closed his eyes and sighed, even as the sneaking, growing, writhing worry started to expand and grow and mutate into something awful. Infection. Now, Dr. Weller was checking for infection. Pressure snaked along his skin behind his ear.
"Does this hurt?" Dr. Weller asked.
"No."
"Have you been up and walking?" Dr. Weller asked.
Deep vein thrombosis. Pneumonia.
"He didn't want to walk when he woke up this morning," Ellen said.
"We walked for a couple hours yesterday, Dr. Weller," Meredith countered.
"I got up about two hours ago," Derek said.
"Really?" Meredith said, her tone betraying her surprise. But then she smiled. "I must have slept through it. That's great."
"You kind of snore a little. It's hard to hear me move over all that racket," Derek said, grinning back at her, but the grin dripped away like water. He couldn't hold it on his face.
"Okay," Dr. Weller said. "Well, you seem to have spiked a slight fever, but I don't see any cause for immediate concern. We'll see if it persists before we worry. I'll check back soon."
"A fever?" Ellen said. "Isn't that bad?"
"Not yet, Mom," Derek replied, trying to ignore the sinking feeling in his stomach. Did he feel sick? He tried to self-gauge and only came back with exhaustion. Exhaustion. Exhaustion. He wanted to sleep. But he didn't feel hot. He didn't feel shaky or ill or have any problems breathing. He'd know if he was going septic. Or if he was coming down with pneumonia. And he'd certainly know if he had a urinary tract infection. He knew too much about the symptoms to ignore them, particularly after a major surgery. But. Fever. He didn't want to stay there longer. He didn't. He didn't. He couldn't. And if he had a complication, they would make him stay. They would make him stay.
"Oh, no, Mrs. Shepherd," said Dr. Weller, but his voice seemed like a distant rumble. "It might be nothing. Nothing looks infected, and he's been relatively active. Like I said, I'll check back soon, and we'll work from there. I'll send in a nurse to redo the bandages, take some blood, and put in a new intravenous line. Just in case. Sometimes, if the IV line is infected, which it doesn't look like, but we can't be too safe, just moving the catheter to another vein is enough to clear it up."
He started to shiver as Dr. Weller left. He leaned forward and drew his hands up to rub his face, only to tear his hands away from himself when his fingertips met his scalp instead of his hair. The skin was rough with the barest hint of stubble. But it was still skin, and that still shocked him. He drew out the motion of his startled withdrawal, making it look purposeful as he took his own look at the intravenous line site. The skin around the catheter wasn't red or streaky or hurting. Not infection. He swallowed. No. Infection, no. If he got an infection, he could go septic, his organs would start to fail, he'd be jammed full of antibiotics, probably put on a ventilator, and he'd be bed-ridden even longer. And he could die.
He let out a wry, soft laugh. Good to see he had his priorities straight. Dying after being put on a ventilator. And all of the sudden, he became aware of his mother's eyes boring into him. Again. She was looking at his scalp. She was looking at Derek and seeing a brain surgery patient. Seeing a man who'd died thirty years ago. David. Dead. Not Derek. Not Derek at all.
"Mom, I'm fine," he said, though his words came out raspy and weak. Really convincing. Sure. "Really, I'm... I'm fine."
She scooted the chair in closer "Are you sure you don't want to eat?"
"I'm tired, Mom," he said. He leaned back against the pillows and let his eyelids droop shut.
"A few bites?" she said. "For me, please?" He heard the clink of silverware and he opened his eyes a slit. She was picking up his fork. For him. She was... She was moving toward his hand with it, not toward his food, but all he saw was that she'd picked up his fork. For him. Like he was a fucking invalid.
"Mom, I can lift the fucking fork on my own," he snapped, grabbing it from her. Meredith stared at them both, biting her lip, her eyes wandering back and forth and back and forth.
His mother blinked. "Derek Shepherd," she hissed in a familiar, scolding tone. Derek Shepherd, what have you done, now? Derek Shepherd, is there a bird in that shoebox? Ellen's lower lip-quivered. But it got hit by a car, Mom. A small moan wavered through the space between them. And then she sighed. "I was only going to give it to you. I wasn't..." Her voice trailed away. She stared at him for a long, painful moment, and then she got up from her chair and sat back on the loveseat. She pulled her knitting project out from her red-striped tote bag and began to work at it, but not before he saw her hands shaking.
"I'm sorry," he said as he put the fork back on the tray table with trembling hands. "I'm... Tired. I'm just..."
A soft, warm touch on his left forearm pulled him out of a drift. "Derek, do you want to take another shower?" Meredith asked softly. "You might feel better."
He blinked, swallowing against the lump forming in his throat. He felt dirty, pasty, soiled. He hadn't showered since the first one. He'd changed his clothes, which had helped. But he hadn't taken a shower. He had felt better after the last one. He closed his eyes and imagined the thunder of the water, the pelting feeling as it beat against his tired muscles, the crease of his skin as she applied pressure with the washcloth and soaped him down. He could stand on his own. He could walk. Well, theoretically. He stared at the floor with a spark of hope overriding the overwhelming fatigue in his limbs. Maybe... Maybe he could actually do it by himself while she waited. Not that he would exactly mind her support. But he... Maybe he could do it by himself.
Another knock at his door pulled his gaze up. "Morning, Der," Sarah said cheerfully as she came into the room. She wore a tight white t-shirt under floppy, frayed, oversized denim overalls. Her black hair was pulled back into a twist that spilled out the top of a turtle-shell brown hair-clip. Her fingers clasped a Starbucks brand paper mug, and she'd slung her large, black leather purse over her other shoulder. She looked like a painter. Stewart followed just behind her, looking more like the walking dead than a person, his tall, pasty, lumbering frame slouched in full, exhausted effect. Lindsey and Annie tore into the room, bumping past both of them.
"Uncle Derek!" Annie exclaimed cheerfully as she skipped into the room, but the sound of her voice was almost painful against the tiredness he felt.
"Guys, quiet, remember?" Stewart said, his voice low and thick with sleep. "It's the crack of dawn for some people."
"It's 8:30AM, Stewart," commented Sarah.
"Like I said, the crack of dawn!"
"Uncle Derek," Annie said as she bounced to a stop beside the bed railing. She was just tall enough that she could rest her chin on top of the rail. Her black hair hung loose and curly down to her shoulders. She grinned, flashing two tiny rows of crooked baby teeth. "Uncle Derek, wanna color again?"
"Maybe later?" he said. He didn't think he could do it then, couldn't even bring himself to pretend with a fake smile. He just...
"Okay," said Annie excitedly, and he couldn't help but marvel at her energy even though it made him feel frail. "Mommy and Daddy bought me new crayons yesterday! We saw seals at the ac... aquari..." She frowned and looked at him expectantly.
"Aquarium," he said.
She nodded. "Aquarium!"
Lindsey came around behind Annie. "We get to see the Space Needle today, Uncle Derek! Have you been there?"
"Yes," he said.
"Is it really tall?" Lindsey asked.
"Yes," he replied.
"How come your hair is gone?" Annie said, her eyes wide and ponderous.
Lindsey poked her. "Hey!" Annie squealed. "Mommy, Lindsey's being mean."
Lindsey hissed, "Mommy explained already."
"But it's different than before," Annie countered.
"Girls," Stewart scolded, reaching out with large hands to pull the two of them away from the bed. The shuffled backward and stopped with a thump when they ran into his legs. "I'm really sorry, Derek," he said.
Derek swallowed. "It's all right." He closed his eyes, and within moments the sounds and the room around him blurred and he felt like he was floating somewhere in a roar. Maybe he didn't need to be stoned to sleep. He just needed to be tired enough. There were so many people in the room. Talking. He couldn't... He wasn't quite sleeping. Just hovering. He felt stares on him, and the volume died down immediately. Mind the sleeping, sick man in the bed, he thought idly, but he couldn't bring himself to tell them he was still awake and it was fine to make noise, because sleeping was hopeless anyway. He couldn't bring himself to move.
"He's acting really listless," Ellen whispered, grating, awful concern leaking from the cracks in her attempt at a flat, sure tone.
"It's just fatigue, Ellen," Meredith said. "It's normal. He's doing really, really well."
An awkward silence filled the room. At least Meredith wasn't freaking out anymore. He'd done something right then. The effort yesterday to move around had been worth it. Definitely. The fact that she'd been sleeping when he'd woken up in the morning, the fact that she didn't seem at all concerned by his fever... At least there was that.
"We just stopped in to say hello before we headed out," Sarah whispered. "Mom, do you want to come with us?"
"No, I'm staying here," she replied.
"It's okay, Mom," Derek mumbled, not opening his eyes. "You can go. I'm fine."
"I don't want to see the Space Needle," she snapped. "I want to sit with my son." The sound of her hands twisting the yarn grew agitated.
"Okay, Mom. Okay," Sarah said quickly, politically avoiding a fight like she always did. "We'll probably stop back in around dinnertime, okay? Maybe we can bring in some carryout or something and have a family dinner." The implication was clear. Maybe we can bring in some carryout because Derek can't go out. Derek can't leave. Derek's stuck. "Mom, will you at least come out to the car with us? You left some of your stuff on the floor in the backseat yesterday, and we figured you might want it."
A protracted silence fell down around them. The clink, clink, clink of Ellen's knitting stopped. She sighed, long, frustrated, shivery. Movement shuffled through the room, followed by a warm hand against his cheek. He couldn't stop himself from flinching away, and she drew her hand back like she'd been burned.
"I'll be right back, sweetheart," she whispered.
"I'm not dying," he snapped. He immediately regretted it. He slit his eyes open and saw her retreating through the door. Sarah swarmed her like a comforting mother hen, and the entire crew exited, leaving him alone with Meredith.
He sighed. "I shouldn't have said that." Why was he being so nasty? He drew his fingers up to his nose and rubbed them up and down along the sides, pinching.
"She's your mother, Derek," Meredith said. "I'm sure, after nearly forty years, she knows you tend to do the spitting, hissing, rabid animal thing when you're exhausted, and that you don't really mean it."
"That doesn't excuse it. She's just... She's thinking about Dad, and she's projecting it onto me, and I know it, but I can't... I should be able to humor her."
The morgue had been cold, austere, silent. The metal walls between the freezer spaces had glowed a sort of green, reflecting the immaculate, lime-colored tiles on the floor. The grout between the tiles, which had probably once been sparkling, immaculate white, had dulled to a dingy, stained gray. The main office had been a tiny, dark room filled with books and papers and musty journals. The pathologist had greeted them at the doorway with a somber look, and his mother had had to sign a bunch of forms. They'd waited. Quiet. Wide-eyed. Still too shell-shocked to understand what was going on in a deep, to-the-marrow way.
What's wrong, Mom?
David. Dad... He died this afternoon.
Ellen Shepherd had prepared them before they had left the house, but it had been like studying for a test. What does death mean? Death means Dad isn't coming home. Like a vacation? No, not like a vacation. He's never coming home.
Natalie and Sarah had been too young to understand, and he'd watched his mother stumble with a quivering voice over words she normally would have said with surety and grace. Words like heaven, gone, heart, love. Died. She'd left Natalie and Sarah with the neighbors, but she'd brought Kathy, Nancy, and Derek to the hospital.
Come say goodbye with me.
The pathologist had led them into the chilly, refrigerated section of the morgue, and there his father had lain, still and silent under a sheet. Sleeping. But not. Pale. Still. His mother had started to sob. She'd kept herself together through everything, but in the moment her gaze had landed on the body, she'd cracked like fine china lobbed against a wall. Her breaking hadn't been screaming or hysterics, though. Just quiet, shuddering, ugly sobs. And Derek remembered. Remembered exactly what she'd said as she'd picked up his father's hand and rubbed the cold, pale knuckles against her cheek.
What am I going to do?
He blinked back to the present as Meredith inched his tray table to the side and climbed into bed beside him, resting against his chest. "Hey," she whispered as she rubbed his chest. "Two more days, Derek. You're over half way." She kissed him softly on the lips. "And you're not getting sick," she added as she pulled away. "You're not going to have to stay."
"I have a fever," he said.
She nodded. "Yes. Do you even feel warm?" she added before putting the back of her palm against his forehead. "You don't feel hot to me. I'm sure it's nothing."
"No. A little. But." That might be because he was thinking about it. Somebody tells you you're hungry, you notice, wow, you're hungry. Somebody asks you if it's hot, and suddenly you're hyperaware that you're uncomfortable. Maybe it was like that. He leaned back against the pillow and sighed.
She gestured toward his chart, eyebrows raised. "If you want," he said. She crawled to the foot of the bed and lifted the chart out of its slot, staring at it as she settled back against him. He tried staring at it with her, but reading printed text was hard enough. Reading doctor handwriting was a bit beyond him.
She flipped past the first page, scanning. "Wow," she said, smiling. "He even writes all those excellents and wonderfuls in his notes."
"Yeah," Derek said. "I have to sign off on all those, you know. I'm thinking for Christmas this year, maybe a thesaurus for him."
She snorted as she put the chart back. "Two more days, Derek," she assured him. "There's nothing wrong with you or Dr. Weller would have put you on antibiotics immediately. And he wouldn't have written excellent fifty times."
He smiled. "You sure pulled a one-eighty."
She kissed him again. "My hot fiancé is very, very convincing," she said against his lips. "And by hot, I mean sexy. Not feverish. And by very, very convincing, I mean I'm sure he's fine. Tired, but fine."
Not dying.
"My fiancé is hotter," he said with a smirk, only to get cut off by an unexpected rumble.
Meredith laughed. "Now, who's got the growly stomach?" She pulled the tray table over their laps. The milk, cheerios, now cold, soupy eggs, and still-glistening sausage patties waited.
"Fine," he said. "Fine, I guess I can eat cheerios." He picked up the spoon and started fumbling with the little travel box. "I'm not touching the eggs or the sausage, though. Why do they even serve that in hospitals? That's like asking for relapses."
"Derek, I hate to break it to you," she said as he poured the cheerios into the little bowl. "But most people in hospitals are not health freaks. And one meal of sausage and eggs isn't going to kill anyone. The protein is actually healthy in small doses."
"It might kill me," he said. He picked up his fork with his free hand and poked at the scrambled, yellow mess on his plate. The eggs made a liquid-squishy sound as he pushed them around. "Look at it. It's... It's..."
"Hospital food?" Meredith said, her eyes sparkling.
"Well, yeah."
"They tend to serve that in hospitals, Derek."
"They do," he replied. The salad he'd eaten on Wednesday night had been all right. It'd been his first venture back into the land of solids. The food on Thursday had been tolerable. This was... "Care to smuggle in something edible for me?"
She grinned. "Maybe."
"Maybe?" he said, eyebrows raised as he worked at the milk carton. He poured the milk into his bowl over the cheerios. "As in, maybe, I won't feed my starving, hot fiancé?"
She nodded. "Maybe."
"This is all your fault, you know," he said as he spooned his first bite.
"What?"
He swallowed and spooned another, almost regretful that the box was so small. He would be done in a few more bites. "I'm going to have cheerio breath all day," he said. "You think pastrami breath is bad?"
"That implies I'm going to be kissing you enough to care," she replied. She wore an adorable, nonchalant-but-pouty expression on her face.
"Aren't you?" he asked. He shoveled another heaping spoonful into his mouth and chewed.
"I guess I can make a sacrifice for my hot fiancé."
After another two bites, he put his spoon down into the empty bowl. A thin film of milk still covered the bottom, and a stray cheerio or two flecked the surface of the milk. He grinned at her. "Sacrificing by finding me food, or by kissing me? Because if I can pick between getting kissed and getting food, I think I'd pick getting kissed."
She leaned into him and caught his lips with hers. Her fingers brushed his scalp, just the way she'd always done before the surgery. It felt different to not feel the pull of his hair against his skin, the tickle of her nails as they sorted out the curly strands into something resembling straight and ordered. Her palm rubbed his ear, down his neck, and settled for clutching at his shoulder. She smelled like lavender. She always did, but this time, it served him like a rejuvenating fuel. The kiss wasn't like before. Before he'd been doused in pain medication and anti-epileptics and other things. Where one kiss with her was enough to set him off a diving board into a lake of desperation. But he did feel it. Everywhere. Slowly. Building. It was something that could be nursed and prodded into the fervor he used to have. Not like before. But possible.
He sighed when she finally pulled away. "Cheerios are definitely not as bad as pastrami," she commented, breathless, and he couldn't help but laugh.
He felt tired, but was able to add relaxed and warm to the list. Warm from kissing. Not warm from fever. Warm. And that was...
He tilted his head into her neck and breathed. The room started to fuzz, and he closed his eyes, blinking away the colors and the light and everything except the fact that he was tired, warm, and relaxed. She moved. A little. He heard the rustle of paper, followed by the dry crackle of a book spine being violated. Another jerk, and a hollow click and the pop-release of air followed as she uncapped her highlighter. His awareness slipped back, and the room around him became a distant, blurry thing loitering in the space behind his eyes.
"He's helping you study?" said a familiar voice, and the room snapped back into place. He blinked, trying to force himself back awake. Wake up, wake up, wake up. It was the first time one of Meredith's friends had seen him, at least while he was awake and aware of it. Someone had been running pretty good interference so far. Meredith maybe. Though he suspected someone else had been involved. Someone with a bit more pull. He swallowed, managing to grunt a little as he lifted his head back up.
Cristina stood in the doorway, her arms folded over her chest, her ankles crossed. She wore her light blue scrubs, a white undershirt, and gray cross trainers. And she looked like she didn't care one iota that Derek was lying there. Her expression was the same flat one she always seemed to wear. The one that said someone with teeth was lurking just underneath, ready to snap.
She closed the distance to the bed and plopped herself down by Derek's and Meredith's feet after shoving the tray table out of the way. The mattress gave, and she pulled her feet up and folded them under herself, Indian-style. "So, what are we studying?"
"Hey, I'm sleeping, here," Derek protested as he shifted his feet. The bed was very small.
"No, you're not," Cristina said. She leaned forward and glanced at the title of the volume Meredith was reading. "Oh, I already read that one."
Meredith looked up from her notes with a sigh as she put her highlighter in the spine. For a brief moment, she seemed relaxed and happy that Cristina was there, and he was surprised to find himself glad for that despite a low undercurrent of discomfort. Cristina had traipsed in like it was any other day. Like this was an on-call room, not a patient room. Not that he would have expected pity from Cristina. But it was refreshing to find his expectations met. She wasn't even treating him like her boss, which she never did anyway. He'd always been the bastard that'd broken Meredith. Ever since Addison had come back into the picture. It was all so blessedly normal he couldn't really bring himself to protest.
Except Meredith seemed to think it worth protesting. A tiny shiver of what he could only assume was realization racked her frame, and her eyes flared wide for a passing moment, so quickly he would have missed it if it weren't for the fact that he was looking at her already. Her gaze ticked to Cristina and back to him in a rapid expression of, "Crap!"
"Don't you have your own attending to take advantage of?" Meredith snapped, and surprisingly, that made him feel even better. Because it meant even Meredith had forgotten for a moment. And that was perfect. Just...
Perfect.
"So," Derek murmured with a low chuckle as he kissed her neck, trying to let her know everything was okay. "You do admit to taking advantage?"
"Shut up," she said, laughing. "We made up our mind that that was a tie."
"You made it up," he replied.
Cristina rolled her eyes. "Whatever," she said. "Burke and I aren't exactly on speaking terms at the moment."
"Again?" Meredith said. "Did you..."
"He's having delusions about us getting married next week," Cristina said with a shrug.
"You're not?" Derek said.
"Only if he decides to do the small one I said I wanted."
"That's really great, Cristina," Meredith said. "I mean that you stood your ground. Not that... You know... Not the delusions."
The skin around Cristina's eyes ticked, and she loosed a little, frustrated sigh. "Yeah, well."
"I'm back," said his mother as she entered the room with her tote bag, which looked considerably fuller than it had been before she'd left. She glanced at Cristina with a curious expression, and when Meredith didn't make an immediate move to introduce her to the new occupant of the room, the new occupant residing on Derek's bed, Ellen added a slightly less confident, "Hello?"
"Oh, sorry," Meredith said. "Ellen, this is my best friend, Cristina Yang. Cristina, this is Ellen Shepherd, Derek's mother."
Ellen smiled brightly. "Hello, dear. It's very nice to meet one of Meredith's friends."
"Hi," said Cristina.
"I tried to tell her I was sleeping," Derek grumbled, but he didn't mean it. Not really. It occurred to him that the friend he really wasn't looking forward to seeing was Izzie.
"And I told you, you're not sleeping. You're talking," Cristina said. She considered him for a moment. "And occasionally making McDreamy eyes at Meredith made only slightly extra dreamy and less mc by the fact that you're drugged. Please, tell me your morphine experience wasn't like Meredith's."
He turned to his mother. "She's sort of always like this."
"No," Cristina commented, "I'm usually worse. So, when are you studying neuro? I want in on that." Her beeper went off. She pulled the little black pager off her belt clip and stared at it with a perplexed expression. "Crap, I have to take this," she said as she hopped off the bed.
And then she was gone.
"Lovely girl," Ellen replied flatly, though her eyes sparkled as though she were in on a joke that nobody else was. She settled down onto the couch, and Derek leaned back against the pillows. He started to drift again.
A light knock at the door pulled him back, and he moaned softly as Abasi walked in. Irritating was making a slow crawl toward understatement as a description for all the interruptions. He rubbed his eyes, trying to wake up and greet the newest reason he wasn't sleeping. A new bandage for his scalp, a new intravenous line, and a blood draw. The worst part of it was that Meredith got up and sat down in the chair beside the bed, leaving him bereft of the feel of her against his side. He sighed as Abasi moved about, letting himself drift a little, just under the surface, awake enough to respond to questions, but trying to recoup some energy. He really just wanted to sleep.
"What's that?" his mother said, which snapped him awake.
"This is mostly just saline at this point, Mrs. Shepherd," Abasi said as he set up a new IV bag. "It keeps him hydrated. We're giving him some medication to reduce the chance of swelling as well."
"What about the fever?" Ellen said.
"No fever, now," Abasi said. "It could have been a bad read. It happens."
"A bad read?"
"Mom, I'm fine. Really," Derek said, sighing as Abasi picked up after himself, wrappers and remnants of things crinkling, and left. The news about the fever was such a heavy relief it'd taken him a moment to realize his mother, who had seemed much better when she'd walked back into his room, was descending rapidly back into the place she'd been before. The bad David is Derek is David place.
"Sarah told me a fever could mean you've got pneumonia."
"Mom, do I look like I have pneumonia?"
"What about sepsis?"
"Where did you hear about-" he began, only to cut his words short. There was no point in knowing. Ellen had gotten her hands on some literature, or she'd pumped Sarah for information. Sarah usually wilted under pressure, and Ellen was a master interrogator. She'd needed the skill with four sisters at war with a son and his best friend. Blame for broken vases and birds in shoeboxes and messes on the floor left un-swept had blasted across sides like a ball in a tennis match. He did it! No, she did! No, he did! "Never mind. That's what the blood work they're doing is for, Mom. But I doubt it."
"Why?"
"Because I'm tired, Mom," he snapped. And then he breathed, forcing himself to relax. He added in a more moderated tone, "I'm tired, but I'm not sick. I feel fine."
"You're not eating," she countered.
He gestured to the tray table. "I ate."
"One miniature bowl of cereal is not eating," she said. "You always eat breakfast."
Silence stretched into a moment that became one, two, three, four seconds. Five. He twisted the thermal blanket in his hands until they hurt. The new intravenous line ached as he clenched his fists and ground his teeth. Would you eat that? He'd almost said it. Almost. But then he'd looked at her. She blinked, pinching fat, ugly tears out. She wiped them away, and she composed herself again, but it'd been enough. Enough to make him feel weak again. And guilty for putting everyone through this. And homesick.
Did he suffer?
No, Ellen. It was very quick. We found him in the supply closet. We tried to revive him, but were unsuccessful.
Derek knew enough now to know that, however brief, his father had definitely suffered. A bursting aneurysm was almost always described as the worst headache ever, coupled with nausea, vomiting, double vision, stiff neck, and other problems. His mother probably knew it was a lie as well. She'd had plenty of opportunity to glance at medical textbooks over the course of her life, what with three daughters, one son, and one... Mark. All graduating medical school.
How could this happen? He was only thirty-eight.
Sometimes it just does. There is no rhyme or reason.
He wanted nothing more than to get up and give her a tour of Seattle. To get up and be himself. To be the person he'd become.
What am I going to do?
I'm not dying, he wanted to say. I'm not. I'm fine.
He just wanted to go home and curl up. He hadn't been mothered like this since before he'd left for college, and it was painful to suddenly be in a position where his mother thought he needed it. Not even when he'd had his crash had she been this bad. Addison and Mark and all his sisters had been there all the time, and it hadn't been like this. After the doctors had finally gotten him stabilized, there hadn't been a lot to be frightened about, and his mother hadn't even managed to go to the hospital until he'd been awake, alert, and breathing on his own again. His concussion had been minor. He'd been bell-rung for a few hours, disoriented, but that had been it.
The ache of exhaustion he'd been holding at bay slowly pulsed back to life. He stared dully at the floor. The tiles spaced and multiplied as his eyes lost focus and two images bloomed from one.
Meredith stood, and the sound of her chair wobbling back into the wall on its wheels echoed after her sentence. He looked at her. She wore a determined, preparing for battle face. She brushed a loose bang away from her eyes and crossed her arms over her chest.
"Ellen, have you been to Stitches?" Meredith said.
His mother blinked and sniffed. "No."
"It's a Seattle fabric store that's supposed to be pretty good," Meredith explained as she rounded the bed and went over to the couch. "I read about it in the paper back when I was doing my knitting to stave off tequila thing. Never actually went to the store, though. You want to go?"
"But I..."
Meredith turned to him, mouthing, I love you, before adding audibly, "Derek, I'm going to take Ellen out for a few hours."
"Meredith, dear, I really don't need to-"
"You're in Seattle," Meredith said, cutting his mother off as she turned back. "I've been meaning to pick the knitting thing back up for a while, and seeing as how we're going to be stuck in here for a few days yet and studying can only carry me so far before I go insane, it seems like the perfect time. You can show me what to get. Izzie tried to teach me earlier this year, but I think I kind of sucked. She used to redo my rows at night. She thinks I didn't know. But it's all about the effort, right? And she had an ug-- Er... Nice sweater by the end, which was great. But she's not nearly as good as you are. I love the scarf you've been knitting. It's a lot less tangley than mine ever were. How do you do it?"
His mother looked lost. Derek almost couldn't help the smile threatening to overtake him as Ellen tried to piece together what Meredith had said.
"She babbles," he offered. "Isn't it cute?"
Meredith's lip twitched, but she schooled herself. "Please, Ellen?" Meredith insisted. "Studying is driving me crazy. I need something else to do."
"She's scary when she's crazy," he said. "Trust me. You want to take her."
Meredith's lip twitched again, but she somehow managed not to smile. "Yes. It's like what happens when you withdraw sleep from Mr. Flirty-But-Grouchy."
"Touché," he said.
That time she grinned.
For a moment, Ellen's gaze darted back and forth between them. Meredith. Derek. Meredith. Derek. "All right," Ellen said with a surrendering sigh.
"Great!" Meredith said. She grabbed her purse from the floor by his bed. Her keys jingled. She shifted from foot to foot, looking adorable in her ratty knit pants and shirt, and he couldn't help but smile as she frowned, and the tip of her tongue appeared as she considered the contents of her purse with the seriousness of a surgeon with an open body cavity. She stuck her hand deep into the depths, rifled around, and, finally satisfied, she turned and guided his mother out the door before Ellen had a chance to change her mind.
Meredith lingered in the doorframe, peering back at him as her lithe fingers clutched at the molding. "You want anything?" she asked simply.
"No," he replied. "Thank you."
She shrugged and smiled. "I owe you a shower later. Get some sleep."
"Yes, ma'am," he replied, winking.
The door shut softly behind her. Sleep. He hoped he could do that.
Author: AriaAdagio
Rating: M
Pairing: Mer/Der
Summary: Post Time After Time. Derek takes Meredith to visit his family in Connecticut, but nothing goes as planned.
~~~~~
A roaring sound wrapped in a curl of shouting voices woke Derek up. He blinked once, twice, three times as a swarm of nurses and doctors pushed the crash cart past his door, but the blur was slow to resolve, and the ceiling remained an unfocused, white blur. This wasn't the first time, or the second, or the third, and he was slowly discovering that there were benefits to being drugged out of one's mind. It made light sleepers into heavy ones, for instance. He swallowed, trying to dispel the dry, cottony feeling in his mouth, but it wouldn't go away.
He tilted his head, staring at the floor for a long set of moments. Tired. Too tired. This wasn't the first time he'd been woken up, or the second, or the third, but it was the first time he'd been woken up and accompanied by the absolute lack of desire to physically get up. The constant noises and interruptions had worn him down, worn him down to the point of giving up on moving around at all. Walking all over the hospital with Meredith the day before had robbed him of everything. He hadn't had much left to wear down.
He raised his watch. 8:00AM. It had only been two hours since Abasi had forced him to sit up and take pill after pill. He'd gotten up then. That had been the last straw, apparently. Meredith had been out cold on the sofa, snoring softly over a book on organ transplant procedures. He'd used the bathroom and gone for a quick stroll up the hall and back. Except it hadn't been quick. By the time he'd gotten back to the bed, he'd been too exhausted to do anything other than surrender back into sleeping despite the racket Meredith had been creating. She'd remained asleep for the duration, despite the loud flush of the toilet and the steady rumble of the IV pole as he'd dragged it across the floor. He'd marveled at her ability to sleep through anything. Marveled. And he'd envied it.
He let his eyes fall shut and tried to let sleep take him away again. Meredith sat to his left in a chair, highlighter squeaking over the pages of some medical volume. Her soft breathing rasped in the space next to his heart monitor. The almost-inaudible bleeps seemed thunderous, and her breathing was a pelting wind more than a soft, balmy breeze. His mother sat in the red loveseat on the other side of the room. She wasn't knitting. But even she was making noise. Moving subtly. From the sound of it, she had a newspaper. The pages shivered and crinkled. Some nurses stood down the hall, gossiping about something, if their scratchy, laughing tone was any indication. He couldn't make out the words.
He gave up on sleeping then, too. For a moment, he debated forcing himself onto his feet, but the debate lasted all of five seconds. No. No more. His body was done for a while. "Mere," he whispered, "Could you get me some water, please?"
Meredith opened her mouth to reply, but the words that followed came from across the room. "I'll get it," Ellen said. The sofa squeaked.
Meredith put her book down and leaned over the railing. "Hey," she said, smiling. She kissed him, gentle, like a wave, before reaching down to grasp his hand and stroke her lithe fingers against his knuckles.
His mother pushed his tray table over his lap and set a small Dixie cup down. "Good morning, sweetheart," Ellen said, her deep, blue eyes drowning in concern, a message of doubt etched in every crease of color in her irises, every line of age on her face. Derek doesn't ask for water. He gets it himself. "How are you feeling?"
Tired. "How long have you been here?" he said.
Ellen shrugged. "I came in at 5 with Mark," she said. "But I didn't sit down until 6:30. Why?"
He sighed in reply. The tray table hung over his lap, just waiting for him to sit up, sit up and take the water, but the cup seemed like it was a marathon away. He swallowed and closed his eyes.
Ellen's weathered fingertips brushed his cheek, and the bug under a microscope feeling amplified. He'd been poked and prodded and monitored and stared at for three days, and even his family was starting to grate. He wanted to hide in a closet, curl up under a big, fluffy blanket that would disguise the fact that he was even there, and go away. A brief stab of guilt slipped between his ribs, because at the same time, he almost expected someone to be with him whenever he woke up, which was... comforting. Comforting against the nerves. The nerves over the fact that he was still essentially helpless. He could walk. He could move. But not far, and not fast. He almost preferred his hospital stay the week before, when he'd been concussed. He'd been too confused, slow, and overwhelmed to really care about anything except the hole a year of his life had drowned in.
"Sweetheart, do you want the bed up?" Ellen asked when he didn't move to drink the water she'd provided.
No. "Okay," he said.
The bed hummed, and his body folded at the waist with no effort on his part. He opened his eyes. His mother had pulled up a chair on his other side, and he was surrounded. The water came within reach. He moved his hand to take the cup, but his whole arm felt like a dead weight. Tired. Fatigue. Too much, yesterday. Just too much. He drank the contents of the cup slowly. The cool water slipped down his throat like a stream through a land cracked with drought. It touched him, deep and soothing and soft.
He put the empty cup back and stared blankly at the floor.
"Do you want to get up?" Meredith asked.
"No," he said.
A knock sounded on his open doorway, and an orderly, the one from before, Nick, brought in a tray of food. "Good morning, Dr. Shepherd," he said brightly. "Breakfast."
"Okay," said Derek as his mother took his cup away to make room for the tray of food. A steaming plate of rubbery eggs swimming in yellowish fluid, some glistening wafers of sausage, and a little travel-sized box of cheerios complete with a small carton of milk comprised the latest meal offering. The silverware sat against the napkin, dull and lusterless. He leaned back and closed his eyes on the blur of Nick's departing frame. The smell of it made his stomach turn, but the sight of it was worse. He sighed. Hospital food was...
"Derek, sweetheart, you should eat," his mother offered into the silence.
He opted not to answer, trying to let himself drift back. Back to somewhere. Sleeping. He heard his mother shuffling in her seat, probably debating whether to prod him or not. Her eyes were on him, boring into him. He could feel it. He hated that. He hated that he'd managed to bring all the bad memories back.
He knew he looked a lot like his father, from the pictures more than the memory. He had a picture that his mother had given him when he'd first moved out of the house. He wasn't a picture in a frame person. He didn't display his life behind panes of fingerprinted glass and tarnished silver for everyone to see. But he liked to look and remember. He kept the photographs he had in his bedside drawer in an envelope. Once in a while, he would pull them out and stare. And he did look like his father. He looked like his mother, too. But he favored his father. The cleft of his chin. The shape of his forehead. The dark hint of stubble that never seemed to disappear, no matter when he'd shaved. His ears. The way his hair had a tendency to frizz up the longer it grew. The lines around his mouth. And the eyes. Particularly the eyes. Elongated half-moons ending in subtle crow's feet.
Derek reminded his mother of David Shepherd.
Every time Derek looked at her since she'd arrived in Seattle, he'd seen the memories etched all across her face in deep, careworn lines of concern. The way her eyes squinted. The way she would, when she wasn't knitting, wring her hands together in a nervous flutter of worry. He wondered if she'd been knitting so much while she'd been there because it gave her hands something to do, and not so much because it was a hobby that traveled well.
He'd been at home when his mother had gotten the call from the hospital. It had been a summer day. August. Two weeks before school had been scheduled to start again. The air had been so hot that, over pavement and off the hoods of cars, it had wavered and made the world beyond the hotspots shimmer. He and Mark had just come home from T-ball practice at the park. His father had been supposed to pick them up, and they'd waited for over an hour before opting to just walk. They had been used to plans getting interrupted at times because his father had worked in the emergency room and often got held up.
His mother had received the phone call. Her face had bleached itself of color. She'd fumbled for a chair, but as soon as she'd hung up the receiver, and Derek had asked what was wrong, she'd jerked as if she'd been startled, her eyes had widened as she'd stared at Derek, and then she'd bolted. She'd locked the bedroom door behind her. Mark had stayed in the kitchen while Derek had chased after her. He'd heard the soft sound of her sobs, muffled through the door. An hour later, she'd come out, composed, called all of his sisters home, and they'd had a small meeting at the dining room table. She'd explained what had happened. And then they'd gone to the hospital. The morgue.
Another knock drew Derek's eyes open again. Dr. Weller smiled from the doorway. "Morning, Dr. Shepherd," he said, flashing a toothy grin as he moved into the room. He glanced at the untouched food tray. "Sorry to interrupt your breakfast. I'm running a little late today," he added as he closed the distance between him and the bed. He stopped at the foot and stared down. He did a quick neurological check, asking a peppering of questions, "Can you move you arms for me? Excellent. Okay, how about your feet? Good. Follow the light?"
"Looking great still, Dr. Shepherd," he said as he moved to the side of the bed and brought out his stethoscope. Ellen backed her chair away to give Dr. Weller room. "Can you lift up your shirt?" he asked, leaning over. Derek swallowed and fumbled with the hemline of his t-shirt. He got it midway up his stomach when Dr. Weller smiled, said that was fine, and slipped his hand up under the fabric. "This will be a little cold. I'm sorry," he said as he listened. It was. Derek breathed when told. Held his breath when told. "Wonderful, Dr. Shepherd," Dr. Weller said.
Temperature taking was the first act of the examination that brought a frown to Dr. Weller's face and a low, rumbling, "Hmm," to his lips instead of commentary on how super everything seemed to be going. "How are you feeling?" Dr. Weller asked as he read the gauge on the thermometer.
"Just tired," Derek said.
"He's not eating his breakfast," Ellen added.
Dr. Weller glanced at Ellen before returning his gaze to Derek. "Any trouble urinating?" said Dr. Weller.
"No," Derek said as a spike of worry hit him. Thermometer. Something was wrong with his temperature. He didn't feel hot. He didn't feel cold. Dr. Weller was checking for signs of urinary tract infection. Hot, then. Dr. Weller thought he had a fever.
"Any nausea?"
"No, except when I looked at those eggs."
Dr. Weller turned to look at the plate of cooling breakfast and chuckled. "Well, I don't think I can blame you there, Dr. Shepherd." Dr. Weller moved around to the intravenous line site and peeled the tape back, examining the skin slowly. He pressed gently on the skin around the catheter. "Any tenderness here?"
"No."
"All right, I'm going to check this incision, now," Dr. Weller said as he moved around the bed again. The tape and bandages tore, and Derek felt cool air laving his scalp.
His eyes darted to Meredith, but she wasn't staring at his scalp or the gnarled, ugly scar. She caught his gaze, her eyes twinkling. Everything's okay, her expression seemed to be saying. Everything's okay, and I love you. He closed his eyes and sighed, even as the sneaking, growing, writhing worry started to expand and grow and mutate into something awful. Infection. Now, Dr. Weller was checking for infection. Pressure snaked along his skin behind his ear.
"Does this hurt?" Dr. Weller asked.
"No."
"Have you been up and walking?" Dr. Weller asked.
Deep vein thrombosis. Pneumonia.
"He didn't want to walk when he woke up this morning," Ellen said.
"We walked for a couple hours yesterday, Dr. Weller," Meredith countered.
"I got up about two hours ago," Derek said.
"Really?" Meredith said, her tone betraying her surprise. But then she smiled. "I must have slept through it. That's great."
"You kind of snore a little. It's hard to hear me move over all that racket," Derek said, grinning back at her, but the grin dripped away like water. He couldn't hold it on his face.
"Okay," Dr. Weller said. "Well, you seem to have spiked a slight fever, but I don't see any cause for immediate concern. We'll see if it persists before we worry. I'll check back soon."
"A fever?" Ellen said. "Isn't that bad?"
"Not yet, Mom," Derek replied, trying to ignore the sinking feeling in his stomach. Did he feel sick? He tried to self-gauge and only came back with exhaustion. Exhaustion. Exhaustion. He wanted to sleep. But he didn't feel hot. He didn't feel shaky or ill or have any problems breathing. He'd know if he was going septic. Or if he was coming down with pneumonia. And he'd certainly know if he had a urinary tract infection. He knew too much about the symptoms to ignore them, particularly after a major surgery. But. Fever. He didn't want to stay there longer. He didn't. He didn't. He couldn't. And if he had a complication, they would make him stay. They would make him stay.
"Oh, no, Mrs. Shepherd," said Dr. Weller, but his voice seemed like a distant rumble. "It might be nothing. Nothing looks infected, and he's been relatively active. Like I said, I'll check back soon, and we'll work from there. I'll send in a nurse to redo the bandages, take some blood, and put in a new intravenous line. Just in case. Sometimes, if the IV line is infected, which it doesn't look like, but we can't be too safe, just moving the catheter to another vein is enough to clear it up."
He started to shiver as Dr. Weller left. He leaned forward and drew his hands up to rub his face, only to tear his hands away from himself when his fingertips met his scalp instead of his hair. The skin was rough with the barest hint of stubble. But it was still skin, and that still shocked him. He drew out the motion of his startled withdrawal, making it look purposeful as he took his own look at the intravenous line site. The skin around the catheter wasn't red or streaky or hurting. Not infection. He swallowed. No. Infection, no. If he got an infection, he could go septic, his organs would start to fail, he'd be jammed full of antibiotics, probably put on a ventilator, and he'd be bed-ridden even longer. And he could die.
He let out a wry, soft laugh. Good to see he had his priorities straight. Dying after being put on a ventilator. And all of the sudden, he became aware of his mother's eyes boring into him. Again. She was looking at his scalp. She was looking at Derek and seeing a brain surgery patient. Seeing a man who'd died thirty years ago. David. Dead. Not Derek. Not Derek at all.
"Mom, I'm fine," he said, though his words came out raspy and weak. Really convincing. Sure. "Really, I'm... I'm fine."
She scooted the chair in closer "Are you sure you don't want to eat?"
"I'm tired, Mom," he said. He leaned back against the pillows and let his eyelids droop shut.
"A few bites?" she said. "For me, please?" He heard the clink of silverware and he opened his eyes a slit. She was picking up his fork. For him. She was... She was moving toward his hand with it, not toward his food, but all he saw was that she'd picked up his fork. For him. Like he was a fucking invalid.
"Mom, I can lift the fucking fork on my own," he snapped, grabbing it from her. Meredith stared at them both, biting her lip, her eyes wandering back and forth and back and forth.
His mother blinked. "Derek Shepherd," she hissed in a familiar, scolding tone. Derek Shepherd, what have you done, now? Derek Shepherd, is there a bird in that shoebox? Ellen's lower lip-quivered. But it got hit by a car, Mom. A small moan wavered through the space between them. And then she sighed. "I was only going to give it to you. I wasn't..." Her voice trailed away. She stared at him for a long, painful moment, and then she got up from her chair and sat back on the loveseat. She pulled her knitting project out from her red-striped tote bag and began to work at it, but not before he saw her hands shaking.
"I'm sorry," he said as he put the fork back on the tray table with trembling hands. "I'm... Tired. I'm just..."
A soft, warm touch on his left forearm pulled him out of a drift. "Derek, do you want to take another shower?" Meredith asked softly. "You might feel better."
He blinked, swallowing against the lump forming in his throat. He felt dirty, pasty, soiled. He hadn't showered since the first one. He'd changed his clothes, which had helped. But he hadn't taken a shower. He had felt better after the last one. He closed his eyes and imagined the thunder of the water, the pelting feeling as it beat against his tired muscles, the crease of his skin as she applied pressure with the washcloth and soaped him down. He could stand on his own. He could walk. Well, theoretically. He stared at the floor with a spark of hope overriding the overwhelming fatigue in his limbs. Maybe... Maybe he could actually do it by himself while she waited. Not that he would exactly mind her support. But he... Maybe he could do it by himself.
Another knock at his door pulled his gaze up. "Morning, Der," Sarah said cheerfully as she came into the room. She wore a tight white t-shirt under floppy, frayed, oversized denim overalls. Her black hair was pulled back into a twist that spilled out the top of a turtle-shell brown hair-clip. Her fingers clasped a Starbucks brand paper mug, and she'd slung her large, black leather purse over her other shoulder. She looked like a painter. Stewart followed just behind her, looking more like the walking dead than a person, his tall, pasty, lumbering frame slouched in full, exhausted effect. Lindsey and Annie tore into the room, bumping past both of them.
"Uncle Derek!" Annie exclaimed cheerfully as she skipped into the room, but the sound of her voice was almost painful against the tiredness he felt.
"Guys, quiet, remember?" Stewart said, his voice low and thick with sleep. "It's the crack of dawn for some people."
"It's 8:30AM, Stewart," commented Sarah.
"Like I said, the crack of dawn!"
"Uncle Derek," Annie said as she bounced to a stop beside the bed railing. She was just tall enough that she could rest her chin on top of the rail. Her black hair hung loose and curly down to her shoulders. She grinned, flashing two tiny rows of crooked baby teeth. "Uncle Derek, wanna color again?"
"Maybe later?" he said. He didn't think he could do it then, couldn't even bring himself to pretend with a fake smile. He just...
"Okay," said Annie excitedly, and he couldn't help but marvel at her energy even though it made him feel frail. "Mommy and Daddy bought me new crayons yesterday! We saw seals at the ac... aquari..." She frowned and looked at him expectantly.
"Aquarium," he said.
She nodded. "Aquarium!"
Lindsey came around behind Annie. "We get to see the Space Needle today, Uncle Derek! Have you been there?"
"Yes," he said.
"Is it really tall?" Lindsey asked.
"Yes," he replied.
"How come your hair is gone?" Annie said, her eyes wide and ponderous.
Lindsey poked her. "Hey!" Annie squealed. "Mommy, Lindsey's being mean."
Lindsey hissed, "Mommy explained already."
"But it's different than before," Annie countered.
"Girls," Stewart scolded, reaching out with large hands to pull the two of them away from the bed. The shuffled backward and stopped with a thump when they ran into his legs. "I'm really sorry, Derek," he said.
Derek swallowed. "It's all right." He closed his eyes, and within moments the sounds and the room around him blurred and he felt like he was floating somewhere in a roar. Maybe he didn't need to be stoned to sleep. He just needed to be tired enough. There were so many people in the room. Talking. He couldn't... He wasn't quite sleeping. Just hovering. He felt stares on him, and the volume died down immediately. Mind the sleeping, sick man in the bed, he thought idly, but he couldn't bring himself to tell them he was still awake and it was fine to make noise, because sleeping was hopeless anyway. He couldn't bring himself to move.
"He's acting really listless," Ellen whispered, grating, awful concern leaking from the cracks in her attempt at a flat, sure tone.
"It's just fatigue, Ellen," Meredith said. "It's normal. He's doing really, really well."
An awkward silence filled the room. At least Meredith wasn't freaking out anymore. He'd done something right then. The effort yesterday to move around had been worth it. Definitely. The fact that she'd been sleeping when he'd woken up in the morning, the fact that she didn't seem at all concerned by his fever... At least there was that.
"We just stopped in to say hello before we headed out," Sarah whispered. "Mom, do you want to come with us?"
"No, I'm staying here," she replied.
"It's okay, Mom," Derek mumbled, not opening his eyes. "You can go. I'm fine."
"I don't want to see the Space Needle," she snapped. "I want to sit with my son." The sound of her hands twisting the yarn grew agitated.
"Okay, Mom. Okay," Sarah said quickly, politically avoiding a fight like she always did. "We'll probably stop back in around dinnertime, okay? Maybe we can bring in some carryout or something and have a family dinner." The implication was clear. Maybe we can bring in some carryout because Derek can't go out. Derek can't leave. Derek's stuck. "Mom, will you at least come out to the car with us? You left some of your stuff on the floor in the backseat yesterday, and we figured you might want it."
A protracted silence fell down around them. The clink, clink, clink of Ellen's knitting stopped. She sighed, long, frustrated, shivery. Movement shuffled through the room, followed by a warm hand against his cheek. He couldn't stop himself from flinching away, and she drew her hand back like she'd been burned.
"I'll be right back, sweetheart," she whispered.
"I'm not dying," he snapped. He immediately regretted it. He slit his eyes open and saw her retreating through the door. Sarah swarmed her like a comforting mother hen, and the entire crew exited, leaving him alone with Meredith.
He sighed. "I shouldn't have said that." Why was he being so nasty? He drew his fingers up to his nose and rubbed them up and down along the sides, pinching.
"She's your mother, Derek," Meredith said. "I'm sure, after nearly forty years, she knows you tend to do the spitting, hissing, rabid animal thing when you're exhausted, and that you don't really mean it."
"That doesn't excuse it. She's just... She's thinking about Dad, and she's projecting it onto me, and I know it, but I can't... I should be able to humor her."
The morgue had been cold, austere, silent. The metal walls between the freezer spaces had glowed a sort of green, reflecting the immaculate, lime-colored tiles on the floor. The grout between the tiles, which had probably once been sparkling, immaculate white, had dulled to a dingy, stained gray. The main office had been a tiny, dark room filled with books and papers and musty journals. The pathologist had greeted them at the doorway with a somber look, and his mother had had to sign a bunch of forms. They'd waited. Quiet. Wide-eyed. Still too shell-shocked to understand what was going on in a deep, to-the-marrow way.
What's wrong, Mom?
David. Dad... He died this afternoon.
Ellen Shepherd had prepared them before they had left the house, but it had been like studying for a test. What does death mean? Death means Dad isn't coming home. Like a vacation? No, not like a vacation. He's never coming home.
Natalie and Sarah had been too young to understand, and he'd watched his mother stumble with a quivering voice over words she normally would have said with surety and grace. Words like heaven, gone, heart, love. Died. She'd left Natalie and Sarah with the neighbors, but she'd brought Kathy, Nancy, and Derek to the hospital.
Come say goodbye with me.
The pathologist had led them into the chilly, refrigerated section of the morgue, and there his father had lain, still and silent under a sheet. Sleeping. But not. Pale. Still. His mother had started to sob. She'd kept herself together through everything, but in the moment her gaze had landed on the body, she'd cracked like fine china lobbed against a wall. Her breaking hadn't been screaming or hysterics, though. Just quiet, shuddering, ugly sobs. And Derek remembered. Remembered exactly what she'd said as she'd picked up his father's hand and rubbed the cold, pale knuckles against her cheek.
What am I going to do?
He blinked back to the present as Meredith inched his tray table to the side and climbed into bed beside him, resting against his chest. "Hey," she whispered as she rubbed his chest. "Two more days, Derek. You're over half way." She kissed him softly on the lips. "And you're not getting sick," she added as she pulled away. "You're not going to have to stay."
"I have a fever," he said.
She nodded. "Yes. Do you even feel warm?" she added before putting the back of her palm against his forehead. "You don't feel hot to me. I'm sure it's nothing."
"No. A little. But." That might be because he was thinking about it. Somebody tells you you're hungry, you notice, wow, you're hungry. Somebody asks you if it's hot, and suddenly you're hyperaware that you're uncomfortable. Maybe it was like that. He leaned back against the pillow and sighed.
She gestured toward his chart, eyebrows raised. "If you want," he said. She crawled to the foot of the bed and lifted the chart out of its slot, staring at it as she settled back against him. He tried staring at it with her, but reading printed text was hard enough. Reading doctor handwriting was a bit beyond him.
She flipped past the first page, scanning. "Wow," she said, smiling. "He even writes all those excellents and wonderfuls in his notes."
"Yeah," Derek said. "I have to sign off on all those, you know. I'm thinking for Christmas this year, maybe a thesaurus for him."
She snorted as she put the chart back. "Two more days, Derek," she assured him. "There's nothing wrong with you or Dr. Weller would have put you on antibiotics immediately. And he wouldn't have written excellent fifty times."
He smiled. "You sure pulled a one-eighty."
She kissed him again. "My hot fiancé is very, very convincing," she said against his lips. "And by hot, I mean sexy. Not feverish. And by very, very convincing, I mean I'm sure he's fine. Tired, but fine."
Not dying.
"My fiancé is hotter," he said with a smirk, only to get cut off by an unexpected rumble.
Meredith laughed. "Now, who's got the growly stomach?" She pulled the tray table over their laps. The milk, cheerios, now cold, soupy eggs, and still-glistening sausage patties waited.
"Fine," he said. "Fine, I guess I can eat cheerios." He picked up the spoon and started fumbling with the little travel box. "I'm not touching the eggs or the sausage, though. Why do they even serve that in hospitals? That's like asking for relapses."
"Derek, I hate to break it to you," she said as he poured the cheerios into the little bowl. "But most people in hospitals are not health freaks. And one meal of sausage and eggs isn't going to kill anyone. The protein is actually healthy in small doses."
"It might kill me," he said. He picked up his fork with his free hand and poked at the scrambled, yellow mess on his plate. The eggs made a liquid-squishy sound as he pushed them around. "Look at it. It's... It's..."
"Hospital food?" Meredith said, her eyes sparkling.
"Well, yeah."
"They tend to serve that in hospitals, Derek."
"They do," he replied. The salad he'd eaten on Wednesday night had been all right. It'd been his first venture back into the land of solids. The food on Thursday had been tolerable. This was... "Care to smuggle in something edible for me?"
She grinned. "Maybe."
"Maybe?" he said, eyebrows raised as he worked at the milk carton. He poured the milk into his bowl over the cheerios. "As in, maybe, I won't feed my starving, hot fiancé?"
She nodded. "Maybe."
"This is all your fault, you know," he said as he spooned his first bite.
"What?"
He swallowed and spooned another, almost regretful that the box was so small. He would be done in a few more bites. "I'm going to have cheerio breath all day," he said. "You think pastrami breath is bad?"
"That implies I'm going to be kissing you enough to care," she replied. She wore an adorable, nonchalant-but-pouty expression on her face.
"Aren't you?" he asked. He shoveled another heaping spoonful into his mouth and chewed.
"I guess I can make a sacrifice for my hot fiancé."
After another two bites, he put his spoon down into the empty bowl. A thin film of milk still covered the bottom, and a stray cheerio or two flecked the surface of the milk. He grinned at her. "Sacrificing by finding me food, or by kissing me? Because if I can pick between getting kissed and getting food, I think I'd pick getting kissed."
She leaned into him and caught his lips with hers. Her fingers brushed his scalp, just the way she'd always done before the surgery. It felt different to not feel the pull of his hair against his skin, the tickle of her nails as they sorted out the curly strands into something resembling straight and ordered. Her palm rubbed his ear, down his neck, and settled for clutching at his shoulder. She smelled like lavender. She always did, but this time, it served him like a rejuvenating fuel. The kiss wasn't like before. Before he'd been doused in pain medication and anti-epileptics and other things. Where one kiss with her was enough to set him off a diving board into a lake of desperation. But he did feel it. Everywhere. Slowly. Building. It was something that could be nursed and prodded into the fervor he used to have. Not like before. But possible.
He sighed when she finally pulled away. "Cheerios are definitely not as bad as pastrami," she commented, breathless, and he couldn't help but laugh.
He felt tired, but was able to add relaxed and warm to the list. Warm from kissing. Not warm from fever. Warm. And that was...
He tilted his head into her neck and breathed. The room started to fuzz, and he closed his eyes, blinking away the colors and the light and everything except the fact that he was tired, warm, and relaxed. She moved. A little. He heard the rustle of paper, followed by the dry crackle of a book spine being violated. Another jerk, and a hollow click and the pop-release of air followed as she uncapped her highlighter. His awareness slipped back, and the room around him became a distant, blurry thing loitering in the space behind his eyes.
"He's helping you study?" said a familiar voice, and the room snapped back into place. He blinked, trying to force himself back awake. Wake up, wake up, wake up. It was the first time one of Meredith's friends had seen him, at least while he was awake and aware of it. Someone had been running pretty good interference so far. Meredith maybe. Though he suspected someone else had been involved. Someone with a bit more pull. He swallowed, managing to grunt a little as he lifted his head back up.
Cristina stood in the doorway, her arms folded over her chest, her ankles crossed. She wore her light blue scrubs, a white undershirt, and gray cross trainers. And she looked like she didn't care one iota that Derek was lying there. Her expression was the same flat one she always seemed to wear. The one that said someone with teeth was lurking just underneath, ready to snap.
She closed the distance to the bed and plopped herself down by Derek's and Meredith's feet after shoving the tray table out of the way. The mattress gave, and she pulled her feet up and folded them under herself, Indian-style. "So, what are we studying?"
"Hey, I'm sleeping, here," Derek protested as he shifted his feet. The bed was very small.
"No, you're not," Cristina said. She leaned forward and glanced at the title of the volume Meredith was reading. "Oh, I already read that one."
Meredith looked up from her notes with a sigh as she put her highlighter in the spine. For a brief moment, she seemed relaxed and happy that Cristina was there, and he was surprised to find himself glad for that despite a low undercurrent of discomfort. Cristina had traipsed in like it was any other day. Like this was an on-call room, not a patient room. Not that he would have expected pity from Cristina. But it was refreshing to find his expectations met. She wasn't even treating him like her boss, which she never did anyway. He'd always been the bastard that'd broken Meredith. Ever since Addison had come back into the picture. It was all so blessedly normal he couldn't really bring himself to protest.
Except Meredith seemed to think it worth protesting. A tiny shiver of what he could only assume was realization racked her frame, and her eyes flared wide for a passing moment, so quickly he would have missed it if it weren't for the fact that he was looking at her already. Her gaze ticked to Cristina and back to him in a rapid expression of, "Crap!"
"Don't you have your own attending to take advantage of?" Meredith snapped, and surprisingly, that made him feel even better. Because it meant even Meredith had forgotten for a moment. And that was perfect. Just...
Perfect.
"So," Derek murmured with a low chuckle as he kissed her neck, trying to let her know everything was okay. "You do admit to taking advantage?"
"Shut up," she said, laughing. "We made up our mind that that was a tie."
"You made it up," he replied.
Cristina rolled her eyes. "Whatever," she said. "Burke and I aren't exactly on speaking terms at the moment."
"Again?" Meredith said. "Did you..."
"He's having delusions about us getting married next week," Cristina said with a shrug.
"You're not?" Derek said.
"Only if he decides to do the small one I said I wanted."
"That's really great, Cristina," Meredith said. "I mean that you stood your ground. Not that... You know... Not the delusions."
The skin around Cristina's eyes ticked, and she loosed a little, frustrated sigh. "Yeah, well."
"I'm back," said his mother as she entered the room with her tote bag, which looked considerably fuller than it had been before she'd left. She glanced at Cristina with a curious expression, and when Meredith didn't make an immediate move to introduce her to the new occupant of the room, the new occupant residing on Derek's bed, Ellen added a slightly less confident, "Hello?"
"Oh, sorry," Meredith said. "Ellen, this is my best friend, Cristina Yang. Cristina, this is Ellen Shepherd, Derek's mother."
Ellen smiled brightly. "Hello, dear. It's very nice to meet one of Meredith's friends."
"Hi," said Cristina.
"I tried to tell her I was sleeping," Derek grumbled, but he didn't mean it. Not really. It occurred to him that the friend he really wasn't looking forward to seeing was Izzie.
"And I told you, you're not sleeping. You're talking," Cristina said. She considered him for a moment. "And occasionally making McDreamy eyes at Meredith made only slightly extra dreamy and less mc by the fact that you're drugged. Please, tell me your morphine experience wasn't like Meredith's."
He turned to his mother. "She's sort of always like this."
"No," Cristina commented, "I'm usually worse. So, when are you studying neuro? I want in on that." Her beeper went off. She pulled the little black pager off her belt clip and stared at it with a perplexed expression. "Crap, I have to take this," she said as she hopped off the bed.
And then she was gone.
"Lovely girl," Ellen replied flatly, though her eyes sparkled as though she were in on a joke that nobody else was. She settled down onto the couch, and Derek leaned back against the pillows. He started to drift again.
A light knock at the door pulled him back, and he moaned softly as Abasi walked in. Irritating was making a slow crawl toward understatement as a description for all the interruptions. He rubbed his eyes, trying to wake up and greet the newest reason he wasn't sleeping. A new bandage for his scalp, a new intravenous line, and a blood draw. The worst part of it was that Meredith got up and sat down in the chair beside the bed, leaving him bereft of the feel of her against his side. He sighed as Abasi moved about, letting himself drift a little, just under the surface, awake enough to respond to questions, but trying to recoup some energy. He really just wanted to sleep.
"What's that?" his mother said, which snapped him awake.
"This is mostly just saline at this point, Mrs. Shepherd," Abasi said as he set up a new IV bag. "It keeps him hydrated. We're giving him some medication to reduce the chance of swelling as well."
"What about the fever?" Ellen said.
"No fever, now," Abasi said. "It could have been a bad read. It happens."
"A bad read?"
"Mom, I'm fine. Really," Derek said, sighing as Abasi picked up after himself, wrappers and remnants of things crinkling, and left. The news about the fever was such a heavy relief it'd taken him a moment to realize his mother, who had seemed much better when she'd walked back into his room, was descending rapidly back into the place she'd been before. The bad David is Derek is David place.
"Sarah told me a fever could mean you've got pneumonia."
"Mom, do I look like I have pneumonia?"
"What about sepsis?"
"Where did you hear about-" he began, only to cut his words short. There was no point in knowing. Ellen had gotten her hands on some literature, or she'd pumped Sarah for information. Sarah usually wilted under pressure, and Ellen was a master interrogator. She'd needed the skill with four sisters at war with a son and his best friend. Blame for broken vases and birds in shoeboxes and messes on the floor left un-swept had blasted across sides like a ball in a tennis match. He did it! No, she did! No, he did! "Never mind. That's what the blood work they're doing is for, Mom. But I doubt it."
"Why?"
"Because I'm tired, Mom," he snapped. And then he breathed, forcing himself to relax. He added in a more moderated tone, "I'm tired, but I'm not sick. I feel fine."
"You're not eating," she countered.
He gestured to the tray table. "I ate."
"One miniature bowl of cereal is not eating," she said. "You always eat breakfast."
Silence stretched into a moment that became one, two, three, four seconds. Five. He twisted the thermal blanket in his hands until they hurt. The new intravenous line ached as he clenched his fists and ground his teeth. Would you eat that? He'd almost said it. Almost. But then he'd looked at her. She blinked, pinching fat, ugly tears out. She wiped them away, and she composed herself again, but it'd been enough. Enough to make him feel weak again. And guilty for putting everyone through this. And homesick.
Did he suffer?
No, Ellen. It was very quick. We found him in the supply closet. We tried to revive him, but were unsuccessful.
Derek knew enough now to know that, however brief, his father had definitely suffered. A bursting aneurysm was almost always described as the worst headache ever, coupled with nausea, vomiting, double vision, stiff neck, and other problems. His mother probably knew it was a lie as well. She'd had plenty of opportunity to glance at medical textbooks over the course of her life, what with three daughters, one son, and one... Mark. All graduating medical school.
How could this happen? He was only thirty-eight.
Sometimes it just does. There is no rhyme or reason.
He wanted nothing more than to get up and give her a tour of Seattle. To get up and be himself. To be the person he'd become.
What am I going to do?
I'm not dying, he wanted to say. I'm not. I'm fine.
He just wanted to go home and curl up. He hadn't been mothered like this since before he'd left for college, and it was painful to suddenly be in a position where his mother thought he needed it. Not even when he'd had his crash had she been this bad. Addison and Mark and all his sisters had been there all the time, and it hadn't been like this. After the doctors had finally gotten him stabilized, there hadn't been a lot to be frightened about, and his mother hadn't even managed to go to the hospital until he'd been awake, alert, and breathing on his own again. His concussion had been minor. He'd been bell-rung for a few hours, disoriented, but that had been it.
The ache of exhaustion he'd been holding at bay slowly pulsed back to life. He stared dully at the floor. The tiles spaced and multiplied as his eyes lost focus and two images bloomed from one.
Meredith stood, and the sound of her chair wobbling back into the wall on its wheels echoed after her sentence. He looked at her. She wore a determined, preparing for battle face. She brushed a loose bang away from her eyes and crossed her arms over her chest.
"Ellen, have you been to Stitches?" Meredith said.
His mother blinked and sniffed. "No."
"It's a Seattle fabric store that's supposed to be pretty good," Meredith explained as she rounded the bed and went over to the couch. "I read about it in the paper back when I was doing my knitting to stave off tequila thing. Never actually went to the store, though. You want to go?"
"But I..."
Meredith turned to him, mouthing, I love you, before adding audibly, "Derek, I'm going to take Ellen out for a few hours."
"Meredith, dear, I really don't need to-"
"You're in Seattle," Meredith said, cutting his mother off as she turned back. "I've been meaning to pick the knitting thing back up for a while, and seeing as how we're going to be stuck in here for a few days yet and studying can only carry me so far before I go insane, it seems like the perfect time. You can show me what to get. Izzie tried to teach me earlier this year, but I think I kind of sucked. She used to redo my rows at night. She thinks I didn't know. But it's all about the effort, right? And she had an ug-- Er... Nice sweater by the end, which was great. But she's not nearly as good as you are. I love the scarf you've been knitting. It's a lot less tangley than mine ever were. How do you do it?"
His mother looked lost. Derek almost couldn't help the smile threatening to overtake him as Ellen tried to piece together what Meredith had said.
"She babbles," he offered. "Isn't it cute?"
Meredith's lip twitched, but she schooled herself. "Please, Ellen?" Meredith insisted. "Studying is driving me crazy. I need something else to do."
"She's scary when she's crazy," he said. "Trust me. You want to take her."
Meredith's lip twitched again, but she somehow managed not to smile. "Yes. It's like what happens when you withdraw sleep from Mr. Flirty-But-Grouchy."
"Touché," he said.
That time she grinned.
For a moment, Ellen's gaze darted back and forth between them. Meredith. Derek. Meredith. Derek. "All right," Ellen said with a surrendering sigh.
"Great!" Meredith said. She grabbed her purse from the floor by his bed. Her keys jingled. She shifted from foot to foot, looking adorable in her ratty knit pants and shirt, and he couldn't help but smile as she frowned, and the tip of her tongue appeared as she considered the contents of her purse with the seriousness of a surgeon with an open body cavity. She stuck her hand deep into the depths, rifled around, and, finally satisfied, she turned and guided his mother out the door before Ellen had a chance to change her mind.
Meredith lingered in the doorframe, peering back at him as her lithe fingers clutched at the molding. "You want anything?" she asked simply.
"No," he replied. "Thank you."
She shrugged and smiled. "I owe you a shower later. Get some sleep."
"Yes, ma'am," he replied, winking.
The door shut softly behind her. Sleep. He hoped he could do that.