After the Storm [2 of 4]
Title: After the Storm
Author: greymcdreamysgh
Pairing: MerDer
Rating: PG-13
Summary: A short serial that takes place immediately following the season 7 finale. How do you recover after the storm?
Disclaimer: All television shows, movies, books, and other copyrighted material referred to in this work, and the characters, settings, and events thereof, are the properties of their respective owners. As this work is an interpretation of the original material and not for-profit, it constitutes fair use. Reference to real persons, places, or events are made in a fictional context, and are not intended to be libelous, defamatory, or in any way factual.
Well I guess I'll just go home,
Oh, God knows where.
Because death is just so full and man so small.
Well I'm scared of what's behind and what's before.
He’s disoriented when his phone wakes him up the next morning. It’s only two hours after he comes back home, so it’s more of a nap than a night’s sleep. Everything that they have said to each other, and all that has transpired-it hits him like a hangover, behind his eyes and in his gut.
The house is still quiet when he goes downstairs to put on a pot of coffee. Cristina’s asleep on the couch, and he prays that she doesn’t wake up. He thinks that over the past year, they’ve come to some sort of understanding and maybe even a friendship, but he will absolutely not be having this conversation with her. Upstairs, he takes a towel out of the linen closet and showers in the bathroom that everybody else shares so he can go as long as possible without waking-ok, without having to confront-Meredith. He steals shampoo from Avery, but realizes that he might not have time to shave today.
He eases open the door of their bedroom when he’s done. Meredith and Zola are asleep in bed, Zola with one arm over her head lying on her back and Meredith on her side with a hand near Zola. Meredith is so close to the edge of the bed that he wonders how she didn’t fall out, especially when he sees all of their pillows on the floor, but then he realizes that Zola is close to the middle and the pillows are for her. He says nothing, deciding to just let them sleep, and sneaks as quietly as he can into their own bathroom to dress and deal with his hair.
Cristina’s still asleep on the couch when he pours himself a cup of coffee and looks around. It seems like the hospital sent them home with a lot of things. There are sample-size cans of formula and a pack of unopened bottles on the kitchen counter, and their bedroom is suddenly full of baby supplies. He has thought about what the first night home from the hospital with his firstborn would be like off and on for fifteen years, ever since he and Addison were newlyweds but more and more now that he and Meredith have been trying so hard to have a baby. He never thought it would be like this, but then again, it seems like nothing ever turns out the way he thinks it will.
While he’s waiting, he makes a bottle for Zola. There isn’t much formula left in the can that’s already opened, just enough for about four ounces, so he uses it all and hopes that will be enough at least to start. In a half hour, he can hear alarm clocks begin to go off, footsteps creaking on the hardwood upstairs, and the water of the shower turning on again. Meredith comes downstairs with Zola in her arms. Zola’s eyes are still sleepy; she looks around as wide-eyed as she can for someone who has just woken up.
“Hi, Zola,” he says softly. “What do you think of your new house?” Zola smiles when she sees him, and snuggles closer to Meredith. The hangover feeling in his stomach gets a little worse for a second.
Meredith hands him the baby and sits down. “Hi,” he says. He hugs Zola close, and kisses her cheek before turning to Meredith. “How was your night?” he asks.
“Long.” She looks more exhausted than he does. Usually, when she comes downstairs, she is showered, dressed, and ready to walk out the door. Today, she looks like her nerves are absolutely shot. “Is there coffee?” she asks.
“Yeah.” He gets up, shifting Zola to his hip, and pours Meredith a cup of coffee, and takes the bottle he made out of the fridge for Zola. “I have a bottle for her. Will she drink it cold?”
Meredith has both hands wrapped around her mug, drinking her coffee black. “I don’t know,” she says. She sounds stressed, but in a nervous way, not an angry way. “Last night, it was kind of lukewarm. Maybe leave it out for a few minutes first?”
But when Zola sees the bottle, she reaches for it anyway, cold or not. He sits down with her in the chair next to Meredith, Zola in one arm and the bottle in the opposite hand. “Let’s just try it,” he says.
When Zola takes the bottle, drinking greedily, Meredith looks down into her cup. He’s so engrossed with the baby who is finally in his arms, in his house, that he barely notices that it takes Meredith awhile to talk again. When she does, she asks quietly, “Are you going to work today?”
He glances over at the clock on the oven and snaps back into reality. He could have chalked this morning up to exhaustion if he didn’t know that he still had this whole mess to sort out at the hospital.
“I have to. I have to meet with the FDA. Will you be ok with her?” He hands Zola, who is still holding her bottle, back to Meredith. “I can come home right after.”
Milk drips down Zola’s front. Meredith reaches for a napkin from the holder at the center of the table, and dabs around her mouth, trying to get everything before Zola’s shirt gets wet. Zola tilts her head back a little as she drinks, and Meredith adjusts her so she’s more settled in her arms.
“We’ll be fine. We’re going to go out for awhile,” she says, “But we’ll see you when we come back.”
He hasn’t given it much thought until now, but he wonders about the logistics of transporting Zola around with limited supplies. The hospital must have given them a car seat, but up until now, he’s thought of Zola as someone who would stay in place for awhile. They never got to take her anywhere further than down the hall from her hospital room, and it seems strange that now they can just put her in their car and drive her all over the city if they want to. It’s stranger still that Meredith has already done it, wants to do it again, and doesn’t seem to care what he thinks about it.
“Where are you going?” he asks. His mug is empty and he’s going to be late for work if he doesn’t leave soon.
“She needs things, Derek. She can’t sleep in that porta-crib again.”
They were supposed to do this together. He didn’t know it was going to be today, or even this week. They never talked about stuff like this while they were trying to get pregnant; after months of disappointment, conversations about a baby’s room felt depressing and foolish. But since they decided to adopt Zola, it had come up more than once. Of course, they thought they’d be decorating in their new house, not cramming more stuff into an already-packed home. They’d just have to figure it out.
He’s waited for this for a long time, and he wants to turn this around. When he asks her if she will wait a few hours until he gets home, she agrees.
A conference call with the trial’s institutional review board is scheduled for 11 AM. He wants to spend some time coming up with a game plan, but by the time he rounds on his post-op patients, it’s time to call in.
It’s unraveling fast. He knows that this trial is flashy, that there’s a lot of money and a lot of emotion involved. The rational part of him is not surprised that it will crash down this quickly, but he thought he would at least have a few days to wrap his own head around all of this before he has to deal with anything beyond the trial’s repercussions in his personal life. Richard asks if Derek wants him on the call, but he shakes him off. Somehow, he feels like Richard’s being there will not help.
There are three doctors on the phone. They start by saying that they want to, and will, schedule a face-to-face meeting, but that they needed more time to coordinate schedules first. They couldn’t get everyone on short notice, so they’ll start with just the three of them and the phone call.
“Dr. Shepherd,” the gruff but clear voice of Dr. Pollock, the head of the trial’s IRB, begins. “Please describe for us what you believe has happened with the administration of your clinical trial.”
Derek wonders if that’s just how this guy talks, or if he’s already pissed. With the phone on speaker, the sensation of that voice in this empty office somehow makes him feel more stressed than he already is. He picks the phone up and holds it to his ear, gripping the receiver tightly. He glances at a picture of him and Meredith on his desk. It was taken a few years ago-by Izzie, he’s pretty sure-on a slow night when they were both on-call. Meredith’s sitting on top of the desk at the nurses’ station, and he’s in the chair next to her, but leaning up out of it. They were the victims of Izzie in one of her sentimental moods. He’s kissing her cheek, and she’s smiling. They are both wearing scrubs and they’re both happy.
He starts talking. “It came to our attention yesterday that a resident working closely with me on the trial improperly accessed information regarding which subjects were to receive the placebo and which were to receive the experimental drug.” He pauses and sighs before he continues. “Because of a personal connection to one of the subjects, who was scheduled to receive the placebo, the resident switched out her information with that of another subject. None of this was disclosed to me or to any of the other supervising physicians until yesterday, when another resident approached one of our attendings.”
“Were either the whistleblower or the other attending involved in the trial?” Dr. Pollock asks.
“No.”
“Dr. Shepherd, this is Dr. Ingram,” a woman chimes in. “I’d like to follow up on the trial’s methodology, which you mentioned a moment ago. Is it correct that this is a single-blind study?”
He doesn’t like the way she asks, like she already knows he’s done something wrong. In a sense, he supposes that she does know that. He hates that he has to answer for all of this, especially when he does not yet have all the answers. He wishes that he could somehow put this on Richard, or on Meredith, to deal with. He hates this feeling of being judged, of failure.
“In a sense, yes.” He continues on as best he can, and hopes that he does not come off as shaken. All he can do now is tell the truth and hope for the best, but he’s not really expecting anything but the worst.
“All subjects were randomly assigned by computer whether they would receive the placebo or the drug, and that data was handled by an individual who was not involved in any capacity with the study other than to work in the laboratory where the data was stored. We only learned which to administer in the OR as the surgery was about to begin, and had no role in assigning subjects to the control group or to the experimental group. The subjects themselves were never informed whether they received the drug or not.”
He hopes he sounds prepared, and that he’s telling them what they want to hear. Ten or fifteen seconds go by without anyone speaking. It feels like an eternity. He turns in his chair a little and grips the fabric of his trousers with his free hand, bunching it up and then flexing his fingers.
“Dr. Shepherd, this is Dr. Bollhardt speaking,” the third doctor, another man, finally says. “Is it correct that all post-operative evaluations were to be conducted by you and the resident assisting on the trial?”
“That is correct.”
“What course of action has the hospital taken so far?”
He takes a deep breath, one he hopes they can’t hear, and says, “The resident who skewed the trial’s data has been suspended without pay, and reinstatement will be determined by the chief of surgery and an additional panel of physicians after two months. Scheduled surgeries are postponed and all subjects have been notified that all trial proceedings have been halted until further notice.”
“Well, Dr. Shepherd, any accusation or admission of scientific misconduct, especially on a trial using human subjects, is taken very seriously. It was appropriate to stop all activities associated with this trial, and we will need to conduct a more formal review.”
It’s what he expected, but it doesn’t mean it hurts any less. Since yesterday, it has been slowly sinking in that his chance is over. It’s a crushing defeat. In his last clinical trial, they were killing people left and right. This one felt like it was working right from the start. But he shouldn’t think about that, because now it’s done.
There’s nothing else to say but what comes next: “I would be happy to cooperate with that review process.”
“We’re pleased to hear that,” Dr. Ingram says. “Whatever misconduct that may have occurred on the part of the resident, frankly-and I’ll speak for myself here-I need to review the methodology of this study more closely. It seems like bias has come into the study at several points, certainly most egregiously with the incident that prompted this discussion. But I am troubled by the amount of involvement that you and your colleague have with this trial. Again, I need to review the information more extensively but, on first glance, what strikes me is that you both would have knowledge of the course of treatment during your post-op evaluations of the patients. Whatever personal biases may have occurred before surgery, it seems to be compounded by the potential for subconscious biases in the evaluation phase.”
“Dr. Ingram, let’s not get ahead of ourselves here,” Dr. Pollock says.
“No, as I said, we do need to conduct a formal review,” she says. “I am merely informing Dr. Shepherd of my concerns.”
He feels beaten down now. It’s unfair that he has to deal with this burden and take this flogging alone. If they knew what the stakes were for him, they would know that he would never do anything to jeopardize this.
“Again,” he says. “I am happy to cooperate with you and to provide you with whatever information you may need as the review process moves forward.”
“Thank you, Dr. Shepherd,” Dr. Pollock says. “Seattle Grace-Mercy West has forwarded us the collected data for your study up to this point, and we will be looking at it carefully over the next few days and weeks. You have already done so, but you are required to stop administering the experimental treatment until further notice”
What comes next is a bomb he wasn’t expecting.
“We also will be notifying the AMA regarding the resident in question,” Dr. Pollock continues. “As you know, penalties for scientific misconduct also fall under their jurisdiction. Thank you for your time and cooperation, Dr. Shepherd. We’ll be in touch.”
He sits in stunned silence for a second before he says thank you and hangs up the phone.
*
It all takes up a lot more time than she thought it would. She feels sort of like a lab tech for this part, with all the sterilization that needs to happen before she can make these bottles. She’s also realizing the need for a highchair, now that she’s trying to do all this stuff with nowhere to put Zola. The whole house suddenly feels like a death trap.
She sits Zola on the counter with one arm around her waist. She squints at the small print on the can of formula and uses her other hand to scoop the requisite amount of powder into the five open bottles. The can empties faster than she thought it would.
“See, we’re figuring it out, right?” she says. Zola stares at her, and leans towards her to reach for the can. Grabbing it, she bangs it on the counter, pleased with herself, she laughs.
Meredith forgot what it felt like when she laughed. For a second, last night and this morning and all the tenseness that exists in the space between her and Derek goes away. She can see why it’s so easy for parents to love their children. Zola grips the rim of the empty can tightly and bangs it on the counter again. She laughs harder this time, and sticks out her tongue a little.
“Is that fun?” she asks the baby, a smile creeping across her face. Zola snickers and hits the can again. As best she can, Meredith screws the nipples onto the bottles with one hand and says, “We need to get you better toys.”
Zola drinks one of the bottles quickly, sitting in the corner of the couch in the crook of Meredith’s elbow. Alex wasn’t kidding when he said yesterday that she was feeding normally. She wonders if she’s giving her enough food; they’ve fed her a few times in the hospital but the nurses always kept track of how much and how often she needed to eat. She hasn’t given it much thought until now. Zola’s still sucking on the bottle, which only has air in it now.
“Are you still hungry?” she asks. She takes the bottle from Zola, who promptly starts crying. “Well, you only have two teeth, so I don’t know. Let’s see.”
She’s scared to leave her alone, so she shifts Zola to her hip and carries her back to the kitchen. “Let’s see,” she says again, but Zola keeps crying. She bounces her on her hip and hopes that she’s crying more out of indignation than anything else. “What can I give you?”
She peels a banana, breaks off a little piece with her fingers and offers it to Zola. She kind of just gums at it for awhile, and ultimately, Meredith winds up mashing the entire thing as best she can in a bowl. She grabs Izzie’s plastic measuring cups from the drawer, and sits Zola down on the living room floor. She feeds Zola tiny bites with a spoon that seems entirely too big for her mouth, but Zola doesn’t seem to mind. She grunts when Meredith isn’t fast enough with the next bite, and has a good time banging Izzie’s measuring cups on the floor.
It feels quiet with just the two of them there. It’s unnerving and different, but not bad. She just needs to get used to it. It feels like a whole day has passed already, but it’s only 11 AM.
Zola finally seems satisfied when she’s done with her banana. Meredith takes a good look at her. She’s trying to chew on one measuring cup and she’s got another in her other hand. She is still wearing just a diaper and the long-sleeved white t-shirt that she wore to bed. Zola doesn’t seem concerned, but Meredith wants to dress her. It’s just that they don’t have much beyond what the hospital sent home. She’s still in her pajamas too. She should try to get both herself and Zola dressed before Derek gets home, but she doesn’t want to take the cups from her and make her cry again.
After awhile, Zola looks like she’s tiring of the cups. Maybe this is a good time to take them away and try to get her changed at least. She tries to help Zola stand, holding her loosely under her armpits. Her knees buckle immediately. Meredith holds her up again, but Zola can’t support herself.
Reality hits her hard; they have a baby with spina bifida. It won’t be enough to be adequate for her; she really will need to do whatever it takes. She will need to be an extraordinary mother. She needs Derek for this part. Zola might not be able to walk. She needs Derek.
Zola smiles at Meredith. She’s not worried about her legs, so Meredith tries to smile back. She keeps holding her upright. “Ok,” she says quietly. “It’s ok. Don’t worry.” Zola sinks down a little, but Meredith keeps a strong hold on her. She wants her to know what it feels like for her feet to be on the ground. “It’s ok,” she says again, more for herself than for Zola. “We’ll figure it out. We’ll get there. We just have to keep trying.”
*
He comes home to a quiet house. Zola, Meredith tells him, has finally gone to sleep in the porta-crib, but they absolutely cannot keep it long-term because she hates it. Meredith is still in her pajamas, curled up on the couch even though it’s nearly one in the afternoon.
“How was it?” she asks.
“I don’t know.”
He hates that it’s not over yet, that he can’t figure out how far this will have to go before it will finally be over. Part of it isn’t her fault; she can’t control her genes and she didn’t make him love her. But overwhelmingly, the mess they’re in now is her fault. He hates this.
He wonders if she feels guilty now that she’s had time to think and now that she was asked not to come to work today. She’s stubborn but she has to feel it now, at least a little. How could she not feel it when it’s all he can think about?
After a silence, she pulls her hair back into a ponytail and hands him a notepad from the coffee table. “I made a list,” she says. “Or I tried to, anyway, of all the things we need for her. I may have forgotten some stuff. But there’s a Babies ‘R Us that’s like 20 minutes away so maybe they can help.”
The list is long and includes the obvious: crib, bedding, highchair, changing table, diapers, more bottles. Further down the list, she has written “non-orphanage clothes” and “real toys.” He smiles; Zola must have gotten into something that Meredith would consider to be not a real toy this morning.
“I can help with this,” he says, sitting down in the chair next to the couch with the list in hand. “I remember a lot from my nieces and nephews.”
She gives him a look that he can’t quite read. As well as he knows her, this is uncharted territory. He never had any doubt that she could gain competency in the area of taking care of a child and fulfilling their physical needs. He doesn’t have doubts about her capacity to love a child either. What he’s concerned about-what he’s still angry about-is this ethical subjectivity that she, and only she, subscribes to.
“I’m not going to apologize because I’ve been around babies before,” he says tiredly.
“I didn’t ask you to. But I am not going to apologize because I haven’t.”
It doesn’t always flare up; in fact, this dark and twisty part of her has shown itself less and less over the years. But when it does come back, it never fails to either piss him off or scare him to death. It’s the part of her that reads into things too much, and makes them more complicated than they actually are. It’s why she is angry now when all he is doing is trying to help.
He doesn’t yet know what to say about the things he said yesterday. He doesn’t really mean that he thinks she’ll be a bad mother. Already, he knows that she has stepped up and done more than she ever thought herself capable of doing. But he’s hurt and he’s angry and he really does wonder how the hell they’re going to do this. Neither of them are religious, but it’s going to be like raising a child with two different belief systems. She doesn’t think what she did was wrong, and he doesn’t know how to get beyond that.
“Did Richard call you?” he asks.
“Yeah, a little while ago,” she says. “I’m suspended without pay for two months.”
“And you’re fine with that?”
“It’s pretty much what I was expecting, Derek. The Chief told me yesterday that he was going to suspend me.”
It feels almost like he doesn’t know her. This is the woman who has practically lived in the hospital for weeks at a time on more than one occasion. Her class of residents is one of the most competitive he’s ever seen, and out of all of them, she and Cristina are at the head of the pack. She wants to be the best and now all of a sudden, she’s taking a two-month break and it doesn’t seem to bother her. Up until yesterday, everybody, she included, wanted a pristine record to try to get chief resident. A two-month suspension would have been a nail in the coffin.
“Did he tell you that the AMA is going to get involved?” he asks. He wonders if it’s appropriate that he asks the question in such an accusatory way, but then he decides that it is.
“No, he didn’t tell me that,” Meredith says quietly.
“Did he tell you that you could have your license suspended or revoked?”
“I know what the AMA does.”
“You don’t seem that concerned about it.”
Frankly, Richard is not good at this kind of thing. He should have known, based on how he has handled other ethical problems over the past few years. Richard talks a good game, but on the inside, he’s soft. Maybe it’s because deep down, he knows that he’s done several dubious things himself over the years. But whatever the reason, when it’s time to dish out punishment, he’s never been heavy-handed. And when Meredith Grey is involved, well, he’s putty.
“Of course I’m concerned about it!” she replies. “But what am I supposed to do? I did what I did, and I knew there would be consequences if someone found out. But I meant what I said yesterday. I would do it again.”
“Meredith, the AMA doesn’t give a damn about your personal relationship with the Chief of Surgery and why you did what you did,” he says. “They don’t care about the noble intentions you had. They could revoke your medical license! And then what?”
He’s trying to be quiet because he doesn’t want to wake Zola. He doesn’t want her to ever have to hear him yell. But the problem with this is that Meredith knows that Richard doesn’t know how to handle her. She knows full well that most of the time when he looks at her, he sees the five-year-old child who used to get dragged around the hospital and shouted at and shifted from person to person. He thinks that he owes her something for that. Honestly, the husband in Derek thinks that Richard certainly does owe Meredith something. But the doctor in him knows that this cycle of blame and victimization has no place in a professional setting.
“I don’t know, Derek.”
“I don’t know why you do this, Meredith.” He throws up his hands and laughs a little at the absurdity of it all. “You just do things with no regard to the consequences, like everything will be fine. And it’s not always fine, Meredith. You have no idea how damn lucky you are.”
“Don’t lecture me, Derek,” she says angrily. “But for the record, you wanted to put Adele in the trial too. I’m not the only one.”
“I wanted to put her in the trial, not destroy the whole damn thing to make sure she got the drug. I wanted to put her in the trial and give her the same shot as every other patient.”
“And that was good enough for you?”
“Of course it wasn’t good enough, but we don’t get to decide what’s good enough!” he cries. “There are millions of people with Alzheimer’s. I’d like to give all of them the treatment if I could. But now I can’t, because of you. Maybe we wouldn’t have gotten it right this time, but we could have made progress. And then maybe one day there could be a cure for Alzheimer’s. I meant what I said yesterday too. If you were focused on those people, on the millions of people who are suffering from this disease, then you wouldn’t have done this.”
“Derek, would you get off your fucking high horse?” she says angrily. “You’re not focused on the millions of people with Alzheimer’s; you want to fix me. There’s something wrong with me that you need to fix. I thought we were past that, but I guess not.”
She’s always been good about calling him on his crap, but the way she says this now makes him feel terrible. He needs this trial, but he also hates it. Does she think he likes seeing what their lives might turn into? He swore on a post-it and then in front of a judge that he would love her in sickness and in health, for better or for worse. He promised that if she gets Alzheimer’s and forgets him, that he will remind her who he is. But by promising these things, it doesn’t mean that he wants them to happen. It doesn’t mean that he has promised to avoid trying to prevent them if he can.
“I’m scared to death that you might get Alzheimer’s,” he says. “Is that so wrong?”
“No. I’m scared too. I wanted to find out, so we could know what we’re in for. We can still do that.”
“That won’t make it better!” he says. “I don’t want you to have Alzheimer’s at all. I want you to be here.”
She leans forward and puts her head in her hands for a second. She takes a deep breath, and when she looks up at him, she says, “Then you don’t get to act like you’re the only one who did anything for personal reasons in this trial.”
“If anything, I did this for you,” he says. “I did this for my wife. And I didn’t do anything that could destroy my career. You did. And you did it for a man who…Meredith, you didn’t even want him at our wedding!”
“Derek, I’m sorry that I hurt you. I am,” she says. “But Adele was begging me to give her, her husband back. She thought I was my mother. I was trying to make it right. So you need to decide if you can live with that.”
He believes her when she says she is sorry, but he isn’t ready to accept the apology. There’s still so much that’s been lost and so much to be afraid of.
“Meredith,” he replies. “It’s not about whether or not I can live with this. My trial’s gone down the drain. Your career might have gone with it. This is already done. But when you pull crap like this, I have to wonder when’s the next time you’re going to put your hand on a bomb. We have a baby now. You can’t take these kinds of risks. Maybe you don’t believe there are a right and a wrong, but in situations like these, there is. Because everybody else believes it. Because the FDA and the AMA believe it, and that’s the way it goes.”
“I can be her mother, Derek. I can’t promise you anything about right and wrong. But if you think the worst thing about being raised by my mother was that she got Alzheimer’s when she was in her fifties, you’re wrong. So, I can promise you that I will do whatever it takes. I want her. And you’re either on board or you’re not.”
She wipes tears out of her eyes. Even though she rarely cries, he hates it when she does. Trying to have a baby has been wearing her down, and she gets emotional much more quickly and frequently than she ever did before. This part of her is different from how she used to be; he never thought she would want a baby as badly as she does. He knows that this past year has broken both of their hearts. Maybe she’s just tired, but maybe she has a different idea of where this fight is going than he does. He wants Zola too. He’s not going to leave.
He tries to smile. They can figure this out later. Softly, gently, he asks, “Do you want to talk more about this list?”
*
When Zola wakes up, they put her in the car and drive to Babies ‘R Us. List in hand, Meredith knows that she has to be forgetting a million things, so her plan is to just walk up and down every aisle and look at everything, regardless of whether it made the original list or not.
She has no idea what she’s doing. There’s no point in trying to avoid that. Common sense has gotten her as far as she can probably expect it to, and a lot of this is going to be a trial by fire situation. Slowly, she’s trying to accept that that’s ok, that Zola doesn’t know any better and by the time she does, they’ll have it together.
In her entire life, this has never crossed her mind before this moment, but she wonders who did this kind of thing for her. Surely, before she was born, Ellis and Thatcher must have realized that the baby would need things. Who made sure that there was a crib ready for her? Did they spend time choosing the right kind of bedding, the way she and Derek were now? Did Ellis read Your Baby’s First Year?
Zola sits in the seat at the front of the cart while Derek pushes it up and down the aisles. She walks alongside the cart, holding the list and a sandwich baggie of Cheerios in one hand, and pulling items from the list off the shelves with the other hand. Every few paces, she slips a Cheerio into Zola’s mouth, which seems to be keeping her happy for the time being.
They’re 20 minutes into the trip when she realizes that they’re going to need to make a return trip soon. Their cart is almost full and they’re barely halfway through the store. It’s overwhelming that there could be a superstore dedicated to babies. Half the cart is taken up by things she didn’t even know existed, like bottle cleaning brushes (which come in four different colors) and teething toys that are shaped like jungle animals.
“Do you think she would like this?” she asks, holding up a package containing a set of crib bedding with blue and green paisley birds and trees. “It’s girly but not too girly. I don’t want her room to be like an explosion of pink.”
“Zola, what do you think?” Derek asks, but she’s too busy waiting for her next Cheerio to pay much attention to the bedding.
They decide to go with the paisley bird bedding. Even though she can tell that Derek wants Zola to be a daddy’s girl, he agrees that they don’t need too much pink crap for her.
There’s not as much time to linger in the store and agonize over which furniture set they should choose and what pattern of fabric should be covering the boppy pillow. It takes enough time to learn what a boppy pillow is and to figure out how much furniture they can even fit in their house right now, let alone make any of the other more cosmetic decisions. It quickly becomes apparent that they will probably have to do most of this again once they’re actually ready to move. She shifts her attention to thinking of this trip as more of a stop-gap.
This is kind of like how she thought it would be. Of course, Zola starts crying after awhile and no longer wants to sit in the cart, but that’s manageable. They’re not fighting. There are moments where she forgets they ever were and that there are still things that they must sort out. For now, this just feels nice. When she tosses a few packs of white onesies into the cart, she thinks back to Callie’s baby shower and feels relief. And when Zola stops crying when she holds her, it makes her so happy that she could bust.
*
After 45 minutes, they’ve already let a sales associate take one full cart to the front of the store for safe-keeping. Now on cart number two, they’re slowing down a little, but they still have a few aisles to go through before he will feel safe leaving the store. He agrees with Meredith-they’re going to have to come back-but he never realized how much stuff they would need until he found himself surrounded by all of it.
He has no idea that there are so many different kinds of strollers. Of course he has seen them before. As someone who both is conscious and has been a pedestrian in a suburb or city, he realizes that strollers are everywhere, but now that they actually have to buy one, he’s at a loss.
“Which one do you think she would like?” he asks.
“Well,” Meredith says slowly, scanning the obscene number of choices. “She has to ride in it, so how about a test drive? Do you want to take a test drive, Zola?” she asks the baby in her arms. “Let’s try that one,” she says, pointing to a basic black stroller with a tray and a padded seat. “Can you grab it?”
He takes the model stroller off the shelf, and Meredith buckles Zola in. “What do you think, Zola?” she asks, squatting down in front of the baby. “Do you like it?” Zola grins.
She pushes it up the aisle a bit and stops. “It handles well,” she says. “You try.”
He leaves the cart and takes the reins on the stroller, pushing Zola back towards Meredith. “Do you like it?” she asks Zola again. Her voice gets softer, and a little higher, when she talks to Zola. He doesn’t think she even realizes.
She feels the fabric of the stroller’s seat and says, “This is practically nicer than my car. If you have no complaints, Zola,” she says as she unbuckles her, “I think we can go with this one. Is that ok?” she asks him.
“Fine by me,” he replies. He puts the model stroller back and takes a ticket so they can pick it up with the rest of their big equipment purchases when they’re ready to leave.
The next aisle is dedicated to walkers, swings, bouncers, jumpers, and playsets. So far, she’s walked a little bit ahead of him, but when she sees this stuff, she turns around to face him.
“I don’t know what to get for her,” she says quietly.
He looks at the pictures on the boxes of babies using this stuff. They scoot around hardwood floors with their delighted parents following closely behind, or they bounce in a harness suspended from a doorway, or they stand to push the buttons of a musical tabletop set.
Zola has already had spinal surgery and brain surgery. But she can move her legs.
“We’re going to get all of it, ok?” he says. “She will use it.”
Meredith nods and snuggles Zola a little closer. She tickles Zola’s side, and Zola giggles and then gives a full-on belly laugh when Meredith does it again. Zola tosses her head back and shrieks happily, and he’s never seen Meredith smile quite like she is now. His heart floods with joy.
* * *
A/N: Thank you all so much for your kind words so far! I'm having fun with this, and I hope you enjoy the next part as much as I enjoyed writing it. I hope that Shonda keeps her promise to shift the focus back to the original characters in S8, because the more I get into this, the more I realize how complicated it is. It deserves time and attention. Thank you, as always, to boofadil for your insight and helpful feedback!
Author: greymcdreamysgh
Pairing: MerDer
Rating: PG-13
Summary: A short serial that takes place immediately following the season 7 finale. How do you recover after the storm?
Disclaimer: All television shows, movies, books, and other copyrighted material referred to in this work, and the characters, settings, and events thereof, are the properties of their respective owners. As this work is an interpretation of the original material and not for-profit, it constitutes fair use. Reference to real persons, places, or events are made in a fictional context, and are not intended to be libelous, defamatory, or in any way factual.
Well I guess I'll just go home,
Oh, God knows where.
Because death is just so full and man so small.
Well I'm scared of what's behind and what's before.
He’s disoriented when his phone wakes him up the next morning. It’s only two hours after he comes back home, so it’s more of a nap than a night’s sleep. Everything that they have said to each other, and all that has transpired-it hits him like a hangover, behind his eyes and in his gut.
The house is still quiet when he goes downstairs to put on a pot of coffee. Cristina’s asleep on the couch, and he prays that she doesn’t wake up. He thinks that over the past year, they’ve come to some sort of understanding and maybe even a friendship, but he will absolutely not be having this conversation with her. Upstairs, he takes a towel out of the linen closet and showers in the bathroom that everybody else shares so he can go as long as possible without waking-ok, without having to confront-Meredith. He steals shampoo from Avery, but realizes that he might not have time to shave today.
He eases open the door of their bedroom when he’s done. Meredith and Zola are asleep in bed, Zola with one arm over her head lying on her back and Meredith on her side with a hand near Zola. Meredith is so close to the edge of the bed that he wonders how she didn’t fall out, especially when he sees all of their pillows on the floor, but then he realizes that Zola is close to the middle and the pillows are for her. He says nothing, deciding to just let them sleep, and sneaks as quietly as he can into their own bathroom to dress and deal with his hair.
Cristina’s still asleep on the couch when he pours himself a cup of coffee and looks around. It seems like the hospital sent them home with a lot of things. There are sample-size cans of formula and a pack of unopened bottles on the kitchen counter, and their bedroom is suddenly full of baby supplies. He has thought about what the first night home from the hospital with his firstborn would be like off and on for fifteen years, ever since he and Addison were newlyweds but more and more now that he and Meredith have been trying so hard to have a baby. He never thought it would be like this, but then again, it seems like nothing ever turns out the way he thinks it will.
While he’s waiting, he makes a bottle for Zola. There isn’t much formula left in the can that’s already opened, just enough for about four ounces, so he uses it all and hopes that will be enough at least to start. In a half hour, he can hear alarm clocks begin to go off, footsteps creaking on the hardwood upstairs, and the water of the shower turning on again. Meredith comes downstairs with Zola in her arms. Zola’s eyes are still sleepy; she looks around as wide-eyed as she can for someone who has just woken up.
“Hi, Zola,” he says softly. “What do you think of your new house?” Zola smiles when she sees him, and snuggles closer to Meredith. The hangover feeling in his stomach gets a little worse for a second.
Meredith hands him the baby and sits down. “Hi,” he says. He hugs Zola close, and kisses her cheek before turning to Meredith. “How was your night?” he asks.
“Long.” She looks more exhausted than he does. Usually, when she comes downstairs, she is showered, dressed, and ready to walk out the door. Today, she looks like her nerves are absolutely shot. “Is there coffee?” she asks.
“Yeah.” He gets up, shifting Zola to his hip, and pours Meredith a cup of coffee, and takes the bottle he made out of the fridge for Zola. “I have a bottle for her. Will she drink it cold?”
Meredith has both hands wrapped around her mug, drinking her coffee black. “I don’t know,” she says. She sounds stressed, but in a nervous way, not an angry way. “Last night, it was kind of lukewarm. Maybe leave it out for a few minutes first?”
But when Zola sees the bottle, she reaches for it anyway, cold or not. He sits down with her in the chair next to Meredith, Zola in one arm and the bottle in the opposite hand. “Let’s just try it,” he says.
When Zola takes the bottle, drinking greedily, Meredith looks down into her cup. He’s so engrossed with the baby who is finally in his arms, in his house, that he barely notices that it takes Meredith awhile to talk again. When she does, she asks quietly, “Are you going to work today?”
He glances over at the clock on the oven and snaps back into reality. He could have chalked this morning up to exhaustion if he didn’t know that he still had this whole mess to sort out at the hospital.
“I have to. I have to meet with the FDA. Will you be ok with her?” He hands Zola, who is still holding her bottle, back to Meredith. “I can come home right after.”
Milk drips down Zola’s front. Meredith reaches for a napkin from the holder at the center of the table, and dabs around her mouth, trying to get everything before Zola’s shirt gets wet. Zola tilts her head back a little as she drinks, and Meredith adjusts her so she’s more settled in her arms.
“We’ll be fine. We’re going to go out for awhile,” she says, “But we’ll see you when we come back.”
He hasn’t given it much thought until now, but he wonders about the logistics of transporting Zola around with limited supplies. The hospital must have given them a car seat, but up until now, he’s thought of Zola as someone who would stay in place for awhile. They never got to take her anywhere further than down the hall from her hospital room, and it seems strange that now they can just put her in their car and drive her all over the city if they want to. It’s stranger still that Meredith has already done it, wants to do it again, and doesn’t seem to care what he thinks about it.
“Where are you going?” he asks. His mug is empty and he’s going to be late for work if he doesn’t leave soon.
“She needs things, Derek. She can’t sleep in that porta-crib again.”
They were supposed to do this together. He didn’t know it was going to be today, or even this week. They never talked about stuff like this while they were trying to get pregnant; after months of disappointment, conversations about a baby’s room felt depressing and foolish. But since they decided to adopt Zola, it had come up more than once. Of course, they thought they’d be decorating in their new house, not cramming more stuff into an already-packed home. They’d just have to figure it out.
He’s waited for this for a long time, and he wants to turn this around. When he asks her if she will wait a few hours until he gets home, she agrees.
A conference call with the trial’s institutional review board is scheduled for 11 AM. He wants to spend some time coming up with a game plan, but by the time he rounds on his post-op patients, it’s time to call in.
It’s unraveling fast. He knows that this trial is flashy, that there’s a lot of money and a lot of emotion involved. The rational part of him is not surprised that it will crash down this quickly, but he thought he would at least have a few days to wrap his own head around all of this before he has to deal with anything beyond the trial’s repercussions in his personal life. Richard asks if Derek wants him on the call, but he shakes him off. Somehow, he feels like Richard’s being there will not help.
There are three doctors on the phone. They start by saying that they want to, and will, schedule a face-to-face meeting, but that they needed more time to coordinate schedules first. They couldn’t get everyone on short notice, so they’ll start with just the three of them and the phone call.
“Dr. Shepherd,” the gruff but clear voice of Dr. Pollock, the head of the trial’s IRB, begins. “Please describe for us what you believe has happened with the administration of your clinical trial.”
Derek wonders if that’s just how this guy talks, or if he’s already pissed. With the phone on speaker, the sensation of that voice in this empty office somehow makes him feel more stressed than he already is. He picks the phone up and holds it to his ear, gripping the receiver tightly. He glances at a picture of him and Meredith on his desk. It was taken a few years ago-by Izzie, he’s pretty sure-on a slow night when they were both on-call. Meredith’s sitting on top of the desk at the nurses’ station, and he’s in the chair next to her, but leaning up out of it. They were the victims of Izzie in one of her sentimental moods. He’s kissing her cheek, and she’s smiling. They are both wearing scrubs and they’re both happy.
He starts talking. “It came to our attention yesterday that a resident working closely with me on the trial improperly accessed information regarding which subjects were to receive the placebo and which were to receive the experimental drug.” He pauses and sighs before he continues. “Because of a personal connection to one of the subjects, who was scheduled to receive the placebo, the resident switched out her information with that of another subject. None of this was disclosed to me or to any of the other supervising physicians until yesterday, when another resident approached one of our attendings.”
“Were either the whistleblower or the other attending involved in the trial?” Dr. Pollock asks.
“No.”
“Dr. Shepherd, this is Dr. Ingram,” a woman chimes in. “I’d like to follow up on the trial’s methodology, which you mentioned a moment ago. Is it correct that this is a single-blind study?”
He doesn’t like the way she asks, like she already knows he’s done something wrong. In a sense, he supposes that she does know that. He hates that he has to answer for all of this, especially when he does not yet have all the answers. He wishes that he could somehow put this on Richard, or on Meredith, to deal with. He hates this feeling of being judged, of failure.
“In a sense, yes.” He continues on as best he can, and hopes that he does not come off as shaken. All he can do now is tell the truth and hope for the best, but he’s not really expecting anything but the worst.
“All subjects were randomly assigned by computer whether they would receive the placebo or the drug, and that data was handled by an individual who was not involved in any capacity with the study other than to work in the laboratory where the data was stored. We only learned which to administer in the OR as the surgery was about to begin, and had no role in assigning subjects to the control group or to the experimental group. The subjects themselves were never informed whether they received the drug or not.”
He hopes he sounds prepared, and that he’s telling them what they want to hear. Ten or fifteen seconds go by without anyone speaking. It feels like an eternity. He turns in his chair a little and grips the fabric of his trousers with his free hand, bunching it up and then flexing his fingers.
“Dr. Shepherd, this is Dr. Bollhardt speaking,” the third doctor, another man, finally says. “Is it correct that all post-operative evaluations were to be conducted by you and the resident assisting on the trial?”
“That is correct.”
“What course of action has the hospital taken so far?”
He takes a deep breath, one he hopes they can’t hear, and says, “The resident who skewed the trial’s data has been suspended without pay, and reinstatement will be determined by the chief of surgery and an additional panel of physicians after two months. Scheduled surgeries are postponed and all subjects have been notified that all trial proceedings have been halted until further notice.”
“Well, Dr. Shepherd, any accusation or admission of scientific misconduct, especially on a trial using human subjects, is taken very seriously. It was appropriate to stop all activities associated with this trial, and we will need to conduct a more formal review.”
It’s what he expected, but it doesn’t mean it hurts any less. Since yesterday, it has been slowly sinking in that his chance is over. It’s a crushing defeat. In his last clinical trial, they were killing people left and right. This one felt like it was working right from the start. But he shouldn’t think about that, because now it’s done.
There’s nothing else to say but what comes next: “I would be happy to cooperate with that review process.”
“We’re pleased to hear that,” Dr. Ingram says. “Whatever misconduct that may have occurred on the part of the resident, frankly-and I’ll speak for myself here-I need to review the methodology of this study more closely. It seems like bias has come into the study at several points, certainly most egregiously with the incident that prompted this discussion. But I am troubled by the amount of involvement that you and your colleague have with this trial. Again, I need to review the information more extensively but, on first glance, what strikes me is that you both would have knowledge of the course of treatment during your post-op evaluations of the patients. Whatever personal biases may have occurred before surgery, it seems to be compounded by the potential for subconscious biases in the evaluation phase.”
“Dr. Ingram, let’s not get ahead of ourselves here,” Dr. Pollock says.
“No, as I said, we do need to conduct a formal review,” she says. “I am merely informing Dr. Shepherd of my concerns.”
He feels beaten down now. It’s unfair that he has to deal with this burden and take this flogging alone. If they knew what the stakes were for him, they would know that he would never do anything to jeopardize this.
“Again,” he says. “I am happy to cooperate with you and to provide you with whatever information you may need as the review process moves forward.”
“Thank you, Dr. Shepherd,” Dr. Pollock says. “Seattle Grace-Mercy West has forwarded us the collected data for your study up to this point, and we will be looking at it carefully over the next few days and weeks. You have already done so, but you are required to stop administering the experimental treatment until further notice”
What comes next is a bomb he wasn’t expecting.
“We also will be notifying the AMA regarding the resident in question,” Dr. Pollock continues. “As you know, penalties for scientific misconduct also fall under their jurisdiction. Thank you for your time and cooperation, Dr. Shepherd. We’ll be in touch.”
He sits in stunned silence for a second before he says thank you and hangs up the phone.
*
It all takes up a lot more time than she thought it would. She feels sort of like a lab tech for this part, with all the sterilization that needs to happen before she can make these bottles. She’s also realizing the need for a highchair, now that she’s trying to do all this stuff with nowhere to put Zola. The whole house suddenly feels like a death trap.
She sits Zola on the counter with one arm around her waist. She squints at the small print on the can of formula and uses her other hand to scoop the requisite amount of powder into the five open bottles. The can empties faster than she thought it would.
“See, we’re figuring it out, right?” she says. Zola stares at her, and leans towards her to reach for the can. Grabbing it, she bangs it on the counter, pleased with herself, she laughs.
Meredith forgot what it felt like when she laughed. For a second, last night and this morning and all the tenseness that exists in the space between her and Derek goes away. She can see why it’s so easy for parents to love their children. Zola grips the rim of the empty can tightly and bangs it on the counter again. She laughs harder this time, and sticks out her tongue a little.
“Is that fun?” she asks the baby, a smile creeping across her face. Zola snickers and hits the can again. As best she can, Meredith screws the nipples onto the bottles with one hand and says, “We need to get you better toys.”
Zola drinks one of the bottles quickly, sitting in the corner of the couch in the crook of Meredith’s elbow. Alex wasn’t kidding when he said yesterday that she was feeding normally. She wonders if she’s giving her enough food; they’ve fed her a few times in the hospital but the nurses always kept track of how much and how often she needed to eat. She hasn’t given it much thought until now. Zola’s still sucking on the bottle, which only has air in it now.
“Are you still hungry?” she asks. She takes the bottle from Zola, who promptly starts crying. “Well, you only have two teeth, so I don’t know. Let’s see.”
She’s scared to leave her alone, so she shifts Zola to her hip and carries her back to the kitchen. “Let’s see,” she says again, but Zola keeps crying. She bounces her on her hip and hopes that she’s crying more out of indignation than anything else. “What can I give you?”
She peels a banana, breaks off a little piece with her fingers and offers it to Zola. She kind of just gums at it for awhile, and ultimately, Meredith winds up mashing the entire thing as best she can in a bowl. She grabs Izzie’s plastic measuring cups from the drawer, and sits Zola down on the living room floor. She feeds Zola tiny bites with a spoon that seems entirely too big for her mouth, but Zola doesn’t seem to mind. She grunts when Meredith isn’t fast enough with the next bite, and has a good time banging Izzie’s measuring cups on the floor.
It feels quiet with just the two of them there. It’s unnerving and different, but not bad. She just needs to get used to it. It feels like a whole day has passed already, but it’s only 11 AM.
Zola finally seems satisfied when she’s done with her banana. Meredith takes a good look at her. She’s trying to chew on one measuring cup and she’s got another in her other hand. She is still wearing just a diaper and the long-sleeved white t-shirt that she wore to bed. Zola doesn’t seem concerned, but Meredith wants to dress her. It’s just that they don’t have much beyond what the hospital sent home. She’s still in her pajamas too. She should try to get both herself and Zola dressed before Derek gets home, but she doesn’t want to take the cups from her and make her cry again.
After awhile, Zola looks like she’s tiring of the cups. Maybe this is a good time to take them away and try to get her changed at least. She tries to help Zola stand, holding her loosely under her armpits. Her knees buckle immediately. Meredith holds her up again, but Zola can’t support herself.
Reality hits her hard; they have a baby with spina bifida. It won’t be enough to be adequate for her; she really will need to do whatever it takes. She will need to be an extraordinary mother. She needs Derek for this part. Zola might not be able to walk. She needs Derek.
Zola smiles at Meredith. She’s not worried about her legs, so Meredith tries to smile back. She keeps holding her upright. “Ok,” she says quietly. “It’s ok. Don’t worry.” Zola sinks down a little, but Meredith keeps a strong hold on her. She wants her to know what it feels like for her feet to be on the ground. “It’s ok,” she says again, more for herself than for Zola. “We’ll figure it out. We’ll get there. We just have to keep trying.”
*
He comes home to a quiet house. Zola, Meredith tells him, has finally gone to sleep in the porta-crib, but they absolutely cannot keep it long-term because she hates it. Meredith is still in her pajamas, curled up on the couch even though it’s nearly one in the afternoon.
“How was it?” she asks.
“I don’t know.”
He hates that it’s not over yet, that he can’t figure out how far this will have to go before it will finally be over. Part of it isn’t her fault; she can’t control her genes and she didn’t make him love her. But overwhelmingly, the mess they’re in now is her fault. He hates this.
He wonders if she feels guilty now that she’s had time to think and now that she was asked not to come to work today. She’s stubborn but she has to feel it now, at least a little. How could she not feel it when it’s all he can think about?
After a silence, she pulls her hair back into a ponytail and hands him a notepad from the coffee table. “I made a list,” she says. “Or I tried to, anyway, of all the things we need for her. I may have forgotten some stuff. But there’s a Babies ‘R Us that’s like 20 minutes away so maybe they can help.”
The list is long and includes the obvious: crib, bedding, highchair, changing table, diapers, more bottles. Further down the list, she has written “non-orphanage clothes” and “real toys.” He smiles; Zola must have gotten into something that Meredith would consider to be not a real toy this morning.
“I can help with this,” he says, sitting down in the chair next to the couch with the list in hand. “I remember a lot from my nieces and nephews.”
She gives him a look that he can’t quite read. As well as he knows her, this is uncharted territory. He never had any doubt that she could gain competency in the area of taking care of a child and fulfilling their physical needs. He doesn’t have doubts about her capacity to love a child either. What he’s concerned about-what he’s still angry about-is this ethical subjectivity that she, and only she, subscribes to.
“I’m not going to apologize because I’ve been around babies before,” he says tiredly.
“I didn’t ask you to. But I am not going to apologize because I haven’t.”
It doesn’t always flare up; in fact, this dark and twisty part of her has shown itself less and less over the years. But when it does come back, it never fails to either piss him off or scare him to death. It’s the part of her that reads into things too much, and makes them more complicated than they actually are. It’s why she is angry now when all he is doing is trying to help.
He doesn’t yet know what to say about the things he said yesterday. He doesn’t really mean that he thinks she’ll be a bad mother. Already, he knows that she has stepped up and done more than she ever thought herself capable of doing. But he’s hurt and he’s angry and he really does wonder how the hell they’re going to do this. Neither of them are religious, but it’s going to be like raising a child with two different belief systems. She doesn’t think what she did was wrong, and he doesn’t know how to get beyond that.
“Did Richard call you?” he asks.
“Yeah, a little while ago,” she says. “I’m suspended without pay for two months.”
“And you’re fine with that?”
“It’s pretty much what I was expecting, Derek. The Chief told me yesterday that he was going to suspend me.”
It feels almost like he doesn’t know her. This is the woman who has practically lived in the hospital for weeks at a time on more than one occasion. Her class of residents is one of the most competitive he’s ever seen, and out of all of them, she and Cristina are at the head of the pack. She wants to be the best and now all of a sudden, she’s taking a two-month break and it doesn’t seem to bother her. Up until yesterday, everybody, she included, wanted a pristine record to try to get chief resident. A two-month suspension would have been a nail in the coffin.
“Did he tell you that the AMA is going to get involved?” he asks. He wonders if it’s appropriate that he asks the question in such an accusatory way, but then he decides that it is.
“No, he didn’t tell me that,” Meredith says quietly.
“Did he tell you that you could have your license suspended or revoked?”
“I know what the AMA does.”
“You don’t seem that concerned about it.”
Frankly, Richard is not good at this kind of thing. He should have known, based on how he has handled other ethical problems over the past few years. Richard talks a good game, but on the inside, he’s soft. Maybe it’s because deep down, he knows that he’s done several dubious things himself over the years. But whatever the reason, when it’s time to dish out punishment, he’s never been heavy-handed. And when Meredith Grey is involved, well, he’s putty.
“Of course I’m concerned about it!” she replies. “But what am I supposed to do? I did what I did, and I knew there would be consequences if someone found out. But I meant what I said yesterday. I would do it again.”
“Meredith, the AMA doesn’t give a damn about your personal relationship with the Chief of Surgery and why you did what you did,” he says. “They don’t care about the noble intentions you had. They could revoke your medical license! And then what?”
He’s trying to be quiet because he doesn’t want to wake Zola. He doesn’t want her to ever have to hear him yell. But the problem with this is that Meredith knows that Richard doesn’t know how to handle her. She knows full well that most of the time when he looks at her, he sees the five-year-old child who used to get dragged around the hospital and shouted at and shifted from person to person. He thinks that he owes her something for that. Honestly, the husband in Derek thinks that Richard certainly does owe Meredith something. But the doctor in him knows that this cycle of blame and victimization has no place in a professional setting.
“I don’t know, Derek.”
“I don’t know why you do this, Meredith.” He throws up his hands and laughs a little at the absurdity of it all. “You just do things with no regard to the consequences, like everything will be fine. And it’s not always fine, Meredith. You have no idea how damn lucky you are.”
“Don’t lecture me, Derek,” she says angrily. “But for the record, you wanted to put Adele in the trial too. I’m not the only one.”
“I wanted to put her in the trial, not destroy the whole damn thing to make sure she got the drug. I wanted to put her in the trial and give her the same shot as every other patient.”
“And that was good enough for you?”
“Of course it wasn’t good enough, but we don’t get to decide what’s good enough!” he cries. “There are millions of people with Alzheimer’s. I’d like to give all of them the treatment if I could. But now I can’t, because of you. Maybe we wouldn’t have gotten it right this time, but we could have made progress. And then maybe one day there could be a cure for Alzheimer’s. I meant what I said yesterday too. If you were focused on those people, on the millions of people who are suffering from this disease, then you wouldn’t have done this.”
“Derek, would you get off your fucking high horse?” she says angrily. “You’re not focused on the millions of people with Alzheimer’s; you want to fix me. There’s something wrong with me that you need to fix. I thought we were past that, but I guess not.”
She’s always been good about calling him on his crap, but the way she says this now makes him feel terrible. He needs this trial, but he also hates it. Does she think he likes seeing what their lives might turn into? He swore on a post-it and then in front of a judge that he would love her in sickness and in health, for better or for worse. He promised that if she gets Alzheimer’s and forgets him, that he will remind her who he is. But by promising these things, it doesn’t mean that he wants them to happen. It doesn’t mean that he has promised to avoid trying to prevent them if he can.
“I’m scared to death that you might get Alzheimer’s,” he says. “Is that so wrong?”
“No. I’m scared too. I wanted to find out, so we could know what we’re in for. We can still do that.”
“That won’t make it better!” he says. “I don’t want you to have Alzheimer’s at all. I want you to be here.”
She leans forward and puts her head in her hands for a second. She takes a deep breath, and when she looks up at him, she says, “Then you don’t get to act like you’re the only one who did anything for personal reasons in this trial.”
“If anything, I did this for you,” he says. “I did this for my wife. And I didn’t do anything that could destroy my career. You did. And you did it for a man who…Meredith, you didn’t even want him at our wedding!”
“Derek, I’m sorry that I hurt you. I am,” she says. “But Adele was begging me to give her, her husband back. She thought I was my mother. I was trying to make it right. So you need to decide if you can live with that.”
He believes her when she says she is sorry, but he isn’t ready to accept the apology. There’s still so much that’s been lost and so much to be afraid of.
“Meredith,” he replies. “It’s not about whether or not I can live with this. My trial’s gone down the drain. Your career might have gone with it. This is already done. But when you pull crap like this, I have to wonder when’s the next time you’re going to put your hand on a bomb. We have a baby now. You can’t take these kinds of risks. Maybe you don’t believe there are a right and a wrong, but in situations like these, there is. Because everybody else believes it. Because the FDA and the AMA believe it, and that’s the way it goes.”
“I can be her mother, Derek. I can’t promise you anything about right and wrong. But if you think the worst thing about being raised by my mother was that she got Alzheimer’s when she was in her fifties, you’re wrong. So, I can promise you that I will do whatever it takes. I want her. And you’re either on board or you’re not.”
She wipes tears out of her eyes. Even though she rarely cries, he hates it when she does. Trying to have a baby has been wearing her down, and she gets emotional much more quickly and frequently than she ever did before. This part of her is different from how she used to be; he never thought she would want a baby as badly as she does. He knows that this past year has broken both of their hearts. Maybe she’s just tired, but maybe she has a different idea of where this fight is going than he does. He wants Zola too. He’s not going to leave.
He tries to smile. They can figure this out later. Softly, gently, he asks, “Do you want to talk more about this list?”
*
When Zola wakes up, they put her in the car and drive to Babies ‘R Us. List in hand, Meredith knows that she has to be forgetting a million things, so her plan is to just walk up and down every aisle and look at everything, regardless of whether it made the original list or not.
She has no idea what she’s doing. There’s no point in trying to avoid that. Common sense has gotten her as far as she can probably expect it to, and a lot of this is going to be a trial by fire situation. Slowly, she’s trying to accept that that’s ok, that Zola doesn’t know any better and by the time she does, they’ll have it together.
In her entire life, this has never crossed her mind before this moment, but she wonders who did this kind of thing for her. Surely, before she was born, Ellis and Thatcher must have realized that the baby would need things. Who made sure that there was a crib ready for her? Did they spend time choosing the right kind of bedding, the way she and Derek were now? Did Ellis read Your Baby’s First Year?
Zola sits in the seat at the front of the cart while Derek pushes it up and down the aisles. She walks alongside the cart, holding the list and a sandwich baggie of Cheerios in one hand, and pulling items from the list off the shelves with the other hand. Every few paces, she slips a Cheerio into Zola’s mouth, which seems to be keeping her happy for the time being.
They’re 20 minutes into the trip when she realizes that they’re going to need to make a return trip soon. Their cart is almost full and they’re barely halfway through the store. It’s overwhelming that there could be a superstore dedicated to babies. Half the cart is taken up by things she didn’t even know existed, like bottle cleaning brushes (which come in four different colors) and teething toys that are shaped like jungle animals.
“Do you think she would like this?” she asks, holding up a package containing a set of crib bedding with blue and green paisley birds and trees. “It’s girly but not too girly. I don’t want her room to be like an explosion of pink.”
“Zola, what do you think?” Derek asks, but she’s too busy waiting for her next Cheerio to pay much attention to the bedding.
They decide to go with the paisley bird bedding. Even though she can tell that Derek wants Zola to be a daddy’s girl, he agrees that they don’t need too much pink crap for her.
There’s not as much time to linger in the store and agonize over which furniture set they should choose and what pattern of fabric should be covering the boppy pillow. It takes enough time to learn what a boppy pillow is and to figure out how much furniture they can even fit in their house right now, let alone make any of the other more cosmetic decisions. It quickly becomes apparent that they will probably have to do most of this again once they’re actually ready to move. She shifts her attention to thinking of this trip as more of a stop-gap.
This is kind of like how she thought it would be. Of course, Zola starts crying after awhile and no longer wants to sit in the cart, but that’s manageable. They’re not fighting. There are moments where she forgets they ever were and that there are still things that they must sort out. For now, this just feels nice. When she tosses a few packs of white onesies into the cart, she thinks back to Callie’s baby shower and feels relief. And when Zola stops crying when she holds her, it makes her so happy that she could bust.
*
After 45 minutes, they’ve already let a sales associate take one full cart to the front of the store for safe-keeping. Now on cart number two, they’re slowing down a little, but they still have a few aisles to go through before he will feel safe leaving the store. He agrees with Meredith-they’re going to have to come back-but he never realized how much stuff they would need until he found himself surrounded by all of it.
He has no idea that there are so many different kinds of strollers. Of course he has seen them before. As someone who both is conscious and has been a pedestrian in a suburb or city, he realizes that strollers are everywhere, but now that they actually have to buy one, he’s at a loss.
“Which one do you think she would like?” he asks.
“Well,” Meredith says slowly, scanning the obscene number of choices. “She has to ride in it, so how about a test drive? Do you want to take a test drive, Zola?” she asks the baby in her arms. “Let’s try that one,” she says, pointing to a basic black stroller with a tray and a padded seat. “Can you grab it?”
He takes the model stroller off the shelf, and Meredith buckles Zola in. “What do you think, Zola?” she asks, squatting down in front of the baby. “Do you like it?” Zola grins.
She pushes it up the aisle a bit and stops. “It handles well,” she says. “You try.”
He leaves the cart and takes the reins on the stroller, pushing Zola back towards Meredith. “Do you like it?” she asks Zola again. Her voice gets softer, and a little higher, when she talks to Zola. He doesn’t think she even realizes.
She feels the fabric of the stroller’s seat and says, “This is practically nicer than my car. If you have no complaints, Zola,” she says as she unbuckles her, “I think we can go with this one. Is that ok?” she asks him.
“Fine by me,” he replies. He puts the model stroller back and takes a ticket so they can pick it up with the rest of their big equipment purchases when they’re ready to leave.
The next aisle is dedicated to walkers, swings, bouncers, jumpers, and playsets. So far, she’s walked a little bit ahead of him, but when she sees this stuff, she turns around to face him.
“I don’t know what to get for her,” she says quietly.
He looks at the pictures on the boxes of babies using this stuff. They scoot around hardwood floors with their delighted parents following closely behind, or they bounce in a harness suspended from a doorway, or they stand to push the buttons of a musical tabletop set.
Zola has already had spinal surgery and brain surgery. But she can move her legs.
“We’re going to get all of it, ok?” he says. “She will use it.”
Meredith nods and snuggles Zola a little closer. She tickles Zola’s side, and Zola giggles and then gives a full-on belly laugh when Meredith does it again. Zola tosses her head back and shrieks happily, and he’s never seen Meredith smile quite like she is now. His heart floods with joy.
* * *
A/N: Thank you all so much for your kind words so far! I'm having fun with this, and I hope you enjoy the next part as much as I enjoyed writing it. I hope that Shonda keeps her promise to shift the focus back to the original characters in S8, because the more I get into this, the more I realize how complicated it is. It deserves time and attention. Thank you, as always, to boofadil for your insight and helpful feedback!