love in the time of science - chapter nine
So, another LitToS chapter. I’m apparently crap at the speedy update thing, but I swear I’m trying. I think speedy thoughts. My typing fingers just don’t always listen. But yeah, here it is. And there is very serious business MerDer conversation inside, so hopefully that’s a good thing.
Also, in unrelated news. The Office just about killed me with the funny last night. Dwight, you can be my safety officer any day.
Title: Love in the Time of Science
Author: Morgen
Summary: Love. Tragedy. The things we’ve left unsaid. This is their story. Set after episode 5.05.
Disclaimer: I am not famous. I do not own TV shows. I am a poor college student with a laptop and a serious procrastination habit.
Rating: Written for grownups.
“What do you mean I don’t get to scrub in?” spluttered Meredith, staring at Bailey in disbelief. “I just spent all morning prepping Mr. Garcia for surgery!”
“Yes and thank you for that,” said Bailey. She was looking down at the chart Meredith had brought her, giving tiny little nods of her head as she scanned the information.
“But you’re still not going to let me scrub in?”
Bailey glanced up and nodded again. “Correct.”
“Then why even have me prep him?” asked Meredith. “An intern could’ve done it.” She could tell she sounded whiny, but she still had too much of a headache to care. This surgery was supposed to distract her from the clinical trial patient Derek apparently wasn’t telling her about. She’d been counting on it.
“Because you’re a junior resident,” said Bailey sharply, snapping the chart shut. Meredith scrunched her face up into an apologetic grimace, but Bailey carried on. “I know you lot think you’re hotshots now, but you’re just one step up from the bottom of the surgical food chain. You’ve got to do the grunt work sometimes, Grey, and I don’t need your help on this.”
“I think I could really learn a lot though,” said Meredith hopefully, changing tactics. “I’d love to watch you perform the anastomosis.”
A small smirk tugged at the corners of Bailey’s mouth. “Suckups,” she said, shaking her head. “You’re not scrubbing in.”
“Fine,” sighed Meredith. “Where do you want me then?” She rubbed her temple, trying to get rid of her lingering headache. The day was bad enough without it. “Can I see if Dr. Shepherd needs help?” she added on impulse. If Derek wasn’t going to page her, she could at least go find out what his problem was.
“Has he paged you?” asked Bailey, a strange, troubled look passing across her face. Meredith frowned, unable to place it.
“Well, no,” she admitted. “But there’s a new clinical trial patient, and Derek had said I could--” Bailey raised her eyebrows, hands on her hips, and Meredith stopped abruptly. “I mean Dr. Shepherd,” she amended. “He said, well he, you know…”
“No, I don’t know,” said Bailey.
“He told me I’d get to scrub in on the trial surgeries,” said Meredith quietly, avoiding Bailey’s eyes. As angry as she’d been at Cristina for saying she was in on the trial because she was sleeping with her boss, Derek wouldn’t have talked to the Chief for anyone else. That much was true. Not that it really mattered anyway since he wasn’t paging her. She fidgeted with her watch, waiting for a lecture, a comment, even another disapproving glare. All she got was a small, pitying smile.
“When Shepherd pages you, fine. Until then, I need you supervising the interns in the pit.”
Meredith looked up, her relief quickly replaced by disappointment. “The pit?” she echoed. “Don’t they know what they’re doing by now? They’ve been interns for months.”
“And they’ll be interns for several more months,” said Bailey. “They’re still green. This isn’t a debate, Grey.” She gave Meredith a searching look, her eyes narrowing a little at the corners. “Can you handle this?” she asked. Her voice was gentle and concerned, and Meredith frowned, not sure what to make of the question.
“Yeah, yeah. Of course I can,” she said, casting a furtive glance at her pager, just incase. It was blank. No missed pages. She felt Bailey’s hand on her arm and jerked back up in surprise.
“I’m sure Derek will talk to you about the trial,” said Bailey.
“Right…” Meredith pursed her lips together. Something seemed off. Bailey never called him Derek to her face. It was always Shepherd. Always. She’d just gotten glared at for calling him Derek. “Umm,” she began tentatively.
“Pit, Grey,” said Bailey, flipping Mr. Garcia’s chart open again.
“Right.” Meredith frowned and nodded. Triple-checked her silent pager. “I’m going.”
The pit was the usual mess of energy and chaos, as loud and overcrowded as ever. Meredith stared at the people jostling back and forth as she tied her hair back in a ponytail, trying to deduce where she was needed. If anywhere. She couldn’t spot a single stranded intern. She might as well just write her pager number up on the dry erase board and wander down to the cafeteria. Try to find Derek and get some sort of explanation. He sure owed her one.
She was halfway to the board when she caught sight of Cristina heading towards her. “Are you down here?” called Cristina. She came to an abrupt halt, leaving several feet of open floor between them. They’d never stood so far apart before. Never needed a buffer just to talk. Meredith stared down at the tile between them and felt dizzy, like it was some great, gaping chasm she was going to tumble into headfirst. She wished she knew what to say. Maybe that would kill the vertigo. She’d bring up their phone call if she could just think of a way to do it without mentioning Derek.
“Well are you?” repeated Cristina impatiently.
“Am I what?”
“Down here.”
“Uh…yeah,” said Meredith. “I guess.”
“Good. Two needs help. The idiot’s trying to do a mattress stitch and mangling some guy’s arm in the process.”
“Why can’t you do it?” said Meredith. “He’s your intern.” She checked her pager again. “Besides, I have a thing.”
“I have surgery,” countered Cristina. “Bailey’s gonna bite my head off if I’m late, so just do it, okay?” She started walking towards the elevator as if that was the end of it. Meredith stood stunned into silence, watching her retreating back for several seconds before starting forward in a rush.
“Bailey’s surgery?” she called as she hurried to catch up. “Now? Her surgery now?”
“Yeah,” said Cristina.
“As in the bowel resection for her diverticulitis patient? You’re scrubbing in?”
Cristina just nodded and pushed the button for the elevator. “Yeah. Why do you care?”
“Because I spent all morning with the guy!” said Meredith. She looked at Cristina in disbelief. “I don’t steal your patients!”
“What?” Cristina scoffed and turned to look at her. “I didn’t steal your patient, and if I was going to take one, I wouldn’t waste my time on diverticulitis guy. Besides, I’ve been stuck down here babysitting the freaks and geeks all morning. When would I even have time to troll?”
“I don’t know,” said Meredith. She felt prickly and irritated as if every thought was as rough as sandpaper to her mind. “How are you on the surgery if you were down here all morning?”
“Bailey called and put me on it,” said Cristina.
“Right. Fine. Whatever…” Meredith shoved her hands into the pockets of her lab coat and turned to go.
“Maybe you prepped the wrong guy.”
“I did not,” began Meredith angrily, but she caught sight of the smirk on Cristina’s face and cracked a smile despite herself. “I didn’t prep the wrong guy,” she muttered.
“Must’ve done something to piss her off,” said Cristina. She was staring at the elevator, but there was a sudden gentleness to her voice as if she was trying to mend things between them. Meredith said nothing. The comments about Derek still smarted, but she didn’t have the energy to bring them up and try to fix it. She didn’t have the energy to defend Derek to Cristina, period. Not when he’d spent the morning trying to keep her home and Cristina got to scrub in on her surgery. He’d probably be glad to hear she was stuck in the pit. It was almost as good as the house. Her thoughts stopped dead and realization spilled over her, hot and burning like a fever.
“Derek did it,” she blurted out. The pieces fit.
Cristina spun around, apparently losing interest in the elevator. “Derek kicked you off Bailey’s surgery?” she asked, shuffling to the side to let the passengers pour out.
“Yes,” said Meredith emphatically. Bailey’s manner made sense. It all made sense. He’d said something. He’d gone and freaking said something to Bailey of all people.
“Why would he even care?”
“We had a thing. Whatever.” Meredith shrugged, crossing her arms tightly over her chest. Her fingernails dug into her arms until it hurt, and at least that was a distraction. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Okay,” said Cristina, turning to go.
“It’s just… Who does he think he is?” she spluttered. “This isn’t even his surgery!”
Cristina glanced back at her, a tiny smile in place as she punched the button for the elevator a second time. The doors slid open.
“He’s not right about this,” continued Meredith. She tightened her ponytail, yanking her hair hard enough to reawaken her headache. Anger and pain felt the same, flaring through her in unison. “He thinks he’s right, but he’s not.”
Cristina snorted, her eyebrows shooting straight up. “Surgery now,” she said as she walked backwards onto the elevator. “Details later. You wanna go to Joe’s tonight?”
“Yeah.” She answered without so much as a moment’s hesitation. At least this felt normal again. And, if the morning was anything to go by, she was definitely going to need a drink tonight. She already needed one. “Eight o’clock?” she asked.
Cristina nodded. “Two’s in curtain three. Go help him before he sutures his scrubs to the guy’s skin?”
“That bad, huh?” said Meredith with a hint of a smile, but the doors slid shut and she was talking to no one. She sighed and turned her back on the elevator. Her pager was still silent and the pit had her trapped. Happiness sloughed off her like dead skin.
She surrendered to the messy rhythm of going and doing, overseeing the interns and signing off on their charts. Their proud attempts at treatment plans. The long litany of names she was creating to describe Derek fell more and more to the background until it was little more than white noise like ugly static on an old TV. Time passed quickly, and she’d made it a good hour without actively thinking about him when she felt her pager vibrating against her hipbone. She yanked it from her scrubs and stared. OCR 3-C was splashed across the tiny screen. The only person who ever paged her to an on-call room was Derek, and it was always for sex. Meredith rolled her eyes. If he thought he was getting any today…
Her anger came back in full force. It tasted metallic to the tip of her tongue, but it propelled her through the hospital with all the force of a raging storm. There was a ringing in her ears, and even the slap of her shoes against the tile seemed too loud. He was unbelievable. He was truly unbelievable. When she found on-call room 3-C, she didn’t even bother with knocking. Just pushed the door open and walked in. Sure enough, he was sitting there on the edge of the bed, a scrub cap still on and his head in his hands. He glanced up as she shut the door.
“Hey,” he said in a low, tired voice.
Meredith crossed her arms and leaned against the wall. “If you paged me here for sex, forget about it.”
“If I what?” asked Derek, shaking his head. “That’s not…no. That’s not why.” He looked down at the ground between his feet, his posture an odd combination of tension and dejection. “We need to talk.”
“Yeah,” said Meredith flatly. “We do.” Her bad mood was a lifeboat in this strange sea the morning had flung her into, and she clung to it. “What did you say to Bailey?”
Derek’s head jerked up, his eyes widening. “What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about whatever you said to her to get me stuck in the pit,” said Meredith. “I spent all morning prepping her patient for surgery, and then she lets Cristina scrub in and sends me down to babysit interns!”
“I’m sure Bailey thought you’d be helpful there.”
“Please,” she said, her voice heavy with sarcasm. She pushed away from the wall and walked over to stand in front of him. “You’ve been trying to keep me home since you got up today. This has your name written all over it.”
“Meredith…”
“Did you talk to her about me or not?”
He was silent for a long time, staring at her with dark eyes and a distant frown. When he finally nodded, Meredith recoiled.
“Unbelievable,” she hissed.
“It’s not what you think,” said Derek quickly.
“It’s not what I think?” echoed Meredith with a hollow laugh. She backed away from the bed, and he followed her to his feet. “Why don’t you just take my mother’s diary and write up all your favorite bits on the OR board? Go ahead and tell the whole freaking hospital! What the hell, Derek? That wasn’t for you to share.”
“I didn’t say a word about the diary,” said Derek. “Not a single word about what happened with your mother.” He reached out for her hand but she yanked it back.
“Yeah, well you sure said enough to get me kicked out of the OR,” she snapped. Her stomach was in knots, and she could hear her heartbeat banging like a war drum inside her head.
“Meredith, it’s not like-”
“Just couldn’t resist getting your way, huh?” she asked, cutting him off. She saw his eyes flash and knew she was inching them closer and closer to the point where they’d stop talking and start screaming at each other. She was far past caring. He’d pulled her from Bailey’s surgery. She was pretty sure that meant she could kiss the clinical trial goodbye as well.
“It’s not about getting my way.” His voice rose to match hers and he stepped closer. “I told Bailey I was worried about you because I am.”
Meredith rolled her eyes. “You need to find a way to drop your overblown savior complex because this is getting ridiculous. I don’t need protecting, and I’m not too damaged to do my job.”
“I don’t have a savior complex,” said Derek indignantly.
“Then why’d you page me here? I’m off the clinical trial, right? Isn’t that what you’re going to tell me?” She saw the guilt flash across his face and laughed out loud to hide the pain. “Of course it is,” she muttered, turning away from him.
“You know about the patient?” asked Derek. His voice was quiet, gentle, washing over her like a lullaby as she stared at the wall, her chest heaving with every breath.
“George told me,” she said, blinking away sudden, stinging tears. She’d cried enough in the past twenty-four hours to last a lifetime. There could be no tears. She sucked in a rattling breath and kept her back to him. “Congratulated me, actually,” she said. “The whole good luck with the trial thing, which would be great, but…you don’t want me on it.” Her voice broke and a single tear rolled down her cheek. She wiped it away like it was something hateful.
“Mer,” said Derek. She felt the heat radiating from his body as he stepped closer. “It’s not that I don’t want you on it. I love working with you.” His breath was warm against the back of her neck, but he wasn’t touching her.
“But I’m not on it, am I?”
He sighed heavily and that was all she needed to know. Her shoulders slumped like she was a marionette and he’d cut the strings. “I want you on the trial, Meredith. I do, but not today,” he said. “You shouldn’t be here today, and I’m not going to apologize for trying to keep you safe when it is so clearly what you need.”
His voice hurt her ears, and she thought the ground might dissolve. Her mother had got to him. Ellis was dead and still she found a way to ruin things.
“I never should’ve let you read the diary,” she whispered, turning around. He looked like she’d just slapped him, and she kept talking so she wouldn’t have to care. “It’s freaking you out. I know it is. I tell you I’m fine, and you won’t even listen.”
“I don’t listen because I know by now that’s a lie,” said Derek. His hands clamped down on her shoulders, keeping her in front of him. “You’re always fine because you never deal with anything.”
“I’ve dealt with this,” said Meredith. Therapy was on the tip of her tongue, but when she met his eyes she couldn’t find the words. The room was smothering and she wanted out. Her face flushed and she pushed at his hands. She wasn’t strong enough to break his grip, but he let go anyway, sighing like she’d disappointed him. “I told you already. My mother didn’t really want to die.”
“She slit her wrists, Meredith.”
“I know that!” she shouted. “I was there, remember? All I’m saying is she didn’t want to die.”
“People don’t slit their wrists just for kicks,” said Derek.
“She wanted Richard to come back to her,” she snapped. Her hands were in fists, fingernails cutting half moons into her palms. This was about love not death, and he was flat out refusing to see the truth.
“And that makes it okay?” asked Derek incredulously. “She wanted him back, and so you’re okay with it?”
“Yes! What else is there to be? It happened. It’s over and done. You move on.”
“But you’re not okay with it.” He caught her hand again, entwining their fingers. “Last night, you were definitely not okay with it.”
She cringed at the memory. “That was last night,” she said. “Not today. Why can’t it just stay as last night?”
A dam seemed to break somewhere behind Derek’s eyes, and it was he who let go this time, dropping her hand. “Here we go again,” he muttered.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means…” He stopped and shook his head as if he’d changed his mind. “No. Do you honestly expect me to just forget about last night so you can pretend you’re fine again?” he asked, his voice loud and rough and overwhelming. “Because I will not do that for you, Meredith. You were catatonic.” She turned away to stare at the wall. The overhead light was dying a slow death, buzzing and flickering in and out, making their shadows dance. “I had to carry you out of the shower so you wouldn’t give yourself pneumonia or hypothermia or whatever it was you were trying to accomplish in there.”
She hugged her arms tightly to her chest, folding into herself as best she could with him standing so close. The light bulb flirted with darkness but wouldn’t commit. “You think there’s something wrong with me?” she asked quietly. The words got stuck in her throat and she had to force them out.
At first he said nothing back and she had only his breathing for company. When he did speak, every word was its own sentence, slow and cautious. Calculated. “I think what your mother did could go a long way to explaining why you…” He sighed. “Why sometimes you’re--”
“So messed up?” supplied Meredith. She put her back to the wall and faced him. “That’s what you’re trying to say, right? You just haven’t come up with the pretty, pretty words you need yet?” She trembled and her voice shook as if there was an earthquake somewhere deep inside her heart. Derek was silent and she had to force herself to breathe, willing the room not to blur with tears. “You see this?” she asked. “This is why I don’t like to talk about my mother.” She pushed away from the wall and started to pace, her voice escalating with every step. “It’s why I waited so long to tell you. You haven’t even known twenty-four hours, and already you think I can’t do my job. You don’t want me on the clinical trial!” she cried, her voice breaking. Derek reached out and caught her by the arms, pulling her close.
“Hey, hey,” he murmured. “Easy, Mer.”
She stumbled to a halt and looked up at him, eyes threatening to overflow. “You think my mother’s made me all fucked in the head, don’t you?”
“I don’t think that,” he said gently.
“Then quit acting like you think I’m on some kind of psychotic break, okay? Just because she slit her wrists doesn’t mean I’m going to slit mine.”
“Okay,” said Derek. He spoke too quickly; that one word was riddled with holes. The truth came to her as quiet as a whisper in the night when he didn’t meet her eyes. Like an ice cube dropped down the back of her shirt, it slipped swiftly down her spine and left her cold.
“You don’t believe me…” she said. There was horror in her voice.
He shook his head. “I said okay.”
“Say it like you mean it, Derek.”
He stared at her in silence for a long time. The only sound was the dying light above them. She wondered what they’d do if it burnt out. Fight it out in the darkness? Walk to another room like this was the sort of conversation that didn’t hurt with every word?
“It’d be easier to believe you if you didn’t have a history with things like this,” said Derek at last, bowing his head under a weight she couldn’t see.
She slithered out of his arms. “What are you talking about?”
“You know exactly what I’m talking about.” His voice was thin as ice about to break, and she felt nauseous. “You drowned yourself.”
Meredith bristled like a cornered animal. Something snapped and then they were shouting. “I was pushed in!” she said.
“That’s not the point,” said Derek. “You didn’t swim!”
“It was cold,” she said, backing up until she reached the wall. He followed her, and the space between them shriveled down to something tiny and red hot.
“I know it was cold.” He leaned forward, his hands against the wall on either side of her head. She felt all the ways he wasn’t touching her, and it was enough to make her want to scream. “Do you know how many tries it took me to find you?” he asked in a voice she’d never heard before. Broken edges and battered things. That was how he spoke. She said nothing. “Do you?” demanded Derek.
The room was spinning when she found her voice. “No.”
“Six,” he said. “So don’t you dare look at me and tell me it was too cold to swim. We both know you’re the better swimmer, and I did it six times. Until my lungs were on fire and I couldn’t feel my feet.” His eyes cut into her, and she shook like she had that day in the bay. When the water had been as brutal as the edge of a knife. Derek had felt it too. “I know exactly how cold it was in there.”
His words took the ground away and she scrambled for something, anything to say. This was not a conversation she’d ever thought they’d have. “Where’s all this even coming from?” she asked at last. She placed a tentative hand on his shoulder, but his body didn’t ground her the way it usually did. “It was months ago,” she whispered, still reeling. “And it changed me. I came back changed.”
“It changed me too,” said Derek. He cradled her cheek in the palm of his hand and brushed his thumb over her lower lip. “You had no pulse,” he said quietly, thoughtfully. There was something distant to the sound. “I held your corpse in my arms. The dead body of the woman I love.” He shook his head, smiling sadly. “That changes a person.” He closed his eyes and drew in a single, shuddering breath. When he opened them again they shone with tears. “Tell me the truth, Meredith,” he said. “You never answer me. You didn’t swim and you damned well know how.”
His voice was like a corkscrew to her mind, and she couldn’t meet his eyes. Even if he knew, admitting it was something else entirely. She felt torn in two and trapped against the wall. “It was just a moment,” she said at last in a voice that sounded very small. “One stupid, tiny moment where I, I…” She stared up at the dying light and wished it would go out; shameful things could be said easier in darkness. Meredith closed her eyes. “I didn’t see the point,” she whispered.
“In living?” he asked incredulously.
She kept her eyes shut. “Yes.”
Derek let out a noise that sounded a lot like a sob and turned away from her, his shoulders shaking. He lifted a hand as if he meant to rake it back through his hair only to be stopped by the scrub cap still sitting there. He yanked it off, crumpling the ferryboats in his fist.
He wasn’t pinning her to the wall anymore, and the sudden freedom felt strange and surreal. Like floating. She took a cautious step in his direction; that felt as safe as walking on a tightrope. Strung out high above a reality that could kill her if she so much as slipped. “Derek, it’s okay,” she said. She wrung her hands together and tiptoed closer. It had to be okay, but he wasn’t turning around. “It was stupid, but it’s over now. It’s over,” she pleaded. “I’m alive. It doesn’t have to be a big deal.”
He spun around to face her. The look in his eyes was raw and devastated, and it seared right through her soul. “It is a big deal,” he said in a rough voice. “You were dead.”
“I know that,” said Meredith, trying to hold herself together, but he stepped closer, shaking his head.
“No, you don’t know,” said Derek forcefully. “You were dead. You have no idea what it was like to sit there and wait for hours while they tried again and again to bring you back.”
She stared up at him speechless, shrinking down into herself. She couldn’t tell if the tears were in her eyes or his.
“Have you even looked at your chart?” he demanded, and something within her started to unravel. “Do you have any idea how many rounds of ACLS drugs they pumped into you? Burke had to put you on cardiopulmonary bypass! They ran your blood through a fucking machine just to try and save your life, and you did it to yourself.”
“I don’t…” She trailed off before she’d barely started, not knowing what to say. This was worse than the diary. The look in his eyes made breathing an impossibility. Coherent thought was long gone too. She felt paralyzed and accused.
Derek shook his head. “The world can snatch your life away from you whenever it wants,” he said. “And there is nothing you can do to stop it, Meredith. Nothing.” He slammed his hand against the wall, leaning into it like it hurt to stand. “But you are not supposed to go looking for ways to throw that life away,” he shouted. “Not anyone and especially not you!”
Meredith listened to the sound of her heart pounding inside her head. There was a hole in it right where the love was supposed to go. Her ribs had hurt when she’d come back from drowning. She’d been speckled with bruises from all the chest compressions and laughter had been agony for a few days, but it was nothing to the way his words were crushing her. She felt blindsided like she’d been taken down by a truck, splattered against some impartial stretch of pavement. If only he’d stop yelling then maybe she could think.
He didn’t stop.
“That is why I’m worried about you,” he continued loudly, pushing her further and further inside herself. “No, that is why I’m terrified. Because Ellis is essentially back from the dead, and how can I be sure it won’t happen again?” He circled closer and she felt ensnared.
“I guess you can’t,” she choked out, stumbling away from him. Her voice was bitterly sarcastic and full of all the tears she’d kept out of her eyes. “Lucky you. You’re dating a psycho who’s going to kill herself over a diary.” She bit down hard on the inside of her cheek to keep from sobbing.
“Don’t joke about this,” pleaded Derek.
Don’t joke about it. Right. Because she really was some sort of suicidal maniac who was just waiting for the opportune moment to off herself. She shook her head and grabbed the doorknob. “I can’t. I…” She swallowed the lump in her throat but couldn’t bring herself to meet his eyes. She knew what she’d find there without looking. Accusation, disappointment. No one loves a failure. “I have to get back to the pit,” she whispered.
She missed the words he said in reply as she pushed the door open and let her feet carry her far, far away. She walked without thinking. All she had left was motion. To stop would be to fall apart, and so Meredith kept walking until she was far away from the on-call room and all the accusations in Derek’s eyes. His voice still echoed inside her head. Shouting, always shouting. She shouldered her way into the stairwell and raced up a flight of stairs. The hallway was too crowded when she reemerged, teeming with patients and nurses and doctors, visitors and orderlies. People everywhere. She felt sick and panicky at the sight of them. Smothering. She stumbled down the hall, breathing in shallow fits and gasps. Drowning again. The faces were already starting to blur when she reached a supply closet and slipped inside.
She slumped to the ground and curled forward, gasping for air. Her palms were cold and slick with sweat, her heart a jackhammer in her throat. She closed her eyes and forced herself to draw in one slow, painful breath after another.
“Are you okay?” asked someone in a quiet voice.
Meredith cried out in surprise, looking up. She was bleary eyed and panting, but she could make out the shape of another woman sitting at the far end of the supply closet. An old pair of jeans and an ill fitting sweatshirt took the place of scrubs, marking her as someone who was most likely a patient or a visitor. Meredith sucked in another breath, trying to get enough oxygen in her lungs to answer.
The woman scooted forward and placed a slender hand on her arm. “Do you need help?” she asked. “Should I try to find somebody?”
Meredith shook her head and finally managed to speak. “No…” She wiped her palms on her scrubs and gave the woman a shaky smile. “Thank you, though.”
“You’re sure you’re okay?” she asked uncertainly.
Meredith drew in one slow, deep breath and then another. On the third try, her lungs stopped burning. She placed her fingers over her carotid artery with some satisfaction. Her pulse was slowing down. “Yeah,” said Meredith. “I’m a doctor.” She put her usual confidence back into her voice and watched as the woman visibly relaxed. Definitely a patient or a visitor then. She smiled again. “I’m fine.”
“Good,” said the woman. “Good.” She had a round, pretty face with messy blonde hair that looked like it hadn’t been combed in a few days. She clutched a pack of tissues in her hand and several balled up ones littered the floor around her.
“Um,” said Meredith, glancing at the tear streaks on the woman’s face. “Are you alright?”
“I’m, I’m, oh,” stammered the woman. “I’m sorry! I know I’m probably breaking all kinds of rules being in here, but I just…” She pulled out a fresh tissue and dabbed at her eyes. “I didn’t want to cry in front of my husband or my daughter, and people kept coming into the restroom!” She smiled wryly, a watery little laugh slipping past her lips. “It’s a hospital. You’d think they’d have better places to cry.”
“They do,” said Meredith simply. “Supply closets.” The woman laughed again and nodded her head. She shifted forward as if to stand up, but Meredith held out a hand. “You can stay in here longer. If you need to,” she said. “No rush.”
“Okay,” said the woman as a fresh flood of tears pooled in her eyes. “Maybe I will.” She sniffled and leaned back against the shelf. “Thank you, um, Doctor…”
“Grey,” said Meredith. “Uh, Meredith, though,” she added in a soft voice. Dr. Grey sounded far too formal for the floor of a supply closet.
“Olivia,” said the woman.
“Right, Olivia. Well…” Meredith looked around the closet. It was dark and quiet, comforting. She started to stand herself. “I should let you-”
The woman shook her head, her hand lifting slightly before flopping back to her lap. The message was clear: stay. It hurts to cry alone. “My daughter’s dying,” she said quietly. The words were tentative, as if testing out some new reality she wanted no part in.
“Oh.” Meredith settled back against the wall. “I’m so sorry,” she said.
“Yeah.” Olivia nodded. “Me too.” She closed her eyes but more tears leaked out, slipping past her eyelids to run down her face and stain the pale green of her sweatshirt a darker emerald. “She was coloring this morning,” she whispered, eyes still closed. “I thought that was a good sign, you know? That she had a lot of strength. But now she’s just lying there too tired to draw, and I’m hiding in a closet like the world’s worst mother.”
“No,” said Meredith. “You’re a person. It hurts. There’s no one right way to do this.”
Olivia buried her head in her hands, her shoulders shaking. “Tell that to my husband,” she said, the words escaping along with a sound that might have been laughter, might have been tears. She sat curled tightly for a long time, lost in some messy form of sorrow, fingers tugging at the roots of her hair. Meredith was silent, watching as her own pain shriveled up and turned insignificant beside the woman’s grief. “You said you were a doctor?” asked Olivia at last, snuffling a little as she straightened up.
“I am,” agreed Meredith.
“Can I ask you, do you know if…” Olivia bit her lip and looked up at the ceiling, blinking rapidly as fresh tears streamed down her face. “Does it help children to know that they’re dying? Because we haven’t, we haven’t told Sarah. My husband thinks we should, but I just,” she shook her head fiercely, “I can’t, I don’t.” She gulped a breath of air and moaned a little. “I don’t want to tell her. I don’t want her to be scared.”
Meredith balled the hem of her lab coat into a fist, squeezing so hard her knuckles hurt. “How old is your daughter?” she asked.
“Six,” said Olivia.
Meredith nodded, trying to think back to cases she’d seen. “I haven’t worked in peds that much,” she said apologetically. “I’m probably not the best person to answer your question, but even at six, even if they haven’t been told they’re dying, they usually have a sense that their body’s failing them. They’re, actually, they’re often more worried about leaving their parents behind than about death itself, and talking about that can be good. I’ve seen it help families.”
“That’s what my husband feels,” said Olivia, her voice hoarse. She had been slowly ripping her tissues into little shreds, leaving scraps of white all over the faded denim of her jeans, but her hands stilled and she looked up. “It’s just Sarah has this one last shot,” she said, a faint flicker of hope in her eyes. “She’s in some sort of experimental trial that’s apparently been successful. Once.”
“Once?” echoed Meredith, the number tugging at her mind like a hangnail caught on a snag. Beth had been one.
“Yeah, once.” Olivia laughed softly, nodding her head. “Not the type of odds it’s easy to trust, I know, but there’s nothing else to even try at this point. So we’re gonna do it, and oh God, I don’t want to tell her because I don’t want her to go into that surgery thinking she could die. She needs to believe she’s going to live. I need my baby to live.” Tears were still dripping down Olivia’s face, but she no longer seemed to notice. She picked up another tissue and ripped it in two. “Do you know what it’s like to watch someone you love die?” she asked, her voice faint and frayed around the edges like an old secret.
“I, um…” Meredith closed her eyes and saw Derek’s face.
I held your corpse in my arms. The dead body of the woman I love.
“It changes a person,” she said quietly. Olivia only nodded, eyes screwed shut and leaking tears. Meredith hesitated a moment, fidgeting with her watch, and then the question came tumbling out before she could stop it. “I’m sorry but is your daughter in Dr. Shepherd’s trial by any chance?”
Olivia’s eyes flew open, filled with a sudden, brilliant flash of life. “Yes,” she said. “Do you know him?”
Meredith nodded, feeling stunned. Here was the surgery she wouldn’t get to see. “He’s a brilliant surgeon,” she said.
“Yes, he must be,” said Olivia. “His credentials…I didn’t know what half of them even meant, but there sure were a lot of them.” Her hair was tear-soaked and matted to her face, and she pushed at it absently. “Do you know him personally?” she asked.
“What?” said Meredith, nearly choking on the word.
“Are you good friends with Dr. Shepherd or is he just a colleague?”
She hesitated, glancing down at her shoes. The toes were scuffed, the laces dingy. Thinking of Derek made her ache.
“I only ask because I need to know what sort of man he is,” continued Olivia hesitantly. “I’ve met him and he seems very nice. But he’s just a face to me, and if Sarah doesn’t survive the surgery, he’s the person who’s going to be there when she dies. It should be me. If she has to go before I do, she shouldn’t have to die in some strange room, strapped down to a table surrounded by strangers. She should be in my arms. And Mike’s. She should be with us.” Olivia’s chin quivered, and she struggled to keep speaking through a fresh onslaught of tears. “But if it happens in the OR, I need to know that she has someone good with her,” she said. “That she’s with a good person, so please, tell me you know him. Tell me you know what he’s like.”
Meredith nodded slowly. “I know him very well,” she said at last. Her voice was thin and shaky, and she felt tears in the corners of her eyes. They settled down there, blurring her vision but refusing to fall. “If he’s the one with your daughter, then you should know his name is Derek,” she said quietly. “Derek Christopher Shepherd. He can be arrogant and he always thinks he’s right,” she said, the words tumbling out quickly, tinged with the residual heat of their argument. “He usually ends up being right though, so I guess there’s at least some sort of precedence there.” She scrunched her nose up a little, smiling despite herself.
Olivia just nodded. “Go on,” she said.
“Well, he takes his job very seriously. He’ll talk your ear off if you get him started on anything related to neurosurgery. Actually,” she frowned, “that’s not quite true. It doesn’t have to be surgery. He’ll talk about whatever. He does this chatty thing where he goes on and on and thinks he’s charming, but he usually is being charming so I let him talk.”
She stopped abruptly, her cheeks flushing. It had to be painfully obvious that she knew Derek as one half of Derek and Meredith, but when she glanced at Olivia, her face was impassive. Their fight felt devastating next to the normalcy of her memories. She missed him then with a sudden, staggering intensity that would’ve bowled her over if she wasn’t already on the ground; she wanted to turn back time to a night when she’d been able to fall asleep in his arms.
“He likes the outdoors,” she continued at last. “Fishing, camping, that sort of thing.” Houses made of candles and hills to paint the future on. “He owns all this land, this beautiful land, which is kinda funny because he’s from Manhattan, but I think Seattle’s more him.” A little sliver of a laugh escaped her, and her eyes slipped shut for a moment. “I like to think he’s happier here,” she said quietly. “His family’s still on the east coast though. Four sisters and way too many nieces and nephews to count.”
“Does he have kids?” asked Olivia.
Meredith’s eyes flew open again and she shook her head. “No,” she said. The answer left her feeling guilty, but she wasn’t sure why. They could have them. Someday. She wouldn’t say no. Assuming they still knew how to talk to each other after everything that had been said, she wouldn’t say no. She shivered and hugged her knees to her chest, staring at the shelves until all the supplies started to blend and blur together. “Not yet,” she said, her voice growing soft and distant. “He wants them though. He’d be a good dad, I think. He, um, he takes care of the people he loves. He wants to keep them safe.”
“He sounds like a good man,” said Olivia as she pulled out another tissue.
“He is,” said Meredith. “You can trust him with your daughter.”
“Yes. I think I can.” She turned away slightly to blow her nose before looking back at Meredith and offering her a shaky smile. “The two of you must be very happy together.”
Meredith just blinked at her. “Excuse me?” she stammered, caught off guard.
“You’re a couple, aren’t you?” She spoke as if there was no doubt. “The way you talk about him, it’s gentle, familiar. Like he’s your lover.”
“Oh,” said Meredith. “That’s not…” An easy question. She felt adrift. But Olivia was watching her curiously, and she nodded her head. “Yeah,” she said at last. “He’s my boyfriend.”
“That’s nice,” said Olivia. Meredith nodded again, unsure of what to say. The sound of her pager going off filled the sudden silence, her muscles tensing in the moment it took her to twist around and pull it from her scrubs. She sighed when she saw the number, relaxing a little. The pit was paging her back, and she couldn’t tell if she felt disappointment or relief that it wasn’t Derek. Somehow it seemed a lot like both.
“I’m sorry, but I have to get back to work,” she said and clambered to her feet.
“Of course,” said Olivia. She started gathering her many discarded tissues. “I should probably get back to my family.”
They reached the door at the same time, Olivia smoothing her messy curls back into some semblance of order with a trembling hand. Her smile was pretty but didn’t make it anywhere near her eyes; faith always suffered the most when children died.
“For what it’s worth,” said Meredith quietly. “Derek is one of the best. I know you’re scared, and I’m not going to say you shouldn’t be, but you should have some hope too.”
Olivia nodded, clutching her tissues to her chest. “I’ll try,” she said before opening the door. Meredith watched as she walked down the hall and out of sight.
-----
The rest of the day passed slowly. Her anger had dulled and faded, replaced by a heaviness she felt deep down inside her. It shadowed everything like a storm cloud taking away the sun. She sutured and charted and answered interns’ questions all on autopilot; her mind was absent, stuck in that place without the sun, trying to think of what to say to Derek. Sorry for drowning. For not seeing how it changed you too. But he’d kicked her off of surgery, and she didn’t see how one made the other okay.
She ended up at home in an empty house without really remembering the drive that brought her there. It was too quiet, and she sat with the TV on just to have some sound. One hour bled into two and then drifted on towards three. She fell asleep with a pillow clutched in her arms, worn well past exhausted from a night without sleep.
Meredith started awake at the sound of her phone and pushed herself up, groggy and disoriented with a crick in her neck. She fished around in the couch cushions for her phone and opened it without bothering to check the caller id.
“Derek?” she said as she muted the television.
“No, it’s me,” said a voice that definitely wasn’t his. Cristina.
Meredith yawned. “Oh. Hey,” she said. She tried to mask her disappointment that it wasn’t him. He wasn’t here. She hadn’t seen him since their fight and he still wasn’t home. Loneliness made her hug the pillow tighter.
“It’s almost nine,” said Cristina.
Meredith squinted at the old analog clock that hung on the wall. The lights were out and the house was dark, but the glow from television screen was enough to show the hour. Cristina was right. Almost nine and he still wasn’t home.
“I thought we were meeting at Joe’s at eight?”
“Crap,” said Meredith. Another thing to feel bad about. She hadn’t even thought about their plans since fighting with Derek. “We did say that.”
“Are you still at the hospital?” asked Cristina.
“No, I’m…I think I fell asleep,” she said apologetically. “I was up all night.”
There was a long pause and then, “Do you still wanna come?”
Meredith sighed and got to her feet. In the past, Cristina never would’ve asked. She would’ve told her she could sleep when she was dead and to get off her lazy ass and into Joe’s already. She didn’t understand why everything had to go weird all at once.
“I don’t know,” she said as she walked to the front window and peered out at the street. There was no sign of Derek’s car. Not even the glow of headlights in the distance to give her hope. He wasn’t here. “I…”
“Come on,” said Cristina. “It’s just Izzie and Alex here, and I’ve had enough of the sex eyes they keep giving each other. You need to save me.”
“I need to save you?” echoed Meredith. She smiled a little and reached up, trying to guess what damage her nap had done to her hair. “I think they’re kinda sweet together.”
“No, Mer. It’s nauseating. Are you coming or not?
Meredith glanced out at her street again. Her heart sunk when she found it as dark as before. He hadn’t called. He wasn’t here. She suddenly, desperately did not want to wait around for him to not show up. “Yeah,” she said quietly. “I’m coming.” She turned her back on the darkened street. “Just give me ten minutes.”
-----
So yeah, Derek finally got a chance to air his long bottled up feelings on the Meredith drowning thing. And it could’ve gone better. Meredith was already pissed because she doesn’t take well to his whole overprotective thing, and Derek decided to express himself through a lot of yelling, which made her shut down and flee. Not the best of all possible outcomes. Because, while this is something Derek has been obsessing about since finding her in the shower, it’s completely out of the blue for Meredith. And what he has to say is hard for her to hear. She feels bad and accused, guilty and overwhelmed, not to mention still very hurt that he’s keeping her off the clinical trial. While he believes he has her best interests at heart, it was actually a pretty stupid idea and one that hurt her a lot. So yeah, all of that adds up and they don’t sit down and talk it out like calm, rational adults. They’re both too hurt and upset for that. Meredith runs and ends up in a closet along with Olivia, Sarah’s mother. This ends up being a very good thing for her. Olivia is quite possibly losing her six year old daughter, and that helps Meredith stop dwelling on everything that happened with Derek because her problems feel like nothing next to this woman’s grief. And talking about Derek for Olivia’s benefit helps her to get past being angry at him. She’s frustrated and hurt, yes, but when she sits down and thinks about it, she loves him and there’s a lot of good there. So Meredith ends up at home, essentially waiting for him because she knows they left things very unfinished and still need to talk. But when he doesn’t come home right away, all of her old insecurities start to pop up. If he’s avoiding her, she doesn’t want to sit around and think about how he isn’t showing up. That sounds too painful. So she goes out with Cristina because things have been kinda weird with her too, but maybe she can at least fix them and have one thing that feels normal. And yeah, that’s pretty much it. Things were definitely angsty for MerDer, but Derek finally told Meredith his side of things, and that’s going to be good for them. Thanks for reading!
Also, in unrelated news. The Office just about killed me with the funny last night. Dwight, you can be my safety officer any day.
Title: Love in the Time of Science
Author: Morgen
Summary: Love. Tragedy. The things we’ve left unsaid. This is their story. Set after episode 5.05.
Disclaimer: I am not famous. I do not own TV shows. I am a poor college student with a laptop and a serious procrastination habit.
Rating: Written for grownups.
“What do you mean I don’t get to scrub in?” spluttered Meredith, staring at Bailey in disbelief. “I just spent all morning prepping Mr. Garcia for surgery!”
“Yes and thank you for that,” said Bailey. She was looking down at the chart Meredith had brought her, giving tiny little nods of her head as she scanned the information.
“But you’re still not going to let me scrub in?”
Bailey glanced up and nodded again. “Correct.”
“Then why even have me prep him?” asked Meredith. “An intern could’ve done it.” She could tell she sounded whiny, but she still had too much of a headache to care. This surgery was supposed to distract her from the clinical trial patient Derek apparently wasn’t telling her about. She’d been counting on it.
“Because you’re a junior resident,” said Bailey sharply, snapping the chart shut. Meredith scrunched her face up into an apologetic grimace, but Bailey carried on. “I know you lot think you’re hotshots now, but you’re just one step up from the bottom of the surgical food chain. You’ve got to do the grunt work sometimes, Grey, and I don’t need your help on this.”
“I think I could really learn a lot though,” said Meredith hopefully, changing tactics. “I’d love to watch you perform the anastomosis.”
A small smirk tugged at the corners of Bailey’s mouth. “Suckups,” she said, shaking her head. “You’re not scrubbing in.”
“Fine,” sighed Meredith. “Where do you want me then?” She rubbed her temple, trying to get rid of her lingering headache. The day was bad enough without it. “Can I see if Dr. Shepherd needs help?” she added on impulse. If Derek wasn’t going to page her, she could at least go find out what his problem was.
“Has he paged you?” asked Bailey, a strange, troubled look passing across her face. Meredith frowned, unable to place it.
“Well, no,” she admitted. “But there’s a new clinical trial patient, and Derek had said I could--” Bailey raised her eyebrows, hands on her hips, and Meredith stopped abruptly. “I mean Dr. Shepherd,” she amended. “He said, well he, you know…”
“No, I don’t know,” said Bailey.
“He told me I’d get to scrub in on the trial surgeries,” said Meredith quietly, avoiding Bailey’s eyes. As angry as she’d been at Cristina for saying she was in on the trial because she was sleeping with her boss, Derek wouldn’t have talked to the Chief for anyone else. That much was true. Not that it really mattered anyway since he wasn’t paging her. She fidgeted with her watch, waiting for a lecture, a comment, even another disapproving glare. All she got was a small, pitying smile.
“When Shepherd pages you, fine. Until then, I need you supervising the interns in the pit.”
Meredith looked up, her relief quickly replaced by disappointment. “The pit?” she echoed. “Don’t they know what they’re doing by now? They’ve been interns for months.”
“And they’ll be interns for several more months,” said Bailey. “They’re still green. This isn’t a debate, Grey.” She gave Meredith a searching look, her eyes narrowing a little at the corners. “Can you handle this?” she asked. Her voice was gentle and concerned, and Meredith frowned, not sure what to make of the question.
“Yeah, yeah. Of course I can,” she said, casting a furtive glance at her pager, just incase. It was blank. No missed pages. She felt Bailey’s hand on her arm and jerked back up in surprise.
“I’m sure Derek will talk to you about the trial,” said Bailey.
“Right…” Meredith pursed her lips together. Something seemed off. Bailey never called him Derek to her face. It was always Shepherd. Always. She’d just gotten glared at for calling him Derek. “Umm,” she began tentatively.
“Pit, Grey,” said Bailey, flipping Mr. Garcia’s chart open again.
“Right.” Meredith frowned and nodded. Triple-checked her silent pager. “I’m going.”
The pit was the usual mess of energy and chaos, as loud and overcrowded as ever. Meredith stared at the people jostling back and forth as she tied her hair back in a ponytail, trying to deduce where she was needed. If anywhere. She couldn’t spot a single stranded intern. She might as well just write her pager number up on the dry erase board and wander down to the cafeteria. Try to find Derek and get some sort of explanation. He sure owed her one.
She was halfway to the board when she caught sight of Cristina heading towards her. “Are you down here?” called Cristina. She came to an abrupt halt, leaving several feet of open floor between them. They’d never stood so far apart before. Never needed a buffer just to talk. Meredith stared down at the tile between them and felt dizzy, like it was some great, gaping chasm she was going to tumble into headfirst. She wished she knew what to say. Maybe that would kill the vertigo. She’d bring up their phone call if she could just think of a way to do it without mentioning Derek.
“Well are you?” repeated Cristina impatiently.
“Am I what?”
“Down here.”
“Uh…yeah,” said Meredith. “I guess.”
“Good. Two needs help. The idiot’s trying to do a mattress stitch and mangling some guy’s arm in the process.”
“Why can’t you do it?” said Meredith. “He’s your intern.” She checked her pager again. “Besides, I have a thing.”
“I have surgery,” countered Cristina. “Bailey’s gonna bite my head off if I’m late, so just do it, okay?” She started walking towards the elevator as if that was the end of it. Meredith stood stunned into silence, watching her retreating back for several seconds before starting forward in a rush.
“Bailey’s surgery?” she called as she hurried to catch up. “Now? Her surgery now?”
“Yeah,” said Cristina.
“As in the bowel resection for her diverticulitis patient? You’re scrubbing in?”
Cristina just nodded and pushed the button for the elevator. “Yeah. Why do you care?”
“Because I spent all morning with the guy!” said Meredith. She looked at Cristina in disbelief. “I don’t steal your patients!”
“What?” Cristina scoffed and turned to look at her. “I didn’t steal your patient, and if I was going to take one, I wouldn’t waste my time on diverticulitis guy. Besides, I’ve been stuck down here babysitting the freaks and geeks all morning. When would I even have time to troll?”
“I don’t know,” said Meredith. She felt prickly and irritated as if every thought was as rough as sandpaper to her mind. “How are you on the surgery if you were down here all morning?”
“Bailey called and put me on it,” said Cristina.
“Right. Fine. Whatever…” Meredith shoved her hands into the pockets of her lab coat and turned to go.
“Maybe you prepped the wrong guy.”
“I did not,” began Meredith angrily, but she caught sight of the smirk on Cristina’s face and cracked a smile despite herself. “I didn’t prep the wrong guy,” she muttered.
“Must’ve done something to piss her off,” said Cristina. She was staring at the elevator, but there was a sudden gentleness to her voice as if she was trying to mend things between them. Meredith said nothing. The comments about Derek still smarted, but she didn’t have the energy to bring them up and try to fix it. She didn’t have the energy to defend Derek to Cristina, period. Not when he’d spent the morning trying to keep her home and Cristina got to scrub in on her surgery. He’d probably be glad to hear she was stuck in the pit. It was almost as good as the house. Her thoughts stopped dead and realization spilled over her, hot and burning like a fever.
“Derek did it,” she blurted out. The pieces fit.
Cristina spun around, apparently losing interest in the elevator. “Derek kicked you off Bailey’s surgery?” she asked, shuffling to the side to let the passengers pour out.
“Yes,” said Meredith emphatically. Bailey’s manner made sense. It all made sense. He’d said something. He’d gone and freaking said something to Bailey of all people.
“Why would he even care?”
“We had a thing. Whatever.” Meredith shrugged, crossing her arms tightly over her chest. Her fingernails dug into her arms until it hurt, and at least that was a distraction. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Okay,” said Cristina, turning to go.
“It’s just… Who does he think he is?” she spluttered. “This isn’t even his surgery!”
Cristina glanced back at her, a tiny smile in place as she punched the button for the elevator a second time. The doors slid open.
“He’s not right about this,” continued Meredith. She tightened her ponytail, yanking her hair hard enough to reawaken her headache. Anger and pain felt the same, flaring through her in unison. “He thinks he’s right, but he’s not.”
Cristina snorted, her eyebrows shooting straight up. “Surgery now,” she said as she walked backwards onto the elevator. “Details later. You wanna go to Joe’s tonight?”
“Yeah.” She answered without so much as a moment’s hesitation. At least this felt normal again. And, if the morning was anything to go by, she was definitely going to need a drink tonight. She already needed one. “Eight o’clock?” she asked.
Cristina nodded. “Two’s in curtain three. Go help him before he sutures his scrubs to the guy’s skin?”
“That bad, huh?” said Meredith with a hint of a smile, but the doors slid shut and she was talking to no one. She sighed and turned her back on the elevator. Her pager was still silent and the pit had her trapped. Happiness sloughed off her like dead skin.
She surrendered to the messy rhythm of going and doing, overseeing the interns and signing off on their charts. Their proud attempts at treatment plans. The long litany of names she was creating to describe Derek fell more and more to the background until it was little more than white noise like ugly static on an old TV. Time passed quickly, and she’d made it a good hour without actively thinking about him when she felt her pager vibrating against her hipbone. She yanked it from her scrubs and stared. OCR 3-C was splashed across the tiny screen. The only person who ever paged her to an on-call room was Derek, and it was always for sex. Meredith rolled her eyes. If he thought he was getting any today…
Her anger came back in full force. It tasted metallic to the tip of her tongue, but it propelled her through the hospital with all the force of a raging storm. There was a ringing in her ears, and even the slap of her shoes against the tile seemed too loud. He was unbelievable. He was truly unbelievable. When she found on-call room 3-C, she didn’t even bother with knocking. Just pushed the door open and walked in. Sure enough, he was sitting there on the edge of the bed, a scrub cap still on and his head in his hands. He glanced up as she shut the door.
“Hey,” he said in a low, tired voice.
Meredith crossed her arms and leaned against the wall. “If you paged me here for sex, forget about it.”
“If I what?” asked Derek, shaking his head. “That’s not…no. That’s not why.” He looked down at the ground between his feet, his posture an odd combination of tension and dejection. “We need to talk.”
“Yeah,” said Meredith flatly. “We do.” Her bad mood was a lifeboat in this strange sea the morning had flung her into, and she clung to it. “What did you say to Bailey?”
Derek’s head jerked up, his eyes widening. “What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about whatever you said to her to get me stuck in the pit,” said Meredith. “I spent all morning prepping her patient for surgery, and then she lets Cristina scrub in and sends me down to babysit interns!”
“I’m sure Bailey thought you’d be helpful there.”
“Please,” she said, her voice heavy with sarcasm. She pushed away from the wall and walked over to stand in front of him. “You’ve been trying to keep me home since you got up today. This has your name written all over it.”
“Meredith…”
“Did you talk to her about me or not?”
He was silent for a long time, staring at her with dark eyes and a distant frown. When he finally nodded, Meredith recoiled.
“Unbelievable,” she hissed.
“It’s not what you think,” said Derek quickly.
“It’s not what I think?” echoed Meredith with a hollow laugh. She backed away from the bed, and he followed her to his feet. “Why don’t you just take my mother’s diary and write up all your favorite bits on the OR board? Go ahead and tell the whole freaking hospital! What the hell, Derek? That wasn’t for you to share.”
“I didn’t say a word about the diary,” said Derek. “Not a single word about what happened with your mother.” He reached out for her hand but she yanked it back.
“Yeah, well you sure said enough to get me kicked out of the OR,” she snapped. Her stomach was in knots, and she could hear her heartbeat banging like a war drum inside her head.
“Meredith, it’s not like-”
“Just couldn’t resist getting your way, huh?” she asked, cutting him off. She saw his eyes flash and knew she was inching them closer and closer to the point where they’d stop talking and start screaming at each other. She was far past caring. He’d pulled her from Bailey’s surgery. She was pretty sure that meant she could kiss the clinical trial goodbye as well.
“It’s not about getting my way.” His voice rose to match hers and he stepped closer. “I told Bailey I was worried about you because I am.”
Meredith rolled her eyes. “You need to find a way to drop your overblown savior complex because this is getting ridiculous. I don’t need protecting, and I’m not too damaged to do my job.”
“I don’t have a savior complex,” said Derek indignantly.
“Then why’d you page me here? I’m off the clinical trial, right? Isn’t that what you’re going to tell me?” She saw the guilt flash across his face and laughed out loud to hide the pain. “Of course it is,” she muttered, turning away from him.
“You know about the patient?” asked Derek. His voice was quiet, gentle, washing over her like a lullaby as she stared at the wall, her chest heaving with every breath.
“George told me,” she said, blinking away sudden, stinging tears. She’d cried enough in the past twenty-four hours to last a lifetime. There could be no tears. She sucked in a rattling breath and kept her back to him. “Congratulated me, actually,” she said. “The whole good luck with the trial thing, which would be great, but…you don’t want me on it.” Her voice broke and a single tear rolled down her cheek. She wiped it away like it was something hateful.
“Mer,” said Derek. She felt the heat radiating from his body as he stepped closer. “It’s not that I don’t want you on it. I love working with you.” His breath was warm against the back of her neck, but he wasn’t touching her.
“But I’m not on it, am I?”
He sighed heavily and that was all she needed to know. Her shoulders slumped like she was a marionette and he’d cut the strings. “I want you on the trial, Meredith. I do, but not today,” he said. “You shouldn’t be here today, and I’m not going to apologize for trying to keep you safe when it is so clearly what you need.”
His voice hurt her ears, and she thought the ground might dissolve. Her mother had got to him. Ellis was dead and still she found a way to ruin things.
“I never should’ve let you read the diary,” she whispered, turning around. He looked like she’d just slapped him, and she kept talking so she wouldn’t have to care. “It’s freaking you out. I know it is. I tell you I’m fine, and you won’t even listen.”
“I don’t listen because I know by now that’s a lie,” said Derek. His hands clamped down on her shoulders, keeping her in front of him. “You’re always fine because you never deal with anything.”
“I’ve dealt with this,” said Meredith. Therapy was on the tip of her tongue, but when she met his eyes she couldn’t find the words. The room was smothering and she wanted out. Her face flushed and she pushed at his hands. She wasn’t strong enough to break his grip, but he let go anyway, sighing like she’d disappointed him. “I told you already. My mother didn’t really want to die.”
“She slit her wrists, Meredith.”
“I know that!” she shouted. “I was there, remember? All I’m saying is she didn’t want to die.”
“People don’t slit their wrists just for kicks,” said Derek.
“She wanted Richard to come back to her,” she snapped. Her hands were in fists, fingernails cutting half moons into her palms. This was about love not death, and he was flat out refusing to see the truth.
“And that makes it okay?” asked Derek incredulously. “She wanted him back, and so you’re okay with it?”
“Yes! What else is there to be? It happened. It’s over and done. You move on.”
“But you’re not okay with it.” He caught her hand again, entwining their fingers. “Last night, you were definitely not okay with it.”
She cringed at the memory. “That was last night,” she said. “Not today. Why can’t it just stay as last night?”
A dam seemed to break somewhere behind Derek’s eyes, and it was he who let go this time, dropping her hand. “Here we go again,” he muttered.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means…” He stopped and shook his head as if he’d changed his mind. “No. Do you honestly expect me to just forget about last night so you can pretend you’re fine again?” he asked, his voice loud and rough and overwhelming. “Because I will not do that for you, Meredith. You were catatonic.” She turned away to stare at the wall. The overhead light was dying a slow death, buzzing and flickering in and out, making their shadows dance. “I had to carry you out of the shower so you wouldn’t give yourself pneumonia or hypothermia or whatever it was you were trying to accomplish in there.”
She hugged her arms tightly to her chest, folding into herself as best she could with him standing so close. The light bulb flirted with darkness but wouldn’t commit. “You think there’s something wrong with me?” she asked quietly. The words got stuck in her throat and she had to force them out.
At first he said nothing back and she had only his breathing for company. When he did speak, every word was its own sentence, slow and cautious. Calculated. “I think what your mother did could go a long way to explaining why you…” He sighed. “Why sometimes you’re--”
“So messed up?” supplied Meredith. She put her back to the wall and faced him. “That’s what you’re trying to say, right? You just haven’t come up with the pretty, pretty words you need yet?” She trembled and her voice shook as if there was an earthquake somewhere deep inside her heart. Derek was silent and she had to force herself to breathe, willing the room not to blur with tears. “You see this?” she asked. “This is why I don’t like to talk about my mother.” She pushed away from the wall and started to pace, her voice escalating with every step. “It’s why I waited so long to tell you. You haven’t even known twenty-four hours, and already you think I can’t do my job. You don’t want me on the clinical trial!” she cried, her voice breaking. Derek reached out and caught her by the arms, pulling her close.
“Hey, hey,” he murmured. “Easy, Mer.”
She stumbled to a halt and looked up at him, eyes threatening to overflow. “You think my mother’s made me all fucked in the head, don’t you?”
“I don’t think that,” he said gently.
“Then quit acting like you think I’m on some kind of psychotic break, okay? Just because she slit her wrists doesn’t mean I’m going to slit mine.”
“Okay,” said Derek. He spoke too quickly; that one word was riddled with holes. The truth came to her as quiet as a whisper in the night when he didn’t meet her eyes. Like an ice cube dropped down the back of her shirt, it slipped swiftly down her spine and left her cold.
“You don’t believe me…” she said. There was horror in her voice.
He shook his head. “I said okay.”
“Say it like you mean it, Derek.”
He stared at her in silence for a long time. The only sound was the dying light above them. She wondered what they’d do if it burnt out. Fight it out in the darkness? Walk to another room like this was the sort of conversation that didn’t hurt with every word?
“It’d be easier to believe you if you didn’t have a history with things like this,” said Derek at last, bowing his head under a weight she couldn’t see.
She slithered out of his arms. “What are you talking about?”
“You know exactly what I’m talking about.” His voice was thin as ice about to break, and she felt nauseous. “You drowned yourself.”
Meredith bristled like a cornered animal. Something snapped and then they were shouting. “I was pushed in!” she said.
“That’s not the point,” said Derek. “You didn’t swim!”
“It was cold,” she said, backing up until she reached the wall. He followed her, and the space between them shriveled down to something tiny and red hot.
“I know it was cold.” He leaned forward, his hands against the wall on either side of her head. She felt all the ways he wasn’t touching her, and it was enough to make her want to scream. “Do you know how many tries it took me to find you?” he asked in a voice she’d never heard before. Broken edges and battered things. That was how he spoke. She said nothing. “Do you?” demanded Derek.
The room was spinning when she found her voice. “No.”
“Six,” he said. “So don’t you dare look at me and tell me it was too cold to swim. We both know you’re the better swimmer, and I did it six times. Until my lungs were on fire and I couldn’t feel my feet.” His eyes cut into her, and she shook like she had that day in the bay. When the water had been as brutal as the edge of a knife. Derek had felt it too. “I know exactly how cold it was in there.”
His words took the ground away and she scrambled for something, anything to say. This was not a conversation she’d ever thought they’d have. “Where’s all this even coming from?” she asked at last. She placed a tentative hand on his shoulder, but his body didn’t ground her the way it usually did. “It was months ago,” she whispered, still reeling. “And it changed me. I came back changed.”
“It changed me too,” said Derek. He cradled her cheek in the palm of his hand and brushed his thumb over her lower lip. “You had no pulse,” he said quietly, thoughtfully. There was something distant to the sound. “I held your corpse in my arms. The dead body of the woman I love.” He shook his head, smiling sadly. “That changes a person.” He closed his eyes and drew in a single, shuddering breath. When he opened them again they shone with tears. “Tell me the truth, Meredith,” he said. “You never answer me. You didn’t swim and you damned well know how.”
His voice was like a corkscrew to her mind, and she couldn’t meet his eyes. Even if he knew, admitting it was something else entirely. She felt torn in two and trapped against the wall. “It was just a moment,” she said at last in a voice that sounded very small. “One stupid, tiny moment where I, I…” She stared up at the dying light and wished it would go out; shameful things could be said easier in darkness. Meredith closed her eyes. “I didn’t see the point,” she whispered.
“In living?” he asked incredulously.
She kept her eyes shut. “Yes.”
Derek let out a noise that sounded a lot like a sob and turned away from her, his shoulders shaking. He lifted a hand as if he meant to rake it back through his hair only to be stopped by the scrub cap still sitting there. He yanked it off, crumpling the ferryboats in his fist.
He wasn’t pinning her to the wall anymore, and the sudden freedom felt strange and surreal. Like floating. She took a cautious step in his direction; that felt as safe as walking on a tightrope. Strung out high above a reality that could kill her if she so much as slipped. “Derek, it’s okay,” she said. She wrung her hands together and tiptoed closer. It had to be okay, but he wasn’t turning around. “It was stupid, but it’s over now. It’s over,” she pleaded. “I’m alive. It doesn’t have to be a big deal.”
He spun around to face her. The look in his eyes was raw and devastated, and it seared right through her soul. “It is a big deal,” he said in a rough voice. “You were dead.”
“I know that,” said Meredith, trying to hold herself together, but he stepped closer, shaking his head.
“No, you don’t know,” said Derek forcefully. “You were dead. You have no idea what it was like to sit there and wait for hours while they tried again and again to bring you back.”
She stared up at him speechless, shrinking down into herself. She couldn’t tell if the tears were in her eyes or his.
“Have you even looked at your chart?” he demanded, and something within her started to unravel. “Do you have any idea how many rounds of ACLS drugs they pumped into you? Burke had to put you on cardiopulmonary bypass! They ran your blood through a fucking machine just to try and save your life, and you did it to yourself.”
“I don’t…” She trailed off before she’d barely started, not knowing what to say. This was worse than the diary. The look in his eyes made breathing an impossibility. Coherent thought was long gone too. She felt paralyzed and accused.
Derek shook his head. “The world can snatch your life away from you whenever it wants,” he said. “And there is nothing you can do to stop it, Meredith. Nothing.” He slammed his hand against the wall, leaning into it like it hurt to stand. “But you are not supposed to go looking for ways to throw that life away,” he shouted. “Not anyone and especially not you!”
Meredith listened to the sound of her heart pounding inside her head. There was a hole in it right where the love was supposed to go. Her ribs had hurt when she’d come back from drowning. She’d been speckled with bruises from all the chest compressions and laughter had been agony for a few days, but it was nothing to the way his words were crushing her. She felt blindsided like she’d been taken down by a truck, splattered against some impartial stretch of pavement. If only he’d stop yelling then maybe she could think.
He didn’t stop.
“That is why I’m worried about you,” he continued loudly, pushing her further and further inside herself. “No, that is why I’m terrified. Because Ellis is essentially back from the dead, and how can I be sure it won’t happen again?” He circled closer and she felt ensnared.
“I guess you can’t,” she choked out, stumbling away from him. Her voice was bitterly sarcastic and full of all the tears she’d kept out of her eyes. “Lucky you. You’re dating a psycho who’s going to kill herself over a diary.” She bit down hard on the inside of her cheek to keep from sobbing.
“Don’t joke about this,” pleaded Derek.
Don’t joke about it. Right. Because she really was some sort of suicidal maniac who was just waiting for the opportune moment to off herself. She shook her head and grabbed the doorknob. “I can’t. I…” She swallowed the lump in her throat but couldn’t bring herself to meet his eyes. She knew what she’d find there without looking. Accusation, disappointment. No one loves a failure. “I have to get back to the pit,” she whispered.
She missed the words he said in reply as she pushed the door open and let her feet carry her far, far away. She walked without thinking. All she had left was motion. To stop would be to fall apart, and so Meredith kept walking until she was far away from the on-call room and all the accusations in Derek’s eyes. His voice still echoed inside her head. Shouting, always shouting. She shouldered her way into the stairwell and raced up a flight of stairs. The hallway was too crowded when she reemerged, teeming with patients and nurses and doctors, visitors and orderlies. People everywhere. She felt sick and panicky at the sight of them. Smothering. She stumbled down the hall, breathing in shallow fits and gasps. Drowning again. The faces were already starting to blur when she reached a supply closet and slipped inside.
She slumped to the ground and curled forward, gasping for air. Her palms were cold and slick with sweat, her heart a jackhammer in her throat. She closed her eyes and forced herself to draw in one slow, painful breath after another.
“Are you okay?” asked someone in a quiet voice.
Meredith cried out in surprise, looking up. She was bleary eyed and panting, but she could make out the shape of another woman sitting at the far end of the supply closet. An old pair of jeans and an ill fitting sweatshirt took the place of scrubs, marking her as someone who was most likely a patient or a visitor. Meredith sucked in another breath, trying to get enough oxygen in her lungs to answer.
The woman scooted forward and placed a slender hand on her arm. “Do you need help?” she asked. “Should I try to find somebody?”
Meredith shook her head and finally managed to speak. “No…” She wiped her palms on her scrubs and gave the woman a shaky smile. “Thank you, though.”
“You’re sure you’re okay?” she asked uncertainly.
Meredith drew in one slow, deep breath and then another. On the third try, her lungs stopped burning. She placed her fingers over her carotid artery with some satisfaction. Her pulse was slowing down. “Yeah,” said Meredith. “I’m a doctor.” She put her usual confidence back into her voice and watched as the woman visibly relaxed. Definitely a patient or a visitor then. She smiled again. “I’m fine.”
“Good,” said the woman. “Good.” She had a round, pretty face with messy blonde hair that looked like it hadn’t been combed in a few days. She clutched a pack of tissues in her hand and several balled up ones littered the floor around her.
“Um,” said Meredith, glancing at the tear streaks on the woman’s face. “Are you alright?”
“I’m, I’m, oh,” stammered the woman. “I’m sorry! I know I’m probably breaking all kinds of rules being in here, but I just…” She pulled out a fresh tissue and dabbed at her eyes. “I didn’t want to cry in front of my husband or my daughter, and people kept coming into the restroom!” She smiled wryly, a watery little laugh slipping past her lips. “It’s a hospital. You’d think they’d have better places to cry.”
“They do,” said Meredith simply. “Supply closets.” The woman laughed again and nodded her head. She shifted forward as if to stand up, but Meredith held out a hand. “You can stay in here longer. If you need to,” she said. “No rush.”
“Okay,” said the woman as a fresh flood of tears pooled in her eyes. “Maybe I will.” She sniffled and leaned back against the shelf. “Thank you, um, Doctor…”
“Grey,” said Meredith. “Uh, Meredith, though,” she added in a soft voice. Dr. Grey sounded far too formal for the floor of a supply closet.
“Olivia,” said the woman.
“Right, Olivia. Well…” Meredith looked around the closet. It was dark and quiet, comforting. She started to stand herself. “I should let you-”
The woman shook her head, her hand lifting slightly before flopping back to her lap. The message was clear: stay. It hurts to cry alone. “My daughter’s dying,” she said quietly. The words were tentative, as if testing out some new reality she wanted no part in.
“Oh.” Meredith settled back against the wall. “I’m so sorry,” she said.
“Yeah.” Olivia nodded. “Me too.” She closed her eyes but more tears leaked out, slipping past her eyelids to run down her face and stain the pale green of her sweatshirt a darker emerald. “She was coloring this morning,” she whispered, eyes still closed. “I thought that was a good sign, you know? That she had a lot of strength. But now she’s just lying there too tired to draw, and I’m hiding in a closet like the world’s worst mother.”
“No,” said Meredith. “You’re a person. It hurts. There’s no one right way to do this.”
Olivia buried her head in her hands, her shoulders shaking. “Tell that to my husband,” she said, the words escaping along with a sound that might have been laughter, might have been tears. She sat curled tightly for a long time, lost in some messy form of sorrow, fingers tugging at the roots of her hair. Meredith was silent, watching as her own pain shriveled up and turned insignificant beside the woman’s grief. “You said you were a doctor?” asked Olivia at last, snuffling a little as she straightened up.
“I am,” agreed Meredith.
“Can I ask you, do you know if…” Olivia bit her lip and looked up at the ceiling, blinking rapidly as fresh tears streamed down her face. “Does it help children to know that they’re dying? Because we haven’t, we haven’t told Sarah. My husband thinks we should, but I just,” she shook her head fiercely, “I can’t, I don’t.” She gulped a breath of air and moaned a little. “I don’t want to tell her. I don’t want her to be scared.”
Meredith balled the hem of her lab coat into a fist, squeezing so hard her knuckles hurt. “How old is your daughter?” she asked.
“Six,” said Olivia.
Meredith nodded, trying to think back to cases she’d seen. “I haven’t worked in peds that much,” she said apologetically. “I’m probably not the best person to answer your question, but even at six, even if they haven’t been told they’re dying, they usually have a sense that their body’s failing them. They’re, actually, they’re often more worried about leaving their parents behind than about death itself, and talking about that can be good. I’ve seen it help families.”
“That’s what my husband feels,” said Olivia, her voice hoarse. She had been slowly ripping her tissues into little shreds, leaving scraps of white all over the faded denim of her jeans, but her hands stilled and she looked up. “It’s just Sarah has this one last shot,” she said, a faint flicker of hope in her eyes. “She’s in some sort of experimental trial that’s apparently been successful. Once.”
“Once?” echoed Meredith, the number tugging at her mind like a hangnail caught on a snag. Beth had been one.
“Yeah, once.” Olivia laughed softly, nodding her head. “Not the type of odds it’s easy to trust, I know, but there’s nothing else to even try at this point. So we’re gonna do it, and oh God, I don’t want to tell her because I don’t want her to go into that surgery thinking she could die. She needs to believe she’s going to live. I need my baby to live.” Tears were still dripping down Olivia’s face, but she no longer seemed to notice. She picked up another tissue and ripped it in two. “Do you know what it’s like to watch someone you love die?” she asked, her voice faint and frayed around the edges like an old secret.
“I, um…” Meredith closed her eyes and saw Derek’s face.
I held your corpse in my arms. The dead body of the woman I love.
“It changes a person,” she said quietly. Olivia only nodded, eyes screwed shut and leaking tears. Meredith hesitated a moment, fidgeting with her watch, and then the question came tumbling out before she could stop it. “I’m sorry but is your daughter in Dr. Shepherd’s trial by any chance?”
Olivia’s eyes flew open, filled with a sudden, brilliant flash of life. “Yes,” she said. “Do you know him?”
Meredith nodded, feeling stunned. Here was the surgery she wouldn’t get to see. “He’s a brilliant surgeon,” she said.
“Yes, he must be,” said Olivia. “His credentials…I didn’t know what half of them even meant, but there sure were a lot of them.” Her hair was tear-soaked and matted to her face, and she pushed at it absently. “Do you know him personally?” she asked.
“What?” said Meredith, nearly choking on the word.
“Are you good friends with Dr. Shepherd or is he just a colleague?”
She hesitated, glancing down at her shoes. The toes were scuffed, the laces dingy. Thinking of Derek made her ache.
“I only ask because I need to know what sort of man he is,” continued Olivia hesitantly. “I’ve met him and he seems very nice. But he’s just a face to me, and if Sarah doesn’t survive the surgery, he’s the person who’s going to be there when she dies. It should be me. If she has to go before I do, she shouldn’t have to die in some strange room, strapped down to a table surrounded by strangers. She should be in my arms. And Mike’s. She should be with us.” Olivia’s chin quivered, and she struggled to keep speaking through a fresh onslaught of tears. “But if it happens in the OR, I need to know that she has someone good with her,” she said. “That she’s with a good person, so please, tell me you know him. Tell me you know what he’s like.”
Meredith nodded slowly. “I know him very well,” she said at last. Her voice was thin and shaky, and she felt tears in the corners of her eyes. They settled down there, blurring her vision but refusing to fall. “If he’s the one with your daughter, then you should know his name is Derek,” she said quietly. “Derek Christopher Shepherd. He can be arrogant and he always thinks he’s right,” she said, the words tumbling out quickly, tinged with the residual heat of their argument. “He usually ends up being right though, so I guess there’s at least some sort of precedence there.” She scrunched her nose up a little, smiling despite herself.
Olivia just nodded. “Go on,” she said.
“Well, he takes his job very seriously. He’ll talk your ear off if you get him started on anything related to neurosurgery. Actually,” she frowned, “that’s not quite true. It doesn’t have to be surgery. He’ll talk about whatever. He does this chatty thing where he goes on and on and thinks he’s charming, but he usually is being charming so I let him talk.”
She stopped abruptly, her cheeks flushing. It had to be painfully obvious that she knew Derek as one half of Derek and Meredith, but when she glanced at Olivia, her face was impassive. Their fight felt devastating next to the normalcy of her memories. She missed him then with a sudden, staggering intensity that would’ve bowled her over if she wasn’t already on the ground; she wanted to turn back time to a night when she’d been able to fall asleep in his arms.
“He likes the outdoors,” she continued at last. “Fishing, camping, that sort of thing.” Houses made of candles and hills to paint the future on. “He owns all this land, this beautiful land, which is kinda funny because he’s from Manhattan, but I think Seattle’s more him.” A little sliver of a laugh escaped her, and her eyes slipped shut for a moment. “I like to think he’s happier here,” she said quietly. “His family’s still on the east coast though. Four sisters and way too many nieces and nephews to count.”
“Does he have kids?” asked Olivia.
Meredith’s eyes flew open again and she shook her head. “No,” she said. The answer left her feeling guilty, but she wasn’t sure why. They could have them. Someday. She wouldn’t say no. Assuming they still knew how to talk to each other after everything that had been said, she wouldn’t say no. She shivered and hugged her knees to her chest, staring at the shelves until all the supplies started to blend and blur together. “Not yet,” she said, her voice growing soft and distant. “He wants them though. He’d be a good dad, I think. He, um, he takes care of the people he loves. He wants to keep them safe.”
“He sounds like a good man,” said Olivia as she pulled out another tissue.
“He is,” said Meredith. “You can trust him with your daughter.”
“Yes. I think I can.” She turned away slightly to blow her nose before looking back at Meredith and offering her a shaky smile. “The two of you must be very happy together.”
Meredith just blinked at her. “Excuse me?” she stammered, caught off guard.
“You’re a couple, aren’t you?” She spoke as if there was no doubt. “The way you talk about him, it’s gentle, familiar. Like he’s your lover.”
“Oh,” said Meredith. “That’s not…” An easy question. She felt adrift. But Olivia was watching her curiously, and she nodded her head. “Yeah,” she said at last. “He’s my boyfriend.”
“That’s nice,” said Olivia. Meredith nodded again, unsure of what to say. The sound of her pager going off filled the sudden silence, her muscles tensing in the moment it took her to twist around and pull it from her scrubs. She sighed when she saw the number, relaxing a little. The pit was paging her back, and she couldn’t tell if she felt disappointment or relief that it wasn’t Derek. Somehow it seemed a lot like both.
“I’m sorry, but I have to get back to work,” she said and clambered to her feet.
“Of course,” said Olivia. She started gathering her many discarded tissues. “I should probably get back to my family.”
They reached the door at the same time, Olivia smoothing her messy curls back into some semblance of order with a trembling hand. Her smile was pretty but didn’t make it anywhere near her eyes; faith always suffered the most when children died.
“For what it’s worth,” said Meredith quietly. “Derek is one of the best. I know you’re scared, and I’m not going to say you shouldn’t be, but you should have some hope too.”
Olivia nodded, clutching her tissues to her chest. “I’ll try,” she said before opening the door. Meredith watched as she walked down the hall and out of sight.
-----
The rest of the day passed slowly. Her anger had dulled and faded, replaced by a heaviness she felt deep down inside her. It shadowed everything like a storm cloud taking away the sun. She sutured and charted and answered interns’ questions all on autopilot; her mind was absent, stuck in that place without the sun, trying to think of what to say to Derek. Sorry for drowning. For not seeing how it changed you too. But he’d kicked her off of surgery, and she didn’t see how one made the other okay.
She ended up at home in an empty house without really remembering the drive that brought her there. It was too quiet, and she sat with the TV on just to have some sound. One hour bled into two and then drifted on towards three. She fell asleep with a pillow clutched in her arms, worn well past exhausted from a night without sleep.
Meredith started awake at the sound of her phone and pushed herself up, groggy and disoriented with a crick in her neck. She fished around in the couch cushions for her phone and opened it without bothering to check the caller id.
“Derek?” she said as she muted the television.
“No, it’s me,” said a voice that definitely wasn’t his. Cristina.
Meredith yawned. “Oh. Hey,” she said. She tried to mask her disappointment that it wasn’t him. He wasn’t here. She hadn’t seen him since their fight and he still wasn’t home. Loneliness made her hug the pillow tighter.
“It’s almost nine,” said Cristina.
Meredith squinted at the old analog clock that hung on the wall. The lights were out and the house was dark, but the glow from television screen was enough to show the hour. Cristina was right. Almost nine and he still wasn’t home.
“I thought we were meeting at Joe’s at eight?”
“Crap,” said Meredith. Another thing to feel bad about. She hadn’t even thought about their plans since fighting with Derek. “We did say that.”
“Are you still at the hospital?” asked Cristina.
“No, I’m…I think I fell asleep,” she said apologetically. “I was up all night.”
There was a long pause and then, “Do you still wanna come?”
Meredith sighed and got to her feet. In the past, Cristina never would’ve asked. She would’ve told her she could sleep when she was dead and to get off her lazy ass and into Joe’s already. She didn’t understand why everything had to go weird all at once.
“I don’t know,” she said as she walked to the front window and peered out at the street. There was no sign of Derek’s car. Not even the glow of headlights in the distance to give her hope. He wasn’t here. “I…”
“Come on,” said Cristina. “It’s just Izzie and Alex here, and I’ve had enough of the sex eyes they keep giving each other. You need to save me.”
“I need to save you?” echoed Meredith. She smiled a little and reached up, trying to guess what damage her nap had done to her hair. “I think they’re kinda sweet together.”
“No, Mer. It’s nauseating. Are you coming or not?
Meredith glanced out at her street again. Her heart sunk when she found it as dark as before. He hadn’t called. He wasn’t here. She suddenly, desperately did not want to wait around for him to not show up. “Yeah,” she said quietly. “I’m coming.” She turned her back on the darkened street. “Just give me ten minutes.”
-----
So yeah, Derek finally got a chance to air his long bottled up feelings on the Meredith drowning thing. And it could’ve gone better. Meredith was already pissed because she doesn’t take well to his whole overprotective thing, and Derek decided to express himself through a lot of yelling, which made her shut down and flee. Not the best of all possible outcomes. Because, while this is something Derek has been obsessing about since finding her in the shower, it’s completely out of the blue for Meredith. And what he has to say is hard for her to hear. She feels bad and accused, guilty and overwhelmed, not to mention still very hurt that he’s keeping her off the clinical trial. While he believes he has her best interests at heart, it was actually a pretty stupid idea and one that hurt her a lot. So yeah, all of that adds up and they don’t sit down and talk it out like calm, rational adults. They’re both too hurt and upset for that. Meredith runs and ends up in a closet along with Olivia, Sarah’s mother. This ends up being a very good thing for her. Olivia is quite possibly losing her six year old daughter, and that helps Meredith stop dwelling on everything that happened with Derek because her problems feel like nothing next to this woman’s grief. And talking about Derek for Olivia’s benefit helps her to get past being angry at him. She’s frustrated and hurt, yes, but when she sits down and thinks about it, she loves him and there’s a lot of good there. So Meredith ends up at home, essentially waiting for him because she knows they left things very unfinished and still need to talk. But when he doesn’t come home right away, all of her old insecurities start to pop up. If he’s avoiding her, she doesn’t want to sit around and think about how he isn’t showing up. That sounds too painful. So she goes out with Cristina because things have been kinda weird with her too, but maybe she can at least fix them and have one thing that feels normal. And yeah, that’s pretty much it. Things were definitely angsty for MerDer, but Derek finally told Meredith his side of things, and that’s going to be good for them. Thanks for reading!