we dreamed a life but then just like that it's done {derek/meredith, alex/meredith}
Title: We Dreamed A Life But Then Just Like That It's Done
Fandom: Grey's Anatomy
Characters/Pairings: Derek/Meredith, Alex/Meredith, mentions of other pairings.
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2,205
Prompt: #66 - Rain for fanfic100
Author's Note: Please don't read this if you're expecting happy MerDer, or happy anything else. It's angst. It's raw and hard and real, and it doesn't play around. But it does have it's moments, and I am extraordinarily proud of it. It's also not specifically chronological.
Summary: Seven years doesn't mean as much as it should, and Derek's starting to figure things like that out a little too late.
He used to know the exact rhythm of her beating heart, and if you asked him he might’ve even be able to tap it out for you too.
It had been different from his, disconcertingly so, and you know he was just so used to being alone, used to rolling over to nothing but the cold side of the bed, that anything would’ve seemed out of the ordinary to him.
Back then, he used to think it meant something. Now he just counts to it, counts the days and weeks since he’d watched her taillights in his rearview mirror as she drove away.
---
They get married in the fall, late September.
She wears ivory silk, strapless; the bridesmaids wear emerald. Cristina’s her maid-of-honor, and he watches Lexie giggle at Mark and his finery, silent in her amusement. There’s the general feeling of happiness, something uplifting in the air.
It’s a far cry from the reception.
Alex shows up, half an hour late to the reception, misses the wedding completely. He’s wasted and angry, bitter and inappropriate - something Meredith would call hurting; Derek, well, he just claims Alex is the same self-centered frat boy asshole that he’s always been - and Cristina pulls him out the back door when everyone seems to have had enough. Ten minutes later they’re back and Alex’s face is a fading pink-red on one side, like he’s been slapped. No one asks and Cristina keeps him away from the alcohol but otherwise doesn’t spend anymore time interacting with him than usual.
The empty seat at the main table manages to put a damper on the evening anyways.
---
Izzie Stevens died in August.
Cancer, and the common thought was at least it had been fairly quick. She was sick and then gone in the span of a few months. Better than years, better not to suffer.
Meredith had sat out on the bench in front of the hospital for hours with Alex, folded into herself, knees pulled to chest, a space in between them, like it holds a person he merely can’t see.
“Meredith,” he’d asked, touched her shoulder, and she didn’t flinch but she didn’t react either. Steady and unmoving like a statue, except for her lips.
“I’ll be fine,” she tells him, without looking at him, without even bothering with things like eye contact and meaning it. “We’ll all be fine. I just need to be alone.”
‘You’re not alone’, he wants to say, motion to Alex. But the other man’s eyes are blank, vacant, and he isn’t moving either, except to breath, so lost in his own head, so maybe she really is alone. Maybe they both are.
He hears they sleep at the hospital that night.
---
It’s funny the way death really does seem to change everything. One single beeping flat line on a monitor and she’s reevaluated what she wants from life.
Derek makes a comment about a couple on the street, hands linked, free hand of the woman pushing one of those double strollers, twins outfitted in matching pink outfits. “Would our kids be cuter than them?” He asks, playfully, trying to recreate that same joking mood that had been in the air the day she’d said it.
Her smile, half-hearted and forced upturned corners, does nothing to aid in that, and he doesn’t mention it again.
---
Lexie moves out of their living room in October.
Meredith volunteers to help her get her stuff out of the apartment she shared with George too, move her into this enormous apartment that Mark’s got set up, finally out of the hotel. It’s a sign of goodwill, and Lexie nods, and Derek supervises and helps Mark and manages to be happy for them, for Mark at finally finding someone he’s close enough with to move in with.
“I love her,” he’d told Derek, months ago, the only reason for all of this that he’d offered and there hadn’t been anymore punches thrown, and Derek thinks he can forgive him this. The end justifies the means and all of that. Really he’d just rather have someone he’s not fighting with. It’s a rare commodity.
The car ride back brings, “One more to go and we’ll have the house to ourselves.”
“No,” she replies, leaning against the glass window as the rain comes down in sheets, another wonderful day in Seattle. “Alex is staying here.”
She makes it sound like it’s not either of their decisions to make. It probably isn’t.
---
He never does build that house.
The blueprints stay sealed in the top drawer of the nightstand, and when he runs his fingers over them years later, packing up again, time to move on, there’s a teardrop that smears the ink on one side.
It isn’t his.
---
“Do you still want to be with me?” He’d asked, one night under the cover of darkness. His hand rested on her hip, tentatively, and she rolled into him, into his touch.
“Of course,” she says, and he always thought that she was beautiful when she smiled, really truly smiled. “I married you didn’t I?”
‘I married Addison, stayed that way for twelve years, even after Mark’ he wants to point out, but doesn’t, because he knows exactly how that would sound. What he means is people, circumstances, change. What he means to ask, should ask, is if she’s changed. Instead he replies, “Yeah. Yeah, you did.”
She frowns, pulls back to look at him, asks the same question, “Do you still want to be with me?”
“Always,” he tells her and means it.
This is five years in.
---
The first few months, they claim, is newlywed bliss. And then you start fighting.
There’s no hard and fast rule to when that stops, lessens. Some say if you get through five years, ten, twenty, it’ll be enough, you’ll be so used to each other you wouldn’t be able to live without each other. And so you’ll stay, keep on pushing forward.
Derek always thought that sounded sad, too melodramatic, instead entertained thoughts of how that was all a bunch of bullshit. He’d made it past ten with Addison and look where that got him. Besides, he likes to think you stay because of love, not because it’s easier not to leave.
He likes to believe in things like true love and steady, grounded marriages, and forever.
With Meredith, he thinks that’s what changed. She stopped believing that forever was possible. She started realizing that it could all be taken away from you in a second and it’s better to just distance yourself, so when you lose something it doesn’t cut so deeply. It’s a lot like Cristina, he figures, a lot like Alex now, again, too, and she gets closer and closer to them as the seasons change and the years blend.
It means she’s farther away from him too.
---
He figures out what’s going on fairly quickly.
When it’s been seven years and Izzie’s room is still exactly the same way as it was, and Alex has never moved out, and she’s back to refusing to have serious conversations without freaking out and making up excuses about places she has to be and running.
Some thing’s never change.
“Where are you going?” He asks from the couch, as she grabs her purse. They’re the only two still there, Alex working some late shift at the hospital, and generally he tries to use this time as time to be with her without having to worry about other people being there. Apparently, that’s not on her agenda tonight.
“I’m meeting Cristina at Joe’s,” she tells him, voice smooth and easy, and he believes her for the most part.
Until the next day and, “I swear, man, I was there until last call. I never saw her or Cristina,” as Mark meets him for their usual morning coffee run.
Right.
---
He remembers what happened after Jen, after that man, her husband, called him a murderer in front of more than a few people, and Meredith had brought tequila to make it all go away at least for that night.
“You’re the best surgeon I know,” she said, holding him by the shoulders to get him to stand still, get him to look at her. His eyes were bloodshot, still in a hazy alcohol-induced state, had been that way for the better part of the week. Rock bottom and still digging, and she kept looking at him like at least she was familiar with this, at least this she could handle, somehow. “And more importantly, you’re the best man I know. But you’re not perfect, anymore than I am, or he is, or she was. You’re not perfect, you’re just human, and I still love you no matter what happened. People still love you, not in spite of what you did, but because of what you did. Because you tried. Because you did what you thought was right.”
It wasn’t what he expected. The normal ‘it’s not your fault, you shouldn’t feel bad, you’re still the best surgeon and it was just a one time screw up’. He’s been holding himself to high standards, taking on ridiculous cases, because that’s all anyone ever tells him. He’s the best; doesn’t that mean he can just handle anything? Shouldn’t it? He’s been thinking that way for so long, he doesn’t remember what it’s like not to push.
She runs her fingers over the cuts and bruises that mar his face, and looks at him like she believes, and for awhile he believes too.
---
“What do you think about moving out of Seattle, you know, after…” he’d trailed off. After he, they, retire, when they’ve finally had enough. He’s talking about where they want to live out the rest of their lives, testing the waters, and he takes her smile as a sign that maybe this is okay.
“It might be nice to get out of the city,” she tells him, without any form of hesitation. The skies are gray outside and this is July, a month before everything changed, on a Sunday, the morning paper in his hands, ink-stained fingers.
They made plans, you see. Just like that. And then they were gone.
---
He follows her in his car. There’s a shitty motel. This goes exactly like it does in the movies.
“You’re seeing someone else,” he stops her as she’s getting into her car. She doesn’t seem shocked to see him there. He wonders if she’s just tired of hiding it, or if she just figured it was a matter of time until she got caught, because really it always is.
She doesn’t tell him one way or another, just stands there, her car door still half open, her jacket open and moving with the wind, and the falling rain slaps him in the cheeks each time the breeze picks up.
“Who is it?”
“You already know who it is,” she finally says, lackluster. Neither of them are yelling, not even raising their voices. Seven years of on and off arguing and cheating allegations is the one thing that doesn’t even faze them.
He has to think, for a moment, and then it all makes sense. “Alex?”
She shrugs, tells him, dryly, “I sleep with inappropriate men,” like it’s an excuse. He’s heard that line before, something Alex used to say many times, hasn’t in a while. Once, though, last year, he had, like a warning, and now Derek wonders if he was trying to tell him something back then.
Moments later, she was in her car, then gone. No ‘I’m sorry’, just the cold hard facts, and maybe it was better that way.
The sign over the motel flickers three times, before the power goes out completely. Someone shouts. The rain continues to pour.
---
“I didn’t start this,” Alex tells him, hands in his pockets, in the doorway to the living room. He doesn’t know where Meredith is. At least, he thinks, Alex had the balls to stand there and say something to him. He didn’t have to. “And I don’t think this had anything to do with you.”
“No?” It starts off as a question, his head cocked just a little to the right, but then it becomes something else, slowly. Realization. “No, it really didn’t, did it? Maybe that was the problem.”
Derek’s last action in that house for the next two weeks is to place their wedding picture face down and walk out the door.
---
“I don’t know how to do this,” he told her, looking down, one of his hands in his jacket pocket, fingers fumbling around a navy blue velvet box. The ring, his future, their future.
She smiled up at him, taking a step closer, some all-knowing look on her face. “Derek Shepherd,” she starts, her lips inches from his, “are you proposing to me?”
He might have blushed, just a little, but she was too close to really notice it. “Badly, but yes,” he winces.
“I’ll marry you,” she whispers, so sure, against his lips, before pressing her own there, her hand on the back of his neck, in his hair.
It had been sunny that afternoon.
Fandom: Grey's Anatomy
Characters/Pairings: Derek/Meredith, Alex/Meredith, mentions of other pairings.
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2,205
Prompt: #66 - Rain for fanfic100
Author's Note: Please don't read this if you're expecting happy MerDer, or happy anything else. It's angst. It's raw and hard and real, and it doesn't play around. But it does have it's moments, and I am extraordinarily proud of it. It's also not specifically chronological.
Summary: Seven years doesn't mean as much as it should, and Derek's starting to figure things like that out a little too late.
He used to know the exact rhythm of her beating heart, and if you asked him he might’ve even be able to tap it out for you too.
It had been different from his, disconcertingly so, and you know he was just so used to being alone, used to rolling over to nothing but the cold side of the bed, that anything would’ve seemed out of the ordinary to him.
Back then, he used to think it meant something. Now he just counts to it, counts the days and weeks since he’d watched her taillights in his rearview mirror as she drove away.
---
They get married in the fall, late September.
She wears ivory silk, strapless; the bridesmaids wear emerald. Cristina’s her maid-of-honor, and he watches Lexie giggle at Mark and his finery, silent in her amusement. There’s the general feeling of happiness, something uplifting in the air.
It’s a far cry from the reception.
Alex shows up, half an hour late to the reception, misses the wedding completely. He’s wasted and angry, bitter and inappropriate - something Meredith would call hurting; Derek, well, he just claims Alex is the same self-centered frat boy asshole that he’s always been - and Cristina pulls him out the back door when everyone seems to have had enough. Ten minutes later they’re back and Alex’s face is a fading pink-red on one side, like he’s been slapped. No one asks and Cristina keeps him away from the alcohol but otherwise doesn’t spend anymore time interacting with him than usual.
The empty seat at the main table manages to put a damper on the evening anyways.
---
Izzie Stevens died in August.
Cancer, and the common thought was at least it had been fairly quick. She was sick and then gone in the span of a few months. Better than years, better not to suffer.
Meredith had sat out on the bench in front of the hospital for hours with Alex, folded into herself, knees pulled to chest, a space in between them, like it holds a person he merely can’t see.
“Meredith,” he’d asked, touched her shoulder, and she didn’t flinch but she didn’t react either. Steady and unmoving like a statue, except for her lips.
“I’ll be fine,” she tells him, without looking at him, without even bothering with things like eye contact and meaning it. “We’ll all be fine. I just need to be alone.”
‘You’re not alone’, he wants to say, motion to Alex. But the other man’s eyes are blank, vacant, and he isn’t moving either, except to breath, so lost in his own head, so maybe she really is alone. Maybe they both are.
He hears they sleep at the hospital that night.
---
It’s funny the way death really does seem to change everything. One single beeping flat line on a monitor and she’s reevaluated what she wants from life.
Derek makes a comment about a couple on the street, hands linked, free hand of the woman pushing one of those double strollers, twins outfitted in matching pink outfits. “Would our kids be cuter than them?” He asks, playfully, trying to recreate that same joking mood that had been in the air the day she’d said it.
Her smile, half-hearted and forced upturned corners, does nothing to aid in that, and he doesn’t mention it again.
---
Lexie moves out of their living room in October.
Meredith volunteers to help her get her stuff out of the apartment she shared with George too, move her into this enormous apartment that Mark’s got set up, finally out of the hotel. It’s a sign of goodwill, and Lexie nods, and Derek supervises and helps Mark and manages to be happy for them, for Mark at finally finding someone he’s close enough with to move in with.
“I love her,” he’d told Derek, months ago, the only reason for all of this that he’d offered and there hadn’t been anymore punches thrown, and Derek thinks he can forgive him this. The end justifies the means and all of that. Really he’d just rather have someone he’s not fighting with. It’s a rare commodity.
The car ride back brings, “One more to go and we’ll have the house to ourselves.”
“No,” she replies, leaning against the glass window as the rain comes down in sheets, another wonderful day in Seattle. “Alex is staying here.”
She makes it sound like it’s not either of their decisions to make. It probably isn’t.
---
He never does build that house.
The blueprints stay sealed in the top drawer of the nightstand, and when he runs his fingers over them years later, packing up again, time to move on, there’s a teardrop that smears the ink on one side.
It isn’t his.
---
“Do you still want to be with me?” He’d asked, one night under the cover of darkness. His hand rested on her hip, tentatively, and she rolled into him, into his touch.
“Of course,” she says, and he always thought that she was beautiful when she smiled, really truly smiled. “I married you didn’t I?”
‘I married Addison, stayed that way for twelve years, even after Mark’ he wants to point out, but doesn’t, because he knows exactly how that would sound. What he means is people, circumstances, change. What he means to ask, should ask, is if she’s changed. Instead he replies, “Yeah. Yeah, you did.”
She frowns, pulls back to look at him, asks the same question, “Do you still want to be with me?”
“Always,” he tells her and means it.
This is five years in.
---
The first few months, they claim, is newlywed bliss. And then you start fighting.
There’s no hard and fast rule to when that stops, lessens. Some say if you get through five years, ten, twenty, it’ll be enough, you’ll be so used to each other you wouldn’t be able to live without each other. And so you’ll stay, keep on pushing forward.
Derek always thought that sounded sad, too melodramatic, instead entertained thoughts of how that was all a bunch of bullshit. He’d made it past ten with Addison and look where that got him. Besides, he likes to think you stay because of love, not because it’s easier not to leave.
He likes to believe in things like true love and steady, grounded marriages, and forever.
With Meredith, he thinks that’s what changed. She stopped believing that forever was possible. She started realizing that it could all be taken away from you in a second and it’s better to just distance yourself, so when you lose something it doesn’t cut so deeply. It’s a lot like Cristina, he figures, a lot like Alex now, again, too, and she gets closer and closer to them as the seasons change and the years blend.
It means she’s farther away from him too.
---
He figures out what’s going on fairly quickly.
When it’s been seven years and Izzie’s room is still exactly the same way as it was, and Alex has never moved out, and she’s back to refusing to have serious conversations without freaking out and making up excuses about places she has to be and running.
Some thing’s never change.
“Where are you going?” He asks from the couch, as she grabs her purse. They’re the only two still there, Alex working some late shift at the hospital, and generally he tries to use this time as time to be with her without having to worry about other people being there. Apparently, that’s not on her agenda tonight.
“I’m meeting Cristina at Joe’s,” she tells him, voice smooth and easy, and he believes her for the most part.
Until the next day and, “I swear, man, I was there until last call. I never saw her or Cristina,” as Mark meets him for their usual morning coffee run.
Right.
---
He remembers what happened after Jen, after that man, her husband, called him a murderer in front of more than a few people, and Meredith had brought tequila to make it all go away at least for that night.
“You’re the best surgeon I know,” she said, holding him by the shoulders to get him to stand still, get him to look at her. His eyes were bloodshot, still in a hazy alcohol-induced state, had been that way for the better part of the week. Rock bottom and still digging, and she kept looking at him like at least she was familiar with this, at least this she could handle, somehow. “And more importantly, you’re the best man I know. But you’re not perfect, anymore than I am, or he is, or she was. You’re not perfect, you’re just human, and I still love you no matter what happened. People still love you, not in spite of what you did, but because of what you did. Because you tried. Because you did what you thought was right.”
It wasn’t what he expected. The normal ‘it’s not your fault, you shouldn’t feel bad, you’re still the best surgeon and it was just a one time screw up’. He’s been holding himself to high standards, taking on ridiculous cases, because that’s all anyone ever tells him. He’s the best; doesn’t that mean he can just handle anything? Shouldn’t it? He’s been thinking that way for so long, he doesn’t remember what it’s like not to push.
She runs her fingers over the cuts and bruises that mar his face, and looks at him like she believes, and for awhile he believes too.
---
“What do you think about moving out of Seattle, you know, after…” he’d trailed off. After he, they, retire, when they’ve finally had enough. He’s talking about where they want to live out the rest of their lives, testing the waters, and he takes her smile as a sign that maybe this is okay.
“It might be nice to get out of the city,” she tells him, without any form of hesitation. The skies are gray outside and this is July, a month before everything changed, on a Sunday, the morning paper in his hands, ink-stained fingers.
They made plans, you see. Just like that. And then they were gone.
---
He follows her in his car. There’s a shitty motel. This goes exactly like it does in the movies.
“You’re seeing someone else,” he stops her as she’s getting into her car. She doesn’t seem shocked to see him there. He wonders if she’s just tired of hiding it, or if she just figured it was a matter of time until she got caught, because really it always is.
She doesn’t tell him one way or another, just stands there, her car door still half open, her jacket open and moving with the wind, and the falling rain slaps him in the cheeks each time the breeze picks up.
“Who is it?”
“You already know who it is,” she finally says, lackluster. Neither of them are yelling, not even raising their voices. Seven years of on and off arguing and cheating allegations is the one thing that doesn’t even faze them.
He has to think, for a moment, and then it all makes sense. “Alex?”
She shrugs, tells him, dryly, “I sleep with inappropriate men,” like it’s an excuse. He’s heard that line before, something Alex used to say many times, hasn’t in a while. Once, though, last year, he had, like a warning, and now Derek wonders if he was trying to tell him something back then.
Moments later, she was in her car, then gone. No ‘I’m sorry’, just the cold hard facts, and maybe it was better that way.
The sign over the motel flickers three times, before the power goes out completely. Someone shouts. The rain continues to pour.
---
“I didn’t start this,” Alex tells him, hands in his pockets, in the doorway to the living room. He doesn’t know where Meredith is. At least, he thinks, Alex had the balls to stand there and say something to him. He didn’t have to. “And I don’t think this had anything to do with you.”
“No?” It starts off as a question, his head cocked just a little to the right, but then it becomes something else, slowly. Realization. “No, it really didn’t, did it? Maybe that was the problem.”
Derek’s last action in that house for the next two weeks is to place their wedding picture face down and walk out the door.
---
“I don’t know how to do this,” he told her, looking down, one of his hands in his jacket pocket, fingers fumbling around a navy blue velvet box. The ring, his future, their future.
She smiled up at him, taking a step closer, some all-knowing look on her face. “Derek Shepherd,” she starts, her lips inches from his, “are you proposing to me?”
He might have blushed, just a little, but she was too close to really notice it. “Badly, but yes,” he winces.
“I’ll marry you,” she whispers, so sure, against his lips, before pressing her own there, her hand on the back of his neck, in his hair.
It had been sunny that afternoon.