DVD Commentary - We Dreamed A Life But Then Just Like That It's Done {GA - Derek/Meredith)
This is the DVD Commentary version of We Dreamed A Life But Then Just Like That It's Done, as requested by _takemeaway_
Starting with a lengthy non-specific intro. So I wrote this in early 2009 and it remains, to this very day, in my top five favorite fics I've ever written. It's real and it's raw and it came at a time where I was breaking free from writing only what people wanted. That got old real quick and I think, now that I write for me, it's done my writing a world of good.
Now that the egotistical stuff is out of the way.
Anyone who read the last commentary knows this but I write to music. Songs, usually one specifically that gives me the main idea, and this one is 'Time Lapse Lifeline' by Maria Taylor. You can see it's influence throughout the fic, unsurprisingly.
Still we stand with the help of a steady hand
Capture images of boy and man
Till its done
And 7 years combined is just a flicker of neon sign
Little negative of hopes replayed
This, of course, is the inspiration behind the motel scene at the climax of this fic. More than that, it's the inspiration behind the style of the fic. It's an exercise in the non-chronological and in dealing with the end of a relationship instead of the beginning of one and I liked that for a change.
Good or bad, here's the fic.
---
Some backstory on this scene: this originally was written not for Derek, not even for Grey's. It was a hundred words or so that I spit out during one of those iTunes shuffle things (the song there? 'If There's A Rocket Tie Me To It' by Snow Patrol'). I have a loose idea of what character/fandom it was for but I couldn't tell you with any amount of certainty.
It sat on my hard drive for a month or so until I was going through my 'defunct' folder looking for spare parts (because that's what happens to everything in that folder, I strip it for parts of other stories) and found this. I don't know what episode I had just watched but I know it was a Friday so I had definitely watched something. Between that and the loose idea the song had given me, I changed a few words and turned it into the intro. Derek's intro.
In retrospect, it works as well for him as for anyone else. I like the thought of heartbeats, simply because they're doctors. It makes a certain kind of sense because of that -- everything revolves around the heartbeat in their line of work. If the heart doesn't beat then it's all over. If the rhythm is all out of whack then there's a problem. So I think that presents an interesting meaning here.
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.
There is a double meaning in the way this is written. Post the wedding, it's all downhill from there. We have the happy people in the honeymoon phase (Lexie and Mark) and then we have reality, in it's not so pleasant form (Alex).
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.
Most of you know I have a think for Alex/Mer. I don't know how many of you know I have a thing for Alex/Cristina, but I do. That's 90% of the reason this is here. The other 10% is that Alex needed to be dealt with and Cristina just flat out makes the most sense. This also shows a lovely disconnect between Meredith and Derek -- in a short sentence fragment it's more or less recounting a fight they have.
The empty seat at the main table manages to put a damper on the evening anyways.
---
For a while, I enjoyed killing off Izzie. A lot. It just kept happening. For some reason, as much as I, at the time, wasn't crazy about it happening on the show, I liked the ramifications it would have on Alex and his behavior. It was a lot of fun to play around with because I like my angst.
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.
This is our little concrete group of five/four/three (it's three now -- go figure) and I like the idea of loyalty and Meredith not leaving him even if he didn't seem to actively want her there or even notice her. I've said this many times but I will forever believe that this show is at it's best when it focuses on the dynamics presented by the friendships rather than relationships. While this fic does go the way of Alex/Meredith, what you see here has nothing to do with the development of that, and the future relationship is not borne out of anything one could refer to as love.
---
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.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm 90% sure I'm referring back to an episode that had just aired. Or something. Quite possibly I just made that all up.
Her smile, half-hearted and forced upturned corners, does nothing to aid in that, and he doesn’t mention it again.
This isn't so much about her not wanting kids with Derek, by the way. This is about her seeing how quickly life just goes away, in a way that's way more personal than what she's used to seeing even working, and having second thoughts about subjecting a child to that. It doesn't mean she never wants kids, it just means that in this particular space of time she's having second thoughts. She's the child of a surgeon who neglected her while she was a surgeon and then lost her mind, very slowly, before she could ever connect with her. That gives you a very different viewpoint on children
---
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.
Clearly this was written during the Derek/Mark standoff from hell. I really hated that, btw, since basically the only time I enjoy Derek's character is when he interacts with Mark (seriously, if that surprises you by now -- ).
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.”
The rain as metaphor again. But hey, it rains constantly on that show.
She makes it sound like it’s not either of their decisions to make. It probably isn’t.
Like I said, loyalty. And to a degree, a need to keep them all together.
---
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.
He still hasn't built that house. I really want that house to be built, which is strange but true. I think it's because it keeps popping up in my fic (see the housewarming party fic I wrote like two years ago.
---
“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?”
The issue here isn't so much that Meredith is out of this relationship. It's that Meredith is out of sorts and Derek is reading that differently than perhaps he should be. It's a relationship ruined by changing circumstances and incorrect interpretations that lead to them both having one foot out the door. That's the problem. It's not love. It's everything else. Because sometimes love isn't enough.
‘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.
Because Derek is a romantic. Not to the degree (of insanity) that Izzie is/was, but enough that it's noticeable to me. Meredith isn't -- I'm not sure she ever has been.
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.
I said I liked the loyalty between these interns but, in a way, these three have a common denominator. They were never the happy ones. There was George/Izzie on one side (cheerful, nice, a little bit idealistic) and then Alex/Cristina (blunt, aware of reality, not good with emotions) -- I always figured Meredith was somewhere in the middle of that.
I realize that George doesn't factor into this story except in the barest of mentions and you have to remember that this was a time where George had faded so far into the background that we barely even knew he was there. We all knew it was the end for him. So yeah, it's accidentally on purpose that he's not there. Regarding him as less of a presence in Meredith's life, it's easier to see how, without that one side to balance out the other, she would become a little more like Alex/Cristina, pretty much reverting. You become a little like your friends, sometimes a lot, and this really is no exception. They grow and evolve around each other.
---
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.
Speaking of reverting. Izzie's room is a memorial and Alex/Meredith are pretending that nothing ever happened more or less. They are actively ignoring it. This is behavior we've seen before, from a different Meredith than the one presented in Season Five, when this was written.
“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.
Can I just say I love Mark as the informant. I really do love their friendship.
---
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.
I love this scene for any number of reasons. First, because it throws you out of the angsty present day and takes you back. It looks at the before. It contrasts well. And it shows you that there was a foundation here, if you had any doubt, and at one point this really did work. Meredith can deal with the flawed, the rock bottom people, because she's lived that.
In essence it's the quote below (which is NOT from Grey's Anatomy, so if you recognize it, which _takemeaway_ will for sure, among others, then good for you) personified.
"This guy's walking down a street when he falls in a hole. The walls are so steep, he can't get out. A doctor passes by, and the guy shouts up, "Hey you, can you help me out?" The doctor writes a prescription, throws it down in the hole and moves on. Then a priest comes along, and the guy shouts up "Father, I'm down in this hole, can you help me out?" The priest writes out a prayer, throws it down in the hole and moves on. Then a friend walks by. "Hey Joe, it's me, can you help me out?" And the friend jumps in the hole. Our guy says, "Are you stupid? Now we're both down here." The friend says, "Yeah, but I've been down here before, and I know the way out."
She's been here. So it's not all of the normal excuses he refers to. It's 'yeah, you screwed up, but so does everyone else, and I have, and I know the way to get back from here'. It's very Meredith to say what she does and to look at it like that. She brings him out of this. And that's what makes all the difference.
---
“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. And then they were gone.
This would be the calm before the storm.
---
This is the climax of the fic and tbh I love it so much I'm not going to mess with it. It just is. It says what needs to be said.
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.
Okay, I lied, I'm interjecting. I overuse that line. I love that line. It was who Meredith was, a while back. She brought her own misery upon herself, to a degree, and it more or less excused very bluntly, via that, a simple statement, and here she is doing it again. It's five words that I use a lot but it's five words that, to me, mean a lot about this character.
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 thought it was very important to have Alex basically go balls to the wall with this one. He could've gone upstairs. He could've stayed at work or gone to the bar. He also could've made excuses.
But he doesn't. He freely admits. And he isn't ashamed and he isn't sorry. He's factually. I like my Alex blunt and I like him honest and he is both of those things here.
This really had nothing to do with Derek. This was about the best of intentions and the worst of circumstances. People change. People move on.
“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?”
I don't buy Derek and the perfect proposal or whatever. I just don't. So in my head this is how it would happen, though that's not the way it worked on the show.
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.
Like I said, rain as a metaphor.
---
I hope those of you who actually read all of this enjoyed it and found some insight from my comments. I definitely was wordier than I was with my last one, so I appear to be learning.
Thanks!
---
Starting with a lengthy non-specific intro. So I wrote this in early 2009 and it remains, to this very day, in my top five favorite fics I've ever written. It's real and it's raw and it came at a time where I was breaking free from writing only what people wanted. That got old real quick and I think, now that I write for me, it's done my writing a world of good.
Now that the egotistical stuff is out of the way.
Anyone who read the last commentary knows this but I write to music. Songs, usually one specifically that gives me the main idea, and this one is 'Time Lapse Lifeline' by Maria Taylor. You can see it's influence throughout the fic, unsurprisingly.
Still we stand with the help of a steady hand
Capture images of boy and man
Till its done
And 7 years combined is just a flicker of neon sign
Little negative of hopes replayed
This, of course, is the inspiration behind the motel scene at the climax of this fic. More than that, it's the inspiration behind the style of the fic. It's an exercise in the non-chronological and in dealing with the end of a relationship instead of the beginning of one and I liked that for a change.
Good or bad, here's the fic.
---
Some backstory on this scene: this originally was written not for Derek, not even for Grey's. It was a hundred words or so that I spit out during one of those iTunes shuffle things (the song there? 'If There's A Rocket Tie Me To It' by Snow Patrol'). I have a loose idea of what character/fandom it was for but I couldn't tell you with any amount of certainty.
It sat on my hard drive for a month or so until I was going through my 'defunct' folder looking for spare parts (because that's what happens to everything in that folder, I strip it for parts of other stories) and found this. I don't know what episode I had just watched but I know it was a Friday so I had definitely watched something. Between that and the loose idea the song had given me, I changed a few words and turned it into the intro. Derek's intro.
In retrospect, it works as well for him as for anyone else. I like the thought of heartbeats, simply because they're doctors. It makes a certain kind of sense because of that -- everything revolves around the heartbeat in their line of work. If the heart doesn't beat then it's all over. If the rhythm is all out of whack then there's a problem. So I think that presents an interesting meaning here.
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.
There is a double meaning in the way this is written. Post the wedding, it's all downhill from there. We have the happy people in the honeymoon phase (Lexie and Mark) and then we have reality, in it's not so pleasant form (Alex).
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.
Most of you know I have a think for Alex/Mer. I don't know how many of you know I have a thing for Alex/Cristina, but I do. That's 90% of the reason this is here. The other 10% is that Alex needed to be dealt with and Cristina just flat out makes the most sense. This also shows a lovely disconnect between Meredith and Derek -- in a short sentence fragment it's more or less recounting a fight they have.
The empty seat at the main table manages to put a damper on the evening anyways.
---
For a while, I enjoyed killing off Izzie. A lot. It just kept happening. For some reason, as much as I, at the time, wasn't crazy about it happening on the show, I liked the ramifications it would have on Alex and his behavior. It was a lot of fun to play around with because I like my angst.
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.
This is our little concrete group of five/four/three (it's three now -- go figure) and I like the idea of loyalty and Meredith not leaving him even if he didn't seem to actively want her there or even notice her. I've said this many times but I will forever believe that this show is at it's best when it focuses on the dynamics presented by the friendships rather than relationships. While this fic does go the way of Alex/Meredith, what you see here has nothing to do with the development of that, and the future relationship is not borne out of anything one could refer to as love.
---
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.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm 90% sure I'm referring back to an episode that had just aired. Or something. Quite possibly I just made that all up.
Her smile, half-hearted and forced upturned corners, does nothing to aid in that, and he doesn’t mention it again.
This isn't so much about her not wanting kids with Derek, by the way. This is about her seeing how quickly life just goes away, in a way that's way more personal than what she's used to seeing even working, and having second thoughts about subjecting a child to that. It doesn't mean she never wants kids, it just means that in this particular space of time she's having second thoughts. She's the child of a surgeon who neglected her while she was a surgeon and then lost her mind, very slowly, before she could ever connect with her. That gives you a very different viewpoint on children
---
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.
Clearly this was written during the Derek/Mark standoff from hell. I really hated that, btw, since basically the only time I enjoy Derek's character is when he interacts with Mark (seriously, if that surprises you by now -- ).
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.”
The rain as metaphor again. But hey, it rains constantly on that show.
She makes it sound like it’s not either of their decisions to make. It probably isn’t.
Like I said, loyalty. And to a degree, a need to keep them all together.
---
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.
He still hasn't built that house. I really want that house to be built, which is strange but true. I think it's because it keeps popping up in my fic (see the housewarming party fic I wrote like two years ago.
---
“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?”
The issue here isn't so much that Meredith is out of this relationship. It's that Meredith is out of sorts and Derek is reading that differently than perhaps he should be. It's a relationship ruined by changing circumstances and incorrect interpretations that lead to them both having one foot out the door. That's the problem. It's not love. It's everything else. Because sometimes love isn't enough.
‘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.
Because Derek is a romantic. Not to the degree (of insanity) that Izzie is/was, but enough that it's noticeable to me. Meredith isn't -- I'm not sure she ever has been.
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.
I said I liked the loyalty between these interns but, in a way, these three have a common denominator. They were never the happy ones. There was George/Izzie on one side (cheerful, nice, a little bit idealistic) and then Alex/Cristina (blunt, aware of reality, not good with emotions) -- I always figured Meredith was somewhere in the middle of that.
I realize that George doesn't factor into this story except in the barest of mentions and you have to remember that this was a time where George had faded so far into the background that we barely even knew he was there. We all knew it was the end for him. So yeah, it's accidentally on purpose that he's not there. Regarding him as less of a presence in Meredith's life, it's easier to see how, without that one side to balance out the other, she would become a little more like Alex/Cristina, pretty much reverting. You become a little like your friends, sometimes a lot, and this really is no exception. They grow and evolve around each other.
---
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.
Speaking of reverting. Izzie's room is a memorial and Alex/Meredith are pretending that nothing ever happened more or less. They are actively ignoring it. This is behavior we've seen before, from a different Meredith than the one presented in Season Five, when this was written.
“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.
Can I just say I love Mark as the informant. I really do love their friendship.
---
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.
I love this scene for any number of reasons. First, because it throws you out of the angsty present day and takes you back. It looks at the before. It contrasts well. And it shows you that there was a foundation here, if you had any doubt, and at one point this really did work. Meredith can deal with the flawed, the rock bottom people, because she's lived that.
In essence it's the quote below (which is NOT from Grey's Anatomy, so if you recognize it, which _takemeaway_ will for sure, among others, then good for you) personified.
"This guy's walking down a street when he falls in a hole. The walls are so steep, he can't get out. A doctor passes by, and the guy shouts up, "Hey you, can you help me out?" The doctor writes a prescription, throws it down in the hole and moves on. Then a priest comes along, and the guy shouts up "Father, I'm down in this hole, can you help me out?" The priest writes out a prayer, throws it down in the hole and moves on. Then a friend walks by. "Hey Joe, it's me, can you help me out?" And the friend jumps in the hole. Our guy says, "Are you stupid? Now we're both down here." The friend says, "Yeah, but I've been down here before, and I know the way out."
She's been here. So it's not all of the normal excuses he refers to. It's 'yeah, you screwed up, but so does everyone else, and I have, and I know the way to get back from here'. It's very Meredith to say what she does and to look at it like that. She brings him out of this. And that's what makes all the difference.
---
“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. And then they were gone.
This would be the calm before the storm.
---
This is the climax of the fic and tbh I love it so much I'm not going to mess with it. It just is. It says what needs to be said.
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.
Okay, I lied, I'm interjecting. I overuse that line. I love that line. It was who Meredith was, a while back. She brought her own misery upon herself, to a degree, and it more or less excused very bluntly, via that, a simple statement, and here she is doing it again. It's five words that I use a lot but it's five words that, to me, mean a lot about this character.
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 thought it was very important to have Alex basically go balls to the wall with this one. He could've gone upstairs. He could've stayed at work or gone to the bar. He also could've made excuses.
But he doesn't. He freely admits. And he isn't ashamed and he isn't sorry. He's factually. I like my Alex blunt and I like him honest and he is both of those things here.
This really had nothing to do with Derek. This was about the best of intentions and the worst of circumstances. People change. People move on.
“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?”
I don't buy Derek and the perfect proposal or whatever. I just don't. So in my head this is how it would happen, though that's not the way it worked on the show.
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.
Like I said, rain as a metaphor.
---
I hope those of you who actually read all of this enjoyed it and found some insight from my comments. I definitely was wordier than I was with my last one, so I appear to be learning.
Thanks!
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