All Along The Watchtower - Part 6B
Title: All Along The Watchtower
Fandom: Grey's Anatomy
Pairing: Mer/Der
Rating: M
Summary: S6 continuation. Immediately post Sanctuary / Death and All His Friends.
All Along The Watchtower - Part 6B
“Mark got us thrown in the drunk tank once,” he said out of the blue.
“What? You? Seriously?”
She tried to imagine Derek crammed into a cell with snoring bikers, nonsensical bar patrons, and a clot of noisy, vomiting Manhattan residents and vagabonds. She couldn't do it. The Derek in her brain remained sober, unfairly accused, and broody in the corner as he tried to ignore the stench and the ribbing.
“Yes,” said Derek. “He pissed on the side of a building in Times Square.”
“And what does that have to do with you, exactly?”
He blinked. “What, you don't think I'd pee on a building?”
“You seriously did that?”
“Well, no,” he said. “But I was somewhere around .16 BAC when they caught Mark. I might have mouthed off a bit.”
“A bit?” she prodded.
He nodded. “A bit, yeah.”
Now, that? That, she could see. She snorted, thinking of all the colorful curses that would have streamed from his mouth. He had no reason to love law enforcement. None. And if he'd been drunk to the point of dysphoria... Yeah.
She pushed his shoulder. “Well, what did you say? Come on, you never tell me about this stuff. I want to know the pre-Seattle Derek Shepherd.”
“I don't really remember,” he said. “You'd have to ask Mark.”
“But you said Mark was drunk.”
He stared. “Did I?”
Laughter burbled up from her chest, unstoppable, and she leaned into him as tears erupted. She gasped. “So, what you mean to say is that you landed you and Mark in the drunk tank.”
“Well, he started it,” Derek said. “Public urination and all.”
She laid her head against his shoulder. She hated cars. The position was about as comfortable as sitting on a bed of spikes. Well, maybe not that bad. But she couldn't bring herself to care. He'd been bed-ridden and sleepy and not talkative and hurt for days. The crushing normality of sitting in the car with him, resting on his shoulder, chatting about stupid inanities, made her forget about her twisty, spine-killing position. She flopped against him and stared, looking up at the line of his jaw. Rain thundered against the window beyond.
“When was this, anyway?” she said.
A noise stuttered in his throat. He looked at her. Something churned behind the haze in his stare, like he realized then that he'd stepped into a trap that could have been avoided if he'd been thinking straight. He blinked, and the worry clouding his gaze dispersed as he made a decision. He sighed. “After my bachelor party,” he confessed. “Addison was pissed that she had to bail us both out so that we could make it on time to the rehearsal dinner.”
She grinned lazily, running her index finger in circles against the flat of his stomach over his shirt. “Hmm,” she purred. “And were there strippers at this bachelor party?”
“Maybe one or two.” Blush crept across his skin.
“Derek Shepherd, did you get a lap dance?”
Red swept down his throat and turned his ears a bright shade of pink. “Maybe one or two.”
“Wow,” she said. “You were positively naughty in your twenties.”
“Only a little.”
“I don't know,” she said. “A drunk tank adventure and a lap dance right before your wedding says maybe more than a little.”
She stroked his arm and breathed the warm scent of his threadbare shirt. Addison had been with him for eleven years. If she let herself get jealous when he brought her up, that made for more than one fourth of his life he couldn't talk about, and she didn't want that. She let herself laugh about it, instead.
Derek hadn't had a bachelor party before their wedding. Not before the one they'd given to Izzie at the last minute, and not before the day they'd planned to go to City Hall and ended up writing vows on a blue post-it note instead. He hadn't gotten drunk. He hadn't needed one last night of freedom with trashy strippers and tassels. Actually, his story sort of complimented the hell out of her.
“I still think you have me beat by a mile in the naughty youth category,” he said.
“I probably do, but, like I said.” She kissed his arm. “I'm not stoned.”
He turned. “Don't I get at least one story?”
“If you can remember to ask me in five minutes, sure.”
“So mean,” he said, frowning. “I'm vulnerable and amnesiac. You're taking advantage.”
“I know,” she said. “Which is why I'd rather tell you later.”
He shook his head. “I don't get it.”
“When you'll actually remember the bulk of the conversation, I'll tell you,” she said. “You know. Just to make it fair.”
“Oh.” He blinked and sighed. “Well, I guess that's okay. Do you have a pen?”
“In my purse in the small zipper pouch at the bottom with my tampons,” she said. “Why?” She stared at the windshield. The rain abated into drizzle and stayed drizzle, finally, and in the distance, she could just make out flares and flashing lights. A solid block of several hundred cars sat between her and a giant roadblock. People crawled back and forth like ants.
Having been given permission, he pulled her purse by the strap into his lap and rummaged through it, a perplexed look plastered on his face, as if drugs made it hard for him to fathom how she fit so much crap in there. He attacked the problem like a surgeon. He moved items to the side in a delicate manner, trying to gain visibility. Suction, she could imagine him saying. Except he'd lost his fine motor control, his focus, and just about everything else that made him a surgeon. The operation took a while. He leaned forward, putting his face closer to the mess. Something crinkled. He'd found the tampon wrappers.
“Got it,” he said after eons, and he withdrew a green Crayola marker from her purse with a grin of triumph. The grin faded as he got a solid look at the item he'd liberated from her tampon stash. Seconds passed. “This isn't a pen. Did I miss a pen?” He frowned.
“No,” she said. “That's what I have.” She couldn't remember how that had gotten in there. She'd maybe stolen it from Pedes to fill out a chart after her ballpoint pen had wandered off. Desperate times, after all, and it was Pedes. They'd think marker charts were cute. Right? Maybe?
He uncapped the marker and wrote in slipshod print on the back of his hand. “I'm not letting you cheat me out of a story because my short term memory is paste,” he explained while she watched, eyebrows creeping up toward her forehead.
“Derek, would I do that?”
“Yes.”
She crossed her arms and stuck her lip out in a pout. “No faith. You have no faith in me whatsoever.”
“Plenty of faith, but you don't tell stories without tequila or torture,” he said. He returned the marker to her purse. “I'm not passing up this opportunity.”
“Not so much tequila anymore,” she said.
He paused and stared, head cocked. “S'true,” he agreed with a nod, and he blossomed into a sloppy grin. “Whole 'n healed or whatever.”
“You make me sound so articulate, Derek, thank you.”
His eyelids dipped, and he shifted to face her. His shoulder pressed into the seat, and his knee came up. He watched her, silent, hazy gaze unblinking. For a long moment, he said nothing, and she thought she'd lost him to another commune with space, but then he sighed. He touched her face as though it were new to him. She sighed and relaxed as he pushed away a tangled lock of her hair. His warm palm made the air whisper as he stroked her skin.
“You're pretty,” he said, and the bald truth of it struck her dumb. He had no inhibitions. What he said, he meant.
She blinked.
His eyes searched her face. “You know you're my best friend, right?”
“Mark is your best friend,” she said.
“Now, who's got no faith?”
“But Mark--”
“Slept with my wife,” he said. “He's my brother. He's my friend. But he's not a best anything. Not anymore, and never again.”
“Derek...”
“I know you and Cristina have your person thing,” he said. “I'm not fishing. I'm not. I'm just saying.”
“Everywhere. All the time. Saying things,” she murmured.
“Yeah. I do that.” He wiped his hands over his face, blinking. He loosed a growling, deep breath. “I'm sorry. I'm really... really stoned.”
Her heart sank. Not fishing. Sorry. He thought she was upset with him. She pulled his hands away from his face and replaced them with her own. “I love you,” she said.
He relaxed.
“Cristina is my person,” she said.
“I know. I said that, I thought.”
“You did,” she assured him, but his confusion seemed to deepen. She struggled to explain. “It's just... Cristina is my person. You're... You're like a piece of me. I can't call you my best friend or my person. Derek, losing you would be like losing a limb, or...”
He nodded. “She's your person. I'm your arm. Got it.” And then he laughed.
She hit him. Not hard. “Well, soul mate sounds even worse,” she said. “Like I threw up in a blender with Shakespeare and karma.”
“That's a disturbing picture when you're on drugs.”
She growled. “You get what I mean, though, right? You get that you're not competing for me, right? There's no competition. There's none. You win. I think I would die if I didn't have you anymore, and that sounds pathetic and melodramatic, but...”
Her frustration died in an explosive whorl of grief. She blinked, and the world morphed into a glassy impressionist painting as she cried. “I had a few hours where I really thought I might have wasted everything. Where I thought that you wouldn't be there in the mornings to make me coffee, or kiss me good morning with your awful morning breath, or tell me I'm more important to you than I've ever been to anyone. I thought that I'd be alone again. And I couldn't breathe. I couldn't breathe, thinking about that. You're it for me. You're so it. Please, you get it, right? You always get it. You have to get it, Derek. Please.”
He stared. “I get it,” he said. “I've been there, too.”
And that said it all. Her lip quivered, and she leaned into his space. “I'm sorry for that,” she said, and she kissed him. His lips, his chin, his throat. “I'm sorry for being insensitive. And for sometimes not being what you need. I'm sorry for everything.”
She traced a line down his neck and placed her palms against his chest, splayed and soft. Resting, not pushing or grabbing. She felt the bandage covering his incision, and she kissed that, too, through his shirt.
He curled around her like a coat, and his hands chased her crying away. “You're what I need, now,” he said. His voice rumbled against her body, soft and low.
“I really do love you,” she said.
“I love you, too.”
They embraced over the parking brake, and in the crawl of moments, everything that had twisted up inside her body unfurled. Stress sloughed away like dead layers of skin. “We're going to traumatize our kid, someday,” she said.
“Oh?” he said.
“Yeah. We seem to have a penchant for nearly dying and raunchy sex. One or the other will send him to therapy before he's five.”
“Him?”
“Or her,” she said. She hugged him, and he laughed. She pulled back and looked at him. “What?”
“Dreaming up new business cards, that's all.”
“For what?”
“Derek C. Shepherd, MD,” he said. “Rock star neurosurgeon, arm, Shakesma in a blender, pending father, and amazing husband.”
She laughed. “You forgot egotistical ass.”
“Well, yes,” he said. His eyelids drooped. “But only sometimes.”
He leaned back against the seat and closed his eyes. She touched his face and ran a palm through his hair. “Only sometimes,” she agreed.
“Mmm,” he groaned. And then his breathing spaced. He fell asleep the way a light turned off from on. With a blink and sudden darkness. She'd worn him out again.
She rubbed his thigh and watched the traffic ahead, which didn't move. The drizzle picked up into a light, steady splatter against the windshield. She sighed and let her mind space as she stared through half-lidded eyes. Maybe Derek was on to something. Spacing. The water dribbled down the windshield. She watched the way it crawled. Nothing happened. It wasn't interesting.
She took a sip of the water she'd brought for him from the trunk and then took another, careful not to take too much. Having to pee on top of all of this would just suck. Her muscles ached. She wanted to stretch, but her clothing and hair had almost dried again, and if she felt bad, Derek must feel worse. She didn't move. She flexed her muscles one by one, starting at her calves and working up to her arms. Isometrics.
She counted sheep and got to somewhere in the thousands. She even tried the radio again, but not a single station came through the mess. This sucked. This really. Really. Sucked.
She closed her eyes and leaned back against the seat. She imagined honking would wake her up if traffic started to move. Irresponsible, yes, but this was just stupid. Waiting here for hours. The black of her eyelids turned red, and she blinked, squinting. The driver in front of her had turned on his car.
She brushed her face with her hands and shifted, trying to see down the road into the gray. An undulating sea of brake lights blinking on and off greeted her through the misty rain. “Oh, thank god, we're moving,” she said, and she turned the key in the ignition. The engine rumbled to life. Derek didn't stir.
The police apparently had decided that it would be a swell thing to collapse three lanes of traffic into a detour on the right shoulder. She merged with the other honking cars, impatience making her head hurt. She tapped the steering wheel with her nails.
Eventually, she passed the wreckage. A single Hyundai rested in two gnarled pieces, one half of it upside down in the left lane, one half of it right side up in the right. A scorched, jack-knifed semi bisected the road through the middle lane. Firemen crawled through the metal and the mess. Lights flashed, blue and red and strobing. Beyond that, a crunched up line of six or seven passenger vehicles, an accordioned pickup truck, broken glass, and a mangled bicycle littered the lanes like a tornado had busted through or something. She bit her lip as a team of paramedics loaded an occupied stretcher into a waiting ambulance.
She glanced back at the destruction, and her lip quivered. There was no way everybody had walked away from that. No way in hell. Somebody had lost her Derek today, or perhaps simply died with him in an eye blink of screaming metal and heat.
Without thinking, she reached for him, and she pulled his hand into her lap. He didn't wake, but the warmth radiating from his skin left her no doubt that his heart still beat and would continue to do so. She inched the car forward and left the tragedy behind.
When she pulled the Cayenne into the driveway, she sighed. “We're home,” she said. She touched his shoulder and squeezed. “Time to wake up. Just for a minute.”
He flinched awake, and a tremor ran through his body. “Huh?”
“Derek, we're home,” she said, trying to break his mental fog into pieces.
He pulled the door handle like a reflex more than anything else. The distant sound of rain made a crescendo as the door yawned open, but he sat there, blinking. Water plinked and skittered through the gap between the door and the car.
“We're home,” she said again.
He squinted at her. The way his nose crinkled made him seem vaguely rabbit-like, but she didn't laugh. “What?” he managed. His breaths rasped.
“Home, Derek,” she said. “We're home.”
“Oh,” he said. He looked around with a bit more awareness. “Oh,” he said again. He fumbled with his seat belt. The latch clicked as it released, and the belt hit him in the chin before it rolled behind his ear into the space behind the door frame.
She reached over his knee to grab her purse, but he stopped her. “I'll get it,” he said, his voice thick with sleep.
She tried to guesstimate how heavy her bag was. He wasn't supposed to be picking up anything that weighed more than five pounds. But... Five pounds? Hardly more than a stack of thick dinner plates or a heavy book. Even if the purse weighed closer to eight pounds, since, really, it was more of a tote, she couldn't see the harm, just this once. Carrying her bag would make him feel a bit more like he was contributing.
“Okay,” she said.
He turned and slid out of the car into the rain. He didn't have the same difficulties as he'd had getting into the car, but after sitting down for hours, he had balance issues trying to stand. His shoes churned gravel. He pinwheeled, and as he twisted to grab the handle and right himself, she heard him grunt. Pain. He turned back to the car and leaned against it, eyes screwed shut. He let the water drench him and didn't move.
She grabbed his duffel bag from the back seat and came around to his side of the car. She put her hand on his shoulder. Her purse lay forgotten in the front seat. “Are you doing okay, Derek?”
“I'm okay,” he said, but he didn't sound okay. His voice wobbled, like he wasn't sure. She couldn't pinpoint why or what might not be okay, since he didn't look like he was still in pain from his landing, but there was a definite lack of okay. He took a deep breath and swallowed, and then he left the safety of the car, hands spread from his hips in a clear indication that his center of balance had been disturbed. Dizzy, maybe? He'd gotten better about that, but... His feet splurched in the muddy grass and left indentations behind. A cool breeze blew. It smelled earthy and full of ozone.
She grabbed her purse, slung it over her free shoulder, and shut the car door behind her. She clicked the lock button on the key chain, and the car chirped. He wasn't moving well. She caught up to him in about three strides and wrapped her arm around his waist. He didn't comment, but her presence seemed to help ground him. He stopped spreading his hands to make a tripod with his body. His left hand gripped her shoulder, and his right arm relaxed by his hip.
“Watch the step,” she said as they approached the door.
He managed, panting, and rested against the door frame while she fumbled for her key. The familiar brass slid into the lock, she turned it, and pushed open the door. He followed her into the house. She dropped her duffel bag and her purse on the floor and turned, watching him as his hands chased up the side of the door. He turned the deadbolt and checked the latch, two things she'd never seen him do before. Her house tended to be Grand Central Station for interns and other young residents. Or, at least, it used to be.
He turned and stood in the dark foyer, dripping on the carpet. He seemed pale. Pale and too thin and disturbed. His body swayed, and he stared at nothing. Rain pattered on the roof and gave the air a percussive quality.
She bit her lip. This wasn't quite how she'd imagined it would go, though, when she thought about it, she wasn't sure what she'd imagined either. The trip from the hospital had been enough to wear him out. She didn't think he was going to skip up the steps with a smile and say goodnight.
“Do you want to go to bed?” she said. He didn't answer, and he didn't give any indication that he'd heard her. She touched his arm. “Derek?”
He blinked. “What?”
“Do you want to go to bed?”
She peered at the stairway, at the long incline and the railing. He hadn't done steps before. Everything she knew about home recovery from heart surgery suggested that for at least a few weeks, stair trips be limited to coming down in the morning and going up at night, because more than that would be too physically trying for someone who had just had his chest cut open and his heart jockeyed with by human hands. She turned and tried to gauge his reaction to the prospect of having to climb all that, but he didn't even glance that way. His face remained expressionless, maybe a little lost.
“Derek?”
“Not yet,” he said. “I'll just sit.”
For a minute, it seemed like he didn't know which way to go. He looked down the hallway toward the kitchen, but then he veered left, his eyes blank. She followed him to the couch and watched, concerned, as he collapsed. He didn't seem to care that he was soaked. Bits of wet, torn grass littered the soles of his shoes. Water discolored the legs of his jeans about four inches up from the hemline of the legs, and wet, dark splotches covered the rest of them. His shirt stuck to his skin, and she could see his bandages through the front of it.
“Can I get you anything?” she said. Nothing. No response. “Derek?” Nothing. She sat beside him and rubbed his thigh. “Earth to Derek,” she said. “Hey.”
His body shuddered. “I'm sorry,” he said. He squeezed his eyes shut like he was trying to get rid of a bad sight. She followed the direction of his stare, but nothing remarkable sat in the line of his gaze. A bookshelf. The wall. “I'm sorry,” he said again. “I feel like I'm wading through molasses.”
“It's fine,” she said. “Do you want a glass of water? You could lie down here if you're tired.”
“I just need a minute,” he said. “That was a long car ride.”
“I'm really sorry about that.”
He shrugged. “It wasn't all bad. You still owe me a story.”
“I don't know,” she said. “You did cheat, after all.”
He gazed at her, eyes dark and clueless. “I cheated?”
The marker had smeared a bit in the rain, leaving streaks of green on his pale skin, but the words were mostly legible. Meredith owes a story. Simple and to the point. She touched his hand. He followed her attention and flinched when he saw his marred skin. “When did...”
She laughed. She couldn't help it. “Oh, that's classic, Derek,” she said. “You remembered about the story, but forgot about the prompt you wrote on your hand so you wouldn't forget it?”
He'd been pretty self-deprecating about the memory thing earlier, but her snicker died when she saw how well he was taking it now. And by well, she meant horribly. A deep sound of worry rumbled in his chest. He wobbled to his feet and took a step, but the impulse halted, and he stared like he didn't know where to go.
“What is it?” she said.
“Your purse. I left it...” He glanced vaguely at the dining room. “I left it somewhere.”
“I got it,” she assured him. “I put it by the door.” She rose to her feet and pulled at his hand. “It's fine. It's really fine, Derek.”
He collapsed back onto the sofa and sighed. His eyes seemed shimmery. Wet. Like he wanted to cry but wasn't letting himself. She rubbed his back, and he blinked.
She didn't know what to do. She'd expected to have him home in fifteen minutes. She'd expected to help him up to bed, where he'd sleep, and that would be the day for him. He'd sleep, and she'd do stuff downstairs, and then the day would wane. She'd go upstairs to join him, and she'd sleep, too. Next to him and in his space for the first time in over a week.
She'd planned to stay with him through the weekend to make sure he could handle taking care of himself in the longer term. That had been the only reason Dr. Altman had been willing to let him go, because of her. If he'd had no one, Seattle Grace would have kept him closer to eleven or twelve days. Maybe more. Derek had improved, but he still wasn't well.
She'd expected most of the three days to involve him sleeping. Nothing was going like she'd imagined, and she felt lost again. But he was the one who'd gotten shot. She could do this. She could be the supportive partner. In the face of that, she had to be. Anything less would be freaking pathetic.
“There's a bright side to this, you know,” she said, at a loss for anything else.
He snorted. His eyes creased as discomfort wound through him, but the pain didn't linger. His gaze evened out, and he stared at her. “There's a bright side to being a helpless guppy?”
“Mmm-hmm,” she said. She shifted to her knees, pressed against his thigh, leaned, and kissed him. She loitered by his lips and spoke against his skin. “It means I have to keep doing this to make sure you remember.” She kissed him again. “Really? I can think of worse fates.” Again. “I'm an excellent kisser.”
Bingo. His tension seemed to drain, which made hers drain as well. He tasted her and ran loose fingers through her tangled hair. His grip was clumsy, and he didn't make it more than an inch before he got stuck in the snarl. Her hair pulled a little, but she didn't care. He looked at her, a hopeful sort of light in his eyes as he pulled his hands loose and settled for petting her instead. “Does it mean you're going to tell me a story, too?” he said.
“You're just not going to let that go, are you?”
“I'm wounded and vulnerable,” he said. “I figure it's my only shot.” She almost resisted, but then he added a soft, rumble-y, “Please?”
He didn't play fair.
“All right,” she said. She threw herself against the back of the couch with a huff and crossed her arms. “All right, fine. What's your preference? Worst drunk dial, loss of virginity, or police encounter?”
He put his back against the arm of the sofa and turned to her with a hazy look of glee on his face. He pondered his choices. “Oh, definitely first run in with the law.”
“First one?” she said. “Or something subsequent?”
“Well, I did show you mine, discounting speeding tickets,” he said.
She grinned. “I got caught shoplifting.”
“Mrs. Shepherd, do you mean to tell me you used to be a klepto?”
“I swiped some hair dye.”
“Oh?” He peered at her. “What color?”
“Fuscia.”
He must have been expecting platinum, or red, or... something normal. His mouth curled in a surprised grin, and he laughed. “Why on earth did you want pink hair?”
She shrugged. “Just tips, actually. Seemed like a good thing to do at the time. I figured my mother would hate it or whatever.”
“A rebellious klepto then?”
“Better than a narcoleptic,” she said, though she regretted saying it. He didn't seem to remember that, either, and he stared blankly at the reference.
The hole in his memory either didn't bother him, though, or lost traction under the weight of his next thought. He made a low sound in his throat. His stare peeled layers of her clothes away, and she couldn't help but giggle. Whatever thought he had, it was a very, very bad one. “So,” he said, and he waited, expectant as he let the low, rich hum of the word fade into silence.
“So, what?”
“Did you dye the carpet and the drapes?”
“I did not dye down there!” she said. “I was like twelve, Derek.”
He grinned. “Uh huh.”
“I didn't!”
“Then I think you owe me another confession,” he decided.
“What?” she said. “Why?”
“Mine was ten times better,” he said.
“You got what you asked for.”
“But I was misled!”
“How? I even let you pick what story! You can't make me take responsibility for your crappy choices. And you can't play the stoned card, either. I wanted to wait, and I said so.”
“I figured you made it past middle school before you became an outlaw,” he said.
She glared, but it didn't feel very strong, not when her lungs quivered, and she struggled not to burst out laughing.
“Well, if you wanted the good ones from the time of my majority or whatever, you should have either been more specific, or thought to ask me after the liver transplant when I was more stoned than you are now,” she said. So there.
The look on his face became dangerous. He grinned, his lips a sly, sarcastic slant. “How do you know I didn't?” he said in a low, rich tone that slid down her spine like a solid stroke of his hand. Her innards thrummed, and she shifted, restless, as her breaths kicked into higher gear. No, she had to tell herself. No sex.
“No way,” she said, trying not to pant with all the launch messages her body was sending her. How could he do that without even touching her? Without even trying? She shook her head. “No, I would remember.”
He cocked his head to the side. “Would you?”
“You're evil,” she said. “You're an evil bastard, Derek.”
“Wounded evil bastard,” he said. “Let's not forget wounded.”
“Whatever.” She huffed. Her body trembled with the stress of no follow through. “So, what did I say?”
He shifted, inching closer. The cushions bowed to his weight. He rested his chin on his hand, his elbow against the back of the couch, and he stared. “Why don't you tell me another story, and we'll compare notes?” he said.
Touch me, he'd said on many nights with the same shivering, purring tone.
She grabbed a cushion with her fingers, lobbed it so hard it made her arm hurt, and whacked him in the face with it. Sexual tension released from her muscles like something had popped loose. “Ass!” she said, laughing.
The painkillers had stripped him of any sort of reflexes. He didn't even try to catch the pillow. His face swept to the right with the blow. He spluttered. His hair stuck up, wet and stiff and scattered by the whiplash. And then he stared. He didn't respond.
The bottom dropped out from her stomach, and relief twisted into something else. “Crap,” she said, pawing forward. She touched his face. “Did I hurt you? I'm sorry.” It's not like he had any recourse, assuming she hadn't nearly killed him again. Not being able to push, pull, or lift most certainly applied to hulking sofa cushions.
He blinked. “No,” he said, drawing out the syllable into something long and slow. “I'm not hurt.” And then he grabbed her thigh and pulled her to him with a grunt. No pulling, her brain screamed. Way, way more than five pounds! Bad! But then his hands slipped under her shirt, he squiggled his fingertips against her skin, and she forgot everything.
She shrieked and lost her breath as her muscles twitched all at once under the assault. “Stop!” she said, choking on laughter. “Derek, stop,” she croaked.
Through a blur of tears, she saw him kneeling over her, teeth bared in a sexy, triumphant grimace, but then she lost it as she arched back into the couch and laughed, and laughed, and laughed. “Bad girl,” he said somewhere in the haze.
She flipped onto her stomach, clawing at the cushions, but her desperate retreat only meant he shifted his attention to her back. A spasm wracked her body, and in her delirium, she prayed she wouldn't kick him. He worked her shoes away as she squirmed, and then he tickled the soles of her feet. Her left leg jerked wildly, and she struck him in the arm without meaning to.
He barked with laughter. “You're very flexible!”
“Stop, god.” She panted. “Uncle. Uncle, uncle.” The words faded to a whine of laughter. “You win,” she managed.
When he let her go, she fell off the couch and landed on the floor with a breathless thump. She moaned, laughing, and inhaled the musty scent of the rug before rolling onto her back and staring at the hazy ceiling. She saw stars. Her vision wavered with the black dots of hyperventilation, but the seconds passed, and her breathing slowed. She wiped her face with her hands, spreading tears across her cheek in a salt slick that chilled her as it evaporated.
“That's what you get for belting me with a pillow when I'm vulnerable and wounded,” he said, staring down at her over the edge of the couch as he panted.
“You're evil incarnate,” she said, her voice hoarse. She coughed. “Got it.”
He grinned at her, but it faded. The force of his will and the thrum of adrenaline in his veins had been a powerful, heady, wonderful thing, but they abandoned him, sprinters overwhelmed in an arduous marathon. She watched it happen. The feverish excitement bled out of his face as she stumbled to her knees and crawled back to him, thumping her kneecaps and feet on the hard floor. Pain wavered on his face as his breaths hammered in his chest. He blinked, and he couldn't quite seem to catch his breath. The clock ticked away the moments as she settled next to him.
He grunted as she hugged him.
Sometimes, it shocked her how fragile he was, now, how easily his body broke under stress. She stroked his damp shirt, frowning when she noticed beads of perspiration along his temples, and wet stains that couldn't be rain because they'd collected underneath his armpits.
“Do you want to lie down, now?” she said.
“No,” he said. “I don't want to.”
She bit her lip. Want. A key word. Soon to be supplanted by need. He struggled to keep his eyes open.
His skin shivered under her palms as she rubbed his arm. With a groan, she forced herself to leave him for a moment. She padded to the hall closet. She pulled a thick winter afghan loose from the pile of musty blankets, even though winter had long since passed, and she returned. She wrapped them inside of it, and he sighed against her shoulder. She snuggled closer.
“I'm sorry,” he said.
“Don't be, Derek. Please, don't.”
His eyelids drooped as he lost the battle. His expression went slack, and he watched her through his eyelashes, breathing in the darkness, but he said nothing. His body felt heavy against her shoulder. Heavier. Dead weight. Rain plinked against the windowpanes. She kissed his forehead.
“It's okay,” she assured him.
He pulled the blanket closer and collapsed in a fluid motion, from sitting to sort of a fetal curl on the seat of the couch. She slipped loose from the afghan and, without word, she helped him lay himself flat on his back. She pulled off his wet, dirty shoes and his saturated, cold socks and threw them to the floor under the coffee table.
Minutes passed. And then his eyes closed at last as exhaustion pulled him under without his consent. She rested with her back against the couch, taking a moment to compose herself. The cushion and his soft belly cradled her head, and she looked to the side, up the line of his arm to the underside of his chin. He breathed, even and steady, but she could still detect shivers as the sweat evaporated from his skin.
Biting her lip, she went back to the closet for another blanket, and she put that on top of the afghan. Though she was reluctant to leave him there, wet and maybe-cold in damp clothes, he'd hit some sort of wall, and she doubted rousing him would be any healthier than letting him shiver for a while, and perhaps even worse. She left him sleeping in the living room, resisting the urge to do nothing but watch him.
She took his duffel bag upstairs and unpacked it for him. She hung his shirts back on the rack in the closet, and folded his pajama pants and put them in his drawer with his socks. She dumped all the dirty clothes into the hamper, and left the duffel in the bathroom in case he needed some of his toiletries or something, though she doubted it, since most of them were dupes, and he already had a full set here.
She stripped the bed next, yanking away the soiled, old sheets and mattress pad, and she replaced them. She tried to get it looking nice, but, she sort of sucked at housework. She folded the bedspread under the pillows. It hung off the sides of the bed, lop-sided. She thought about stacking the pillow shams back on the bed, but it seemed like a lot of effort, considering they would both be sleeping there in a few hours anyway.
She gathered up the sheets and the full hamper and waddled down the stairs with them. The answering machine beeped as she stumbled through the kitchen, dropping socks and underwear and other things in her wake. The room smelled like something rotten, and she gagged, almost losing her grip on the hamper, too. Dirty dishes sat in the sink, mold spreading across old food like fuzzy carpeting. Little flying bugs hovered in the air above the trashcan and the pile of dishes. Her eyes watered, and her gag reflex kicked in again.
The answering machine, oblivious to the decaying mess, beeped again. She gasped, trying to breathe through her mouth to stop the smell. “All right, one freaking second,” she said.
She made it to the washing machine and dropped everything in a heap. She stuffed some whites in first, since they were both running out of clean clothes after over eight days away. She turned the start dial, and the machine had just rumbled to life when her watch beeped. 2PM.
She sighed. The kitchen would have to wait a little. She gathered a breath deep into her chest and launched back into the room, unwilling to breathe. She grabbed a glass, filled it under the faucet, and vacated as quickly as possible. She sucked in air as she closed the kitchen door behind her. She grabbed his pills from her purse, and she returned to the couch.
He'd been asleep twenty minutes, at best, and she hated to wake him, but... She touched his shoulder through the blanket, anyway. “Derek,” she whispered.
Nothing.
“Derek, come on. You need to wake up for a minute.”
With a deep sound of pain and frustration, he rolled away from her into the back of the sofa. When he put weight on his arm and his side, he let loose a breathless sort of croak, and he flattened out again. His body shifted under the blankets, and then he wiped muzzily at his face, but he didn't open his eyes.
“Please, I don't want to cough,” he said.
“You don't need to,” she said. “You just need to take this, and you can go back to sleep. Can you sit up?”
He sucked in a breath and didn't move. She felt his muscles tremble underneath her hands. She slid her arm underneath his back, and together, they managed to get him into a slouch. He dropped his bare feet over the edge of the sofa, and he hovered over his knees with the blanket curled around him, breathing like he hurt and he wanted it to stop. He rubbed his eyes, and, finally, he looked at her. Sort of. His stare conveyed no recognition. His hair stuck up all over. Dark circles gave him a racoonish appearance around the eyes.
He took the pill from her hand like an automaton. He didn't want to take the glass of water no matter what she tried. She ended up tipping the glass to his lips for him. Her stomach churned as he swallowed, water dripping everywhere in a giant, spluttering mess. She rubbed his shoulder. If he were at all awake, he would feel so embarrassed, and she ached for him.
“You can go back to sleep now,” she said. She tried to get him to lie back down, but he wouldn't budge. “Derek?” she whispered.
He blinked, stood, and shambled toward the hallway. He clutched the blankets, and they trailed after him like a long cape. She followed him, concerned that, in his stupor, he would try the stairs. When the door slammed in her face, she flinched and came back to herself. She stood in the hallway outside the bathroom.
“Let me know if you need anything,” she told the door.
“I'm fine,” she thought she heard him grumble, though she could have imagined it. She didn't let herself dwell on it. He was on a truckload of drugs. He hurt. He'd been woken from a sound, deep sleep, and she'd stuffed a pill down his throat before he'd really regained any sort of thought processes. He was allowed to be a bit grumpy.
She returned to the kitchen. She pushed through the door and gagged, though the urge seemed less, now that she'd started growing accustomed to the horrible smell. She stared at the disaster area. She didn't know what the hell to do first, and the answering machine wouldn't. Freaking. Shut up.
The answering machine, however, didn't make her want to vomit, so she left it. She grabbed a big black drawstring trash bag from the roll under the sink and attacked the refrigerator. The solidifying, reeking milk was the first to go, followed by the half-and-half, some very ripe orange juice, and a box of leftovers from some restaurant. She threw out liquifying strawberries. A fuzzy collection of unidentifiable items that had become a science experiment. She threw out the yellowing stick of margarine. She tossed vegetables and dip and all sorts of other things that normally, in a house full of four adults, they churned through in a matter of days. Thursday was usually grocery night, too, which meant the day of the shooting would have been when the untouched perishables on their last legs would have been swept clear to make room for replacements.
She closed the fridge door and attacked the counters next. She tossed bread that had become solid mold and mushy, browning apples that left little puddles behind. She fought her reflex to throw up again, and nausea swirled around her head as she approached the trashcan. She tipped it, and dumped everything from that into the giant bag as well. A plume of rotting stench hit her right in the face, and then?
Then, she threw up. Right into the bag. She gagged until her stomach hurt. Little flying creepy crawly things buzzed in her face, and she retched again and again until she was empty and trembling. Her nose ran. She swallowed bile. She twisted the ties on the bag and shut it. Then she wrapped it in a second bag, and shut that. The smell died to a tolerable level, and she heaped the bag by the trashcan.
When Derek wandered into the room, barefoot, blankets draped over his shoulders, and his hair all askew like some sort of windblown refugee, she was still trying to build the courage to clean the dishes in the sink. “Hey,” she said, and then she frowned. She'd been slamming things. Retching. Wrinkling trash bags. “I'm not keeping you up, am I?”
He shook his head. “No.”
The answering machine beeped again, and he moved toward it, his steps slow and deliberate, like he was hurting again. He looked haggard. And tired. And yet he wasn't sleeping. She debated whether to ask him about another Percocet, when he hit the button.
“You have thirteen new messages,” the machine said in its flat, mechanical tone.
Beep.
“Derek, it's Mom,” said Mrs. Shepherd in a wavering, panicked-but-forced-into-calm voice. “I've tried your office, both of your work cells, your personal cell, and now here. Mark's not answering any of his phones either. I didn't have Meredith's cell phone number stored, so I'm hoping you're with her. We saw the news. I know you're probably busy managing the troops, but, please, call, and tell us everyone is okay when you have a moment.”
Beep.
“Derek? Kathy. You need to call. Mom's freaking out.” Kathy's voice hitched. “We're all freaking out.”
Beep.
“Derek, it's Mom again. I'm really hoping this machine is broken.” Meredith bit her lip as she listened to Carolyn suck in a breath like she was forcing herself not to cry. “Call as soon as you get this.”
Beep.
“Lexie?” said Thatcher. “Meredith?” he added as an afterthought. “Please, call me when you can.”
Beep.
“Derek, this really isn't funny,” a woman snapped. Rachel? “Call somebody, damn it.”
Beep.
“Mom again. Sorry.”
Beep.
“Uh, hi. This is Aaron. I... Never mind.”
Beep.
“Derek, your family is ringing me every five minutes to see if somebody's contacted me, and I have no idea what to tell them,” said Addison. Her voice sounded low and warbling, like she was crying. She sniffed. “I'm watching the news. You can reach me at Sam's... Just call, okay? Or Meredith. Or anybody else who's there in that godforsaken zoo. Call, please.”
Beep.
“I'm sorry,” said a tiny voice. “I shouldn't have called it a godforsaken zoo. Please, call.”
Beep.
“You'd better not be dead,” Nancy snapped, “Or I'll have to strangle you myself. They're estimating casualties.” Then her voice broke. “Please, don't be dead.”
Beep.
“Mom again.”
Beep.
“Hi,” said an unfamiliar, feminine voice. “This is Janine Wilkinson from the Seattle Times. I'm calling Derek Shepherd concerning the recent shootings at Seattle Grace. I'd appreciate it if you would give me a call back. You can reach me at the city desk, extension 9216.”
Beep.
“Dr. Shepherd? Detective Wolff. We spoke on Sunday afternoon. I just wanted to let you know I've sent a packet for you in the mail. It has my business card and the numbers for some hotlines you can call. If you change your mind about making a statement, or just want to talk off the record with somebody who understands, my door is always open. I know this is a very difficult time, and I wanted to express my deepest sympathy to you and your wife.”
Beep.
“You have no new messages,” said the machine.
Derek stared at the machine, and he didn't move. Meredith's gaze dropped to the floor as a lump formed in her throat. “Those must be old,” she said. Anger made her teeth clench. Well, duh, Meredith. Of course they were old. “I... I didn't come in here. When I came home before,” she said. “All I did was sleep. I'm sorry. I should have... I should have gotten rid of them.”
Fandom: Grey's Anatomy
Pairing: Mer/Der
Rating: M
Summary: S6 continuation. Immediately post Sanctuary / Death and All His Friends.
All Along The Watchtower - Part 6B
“Mark got us thrown in the drunk tank once,” he said out of the blue.
“What? You? Seriously?”
She tried to imagine Derek crammed into a cell with snoring bikers, nonsensical bar patrons, and a clot of noisy, vomiting Manhattan residents and vagabonds. She couldn't do it. The Derek in her brain remained sober, unfairly accused, and broody in the corner as he tried to ignore the stench and the ribbing.
“Yes,” said Derek. “He pissed on the side of a building in Times Square.”
“And what does that have to do with you, exactly?”
He blinked. “What, you don't think I'd pee on a building?”
“You seriously did that?”
“Well, no,” he said. “But I was somewhere around .16 BAC when they caught Mark. I might have mouthed off a bit.”
“A bit?” she prodded.
He nodded. “A bit, yeah.”
Now, that? That, she could see. She snorted, thinking of all the colorful curses that would have streamed from his mouth. He had no reason to love law enforcement. None. And if he'd been drunk to the point of dysphoria... Yeah.
She pushed his shoulder. “Well, what did you say? Come on, you never tell me about this stuff. I want to know the pre-Seattle Derek Shepherd.”
“I don't really remember,” he said. “You'd have to ask Mark.”
“But you said Mark was drunk.”
He stared. “Did I?”
Laughter burbled up from her chest, unstoppable, and she leaned into him as tears erupted. She gasped. “So, what you mean to say is that you landed you and Mark in the drunk tank.”
“Well, he started it,” Derek said. “Public urination and all.”
She laid her head against his shoulder. She hated cars. The position was about as comfortable as sitting on a bed of spikes. Well, maybe not that bad. But she couldn't bring herself to care. He'd been bed-ridden and sleepy and not talkative and hurt for days. The crushing normality of sitting in the car with him, resting on his shoulder, chatting about stupid inanities, made her forget about her twisty, spine-killing position. She flopped against him and stared, looking up at the line of his jaw. Rain thundered against the window beyond.
“When was this, anyway?” she said.
A noise stuttered in his throat. He looked at her. Something churned behind the haze in his stare, like he realized then that he'd stepped into a trap that could have been avoided if he'd been thinking straight. He blinked, and the worry clouding his gaze dispersed as he made a decision. He sighed. “After my bachelor party,” he confessed. “Addison was pissed that she had to bail us both out so that we could make it on time to the rehearsal dinner.”
She grinned lazily, running her index finger in circles against the flat of his stomach over his shirt. “Hmm,” she purred. “And were there strippers at this bachelor party?”
“Maybe one or two.” Blush crept across his skin.
“Derek Shepherd, did you get a lap dance?”
Red swept down his throat and turned his ears a bright shade of pink. “Maybe one or two.”
“Wow,” she said. “You were positively naughty in your twenties.”
“Only a little.”
“I don't know,” she said. “A drunk tank adventure and a lap dance right before your wedding says maybe more than a little.”
She stroked his arm and breathed the warm scent of his threadbare shirt. Addison had been with him for eleven years. If she let herself get jealous when he brought her up, that made for more than one fourth of his life he couldn't talk about, and she didn't want that. She let herself laugh about it, instead.
Derek hadn't had a bachelor party before their wedding. Not before the one they'd given to Izzie at the last minute, and not before the day they'd planned to go to City Hall and ended up writing vows on a blue post-it note instead. He hadn't gotten drunk. He hadn't needed one last night of freedom with trashy strippers and tassels. Actually, his story sort of complimented the hell out of her.
“I still think you have me beat by a mile in the naughty youth category,” he said.
“I probably do, but, like I said.” She kissed his arm. “I'm not stoned.”
He turned. “Don't I get at least one story?”
“If you can remember to ask me in five minutes, sure.”
“So mean,” he said, frowning. “I'm vulnerable and amnesiac. You're taking advantage.”
“I know,” she said. “Which is why I'd rather tell you later.”
He shook his head. “I don't get it.”
“When you'll actually remember the bulk of the conversation, I'll tell you,” she said. “You know. Just to make it fair.”
“Oh.” He blinked and sighed. “Well, I guess that's okay. Do you have a pen?”
“In my purse in the small zipper pouch at the bottom with my tampons,” she said. “Why?” She stared at the windshield. The rain abated into drizzle and stayed drizzle, finally, and in the distance, she could just make out flares and flashing lights. A solid block of several hundred cars sat between her and a giant roadblock. People crawled back and forth like ants.
Having been given permission, he pulled her purse by the strap into his lap and rummaged through it, a perplexed look plastered on his face, as if drugs made it hard for him to fathom how she fit so much crap in there. He attacked the problem like a surgeon. He moved items to the side in a delicate manner, trying to gain visibility. Suction, she could imagine him saying. Except he'd lost his fine motor control, his focus, and just about everything else that made him a surgeon. The operation took a while. He leaned forward, putting his face closer to the mess. Something crinkled. He'd found the tampon wrappers.
“Got it,” he said after eons, and he withdrew a green Crayola marker from her purse with a grin of triumph. The grin faded as he got a solid look at the item he'd liberated from her tampon stash. Seconds passed. “This isn't a pen. Did I miss a pen?” He frowned.
“No,” she said. “That's what I have.” She couldn't remember how that had gotten in there. She'd maybe stolen it from Pedes to fill out a chart after her ballpoint pen had wandered off. Desperate times, after all, and it was Pedes. They'd think marker charts were cute. Right? Maybe?
He uncapped the marker and wrote in slipshod print on the back of his hand. “I'm not letting you cheat me out of a story because my short term memory is paste,” he explained while she watched, eyebrows creeping up toward her forehead.
“Derek, would I do that?”
“Yes.”
She crossed her arms and stuck her lip out in a pout. “No faith. You have no faith in me whatsoever.”
“Plenty of faith, but you don't tell stories without tequila or torture,” he said. He returned the marker to her purse. “I'm not passing up this opportunity.”
“Not so much tequila anymore,” she said.
He paused and stared, head cocked. “S'true,” he agreed with a nod, and he blossomed into a sloppy grin. “Whole 'n healed or whatever.”
“You make me sound so articulate, Derek, thank you.”
His eyelids dipped, and he shifted to face her. His shoulder pressed into the seat, and his knee came up. He watched her, silent, hazy gaze unblinking. For a long moment, he said nothing, and she thought she'd lost him to another commune with space, but then he sighed. He touched her face as though it were new to him. She sighed and relaxed as he pushed away a tangled lock of her hair. His warm palm made the air whisper as he stroked her skin.
“You're pretty,” he said, and the bald truth of it struck her dumb. He had no inhibitions. What he said, he meant.
She blinked.
His eyes searched her face. “You know you're my best friend, right?”
“Mark is your best friend,” she said.
“Now, who's got no faith?”
“But Mark--”
“Slept with my wife,” he said. “He's my brother. He's my friend. But he's not a best anything. Not anymore, and never again.”
“Derek...”
“I know you and Cristina have your person thing,” he said. “I'm not fishing. I'm not. I'm just saying.”
“Everywhere. All the time. Saying things,” she murmured.
“Yeah. I do that.” He wiped his hands over his face, blinking. He loosed a growling, deep breath. “I'm sorry. I'm really... really stoned.”
Her heart sank. Not fishing. Sorry. He thought she was upset with him. She pulled his hands away from his face and replaced them with her own. “I love you,” she said.
He relaxed.
“Cristina is my person,” she said.
“I know. I said that, I thought.”
“You did,” she assured him, but his confusion seemed to deepen. She struggled to explain. “It's just... Cristina is my person. You're... You're like a piece of me. I can't call you my best friend or my person. Derek, losing you would be like losing a limb, or...”
He nodded. “She's your person. I'm your arm. Got it.” And then he laughed.
She hit him. Not hard. “Well, soul mate sounds even worse,” she said. “Like I threw up in a blender with Shakespeare and karma.”
“That's a disturbing picture when you're on drugs.”
She growled. “You get what I mean, though, right? You get that you're not competing for me, right? There's no competition. There's none. You win. I think I would die if I didn't have you anymore, and that sounds pathetic and melodramatic, but...”
Her frustration died in an explosive whorl of grief. She blinked, and the world morphed into a glassy impressionist painting as she cried. “I had a few hours where I really thought I might have wasted everything. Where I thought that you wouldn't be there in the mornings to make me coffee, or kiss me good morning with your awful morning breath, or tell me I'm more important to you than I've ever been to anyone. I thought that I'd be alone again. And I couldn't breathe. I couldn't breathe, thinking about that. You're it for me. You're so it. Please, you get it, right? You always get it. You have to get it, Derek. Please.”
He stared. “I get it,” he said. “I've been there, too.”
And that said it all. Her lip quivered, and she leaned into his space. “I'm sorry for that,” she said, and she kissed him. His lips, his chin, his throat. “I'm sorry for being insensitive. And for sometimes not being what you need. I'm sorry for everything.”
She traced a line down his neck and placed her palms against his chest, splayed and soft. Resting, not pushing or grabbing. She felt the bandage covering his incision, and she kissed that, too, through his shirt.
He curled around her like a coat, and his hands chased her crying away. “You're what I need, now,” he said. His voice rumbled against her body, soft and low.
“I really do love you,” she said.
“I love you, too.”
They embraced over the parking brake, and in the crawl of moments, everything that had twisted up inside her body unfurled. Stress sloughed away like dead layers of skin. “We're going to traumatize our kid, someday,” she said.
“Oh?” he said.
“Yeah. We seem to have a penchant for nearly dying and raunchy sex. One or the other will send him to therapy before he's five.”
“Him?”
“Or her,” she said. She hugged him, and he laughed. She pulled back and looked at him. “What?”
“Dreaming up new business cards, that's all.”
“For what?”
“Derek C. Shepherd, MD,” he said. “Rock star neurosurgeon, arm, Shakesma in a blender, pending father, and amazing husband.”
She laughed. “You forgot egotistical ass.”
“Well, yes,” he said. His eyelids drooped. “But only sometimes.”
He leaned back against the seat and closed his eyes. She touched his face and ran a palm through his hair. “Only sometimes,” she agreed.
“Mmm,” he groaned. And then his breathing spaced. He fell asleep the way a light turned off from on. With a blink and sudden darkness. She'd worn him out again.
She rubbed his thigh and watched the traffic ahead, which didn't move. The drizzle picked up into a light, steady splatter against the windshield. She sighed and let her mind space as she stared through half-lidded eyes. Maybe Derek was on to something. Spacing. The water dribbled down the windshield. She watched the way it crawled. Nothing happened. It wasn't interesting.
She took a sip of the water she'd brought for him from the trunk and then took another, careful not to take too much. Having to pee on top of all of this would just suck. Her muscles ached. She wanted to stretch, but her clothing and hair had almost dried again, and if she felt bad, Derek must feel worse. She didn't move. She flexed her muscles one by one, starting at her calves and working up to her arms. Isometrics.
She counted sheep and got to somewhere in the thousands. She even tried the radio again, but not a single station came through the mess. This sucked. This really. Really. Sucked.
She closed her eyes and leaned back against the seat. She imagined honking would wake her up if traffic started to move. Irresponsible, yes, but this was just stupid. Waiting here for hours. The black of her eyelids turned red, and she blinked, squinting. The driver in front of her had turned on his car.
She brushed her face with her hands and shifted, trying to see down the road into the gray. An undulating sea of brake lights blinking on and off greeted her through the misty rain. “Oh, thank god, we're moving,” she said, and she turned the key in the ignition. The engine rumbled to life. Derek didn't stir.
The police apparently had decided that it would be a swell thing to collapse three lanes of traffic into a detour on the right shoulder. She merged with the other honking cars, impatience making her head hurt. She tapped the steering wheel with her nails.
Eventually, she passed the wreckage. A single Hyundai rested in two gnarled pieces, one half of it upside down in the left lane, one half of it right side up in the right. A scorched, jack-knifed semi bisected the road through the middle lane. Firemen crawled through the metal and the mess. Lights flashed, blue and red and strobing. Beyond that, a crunched up line of six or seven passenger vehicles, an accordioned pickup truck, broken glass, and a mangled bicycle littered the lanes like a tornado had busted through or something. She bit her lip as a team of paramedics loaded an occupied stretcher into a waiting ambulance.
She glanced back at the destruction, and her lip quivered. There was no way everybody had walked away from that. No way in hell. Somebody had lost her Derek today, or perhaps simply died with him in an eye blink of screaming metal and heat.
Without thinking, she reached for him, and she pulled his hand into her lap. He didn't wake, but the warmth radiating from his skin left her no doubt that his heart still beat and would continue to do so. She inched the car forward and left the tragedy behind.
When she pulled the Cayenne into the driveway, she sighed. “We're home,” she said. She touched his shoulder and squeezed. “Time to wake up. Just for a minute.”
He flinched awake, and a tremor ran through his body. “Huh?”
“Derek, we're home,” she said, trying to break his mental fog into pieces.
He pulled the door handle like a reflex more than anything else. The distant sound of rain made a crescendo as the door yawned open, but he sat there, blinking. Water plinked and skittered through the gap between the door and the car.
“We're home,” she said again.
He squinted at her. The way his nose crinkled made him seem vaguely rabbit-like, but she didn't laugh. “What?” he managed. His breaths rasped.
“Home, Derek,” she said. “We're home.”
“Oh,” he said. He looked around with a bit more awareness. “Oh,” he said again. He fumbled with his seat belt. The latch clicked as it released, and the belt hit him in the chin before it rolled behind his ear into the space behind the door frame.
She reached over his knee to grab her purse, but he stopped her. “I'll get it,” he said, his voice thick with sleep.
She tried to guesstimate how heavy her bag was. He wasn't supposed to be picking up anything that weighed more than five pounds. But... Five pounds? Hardly more than a stack of thick dinner plates or a heavy book. Even if the purse weighed closer to eight pounds, since, really, it was more of a tote, she couldn't see the harm, just this once. Carrying her bag would make him feel a bit more like he was contributing.
“Okay,” she said.
He turned and slid out of the car into the rain. He didn't have the same difficulties as he'd had getting into the car, but after sitting down for hours, he had balance issues trying to stand. His shoes churned gravel. He pinwheeled, and as he twisted to grab the handle and right himself, she heard him grunt. Pain. He turned back to the car and leaned against it, eyes screwed shut. He let the water drench him and didn't move.
She grabbed his duffel bag from the back seat and came around to his side of the car. She put her hand on his shoulder. Her purse lay forgotten in the front seat. “Are you doing okay, Derek?”
“I'm okay,” he said, but he didn't sound okay. His voice wobbled, like he wasn't sure. She couldn't pinpoint why or what might not be okay, since he didn't look like he was still in pain from his landing, but there was a definite lack of okay. He took a deep breath and swallowed, and then he left the safety of the car, hands spread from his hips in a clear indication that his center of balance had been disturbed. Dizzy, maybe? He'd gotten better about that, but... His feet splurched in the muddy grass and left indentations behind. A cool breeze blew. It smelled earthy and full of ozone.
She grabbed her purse, slung it over her free shoulder, and shut the car door behind her. She clicked the lock button on the key chain, and the car chirped. He wasn't moving well. She caught up to him in about three strides and wrapped her arm around his waist. He didn't comment, but her presence seemed to help ground him. He stopped spreading his hands to make a tripod with his body. His left hand gripped her shoulder, and his right arm relaxed by his hip.
“Watch the step,” she said as they approached the door.
He managed, panting, and rested against the door frame while she fumbled for her key. The familiar brass slid into the lock, she turned it, and pushed open the door. He followed her into the house. She dropped her duffel bag and her purse on the floor and turned, watching him as his hands chased up the side of the door. He turned the deadbolt and checked the latch, two things she'd never seen him do before. Her house tended to be Grand Central Station for interns and other young residents. Or, at least, it used to be.
He turned and stood in the dark foyer, dripping on the carpet. He seemed pale. Pale and too thin and disturbed. His body swayed, and he stared at nothing. Rain pattered on the roof and gave the air a percussive quality.
She bit her lip. This wasn't quite how she'd imagined it would go, though, when she thought about it, she wasn't sure what she'd imagined either. The trip from the hospital had been enough to wear him out. She didn't think he was going to skip up the steps with a smile and say goodnight.
“Do you want to go to bed?” she said. He didn't answer, and he didn't give any indication that he'd heard her. She touched his arm. “Derek?”
He blinked. “What?”
“Do you want to go to bed?”
She peered at the stairway, at the long incline and the railing. He hadn't done steps before. Everything she knew about home recovery from heart surgery suggested that for at least a few weeks, stair trips be limited to coming down in the morning and going up at night, because more than that would be too physically trying for someone who had just had his chest cut open and his heart jockeyed with by human hands. She turned and tried to gauge his reaction to the prospect of having to climb all that, but he didn't even glance that way. His face remained expressionless, maybe a little lost.
“Derek?”
“Not yet,” he said. “I'll just sit.”
For a minute, it seemed like he didn't know which way to go. He looked down the hallway toward the kitchen, but then he veered left, his eyes blank. She followed him to the couch and watched, concerned, as he collapsed. He didn't seem to care that he was soaked. Bits of wet, torn grass littered the soles of his shoes. Water discolored the legs of his jeans about four inches up from the hemline of the legs, and wet, dark splotches covered the rest of them. His shirt stuck to his skin, and she could see his bandages through the front of it.
“Can I get you anything?” she said. Nothing. No response. “Derek?” Nothing. She sat beside him and rubbed his thigh. “Earth to Derek,” she said. “Hey.”
His body shuddered. “I'm sorry,” he said. He squeezed his eyes shut like he was trying to get rid of a bad sight. She followed the direction of his stare, but nothing remarkable sat in the line of his gaze. A bookshelf. The wall. “I'm sorry,” he said again. “I feel like I'm wading through molasses.”
“It's fine,” she said. “Do you want a glass of water? You could lie down here if you're tired.”
“I just need a minute,” he said. “That was a long car ride.”
“I'm really sorry about that.”
He shrugged. “It wasn't all bad. You still owe me a story.”
“I don't know,” she said. “You did cheat, after all.”
He gazed at her, eyes dark and clueless. “I cheated?”
The marker had smeared a bit in the rain, leaving streaks of green on his pale skin, but the words were mostly legible. Meredith owes a story. Simple and to the point. She touched his hand. He followed her attention and flinched when he saw his marred skin. “When did...”
She laughed. She couldn't help it. “Oh, that's classic, Derek,” she said. “You remembered about the story, but forgot about the prompt you wrote on your hand so you wouldn't forget it?”
He'd been pretty self-deprecating about the memory thing earlier, but her snicker died when she saw how well he was taking it now. And by well, she meant horribly. A deep sound of worry rumbled in his chest. He wobbled to his feet and took a step, but the impulse halted, and he stared like he didn't know where to go.
“What is it?” she said.
“Your purse. I left it...” He glanced vaguely at the dining room. “I left it somewhere.”
“I got it,” she assured him. “I put it by the door.” She rose to her feet and pulled at his hand. “It's fine. It's really fine, Derek.”
He collapsed back onto the sofa and sighed. His eyes seemed shimmery. Wet. Like he wanted to cry but wasn't letting himself. She rubbed his back, and he blinked.
She didn't know what to do. She'd expected to have him home in fifteen minutes. She'd expected to help him up to bed, where he'd sleep, and that would be the day for him. He'd sleep, and she'd do stuff downstairs, and then the day would wane. She'd go upstairs to join him, and she'd sleep, too. Next to him and in his space for the first time in over a week.
She'd planned to stay with him through the weekend to make sure he could handle taking care of himself in the longer term. That had been the only reason Dr. Altman had been willing to let him go, because of her. If he'd had no one, Seattle Grace would have kept him closer to eleven or twelve days. Maybe more. Derek had improved, but he still wasn't well.
She'd expected most of the three days to involve him sleeping. Nothing was going like she'd imagined, and she felt lost again. But he was the one who'd gotten shot. She could do this. She could be the supportive partner. In the face of that, she had to be. Anything less would be freaking pathetic.
“There's a bright side to this, you know,” she said, at a loss for anything else.
He snorted. His eyes creased as discomfort wound through him, but the pain didn't linger. His gaze evened out, and he stared at her. “There's a bright side to being a helpless guppy?”
“Mmm-hmm,” she said. She shifted to her knees, pressed against his thigh, leaned, and kissed him. She loitered by his lips and spoke against his skin. “It means I have to keep doing this to make sure you remember.” She kissed him again. “Really? I can think of worse fates.” Again. “I'm an excellent kisser.”
Bingo. His tension seemed to drain, which made hers drain as well. He tasted her and ran loose fingers through her tangled hair. His grip was clumsy, and he didn't make it more than an inch before he got stuck in the snarl. Her hair pulled a little, but she didn't care. He looked at her, a hopeful sort of light in his eyes as he pulled his hands loose and settled for petting her instead. “Does it mean you're going to tell me a story, too?” he said.
“You're just not going to let that go, are you?”
“I'm wounded and vulnerable,” he said. “I figure it's my only shot.” She almost resisted, but then he added a soft, rumble-y, “Please?”
He didn't play fair.
“All right,” she said. She threw herself against the back of the couch with a huff and crossed her arms. “All right, fine. What's your preference? Worst drunk dial, loss of virginity, or police encounter?”
He put his back against the arm of the sofa and turned to her with a hazy look of glee on his face. He pondered his choices. “Oh, definitely first run in with the law.”
“First one?” she said. “Or something subsequent?”
“Well, I did show you mine, discounting speeding tickets,” he said.
She grinned. “I got caught shoplifting.”
“Mrs. Shepherd, do you mean to tell me you used to be a klepto?”
“I swiped some hair dye.”
“Oh?” He peered at her. “What color?”
“Fuscia.”
He must have been expecting platinum, or red, or... something normal. His mouth curled in a surprised grin, and he laughed. “Why on earth did you want pink hair?”
She shrugged. “Just tips, actually. Seemed like a good thing to do at the time. I figured my mother would hate it or whatever.”
“A rebellious klepto then?”
“Better than a narcoleptic,” she said, though she regretted saying it. He didn't seem to remember that, either, and he stared blankly at the reference.
The hole in his memory either didn't bother him, though, or lost traction under the weight of his next thought. He made a low sound in his throat. His stare peeled layers of her clothes away, and she couldn't help but giggle. Whatever thought he had, it was a very, very bad one. “So,” he said, and he waited, expectant as he let the low, rich hum of the word fade into silence.
“So, what?”
“Did you dye the carpet and the drapes?”
“I did not dye down there!” she said. “I was like twelve, Derek.”
He grinned. “Uh huh.”
“I didn't!”
“Then I think you owe me another confession,” he decided.
“What?” she said. “Why?”
“Mine was ten times better,” he said.
“You got what you asked for.”
“But I was misled!”
“How? I even let you pick what story! You can't make me take responsibility for your crappy choices. And you can't play the stoned card, either. I wanted to wait, and I said so.”
“I figured you made it past middle school before you became an outlaw,” he said.
She glared, but it didn't feel very strong, not when her lungs quivered, and she struggled not to burst out laughing.
“Well, if you wanted the good ones from the time of my majority or whatever, you should have either been more specific, or thought to ask me after the liver transplant when I was more stoned than you are now,” she said. So there.
The look on his face became dangerous. He grinned, his lips a sly, sarcastic slant. “How do you know I didn't?” he said in a low, rich tone that slid down her spine like a solid stroke of his hand. Her innards thrummed, and she shifted, restless, as her breaths kicked into higher gear. No, she had to tell herself. No sex.
“No way,” she said, trying not to pant with all the launch messages her body was sending her. How could he do that without even touching her? Without even trying? She shook her head. “No, I would remember.”
He cocked his head to the side. “Would you?”
“You're evil,” she said. “You're an evil bastard, Derek.”
“Wounded evil bastard,” he said. “Let's not forget wounded.”
“Whatever.” She huffed. Her body trembled with the stress of no follow through. “So, what did I say?”
He shifted, inching closer. The cushions bowed to his weight. He rested his chin on his hand, his elbow against the back of the couch, and he stared. “Why don't you tell me another story, and we'll compare notes?” he said.
Touch me, he'd said on many nights with the same shivering, purring tone.
She grabbed a cushion with her fingers, lobbed it so hard it made her arm hurt, and whacked him in the face with it. Sexual tension released from her muscles like something had popped loose. “Ass!” she said, laughing.
The painkillers had stripped him of any sort of reflexes. He didn't even try to catch the pillow. His face swept to the right with the blow. He spluttered. His hair stuck up, wet and stiff and scattered by the whiplash. And then he stared. He didn't respond.
The bottom dropped out from her stomach, and relief twisted into something else. “Crap,” she said, pawing forward. She touched his face. “Did I hurt you? I'm sorry.” It's not like he had any recourse, assuming she hadn't nearly killed him again. Not being able to push, pull, or lift most certainly applied to hulking sofa cushions.
He blinked. “No,” he said, drawing out the syllable into something long and slow. “I'm not hurt.” And then he grabbed her thigh and pulled her to him with a grunt. No pulling, her brain screamed. Way, way more than five pounds! Bad! But then his hands slipped under her shirt, he squiggled his fingertips against her skin, and she forgot everything.
She shrieked and lost her breath as her muscles twitched all at once under the assault. “Stop!” she said, choking on laughter. “Derek, stop,” she croaked.
Through a blur of tears, she saw him kneeling over her, teeth bared in a sexy, triumphant grimace, but then she lost it as she arched back into the couch and laughed, and laughed, and laughed. “Bad girl,” he said somewhere in the haze.
She flipped onto her stomach, clawing at the cushions, but her desperate retreat only meant he shifted his attention to her back. A spasm wracked her body, and in her delirium, she prayed she wouldn't kick him. He worked her shoes away as she squirmed, and then he tickled the soles of her feet. Her left leg jerked wildly, and she struck him in the arm without meaning to.
He barked with laughter. “You're very flexible!”
“Stop, god.” She panted. “Uncle. Uncle, uncle.” The words faded to a whine of laughter. “You win,” she managed.
When he let her go, she fell off the couch and landed on the floor with a breathless thump. She moaned, laughing, and inhaled the musty scent of the rug before rolling onto her back and staring at the hazy ceiling. She saw stars. Her vision wavered with the black dots of hyperventilation, but the seconds passed, and her breathing slowed. She wiped her face with her hands, spreading tears across her cheek in a salt slick that chilled her as it evaporated.
“That's what you get for belting me with a pillow when I'm vulnerable and wounded,” he said, staring down at her over the edge of the couch as he panted.
“You're evil incarnate,” she said, her voice hoarse. She coughed. “Got it.”
He grinned at her, but it faded. The force of his will and the thrum of adrenaline in his veins had been a powerful, heady, wonderful thing, but they abandoned him, sprinters overwhelmed in an arduous marathon. She watched it happen. The feverish excitement bled out of his face as she stumbled to her knees and crawled back to him, thumping her kneecaps and feet on the hard floor. Pain wavered on his face as his breaths hammered in his chest. He blinked, and he couldn't quite seem to catch his breath. The clock ticked away the moments as she settled next to him.
He grunted as she hugged him.
Sometimes, it shocked her how fragile he was, now, how easily his body broke under stress. She stroked his damp shirt, frowning when she noticed beads of perspiration along his temples, and wet stains that couldn't be rain because they'd collected underneath his armpits.
“Do you want to lie down, now?” she said.
“No,” he said. “I don't want to.”
She bit her lip. Want. A key word. Soon to be supplanted by need. He struggled to keep his eyes open.
His skin shivered under her palms as she rubbed his arm. With a groan, she forced herself to leave him for a moment. She padded to the hall closet. She pulled a thick winter afghan loose from the pile of musty blankets, even though winter had long since passed, and she returned. She wrapped them inside of it, and he sighed against her shoulder. She snuggled closer.
“I'm sorry,” he said.
“Don't be, Derek. Please, don't.”
His eyelids drooped as he lost the battle. His expression went slack, and he watched her through his eyelashes, breathing in the darkness, but he said nothing. His body felt heavy against her shoulder. Heavier. Dead weight. Rain plinked against the windowpanes. She kissed his forehead.
“It's okay,” she assured him.
He pulled the blanket closer and collapsed in a fluid motion, from sitting to sort of a fetal curl on the seat of the couch. She slipped loose from the afghan and, without word, she helped him lay himself flat on his back. She pulled off his wet, dirty shoes and his saturated, cold socks and threw them to the floor under the coffee table.
Minutes passed. And then his eyes closed at last as exhaustion pulled him under without his consent. She rested with her back against the couch, taking a moment to compose herself. The cushion and his soft belly cradled her head, and she looked to the side, up the line of his arm to the underside of his chin. He breathed, even and steady, but she could still detect shivers as the sweat evaporated from his skin.
Biting her lip, she went back to the closet for another blanket, and she put that on top of the afghan. Though she was reluctant to leave him there, wet and maybe-cold in damp clothes, he'd hit some sort of wall, and she doubted rousing him would be any healthier than letting him shiver for a while, and perhaps even worse. She left him sleeping in the living room, resisting the urge to do nothing but watch him.
She took his duffel bag upstairs and unpacked it for him. She hung his shirts back on the rack in the closet, and folded his pajama pants and put them in his drawer with his socks. She dumped all the dirty clothes into the hamper, and left the duffel in the bathroom in case he needed some of his toiletries or something, though she doubted it, since most of them were dupes, and he already had a full set here.
She stripped the bed next, yanking away the soiled, old sheets and mattress pad, and she replaced them. She tried to get it looking nice, but, she sort of sucked at housework. She folded the bedspread under the pillows. It hung off the sides of the bed, lop-sided. She thought about stacking the pillow shams back on the bed, but it seemed like a lot of effort, considering they would both be sleeping there in a few hours anyway.
She gathered up the sheets and the full hamper and waddled down the stairs with them. The answering machine beeped as she stumbled through the kitchen, dropping socks and underwear and other things in her wake. The room smelled like something rotten, and she gagged, almost losing her grip on the hamper, too. Dirty dishes sat in the sink, mold spreading across old food like fuzzy carpeting. Little flying bugs hovered in the air above the trashcan and the pile of dishes. Her eyes watered, and her gag reflex kicked in again.
The answering machine, oblivious to the decaying mess, beeped again. She gasped, trying to breathe through her mouth to stop the smell. “All right, one freaking second,” she said.
She made it to the washing machine and dropped everything in a heap. She stuffed some whites in first, since they were both running out of clean clothes after over eight days away. She turned the start dial, and the machine had just rumbled to life when her watch beeped. 2PM.
She sighed. The kitchen would have to wait a little. She gathered a breath deep into her chest and launched back into the room, unwilling to breathe. She grabbed a glass, filled it under the faucet, and vacated as quickly as possible. She sucked in air as she closed the kitchen door behind her. She grabbed his pills from her purse, and she returned to the couch.
He'd been asleep twenty minutes, at best, and she hated to wake him, but... She touched his shoulder through the blanket, anyway. “Derek,” she whispered.
Nothing.
“Derek, come on. You need to wake up for a minute.”
With a deep sound of pain and frustration, he rolled away from her into the back of the sofa. When he put weight on his arm and his side, he let loose a breathless sort of croak, and he flattened out again. His body shifted under the blankets, and then he wiped muzzily at his face, but he didn't open his eyes.
“Please, I don't want to cough,” he said.
“You don't need to,” she said. “You just need to take this, and you can go back to sleep. Can you sit up?”
He sucked in a breath and didn't move. She felt his muscles tremble underneath her hands. She slid her arm underneath his back, and together, they managed to get him into a slouch. He dropped his bare feet over the edge of the sofa, and he hovered over his knees with the blanket curled around him, breathing like he hurt and he wanted it to stop. He rubbed his eyes, and, finally, he looked at her. Sort of. His stare conveyed no recognition. His hair stuck up all over. Dark circles gave him a racoonish appearance around the eyes.
He took the pill from her hand like an automaton. He didn't want to take the glass of water no matter what she tried. She ended up tipping the glass to his lips for him. Her stomach churned as he swallowed, water dripping everywhere in a giant, spluttering mess. She rubbed his shoulder. If he were at all awake, he would feel so embarrassed, and she ached for him.
“You can go back to sleep now,” she said. She tried to get him to lie back down, but he wouldn't budge. “Derek?” she whispered.
He blinked, stood, and shambled toward the hallway. He clutched the blankets, and they trailed after him like a long cape. She followed him, concerned that, in his stupor, he would try the stairs. When the door slammed in her face, she flinched and came back to herself. She stood in the hallway outside the bathroom.
“Let me know if you need anything,” she told the door.
“I'm fine,” she thought she heard him grumble, though she could have imagined it. She didn't let herself dwell on it. He was on a truckload of drugs. He hurt. He'd been woken from a sound, deep sleep, and she'd stuffed a pill down his throat before he'd really regained any sort of thought processes. He was allowed to be a bit grumpy.
She returned to the kitchen. She pushed through the door and gagged, though the urge seemed less, now that she'd started growing accustomed to the horrible smell. She stared at the disaster area. She didn't know what the hell to do first, and the answering machine wouldn't. Freaking. Shut up.
The answering machine, however, didn't make her want to vomit, so she left it. She grabbed a big black drawstring trash bag from the roll under the sink and attacked the refrigerator. The solidifying, reeking milk was the first to go, followed by the half-and-half, some very ripe orange juice, and a box of leftovers from some restaurant. She threw out liquifying strawberries. A fuzzy collection of unidentifiable items that had become a science experiment. She threw out the yellowing stick of margarine. She tossed vegetables and dip and all sorts of other things that normally, in a house full of four adults, they churned through in a matter of days. Thursday was usually grocery night, too, which meant the day of the shooting would have been when the untouched perishables on their last legs would have been swept clear to make room for replacements.
She closed the fridge door and attacked the counters next. She tossed bread that had become solid mold and mushy, browning apples that left little puddles behind. She fought her reflex to throw up again, and nausea swirled around her head as she approached the trashcan. She tipped it, and dumped everything from that into the giant bag as well. A plume of rotting stench hit her right in the face, and then?
Then, she threw up. Right into the bag. She gagged until her stomach hurt. Little flying creepy crawly things buzzed in her face, and she retched again and again until she was empty and trembling. Her nose ran. She swallowed bile. She twisted the ties on the bag and shut it. Then she wrapped it in a second bag, and shut that. The smell died to a tolerable level, and she heaped the bag by the trashcan.
When Derek wandered into the room, barefoot, blankets draped over his shoulders, and his hair all askew like some sort of windblown refugee, she was still trying to build the courage to clean the dishes in the sink. “Hey,” she said, and then she frowned. She'd been slamming things. Retching. Wrinkling trash bags. “I'm not keeping you up, am I?”
He shook his head. “No.”
The answering machine beeped again, and he moved toward it, his steps slow and deliberate, like he was hurting again. He looked haggard. And tired. And yet he wasn't sleeping. She debated whether to ask him about another Percocet, when he hit the button.
“You have thirteen new messages,” the machine said in its flat, mechanical tone.
Beep.
“Derek, it's Mom,” said Mrs. Shepherd in a wavering, panicked-but-forced-into-calm voice. “I've tried your office, both of your work cells, your personal cell, and now here. Mark's not answering any of his phones either. I didn't have Meredith's cell phone number stored, so I'm hoping you're with her. We saw the news. I know you're probably busy managing the troops, but, please, call, and tell us everyone is okay when you have a moment.”
Beep.
“Derek? Kathy. You need to call. Mom's freaking out.” Kathy's voice hitched. “We're all freaking out.”
Beep.
“Derek, it's Mom again. I'm really hoping this machine is broken.” Meredith bit her lip as she listened to Carolyn suck in a breath like she was forcing herself not to cry. “Call as soon as you get this.”
Beep.
“Lexie?” said Thatcher. “Meredith?” he added as an afterthought. “Please, call me when you can.”
Beep.
“Derek, this really isn't funny,” a woman snapped. Rachel? “Call somebody, damn it.”
Beep.
“Mom again. Sorry.”
Beep.
“Uh, hi. This is Aaron. I... Never mind.”
Beep.
“Derek, your family is ringing me every five minutes to see if somebody's contacted me, and I have no idea what to tell them,” said Addison. Her voice sounded low and warbling, like she was crying. She sniffed. “I'm watching the news. You can reach me at Sam's... Just call, okay? Or Meredith. Or anybody else who's there in that godforsaken zoo. Call, please.”
Beep.
“I'm sorry,” said a tiny voice. “I shouldn't have called it a godforsaken zoo. Please, call.”
Beep.
“You'd better not be dead,” Nancy snapped, “Or I'll have to strangle you myself. They're estimating casualties.” Then her voice broke. “Please, don't be dead.”
Beep.
“Mom again.”
Beep.
“Hi,” said an unfamiliar, feminine voice. “This is Janine Wilkinson from the Seattle Times. I'm calling Derek Shepherd concerning the recent shootings at Seattle Grace. I'd appreciate it if you would give me a call back. You can reach me at the city desk, extension 9216.”
Beep.
“Dr. Shepherd? Detective Wolff. We spoke on Sunday afternoon. I just wanted to let you know I've sent a packet for you in the mail. It has my business card and the numbers for some hotlines you can call. If you change your mind about making a statement, or just want to talk off the record with somebody who understands, my door is always open. I know this is a very difficult time, and I wanted to express my deepest sympathy to you and your wife.”
Beep.
“You have no new messages,” said the machine.
Derek stared at the machine, and he didn't move. Meredith's gaze dropped to the floor as a lump formed in her throat. “Those must be old,” she said. Anger made her teeth clench. Well, duh, Meredith. Of course they were old. “I... I didn't come in here. When I came home before,” she said. “All I did was sleep. I'm sorry. I should have... I should have gotten rid of them.”