All Along The Watchtower - Part 20.3 (We got all the memories)
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.
Sorry this is a bit late. Travel interrupted my schedule :) I'm behind on my feedback replies, but let me say, as always, I really appreciate everyone who takes the time to leave comments. My goal is, not only to entertain myself, but to entertain the people I share my stories with, so, I love to hear from my readers! Thanks also to my awesome beta readers for putting up with my grueling demands!
All Along The Watchtower - Part 20.3
(We got all the memories)
Meredith paced in the hallway outside of Derek's hospital room for what felt like years as she tried not to think about how sick he was. How sick he'd been. About how close he'd come to dying in the last month, not once, but twice. Once via attempted murder, and another time via a combination of crap luck and his horrific stubborn streak. This wasn't fair. None of this was freaking fair.
He'd been transferred to a step-down unit late that afternoon after two nights in the ICU. The step-down unit was a real room with real walls, a lockable door, and a private bathroom, and it was a glorious rung up on the privacy ladder for him. Except she wasn't entirely convinced he should be there, yet. He still had a fever, and they'd stopped making serious gains at lowering it. The antipyretics seemed to have gotten stuck in neutral as he'd hit 101.7 or so. On top of that, he wouldn't eat. She'd watched breakfast, lunch, and dinner trays being taken away from him that day, all untouched, and he hadn't eaten anything the day before, either. At least he was lucid, for the most part, though his grasp on reality didn't seem all that firm. With his voice in shreds, she couldn't really call what he did speaking, but he seemed to interact with nothing at all, sometimes.
Her hands trembled. A worried lump gobbled up the empty space in her throat, and then she couldn't swallow because the lump had grown to basketball proportions. He'd nearly died again, and he wouldn't eat, and she couldn't touch him, and his fever was stuck, and he should be back in the ICU, being more closely monitored. Except if it were anybody else and not Derek, she'd be signing the 'discharge to step-down' papers herself. His fever was stuck, yes, but it was far better than it had been, and unless it stayed stuck for a long time, like days, not eight hours, she was being irrational, and stupid, and freaky, and she wished this would just... Stop. He was very sick, and she hated it, but that was all. Except telling herself to stop didn't make anything stop. Derek had almost died again.
Again. Once was already too much.
She paused in the quiet hallway and rubbed her temples. Her eyes hurt from lack of sleep, and her head hurt from endless worrying. The white walls seemed to brighten, turn incandescent, and then stab at her retinas with vicious knives. She closed her eyelids, and sighed as she rested against the wall, listening to the sounds surrounding her. A pair of doctors conversed in whispers several doors down. The floor nurse tapped away at a keyboard at the station just around the corner, and the sound fluttered back to Meredith, vague and distant. The scent of antiseptic tickled her nose.
“For the record, I am not here, and I never was here, and I certainly never drove across town for this,” a familiar voice told Meredith.
Meredith's eyes slammed open, and she found herself inches from her boss. Dr. Bailey stood by the door, wearing a tan raincoat that covered street clothes - slacks and shiny loafers. The shoulders of the raincoat had darkened with rainwater. Meredith's jaw tumbled open.
“Dr. Bailey?” she said.
Dr. Bailey frowned at Meredith, her eyes intent, concerned pools of brown. Dr. Bailey glanced at the closed doorway to Derek's room, and her frown deepened. “Why are you standing in the hallway?” she said. Her wet shoes squeaked on the tiled floor as she shifted. “Did that fool kick you out of the room?”
Meredith blinked. “Dr. Bailey?”
Dr. Bailey nodded. “That would be my name, Dr. Grey.”
“But...” Meredith swallowed. “How are you here?”
“I thought I already explained that. I'm not here.”
“But... Why aren't you here?” Meredith said, feeling strangely clueless.
“Because I do not drive across town to visit arrogant, stubborn neurosurgeons when they get sick.”
“But...”
“Spit it out, Grey,” Dr. Bailey said as she folded her arms over her chest. Her small frame puffed up with her authoritative tone.
Meredith shook her head. “I mean, who told you... about...?” Derek. Nearly dying. Again.
“I have spies, Grey,” said Bailey. “Everywhere. I see and know everything. Or haven't you learned that by now?”
“But this isn't Seattle Grace--”
Dr. Bailey held up a hand as if to silence her. “I see and know everything,” Dr. Bailey said. She shuddered and shook her head. “Not that I want to.”
An orderly walked past, rolling an empty gurney covered in rumpled sheets. Meredith paused as he went by. She swallowed. “Derek didn't kick me out,” she said. “He's... using the bathroom. I wanted to give him some privacy.”
Not quite the truth, but close enough. He had an intravenous line feeding him fluids, antibiotics, and other medications nonstop. No longer intent on monitoring Derek's kidney function so closely, the doctor had removed Derek's catheter just before they'd moved Derek out of the ICU. Except Derek was still sick. Still feverish. Still weak. And tired. And lethargic. He didn't even want to get up. Didn't want to try. Meredith had handed him the plastic urinal and left so he could do his business in private.
“How is he doing?” Dr. Bailey asked as her voice dropped low with empathetic concern.
Meredith shrugged. “He's sick, and he doesn't want to be here.”
“He's one of those, is he?”
“One of what?”
Dr. Bailey's eyebrows raised. “Horrible patients?”
Meredith shook her head. “He's too sick to be a horrible patient. He... almost died again.”
“He what?”
“His temperature hit 104.9. The doctor was debating whether to put him on a ventilator because he couldn't breathe. It's agony for him to cough. And he... he almost...” Died. Died. Died. She closed her eyes and tried to stop the quailing in her gut as she remembered how bad he'd been two nights ago. How frail he'd looked when they'd had to pull him from the car and wheel him into the emergency bay. His eyes had been open, but he'd been caught in feverish delirium, and there just... hadn't been anybody home.
“How is he, now?” Dr. Bailey said, her voice gentle.
“He's not eating, and he's in a lot of pain, but they got his fever down to 101.7...” Meredith sighed. “I thought we were done. I thought we were done when I took him home after the shooting. This is...” Her throat hurt. “I don't know what this is, but it's horrible.”
“Grey,” Bailey said, “if there's one thing I know about that man, it's that he's annoying.”
Meredith blinked. “What?”
“He'll be fine.” Meredith opened her mouth to protest, but Bailey barreled onward. “And not your version of fine, just so we're clear,” Bailey said. She splayed her palm against her chest. “My version. Which is actually honest-to-god fine.”
“But--”
“If he's not fine, he can't be annoying,” Bailey clarified.
Meredith looked at the floor. “Oh.”
A warm hand touched Meredith's shoulder. Dr. Bailey moved closer. Wet shoes squeaked. “And he loves you,” Dr. Bailey said, her voice soft and mothering. “That idiot would move heaven and earth to be fine for that.”
Meredith nodded, but she didn't respond. They stood in silence in the hallway for several minutes. Meredith glanced at her watch. She'd given him ten minutes. To pee. He had to be finished. Surely. She pushed away from the wall, trying to ignore the swaying feeling as her body fought gravity and an upset stomach. She blinked, and the dizzying, black waterfall receded.
“Let me see if he's done,” Meredith said. As she began to turn the doorknob, she glanced at Dr. Bailey. She tightened her grip until the knob's edges bit into her skin. “Give me a second, okay?”
Dr. Bailey nodded. Meredith moved across the threshold, back into Derek's private room. He'd filled the urinal, which rested on his tray table over his lap, at the opposite end from his still untouched bowl of oatmeal. After he'd refused breakfast, lunch, and dinner that day, she'd gotten desperate to see him eat. She didn't want to have to see him with a feeding tube, and she'd wondered if, perhaps, he hadn't been eating simply because the full meal trays served by the hospital were too daunting for somebody so sick, but she'd had no luck. He wouldn't eat the oatmeal, either, though she couldn't tell if that was her failure to cook more than his failure to consume.
Subtle wisps of steam curled up from the Styrofoam bowl. A plastic spoon poked up from the concoction a bit like a flag, which made her think she might not have added enough water. Shouldn't the spoon fall to the side or something? Oatmeal should be mushy, she thought.
She walked under the television, which hung high on the wall and had been muted. The only sounds in the room were the high-pitched, background whine of the television electronics, the slow bleep of Derek's pulse oximeter, and his chuff-y, labored breathing. He lay on the bed on top of the sheets, not sitting so much as propped at a shallow angle. A sheen of sweat dotted his brow along his hairline and down his temples to his wet sideburns, but that was all. A far cry from how bad he'd been the day before, when she'd had to bathe him. He still wore the full oxygen mask, and he stared dully at the muted television, where the Yankees were decimating the Mets 4-0. His gaze didn't shift to face her as she entered. He didn't greet her. He didn't move. He stared, listless. She couldn't even tell if he was a Yankees or a Mets fan, though she knew he likely had to be one or the other, given where he was from.
She resisted the urge to touch his naked shin as she moved alongside the bed to his tray table. No touching except when necessary, she chastised herself. She still had no idea what kind of touching was okay, and what kind of touching wasn't. She didn't understand it at all.
“Derek,” she whispered. Finally, he looked at her. “Hey,” she said. She gave him a small, wobbly smile that she hoped he would find encouraging, and for a moment, the empty space between them seemed to connect with a tangible cord. Some connection. The sense that her gaze pulled at him like an anchor overwhelmed her. For all his shaky reality, he was in the room then, and he loved her, and she knew it. His pupils sharpened in the sea of blue surrounding them, and she couldn't help herself. She touched his brow and rolled her fingers back through his damp hair as she leaned over the railing on the bed. Her eyes watered when he leaned into her touch like he'd been suffering through a drought, and her palm was water. Which made no sense, damn it. What was good, and what wasn't?
“Bailey's here to see you,” Meredith said. She grabbed the urinal. “Let me... take this.”
He didn't move or blink as she walked into the bathroom and dumped the receptacle’s contents into the toilet. In fact, she wasn't quite sure he'd understood the bit about Bailey. But when she set the empty urinal down in the bathroom and moved back into the main room, she discovered she was too late for further clarification.
Derek blinked at his short, determined visitor, and then his gaze sharpened from somewhere adrift into helpless panic. Meredith read the thoughts crossing his face as though he'd spoken them. I'm sick. I'm lying on a hospital bed in nothing but a skimpy gown. I can't lift my own head off the pillow. I don't want a visitor.
Guilt stabbed at Meredith for not policing the situation better despite her exhaustion - she hadn't been thinking -- but Bailey intervened before the awful, churning feeling gutted her. “Oh, don't give me that look,” Dr. Bailey said as she pulled a chair close to the bed and sat. The chair squawked as she settled. “You know you're happy to see me,” she told him. She leaned against the railing and gripped it. Her gaze didn't wander away from his face, not to the monitors, or his bare legs, or the muted television, as if to say, I'm here to see you. Not whatever you're embarrassed about.
His eyelids drooped. He pulled his mask down and panted in the open air, as though that small act had sapped him. His wheezy breaths filled the silence while Dr. Bailey waited patiently for him to speak. After about fifteen seconds, he tried, but his throat butchered whatever the original utterance had been. One syllable popped. Another dropped like a brick into oblivion and made no noise at all. The last was a hoarse, mumbled, unidentifiable whisper. And then he was coughing. First, a bubbly, weak cough that stuttered in his throat, but that was followed in sharp succession by a stronger, more forceful one that sent him rolling forward with its momentum. He grabbed feebly at the railing for support. An expression of abject pain sliced his face.
Dr. Bailey snapped into motion. She leaned over the railing, and she put her hand against his back. “That's right,” she encouraged. “Get that bad stuff out of your lungs.”
He blinked as his lungs settled, and a fat pair of tears tangled in his eyelashes and collected on the puffy flesh underneath. He didn't brush the tears away despite his audience. He looked beyond Dr. Bailey to Meredith, and their eyes met. His gaze was glassy with drugs, fever, and sickness, which had also flushed his face, but the anchor feeling pulled at her again.
She swallowed as she sat down in the small reading chair in the corner of the room. She wished there was something she could do for him. Anything. Home, he'd croaked at her, and she'd only been able to tell him he would be stuck here for a few more days.
His eyes slid shut as he flattened against the bed, breathing noisily. Dr. Bailey resettled the mask back over his nose. “You don't have to talk,” she told him as she settled back in her chair. She pushed her arm under the railing and grabbed his hand, mindful of the intravenous line stuck in the back of his palm. Her knuckles turned white as she squeezed. Another cough ripped him up and spat him out, leaving him haggard and sniffling and panting. He blinked, and his collection of tears spilled. He looked away. His Adam’s apple rolled along his throat, and the mask shifted as he swallowed.
“I know you're tired, and everything hurts, and life's not fair, but you are not allowed to give up,” Dr. Bailey said. “Okay?”
Derek looked at her, his expression desolate.
Dr. Bailey smiled. “You have too many people who want to see your stupid smile and your stupid hair back at work. Not that I'm one of them, because I'm not here.”
The skin around his red eyes crinkled. Not much. Just a little. A small hint of a smile. Meredith leaned forward in her chair. That was something she hadn't seen in... days. His head shook minutely, as if he meant to say, “Nope, never happened.” The oxygen mask fogged.
“Exactly,” Dr. Bailey replied with a firm nod as though he'd spoken aloud. She glanced at his tray table to the cooling, solid-ish oatmeal. “So, is something wrong with your oatmeal? Not enough cinnamon? It smells good.”
“I cooked it,” Meredith said, her voice glum.
“Grey, that's immaterial,” Dr. Bailey said without looking away from Derek. “You can't mess up oatmeal.”
Meredith sighed. “I think I probably can mess up oatmeal, yeah.”
“Instant oatmeal?” Dr. Bailey said, eyebrows raised. “All you do is add water.”
The crinkle around Derek's eyes deepened as he breathed under the mask. Meredith stared at the bowl and the unappetizing glop she'd made. She'd put the bowl on his tray table less than twenty minutes ago. Just before she'd left the room, actually. Theoretically, the oatmeal should still be edible. Just as, theoretically, it shouldn't be possible to start a kitchen fire while microwaving pizza, but that had still happened to her, once. Theoretical was a tricky word.
“I'm... talented that way,” Meredith admitted. “Talented at sucking.” Dr. Bailey frowned, and Meredith's face reddened when she realized what she'd said. She rushed to add, “I mean it's probably horrible, disgusting, awful oatmeal.”
Dr. Bailey snorted. “You see this?” she said to Derek, but gestured at Meredith. “You're making your wife feel bad about something she cooked for you. At least give it a try.”
Meredith's eyes widened as Derek pulled his mask down. He said something. Two words. An unidentifiable crackle followed by a rasping, “H... Hungry.” His noisy breathing flooded the room, and he stared at the bowl she'd microwaved with glazed disinterest.
“Well, if you're hungry, eat,” Dr. Bailey said.
Derek made a face. “Not,” he croaked, his entire chest heaving the with effort of pushing out that single, intelligible syllable. “Not... h...” He choked on the h, and his expression turned molten as he stumbled all over it and gave up. He glared.
Dr. Bailey blinked. For a moment, she remained silent. She took a breath. Her voice shook with intensity when she said, “If you mean to tell me, Dr. Derek Shepherd, that after all of this, a bowl of oatmeal is going to stop you, I don't know what to say. Because the Derek Shepherd I know would want to get better, and he would know that starving himself wouldn't do much, other than torture the poor woman who made his dinner for him in the first place.”
His expression crumpled, and Meredith twitched in her chair. Don't bully him, she wanted to say. He was sick, and he couldn't speak to respond, and he felt bad enough already. Except then he picked up the spoon from the bowl with a shaky hand and plunged it into the oatmeal goop almost vengefully. She watched him take his first bite to eat in more than two days. His dark, stormy expression clouded the entire room, and his nose crinkled with what had to be disgust, but his jaw worked, and he settled into a chewing rhythm, and no matter how miserable he looked, Meredith couldn't help but smile. Because he was eating.
Dr. Bailey leaned back in her chair with a satisfied nod, still holding his free hand.
“How bad is it?” Meredith said as Derek swallowed. “I mean, on a scale of oatmeal to brick?”
His lips parted. A word didn't launch. He swallowed and tried again. “Ten,” he managed.
Dr. Bailey snorted.
Meredith blinked as he picked up his spoon for a second bite. “Ten?” she said. “Is oatmeal a ten, or is a brick a ten?” From his expression as he stared at the bowl, she could only assume that ten meant brick. “I can get you something else. Just name it. Please.” She left her chair and approached the bed, only to be interrupted when the floor nurse bustled in with a smile and a clipboard.
“Dr. Shepherd,” the woman said. Her brown hair was pulled into a stark bun, and she had a pen tucked over her ear. “You're eating! That's wonderful to see. Are you feeling any better?”
He looked up at her and swallowed bite number two, but he didn't speak. The nurse approached the bed and quickly checked his pulse and tympanic temperature. She smiled again. “101.5,” she said as she glanced at the digital display on the small ear thermometer. “Looks like we're moving again. Hang in there. You'll be out of here, soon.” She scribbled some notes on his chart. “Be sure to put your mask back on when you're finished eating,” she said, and then she left as quickly as she'd come.
The woman's name was Janet. Meredith liked her. Janet was fast and unobtrusive, but warm and caring, and, really, just a very nice person.
Derek shook his head and dipped the spoon for bite number three. A tired expression swept over his face, and Meredith gripped the railing by his bed. The hand and arm he used to lift the spoon trembled. The plastic ticked as it hit his teeth, and he took his next bite. She glanced at the bowl. Some progress. Not much. Three bites. Three bites should never be such horrendously difficult achievements.
He tried a fourth bite. He did. But his eyelids drooped, and the spoon stuck in the oatmeal while he stared at the bowl. Like he saw it, but he just... couldn't. Couldn't lift it. He wheezed, and he blinked once, twice. Each time his eyelids took longer to rise, but he didn't let go of the spoon.
Dr. Bailey stood. She smiled. “Well, I don't want to keep you up. You keep fighting, and I'll see you soon. For the first time. Because I wasn't here. Okay?”
Derek nodded. Sort of. Except with the last dip of his head, his chin tilted toward his chest and didn't rise again. He stared at the oatmeal, holding the spoon, a dead glaze robbing him of any expression.
“By the way, I'm slightly relieved,” Dr. Bailey said as she reached the threshold of his room.
“By what?” Meredith said as she sat in the chair Dr. Bailey had been using.
Dr. Bailey gestured at Derek, who, at this point, was barely sentient. “At least I know his hair isn't always stupidly perfect,” she said. She shook her head, and then she left.
Derek didn't react at all as his last blink became slumber.
When Meredith snapped awake in a bath of moonlight, curled up in his arms, she didn't know where she was, and the disorientation kicked her heart into overdrive. She jerked and looked around, blinking muzzily, fighting sleep to try and figure out... what... His arms tightened around her, and she was warm, and cocooned, and protected. The sheets smelled like him, musky and male. Her muscles relaxed, and as her dreams slipped out of her grasp, she remembered. She wasn't in the hospital with Derek. She was in a very small bed in a cabin in the middle of nowhere with Derek.
He'd spooned her again at some point. He'd pressed his nose into her neck. She listened to his thick, even breathing by her ear as she squinted at their surroundings. A large window at the head of the bed towered over them. The moon hovered in the sky, a bright pie plate poking through the wispy ends of puffy clouds. It spilled a diagonal shaft of white light onto the bed where she and Derek slept. Half the sky, it seemed, had cleared up over the hours, leaving twinkling bits of glass-like stars flecking the endless black.
The bedroom was small and danced with long, dark shadows. A small nightstand with a lamp and a clock sat on her side of the bed, and the black mass of a dresser rested against the far wall by the doorway. She couldn't read the clock on the nightstand. It wasn't digital, and she couldn't see the hands marking the time despite the bath of moonlight because the face was so small. A second window looked into the night on the wall to her right, pouring another shaft of moonlight into the room on the floor a few feet away.
He twitched. An almost snore pressed against her ear. She stroked the arm he'd wrapped over her naked hip. He'd been so sick in the hospital the second time. She'd almost lost him twice, now. The universe had sent her two blaring messages that what they had together could easily be severed through no fault of their own, and she'd received them crystal clear.
His grip tightened, and he muttered something in her ear. He moved, his body a pale, disrupted line of stress in the dim moonlight as his legs scissored. She clutched his hand and squeezed. “Derek,” she whispered.
He shook his head like he was trying to break loose from his dream. “Mmm, no.”
“Derek,” she said, more insistent.
A terrified gasp hit her skin. His body jerked. He kicked at some phantom that wasn't there. “No!” he snapped, and then his sleep shattered. He sucked in a breath. She listened to him swallow. The blankets rustled as he pressed his naked body tightly against hers. His body trembled with disquiet. He grunted.
“You okay?” she whispered as she stroked his arms. The tiny, light hairs on his skin chased her fingertips.
“S'dreaming,” he said thickly.
“That's right,” she said. “You were dreaming.” She stroked his arms. “It's not real, and you're okay.”
He didn't speak for a long time. His breaths tightened as he struggled with his demons. She stared at the shadows dancing along the sides the room, wondering if he saw Gary Clark there. Loitering. Waiting. She imagined him standing there with a gleaming pistol, and she heard his snarled words as he told Derek he was worthless.
“He's not real, Derek,” she said. “It's just you and me here.”
“I know he's not real,” Derek said. “That doesn't mean he's not there.”
“Is he talking to you?”
Derek didn't answer, but that was answer enough. Yes. Yes, Gary Clark was speaking.
“I want...” Derek said, his voice breathy, and his body shook.
She swallowed. “Percocet?”
A pained sigh hitched in his chest. “I just want to sleep,” he said. “It helped me sleep.”
Meredith rolled out of the spoon Derek provided, turning, struggling in the small bed, and pressed her face against his naked chest. He grunted, deep and dark, like he was trying not to cry. She kissed his skin. A taste of salt touched her tongue. And then she kissed him again. His tension drained as she lay on hands, just touching, pressing her warmth into his.
“You can sleep without it,” she told him, a soft, soothing whisper. “Shh.” She kissed him again, and he loosed a stress-venting sigh. “Just think. We're here on the lake, lying naked in the moonlight. We have our forty-eight hours. Uninterrupted. Just you and me. And you can go fishing on the lake tomorrow and relax. I'll go with you in the boat. I promise.”
“Hmm,” he murmured. “Sex?”
“Now?”
“Morrow,” he said, sleep thick in his voice, robbing him of syllables.
“Absolutely,” she assured him.
His thick breathing evened into steady rasps. His grip loosened.
“I'm here,” she soothed. “You're fine. Everything is fine. You can sleep. You can.”
As he spilled into dreams again, she pulled on his arm, and he wrapped around her, warm and naked and hers. Except when she closed her eyes to sleep beside him, she kept thinking of her dream from before, and she couldn't stop hearing Bailey's voice in her head, telling her Derek would be fine.
Dr. Grey, if his pulse-ox gets any lower, we'll need to put him on a ventilator, Derek's doctor at Seattle Presbyterian had told her after pulling her aside. Her world had snapped in two on that moment. Putting somebody on a ventilator was a big freaking deal. A maybe-permanent freaking deal. Whenever somebody was put on a ventilator, there was always a chance, some quirky, unpredictable possibility, that his or her lungs wouldn't start again, and he or she couldn't ever be removed from the ventilator in the future. That was why a ventilator was usually used only as a last resort.
But what had been worse than realizing how bad things were was realizing there wasn't a blessed thing she could say in the situation. The doctor had told her about Derek. Informed her. Not asked her. She'd been a visitor who had no say about his treatment. Never once had the doctor said, Should we put him on a ventilator? Or, Do you know what his wishes are about being on a ventilator? Seattle Presbyterian staff had enforced strict visiting hours that first day, when she knew full well that hospitals, or at least Seattle Grace, went out of their way to give loved ones more time with family members who were dying.
When he'd been in the ICU in Seattle Presbyterian, she'd been allowed ten minutes every two hours during visiting hours, and not at all overnight. He's in critical condition, and he needs to rest, they'd claimed to keep her away, which was true. He had been in critical condition. And he had needed rest. But that was what hospital staff said to somebody they didn't feel should be allowed free access, for one reason or another. They'd loosened up a bit after that first awful day and night, once they'd seen she wasn't some loitering nut job, and he clearly recognized her, even as out of it as he'd been, but, still...
To Seattle Presbyterian, she wasn't Derek Shepherd's wife or his family or anyone.
She was just some girl, and she'd had nothing in her possession to prove otherwise. She doubted they would have done more than nod and smile at the framed post-it she and Derek kept over their bed.
The situation at Seattle Presbyterian had been so different than her experience at Seattle Grace when he'd been shot. At Seattle Grace, she'd been allowed to see him before he'd recovered fully from the anesthesia. They'd let her sleep in a chair in his ICU cubicle as long as she stayed out of the way of the nurses and doctors. They'd put out a spare cot for her to sleep on in his step-down room without her even asking.
She pressed against him, snuggling closer. They'd been lucky, so far, that their tragedy had been limited to Seattle, and largely limited to Seattle Grace, where everybody knew them. Knew they were a married couple, even if it wasn't by law. If Derek got seriously hurt again, or had some new complication from his injuries or his PTSD or his drug whatever, to the point that he couldn't speak for himself, she didn't know what she would do. She didn't want to be just some girl again.
She bit her lip. What if he slipped, metaphorically, took some pills, and they had to start all over? He'd been clean for little more than a week and a half. It would be so easy, and so tempting, for him to stumble. Wouldn't it? Her gut churned as she worried. Yes, a small voice said. That annoying voice that always told her things she didn't want to hear. He still wants it, even if he's not acting on it, said the voice. He's said so. He said so just now.
If that were to happen, if he were to slip, she would insist on rehab. She'd told him she would. She knew he wouldn't want to go back to Seattle Grace for that, which would mean the Seattle Presbyterian situation all over again, be that at Seattle Pres itself, or some specialized rehab clinic somewhere.
If he became unable to speak for himself, somehow, she'd be just a girl again. Not a wife. Not unless she and he took great pains to get a lot of additional paperwork signed before whatever crisis might pop up in their faces, unwanted.
And they were having a baby together.
What if something happened to Meredith? A lump formed in her throat. She had nobody but Derek and Cristina and Lexie and Alex. Mark, maybe, too, though he was more Derek's person than hers. But that was it. She had five people in the universe. Four and a half, since Mark didn't quite count. Because George had freaking died, and Izzie had stormed out of Meredith's life and refused to return a single phone call except to say stop calling. It's just a place I worked, and I can do that anywhere, Izzie had said when Meredith had tried to tell Izzie she had a home. Izzie was working somewhere in... Boise, now, enjoying her fake fresh start. Or something. Alex would know. Meredith didn't care much anymore. Not after Izzie had lit up a blowtorch and burned the last bridge.
Meredith listened to Derek breathe, such a strong, steady sound compared to how his lungs had sounded when he'd been in the hospital with pneumonia. In and out. In and out. When she moved, he resettled around her as though he were conscious of her needs even in dreams, though he didn't wake. He pulled her close with his strong arms. She relaxed against his heat and the safe cocoon he offered, even as her throat closed up.
She had nobody but him and Cristina and Lexie and Alex, and if something was going to happen to her, she wanted them all to be there. All of them. But at the very least? Him. In the room. Not kept out by stupid visiting hours, or some slip of paper he hadn't freaking signed. She wanted him to be able to say, No, my wife wouldn't want a ventilator. Let her go. Or, Yes, save my wife. Or whatever he thought was necessary for the situation.
She was the recipient of crappy, freaky genes. If she got all early onset Alzheimer-y and couldn't remember who the hell he was, or who the hell she was, she wanted him to be able to speak for her. She needed for him to be able to speak for her, because he understood her. He got her. Getting her was his thing. If she was Alzheimer-y and couldn't remember anything, she wanted decisions on her care to be in his hands. They hadn't really talked much about living wills, or their thoughts on life saving measures in various situations. She wasn't even sure she knew what she wanted for sure. But she trusted him as her soul mate, arm, Shakesma in a blender whatever, to be able to make the right decision because he got her, and that was his thing.
She kissed his chest along the line of the scar on his sternum and closed her eyes, musing until the moments bled together, and she lost track. The moonlight burned overhead, bright like the sun crowned the sky, and she closed her eyes to shut out the blaze. She listened to him breathe. Over and over and over, unceasing. Alive, and okay.
He jerked around her, and his arms tightened like a vise, shocking her out of hypnosis. “No,” he blurted, and the single word exploded next to her ear like a bomb in the close space. His breathing hitched, and then he swallowed.
“You okay?” she said.
He grunted, and then he moaned. It was a thick, weeping sound that made her chest tighten. “No,” he said. “I'm not.” She stroked him, and his tight, shaky breaths subsided into smoother, raspier things, but not the soothing waves she wanted to hear. She reached up, and she pulled her fingers through his hair. Slowly, he relaxed.
“I'm sorry you can't sleep,” she said.
The blankets rustled. “Not your fault,” he said. “I'm sorry to keep you up.”
“You didn't, and you're not,” she said. “I was just thinking about stuff.”
“Mmm. Like what?”
“Just...” She sighed. She didn't see the point in belaboring how she'd felt when he'd been sick and she'd been kept away. Not when he was trying so hard to sleep. She settled on telling him, “I love you.”
“Love you, too,” he echoed, his tone sleepy. Lethargic. Like this nightmare hadn't been as bad, and he was close already to putting it behind him.
She kissed him. The moonlight was freaking bright, even through her eyelids. She sighed and sat up. He pressed his face into his pillow with a groan at her loss, but she ignored him, determined. There must be a cord for the blinds, somewhere. She squinted blearily at the window and felt along the sill, only to stop and stare out at the view. From her new vantage point, she saw not one moon, but two, the second reflected in shimmery, shifting glass. On a whim, she leaned forward, her palms against the latticework, and she pushed with a grunt that made the bed frame jerk and groan. Derek flinched, and the bed squeaked with the harsh movement.
She grimaced. “It's just me. I'm opening the window,” she said. Stupid. She shook her head. She should have warned him. “Or, well... trying to.” Her arms shook with the strain, but she kept pushing. She'd already started this. Better to finish it. And, maybe, chopping out some of the light would help him sleep.
“Need help?” he muttered into his pillow.
“I got it,” she said, half groaning more than speaking, as she forced the window up along its tracks. The thing did not want to move. But then it hitched once. Twice. Finally, the window jerked upward with a protesting moan, and a chilly breeze blew across the bed from outside. The sound of lapping, slosh-y waves and a chorus of frogs spilled into the room and soothed her ears. She'd heard the frogs before, but not the waves. She hadn't realized the frogs meant they were right on top of the water.
She glanced through the screen and down. The ground wasn't several feet below as expected. There was a dock down below to the right, but from this vantage point? Right. On top. Of the lake. Like the cabin was partially on stilts or something. Or maybe a cliff-y thing. On that note, she found the cord for the blinds and plunged the bedroom into muted darkness, which was made imperfect by the moonlight falling through the other window.
Derek sighed as she resettled into his arms. She panted from her exertion. “We're right on the lake,” she said. “Like right. Freaking. On it.”
“Hmm,” he said. He didn't sit up to shove the blind away and look out the window with excitement. He rubbed her shoulder sedately. “I'll catch a fish,” he said, random and half-asleep.
She smiled. Apparently, the window disruption hadn't ruined his progress back to sleep as much as she'd thought it had. She let her eyelids droop. She kissed him. “You'll catch plenty,” she said. She stroked his face, and they both fell asleep to the rhythm of the waves.
Fandom: Grey's Anatomy
Pairing: Mer/Der
Rating: M
Summary: S6 continuation. Immediately post Sanctuary / Death and All His Friends.
Sorry this is a bit late. Travel interrupted my schedule :) I'm behind on my feedback replies, but let me say, as always, I really appreciate everyone who takes the time to leave comments. My goal is, not only to entertain myself, but to entertain the people I share my stories with, so, I love to hear from my readers! Thanks also to my awesome beta readers for putting up with my grueling demands!
All Along The Watchtower - Part 20.3
(We got all the memories)
Meredith paced in the hallway outside of Derek's hospital room for what felt like years as she tried not to think about how sick he was. How sick he'd been. About how close he'd come to dying in the last month, not once, but twice. Once via attempted murder, and another time via a combination of crap luck and his horrific stubborn streak. This wasn't fair. None of this was freaking fair.
He'd been transferred to a step-down unit late that afternoon after two nights in the ICU. The step-down unit was a real room with real walls, a lockable door, and a private bathroom, and it was a glorious rung up on the privacy ladder for him. Except she wasn't entirely convinced he should be there, yet. He still had a fever, and they'd stopped making serious gains at lowering it. The antipyretics seemed to have gotten stuck in neutral as he'd hit 101.7 or so. On top of that, he wouldn't eat. She'd watched breakfast, lunch, and dinner trays being taken away from him that day, all untouched, and he hadn't eaten anything the day before, either. At least he was lucid, for the most part, though his grasp on reality didn't seem all that firm. With his voice in shreds, she couldn't really call what he did speaking, but he seemed to interact with nothing at all, sometimes.
Her hands trembled. A worried lump gobbled up the empty space in her throat, and then she couldn't swallow because the lump had grown to basketball proportions. He'd nearly died again, and he wouldn't eat, and she couldn't touch him, and his fever was stuck, and he should be back in the ICU, being more closely monitored. Except if it were anybody else and not Derek, she'd be signing the 'discharge to step-down' papers herself. His fever was stuck, yes, but it was far better than it had been, and unless it stayed stuck for a long time, like days, not eight hours, she was being irrational, and stupid, and freaky, and she wished this would just... Stop. He was very sick, and she hated it, but that was all. Except telling herself to stop didn't make anything stop. Derek had almost died again.
Again. Once was already too much.
She paused in the quiet hallway and rubbed her temples. Her eyes hurt from lack of sleep, and her head hurt from endless worrying. The white walls seemed to brighten, turn incandescent, and then stab at her retinas with vicious knives. She closed her eyelids, and sighed as she rested against the wall, listening to the sounds surrounding her. A pair of doctors conversed in whispers several doors down. The floor nurse tapped away at a keyboard at the station just around the corner, and the sound fluttered back to Meredith, vague and distant. The scent of antiseptic tickled her nose.
“For the record, I am not here, and I never was here, and I certainly never drove across town for this,” a familiar voice told Meredith.
Meredith's eyes slammed open, and she found herself inches from her boss. Dr. Bailey stood by the door, wearing a tan raincoat that covered street clothes - slacks and shiny loafers. The shoulders of the raincoat had darkened with rainwater. Meredith's jaw tumbled open.
“Dr. Bailey?” she said.
Dr. Bailey frowned at Meredith, her eyes intent, concerned pools of brown. Dr. Bailey glanced at the closed doorway to Derek's room, and her frown deepened. “Why are you standing in the hallway?” she said. Her wet shoes squeaked on the tiled floor as she shifted. “Did that fool kick you out of the room?”
Meredith blinked. “Dr. Bailey?”
Dr. Bailey nodded. “That would be my name, Dr. Grey.”
“But...” Meredith swallowed. “How are you here?”
“I thought I already explained that. I'm not here.”
“But... Why aren't you here?” Meredith said, feeling strangely clueless.
“Because I do not drive across town to visit arrogant, stubborn neurosurgeons when they get sick.”
“But...”
“Spit it out, Grey,” Dr. Bailey said as she folded her arms over her chest. Her small frame puffed up with her authoritative tone.
Meredith shook her head. “I mean, who told you... about...?” Derek. Nearly dying. Again.
“I have spies, Grey,” said Bailey. “Everywhere. I see and know everything. Or haven't you learned that by now?”
“But this isn't Seattle Grace--”
Dr. Bailey held up a hand as if to silence her. “I see and know everything,” Dr. Bailey said. She shuddered and shook her head. “Not that I want to.”
An orderly walked past, rolling an empty gurney covered in rumpled sheets. Meredith paused as he went by. She swallowed. “Derek didn't kick me out,” she said. “He's... using the bathroom. I wanted to give him some privacy.”
Not quite the truth, but close enough. He had an intravenous line feeding him fluids, antibiotics, and other medications nonstop. No longer intent on monitoring Derek's kidney function so closely, the doctor had removed Derek's catheter just before they'd moved Derek out of the ICU. Except Derek was still sick. Still feverish. Still weak. And tired. And lethargic. He didn't even want to get up. Didn't want to try. Meredith had handed him the plastic urinal and left so he could do his business in private.
“How is he doing?” Dr. Bailey asked as her voice dropped low with empathetic concern.
Meredith shrugged. “He's sick, and he doesn't want to be here.”
“He's one of those, is he?”
“One of what?”
Dr. Bailey's eyebrows raised. “Horrible patients?”
Meredith shook her head. “He's too sick to be a horrible patient. He... almost died again.”
“He what?”
“His temperature hit 104.9. The doctor was debating whether to put him on a ventilator because he couldn't breathe. It's agony for him to cough. And he... he almost...” Died. Died. Died. She closed her eyes and tried to stop the quailing in her gut as she remembered how bad he'd been two nights ago. How frail he'd looked when they'd had to pull him from the car and wheel him into the emergency bay. His eyes had been open, but he'd been caught in feverish delirium, and there just... hadn't been anybody home.
“How is he, now?” Dr. Bailey said, her voice gentle.
“He's not eating, and he's in a lot of pain, but they got his fever down to 101.7...” Meredith sighed. “I thought we were done. I thought we were done when I took him home after the shooting. This is...” Her throat hurt. “I don't know what this is, but it's horrible.”
“Grey,” Bailey said, “if there's one thing I know about that man, it's that he's annoying.”
Meredith blinked. “What?”
“He'll be fine.” Meredith opened her mouth to protest, but Bailey barreled onward. “And not your version of fine, just so we're clear,” Bailey said. She splayed her palm against her chest. “My version. Which is actually honest-to-god fine.”
“But--”
“If he's not fine, he can't be annoying,” Bailey clarified.
Meredith looked at the floor. “Oh.”
A warm hand touched Meredith's shoulder. Dr. Bailey moved closer. Wet shoes squeaked. “And he loves you,” Dr. Bailey said, her voice soft and mothering. “That idiot would move heaven and earth to be fine for that.”
Meredith nodded, but she didn't respond. They stood in silence in the hallway for several minutes. Meredith glanced at her watch. She'd given him ten minutes. To pee. He had to be finished. Surely. She pushed away from the wall, trying to ignore the swaying feeling as her body fought gravity and an upset stomach. She blinked, and the dizzying, black waterfall receded.
“Let me see if he's done,” Meredith said. As she began to turn the doorknob, she glanced at Dr. Bailey. She tightened her grip until the knob's edges bit into her skin. “Give me a second, okay?”
Dr. Bailey nodded. Meredith moved across the threshold, back into Derek's private room. He'd filled the urinal, which rested on his tray table over his lap, at the opposite end from his still untouched bowl of oatmeal. After he'd refused breakfast, lunch, and dinner that day, she'd gotten desperate to see him eat. She didn't want to have to see him with a feeding tube, and she'd wondered if, perhaps, he hadn't been eating simply because the full meal trays served by the hospital were too daunting for somebody so sick, but she'd had no luck. He wouldn't eat the oatmeal, either, though she couldn't tell if that was her failure to cook more than his failure to consume.
Subtle wisps of steam curled up from the Styrofoam bowl. A plastic spoon poked up from the concoction a bit like a flag, which made her think she might not have added enough water. Shouldn't the spoon fall to the side or something? Oatmeal should be mushy, she thought.
She walked under the television, which hung high on the wall and had been muted. The only sounds in the room were the high-pitched, background whine of the television electronics, the slow bleep of Derek's pulse oximeter, and his chuff-y, labored breathing. He lay on the bed on top of the sheets, not sitting so much as propped at a shallow angle. A sheen of sweat dotted his brow along his hairline and down his temples to his wet sideburns, but that was all. A far cry from how bad he'd been the day before, when she'd had to bathe him. He still wore the full oxygen mask, and he stared dully at the muted television, where the Yankees were decimating the Mets 4-0. His gaze didn't shift to face her as she entered. He didn't greet her. He didn't move. He stared, listless. She couldn't even tell if he was a Yankees or a Mets fan, though she knew he likely had to be one or the other, given where he was from.
She resisted the urge to touch his naked shin as she moved alongside the bed to his tray table. No touching except when necessary, she chastised herself. She still had no idea what kind of touching was okay, and what kind of touching wasn't. She didn't understand it at all.
“Derek,” she whispered. Finally, he looked at her. “Hey,” she said. She gave him a small, wobbly smile that she hoped he would find encouraging, and for a moment, the empty space between them seemed to connect with a tangible cord. Some connection. The sense that her gaze pulled at him like an anchor overwhelmed her. For all his shaky reality, he was in the room then, and he loved her, and she knew it. His pupils sharpened in the sea of blue surrounding them, and she couldn't help herself. She touched his brow and rolled her fingers back through his damp hair as she leaned over the railing on the bed. Her eyes watered when he leaned into her touch like he'd been suffering through a drought, and her palm was water. Which made no sense, damn it. What was good, and what wasn't?
“Bailey's here to see you,” Meredith said. She grabbed the urinal. “Let me... take this.”
He didn't move or blink as she walked into the bathroom and dumped the receptacle’s contents into the toilet. In fact, she wasn't quite sure he'd understood the bit about Bailey. But when she set the empty urinal down in the bathroom and moved back into the main room, she discovered she was too late for further clarification.
Derek blinked at his short, determined visitor, and then his gaze sharpened from somewhere adrift into helpless panic. Meredith read the thoughts crossing his face as though he'd spoken them. I'm sick. I'm lying on a hospital bed in nothing but a skimpy gown. I can't lift my own head off the pillow. I don't want a visitor.
Guilt stabbed at Meredith for not policing the situation better despite her exhaustion - she hadn't been thinking -- but Bailey intervened before the awful, churning feeling gutted her. “Oh, don't give me that look,” Dr. Bailey said as she pulled a chair close to the bed and sat. The chair squawked as she settled. “You know you're happy to see me,” she told him. She leaned against the railing and gripped it. Her gaze didn't wander away from his face, not to the monitors, or his bare legs, or the muted television, as if to say, I'm here to see you. Not whatever you're embarrassed about.
His eyelids drooped. He pulled his mask down and panted in the open air, as though that small act had sapped him. His wheezy breaths filled the silence while Dr. Bailey waited patiently for him to speak. After about fifteen seconds, he tried, but his throat butchered whatever the original utterance had been. One syllable popped. Another dropped like a brick into oblivion and made no noise at all. The last was a hoarse, mumbled, unidentifiable whisper. And then he was coughing. First, a bubbly, weak cough that stuttered in his throat, but that was followed in sharp succession by a stronger, more forceful one that sent him rolling forward with its momentum. He grabbed feebly at the railing for support. An expression of abject pain sliced his face.
Dr. Bailey snapped into motion. She leaned over the railing, and she put her hand against his back. “That's right,” she encouraged. “Get that bad stuff out of your lungs.”
He blinked as his lungs settled, and a fat pair of tears tangled in his eyelashes and collected on the puffy flesh underneath. He didn't brush the tears away despite his audience. He looked beyond Dr. Bailey to Meredith, and their eyes met. His gaze was glassy with drugs, fever, and sickness, which had also flushed his face, but the anchor feeling pulled at her again.
She swallowed as she sat down in the small reading chair in the corner of the room. She wished there was something she could do for him. Anything. Home, he'd croaked at her, and she'd only been able to tell him he would be stuck here for a few more days.
His eyes slid shut as he flattened against the bed, breathing noisily. Dr. Bailey resettled the mask back over his nose. “You don't have to talk,” she told him as she settled back in her chair. She pushed her arm under the railing and grabbed his hand, mindful of the intravenous line stuck in the back of his palm. Her knuckles turned white as she squeezed. Another cough ripped him up and spat him out, leaving him haggard and sniffling and panting. He blinked, and his collection of tears spilled. He looked away. His Adam’s apple rolled along his throat, and the mask shifted as he swallowed.
“I know you're tired, and everything hurts, and life's not fair, but you are not allowed to give up,” Dr. Bailey said. “Okay?”
Derek looked at her, his expression desolate.
Dr. Bailey smiled. “You have too many people who want to see your stupid smile and your stupid hair back at work. Not that I'm one of them, because I'm not here.”
The skin around his red eyes crinkled. Not much. Just a little. A small hint of a smile. Meredith leaned forward in her chair. That was something she hadn't seen in... days. His head shook minutely, as if he meant to say, “Nope, never happened.” The oxygen mask fogged.
“Exactly,” Dr. Bailey replied with a firm nod as though he'd spoken aloud. She glanced at his tray table to the cooling, solid-ish oatmeal. “So, is something wrong with your oatmeal? Not enough cinnamon? It smells good.”
“I cooked it,” Meredith said, her voice glum.
“Grey, that's immaterial,” Dr. Bailey said without looking away from Derek. “You can't mess up oatmeal.”
Meredith sighed. “I think I probably can mess up oatmeal, yeah.”
“Instant oatmeal?” Dr. Bailey said, eyebrows raised. “All you do is add water.”
The crinkle around Derek's eyes deepened as he breathed under the mask. Meredith stared at the bowl and the unappetizing glop she'd made. She'd put the bowl on his tray table less than twenty minutes ago. Just before she'd left the room, actually. Theoretically, the oatmeal should still be edible. Just as, theoretically, it shouldn't be possible to start a kitchen fire while microwaving pizza, but that had still happened to her, once. Theoretical was a tricky word.
“I'm... talented that way,” Meredith admitted. “Talented at sucking.” Dr. Bailey frowned, and Meredith's face reddened when she realized what she'd said. She rushed to add, “I mean it's probably horrible, disgusting, awful oatmeal.”
Dr. Bailey snorted. “You see this?” she said to Derek, but gestured at Meredith. “You're making your wife feel bad about something she cooked for you. At least give it a try.”
Meredith's eyes widened as Derek pulled his mask down. He said something. Two words. An unidentifiable crackle followed by a rasping, “H... Hungry.” His noisy breathing flooded the room, and he stared at the bowl she'd microwaved with glazed disinterest.
“Well, if you're hungry, eat,” Dr. Bailey said.
Derek made a face. “Not,” he croaked, his entire chest heaving the with effort of pushing out that single, intelligible syllable. “Not... h...” He choked on the h, and his expression turned molten as he stumbled all over it and gave up. He glared.
Dr. Bailey blinked. For a moment, she remained silent. She took a breath. Her voice shook with intensity when she said, “If you mean to tell me, Dr. Derek Shepherd, that after all of this, a bowl of oatmeal is going to stop you, I don't know what to say. Because the Derek Shepherd I know would want to get better, and he would know that starving himself wouldn't do much, other than torture the poor woman who made his dinner for him in the first place.”
His expression crumpled, and Meredith twitched in her chair. Don't bully him, she wanted to say. He was sick, and he couldn't speak to respond, and he felt bad enough already. Except then he picked up the spoon from the bowl with a shaky hand and plunged it into the oatmeal goop almost vengefully. She watched him take his first bite to eat in more than two days. His dark, stormy expression clouded the entire room, and his nose crinkled with what had to be disgust, but his jaw worked, and he settled into a chewing rhythm, and no matter how miserable he looked, Meredith couldn't help but smile. Because he was eating.
Dr. Bailey leaned back in her chair with a satisfied nod, still holding his free hand.
“How bad is it?” Meredith said as Derek swallowed. “I mean, on a scale of oatmeal to brick?”
His lips parted. A word didn't launch. He swallowed and tried again. “Ten,” he managed.
Dr. Bailey snorted.
Meredith blinked as he picked up his spoon for a second bite. “Ten?” she said. “Is oatmeal a ten, or is a brick a ten?” From his expression as he stared at the bowl, she could only assume that ten meant brick. “I can get you something else. Just name it. Please.” She left her chair and approached the bed, only to be interrupted when the floor nurse bustled in with a smile and a clipboard.
“Dr. Shepherd,” the woman said. Her brown hair was pulled into a stark bun, and she had a pen tucked over her ear. “You're eating! That's wonderful to see. Are you feeling any better?”
He looked up at her and swallowed bite number two, but he didn't speak. The nurse approached the bed and quickly checked his pulse and tympanic temperature. She smiled again. “101.5,” she said as she glanced at the digital display on the small ear thermometer. “Looks like we're moving again. Hang in there. You'll be out of here, soon.” She scribbled some notes on his chart. “Be sure to put your mask back on when you're finished eating,” she said, and then she left as quickly as she'd come.
The woman's name was Janet. Meredith liked her. Janet was fast and unobtrusive, but warm and caring, and, really, just a very nice person.
Derek shook his head and dipped the spoon for bite number three. A tired expression swept over his face, and Meredith gripped the railing by his bed. The hand and arm he used to lift the spoon trembled. The plastic ticked as it hit his teeth, and he took his next bite. She glanced at the bowl. Some progress. Not much. Three bites. Three bites should never be such horrendously difficult achievements.
He tried a fourth bite. He did. But his eyelids drooped, and the spoon stuck in the oatmeal while he stared at the bowl. Like he saw it, but he just... couldn't. Couldn't lift it. He wheezed, and he blinked once, twice. Each time his eyelids took longer to rise, but he didn't let go of the spoon.
Dr. Bailey stood. She smiled. “Well, I don't want to keep you up. You keep fighting, and I'll see you soon. For the first time. Because I wasn't here. Okay?”
Derek nodded. Sort of. Except with the last dip of his head, his chin tilted toward his chest and didn't rise again. He stared at the oatmeal, holding the spoon, a dead glaze robbing him of any expression.
“By the way, I'm slightly relieved,” Dr. Bailey said as she reached the threshold of his room.
“By what?” Meredith said as she sat in the chair Dr. Bailey had been using.
Dr. Bailey gestured at Derek, who, at this point, was barely sentient. “At least I know his hair isn't always stupidly perfect,” she said. She shook her head, and then she left.
Derek didn't react at all as his last blink became slumber.
When Meredith snapped awake in a bath of moonlight, curled up in his arms, she didn't know where she was, and the disorientation kicked her heart into overdrive. She jerked and looked around, blinking muzzily, fighting sleep to try and figure out... what... His arms tightened around her, and she was warm, and cocooned, and protected. The sheets smelled like him, musky and male. Her muscles relaxed, and as her dreams slipped out of her grasp, she remembered. She wasn't in the hospital with Derek. She was in a very small bed in a cabin in the middle of nowhere with Derek.
He'd spooned her again at some point. He'd pressed his nose into her neck. She listened to his thick, even breathing by her ear as she squinted at their surroundings. A large window at the head of the bed towered over them. The moon hovered in the sky, a bright pie plate poking through the wispy ends of puffy clouds. It spilled a diagonal shaft of white light onto the bed where she and Derek slept. Half the sky, it seemed, had cleared up over the hours, leaving twinkling bits of glass-like stars flecking the endless black.
The bedroom was small and danced with long, dark shadows. A small nightstand with a lamp and a clock sat on her side of the bed, and the black mass of a dresser rested against the far wall by the doorway. She couldn't read the clock on the nightstand. It wasn't digital, and she couldn't see the hands marking the time despite the bath of moonlight because the face was so small. A second window looked into the night on the wall to her right, pouring another shaft of moonlight into the room on the floor a few feet away.
He twitched. An almost snore pressed against her ear. She stroked the arm he'd wrapped over her naked hip. He'd been so sick in the hospital the second time. She'd almost lost him twice, now. The universe had sent her two blaring messages that what they had together could easily be severed through no fault of their own, and she'd received them crystal clear.
His grip tightened, and he muttered something in her ear. He moved, his body a pale, disrupted line of stress in the dim moonlight as his legs scissored. She clutched his hand and squeezed. “Derek,” she whispered.
He shook his head like he was trying to break loose from his dream. “Mmm, no.”
“Derek,” she said, more insistent.
A terrified gasp hit her skin. His body jerked. He kicked at some phantom that wasn't there. “No!” he snapped, and then his sleep shattered. He sucked in a breath. She listened to him swallow. The blankets rustled as he pressed his naked body tightly against hers. His body trembled with disquiet. He grunted.
“You okay?” she whispered as she stroked his arms. The tiny, light hairs on his skin chased her fingertips.
“S'dreaming,” he said thickly.
“That's right,” she said. “You were dreaming.” She stroked his arms. “It's not real, and you're okay.”
He didn't speak for a long time. His breaths tightened as he struggled with his demons. She stared at the shadows dancing along the sides the room, wondering if he saw Gary Clark there. Loitering. Waiting. She imagined him standing there with a gleaming pistol, and she heard his snarled words as he told Derek he was worthless.
“He's not real, Derek,” she said. “It's just you and me here.”
“I know he's not real,” Derek said. “That doesn't mean he's not there.”
“Is he talking to you?”
Derek didn't answer, but that was answer enough. Yes. Yes, Gary Clark was speaking.
“I want...” Derek said, his voice breathy, and his body shook.
She swallowed. “Percocet?”
A pained sigh hitched in his chest. “I just want to sleep,” he said. “It helped me sleep.”
Meredith rolled out of the spoon Derek provided, turning, struggling in the small bed, and pressed her face against his naked chest. He grunted, deep and dark, like he was trying not to cry. She kissed his skin. A taste of salt touched her tongue. And then she kissed him again. His tension drained as she lay on hands, just touching, pressing her warmth into his.
“You can sleep without it,” she told him, a soft, soothing whisper. “Shh.” She kissed him again, and he loosed a stress-venting sigh. “Just think. We're here on the lake, lying naked in the moonlight. We have our forty-eight hours. Uninterrupted. Just you and me. And you can go fishing on the lake tomorrow and relax. I'll go with you in the boat. I promise.”
“Hmm,” he murmured. “Sex?”
“Now?”
“Morrow,” he said, sleep thick in his voice, robbing him of syllables.
“Absolutely,” she assured him.
His thick breathing evened into steady rasps. His grip loosened.
“I'm here,” she soothed. “You're fine. Everything is fine. You can sleep. You can.”
As he spilled into dreams again, she pulled on his arm, and he wrapped around her, warm and naked and hers. Except when she closed her eyes to sleep beside him, she kept thinking of her dream from before, and she couldn't stop hearing Bailey's voice in her head, telling her Derek would be fine.
Dr. Grey, if his pulse-ox gets any lower, we'll need to put him on a ventilator, Derek's doctor at Seattle Presbyterian had told her after pulling her aside. Her world had snapped in two on that moment. Putting somebody on a ventilator was a big freaking deal. A maybe-permanent freaking deal. Whenever somebody was put on a ventilator, there was always a chance, some quirky, unpredictable possibility, that his or her lungs wouldn't start again, and he or she couldn't ever be removed from the ventilator in the future. That was why a ventilator was usually used only as a last resort.
But what had been worse than realizing how bad things were was realizing there wasn't a blessed thing she could say in the situation. The doctor had told her about Derek. Informed her. Not asked her. She'd been a visitor who had no say about his treatment. Never once had the doctor said, Should we put him on a ventilator? Or, Do you know what his wishes are about being on a ventilator? Seattle Presbyterian staff had enforced strict visiting hours that first day, when she knew full well that hospitals, or at least Seattle Grace, went out of their way to give loved ones more time with family members who were dying.
When he'd been in the ICU in Seattle Presbyterian, she'd been allowed ten minutes every two hours during visiting hours, and not at all overnight. He's in critical condition, and he needs to rest, they'd claimed to keep her away, which was true. He had been in critical condition. And he had needed rest. But that was what hospital staff said to somebody they didn't feel should be allowed free access, for one reason or another. They'd loosened up a bit after that first awful day and night, once they'd seen she wasn't some loitering nut job, and he clearly recognized her, even as out of it as he'd been, but, still...
To Seattle Presbyterian, she wasn't Derek Shepherd's wife or his family or anyone.
She was just some girl, and she'd had nothing in her possession to prove otherwise. She doubted they would have done more than nod and smile at the framed post-it she and Derek kept over their bed.
The situation at Seattle Presbyterian had been so different than her experience at Seattle Grace when he'd been shot. At Seattle Grace, she'd been allowed to see him before he'd recovered fully from the anesthesia. They'd let her sleep in a chair in his ICU cubicle as long as she stayed out of the way of the nurses and doctors. They'd put out a spare cot for her to sleep on in his step-down room without her even asking.
She pressed against him, snuggling closer. They'd been lucky, so far, that their tragedy had been limited to Seattle, and largely limited to Seattle Grace, where everybody knew them. Knew they were a married couple, even if it wasn't by law. If Derek got seriously hurt again, or had some new complication from his injuries or his PTSD or his drug whatever, to the point that he couldn't speak for himself, she didn't know what she would do. She didn't want to be just some girl again.
She bit her lip. What if he slipped, metaphorically, took some pills, and they had to start all over? He'd been clean for little more than a week and a half. It would be so easy, and so tempting, for him to stumble. Wouldn't it? Her gut churned as she worried. Yes, a small voice said. That annoying voice that always told her things she didn't want to hear. He still wants it, even if he's not acting on it, said the voice. He's said so. He said so just now.
If that were to happen, if he were to slip, she would insist on rehab. She'd told him she would. She knew he wouldn't want to go back to Seattle Grace for that, which would mean the Seattle Presbyterian situation all over again, be that at Seattle Pres itself, or some specialized rehab clinic somewhere.
If he became unable to speak for himself, somehow, she'd be just a girl again. Not a wife. Not unless she and he took great pains to get a lot of additional paperwork signed before whatever crisis might pop up in their faces, unwanted.
And they were having a baby together.
What if something happened to Meredith? A lump formed in her throat. She had nobody but Derek and Cristina and Lexie and Alex. Mark, maybe, too, though he was more Derek's person than hers. But that was it. She had five people in the universe. Four and a half, since Mark didn't quite count. Because George had freaking died, and Izzie had stormed out of Meredith's life and refused to return a single phone call except to say stop calling. It's just a place I worked, and I can do that anywhere, Izzie had said when Meredith had tried to tell Izzie she had a home. Izzie was working somewhere in... Boise, now, enjoying her fake fresh start. Or something. Alex would know. Meredith didn't care much anymore. Not after Izzie had lit up a blowtorch and burned the last bridge.
Meredith listened to Derek breathe, such a strong, steady sound compared to how his lungs had sounded when he'd been in the hospital with pneumonia. In and out. In and out. When she moved, he resettled around her as though he were conscious of her needs even in dreams, though he didn't wake. He pulled her close with his strong arms. She relaxed against his heat and the safe cocoon he offered, even as her throat closed up.
She had nobody but him and Cristina and Lexie and Alex, and if something was going to happen to her, she wanted them all to be there. All of them. But at the very least? Him. In the room. Not kept out by stupid visiting hours, or some slip of paper he hadn't freaking signed. She wanted him to be able to say, No, my wife wouldn't want a ventilator. Let her go. Or, Yes, save my wife. Or whatever he thought was necessary for the situation.
She was the recipient of crappy, freaky genes. If she got all early onset Alzheimer-y and couldn't remember who the hell he was, or who the hell she was, she wanted him to be able to speak for her. She needed for him to be able to speak for her, because he understood her. He got her. Getting her was his thing. If she was Alzheimer-y and couldn't remember anything, she wanted decisions on her care to be in his hands. They hadn't really talked much about living wills, or their thoughts on life saving measures in various situations. She wasn't even sure she knew what she wanted for sure. But she trusted him as her soul mate, arm, Shakesma in a blender whatever, to be able to make the right decision because he got her, and that was his thing.
She kissed his chest along the line of the scar on his sternum and closed her eyes, musing until the moments bled together, and she lost track. The moonlight burned overhead, bright like the sun crowned the sky, and she closed her eyes to shut out the blaze. She listened to him breathe. Over and over and over, unceasing. Alive, and okay.
He jerked around her, and his arms tightened like a vise, shocking her out of hypnosis. “No,” he blurted, and the single word exploded next to her ear like a bomb in the close space. His breathing hitched, and then he swallowed.
“You okay?” she said.
He grunted, and then he moaned. It was a thick, weeping sound that made her chest tighten. “No,” he said. “I'm not.” She stroked him, and his tight, shaky breaths subsided into smoother, raspier things, but not the soothing waves she wanted to hear. She reached up, and she pulled her fingers through his hair. Slowly, he relaxed.
“I'm sorry you can't sleep,” she said.
The blankets rustled. “Not your fault,” he said. “I'm sorry to keep you up.”
“You didn't, and you're not,” she said. “I was just thinking about stuff.”
“Mmm. Like what?”
“Just...” She sighed. She didn't see the point in belaboring how she'd felt when he'd been sick and she'd been kept away. Not when he was trying so hard to sleep. She settled on telling him, “I love you.”
“Love you, too,” he echoed, his tone sleepy. Lethargic. Like this nightmare hadn't been as bad, and he was close already to putting it behind him.
She kissed him. The moonlight was freaking bright, even through her eyelids. She sighed and sat up. He pressed his face into his pillow with a groan at her loss, but she ignored him, determined. There must be a cord for the blinds, somewhere. She squinted blearily at the window and felt along the sill, only to stop and stare out at the view. From her new vantage point, she saw not one moon, but two, the second reflected in shimmery, shifting glass. On a whim, she leaned forward, her palms against the latticework, and she pushed with a grunt that made the bed frame jerk and groan. Derek flinched, and the bed squeaked with the harsh movement.
She grimaced. “It's just me. I'm opening the window,” she said. Stupid. She shook her head. She should have warned him. “Or, well... trying to.” Her arms shook with the strain, but she kept pushing. She'd already started this. Better to finish it. And, maybe, chopping out some of the light would help him sleep.
“Need help?” he muttered into his pillow.
“I got it,” she said, half groaning more than speaking, as she forced the window up along its tracks. The thing did not want to move. But then it hitched once. Twice. Finally, the window jerked upward with a protesting moan, and a chilly breeze blew across the bed from outside. The sound of lapping, slosh-y waves and a chorus of frogs spilled into the room and soothed her ears. She'd heard the frogs before, but not the waves. She hadn't realized the frogs meant they were right on top of the water.
She glanced through the screen and down. The ground wasn't several feet below as expected. There was a dock down below to the right, but from this vantage point? Right. On top. Of the lake. Like the cabin was partially on stilts or something. Or maybe a cliff-y thing. On that note, she found the cord for the blinds and plunged the bedroom into muted darkness, which was made imperfect by the moonlight falling through the other window.
Derek sighed as she resettled into his arms. She panted from her exertion. “We're right on the lake,” she said. “Like right. Freaking. On it.”
“Hmm,” he said. He didn't sit up to shove the blind away and look out the window with excitement. He rubbed her shoulder sedately. “I'll catch a fish,” he said, random and half-asleep.
She smiled. Apparently, the window disruption hadn't ruined his progress back to sleep as much as she'd thought it had. She let her eyelids droop. She kissed him. “You'll catch plenty,” she said. She stroked his face, and they both fell asleep to the rhythm of the waves.