All Along The Watchtower - Part 21.2
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.
In which we continue Derek's terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.
WARNING!!! There are serious, adult themes and concepts as well as graphic violence depicted in this chapter. I'm rating this chapter specifically M, and not for porny goodness. I'm not kidding, and I'm not hesitant about this rating. Please, plan accordingly.
All Along The Watchtower - Part 21.2
The doorknob to the on-call room turned and the door opened, giving Derek little chance to contemplate it. He jerked, startled, and squinted muzzily at the person who'd broken into his sanctuary early. Before Derek had steeled himself to emerge.
“Hey, man,” Mark said, his voice gruff as he stood in the doorway, tall and imposing. “Debbie told me you were in here.”
“What do you want?” Derek snapped as he rubbed his eyes.
Mark held up his hands. “Whoa,” he said. “Aggressive much?”
“I'm not having a meltdown,” Derek said. He leaned over the edge of the mattress and picked up his cell phone and his beeper. He clipped his beeper on the waistband of his scrubs, and stuffed the cell phone in his lab coat pocket. “Tell Meredith I'm still not dying.”
“I didn't say you were dying, Mr. Paranoid,” Mark said. “And I didn't say she sent me, either, did I?”
“You don't need to say it. It's written all over your face.”
Mark closed the door behind himself and leaned against the wall, his thick arms folding over his chest. “Is not,” he said.
“Is, too.”
“Is not!” Mark said.
Derek rolled his eyes and glanced at his watch. Barely any time left. He stood and stretched out, reaching above his head and extending to his tiptoes. The collecting tension of anticipation released, somewhat.
“You're not thinking about doing something stupid, right?” Mark prodded.
Derek sighed. There it was. The scrutiny. Starting. He knew everybody meant well, but that didn’t stop the constant check-ins from irritating him. “I'm barely thinking at all,” he said.
Mark nodded. “You're going to Joe's with me tonight.”
“I am?”
“You'll have a club soda, and you'll play darts with me.”
“I will?”
“You will,” Mark said. “Because I asked you, and I know your dance card isn't exactly full lately.”
Derek sighed. Okay, there was ripping off a band-aid, and then their was jamming a scalpel into a healing bullet wound. Working for eight hours seemed like enough of a stretch of his capabilities. “Mark, I just want to go home to my dog and my pregnant wife.”
Mark shook his head, his expression impassive. “Not tonight.”
“Mark--”
“Not tonight, man,” Mark said. “You're getting out of the house.”
“I'm out of the house, now.”
“But not for fun,” Mark countered. “And your pregnant wife won't be there to go home to, anyway.”
Derek froze. He'd been looking forward to his reward for tolerating the day. Going home. Kissing his wife hello. Enjoying a long, relaxing bath with her. She liked to take bubble baths when she had the time, and she'd been taking them every chance she had since she'd gotten pregnant. Aches, maybe. Swelling? She hadn't said anything, and denied discomfort when he asked, but she always let him join her, even if it was just to keep her silent company while she read her latest book. He'd imagined they might have sex that night, too, given the rare but perfect mesh of their schedules. She had the entire evening off and wasn't expected back to work until Wednesday morning.
He frowned. She hadn't said a word about not being home that evening. Not that he was her keeper or anything. And not that he'd exactly been conversational that morning when she'd seen him for the first time in twelve hours. “She didn't say anything,” he said helplessly as his hopeful plans for a recuperative evening shattered before his eyes.
“I have it on good authority that Meredith will be hitting the bar with Yang tonight,” Mark said.
Derek raised his eyebrows. “The bar? But she's pregnant.”
“Non-alcoholicly hitting it,” Mark clarified. “Just like you will be. With me.”
“But that's--”
“Not fair?” Mark said. He grinned and clapped Derek on the shoulder. “I know. See you there after your shift?”
Derek shrugged. “I guess.”
“I knew you'd come around.”
Derek's pager whined. Frowning, he picked it off his waistband and stared at it in the dimness. The sunlight filtering in through the blind slats had brightened as the morning advanced. 7:30AM the pager's clock proclaimed. His shift had officially started, and the small message on the screen told him he was needed in the ER, which was weird. He wasn't allowed to practice emergency medicine. In fact, the Board had expressly forbidden him from it. Simple care, conference room consults, and scut work. That was it.
“Duty calls?” Mark said, a twinkle in his eye.
Derek glared as he pushed past his friend out into the hallway. To work. The moment of engagement sank tension into his muscles almost reflexively. “Did you plan this so I couldn't argue with you anymore?” he said.
“Not me,” Mark said. “I swear.”
“Right,” Derek said.
“See you after your shift?”
Derek didn't dignify Mark's cheerful question with an answer as he jogged in the direction of the ER. Jogged. The page message said nothing about an emergency. He wasn't allowed to work on emergencies. That didn't mean it wasn't an emergency, though, and he would treat it like one until he knew otherwise. His phone rang, vibrating enthusiastically in his pocket as he trotted to the elevator, but he didn't answer it.
Emergency summed up the polar opposite of the scene Derek found in the bright, empty ER. A man sat on a gurney with a bloody nose, his head tipped forward into a crimson-stained cloth. He wore a hospital gown and an intravenous line had been set into his wrist. Cancer, Derek decided from the man's bony figure and tired, bruised-looking countenance. Two parents fussed with a screaming baby, but he couldn't make any sort of assessment on sight for them. Every other gurney lay empty. The bright bay doors let a long shaft of morning sunlight in from the east. Nobody walked in or out. No ambulance sirens bleated or chirped to announce their presence. No frantic trauma team burst down the white hallway into the bay. A single brown-clothed trauma nurse moved through the room, and Dr. Bailey stood at the admitting desk, chewing on the end of a pen as she scrutinized a clipboard. The room, normally bustling and full of activity, seemed sedate.
Derek sidled to the desk, no longer rushing, and leaned against the countertop at a slant. Dr. Bailey's pen halted, and Derek watched her brown eyes as she gazed first at his shoes, and then trailed up his legs to the cursive Dr. Shepherd embroidered in blue at his left breast, close to where he'd been shot. She rolled her eyes without meeting his gaze before her pen resumed its scribbling, and he couldn't help but smile at her assessment. Or smirk, he decided. Dr. Bailey would definitely consider this a smirk.
Some things, he decided, still felt pretty good. Like knowing he could irritate her with a simple lean.
“Why was I paged?” Derek said.
“Because I paged you,” Bailey said.
“That's informative.”
She circled something with her pen in blue ink, and then she looked up. “There was a scheduling snafu when Dr. Keller called in sick. I'm trying to juggle my time between here and the clinic, which is also short-staffed.”
He frowned. “What is there to juggle? This is a ghost town.”
“Do you expect me to be able to warp time and space to be in both places at once?” she said.
“No...”
She shoved the clipboard and pen into his hands. “Then there's juggling.”
He glanced at her notes. The parents with the fussy baby had already been seen and only waited on a prescription. For the mom, actually. Not the baby. The man with the bloody nose had been admitted, and an orderly would be there to transfer him soon to the oncology wing. Not only was the bay nearly empty, the few people in it didn't need any care.
“Not very urgent juggling,” he said.
“Are you saying you can't help me in my desperate hour of need?”
“I didn't say that,” he said.
“Then what's the problem?”
He sighed, exasperated. “Is this intervention day or something? What did Meredith say to you?”
“Nothing,” Dr. Bailey said. Her eyes narrowed. “Do you need an intervention?”
“No...”
“All right, then,” she said. She took his hand in her own and shook it. She gave him a subtle squeeze that he wasn't sure if he'd imagined or not. “Thank you for helping me,” she said.
He flexed his fingers. “You're... welcome.”
She left him at the desk to do... nothing, really. He stood there, flummoxed. He'd never seen an ER this dead. Meredith had told him the ER had been a ghost town and had described it much like this in the weeks after he'd been shot, but the shooting had been more than three months ago, now. Curious, he checked the scanner on the desk for ambulance chatter. Nothing. Two paramedics discussed their breakfast choices - Wendy's or McDonald's - apparently forgetting the entire city could hear them, but other than that, no matter how he tuned the receiver, no matter what channel, he only received the hiss of static. Seattle seemed miraculously free of injury and sickness that morning.
He sat down at the desk in the black, rolling chair, letting his feet skid on the floor. He propped his elbows on the desk. He ached. His joints. Everything. His vision turned to blur and blear as he rubbed his eyes. Only Tuesday morning, after a short, six-hour shift on Monday, and he felt a bit like he'd been working an overnight shift at the end of a long week. Heart surgery, pneumonia, post-traumatic stress, and a still-lingering bout with depression had destroyed any semblance of stamina in his possession. Between needing Meredith to pull him through the weak spot that morning, Mark dictating Derek's social life in the evening, and Dr. Bailey leaving him with the menial task to end all menial tasks, he decided the only thing left that was needed to complete the boxed set of 'you can't handle life anymore' would be Richard showing up to supervise Derek's desk jockeying.
His phone rang again, vibrating in his pocket. Sighing, he pulled it out and glanced at the display. The two calls he'd ignored and this call were all from the same number. Kathy, read the pixelated display. She'd been calling since 6:00 AM. He rolled his eyes and dumped the call to voice mail. He wasn't in the mood for yet more pestering from the East Coast peanut gallery, not today. Not ever, but certainly not after this morning.
It's totally normal, Meredith had said.
He clenched his fingers. None of his twisted thoughts felt normal. No matter what Meredith said. No matter what pamphlet or guide he read. He closed his eyes and found his father there, waiting in his mind's eye, face pallid, eyes glassy.
Derek, listen to me. This is very important.
Dad?
I'm sorry.
Sorry for what, Dad?
Michael Shepherd had taken a breath. His gaze had lit like a glowing candle, as if he'd seen something miraculous hovering before his blue eyes. And then he'd died without ever answering Derek's question.
He'd died.
Derek rubbed his eyes, trying to scrape away the burning, aching sensation that told him he skated close to losing his composure to overactive tear ducts. He'd experienced too much violence to ever wish it on somebody else. Why, then, could he imagine six different ways in as many seconds to kill Gary Clark? And why, the more personal and gruesome the method, did the thoughts not twinge some sort of gag reflex? Some disgust? Anything to tell him his moral compass might still be intact?
He clenched his fingers and closed his eyes, sitting stock still as that line of thinking dragged him down the rabbit hole to a gory, awful place. A scalpel in his hand cut flesh it wasn't supposed to cut. Blood and bits swam in a macabre, oozing river. Mr. Clark pleaded--
His eyes snapped open and he pushed back against his chair. “No,” he blurted. To no one. The empty bay stared back at him. The man with the nosebleed had been taken away, and the couple with the baby were too engrossed in conversation to care about his outburst.
When the desk phone rang, his heart caught in his throat, and he would have jumped out of his skin if he weren't already so discombobulated he didn't have much balance. The chair rolled back a foot. Derek clenched his teeth and took a deep, cleansing breath. His heart slowed in the space of moments, but the burst of adrenaline made him feel shaky and a bit sick. He picked up the phone from its cradle and propped it between his ear and shoulder as he readied his pen, trying to hold his trembling fingers still in hopes of producing something legible.
“Seattle Grace Mercy West Emergency Room, this is Dr. Shepherd,” he said in a tone about ten times more confident than he felt. “How may I help you?”
A bluster of breath hit the other end of the line. A sigh? “Derek,” said a familiar voice.
A familiar voice whose owner sang alto in the church choir, and even knowing his healthy eating habits, even after he'd moved and had no private practice with no admin staff to feed and no clients to woo, still guilted him for huge Girl Scout cookie orders by the caseload every winter for her youngest daughter, Nina. A voice he could still hear in his head, even after decades, telling him, Derek, put that back! or Derek, stop it, that's mine! when he'd been the youngest instead of Amy, and she'd been forced to babysit. Back when he'd been too little to care much about rules, and he hadn't needed Mark to egg him into doing something mischievous. Derek, sweety, come on, she'd said, her hand squeezing his shoulder as she'd tried to pull him back from his father's open grave. He'd stared blankly at the coffin. They wouldn't bury it until everybody left. Those were the rules. If he didn't leave... Let them work, she'd said, though, and she'd made him walk away.
He woke groggily to the sight of her beyond his gummy eyelashes. She flipped her curly black-and-silver hair behind her ears. “Hey, sleepyhead,” Kathy said, smiling at him as she put her magazine down. “How are you feeling?”
He rubbed the crust from his eyelashes and blinked. He didn't know what time it was. What day it was. Breathing made his body feel bisected by a blade, and he didn't feel well enough or high enough to fake any semblance of health. He winced instead of spoke, and then he let his eyes drift shut for a moment.
“Nancy's getting more coffee,” Kathy said, her voice a soft whisper. “Meredith is in the shower. Everybody else is out. Mom told us we needed to visit in smaller groups. I'm sorry we wore you out yesterday. We all lost our heads, I guess.”
He clutched the thermal blanket covering his legs. He couldn't remember anything beyond Meredith finding him in the dark after her ER visit. Telling him she was fine. That she didn't need a D&C, and so she hadn't gotten one. “It's morning?” he croaked.
“Afternoon,” Kathy said. “You don't remember the nurse checking you earlier?”
He remembered coughing while the nurse encouraged him. Meredith had coached him through the agony, her small hand gripping his. Then nothing.
He tried opening his eyes again. Blur resolved into focus. Barely. Cloudy gray hovered outside the window. The blankets covering Meredith's cot were rumpled and displaced. The distant, metallic plink of water falling emanated from his private bathroom. Nobody other than Kathy was in the room.
“Do you want some water?” Kathy said, her crystal blue gaze creased with concern.
He nodded, and she disappeared for a moment. She returned with a plastic cup. He gripped it in his shaky hands and sipped. The cool water sliding down his throat felt like ambrosia.
“Hungry?” she said.
He felt too awful to think about eating. He shook his head. “Maybe later.”
He stared, dazed, at the foot of the bed, and he lost track of the moments as he listened to the distant roar of the shower and the bustle of the hospital outside his open door. Kathy hovered by the bed railing, but she seemed briefly content to let him find his sentience in gradual steps. He drifted in the silence, one hand resting over his bullet wound as he breathed. He felt the bandage through his shirt.
“Where's Mom?” he said.
Kathy's odd expression made him realize she'd probably answered that question already, though he couldn't recall. “Out sightseeing,” Kathy said. “We've been trying to cut down on how many people are in the room with you at once.”
“Oh.”
Kathy gestured to the small reading chair by Meredith's cot. “Want help to the chair? You're supposed to be sitting up and walking a little today, if you can manage it.”
“Kathy,” he rasped. He closed his eyes. The fuzzy, flowing feeling in his head made it hard to think.
A hand gripped his and squeezed. “I know it feels really rotten,” Kathy said, closer, “But you need to try. Just a little to help yourself heal. You've slept all morning. I'll help you.”
He licked his lips and peered at her. “Have you been shot?”
She blinked. “What?”
“Then you don't know how it feels,” he said.
She frowned at him, but didn't retort.
“You're going to stare at me and pester me until I try, aren't you?” he said.
Her lip twitched with the hint of a smile. “Just try,” she said. “It'll be good for you.”
He looked at the bathroom door. His eyes watered as melancholy swept over him like a wave. He would have been a father. He didn't really know how to feel about that or how to comprehend what had been lost. Not when he could barely put two and two together and get four in his head. The thought of Meredith alone in the shower made a lump form in his throat. She would still be bleeding, aching, and those were just the physical results. He wanted to be there. For her. But she'd had to hold him up in the shower, yesterday. She'd been forced to care for him.
His chest hurt. Though nature had performed the killing blow, Gary Clark had still stolen something profound from him. From them.
“Derek?” his sister prodded in the quiet.
He wiped his eyes with the backs of his knuckles. “M'okay,” he said.
“I think you're lying.”
A pair of tears splotched his face. He'd been shot, and his wife was finishing a miscarriage. The lump in his throat made it hard to speak, so he didn't bother to try.
He pushed his tray table backward, and he brushed his hand weakly along the bed railing. Kathy snapped upright from her chair and pushed the railing down for him. He untangled the nasal cannula and put it by his hip. Pushing away from the mattress to sit up under his own power brought pain lancing through his torso. He gripped Kathy's bony shoulder, trying to breathe, shaking, unable to stifle a long moan. She helped him bring his feet over the edge of the mattress, and she stood there, patient, a pillar of balance and support as he shifted and hobbled until he managed upright.
The room swam, and his chest felt like it might fall out of his body.
“Happy?” he said, panting. He brushed his wet face with his shaking palms.
She guided his feet into his flip-flops. “Walk a little,” she said. She rubbed the small of his back through his shirt with her warm hand. “You can do it.”
The IV pole squeaked as he gripped it and leaned. He shuffled to the foot of the bed. All of five feet. Everything swam behind his eyes, and his head spun.
“Come on,” she urged, and with glacial progress, he tottered to the doorway. The process of walking twelve feet took minutes. Not seconds.
His breaths escaped him in painful blusters, and his limbs felt like overcooked spaghetti. He rested his forehead against the doorjamb, his body half in the hallway, half in his room. His eyes burned. “Kathy, I--” he managed.
“Derek,” said Nancy, “you're up! Walking to the door is wonderful!”
He didn't feel wonderful.
Derek squinted muzzily down the hallway at his approaching sister. A fat mug steamed in her hand. She dodged a passing nurse he knew he knew, but couldn't remember beyond the barest recognition. Nancy smiled at him as she caught up to the clot of people hovering his doorway. He glanced at the bathroom door, which blocked him from Meredith. The rush of the water behind the wooden barrier continued. His lower lip quivered. She took long showers when she was upset. Or hurting. Or tired and trying to wake up. Or all three.
He took a step in the direction of the bathroom, only to blanch. The room blotted out for a sickening moment, where all he could do was hold onto his IV pole to keep from spilling to the floor. Everything hurt. Moving. Thinking. Feeling.
“Do you need to use the restroom?” Kathy said against his ear as she followed the direction of his wavering focus. She gripped his waist as Nancy dashed to set her coffee cup down on his tray table. Nancy flanked him and came to his other side.
His legs wobbled.
“No,” he managed.
Kathy rubbed his back, and she pulled on his arm as if to guide him to the reading chair. “You're doing great, Derek, just--”
“Stop telling me what to do,” he snapped. “You don't know what I need.”
Tense, ugly silence stretched between the three of them. He trembled. The doorknob twisted, and the bathroom door opened, revealing Meredith, her hair stringy and wet from her shower. She wore a ratty t-shirt and some knit pants, and tiny beads of water dotted her brow. Steam billowed out of the bathroom. Her expression seemed... haunted. Pained.
She stared at him. “Are you okay?” she said, and that was it. That was all. Nothing about her.
He swallowed as his decision coalesced. “I can make it to the end of the hall,” he told his riveted audience.
Kathy opened her mouth, but he glared at her, and she shut it. Meredith smiled at him. “That's really good,” she said, her voice tired. She sat heavily in the chair Kathy had been trying to push him toward. Her hunched posture told him without words that she hurt. But all she did was stare at him, a hopeful glint in her eyes, and he couldn't take it anymore. Couldn't take the lack of parity.
They'd lost a baby. This shouldn't be all about him, and yet it was, and all the things he'd normally do to flip the situation around were beyond his present capabilities. He could barely wobble to her. Holding up a toothbrush for more than a minute hurt. Sweeping her into his arms seemed like fantasy.
He turned on his heels and forced himself to move despite the mire of discomfort and the drugged feeling that spun thick webs inside his head. He hobbled over his threshold. Out of his room. He scaled along the hallway's edge, shaking, moving at the speed of a turtle with a pair of broken legs. Meredith didn't follow, and he couldn't decide whether that made him feel better that he wasn't the center of attention for her for a moment, that she could focus on herself, or worse that he'd left her alone and that maybe she hurt too much to chase after him, even when he moved this slowly. Panting breaths seared his sore throat. He felt pasty and dizzy and sick. Nancy cheered him on from behind, but Kathy...
“Derek, did something happen?” Kathy asked point-blank as he neared the first doorway after the one that opened into his room.
He stopped, panting, and closed his eyes. “I got shot, Kathy,” he said.
“Something else,” she said, eyebrows raised.
“I'm fine,” he insisted.
She stared at him for a long, penetrating moment. “Derek, you can talk to us,” she said.
“What's going on?” Nancy said.
“I got shot,” he said. “Isn't that enough going on?”
“It's something else,” said Kathy.
He turned to face his older sisters. Nancy looked confused more than anything else. The lines of many years of laughter creased Kathy's face, but she seemed somber, now, and more severe in that seriousness. He gripped his IV pole. “Please,” he said, “I need to walk to the corner.” He glanced over his shoulder. The bright hallway fuzzed and came back, a blur of bustling staff and endless white. Nurse Tyler gave him a thumbs up as he passed by, a clipboard in his hand. Derek stared at the corner, a junction about forty feet away, where Tyler turned to the right. Fifty feet total. Derek could walk that. He swallowed. “I need to do this. Stop being my shrink.”
Kathy's mouth opened and closed and opened. “Derek, I'm not being--”
“Stop, anyway,” he said. “Please. I got shot. I need to walk to the corner for...”
“For...?” Nancy said.
He closed his mouth and didn't answer. He wiped his face. He turned and he grabbed the railing along the wall with one hand, and held his IV pole with his other. He slid one foot forward and pressed his weight into it. Pain sliced his middle with every clipped breath. He winced. One foot done. Thirty-nine more to go, and then he would ask for a wheelchair, but only then, when he reached the intersection.
He traveled another step alone. A third. Then a warm hand closed around his shoulder and squeezed when he took his fourth. “You're doing great, Derek,” Kathy said, her voice soft, encouraging, sure. Nancy joined in, coaching from behind.
They both stayed with him the entire way.
“Derek? Derek, hello?”
Derek blinked. The present returned, a slow slide of details coalescing with his memories. He rubbed the bridge of his nose. The bright well of natural light falling through the ER bay doors overwrote the memory of endless fluorescent bulbs in the hallway outside his hospital room.
Kathy, his oldest sister, older by eight years, had already been out of the house and married by the time their dad had been killed, and already had eight kids before he'd managed to have a single one. She'd always been the family vanguard. The referee. The supportive cheerleader or the voice of reason, whichever she felt fit the needs of the situation.
“Kathy, I can't really talk right now,” he said to the phone, expecting reasoning and refereeing more than cheerleading, this time. “I'm at work.”
“Well, you wouldn't pick up the phone anywhere else, and this is important.”
“Important enough to call me four times since 6:00 AM?”
“Um...” Silence stretched. He chuckled despite his tension at her predictable, colorful curse. She sighed, a bluster of breath on the line. “I'm sorry,” she said. “I added instead of subtracted for the time difference. I blame John. He's on a decaff kick, and it's left me addled.”
He smiled as he leaned back in his chair. Her blunder was caused by more than just decaf coffee, though he didn't feel inclined to argue or tease right now. Kathy couldn't organize her way out of an appointment book that had already been arranged by date and time. She failed to complete the time zone conversion every few calls. Earlier in August, she'd blamed the stress of helping Mia pack for her freshman year of college at Stanford. Mia was Kathy's second oldest child after Abby.
“It's okay,” he said, and though the question was superfluous, he added, “What do you need?”
He knew what she wanted to talk about. He'd already spent three hours deflecting both Nancy and Rachel on the very same subject that weekend, and his sisters, excluding Amelia, tended to act in tandem whenever they rained judgment.
“I want to talk about the wedding,” Kathy replied.
“Kath, I told Mom I can't handle a huge Shepherd family shindig right now,” he said. “Okay? I can't handle it.”
The line hissed with a long silence. “This just isn't like you,” Kathy said, her tone cautious.
He closed his eyes. The phone creaked as he gripped it tightly. “It's too much for me,” he said. “I've had months and months of too much for me, and I'm finally training myself to admit it when I'm in over my head. What more do you want me to say?”
“Derek...” she began.
“Look, Kathy, I have to go,” he lied, staring at the nearly empty bay. An ER nurse in brown scrubs spoke to the couple with the baby, the only occupants of the room. “If that's all you wanted to--”
“Derek, your wedding is in a matter of weeks,” Kathy said. “I wanted to make sure you're okay. That you're not making a mistake.”
He frowned. The other two conversations he'd had with his sisters hadn't gone like this. Not once had anybody intimated they were unhappy with his choice of bride. The complaints and needling had begun and ended on whether Rachel and Nancy could attend, and why he'd gone through Mom to bar them from the wedding instead of telling them himself. It had been his mother's idea to break the news gently to them in person instead of having him do it over the phone. Apparently, her plan hadn't worked so well, because within hours, his phone had been ringing off the hook. All fucking weekend. First his mother to warn him they hadn't taken it well, and then his stampede of upset sisters.
“I thought you wanted me to get married,” he said, his tone low and dangerous.
“I did,” Kathy said. “I mean, I do, but--”
He clenched his fingers around the phone. Meredith being suitable for him was not a fight he was prepared for today, or ever again. Nobody had argued with him on that point since he'd moved in with her, well over a year ago. Almost two, now, actually. “I love Meredith, and as far as I'm concerned, we're already married,” Derek said. “We've already had our first anniversary. This isn't anything new.”
“The post-it thing is a sham, Derek,” Kathy said. “Meredith is just your girlfriend until you get a marriage license.”
“It's not a sham. What we have is not a sham.” He clenched his teeth. Tension pulled his muscles to the point of pain. “You don't get to call it that.”
“Derek, it's not real,” Kathy protested.
“It's real, Kath,” he said, bristling. “And I'm done talking to you. Don't call me about this again.”
“Derek, wait,” Kathy said, her voice a tinny, distant squawk as he moved to slam the phone back on the receiver. He sighed at her distressed, begging tone. He held the phone, his arm extended, an inch away from hanging up. “Wait, please, I just...”
He gave up and pressed the phone to his ear. “What?” he said tiredly.
“I like Meredith,” Kathy said. “I really do. She's very sweet, and she clearly loves you, and I want you to be happy. Both of you. I just want to make sure that, with all this other stuff going on, you're not making a rash decision. That's all.”
He glowered. “You mean you don't think I should get married because I might be crazy.”
“That's not what I said.”
“Stop being a shrink with me, for once in your life,” he snapped.
“Then stop twisting my words! I'm not being a shrink. I'm being your big sister who loves you!”
“Look,” he said evenly. “I've loved Meredith for a very long time. She is my wife already. In my heart, she is. It doesn't matter whether you believe the post-it or not, because I believe it, I've believed it since I signed it, and it's my marriage. This isn't new or rash. This is just...”
“What, Derek?” Kathy demanded. “What is it, that it's suddenly so important to you and to her, when clearly it wasn't important enough before? That's all I want to know!”
He glared at nothing in particular. He focused on the pencil cup. “If I get shot again, I need to know she'll be able to make decisions, if it comes down to that, and she wants some goddamned peace of mind. Is that so wrong?”
A long silence stretched on the other end of the line. He listened to her breathing. “You won't get shot again,” she said, her voice quiet, quivering.
He couldn't stop the roll of hopeless, upset laughter that fell from his lips. “Pick a fucking catastrophe, then,” he said. His life sometimes felt like Russian roulette with five loaded chambers out of six instead of only one. He blinked, and the room blurred. God, damn it. Why couldn't he keep it together today? He wiped his face with a shaky hand.
“Okay,” she said, fight absent from her tone. “I believe you,” she said. “I hate your reasoning, but I believe you're doing what you need to do.”
“Why do you hate my reasoning?” he said.
“Because you're my little brother,” she said. Her voice thickened with hurting anger. “You shouldn't have been there when Dad died, and you shouldn't have nearly gotten killed in your own hospital, and you shouldn't be scared of your own family who loves you.”
“I'm not scared of you,” he said. His head hurt. “I'm just trying to be realistic.”
She sighed. “I know,” she said. “That doesn't mean I have to like it.”
“I love her very much, Kathy,” he added quietly. “This isn't rash or a mistake. I promise.”
“I believe you,” she said. “I'm sorry. I really didn't mean to upset you.”
He swallowed. “It's okay.” Though it wasn't. It wasn't okay. He blinked, trying to focus the blur in front of his face and failing. Why did he have to be such a hopeless mess?
“I want you to be happy, okay?” Kathy said. “I really do.”
“Thanks, Kathy.”
A sniffle fell through the line and hit his ear, discordant. He clutched the phone at the familiar sound. He'd heard it growing up. Her crying. A lot of it when Dad had died or when her latest boyfriend had broken her heart and he'd been too young to think of it as anything more than gross. His breaths tightened in his chest. Great. They were both a fucking mess. He hated fighting with his sisters, even when he felt well. I'm sorry, he wanted to say. He opened his mouth.
“Will you have somebody take pictures, please?” Kathy said, interrupting his plans.
He shook his head. “Of what?”
“The wedding, silly,” she said. He imagined her smiling as she wiped her bright blue eyes. “I want to see it, even if I can't be there.”
“Of course, I'll send you pictures, Kath,” he said, putting conviction in every word. “I'd already planned to do that. It's not that I don't want to share this with you or the others. I wanted...” He wanted to be better, and he wanted everybody to be there, except even after three weeks on the Paxil, the thought of so many people vying for space at the courthouse, or even at the house... His stomach fluttered, and he shoved the thought away before the butterflies exploded into fully bloomed anxiety. “I'll send you pictures.”
He felt her smile through the line. “Thanks,” she said, her tone warm, understanding, and that made him feel better. A little.
“I really have to get back to work,” he said.
“I know,” she said. “Love you.”
He closed his eyes and breathed. “I love you, too, Kathy.”
He listened to the click of her hanging up against his ear. He pressed the phone against his forehead and swallowed, and then he placed it back in its cradle. A sheaf of papers hitting the desk made him flinch and look up.
Fandom: Grey's Anatomy
Pairing: Mer/Der
Rating: M
Summary: S6 continuation. Immediately post Sanctuary / Death and All His Friends.
In which we continue Derek's terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.
WARNING!!! There are serious, adult themes and concepts as well as graphic violence depicted in this chapter. I'm rating this chapter specifically M, and not for porny goodness. I'm not kidding, and I'm not hesitant about this rating. Please, plan accordingly.
All Along The Watchtower - Part 21.2
The doorknob to the on-call room turned and the door opened, giving Derek little chance to contemplate it. He jerked, startled, and squinted muzzily at the person who'd broken into his sanctuary early. Before Derek had steeled himself to emerge.
“Hey, man,” Mark said, his voice gruff as he stood in the doorway, tall and imposing. “Debbie told me you were in here.”
“What do you want?” Derek snapped as he rubbed his eyes.
Mark held up his hands. “Whoa,” he said. “Aggressive much?”
“I'm not having a meltdown,” Derek said. He leaned over the edge of the mattress and picked up his cell phone and his beeper. He clipped his beeper on the waistband of his scrubs, and stuffed the cell phone in his lab coat pocket. “Tell Meredith I'm still not dying.”
“I didn't say you were dying, Mr. Paranoid,” Mark said. “And I didn't say she sent me, either, did I?”
“You don't need to say it. It's written all over your face.”
Mark closed the door behind himself and leaned against the wall, his thick arms folding over his chest. “Is not,” he said.
“Is, too.”
“Is not!” Mark said.
Derek rolled his eyes and glanced at his watch. Barely any time left. He stood and stretched out, reaching above his head and extending to his tiptoes. The collecting tension of anticipation released, somewhat.
“You're not thinking about doing something stupid, right?” Mark prodded.
Derek sighed. There it was. The scrutiny. Starting. He knew everybody meant well, but that didn’t stop the constant check-ins from irritating him. “I'm barely thinking at all,” he said.
Mark nodded. “You're going to Joe's with me tonight.”
“I am?”
“You'll have a club soda, and you'll play darts with me.”
“I will?”
“You will,” Mark said. “Because I asked you, and I know your dance card isn't exactly full lately.”
Derek sighed. Okay, there was ripping off a band-aid, and then their was jamming a scalpel into a healing bullet wound. Working for eight hours seemed like enough of a stretch of his capabilities. “Mark, I just want to go home to my dog and my pregnant wife.”
Mark shook his head, his expression impassive. “Not tonight.”
“Mark--”
“Not tonight, man,” Mark said. “You're getting out of the house.”
“I'm out of the house, now.”
“But not for fun,” Mark countered. “And your pregnant wife won't be there to go home to, anyway.”
Derek froze. He'd been looking forward to his reward for tolerating the day. Going home. Kissing his wife hello. Enjoying a long, relaxing bath with her. She liked to take bubble baths when she had the time, and she'd been taking them every chance she had since she'd gotten pregnant. Aches, maybe. Swelling? She hadn't said anything, and denied discomfort when he asked, but she always let him join her, even if it was just to keep her silent company while she read her latest book. He'd imagined they might have sex that night, too, given the rare but perfect mesh of their schedules. She had the entire evening off and wasn't expected back to work until Wednesday morning.
He frowned. She hadn't said a word about not being home that evening. Not that he was her keeper or anything. And not that he'd exactly been conversational that morning when she'd seen him for the first time in twelve hours. “She didn't say anything,” he said helplessly as his hopeful plans for a recuperative evening shattered before his eyes.
“I have it on good authority that Meredith will be hitting the bar with Yang tonight,” Mark said.
Derek raised his eyebrows. “The bar? But she's pregnant.”
“Non-alcoholicly hitting it,” Mark clarified. “Just like you will be. With me.”
“But that's--”
“Not fair?” Mark said. He grinned and clapped Derek on the shoulder. “I know. See you there after your shift?”
Derek shrugged. “I guess.”
“I knew you'd come around.”
Derek's pager whined. Frowning, he picked it off his waistband and stared at it in the dimness. The sunlight filtering in through the blind slats had brightened as the morning advanced. 7:30AM the pager's clock proclaimed. His shift had officially started, and the small message on the screen told him he was needed in the ER, which was weird. He wasn't allowed to practice emergency medicine. In fact, the Board had expressly forbidden him from it. Simple care, conference room consults, and scut work. That was it.
“Duty calls?” Mark said, a twinkle in his eye.
Derek glared as he pushed past his friend out into the hallway. To work. The moment of engagement sank tension into his muscles almost reflexively. “Did you plan this so I couldn't argue with you anymore?” he said.
“Not me,” Mark said. “I swear.”
“Right,” Derek said.
“See you after your shift?”
Derek didn't dignify Mark's cheerful question with an answer as he jogged in the direction of the ER. Jogged. The page message said nothing about an emergency. He wasn't allowed to work on emergencies. That didn't mean it wasn't an emergency, though, and he would treat it like one until he knew otherwise. His phone rang, vibrating enthusiastically in his pocket as he trotted to the elevator, but he didn't answer it.
Emergency summed up the polar opposite of the scene Derek found in the bright, empty ER. A man sat on a gurney with a bloody nose, his head tipped forward into a crimson-stained cloth. He wore a hospital gown and an intravenous line had been set into his wrist. Cancer, Derek decided from the man's bony figure and tired, bruised-looking countenance. Two parents fussed with a screaming baby, but he couldn't make any sort of assessment on sight for them. Every other gurney lay empty. The bright bay doors let a long shaft of morning sunlight in from the east. Nobody walked in or out. No ambulance sirens bleated or chirped to announce their presence. No frantic trauma team burst down the white hallway into the bay. A single brown-clothed trauma nurse moved through the room, and Dr. Bailey stood at the admitting desk, chewing on the end of a pen as she scrutinized a clipboard. The room, normally bustling and full of activity, seemed sedate.
Derek sidled to the desk, no longer rushing, and leaned against the countertop at a slant. Dr. Bailey's pen halted, and Derek watched her brown eyes as she gazed first at his shoes, and then trailed up his legs to the cursive Dr. Shepherd embroidered in blue at his left breast, close to where he'd been shot. She rolled her eyes without meeting his gaze before her pen resumed its scribbling, and he couldn't help but smile at her assessment. Or smirk, he decided. Dr. Bailey would definitely consider this a smirk.
Some things, he decided, still felt pretty good. Like knowing he could irritate her with a simple lean.
“Why was I paged?” Derek said.
“Because I paged you,” Bailey said.
“That's informative.”
She circled something with her pen in blue ink, and then she looked up. “There was a scheduling snafu when Dr. Keller called in sick. I'm trying to juggle my time between here and the clinic, which is also short-staffed.”
He frowned. “What is there to juggle? This is a ghost town.”
“Do you expect me to be able to warp time and space to be in both places at once?” she said.
“No...”
She shoved the clipboard and pen into his hands. “Then there's juggling.”
He glanced at her notes. The parents with the fussy baby had already been seen and only waited on a prescription. For the mom, actually. Not the baby. The man with the bloody nose had been admitted, and an orderly would be there to transfer him soon to the oncology wing. Not only was the bay nearly empty, the few people in it didn't need any care.
“Not very urgent juggling,” he said.
“Are you saying you can't help me in my desperate hour of need?”
“I didn't say that,” he said.
“Then what's the problem?”
He sighed, exasperated. “Is this intervention day or something? What did Meredith say to you?”
“Nothing,” Dr. Bailey said. Her eyes narrowed. “Do you need an intervention?”
“No...”
“All right, then,” she said. She took his hand in her own and shook it. She gave him a subtle squeeze that he wasn't sure if he'd imagined or not. “Thank you for helping me,” she said.
He flexed his fingers. “You're... welcome.”
She left him at the desk to do... nothing, really. He stood there, flummoxed. He'd never seen an ER this dead. Meredith had told him the ER had been a ghost town and had described it much like this in the weeks after he'd been shot, but the shooting had been more than three months ago, now. Curious, he checked the scanner on the desk for ambulance chatter. Nothing. Two paramedics discussed their breakfast choices - Wendy's or McDonald's - apparently forgetting the entire city could hear them, but other than that, no matter how he tuned the receiver, no matter what channel, he only received the hiss of static. Seattle seemed miraculously free of injury and sickness that morning.
He sat down at the desk in the black, rolling chair, letting his feet skid on the floor. He propped his elbows on the desk. He ached. His joints. Everything. His vision turned to blur and blear as he rubbed his eyes. Only Tuesday morning, after a short, six-hour shift on Monday, and he felt a bit like he'd been working an overnight shift at the end of a long week. Heart surgery, pneumonia, post-traumatic stress, and a still-lingering bout with depression had destroyed any semblance of stamina in his possession. Between needing Meredith to pull him through the weak spot that morning, Mark dictating Derek's social life in the evening, and Dr. Bailey leaving him with the menial task to end all menial tasks, he decided the only thing left that was needed to complete the boxed set of 'you can't handle life anymore' would be Richard showing up to supervise Derek's desk jockeying.
His phone rang again, vibrating in his pocket. Sighing, he pulled it out and glanced at the display. The two calls he'd ignored and this call were all from the same number. Kathy, read the pixelated display. She'd been calling since 6:00 AM. He rolled his eyes and dumped the call to voice mail. He wasn't in the mood for yet more pestering from the East Coast peanut gallery, not today. Not ever, but certainly not after this morning.
It's totally normal, Meredith had said.
He clenched his fingers. None of his twisted thoughts felt normal. No matter what Meredith said. No matter what pamphlet or guide he read. He closed his eyes and found his father there, waiting in his mind's eye, face pallid, eyes glassy.
Derek, listen to me. This is very important.
Dad?
I'm sorry.
Sorry for what, Dad?
Michael Shepherd had taken a breath. His gaze had lit like a glowing candle, as if he'd seen something miraculous hovering before his blue eyes. And then he'd died without ever answering Derek's question.
He'd died.
Derek rubbed his eyes, trying to scrape away the burning, aching sensation that told him he skated close to losing his composure to overactive tear ducts. He'd experienced too much violence to ever wish it on somebody else. Why, then, could he imagine six different ways in as many seconds to kill Gary Clark? And why, the more personal and gruesome the method, did the thoughts not twinge some sort of gag reflex? Some disgust? Anything to tell him his moral compass might still be intact?
He clenched his fingers and closed his eyes, sitting stock still as that line of thinking dragged him down the rabbit hole to a gory, awful place. A scalpel in his hand cut flesh it wasn't supposed to cut. Blood and bits swam in a macabre, oozing river. Mr. Clark pleaded--
His eyes snapped open and he pushed back against his chair. “No,” he blurted. To no one. The empty bay stared back at him. The man with the nosebleed had been taken away, and the couple with the baby were too engrossed in conversation to care about his outburst.
When the desk phone rang, his heart caught in his throat, and he would have jumped out of his skin if he weren't already so discombobulated he didn't have much balance. The chair rolled back a foot. Derek clenched his teeth and took a deep, cleansing breath. His heart slowed in the space of moments, but the burst of adrenaline made him feel shaky and a bit sick. He picked up the phone from its cradle and propped it between his ear and shoulder as he readied his pen, trying to hold his trembling fingers still in hopes of producing something legible.
“Seattle Grace Mercy West Emergency Room, this is Dr. Shepherd,” he said in a tone about ten times more confident than he felt. “How may I help you?”
A bluster of breath hit the other end of the line. A sigh? “Derek,” said a familiar voice.
A familiar voice whose owner sang alto in the church choir, and even knowing his healthy eating habits, even after he'd moved and had no private practice with no admin staff to feed and no clients to woo, still guilted him for huge Girl Scout cookie orders by the caseload every winter for her youngest daughter, Nina. A voice he could still hear in his head, even after decades, telling him, Derek, put that back! or Derek, stop it, that's mine! when he'd been the youngest instead of Amy, and she'd been forced to babysit. Back when he'd been too little to care much about rules, and he hadn't needed Mark to egg him into doing something mischievous. Derek, sweety, come on, she'd said, her hand squeezing his shoulder as she'd tried to pull him back from his father's open grave. He'd stared blankly at the coffin. They wouldn't bury it until everybody left. Those were the rules. If he didn't leave... Let them work, she'd said, though, and she'd made him walk away.
He woke groggily to the sight of her beyond his gummy eyelashes. She flipped her curly black-and-silver hair behind her ears. “Hey, sleepyhead,” Kathy said, smiling at him as she put her magazine down. “How are you feeling?”
He rubbed the crust from his eyelashes and blinked. He didn't know what time it was. What day it was. Breathing made his body feel bisected by a blade, and he didn't feel well enough or high enough to fake any semblance of health. He winced instead of spoke, and then he let his eyes drift shut for a moment.
“Nancy's getting more coffee,” Kathy said, her voice a soft whisper. “Meredith is in the shower. Everybody else is out. Mom told us we needed to visit in smaller groups. I'm sorry we wore you out yesterday. We all lost our heads, I guess.”
He clutched the thermal blanket covering his legs. He couldn't remember anything beyond Meredith finding him in the dark after her ER visit. Telling him she was fine. That she didn't need a D&C, and so she hadn't gotten one. “It's morning?” he croaked.
“Afternoon,” Kathy said. “You don't remember the nurse checking you earlier?”
He remembered coughing while the nurse encouraged him. Meredith had coached him through the agony, her small hand gripping his. Then nothing.
He tried opening his eyes again. Blur resolved into focus. Barely. Cloudy gray hovered outside the window. The blankets covering Meredith's cot were rumpled and displaced. The distant, metallic plink of water falling emanated from his private bathroom. Nobody other than Kathy was in the room.
“Do you want some water?” Kathy said, her crystal blue gaze creased with concern.
He nodded, and she disappeared for a moment. She returned with a plastic cup. He gripped it in his shaky hands and sipped. The cool water sliding down his throat felt like ambrosia.
“Hungry?” she said.
He felt too awful to think about eating. He shook his head. “Maybe later.”
He stared, dazed, at the foot of the bed, and he lost track of the moments as he listened to the distant roar of the shower and the bustle of the hospital outside his open door. Kathy hovered by the bed railing, but she seemed briefly content to let him find his sentience in gradual steps. He drifted in the silence, one hand resting over his bullet wound as he breathed. He felt the bandage through his shirt.
“Where's Mom?” he said.
Kathy's odd expression made him realize she'd probably answered that question already, though he couldn't recall. “Out sightseeing,” Kathy said. “We've been trying to cut down on how many people are in the room with you at once.”
“Oh.”
Kathy gestured to the small reading chair by Meredith's cot. “Want help to the chair? You're supposed to be sitting up and walking a little today, if you can manage it.”
“Kathy,” he rasped. He closed his eyes. The fuzzy, flowing feeling in his head made it hard to think.
A hand gripped his and squeezed. “I know it feels really rotten,” Kathy said, closer, “But you need to try. Just a little to help yourself heal. You've slept all morning. I'll help you.”
He licked his lips and peered at her. “Have you been shot?”
She blinked. “What?”
“Then you don't know how it feels,” he said.
She frowned at him, but didn't retort.
“You're going to stare at me and pester me until I try, aren't you?” he said.
Her lip twitched with the hint of a smile. “Just try,” she said. “It'll be good for you.”
He looked at the bathroom door. His eyes watered as melancholy swept over him like a wave. He would have been a father. He didn't really know how to feel about that or how to comprehend what had been lost. Not when he could barely put two and two together and get four in his head. The thought of Meredith alone in the shower made a lump form in his throat. She would still be bleeding, aching, and those were just the physical results. He wanted to be there. For her. But she'd had to hold him up in the shower, yesterday. She'd been forced to care for him.
His chest hurt. Though nature had performed the killing blow, Gary Clark had still stolen something profound from him. From them.
“Derek?” his sister prodded in the quiet.
He wiped his eyes with the backs of his knuckles. “M'okay,” he said.
“I think you're lying.”
A pair of tears splotched his face. He'd been shot, and his wife was finishing a miscarriage. The lump in his throat made it hard to speak, so he didn't bother to try.
He pushed his tray table backward, and he brushed his hand weakly along the bed railing. Kathy snapped upright from her chair and pushed the railing down for him. He untangled the nasal cannula and put it by his hip. Pushing away from the mattress to sit up under his own power brought pain lancing through his torso. He gripped Kathy's bony shoulder, trying to breathe, shaking, unable to stifle a long moan. She helped him bring his feet over the edge of the mattress, and she stood there, patient, a pillar of balance and support as he shifted and hobbled until he managed upright.
The room swam, and his chest felt like it might fall out of his body.
“Happy?” he said, panting. He brushed his wet face with his shaking palms.
She guided his feet into his flip-flops. “Walk a little,” she said. She rubbed the small of his back through his shirt with her warm hand. “You can do it.”
The IV pole squeaked as he gripped it and leaned. He shuffled to the foot of the bed. All of five feet. Everything swam behind his eyes, and his head spun.
“Come on,” she urged, and with glacial progress, he tottered to the doorway. The process of walking twelve feet took minutes. Not seconds.
His breaths escaped him in painful blusters, and his limbs felt like overcooked spaghetti. He rested his forehead against the doorjamb, his body half in the hallway, half in his room. His eyes burned. “Kathy, I--” he managed.
“Derek,” said Nancy, “you're up! Walking to the door is wonderful!”
He didn't feel wonderful.
Derek squinted muzzily down the hallway at his approaching sister. A fat mug steamed in her hand. She dodged a passing nurse he knew he knew, but couldn't remember beyond the barest recognition. Nancy smiled at him as she caught up to the clot of people hovering his doorway. He glanced at the bathroom door, which blocked him from Meredith. The rush of the water behind the wooden barrier continued. His lower lip quivered. She took long showers when she was upset. Or hurting. Or tired and trying to wake up. Or all three.
He took a step in the direction of the bathroom, only to blanch. The room blotted out for a sickening moment, where all he could do was hold onto his IV pole to keep from spilling to the floor. Everything hurt. Moving. Thinking. Feeling.
“Do you need to use the restroom?” Kathy said against his ear as she followed the direction of his wavering focus. She gripped his waist as Nancy dashed to set her coffee cup down on his tray table. Nancy flanked him and came to his other side.
His legs wobbled.
“No,” he managed.
Kathy rubbed his back, and she pulled on his arm as if to guide him to the reading chair. “You're doing great, Derek, just--”
“Stop telling me what to do,” he snapped. “You don't know what I need.”
Tense, ugly silence stretched between the three of them. He trembled. The doorknob twisted, and the bathroom door opened, revealing Meredith, her hair stringy and wet from her shower. She wore a ratty t-shirt and some knit pants, and tiny beads of water dotted her brow. Steam billowed out of the bathroom. Her expression seemed... haunted. Pained.
She stared at him. “Are you okay?” she said, and that was it. That was all. Nothing about her.
He swallowed as his decision coalesced. “I can make it to the end of the hall,” he told his riveted audience.
Kathy opened her mouth, but he glared at her, and she shut it. Meredith smiled at him. “That's really good,” she said, her voice tired. She sat heavily in the chair Kathy had been trying to push him toward. Her hunched posture told him without words that she hurt. But all she did was stare at him, a hopeful glint in her eyes, and he couldn't take it anymore. Couldn't take the lack of parity.
They'd lost a baby. This shouldn't be all about him, and yet it was, and all the things he'd normally do to flip the situation around were beyond his present capabilities. He could barely wobble to her. Holding up a toothbrush for more than a minute hurt. Sweeping her into his arms seemed like fantasy.
He turned on his heels and forced himself to move despite the mire of discomfort and the drugged feeling that spun thick webs inside his head. He hobbled over his threshold. Out of his room. He scaled along the hallway's edge, shaking, moving at the speed of a turtle with a pair of broken legs. Meredith didn't follow, and he couldn't decide whether that made him feel better that he wasn't the center of attention for her for a moment, that she could focus on herself, or worse that he'd left her alone and that maybe she hurt too much to chase after him, even when he moved this slowly. Panting breaths seared his sore throat. He felt pasty and dizzy and sick. Nancy cheered him on from behind, but Kathy...
“Derek, did something happen?” Kathy asked point-blank as he neared the first doorway after the one that opened into his room.
He stopped, panting, and closed his eyes. “I got shot, Kathy,” he said.
“Something else,” she said, eyebrows raised.
“I'm fine,” he insisted.
She stared at him for a long, penetrating moment. “Derek, you can talk to us,” she said.
“What's going on?” Nancy said.
“I got shot,” he said. “Isn't that enough going on?”
“It's something else,” said Kathy.
He turned to face his older sisters. Nancy looked confused more than anything else. The lines of many years of laughter creased Kathy's face, but she seemed somber, now, and more severe in that seriousness. He gripped his IV pole. “Please,” he said, “I need to walk to the corner.” He glanced over his shoulder. The bright hallway fuzzed and came back, a blur of bustling staff and endless white. Nurse Tyler gave him a thumbs up as he passed by, a clipboard in his hand. Derek stared at the corner, a junction about forty feet away, where Tyler turned to the right. Fifty feet total. Derek could walk that. He swallowed. “I need to do this. Stop being my shrink.”
Kathy's mouth opened and closed and opened. “Derek, I'm not being--”
“Stop, anyway,” he said. “Please. I got shot. I need to walk to the corner for...”
“For...?” Nancy said.
He closed his mouth and didn't answer. He wiped his face. He turned and he grabbed the railing along the wall with one hand, and held his IV pole with his other. He slid one foot forward and pressed his weight into it. Pain sliced his middle with every clipped breath. He winced. One foot done. Thirty-nine more to go, and then he would ask for a wheelchair, but only then, when he reached the intersection.
He traveled another step alone. A third. Then a warm hand closed around his shoulder and squeezed when he took his fourth. “You're doing great, Derek,” Kathy said, her voice soft, encouraging, sure. Nancy joined in, coaching from behind.
They both stayed with him the entire way.
“Derek? Derek, hello?”
Derek blinked. The present returned, a slow slide of details coalescing with his memories. He rubbed the bridge of his nose. The bright well of natural light falling through the ER bay doors overwrote the memory of endless fluorescent bulbs in the hallway outside his hospital room.
Kathy, his oldest sister, older by eight years, had already been out of the house and married by the time their dad had been killed, and already had eight kids before he'd managed to have a single one. She'd always been the family vanguard. The referee. The supportive cheerleader or the voice of reason, whichever she felt fit the needs of the situation.
“Kathy, I can't really talk right now,” he said to the phone, expecting reasoning and refereeing more than cheerleading, this time. “I'm at work.”
“Well, you wouldn't pick up the phone anywhere else, and this is important.”
“Important enough to call me four times since 6:00 AM?”
“Um...” Silence stretched. He chuckled despite his tension at her predictable, colorful curse. She sighed, a bluster of breath on the line. “I'm sorry,” she said. “I added instead of subtracted for the time difference. I blame John. He's on a decaff kick, and it's left me addled.”
He smiled as he leaned back in his chair. Her blunder was caused by more than just decaf coffee, though he didn't feel inclined to argue or tease right now. Kathy couldn't organize her way out of an appointment book that had already been arranged by date and time. She failed to complete the time zone conversion every few calls. Earlier in August, she'd blamed the stress of helping Mia pack for her freshman year of college at Stanford. Mia was Kathy's second oldest child after Abby.
“It's okay,” he said, and though the question was superfluous, he added, “What do you need?”
He knew what she wanted to talk about. He'd already spent three hours deflecting both Nancy and Rachel on the very same subject that weekend, and his sisters, excluding Amelia, tended to act in tandem whenever they rained judgment.
“I want to talk about the wedding,” Kathy replied.
“Kath, I told Mom I can't handle a huge Shepherd family shindig right now,” he said. “Okay? I can't handle it.”
The line hissed with a long silence. “This just isn't like you,” Kathy said, her tone cautious.
He closed his eyes. The phone creaked as he gripped it tightly. “It's too much for me,” he said. “I've had months and months of too much for me, and I'm finally training myself to admit it when I'm in over my head. What more do you want me to say?”
“Derek...” she began.
“Look, Kathy, I have to go,” he lied, staring at the nearly empty bay. An ER nurse in brown scrubs spoke to the couple with the baby, the only occupants of the room. “If that's all you wanted to--”
“Derek, your wedding is in a matter of weeks,” Kathy said. “I wanted to make sure you're okay. That you're not making a mistake.”
He frowned. The other two conversations he'd had with his sisters hadn't gone like this. Not once had anybody intimated they were unhappy with his choice of bride. The complaints and needling had begun and ended on whether Rachel and Nancy could attend, and why he'd gone through Mom to bar them from the wedding instead of telling them himself. It had been his mother's idea to break the news gently to them in person instead of having him do it over the phone. Apparently, her plan hadn't worked so well, because within hours, his phone had been ringing off the hook. All fucking weekend. First his mother to warn him they hadn't taken it well, and then his stampede of upset sisters.
“I thought you wanted me to get married,” he said, his tone low and dangerous.
“I did,” Kathy said. “I mean, I do, but--”
He clenched his fingers around the phone. Meredith being suitable for him was not a fight he was prepared for today, or ever again. Nobody had argued with him on that point since he'd moved in with her, well over a year ago. Almost two, now, actually. “I love Meredith, and as far as I'm concerned, we're already married,” Derek said. “We've already had our first anniversary. This isn't anything new.”
“The post-it thing is a sham, Derek,” Kathy said. “Meredith is just your girlfriend until you get a marriage license.”
“It's not a sham. What we have is not a sham.” He clenched his teeth. Tension pulled his muscles to the point of pain. “You don't get to call it that.”
“Derek, it's not real,” Kathy protested.
“It's real, Kath,” he said, bristling. “And I'm done talking to you. Don't call me about this again.”
“Derek, wait,” Kathy said, her voice a tinny, distant squawk as he moved to slam the phone back on the receiver. He sighed at her distressed, begging tone. He held the phone, his arm extended, an inch away from hanging up. “Wait, please, I just...”
He gave up and pressed the phone to his ear. “What?” he said tiredly.
“I like Meredith,” Kathy said. “I really do. She's very sweet, and she clearly loves you, and I want you to be happy. Both of you. I just want to make sure that, with all this other stuff going on, you're not making a rash decision. That's all.”
He glowered. “You mean you don't think I should get married because I might be crazy.”
“That's not what I said.”
“Stop being a shrink with me, for once in your life,” he snapped.
“Then stop twisting my words! I'm not being a shrink. I'm being your big sister who loves you!”
“Look,” he said evenly. “I've loved Meredith for a very long time. She is my wife already. In my heart, she is. It doesn't matter whether you believe the post-it or not, because I believe it, I've believed it since I signed it, and it's my marriage. This isn't new or rash. This is just...”
“What, Derek?” Kathy demanded. “What is it, that it's suddenly so important to you and to her, when clearly it wasn't important enough before? That's all I want to know!”
He glared at nothing in particular. He focused on the pencil cup. “If I get shot again, I need to know she'll be able to make decisions, if it comes down to that, and she wants some goddamned peace of mind. Is that so wrong?”
A long silence stretched on the other end of the line. He listened to her breathing. “You won't get shot again,” she said, her voice quiet, quivering.
He couldn't stop the roll of hopeless, upset laughter that fell from his lips. “Pick a fucking catastrophe, then,” he said. His life sometimes felt like Russian roulette with five loaded chambers out of six instead of only one. He blinked, and the room blurred. God, damn it. Why couldn't he keep it together today? He wiped his face with a shaky hand.
“Okay,” she said, fight absent from her tone. “I believe you,” she said. “I hate your reasoning, but I believe you're doing what you need to do.”
“Why do you hate my reasoning?” he said.
“Because you're my little brother,” she said. Her voice thickened with hurting anger. “You shouldn't have been there when Dad died, and you shouldn't have nearly gotten killed in your own hospital, and you shouldn't be scared of your own family who loves you.”
“I'm not scared of you,” he said. His head hurt. “I'm just trying to be realistic.”
She sighed. “I know,” she said. “That doesn't mean I have to like it.”
“I love her very much, Kathy,” he added quietly. “This isn't rash or a mistake. I promise.”
“I believe you,” she said. “I'm sorry. I really didn't mean to upset you.”
He swallowed. “It's okay.” Though it wasn't. It wasn't okay. He blinked, trying to focus the blur in front of his face and failing. Why did he have to be such a hopeless mess?
“I want you to be happy, okay?” Kathy said. “I really do.”
“Thanks, Kathy.”
A sniffle fell through the line and hit his ear, discordant. He clutched the phone at the familiar sound. He'd heard it growing up. Her crying. A lot of it when Dad had died or when her latest boyfriend had broken her heart and he'd been too young to think of it as anything more than gross. His breaths tightened in his chest. Great. They were both a fucking mess. He hated fighting with his sisters, even when he felt well. I'm sorry, he wanted to say. He opened his mouth.
“Will you have somebody take pictures, please?” Kathy said, interrupting his plans.
He shook his head. “Of what?”
“The wedding, silly,” she said. He imagined her smiling as she wiped her bright blue eyes. “I want to see it, even if I can't be there.”
“Of course, I'll send you pictures, Kath,” he said, putting conviction in every word. “I'd already planned to do that. It's not that I don't want to share this with you or the others. I wanted...” He wanted to be better, and he wanted everybody to be there, except even after three weeks on the Paxil, the thought of so many people vying for space at the courthouse, or even at the house... His stomach fluttered, and he shoved the thought away before the butterflies exploded into fully bloomed anxiety. “I'll send you pictures.”
He felt her smile through the line. “Thanks,” she said, her tone warm, understanding, and that made him feel better. A little.
“I really have to get back to work,” he said.
“I know,” she said. “Love you.”
He closed his eyes and breathed. “I love you, too, Kathy.”
He listened to the click of her hanging up against his ear. He pressed the phone against his forehead and swallowed, and then he placed it back in its cradle. A sheaf of papers hitting the desk made him flinch and look up.