Lightning Strikes Twice - Part 10

[ariaadagio]

Title: Lightning Strikes Twice
Fandom: Grey's Anatomy
Pairing: Duh.  (Mer/Der)
Rating: M
Timeline: Post Time After Time.

Just a quick note -- I'm waaaaaaaaaay behind on replying to people's comments.  I'm just trying to get this part up before I'm too busy to do it.  I'll try and get back to everyone asap.  I really do appreciate the feedback.  And I'm not ignoring you! :)

~~~~~

The first time he woke up that day, he moaned and scrabbled for a pillow to throw over his head.  "Please, no," he groaned.  "D-E-R-E-K.  I'm fine."  He screwed his eyes shut and tried to go back to the abyss.  Exhaustion clawed at him like a wild beast, scraping down behind his eyes with sharp, wounding talons, picking apart his muscles like he was carrion, glutting on each sinew.

He didn't want to be awake.  He just didn't.  He was tired of everything shaking out of control.  He was tired of barely being able to make it to the bathroom by himself.  He was tired of sitting up and wishing he hadn't.  He was tired of light stabbing at his eyes when he bothered opening them.  He was tired of noises seeming five hundred times louder than they should have been.  He was tired of not being able to keep up with people speaking, tired of the dim haze that gripped his mind, making him feel like the world was on fast-forward and he was stuck in slow motion.  He was tired of remembering Mark, sliding up against Addison's body in a wave of motion as she screamed with release.  He was tired.

Except whoever had woken him up persisted.  A hand rubbed down his back along his spine.  It felt so good in the midst of all the misery that he sighed.  "Derek," whispered a familiar female voice as the scent of lavender curled down his throat.  "Come on.  I want you to take one of these."

He rolled onto his back and cracked an eye open.  The blur resolved into Meredith.  She held a glass of water in one hand and a popped open orange prescription bottle in the other.  He blinked and groaned.  "What is it?"

"It's for your dizziness.  It'll make you feel better," she said.  Her voice was like a gentle wave, lapping at him from far away.  He ran his hands over his face.  Stabbing pricks of stubble that'd been allowed to languish on his face for over a day and a half scraped at his skin.  He hadn't taken a shower since before the accident that he still didn't remember, so who knew when that had been.  He probably looked wretched and sick and pasty, which, really, was how he felt.

But the look on her face as she stared at him in the dimness had no hint of disgust in it.  Just concern.  She jiggled the pill bottle, jarring his wandering attention back to her.  "Derek?" she whispered.

He stared at it.  It was probably a sedative.  There weren't many things to treat dizziness that didn't have side effects that were likely to knock him out.  Even if it was only mild, he was out of it enough already that it would easily do the rest of the job.  But at the moment, that seemed like a blissful idea.  He groaned and wrenched himself up into a good position to swallow without choking, sighing as the familiar swimming sensation started with the increased elevation.

He swiped out with a shaky hand and downed the pill with the water in a jerky, clumsy motion, and collapsed back onto the bed.  "Thank you," he mumbled as he felt the pill slide down his throat.  He closed his eyes.

She rubbed her hand along his chest.  It felt so nice, so comforting.  She seemed to know everything he liked.  "It's still Monday, right?" he asked, his voice hoarse and bitter against his throat.  He was pretty sure it was Monday.  He wouldn't still be this tired if he weren't recovering from Sunday at the hospital.  He hoped.

"Yes.  Lunchtime.  Almost everyone is gone right now.  It's pretty quiet.  Something about a mass shopping expedition made everyone clear out fast."

"Why didn't you go?"

"I'm...  Not much of a shopper," she replied.

"Oh," he said.  But that was about all he managed before he felt like something underneath him was coming up to yank him down, down, down below.  He remembered groaning.  He remembered as he dipped his eyes shut that she was still staring at him, looking beautiful, smelling like lavender.  The repeated motion of her tiny palms against his shirt calmed him, and he just let it take him.  The exhaustion swallowed him whole not long after.

The second time he woke up, he still felt like crap.  But he needed to get up.  Needed.  He stumbled to his feet and gasped in surprise.  The only thing that was making him trip was his own barely-wakefulness.  The room moved, yes, but it was slow enough that he could pretty much ignore it, like a dull ache in the background, an annoying hangnail.

He poked his head out into the hallway, squinting at the bright light until it resolved into something more reasonable that he could see in.  Quiet stillness hugged the hallway.  A series of small taps and thumps filtered up the steps from downstairs, but it was a quiet, unobtrusive sort of noise, merely indicating that the house was inhabited by someone other than himself.  What he found himself exceptionally grateful for was that there were no children running around, laughing, giggling, screaming.  He loved his nieces and nephews, but right now, all of that would have been like someone raking his or her nails down a chalkboard.  The brief moment when the kids had attacked him on his arrival had almost convinced him he was going to die.  It had felt that awful when they'd shoved their glue-covered, smelly papers at him and shrieked with excitement.  He wondered if perhaps his family, having realized this, had subtly gotten everyone out of the house for his benefit.  It would be just like them...

He made his way to the bathroom and relieved himself.  And then, on a whim, he decided to take a shower.  He really did feel disgusting, and now that he could stand for a prolonged period, it didn't seem like the effort outweighed the benefits anymore.

He locked the door and stripped, shucking his soiled clothing while a curl of distaste pulled his lip up into a scowl.  The warm water on his skin was heaven, utter heaven.  He stood there, almost weeping from the comfort it provided.  Soap.  Soap was a wonderful thing.  Just feeling clean again helped with the depression that'd been dragging him down into a dark, dank hole.  Steam curled up around him, opening up his pores, making him sweat, but the sluicing water drew it away, and it felt like the sick feeling that clung to him was unlatching, spiraling off him into the drain, gurgling away.  When he finally stepped out of the tub, it wasn't because he was ready to be done.  It was because the water had started losing its heat.

He grabbed the first towel from the large stack on the back of the toilet.  During these huge reunions, his mother usually just constantly restacked clean ones every day, claiming it was easier than trying to remember whose towel was whose.  He wrapped it around his waist, picked up John's pajamas, and wandered back to the guestroom where Meredith had stashed him, only then realizing he had no idea where his clothes were.

He thought about it slowly for a few moments before he noticed that there were two suitcases propped up against the farthest windowsill.  He went over and dipped down into the one he vaguely recognized as his own, and he pulled out a pair of his own pajama pants and a t-shirt.  He put them on, relishing the clean, cool feeling of them.

He sighed and stared at the bed, almost ready to sink back into it, when a flash came, unbidden, like a spear of light into his brain.  "Mark," Addison had moaned as she'd slammed up into him.  Mark had grunted and twitched, and then Addison had screamed.  Derek had watched for a whole twenty seconds in frozen horror before they'd seen him.  A whole twenty seconds of thrusting, grunting, and moaning before suddenly Addison was sobbing with guilt, not screaming with pleasure.  And Mark, being Mark, had just mumbled something about letting the two of them work things out before he'd darted into the bathroom, all while Addison had frantically tried to stop Derek from ripping the sheets from the bed.  Mark hadn't even had the decency to look all that ashamed.  He'd just looked... sated.

"He was just here," Addison had cried at Derek.

He swallowed against the disgust suddenly roiling in him, and the sick, foggy feeling that the shower had sort of washed away came crashing back into him like a wrecking ball.  He blinked and walked out of the room as quickly as he could manage, shuddering, almost gagging at the blast of imagery.

The steps were a challenge that he took slowly, shakily.  Every time he closed his eyes at the effort, a hyper real picture of Mark, turning toward him, glassy-eyed with orgasm, ripped through his head.  He made it to the foot of the stairs and wandered into the kitchen, again wincing as the light levels bumped up to new, uncomfortable heights.

"Der, good um... afternoon, I guess," Nancy said with a smile as she glanced at her watch.  She was sitting at the table reading some magazine.  "You look wretched.  Are you feeling all right?"

"No," he grunted and pulled up a seat at the table.   "I feel like I was in a car accident and my head got cracked on the steering wheel."  And I feel like I saw my wife fucking my best friend.  He groaned into the heel of palm as he rested his head on his arms and his elbows on the table, wishing the picture of it would just go away.

Nancy clucked her tongue.  "No need to snap."

"Where's Meredith?" he asked.

Nancy shrugged, but her look of nonchalance failed to convince.  "Out for a walk with Kathy, I think.  Kathy practically had to drag her out of the house.  Really, she's very antisocial."

His eyes narrowed.  "I'd be antisocial too if I had to spend the day with you."

"Jeez, Der," Nancy said with a frown.  "I'm only trying to kid."

"Except you're not."

Nancy sniffed and looked back at her magazine, her entire demeanor morphing away from the fakeness into something dour and unamused.  "I noticed she got you into bed with her already..." she muttered as she pretended to read a very interesting article.  "How did that happen?"

"Nancy..."  Derek groaned into his hands.  "It's none of your business."

She slammed the magazine back on the table.  "You're my brother.  It is my business when you're going to ruin your career and you've already ruined your marriage over some slut you picked up in a bar one night.  It is my business when you don't even remember who she is, and you're already sleeping with her again.  You're vulnerable, Derek.  You need to be careful."

"I can't even walk on my own.  You think I had sex with her?" he asked, incredulous.  He felt foggy, grasping at things she'd said like pulling flying twigs out of a stiff gale.  Most of the time he wasted trying to grab onto something.  Meeting at a bar?  They'd met at a bar?  But then Nancy spoke, and pulled him away from the act of wondering.

"Well, you ended up there somehow..." she grumbled.

He swiped his hands through his hair.  The spinning in the room was starting to pick up.  And his head started to throb.  He ran his fingers along the bridge of his nose as the sound of Mark's bass grunting slammed up against his ears and made his head swim.

"Jesus, Nancy," he said, followed with a moan.  "I remembered something.  I got upset.  Meredith was awake.  She helped me with it.  That's all.  And what the hell are you talking about, ruining my career and my marriage?"

"She's your intern, Derek.  She works for you.  How do you think that looks to the medical community?  And Addison...  She flew out to Seattle after you.  She dropped her whole life to live with you out in that horrible little trailer.  She was trying.  I know she had a fling with Mark.  But she was trying, Derek.  And that woman poisoned it for the both of you."

Another few tidbits of information he hadn't expected.  He'd actually gone after one of his own staff?  She was pretty, and sweet, but hardly sex on feet.  What the...  Trailer?  Trying?  And then his scattered brain registered the rest of what she'd said.  She knew Mark and Addison had had an affair, and they were still even having this conversation?

"How can you think a fling with Mark is even remotely all right?" he asked.

She shrugged.  "Because it's Mark."

"Because it's Mark..." he said, his voice low and cautious and confused.

"Sex to him is like indulging in ice cream.  It's bad for him, but it has just about the same deep meaning."

He frowned.  "Nancy, are you even listening to yourself?  You're comparing having an extramarital affair to having a dessert."

"You didn't even try to forgive her, Derek," Nancy protested, her eyes flaring in what he could only describe as desperation.  "She spent so many nights with me on the phone in tears because you wouldn't even give her the time of day.  You spent the whole time you 'tried' to rebuild your marriage making goo-goo eyes at that insipid little intern."

Silence crackled like a livewire in the room.  He frowned, trying to process what she'd just said.  He... tried to fix things with Addison...  Tried to...  He started to get confused, started to wonder over the exact timeline of everything he was missing.  He knew now that he had a hole the size of a year.  But...  Where did Meredith fit into that if he'd tried with Addison again?  And... And... Why?  Why had he...  He blinked as his thoughts oozed around in his head, bumping and colliding at the speed of molasses, and yet there were so many of them, he started to pant, overwhelmed with it all.  All of that, and behind it all, Mark and Addison were still screwing.  Still moaning.  If he'd had anything in his stomach, he was pretty sure it would have ended up on the table right then.

"Nancy," he said, swallowing against the slowly building sickness twisting in his gut, knocking around behind his eye sockets like anvils slamming into pavement.  "Right now, right this moment, I'm fucking amazed I even tried at all."

"How can you say that?" she hissed.

He slammed his hand into the table, frustrated when it started to shake, but it only incensed him more against the mounting torment.  "Do you know what it's like to walk into a room and find your spouse screaming someone else's name?  Someone you would have entrusted your life to?  It's like rotting from the inside out.  It makes me nauseated.  It's like someone's shoved a five-day-old corpse in my face and won't let me look away.  I can't close my eyes without seeing it and wanting to vomit.  I want to hate them both, but all I can do is feel sick inside.  Sick and awful, like everything up until that moment was my life being wasted.  I know I wasn't around, I wasn't there.  But it takes two, Nancy.  She never fucking said a word.  And then I find her with Mark, twisting up against him, slick with sweat.  And I can't breathe, Nancy.  I can't breathe just thinking of it.  How do you rebuild a marriage from that?  Tell me how I was supposed to do that."

Nancy's lower lip trembled.  "I thought you didn't remember."

"I wish I didn't.  I wish I could stab my eyes out," he snapped.

"It'll get better after you've had time to process it."

"Nancy..."

"It will!"

"What the hell is wrong with you, Nancy?" he growled.

"Nothing!" she said as her eyes watered over and she started to cry.  "I'm sorry.  I'm...  I have to go."  She wiped her hands frantically at her eyes and fled, the front door slamming moments later, leaving him wondering what the hell had just happened, wondering, and shaking, and sick.

His stomach heaved, but he clamped down on it, and he laid his head down against the cool surface of the table, pushing the placemat away as he collapsed.  The grain felt nice against the sudden heat radiating from his skin.  The sunlight falling into the room through the huge bay windows and the skylight overhead, which had been barely tolerable before, was bright and stabbing and painful.  He sat in the chair, twitching, shaking, unable to stop as the stress twined around his heart.  He closed his eyes, but everything was still too bright.

He stood, flailing at the sudden need to get out of there, but now the room was spinning at full tilt, and with his eyes shut against the glare, he didn't think he could make it.  He sank back to the table, his hands gripped around his stomach, miserable as a headache flared into existence.

The front door creaked open and shut.  He heard voices, distant.  And then suddenly they were there in the kitchen.  "Derek?" Kathy asked from far away.  "What are you doing out here?  Are you okay?  What's going on?"

He cringed away from her as the loud syllables pounded into his eardrums and made him shudder.  The lights blessedly dimmed as somebody pulled down all the shades, though the sounds of the snapping blinds made him flinch.  A glass of water and a pill was shoved at him, which he somehow managed to swallow.  Somebody rubbed his back, whispered soothing things at him.  And it all slowly, gradually settled away, like the pieces of a snow globe storm settling after a harsh shake.

He breathed, finally risking opening his eyes.  Kathy sat across from him, staring and worried.  Meredith sat in the chair next to him.  "You okay?" Kathy whispered.

"Yeah," he said, his voice grating against his throat.  "Had a fight with Nancy.  Little bit too much for me on top of everything else."

Kathy frowned.  "And she left you like this?  Alone?"

"She didn't know," he said.  Meredith replaced his glass of water with a fresh one, and he sucked it down.

"Okay," Kathy said with a sigh.  "I'm going to go see if I can find her, I guess.  You'll be all right?"

"I'm fine now," Derek muttered.

Kathy nodded and left, leaving Derek alone with Meredith in the kitchen.  She frowned at him, but didn't really press him about anything that'd just happened, which he was very grateful for.

"Are you hungry?" she asked.  "Have you even eaten at all today?"

Derek sighed.  Now that everything had settled again, he was surprised to find he actually was kind of hungry.  "I could eat," he said, trying to make it sound noncommittal.

She smiled.  "All right.  Well, I don't cook.  So, um.  Let's see."  She went over and started working her way systematically through the cabinets, peering at the contents of each one.

He watched her, watched the tiny motions of her tiny hands as she gripped the handles of the cabinets, watched her hips sway as she moved back and forth.  Her hair... sort of a mix between mousy brown and golden blond, hung in a loose, sloppy ponytail with bits and pieces sticking out of the main loop, which was twisted back under.

"So, when you said you were going to be a neurosurgical resident," he said.  "Did you mean at Seattle Grace?"

She turned and smiled.  "Yes.  You're kind of my boss."

"Kind of?"

"Okay, totally my boss," she amended, and then she frowned.  "In the professional arena, anyway."

"How did that happen?" he asked.  "I mean...  It's..."

"Inappropriate?" she asked, a smile curling at her lips.

"Well, yeah."

"When we met, I didn't know you were my co-worker.  It was my last night before my internship started.  We got drunk and had some fun.  I kicked you out in the morning, thinking I'd never see you again.  And then we kind of collided at work.  I was mortified.  You were smug.  And, after that...."

"After that..."

"You said yes a lot, I said no a lot.  I gave up after a few weeks and went with it.  You get points for persistence, but not for suave.  And I can't believe you're just now realizing it's inappropriate.  You couldn't have done that before with all the vehement no, no, nos?"

He raised an eyebrow, trying desperately not to be amused at her recounting of events.  She made it sound so flirty and fun despite how utterly wrong it all was.  And it was.  Utterly wrong.

"You told me no," he began slowly, trying to absorb it all.  "After I knew you were my intern, and I still wouldn't leave you alone?"

"Nope," she said.

"Why?" he asked.

She turned.  "You're not doing good things to my ego here, Derek."

"I'm sorry," he stuttered.  "It's not that you're not attractive.  Because you are."  He swallowed as he tried not to think suddenly of her shirt, tightly gripping her breasts, her mischievous, curling smile, the sexy way a loose bang wisped down over her forehead.  Earlier, when he'd been thinking she wasn't sex on feet...  That must have been the concussion talking.  Because now that he was scrutinizing, she was starting to make him almost pant.  He tried to think other thoughts for a minute, tried to let himself get lost in the cloud that gripped his mind.  One.  Two.  Three.  Five.

"It's just..." he finally managed to stutter.  "I...  I never..."

She grinned, saving him the embarrassment of trying to dig himself out of that hole when she said, "What, you mean you weren't an egotistical ass before you came to Seattle?"

He shrugged.  "Uh...  I guess not?"

"Honestly, Derek, after seeing you last night, things are starting to make a whole lot more sense to me."

"Well, that makes one of us," he said.

"You overcorrected.  Everyone wants to be desirable and in control.  And you probably didn't think you were either.  I know the feeling.  Believe me, I do."

For a moment, he just stared at her, just stared, unable to speak.  "I guess," he said, his voice scraping the lower registers of his capabilities, low and throaty and wounded.  He stared down at his hands, squeezed his eyes shut against another sudden flash of Mark, pounding into Addison.

"Sorry," she said.  "We don't have to talk about this.  And, I do, by the way."

"Do what?"

"Find you incredibly desirable," she said, her lips curling as she practically purred at him.

She walked over to the fridge and pulled out the milk carton.  He watched her, transfixed as she lithely canvassed the kitchen, sexy, swaggering, and apparently his.  He blinked finally when he noticed a bowl of muesli in front of him.  He stared at it for a long moment.

"This is my favorite," he said, and then he felt dumb.  Of course she probably knew that by this point.

"I still say cold pizza is better," she replied with a wink.

"Cold pizza?" he said, incredulous.  "That's pathetic."

"Somehow, I knew you'd say that."

She sat down across from him with her own bowl.  She smiled at him, deep and full.  And when she looked at him, he had no doubt how much she loved him, how much she felt and worried for him.  How much she desired him.  She hadn't just been throwing words at him to comfort him.  She'd meant it.

"So, tell me about all the egotistical, assy things I did," he said, suddenly desperately curious.

He couldn't say exactly when it happened.  Couldn't say when his point of view changed.  It could have been that moment when she'd smiled at him before she'd started plundering her own bowl of cereal.  It could have been when the spoon had pressed flat against her lower lip and she'd licked the underside in a cute way that had, for some reason, made him lust for her to be doing that to him instead.  It could have been when she'd reached across the table and poured him another bowl, and the scent of her had overwhelmed him.

But it was definitely between the time he'd sat down and the time he eventually got up.

He fell in love with Meredith, sort of like getting hit with a bolt of lightning.  One moment, he was merely happy to watch her, to talk with her, anything to help him sort out the mess in his head.  The next moment, the air was scorching, and he was hanging on every word as she explained in detail how he'd pursued her relentlessly for weeks.  He didn't understand it.  Didn't know how the world had gotten so turned around on him in such a short period of time.

But suddenly, the memory of Mark and Addison didn't seem so important anymore.