Lightning Strikes Twice - Part 21

[ariaadagio]

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

This part... was very, very difficult for me to write.  I've been building, building, building for this since Part 1, laying the bricks, stringing up the pieces.  I hope you enjoy it.  And, no, I'm sorry, I still have no idea how much longer this fic will be.  There's still so much I need to do...  It could be two parts, it could be ten or more.  It really depends on how the inspiration hits.  I'm writing this part to part.  It's exhilarating, but it makes any sort of coherent discussion of my plan very hard.  I have an end point.  No idea how I'm gonna lay the tracks though.  I hope you enjoy the ride, regardless :)

~~~~~

Meredith was in the bedroom when he finished with his shower.  She turned as she heard the door open.  He walked in, a white, fluffy towel wrapped around his waist.  His eyes were red-rimmed.  His hair was slicked back against his scalp.  Various scratches grazed his arms, his neck, and his sides, though, from what she could see of his legs, at least they had escaped most abuse.  He really did look like he'd gotten into a tiff with a wood chipper.  She wondered what the hell he'd been doing prior to his mysterious appearance right in front of the jail.

"Are you still all shouty?" she asked, trying not to sound bitter.  "I can go..."

He blinked, looking at her as if it was the first time he'd noticed her standing there.  He took a deep breath that made it sound like something was crushing him, and he slid down against the door.  "No," he said.  "I'm sorry..."  He breathed, breathed, like he was trying to rein himself in.  "It's not you, Meredith."

She reminded him of a wounded animal.  Normally docile, lovable, friendly.  But in so much misery he was just biting and snapping at anything that moved.  It wasn't her.  It really wasn't.  She could tell from the sincerity in his voice, no matter how twisted with tension his tone was.  He had been yelling at her because she had been stupid enough to be there.

Love made her do stupid, stupid things.  Like fly in a tin can across the country to meet the family of her formerly married, slightly unstable boss.  Except it didn't feel stupid.  There'd been stirring.  And sex.  And people who seemed to like her.  And Derek, who loved her.

He wrapped his arms around his knees and put his head down in the crook between them.  She walked over and slid down next to him.  "I'm sorry I keep doing the apologizing thing," she said as she put her hand on his back.  "That was the last one, I promise."  He twitched, and a guttural, unhappy chuckle rolled out of him, but he didn't look up.

She ran her palm up and down, trying to think of something to say, anything at all.  He was so tense, it was making her ache just watching him.  She leaned over his back, grasped his shoulders, and laid her cheek against his neck.  It was like resting against a table or something, no give whatsoever.

His wet hair was cool against her forehead, which was something she would have expected.  But so was the rest of his skin, particularly his arms, which were solid blocks of freezing... whatever.  His skin was pale.  She ran her hands under his shoulders, down his chest, which jerked with tight, panting breaths.  Without even trying to pretend the movement meant something else, she felt for his pulse at his jugular.  His heartbeat felt like a jackhammer under his skin.  Way, way too fast for somebody who was just sitting there.

She sighed, trying to figure out what to do.  She could pretend, pretend and let him just go on like this until he was ready to talk.  It was what she probably would have done.  Before.  Before this whole family reunion thing...  Before she suddenly found herself being Miss Assertive all the time.  Where had that come from, anyway?

Love.  Stupid.  Pretty much a good summation, she thought.

He'd looked so frightened earlier.  Her heart had gotten stuck up in her throat when she'd watched him flailing around, trying to run away, only to get mowed down by an overzealous Stewart.  He was getting flashes, or something, only to have them disappear on him.  That's what he'd said.  But why would they be doing that?  He hadn't seemed to be having any problems before this with memories coming back.  If anything, everything had been coming back to him too quickly.

"Derek, do you think..." she began, hesitant, worried that she was about to make a huge mistake.  Love.  Stupid.  "Well, that maybe you're having so much trouble with this because you don't want to remember it?"

He stilled.  The block of tension under her hands stiffened even more.  She hadn't thought it was possible for him to tense up even worse.  She bit her lip as he finally brought his head up from his knees to look at her.  He rested his cheek against his kneecap and stared at her with dull, consigned misery hooding his gaze.  "You think I like being like this?" he asked, his voice low and grating.  He heaved a sigh that racked his frame, and then he was the tense pile of rigid muscle again.

"No," Meredith replied.  "No, I don't.  But it scares me that maybe you think this is better than the alternative."

He stared at her.  "I just want it to be over, Meredith."

"But you don't want to get through it," she said.  "You want to have the surgery done, but you don't want the guy with the scalpel to make the incision."

"Why would anyone?" he said.  He grunted and started rising to his feet, shaking off her embrace as he gained his balance.  He leaned against the door for a moment with his eyes closed before he pushed off.  "I can't be numb for this."

"I'm not saying it's wrong for you not to want that, Derek," she said as he stalked over to his suitcase and pulled out his last pair of clean pajama pants.  They were dark blue, almost black, with lighter blue stripes so thin they were barely visible from a distance.  He slipped them up under the towel, which peeled away from his waist as he brought the pants up.  The towel fell to the carpet with a thud.  He didn't pick it up, didn't seem to care.  He didn't even bother with a shirt.  He wandered over to the bed and flopped down onto it without bothering to pull the sheets back.

"Then what do you want from me?" he asked as he pulled his hands up against his face and sighed into his palms.  It was a high-pitched breath.  Like a moan and an exhalation tied into one warped vocalization.

She slipped into bed next to him, scooted up against him, and rested her head on his shoulder.  He was freezing.  And tense.  Nothing like the excellent, furnacey pillow he usually made.

"Why don't you try telling me what you do remember?" she said, running her hand up and down his chest, trying to offer some sort of comfort to him, any sort of comfort.

He swallowed.  "Just the water," he said, his voice flat, tight, almost... shivery.  Like there was more to the picture, but he was blanking it out.  Or ignoring it.  An ignore the man behind the curtain sort of thing.

"What about the water do you remember?" she asked.

"I remember looking out.  It was gray.  There were clouds.  And that's it, Meredith."

She propped her elbow up and rested her head on her palm.  She stared at his profile.  "Why were you looking at the water?"

"I don't-"  His voice cut off.  He stared at the ceiling, blink, blink, blinking.

That was the moment when she realized she was absolutely right.  When he sighed and tried to draw himself back in, she knew.  He was sliding toward the cliff, but he'd found a rock, dug his heels in, and was standing there, arms straining, back breaking, getting pulled toward the fall, and pushing back into the ground to stop it despite the agony of the weight.

"Why were you looking?" she prodded.

"A little girl was pointing at it."

"Why?"

"Meredith..."

"Why was she pointing at it?"

He sighed.  "Because I asked her where you were..."

"What did the girl look like?"

"Blond.  Maybe eight.  She had... pigtails."

Meredith closed her eyes.  She remembered the girl.  It was pretty much the only thing from that day that she remembered still with any sort of clarity.  That girl had been so lost.  She'd never spoken.  Not once.  And she'd had to watch Meredith fall into the water, get knocked into the Sound by a bloody, delirious man.

"She wore a pink shirt," Meredith said.  "And a little brown jacket?"

"Yeah."

"Was she okay?"

"What?"

"When you found her, she was okay?"

"Meredith, I honestly wasn't thinking about whether she was okay or not when I found her."

Meredith sighed, trying to force the image of the girl out of her head.  She was probably fine.  Traumatized, but fine.  Kids usually recovered a lot faster from that sort of thing than adults did.  Right?  She hoped she hadn't helped create a dark and twisty apprentice.  But that was a worry for another time.

Another time when Derek wasn't breaking before her eyes into little pieces of himself.

"Why did you ask her where I was?" she said.

"Because I couldn't find you, and I knew she'd been with you..."

"So, you were looking at the water, and she was pointing.  What next?"

He shook his head.  "I don't know, Meredith.  I don't remember."

"What happened after you looked at the water?"

"I don't know," he replied, more forcefully.  More...  He sounded like a pencil clenched in someone's grip, breaking, breaking, breaking, just waiting for the stuttery, finalized snap to end it all.  She watched his face.  His eyes flared with a sort of drowning terror, like he could see exactly what she was doing, could see her coming at him with the blade to cut the rope he was hanging onto with a twisting, relentless grip.  His breaths came in little distressed gasps.  He was close, and all she had to do was push him.  All she had to do was cut the rope...

Why are you doing this, Meredith?  A little voice asked.  Why, why, why.

He'd been so broken the night before, and now she was doing it on purpose, pushing him, prodding him to remember stuff he didn't think he was ready for.  Why?  She felt almost like she was staring at a botched experiment, trying to repair a gaping hole with only a thread and a needle.  There was the damage she'd caused, lying there in the puddle of the man she used to know, who used to smile and laugh and chase her into the elevator.  Poke, poke, poke him with a stick.  See how awful she'd made things?  Poke...

She'd done this.  And he wasn't going to get through it on his own.

You can't do this to me again.

He'd told her the night before he'd invited her on this little trip.  Not in so many words, but he'd told her he couldn't take another hit.  He was down for the count.  He thought another one would kill him.

And now, whether he remembered it or not, whether he realized it or not, she was utterly convinced he was trying to protect himself.  Except it was hurting him.  Pain pinched the skin around his eyes, and she wasn't entirely sure it was emotional.  The constant tension, all the time, unrelenting, it had to be doing awful things to him, worse than what she could feel in his racing pulse, his stiff frame.  He was stuck there in painful limbo, because he wasn't letting himself go on his own.  Eventually, physics would win and he'd careen forward under the force of it all whether he wanted to or not...  The question was, how much more broken would he get if he kept trying to stall?

That scared her, scared her deeply.  She regretted warning him.  They'd been words she needed to say.  She'd been grateful for the second chance to explain herself without the actual death lying at their feet like a ready-made conclusion.  But she'd been right.

He was counting.  Anticipating.  Making it worse.  He'd hit three.  He'd hit three and had managed to shove his way past to four, to five, to six, cramming endless numbers into endless, torturous moments of waiting for the blow to come.  The anticipation was an enemy.  It'd made her say she was sorry, again, and again, and again.  It'd made him worry about what was so horrible...

If she hadn't told him, he probably would have let it all slam into him before he would have had a chance to realize what was going on.  It would have slammed into him, and it would have been painful, and awful, and all sorts of ugly things.  But at least it would have been done.

They both needed it to be done.

They both did.

She took a deep breath, certainty renewed that, to help him, she was going to have to hurt him.

"What happened, Derek?" she asked.

"Nothing," he snapped.

"Think."

He swallowed.  "Stop it," he whispered.  He rolled away from her.  His torso shuddered.

So close, so close, so close, she thought.  She leaned into him, wrapped her arms around him, refusing to let him close her off.

"Think, Derek," she said, snapping at the space over his left ear as she tried to remember the day on her own.  Most of the time she thought about it, it was the moments following, when she'd woken up and Cristina had been hovering.  Or when he'd come to visit her in her room, to tell her that her mother had died.  She sighed and thought back.

"You saw the water," she said.  "It was gray.  Relatively calm.  It smelled oily from the crash.  Gross.  I remember wanting to choke from it when I first got off the ambulance, but everything else, the people, the traumas, the pain, it was enough to distract me from it, enough to get me going."

He gripped one of her hands with his own, forcing her to stop her soothing motions.  His grasp tightened to an almost painful degree, jamming her knuckles together in a mashed jumble.  She doubted he even realized he was doing it.  "Stop it," he said, his voice low and pained.

"There were one or two little sailboats in the distance," she continued, ignoring him.  "I wondered why the hell anyone would want to sail on such a crappy day...  But, then again, maybe they were just gawkers."

"I wasn't watching the goddamned sailboats, Meredith," he snapped.  "I was trying to find your body, for Christ's sake.  Your body, Meredith.  Your corpse.  You.  Dead.  I didn't give a shit about sailboats."

He rolled to face her.  An angry flush gripped his face, making the paleness of the rest of him seem almost shell white.  His eyes, still rimmed with red, swam with a watery film.  His mouth opened, and a breathy, pained rasp came pouring from it like blood from an oozing wound.

"Did you jump in?" she asked.

He blinked, and the watery film finally started spilling over.  "I don't remember," he said.

"Derek..."

"Stop it," he hissed.  "Stop yelling at me.  I don't remember.  I don't, Meredith.  It won't come."

She reached up with her hands and fingered a piece of his hair.  It was drying, starting to frizz up into a slightly curled mess.  "The rest of it came back just fine, Derek," she whispered as she inched up close to his face.  He flinched as she stared at him.

Liar, liar, liar, Derek.  You're lying.

"Stop," he pleaded.

"The blue glow stick.  Were you afraid of it because it made me look like I looked when you found me?"

He closed his eyes.  A fat pair of tears squeezed out from under his eyelids.  He reached up and tried to sweep them away with his palms, but she grabbed his wrists, halting his attempt.

"What did I look like when you found me?"

He ripped his arms from her grasp.  He quivered.  Everything was starting to quiver.  He wouldn't open his eyes.  His body started to curl.  His knees pushed up into hers like he was trying to slip into a fetal position.  It made her want to cry.  Just let it go, she wanted to scream.

"When did you find me?" she asked.  "How long did it take?"

A grating, hollow sound ripped across his vocal cords.  So close, so close, so close.  She wanted to stop, she wanted to stop yelling at him, to stop hurting him, but they needed this to end, and he wasn't letting it.

"Did you find me in the water?  How did you find me in the water, Derek?  Did you carry me to an ambulance?  What happened then?"

His eyes snapped open, and he gave her a broken, resigned look.  He sighed, but it was more of a sob than anything else.  "Please," he said.  "Don't do this to me.  I don't want to--"

"See?" she snapped, cutting him off.  "You are blocking it.  Whether you mean to or not, you are blocking it.  It's not that it won't come, Derek.  It's that you don't want it to come."

He heaved a sobbing breath.  "Please," he said.  She put a finger on his lips and shushed him.

"This isn't about what you want anymore.  This isn't even about what I want.  You think I want this any more than you do?  You think I want to see what I did to you firsthand?  You're making me do it, Derek.  You're lying here in abject misery because you won't push yourself.  It sucks.  I know it sucks to remember.  But it happened.  And it's going to have to happen again sometime.  And we are never going to get any closure for this until it does.  I'm sick of feeling like I need to apologize.  And I'm sick of you not being able to look at me the same way anymore without amnesia to help you block my stupidity from your brain.  This week has been wonderful, Derek, in a way.  It's let us work through things that you and I both know we never, ever would have brought up again, because you internalize until you've created your own black hole of non-escaping thoughts, and I run away until I've lapped myself.  But it's a fantasy.  This reset is a fantasy.  There's still a month's worth of crap piled up that we need to deal with, or we're going to implode.  It's not gone just because you don't remember it.  I would give anything to run away right now, Derek.  But you fell in love with me over a box of crappy cereal, your mom hugged me, I stirred a bowl of cookie batter, you've been saying all these nice things, and I need it.  I need something in my life to not suck.  I need it more than anything, right now."

She stopped her litany, panting, panting with the sudden heat of her fury at him for doing this, at herself for causing this, at life for just being, and everything else in between because it seemed like a good, unprejudiced, guilt-free way to rage.  Nothing was spared.

Love was stupid.  But she wanted it.

Life was stupid.  But she wanted it.

Family was stupid.  But she wanted it.

And she'd had to die.  She'd had to die, and he'd had to go through this crap, twice, just for her to figure all of that out definitively.

And it sucked.

Everything.  Sucked.

He blinked at her.  His lip trembled.  "Did you even take a breath?" he asked, his voice quiet, low, tired.

She smiled through the pain.  "Possibly."

"You're very, very bossy," he whispered.

"Keeps you in line, right?" she replied.

He closed his eyes, nodded, the barest tick of motion, and sighed.

"I thought..." he began.  "I thought, when she pointed...  Why is she pointing at the Sound?  There's nothing in the Sound except ferry debris.  She's just a traumatized little girl, and she's making stuff up because I'm pushing her.  But then I looked down."

"And?' she asked.

"The water was murky.  But I saw a shadow.  I saw something.  Pale.  Bluish.  Like scrubs.  I threw off my jacket and ran down the steps, trying to get a better look.  I called your name.  I called it four times before I realized."

"Realized?"

He moaned, shook his head.  Silent words formed on his lips.  I don't want.  She saw them there, not spoken, but said, nonetheless, hovering.  He jerked, like he'd seen or heard something, something in his head.

"Realized?" she prodded, digging her fingers into his bicep, trying to snap him back out of whatever thrall of memory he was caught in.

Another sob.  Just one.  He shivered with short, tiny breaths.  "That it was utterly useless," he said.

She pulled her nails from his bicep.  "Oh," she said.

"So, I dove in.  It was like hitting a wall of ice.  For a minute, I couldn't think straight, couldn't see, couldn't breathe.  I've never been so scared in my life, Meredith.  I was..."

"What?"

"I didn't know whether it would be better to find you or not find you.  I was terrified of both.  And the water was cold, and I looked for you, and my joints started locking up.  I couldn't..."

His eyes snapped open, but the gaze that gripped his eyes was unseeing, distant, flaring with terror.  He made a choking noise, pawed at her with his hands.  His whole body jerked.

"Couldn't..." she prodded.

He panted, leaned his forehead against hers.  His skin was freezing.  His body started trembling again.  "I don't remember," he said.

"I think you do."

Liar, liar, liar, Derek.  You're lying.  She stared at him, but something... Something was different this time.

"Please, stop," he moaned.  Something about the way he said it finally brought her pause.  Perhaps it was the warbling, unadulterated, breaking terror latching onto each syllable like a barnacle.  Perhaps it was the way he blanched, even paler than he had been before.  Perhaps it was the curl of his fingers over her hip, tight, tight, tighter.  Enough to leave a bruise.  Perhaps it was the slow descent of his breathing into something that more resembled choking.  Or the way his eyes flared.  She didn't know.

I've never been so scared in my life.

"Okay," she said, twisting a curl of his hair in her fingers.  She ran a palm down the side of his face.  He closed his eyes, panting through his nose, nostrils flaring.  But it calmed, slowly, like the receding of a tide.  She'd put her dagger away, and the change was...  She couldn't say good.  He was still awful.  But he wasn't lying there like a sheet of glass to her hammer anymore.

"Okay," she whispered.  "I'll stop.  It's okay."

They'd made progress.  She would have to live with that.

He rolled onto his side and sat up.  For a minute, she wondered what he was doing.  When she sat up to embrace him, she followed the line of his gaze to the pill bottle that contained his Xanax supply.  He took the bottle into his hands and popped out one of the pills.  But he didn't take it.  He just stared at it, stared at the little thing sitting in his shaky palm.

"I don't want it," he whispered.

"I know."

He tilted his head back and swallowed it dry.  He put the bottle back on the nightstand, and then he just sat there.  Just sat.  For a moment, silence hung in the room like a comforting blanket.  She rested her head against his back and listened, just listened as he breathed.

"It's okay," she said.

He didn't reply.

"When this is over, we're going to Joe's," she said, rubbing his stomach.  "I'm going to have a big, fat glass, or possibly a whole bottle, of tequila.  You can have some of your favorite scotch.  On me.  We'll get pissed.  Well, I'll get pissed, and you can stay sober and laugh at me if you want.  But there will be alcohol.  Sometimes, alcohol is good."

He snorted with a bitter laugh.  "If I could get drunk right now, Meredith, I'd..."  His words trailed away.

"You'd?"

He shrugged.  "Get drunk.  Believe me.  I would rather be drunk right now."  He sighed.  "It's almost tempting anyway."

"I hope you're kidding," she said.  Xanax mixed with alcohol could kill.

When he didn't reply, didn't even attempt to make an excuse for what he'd said, a cold sliver of dread jabbed down her throat.  "Derek?" she prodded.

He started wringing his hands together.  His breaths, which had gradually slowed down to an even rasp after she'd stopped trying to get him to spill his memories out for her to tabulate, stayed calm and slow, but the end of each one crushed in the downward swell of his torso, like he was pressing down on his diaphragm to keep from exploding into sobs.  He blinked once, and then he went back to the staring.  Distant, empty staring, and not for the first time that evening, she felt like he'd left her alone in the room with the shell of him.

"You matched your scrubs," he said.

"What?"

"When I pulled you out of the water, you matched your scrubs."

"Okay..." she replied, wondering why, after all the warbling, pitchy distress of the night, it sounded like he was reading a pamphlet about cold medicine or something equally fascinating.

He sighed.  "And when I picked you up, you were so light...  You were nothing.  A drip.  You were waterlogged, I could barely walk, and I picked you up like you were nothing."

"And?"

"It took three dives.  I saw you on the second one.  Just drifting in the corner of my eye.  The loose parts of your hair spilled out like angel hair pasta.  I wanted to grab you then, but I was out of air, so I swam up, broke the surface.  I was freezing.  I could barely get my arms to work.  But I dove again.  I nearly passed out.  You were all the way at the bottom.  I grabbed the scruff of your shirt and pulled.  I swam to the dock and crawled out with you.  And that was when I had to start giving you CPR.  CPR, Meredith.  It was like kissing an ice cube.  Except it was you.  For twenty minutes.  For twenty minutes, I breathed for you, and those were the longest twenty minutes of my life."

For a minute he just sat there, wringing his hands, staring, blank, blank, blank.  And then he stood and walked out of the room like an automaton.  Concern flaring like a phosphorous fire, she moved after him, though it was hardly a race.  He walked to the bathroom like he was going to brush his teeth or something, walked, walked.  No rush.  Nothing wrong there, no...

Except everything was wrong.

It didn't become frantic until he crossed the threshold.  The change was fast.  Like Superman in a blur or something, or who was that other superhero?  The Flash.  One moment he was standing on the threshold, the arches of his bare feet wrapped over the base molding.  The next, a dull thud followed as he flipped the toilet seat back and collapsed to the floor in a collection of jerky, desperate movements.  The very next, the horrible sound of him retching wrapped around her ears and told her without any doubts...

Everything was wrong.  Incorrect.  Bad.  Bzzzzt.

She blinked, suddenly at a loss, unsure, unknowing.  He hunched over the bowl, hugging it, shaking, any semblance of flesh tone missing from the sheetrock posing as his skin, and she had no idea what to do.  She glanced up and down the hall.  Nobody was there.  It wasn't even quite ten yet.  Everyone was probably still outside, intent on playing well into the night...

She closed the door behind her anyway.  She collapsed next to him, ran her hands up and down his back as he quivered.  He rested, folded over the bowl, forehead cradled in his crossed arms, breathing, but he didn't move back into a sitting position.

The moment she sat there in indecision was one of the longest in her life.  He was barely processing this.  This thing that she'd done.  And it was all her fault.  A litany of apologies collected on her tongue, threatening to spill over, to push through the unresponsive pile of gelatin her inhibitions had become.  Apologies for dying in the first place.  Apologies for forcing him to think about it and remember.  Apologies for the stupidness of the whole thing.  So many things were stupid...

She settled on, "I'm here."

Another round of retching took the guilt and pounded it into her pores like a mallet.  When he finished this time, he flushed the toilet and leaned back against the wall in a shivery, pale pile.  She didn't know what she'd expected, but it wasn't this.  Not this strange, sick, not upset, and yet so upset it was scary Derek.  She'd never seen him like this.  Not even on the night after the accident, when she'd woken up and he'd been standing in the doorway, or later that night, when he'd cradled her.  He'd seemed distant, a little shaken.  But nothing, nothing like this.

Denial, denial, denial.

Maybe this actually was the first time he was dealing with it...

"Do you want to brush your teeth?" she asked, a sudden, burning need to fill the silence overwhelming her.

She stood and grabbed his toothbrush from the toothbrush cup, squirted some Crest on it, tried not to look at him, didn't even wait for his answer.  She wet it under the faucet and handed it down to him, but he didn't take it.

"Derek," she said.  "Do you want your toothbrush?"

She shoved it at him like a spear.  Or one of those little cocktail toothpicks, like the sword of a fairy.  Jab, jab, jab.  She felt so silly.  So flustered.  And she just didn't know what to do.

He seemed... almost... shell-shocked.

After a long set of moments, he reached up for the toothbrush and took it, but he was like a ghost sitting there.  He brushed in slow, even strokes as he stared blankly at the space in front of him.  After a few minutes, he struggled to his feet and spat everything out in the sink, swished with some water, spat again.  And then he was back on the floor, staring, breathing.

"Can I...?" she asked, not finishing the question.  She scooted close to him, until she lined up against his side.  He didn't protest, didn't say a word.  She wrapped her arms around him.  He wobbled at the movement, like he wasn't really consciously holding his body upright.  "Will you talk to me?" she asked.

"There's nothing left," he said, his voice dull and flat.  "Stop asking."

"Stop asking what?"

"I don't remember any more."

"Derek, I wasn't trying to..." she said, halting when she saw from the look on his face that it didn't matter, because listening was something that was not happening with his ears right then.

"We got off the plane, and I sat down in the car, and that's it," he said.  "I don't remember any more."

"Then that's all there is.  If you can't remember the accident at this point, I doubt you ever will.  It's common for that to happen.  You know that."

"I'm done."

"Yes.  You made it," she whispered.

"We talked about marriage, and you said you didn't want it," he said.

"You said you didn't want it either, Derek."

He laughed.  "I know."  His lip quivered.  The laugh dissolved.  He turned to stare at her, his eyes streaked over with tears, and she felt horrible about it, but she almost wanted to sigh with relief.  This was at least better than the non-reaction from before.

He cried, but it wasn't really a weeping sort of thing, wasn't overwhelming, not like the shower earlier that day.  It was quiet.  She wouldn't have known it was happening if it wasn't obvious from his glistening face.  She ran her hands through his hair and just sat with him, waited it out while he exhausted himself.  He didn't try to wipe anything away.  He just sat there, leaking, quiet.  The horrible tension was gone from his muscles.  His skin was warming up, too.

He rested against her for a long, long time before he said, "You matched your scrubs.  How could you ever want to do that to yourself?"

"I didn't, Derek.  It wasn't a conscious thought, or some sort of premeditated thing.  It just... happened.  And it's something I will regret for the rest of my life."

He grunted with a tortured sort of breath.  "Yeah.  Me too."

She didn't know what that meant.

And he didn't tell her.