Lightning Strikes Twice - Part 36A
Title: Lightning Strikes Twice
Fandom: Grey's Anatomy
Pairing: Duh. (Mer/Der)
Rating: M
Timeline: Post Time After Time.
Well, if the last two parts haven't cemented for you why I absolutely had to do this Derek-needs-surgery storyline, hopefully this one will do it :) These last three chapters have been FUN for me. So much juicy character-analysis goodness! My sandbox is a very fun place for me right now. I really hope you enjoy this, but if you don't, of course I'm always open to suggestions! I hope to have Part 37 up on Friday night if my poor Super Special Beta Reader isn't dead yet from the text overload. My chapters seem to be getting longer and longer on average, lol.
Thank you, btw, to
apurplepatch for the adorable icon :)
~~~~~
Meredith called Ellen while she was still clinging to the strange numbness. While smiling at her shiny ring and saying everything would be fine was still working. Mostly. It was still working, though the façade had begun to crack. It had been thirty minutes since they'd wheeled him away.
Derek, most likely, hadn't even been put under yet, most likely was still babbling to the scrub nurses, high, not caring that he didn't care they were wheeling him into the bright, sterile, austere OR 2. Can you put my ex-hair in a bag after you shave it off? Mere wants it. With a goofy smile and floppy limbs, he'd watch the scenery passing by and probably wouldn't really think much about it beyond simple thoughts.
Bright lights. They hurt my eyes. People are staring at me. Lots of masked faces. They're lifting me onto a table. Sterilizing the razor. Anesthesiologist's eyes are crinkling. I should smile back. Why? Do I care?
She shook her head, trying not to worry. Trying not to focus on it. Her watch came up to her face in a spastic, habitual motion before she could stop herself. Pass the time. Pass the time. Was time passing? Her watch. Thirty-three minutes. They had to be starting... Stop. Stop it. Stop thinking about...
Meredith had sat down in an unpopulated area of the waiting room and dialed the number saved in Derek's contact list, saved on the phone she'd used to take the porny pictures of herself. She hadn't yet gotten around to putting the number in her own phone. It'd been barely more than four days since she'd left Connecticut. She'd assumed she'd have more time to start acclimating to the whole actively having a family thing.
She'd assumed.
A cheerful hello was what finally forced her from her ominous musing, if only for a moment.
"Hi..." Meredith said, hesitant, unsure as she sifted through the fog that held her in its grip. Fine. All fine. Everything. Peachy. Derek wasn't lying cold and alone in a sea of people, practically naked on some gurney while they-- "Ellen?"
Breathe deep, Dr. Shepherd. Think about something happy.
She imagined his eyelids drooping as they pushed the mask over his face. He'd smile. Because the gas was a sort of giddy thing, and the drugs already crippling him made him not really know any better. She imagined him trying to think of something, only to have it all fade away into an inkblot. The sounds would be the last to go, but the descent into silence would be quick. Seconds. Out. And Derek would be asleep.
Derek would be gone.
Blink, and she was back in the waiting room, clutching Derek's phone, and everything started to crumble. Her breaths sharpened. The room fuzzed as her eyes watered. But, still, she sat there, fine. Everything would be fine.
Fine.
Ellen paused for a heartbeat, just one thump-thump that rattled in Meredith's head, before she answered Meredith's wispy greeting with a warm, "Meredith! Hello, dear. I hadn't expected to hear from you so soon."
Meredith blinked at that, and were she not sort of vibrating underneath the dull hum of shock, finefinefine, she might have noted that Ellen had quantified her statement with the words so soon. And, were she not in that shivery shock, Meredith might have smiled, realized she really had integrated into Derek's family. Somehow. Discounting the hodgepodge she'd built from the Seattle Grace interns, Derek's family was her first family that didn't suck. Her first family that actually expected her to communicate with them on a regular basis. Her first family that she would look forward to communicating with on a regular basis. But Ellen spoke onward when Meredith didn't answer, leaving the words behind in a muddle of other subjects obviously meant to fill the strange gap Meredith was leaving.
"How are you doing? Is it official yet? I'd love to hear the story! Der is a hopeless romantic when he puts his mind to it. It's just that sometimes he gets so excited that he trips all over his plans."
Meredith blinked again.
It was when, to fill the silence, Ellen followed with a hesitant, cautious, "I hope Derek is feeling better?" that Meredith had finally snapped like a twig and started to cry into the phone.
He'll be fine, dear. I'm sure of it.
"Derek's in surgery," she said between pants. "He... asked me to call."
The razor would whir when they turned it on, lowering in pitch as it connected with something to cut. They would start on the left side of his head and slide it back from his face to the nape of his neck. Quick. Sweeping, arcing, repeated motions until they worked their way around to the right side. She'd seen it done. Next would come the disinfectant after they had cleared his beautiful curls away. Betadine. Discolored. Brown. Cold. Sort of like rusty, old blood. They'd tilt his face from side to side to get at him, all angles, and he'd offer no resistance.
"What's wrong?" Ellen said in an innocent, confused way that carried her bewilderment across the continent to Meredith's right ear. Ellen didn't understand. Why would she have understood? Derek was a surgeon. Derek was always in surgery.
They'd put the Foley catheter in next. They'd lift his gown away, show him to everyone in the room. And the endotracheal tube. They'd probably do that at the same time. To keep his airway open. Just tilt his head back, pry his unresisting mouth open, shove a laryngoscope back into his throat, and then the plastic tube would slide down, bend in the direction the scope commanded it to go, push deep into his airway, and he'd be...
At their mercy.
"He's having a craniotomy," Meredith said, wiping at her face, trying to stop, stop, stop and behave like a rational adult. Ellen gasped as the word having, not doing, settled into the vague hiss of static on the line like a louder searing brand. Having. Having. Having. "Brain surgery. He wanted me to call you. He didn't have time. We just... found out. About two hours ago."
They'd pull his body back. His body. To rest on the horseshoe-shaped headrest that would keep his head immobile. They'd cover him with tarps. For sterility. But the piling barriers would also make it harder to remember he was Derek.
Derek Shepherd.
Her fiancé.
"Brain... That's..." Ellen said, like a startled bird, chirp, before her voice fell into a deep well of silence. For a space of moments, she breathed heavily into the phone, and Meredith had to pull the phone away. "Not an aneurysm?"
Meredith's breath caught on Ellen's quiet, hopeless little words.
What happened to your dad?
Ruptured brain aneurysm. One minute he was fine, and the next...
And she realized. She wasn't going to get any reassurance. She wasn't going to get a virtual hug or an it'll be all right. Not from Ellen. Not this time. Ellen had clocked in her mothering time on the Tuesday before, when he'd needed the hospital trip then.
Meredith swallowed everything back into a deep, dark, closed-off pit. Surgeon-in-a-box. She still hadn't mastered it, couldn't do it half as well as some. Cristina. Derek. Dr. Bailey. She took a breath, flattened herself against the fake calm like a tide crawling up a beach, even as everything had threatened to claw loose and suck her into a torrent of tears again.
His hand. The anesthesiologist would keep it in sight. Coloring of the skin underneath the fingernails was important. She'd always loved Derek's hands. Dr. Weller would still be able to see Derek's hand as he pulled the scalpel down over the newly shaven skin.
Box. Box. Think box. Duct tape. Packed. Surgeon-in-a-box. Surgeon via FedEx. Becalmed.
"No, not like that," Meredith explained, calm, collected, hanging on by the barest sinew. She gripped the phone with such ferocity her fingers started to ache. The room fuzzed out as she forced herself away from sobbing by blotting out the necessity of breathing from her head. "When he hit his head on the steering wheel, he tore some veins connecting his..." Arachnoid mater and dura mater... "The area between his skull and his brain. And it's been bleeding and clotting on and off since the accident. There's not enough room in his skull for everything, and it's... The surgery is to get rid of the stuff that shouldn't be there. It's... serious. But, Ellen, we got to it early enough that he should... be fine." And they were getting married. He had to be fine. She'd proposed. She didn't do things like proposing. She didn't... She...
They were getting married.
Surgeon-in-a-box threatened to break and spill out through the seams.
"I'm packing," Ellen said softly. "He's... I'm. Packing. Brain surgery? How long does that? How... Does..."
The rest of the phone call was a barely coherent blur, a test to see how well Meredith could manage to sound even just a speck of fine when she was falling apart. Hours, she said into the whirl. The whirl where all she could hear was the whine of a neurosurgical drill, and all she could see was his hand, just his hand peeking out from underneath the tarps. Not fine. This was not fine. He'd be in intensive care for at least a day, she said. Five days in the hospital, at least. For six to eight weeks after that, he'd feel fatigued and unhealthy.
Ellen was distraught. Brain. Brain surgery, she kept saying.
What if there is? Brain damage, I mean.
It was such a distant reaction from the calm she'd displayed throughout the week before. She'd focused. Before. On the brain injury. But she hadn't been overwhelmed with it. Perhaps she hadn't been willing to submit to panic until it had been definitively announced. And it never had been. The worry had collapsed and disappeared into the moment when Dr. Zalkind had said it was a concussion.
A concussion was easy to sweep away as a minor injury, easy to sweep away as a head injury without really realizing that it was, at the core, a brain injury. Waiting for Derek in the waiting room at Sharon Hospital had been about the tension of not knowing, of wondering whether Derek would be all right. Now, it was about whether they could fix him from not being all right. Fix. Damage already done.
Brain. Brain surgery.
Damage done. Could get worse.
The why of her reaction really didn't matter. Ellen was distraught. It was a reality Meredith somehow hadn't expected. The woman had been so calm and supportive before. And, now? Now... Meredith felt helpless to offer any sort of comfort beyond the breathless assurance that, "He'll be fine. He'll be fine. He'll be fine." And even as she said the words, she started to cry harder. Because, deep down in the darkest pit of herself, she worried. Not fine. Not fine at all.
Denial, finefinefine, offered nothing comforting to untwist her jumbled daymare. It didn't blot away the horrible suspicion that he would be there somewhere. Somewhere underneath the tarps. He would be so scared. Somewhere. Inside. Where he couldn't do anything but be scared. Because the rest of him would be under anesthesia, cut open with a drill.
A drill.
A freaking drill.
Not fine.
She worried that she was speaking nothing but lies. Because Derek was a pale hand in OR 2, and he had no voice. He had no power. And he was hurt. Really, truly hurt. And he might die. He very possibly might die. Or he might wake up broken.
When Ellen mentioned calling his sisters, somewhere in the tangle of their collective sobs and Meredith's guilt-ridden consoling - Lies! -- Meredith felt even worse. Because she should have offered to do it. She should have. But suddenly, she just couldn't. She couldn't break the news to four more people who loved him. She was barely dealing with Ellen. Barely dealing. She couldn't breathe. She couldn't think. She was being irrational. Derek wasn't afraid. He was unconscious. He'd wake up after hours and wonder why the hole in his life seemed like the barest slice of a moment.
The whole phone call with Ellen was proving to her what a razor sharp line she walked. It cut the soles of her feet down to the bone. She could offer to support Derek all she wanted. She could offer to be there. She could call his mother. She could. But she couldn't. She couldn't pretend she was fine, or that it'd be fine, or that he'd be fine.
Because he was her Derek, and he was having brain surgery. And nothing about brain surgery was okay.
Everything around her cracked like the fake slice of land behind a broken mirror as she hung up the phone, and she started wandering aimlessly, not really paying attention to where her feet were taking her. People congratulated her here and there, a scattershot of voices in the din, but the words felt hollow to her ears. Hollow, wrong, not fine. She couldn't get married if he died.
Really not fine. She was.
She wandered into room 309 without thinking. Without...
"Meredith!" Susan said with a smile, looking up from her magazine as Meredith stopped three feet inside the doorframe, committed to being in the room, but not entering like she knew she was welcome, not moving, not thinking, just... There.
Meredith crossed her arms. Cold. Was it cold? Susan was sitting up in bed, looking healthy and rosy and cheerful. Recovering from her surgery. She'd probably go home in the next day. Maybe later in the evening. No heart monitor clipped her finger. No intravenous line snaked into her wrist. No medical machinery hummed. She seemed almost like she was staying at a hotel with nurses. Susan didn't look cold.
It probably wasn't really that cold.
"Thatch is out with the girls," Susan continued quickly, almost reflexively. It was her way of telling Meredith that the man she was scared to relate with was not there and wouldn't be there for a while. In the room sat only Susan. Meredith recognized Susan's method vaguely against the roar, roar, roaring in her head. It was the secret code that meant she didn't have to dodge into a linen closet somewhere. Which was good. Because she didn't think she could deal with Thatcher right then. She felt like a feather would crumple her into a heap, knock her over into a helpless Meredith pile of sobbing, frail little Meredith bits.
Seriousness crept across Susan's face as the last syllable skipped into silence. She glanced up and down at Meredith. Meredith, who stood there, eyes puffy, hair in stringy tendrils, face pale and blotched, makeup run away from her like Houdini out of a chained box, streaky, smeared. She hovered in the entryway, shivering, mussed, like she was some sort of disastrous surgical refugee from the bomb scare, post bomb. Meredith stared back at Susan. Stared. Stared. Stared. Because if she moved, she was going to cry. And if she cried again, she wouldn't stop. Because Derek was having brain surgery. And it was really hitting her. Hitting her like a deer on a two-lane, rural road in Connecticut at night.
And nothing was okay.
Susan's eyes narrowed. "Are you all right?"
No.
Meredith burst into tears all over again. She walked over to the bed with a stilted, hitching set of steps that seemed more like wobbling attempts at not falling over than they seemed like strides. She collapsed down onto the edge of the bed, sniffling, heaving, staring at the thermal blanket she'd just creased further into the mattress. She picked up an edge and fiddled with it, tore at it, worried at it, felt along the seam with the pads of her fingers. Because it was better than ripping at her own fingers.
"Please, don't... I know..." she managed, complete thoughts shattering like glass on tile before they hit the edges of her lips.
Susan scooted up. Meredith felt a warm hand on her shoulder. "What's wrong?" Susan said quietly. Her arms came around Meredith, and Meredith felt herself being pulled back onto the bed. Pulled and enveloped in something she'd never ever had before. Not even before Ellis had been diagnosed.
Stop sniveling, and buck up. You're my daughter. You're not a weak little girl.
Meredith curled up and sobbed.
She was a grown woman. She felt pathetic. Pathetic, and yet, "I need a mom," she whispered into Susan's nightgown. "Pl... please. I'm sorry. This isn't. I'm being." Selfish. "I just... I need. Aren't moms supposed to fix it? Please. I need it to be fixed. I need it."
Susan didn't pry. She just held Meredith, rubbed her back, whispered shushing noises.
Her breaths slowed. The moments crawled into a glacial, weary procession. People passed by Susan's door. Noisy. Tumbling bits of sound poked through Susan's continuous, soothing waves of shushing. And Meredith kept falling, falling, falling into something deep and cold and unyielding like the gelid depths of the Sound. She wondered if they had drilled his skull open yet, or if they were still making holes, or if they'd even started that part yet at all. She wondered if some part of him, somewhere deeply entrenched in the soul that always twinkled in his eyes, was awake and terrified, even though it was a ridiculous notion. Or was it? She'd had a conversation over her corpse with Denny and Doc and... others. Was being unconscious truly so different? She wondered if she'd said, "I love you," enough to make a difference if it came down to a moment. If it came down to a gavel fall of decision. If there was a choice. She wondered. Would his dad be a bridge like her mother had been?
Code Blue!
Footsteps crunched up into a hurtling swarm of tapping, slamming, shuffling. Past the door, the herd of nurses and doctors thundered, down the hall, crash cart rumbling and buried somewhere in the crush of them. Meredith flinched as she heard the thump of electricity jolting through a maybe-corpse just a few rooms down. She buried her nose into Susan's nightgown, and Susan let her. Just held her.
Not Derek. Not Derek. Not Derek. Derek was nowhere near.
Please, be okay, she pleaded.
I need.
Palms slid up and down her back, rustling softly in the bubble of silence in the room. Not like Derek did it. But... Shushing laved her ears like the roll and hiss of calming waves when she went to the beach to read in a lawn chair under the beat of sunshine. Not like Derek did it. But... Fingers stroked her hair and the tickle of her follicles shifting in their tangled jumble sent a warm, numb drawl of relaxing sensation down her nerve tips. Not like Derek did it. But...
Perfect in its own way.
The horrid tension unwound itself from her bones and her muscles until all that was left of her grief were the spasms of crying, which died out moments after. Sobbing reduced to shaky breaths and then to sighs and then to nothing but rasping things that kept her conscious in the lull. When Meredith finally sat up, pulled back, and began to wipe at her burning, stinging, itchy eyes, she managed a low, exhausted, throaty, "Thank you." It didn't feel like enough. It didn't feel like anything.
Selfish.
Susan smiled. "Do you want to talk about it? Or have I fulfilled my motherly duties?"
Meredith sniffled and shook her head. No talking. Please. And yet she couldn't get her mind away from him. "I proposed. It's official. I'm wearing a ring," she said, thrusting her hand out for Susan to see. She couldn't hold her hand still. It shook in the air like she'd sucked down one too many Jolt colas and hadn't come off the caffeine high yet. Except it was something else. Something deep and churning and wrenching. Definitely not a high. She bit her lip.
Susan reached out and grasped her hand, warm, calming, and the shaking stilled with the new support to brace the limb in place. "Congratulations," Susan said softly. Her voice hitched on a syllable that didn't mean a thing, as if she were debating. Press or don't press. Press or don't press. She sighed. "Meredith... Tell me what's wrong... You were so happy on Sunday."
Meredith breathed softly. Tell her. Tell her. Just get it out. Pull the knife out of the sucking wound and jab it in again. Maybe it would hurt less the second time with the second mom.
"I..." she said, stumbling on the word and giving up when nothing else came after it.
"Would you like to come to dinner tomorrow?" Susan prodded. "Thatch is taking me home tonight. I think I can have something guest-worthy ready by then. The girls will be out. It would just be us. I'll even make Thatcher leave, if you want."
Meredith sniffed and shook her head. "I can't. I have to be here."
"I thought you'd just started your thirty-six today," Susan said, frowning. "They're making you stay an extra day?"
"Derek's sick," she whispered. The knife slipped between her ribs. "He's having surgery. I have to be here. I have to... Be here." It didn't. It didn't hurt less.
It hurt more.
And then the tears started all over again, more like an exhausted leak than the thunder burst from before. The mothering started all over again, and it was warm and loving and Meredith held onto Susan like she was the only thread attaching Meredith to life. Because she needed it. She needed to be mommed. She needed to have someone tell her Derek would be fine, someone who could tell her, even if it were a grave falsity, and still have it sound like scientific law. Derek would be fine. Not Cristina, because she'd say it with snark or sarcasm or a bitter drop of realism, and realism meant Derek would not necessarily be fine. Cristina couldn't fake the mom thing at gunpoint. Not Izzie or George. They wouldn't work. She had no idea why. They just seemed... Wrong. And Alex's internal wiring seemed to disallow any sort of sugar coating. Derek would have worked. Derek made even the worst things seem okay when he held her, and the soft, laving whispers of his voice could make her believe the sky was green or that gravity was an option. But Derek was the not fine prying open cataclysmic rifts in her composure, the not fine shredding up her heart into little, bleeding bits. And he couldn't be there for her. He had to be there for him. He had to not die. And that was a hard job. Fixing a cut open skull. Fixing a bleeding brain. Dissolving the drowning clutch of anesthesia on his central nervous system. Healing. Hard job.
She sniffled. "I'm sorry," she told Susan as the waves subsided again.
"For what?"
"I was mean to you until..." I needed this.
"Forgiven," Susan replied without hesitation. "It's what moms do."
"I'd like to do the dinner thing," Meredith said. "Maybe next week after I take Derek... home. I need... I want to try this. I do."
"All right," Susan said.
Meredith stood and brushed herself off, wiping fiercely at her eyes. "I'm going to go wait..."
"You're welcome to stay. You don't have to talk. You could just sit."
"No, no I have to... Thank you. I just... Have to..." Get books. Do something else. Move. Not think about the fact that Derek was lying on a table, bleeding, exposed, and maybe dying.
She finally did the thing she'd been trying so hard to decimate from her repertoire. She couldn't. Couldn't stop. She'd breached the threshold of the room and taken a single step beyond before Susan's calm, "Meredith?" reined her to a halt. She paused and turned, sort of like a slow-motion replay on a sports channel. Aaaaand, Meredith pauses on the brink of the end zone. Why isn't she running for the touchdown? What made her stop? She should be going, going, gone! I know, Bart. It's a shame when these athletes fuck up.
Run.
Run away.
Susan gave her a beautiful, warm, comfortable smile. "Derek will be fine," she said. "I'll call you about dinner later this week."
Meredith managed a watery smile. "Okay."
And then she left, but somehow, it wasn't fleeing anymore.
The congratulations and condolences flitting at her from all directions didn't stab at her anymore, didn't make her steps falter like she was slogging through a sucking pit of mud. She made a circuit of the surgical ward two or three times before she altered course toward the locker rooms. She pulled some of her books from her locker, grabbed a highlighter that may or may not have still been working. The moments passed, each one a small eon of its own, long enough to witness a star coalesce from nothing and die into dust.
She ended up in the gallery, which was empty. All of the ORs were still taken. The board was a wall of black, scribbly text. Derek Shepherd had been hastily markered in on the row for OR 2, for once not listed as the surgeon, but as the patient. Everyone was in surgery. Everyone except Meredith.
Izzie and George stood down below, swathed in their surgical scrubs. They hovered over an open body cavity under the instruction of one of the general surgical residents. Dr. Lu. They'd been there since before Meredith had slipped out of lab running to check on Derek the last time. The time she'd found him in the conference room, yelling at Mark.
They didn't know yet. Unless the gossip network had somehow breached the sterile barrier dividing the operating rooms from the rest of the surgical wing, which, given the fact that Nurse Debbie was the ringleader of said gossip network, was sort of possible. But Izzie caught Meredith's eye once as she looked up, and there was no wild blaming or happiness or anything cradled in the soft brown of her eyes except the usual casual airs of friendship. George looked up and quirked his eyebrows at her in a brief hello. And then they both looked back down at the bloody mess waiting for them to fix it. They didn't know.
Meredith had no idea where Alex and Cristina were. She didn't really care. They'd find her if they wanted her, and she didn't have the energy to try and beat the flow of the whispers burbling through the halls like the swell and churn of water over rocks, like rapids. Some of it was true. Some of it was pure fabrication.
I heard Dr. Grey proposed to Dr. Shepherd! True. I heard Dr. Shepherd is dying! Maybe. I heard that her ring is worth more than my car! Maybe. I heard Dr. Montgomery left town because she heard about the proposal! Fabricated. I heard they had sex on a plane! True. I heard she's doing the Chief on the side! Fabricated.
I heard, I heard, I heard.
She bowed her head into her hands and leaned her elbows onto the edges of her book in the margins on the left and right, keeping it spread against her knees, pinning it like an offending little bug. She let the diamond of her ring dig a deep, painful pit into her cheek as she grouped her fingers into fists and jammed her cheeks down onto them. She tried to read the words, but they spilled into a blurry mess that didn't make sense. The pictures blotted like colored islands dotting a sea of murky gray where the text was supposed to be. And nothing made any sense.
Nothing made any sense at all.
She didn't look up as the door opened. Someone took a step into the room, and the hairs on the back of her neck began to stand on end in a subtle whisper of foreboding. A deep, somber breath filled the silence. The presence hovered and shifted and fidgeted like someone preparing dreadful news. Meredith leaned into her hands, clutched at herself, trying not to be sick. Someone had come to find her and tell her that...
Derek.
She swallowed, still refusing to look as she felt the ominous presence slide into the seat one away from her on the left. No words. Nothing. She finally looked up and found Chief Webber easing back into a slouch. He looked at her, silent, but his face wasn't a bad news face. Just a worried one.
"How are you doing, Meredith?" he asked, his voice low and honey-rich. He pulled his palms over the gray fuzz of his hair and wrapped the motion around to pull down the flesh of his cheeks. His eyes narrowed in an understanding, pitying gaze, and it was...
Too much.
He looked...
"Seriously?" she snapped, her voice finding unexpected strength in the burbling well of anger she'd almost forgotten about in the chaos of Derek. Derek maybe dying. Derek maybe broken. "You have the nerve to ask me that now? Now, when my fiancé is... Now. Seriously?"
"I poked my head into OR 2," he said. "He's stable. Everything is going fine. They were just removing the skull flap when I left."
A vague trickle of momentary relief - Derek alive! -- drowned under the rumble roar of the tidal wave. Derek had his skull open. Guessing. She'd dealt with the guessing. The knowing. The knowing was different. Different and scary and painful. Derek was lying cold and alone on a table, exposed, vulnerable. If Dr. Weller decided in a delirious moment of whimsy that he no longer wanted to be a neurosurgeon, he could walk away, and Derek would be left behind, gaping open, bloody, and he would die. Derek. Derek had a hole in his skull. While he slept, but not really slumbered, while he was removed from the world. If Dr. Weller walked away, Derek would die. Definitively. There wouldn't be any sort of choice involved. Derek existed because Dr. Weller kept him existing. Derek was a hand, poking out from underneath a tarp. Derek was a body, nearly naked underneath the covers, tubes and wires dictating his life for him. Derek was living, but he was trapped in his mortal fear.
And the Chief had intruded. The Chief. A general surgeon. A surgeon who operated on livers and intestines and stomachs, on pancreases and on other things. Organs and body parts that had nothing to do with an open skull. Nothing to do with brains. The Chief had had no reason to be in that room. The room where Derek lay cut open. None.
A cold spear slipped down her throat, scraping, stinging, and her heart began to scream with a freezing, bitter sort of pain. A weary breath became a suppressed explosion as she held it down against her diaphragm and squeezed her lungs tight within her tiny frame. Tired, pent up rage simmered. She drew her fingers down across the pages of her book. The pads of her fingers squeaked against the filmy paper, and her knuckles turned a bloodless white.
"Why did you poke your head in at all?" she said, quiet, dangerous.
"To get an update for-"
Bad answer. You. To get an update for you, he'd been going to say. You. Meredith. Adulterous fake-child.
"He doesn't want people looking at him," she snarled before he could finish. "You're not a neurosurgeon. You don't need to be there. He doesn't want it, and there's no way you couldn't have known. He asked you to keep the interns out of it. He asked you for no gallery. He asked for a private hospital room. He refused to let Mark Sloane, the best plastic surgeon on this side of the country, close the incision for him. He didn't even want to get this done here at all. Don't tell me you didn't connect the dots. You're a surgeon. You're smart. So, spare me the updates, and leave me alone. Leave Derek alone. Just leave us alone, Chief."
He couldn't keep doing this, taking liberties, insinuating himself. Not at the expense of Derek, who, lately, seemed to be the only person who was taking hits for it. It. The thing with Ellis and the Chief. Being Ellis Grey's dirty mistress did not mean the Chief had a say in Meredith's life. She'd grown up well outside the sphere of Seattle Grace and its gossip-ridden halls. Richard Webber hadn't fought any harder for her than Thatcher had. Richard Webber had fought less. He'd actively said no and stayed with Adele. Richard Webber was not her freaking father. Not now. Not then. Not ever.
And he had to stop.
"Meredith," the Chief said, soothing, "I know you're nervous, but-"
She doubted Cristina had been similarly consoled when it had been Burke lying there. And when the intern had been George, and his dad had been the one on the table, it'd been nothing but the clinical stuff, using the very logical justification about doctor patient confidentiality. And that was all fine. Except one was not like the others. She was special.
And it sucked.
"Stop trying to be my dad!" she said, fuming, bitter, mean, nasty, angry, all sorts of ugly things. She flung her book down on the seat beside her and stood, panting. "You're not my freaking dad! I don't need coddling, and I sure as hell don't need to be patronized by the man who ruined Derek's career and screwed up the family that was supposed to be my real one. Seriously!"
The Chief blinked and swallowed. His eyes widened, and she felt a perverse sort of glee. Just because she was sweet and friendly Meredith, unassuming Meredith, the Meredith who'd just died, lost her mother, and was sad from time to time, did not mean she had no freaking teeth.
"What?" he said.
"Don't play stupid with me," she snapped. "I'm not some weak little trauma case for you to protect. You shouldn't have stuck your nose in. Chief was Derek's dream, and you spat on it just to guarantee I had a warm body in bed with me every night? Seriously? Making him choose between me and his dream job? Seriously? How the hell do you think that makes me feel? If you have to clip his wings just to get him to treat me right, I don't want him anyway. I'm an adult. I can say no. I can make my own decisions. And Derek? He's a full-grown man. He can juggle his own commitments without you as a freaking ringleader, and he can make his own choices about his love life. He can do whatever the hell he wants as long as he stays breathing. He might be an arrogant, self-loving bastard at times, but he's always been there for me when I've needed it, regardless of this stupid, life-sucking job, married or not, and he's... And now he's... Now, he might die. So, shut up. Just... Shut up, and go away. Before I say something else I won't regret."
The Chief stared at her, blinking as her rage receded to a simmer.
"Meredith," he said. "Derek withdrew himself from consideration when he met with me this morning. He's not in the running for Chief anymore."
The world stopped, and the remaining fury fell away for a moment like deadwood in a storm of wind.
"He... What?"
"He said he didn't want it anymore. He loves you, and he loves the cutting, not the paperwork, he said."
Dreams can change. I love you, and I want you. And it was just a job.
"He," she said, her voice falling into a warble. She sniffled and drew her hands across her cheeks. The skin of her cheeks mashed up against her nose. She scraped again. Everything blurred. "Said that?"
"Yes," Chief Webber said.
Her palms came away wet and sticky. Her eyes burned. He'd told her. He'd told her she was more important than the job, but it was one thing to speculate that he didn't even want the job anymore now that he had her, and another thing entirely to hear that he'd said it out loud. To someone else.
The words bled little drops of reality that struck her skin like the spray of water from a showerhead.
Derek had given up his dream.
I sure as hell won't be able fuck around with people's nervous systems using a knife.
What if I'm not Head of Neurosurgery anymore, Meredith?
Derek hadn't given up his dream. He'd changed it. Realigned it to the person he'd become when he'd left New York. The person he'd always been under the skin, the person who'd bloomed in the drizzly, Seattle air, away from the grip of the bustle, the roar, the thrill of a city that never went dark or slept. The person she'd, by a quirk of chance, gotten to know and cherish and desire and love.
You've always seemed more to me like you're in it for the feel-good, not for the money or the clout.
He didn't want to do the managerial crap. He didn't want the bragging rights of a title. He didn't want a paycheck bursting with zeroes. He wanted love and a family. He wanted to cut. To help and fix and save like some real life super-hero, but not because it was cool, or because it made him better in the eyes of his peers, but because of the helping, the fixing, the saving. Because it made him feel whole.
Derek Shepherd was a surgeon, and after this craniotomy, he might not ever be a surgeon again. He might be damaged. He might be... unable. All he wanted to do was cut. All he wanted was Meredith. And kids. A family. And the fact that he'd come out and said so to the Chief, hours before an operation that could potentially diminish him...
I'm supposed to be the one fixing this... I don't have this. I fix this... I can fix...
Derek Shepherd had given up Chief.
I said yes, right?
Derek Shepherd had said yes.
Derek Shepherd had finally figured himself out.
"Oh," she said, her voice low and weepy, even as she laughed. Softly. Derek had figured himself out. And for a moment, just a moment, she was happy. From all the suckitude and hurt and awfulness interspersed with the perfection of the last week and a half, he'd... figured himself out. He'd figured himself out, and they were getting married.
She was engaged!
As the manic laughter died away, she collapsed back into the chair and hugged herself. The yo-yo slowed, shivered on the end of its string, and stopped in a pit far below the space she'd started in. Exhaustion pulled her into numbness. Numbness that surrendered to ache and then to sharp, throbbing pains.
It seemed wrong that all of these wonderful things could be happening on the brink of something with the potential to become so awful.
Derek might die. Derek might break.
"Well, it still gave you no right," she whispered over the lump in her throat, grating bits of razor sharp pain sliding up and down her vocal cords with each syllable. "None at all. That was his decision to make. You never should have factored into it."
"I'm sorry, Meredith."
She turned to Chief Webber and narrowed her eyes, staring angrily, tiredly, sadly at him. Her face was blotchy and red and tear-stained. She didn't care. "You're my boss. Not my dad. Act like it."
She had a family with Cristina and Izzie and George and Alex. She was inheriting a family with Derek. She was repairing a family with Susan.
Richard Webber was not her family. Richard Webber belonged to a dead woman. An idea that was gone from possibility.
He stared at her for a long moment. His hands cupped his knees and clenched, scrunching up the fabric of his scrubs. He sighed. As he stood to leave, he said quietly, heavily, as though he'd failed at something, "All right."
For a moment, he looked heartbroken, but then something shifted on his face like a gear falling into place, and he turned back into the stoic surgeon she knew he was. Surgeon-in-a-box. She had a feeling she was staring at the master. She didn't let it break her resolve. The man had had no right. No right at all. His advice had nearly backfired. Forcing Derek to choose, especially when Derek hadn't even known what he'd really wanted with his life, not in any sort of quantifiable sense... It had nearly, truly backfired. She might never have had the ring or the moments of bliss when he'd proposed or when she'd proposed. She might never have had those moments, and they might have both been miserable and still drowning in mistrust.
It's not a mistake...
"Chief?" she asked as he pushed open the door to the gallery. It was a whim. A whim to ask, but...
He turned to look at her. "Yes, Mered-Dr. Grey?"
"Would you have picked him? If it weren't for me?"
"If I'm your boss," he said, his tone flat and quiet, "You know I can't answer that."
She regarded him for a moment. "Okay," she said with a tiny, shivery nod. "I can live with that."
He nodded and sighed. His gaze darted to her finger for a flicker of a moment. The mask cracked just a little. The skin around his eyes crinkled as he narrowed his gaze. "Congratulations, by the way," he said. And then he was gone, and she was left again in silence.
Fandom: Grey's Anatomy
Pairing: Duh. (Mer/Der)
Rating: M
Timeline: Post Time After Time.
Well, if the last two parts haven't cemented for you why I absolutely had to do this Derek-needs-surgery storyline, hopefully this one will do it :) These last three chapters have been FUN for me. So much juicy character-analysis goodness! My sandbox is a very fun place for me right now. I really hope you enjoy this, but if you don't, of course I'm always open to suggestions! I hope to have Part 37 up on Friday night if my poor Super Special Beta Reader isn't dead yet from the text overload. My chapters seem to be getting longer and longer on average, lol.
Thank you, btw, to
apurplepatch for the adorable icon :)
~~~~~
Meredith called Ellen while she was still clinging to the strange numbness. While smiling at her shiny ring and saying everything would be fine was still working. Mostly. It was still working, though the façade had begun to crack. It had been thirty minutes since they'd wheeled him away.
Derek, most likely, hadn't even been put under yet, most likely was still babbling to the scrub nurses, high, not caring that he didn't care they were wheeling him into the bright, sterile, austere OR 2. Can you put my ex-hair in a bag after you shave it off? Mere wants it. With a goofy smile and floppy limbs, he'd watch the scenery passing by and probably wouldn't really think much about it beyond simple thoughts.
Bright lights. They hurt my eyes. People are staring at me. Lots of masked faces. They're lifting me onto a table. Sterilizing the razor. Anesthesiologist's eyes are crinkling. I should smile back. Why? Do I care?
She shook her head, trying not to worry. Trying not to focus on it. Her watch came up to her face in a spastic, habitual motion before she could stop herself. Pass the time. Pass the time. Was time passing? Her watch. Thirty-three minutes. They had to be starting... Stop. Stop it. Stop thinking about...
Meredith had sat down in an unpopulated area of the waiting room and dialed the number saved in Derek's contact list, saved on the phone she'd used to take the porny pictures of herself. She hadn't yet gotten around to putting the number in her own phone. It'd been barely more than four days since she'd left Connecticut. She'd assumed she'd have more time to start acclimating to the whole actively having a family thing.
She'd assumed.
A cheerful hello was what finally forced her from her ominous musing, if only for a moment.
"Hi..." Meredith said, hesitant, unsure as she sifted through the fog that held her in its grip. Fine. All fine. Everything. Peachy. Derek wasn't lying cold and alone in a sea of people, practically naked on some gurney while they-- "Ellen?"
Breathe deep, Dr. Shepherd. Think about something happy.
She imagined his eyelids drooping as they pushed the mask over his face. He'd smile. Because the gas was a sort of giddy thing, and the drugs already crippling him made him not really know any better. She imagined him trying to think of something, only to have it all fade away into an inkblot. The sounds would be the last to go, but the descent into silence would be quick. Seconds. Out. And Derek would be asleep.
Derek would be gone.
Blink, and she was back in the waiting room, clutching Derek's phone, and everything started to crumble. Her breaths sharpened. The room fuzzed as her eyes watered. But, still, she sat there, fine. Everything would be fine.
Fine.
Ellen paused for a heartbeat, just one thump-thump that rattled in Meredith's head, before she answered Meredith's wispy greeting with a warm, "Meredith! Hello, dear. I hadn't expected to hear from you so soon."
Meredith blinked at that, and were she not sort of vibrating underneath the dull hum of shock, finefinefine, she might have noted that Ellen had quantified her statement with the words so soon. And, were she not in that shivery shock, Meredith might have smiled, realized she really had integrated into Derek's family. Somehow. Discounting the hodgepodge she'd built from the Seattle Grace interns, Derek's family was her first family that didn't suck. Her first family that actually expected her to communicate with them on a regular basis. Her first family that she would look forward to communicating with on a regular basis. But Ellen spoke onward when Meredith didn't answer, leaving the words behind in a muddle of other subjects obviously meant to fill the strange gap Meredith was leaving.
"How are you doing? Is it official yet? I'd love to hear the story! Der is a hopeless romantic when he puts his mind to it. It's just that sometimes he gets so excited that he trips all over his plans."
Meredith blinked again.
It was when, to fill the silence, Ellen followed with a hesitant, cautious, "I hope Derek is feeling better?" that Meredith had finally snapped like a twig and started to cry into the phone.
He'll be fine, dear. I'm sure of it.
"Derek's in surgery," she said between pants. "He... asked me to call."
The razor would whir when they turned it on, lowering in pitch as it connected with something to cut. They would start on the left side of his head and slide it back from his face to the nape of his neck. Quick. Sweeping, arcing, repeated motions until they worked their way around to the right side. She'd seen it done. Next would come the disinfectant after they had cleared his beautiful curls away. Betadine. Discolored. Brown. Cold. Sort of like rusty, old blood. They'd tilt his face from side to side to get at him, all angles, and he'd offer no resistance.
"What's wrong?" Ellen said in an innocent, confused way that carried her bewilderment across the continent to Meredith's right ear. Ellen didn't understand. Why would she have understood? Derek was a surgeon. Derek was always in surgery.
They'd put the Foley catheter in next. They'd lift his gown away, show him to everyone in the room. And the endotracheal tube. They'd probably do that at the same time. To keep his airway open. Just tilt his head back, pry his unresisting mouth open, shove a laryngoscope back into his throat, and then the plastic tube would slide down, bend in the direction the scope commanded it to go, push deep into his airway, and he'd be...
At their mercy.
"He's having a craniotomy," Meredith said, wiping at her face, trying to stop, stop, stop and behave like a rational adult. Ellen gasped as the word having, not doing, settled into the vague hiss of static on the line like a louder searing brand. Having. Having. Having. "Brain surgery. He wanted me to call you. He didn't have time. We just... found out. About two hours ago."
They'd pull his body back. His body. To rest on the horseshoe-shaped headrest that would keep his head immobile. They'd cover him with tarps. For sterility. But the piling barriers would also make it harder to remember he was Derek.
Derek Shepherd.
Her fiancé.
"Brain... That's..." Ellen said, like a startled bird, chirp, before her voice fell into a deep well of silence. For a space of moments, she breathed heavily into the phone, and Meredith had to pull the phone away. "Not an aneurysm?"
Meredith's breath caught on Ellen's quiet, hopeless little words.
What happened to your dad?
Ruptured brain aneurysm. One minute he was fine, and the next...
And she realized. She wasn't going to get any reassurance. She wasn't going to get a virtual hug or an it'll be all right. Not from Ellen. Not this time. Ellen had clocked in her mothering time on the Tuesday before, when he'd needed the hospital trip then.
Meredith swallowed everything back into a deep, dark, closed-off pit. Surgeon-in-a-box. She still hadn't mastered it, couldn't do it half as well as some. Cristina. Derek. Dr. Bailey. She took a breath, flattened herself against the fake calm like a tide crawling up a beach, even as everything had threatened to claw loose and suck her into a torrent of tears again.
His hand. The anesthesiologist would keep it in sight. Coloring of the skin underneath the fingernails was important. She'd always loved Derek's hands. Dr. Weller would still be able to see Derek's hand as he pulled the scalpel down over the newly shaven skin.
Box. Box. Think box. Duct tape. Packed. Surgeon-in-a-box. Surgeon via FedEx. Becalmed.
"No, not like that," Meredith explained, calm, collected, hanging on by the barest sinew. She gripped the phone with such ferocity her fingers started to ache. The room fuzzed out as she forced herself away from sobbing by blotting out the necessity of breathing from her head. "When he hit his head on the steering wheel, he tore some veins connecting his..." Arachnoid mater and dura mater... "The area between his skull and his brain. And it's been bleeding and clotting on and off since the accident. There's not enough room in his skull for everything, and it's... The surgery is to get rid of the stuff that shouldn't be there. It's... serious. But, Ellen, we got to it early enough that he should... be fine." And they were getting married. He had to be fine. She'd proposed. She didn't do things like proposing. She didn't... She...
They were getting married.
Surgeon-in-a-box threatened to break and spill out through the seams.
"I'm packing," Ellen said softly. "He's... I'm. Packing. Brain surgery? How long does that? How... Does..."
The rest of the phone call was a barely coherent blur, a test to see how well Meredith could manage to sound even just a speck of fine when she was falling apart. Hours, she said into the whirl. The whirl where all she could hear was the whine of a neurosurgical drill, and all she could see was his hand, just his hand peeking out from underneath the tarps. Not fine. This was not fine. He'd be in intensive care for at least a day, she said. Five days in the hospital, at least. For six to eight weeks after that, he'd feel fatigued and unhealthy.
Ellen was distraught. Brain. Brain surgery, she kept saying.
What if there is? Brain damage, I mean.
It was such a distant reaction from the calm she'd displayed throughout the week before. She'd focused. Before. On the brain injury. But she hadn't been overwhelmed with it. Perhaps she hadn't been willing to submit to panic until it had been definitively announced. And it never had been. The worry had collapsed and disappeared into the moment when Dr. Zalkind had said it was a concussion.
A concussion was easy to sweep away as a minor injury, easy to sweep away as a head injury without really realizing that it was, at the core, a brain injury. Waiting for Derek in the waiting room at Sharon Hospital had been about the tension of not knowing, of wondering whether Derek would be all right. Now, it was about whether they could fix him from not being all right. Fix. Damage already done.
Brain. Brain surgery.
Damage done. Could get worse.
The why of her reaction really didn't matter. Ellen was distraught. It was a reality Meredith somehow hadn't expected. The woman had been so calm and supportive before. And, now? Now... Meredith felt helpless to offer any sort of comfort beyond the breathless assurance that, "He'll be fine. He'll be fine. He'll be fine." And even as she said the words, she started to cry harder. Because, deep down in the darkest pit of herself, she worried. Not fine. Not fine at all.
Denial, finefinefine, offered nothing comforting to untwist her jumbled daymare. It didn't blot away the horrible suspicion that he would be there somewhere. Somewhere underneath the tarps. He would be so scared. Somewhere. Inside. Where he couldn't do anything but be scared. Because the rest of him would be under anesthesia, cut open with a drill.
A drill.
A freaking drill.
Not fine.
She worried that she was speaking nothing but lies. Because Derek was a pale hand in OR 2, and he had no voice. He had no power. And he was hurt. Really, truly hurt. And he might die. He very possibly might die. Or he might wake up broken.
When Ellen mentioned calling his sisters, somewhere in the tangle of their collective sobs and Meredith's guilt-ridden consoling - Lies! -- Meredith felt even worse. Because she should have offered to do it. She should have. But suddenly, she just couldn't. She couldn't break the news to four more people who loved him. She was barely dealing with Ellen. Barely dealing. She couldn't breathe. She couldn't think. She was being irrational. Derek wasn't afraid. He was unconscious. He'd wake up after hours and wonder why the hole in his life seemed like the barest slice of a moment.
The whole phone call with Ellen was proving to her what a razor sharp line she walked. It cut the soles of her feet down to the bone. She could offer to support Derek all she wanted. She could offer to be there. She could call his mother. She could. But she couldn't. She couldn't pretend she was fine, or that it'd be fine, or that he'd be fine.
Because he was her Derek, and he was having brain surgery. And nothing about brain surgery was okay.
Everything around her cracked like the fake slice of land behind a broken mirror as she hung up the phone, and she started wandering aimlessly, not really paying attention to where her feet were taking her. People congratulated her here and there, a scattershot of voices in the din, but the words felt hollow to her ears. Hollow, wrong, not fine. She couldn't get married if he died.
Really not fine. She was.
She wandered into room 309 without thinking. Without...
"Meredith!" Susan said with a smile, looking up from her magazine as Meredith stopped three feet inside the doorframe, committed to being in the room, but not entering like she knew she was welcome, not moving, not thinking, just... There.
Meredith crossed her arms. Cold. Was it cold? Susan was sitting up in bed, looking healthy and rosy and cheerful. Recovering from her surgery. She'd probably go home in the next day. Maybe later in the evening. No heart monitor clipped her finger. No intravenous line snaked into her wrist. No medical machinery hummed. She seemed almost like she was staying at a hotel with nurses. Susan didn't look cold.
It probably wasn't really that cold.
"Thatch is out with the girls," Susan continued quickly, almost reflexively. It was her way of telling Meredith that the man she was scared to relate with was not there and wouldn't be there for a while. In the room sat only Susan. Meredith recognized Susan's method vaguely against the roar, roar, roaring in her head. It was the secret code that meant she didn't have to dodge into a linen closet somewhere. Which was good. Because she didn't think she could deal with Thatcher right then. She felt like a feather would crumple her into a heap, knock her over into a helpless Meredith pile of sobbing, frail little Meredith bits.
Seriousness crept across Susan's face as the last syllable skipped into silence. She glanced up and down at Meredith. Meredith, who stood there, eyes puffy, hair in stringy tendrils, face pale and blotched, makeup run away from her like Houdini out of a chained box, streaky, smeared. She hovered in the entryway, shivering, mussed, like she was some sort of disastrous surgical refugee from the bomb scare, post bomb. Meredith stared back at Susan. Stared. Stared. Stared. Because if she moved, she was going to cry. And if she cried again, she wouldn't stop. Because Derek was having brain surgery. And it was really hitting her. Hitting her like a deer on a two-lane, rural road in Connecticut at night.
And nothing was okay.
Susan's eyes narrowed. "Are you all right?"
No.
Meredith burst into tears all over again. She walked over to the bed with a stilted, hitching set of steps that seemed more like wobbling attempts at not falling over than they seemed like strides. She collapsed down onto the edge of the bed, sniffling, heaving, staring at the thermal blanket she'd just creased further into the mattress. She picked up an edge and fiddled with it, tore at it, worried at it, felt along the seam with the pads of her fingers. Because it was better than ripping at her own fingers.
"Please, don't... I know..." she managed, complete thoughts shattering like glass on tile before they hit the edges of her lips.
Susan scooted up. Meredith felt a warm hand on her shoulder. "What's wrong?" Susan said quietly. Her arms came around Meredith, and Meredith felt herself being pulled back onto the bed. Pulled and enveloped in something she'd never ever had before. Not even before Ellis had been diagnosed.
Stop sniveling, and buck up. You're my daughter. You're not a weak little girl.
Meredith curled up and sobbed.
She was a grown woman. She felt pathetic. Pathetic, and yet, "I need a mom," she whispered into Susan's nightgown. "Pl... please. I'm sorry. This isn't. I'm being." Selfish. "I just... I need. Aren't moms supposed to fix it? Please. I need it to be fixed. I need it."
Susan didn't pry. She just held Meredith, rubbed her back, whispered shushing noises.
Her breaths slowed. The moments crawled into a glacial, weary procession. People passed by Susan's door. Noisy. Tumbling bits of sound poked through Susan's continuous, soothing waves of shushing. And Meredith kept falling, falling, falling into something deep and cold and unyielding like the gelid depths of the Sound. She wondered if they had drilled his skull open yet, or if they were still making holes, or if they'd even started that part yet at all. She wondered if some part of him, somewhere deeply entrenched in the soul that always twinkled in his eyes, was awake and terrified, even though it was a ridiculous notion. Or was it? She'd had a conversation over her corpse with Denny and Doc and... others. Was being unconscious truly so different? She wondered if she'd said, "I love you," enough to make a difference if it came down to a moment. If it came down to a gavel fall of decision. If there was a choice. She wondered. Would his dad be a bridge like her mother had been?
Code Blue!
Footsteps crunched up into a hurtling swarm of tapping, slamming, shuffling. Past the door, the herd of nurses and doctors thundered, down the hall, crash cart rumbling and buried somewhere in the crush of them. Meredith flinched as she heard the thump of electricity jolting through a maybe-corpse just a few rooms down. She buried her nose into Susan's nightgown, and Susan let her. Just held her.
Not Derek. Not Derek. Not Derek. Derek was nowhere near.
Please, be okay, she pleaded.
I need.
Palms slid up and down her back, rustling softly in the bubble of silence in the room. Not like Derek did it. But... Shushing laved her ears like the roll and hiss of calming waves when she went to the beach to read in a lawn chair under the beat of sunshine. Not like Derek did it. But... Fingers stroked her hair and the tickle of her follicles shifting in their tangled jumble sent a warm, numb drawl of relaxing sensation down her nerve tips. Not like Derek did it. But...
Perfect in its own way.
The horrid tension unwound itself from her bones and her muscles until all that was left of her grief were the spasms of crying, which died out moments after. Sobbing reduced to shaky breaths and then to sighs and then to nothing but rasping things that kept her conscious in the lull. When Meredith finally sat up, pulled back, and began to wipe at her burning, stinging, itchy eyes, she managed a low, exhausted, throaty, "Thank you." It didn't feel like enough. It didn't feel like anything.
Selfish.
Susan smiled. "Do you want to talk about it? Or have I fulfilled my motherly duties?"
Meredith sniffled and shook her head. No talking. Please. And yet she couldn't get her mind away from him. "I proposed. It's official. I'm wearing a ring," she said, thrusting her hand out for Susan to see. She couldn't hold her hand still. It shook in the air like she'd sucked down one too many Jolt colas and hadn't come off the caffeine high yet. Except it was something else. Something deep and churning and wrenching. Definitely not a high. She bit her lip.
Susan reached out and grasped her hand, warm, calming, and the shaking stilled with the new support to brace the limb in place. "Congratulations," Susan said softly. Her voice hitched on a syllable that didn't mean a thing, as if she were debating. Press or don't press. Press or don't press. She sighed. "Meredith... Tell me what's wrong... You were so happy on Sunday."
Meredith breathed softly. Tell her. Tell her. Just get it out. Pull the knife out of the sucking wound and jab it in again. Maybe it would hurt less the second time with the second mom.
"I..." she said, stumbling on the word and giving up when nothing else came after it.
"Would you like to come to dinner tomorrow?" Susan prodded. "Thatch is taking me home tonight. I think I can have something guest-worthy ready by then. The girls will be out. It would just be us. I'll even make Thatcher leave, if you want."
Meredith sniffed and shook her head. "I can't. I have to be here."
"I thought you'd just started your thirty-six today," Susan said, frowning. "They're making you stay an extra day?"
"Derek's sick," she whispered. The knife slipped between her ribs. "He's having surgery. I have to be here. I have to... Be here." It didn't. It didn't hurt less.
It hurt more.
And then the tears started all over again, more like an exhausted leak than the thunder burst from before. The mothering started all over again, and it was warm and loving and Meredith held onto Susan like she was the only thread attaching Meredith to life. Because she needed it. She needed to be mommed. She needed to have someone tell her Derek would be fine, someone who could tell her, even if it were a grave falsity, and still have it sound like scientific law. Derek would be fine. Not Cristina, because she'd say it with snark or sarcasm or a bitter drop of realism, and realism meant Derek would not necessarily be fine. Cristina couldn't fake the mom thing at gunpoint. Not Izzie or George. They wouldn't work. She had no idea why. They just seemed... Wrong. And Alex's internal wiring seemed to disallow any sort of sugar coating. Derek would have worked. Derek made even the worst things seem okay when he held her, and the soft, laving whispers of his voice could make her believe the sky was green or that gravity was an option. But Derek was the not fine prying open cataclysmic rifts in her composure, the not fine shredding up her heart into little, bleeding bits. And he couldn't be there for her. He had to be there for him. He had to not die. And that was a hard job. Fixing a cut open skull. Fixing a bleeding brain. Dissolving the drowning clutch of anesthesia on his central nervous system. Healing. Hard job.
She sniffled. "I'm sorry," she told Susan as the waves subsided again.
"For what?"
"I was mean to you until..." I needed this.
"Forgiven," Susan replied without hesitation. "It's what moms do."
"I'd like to do the dinner thing," Meredith said. "Maybe next week after I take Derek... home. I need... I want to try this. I do."
"All right," Susan said.
Meredith stood and brushed herself off, wiping fiercely at her eyes. "I'm going to go wait..."
"You're welcome to stay. You don't have to talk. You could just sit."
"No, no I have to... Thank you. I just... Have to..." Get books. Do something else. Move. Not think about the fact that Derek was lying on a table, bleeding, exposed, and maybe dying.
She finally did the thing she'd been trying so hard to decimate from her repertoire. She couldn't. Couldn't stop. She'd breached the threshold of the room and taken a single step beyond before Susan's calm, "Meredith?" reined her to a halt. She paused and turned, sort of like a slow-motion replay on a sports channel. Aaaaand, Meredith pauses on the brink of the end zone. Why isn't she running for the touchdown? What made her stop? She should be going, going, gone! I know, Bart. It's a shame when these athletes fuck up.
Run.
Run away.
Susan gave her a beautiful, warm, comfortable smile. "Derek will be fine," she said. "I'll call you about dinner later this week."
Meredith managed a watery smile. "Okay."
And then she left, but somehow, it wasn't fleeing anymore.
The congratulations and condolences flitting at her from all directions didn't stab at her anymore, didn't make her steps falter like she was slogging through a sucking pit of mud. She made a circuit of the surgical ward two or three times before she altered course toward the locker rooms. She pulled some of her books from her locker, grabbed a highlighter that may or may not have still been working. The moments passed, each one a small eon of its own, long enough to witness a star coalesce from nothing and die into dust.
She ended up in the gallery, which was empty. All of the ORs were still taken. The board was a wall of black, scribbly text. Derek Shepherd had been hastily markered in on the row for OR 2, for once not listed as the surgeon, but as the patient. Everyone was in surgery. Everyone except Meredith.
Izzie and George stood down below, swathed in their surgical scrubs. They hovered over an open body cavity under the instruction of one of the general surgical residents. Dr. Lu. They'd been there since before Meredith had slipped out of lab running to check on Derek the last time. The time she'd found him in the conference room, yelling at Mark.
They didn't know yet. Unless the gossip network had somehow breached the sterile barrier dividing the operating rooms from the rest of the surgical wing, which, given the fact that Nurse Debbie was the ringleader of said gossip network, was sort of possible. But Izzie caught Meredith's eye once as she looked up, and there was no wild blaming or happiness or anything cradled in the soft brown of her eyes except the usual casual airs of friendship. George looked up and quirked his eyebrows at her in a brief hello. And then they both looked back down at the bloody mess waiting for them to fix it. They didn't know.
Meredith had no idea where Alex and Cristina were. She didn't really care. They'd find her if they wanted her, and she didn't have the energy to try and beat the flow of the whispers burbling through the halls like the swell and churn of water over rocks, like rapids. Some of it was true. Some of it was pure fabrication.
I heard Dr. Grey proposed to Dr. Shepherd! True. I heard Dr. Shepherd is dying! Maybe. I heard that her ring is worth more than my car! Maybe. I heard Dr. Montgomery left town because she heard about the proposal! Fabricated. I heard they had sex on a plane! True. I heard she's doing the Chief on the side! Fabricated.
I heard, I heard, I heard.
She bowed her head into her hands and leaned her elbows onto the edges of her book in the margins on the left and right, keeping it spread against her knees, pinning it like an offending little bug. She let the diamond of her ring dig a deep, painful pit into her cheek as she grouped her fingers into fists and jammed her cheeks down onto them. She tried to read the words, but they spilled into a blurry mess that didn't make sense. The pictures blotted like colored islands dotting a sea of murky gray where the text was supposed to be. And nothing made any sense.
Nothing made any sense at all.
She didn't look up as the door opened. Someone took a step into the room, and the hairs on the back of her neck began to stand on end in a subtle whisper of foreboding. A deep, somber breath filled the silence. The presence hovered and shifted and fidgeted like someone preparing dreadful news. Meredith leaned into her hands, clutched at herself, trying not to be sick. Someone had come to find her and tell her that...
Derek.
She swallowed, still refusing to look as she felt the ominous presence slide into the seat one away from her on the left. No words. Nothing. She finally looked up and found Chief Webber easing back into a slouch. He looked at her, silent, but his face wasn't a bad news face. Just a worried one.
"How are you doing, Meredith?" he asked, his voice low and honey-rich. He pulled his palms over the gray fuzz of his hair and wrapped the motion around to pull down the flesh of his cheeks. His eyes narrowed in an understanding, pitying gaze, and it was...
Too much.
He looked...
"Seriously?" she snapped, her voice finding unexpected strength in the burbling well of anger she'd almost forgotten about in the chaos of Derek. Derek maybe dying. Derek maybe broken. "You have the nerve to ask me that now? Now, when my fiancé is... Now. Seriously?"
"I poked my head into OR 2," he said. "He's stable. Everything is going fine. They were just removing the skull flap when I left."
A vague trickle of momentary relief - Derek alive! -- drowned under the rumble roar of the tidal wave. Derek had his skull open. Guessing. She'd dealt with the guessing. The knowing. The knowing was different. Different and scary and painful. Derek was lying cold and alone on a table, exposed, vulnerable. If Dr. Weller decided in a delirious moment of whimsy that he no longer wanted to be a neurosurgeon, he could walk away, and Derek would be left behind, gaping open, bloody, and he would die. Derek. Derek had a hole in his skull. While he slept, but not really slumbered, while he was removed from the world. If Dr. Weller walked away, Derek would die. Definitively. There wouldn't be any sort of choice involved. Derek existed because Dr. Weller kept him existing. Derek was a hand, poking out from underneath a tarp. Derek was a body, nearly naked underneath the covers, tubes and wires dictating his life for him. Derek was living, but he was trapped in his mortal fear.
And the Chief had intruded. The Chief. A general surgeon. A surgeon who operated on livers and intestines and stomachs, on pancreases and on other things. Organs and body parts that had nothing to do with an open skull. Nothing to do with brains. The Chief had had no reason to be in that room. The room where Derek lay cut open. None.
A cold spear slipped down her throat, scraping, stinging, and her heart began to scream with a freezing, bitter sort of pain. A weary breath became a suppressed explosion as she held it down against her diaphragm and squeezed her lungs tight within her tiny frame. Tired, pent up rage simmered. She drew her fingers down across the pages of her book. The pads of her fingers squeaked against the filmy paper, and her knuckles turned a bloodless white.
"Why did you poke your head in at all?" she said, quiet, dangerous.
"To get an update for-"
Bad answer. You. To get an update for you, he'd been going to say. You. Meredith. Adulterous fake-child.
"He doesn't want people looking at him," she snarled before he could finish. "You're not a neurosurgeon. You don't need to be there. He doesn't want it, and there's no way you couldn't have known. He asked you to keep the interns out of it. He asked you for no gallery. He asked for a private hospital room. He refused to let Mark Sloane, the best plastic surgeon on this side of the country, close the incision for him. He didn't even want to get this done here at all. Don't tell me you didn't connect the dots. You're a surgeon. You're smart. So, spare me the updates, and leave me alone. Leave Derek alone. Just leave us alone, Chief."
He couldn't keep doing this, taking liberties, insinuating himself. Not at the expense of Derek, who, lately, seemed to be the only person who was taking hits for it. It. The thing with Ellis and the Chief. Being Ellis Grey's dirty mistress did not mean the Chief had a say in Meredith's life. She'd grown up well outside the sphere of Seattle Grace and its gossip-ridden halls. Richard Webber hadn't fought any harder for her than Thatcher had. Richard Webber had fought less. He'd actively said no and stayed with Adele. Richard Webber was not her freaking father. Not now. Not then. Not ever.
And he had to stop.
"Meredith," the Chief said, soothing, "I know you're nervous, but-"
She doubted Cristina had been similarly consoled when it had been Burke lying there. And when the intern had been George, and his dad had been the one on the table, it'd been nothing but the clinical stuff, using the very logical justification about doctor patient confidentiality. And that was all fine. Except one was not like the others. She was special.
And it sucked.
"Stop trying to be my dad!" she said, fuming, bitter, mean, nasty, angry, all sorts of ugly things. She flung her book down on the seat beside her and stood, panting. "You're not my freaking dad! I don't need coddling, and I sure as hell don't need to be patronized by the man who ruined Derek's career and screwed up the family that was supposed to be my real one. Seriously!"
The Chief blinked and swallowed. His eyes widened, and she felt a perverse sort of glee. Just because she was sweet and friendly Meredith, unassuming Meredith, the Meredith who'd just died, lost her mother, and was sad from time to time, did not mean she had no freaking teeth.
"What?" he said.
"Don't play stupid with me," she snapped. "I'm not some weak little trauma case for you to protect. You shouldn't have stuck your nose in. Chief was Derek's dream, and you spat on it just to guarantee I had a warm body in bed with me every night? Seriously? Making him choose between me and his dream job? Seriously? How the hell do you think that makes me feel? If you have to clip his wings just to get him to treat me right, I don't want him anyway. I'm an adult. I can say no. I can make my own decisions. And Derek? He's a full-grown man. He can juggle his own commitments without you as a freaking ringleader, and he can make his own choices about his love life. He can do whatever the hell he wants as long as he stays breathing. He might be an arrogant, self-loving bastard at times, but he's always been there for me when I've needed it, regardless of this stupid, life-sucking job, married or not, and he's... And now he's... Now, he might die. So, shut up. Just... Shut up, and go away. Before I say something else I won't regret."
The Chief stared at her, blinking as her rage receded to a simmer.
"Meredith," he said. "Derek withdrew himself from consideration when he met with me this morning. He's not in the running for Chief anymore."
The world stopped, and the remaining fury fell away for a moment like deadwood in a storm of wind.
"He... What?"
"He said he didn't want it anymore. He loves you, and he loves the cutting, not the paperwork, he said."
Dreams can change. I love you, and I want you. And it was just a job.
"He," she said, her voice falling into a warble. She sniffled and drew her hands across her cheeks. The skin of her cheeks mashed up against her nose. She scraped again. Everything blurred. "Said that?"
"Yes," Chief Webber said.
Her palms came away wet and sticky. Her eyes burned. He'd told her. He'd told her she was more important than the job, but it was one thing to speculate that he didn't even want the job anymore now that he had her, and another thing entirely to hear that he'd said it out loud. To someone else.
The words bled little drops of reality that struck her skin like the spray of water from a showerhead.
Derek had given up his dream.
I sure as hell won't be able fuck around with people's nervous systems using a knife.
What if I'm not Head of Neurosurgery anymore, Meredith?
Derek hadn't given up his dream. He'd changed it. Realigned it to the person he'd become when he'd left New York. The person he'd always been under the skin, the person who'd bloomed in the drizzly, Seattle air, away from the grip of the bustle, the roar, the thrill of a city that never went dark or slept. The person she'd, by a quirk of chance, gotten to know and cherish and desire and love.
You've always seemed more to me like you're in it for the feel-good, not for the money or the clout.
He didn't want to do the managerial crap. He didn't want the bragging rights of a title. He didn't want a paycheck bursting with zeroes. He wanted love and a family. He wanted to cut. To help and fix and save like some real life super-hero, but not because it was cool, or because it made him better in the eyes of his peers, but because of the helping, the fixing, the saving. Because it made him feel whole.
Derek Shepherd was a surgeon, and after this craniotomy, he might not ever be a surgeon again. He might be damaged. He might be... unable. All he wanted to do was cut. All he wanted was Meredith. And kids. A family. And the fact that he'd come out and said so to the Chief, hours before an operation that could potentially diminish him...
I'm supposed to be the one fixing this... I don't have this. I fix this... I can fix...
Derek Shepherd had given up Chief.
I said yes, right?
Derek Shepherd had said yes.
Derek Shepherd had finally figured himself out.
"Oh," she said, her voice low and weepy, even as she laughed. Softly. Derek had figured himself out. And for a moment, just a moment, she was happy. From all the suckitude and hurt and awfulness interspersed with the perfection of the last week and a half, he'd... figured himself out. He'd figured himself out, and they were getting married.
She was engaged!
As the manic laughter died away, she collapsed back into the chair and hugged herself. The yo-yo slowed, shivered on the end of its string, and stopped in a pit far below the space she'd started in. Exhaustion pulled her into numbness. Numbness that surrendered to ache and then to sharp, throbbing pains.
It seemed wrong that all of these wonderful things could be happening on the brink of something with the potential to become so awful.
Derek might die. Derek might break.
"Well, it still gave you no right," she whispered over the lump in her throat, grating bits of razor sharp pain sliding up and down her vocal cords with each syllable. "None at all. That was his decision to make. You never should have factored into it."
"I'm sorry, Meredith."
She turned to Chief Webber and narrowed her eyes, staring angrily, tiredly, sadly at him. Her face was blotchy and red and tear-stained. She didn't care. "You're my boss. Not my dad. Act like it."
She had a family with Cristina and Izzie and George and Alex. She was inheriting a family with Derek. She was repairing a family with Susan.
Richard Webber was not her family. Richard Webber belonged to a dead woman. An idea that was gone from possibility.
He stared at her for a long moment. His hands cupped his knees and clenched, scrunching up the fabric of his scrubs. He sighed. As he stood to leave, he said quietly, heavily, as though he'd failed at something, "All right."
For a moment, he looked heartbroken, but then something shifted on his face like a gear falling into place, and he turned back into the stoic surgeon she knew he was. Surgeon-in-a-box. She had a feeling she was staring at the master. She didn't let it break her resolve. The man had had no right. No right at all. His advice had nearly backfired. Forcing Derek to choose, especially when Derek hadn't even known what he'd really wanted with his life, not in any sort of quantifiable sense... It had nearly, truly backfired. She might never have had the ring or the moments of bliss when he'd proposed or when she'd proposed. She might never have had those moments, and they might have both been miserable and still drowning in mistrust.
It's not a mistake...
"Chief?" she asked as he pushed open the door to the gallery. It was a whim. A whim to ask, but...
He turned to look at her. "Yes, Mered-Dr. Grey?"
"Would you have picked him? If it weren't for me?"
"If I'm your boss," he said, his tone flat and quiet, "You know I can't answer that."
She regarded him for a moment. "Okay," she said with a tiny, shivery nod. "I can live with that."
He nodded and sighed. His gaze darted to her finger for a flicker of a moment. The mask cracked just a little. The skin around his eyes crinkled as he narrowed his gaze. "Congratulations, by the way," he said. And then he was gone, and she was left again in silence.