Lightning Strikes Twice - Part 36B

[ariaadagio]

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

~~~~~

She rubbed her thumb and forefinger up and down the bridge of her nose, sighing tiredly.  She didn't even try to pick up her book again.  She'd been a fool to think she could study while she waited.  And staring at Izzie and George, both arm deep in blood and gore, just made her think of Derek all alone and maybe dying.  She gathered up her things and wandered again.

One lap.  Two laps.  Three laps.  Four laps.

Congratulations!  I'm so sorry!  Congratulations!  He'll be fine!  Congratulations!  We're all rooting for him...

She managed to pick at some food after ordering in the cafeteria with an incoherent mumble.  The incoherent mumble resulted in a sandwich that tasted dry and crumby and pasty like something days old and sun-baked.  But, at least it calmed some of the pang-filled fluttering in her gut.  She went back to wandering as the last swallow settled.

Congratulations and condolences swarmed her from all sides as the gossip continued leaking through the halls.  The whirl of words became too much, and she slowly gravitated toward the quiet of their basement hallway.  Hers and Alex's and Izzie's and George's and Cristina's.  Her family's.

She collapsed onto the empty gurney that was always there and sighed, glancing at her watch.  Pass the time.  Pass the time.  Was time passing?  Three hours.  Three whole hours.  How had it only been three hours?

She lay there, her arm draped over the side of the bed, dangling in a state of misery.  She stared at the blur.  Tired aching hung behind her eyes like a living, breathing pulse.  Sleep, sleep, sleep, but sleeping would never happen.  She couldn't.  She had to be there.  Not off in a fantasy of dreaming.  She had to be there when they brought news.  Good or bad.  Bad.  Probably bad.  What was she going to do if it was bad?

The double doors to the hallway opened with a thunderous, vibrating thud, and Cristina huffed into the blurry void in front of Meredith.  The blue of her scrubs hazed Meredith's view with a sky-colored cloud, blotting out the world like a strange new blindness.  Blue.  Blue.  Blue.  Or was it technically cerulean?  Cornflower?  Or should she simply classify it as the blue that Derek didn't like?

Was time passing?

Meredith blinked, resisting the urge, for once, to pull her watch up again.  Instead she continued lying limply, lifeless, tired on the gurney.  An exhausted sprawl of limbs and other things.

"Explain to me why I heard from Nurse Olivia that you're engaged to McDreamy," Cristina said, her arms folding over her chest in a standoffish, annoyed pose.

"Because I am?" Meredith said.  She flopped her hand up so Cristina could see the ring.  It was the only response she could formulate.  The only thing.  Her brain suddenly seemed stir-fried.  Battered.  Dissolved into a cluster of neurons, discordant, miscommunicating, stupid, speaking Greek.  And she had neither the burbling simmer of fight nor even the desire to fight right then.  Not with Cristina, anyway.  Not even guilt sang somewhere deep within, festering.  She didn't feel the urge to apologize for something she wasn't even sure she was sorry for.  The not telling thing.  Was she sorry?  No.

Cristina's gaze flicked to the ring that encircled Meredith's dangling ring finger and then back to Meredith's blotchy, crying face.  Her eyes widened, as if she almost hadn't expected it to be true, and now the incontrovertible fact of the sparkly diamond had sent her over the cliff of doubt, and falling into... certainty.  Meredith rolled onto her back and scraped her hands down her face, trying to clear the haze as Cristina repeated, harsher, more grating and snippy, "Explain to me why I heard from Syph Nurse that you're engaged to McDreamy."

"Cristina," Meredith sighed.  "He's in surgery right now.  He might die.  Or get broken.  Or...  He's all alone.  I had to call his mother and tell her...  I had to...  Can we not...  Can we not do this right now?  I'm barely..."

Cristina sat down on the edge of the gurney with a jerky huff.  The mattress dipped.  Her arms re-folded.  "I knew something happened on that stupid McFamily vacation.  I knew it."

"Cristina..."

Cristina rolled her eyes.  "It's a craniotomy for a subacute hematoma almost slow enough to be chronic.  He'll be fine."

"Cristina," Meredith said as she pushed herself back up into a sitting position.  She resettled next to her friend and wilted into a slouch.  Their shoulders bumped.  Cristina didn't prickle and shy away.  She sat.  Still.  Meredith continued, "He could stroke out.  Dr. Weller could give him permanent brain damage if he nicks something he's not supposed to nick.  Derek might develop post-op epilepsy.  Mortality rates for craniotomies here at Seattle Grace are..."  Real.  Numbers that were whole and then some, not a sliver of a percentage with a lot of leading zeroes.  But she couldn't say it.  "I don't care if the bleed is slower than toothpaste spit.  It's his skull.  They're drilling open his skull, and he...  He could...  There're so many things that could go wrong, I don't even want to... He could..."

Die.  Break.  Die.  Break.

"He'll be all right, Meredith," Cristina said.  Meredith had been right.  Cristina couldn't do the mom thing at gunpoint.  She said it soft and quiet and serious.  But it didn't work right.  Not this time.  Not when Cristina couldn't argue with science that he was fine.  Derek was already broken.  Cristina couldn't argue him fine like she had with the concussion.

Meredith sighed.  The hot, stinging tears had started again at some point.  She'd lost track of how many freaking times she'd cried that day.  How many times she'd cried in the last three hours.  She couldn't do it anymore.  She was broken.  Whatever turned the faucets on and off was busted.  Shattered.  She sat there, leaking, not caring that she was leaking anymore.  At least with Cristina, she didn't have to care that she was leaking, and she could just let herself.  Cry.  Get it out.

"What if he's not fine?" Meredith said as she wiped at her eyes.  "What'll I do if he's not?  I just figured out how much I need him, and he's..."

Cristina stared at her.  "Why didn't you tell me, Meredith?"

"I just proposed less than four hours ago," Meredith replied.  Bitterness swept down her throat.  Why couldn't Cristina ever be...  Why couldn't she just...  "Derek is potentially dying, and I'm trying.  I'm trying so hard to stay afloat for him, and I just can't keep it up when he's not here to see it.  I can't not freak out right now.  So, pardon me if I didn't run and tell you first thing while I'm busy trying not to drown all over again."

"I don't buy it," Cristina said.

"Buy it?  Buy what?" Meredith asked.  "That I'm flipping out because the man I'm supposed to marry might flat line alone, exposed, and cut up on a gurney somewhere?  Seriously?  Why do you hate him so much?  Please, Cristina, I don't need your human cactus routine right now.  I can't handle it, okay?  I love you, but I can't.  I can't do it.  Please.  Please, just..."  She sighed and sniffled.

Cristina's eyes widened.  She looked...  Stricken.  Almost regretful.  "I meant I don't buy that you just got engaged.  You've been acting weird all week.  I didn't mean..."

Meredith stared at Cristina through the wall of tears.  The double doors to the hallway slammed open and Meredith stiffened into a tense pile of bones and aching muscles.  A disheveled orderly shuffled through, staring at them oddly, but he moved quickly past them in a hurried tangle of movement.  His footsteps tapped down the hallway, echoing until he rounded the corner, and his intrusion muffled into silence.

Meredith bit a sob into tiny pieces and wilted again.  She couldn't...  She glanced at her watch.  Was time passing?  Yes.

A warm hand clasped around her shoulder, and Cristina pulled Meredith down against her soft, clean scrubs in a light embrace.  "This isn't hugging," Cristina said.  "Just so you know."

"Okay," Meredith replied, her voice scratchy, sandy, a desert looking for an oasis.  She sniffled, and Cristina let her cry for a long time.  Cristina sat there, holding her.  She didn't caress or comfort like Susan had, or like Derek often did.  She just held on.  But from Cristina, that was like an armistice in the middle of World War Three, and Meredith took it for what it was.

Comfort.

And maybe she wasn't sorry.  Maybe she wasn't, but she did owe Cristina an explanation.  Something.  Because she hadn't done the not telling thing out of spite.  She hadn't.  And, now, Cristina was not-hugging her anyway, despite what the not telling thing obviously looked like to her -- a broken bond or something.

"You're not happy, Cristina," Meredith whispered.  "And it just felt wrong to shove it in your face that I'm not miserable like you are.  Or, at least, I wasn't miserable.  Now, I'm just trying not to throw up.  I can't..."

Cristina sighed.  "I'm not miserable."

"You could have fooled me."

"I'm not," Cristina said.  "When are you going to get married?"

"I don't know," Meredith said.  A sigh tumbled off her lips, and she slumped as the world blurred again.  Her cheeks hurt from all the rubbing and the salty smears her hands had left behind.  "I just want him to not die and not break right now.  Not dying would be good.  Not breaking would be... good."

The silence in the hallway burgeoned into a roaring, rushing thing.  So loud.  Visions of Derek, a lonely hand sticking out from underneath a sea of tarps and plastic, drifted in her brain like dead bits of things, flotsam, floating.  Scary.  Closing her eyes didn't seem to help.  It just made the pictures brighter.  How long would Dr. Weller try if he had a flat line?  Certainly not three hours.  Was twenty minutes enough to choose?  Would there even be a choice?

"What do you mean you don't know?" Cristina asked softly, just when Meredith had begun to think Derek's death would strangle her.  Even if he didn't actually die.

"We're just... engaged," Meredith said.  Her fingers clutched at her ring.  The setting dug into her skin like rocky sand on bare skin.  "No date set or anything."

"But..." Cristina replied, her voice wandering off into silence, as if she didn't, couldn't understand the concept.  Engaged without a definitively marked end.  Engaged without ultimatums.  Engaged without anything but a promise that eventually, there would be something more permanent in place.  Eventually.  When things lined up right, and everything seemed like it needed to move forward again on its own, rather than being pushed and shoved and forced like a square peg into a round hole.

"It doesn't have to be all give, give, give, Cristina.  You can take.  Derek's willing to wait until I'm ready, and I'm just not ready yet."

"Well, I'm ready," Cristina insisted.  "That's why I have a date set."

"If you're ready, then why are you so unhappy?"

"I'm not unhappy.  I'm..."

"What?" Meredith prodded.

"Just..." Cristina stuttered.  Her voice halted, and she uncharacteristically filled the air with flat, dead noise while her brain ran around looking for the next word she wanted.  She cut off with a sad-sounding, sighing, defeated, "Not thrilled."

Meredith turned to stare at her friend, and thoughts of Derek dying, being alone, dying and being alone, dying and being alone and cut up and bleeding faded into a whining background noise, like the smaller picture-in-a-picture on a television, one of those huge flat ones with all of those features for people even more scatterbrained and mind-wandering than she was.  She wiped her eyes, clearing the fresh leakage away, and sniffled, trying to look at the big picture, trying to ignore the clawing worry and fear and pain for a minute.  Trying to absorb Cristina's problems.  It helped to not think of Derek in the now sense.  And Cristina needed...  Cristina was...  Cristina's eyes were squinty with not-tears.  Because Cristina wouldn't ever cry unless she really, really meant it.  She was slumped and sighing, but not depressed.  Because Cristina wouldn't ever show that she was depressed unless she really, really meant it.

Except she was showing those things, even though Meredith was fairly certain they weren't overwhelming, really, really meant it sorts of feelings.  In that vulnerable moment, she was showing Meredith she had the same, trembling maybe-feelings as everyone else when things weren't drowning in a pit of bitter angst or rocketing into a cloud of giddy.  She had the uncertain, half-hearted in-betweens, too.  The moment would live for Meredith, etched in permanent memory.  Cristina's mask had failed, cracked, outright broken.  Or was it an intentional thing?  A window.  Beyond the cactus bit resided someone who felt and loved and lived with little swings of emotion just like everyone else.  She was just exceptionally good at theatrics and denial.  Was it that?  Maybe.  Probably.

Yes.

And Meredith found that she had no idea what to do.  Her experience with Derek was so different than what Cristina seemed to have with Burke.  Derek wanted things, but he'd made it quite clear he was absolutely unwilling to force Meredith into anything.  He wanted things, but he wanted her to want them, too.  He even offered concessions.  Hotdogs and things.  Cristina didn't seem to be getting any hotdogs at all.  Literal hotdogs.  Not...  Yeah.  Not that.

"Cristina, isn't being thrilled sort of the whole point?" Meredith began hesitantly.  "We're engaged.  It's...  It's freaking mind-bending.  And strange.  And new.  But...  It's not bad."

Cristina chirped with wry, grating laughter.  "You giving me relationship advice.  You."

She's got my McDreamy.  And my McDog.  She's got my McLife.

"Yes, Cristina.  I'm worried about you.  And now that I actually have a basis for comparison, I just...  I think being engaged is supposed to be... happy.  Mostly."

Except for moments like this one.

"You're acting like a pod person," Cristina said, half-hearted, weary.  She tore her fingers through her hair and sighed, long and low.  The rustle of fabric slid low and quiet through the air as she shifted.

"No, I'm acting like me," Meredith said.  "Me that, for once, isn't miserable.  But me.  Has Burke given you an inch on anything?"

"Of course, he has.  He--"

"How many people will be at the wedding?"

Cristina looked down at the floor.  "I don't know.  A few."

"I thought you wanted just the four of us at city hall," Meredith replied.  "You, me, Burke, and Derek."

Cristina scowled.  It was a dark, hating, bitter look.  "Yeah, well, Burke's mother got involved."

"What does Burke's mother have to do with you and Burke?"

"Look, Meredith," Cristina snapped, suddenly hostile underneath the storm of poke, poke, poking.  "I'm trying, here.  Stop..."

"Stop what?  Pointing out that maybe there's something wrong?"

"Look," Cristina snapped, and the cactus shell began to prickle.  "Just because you've found momentary bliss with your temporarily re-McDreamied McDreamy doesn't mean your life is suddenly the peg by which all others should be measured, and it certainly doesn't mean my fiancé should suddenly be perfect.  McDreamy is an ass, not a saint.  I remember when he ripped your heart out, Mere.  Do you?  And is he even technically McDreamy without the hair?  Seriously?"

Silence stretched between them.  Meredith swallowed, wiped her face.  She'd known.  Deep.  Back on the rear shelves of her brain.  The dusty ones she didn't often use.  Somewhere, she'd known that Cristina didn't like Derek.  Not really before the Addison disaster.  And she'd certainly never recovered from that.  Cristina was tolerant.  Tolerant, and that was it.  Because that's what people did for their persons, even when they were certain grave mistakes were being made.

Cristina was tolerant.  Cristina had been there.  Been there when Derek hadn't been, at least not in the openly relationshipped sense.  Been there when Derek had been the married McBastard who had left Meredith for his ex-wife, his ex-wife who he hated, or at least didn't love anymore.  Cristina had been there when Meredith had debated.  Finn or Derek.  Finn or Derek.  Back when Finn had seemed stable and healthy and safe to Derek's unproven and painful and dangerous.  Cristina had been there through it all.  Not necessarily unjudging, but always there.  Tolerating.  Cristina was her person.  She was Meredith's person but...  She was stagnant.  Unforgiving.

"Yes, Cristina, he hurt me," Meredith said.  "When you love someone, you can get hurt.  But hurt isn't always something that sticks.  Love is enough to fix a lot of things, too."

Cristina stared at the floor and didn't answer.

"And, Cristina," Meredith added.  "If you say one word to him about his hair when he gets out of surgery, my person or not, I will hurt you.  I will hurt you, Cristina.  He's my person.  You're my person.  But...  He's my other person.  And he's sick.  And he's scared.  And I don't know what to do for him.  But I can at least freaking keep him from being teased."

Cristina looked up.  Her eyes widened.  "You'd ask him to lug a corpse with you?"

Meredith blinked.  "What?"

"If you murdered someone, you'd ask him to help?"

"That'd be... breaking the rules."

"You and Derek have rules about corpse dragging?"

"No," Meredith said.  "No, I meant about the murder.  Murder is wrong."

"Well, yeah, Meredith," Cristina replied, shrugging.  "It's murder."

"It's just..." Meredith began, pausing.  Would she really ask Derek to help her lug a body?  And when the hell would she ever have a body to lug?  Even rhetorically, it was hard to get in the right mindset to debate the complexities of who she'd ask to be her accomplice in corpse lugging, because that required murder.  Taking somebody's life.  On purpose.  She was a surgeon.  She fixed life.  She was a returned-from-the-dead surgeon.  She fixed life, and she valued it.  Immensely.  Why the hell would she murder someone?  And, would this be a crime of passion, or would it be planned?  And...  This was ludicrous.

Would she ask Derek to help her lug a body?  A body that was dead because she'd killed the owner?  She'd certainly ask Cristina first.  Cristina wouldn't ask any questions.  She'd do the person-y tolerating thing.  But the question was about Derek.

"Derek's got serious moral... things.  Moral things.  Morals.  I..." she mused.

She liked to think that she loved Derek unconditionally.  Hell, she knew she loved him with minimal conditions already.  He'd dumped her for his wife.  His wife.  And they'd managed to come back from that.  Murder, though?  That was a bit...  Different.  Not a personal betrayal, but a betrayal of the person she thought he was.  He wouldn't kill anyone.  Not ever.  But... if he did.  If he somehow did.  If he somehow snapped and lost his temper and just... Poof.  Killed someone.  If Derek had a body lying on the floor, and he was crying...  She was certain he'd be the kind of person who would cry over that sort of thing.  If he was standing over a body, crying, wondering what the hell to do with it, distraught, she'd...  She'd want to help.  Maybe it would break something.  Break something in their relationship.  Because he would have killed someone, and that just wasn't Derek.  But she would want to be there, fighting like hell to keep the break from happening.  The smallest sliver of her, the very largest piece of herself that could actually believe she was capable of killing another human being on purpose, wanted to believe he'd be the same way.  He'd want to be there.

"Yeah," she said.  "Maybe not before I asked you.  But, yeah, I'd ask him to help.  Unless it's sometime in the next few weeks.  He'll have weight restrictions on what he can lift, and I wouldn't want-"

"I wouldn't ask Burke," Cristina said, interrupting.  "Not second, third, or ever."

Meredith shrugged.  "Two weeks ago, I probably wouldn't have asked Derek."

The double doors yawned open, foreboding, slow, and the motion bulged with awful promises.  A nurse she didn't recognize walked through.  The nurse smiled and said a friendly, hesitant hello before she pattered down the hallway, much like the orderly had done.  And then she was gone.

Meredith wilted, a sobbing sigh bursting from deep within her gut.  She wished it would end.  She wished fate would make up its freaking mind before she lost hers.  Cristina pulled Meredith up against her shoulder again, and they sat, weary and silent for a long crawl of moments.

"It hurt," Cristina confessed.  "It really hurt when I thought I couldn't go forward, and he refused to be kind, rewind.  I know we have something.  It wouldn't have hurt if we didn't.  I..."

Meredith wiped away the renewed tears, blinking, blinking, sniffling.  "Then you have a good start, Cristina, but..."

Cristina sighed.  Her fingers clutched Meredith tightly.  Not a hug.  Just an absent...  unconscious sort of pleading.  "What the hell did you do over vacation that made you so sure?"  And how do I do it, too?  The second question hung unspoken in the air.

"I don't know," Meredith replied.  "We grew up?  I guess.  I don't... know.  It's like... knitting.  Sort of."

Cristina quirked an eyebrow.  "Knitting," she said, disbelief flattening her tone.  "Knitting made you marriage-happy?"

"Yeah," Meredith said.  "We finished seventy rows, only to realize the middle thirty were a freaking mess of suck.  So, we yanked them out and re-stitched.  We didn't throw anything away, and the thread might still be a little kinked from before, but we made something new with it.  New and... less tangly.  I think."  She sighed.  "Sorry, that was pretty lame.  I can't do the poet thing very well."

Dat's ma goil. Always expressin' hoiself like a poet.

"When Burke was shot... I waited until he was all right to stay with him.  I was...  I don't do this stuff well, Meredith.  And you?  You're sitting here with a ring on your finger..."  While Derek was in the OR possibly dying.

Cristina left the words unsaid, but they hung there in the air like smog, dirty, coiling, choking.  Meredith blinked.

"I needed to do it," Meredith whispered.  "If I hadn't done it and he ends up dying, I...  I don't know.  I'm so..."  Her voice trailed away.  So...  What?  So scared, twisted, terrified, anxious?  Confident, happy, loved, in love?  She began to wonder if the reason she felt so sick was because her brain couldn't make up its goddamned mind.  I'm engaged!  Derek's sick.  Not meshable.

"I won't make fun of his hair," Cristina murmured.

"Thank you," Meredith said, sighing.  The crumpling pain that curled her shoulders over and made her wilt lessened, just a little.  "I know you never really liked him."

"You're my person, Mere," Cristina said.  "My only person.  And he hurt you.  Badly."

"He did," Meredith agreed.

"He'll be okay, Mere," Cristina said, and Meredith felt a fuzzy warmth seeping down into her core.  The relief that the words brought was like finding out this really had been a bad dream brought on by chicken marsala, or perhaps indigestion.  Almost as good, anyway.  Derek would be okay.  Cristina meant it.  If she was lying, she hid the deception under a veil of secrecy so opaque and thick that a jackhammer couldn't have torn through on the highest, most jackhammery setting.  Perhaps, Cristina wasn't so bad at the mom thing after all.  Or maybe it was just the person thing.  The unconditional love thing.

Meredith sighed.  "You should ask him," she said.  "Ask Burke for the city hall wedding with just us four.  It's what you want."

"I..."

"Derek said I could have a reception banquet with hotdogs if I wanted."

"Isn't he some sort of health nut?"

Meredith sniffled, couldn't help the smallish whuff of laughter, even as a fresh batch of tears spilled down.  "Yeah," she said as she wiped her face.  "He is."

Cristina looked at her.  "I'm not good at this, Mere..."

"It doesn't mean you have to let him walk on you," Meredith said.  "You're Cristina.  You take crap from no one.  Believe me.  I know."

Whatever.  Everybody has problems.  Now, get your ass out of bed, and get to work!

Cristina sent a woeful, racking sigh tumbling out of her mouth.  Her body heaved with it.  And then her whole frame crumpled.  "I take crap from Burke."

"That's okay," Meredith said.  "As long as he takes crap from you, too."

Cristina raised an eyebrow.  "McDreamy dumps you for his wife, and you get hotdogs at your wedding in exchange.  You call that even?"

"It's not about getting even," Meredith said.  "It's about being equal."

"Okay, you really are a pod person, Meredith.  What the hell?"

"It's just some stuff I figured out."

"Right," Cristina replied.  But it wasn't a snapping word or a biting one.  It was offhanded.  Ponderous.  Breathy.

Meredith hoped Cristina would be okay.  But if she wasn't, if she did the big wedding thing with a huge crowd in a dress because Burke had made her, Meredith would do the person thing.  She'd tolerate and be there.  Not necessarily unjudging.  But tolerating.

They sat there for a long time.  She didn't ask Cristina why she wasn't working, wasn't wrist deep next to Burke repairing torn valves and other things.  She didn't dare.  She let the moments pass in silence.  The space between them was comfortable again.  For the first time in a long time, Cristina sat next to her, and there wasn't an urge to say anything, or to try and figure out what to leave unsaid.

Meredith's eyelids started to droop.  She lay down on the gurney.  Cristina flattened out next to her.  They relaxed and stared at the ceiling, nothing but the sound of their breathing intervening in the peace between them.  A doze started to pull a blurry blanket over her eyes.

Meredith hovered somewhere in a vague state, relaxed, but not sleeping.  When her beeper went off, the shrill sound of it made the length of her body jerk in surprise.  She flailed for a moment, swallowing, disoriented.  She uttered some unfinished, half-dreamed thought in a messy drip of syllables before she managed to draw the little black device from its clip on her waist.

RcvryRm3 - OK said the little display.

Recovery Room 3 was paging her?

Recovery... OK.  Recovery Rooms were for immediate post-op patients still waking up from anesthesia.  Recovery Room 3 - OK.  Which meant...

Derek.  Derek was done?  Not dead?  Not dying?  Done?  Reassembled?  Okay?

Waking up.

She glanced at her watch.  Time had stolen a chunk of her life while she'd been lying there, silent, sort of dreaming, lulled and weary.  Cristina had helped bump the pace along.  They'd needed to have that discussion.  They'd needed to have that alone time.  Five hours.  She'd been waiting five hours.  Five hours was all gone.

"Well?" Cristina said, sighing next to her as she got a view of the beeper's text.  "Go on.  I won't say I told you so."

The next five minutes blurred into a flurry of color and light and sound as she raced through the halls toward Recovery Room 3.  Recovery Room 3, where she would find Derek.

Derek, waking up.