Lightning Strikes Twice - Part 38B

[ariaadagio]

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

~~~~~

Throughout the night, they pulled him from slumber for this test, for that test, to check this, to check that, until he felt so picked at and prodded at that he found himself wondering more than once if he could get up.  He knew how to take the catheter out.  And the intravenous line.  And everything else was just a matter of pulling.  The monitors, anyway.  He could...

He could what?

Just the thought of having to get up in addition to dealing with all the personal invasions made him weary, made his head throb.  Every time they woke him, slumber came less easily.  He found himself lying in a tense, half-dozing state, staring at the world through blurry, dazed slits, waiting for the next invasion as the weed grew and grew and grew.  Would they push his bed up again, forcing him to sit?  Would they hoist an arm to take his pulse as though it were just a thing to lift and not a piece of him?  Slip a hand underneath his gown without permission, measure his heartbeat with a stethoscope or something else?  Perhaps, if he took the catheter out, they wouldn't bother to put it back in, and they'd let him up to use the restroom on his own.  But thoughts of that much walking crushed him into a weary pulp, and asking for a cup every time he had to go would feel even worse, because then they wouldn't just be taking control away from him, they would be keeping it for themselves.

At least he was becoming a little more accustomed to being so high he was in the rafters.  The fuzzy pulse of morphine behind his eyes had dimmed and wasn't quite so obnoxiously retarding anymore.  Or, perhaps, they'd just reduced the dosage over time.  It didn't matter.  It wasn't like he had a clue about it.  He said ow, they drugged him.  He tried not to say ow, they figured it out and still drugged him.  How much?  Who knew?  The intravenous bag was out of his reach unless he stood up to check it.  And standing wasn't going to happen.  Not when the mere rebellious thought of it made him cringe with a rolling sort of exhaustion, the kind that swept over him in waves and drowned, drowned, drowned until he was waterlogged and dead to the world with it.

When Meredith shifted in her chair and pulled his hand into her own, silencing the inner turmoil, if only for a moment, he began to realize just how much his thoughts were festering in the grips of his immobility and weakness.  She started to rub his arm.

"Derek," she whispered.  "You have to stop."

He swallowed, his eyes widening from their droop as he realized he was being scrutinized, that he wasn't fooling anyone about resting.  Nothing was private.  At least his throat didn't feel so torn anymore after several cups of ice chips.  He was pretty sure they'd graduate him to real water soon.  And then maybe pudding or something.  Pudding.  If they'd let him.  The festering, darkening whirl returned.

He turned to watch her.  She leaned over her book, her midsection covering the words away, not that he could focus well on them in the first place.  Text littered the pages, and that was about his limits of discernment at that point.  Her uncapped highlighter rolled to the floor.  She scooted up the chair until it bumped into the side of his bed, and then her hands began to soothe him in earnest.

He leaned back against the pillows, relishing the warmth, letting his eyelids droop.  The room was dim.  He left the light on over his bed for Meredith's benefit more than his own.  He was tired enough that the glare didn't keep him from sleeping.  No, that was other things.  Light filtered in from the hallway through the cracks in the blinds.  People walked past left and right and could easily see in.  Really, though, he'd been lucky to get a room at all.  Most of Seattle Grace's ICU wards were just a line of beds with curtains separating them from each other.  Some even had temporary metal divider walls.  But few were actual rooms served by actual walls.

"I'm tired, Mere," he whispered, his voice still a little warped from the damage to his throat.  He blinked.  The backs of his eyes stung, and his whole body started to shiver with embarrassment.  He'd cried so much by then that the whole hospital probably thought he was some sort of weepy, emotional, pathetic pile of a man.

McDreamy weeps like a girl.  McDreamy is weak.  McDreamy's urine output isn't up to snuff.  McDreamy's heartbeat isn't average.  McDreamy has an ounce of body fat where it shouldn't be.  McDreamy has a weird, dented, little birthmark on his hip.  I pronounce him not McPerfect.  Every bit and piece of him was probably on the conveyor belt of gossip being dissected and torn apart.

"Then sleep," Meredith said, yanking him from the spiral of his thoughts.  "I'll be here."

He felt selfish.  There were plenty of people with serious diseases or injuries who were bedridden for far more than a week.  Incurable or not healing.  Wouldn't ever get out of the hospital again.  Didn't have a beautiful girlfriend sitting by them, supportive, all the time.  Plenty of people like that, and yet he couldn't stop.  Couldn't stop thinking horrible, twisting thoughts, and that made him feel even weaker.  Just deal.  Deal with it.

He blinked, sniffled, tried to stop.  Tried.  He did.  But everything, it seemed, was beyond his capabilities.  Everything.  A film of tears blurred the scenery into the vast, muted splotches of an impressionist painting.  Wetness spilled down his cheeks.

"Do you need them to up the morphine dose, again, Derek?" Meredith asked.

"No," he said.  "Please, don't let them.  I'm not... It's not...  Please."

Begging.  Begging.  He was begging.

Derek Shepherd didn't beg.

Except with her.  But that had been...  Different.

He flailed out and grabbed the bed railing that still stood up against the mattress.  Meredith had lowered the one on her side.  He pulled himself over onto his side and drew his knees up as far as they would go, mindful of the wires and other things he didn't want to be yanking on him.  Yanking.  Telling him he was attached, whether he wanted to be or not.  Twisting and turning to avoid it all was a sad affair that left him drained and panting and feeling weaker than he'd ever felt in his life.  At least when he'd crashed, he'd had discernable injuries keeping him from moving.  This was just... an aching fatigue that gnawed him to the core, leaving him raw and damaged.  The room faded into darkness for a minute.

"I want to go home," he whispered, and he felt even weaker.  "Please, Mere.  I can't do this.  I can't."

Can't.

The word crushed him like a collapsing building.

Can't.

Footsteps.  Someone shuffled in the room, and he curled up even further.  Great.  Just another thing to advertise for Nurse Debbie.  McDreamy's crying again!  Poor, homesick baby.

Can't.

"Can you come back in a few minutes, please?" Meredith said.

"Sure," said the voice of one of his ICU nurses.  Her name was Francine.  He knew her.  He'd worked with her.  He'd smiled and wished her family well over Christmas, despite his melancholy at the time.  And now she was seeing him crumpled up in his bed, crying over something that was so stupid it was pitiful.

He wanted to go home.

For a march of seconds, all he heard was Meredith breathing behind him, watching him.  And then the bed dipped, the sheets rustled, and her warm length settled against his grief-shivery back.  "Derek, you've been drugged.  A lot.  A whole, freaking lot.  It's bound to make you feel awful on top of everything else," she whispered into his neck.  Her hand slipped over his torso and gripped him around the waist.

"I'm here, though," she continued.  Her soft words calmed his churning, twitching body.  "And tomorrow, things will be better.  You'll be out of the ICU, and they won't be checking on you every ten minutes.  You're doing great, despite what you may think.  You just had brain surgery, Derek.  You just had brain surgery, and you somehow managed to be flirting with me less than three hours later.  You're strong to me.  You're very strong.  None of this is permanent.  Nobody will think less of you.  And nobody is gossiping.  Nobody.  You're respected around here, Derek.  You're respected, and people look up to you as a great teacher and a friendly guy, and the only thing bouncing around the hallways regarding this particular thing is concern.  Our engagement is everywhere.  Our sex lives are everywhere.  But your state of health and your feelings about said health are not.  People know there are lines, Derek.  And I love you.  Not that that has much to do with brain surgery, but I do.  I really, really do."

He sighed, his chest stumbling over it and breaking it up into a short train of exhalations.  "They're not?"

"Nope," Meredith said, her whisper laving the nape of his neck where the bandages stopped.  "Cristina has been prowling the nurses' stations doing the search and destroy mode thing for me to make sure, but she hasn't run into anything other than a new pool about our wedding date.  Most people are thinking next spring, by the way.  I wonder if we're allowed to bet?  Because I sure as hell don't know.  It's not like I'd be at an unfair advantage.  Anyway.  If there's anything about your surgery, it's way buried in the SGH underground."

He drew a shaky hand up to rub his face.  He briefly tangled with the nasal cannula. Another thing to remind him.  But he forced his thoughts away from that.  Meredith.  Meredith was warm, and next to him, and breathing, and whispering, rubbing her scent all over his pillows and his sheets.  Lavender curled against him.  Her hands gripped him, squeezed him.  And it was what he needed.  He let it be all that he needed.  He let it.

He didn't need to get up.  He didn't need to be cutting.  He didn't need anything else to feel whole.

He didn't.

Right?

"We have an underground?" he asked, his voice rough, not from his throat, just the tangle of emotions writhing in every broken crevice of himself.

"Doesn't everything?" she replied, stroking the line of his torso from his armpit to his hip.

"Are we talking literal," he said, trying, clawing for the levity he'd managed earlier, "Like London, or..."

Meredith snickered into his neck and kissed him.  "Mind the gap!" she said with a pitiful rendition of a British accent with all the wrong letters stretched and warped.  She nipped her way down to the bump of his clavicle, brushed the gown away from his shoulder, and kept going as far as she could, kissing, leaving hot, wet trails of soothing evaporation behind.

He closed his eyes and sighed at the attention.  He'd been touched and poked and prodded and moved and shoved and turned all night, but this?  This felt like it was resetting the balance, and he yearned for more, not because it had to do with sex, but because it had to do with Meredith, touching him, reassuring him that not all skin-to-skin had to send a shiver of disgust rolling down his spine.  It was... relief.  The purest form.  Like when he'd discovered she hadn't died in the bomb explosion.  Or like when she'd taken him back after all his crap, despite his mistakes.

He'd been stuck in the bed for hours, and aside from handholding and rubbing, she hadn't gotten this close.  Perhaps she'd been afraid to upset all the wires and monitors, which was understandable.  But he'd done that on his own when he'd rolled over.  He'd given her a place to lie down that wouldn't disrupt anything.  He should have tried that earlier.

A moan rumbled through him as she slipped her hand underneath his gown and her palm flattened out across the skin just underneath his navel.  Her touch warmed him all the way to his spine.  A shiver of sensation ran through him, and she lay there, holding.  A sobbing breath fell from his lips, but relief had conceived it, not pain.  He panted as the tears finally halted, blinking, wishing he were strong enough to do something, anything to return the gesture.  Exhaustion hammered him from all directions, but it didn't matter as much anymore.

"I love you, Mere," he said, the sound of it barely escaping the grips of his lungs.  The space in front of him blurred, but only because he'd let his eyes lose focus.  "I keep forgetting to say it out loud today."

"It's okay," she said.  He felt her smile as she branded his skin with another soft, soothing kiss.  "I figured you were saving up for a good one or something."

A soft breath of wry laughter fell from his lips.  He winced as the pressure stabbed him with a sharp ache behind his eyes.  But it faded quickly.  "That wasn't a particularly good one," he said, accenting the sentence with a frustrated sigh.

"You just had brain surgery, and you're miserable," she said.  One of her index fingers snaked over his ear underneath the oxygen line.  The touch was soft and snaking and light, like she'd gathered up a feather to tease him with.  His eyelids drooped as she moved and slipped her hands down against his chest, underneath his gown.  "I'd say that makes it pretty good.  Points for working in a subtle apology, too.  And I'll give you extra credit for fighting a gallon of morphine to say it to me and not some random orderly."

He stilled.  "I haven't told an orderly, have I?"

"No," she said with a brief laugh that made everything seem lighter.  "You're sort of the anti-Meredith on all this stuff.  Quiet and stewy rather than loud and happy.  I think it's something about the latest drug cocktail, because you were pretty ecstatic about stuff before surgery."

"Quiet and stewy?" he said.  He couldn't help but chuckle.  Just a little.  A tiny thing.  Stewy?  It sounded like a nickname for Stewart.  Not a state of being.

"Yeah," she said.  "But you make such a sexy pouter.  Hard to keep myself off you when you're sad, you know."

He couldn't stop the smile that drew his lips back.  He sighed and let his eyelids fall shut.  "Being sad gets me sex?" he said.  He wasn't in the mood for it.  At all.  Not right then.  But it was something to look forward to.  Something to make his wishes to go home seem less pitiful.

She kissed him and squeezed her fingers, gripping him tightly.  There.  She was there.  She was hot and real against his back.  Breathing.  There.  "Possibly," she whispered, dusting him with another light kiss.

"Hmm," he grunted noncommittally.  "So, if I cry some more, do I get kissing?"

Tired.  The exhaustion that'd been pounding had finally knocked through the door he'd shoved between himself and it.  Conscious thought dripped out of him, and his muscles slowly relaxed.  Sinking.  He was.  Sinking.

"Get some sleep, Derek," Meredith said from far away.  "I love you.  I'll be here."

And time once more wandered out of his awareness, replaced by twisting, narcotic dreams.

When he woke up again, he couldn't figure out what was different.  He came back to himself slowly.  Sound first.  His heart monitor beeped softly.  The fluorescent light that bathed his bed in ghastly white hummed.  The noises of civilization drifted in through the open doorway.  Footsteps.  Voices.  Clackity-clacks of typing.  Wheels, turning.  He focused on his immediate surroundings.  Somebody was there, standing at the foot of his bed, staring.  Breathing.  Shuffling.  Pages flipped.

At first, Derek thought the mysterious observer was a nurse.  Meredith sounded wholly different, more delicate, smaller.  That was when he realized what was strange.  No Meredith.  Her scent lay faintly on his pillow, but the soft sound of her breathing, the rustling and squeaks of her highlighter didn't accent the air, not even in the muted way that said the sounds were happening, he just wasn't hearing them all yet.  No, this breathing was heavier.  Fuller.  Coming from a larger body than Meredith possessed.  Larger.  Male.

Derek forced himself to the surface, opening his eyes before he was really ready to greet the world.  A shock of color slammed across what had been comfortable darkness.  He blinked, and things started focusing.  He blinked again, and he found Mark paging through his chart with a vague frown on his face.

"Stop," Derek said, his voice back to something hoarse and scratchy after lack of use.  The soreness in his throat had, at least, faded to a faint tickle of irritation.  "Those are mine."

Mark looked up.  His face colored with a slightly more peach tone.  Almost a blush, but not quite.  Caught.

"Hey, you're awake," he said in useless observation, clearing his throat in an awkward gust of throaty, rumbling sound.  "Hey, man."  He put the chart down without comment into the flap at the end of Derek's bed and wandered around to the seat where Meredith had spent most of the night.

Mark collapsed into it and leaned forward onto his elbows, which he caught with his knees.  His eyes ran up and down the length of the bed, widening slightly.  The chair squeaked on its wheels as Mark shifted in the seat.

Derek searched the room with his gaze.  Meredith was gone.  Meredith had said she would be there.  But she was gone.  An irrational club of fear that he hated himself for conjuring bludgeoned his mind before he could formulate something reasonable.  In the bathroom.  Grabbing some coffee.  Stretching her legs.

He swallowed.  Of course, her disappearance was something reasonable.  Snacking.  Catnap in an on-call room.  Shower.  It--

"Meredith's out in the hallway on her phone," Mark replied, answering the unspoken question Derek hadn't gotten up the energy to ask yet.  "Passed her on the way in.  Sounded like she's talking to Mom.  She probably didn't want to wake you."

"Oh," Derek said.  He reached up and rubbed the bridge of his nose.  The intravenous line followed his arm.  His forearm looked thin and something about the offending tube and the itchy surgical tape just made him look... sick.  Regardless of its purpose.

He closed his eyes and sighed.  His mind felt like cotton.  His mouth felt pasty.  At least the throbbing ache seemed less...  Much less.  His mind was clearer than it had been all night, and still no ache.  Either he'd developed a ridiculous tolerance to morphine in a short period of time, or they'd reduced his dosage.  A lot.  Maybe they would drop him down to codeine as soon as he was dealing with solids again.

His mind was clearer, but the exhaustion hadn't lessened whatsoever.

"What's the biggest mistake you've ever made?" Mark asked.

Derek twitched toward the sound.  He'd forgotten Mark was there.  Forgotten.  Maybe he wasn't thinking quite as clearly as he would have liked...  "Mmm?" he muttered, rumbling against his weakened vocal cords.  He wanted Mark to go away.  But he was tired.  He didn't have the fight in him to even try to get Mark to leave.  Mark never left without dragging his virtual feet while he mumbled every protest from reasonable to pathetic.

"You told me trusting me was the second biggest mistake you've ever made," Mark said.  "I want to know what the biggest mistake was."

Derek heaved a breath.  What?  When had?  When...  Things were not making sense anymore.  Maybe he really was muddled.  He blinked his eyes back open.  The sky beyond the windows was a deep cobalt color with just a hint of brightening.  How long?  When...

"What time is it?" he asked, confused, his voice sluggishly composing itself as his thoughts raced.

"5 AM, Derek," Mark said.  And then he grasped Derek's hand.

The touch made Derek cringe away as his enemy but friend shattered the fragile concept of personal space, a concept Derek had been clinging to since Meredith had lulled him to sleep again, but he didn't have the will to argue it further, and the grip stayed after Derek settled, because Mark held on like a leech.  Like a parasite.  If there was one thing Mark was good at, it was not going away when he wasn't wanted.

Derek leaned back against the pillow and breathed through his nostrils like a startled, frightened animal.  He was stuck.  Stuck in the bed.  And Mark wouldn't go away.

Mark's hand was warm.  And the look on his face was pleading.  Begging.  Begging in a way that had earlier reduced Derek to tears when he'd been forced to do it.  Mark didn't beg, either.  And something about that made Derek not hate the forced intimacy so much.  Because Mark was reduced to begging, and inversely, that made Derek feel a little powerful.

He needed powerful right then, desperately, no matter how rotten it made him for stepping all over Mark.  Power was ambrosia to him when he couldn't even walk.  Power.  It was a vague feeling, tingling, wispy.  Just at the tattered edges of his conscious thought.  But it was enough to make Derek not struggle anymore.

Enough to give an inch.

"Please, it's..." Mark said, his voice cutting deep and low and weeping, despite the relative stability of his gaze, stable except for the rabid, fierce stare that begged.  Begged Derek.  "Please, answer me."

Derek blinked.  What had been the question again?

"Your biggest mistake," Mark prodded, reading Derek's dazed behavior like a cheap novel off a shelf.

"Leaving Meredith," Derek replied with only a bumbling moment of hesitation as his brain started working again.  Muddled.  Definitely muddled.  Now that he was required to have a conversation, the sluggish, disjointed tumbling in his head resembling thinking became readily apparent.  "Not signing the papers the first time."

Mark's eyes widened before narrowing.  He swallowed.  And he cleared his throat.  "Oh," he said.  He looked up with a smirk after he'd recovered from his surprise.  "You're really sort of moonstruck, aren't you?"

"And tired, Mark."  Derek sighed, letting his eyes fall shut.  He wanted his hand back.

It's okay, man.  Don't worry.

This wasn't like the last time.  The blur began to take him away again.  Meredith was fine.  But on the phone.  Not there.  Mark had his hand captive.  And a nurse was due to check his vitals and change his Foley bag again.  He could tell from the uncomfortable feeling in his groin, more uncomfortable than usual, anyway.  Sleeping seemed like a good escape.  Sleeping seemed...

Necessary.

"When you met her," Mark said, piercing through the fog like a boat on the open water.  "Was it like when you met Addison?"

Derek snuffled back awake.  "Met?" he asked, trying to keep track of things.  Trying.  Facts kept slipping through his precarious grip.

"Meredith," Mark clarified.

"It was never like that," Derek said, not bothering to open his eyes.  Meredith not like Addison.  Not like.  That was a fact that made it through the morphine unscathed.  It was an internal law.

"What was it like?" Mark asked.

Derek's first response was something nasty.  Why are you prying?  Why are you trying to tease me?  What's with the torture?

But Mark...  Something overlaid his usual, flat, aloof tone with vulnerability.  Something about his whole demeanor seemed off.  Uncharacteristic.  He wanted to understand.  He was curious, and he was asking.  Asking like a four-year-old.  What's this mean?  What's that mean?  Why is the sky blue?

And Derek was too tired to snap anymore.

What had he been saying?

"What was it like?" Mark prodded again, his voice slow and patient, not nasty, not laughing at Derek's mental floundering.

A moment, bright and colorful and real, materialized loud and singular amongst the cacophony of other things.

I was sitting there with my world stopped, and I didn't even know what her name was.  It was like a...  Like lightning.

"Lightning," Derek replied, relishing the sudden mental silence as he focused on that moment and breathed.  Meeting Meredith had been like lightning.  Meeting Meredith had been...

Coming home.

Taking a breath.

Living again.

Another silence sent him drifting, floating, loose, on the edge of sleep, skimming it like a hand reaching down from a boat to break the surface of the water below.  He knew Mark would pull him back again when he figured out his next line of interrogation.  Thinking in between, trying to anticipate the next question was too much like real thinking, and it just made things hurt again when he'd been rather enjoying the not hurting.  Sleep.

"Remember freshman year of college when you met that girl?" Mark said, distant, like he stood on a cliff across a deep ravine.  His voice widened into the rumble of thunder as Derek was yanked away from the fog and back into the hospital room.  "What was her name?  Cassie?"  Derek blinked as the memory coalesced, sluggish piece by sluggish piece.  Casey.  Casey had been a sophomore.  Lovely woman.  But...  Mark continued, "Tall.  Curvy.  Black hair.  The one with the big ju--"

"Casey," Derek corrected before Mark could finish, mindful of Nurse Francine, who darted from monitor to monitor, checking him quietly.  He hadn't even noticed her approach.  She lifted the wrist Mark didn't have a hold on and listened to his pulse quickly.  She smiled.

"Morning, Dr. Shepherd," she said cheerfully.  "You look like you're feeling a little better.  Do you need anything?"

"No, thanks," Derek replied.  Except for Mark to go away.  But Francine wasn't supposed to be a bouncer.

She nodded, speaking cheerfully as she bent down at the foot of the bed.  "All right," she said.  Plastic crinkled, and the awful feeling in his groin died down into just a subtle needing.  Needing to urinate instead of NEEDING.  He couldn't help the sigh of relief that tumbled from his lips.  "I'll bring you something soft to work on in a little bit," Francine continued.  "Maybe pudding?  Or Jell-O.  We'll see how that goes.  Maybe we can put you on the regular meal rotation soon."

She stood up, bag in hand, grinning, as though eating real food again was supposed to be the best news in the world.  Derek closed his eyes against the sudden, bitter sting that made it hard to keep his eyes open.  He blinked.  But it didn't go away.

"Right.  Casey MacIntyre," Mark said with a soft chuckle as Francine trotted out of the room.  "You said that was like lightning when she kissed you in the alley behind the bookstore."

Derek loosed a noncommittal breath that could have been a laugh if he'd given any of himself to it.  But he hadn't.  He didn't feel like laughing.  "I remember," he said, his tone low and grating.  He blinked, trying to ease away the burn in his eyes.  He reached up with both hands to wipe it all away.  Mark unexpectedly released him without comment.

Derek leaned away, looking to the side.  Away from Mark.  God, he didn't want Mark to watch him fall apart.  He sucked in a breath and forced it all back down, blinking, blinking, blinking.  The cloud of morphine he'd been so certain he'd overcome seemed cloudier, sludgier.  Perhaps he'd been in denial before.  Or just not thinking hard enough to notice how fucked up he still was.  Because now his mind was positively scattered.  Like bits of confetti caught in a torrent of wind.  He cleared his throat, wincing as the action sent a jab of pain back through his skull.

When he looked back, he found Mark watching him quietly.  But Mark didn't comment.  Didn't ask, "Are you okay, man?"  Didn't say a word to illustrate he'd just seen Derek have a minor breakdown.  And Meredith had helped.  Earlier.  She'd helped.  The upset tumbled away and didn't seem to linger like a dark, coiling thing.

"And Addison," Mark continued as if the little episode hadn't happened.  "When you met her, that was lightning, too.  You said she was the love of your life."

"Yeah," Derek said, relief pouring through him when he saw that Mark was going to let it go and not drill into him with questions.  No more drills.  "I said that."

Mark shook his head.  "You fall hard and fast, man.  I don't know how you do it."

"This thing with Meredith isn't like those," Derek said.  Meredith not like Addison.  Certainly not like Casey.  He could cling to that.  He could... think about that.  Because it wasn't thinking.  It was innate.

"It isn't?"

"After Meredith struck me, I never got up again," Derek said, trying to explain it in simple terms that Mark would understand.  Simple terms he could piece together in the din of fragmented everything.  "I'm not just me anymore.  I have...  I never..."

His explanation fell apart, and a roll of aching overwhelmed him.  But he didn't.  He didn't want to ask for more.  It made him feel worse to know he couldn't even control his thought processes, let alone his body.  He could live with ache and a bit of mental tangle.  He didn't want painless stupor.

What had he been saying?

"So," Mark said, pulling him back, back, back into the conversation.  "What were Addison and Casey?"

"What?" Derek said, blinking.  Why couldn't...

"You said meeting Meredith was like lightning.  What were Addison and Casey?"

Definitely not lightning.

"Carpet static," Derek replied tiredly, grabbing at the first cogent metaphor he could think of.  "But I was too naive to know it at the time."

"Oh," Mark replied, but it was clear from his tone that something had made him wonder.  Confused him.  But Derek couldn't think of any other way to put it.  And he wanted to sleep again.  He wanted...

He sighed and sank down into the bed as far as he could relax himself to go.  "I'm tired, Mark.  Please."  Stop poking.  Leave me be.  Let me sleep.  Go away.  Can't think.

"Okay," Mark said.  Derek twitched in surprise and sighed, sighed, grateful that he didn't have to fight.

For a moment, Derek drifted again.  Drifted loose.  Near to sleeping.  Near, so near.

"Can I...  Stay?" Mark asked.  "I have some notes to write, and I..."

Derek jerked at the rumbling intrusion into the tired, drugged roar, but...  Mark.  Asking.  Not Mark telling.  Asking.  Derek rested, eyes shut, thinking.  Dr. Bailey had been saying something earlier.  Something important.  What was?  Right.  "Quiz Meredith on plastics," Derek said.

"I... okay," Mark said, agreeing quickly despite his obvious confusion.  "Okay, when she comes back in, I can do that."

Things began to stretch.  Derek felt like he was dangling at the end of a rubber band.  Sounds dimmed.  His awareness of his surroundings shrunk to a pinpoint.  His head dipped to the side.

"Derek?" Mark whispered, snapping him back.

"Mmm..."

"How do you know the difference between carpet static and lightning if you've only felt one?" Mark said.

It was a loaded question.  Because Derek, as blurry and jumbled as his thinking was, had enough faculties left to realize this was a question about Addison.  His ex-wife.  Mark's adulterous toy.  Or maybe not really a toy, if the question was any indication.  Addison.

Maybe the morphine dulled his caring.  The realization about the nature of the underlying subject didn't overwhelm with anger or anything of the sort.  He was tired.  He wanted sleep.  He wanted to not need sleep every five minutes.  Everything else seemed inconsequential next to that.  Mark didn't get it.  Mark wasn't going to get it.  Why waste energy grinding his molars over something that would never happen?  Why waste... hope?

The room slogged around him like molasses.  Sleep.  Go back to sleep.

Mark didn't matter.  Addison didn't matter.  Mark and Addison didn't matter.

"If losing her would wound you, it's carpet static," Derek mumbled.  "If losing her would cut something out of you that could never be replaced, it's lightning."  And despite it all, he managed to smile in a way that made his nerve endings tingle.

Meredith was definitely lightning.

Mark laughed after a long pause, perhaps to piece together the sleep-slurred words.  "I forgot how sappy you are."

Derek grunted, sniffed.  "I'm drugged."

"And sappy."

"Shut up, Mark," Derek snapped.  But the words had no bite.  Just tired resignation.

"All right," Mark said, quiet, also resigned.

"Jesus," Derek said, slurred, mumbling, "I'm not dying."  Annoyance tangoed with the exhaustion crushing him down.  He felt Mark's piercing stare.  And his constant surrendering was too weird to let pass.  Mark was like a rhinoceros.  Always pushing.  Always knowing and forcing everyone around him to know what he knew with a roar and a charge.  Mark suddenly acting like a feeble mouse confused him.  Because that wasn't Mark.

Was it?

"You were," Mark said.  "And I...  You were.  I'm... trying.  To listen."

Truth.  Perhaps he would have left if Derek had bothered to ask instead of just thinking it.

"I feel like shit," Derek confessed, the words tumbling from him, wheezy, breathless, almost like a spill of quiet sobs.  It was a crushing admission.  And the rest of him slipped away into the mire.

Sleep.

"I know, man," Mark replied from far away, his words strangely comforting.  "It'll be okay."

Derek didn't comment as his anchor finally came loose, and time parted company once again.  His last coherent observation was that Meredith was very good at plastics questions.  The soft mumble of Mark's complicated queries intermingled with her whispered, confident answers.  The words hit his eardrums like a soothing wave and soon fell into silence.