Lightning Strikes Twice - Part 44A
Title: Lightning Strikes Twice
Fandom: Grey's Anatomy
Pairing: Duh. (Mer/Der)
Rating: M
Timeline: Post Time After Time.
This is a big Derek part, even though he's not in it at all. I had a lot of fun finally bringing everything full circle. I hope you enjoy!
~~~~~
Crap.
The situation didn't really sink in until Meredith found herself pulling her seatbelt across her lap and stuffing her keys in the ignition. Ellen settled into the passenger side of the vehicle, silent, her red-striped tote bag on the floor by her feet, her small leather purse clutched in her hands. The car rumbled to life, and Meredith sat there, feeling the vibrations of the engine more than hearing them. Her SUV was back at the house. She'd driven Derek to his appointment with Dr. Weller in his black Lexus because the ride was smoother.
And that sounded vaguely naughty.
And Ellen was sitting in the passenger side of the car, silent. Had she mentioned the silent part? No? Silent. Definitely silent.
Crap. Crap. Crap.
She'd seen how growly Derek had been getting the more his mother had needled, and she hadn't really thought about what the implications would be of intervention. She'd just reacted. Now, Derek was alone. And Meredith was alone with Derek's mother. Ellen. Who she hadn't ever really been alone with except in moments of extreme peril and badness, thus precluding the need for serious discussion beyond the standard platitudes. Which hadn't made for excellent conversation.
"Do you want the radio on, or something?" Meredith asked as she started fumbling with the dial, nerves making her fingers shake. She'd run interference with Derek's mother. Why had she done that? She didn't do that. Moms were Meredith kryptonite. She babbled onward, unable to stop herself, "Because Derek likes to have the radio on for the noise, and maybe, I don't know. Is that hereditary? It seems like it would be. Liking or disliking noise should totally be a gene thing. He keeps it on the stupidest station ever, though. Do you like The Clash, too?"
Ellen blinked as if she'd been snapped out of a daze. She turned, her gaze flicked to the radio as Meredith twisted the dial, and then she sighed. "Oh, no, dear. No, thank you," she said before turning back to gaze out the window, and Meredith yanked her hand away from the offending device as though she'd been scalded.
Meredith sighed, the puff of air escaping through her lips like she was blowing into a trumpet, sending loose bangs flying. "Okay, not a gene thing." She pulled the car out of the parking spot.
Seattle was having one of its bleaker days. Gray clouds hovered in a sheet over the city, robbing the sprawl of humanity of what should have been a beautiful, cerulean July day. Contrary to popular belief, there were a few weeks out of the year where Seattle was almost constantly beautiful. Idyllic. That day was far from idyllic. The whole week had been far from idyllic, actually, she realized. It'd been raining on and off since she and Derek had gotten home from Connecticut.
People wandered in from the parking lot to the hospital or wandered out to find their cars, little specks of activity against a background of bleary. Umbrellas hung folded at their sides, ready to come up like shields at a moment's notice, but more like a fashionable accessory than an unusual addition to the standard apparel. You could always tell the natives, just by how they held their umbrellas, assuming they even bothered with umbrellas at all. People who minded getting wet didn't make it long in Washington, or Oregon, for that matter. Puddles and other memories of a recent drizzle carpeted the pavement with an oil slick sheen, the kind that swirled faintly with all the colors of the rainbow. The air smelled earthy, like rain, even in the car as it cycled through the ducts from the outside.
"I used to," Ellen said.
"Used to what?" Meredith asked.
"I had six rambunctious children, Meredith. I have fourteen rambunctious grandchildren. I enjoy the quiet when I can these days. But I used to have the radio on all the time."
"Oh," Meredith said. "Sorry."
Ellen turned to her. "Whatever for?"
Meredith bit her lip. "I... I don't know. It just seemed like the thing to say."
A ghost of a smile chased across Ellen's face before it disappeared. "It's really all right, dear."
"What is?"
"I know you're doing this for him," Ellen said.
Meredith gripped the steering wheel tightly as she navigated out of the lot. "I really just wanted to go shopping for knitting things. Because I used to knit. And you knit. And it seemed appropriate. Because when would it be better to start again than when I have a really good coach. Assuming you'll help me. I'm sorry. Should I not have assumed that?" she asked, trying to stall the onslaught of panic slowly pulling her into a tailspin of unstoppable babble. "I just... Knitting seemed like a good idea," she added when Ellen didn't reply.
Crap, crap, crap the chorus twittered in her head.
"I like to do it," Ellen replied absently. "It's relaxing. It gives me something to..."
"It helps with surgical dexterity," Meredith blurted. Crap. Like Ellen would care about surgical dexterity.
Ellen raised an eyebrow, watching the scenery pass by as Meredith navigated the streets. "Does it? Hmm," she said.
Meredith swallowed. That was exactly like how Derek sounded. Hmm. She'd thought it was his own verbal quirk. His own sexy verbal quirk. She loved it when he purred deep and low and happy. Hmm. Sometimes, he used it when he was tired, or hurting, or depressed, when a single unhappy syllable could explain everything, wordless, better than a rant or diatribe ever could. The sexy, happy ones were her favorite, the ones when he had naughty thoughts about how delectable she looked, or when he debated what'd he do to her later when he had her alone. Kiss her. Touch her. Unwrap her like a present. The sound itself was like a wave of silk, crawling up her spine. It made her shiver. Not that his mother saying it was sexy. His mother saying it was just... uncanny. And female. And weird. And...
Derek. She'd left Derek alone so she could baby-sit his mother. His mother who hmmed as well. His mother who was freaking out. Well, maybe not freaking out. She was actually rather subdued. It was a subdued... freak. Freak that was not freaking. Ellen was upset. She'd been upset all morning, and she'd been taking it out on Derek. And now she and Meredith were alone in the car together. And Meredith was freaking out. Freaking. Out. About being alone with Ellen for the first time... Ever. Ellen, who, while she'd been very kind and tolerant, probably had no desire to be there in the car with Meredith, who had no desire to be there in the car with Ellen.
Meredith had gotten the impression that she'd slowly been gaining ground, slowly getting Ellen to like her. But... Of all the Shepherds, Ellen was the only unknown quantity. The one she didn't know if she had swayed yet. There'd been progress. Positive progress. But that didn't necessarily mean there was a specific amount of like. Or dislike. Or anything really.
What if...
"Red light," Ellen said softly.
Meredith slammed her foot on the brake pedal. "Red!" she exclaimed as she stared at the intersection light. Her heart throbbed in her chest as the car behind her honked about her sudden stop. Ellen pulled her hand off the dashboard nonchalantly. Meredith swallowed, and her breath came back to her. "Yes, yes, that's red. Very red. I'm... Sorry." Sorry for potentially almost killing you. "Yeah. So, how do you like Seattle?" A spatter of drizzle started to hit the windshield, and she flicked the wipers on.
"It's very green," Ellen replied. "But very gray."
"Yeah, it is green," Meredith agreed. "I've never seen it so green anywhere else. It's like... Like one of those digital film editor people saw the East Coast and the plains and the deserts, thought they were drab, and colorized everything over here to make up for the mess of things everywhere else."
Ellen laughed softly. "I guess the East Coast would seem drab compared to here."
"It's our gift for tolerating all this stupid rain, I think," Meredith said.
"I suppose," Ellen said.
Silence fell into the space between them. The air conditioner whooshed softly in the undercurrent. The sound of traffic hung just in the back of Meredith's awareness, mostly muted by the cabin of the car. The splat, splat, splat of rain began to thunder down onto the windshield as the drizzle became something heavier. The windshield wipers worked hard to clear the mess away. The light turned green, and Meredith accelerated.
It was weird. Wholly weird. Meredith's mind raced as she tried to think of something, anything to say. How do you like Seattle was the penultimate small-talk. It should have carried them through the drear to the store, where Ellen would have, with hope, been distracted by the fancy fabrics and yarns and stuff, but it hadn't. Now, what was she supposed to do? At least the silence wasn't a tense one. Ellen stared off into her own world, her posture relaxed as she pondered the complexities of each raindrop streaking down the window on her side.
"It gives me something else to worry about," Ellen said after they'd gone a few blocks in silence. "Knitting does. Stitching correctly. If I focus on that, I'm not making him feel horrible. I don't want to sit there and make him feel awful, but I can't seem to..." Her voice cut off as she sucked in a breath, two, three, four. Her lip quivered. She raised her weathered, spindly fingers to her face and brushed at her eyes.
Crap, Meredith decided. Taking her future mother-in-law for a trek to a knitting store, alone, when she knew Ellen was already upset... Such a bad, bad idea. She hoped Derek was getting something out of this. Some sleep. Anything to make it worth it. She hoped he didn't mind being alone. She'd promised him she'd stay the whole time. And then she'd left. She'd left, albeit with his mother, but she'd broken the promise all the same. When she'd poked her head back into his room, asked if there was anything he needed, given him a chance to tell her he didn't want them to go, he'd seemed okay with it. He'd... She hoped he would be all right. Better than her stuck in the car alone with his mother, at least.
She snapped out of her thoughts, only to find that the watery, red-eyed look Ellen had been harboring had been replaced with a steady stream of upset. Ellen sniffled softly, staring out the rain-streaked window, looking lost.
"He knows you're upset," Meredith said, trying to reassure her. Anything. "He didn't take any of it personally. He's actually mad at himself for being nasty with you."
Ellen brushed her face and laughed, soft and weepy. "I know I'm not helping," she said. "But I... I'm sorry, dear. He's... He's very sick. David was fine, and then he was gone. I never had any time. And now I do, and all I can think about is that I'm running out of it. I'm not supposed to outlive my son, and from what you and Sarah and the doctor all told me, I almost did."
"Ellen, Derek's going to be fine," Meredith rushed to say, reflexive. "Brain surgery is really hard to deal with for a lot of families because there aren't really any obvious wounds to explain why someone is so bad off afterward. It's hard. It's hard to understand that somebody who, on the outside, looks perfectly healthy, is all torn up on the inside. Craniotomies are notorious for causing fatigue, trouble with concentration, and monster headaches afterward. There is nothing wrong with Derek right now that shouldn't be wrong."
The words had already spilled out of her mouth before she realized what a hypocrite she was being. It was the standard spiel for people having a hard time with a loved one who'd suffered a brain injury, and the words had hopped off her lips by rote. She sighed, upset with herself for even going there. Two days before, she'd been the one who'd needed to talk, and Derek, who'd been feeling like crap, had been there for her, explained to her in tangible terms why he would be there for the long haul. No amount of consoling had helped her before that. No amount of hearing that he would be fine had helped her before that. Ellen needed something she could hold onto, something concrete, something she could understand. She needed her own I'd-come-back-for-you words of truth that would ease her doubting back into its dark and subtle place. And Meredith didn't have those. She had platitudes.
"I know," Ellen replied. "In my head, I know that he's okay. But he looks... With the sheet. Lying flat. David was thirty-eight. He looked so much like Derek does now. He even wore a watch that looked the same," she said. Ellen loosely ran her fingers against her wrist. She didn't wear a watch, but she had a thin gold bracelet the width of perhaps four strands of hair. The bracelet slid up and down with the motions of her worry, catching the light on the coattails of random moments, glittering. She stared out the window, oblivious to it. "The same style. I keep thinking about that day. The same watch. It's silly, the details I remember. I don't remember what shirt he wore in the morning, or what he had for breakfast, or whether he said I love you before he left for work. I wasn't expecting it to be the last day, or I would have paid more attention, I think." Her voice trailed away, and she got lost in the glaze of downpour across her window.
"Aneurysms can be very sudden," Meredith said. Lame. She felt like a lame duck. Like she was consoling someone for being a screwed up freak. She couldn't do that without feeling the stinging burn of hypocrisy only made worse by the fact that this was Derek's mother. Derek's mother, who already had plenty of reasons to dislike Meredith, should she choose to grab hold of them.
"It was," Ellen replied, her voice drifting off. The rain beat down on the roof and the windshield and the road. The road below sounded wet, and the car in front of Meredith sprayed a fan of mist behind it in its wake. A sea of red brake lights spread out before her on the road, lighting up and turning off like the call and response of fireflies on a summer evening.
Ellen glanced at Meredith for a long moment, long enough for Meredith to catch it out of the corner of her eye while she focused on the road. Considering. Ellen was considering her. Ellen's gaze was lost, searching, wondering. When she blinked and broke the stare, something had snapped, and she'd found what she was looking for.
"Nancy begged me," Ellen said.
"What?" Meredith said as she stopped for another light.
Ellen shook her head. "She was fourteen. Kathy was thirteen. Teenagers. Always certain they know best. When David died, they didn't believe me. They wanted to go to the morgue with me to identify the body, and they begged. I was too upset to deal with them begging, to say no when I should have," she said. She blinked, and new tears refreshed the evaporating, salty trail. "Sarah asked questions. Lots of questions. She was six. Old enough to know what it meant, but not old enough to really, really understand it, you know? Natalie was only three. She didn't understand no matter what I said, but she cried. I think she picked up on the mood in the room. In some ways, I'm glad she and Sarah were so young. They were saved from the worst of it. The funeral was just a thing to go to." Ellen sighed. "But Derek... Der stood there and stared when I told them all their father had died. Kathy and Nancy kept saying I was wrong. They were crying, telling me it wasn't right. That there'd been a mistake. But Derek. He just..." She shook her head, her eyebrows twitched once. "Stared. I thought... I convinced myself that seeing David would help them realize what had happened. I thought I could... Hold myself together long enough to get through the day. He didn't ask questions, and I thought that was because he was in denial like his sisters. But he was just a boy. I shouldn't have taken him to see the body, but Nancy and Kathy begged me, I was too upset, he got stuck in the middle of it all, and that's something I will always, always regret."
Meredith blinked, trying not to imagine it, trying and failing. She'd seen pictures of Derek as a kid dotting the walls of Ellen's home. He'd made a cute kid. He'd been a stick, nothing but skin and the sharp angles of bones. His curly hair had been more of an unruly mop back then than anything resembling styled. Dark lashes and dark brows painted his pale face, drawing attention to his eyes. In the earlier photos, back when he'd been a boy and nothing but, he'd always smiled, and it'd been a bright, beautiful thing that took everything else out of the picture and told the person looking at it, "Hello! I'm happy!" She tried to picture him like Ellen was describing, and she just couldn't do it.
The light turned green and she put her foot on the gas pedal, but she was barely aware of driving, which was bad. Bad. But she couldn't...
She'd known Derek's father had died young. It had been the weirdest moment when she'd found out. She'd gone to see her mother at the nursing home. Shortly after she and Derek had gotten back together. The visit had been rough. All Ellis had done was rant that she shouldn't have had a daughter because it had messed things up with Richard, and Meredith had come home barely holding herself together. Derek hadn't asked her what was wrong as she'd crawled under the covers. He'd just slipped his arms around her and held her. She'd started to cry, and he'd whispered things in her ear, whispered things that made it all better even when it wasn't. She'd apologized when she'd pulled herself together.
What for? he'd said.
I wish I had normal parents, she'd mused. Like yours. I bet your father taught you how to fish and took you camping and did all sorts of normal stuff. My mother taught me how to be the freak I am today.
His hands had stopped their soothing motions against her back. My dad is dead, Meredith. He's been dead a long time. Since I was ten.
She'd been too shocked to respond, mentally kicking herself as she'd fought for something to say to that. Anything. Sorry? Sorry had seemed trite and stupid and wrong, considering she'd just been ranting about her parents who'd both been very much alive at the time. They hadn't given her the best childhood, but... She'd had them. Sort of. She couldn't imagine how she would have felt if her mother had died even earlier than she had. Back when they had been living in Boston or something. Back when Meredith had been angry at the world. Angry and pink-haired. Perhaps even earlier, when Meredith had still thought she might be good enough someday. But then he'd kissed the top of her head and whispered into her hair, Nobody is normal, Meredith. But you're not a freak.
Tears stung her eyes. "Ellen..." she whispered, flailing frantically for anything to say, anything that would be appropriate, but she failed.
"He's always... He likes to turn himself inward when he's upset or hurting," Ellen said. "It's so easy to assume he's all right when he's not. It took him days to cry about his father, days where all he did was sit around and stare, and then I found him in his room, sobbing. Three nights in a row. Maybe four. And then he never did it again. The girls all did horribly that first semester in school. Derek was the top student in his class. He never came to me about anything again. Until you. It's like he shut himself off for thirty years."
You were like coming up for fresh air...
"I don't know what to say," Meredith whispered, trying to reconcile what she was hearing with the Derek she loved. It did a certain amount to explain everything. How Derek had slowly drifted into a persona. A distant workaholic with a driving need to please everyone, stuck in an unhappy marriage. You could only fake being bright and shiny for so long before it all fell apart.
It's like I was drowning, and you saved me.
"It's my fault," Ellen continued. "I shouldn't have taken him. Nancy and Kathy did need it. Derek didn't. He knew. He didn't need it driven into him like a spike. He and David were very close. I shouldn't have assumed..."
Meredith pulled into the parking lot at Stitches and turned the car off, but she didn't move. She couldn't. The rain splattering down on the windshield stopped, abrupt, like someone had flipped the universal rain switch or something. Misty gray remained behind, clogging the air with water droplets thick enough to make the air seem cloudy and wet.
"He told me he doesn't remember very much about his father," Meredith replied as if it would wipe the truth away.
Ellen sighed. "Children all deal with grief very differently."
And Derek had apparently faked himself into being fine until it stuck. Fake fine. His whole life. His whole freaking life. How did that work? She wondered if he even had a clue what had gone wrong or when. He probably didn't. It'd shaped him. It explained why all the photographs she'd seen further along in the Derek as a kid timeline had always seemed so serious.
"Derek thinks you're upset because you're thinking about his dad," Meredith said. "So does Sarah, I think."
"I am," Ellen replied, shrugging. "But I'm not. Derek changed. He changed so much when he disappeared. He's found a way to be bright and alive again... You reconnected him with himself, and I will always be grateful. He flirts and jokes and smiles all the time. You saved my son, Meredith. I'd gotten so used to him being a ghost in his own life," she said. Her voice trailed away and she blinked, looking out at the parking lot. The pavement had started to steam, and everything outside the car was murky and waterlogged. She sighed. "I don't want to outlive my children, Meredith. I had to outlive my husband, and I can't... Especially with Derek. Not now. Not when he's finally okay again. He's my boy. And he's happy. He's supposed to have time to be happy."
"Ellen, Ellen, he'll have plenty of time," Meredith insisted before adding in a tiny voice, "He's fine. He's perfectly fine." The words sliced into her like tiny razors, but instead of making her eyes sting with the pain of it, they cut the tears away. Derek fine. She realized, in that moment, without a doubt, that she believed it. She'd been put to the test, trying to defend what she knew was the truth, and it was. It was the truth. Derek would be fine.
I love a lot of things, Meredith. But I love you the most.
Ellen hadn't been witness to his admission, didn't know the universe was being nice, for once. She couldn't know. But Meredith knew. It was just a thing that was true.
"I keep seeing him on the gurney in the morgue," Ellen said. "They look so much alike. I keep pulling the sheet back in my head, and it's my sweet Der instead of David. And I don't know how to stop it."
"I was freaking out, too," Meredith replied.
Ellen nodded as she wiped streaks of tears away. "I know you were, dear," she said. "I'm glad talking helped." She met Meredith's gaze, solid, blue, fathomless. One blink, and Meredith found the part of the sentence Ellen had omitted. Talking helps me, too.
Meredith gripped the steering wheel, letting her nails bite into the protective leather covering. She might be making dents or tears or something. She didn't know. She didn't care. Derek could buy a new steering wheel cover if it bugged him that much. "Maybe you should talk to Derek," Meredith said. "Talk to... About. You know. Derek is very good at talking people down off proverbial ledge things."
Unlike her. Unlike Meredith. She felt like she was out of her league. She'd barely gotten talking to Derek down. She'd barely gotten talking to Cristina down. Talking to Ellen? Meredith Grey couldn't console Ellen Shepherd. Ellen Shepherd was... She was the mom. She was the Shepherd mom. She was the normal, loving Shepherd mom. The mom Meredith found herself wishing Ellis could have been more like.
Ellen shook her head. "I can't talk to him about David. Not like that."
"Why not?"
"I just can't," Ellen replied with a shrug. "To me, sometimes, he is David. An echo of him. And I can't... I can't do that."
"Oh," Meredith said, feeling grossly inadequate all over again. "Okay. Well..."
"Thank you, Meredith."
"For what?"
Ellen laughed softly as she wiped her eyes again. Her eyes were rimmed with red, but no tears fell. "Listening to an old woman moan about things that should be in the grave with David. It helps, sometimes. To talk about it. I miss him sometimes just for that. David, I mean."
Meredith blinked, realizing for the first time that the woman she'd feared, the woman she'd been at battle to please, the woman she'd sort of admired as a perfect example of a classic, normal, does-everything-right mom, was just a person. Not a perfect mom. But she tried. And she cared. And she was lonely.
Lonely.
"I um. Sure. No problem. I kind of... I do understand," Meredith said, struggling to say the right thing. Was there a right thing anymore? She didn't know. She didn't know anything. "About..." Meredith stammered, continuing, "Well, I kind of ran in circles with my own Derek-is-dying horror scenarios. It wasn't... It was a bad thing. And... You know..." She paused to gesture at the store awning twenty feet beyond the car. "We don't have to go to the fabric store, you know. I just... I was trying... Is there someplace else you'd rather see?" she asked, even as something inside her snapped. Coward!
She watched Ellen, lonely even after thirty years to get used to the idea of being alone, and she saw herself in the distant future. Eight years was a lot. But it wasn't fair or right or okay to worry about it now. It was just a waste of the good years. And the good years before it would be worth it. Absolutely worth it. That was all she could do. All she could ever do. At least seeing Ellen bolstered her certainty into something granite and immobile, not just a word or a fake self-assurance. Ellen hadn't once spoken of regret over loving whom she loved.
"The fabric store is fine," Ellen replied, following the shift in subject as if it had been something linear and predictable, and then the talking thing fell into silence.
Meredith wondered if she'd done something wrong, wondered if she'd cut abruptly short something that she should have let peter off on its own, in its own time, in due course. She felt a little useless as Ellen wiped her face and gathered her purse, but when Ellen got out of the car to peer at the store awning, her gaze flicked between the store and Meredith, and then she smiled.
Fandom: Grey's Anatomy
Pairing: Duh. (Mer/Der)
Rating: M
Timeline: Post Time After Time.
This is a big Derek part, even though he's not in it at all. I had a lot of fun finally bringing everything full circle. I hope you enjoy!
~~~~~
Crap.
The situation didn't really sink in until Meredith found herself pulling her seatbelt across her lap and stuffing her keys in the ignition. Ellen settled into the passenger side of the vehicle, silent, her red-striped tote bag on the floor by her feet, her small leather purse clutched in her hands. The car rumbled to life, and Meredith sat there, feeling the vibrations of the engine more than hearing them. Her SUV was back at the house. She'd driven Derek to his appointment with Dr. Weller in his black Lexus because the ride was smoother.
And that sounded vaguely naughty.
And Ellen was sitting in the passenger side of the car, silent. Had she mentioned the silent part? No? Silent. Definitely silent.
Crap. Crap. Crap.
She'd seen how growly Derek had been getting the more his mother had needled, and she hadn't really thought about what the implications would be of intervention. She'd just reacted. Now, Derek was alone. And Meredith was alone with Derek's mother. Ellen. Who she hadn't ever really been alone with except in moments of extreme peril and badness, thus precluding the need for serious discussion beyond the standard platitudes. Which hadn't made for excellent conversation.
"Do you want the radio on, or something?" Meredith asked as she started fumbling with the dial, nerves making her fingers shake. She'd run interference with Derek's mother. Why had she done that? She didn't do that. Moms were Meredith kryptonite. She babbled onward, unable to stop herself, "Because Derek likes to have the radio on for the noise, and maybe, I don't know. Is that hereditary? It seems like it would be. Liking or disliking noise should totally be a gene thing. He keeps it on the stupidest station ever, though. Do you like The Clash, too?"
Ellen blinked as if she'd been snapped out of a daze. She turned, her gaze flicked to the radio as Meredith twisted the dial, and then she sighed. "Oh, no, dear. No, thank you," she said before turning back to gaze out the window, and Meredith yanked her hand away from the offending device as though she'd been scalded.
Meredith sighed, the puff of air escaping through her lips like she was blowing into a trumpet, sending loose bangs flying. "Okay, not a gene thing." She pulled the car out of the parking spot.
Seattle was having one of its bleaker days. Gray clouds hovered in a sheet over the city, robbing the sprawl of humanity of what should have been a beautiful, cerulean July day. Contrary to popular belief, there were a few weeks out of the year where Seattle was almost constantly beautiful. Idyllic. That day was far from idyllic. The whole week had been far from idyllic, actually, she realized. It'd been raining on and off since she and Derek had gotten home from Connecticut.
People wandered in from the parking lot to the hospital or wandered out to find their cars, little specks of activity against a background of bleary. Umbrellas hung folded at their sides, ready to come up like shields at a moment's notice, but more like a fashionable accessory than an unusual addition to the standard apparel. You could always tell the natives, just by how they held their umbrellas, assuming they even bothered with umbrellas at all. People who minded getting wet didn't make it long in Washington, or Oregon, for that matter. Puddles and other memories of a recent drizzle carpeted the pavement with an oil slick sheen, the kind that swirled faintly with all the colors of the rainbow. The air smelled earthy, like rain, even in the car as it cycled through the ducts from the outside.
"I used to," Ellen said.
"Used to what?" Meredith asked.
"I had six rambunctious children, Meredith. I have fourteen rambunctious grandchildren. I enjoy the quiet when I can these days. But I used to have the radio on all the time."
"Oh," Meredith said. "Sorry."
Ellen turned to her. "Whatever for?"
Meredith bit her lip. "I... I don't know. It just seemed like the thing to say."
A ghost of a smile chased across Ellen's face before it disappeared. "It's really all right, dear."
"What is?"
"I know you're doing this for him," Ellen said.
Meredith gripped the steering wheel tightly as she navigated out of the lot. "I really just wanted to go shopping for knitting things. Because I used to knit. And you knit. And it seemed appropriate. Because when would it be better to start again than when I have a really good coach. Assuming you'll help me. I'm sorry. Should I not have assumed that?" she asked, trying to stall the onslaught of panic slowly pulling her into a tailspin of unstoppable babble. "I just... Knitting seemed like a good idea," she added when Ellen didn't reply.
Crap, crap, crap the chorus twittered in her head.
"I like to do it," Ellen replied absently. "It's relaxing. It gives me something to..."
"It helps with surgical dexterity," Meredith blurted. Crap. Like Ellen would care about surgical dexterity.
Ellen raised an eyebrow, watching the scenery pass by as Meredith navigated the streets. "Does it? Hmm," she said.
Meredith swallowed. That was exactly like how Derek sounded. Hmm. She'd thought it was his own verbal quirk. His own sexy verbal quirk. She loved it when he purred deep and low and happy. Hmm. Sometimes, he used it when he was tired, or hurting, or depressed, when a single unhappy syllable could explain everything, wordless, better than a rant or diatribe ever could. The sexy, happy ones were her favorite, the ones when he had naughty thoughts about how delectable she looked, or when he debated what'd he do to her later when he had her alone. Kiss her. Touch her. Unwrap her like a present. The sound itself was like a wave of silk, crawling up her spine. It made her shiver. Not that his mother saying it was sexy. His mother saying it was just... uncanny. And female. And weird. And...
Derek. She'd left Derek alone so she could baby-sit his mother. His mother who hmmed as well. His mother who was freaking out. Well, maybe not freaking out. She was actually rather subdued. It was a subdued... freak. Freak that was not freaking. Ellen was upset. She'd been upset all morning, and she'd been taking it out on Derek. And now she and Meredith were alone in the car together. And Meredith was freaking out. Freaking. Out. About being alone with Ellen for the first time... Ever. Ellen, who, while she'd been very kind and tolerant, probably had no desire to be there in the car with Meredith, who had no desire to be there in the car with Ellen.
Meredith had gotten the impression that she'd slowly been gaining ground, slowly getting Ellen to like her. But... Of all the Shepherds, Ellen was the only unknown quantity. The one she didn't know if she had swayed yet. There'd been progress. Positive progress. But that didn't necessarily mean there was a specific amount of like. Or dislike. Or anything really.
What if...
"Red light," Ellen said softly.
Meredith slammed her foot on the brake pedal. "Red!" she exclaimed as she stared at the intersection light. Her heart throbbed in her chest as the car behind her honked about her sudden stop. Ellen pulled her hand off the dashboard nonchalantly. Meredith swallowed, and her breath came back to her. "Yes, yes, that's red. Very red. I'm... Sorry." Sorry for potentially almost killing you. "Yeah. So, how do you like Seattle?" A spatter of drizzle started to hit the windshield, and she flicked the wipers on.
"It's very green," Ellen replied. "But very gray."
"Yeah, it is green," Meredith agreed. "I've never seen it so green anywhere else. It's like... Like one of those digital film editor people saw the East Coast and the plains and the deserts, thought they were drab, and colorized everything over here to make up for the mess of things everywhere else."
Ellen laughed softly. "I guess the East Coast would seem drab compared to here."
"It's our gift for tolerating all this stupid rain, I think," Meredith said.
"I suppose," Ellen said.
Silence fell into the space between them. The air conditioner whooshed softly in the undercurrent. The sound of traffic hung just in the back of Meredith's awareness, mostly muted by the cabin of the car. The splat, splat, splat of rain began to thunder down onto the windshield as the drizzle became something heavier. The windshield wipers worked hard to clear the mess away. The light turned green, and Meredith accelerated.
It was weird. Wholly weird. Meredith's mind raced as she tried to think of something, anything to say. How do you like Seattle was the penultimate small-talk. It should have carried them through the drear to the store, where Ellen would have, with hope, been distracted by the fancy fabrics and yarns and stuff, but it hadn't. Now, what was she supposed to do? At least the silence wasn't a tense one. Ellen stared off into her own world, her posture relaxed as she pondered the complexities of each raindrop streaking down the window on her side.
"It gives me something else to worry about," Ellen said after they'd gone a few blocks in silence. "Knitting does. Stitching correctly. If I focus on that, I'm not making him feel horrible. I don't want to sit there and make him feel awful, but I can't seem to..." Her voice cut off as she sucked in a breath, two, three, four. Her lip quivered. She raised her weathered, spindly fingers to her face and brushed at her eyes.
Crap, Meredith decided. Taking her future mother-in-law for a trek to a knitting store, alone, when she knew Ellen was already upset... Such a bad, bad idea. She hoped Derek was getting something out of this. Some sleep. Anything to make it worth it. She hoped he didn't mind being alone. She'd promised him she'd stay the whole time. And then she'd left. She'd left, albeit with his mother, but she'd broken the promise all the same. When she'd poked her head back into his room, asked if there was anything he needed, given him a chance to tell her he didn't want them to go, he'd seemed okay with it. He'd... She hoped he would be all right. Better than her stuck in the car alone with his mother, at least.
She snapped out of her thoughts, only to find that the watery, red-eyed look Ellen had been harboring had been replaced with a steady stream of upset. Ellen sniffled softly, staring out the rain-streaked window, looking lost.
"He knows you're upset," Meredith said, trying to reassure her. Anything. "He didn't take any of it personally. He's actually mad at himself for being nasty with you."
Ellen brushed her face and laughed, soft and weepy. "I know I'm not helping," she said. "But I... I'm sorry, dear. He's... He's very sick. David was fine, and then he was gone. I never had any time. And now I do, and all I can think about is that I'm running out of it. I'm not supposed to outlive my son, and from what you and Sarah and the doctor all told me, I almost did."
"Ellen, Derek's going to be fine," Meredith rushed to say, reflexive. "Brain surgery is really hard to deal with for a lot of families because there aren't really any obvious wounds to explain why someone is so bad off afterward. It's hard. It's hard to understand that somebody who, on the outside, looks perfectly healthy, is all torn up on the inside. Craniotomies are notorious for causing fatigue, trouble with concentration, and monster headaches afterward. There is nothing wrong with Derek right now that shouldn't be wrong."
The words had already spilled out of her mouth before she realized what a hypocrite she was being. It was the standard spiel for people having a hard time with a loved one who'd suffered a brain injury, and the words had hopped off her lips by rote. She sighed, upset with herself for even going there. Two days before, she'd been the one who'd needed to talk, and Derek, who'd been feeling like crap, had been there for her, explained to her in tangible terms why he would be there for the long haul. No amount of consoling had helped her before that. No amount of hearing that he would be fine had helped her before that. Ellen needed something she could hold onto, something concrete, something she could understand. She needed her own I'd-come-back-for-you words of truth that would ease her doubting back into its dark and subtle place. And Meredith didn't have those. She had platitudes.
"I know," Ellen replied. "In my head, I know that he's okay. But he looks... With the sheet. Lying flat. David was thirty-eight. He looked so much like Derek does now. He even wore a watch that looked the same," she said. Ellen loosely ran her fingers against her wrist. She didn't wear a watch, but she had a thin gold bracelet the width of perhaps four strands of hair. The bracelet slid up and down with the motions of her worry, catching the light on the coattails of random moments, glittering. She stared out the window, oblivious to it. "The same style. I keep thinking about that day. The same watch. It's silly, the details I remember. I don't remember what shirt he wore in the morning, or what he had for breakfast, or whether he said I love you before he left for work. I wasn't expecting it to be the last day, or I would have paid more attention, I think." Her voice trailed away, and she got lost in the glaze of downpour across her window.
"Aneurysms can be very sudden," Meredith said. Lame. She felt like a lame duck. Like she was consoling someone for being a screwed up freak. She couldn't do that without feeling the stinging burn of hypocrisy only made worse by the fact that this was Derek's mother. Derek's mother, who already had plenty of reasons to dislike Meredith, should she choose to grab hold of them.
"It was," Ellen replied, her voice drifting off. The rain beat down on the roof and the windshield and the road. The road below sounded wet, and the car in front of Meredith sprayed a fan of mist behind it in its wake. A sea of red brake lights spread out before her on the road, lighting up and turning off like the call and response of fireflies on a summer evening.
Ellen glanced at Meredith for a long moment, long enough for Meredith to catch it out of the corner of her eye while she focused on the road. Considering. Ellen was considering her. Ellen's gaze was lost, searching, wondering. When she blinked and broke the stare, something had snapped, and she'd found what she was looking for.
"Nancy begged me," Ellen said.
"What?" Meredith said as she stopped for another light.
Ellen shook her head. "She was fourteen. Kathy was thirteen. Teenagers. Always certain they know best. When David died, they didn't believe me. They wanted to go to the morgue with me to identify the body, and they begged. I was too upset to deal with them begging, to say no when I should have," she said. She blinked, and new tears refreshed the evaporating, salty trail. "Sarah asked questions. Lots of questions. She was six. Old enough to know what it meant, but not old enough to really, really understand it, you know? Natalie was only three. She didn't understand no matter what I said, but she cried. I think she picked up on the mood in the room. In some ways, I'm glad she and Sarah were so young. They were saved from the worst of it. The funeral was just a thing to go to." Ellen sighed. "But Derek... Der stood there and stared when I told them all their father had died. Kathy and Nancy kept saying I was wrong. They were crying, telling me it wasn't right. That there'd been a mistake. But Derek. He just..." She shook her head, her eyebrows twitched once. "Stared. I thought... I convinced myself that seeing David would help them realize what had happened. I thought I could... Hold myself together long enough to get through the day. He didn't ask questions, and I thought that was because he was in denial like his sisters. But he was just a boy. I shouldn't have taken him to see the body, but Nancy and Kathy begged me, I was too upset, he got stuck in the middle of it all, and that's something I will always, always regret."
Meredith blinked, trying not to imagine it, trying and failing. She'd seen pictures of Derek as a kid dotting the walls of Ellen's home. He'd made a cute kid. He'd been a stick, nothing but skin and the sharp angles of bones. His curly hair had been more of an unruly mop back then than anything resembling styled. Dark lashes and dark brows painted his pale face, drawing attention to his eyes. In the earlier photos, back when he'd been a boy and nothing but, he'd always smiled, and it'd been a bright, beautiful thing that took everything else out of the picture and told the person looking at it, "Hello! I'm happy!" She tried to picture him like Ellen was describing, and she just couldn't do it.
The light turned green and she put her foot on the gas pedal, but she was barely aware of driving, which was bad. Bad. But she couldn't...
She'd known Derek's father had died young. It had been the weirdest moment when she'd found out. She'd gone to see her mother at the nursing home. Shortly after she and Derek had gotten back together. The visit had been rough. All Ellis had done was rant that she shouldn't have had a daughter because it had messed things up with Richard, and Meredith had come home barely holding herself together. Derek hadn't asked her what was wrong as she'd crawled under the covers. He'd just slipped his arms around her and held her. She'd started to cry, and he'd whispered things in her ear, whispered things that made it all better even when it wasn't. She'd apologized when she'd pulled herself together.
What for? he'd said.
I wish I had normal parents, she'd mused. Like yours. I bet your father taught you how to fish and took you camping and did all sorts of normal stuff. My mother taught me how to be the freak I am today.
His hands had stopped their soothing motions against her back. My dad is dead, Meredith. He's been dead a long time. Since I was ten.
She'd been too shocked to respond, mentally kicking herself as she'd fought for something to say to that. Anything. Sorry? Sorry had seemed trite and stupid and wrong, considering she'd just been ranting about her parents who'd both been very much alive at the time. They hadn't given her the best childhood, but... She'd had them. Sort of. She couldn't imagine how she would have felt if her mother had died even earlier than she had. Back when they had been living in Boston or something. Back when Meredith had been angry at the world. Angry and pink-haired. Perhaps even earlier, when Meredith had still thought she might be good enough someday. But then he'd kissed the top of her head and whispered into her hair, Nobody is normal, Meredith. But you're not a freak.
Tears stung her eyes. "Ellen..." she whispered, flailing frantically for anything to say, anything that would be appropriate, but she failed.
"He's always... He likes to turn himself inward when he's upset or hurting," Ellen said. "It's so easy to assume he's all right when he's not. It took him days to cry about his father, days where all he did was sit around and stare, and then I found him in his room, sobbing. Three nights in a row. Maybe four. And then he never did it again. The girls all did horribly that first semester in school. Derek was the top student in his class. He never came to me about anything again. Until you. It's like he shut himself off for thirty years."
You were like coming up for fresh air...
"I don't know what to say," Meredith whispered, trying to reconcile what she was hearing with the Derek she loved. It did a certain amount to explain everything. How Derek had slowly drifted into a persona. A distant workaholic with a driving need to please everyone, stuck in an unhappy marriage. You could only fake being bright and shiny for so long before it all fell apart.
It's like I was drowning, and you saved me.
"It's my fault," Ellen continued. "I shouldn't have taken him. Nancy and Kathy did need it. Derek didn't. He knew. He didn't need it driven into him like a spike. He and David were very close. I shouldn't have assumed..."
Meredith pulled into the parking lot at Stitches and turned the car off, but she didn't move. She couldn't. The rain splattering down on the windshield stopped, abrupt, like someone had flipped the universal rain switch or something. Misty gray remained behind, clogging the air with water droplets thick enough to make the air seem cloudy and wet.
"He told me he doesn't remember very much about his father," Meredith replied as if it would wipe the truth away.
Ellen sighed. "Children all deal with grief very differently."
And Derek had apparently faked himself into being fine until it stuck. Fake fine. His whole life. His whole freaking life. How did that work? She wondered if he even had a clue what had gone wrong or when. He probably didn't. It'd shaped him. It explained why all the photographs she'd seen further along in the Derek as a kid timeline had always seemed so serious.
"Derek thinks you're upset because you're thinking about his dad," Meredith said. "So does Sarah, I think."
"I am," Ellen replied, shrugging. "But I'm not. Derek changed. He changed so much when he disappeared. He's found a way to be bright and alive again... You reconnected him with himself, and I will always be grateful. He flirts and jokes and smiles all the time. You saved my son, Meredith. I'd gotten so used to him being a ghost in his own life," she said. Her voice trailed away and she blinked, looking out at the parking lot. The pavement had started to steam, and everything outside the car was murky and waterlogged. She sighed. "I don't want to outlive my children, Meredith. I had to outlive my husband, and I can't... Especially with Derek. Not now. Not when he's finally okay again. He's my boy. And he's happy. He's supposed to have time to be happy."
"Ellen, Ellen, he'll have plenty of time," Meredith insisted before adding in a tiny voice, "He's fine. He's perfectly fine." The words sliced into her like tiny razors, but instead of making her eyes sting with the pain of it, they cut the tears away. Derek fine. She realized, in that moment, without a doubt, that she believed it. She'd been put to the test, trying to defend what she knew was the truth, and it was. It was the truth. Derek would be fine.
I love a lot of things, Meredith. But I love you the most.
Ellen hadn't been witness to his admission, didn't know the universe was being nice, for once. She couldn't know. But Meredith knew. It was just a thing that was true.
"I keep seeing him on the gurney in the morgue," Ellen said. "They look so much alike. I keep pulling the sheet back in my head, and it's my sweet Der instead of David. And I don't know how to stop it."
"I was freaking out, too," Meredith replied.
Ellen nodded as she wiped streaks of tears away. "I know you were, dear," she said. "I'm glad talking helped." She met Meredith's gaze, solid, blue, fathomless. One blink, and Meredith found the part of the sentence Ellen had omitted. Talking helps me, too.
Meredith gripped the steering wheel, letting her nails bite into the protective leather covering. She might be making dents or tears or something. She didn't know. She didn't care. Derek could buy a new steering wheel cover if it bugged him that much. "Maybe you should talk to Derek," Meredith said. "Talk to... About. You know. Derek is very good at talking people down off proverbial ledge things."
Unlike her. Unlike Meredith. She felt like she was out of her league. She'd barely gotten talking to Derek down. She'd barely gotten talking to Cristina down. Talking to Ellen? Meredith Grey couldn't console Ellen Shepherd. Ellen Shepherd was... She was the mom. She was the Shepherd mom. She was the normal, loving Shepherd mom. The mom Meredith found herself wishing Ellis could have been more like.
Ellen shook her head. "I can't talk to him about David. Not like that."
"Why not?"
"I just can't," Ellen replied with a shrug. "To me, sometimes, he is David. An echo of him. And I can't... I can't do that."
"Oh," Meredith said, feeling grossly inadequate all over again. "Okay. Well..."
"Thank you, Meredith."
"For what?"
Ellen laughed softly as she wiped her eyes again. Her eyes were rimmed with red, but no tears fell. "Listening to an old woman moan about things that should be in the grave with David. It helps, sometimes. To talk about it. I miss him sometimes just for that. David, I mean."
Meredith blinked, realizing for the first time that the woman she'd feared, the woman she'd been at battle to please, the woman she'd sort of admired as a perfect example of a classic, normal, does-everything-right mom, was just a person. Not a perfect mom. But she tried. And she cared. And she was lonely.
Lonely.
"I um. Sure. No problem. I kind of... I do understand," Meredith said, struggling to say the right thing. Was there a right thing anymore? She didn't know. She didn't know anything. "About..." Meredith stammered, continuing, "Well, I kind of ran in circles with my own Derek-is-dying horror scenarios. It wasn't... It was a bad thing. And... You know..." She paused to gesture at the store awning twenty feet beyond the car. "We don't have to go to the fabric store, you know. I just... I was trying... Is there someplace else you'd rather see?" she asked, even as something inside her snapped. Coward!
She watched Ellen, lonely even after thirty years to get used to the idea of being alone, and she saw herself in the distant future. Eight years was a lot. But it wasn't fair or right or okay to worry about it now. It was just a waste of the good years. And the good years before it would be worth it. Absolutely worth it. That was all she could do. All she could ever do. At least seeing Ellen bolstered her certainty into something granite and immobile, not just a word or a fake self-assurance. Ellen hadn't once spoken of regret over loving whom she loved.
"The fabric store is fine," Ellen replied, following the shift in subject as if it had been something linear and predictable, and then the talking thing fell into silence.
Meredith wondered if she'd done something wrong, wondered if she'd cut abruptly short something that she should have let peter off on its own, in its own time, in due course. She felt a little useless as Ellen wiped her face and gathered her purse, but when Ellen got out of the car to peer at the store awning, her gaze flicked between the store and Meredith, and then she smiled.