Lightning Strikes Twice - Part 22
Title: Lightning Strikes Twice
Author: AriaAdagio
Rating: M
Pairing: Mer/Der
Summary: Post Time After Time. Derek takes Meredith to visit his family in Connecticut, but nothing goes as planned.
~~~~~
Derek woke up drowning. His whole body jerked. A choking breath swept down his throat as the murky water parted before his eyes, leaving darkness. He blinked and swept his hands down over his face. His shaky palms slipped on the sweat until he got to the stubble.
He sat up. The room spun. Everything felt unsettled, almost like someone was using his stomach as a popcorn popper. His heart throbbed unevenly in his chest.
Meredith lay snoring next to him. They'd migrated back to the bedroom after a while, stumbled into an uneasy sleep. She'd spooned him, and he'd lain there, listening to her breathing, just listening. Something he'd done countless nights since her accident. Lain there. Listening to her breathe. Somewhere along the line, he'd fallen asleep, and somewhere after that, they'd apparently rolled apart.
Breathe, breathe, breathe. He tried to rein himself. His innards curled. He wrapped his arms around his stomach and threw his legs over the side of the mattress as he leaned down over his knees.
He'd thought he was done. Done with this. There was nothing left to surprise him, unless by some miracle he remembered the car crash, but that was extremely unlikely. If the concussion had made him develop some sort of anxiety disorder, he didn't know what he was going to do. He didn't...
He growled. Stop. Worrying. Stop it.
He forced himself to stand up, wobbling slightly. His balance went on walkabout for a moment when his hand left the support of the mattress, and he flailed, knocking the clock, the pill bottle, and his sunglasses off the nightstand as he struggled to right himself. Meredith snorted and rolled over, but she didn't wake.
He stood, leaning against the nightstand like a runner stretching out his calves, breathing, listening to her breathing. Stop it. The Xanax bottle lay on the ground near his feet. Stop. Worrying. He watched the bottle for a long set of moments before he realized.
He'd vomited up the last pill. He wasn't on anything right then.
He leaned down to pick up the bottle. He had the cap popped open before he stopped, paused with his index finger fishing for a pill. No. He didn't need it anymore. There was nothing left to give him a panic attack, which was really what this stuff was for. Not generalized anxiety treatment. Nothing left. He put the bottle back on the nightstand.
He could deal with this. He... He swallowed. There was no way he was going to get more sleep like this until he calmed himself down. Nervous energy propelled him through the wobbling seasickness to the doorframe, where he hovered, breathing, letting the spinning settle again. His muscles shook. He rested his right temple against the molding.
He watched her sleeping.
Her hair tumbled over her in a haphazard array. One arm clutched under the pillow, propping her head up. The other dangled over the side of the bed. One knee was drawn up toward her armpit. The other was straight. Her face barely poked out from the tumble of her hair and the pillows. Even in the darkness, even under all the concealment, she still seemed more alive, more colorful than she had been in the water.
He swallowed and stared at her for a long, long time before he felt well enough to push off the doorframe and keep moving. He wandered down the hall through the dim, comforting glow of the plug in nightlights and eased himself down the steps. By the time he made it to the landing, he felt marginally better. Marginally.
He shuffled into the kitchen, only to find Kathy sitting at the breakfast table sipping at a mug of coffee. Her curly hair was mussed into a wayward, flying mess. She wore an old, beat up, terrycloth bathrobe the color of a washed-out lime, but no slippers. Her bare feet were wrapped back under the legs of the chair. The overhead lights were on, but tamped down to something so dim it was barely noticeable.
"Is that decaf?" he asked as he moved into the room with careful, deliberate steps. He could do careful and deliberate. It's when he tried anything more significant that things went a little crazy.
She started as he moped past toward the cabinet. "Um, yeah. There's more in the pot if you want some," she replied.
He moved to the counter, resting for a moment while the room swirled. He reached up into the cabinet for a mug. He poured himself a full cup from the pot, which seemed heavy enough that it made his arm shake. He brought the cup back and sat down next to her.
"What are you doing up?" he asked. He took a long sip of the bitter, hot liquid. It was nearly warm enough to scald, but not quite. He panted, trying to cool his mouth off as he leaned up, gripped his temples with his fingers, and started to rub in slow, soothing circles.
"Nancy," Kathy said. "I've been sitting with her. She's really bad, Derek. I don't know..." She sighed and swept her hands back through her mess of curls. They flattened against her scalp, only to spring out again.
He stared down into his coffee cup. "Oh," he said. He didn't have much else to say about Nancy right then. She was... Well, he knew the place she was in right then. Asking about it, speculating about it, was useless. "Maybe you should just leave her be, Kath."
"If she flies off to Timbuktu like you did, then I'll leave her be. As long as she stays, she's asking for help, even if she's not asking," Kathy said. "You should talk to her. Really talk. I know she's been awful to you, but..."
Silence crept into the room. Derek grunted before taking another sip of his coffee. Kathy watched his hands suspiciously as he held the mug in a shaky, two-handed grip.
"What about you, Der? Why are you awake? You look awful. Who died?"
A cold well of pain settled in the back of his throat and slipped down into his stomach. Who died. Yeah. That about summed it up. He sighed as everything that had slowly been settling agitated again. He shifted in his seat, swallowed, let loose a breath that raked across his vocal cords. "I forgot my pill last night and I-"
"Again?" Kathy interrupted. "Derek, you can't just not take doses. You could have seizures..."
"I've been on it for less than forty-eight hours, Kath," he snapped. "I'm not going to get dependant in two days, and I'm certainly not going to have withdrawal seizures."
He fumbled across the placemat for the coffee cup, fumbled, fumbled, trying to push down on the upswing of thoughts he didn't want. Who died. Meredith died. Meredith drowned. At least all her rampant apologizing finally made sense to his brain, now that he could connect the words with the awful picture in his head. The awful...
"Still, Derek," Kathy was saying through the din of his racing thoughts. He breathed, trying to absorb it, but pretty much only the cadences hit him. "Xanax is a powerful psychotropic drug. If you keep yo-yoing whether you take it or not, you're going to have some side-effects..."
A smash. A wet creep burned his bare chest, hands, and lap. He hissed as he pushed back from the table. Coffee was everywhere, dripping over the side, soaking the placemat with a spreading, crawling brown stain. The mug had slipped. Slipped in his grasp...
"Like that, for instance. Tremors again?" Kathy said. She got up and retrieved the roll of paper towels from overtop the refrigerator.
He stared down at himself in disbelief. Coffee. Everywhere. He watched his shaky hands. "I'm not going to take it anymore," he said as she started moving around, mopping up the mess.
"Derek, are you sure that's a good idea?" she asked, frowning at him as she handed him a wad of paper towels. "You're--"
"I can't, Kathy," he said, dabbing at himself robotically, soaking the warm sting away. It had been hot enough to hurt a little, but not enough to burn before it had started evaporating. "I can't be a surgeon on Xanax. I can't. I-"
"Hey," she said. She stopped her mopping and put a warm hand on his bare shoulder. "This isn't permanent, Derek. It's just to help you cope..."
"Cope."
"Yes."
He couldn't stop the ironic, bitter laughter that pealed from his lips. He put his elbows on the cold table. His skin slipped once, twice on the barely dried mess that Kathy had cleaned up before he gained purchase. He collapsed his face into his hands. Cope. If history was any lesson, he sucked at coping. And he didn't think a little pill was going to fix it. Sure, it might fix the fact that he couldn't hold his hands still, the fact that the room swayed, but it didn't change the fundamental thing that was doing the coping. Him.
Meredith drifted in the water behind his eyes, cold, still, and blue.
"Do you think I'm a bad person?" he asked.
"No," Kathy replied. She threw the towels out in the waste bin near the counter. The little flip door wobbled back and forth for several moments after the cluster of towels hit it and went through. She sat down and scooted her chair up.
"I just..." He sighed, heavy, frustrated. "How did I?"
"Derek..."
He looked up at her. She stared back at him, wide blue eyes serious, calculating, concerned. He sucked in one breath, two. His eyes pinched with a stabbing sort of pain, his sight blurred, and then everything fell back out of him in a twisted tumble.
"Meredith drowned," he said between sucking, racking breaths that had his body rocking back and forth like a boat on a wave. "A month ago, she drowned. I pulled... Pulled her out of the water. She was resuscitated after more than three hours of clinical death. And I wasn't dealing so well with it. I wanted to come home so badly, Kathy. I didn't know what else to do, I..."
"Hey," Kathy whispered. She stopped his swaying, gripping his shoulders in her arms. "Hey, hey," she soothed.
"I have no idea what I'm doing, Kathy."
"Do you ever?"
"I used to be a good person. And then someone shot my glass house. The dirty pit fighter that got left behind... He disgusts me," Derek said, his lip curling in hatred.
"Derek, you're one of the sweetest people I know," Kathy said, her voice forceful and definitive. "I know what Addison and Mark did really threw you. It's natural for your self-esteem to take a hit, but you can't let what's happened own you."
He leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms over his chest, jammed his shaky palms into his armpits. When he closed his eyes, he got the sensation that he was sitting on a turntable again. He opened them and stared at the ceiling, consigned to watch the room blur with tears that didn't fall. He blinked, watching the fan loop around in slow, dreary circles that hardly made the air move. It hung down from the rafter that bisected the skylight. Beyond the glass, murky black hovered like a one-dimensional sheet. Little stars barely pricked through the dim but blanketing glare of the overhead lights on the windows, a glare that showed his reflection back to him, staring up from below.
Who died?
"I treated her like shit," he said.
"Addison?"
"Meredith. Well, both, really."
"Derek, what are you..." Kathy blinked. She leaned back in her chair, took a deep, deep breath, and nodded, like she was preparing for some sort of... fight the good fight... thing. "Okay. You're going to have to help me out here before I can offer you my opinion. Because you're all over the map."
"Don't psychoanalyze-"
"Bull, Derek," she snapped. "You wouldn't have brought this up, not to me, unless you wanted help, no matter how stubborn you want to be about admitting it. I swear, you and Nancy are like twins sometimes."
He swallowed. Reflection-him stared back down. He looked bad. Just... Bad. Not exactly sick, not unfit. Just. Bad. The analog clock on the wall ticked off the moments. Two-thirty. Two-thirty and one second. Two seconds. Three. The picture on the glass seemed to warp a little, warp as it curled into the wavering, amorphous blur that had been in the space of water between him and Meredith on the day she'd died.
She'd floated like some sort of... Like the astronauts in those documentaries about space on the Discovery channel. Floating, drifting. Except the astronauts weren't lifeless. And she had been. Lifeless. Blue with the chill. A popsicle. His Meredith, blue, cold, and dead.
He hadn't really thought about it, hadn't processed that it'd been sort of on purpose until he'd been stuck in the agony of waiting after he'd delivered her to her saviors. She'd been twenty feet from the edge of the pier. Twenty feet. It had been difficult to swim with the cold, but he'd managed, somehow, to do six times that distance. More than that, even, because he'd searched in various directions. And if he had been able to do it, despite the fact that his joints had been locking up, despite the fact that the chill had addled his brain to the point that when he had been climbing out of the water, it had taken him a moment to realize the full extent of what was going on, that he'd had Meredith in his arms... Meredith with no pulse.
If he had been able to do that, been able to swim down, swim up, swim down, swim up, swim down, swim up... Why hadn't she at least been able to make it twenty feet? She'd been able to swim laps around him in his lake. He knew. He'd tried to catch her more than once, only to get left in the figurative dust. He'd tried to convince himself she'd hit her head, been shocked, something, anything. Except... There'd been no bump on her head anywhere. There'd been no cuts. No bruises to indicate any sort of trauma. True, one didn't need a bruise or a wound for there to be a head trauma, but... But. But. It all came down to that. The but. Hovering there at the end of all his excuses for her.
The frantic CPR hadn't started until he'd gotten into the ambulance, and his fingers and limbs had started to burn and agonize with the pain of reheating. His own skin had been a little blue, too. His hair had dripped cold, icy water. But he hadn't paid much attention as he'd slammed the heel of his palm into her chest. One, two, three, four, five. Breathe.
When she'd told him later that a patient had knocked her in, he'd almost let it go. She hadn't jumped. Hadn't tried to drown herself. But the nagging question... Why hadn't she at least tried to swim? It had pounded on him for weeks like a slowly demolishing wrecking ball.
He blinked back to himself, only to find Kathy still staring at him, still concerned.
"I remembered her drowning," he said. He leaned down onto the table and started worrying at his index finger with the fingers of his other hand. "Earlier, I remembered. She's been so worried that I would... blame her when I remembered. Or... I don't know. Not trust her anymore... I promised I'd try to keep perspective..."
Perspective. He wanted to take a sledgehammer and beat the word to death. He had perspective. Before, he'd been wandering into the wrong conclusion with the constant drumbeat of the why, why, why. The wrong conclusion that she somehow needed him to breathe for her, that she couldn't stand on her own two feet. Maybe he'd known on some deep level that he'd been compensating for the reality. Maybe he'd known that he'd been shelling up, almost pulling away because of said reality. Now. Now, he had perspective, enough to know that the breathing thing was bullshit, and the reality... Compensating for it was impossible. It wasn't murky anymore, wasn't some weird, nebulous idea. Perspective. He wanted a mallet.
Who died?
"Am I to understand that this wasn't an entirely... accidental drowning?" Kathy asked, her voice low, quiet, cautious.
"It... wasn't an accident. But it wasn't. Wasn't..."
"Suicide?"
"No," he said. "It wasn't that."
"Okay..."
"She... She just didn't swim when she, well, she might have been able to."
"Has she told you this? You're not just jumping to conclusions?"
"We've... talked about it," Derek said.
Kathy sighed. "Derek, it's natural for you to be harboring some guilt over this. Family members of people who have committed suicide often feel like there was something they could have done differently or-"
He shook his head, back and forth, back and forth like a windshield wiper. "She was so... When I met her. She was so happy. And bossy. She was bossy. And she just seemed... lighter. And then I... I... broke her, Kathy. The thing with Addison. I... I should have just signed the papers the first time."
Kathy sat beside him silently for a moment. Her soft breathing sliced the air like thunder in the quiet. The chair creaked as she shifted. Derek stared at his hands. Just stared. Stared. The world blurred out. He started to worry at his fingers again, wringing his hands through each other in a nervous outlet for the movement his body was demanding of him.
None of this would have happened if he had done the right thing from the start.
"Wait," Kathy said. "You think you're the entire reason she died?"
"No," he said. His skin started to burn with the friction from the slip, slip, slide of his palms. "She had other things going on. But I could have been there for her more... And I can't help but think that maybe if I hadn't come along, the straw that broke her back wouldn't have... seemed so heavy."
Kathy's hands came down over top his own. She grasped them, pulled them apart, forcing him to look at her, to stop focusing on such a mundane outlet for his tension.
"Okay, Derek," she said. "First of all, you cannot, cannot, cannot let yourself fall into the trap of blaming yourself for what she did. She did it, Derek. She did. Unless you've graduated from fixing brains to controlling them, you are not to blame. Okay?"
His lip started to quiver. He blinked. The blur resolved for a moment as the water squeezed out and down over his cheeks, only to come back, resolve, come back, resolve, come back. He sucked in a breath.
"She was blue, Kathy. She was so blue. And cold. And I tried to--"
"You. Are not. To blame, Derek," she enunciated, squeezing his hands.
"I don't know what to do, Kath. I don't..."
"Well, you can start by stopping that. Stop trying to figure out what to do and just let yourself grieve. You're not going to get anywhere if you don't deal with that first. She may still be here, but you need to grieve, and from what I've seen, you haven't really let yourself do it. You can't just tuck it all away. It needs to come out, Der."
She released his hands. He let them fall into his lap. He stared at them.
Who died?
He wrapped his arms around his stomach and hunched over. An empty moan curled out of him. It sounded like a dying man, begging for water. Except there was already water everywhere, clogging his mind, clogging his eyes, clogging his throat.
"Today," he said, his breath rasping. "Earlier, I was wondering if we'd ever talked about marriage. I couldn't understand why we wouldn't have. I... She's the one, Kath. She's the love of my life. And now. Now I..."
"Now?"
"I feel like I would be... trapping her in the pain that killed her in the first place. Like I would be a..." He swallowed. "A murderer for even asking." The words slipped off his tongue with the awful taste of carrion. He sighed. He couldn't... He felt so twisted up inside, he just couldn't...
Couldn't...
Another long silence filled the room. He could feel her staring at him, staring through him, peeling off his layers like bits of onion. He couldn't bring himself to look at her, so he settled on collapsing his face into his hands again and heaving a sigh.
Who died?
Perspective.
Half a day ago, he'd been worried. Worried, terrified about what he was going to remember, but he'd been sure that whatever it was wasn't even going to come close to strangling his desire to spend the rest of his life with her. And now, not only was the prospect of an actual life after Addison slain under the crush of reality, it had turned out that he'd asked Meredith before, at least mentioned it, and she'd reacted with what nearly amounted to disgust. He hadn't wanted it either, well, not enough to press it. Where had the kind of disconnect happened that a month ago he hadn't wanted it, and now he was stuck sitting at the table in agony while his psychiatrist sister cut him into little Freudian pieces, pieces that wished he didn't want it so badly it ached. Nothing made sense anymore.
"That's a bit melodramatic, I think," Kathy said, ripping him from his thoughts.
"But I..."
"Everyone has relationship problems, Derek. Everyone. Don't make Romeo and Juliet out of this when all you've got is Derek and Meredith. You might have broken her heart. But the crazy thing about people is that the heart is remarkably resilient. People have a lot of room for love, Derek... If you were as bad for her as you're saying, don't you think you would be alone at this reunion right now? She can say no, Derek. She can say enough. She's perfectly capable of it. Whatever happened in the water with her, that's between her and the water. I don't think you factored into the equation."
He sighed. Derek the pit fighter equals misery. "Then explain the equation to me, Kathy, because I sure don't-"
"One plus four equals nine," she replied abruptly.
He swallowed. "What?"
"Humans don't make sense, Derek. It's why Addison can screw Mark, and Mark can screw Addison. It's why you can treat the woman you love like shit, why, on a bad, bad day, you can break all the rules you've set up for yourself, no matter how firm you think they are, and why Meredith can decide on a whim that swimming is for the fishes. Sometimes that's all there is to it. Sure, we can guess at what might have contributed, we can make an effort to not let those things happen again, but don't assume you'll always get the same answer to the same numbers on any given day."
He ran his hands through his hair, trying to ignore the aching lump that was forming in the back of his throat. "That doesn't feel very comforting, Kathy."
"You're not a dirty pit fighter, Derek. You're a nice guy with a bit of a god complex that got kicked into the nine by the four a few times. Does Meredith seem happy now, to you?"
"Yeah," he replied, a smile crawling across his face as the sudden redirection gave him levity. Meredith happy. That gave him levity. She'd been so wonderful this week. She'd been so worried about dealing with his family, so, so, worried, but he got the impression she was actually having fun now, despite being a little overwhelmed.
I stirred cookie batter.
She'd been so happy over such a simple thing. And this whole week she'd been... So strong. So very, very strong. Lighter than he could ever remember her being since Addison.
He'd been falling to pieces, and she'd been there, picking him up. He hadn't realized until now how odd it felt to have the tables turned. He'd always considered himself Meredith's support, always felt like he was having to prop the both of them up, at least, he had since they'd gotten back together. It hadn't felt like that the first time around. But she'd changed. And that dynamic, the original one, they'd lost it somewhere along the way. But now she was picking him up, and again, he was brought back around in a circle.
Perspective.
Not being able to breathe... Bullshit.
"Do you think she needs counseling?"
"No," he said. "Not unless she wants it for... Other things. But not this."
Palms. On his face. Pulling his gaze away from his hands. His world shifted into a close-up of Kathy as she leaned in, eyes flashing. "Then the only thing you can do at this point is take care of you. Take care of you, and try not to do the stupid stuff that hurt her again. The rest is out of your control. And that does not mean taking yourself out of the equation for her sake. Because that? That would hurt her, Derek. And that? That, you could definitely blame yourself for. You take yourself out of the equation if that's what you think you need, not because that's what you think she needs."
He blinked, blinked against the new swell of upset. "I need her so much it hurts, Kath," he said, his voice low and grating.
Kathy smiled and squeezed his shoulder. "Then stop worrying about the rest, Derek. It's just not important. Okay?"
"Okay."
"And it's not your fault. Okay?"
"Okay."
"Get some sleep, Der," Kathy said. She stood up from her chair, ruffled his hair, stretched, and yawned. "You're pushing yourself way too much. Four days ago we were wondering if you were going to die."
He nodded. With a sigh, he pushed up from the table. The earlier swimming, spinning was gone, slowly diminished over time as he'd had a chance to slow his mind down to a reasonable pace. He double-checked to make sure the coffee had all been picked up, and then he wandered back to the bedroom.
Meredith lay in much the same position as she had been. He slipped into bed next to her. Grieve, Kathy had said. Grieve. He wrapped his arms around her torso and pulled her up against himself tightly. She made a little squeak of surprise as she wakened enough to realize she was being moved, but she relaxed almost immediately.
"Hey," she whispered.
He kissed the side of her neck, just under her right ear. "Hey," he whispered.
Her warm body pressed into his. Her torso shifted with each of her long, soothing breaths. He slipped his hand up underneath her shirt and rubbed his palm along her stomach, relishing the feel of the rise and fall. Her lotion made her smell like cinnamon. He let it sweep down into the back of his throat and soothe him.
"I almost lost you," he said, mumbling into the skin of her shoulder as he kissed her there.
"I'm sorry," she said.
"I know," he said. "Me, too."
Her breaths evened out and the snores returned, but he didn't mind. He ran his fingers through her hair, just enjoyed being close.
Who died?
Derek the dirty pit fighter.
Author: AriaAdagio
Rating: M
Pairing: Mer/Der
Summary: Post Time After Time. Derek takes Meredith to visit his family in Connecticut, but nothing goes as planned.
~~~~~
Derek woke up drowning. His whole body jerked. A choking breath swept down his throat as the murky water parted before his eyes, leaving darkness. He blinked and swept his hands down over his face. His shaky palms slipped on the sweat until he got to the stubble.
He sat up. The room spun. Everything felt unsettled, almost like someone was using his stomach as a popcorn popper. His heart throbbed unevenly in his chest.
Meredith lay snoring next to him. They'd migrated back to the bedroom after a while, stumbled into an uneasy sleep. She'd spooned him, and he'd lain there, listening to her breathing, just listening. Something he'd done countless nights since her accident. Lain there. Listening to her breathe. Somewhere along the line, he'd fallen asleep, and somewhere after that, they'd apparently rolled apart.
Breathe, breathe, breathe. He tried to rein himself. His innards curled. He wrapped his arms around his stomach and threw his legs over the side of the mattress as he leaned down over his knees.
He'd thought he was done. Done with this. There was nothing left to surprise him, unless by some miracle he remembered the car crash, but that was extremely unlikely. If the concussion had made him develop some sort of anxiety disorder, he didn't know what he was going to do. He didn't...
He growled. Stop. Worrying. Stop it.
He forced himself to stand up, wobbling slightly. His balance went on walkabout for a moment when his hand left the support of the mattress, and he flailed, knocking the clock, the pill bottle, and his sunglasses off the nightstand as he struggled to right himself. Meredith snorted and rolled over, but she didn't wake.
He stood, leaning against the nightstand like a runner stretching out his calves, breathing, listening to her breathing. Stop it. The Xanax bottle lay on the ground near his feet. Stop. Worrying. He watched the bottle for a long set of moments before he realized.
He'd vomited up the last pill. He wasn't on anything right then.
He leaned down to pick up the bottle. He had the cap popped open before he stopped, paused with his index finger fishing for a pill. No. He didn't need it anymore. There was nothing left to give him a panic attack, which was really what this stuff was for. Not generalized anxiety treatment. Nothing left. He put the bottle back on the nightstand.
He could deal with this. He... He swallowed. There was no way he was going to get more sleep like this until he calmed himself down. Nervous energy propelled him through the wobbling seasickness to the doorframe, where he hovered, breathing, letting the spinning settle again. His muscles shook. He rested his right temple against the molding.
He watched her sleeping.
Her hair tumbled over her in a haphazard array. One arm clutched under the pillow, propping her head up. The other dangled over the side of the bed. One knee was drawn up toward her armpit. The other was straight. Her face barely poked out from the tumble of her hair and the pillows. Even in the darkness, even under all the concealment, she still seemed more alive, more colorful than she had been in the water.
He swallowed and stared at her for a long, long time before he felt well enough to push off the doorframe and keep moving. He wandered down the hall through the dim, comforting glow of the plug in nightlights and eased himself down the steps. By the time he made it to the landing, he felt marginally better. Marginally.
He shuffled into the kitchen, only to find Kathy sitting at the breakfast table sipping at a mug of coffee. Her curly hair was mussed into a wayward, flying mess. She wore an old, beat up, terrycloth bathrobe the color of a washed-out lime, but no slippers. Her bare feet were wrapped back under the legs of the chair. The overhead lights were on, but tamped down to something so dim it was barely noticeable.
"Is that decaf?" he asked as he moved into the room with careful, deliberate steps. He could do careful and deliberate. It's when he tried anything more significant that things went a little crazy.
She started as he moped past toward the cabinet. "Um, yeah. There's more in the pot if you want some," she replied.
He moved to the counter, resting for a moment while the room swirled. He reached up into the cabinet for a mug. He poured himself a full cup from the pot, which seemed heavy enough that it made his arm shake. He brought the cup back and sat down next to her.
"What are you doing up?" he asked. He took a long sip of the bitter, hot liquid. It was nearly warm enough to scald, but not quite. He panted, trying to cool his mouth off as he leaned up, gripped his temples with his fingers, and started to rub in slow, soothing circles.
"Nancy," Kathy said. "I've been sitting with her. She's really bad, Derek. I don't know..." She sighed and swept her hands back through her mess of curls. They flattened against her scalp, only to spring out again.
He stared down into his coffee cup. "Oh," he said. He didn't have much else to say about Nancy right then. She was... Well, he knew the place she was in right then. Asking about it, speculating about it, was useless. "Maybe you should just leave her be, Kath."
"If she flies off to Timbuktu like you did, then I'll leave her be. As long as she stays, she's asking for help, even if she's not asking," Kathy said. "You should talk to her. Really talk. I know she's been awful to you, but..."
Silence crept into the room. Derek grunted before taking another sip of his coffee. Kathy watched his hands suspiciously as he held the mug in a shaky, two-handed grip.
"What about you, Der? Why are you awake? You look awful. Who died?"
A cold well of pain settled in the back of his throat and slipped down into his stomach. Who died. Yeah. That about summed it up. He sighed as everything that had slowly been settling agitated again. He shifted in his seat, swallowed, let loose a breath that raked across his vocal cords. "I forgot my pill last night and I-"
"Again?" Kathy interrupted. "Derek, you can't just not take doses. You could have seizures..."
"I've been on it for less than forty-eight hours, Kath," he snapped. "I'm not going to get dependant in two days, and I'm certainly not going to have withdrawal seizures."
He fumbled across the placemat for the coffee cup, fumbled, fumbled, trying to push down on the upswing of thoughts he didn't want. Who died. Meredith died. Meredith drowned. At least all her rampant apologizing finally made sense to his brain, now that he could connect the words with the awful picture in his head. The awful...
"Still, Derek," Kathy was saying through the din of his racing thoughts. He breathed, trying to absorb it, but pretty much only the cadences hit him. "Xanax is a powerful psychotropic drug. If you keep yo-yoing whether you take it or not, you're going to have some side-effects..."
A smash. A wet creep burned his bare chest, hands, and lap. He hissed as he pushed back from the table. Coffee was everywhere, dripping over the side, soaking the placemat with a spreading, crawling brown stain. The mug had slipped. Slipped in his grasp...
"Like that, for instance. Tremors again?" Kathy said. She got up and retrieved the roll of paper towels from overtop the refrigerator.
He stared down at himself in disbelief. Coffee. Everywhere. He watched his shaky hands. "I'm not going to take it anymore," he said as she started moving around, mopping up the mess.
"Derek, are you sure that's a good idea?" she asked, frowning at him as she handed him a wad of paper towels. "You're--"
"I can't, Kathy," he said, dabbing at himself robotically, soaking the warm sting away. It had been hot enough to hurt a little, but not enough to burn before it had started evaporating. "I can't be a surgeon on Xanax. I can't. I-"
"Hey," she said. She stopped her mopping and put a warm hand on his bare shoulder. "This isn't permanent, Derek. It's just to help you cope..."
"Cope."
"Yes."
He couldn't stop the ironic, bitter laughter that pealed from his lips. He put his elbows on the cold table. His skin slipped once, twice on the barely dried mess that Kathy had cleaned up before he gained purchase. He collapsed his face into his hands. Cope. If history was any lesson, he sucked at coping. And he didn't think a little pill was going to fix it. Sure, it might fix the fact that he couldn't hold his hands still, the fact that the room swayed, but it didn't change the fundamental thing that was doing the coping. Him.
Meredith drifted in the water behind his eyes, cold, still, and blue.
"Do you think I'm a bad person?" he asked.
"No," Kathy replied. She threw the towels out in the waste bin near the counter. The little flip door wobbled back and forth for several moments after the cluster of towels hit it and went through. She sat down and scooted her chair up.
"I just..." He sighed, heavy, frustrated. "How did I?"
"Derek..."
He looked up at her. She stared back at him, wide blue eyes serious, calculating, concerned. He sucked in one breath, two. His eyes pinched with a stabbing sort of pain, his sight blurred, and then everything fell back out of him in a twisted tumble.
"Meredith drowned," he said between sucking, racking breaths that had his body rocking back and forth like a boat on a wave. "A month ago, she drowned. I pulled... Pulled her out of the water. She was resuscitated after more than three hours of clinical death. And I wasn't dealing so well with it. I wanted to come home so badly, Kathy. I didn't know what else to do, I..."
"Hey," Kathy whispered. She stopped his swaying, gripping his shoulders in her arms. "Hey, hey," she soothed.
"I have no idea what I'm doing, Kathy."
"Do you ever?"
"I used to be a good person. And then someone shot my glass house. The dirty pit fighter that got left behind... He disgusts me," Derek said, his lip curling in hatred.
"Derek, you're one of the sweetest people I know," Kathy said, her voice forceful and definitive. "I know what Addison and Mark did really threw you. It's natural for your self-esteem to take a hit, but you can't let what's happened own you."
He leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms over his chest, jammed his shaky palms into his armpits. When he closed his eyes, he got the sensation that he was sitting on a turntable again. He opened them and stared at the ceiling, consigned to watch the room blur with tears that didn't fall. He blinked, watching the fan loop around in slow, dreary circles that hardly made the air move. It hung down from the rafter that bisected the skylight. Beyond the glass, murky black hovered like a one-dimensional sheet. Little stars barely pricked through the dim but blanketing glare of the overhead lights on the windows, a glare that showed his reflection back to him, staring up from below.
Who died?
"I treated her like shit," he said.
"Addison?"
"Meredith. Well, both, really."
"Derek, what are you..." Kathy blinked. She leaned back in her chair, took a deep, deep breath, and nodded, like she was preparing for some sort of... fight the good fight... thing. "Okay. You're going to have to help me out here before I can offer you my opinion. Because you're all over the map."
"Don't psychoanalyze-"
"Bull, Derek," she snapped. "You wouldn't have brought this up, not to me, unless you wanted help, no matter how stubborn you want to be about admitting it. I swear, you and Nancy are like twins sometimes."
He swallowed. Reflection-him stared back down. He looked bad. Just... Bad. Not exactly sick, not unfit. Just. Bad. The analog clock on the wall ticked off the moments. Two-thirty. Two-thirty and one second. Two seconds. Three. The picture on the glass seemed to warp a little, warp as it curled into the wavering, amorphous blur that had been in the space of water between him and Meredith on the day she'd died.
She'd floated like some sort of... Like the astronauts in those documentaries about space on the Discovery channel. Floating, drifting. Except the astronauts weren't lifeless. And she had been. Lifeless. Blue with the chill. A popsicle. His Meredith, blue, cold, and dead.
He hadn't really thought about it, hadn't processed that it'd been sort of on purpose until he'd been stuck in the agony of waiting after he'd delivered her to her saviors. She'd been twenty feet from the edge of the pier. Twenty feet. It had been difficult to swim with the cold, but he'd managed, somehow, to do six times that distance. More than that, even, because he'd searched in various directions. And if he had been able to do it, despite the fact that his joints had been locking up, despite the fact that the chill had addled his brain to the point that when he had been climbing out of the water, it had taken him a moment to realize the full extent of what was going on, that he'd had Meredith in his arms... Meredith with no pulse.
If he had been able to do that, been able to swim down, swim up, swim down, swim up, swim down, swim up... Why hadn't she at least been able to make it twenty feet? She'd been able to swim laps around him in his lake. He knew. He'd tried to catch her more than once, only to get left in the figurative dust. He'd tried to convince himself she'd hit her head, been shocked, something, anything. Except... There'd been no bump on her head anywhere. There'd been no cuts. No bruises to indicate any sort of trauma. True, one didn't need a bruise or a wound for there to be a head trauma, but... But. But. It all came down to that. The but. Hovering there at the end of all his excuses for her.
The frantic CPR hadn't started until he'd gotten into the ambulance, and his fingers and limbs had started to burn and agonize with the pain of reheating. His own skin had been a little blue, too. His hair had dripped cold, icy water. But he hadn't paid much attention as he'd slammed the heel of his palm into her chest. One, two, three, four, five. Breathe.
When she'd told him later that a patient had knocked her in, he'd almost let it go. She hadn't jumped. Hadn't tried to drown herself. But the nagging question... Why hadn't she at least tried to swim? It had pounded on him for weeks like a slowly demolishing wrecking ball.
He blinked back to himself, only to find Kathy still staring at him, still concerned.
"I remembered her drowning," he said. He leaned down onto the table and started worrying at his index finger with the fingers of his other hand. "Earlier, I remembered. She's been so worried that I would... blame her when I remembered. Or... I don't know. Not trust her anymore... I promised I'd try to keep perspective..."
Perspective. He wanted to take a sledgehammer and beat the word to death. He had perspective. Before, he'd been wandering into the wrong conclusion with the constant drumbeat of the why, why, why. The wrong conclusion that she somehow needed him to breathe for her, that she couldn't stand on her own two feet. Maybe he'd known on some deep level that he'd been compensating for the reality. Maybe he'd known that he'd been shelling up, almost pulling away because of said reality. Now. Now, he had perspective, enough to know that the breathing thing was bullshit, and the reality... Compensating for it was impossible. It wasn't murky anymore, wasn't some weird, nebulous idea. Perspective. He wanted a mallet.
Who died?
"Am I to understand that this wasn't an entirely... accidental drowning?" Kathy asked, her voice low, quiet, cautious.
"It... wasn't an accident. But it wasn't. Wasn't..."
"Suicide?"
"No," he said. "It wasn't that."
"Okay..."
"She... She just didn't swim when she, well, she might have been able to."
"Has she told you this? You're not just jumping to conclusions?"
"We've... talked about it," Derek said.
Kathy sighed. "Derek, it's natural for you to be harboring some guilt over this. Family members of people who have committed suicide often feel like there was something they could have done differently or-"
He shook his head, back and forth, back and forth like a windshield wiper. "She was so... When I met her. She was so happy. And bossy. She was bossy. And she just seemed... lighter. And then I... I... broke her, Kathy. The thing with Addison. I... I should have just signed the papers the first time."
Kathy sat beside him silently for a moment. Her soft breathing sliced the air like thunder in the quiet. The chair creaked as she shifted. Derek stared at his hands. Just stared. Stared. The world blurred out. He started to worry at his fingers again, wringing his hands through each other in a nervous outlet for the movement his body was demanding of him.
None of this would have happened if he had done the right thing from the start.
"Wait," Kathy said. "You think you're the entire reason she died?"
"No," he said. His skin started to burn with the friction from the slip, slip, slide of his palms. "She had other things going on. But I could have been there for her more... And I can't help but think that maybe if I hadn't come along, the straw that broke her back wouldn't have... seemed so heavy."
Kathy's hands came down over top his own. She grasped them, pulled them apart, forcing him to look at her, to stop focusing on such a mundane outlet for his tension.
"Okay, Derek," she said. "First of all, you cannot, cannot, cannot let yourself fall into the trap of blaming yourself for what she did. She did it, Derek. She did. Unless you've graduated from fixing brains to controlling them, you are not to blame. Okay?"
His lip started to quiver. He blinked. The blur resolved for a moment as the water squeezed out and down over his cheeks, only to come back, resolve, come back, resolve, come back. He sucked in a breath.
"She was blue, Kathy. She was so blue. And cold. And I tried to--"
"You. Are not. To blame, Derek," she enunciated, squeezing his hands.
"I don't know what to do, Kath. I don't..."
"Well, you can start by stopping that. Stop trying to figure out what to do and just let yourself grieve. You're not going to get anywhere if you don't deal with that first. She may still be here, but you need to grieve, and from what I've seen, you haven't really let yourself do it. You can't just tuck it all away. It needs to come out, Der."
She released his hands. He let them fall into his lap. He stared at them.
Who died?
He wrapped his arms around his stomach and hunched over. An empty moan curled out of him. It sounded like a dying man, begging for water. Except there was already water everywhere, clogging his mind, clogging his eyes, clogging his throat.
"Today," he said, his breath rasping. "Earlier, I was wondering if we'd ever talked about marriage. I couldn't understand why we wouldn't have. I... She's the one, Kath. She's the love of my life. And now. Now I..."
"Now?"
"I feel like I would be... trapping her in the pain that killed her in the first place. Like I would be a..." He swallowed. "A murderer for even asking." The words slipped off his tongue with the awful taste of carrion. He sighed. He couldn't... He felt so twisted up inside, he just couldn't...
Couldn't...
Another long silence filled the room. He could feel her staring at him, staring through him, peeling off his layers like bits of onion. He couldn't bring himself to look at her, so he settled on collapsing his face into his hands again and heaving a sigh.
Who died?
Perspective.
Half a day ago, he'd been worried. Worried, terrified about what he was going to remember, but he'd been sure that whatever it was wasn't even going to come close to strangling his desire to spend the rest of his life with her. And now, not only was the prospect of an actual life after Addison slain under the crush of reality, it had turned out that he'd asked Meredith before, at least mentioned it, and she'd reacted with what nearly amounted to disgust. He hadn't wanted it either, well, not enough to press it. Where had the kind of disconnect happened that a month ago he hadn't wanted it, and now he was stuck sitting at the table in agony while his psychiatrist sister cut him into little Freudian pieces, pieces that wished he didn't want it so badly it ached. Nothing made sense anymore.
"That's a bit melodramatic, I think," Kathy said, ripping him from his thoughts.
"But I..."
"Everyone has relationship problems, Derek. Everyone. Don't make Romeo and Juliet out of this when all you've got is Derek and Meredith. You might have broken her heart. But the crazy thing about people is that the heart is remarkably resilient. People have a lot of room for love, Derek... If you were as bad for her as you're saying, don't you think you would be alone at this reunion right now? She can say no, Derek. She can say enough. She's perfectly capable of it. Whatever happened in the water with her, that's between her and the water. I don't think you factored into the equation."
He sighed. Derek the pit fighter equals misery. "Then explain the equation to me, Kathy, because I sure don't-"
"One plus four equals nine," she replied abruptly.
He swallowed. "What?"
"Humans don't make sense, Derek. It's why Addison can screw Mark, and Mark can screw Addison. It's why you can treat the woman you love like shit, why, on a bad, bad day, you can break all the rules you've set up for yourself, no matter how firm you think they are, and why Meredith can decide on a whim that swimming is for the fishes. Sometimes that's all there is to it. Sure, we can guess at what might have contributed, we can make an effort to not let those things happen again, but don't assume you'll always get the same answer to the same numbers on any given day."
He ran his hands through his hair, trying to ignore the aching lump that was forming in the back of his throat. "That doesn't feel very comforting, Kathy."
"You're not a dirty pit fighter, Derek. You're a nice guy with a bit of a god complex that got kicked into the nine by the four a few times. Does Meredith seem happy now, to you?"
"Yeah," he replied, a smile crawling across his face as the sudden redirection gave him levity. Meredith happy. That gave him levity. She'd been so wonderful this week. She'd been so worried about dealing with his family, so, so, worried, but he got the impression she was actually having fun now, despite being a little overwhelmed.
I stirred cookie batter.
She'd been so happy over such a simple thing. And this whole week she'd been... So strong. So very, very strong. Lighter than he could ever remember her being since Addison.
He'd been falling to pieces, and she'd been there, picking him up. He hadn't realized until now how odd it felt to have the tables turned. He'd always considered himself Meredith's support, always felt like he was having to prop the both of them up, at least, he had since they'd gotten back together. It hadn't felt like that the first time around. But she'd changed. And that dynamic, the original one, they'd lost it somewhere along the way. But now she was picking him up, and again, he was brought back around in a circle.
Perspective.
Not being able to breathe... Bullshit.
"Do you think she needs counseling?"
"No," he said. "Not unless she wants it for... Other things. But not this."
Palms. On his face. Pulling his gaze away from his hands. His world shifted into a close-up of Kathy as she leaned in, eyes flashing. "Then the only thing you can do at this point is take care of you. Take care of you, and try not to do the stupid stuff that hurt her again. The rest is out of your control. And that does not mean taking yourself out of the equation for her sake. Because that? That would hurt her, Derek. And that? That, you could definitely blame yourself for. You take yourself out of the equation if that's what you think you need, not because that's what you think she needs."
He blinked, blinked against the new swell of upset. "I need her so much it hurts, Kath," he said, his voice low and grating.
Kathy smiled and squeezed his shoulder. "Then stop worrying about the rest, Derek. It's just not important. Okay?"
"Okay."
"And it's not your fault. Okay?"
"Okay."
"Get some sleep, Der," Kathy said. She stood up from her chair, ruffled his hair, stretched, and yawned. "You're pushing yourself way too much. Four days ago we were wondering if you were going to die."
He nodded. With a sigh, he pushed up from the table. The earlier swimming, spinning was gone, slowly diminished over time as he'd had a chance to slow his mind down to a reasonable pace. He double-checked to make sure the coffee had all been picked up, and then he wandered back to the bedroom.
Meredith lay in much the same position as she had been. He slipped into bed next to her. Grieve, Kathy had said. Grieve. He wrapped his arms around her torso and pulled her up against himself tightly. She made a little squeak of surprise as she wakened enough to realize she was being moved, but she relaxed almost immediately.
"Hey," she whispered.
He kissed the side of her neck, just under her right ear. "Hey," he whispered.
Her warm body pressed into his. Her torso shifted with each of her long, soothing breaths. He slipped his hand up underneath her shirt and rubbed his palm along her stomach, relishing the feel of the rise and fall. Her lotion made her smell like cinnamon. He let it sweep down into the back of his throat and soothe him.
"I almost lost you," he said, mumbling into the skin of her shoulder as he kissed her there.
"I'm sorry," she said.
"I know," he said. "Me, too."
Her breaths evened out and the snores returned, but he didn't mind. He ran his fingers through her hair, just enjoyed being close.
Who died?
Derek the dirty pit fighter.