Title: Do You Ever Get Weary?
Author: greymcdreamysgh
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Mer/Der
Summary: Meredith and Derek have been married for a few years, struggling through life’s difficulties. They rent a beach house for the summer in an attempt to repair what was broken in their marriage. Now, back home in Seattle, they try to make it work together, balancing home and marriage and parenting with work and surgery.
Disclaimer: I don't own Grey's Anatomy.
Previous Chapters: Here
Author: greymcdreamysgh
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Mer/Der
Summary: Meredith and Derek have been married for a few years, struggling through life’s difficulties. They rent a beach house for the summer in an attempt to repair what was broken in their marriage. Now, back home in Seattle, they try to make it work together, balancing home and marriage and parenting with work and surgery.
Disclaimer: I don't own Grey's Anatomy.
Previous Chapters: Here
All you really need is someone to be here
Someone who never lets you disappear
And I will be that witness to your life
A few weeks later, the damp chill of late autumn had settled in and life had returned to its usual routine. Emily didn’t mention the beach as much anymore, not once her summer clothes had been packed away and her life had returned to what she’d known since she was a few weeks old. Just when Meredith and Derek were sure she had forgotten all about the summer though, Emily would point to one of the pictures on the mantle that they had had framed, and recall with poignant detail the memory of a vanilla ice cream cone dripping down her fingers or the spray of ocean water in her face. These mentions were cursory, just brief pauses in the whirlwind that was Emily’s life to let memory slip in, but she seemed to remember just when Meredith and Derek needed to remember a little bit as well.
Fellowship information and applications started to come in for Meredith a few weeks after they returned home, with envelopes arriving from University of Washington, Seattle Children’s, Seattle Presbyterian, Mercy West, and Seattle Grace, as well as Brigham and Women’s in Boston, Vanderbilt in Nashville, University of Chicago, Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, and Mount Sinai in New York. Stacks of thick envelopes built up on the kitchen counter, and over the past few weeks, Meredith had slowly started to make her way through them, reading everything carefully as the familiar anxiety of trying to decide the rest of her life set in. So far, she had been lucky. Dartmouth was right. Seattle Grace was right. But there had been limits then, she told herself one evening as she sat down to try to sort through these programs. Back then, she had to stay close, but not too close, struggling to negotiate the logistics of medical school and residency with a mother who didn’t remember her.
She’d taken Emily home just before five that afternoon, just after Derek had an intern page her to let her know that he’d been called to an incoming head trauma needing an emergency craniotomy. Now, a little after 6:30 in the evening, Emily brought down some of her toys to play with in the living room, and Meredith went to the kitchen and brought the stack of paperwork in to work on for awhile.
The programs all seemed outstanding, she thought, flipping through them again. Spinal surgery and pediatric neurosurgery and trauma and everything she had honed an interest in over the past several years—somebody wanted her to come work for them to do it.
She slid the contents of the Johns Hopkins envelope out onto her lap. Pictures of pristine hallways, expensive equipment manned by dozens of doctors in full scrubs and surgical masks, and the prestigious-looking dome, graced almost every page of their information booklets. The letter, Meredith thought as she read over it again, was as flattering to them as much as it was to her. One of the best. Ranked by U.S. News and World Report. Premier surgical fellowship opportunity. We want you. Baltimore.
Meredith glanced over at Emily, cross-legged on the floor as she paraded a toy pony across the hardwood in one hand and held on to the accompanying doll in the other. She smiled as Emily babbled nonsense quietly to herself, and glanced back down at the paperwork in front of her. Gathering it up, she quickly sorted through the envelopes and divided them into two piles on the table in front of her. In one pile, she left Boston, Nashville, Chicago, and New York and stacked the opened Baltimore information on top. Pushing that pile aside, she reached with both hands for Seattle. She spilled the contents of the Seattle Grace envelope into her lap, took her pen, and started filling out the application.
She’d filled in the particulars—her name, date of birth, social security number, home address—when Emily stood up, still clad in her jeans and green sweater.
“Mommy, watch me!” she cried, waiting until Meredith looked up before she leaped into the air and then twirled herself around twice before plopping back on the ground.
“Where’d you learn that?” Meredith asked, somewhat amused at her acrobatics.
“On the TV,” Emily offered proudly, throwing her hands up as she focused intently on Meredith’s every subtle reaction.
“Oh, really?” Meredith prodded, unable to recall anytime in which Emily may have seen some kind of elaborate dance contest or figure-skating competition or anything of the sort. “Who let you watch TV?”
“You,” Emily shrugged, and went back to playing with her toys.
“Oh,” Meredith breathed quietly, racking her brain to try to remember when this would have happened. It couldn’t have been in the past couple of days, when she and Derek had been able to leave the hospital at the same time and the television had proven unnecessary to keep Emily busy on those evenings.
She went back to her paperwork, getting into the meaty part of the application in which details about her undergraduate degree, her medical school, and the hospital in which she was completing her residency were required. She wrote Dartmouth College under both undergraduate and graduate programs, and quickly scribbled the corresponding years of graduation next to each. Seattle Grace Hospital, Seattle, Washington went under the ‘Residency’ heading, along with the year of her expected completion of the program and her scores on her intern exam.
A memory flickered across her mind as she started to describe the details of her surgical residency program, a little redundant, she thought, since Seattle Grace should know better than anyone what their own program entailed.
Last week, Emily, bored with coloring, bored with seemingly all her toys, whined for a good ten minutes while Meredith tried to fix dinner and return phone calls. She put the television on for her as a last resort and glanced in periodically, but hadn’t kept an exceptionally close eye on the program itself.
She shook her head, and tried to concentrate on her application. Extensive surgical experience with world-class instruction. It’s not like she watched something horrible; it wasn’t even inappropriate at all. Performed and assisted on numerous advanced brain and spinal procedures; please see attached list. But you weren’t watching her. Hope to further cultivate these skills as a surgical fellow. She did something without you.
Meredith sighed and scanned down to the next section, in which she was asked why she wanted to pursue a fellowship opportunity at Seattle Grace.
“Mommy! Look!” Emily cried, springing up again. She thrust the plastic pony towards Meredith and pressed the button on the side that made its saddle light up, the same button that they’d pressed dozens upon dozens of times before. “Look, Mommy!” Emily said as she pressed it once more.
“I know, that’s cool, Em!” Meredith replied, glancing up briefly. “That pony is great, isn’t it?”
“I can do this too!” Emily interjected quickly, before Meredith even had the chance to turn back to her paperwork. She extended her arms and spun herself around, hard enough that she bumped the coffee table slightly with her hip before collapsing into a fit of giggles on the floor. “See?” she demanded, flushed and looking up at Meredith.
Meredith snorted a little, trying to keep her laughter in while Emily looked up at her expectantly. She glanced at the time, blinking at her from the DVD player across the room, and turned back to Emily. “I think it’s time for you to start quieting down,” she said, watching Emily’s expression turn to a pout at the slightest hint of impending bedtime. “Do you want to get your pajamas on?”
“No,” she sulked, gathering up her pony and her doll and resuming her play, seemingly all too willing to ignore Meredith until she put the unacceptable idea of bedtime to rest.
“Ok,” Meredith sighed, willing to pick her battles for now. “Five more minutes and then pajamas.”
Emily nodded absentmindedly, scooting over a few feet to grab a few other toys she had brought downstairs with her to incorporate them into her game. Meredith returned her attention to her application and tried to utilize the few minutes she had until Emily really had to get ready for bed.
Why do you want to pursue a surgical fellowship at Seattle Grace Hospital?
Meredith bit her lip while she tried to collect her thoughts. Why? Emily. Derek. Cristina. Because Baltimore and Nashville and New York weren’t home. Because she could pack up their photographs and their dishes and even the couch she was sitting on and send them elsewhere in a truck, but the view from their porch and the floorboards where Emily took her first steps were not so easily transported. Because she spent over five years establishing herself here and she was not about to uproot the life she had worked so hard to keep and disrupt the child she would do anything to protect. Because Seattle Grace was the only program that was both worthy and safe.
She pressed her pen to the paper, wanting to write all these things down as quickly as they came to her, and lifted it mere seconds later. The Chief would be the only one on the board who wouldn’t think she was way off-kilter if she really wrote those things, her real reasons, even though they were as much the truth as anything she could say about the caliber of the fellowship program.
Meredith sat, lost in her thoughts for a few moments, and when she finally took her pen to the paper again, she wrote about the professional relationships she had developed over the years and the unparalleled excellence of her residency program that she was certain the fellowship program would match or exceed.
When she finally looked up again, Emily was still playing with her back towards her, but the clock let her know that a half hour had passed from the time when she warned Emily that she had five minutes left.
Crap, she muttered to herself. “Em, come on, time for PJs,” she announced hastily, sliding the application and miscellaneous accompanying papers and envelopes to the side before she stood up. She extended her hand towards Emily and motioned for her to come along.
Emily sighed and dropped her toys at her side before she scrambled to her feet and took Meredith’s hand. She took the stairs slowly, one at a time. “I need a bath too?” she asked, grabbing for the railing with her free hand.
“Oh, I think so,” Meredith replied. “That’s the rule, isn’t it?”
“No,” Emily shot back immediately, yet casually, her eyes focused directly in front of her rather than on Meredith.
Meredith led Emily into the bathroom, started the water for the tub, and plopped down on the floor. She helped Emily strip off her clothes, and held her hand as she climbed into the tub, attempting to avoid the plastic cups and toys that Emily kept in the tub with her. Emily was quiet and cooperative as Meredith coaxed her head back under the faucet and soaked her hair.
“You want to do it yourself, Em?” Meredith asked, offering the upturned shampoo bottle to her as she turned off the faucet.
“Ok.” Emily stuck out her hands, palms up, and Meredith squirted a dollop of Emily’s shampoo, the no tears formula that she insisted on.
“Rub your hands together,” she instructed, demonstrating on her own hands. “Like this.”
Meredith let Emily take the lead for awhile. Emily stretched both arms up, her shoulder blades jutting out in the process, and rubbed the shampoo into her curly hair. She knit her brow in concentration, absentmindedly distributing the shampoo to only the middle of her head, scrubbing intently for a minute or two.
“Can I help you a little bit?” Meredith offered, waiting for Emily to nod before she reached forward and gently scrubbed a thick lather all the way around Emily’s hairline. She turned the faucet back on, took one of the cups floating in the water, and filled it to the brim. “Close your eyes, Em.” Emily responded immediately, tilting her head backward and squeezing her eyes shut while Meredith formed a sort of visor with her palm to shield Emily’s eyes and poured cupful after cupful of water over her sudsy hair.
When the shampoo was all rinsed out, Emily righted her head and looked up at Meredith in earnest. “I can play?”
“For a few minutes,” Meredith agreed, working up a lather on one of Emily’s pink washcloths. Emily poured soapy water from cup to cup while Meredith gently wiped her down, trying not to disrupt her as much as possible.
“I all done?” Emily asked while she was still soap-covered, trying to get to her feet.
“No, you are not done yet,” Meredith said quickly. “Sit back down please, and I’ll rinse you off. Then you can be done.”
Emily obediently plopped back down with Meredith’s help in the few inches of bathwater. Leaning forward, she grabbed for a few different toys—some sea animals that floated in the water and could squirt streams of water, though Emily didn’t know about that particular feature.
“Where’s my Daddy?” she sighed as she plunged the blue whale under the water and then brought it up again.
“Daddy is at the hospital,” Meredith replied, quickly rinsing Emily down, “But he’ll be home soon.”
“Before my bedtime?”
Derek had probably started the emergency craniotomy that barely had time for a CT at about 6:00 that evening. Meredith was admittedly running late with the bedtime routine, but even if she got Emily to bed at 9:30 instead of her usual 8:30, there was no way he would finish and get home before she fell asleep.
“He’s doing his best,” Meredith promised. “And if you fall asleep before he gets home, he’ll wake you up to say goodnight, ok?”
“I guess,” Emily replied, shrugging her shoulders. She smacked both hands lightly against the sheen of the water, pursed her lips, and opened her eyes wide as she stared up at Meredith.
Choosing the evening’s pajamas shouldn’t have been the ordeal that it was, Meredith thought, but when Emily shrugged off her towel after brushing her teeth and ran naked down the hall and back to her bedroom, Meredith really should have known.
Meredith sat in front of Emily, who had at least agreed to put panties on, and rifled through Emily’s bottom drawer.
“No,” Emily said indignantly, literally turning her back on the coordinating long-sleeved yellow shirt and pants with the blue butterflies. “The pink ones.”
“Em,” Meredith said tersely, holding out the first pink pair she saw in the drawer, sighing in frustration when Emily shook her head no. “Come on, stop.”
“With the fwowers,” Emily said stubbornly, and crossed her arms across her chest.
“These?” Meredith asked, holding out what Emily did not know would be the final choice, a pair of pink pajamas with white flowers that were virtually identical to the yellow pair in both cut and fabric. She shook her head in disbelief when Emily finally nodded, and raised her arms above her head for Meredith to slip the shirt on.
Emily sulked as she stepped into the matching pants, one leg at a time, while holding on to Meredith’s shoulders for stability. Meredith frowned at Emily’s expression, and the irritability that had overtaken her disposition.
Standing, she took the comb off of the top of Emily’s dresser and perched on the end of Emily’s bed. Emily remained where she was, quietly regarding Meredith with a tense stare. Meredith said nothing, but when she cocked her head, Emily came over to stand in front of her without incident.
“Em,” Meredith prodded, running the comb gently through Emily’s curls. “Hey,” she said quietly, gripping Emily’s waist and turning her around. She wore a blank expression, staring almost through Meredith. “Hey,” Meredith repeated, smiling this time, “Can you show me something else? One of your other dance moves?”
Emily shook her head.
“Why not?”
“I not want to,” she said, looking down.
A pang of guilt shot through Meredith. Emily had been all too happy to show her earlier, when she was only half-paying attention, and now, at three years old, it was as if she had learned to just be quiet. Don’t bother Mommy while she’s working. “Please?” Meredith asked again. “I really want to see how well you dance.”
Emily eyed Meredith cautiously, almost as if she didn’t quite believe her, and it was all Meredith could do to keep a smile on her face. “Please?” she asked again, touching her cheek ever so gently.
Emily’s face brightened a little at the contact. She reached forward and grabbed for Meredith’s hands. “You have to twirl me, Mommy!” she said, twirling herself before Meredith could help, spinning around once, then twice, while holding her hands.
“Did you learn this from the TV?” Meredith asked when she was finished, still holding her hands while she looked up at her, delighted. “No, my Daddy showeded me.”
“He did?” Meredith asked incredulously. First the afternoon tea parties, and now the nighttime dance sessions—there was this whole secret world, full of little moments that Meredith didn’t know about, but that she was all too happy to have revealed to her slowly, piece by piece.
“Like this,” Emily instructed, still holding Meredith’s hands as she climbed up onto her bare feet and swayed from side to side.
“Yeah?”
Emily nodded. “See?”
Meredith smiled, and ran a few fingers through Emily’s damp hair. “Ok, what do you think? How about a book?” Meredith asked once Emily had decided to finish dressing. She glanced at the clock sitting atop Emily’s dresser. She could still get Emily in bed relatively on time and maintain some semblance of routine.
Emily shook her head. “I can have TV?” she asked hopefully.
Meredith almost laughed at her earnestness in asking. She knew that television was generally not allowed so close to bedtime, but unfailingly, she always seemed to know exactly which days Meredith was likely to relent. Emily maintained her gaze of assumed demure sweetness, and finally cracked a smile when Meredith answered, “You can have TV or a book, not both, ok? A little bit.”
“I want Jasmine!” she exclaimed immediately.
Jasmine was the new obsession, replacing Cinderella just days before as the go-to princess in Emily’s life when Kathleen mailed a package containing no less than 10 DVDs that her girls didn’t watch anymore. Though Emily wanted to watch Aladdin, and had good intentions to do so, she did not anticipate being so thoroughly terrified of Jafar. At his first major appearance, Emily screamed and scrambled into Derek’s lap, and the movie had to be turned off. Meredith thought that was the end of it, but she was awakened a little after one that morning when Emily crawled into her bed, sobbing something about a dream where Jafar threw her into the cave.
“You’re not going to get too scared?” Meredith asked.
“I am a big girl,” Emily replied defiantly.
“I know,” she replied, “But remember Jafar was a little bit scary last time we watched it?”
“I not get scared this time,” she promised, bouncing up and down in anticipation. “It’s just pretend, Mommy,” she said seriously, repeating what she and Derek had told her in the middle of the night earlier that week.
“Ok, but we can’t watch the whole movie, because it’s almost bedtime.”
Emily did fairly well for the first ten minutes of the movie, which could have been credited to the fact that Meredith fast-forwarded past the original scene that caused the nightmare to a much more upbeat part of the movie involving a blue genie explicating Aladdin’s newfound opportunity.
Meredith went back to filling out her applications while Emily watched the movie. She kept an eye on the clock this time, glancing up every few minutes to make sure they were still on schedule. Barely ten minutes into the movie, the action had slowed, and Emily crawled across the couch cushions and onto Meredith’s lap. If she knew she was disrupting, crinkling, the papers in Meredith’s lap, she didn’t care. She swung one leg over Meredith’s lap, effectively straddling her as she brought her torso flush with Meredith’s and let Meredith bear all her weight.
Meredith slid her papers off to the side a bit and glanced down at Emily. She laid her head on Meredith’s chest, and alternated between quick glances up at Meredith and longer ones at the television. On screen, Jafar was plotting how he would take control of the kingdom.
“Is it too scary?” Meredith asked.
She was about to reach for the remote to turn off the television when Emily murmured breathily, “No.”
“Just tired?” she asked, wrapping her left arm around Emily’s waist. Emily nodded in response, and Meredith took a few seconds to pull out the corners of some papers that had gotten trapped under Emily or between them. She shifted all the paperwork to the side, all the way to the next couch cushion. She tucked a lock of Emily’s hair behind her ear, and then wrapped both arms around the sleepy child.
Meredith let the movie go on for a few more minutes while Emily’s breathing relaxed. She glanced at the papers stacked high on the coffee table in front of her in two piles, and then to her right at the half-finished application, the first of many. Emily snuggled a little closer in that moment. The paperwork could wait.
“Em?” Meredith whispered.
Emily grabbed at Meredith. Her eyes were closed, and Meredith knew she was probably looking for a lock of her hair to hold on to, but she couldn’t reach one from this angle. In an apparent settlement, Emily clutched at the fabric of Meredith’s t-shirt with her left hand, bunching up a handful of the material where it glossed just barely over her ribs, under her breast.
“How about this weekend, we carve a pumpkin?” she asked when she felt Emily respond just barely, cocking her head upward barely an inch.
“Not a scary one,” she mumbled sleepily.
“Not a scary one,” Meredith agreed. She settled deeper into the pillows and laid a palm flat on Emily’s back.
“When is the weekend?”Emily asked, her words slow and heavy as she tried to cling to consciousness long enough to get a few last questions out.
“In two days,” she responded quietly.
“Is two days soon?”
“Yeah, it is.”
Emily drifted off within the next few minutes. Her body grew limp and her grip on Meredith’s shirt slackened. A little bit of drool pooled in her slightly open mouth, dripping onto Meredith’s shirt sleeve. Meredith managed to reach for the remote with minimal movement and turn the volume of the movie down low enough so that it was almost muted. She kept one hand on Emily and reached to her right to drag the Seattle Grace paperwork closer to her. Taking the pen back in her hand, she flipped through the application with her free hand, filling in more information.
She had just finished her Seattle Grace application and was about to try to stand up and carry Emily up to her bed when she heard a key turn in the front door. Derek bustled in, his briefcase slamming against the screen door. “Hey,” he called from the foyer.
“Hey,” she murmured, smiling tiredly when he came into the living room. “Shh.”
“Sorry,” he whispered, leaning down to look at Emily’s sleeping face. He ran a hand over the back of her head, smoothing her hair down. “Hey,” he said quietly, kissing Meredith.
“How was your surgery?” she asked.
He shook his head sadly, and sat down on the couch next to her.
“I’m sorry.”
“Thanks,” he sighed. “I’m sorry I’m so late. The guy’s wife was coming from Spokane. She was away on a business trip; I wanted to wait until she got there.”
“I’m sure that meant a lot to her,” Meredith assured him.
“Yeah, well,” he sighed again, “Nothing really helps. But I figured it was the least I could do. How was your day?” he asked, placing a hand over the hand Meredith kept on Emily’s back.
“I assisted Dr. Weller with his corpus callosotomy,” she said quietly, doing her best not to wake Emily up.
“Oh, that’s great!” he exclaimed, squeezing her hand just a little.
“Yeah, no seizures yet, so we’ll see,” she said. She clasped her left hand with his right, threading her fingers through the spaces between his, and switched to holding Emily against her with her right hand. “Poor woman has a hell of a rehab ahead of her though,” she said.
“She does,” Derek agreed. “But it’ll be worth it if she’s not having grand mal seizures all the time.”
“That’s what she said.”
“What do you say?” he asked.
Meredith thought back to Angela Oswald’s pre-op that morning, when Dr. Weller had asked her to go in and answer any remaining questions and make sure that everything was in order to proceed that day. Angela didn’t have many questions about the procedure itself; from the way she talked about it, she could have practically performed the operation herself. She even understood that she might not be able to speak her fiancé’s name when she saw his face; she might not even be able to write out a shopping list at first. Her questions were about other things entirely, like how would he know she loved him if she couldn’t say the words, and what could she do to make herself recover faster.
Angela talked about her fiancé; his name was Paul, and they met in a bar. She said she knew the story was cliché, but he came along just when she was sure she would never find someone. She had been terrified to tell him about her epilepsy, which she’d had since childhood, but when she finally did, he stayed by her side. And when the disease started to get worse about a year ago, he didn’t run, but proposed instead. She was scared of this procedure, but didn’t know any other way to try to ensure some semblance of a normal future.
“She’s getting married next year,” Meredith shrugged. “We did a good thing.”
“Amazing surgery, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, it is,” she whispered. “I, uh…,” she looked up and grinned at him. “Emily and I danced tonight.”
“Really?” he asked amusedly.
“She said she learned it on TV,” Meredith continued, burying her nose in Emily’s hair and breathing in. “And from you.”
“Well, I don’t know what she learned on TV, but we’ve been practicing a little bit,” Derek admitted.
“Really?” Meredith asked, surprised, rubbing a few slow circles over Emily’s back.
“Yeah, well…,” he shrugged.
“I love you,” she whispered, and inched forward as much as she could for a quick kiss.
“I love you too,” he replied. He stood up then, and reached down for Emily. “Here, I’ll put her in bed.”
He scooped Emily into his arms. She whimpered a little at the movement, but, almost fluid in his arms, molded herself against his body. Her head rested limply on his shoulder, her arms hung at her sides.
Meredith stood up after Derek and stretched, trying to work the kinks out of her neck and back after hours in the same position. “Can you wake her up and kiss her goodnight before you tuck her in?” she asked, pulling her arms behind her back at odd angles. She brushed a few fingertips across Emily’s cheek, and kissed the top of her head. “I told her you would if she was asleep when you got home.”
Derek promised that he would, and carried her upstairs. Meredith gathered her papers off the couch and stacked them on the coffee table next to the others. While she tried to get organized, she mentally ran through her list of what she still had to do. The application itself was almost finished, but she needed several recommendations from her superiors, and she hadn’t asked for them yet. She’d ask the Chief, of course, and Dr. Bailey, even though she wasn’t a neurosurgeon. Should she include some sort of written explanation as to why she wasn’t including a letter from the Head of Neurosurgery? He was her husband; it’s not as if he could write a truly objective assessment of her skill. Dr. Weller and Dr. Krycek were fine doctors, and they would probably be more than happy to write letters to help her try to get whatever fellowship she wanted, but they weren’t Derek Shepherd.
Once her papers were in order, she turned off the TV, curled up on the couch, and waited for Derek. She stared at the applications in front of her, wishing that she could somehow bypass the whole process. As she attempted to calculate a strategy, Derek came back downstairs, and took a seat next to her on the couch.
“She said, ‘Daddy, I watched Aladdin and I wasn’t scared,’” he announced, situating himself flush next to her.
“If she sleeps in her bed tonight, I’ll believe it,” she replied. She sat up a little and curled into his embrace.
“Well, let’s hope she does,” Derek agreed. He kissed the top of her head, and rested his hand on her hip. Eyeing the stack of applications in front of him, he asked, “What are you doing?”
“Fellowship applications,” sighed in frustration. “Trying to get through some of them anyway.”
“Yeah?” he asked. “What looks good?”
“Seattle Grace has a good pediatric neurosurgery program. Dr. Weller was telling me about it, and it sounds pretty great. Lots of cases, and even working closely with Seattle Children’s on some cases. Plus I heard the boss is pretty decent,” she grinned.
“Yeah, I have heard good things about him,” he smirked. “That sounds great, Meredith. I think you’re going to love being a fellow. Better surgeries, more specialized cases. It’ll give you more opportunities to show what you’ve got. Anybody else?” he asked. He reached for the stack of applications on the table in front of them and took the opened Johns Hopkins material off the top of the pile.
“That came from Johns Hopkins a few weeks ago. They have a spinal surgery program, and a pediatric neurosurgery program.”
“This is pretty extensive,” he said, pursing his lips. “Did you compile your summary of all the surgical procedures you performed in the past 12 months? And your five letters of recommendation?”
“No, and no,” Meredith sighed. “Lie to me and tell me I’ll get it done before the deadline.”
“You’ll get them all in before the deadline. And I’m not lying,” he assured her.
“And then I have to pass the boards.”
“Which you will,” he promised emphatically. He reclined and inched a little closer to her. “Which one are you thinking of going for?” Derek asked, leafing through the literature they had sent. “Peds? Peds, right?” he pressed, looking up at her with the papers sitting on his lap.
“Actually, neither,” she shrugged, scooping the papers up off his lap and sifting them together, putting them back on the table.
“Why not?” Derek asked incredulous. “Meredith, it’s Johns Hopkins.”
“Derek, it’s in Baltimore,” she countered.
“There’s an aquarium. Lots of military history. A bad baseball team. Makes for a very nice spring and summer for Yankee fans like myself.”
“Well, as wonderful as the idea of potentially decades of baseball-related glory would be for you, we can’t just pick up and move, Derek,” she said matter-of-factly.
“Why not, exactly?”
“You have a job,” she replied, just a hint of sarcasm coloring her words. “I have a job.”
“Ah, but you’d have a new job.”
“And what about you?” she asked.
“Oh, I’m sure I’d find work,” he replied playfully. Sifting through the non-Seattle pile of applications, he shook his head as he looked at each one. “Meredith, Vanderbilt, Chicago, Brigham and Women’s, Mount Sinai, Johns Hopkins? This is amazing.”
She just stared at him while he stared at the applications, and said nothing until he sensed the tone of her silence and looked up at her. She sighed, glancing back and forth between Derek and the pile of applications in his hands.
She thought about all the things that she could write on those applications, of all the reasons why she wanted those fellowships, why she deserved those fellowships. She had plenty to say about what she had learned as a resident at Seattle Grace Hospital, and how the surgical and clinical skills she learned there would surely bring her success elsewhere. In between learning how to impact aneurysms and delicately cut out tumors and repair nerves, she learned how to trust and love and let people in. She learned that the surgeon should never think herself too good or too busy to shave her eight-year-old patient’s head for him because he asked. She learned how to make a life and a home with a lover, and how to realize that that lover was not just a lover, but a soulmate. She learned how to hold a baby and how not to buckle under the awesome responsibility of having someone truly believe that you were perfect. And she learned the layered meaning, and understood with new sincerity, of the directive to first do no harm.
“What about Em?” she asked finally, scrambling for the words that ultimately came out so easily.
“She would be ok,” Derek promised quietly, adding more before she could say anything. “She would, Meredith. She’s only three, so if we were going to move anywhere, that’d be the time, before she started school.”
“I guess that’s true,” Meredith conceded, but as thoughts of Seattle flooded her mind, she asked, “But you could just leave Seattle? Just like that?”
“Meredith, I’m just saying,” Derek murmured, setting the applications on the table. He took her hand, and looked her in the eye. “If you wanted to go, I’d go with you,” he promised. “Wherever you wanted to go. I love Seattle, and I love our life,” he added emphatically, “But if you got a job somewhere else, I’d go with you. That’s all I’m saying.”
* * *
A/N: I know this is long, long overdue, so I hope I didn't lose you guys with the 2 1/2 month wait. Life is good, just extremely hectic and stressful. Four more weeks in the semester :) Just when I start think that I will never have time to write for myself and is it even worth it, I get a comment here and it makes me remember why I love this story and love this fandom. I hope you all enjoy this, though I realize it's slightly shorter than my chapters usually are, and I can't wait until 4/24 to talk all things Grey's with you all again. Thanks for sticking around and reading; it means so much to me!![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif)
boofadil - you are the best. Seriously.
Someone who never lets you disappear
And I will be that witness to your life
A few weeks later, the damp chill of late autumn had settled in and life had returned to its usual routine. Emily didn’t mention the beach as much anymore, not once her summer clothes had been packed away and her life had returned to what she’d known since she was a few weeks old. Just when Meredith and Derek were sure she had forgotten all about the summer though, Emily would point to one of the pictures on the mantle that they had had framed, and recall with poignant detail the memory of a vanilla ice cream cone dripping down her fingers or the spray of ocean water in her face. These mentions were cursory, just brief pauses in the whirlwind that was Emily’s life to let memory slip in, but she seemed to remember just when Meredith and Derek needed to remember a little bit as well.
Fellowship information and applications started to come in for Meredith a few weeks after they returned home, with envelopes arriving from University of Washington, Seattle Children’s, Seattle Presbyterian, Mercy West, and Seattle Grace, as well as Brigham and Women’s in Boston, Vanderbilt in Nashville, University of Chicago, Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, and Mount Sinai in New York. Stacks of thick envelopes built up on the kitchen counter, and over the past few weeks, Meredith had slowly started to make her way through them, reading everything carefully as the familiar anxiety of trying to decide the rest of her life set in. So far, she had been lucky. Dartmouth was right. Seattle Grace was right. But there had been limits then, she told herself one evening as she sat down to try to sort through these programs. Back then, she had to stay close, but not too close, struggling to negotiate the logistics of medical school and residency with a mother who didn’t remember her.
She’d taken Emily home just before five that afternoon, just after Derek had an intern page her to let her know that he’d been called to an incoming head trauma needing an emergency craniotomy. Now, a little after 6:30 in the evening, Emily brought down some of her toys to play with in the living room, and Meredith went to the kitchen and brought the stack of paperwork in to work on for awhile.
The programs all seemed outstanding, she thought, flipping through them again. Spinal surgery and pediatric neurosurgery and trauma and everything she had honed an interest in over the past several years—somebody wanted her to come work for them to do it.
She slid the contents of the Johns Hopkins envelope out onto her lap. Pictures of pristine hallways, expensive equipment manned by dozens of doctors in full scrubs and surgical masks, and the prestigious-looking dome, graced almost every page of their information booklets. The letter, Meredith thought as she read over it again, was as flattering to them as much as it was to her. One of the best. Ranked by U.S. News and World Report. Premier surgical fellowship opportunity. We want you. Baltimore.
Meredith glanced over at Emily, cross-legged on the floor as she paraded a toy pony across the hardwood in one hand and held on to the accompanying doll in the other. She smiled as Emily babbled nonsense quietly to herself, and glanced back down at the paperwork in front of her. Gathering it up, she quickly sorted through the envelopes and divided them into two piles on the table in front of her. In one pile, she left Boston, Nashville, Chicago, and New York and stacked the opened Baltimore information on top. Pushing that pile aside, she reached with both hands for Seattle. She spilled the contents of the Seattle Grace envelope into her lap, took her pen, and started filling out the application.
She’d filled in the particulars—her name, date of birth, social security number, home address—when Emily stood up, still clad in her jeans and green sweater.
“Mommy, watch me!” she cried, waiting until Meredith looked up before she leaped into the air and then twirled herself around twice before plopping back on the ground.
“Where’d you learn that?” Meredith asked, somewhat amused at her acrobatics.
“On the TV,” Emily offered proudly, throwing her hands up as she focused intently on Meredith’s every subtle reaction.
“Oh, really?” Meredith prodded, unable to recall anytime in which Emily may have seen some kind of elaborate dance contest or figure-skating competition or anything of the sort. “Who let you watch TV?”
“You,” Emily shrugged, and went back to playing with her toys.
“Oh,” Meredith breathed quietly, racking her brain to try to remember when this would have happened. It couldn’t have been in the past couple of days, when she and Derek had been able to leave the hospital at the same time and the television had proven unnecessary to keep Emily busy on those evenings.
She went back to her paperwork, getting into the meaty part of the application in which details about her undergraduate degree, her medical school, and the hospital in which she was completing her residency were required. She wrote Dartmouth College under both undergraduate and graduate programs, and quickly scribbled the corresponding years of graduation next to each. Seattle Grace Hospital, Seattle, Washington went under the ‘Residency’ heading, along with the year of her expected completion of the program and her scores on her intern exam.
A memory flickered across her mind as she started to describe the details of her surgical residency program, a little redundant, she thought, since Seattle Grace should know better than anyone what their own program entailed.
Last week, Emily, bored with coloring, bored with seemingly all her toys, whined for a good ten minutes while Meredith tried to fix dinner and return phone calls. She put the television on for her as a last resort and glanced in periodically, but hadn’t kept an exceptionally close eye on the program itself.
She shook her head, and tried to concentrate on her application. Extensive surgical experience with world-class instruction. It’s not like she watched something horrible; it wasn’t even inappropriate at all. Performed and assisted on numerous advanced brain and spinal procedures; please see attached list. But you weren’t watching her. Hope to further cultivate these skills as a surgical fellow. She did something without you.
Meredith sighed and scanned down to the next section, in which she was asked why she wanted to pursue a fellowship opportunity at Seattle Grace.
“Mommy! Look!” Emily cried, springing up again. She thrust the plastic pony towards Meredith and pressed the button on the side that made its saddle light up, the same button that they’d pressed dozens upon dozens of times before. “Look, Mommy!” Emily said as she pressed it once more.
“I know, that’s cool, Em!” Meredith replied, glancing up briefly. “That pony is great, isn’t it?”
“I can do this too!” Emily interjected quickly, before Meredith even had the chance to turn back to her paperwork. She extended her arms and spun herself around, hard enough that she bumped the coffee table slightly with her hip before collapsing into a fit of giggles on the floor. “See?” she demanded, flushed and looking up at Meredith.
Meredith snorted a little, trying to keep her laughter in while Emily looked up at her expectantly. She glanced at the time, blinking at her from the DVD player across the room, and turned back to Emily. “I think it’s time for you to start quieting down,” she said, watching Emily’s expression turn to a pout at the slightest hint of impending bedtime. “Do you want to get your pajamas on?”
“No,” she sulked, gathering up her pony and her doll and resuming her play, seemingly all too willing to ignore Meredith until she put the unacceptable idea of bedtime to rest.
“Ok,” Meredith sighed, willing to pick her battles for now. “Five more minutes and then pajamas.”
Emily nodded absentmindedly, scooting over a few feet to grab a few other toys she had brought downstairs with her to incorporate them into her game. Meredith returned her attention to her application and tried to utilize the few minutes she had until Emily really had to get ready for bed.
Why do you want to pursue a surgical fellowship at Seattle Grace Hospital?
Meredith bit her lip while she tried to collect her thoughts. Why? Emily. Derek. Cristina. Because Baltimore and Nashville and New York weren’t home. Because she could pack up their photographs and their dishes and even the couch she was sitting on and send them elsewhere in a truck, but the view from their porch and the floorboards where Emily took her first steps were not so easily transported. Because she spent over five years establishing herself here and she was not about to uproot the life she had worked so hard to keep and disrupt the child she would do anything to protect. Because Seattle Grace was the only program that was both worthy and safe.
She pressed her pen to the paper, wanting to write all these things down as quickly as they came to her, and lifted it mere seconds later. The Chief would be the only one on the board who wouldn’t think she was way off-kilter if she really wrote those things, her real reasons, even though they were as much the truth as anything she could say about the caliber of the fellowship program.
Meredith sat, lost in her thoughts for a few moments, and when she finally took her pen to the paper again, she wrote about the professional relationships she had developed over the years and the unparalleled excellence of her residency program that she was certain the fellowship program would match or exceed.
When she finally looked up again, Emily was still playing with her back towards her, but the clock let her know that a half hour had passed from the time when she warned Emily that she had five minutes left.
Crap, she muttered to herself. “Em, come on, time for PJs,” she announced hastily, sliding the application and miscellaneous accompanying papers and envelopes to the side before she stood up. She extended her hand towards Emily and motioned for her to come along.
Emily sighed and dropped her toys at her side before she scrambled to her feet and took Meredith’s hand. She took the stairs slowly, one at a time. “I need a bath too?” she asked, grabbing for the railing with her free hand.
“Oh, I think so,” Meredith replied. “That’s the rule, isn’t it?”
“No,” Emily shot back immediately, yet casually, her eyes focused directly in front of her rather than on Meredith.
Meredith led Emily into the bathroom, started the water for the tub, and plopped down on the floor. She helped Emily strip off her clothes, and held her hand as she climbed into the tub, attempting to avoid the plastic cups and toys that Emily kept in the tub with her. Emily was quiet and cooperative as Meredith coaxed her head back under the faucet and soaked her hair.
“You want to do it yourself, Em?” Meredith asked, offering the upturned shampoo bottle to her as she turned off the faucet.
“Ok.” Emily stuck out her hands, palms up, and Meredith squirted a dollop of Emily’s shampoo, the no tears formula that she insisted on.
“Rub your hands together,” she instructed, demonstrating on her own hands. “Like this.”
Meredith let Emily take the lead for awhile. Emily stretched both arms up, her shoulder blades jutting out in the process, and rubbed the shampoo into her curly hair. She knit her brow in concentration, absentmindedly distributing the shampoo to only the middle of her head, scrubbing intently for a minute or two.
“Can I help you a little bit?” Meredith offered, waiting for Emily to nod before she reached forward and gently scrubbed a thick lather all the way around Emily’s hairline. She turned the faucet back on, took one of the cups floating in the water, and filled it to the brim. “Close your eyes, Em.” Emily responded immediately, tilting her head backward and squeezing her eyes shut while Meredith formed a sort of visor with her palm to shield Emily’s eyes and poured cupful after cupful of water over her sudsy hair.
When the shampoo was all rinsed out, Emily righted her head and looked up at Meredith in earnest. “I can play?”
“For a few minutes,” Meredith agreed, working up a lather on one of Emily’s pink washcloths. Emily poured soapy water from cup to cup while Meredith gently wiped her down, trying not to disrupt her as much as possible.
“I all done?” Emily asked while she was still soap-covered, trying to get to her feet.
“No, you are not done yet,” Meredith said quickly. “Sit back down please, and I’ll rinse you off. Then you can be done.”
Emily obediently plopped back down with Meredith’s help in the few inches of bathwater. Leaning forward, she grabbed for a few different toys—some sea animals that floated in the water and could squirt streams of water, though Emily didn’t know about that particular feature.
“Where’s my Daddy?” she sighed as she plunged the blue whale under the water and then brought it up again.
“Daddy is at the hospital,” Meredith replied, quickly rinsing Emily down, “But he’ll be home soon.”
“Before my bedtime?”
Derek had probably started the emergency craniotomy that barely had time for a CT at about 6:00 that evening. Meredith was admittedly running late with the bedtime routine, but even if she got Emily to bed at 9:30 instead of her usual 8:30, there was no way he would finish and get home before she fell asleep.
“He’s doing his best,” Meredith promised. “And if you fall asleep before he gets home, he’ll wake you up to say goodnight, ok?”
“I guess,” Emily replied, shrugging her shoulders. She smacked both hands lightly against the sheen of the water, pursed her lips, and opened her eyes wide as she stared up at Meredith.
Choosing the evening’s pajamas shouldn’t have been the ordeal that it was, Meredith thought, but when Emily shrugged off her towel after brushing her teeth and ran naked down the hall and back to her bedroom, Meredith really should have known.
Meredith sat in front of Emily, who had at least agreed to put panties on, and rifled through Emily’s bottom drawer.
“No,” Emily said indignantly, literally turning her back on the coordinating long-sleeved yellow shirt and pants with the blue butterflies. “The pink ones.”
“Em,” Meredith said tersely, holding out the first pink pair she saw in the drawer, sighing in frustration when Emily shook her head no. “Come on, stop.”
“With the fwowers,” Emily said stubbornly, and crossed her arms across her chest.
“These?” Meredith asked, holding out what Emily did not know would be the final choice, a pair of pink pajamas with white flowers that were virtually identical to the yellow pair in both cut and fabric. She shook her head in disbelief when Emily finally nodded, and raised her arms above her head for Meredith to slip the shirt on.
Emily sulked as she stepped into the matching pants, one leg at a time, while holding on to Meredith’s shoulders for stability. Meredith frowned at Emily’s expression, and the irritability that had overtaken her disposition.
Standing, she took the comb off of the top of Emily’s dresser and perched on the end of Emily’s bed. Emily remained where she was, quietly regarding Meredith with a tense stare. Meredith said nothing, but when she cocked her head, Emily came over to stand in front of her without incident.
“Em,” Meredith prodded, running the comb gently through Emily’s curls. “Hey,” she said quietly, gripping Emily’s waist and turning her around. She wore a blank expression, staring almost through Meredith. “Hey,” Meredith repeated, smiling this time, “Can you show me something else? One of your other dance moves?”
Emily shook her head.
“Why not?”
“I not want to,” she said, looking down.
A pang of guilt shot through Meredith. Emily had been all too happy to show her earlier, when she was only half-paying attention, and now, at three years old, it was as if she had learned to just be quiet. Don’t bother Mommy while she’s working. “Please?” Meredith asked again. “I really want to see how well you dance.”
Emily eyed Meredith cautiously, almost as if she didn’t quite believe her, and it was all Meredith could do to keep a smile on her face. “Please?” she asked again, touching her cheek ever so gently.
Emily’s face brightened a little at the contact. She reached forward and grabbed for Meredith’s hands. “You have to twirl me, Mommy!” she said, twirling herself before Meredith could help, spinning around once, then twice, while holding her hands.
“Did you learn this from the TV?” Meredith asked when she was finished, still holding her hands while she looked up at her, delighted. “No, my Daddy showeded me.”
“He did?” Meredith asked incredulously. First the afternoon tea parties, and now the nighttime dance sessions—there was this whole secret world, full of little moments that Meredith didn’t know about, but that she was all too happy to have revealed to her slowly, piece by piece.
“Like this,” Emily instructed, still holding Meredith’s hands as she climbed up onto her bare feet and swayed from side to side.
“Yeah?”
Emily nodded. “See?”
Meredith smiled, and ran a few fingers through Emily’s damp hair. “Ok, what do you think? How about a book?” Meredith asked once Emily had decided to finish dressing. She glanced at the clock sitting atop Emily’s dresser. She could still get Emily in bed relatively on time and maintain some semblance of routine.
Emily shook her head. “I can have TV?” she asked hopefully.
Meredith almost laughed at her earnestness in asking. She knew that television was generally not allowed so close to bedtime, but unfailingly, she always seemed to know exactly which days Meredith was likely to relent. Emily maintained her gaze of assumed demure sweetness, and finally cracked a smile when Meredith answered, “You can have TV or a book, not both, ok? A little bit.”
“I want Jasmine!” she exclaimed immediately.
Jasmine was the new obsession, replacing Cinderella just days before as the go-to princess in Emily’s life when Kathleen mailed a package containing no less than 10 DVDs that her girls didn’t watch anymore. Though Emily wanted to watch Aladdin, and had good intentions to do so, she did not anticipate being so thoroughly terrified of Jafar. At his first major appearance, Emily screamed and scrambled into Derek’s lap, and the movie had to be turned off. Meredith thought that was the end of it, but she was awakened a little after one that morning when Emily crawled into her bed, sobbing something about a dream where Jafar threw her into the cave.
“You’re not going to get too scared?” Meredith asked.
“I am a big girl,” Emily replied defiantly.
“I know,” she replied, “But remember Jafar was a little bit scary last time we watched it?”
“I not get scared this time,” she promised, bouncing up and down in anticipation. “It’s just pretend, Mommy,” she said seriously, repeating what she and Derek had told her in the middle of the night earlier that week.
“Ok, but we can’t watch the whole movie, because it’s almost bedtime.”
Emily did fairly well for the first ten minutes of the movie, which could have been credited to the fact that Meredith fast-forwarded past the original scene that caused the nightmare to a much more upbeat part of the movie involving a blue genie explicating Aladdin’s newfound opportunity.
Meredith went back to filling out her applications while Emily watched the movie. She kept an eye on the clock this time, glancing up every few minutes to make sure they were still on schedule. Barely ten minutes into the movie, the action had slowed, and Emily crawled across the couch cushions and onto Meredith’s lap. If she knew she was disrupting, crinkling, the papers in Meredith’s lap, she didn’t care. She swung one leg over Meredith’s lap, effectively straddling her as she brought her torso flush with Meredith’s and let Meredith bear all her weight.
Meredith slid her papers off to the side a bit and glanced down at Emily. She laid her head on Meredith’s chest, and alternated between quick glances up at Meredith and longer ones at the television. On screen, Jafar was plotting how he would take control of the kingdom.
“Is it too scary?” Meredith asked.
She was about to reach for the remote to turn off the television when Emily murmured breathily, “No.”
“Just tired?” she asked, wrapping her left arm around Emily’s waist. Emily nodded in response, and Meredith took a few seconds to pull out the corners of some papers that had gotten trapped under Emily or between them. She shifted all the paperwork to the side, all the way to the next couch cushion. She tucked a lock of Emily’s hair behind her ear, and then wrapped both arms around the sleepy child.
Meredith let the movie go on for a few more minutes while Emily’s breathing relaxed. She glanced at the papers stacked high on the coffee table in front of her in two piles, and then to her right at the half-finished application, the first of many. Emily snuggled a little closer in that moment. The paperwork could wait.
“Em?” Meredith whispered.
Emily grabbed at Meredith. Her eyes were closed, and Meredith knew she was probably looking for a lock of her hair to hold on to, but she couldn’t reach one from this angle. In an apparent settlement, Emily clutched at the fabric of Meredith’s t-shirt with her left hand, bunching up a handful of the material where it glossed just barely over her ribs, under her breast.
“How about this weekend, we carve a pumpkin?” she asked when she felt Emily respond just barely, cocking her head upward barely an inch.
“Not a scary one,” she mumbled sleepily.
“Not a scary one,” Meredith agreed. She settled deeper into the pillows and laid a palm flat on Emily’s back.
“When is the weekend?”Emily asked, her words slow and heavy as she tried to cling to consciousness long enough to get a few last questions out.
“In two days,” she responded quietly.
“Is two days soon?”
“Yeah, it is.”
Emily drifted off within the next few minutes. Her body grew limp and her grip on Meredith’s shirt slackened. A little bit of drool pooled in her slightly open mouth, dripping onto Meredith’s shirt sleeve. Meredith managed to reach for the remote with minimal movement and turn the volume of the movie down low enough so that it was almost muted. She kept one hand on Emily and reached to her right to drag the Seattle Grace paperwork closer to her. Taking the pen back in her hand, she flipped through the application with her free hand, filling in more information.
She had just finished her Seattle Grace application and was about to try to stand up and carry Emily up to her bed when she heard a key turn in the front door. Derek bustled in, his briefcase slamming against the screen door. “Hey,” he called from the foyer.
“Hey,” she murmured, smiling tiredly when he came into the living room. “Shh.”
“Sorry,” he whispered, leaning down to look at Emily’s sleeping face. He ran a hand over the back of her head, smoothing her hair down. “Hey,” he said quietly, kissing Meredith.
“How was your surgery?” she asked.
He shook his head sadly, and sat down on the couch next to her.
“I’m sorry.”
“Thanks,” he sighed. “I’m sorry I’m so late. The guy’s wife was coming from Spokane. She was away on a business trip; I wanted to wait until she got there.”
“I’m sure that meant a lot to her,” Meredith assured him.
“Yeah, well,” he sighed again, “Nothing really helps. But I figured it was the least I could do. How was your day?” he asked, placing a hand over the hand Meredith kept on Emily’s back.
“I assisted Dr. Weller with his corpus callosotomy,” she said quietly, doing her best not to wake Emily up.
“Oh, that’s great!” he exclaimed, squeezing her hand just a little.
“Yeah, no seizures yet, so we’ll see,” she said. She clasped her left hand with his right, threading her fingers through the spaces between his, and switched to holding Emily against her with her right hand. “Poor woman has a hell of a rehab ahead of her though,” she said.
“She does,” Derek agreed. “But it’ll be worth it if she’s not having grand mal seizures all the time.”
“That’s what she said.”
“What do you say?” he asked.
Meredith thought back to Angela Oswald’s pre-op that morning, when Dr. Weller had asked her to go in and answer any remaining questions and make sure that everything was in order to proceed that day. Angela didn’t have many questions about the procedure itself; from the way she talked about it, she could have practically performed the operation herself. She even understood that she might not be able to speak her fiancé’s name when she saw his face; she might not even be able to write out a shopping list at first. Her questions were about other things entirely, like how would he know she loved him if she couldn’t say the words, and what could she do to make herself recover faster.
Angela talked about her fiancé; his name was Paul, and they met in a bar. She said she knew the story was cliché, but he came along just when she was sure she would never find someone. She had been terrified to tell him about her epilepsy, which she’d had since childhood, but when she finally did, he stayed by her side. And when the disease started to get worse about a year ago, he didn’t run, but proposed instead. She was scared of this procedure, but didn’t know any other way to try to ensure some semblance of a normal future.
“She’s getting married next year,” Meredith shrugged. “We did a good thing.”
“Amazing surgery, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, it is,” she whispered. “I, uh…,” she looked up and grinned at him. “Emily and I danced tonight.”
“Really?” he asked amusedly.
“She said she learned it on TV,” Meredith continued, burying her nose in Emily’s hair and breathing in. “And from you.”
“Well, I don’t know what she learned on TV, but we’ve been practicing a little bit,” Derek admitted.
“Really?” Meredith asked, surprised, rubbing a few slow circles over Emily’s back.
“Yeah, well…,” he shrugged.
“I love you,” she whispered, and inched forward as much as she could for a quick kiss.
“I love you too,” he replied. He stood up then, and reached down for Emily. “Here, I’ll put her in bed.”
He scooped Emily into his arms. She whimpered a little at the movement, but, almost fluid in his arms, molded herself against his body. Her head rested limply on his shoulder, her arms hung at her sides.
Meredith stood up after Derek and stretched, trying to work the kinks out of her neck and back after hours in the same position. “Can you wake her up and kiss her goodnight before you tuck her in?” she asked, pulling her arms behind her back at odd angles. She brushed a few fingertips across Emily’s cheek, and kissed the top of her head. “I told her you would if she was asleep when you got home.”
Derek promised that he would, and carried her upstairs. Meredith gathered her papers off the couch and stacked them on the coffee table next to the others. While she tried to get organized, she mentally ran through her list of what she still had to do. The application itself was almost finished, but she needed several recommendations from her superiors, and she hadn’t asked for them yet. She’d ask the Chief, of course, and Dr. Bailey, even though she wasn’t a neurosurgeon. Should she include some sort of written explanation as to why she wasn’t including a letter from the Head of Neurosurgery? He was her husband; it’s not as if he could write a truly objective assessment of her skill. Dr. Weller and Dr. Krycek were fine doctors, and they would probably be more than happy to write letters to help her try to get whatever fellowship she wanted, but they weren’t Derek Shepherd.
Once her papers were in order, she turned off the TV, curled up on the couch, and waited for Derek. She stared at the applications in front of her, wishing that she could somehow bypass the whole process. As she attempted to calculate a strategy, Derek came back downstairs, and took a seat next to her on the couch.
“She said, ‘Daddy, I watched Aladdin and I wasn’t scared,’” he announced, situating himself flush next to her.
“If she sleeps in her bed tonight, I’ll believe it,” she replied. She sat up a little and curled into his embrace.
“Well, let’s hope she does,” Derek agreed. He kissed the top of her head, and rested his hand on her hip. Eyeing the stack of applications in front of him, he asked, “What are you doing?”
“Fellowship applications,” sighed in frustration. “Trying to get through some of them anyway.”
“Yeah?” he asked. “What looks good?”
“Seattle Grace has a good pediatric neurosurgery program. Dr. Weller was telling me about it, and it sounds pretty great. Lots of cases, and even working closely with Seattle Children’s on some cases. Plus I heard the boss is pretty decent,” she grinned.
“Yeah, I have heard good things about him,” he smirked. “That sounds great, Meredith. I think you’re going to love being a fellow. Better surgeries, more specialized cases. It’ll give you more opportunities to show what you’ve got. Anybody else?” he asked. He reached for the stack of applications on the table in front of them and took the opened Johns Hopkins material off the top of the pile.
“That came from Johns Hopkins a few weeks ago. They have a spinal surgery program, and a pediatric neurosurgery program.”
“This is pretty extensive,” he said, pursing his lips. “Did you compile your summary of all the surgical procedures you performed in the past 12 months? And your five letters of recommendation?”
“No, and no,” Meredith sighed. “Lie to me and tell me I’ll get it done before the deadline.”
“You’ll get them all in before the deadline. And I’m not lying,” he assured her.
“And then I have to pass the boards.”
“Which you will,” he promised emphatically. He reclined and inched a little closer to her. “Which one are you thinking of going for?” Derek asked, leafing through the literature they had sent. “Peds? Peds, right?” he pressed, looking up at her with the papers sitting on his lap.
“Actually, neither,” she shrugged, scooping the papers up off his lap and sifting them together, putting them back on the table.
“Why not?” Derek asked incredulous. “Meredith, it’s Johns Hopkins.”
“Derek, it’s in Baltimore,” she countered.
“There’s an aquarium. Lots of military history. A bad baseball team. Makes for a very nice spring and summer for Yankee fans like myself.”
“Well, as wonderful as the idea of potentially decades of baseball-related glory would be for you, we can’t just pick up and move, Derek,” she said matter-of-factly.
“Why not, exactly?”
“You have a job,” she replied, just a hint of sarcasm coloring her words. “I have a job.”
“Ah, but you’d have a new job.”
“And what about you?” she asked.
“Oh, I’m sure I’d find work,” he replied playfully. Sifting through the non-Seattle pile of applications, he shook his head as he looked at each one. “Meredith, Vanderbilt, Chicago, Brigham and Women’s, Mount Sinai, Johns Hopkins? This is amazing.”
She just stared at him while he stared at the applications, and said nothing until he sensed the tone of her silence and looked up at her. She sighed, glancing back and forth between Derek and the pile of applications in his hands.
She thought about all the things that she could write on those applications, of all the reasons why she wanted those fellowships, why she deserved those fellowships. She had plenty to say about what she had learned as a resident at Seattle Grace Hospital, and how the surgical and clinical skills she learned there would surely bring her success elsewhere. In between learning how to impact aneurysms and delicately cut out tumors and repair nerves, she learned how to trust and love and let people in. She learned that the surgeon should never think herself too good or too busy to shave her eight-year-old patient’s head for him because he asked. She learned how to make a life and a home with a lover, and how to realize that that lover was not just a lover, but a soulmate. She learned how to hold a baby and how not to buckle under the awesome responsibility of having someone truly believe that you were perfect. And she learned the layered meaning, and understood with new sincerity, of the directive to first do no harm.
“What about Em?” she asked finally, scrambling for the words that ultimately came out so easily.
“She would be ok,” Derek promised quietly, adding more before she could say anything. “She would, Meredith. She’s only three, so if we were going to move anywhere, that’d be the time, before she started school.”
“I guess that’s true,” Meredith conceded, but as thoughts of Seattle flooded her mind, she asked, “But you could just leave Seattle? Just like that?”
“Meredith, I’m just saying,” Derek murmured, setting the applications on the table. He took her hand, and looked her in the eye. “If you wanted to go, I’d go with you,” he promised. “Wherever you wanted to go. I love Seattle, and I love our life,” he added emphatically, “But if you got a job somewhere else, I’d go with you. That’s all I’m saying.”
* * *
A/N: I know this is long, long overdue, so I hope I didn't lose you guys with the 2 1/2 month wait. Life is good, just extremely hectic and stressful. Four more weeks in the semester :) Just when I start think that I will never have time to write for myself and is it even worth it, I get a comment here and it makes me remember why I love this story and love this fandom. I hope you all enjoy this, though I realize it's slightly shorter than my chapters usually are, and I can't wait until 4/24 to talk all things Grey's with you all again. Thanks for sticking around and reading; it means so much to me!
boofadil - you are the best. Seriously. 43 comments | Leave a comment