fragments of my life [MERDER]

ELEVEN

Derek Shepherd was not doing well. 

The therapy was helping- well, not really. If it was helping, it was only a tiny amount, but not nearly as much as Derek needed. It had been a week of therapy sessions with Dr. Wyatt, the same therapist Meredith had previously used, and Derek had gotten nowhere. If anything, he'd gotten worse. 

Mark had known Derek a long time. They were best friends, brothers, and so it made sense that Mark noticed Derek's declining moods, his moodiness, his absence of hope, before anyone else. For the first time in Mark's life, he had witnessed Derek truly broken. Derek wasn't even this torn up when he had slept with Addison, Mark thought, and that was bad. Mark realised how much Derek loved Meredith, and how much not being with her, not seeing her, not knowing if she was alive, okay, anything - it was slowly killing his best friend, eating him up from the inside. All Derek felt was guilt, and despair. It had taken him the best part of two months, but Derek had finally realised that Meredith leaving was his own fault, and had admitted that he needed help.

Mark grew up with Derek, and he'd never seen him like this. He had no idea what to do, or what to say to him. He was a shell of a man. He had lost the light in his eyes. Mark noticed this days ago, and so had called in the action team.

Carolyn Shepherd was not a happy woman. After hearing what her son had done to Meredith, a woman she knew he loved so much, a woman she knew he needed, she was shocked. She had raised him better than this, she thought. Even if she hadn't, she thought that his experience with Addison and Mark would have proven to him how much what he did could destroy the other person in the relationship. She recognised that Meredith had made a mistake too, but it was no excuse for what Derek did. She could barely sympathise with her son over Meredith leaving - if she was Meredith, she would have done the exact same thing. She probably would have done worse. Carolyn had hope, though. She had hope that his son's wife would come back to him. She had hope that Derek would somehow be able to win her back, that she would agree to hear him out, that she would realise how much she missed him, and how much they needed each other. She had to, right? If she didn't, Carolyn thought, if Meredith couldn't bring herself to reconcile with Derek, her son would never be the same, and she couldn't let that happen.

It was early in the morning, the Seattle air was cold and crisp, the sky was a dark-blue colour and the birds could still be heard chirping. Derek was sitting his office, staring, thinking. It's all he'd been doing recently, other than surgery and therapy. Just thinking, mostly beating himself up, going through all the worst-case what/if scenarios his mind could conjure up. He was mid-way playing out yet another reality in which Meredith would refuse to come back to him when he was harshly snapped back into reality by a loud knock on his door. Thinking it was Mark, coming to yell at him yet again, or try to talk to him in a way that just helped no one, he groaned audibly and grunted.

"What do you want now?"

"What do I want now?" Derek was shocked at the face he saw when the door when it opened, "Derek Christopher Shepherd you stupid, imbecilic man. I raised you better than this!" Carolyn screamed, using her handbag to hit her son on the arm as he sat in his chair.

"Ma? What are you doing here?" Derek's eyes widened as he used his legs and spare arm to defend himself against his mother's attack.

"You destroyed the one good thing in your life Derek, and all you're doing is moping around like some lost, sick child, instead of doing what you should be doing."

"Which is what, Ma?" Derek inquired, sighing as his mother sat down in the chair opposite him.

"Honestly, you should be praying, Derek. You should be talking to God, praying that Meredith's got enough reason to come back here and forgive your-. You know what, Derek? She doesn't have to. If I was her, I wouldn't. You're giving her zero reason to."