fragments of my life [MERDER]

TWENTY-FOUR

"So... oh god, where do I begin." Meredith trailed off, scratching her neck, looking around the room, her eyes darting from place to place.

"Do you remember what happened?" She asked, Derek's expression giving away that he knew vague details, but not much else.

"Car accident", Derek gulped, Meredith grabbing the water off the tray table, filling a glass, and offering sips to him through a straw.

"Yeah... yeah you were." She shuddered remembering the state of Derek at the start when she'd just arrived; covered in cuts, bruises... he looked bad, broken.

"I'll try my best to fill in the gaps for you. Here goes, a drunk driver slammed into you guys. He was driving down the street on the wrong side of the road, three times the legal limit." Meredith paused, unsure if Derek would want to know the next part. A look in his crystal blue eyes displayed pure confusion, so she painfully restarted the story. Her voice became laced with a bitter acid as she continued.

"As far as I know, the bastard that hit you is fine." She scoffed, thinking what a cruel twist of fate it was that Mark was dead and the drunk got away, injury free.

"You had head, chest, and abdominal trauma. They fixed it all in the initial surgery, but the swelling had to go down, so they put you in a coma, and well, you only just woke up, a month later."

"Mark's dead, isn't he." Derek added, deadpanned.

"Yeah- wait, you had the dream too?" Her eyes narrowed as her mouth widened in shock.

"What do you mean too?" Derek's features now displayed the same shock as Meredith's.

"Never mind, that can wait. You had the dream?" Meredith questioned again.

"Yeah... I was out at the lake where my dad used to take me fishing before I died... I saw him, and Mark. That's how I knew he was dead. They told me how much of an idiot I'd been, pretty much, and how I needed to come back to fix it."

"None of that matters any- "

Meredith was cut off by Derek and knowing that he'd always hated her invalidating her own feelings, it didn't come as a surprise. It was nice to see that that part of him had never gone away.

"Yes, it does. It does matter." He ordered, with conviction in his voice, remembering his conversations with his father and Mark.

"I hurt you, I'm not going to shy away from that anymore. I should have never tried to make excuses for my behaviour in the first place. I hurt you so bad that I made you hate me, that every time you thought about me or were around me you were in overwhelming amounts of pain. That's all my fault. It's on me, Mer. I should have never..."

"It doesn't matter." Meredith protested, inhaling.

"We can't change any of that. We can only change how we move on from that, but that's a discussion for another time. Soon, but not now. There are more important things for the here and now." Meredith exhaled, grasping her husband's hand slightly tighter than before.

"I'm sure you have questions about the last eight months. I'll do my best to answer them."

"You said you had a dream, too?" Derek inquired, worry creeping onto his face. "What happened?"

"It's corny... remember when you suggested we get married naked in a field of flowers? I was there, not naked, but in the field of flowers. They were beautiful, it was just so relaxed; there was no hurt there. Mark came to me; told me I shouldn't be there. I really wasn't there long, in the real world it translated to two days."