I Will Follow You Into the Dark

CHAPTER 20

Does sidekick love and patience have limits? Apparently, I'm on a course to find out............this fic would probably be a completely different read if I wrote it chronologically.......but my warped brain keeps the flashback thing going, so here's more...............





He looked at her with pain and grief and fear written all over his face. He swallowed hard and looked at Jen with such a pitiful, pleading expression that she felt tears leap to her eyes.

"Her name is Meredith."

Jen just sat there waiting for him to say something else.

"You asked me who I loved when we argued a few months ago," he said sadly. "Her name is Meredith."

"Oh.......," was all Jen could say.

Derek started talking as he continued to stare at his shoes. "I haven't seen her or spoken to her in years........"


[NOTE: Begin LONG series of flashbacks.......so I won't put them all in italics.]


A few days after Derek found out who he was, he was on a plane for Boston. Justin had driven him to the airport and encouraged him until the minute he boarded the plane. The Peace Corps was sending someone to meet him when he arrived. Someone from the hospital in Quito had talked with him about what he remembered so far and prepared him for various ways his other memories might or might not return.

He was literally frightened out of his mind. He was flying to a city he didn't remember to be greeted by a family he didn't recognize and to assimilate himself into a life he hadn't been living. He opened the folder again. It contained faxed copies of family pictures, a photo of his mother's house, and photos from his childhood.

As he flipped through the photos, Derek concentrated on details. He reviewed the things he had already remembered from staring at them the previous hundred times and then searched them for details he hadn't yet noticed. Despite the fact that he could describe each photo in excruciating detail, he couldn't tell you anything about any of the people in the photos, and he didn't remember any of the events being captured in them, or how he felt about them. Well, that wasn't completely true, he did remember the names of his family members now since they had been scribbled across the bottom of the faxed pages. They looked like nice people, and they had been thrilled when he called to let them know that he was alive and planning to return to Boston.

He ached for one small comforting memory to materialize, but nothing had. As the plane began its descent in Boston, Derek's hands were clammy and his stomach was in knots. He tried deep breathing, and he'd had two tiny bottles of scotch, but he couldn't relax. He knew he was doing the right thing. As he put the folder into his bag, he sighed and gave up. He gave in to the panic that was building inside him. Maybe if he actually went crazy, he wouldn't care about not remembering anything anymore.

Fidgeting and getting increasingly more nervous, he reached into the pocket of his jacket to retrieve the claim tickets for his luggage. When he pulled the papers out of his pocket, he had also retrieved his two most prized possessions. Glancing down at the well-worn photos—the one of the beautiful young woman smiling at him and the other of him embracing the same woman—he felt his blood pressure plummet. He relaxed in spite of all the reasons he should be going insane. She had seen him through every day of his time in Ecuador, and she was still there with him on the long, frightening voyage home. It didn't seem to matter that he couldn't remember her or conjure up her name. He ran his thumb along the edge of the photo of the woman smiling as he would have done along her cheekbone before kissing her. He smiled back at her tenderly. She was part of his life, and he was grateful for the familiarity of her photo to him.

He'd been surprised that there hadn't been more recent photos of her in the set sent by the Peace Corps, but he tried not to dwell on that. He could ask about that later. For now, he was content just to gaze at her beauty and imagine what she must have meant to him.