KARMA

Day 04 : T is for Trauma

Chapter 11 - Day 04

Day 04 : T is for Trauma. . .

* * *

"How is Meredith? Have you called her? I heard she's -"

"No, I don't think it's that we should be talking about now."

"Oh. I just - Derek, I'm sorry."

"You don't have to keep saying that."

* * *

She dreams of freckles and laughter, running through a meadow of dandelions and mallow trees.

She's five again.

She dreams of the ocean late at night and longs for the wild salt air.

She dreams of Florence, cheese shops, persnickety fiats and very fine leather.

She'd just graduated high school.

She dreams of that night, like she does many nights before, moonlight in her hair and a warm mouth roaming over her body, strong fingers gripping her hips, hard, slick heat pulsing inside of her.

Mark.

She dreams in snippets of everything horrible that follows.

Sheets and apologies and clothes and stairs and arms, arms and tears and rain, pitter-patter, and doors and wrists and fists, fists, Addison-and-Derek, then darkness, then she woke up bound and in a trunk.

Seven years gone, just like that.

Derek.

She dreams of red, of so much red on the winter cold, damp cement, that was scraping the fragile skin of her spine, the dark curly head of hair (an all-Shepherd definite trait.) was mute and blue and tangled, and she almost - just almost died at the ripping pain. But then, she did die later with her when she was ripped out of her arms.

She dreams of the heavy porcelain that snapped her wrist and the cold concrete that became her friend for days there after. The deafening thoughts, an accompaniment to her running mind, the certainty she can't ever operate again.

But it's not like any hospitals will ever be dying to have her hold a scalpel now.

She's nothing if not a surgeon.

She feels a phantom blow to her hand sometimes, hitting her almost always unexpectedly, but always always with the same crushing intensity. It's like it doesn't ever want her to forget. She'd hiss or gasp, and sometimes tears would gather in her eyes too. She'll look down, half expecting to see a distorted, pulsating hand, but always doesn't.

She wakes in cold sweat to the memory of Bizzy's vehement laughter echoing with the atoms in the air.

She knows that day, remembers it like it was yesterday because that day was really the start of her ever-lasting insecurities, when the child in her was slowly forced to die.

Because at eight when your own mother regard you to her country club friends as the 'ugly duckling' and not by your given name, that does something to a child.

Because at eight when you ask your father whether you're good looking, and his response was to only blink, speechless to your question, but before running up to your room to hide, he said, and with great hesitance too, that your face has character.

Not answering at all would have done less damage and lying to her face would have been more than just fine, too.

That afternoon, she ran up to her room and cried. Of course. Mostly because she was lonely, she didn't have anyone to talk to anymore - not that the housekeepers weren't anyone, it was just different, the whole experience/conversation as a whole (they were being paid to listen to her.), than when she'd talk to Archer. Because by then, he was sent off to France for three years to study. And what's worse than living in a cold mansion alone with Bizzy is Archer coming back home completely unrecognisable.