Work Text:
One day, Meredith loses her Mayo Clinic badge. Getting in isn’t a big deal - she texts Dr Bartley and they sign her in. She looks everywhere for the badge. It’s not in her hotel room or the lab. She dumps out the contents of both her suitcase and her bag, but it’s nowhere. She texts Nick to see if he somehow has it, but it goes to voicemail, so she texts him. No response. It has just vanished into thin air.
This bothers her all day, and she just goes through the motions in the lab. Dr Bartley gives her a few looks but they don’t know Meredith very well, and not on a personal level, so they don’t say anything. Amelia is in Seattle with a critical patient, so she’s not there to force Meredith to say what’s wrong. So it festers.
She sits in the lab, half working, half listening to anything anyone says to her, staring at her computer screen and wringing her hands. It’s not that she cares that much about the badge - she’ll get a replacement, Mayo will charge her $10 or something.
It’s the fact that she has forgotten where something is. It’s a reminder that Alzheimer’s is in her genes and may rear its stupid ugly head at any point and she’ll forget everything. Her kids, her work, her life. It’ll all just go, and she’ll live in the past like her mom did for all those years until she died. She has the genetic markers. She’s not getting any younger. And she has objectively shitty luck.
Thankfully, Derek won’t be around to see her lose herself. She had worried about that for years. That he would be left in the position she was in with her mother, visiting her in a nursing home once every few days, watching her disappear. Wishing she hadn’t messed up his Alzheimer’s clinical trial, ruining his chances of finding a cure. He’s been spared, at least.
So what the hell is she doing, getting involved with another man, possibly subjecting him to the same bleak, miserable future?
Also - there’s the fact that Derek is gone. The love of her life is dead. Her sister, her mom, her dad (crappy though he was), her dear friend George, the first man she loved after Derek - all dead. Hayes is lucky that his son started having panic attacks about them dating and they ended sooner rather than later. She’s a bomb, ready to detonate at any time, leaving nothing but shrapnel and deep wounds behind.
She should end things with Nick while he’s still safe. He doesn’t know about the Alzheimer’s - just that her mother died from its complications. He knows that she’s a widow, but not that so many other people she’s loved have died, too, and in pretty terrible ways. It’s irresponsible of her. She’s been letting her feelings get in the way. If she really cares for him, she’d let him go now. Spare him the mess.
A tiny, still-rational part of her knows she’s overreacting to losing a work badge. But she’s gone dark and twisty, and now all she needs is a bottle of tequila.
“Um, hey.” A voice interrupts her spiralling thoughts. She looks up. It’s Nick and he looks confused. “I thought we were having dinner.”
He’s in his brown jacket that is inappropriate for the frigid Minnesota air and his hair is doing whatever messy thing it does and he has scruff on his face, and her body automatically reacts to the whole picture, even as her mind tells her to cut it out.
She just stares at him, her mind and body having an internal war she has no control over. He just gazes back at her until it’s probably too weird and he clears his throat. “Is something wrong? You didn’t answer my texts.”
Dumbly, she looks at her phone face down next to her laptop and turns it over. The screen lights up, showing her multiple unread messages from both Nick and people in Seattle. “Oh,” she says, blinking. “God. What time is it?”
His brow is now furrowed with worry. “Eight thirty. I thought we were meeting at eight in the lobby of the hospital, but I waited and you didn’t show and you didn’t answer my text, so I went by your hotel room, and you weren’t there either. Is everything okay?”
She blinks again, trying to clear her mind. “Yeah, everything’s fine. I lost track of time, I am so sorry.”
He smiles at her, though his eyes still look concerned. “No problem. I’ve been there. Also,” he adds. “Your badge was in my car. Sorry I didn’t answer sooner. I was in surgery.” He holds up the white badge with its metal clip.
“Oh.” She takes the badge and stands up. So she isn’t really losing her mind. Except she is. “You still want to get dinner?”
“Yes,” he says, smile widening.
Through dinner, she tries to shake off the darkness, but it instead distracts her. He keeps up the conversation, chatting easily about a kid who thought she could just get an animal’s heart and requested a horse’s, “because they’re so strong and brave.” They get through the meal and are in his car on the way back to the hotel, when he says, “Okay, really, what’s going on?”
“Um,” she replies, trying to figure out how to put everything into words. He’s close enough that she can smell him, all woodsy and minty and sexy, and it distracts her for a second.
He turns the car left instead of right, away from the hotel, and drives without a word on the new direction, but she eventually recognizes the road. They’re headed toward the lake where they had their first date.
He parks and turns off the headlights but leaves the car on so they have heat. “Okay, tell me what happened,” he says, turning to face her.
She gives a big sigh. How to begin? “There are things I haven’t told you.”
“Like what?” he asks. It’s dark and she can barely make out his frown. She sighs again and looks out at the lake, still and probably freezing. “Meredith?”
“Everyone I love dies,” she blurts out, and then it’s like she can’t stop talking. All of her dark, twisty thoughts, from the deaths to the possible Alzheimer’s, come spewing out like word vomit. “We should probably end things now so you don’t die, too,” she concludes with a sardonic twist of her lips.
He’s quiet during her entire dark and twisty confession, and the silence continues for a while afterward as he processes what she’s said. All she can hear is the gentle reassuring hum of the car’s engine and the constant warm air coming through the air vents. Finally, he asks, tentatively, “Do you actually want to stop seeing each other?” She’s never heard hesitation in his voice before and it makes her want to gather him in her stupid Alzheimer’s laden arms and hold on to him for all she’s worth.
“No,” she replies emphatically. “But I also don’t want anything bad to happen to you.”
“Okay, so first off, lets make it clear that we aren’t breaking up.” She opens her mouth to object and he holds up his hand to stop her. “No, really,” he says, reaching down to take her hand and lace his fingers through hers. Somehow, his hand is warm, or maybe hers is just extra cold. “You’ve gone dark, but that doesn’t scare me. None of the other stuff does, either.”
She looks at him pointedly. “It should.”
He shakes his head at her. “It doesn’t. You think bad things haven’t happened to me, too? I’ve stared death in the face, and I live every day knowing that my body might reject this kidney and I’ll get sick again. But I’d be wasting this kidney if I live life being afraid of the future.” He pauses to bring their entwined fingers to his mouth and kiss her knuckles. “We have to live in the moment. Maybe you will get Alzheimer’s. Maybe I’ll reject my kidney. But maybe neither of those things will happen.”
“What if they do?” She likes what he’s saying, wants to cling to it, but the pessimist in her can’t help but try to poke holes in his reassuring words.
He shrugs. “So we deal. Life has given you a really crappy hand, yeah. But you’ve survived and you’re here. And somehow, we’re both here. It’s total coincidence that I went to your hospital to do that organ recovery so soon after my transplant and collapsed in front of you. And that we saw each other in that restaurant years later. There’s something here. And I know, you had your great love and he died, but I’ll take whatever you can give me. It’s all worth it.”
“But how do you know it’s worth it?” she asks.
“I don’t know,” he admits. “How do you know what to do when a surgery goes sideways? It’s instinct. I have an instinct about us.”
She takes a breath and then another. He squeezes her hand. “Okay,” she says eventually.
A slow smile spreads across his face, replacing frown lines and concerned eyes. “Okay,” he echoes.
After she woke up from her covid coma, she had promised herself she wouldn’t take anything for granted. That she would do what Derek wanted her to do - live, and not be so hard on herself. She allows herself to smile at Nick, this gorgeous man who reentered her life so unexpectedly. She takes another breath. She can do this.
***
“So,” he says some time later when they’re in her hotel room, in bed, limbs tangled. “You said that everyone you love dies and you didn’t want me to die.”
When he puts it that way, it sounds dramatic. “Yeah?”
“Is that your dark and twisted way of saying you love me?” His voice is joking but she looks over at him and his eyes are serious.
“Yes.” She doesn’t hesitate. It doesn’t terrify her. The Alzheimer’s that might be waiting around the corner does, but not this. She thinks about what Zola said to her a few years ago, how love isn’t like candy. You can’t be too greedy for it, and you can’t fill up on it. Derek was her soul mate - her great love. But who’s to say that you don’t have more than one soul mate, more than one great love? Maybe if your heart is open and the right person comes along and you don’t force it, maybe it can happen twice.
He smiles in a way that makes her warm inside. “I love you, too,” he says quietly, pulling her closer to him and kissing her.