Human beings, contrary to what Hollywood would have you believe, are not nearly as resilient in a fight as you would expect. Take away rules about kidney punches, mouth guards, padded gloves, jock straps, and skin grease, and even a professional boxer would probably drop in a few minutes against someone determined to lay him flat. Adrenaline helps for a little while, but it takes a lot of power to move arms and legs at levels that would inflict damage. Once the first few punches are out of the way, humans tire, and fights die out, but that initial burst of violence can be brutal. A good swipe at the head... Broken skull or neck. Kidney punch... You'll find blood in the toilet with your urine. Bites? Germ-infested infections waiting to happen. Even a good hair pull can bring scalp off with it. Bones can break. Organs can perforate. Any number of horrible things can happen when somebody hits you.

Which is why I'm trying to stay very, very quiet as I take Derek's palm into my own. I want to babble and panic. I want to pet every inch of him to tell myself he's in one piece. He was limping as I walked him away from the fight (sprained ankle? Torn ligament? Broken foot? Slipped disc?). Mark has the frame of a football player. He’s tough, large, and ready to break whoever gets in his way. Derek seems like more of a swimmer. Lean, agile, and not meant to take heavy abuse, but rather avoid it. Mark is huge. Derek is not.

Derek is...

Hurt. Bleeding. Shaking.

He's not looking at me, instead choosing to ponder the cracks between the floor tiles with a singular intensity I always assumed he reserved for me. He sits on the black leather couch in his pristine office as though the room were closing in on him. His shoulders hunch, drawn in to his torso, and his spine bends like a sapling cowed by the wind. I get the distinct impression that his silent commune is more of a confession of worthlessness to whoever might be listening.

Well, you’re not worthless, damn it, I want to snap. Except I don’t.

I try to stay very, very quiet. I do.

There's blood on his lip (broken tooth?). He wheezes, barely a whisper of sound above the hush of the heater (collapsed lung? Bruised diaphragm? Cracked rib?), but I don't panic. I don't babble. If I tried to do all the silly girl things I want to do right this moment, it would break the gift he gave me. The part of himself that he trusts me with. The part that he doesn't let anybody else see. That part would break, and I don't think he would ever let me in to see it again. I look at his hand, and that's all I permit myself, because he's Derek, and he's hurt, and the last thing I want to do is break him more than God (or whatever) has already.

He’s Derek. And he’s hurt. He needs to be a stupid man about this. He needs some moments without sympathy or lectures or anything at all. He needs them like breathing. I know that much. He’s not like me and Cristina. I could never take him home and gripe to him over popcorn (could I?).

His palm in mine, I stare while I have the chance, surprised he’s let me look him over even this much. I've always liked Derek's hands (perfect to caress me), but all I can imagine at this moment is blood and gore. My mind’s eye is like a canvas for violence.

I only saw the last moments of the fight, Derek on the floor, beaten, Mark snarling, being held back by Dr. Hunt. Little shakes run through my body at the thought of it. I’ve never seen Derek seriously hurt before, never seen slices of red across his face that might need stitches, or the crust of old blood trapped in the creases of his knuckles. I don’t even recall the last time he took a sick day.

I suppose it shouldn’t surprise me. He laid Mark flat in one unexpected strike nearly a year ago. I’ve seen him upset a pile of papers in a wild lash of fury (it was the beginning of this). He has a roaring temper and a mean streak the size of Seattle. I suppose it’s his passion.

So, why does this situation, him licking vicious wounds, surprise me (scare me)? It just does. Perhaps I’ve fooled myself into thinking we might be damaged, but we’re more civilized than that.

All at once, I’m almost as furious at him as I am worried for him, but I’m quiet. Remember? Very, very quiet. Now is not the time.

I stroke his fingers one by one by one, until I've touched every knuckle, every line, every freckle and stray callus. I've managed not to cry on him again so far, but my tone is traipsing perilously close to a warble when I say, “I don't think there's anything broken.”

“Sure,” he mumbles, as if that’s the last worry on his mind. He flexes his fingers as if he relishes the pain it brings. Once. Again. He really does have beautiful hands, and I’m bereft when he takes them from me. First, he clenches them at his hips, and then, as if he can't decide what to do with them anymore, he folds his arms over his chest, and he hides them in his armpits. (He's a surgeon. Why can't he remember how many people he's healed with those hands?)

He sniffles, licks his broken lip, and for the first time since I found him crumpled on the floor, Mark frenzied and struggling a foot away from him, he meets my eyes.

I really want to babble.

“Derek,” I whisper, unable to stop myself. (You didn't kill that woman.)

“I'm fine,” he assures me, but his voice is broken. His lower lip quivers. “I'm fine,” he says again. He hobbles to his feet, moving with the agility and grace of a candidate for hip-replacement. A wince smears across his face, only to be engulfed by an oblivion that scares me. The nothing creeps across his face, eating away at his expression until he has nothing left at all. Nothing but a vacant expression, though his eyes are close to overflowing. But he doesn't cry. He doesn't do anything. His torso fills with one breath, two breaths, three.

“Derek,” I begin again, but he cuts me off.

“I'd like to go home,” he says, his voice quiet and flat, and I can do nothing but nod. I am powerless in the wake of this. I have no idea what to do. I want to dance it out, or have sex, or do something that will make it better, like I did before, but I can't, because that Derek, the one I almost figured out, and this Derek, the one I just met moments ago, are different creatures (He’s like a bouquet. I pick a new Derek every day). That Derek was on the brink.

This Derek is broken. (God, I don't want to break him further. Please. Why did you do this to him?)

His stride is stilted as he walks to the small locker beside his desk. I want to shake him. To make him look at his diplomas (he earned them with sweat), all the thank you cards he has stuck up on the board by his phone (he keeps every single one he gets), or the awards and articles that litter this room with such frequency that one might consider them wallpaper more than accents (the news piece on the trial we did together is framed). He’s buried in praise. He’s one of the country’s most decorated neurosurgeons. He loses people more often because he attempts the impossible. He takes the hard cases that nobody else will touch. He innovates. Of course he loses people. He loses people because he’s willing to risk. Of course. Of course.

I want to shake him for forgetting. Instead, I am silent. Why? It seems appropriate, maybe. I don’t freaking know. (What am I doing?)

He doesn’t ask for help as he changes into street clothes. His agonized movements make me want to take his arm, pull his shirt over his head, do something to make this go faster, to get us away from all these things that should be reminding him how much he succeeds, but instead seem to be reminding him he’s a murderer (he’s not, damn it).

I want to hug him. Hugging seems like something I can do that wouldn’t be overly panicky, possibly even welcomed, but something more than just his soul is bruised (his breathing is still funny), and I’m not quite sure how to touch him. I settle for brushing his shoulder with my hand as his pull-on sweater settles around his weary frame.

“I love you,” I tell him (even though I’m angry, confused, scared, helpless, baffled, tryingtobequiet).

I raised you to be an extraordinary human being...

His funny breathing slows further to a rattle (I will not pester him). He sighs and gives me a slight nod, though he’s back to not looking at me. The floor tiles mesh in an artistic way, I think. Better to stare at those than nothing at all.

After all this, after minutes and minutes of desperately saying nothing, I take him home.

The ride in the car is long and quiet. He stares at the trees and the buildings and the people and the traffic, a mural of gray and lush greens passing by, but he doesn’t really see them. A woman chases her small child down the street. Derek doesn’t react. A man is yelling at a taxi. Derek doesn’t react. We hit the third light in a row (the world is against me), and he doesn't react. He’s still like a cadaver, pale, quiet. While he’s busy peering at the side mirror, I turn the heater, rubbing my hands together. I’m not cold, but I’d rather he think I’m turning it on for me.

When I pull into the driveway by the house and stop the car, he disappears like a wraith. I twist back to retrieve my purse and his briefcase from the back seat, and when I turn forward, the passenger side door closes with a thud, and he wanders up the drive, slight limp in his step. I let him go, but I won't let him go far. He can have space, I tell myself. But he can't have alone. I can't let it happen. I can't.

He will not leave me, not after all this. I stare at the front door as he closes it behind him, stare the command into his departing form, stare until I have to blink because it hurts. I wipe my face with my hands and take a deep breath, trying to ignore the encroaching sense of panic.

Now what?

I hear the vague patter-patter of the shower upstairs as I let myself into the foyer, and I bite my lip. He wasn't moving so well when he got out of the car. I hope he can manage. I don't trust him to call if he needs help. What will I do if he does need help?

I put a pot of coffee on (decaf) while I wait. Coffee is one of the few things in the kitchen I can do well. Coffee and cereal, really. That's about it. Cereal isn't much of a let's chat comfort food, so that leaves only coffee.

The bittersweet scent of Vienna Irish Cream curls around me, and I have two steaming cups ready. He likes his coffee black, but mine must be full of sugar and cream and other crap to qualify as drinkable. To amuse myself I tear open packet after packet, dump calorie after calorie into my cup, and stir. The rich brown hypnotizes me as it bleeds slowly beige.

I sit at the table and wait, stirring my cup from time to time with a clink, clink, clink. And I wait. Too long. I tap my fingers against the table, fiddle with one of the seams in the place mat where my untouched coffee cup sits. The day is dreary, but it's not raining like the day before. The shower is still running overhead. With no drizzle outside to hide it, I hear the fall of water.

Why is he taking so long?

I wait until the steam wafting from the coffee isn't visible anymore, and then I decide I've waited long enough.

“Derek?” I call as I thump up the stairs. I rap lightly on the bathroom door with the back of my hand to give him some warning, but I have the sinking feeling that it doesn't matter, that he probably wouldn't hear me anyway.

The sight inside the bathroom breaks my heart.

He sits on the cold floor of the shower, arms wrapped around his knees as the water from the faucet rains down. He’s staring at the drain, wet, silent. He doesn't look at me as I strip. He doesn’t look at me as I slide the glass back along its tracks. He doesn’t look at me as I step into the shower with him and lower myself to the floor in front of him.

“Derek,” I say, and then he looks at me, eyes dull. “The water will get cold,” I say, helpless. (What am I doing?) The warm water rushes down around us, pounding like a thunderstorm of heartbeats. I smell soap and wet air. The world shrinks to the space around us, a small bubble. There’s nothing else.

He breathes once, twice, each time as though his lungs are a razor, cutting him, and then he falls apart. I wrap my arms around him. We are naked, laid bare for each other. He cries. Ugly, wrenching sobs that scrape his throat raw. I've never seen him like this. Never seen him torn apart and dark and down, and I'm frozen. Yesterday was nothing. Yesterday was a bump on the way over the cliff.

Water sloshes as he jerks in my arms like I'm the hunter that shot him. I grip his hair. It catches on my fingers, wet and knotted, until I'm sort of stuck, and he's still moving. It must hurt, but I don't think he cares.

“Shhh,” I whisper against his ear.

My palms press against his water-slicked back. His muscles bunch and cord like a lethal cat. As I roam, I feel knot after knot after knot underneath his skin, and I untie them with my fingers. He's whole, his back untouched by cuts and weals, unlike his face, but I don't have time to stop worrying anymore. I don't have time. I don't.

And then I thought, just for a second, I thought... What's the point?

The memory swallows me like a riptide. My chest tightens, and I gasp, but Derek is too deep in his own misery to notice. For a moment, I get that strange sensation again, like I'm looking down on myself, helpless, as Derek shatters in my grasp. I am catatonic, useless, and then the paralysis breaks. The pieces collect in my center and pour out of me, into my arms. Strength. Power.

I hug him so hard he sucks in a jagged breath. I think perhaps I hurt him. (I suddenly don't care). “You can't quit,” I hiss in his ear, my voice so low and growly I can't recognize it as my own, “If you even think about it, Derek, I'll--” The threat of vengeance dies on my lips. The fight bleeds out of me as my life beyond this point fast forwards before my eyes. In every framed moment, I am alone, and tired, and hopeless. My nails dig into his skin. “You'll leave me here,” I whisper, dark, grating. (He can't leave me again. He can't.) “And the people you do save will have no one.”

The rush of the water fills the sudden silence. I did hurt him. I did. I did-- (shut up, shut up, shut up).

The lull stretches, until I think maybe the water is pounding me from the inside. The heat makes me pant. I hug his slick body, but he says nothing. I'm lost again, flailing. At least he's not sobbing anymore. Was that better or worse than this brooding silence? Then the moment rebounds with a snap, and the quiet unwinds from the spindle. He has no words for me, but he speaks with the way his dark look deepens, despair melting into something else. Something primal. Base.

He buries his face against my shoulder with a sigh, and the stretch of stillness is gone. I feel him against my clavicle first. Searching, unsure (not like Derek). He pushes my body back, hand splayed against my heart, and then he draws his wet fingers across my skin, stroking me breast to womb.

He always strokes me when we make love. Everywhere. It's as though he must remind himself that I'm real by confirming every inch of me. I can't think of a place on my body that he hasn't explored with the pad of his thumb or the soft press of his lips. The night before, he took his thumb and his index finger, and he brought me to a place beyond reason or care. He caressed my insides, and he made me into his own sort of musical instrument.

(I remember moaning.)

Remembering the meticulous care with which he played me (I think I would be a cello), I moan. His grip tightens. “Please,” I whimper, but the word has no chance to fade before he takes it into himself, devouring.

He kisses me, tongue plunging, needing, searching, telling me that I'm his, and he has no plans to leave me alone. He needs me. He needs. As the water strikes down like lightning, he sets my nerves alight. A deep, dark sound lingers in his throat, like a growl, but whittled away into something without threat and only desire. Every kiss and touch begins to punish as he remembers his strength and his anger and his guilt, but he isn't crying anymore. I say nothing as I let him work things out with my skin, my self, my soul. I would rather he do that than suffer next to me but alone.

I draw my hands against his breastbone. He has a dark splotch underneath his right pectoral, uneven, purpling, spread out over three ribs as though someone had spilled an inkblot on him. I gasp and pull my hand away, but he catches it and holds me there. His lips draw into a grimace.

“Derek,” I whisper. (Cat scan. Internal bleeding. Or just a bruise?)

“It's fine,” he mumbles. “It's...” But he doesn't finish as he takes my mouth with his and robs me of my will. “I need it,” he adds, his voice rumbling deep in my throat. “I need it.” His words dissolve into a groan as he presses my palm against him. Agony peals across his face. My nails clench, but he holds me as he takes trembling breaths.

“It's fine,” he growls. His voice breaks. “I'm...”

Steam curls around us, thick and sluggish and stifling.

“Please,” he says. I can't say no. I can't even consider it.

The water splashes as we grapple for each other. He pushes me back against the wall. “Ow,” I mutter against his ear. “Spigot.” We shift, a war of slipping, sliding, wet bodies, squeaking against the tub as we struggle for traction. In moments, the battle is won, but we forgo a ceasefire, and begin again in a whorl of flame and water.

I hiss as the cold tiles hit my back, but I forget the gelid chill as he spreads me wide, hands curled around each thigh, so close, so close. He shifts. His palm rests against my core. I slide forward. The tub squeaks.

He stares, a wild, nonsensical expression conquering his face. “Mmm,” he purrs. He leans forward on his knees, shoving into my space until he towers over me, and the world is just a gray swirl of steam and the dark silhouette of him.

Obsidian eyes stare down at me. His pupils dilate, and I watch the small ghosts of myself within them. I love the way he looks at me. I am bare. I am his. His rumbling groan tells me so.

I pet his slick skin. The ripple of his ribs eases into a flat plane. My fingers dance below his navel, tangling with the trail of dark, wispy hair that leads down, down, down. I encircle him. He's like velvet in my hand, and he's ready. Very ready.

He needs this.

“Now,” I say. The world advances like a set of isolated pictures. We're apart. Blink. We're together. Blink. I'm squashed against the tiles, imprisoned by the cold red wall and thrilling heat of his heaving frame. He slides me against his thighs, and then he finds my center like a key finding its lock. He opens me to oblivion with a push. I tighten my legs around his waist and take him with me.

Maybe you should try the thing.

What thing?

You know that thing... that you do... in the shower with the bending. The thing...

Our panting resounds in tandem. He fills me, and my fingers find his hair, tangling. I don't untangle this time. I want him. I never want him to move, but I don't want him to stop moving. He shifts, and I curl against him, ear to chest. He makes a noise. Male. Twisted. Undone.

His thighs quiver with tension as he strains against me. His lips are at my throat as he fills me to the hilt, shifting, shifting, but never abandoning. Time slips away like blood from a mortal wound until we have none. No time left. He pants and groans, rumbling against me.

The blurry picture in front of my eyes melts further. My nails dig into his neck. His shoulders. Deltoids. Teres minor. Teres major. Latissimus dorsi. Down. He presses into me, and my grip tightens further. I can't stop it. I pet the curve of his spine. More. I need it. Need. Oh, god.

Steam burns down my throat. I need. A moan rips me apart. “Harder,” I groan. He shifts for leverage, and I think I might die as he moves inside me, too. My teeth find his clavicle, and his loamy, male taste sweeps over my tongue. I nip and tease and beg.

“Please,” I say.

I lose all sense of what he's doing except that he's doing it right. So right. Everything inside me tenses like a trigger somewhere is being pulled, and all I can do is push and moan and pant. He throws his head back. I rub my palm along his throat, and he growls. He growls, and I join him in the violence of the struggle. We fight together for that little moment at the end, when I know it's going to happen, I can't stop it, and all I can bring myself to care about is that singular point in time where I'm at terminal velocity, free-falling, adrift in my own body as it twitches with pleasure. It's coming, it's coming, and then it's here.

He shoves me into that moment like a freight train. What little awareness I have is derailed with his final push, and I'm screaming, screaming loud. My sight bleeds red. I feel his skin against my fingertips as I float. His warmth wraps around me, and I'm helpless and shaking for an eternity of moments, then done and dazed, breathing softly against his breastbone as he allows himself to follow me into abandon.

I barely feel him twitch inside me. He collapses with a heavy grunt. We breathe, my heartbeat striking like a gong in my ears. Only as he drops his head against my shoulder with a pant, bracing himself against the wet wall with shaking arms, do I realize the water is freezing.

He shifts as he fumbles for the faucet. His body jars, a squeak follows, the thunderous spray tapers to a plink, plink, plink, the drain gurgles, and then silence crowns our coupling with a somber countenance.

(Am I breathing?)

My head thunks against the wall as I recover, my eyes hooded. Beads of water sparkle across his alabaster skin. The red of the tiles blurs around his frame. Blood and flesh. He sighs, leans back on his haunches, and then sits. His elbows find his knees, and the misery we loved away like buckshot scattering birds hovers, glides, circles, sinks, and settles in his face.

Shivers follow after the misery, but we linger, quiet. “You can't give up,” I say to the silence.

He doesn't look at me. But I will make him. I will make him know. I lean forward. My right hand finds his forehead, my left finds his chest. I toil with the tuft of wet hair between his pectorals before sliding to find him. His heartbeat. It thumps against my hands, his heart captive behind his breastbone, and despite the fact that the world is falling down around us, I am home. I splay my fingers against slick, cool skin, and breathe. Breathe us.

“Derek,” I say. “You're not allowed to give up.”

“Mere,” he whispers. His dark, punished eyes stare me down as if to say, “Oh, yes, yes I can.”

“But if you do,” I add (Why does he have to pick now to break the rules?) before he can tell me how badly I've failed in this endeavor. I kiss him, sighing at the fresh, clean taste of him. “If you do... I'm not. Freaking. Budging.”

I kiss him again, and then I get out of the tub. We need towels. We need towels because we're wet and cold and--

He groans behind me, loud and long, the kind of groan that's forced, not inadvertent. He squeezes every syllable out of his torso with gusto. A thud-shuffle follows. I turn, fluffy towel in hand, to find him standing there, one hand squeegeeing dripping curls away from his forehead, the other loose and relaxed by his hip. He stares at me with a dark, predatory gleam (How long before you're dulling his pain again?). His eyes roam from my toes to my head. I let him look, let him escape. For moments, he stares, and for those moments, he's free again from all the bad crap that's going on. He's free, and I'm lost in a torrent of imaginary touches and desire. My hands clench the towels in my grip as my breath shortens. We live in the fantasy, returning after seconds to the wet, chilly room. Condensation drips down the mirrors and the walls.

Derek flicks his hand loose from his hair. Water sprays down around his naked body. He starts to shiver as he raises his palms to his face with a heavy, weary sigh. “I need a drink,” he says, his voice whisper quiet. Lost.

I hand him a towel. “There's some Glenlivet in the liquor cabinet unless somebody drank it.”

He shakes his head as he draws the towel around his slim hips. “Something stronger,” he says. I think of the slim gold bottle sitting in the back of the cabinet next to his Scotch, the way it knocks my brain and body into a tipsy blur in one swift swallow. I haven't actually partaken in quite a while, I realize. (He's been here.) “I need...” he continues, and then his voice falls away from him over a cliff and into silence. He swallows, quaking. I bite my lip. It's okay, I want to say. It's okay. Please, it's okay.

(You didn't kill that woman.)

“Tequila's no good for you,” I say, as I close the space between us and wrap my arms around him. “It doesn't call, doesn't write... It's not nearly as much fun to wake up to.” We're both wet and cold and tired. Done for the day. For the week. I kiss him, pull his lips from his teeth. He breathes me in.

“No,” he says. “I have you for that.”

I find a smile. “Okay.”

I touch his shoulder and squeeze it before I turn to leave, laundry-list plan walking out in front of my mind in a march of step one, step two, step three to a numb Derek. My clothes are in the bedroom. There are shot glasses in the kitchen. My neglected Tequila is in the liquor cabinet in the dining room.

I can't take any of this bad day away, but I can do the little things and hope they add up.

~Fin~