Merder: Different Circumstances

Chapter Fifteen

Numb.

That was all Meredith felt.

She knew there was certain to be damage to her back from the angle and force of impact she hit the water, but she couldn't feel it. At first it hurt, so did her head. It hurt so much that after trying to swim against the current felt like death after a matter of minutes.

She was a strong swimmer, she could swim.

But, between the searing pain in her head and the shooting up her back, she just gave up. That was when the numbness began. When she stopped moving, her body temperature finally dropped to that of the water, and then some lower.

It was almost kind of relaxing for her. The physical pain across her body came to an end, and the ache in her heart from previous events of the day began to dull. Maybe because she knew this was it, whether she survived or not.

After a while of just bobbing up and down with the waves and floating along the surface, Meredith found herself ever so slowly beginning to sink. She tried to throw her arms in the air, but they felt as though they were weighed down with bricks. She tried to kick her legs, but they just wouldn't move. She tried to shout for help, but her throat was dry.

She accepted her fate and just let it happen. The water slowly covering her chin, then her mouth, then her nose. All the way up to her eyes, when she finally closed them because the burning sensation on them was too much.

Meanwhile, Derek's ambulance had a quick turn around and he was already pulling back up to the dock. When he got out, his first instinct was to look to see if Meredith was anywhere, but he couldn't see her in the sea of casualties.

"We need someone over here." Someone shouted, and Derek just followed the voice.

Derek went over to a man on a stretcher, covered in a jacket. He thrashed about on the stretcher and shouted above the noises of everyone else. Derek helped a group of people load the man onto the ambulance, as he was becoming a danger to not just himself, but everyone else on the dock.

It was when he noticed the name tag on the jacket that Derek stopped in his tracks and took a minute to look at it again. However it didn't change. As clear as anything, the tag attached to the jacket was Meredith's.

Derek wanted to stop, ask questions about where the man got the jacket, but they were being rushed off the ambulance so they could drop the patient off at the hospital and soon return. He grabbed it and got off the back, holding it close to his chest and no longer hearing the shouts from his colleagues around him.

The same girl, who had attached herself to Meredith, soon became the only person Derek could see on the dock. She was alone, and had been watching them load the ambulance from a distance.

"Hi, do you remember me? Yeah, I was talking to Meredith before. Where is she?" Derek asked, crouching down to the girls level.

He got silence in response. The girl just stared at the spot the ambulance had been before it departed and it was almost as though she hadn't even heard him.

"Where's Meredith?" He asked again, a bit louder this time but still not letting his tone change as he didn't want to frighten her.

This time, she looked at him, straight into his eyes. Her expression made a chill run through his body. She turned her head further to look at the edge of the dock and her eyes soon became trained on the water.

"Can you show me? Point for me? Take me to her?" Derek asked desperately.

She began to slowly move, stepping around the people on the floor and between those who towered over her. They got closer to the edge of the dock and Derek's confusion only increased.

When they reached the edge, the girl continued to stare out at the water and Derek was about to ask again, this time his impatient would have shown, but she raised her hand out, pointing her finger out. He looked out, longing to see what exactly the girl meant, but when he saw a cluster of small air bubbles bursting at the surface he knew exactly what she meant.

"Oh my god." He whispered, unable to muster any louder noise.

Without speaking to the girl again, he threw his jacket off onto the dock, not needing any extra weight holding him down, and dived into the water. This was perhaps the first moment in his life he had ever been grateful his mother made him take diving classes, but as soon as he hit the cold water that thought was no longer relevant.

He knew that this would be his best opportunity to find Meredith, the first drive being the deepest and he didn't know how deep she was exactly. He didn't even know how long she had been underwater for, without oxygen for.

Derek was about to give up, his chest felt as though it was on fire and his eyes were starting to burn with the water on them. Just as he began to kick his feet to swim up to the surface again, he noticed a figure in the water blocking the light.

Using what little energy he had left, he swam over and grabbed her by the material of her top, pulling her close. By this point, Derek's lungs were screaming for air and he very almost inhaled the water, but he used all of his effort to ignore the pain and continue swimming to the water.

When he broke the water, he forcefully gasped in so much that his head began to feel light, but he didn't stop swimming. Derek glanced down to the body in his arms and although he already knew it was her, when he saw Meredith's face his heart ached.

"Mer, please. Please be okay." Derek whispered to her as he started to swim over to the ramp out of the water.

A small crowd had began to gather around the edge of the dock and the ramp, a group of paramedics waiting with a stretcher and warming blankets. He couldn't help but notice the same girl who had led him to Meredith still standing at the dock edge, her eyes just focused on him.

It took him a couple of minutes to swim the both of them over to the ramp out of the water, with the current against him and feeling as though his body was getting colder by the second. Once he reached the ramp, people took Meredith out of his embrace and placed her on the stretcher, whilst warming blankets were wrapped around him.

Some people tried to pull Derek away from Meredith, to tend to his potential hypothermia, but he brushed them off. He just needed to be with Meredith.