You Without Me Ain't Right

Disclaimer: I don't own anything. Property of Shondaland.

Author's Note: This is my first GA fic. I'm a little bit in love with Merluca.

A tight ache across her shoulders and a crick in her neck prodded her awake. She sat up, wincing and kneaded her fingertips into her shoulder. Her legs were hurting and her deodorant wasn't quite helping with the stale sweat problem she had going on, thank you. It was almost as if she had just spent 27 hours in surgery. Oh yeah...she had.

She squinted down at her wristwatch in the shadowy room, lit up only by the artificial-strip lights of the corridor outside that smelled of hospital detergent and microwave meals. 4:25am. Now, this was some intern, throwback. She half-expected to find Cristina drooling somewhere beside her.

"Why do you insist on sleeping here when we have a perfectly good bed at home? Meh, perfectly good might be stretching it actually, I'm pretty sure we broke it a little bit," said an amused, male voice.

Meredith scraped a crumb of sleep from the corner of her eye, and looked up, blearily to see DeLuca sitting on a chair at her bedside, beside a sharps box and an Alaris pump, gazing over at her like she was something wondrous.

Except he looked like DeLuca with a Snapchat filter over him. He looked older; his cheekbones were more chiseled; his eyes looked a little crinklier. But he was tanned. Properly tanned, like he'd been on vacation for three months. The man needed to be on a beach, in a Little Mix music video, dancing with Perrie. The navy scrubs pulled the whole look together very nicely. Wait, navy?

"DeLuca?"

"Dr. Grey," he smirked. "God, we're still in the 'You call me DeLuca' stage for you, aren't we?"

Meredith felt like she was in a dream or hallucinating. He was DeLuca but he wasn't. Her brain was too foggy with tiredness to keep up with what was going on.

"Why are you in navy scrubs?" she asked him, frowning.

"You want me to take them off, Dr. Grey?" he offered, with his trademark smoulder and head tilt.

Meredith felt an unfamiliar surge of panic and pulled the hospital blanket around her tightly, for reassurance and swung her legs round to get off the bed. Nothing made sense. No recall of how she got here, blurred vision, loss of memory. Ok, so she was neurologically compromised. Definitely. So…tumour? Or head-injury? Or stroke? Where was Amelia? Maybe this was Alzheimer's. Nothing quite like keeping it in the family.

As if sensing her unease, DeLuca jumped up and clambered onto the bed beside her in an instant.

"Hey, Meredith," he soothed, putting his arm around her and pressing a kiss to her forehead. "Shhh. It's ok, sweetie. Stay here."

He trailed his free hand down her arm and entwined their fingers, tightly, rubbing circles into the back of her hand with his thumb. "It's me."

She saw the glint of a wedding band on his ring finger and stared at it, suspiciously. Of course the achingly good-looking ones who set up camp in her heart were always secretly married. When the hell had that happened? She felt tears of frustration prickle at her eyelids and took a deep breath.

"What happened?" she croaked. "I was just in surgery," she insisted, feeling wrong-footed, looking wildly around for any kind of indication of what on earth had happened to her.

"Meredith," breathed DeLuca, quietly in that way of his that could make the hairs on her arms stand up. He stroked a thumb over her jaw. "You have meningitis," he told her quietly. "Schmitt did an LP, to reduce your ICP and you're on a cocktail of IVs. You're going to be just fine, ok? Better, even. Look who you have as your personal nurse," he smiled, stretching his arms out. "I come with free ice-chips."

Meredith realized that she was staring at his extremely broad shoulders in something that felt a bit like longing and shook her head to try and clear that particular train of thought. But that made her head feel like it was full of loose marbles.

"Meningitis?" she echoed, faintly, feeling that sick, panicky feeling creep back up. "What were my white count levels?"

DeLuca pressed a warm finger to her lips to shut her up. Without thinking, she kissed it. Something in her brain was telling her that it was ok, that he probably wouldn't mind.

"Nothing for you to worry about," he told her, firmly. "Let me do the worrying." He kissed her forehead, again.

"Can you at least check on my post-ops, please?" she ordered, trying to interject some form of normality into a situation that was making her head feel fuzzy.

DeLuca nodded against her head; she felt the soft bristles of his beard scratching her temple.

"Of course," he said in a strained voice, as if he was having to force the words out.

But instead of standing up, her held her closer, so that his chest was touching hers and he was cradling her head against his shoulder, his stethoscope digging into her, uncomfortably. He gave a loud sniff and disentangled himself from her, gently.

Being held by him was a bit like sinking into a hot bath and she missed his warmth instantly so she found herself clutching wildly at his scrub top, like a child desperate to keep him close.

"All right then, maybe not," he chuckled, tucking loose strands of hair behind her ears.

A tall, beautiful woman in a pristine white coat edged into Meredith's hospital room, carrying two cups of lava-hot coffee from the cart outside.

"Hey. I brought coffee," she announced, waving them at an exhausted-looking Andrew DeLuca. "How is she?"

"Hey, Zola," he said, his eyes lighting up. He got up out of his chair and gestured for her to take his place.

"Nah, I'm good perching here," she insisted, kissing him on the cheek in greeting. "You look like hell, by the way. Here."

She forced the coffee into his hand and climbed onto Meredith's bed, tucking one leg underneath her.

"She still has a fever," DeLuca told her, rubbing tiredly at his face. "And she keeps on waking up and trying to get out of bed to see patients."

"Does she know who you are, today?" asked Zola, taking a sip of her own coffee and assessing Meredith's grey pallor and rake-thin arms sticking out from under her blanket.

"Oh yeah, she just did her 27 hour surgery. She seems to think I'm still her resident," replied DeLuca with a half-smile, looking back at Meredith. "She's having issues with my scrubs."

"That's definitely progress," quipped Zola, dryly. It's better than her asking for my Dad, again."

DeLuca shot a haunted look at her, his eyes pained.

"What? She thought I was Aunt Maggie, yesterday." Zola reminded him. "I'm probably going to need therapy."

There was a small silence. All that could be heard was the whirring of Meredith's Alaris pump.

DeLuca reached over and took Zola's hand. "I'll love you enough for the both of us, whilst your mom's hallucinating and seeing pets who died twenty years ago. And then every day after that," he told her, earnestly, giving her fingers a squeeze.

Zola smiled back at him, her eyes shiny with unshed tears.

"I know," she said.

She cleared her throat, trying to get rid of the lump there. DeLuca closed his eyes and leant his head back against the chair, his entire body crumpling. There were grey shadows under his eyes. He looked like he had two black eyes.

"How was the skills lab?" he asked her, clearly trying to change the subject.

Zola shot him a 'What do you think?' look. "I finished early," she said with a shrug. "I already know how to put in a trache, so I helped this girl who seemed to think it went through the pharynx. She nailed it!" she sang, sounding like a proud mom.

"Then, the other medical students were creating a situation that was both hostile to my learning and detrimental to my mental health," she continued, sounding disgusted. "So I left."

"What? What were they saying?" asked DeLuca sharply, his eyebrows furrowed with concern. His dark eyes were soft, but there was fiery protectiveness there, too.

"You know they call you 'DeLuca the Ovary Destroyer?' said Zola with distaste, visibly wrinkling her nose at him.

DeLuca let out a guffaw of laughter, his cheeks going faintly pink and scrunched his eyes up, hiding his face in his hands.

"Dare I ask why?" he asked, sounding fearful.

Zola tutted and stared pointedly at Meredith's vital signs on the screen beside him.

"Because you're an Italian trauma attending who walks around with a cute baby," she told him, tonelessly. "Apparently. Does Mom know you carry Giovanni around like an accessory?"

DeLuca grinned at her; the first real smile he had cracked in days. "Hey. You've heard of hospital therapy dogs. He's a therapy baby," he insisted, fondly.

"His first words are gonna be, 'Push one of Epi!" snorted Zola, laughing at the bambi-eyed look of adoration that always took over DeLuca's face whenever he talked about his son. Or looked at Meredith. Whichever.

But then, he went back to checking Meredith's cannula site and rearranging her blankets and looked like he had aged ten years.

"Andrew, when did you last get some sleep and some food?" asked Zola quietly. "Or a shave? Definitely got a bit of silver beard going on, there. Why don't you go home?"

DeLuca opened one eye to squint at her. "Not since she was admitted. I'm not leaving her," he said, flatly. "How could I leave her? She doesn't know who anyone is. The least I can do is make sure that she knows that I'm a someone. I'm someone who loves her, even if she doesn't understand who I am. She looks after everyone else, I look after her. That's how we work."

He reached over to smooth back Meredith's hair. "And I do not have a silver beard," he added, sounding mildly put out.

"Just a sprinkle," insisted Zola, warmly with a giggle.

"Any silver hairs are entirely your brilliant mother's fault and are 100% worth it," shot back DeLuca, closing his eyes again, with a deep sigh.

"So you're admitting you have silver hairs?"

"This conversation is giving me silver hairs," he grumbled. "Shouldn't you be suturing a banana somewhere?"

Zola laughed, and tucked her feet underneath Meredith's blanket. "I've finished lab skills for the day. And you know that I've been suturing bananas since I was 8."

DeLuca took a swig of coffee, his eyes twinkling.

"I've been suturing since I was 6," he said nonchalantly stretching his arms above his head, like it was no big deal.

"That's pathetic," said a new voice, causing DeLuca's head to shoot up and making Zola jump.

"I learnt to suture when I was 4," croaked Meredith, slowly opening her eyes and looking right at DeLuca with a glimmer of a smile on her face. "Amateurs."

A Few Years Earlier

A tight ache across her shoulders and a crick in her neck prodded her awake. She was curled up on a gurney. That, she could remember collapsing onto. The bed being in a side-room and with the raffle prize of an extra-starched hospital blanket tucked up around her chilly ears? That was clearly the work of a hospital elf because she most certainly did not remember wrapping herself in a blanket and free-wheeling down a corridor. She sat up, wincing and kneaded her fingertips into her shoulder. Her legs were hurting and her deodorant wasn't quite helping with the stale sweat problem she had going on, thank you. It was almost as if she had just spent 27 hours in surgery. Breaking the hospital record.

She squinted down at her wristwatch in the shadowy room, lit up only by the artificial-strip lights of the corridor outside that smelled of hospital detergent and microwave meals. 4:25am. She was starving, needed a shower and medical waste would reject her feet.

Her spine creaking and complaining at the movement, she swung her legs off the gurney and got to her feet, unsteadily. The balls of her feet were burning.

"Good Morning, Dr. Grey," yawned a nurse, resting her chin on her hand as she wrote in a chart, a cardboard cup of hospital coffee at her elbow. "Only two and a half hours till the Day Shift arrives," she said in a monotone as Meredith passed the nurses' station.

"Not that you're counting," said Meredith smiling over her shoulder, horribly aware that her morning breath could kill a plant.

She made her way down the corridor, heading for the nearest on-call room.

When she pushed open the door, she knew immediately that she had found the right one. It smelled of coffee, hot breath and that Dior Sauvage scent that reminded her of freezing on a hospital roof and clutching a plastic tumbler of wine with a man that made her insides squirm.

A chink of light from the corridor fell on a head of extremely tousled black curls, sticking out from the blankets. She toed off her sneakers and slipped into the bunk behind him, trying not to disturb him.

DeLuca stirred as the mattress moved, looking adorably confused as he peered over his shoulder at her.

"Meredith?"

"Hey," she breathed, pressing a quick kiss to the back of his neck and slinging a leg over his.

In response, he shuffled over to give her more room, linked his fingers through hers and pulled her arm up to his chest so that she was hugging him like a baby koala bear.

She didn't like the word 'snuggle', hated it in fact, but that's exactly what she did against his warm back and broad shoulders.

"Thanks for putting me to bed," she whispered. "You're very sweet."

"Mmmh, no. You'll know when I put you to bed," he muttered sleepily in Italian, not entirely waking up.

She drifts off to sleep almost instantly, not knowing that in the morning, her fingers will be numb. Or that she will refuse to kiss DeLuca until she has brushed her teeth, but that he will insist that he doesn't care and will kiss her anyway.

Or that they will be woken up by Schmitt stumbling haplessly into the room at 8am.

Or that, judging by the envious, hostile looks she'll get in the cafeteria, half of the nursing students in the hospital are in love with DeLuca.

Or that they'll argue and she'll scream at him but that DeLuca will never so much as raise his voice at her because he promised himself when he was 8 years old that he would never shout at a woman the way his dad shouted at his mom.

Or that she'll insist she's too old to have any more kids and will plead with him to leave her for a woman who will give him children but that he will say that he loves her more than he loves the thought of having kids, and he's been dreaming about making Doctor Who-themed Halloween costumes for his kids since the 90s.

Or that she'll accidentally fall pregnant after a few too many tequila shots at Richard's 70th birthday party. Or that their son will make the most impossibly adorable Dalek. No, she doesn't know about any of that.