Hey there… anyone still reading?

Regarding the Elephant in the room: When Shonda killed off Derek I wasn't that heartbroken, I had been watching Grey's on and off starting season 8 (my decreased fanatism is partly responsible for my not writing for 5 years) and when he died I was more curious how they would handle him being gone than angry at Shonda for killing him off (though I did felt his death was a lot more horrible than it needed to be). Last year when I was flirting with maybe continuing this thing I wasn't sure if I was going to kill off Derek too but I was tempted to write the Ellen-Tyler exchange from the last chapter.

Then this year happened. I lost a close relative in March. Have I accepted his death yet? Nope still in denial. I thought that maybe writing a family coping with a death of one of its key members would be therapeutic for me. Maybe it would help me process that grief I've been pushing aside. Did it help? I'm not sure yet but it certainly didn't hurt. When I killed off the Elementary school teacher I felt much more at peace with the death of mine own but I had been mourning for 4 years already. Maybe when I read the last chapter again in a few months I'll bawl my eyes out.

If I broke your heart I apologize and I hope that knowing that McDreamy's death had a purpose helps you read the last chapter of this thing (I thought I had given enough hints at his death but I guess not. My bad)

Regarding the current update: Last chapter. Wow.

I feel this story ended up being a lot more about the kids I made up so it seems fitting to end it with them. Also Cristina leaving broke my heart a lot more than Derek dying and we never got to see Meredith and Cristina talking about what happened to him, so they do in this.

Probably the last update this thing is ever going to get. I'm a little sad at that.

Meredith's room post mother-daughter time.

Meredith closed her bedroom door and leaned against it for a few seconds. It was done, everything was ready for tomorrow, Ellen was okay. She'd be too.

"How did your moment go?" Cristina sat on "her" side of the bed already in her pajamas while checking work emails.

"It went well. But I'd like one with you too now." Meredith quickly changed into her pajamas before crawling into bed next to Cristina.

"We did it. Our kids are leaving for college. All they'll need us for now is money. And they turned out pretty well." Cristina said.

"I'm not done yet I still have Tyler." Meredith replied.

"That's what you get for having 4 children." Cristina reached under the bed and pulled out a full bottle of tequila, handing it to Meredith.

"I gave her the sweatshirt." Meredith said before taking her first sip.

"What sweatshirt?"

"Derek's Columbia sweatshirt." Meredith drank some more before passing the bottle to Cristina.

"Oooookay. We are happy about that right?" Cristina asked.

"I figured he'd want her to have it." Meredith stated before being handed back the bottle.

"Did she like it?"

"She's probably crying right now but I think she did. She's wearing it tomorrow."

"Karen wants to be my friend." Cristina changed the topic after a big gulp.

"You had a heart-to-heart?" Meredith asked.

"Yep. And I have to be up early tomorrow to be at the house so we can take the cab to the airport all together. I'm flying to California with them too. Booked the plane at the very last minute. It was the only request from her." Cristina thought about that impending flight back to Seattle, alone, with Owen.

"Mine didn't ask that." Meredith had another sip.

"She has the sweatshirt. You meant to give her that one comfort. It's all you could have done for her." Cristina gave her a pat on the shoulder.

"I still feel like I failed him. Ellen missed out on so much. Tyler missed out on even more. And he missed this."

"There was nothing you could have done. It's horrible but it was outside anyone's control, I will not let you blame yourself for Derek you hear?!"

Meredith looked down to her lap before taking one of Cristina's hands and squeezing it for support and confirmation.

"Thank you for telling the twins. Thank you for flying in for those two weeks. I don't know how I would have dealt with everything without another adult in the house."

"It was the least I could have done. If the shoe was on the other foot you'd do the same for me. Remember when I had my own room here? I'm still in debt to you." Cristina squeezed her hand before placing the bottle in it.

"Good to know other people think I'm great." Meredith drank some more.

"I don't think, I know. You are a great mother. Ellen is leaving now, Tyler is going to leave in a couple years you're doing just fine."

"And then I'll be on my own." Meredith realized, staring blankly at the wall.

"You don't have to." Cristina tapped her on the shoulder to rouse her back from her stupor.

"I don't want to think about that. It's too soon." Meredith dismissed.

"You don't have to think about that just yet, you're still adjusting. I can be your wing woman at the nursing home if you want me to." Cristina offered.

"He was the love of my life." Meredith took a giant sip.

"I know. Took you guys a while to finally stick together though…" Cristina took the bottle from Meredith's hand before she could finish the bottle by herself.

"Remember when you had sleepovers in our bed in the middle of the night?" Meredith laughed.

"And look at us now. Same bed even."

"Derek is rolling in his grave!" Meredith began to laugh before realizing the reality of her words, leaving the room silent for a few moments.

"That got dark quick." Cristina added along with some more tequila.

"If I can't make fun of my dead husband who can really?" Meredith asked.

"You are right." Cristina attributed Meredith's words to the magic of alcohol and decided to play along.

"Derek would have baked them a cake. With sprinkles." Meredith stole the bottle back.

"Fucking Derek!"

"And we would probably be fucking right now."

"Literally fucking Derek." Cristina laughed at her own terrible joke.

"He'd not approve of us drinking in bed." Meredith pointed out.

"Too bad he's not here." Cristina expected a chuckle our small smile but got nothing but silence. "Did I go too far?" She asked.

"It's not like he can hear you." Meredith laughed, Cristina following her.

"I miss him. Every day, all the time." Meredith leaned her head on Cristina's shoulder, the bottle in her hand forgotten and nearly empty.

"I know." Cristina threw an arm around her and rubbed her arm.

"I miss my girls." Meredith continued.

"You both raised them well."

"I miss you too. Getting chocolate is nice but I miss you a lot."

"I know."

"The love of my life is dead. I still feel numb to it." Meredith felt like crying but her eyes wouldn't do it.

"I think most of us are still in disbelief." Cristina took the tequila bottle from Meredith's hand and placed it on the nightstand.

"I think all my children are in denial."

"They'll process it. Each in their own way."

Meredith sat up, leaving Cristina's shoulder and putting a second pillow behind her back, leaning on the headboard.

"Ruby has been peppy, like she feels the need to cheer us up or something, Grace won't go anywhere without my future daughter-in-law, I think she's using her as a crutch and Ellen…" Meredith paused, the past few months replaying before her eyes. "She's been so good with her brother. They were always close but I sometimes wonder who parented him the most the past few months, me or her. She made dinner the best she could, she helped him with homework, kept an eye on him at school, one time they even went hunting for art supplies together. I don't think she has grieved at all Cristina, I think she focused all her energy on school and Tyler to distract herself from Derek being gone. I'm scared she'll breakdown at school, all those distractions will be gone. And Tyler… it's just going to be him and me now, his sister won't be here to help him out and I'm not always going to be able to be home as much as I'd like." Meredith trailed off.

"They're your kids. You have survived a ridiculous amount of traumas and are still a functioning human I think they can survive a thing that would happen eventually anyways. It happened way earlier than any of us would like but they'll get through it. They have Grey genes in them, they are like cockroaches." Cristina gave Meredith a reassuring pat on the shoulder.

"Did you just compare my children to bugs?" Meredith turned her head to squint her eyes at Cristina.

"I like to think of my own child as a tardigrade, capable of surviving like 5 mass extinctions. Those are my genes! The genes that make her a compassionate human being are all Owen's." Cristina leaned on Meredith's shoulder.

"You are compassionate. In your own way but you are. You don't give your humanity enough credit." Meredith nagged.

"And you don't give your resilience enough credit. Or your children's. You roach family you." Cristina nagged back.

"Remember when I told you Derek is the love of my life but you're my soulmate?" Meredith asked.

"Yes."

"That's still true." She leaned her head on Cristina's.

"Deep down I think you're my soulmate too." Cristina turned off the bedside lamp and began adjusting the covers, knowing their conversation was reaching its end.

"You think you and Owen will ever go somewhere?" Cristina froze at the question.

"We kissed tonight. He wants to try again." She confessed.

"Go for it."

"I don't want to hurt him again, I don't know if I should." Cristina rubbed her temple.

"Cristina enjoy it while the love of your life is still living." Meredith ordered.

"Of course my soulmate." Cristina smiled before they both attempted to fall asleep.

Xxxxxxxxx

Ellen's dorm room, Columbia

"And we're done." Grace declared. They had handled paperwork, carried everything to the dorm and unpacked most of Ellen's stuff, leaving only the décor for her to do.

"I guess this is the part where I say goodbye to you guys huh?" Ellen shrugged her shoulders, looking around at her new room and her old family she wouldn't see for months.

"It is." Meredith confirmed.

"Me too!" Ruby yelled from her skype call on Ellen's laptop.

"Have you figured out how you're going to do this?" Meredith asked.

"I'd like to have a group hug." Ellen stated before having three sets of arms wrap around her.

"Okay now I'm going to say goodbye to each of you." She declared, the arms around her loosening.

"Me first! Before the calls falls through!" Ruby begged.

"O-kay Ruby, I planned on it!" She rolled her eyes. "Thank you for dinner and all the advice you gave me over the past 17 years. I love you." Ellen said while holding the computer screen to her face.

"I love you too! I gotta go I think I have an eyelash in my eye." Ruby turned off the call, probably to go sob into a corner.

"Grace."

"Ellie."

"It was nice sparing with you from time to time. You are the evil twin but I guess you grew on me." Ellen extended her hand, asking for a handshake.

"You're not half bad either kid. Good thing I asked for you. Good luck and don't do anything I wouldn't do." Grace gave her a slight punch in the shoulder before turning her back and waiting at the doorframe.

"Wasn't planning on it." Ellen muttered before moving to the next relative.

"Tyler." She took a deep breath. "We have to do this."

"I know." He hugged her.

She pushed him off her, placing her hands on his shoulders and bending slightly so as to be at eye-level with him.

"About what I said last night there's something I didn't tell you. We are very alike and knowing you I have a feeling you won't be popular anytime soon. But that's perfectly fine. I want you to work on being the best you can make yourself at what you love and I don't want you to be afraid of telling people the weird stuff you're into even if it scares them a bit. Keep up the stop motions and the sketches and your comics and be as in love with them as you can, because 6 years from today I'll be saying goodbye to you and you'll look back on all the time you spent alone and, though it will sting a little knowing you were left out of stuff, you will know you had fun doing whatever it was you did alone and, hopefully, someday people that get you will come along. The wait is the worst part. Okay?"

"That is the most hopeful thing you've ever said to me." Tyler said after processing all the information.

"Till then be you. Be the little brother that made his sister drawings and then asked her to do voices for his cartoons. Be Tyler." She smiled.

"I get it." Tyler smiled.

"And help mom out and don't do drugs and don't ever date a cheerleader they are wretched humans. And don't do drugs. Even if Andy does them too." Ellen added.

"What?" Tyler squinted his eyes not understanding why or how Andy (with an uncle they'd seen cooking in his trailer in nothing but underwear once and then refusing to let them see the "soufflé" so it wouldn't collapse) would get his hands on anything other than a spray-paint can.

"I love you." Ellen hugged him one last time.

"I love you too. Thank you for the advice." He smiled and went to join Grace.

"If you need anything I'm one call away." Ellen called after him before turning her attention to the last relative in her room.

"Mom. You're last." She stated not really knowing what to say to her.

"After what you just said to your brother I don't think I have anything to tell you." Meredith got up from the bed she'd been sitting on and walked over to Ellen.

"Want to give mom talk a whirl anyways?" Ellen asked.

"Try to sleep when you can, eat, make friends not named Karen, study hard, careful with frat boys and if anyone is going to teach you how to drink properly it's going to be me." She finished.

"Sure mom." Ellen smiled.

"Your dad agrees with me. He can't tell you himself but he does." Meredith took hold of her shoulders and looked her in the eyes.

"I know." Ellen's smiled faded a little and her eyes prickled.

"And I thank him for being on board with my crazy idea of carrying that life-threatening pregnancy to the end. We were proud of you when you came home from the NICU and we're proud of you now that you're officially a college girl." Meredith finished while Ellen gave her a bone crushing hug.

"Thank you mom." Ellen walked her mother to the door, watching her join her brother and sister in the hall.

"Thank you everyone." She told them before a parting hug and then they began to walk away, out of Ellen's day-to-day.

"And follow your own advice, be you godammit!"Meredith yelled three doors down from Ellen's room.

"Don't cook!" Ellen replied.

"I'd never!" Meredith yelled before reaching the corner and leaving Ellen's field of vision.

Just then she could swear she heard her father's laughter after her family.

She returned to the inside of her room and waited to see her family walk by the window. They walked past it as she was close to tears, but a knock on the door distracted her from the impending crying fest.

"Hi." Said a red-haired girl, standing in the doorway.

"Hi." Ellen wiped her eyes and greeted back.

"I'm LeAnn. LeAnn Martin, you must be my new roommate." LeAnn walked into the room and extended her hand to her.

"I guess I am. I'm Ellen. Ellen Shepred." She gave her a handshake.

"Nice to meet you Ellen, where are you from?" LeAnn sat on her bed fumbling through her nightstand drawer for her phone charger.

"Seattle and you?" Ellen sat down on her bed in front of LeAnn.

"Arkansas. From the land of big watermelons and Bill Clinton." She answered. "I hate it." She added as she slammed the drawer shut after finding the damn charger.

"I neither like nor dislike Seattle. It rains a bit too much though." Ellen played with her hair.

"What's your major?" LeAnn asked.

"MIB." Ellen replied, hoping that people at Columbia would know her major just from the acronym instead of its long name.

"Really? Me too!" LeAnn lit up.

I guess we can be study buddies." Ellen said while thinking to herself "Score! I've met a classmate already!"

"I've taken the liberty of decorating my side of the room with my K-Pop posters but if anything bothers you I can take it down." LeAnn offered.

"If my gigantic poster bothers you I can take it down too. It's a bit weird." Ellen pointed to the wall next to her bed where Tyler's gift had been scotch taped 30 minutes before.

"It's cool! Where did you get it?" LeAnn hopped on Ellen's bed to better inspect the drawings.

"My little brother made it for me." She said.

"You got anymore siblings?" LeAnn asked, while wondering why so many cartoons from her childhood were next to David Bowie. That little brother must be special.

"Two older sisters. Twins actually. One is pre-med at Dartmouth and the other is a law student at Harvard."

"You guys must pump out geniuses! I'm an only child, I'm the smart one, the pretty one and the favourite." She smiled.

"That's a nice way of putting it. What do you do for fun?" Ellen asked.

"I watch a lot of anime and stalk K-Pop bands. On occasion I also write Fanfiction." LeAnn threw a peace sign followed by a heart symbol over her eye like a monocle.

"I watch online reviews of movies I haven't seen and my brother says I need to start a podcast because I can do a lot of different voices." Ellen threw a peace sign back.

"About what?"

"I don't know. I got zero material." Ellen shrugged her shoulders.

Just then they heard what sounded like a dying whale followed by a drunk man ranting passionately about either Franz Ferdinand or Franz Kafka. It was definitely about a Franz.

"What's that noise?" Ellen looked to the door trying to see any signs of the cause of the annoying soundwaves.

"John Charles." LeAnn answered.

"Who's John Charles?"

"A PhD candidate. He's way older than us but still lives in the dorm and is the resident drunk guy. Might be a genius though." LeAnn shrugged her shoulders just as a man in a stripped sweater walked past their room still ranting.

"That guy is getting a PhD?" Ellen asked in disbelief.

"I don't get it either. My guess was him getting cirrhosis first." LeAnn shrugged.

"You know what LeAnn? I think we'll get along just fine." After witnessing John Charles everyone Ellen could possibly meet was a normal, nice person.

"I think so too. Have you met anyone else from our major?" LeAnn checked her phone to see if she had enough battery for half an hour.

"You're my first." Ellen replied.

"Let me show you around then. I'll introduce you to the chubby Britney Spears superfan and to the girl who plays cartoon theme songs on the guitar at 3am. She lives next door… sorry. We also have an artist, a prolific writer of manifestos and a girl who will refer to you as "child"." LeAnn grabbed her arm and dragged her out the door.

"I think I might have material for that podcast after all." Ellen said.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Meredith's room, that night.

Meredith stared that blue post-it she had framed on her wall. She got up on her bed and removed it from its place sitting down with it in her hands.

She read the words they'd written several times as she looked back on the 25 years she'd spent with Derek, from waking up next to him on her living room to their last kiss. In those 25 years there were plenty of bad moments but in hindsight she couldn't really care about them. They had changed each other's lives and now she was a top surgeon, a mother of four and, sadly, a widow. It would have been nice to have Derek in that dorm room too that day. It would have been nice to have had another 25 years too but it was the hand she was dealt and she'd have to live with it the best she could. Her kids seemed to be doing that she couldn't fail them.

She took the post-it out of the frame and replaced it with their last family photo, from the previous Christmas. The post-it? She put it in her wallet. Just to carry something of theirs on her day-to-day.

"Mom? Are you ok? Aunt Cristina just got home and Ellen's on the phone!" Tyler knocked on her door.

"I'm fine sweetie, put your sister on speaker." And glancing at the post-it one last time she thought to herself "Just one left Derek. I think I might just handle it."

THE END

And I guess this is it. I didn't end nowhere near what I expected when I started this but in the original planning Tyler didn't exist either so *shrugs*.

I had a lot of fun writing the last 4 chapters and I'd like to thank you if you took the time to read them.

I felt tempted to continue this with maybe a "college years" spin-off but my college experience is drastically different from anything any kid would have and I'd eventually start writing in people from my actual life (in fact I did it already) so this is pretty much the definitive end. Kind of a shame really, I'm quite attached to my OC's from this story (even if I stole the twins' names from According to Jim when I was like 10, these characters have been in my head for a pretty significant amount of time).

About reviews: last chance to leave them ;)

Thank you from the girl who started posting in the 7th grade and is now on her way to her second year of college. It was a pretty long ride