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PROLOGUE
' WHERE BABIES COME FROM '

* tws: season five episode eighteen derek, very blurry lines around consent, implied sexual content, blood, and vague mentions of domestic abuse *

Monica was on a fishing trip with her Father when she got her first period.

She was twelve at the time, and she looked the part: too-long limbs, skin that had to stretch over the knobs of her bones, and the fading Fox and the Hound t-shirt that hung loosely over her frame. She was very young, even at twelve, and one could tell: too sensitive, always hiding behind her brother wherever they went, and terrified of what having her period meant, of the implications of the only kind of bloodshed to be considered impure. So terrified, in fact, that, instead of telling her Father what happened and risking him abandoning the first thing they did together in months to take her home, she shoved a wad of rest stop toilet paper into her underwear and paid it no mind.

Or, at least, she tried to.

By the time they'd returned at the end of their trip, a cooler full of river fish (most of which he had caught) with them, she was painfully aware of it.

It wasn't until the sun started to set, when the two of them were sitting on rusty lawn chairs outside of the trailer the family called home and cleaning the fish they'd caught for cooking, the smell of the sweltering summer and the hushpuppies her sister was cooking on the air, that he finally noticed. Monica had been squirming for nearly half an hour, her face flushed with a burgeoning sunburn (her father, with his weather worn, leathery skin, hadn't thought to pack and sunscreen with them) and the embarrassment that was prickling up her neck, when he cleared his throat and asked her a question over the humming of the radio.

"You got ants in your pants, Copper?"

She didn't look up from the fish that she was carving from tail to gills. Just shrugged and said. "No."

"Then why're you wiggling like that?"

At twelve, Monica was many things, but she was not a very good liar. . It was a trait her mother used to boast about at Church on Sundays-- my youngest, my redhead, she tells me everything-- but, she found herself in trouble, and ostracized, more often than not.

Her only brother, Jack, once, while using the hem of his shirt to dab at a wound on her forehead that she swore up and down did not come from riding her bike after dark like she was warned not to, told her to never, ever play poker; their sister, Denise, who was three years Jack's junior but still much older than Monica (and somehow lacked all of the warmth that both of them possessed), tended to sneer, slamming doors in Monica's face and telling her to get lost, excluding Monica on the basis that the younger girl always coughed up to mother.

So, when every excuse she came up with sounded more ridiculous than the last, the girl who could not lie lifted her head to meet her father's gaze.

"I got my period this morning..."

He inhaled deeply and sat up a little straighter.

Monica felt herself go pale with worry.

"Why didn't you say something earlier? We could've stopped and gotten you something."

"'Cause I was afraid you'd take me home."

Her father's bushy brows drew together to the center of his forehead. "Why would I do that?"

"'Cause it's a sin."

His face slackened as she sniffed again, and he sucked his teeth.

"Oh, Copper," He dropped a fish into the bucket and reached across the space between them with blood stained fingers, brushing her cheek with his knuckles, "it don't got nothing to do with sin, sweetheart. Nature's just taking it's course, as nature does."

It was Monica's turn to furrow her brows, then. "But Momma said--"

Her father smiled at her from beneath a forest of red and white hairs. (God, he'd reminded her so much of Santa Claus in the last years of his life. Rosy cheeks, white beard, and a stomach that shook when he laughed-- and he was always laughing..)

"Your Momma don't know nothing about anything."

Monica could remember being shocked more than anything. It felt like such a wrong thing to say, with her mother one foot in the grave, her childbed sending her right into her deathbed with late stage kidney failure. The pastor in town advised that it was in poor taste to speak ill of the dead and dying-- something that, like the careful consideration she used to separate a fish's flesh from its bone, would stick with her well into her adult life-- but, she supposed, it wasn't likely that he'd listen to anything that the pastor said.

Willard Fowler was a Godless man. He just believed in something older.

(Her mother needed a steeple, but the walls of her father's church were held up by the trees.)

"But--"

"All this means, Copper, is that you're becoming a woman." He resumed his gutting if only to relieve her of the weight of his gaze. "Someday, in the future, you're gonna move far away from here and find you a nice man, and he's gonna make you happy, and you're gonna have babies, and everything will make sense."

They stopped talking after that. Monica, as pensive as a twelve year old in excruciating pain could be, stared at the side of his face as it was haloed by the rays of the setting sun, and internalized a meaning that he did not intend her to take.

Fifteen years later, as she stood in front of a different trailer, thousands of miles away from anything she could call home, and felt the downpour soak through her clothes, the memory of that day was at the very forefront of Monica's mind.

When Meredith burst into the spare bedroom that Monica was living in and interrupted her studying to regale her with the colorful account of Richard Webber's (and Miranda Bailey's) several fruitless attempts to pull a stubborn neurosurgeon out of his self-inflicted, woodland banishment (a tale that began with an engagement ring and a baseball bat, and ended with several curses being placed on his name and the assurance that they were so over this time), Monica knew that nothing good was going to come of it.

(Nothing good ever came of anything when it came to being involved with Derek and Meredith.)

You're good at talking to people, The blonde said, just go out there and work your magic.

In Monica's opinion, the three or four times she had to help Meredith convince everyone that Alex wasn't that bad of a person and the one time she wrote a half-decent Dear John letter from Cristina to Burke in the back room of a church were not big enough feats for her to be considered a professional, but the refusal never left her lips. She just couldn't, not with her friend standing there, eyes rimmed with red and lip wobbling as she clung to what was left of her resolve.

So, she set her notes aside and drove out to the trailer, ignoring Doctor Herman's phone calls and, in turn, being ignored by Derek every time she tried to ring him.

And, when her knocking received no response, she stood out in the rain and weighed her options as her molars ground against the soft flesh of her inner cheek, trying to shake the strange claustrophobia being reminded of her childhood made her feel. By the time she reached college age, Monica had developed the crippling fear that she'd be stuck in that double-wide for the rest of her life, never living up to the only dream her late father ever had for her. Nothing about this was the same-- Seattle was too cold, too wet, and the tin box in front of her was miniscule and lifeless despite all attempts to decorate it. It paled in comparison (Where was the music? She wanted to ask. Where was the love, the community, this far out in the sticks?)-- but, as her fingers twitched with the urge to open the door, she, strangely, felt sixteen again.

The knob turned in her hand, and she half-expected to find her father's corpse on the other side of the door as she pushed it open.

(Maybe she really was still sixteen. Maybe she always would be. Time, she thought, had ceased to move on without him. She found her father's corpse in the facade of every man she'd dated since. She'd probably never stop finding him.)

A drunk Derek Shepherd was the only thing waiting for her, though.

"Hi." She said, shutting it behind her as he lifted his head to look at her, the movement lazy and sluggish, not unlike the way her childhood dog would when she returned home in the early mornings as a teenager. "One of your cherry lights is out."

Monica wasn't sure why she said it. There was just something so heavy about the gaze he'd settled on her that, briefly, caught her off guard. But, one of the cherry lights was out, a black dot that she couldn't stop staring at when she was outside, that her eyes drifted back to as they stood there in silence.

The shadow of the man she'd come to know just, as he finally processed the words, sneered at her, his lips pulling back over his teeth in a way that she was sure was meant to frighten her.

"Go home, Fowler."

"I'm sorry, but I can't do that. I promised someone I care about that I'd try to help you."

Derek scoffed and rubbed the heels of his palms into his eyes as she took her coat off and folded it over the edge of the closest chair.

"What? Did she think that sending you was going to just magically put me back together? That a little Southern Hospitality would give that woman her life back?"

"Something like that..." She mumbled her response to his rhetorical questions, chewing on the inside of her cheek again.

As he stared at her with nothing but vitriol, Monica busied her hands with clearing empty beer bottles and cans off the counter and out of the sink. It reminded her of the cleanup the day after her father's burial, of how she tiptoed on the freshly de-carpeted floors and around her brother's unconscious body; did Derek feel it too? The ghost, the indescribable loss, that seemed to choke the air from the room?

Or was she just losing her mind?

She took his dig at her sexual habits like he hadn't said a thing at all. "Listen, Derek, I have a sacrococcygeal teratoma removal to scrub in on in a few hours--"

"Then why don't you just leave?"

"So the sooner that we can get through this--"

"Leave, Monica. Go home. Go find some bed to warm."

"The sooner that you get some food into you or take a shower--"

"Get out!" He was shouting, now, and launched himself to his feet.

Monica's heart rate spiked as he closed the very small distance between them and stood over her, but she didn't flinch away from him, instead standing still, feeling a little like a deer staring down the road at the bright lights of an eighteen wheeler. She was not unused to this-- to the intrinsic violence of some men, to the way that they liked to raise their voices and puff their chests like snarling dogs that sit behind fences with their hackles raised-- and, so, she told herself that she would not be afraid. When she was thirteen, a man two towns over killed his whole family and dumped their bodies in a lake. When she was fifteen, she saw her brother realize, in real time, that he was too big and too old to hit their sister back.

And she was twenty the first (and subsequently last) time a boyfriend let his thumb sink too far into the recess between her artery and esophagus.

Derek Shepherd was not someone she would be afraid of for the simple fact that she had seen worse. He was not a violent man.He could be mean, yes, and thought a little too highly of himself, but violent? No.

She did not know much but she knew that Derek, who had a nice pedigree and the happy-go-lucky attitude to go along with it, was not going to hurt her.

Still, in light of recent baseball related incidents, the words fell out of her before she could stop them.

"What? Are you going to hit me?" She whispered, voice barely audible over the sound of the rain hitting the roof, and then cleared her throat. "My brother is a heroin addict, Derek. Yell, and bang things, and call me a whore some more, if you really feel the need, but you will not scare me away. I am going to stand right here until you stop feeling sorry for yourself and get into that shower."

She saw no need to say anything else. How many times over the past days had he been told that there was meaning to life? Reminded of the oath he took, that he was the kind of man who liked ferryboats and said things like it's a beautiful day to save lives? Too many for it to even be effective anymore, she was sure.

Thankfully, Derek didn't seem to feel the need, either. He just stared at her, expression dull and eyes slightly unfocused, for a moment before he sulked off into the bathroom, slamming the door behind him like a child throwing a tantrum.

Monica exhaled in a way that aged her once he was gone.

She resumed tidying in his absence, coming up with all the things that she'd make Meredith do to repay her for this (and then retracting them all in the same breath.) The trailer looked half-habitable by the time he returned, appearing just as apathetic and out of it as he had when he went it but clean, at least, and wearing nothing but a towel.

Her eyes immediately flitted back to the dish she was washing.

"That wasn't okay."

"Nothing is okay--"

"Treating people like that is not okay." She was speaking much more tenderly than she wanted.  "Offering a beer to a recovering alcoholic is not okay. Scaring Meredith with baseball bats and drunken behavior is not okay."

Derek was gritting his teeth when she looked up at him again.

"I know."

"Good."

He sighed again and sat on the edge of the bed, putting his face into his hands. "It was all a waste. All of it. Every... Year spent in medical school, every hour I worked during my residency, even surgery... Just... All of it."

That last bit was said in an exhale, and his whole body seemed to... deflate with it. Monica tried not to frown as she took a second to weigh her options.

Derek did not look up at her when she tentatively sat beside him.

"It wasn't all a waste--" She tried.

"I have killed more people than I've saved." He said. He pulled his head from his hands, then, and turned to her. "What would you call that if not a waste?"

"Neurosurgery?"

Derek laughed. It was just as bitter and hollow as the rest of him. Monica had a hard time meeting him in the middle-- he'd been perfectly content butchering brains and making millions of dollars a year before this, so why, she wondered, was he falling so hard, now?

"Do you ever wake up and wonder if you're actually a terrible person?" He asked, suddenly, and sweat beaded at her brow. "I bet you do."

Monica looked at him like he'd just punched her in the gut. She felt like he had. "Derek."

"Don't bother denying it."

"You're being mean."

"Mark told me all about it." He continued as if she hadn't said a thing at all. "Never mentioned you by name but... He's just got a way of making you bare your soul during pillow talk, doesn't he?"

She swallowed past the lump in her throat and ignored the burn of tears behind her nose.

There was plenty, Monica supposed, to be admired in Derek Shepherd. He was pretty. Successful. There were qualities within him, surely, that were good enough for Addison Montgomery and Meredith Grey to both fall irrevocably in love with him.

There was also plenty that she knew to be undesirable.

For a man who had given up so easily, he was the perfect surgeon. More knife than man, he was always cutting the deepest.

Monica considered hurting him back. She thought about all of the things that she knew, the things that her friends told her (the things that his best friend told her because, as it turned out, she had a way of making men talk, too), that she could throw back in his face.

"You're drunk." She said instead, mostly reminding herself, and looked into the trailer so she didn't have to look at him, with his hazy eyes and his damp hero hair.

"Not that drunk." He corrected.

Monica inhaled deeply and balled her hands into her fists. The bite of her chewed ragged nails digging into her palms felt nicer than she'd care to admit. "Try all you want, Derek, but you're not gonna drag me down with you." She finally turned back to him, then. Their faces were so close that she could smell the alcohol on his every wheezed breath. "You think that you're in a dark place now? Well, I lived in mine. For years. This ain't nothing compared to that."

All of the fight, strangely enough, left Derek's face. Monica doubted that he came to any kind of realization that would stick with him, but the suddenness of his change in expression worried her.

She didn't say anything when he started leaning forward, just jerked her head away and let his head fall into the crease of her neck.

"I'm sorry." He mumbled into her shirt, and sniffled miserably.

"It's okay." She said, even if she didn't mean it.

He continued to mumble it-- this, a litany of half-assed apologies said just so she'd stop being angry, not because anyone was actually sorry, was also something that she came to expect-- but she stopped hearing it as the crescendo of her heartbeat filled her ears.

I'm sorry, he said as he kissed her neck.

I'm sorry, as he kissed her jaw.

I'm sorry, as he kissed behind her ear.

"You're drunk." She repeated, voice hoarse. She knew that she should have stopped him. She was so sure that she wanted to stop him. But she found herself unable to, frozen as her mind struggled to settle with the reality of the situation. "You're drunk, and you just broke off your engagement. You don't want this."

"I'm not that drunk." He insisted, breath warm and wet against the skin of her neck. "And we're bad people. Bad people need each other."

Here it was. The hidden clause that neither she nor Meredith could have foreseen in their hasty agreement.

How easily strung along Monica, who had found herself in the bed of nearly every man who was nice enough to her, could be-- and how willing Derek could be to string along.

"Derek--"

"Please." He pleaded, sounding as pathetic as she felt. "Let me make everything up to you."

(Monica knew the only reason he was doing it. She knew that she smelled of the same laundry detergent and shampoo, and that, later, he could hold onto the blurry memories of a woman with similar enough hair and feel less sorry for himself.)

(She knew. She knew, and yet.)

(It would not be the first time she slept with a man who wanted her to be someone else.)

The creeping fear that she would never leave a trailer came back as Derek's hand found her thigh, but she swallowed that with her pride.

(Around an hour later, when Meredith came bearing bad scans and even worse news, Derek would greet her with soft eyes and a civility that he hadn't had in days. At the same time, Monica, who was long gone, would sit in an empty parking lot and replay the voicemails left on her phone until the news of Izzie Stephens' prognosis settled in, and her body could wrack with new sobs for a much better reason.)

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GRACE'S OPERATING THEATER:

word count -- 3495 (unedited)

this is where I remind everyone that they want more complex female characters, so they cannot bitch and moan about every (absolutely terrible) decision she makes.

rip to baby fowler-shepherd (and it will be FOWLER shepherd.) you will be so loved, the circumstances of your conception were just less than ideal.

comments and votes are super appreciated! they let me know that you guys like my writing and I cannot stress how much they motivate me to continue! thank you