He’s on his way back downstairs to the locker rooms to change when he runs headlong into Meredith.

“I thought you were going home?” Alex asks, knowing her shift ended at the same time his did. They’d been that way pretty much for the past week, so he was getting used to meeting up with her at some point between the way out and either Joe’s or at home.

“In awhile. I’m not done here yet.” She tells him, seeming far too smiley for someone who presumably has to work overtime.

“Running labs?”

“Not really.”

He’s confused. “Are you going to tell me or do I have to keep guessing?”

“I’m going up to the roof,” she admits, and before he can ask why she gets a bad idea. “Wanna come?”

It’s less of a question, more a simple statement of her intentions, because she nudges him in that direction, leaving him little choice but to follow. “You know I know you’re having a bad couple of weeks but is jumping off the roof really the answer?”

“Shut up,” she barks at him, midstep, coming to the door and turning the handle, leading up to the roof.

“Alright, you’re on the roof. Happy?” He asks, as she comes to a stop towards the end of the landing.

She ignores his question. “Have you ever been up here?”

“Yeah. Fought Yang over a helicopter to go pick up a heart.” He doesn’t say whose heart but she seems to know anyways. “Not exactly the best memory.”

“It’s better at night. When the moon’s out.” It isn’t full but it’s close. He hesitates to look down; heights have always made his head spin a little. “I swear this is the only place in the whole city where you can see the stars.”

He’s never really seen her as a lover of the outdoors. It’s either the hospital or home for all of them and the sun and the moon mean nothing more than how close they are to the end of their shift. But here she seems positively enthralled by her surroundings and he just can’t grasp why.

“Everything looks small from up here.” She explains, almost like she can read his mind, which, at this point, is not entirely surprising. “You can see everything, this whole mess of people and it just...” she turns to him, like she just noticed she’s talking aloud again, instead of thinking, “we don’t seem so dark and twisty anymore you know?”

And that’s what this is about. Meredith’s quest to prove that she’s not as broken as people think she is. As Derek thinks she is. It’s easier to do that on a rooftop at midnight where people look like ants and the only person who can tell you that you’re crazy won’t because that means admitting that they’re both fucked. There isn’t a drink strong enough or a place high enough to get him to do that.

“Do you think we’re doomed?” She asks, really, seriously asks, not for the first time but usually she’s drunk when she does this and if it wasn’t for the fact that she just got out of surgery half an hour ago he’d think she was.

He won’t lie. “Kind of, yeah.”

She nods, shrugs, looks down below again.

He watches her feet, almost waiting for her to step forward. This is a woman who, once upon a not so long time ago, tried to drown herself in her own bathtub. And he may not be her best friend or her soulmate or her anything with a title, but he does care. He hates that he cares but he does it anyway. He cares about them all, right down to O’Malley, because these are his people and she was the only one who ever really stuck by him, even after he cheated on Izzie, and he remembers these things.

One foot lifts, and drops back. She backs away from the very edge, turning to go back to the stairs and he’s convinced that he’s just crazy and tired and making something out of nothing, until her voice breaks through, quieter than it was previously.

“Sometimes it’s nice to pretend we’re not.”

She goes back down the stairs, never noticing that he’s no longer following her, leaving him on that rooftop, just for a moment, the moon and the stars reminding him of a time where he had dreams that extended beyond surgery and one night stands.