Endings and Beginnings

Deep breaths, now, boyo. Easy does it.

Sean takes the steps up to Meredith's apartment two at a time, his heart in his throat. It's not that he's nervous, exactly, as this is far from the most unnerving thing he's done today, but he really doesn't want to be doing it. He's turned it over every which way in his head and he just doesn't see how it can be anything but the right thing to do, but it still somehow feels like a mistake. That doesn't make any sense, though. He can practically still hear the sirens tailing him, for Christ's sake, and alright, maybe that will prove to be a mistake in time, but this? Pulling away from Meredith for her own good? It's just a natural consequence of things.

Now if only all of his perfectly reasoned justifications made him feel less miserable about it.

Sighing as he gets to her door, he musters up all the nerve he has (which is quite a lot, as it happens) and knocks, going over all of his rehearsed lines in his head one last time.

(no subject)

He's a fool. He's the biggest bloody fool there's ever been and he somehow never even saw it.

Sean had driven home in a bit of a daze after ending things with Meredith. Had he regretted it? Hard to say. He regretted having to do it, certainly, but he needed to stay firm in his resolve. It was the right thing. He couldn't regret doing the right thing.

And then it hit him. Not anything vehicular, although with the distracted way he was driving his new rig, he would probably have it coming to him. No, it was the sudden onslaught of missing memories that he hadn't even realized were missing and yeah, he then understood just why Meredith was so out of it on that day with the lion.

But no. Onslaught was the wrong word. Years of memories constituted a whole lot of experiences, but there was no sudden flash of a past life coming upon him, no bombardment of unfamiliar images. They just slipped into his mind right where they always belonged, quiet and unobtrusive. One moment, Sean was turning away from the road home, thinking that he had instead earned himself a bit of a cruise through the countryside to settle his spirits some. The next, he was slamming on the brakes, acutely aware that he'd just walked out on his wife.

The specific moments all felt distant, a little faded with the passage of time, but they nevertheless stuck out starkly in his memory by simple virtue of his being unused to them being there at all, and it was almost more than he could bear to deal with them.

Fortunately, he wasn't about to even try just yet. He had more important things to do.

Pulling hurriedly to the side of the road before he did end up smashing into something in his distraction, Sean pocketed his keys and hopped out to make sure nobody was near enough on that particular stretch of the road out of town before opening his mouth and taking to the skies. Driving was far too slow given how vital his business was, anyway.

Which brings him to now, carefully dropping out of the (brutally cold, for the record) cloud cover to touch roughly down in an alley behind the apartment he quit all of half an hour ago and running out like a madman. Every extra second he wastes, leaving her to simply try getting over him, is nigh unforgivable.

Sean takes the steps up to Meredith's apartment three at a time, not bothering to think about what he's going to say this time before he starts hammering at the door, the biggest fool in the whole damned universe.