𝙇𝙓𝙓𝙑𝙄𝙄.
BETH AND DEREK

──────

LET THE RECORD show, Derek's proclivity to work late at the night was not anything to do with his marriage.

Even so, he guessed that he hadn't worked like this in his last marriage. 

He knew how Addison had described him: cold, callous and work-obsessed to the point where it had distanced them and left a void between them that they hadn't been able to navigate. 

But even then, he'd never gotten like this~

He sat there in his office, shuffling papers and wondering whether he was the only doctor left in the administration wing. 

It was dark outside, bottomlessly dark and he knew that somewhere out there, his wife was at a dinner with friends that had once been his. Instead, Derek was sat at his desk, scrawling on paper and going over budget meeting notes that he was dispassionately interested in. 

Ever so often, he'd glance up at the clock, watching the hours tick and the night go onwards, counting the minutes it'd been since his secretary had phoned through to tell him she was leaving. He sat there with numb fingers and numb toes, his nose still bruised, and a deep sense of conflict still buried in his aching bones.

And then someone knocked on his office door.

He hadn't expected it. 

Usually, if someone needed the Chief of Surgery at this hour they'd page through or phone directly in, past his secretaries' desk. 

Initially, Derek had been so unused to the structure of this job, on how everything had to be organised, cleared and booked to the point where his day was timetabled, and colour coded. 

It had been a headache for a surgeon like him to acclimatise to, going from a job where he was constantly kept on his toes and taken by surprise at every twist and turn—at first, the monotony of it had driven him crazy (or maybe it still was and Derek had just gotten used to the eye twitches and the solemn sighs?) and it had taken everything within him not to quit.

He found it oddly sad to think that this was the height of his excitement these days: a night-time visitor who wasn't scrawled into his schedule.

"Come in."

Derek had long forgotten what it was like to be surprised (even Beth's serve had been booked and properly approached) but he felt it when he looked over towards his door. 

He watched it swing open, his brow folding slightly as he tried to place the face—the woman walked in, a guilty but stressed smile on her face as she closed the door behind her. 

He watched as her dark hair shifted against her psychiatry uniform and her equally dark eyes flickered across the overcast, dark office. She moved carefully, as if she didn't want to disturb him, but her steps were urgent and slightly hurried. Her apologises about interrupting his work came at the exact moment he realised who it was.

"Doctor Ballard," Derek said, realising this was his new Chief of Psychiatry, the only other person in this hospital who understood a fraction of paperwork and stress he was subjected to. 

It seemed as though he wasn't the only person who was working late tonight. She halted in front of his desk and heaved a breath that was half exhausted and half-strangled.

"Don't apologise," He said, "It's a welcome surprise—"

She seemed to laugh to herself, drawing his attention to a manila folder that she had grasped in between her fingers. Her hair was slightly mussed as if she'd been combing her fingers through the tresses obsessively or yanking it at the root. 

There was a slight redness in her cheek that suggested she'd been on the phone for a long time, the receiver pressed in between her jawbone and her shoulder. From the sight of her alone, Derek could tell that she had not had a very good day.

"I appreciate it, but I don't think you're going to be saying that for much longer."

Ballard's amusement made his eyebrows raise in apprehension. 

He sat forwards in his seat and very gradually, caught onto the fact that this wasn't his average midnight meeting. 

No, he encouraged her to take a seat and she set the folder on the edge of his desk, crossing her ankles. It didn't surpass him how she looked, somehow, more tired than he did. It was as if this week in particular had aged both of them—he supposed that was, in some capacity, a world record. 

She'd only been here for a week and a half and already, Bethenny Ballard had been worn down by some degree, by the charm of Seattle Grace Mercy West hospital.

"How can I help?"

 His apprehension came hand-in-hand with his need to help. He shared that with his ex-wife, the need to constantly fix things and save the damsel from the burning building. Maybe that's why, instead of dread, when he watched Ballard sigh, he was filled with an inherent sense of duty.

 Wasn't it his job now anyway? 

To help everyone no matter surgical or administration or even business?

"I'm hoping you can," Ballard said with another breath that seemed to further age her. 

She reached forwards and untied the front of her folder. Across from her, Derek leant back in his chair, his attention completely caught on the way the tie twisted in between her fingers.

 "Honestly," She said, "I don't really know where to start but I was hoping that you could give me some guidance on where exactly to go with this—"

"Of course," Derek said lightly, although something at the back of his head stirred. 

She seemed to move in slow motion and, for a moment, Derek ran through every incident at the back of his head, every reason she could have had for appearing in his office like this. 

He thought over the past week and a half, over everything meeting he'd had, over everything conversation and every revelation and he got caught on the way her mouth dipped into something a little more troubled. 

A long sigh fell through Derek's lips as he came to a mental halt at a picture of Mark's face. 

"If this is about some sort of complaint for misconduct against Doctor Sloan—"

That was how his day was going to go, right? He was going to start his Saturday by defending the fact Mark had slept with his new hire and probably been an ass in the process. 

Of course, it was. That folder was probably containing all of these papers about how Mark was a HR case just waiting to happen. He supposed that he should have seen it coming, wasn't this exactly what he was supposed to expect? 

Mark had caused so many issues for so many doctors that really didn't it just make sense?

But, to Derek's surprise, Ballard looked upwards, her brow furrowing as she looked over at the Chief of Surgery.

"No," She shook her head and then, a very slow amused smile crept onto her face, "I guess you can say that I've been won over by his charm..."

 Derek's eyebrows raised as she chuckled soundlessly and drew the papers out of her folder. Her smile slowly faded into something far more professional. 

"This, on the other hand, it's a bit more serious than the fact your Head of Plastics can't keep it in his pants..."

At first glance, Derek could see that it was a phone transcript. 

A series of lines that followed, what looked like, a very long conversation. He briefly saw the time stamps between each sentence—it had been hours in the making, a long meeting that had happened over the past day across a series of calls. Slowly, a dent appeared between Derek's eyebrows and Ballard cleared her throat, preparing to launch into the details from the past forty-eight hours.

"Obviously, because I'm new here I don't really know the protocols very well," She spoke with her hands, gesturing down to the minutes of her meeting with a flippant wave. "So the hospital board recommended that I reach out to you for some help with this. I don't know the staff in my department that well and I was hoping that you'd be almost like a staff co-ordinator in these proceedings. I'll need someone whose a bit more familiar with the staff."

"Sure," Derek said, now very wary of what exactly she was about to say. "So this is an HR issue?"

"From what I've gathered through all of the meetings I've been in for the past two days, it's an everyone issues," Ballard's joke felt dry and exhausted. Her smile cracked dull against the sigh that fell past her lips like punctuation. "But essentially, yes. It involves my department, a member of my staff in my department and the DEA."

DEA. Derek could see it printed on the top of the phone transcript. 

DEA: Drug Enforcement Administration. 

The sort of people who dealt with all of the legal things that went on behind hospital doors when it came to pain medication and the ongoing war against addiction. He felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up as Ballard handed the document to him. 

He could hear it slide against the desk, the scrape of paper against wood. It was faint and yet it was almost like the sound of nails against a chalkboard; it made his muscles tense and a chill run down his spine.

Issues with medication weren't taken lightly, Derek knew that. 

For the DEA to get in contact with the Chief of a department, that's when things got messy. He looked down at the paper but found himself unable to read the words on the page; everything just looked like a mess of tiny characters, of lines and punctuation that his exhausted brain couldn't keep up with. As Ballard began to speak, Derek found himself unable to do anything but listen.

The last time Derek had been in contact with the DEA, things had gotten more than messy. He'd sat there in an office, watching as the Surgical Coordinator at Manhattan West started making phone calls and organised meetings, throwing the government agency's name around as if they were good friends. 

He'd watched things get bloody and brutal and things get personal—He'd watched the DEA investigate Beth and threaten to sully her good name, all because he'd voiced concerns about her practice as a doctor.

Derek swallowed, his throat dry and cracked. Yeah, he didn't want to think about that, not now.

"They reached out a couple of days ago and I've been in contact with them since..." 

Ballard was pulling more papers out of her folder, oblivious to the way that Derek seemed to lag behind very slightly. There was so much information, so much to read and so much to listen to; he wasn't sure whether he was just tired or he was a little too close to something that almost felt personal. 

"I've been through hours of meetings trying to discuss what the best plan of action is and that leads me here, to you, and I'm sorry for the short notice—"

"It's okay," He murmured slightly, leaning forwards in his chair, "What do you need me to do?"

Ballard paused and gave him a soft smile as if she was deeply grateful for his help.

He didn't doubt it.

He watched closely as she reached back into her folder and produced a set of small paper squares. Script Rx's, medication slips that Derek must've signed a hundred times over in his life. 

He recognised them before she even spoke; every doctor had a pad filled with them, prescriptions that eventually resulted in legal documents allowing patients access to gate-kept medication. 

He had a prescription pad of his own in the desk beside him and he was sure that Ballard had one too-- it was one of the most guarded and important pieces of equipment any doctor had.

She tapped a finger against it lightly.

"A few days ago the DEA flagged one of my staff member's prescription pads for suspicious activity..." 

Ballard averted his attention to a page of the transcript, but Derek found himself slightly miffed when he realised that names had been redacted. He found himself staring at a conversation that was partially blacked out, a mess of marker-boxes and blank gaps. 

"For the past two months the doctor in question has been making very suspicious prescriptions to the pharmacy inside of the hospital for pain medication," She explained, "Specifically, Fentanyl, which I'm sure as you're aware is a very big red flag for any practising doctor that's aware of addiction protocol—"

He was aware. Fentanyl was not a drug that was prescribed lightly. It was the sort of drug that could ruin lives, strip people of all of their inhibitions and bleed them dry. 

He read through the redacted conversation, his brow furrowing as he read the drug name and how it popped up over and over again. Surgical protocol in this hospital meant that it was only prescribed for some of the big risk cases, where the pain was imminent and unavoidable. 

More often and not it was given to patients who had been through extremely taxing surgeries, big heavy-duty ones that required a lot to recover from.

"It's flagged the system as a possible breach of protocol," She continued, clearing her throat as she assessed everything practically. Derek, meanwhile, was staring in between the phone transcript and the prescription slips, his brow furrowed and lips pursed. "As you know with fentanyl, that's a very high-risk drug so we're taking this very seriously..."

The response felt political as if she'd been coached how to handle this whole situation by someone very important. She seemed to recite the words as if she'd been paid to say them, gently sliding pieces of paper across the desk to catch him up to date with the information. 

Meanwhile, a muscle ticked in Derek's jaw, his shoulders heaving slightly as he attempted to make sense of the uneasy feeling in his bones.

"So, of course, they want to launch an investigation into this member of staff for prescription abuse. It's their concern that this member of staff has been using fentanyl or providing it to members of the community, prescribing it to a patient who isn't even correctly documented on the system." Ballard kept talking but Derek stared at a redacted block, knowing that a name loomed underneath it. He felt the itch of suspicion at the back of his head but couldn't find it within himself to voice it. "We've put a suspension on the pad and I'm hoping that you would be available for a meeting tomorrow in which we're going to hold an intervention. The board has discussed having a councillor, you and I, along with five members of the board--"

Derek tilted his head to the side, his eyes still set on the paper in front of him.

"--We've also discussed police intervention which might be a step that we need to take," Ballard breezed through once again, his eye twitching as he listened silently, "The prescriptions go back over a long period of time, enough for us to be concerned about long term harm risks to either the undocumented patients, any recipients of illegal dealing or the doctor themselves--"

"Who is it?"

The sudden question caught her off-guard. 

She'd been so focused on telling him information that his interjection seemed to visibly throw her off-guard kilter. 

Her eyes raised to him, breath catching as if she hadn't expected something so vaguely unprofessional.

He didn't want to know. He didn't want her to answer. 

Answering, as Derek had found, was a pretty shitty game to play. 

He needed to know what he didn't want to-- he wanted Ballard to tell him that it was highly classified information, past his pay grade or past some sort of privacy clause that was built in order to protect their identity. 

But, at the same time, he wanted Ballard to tell him that it wasn't who he thought it was. That was very definitely not who had thought it was.

"The doctor under investigation?" 

Derek's voice felt small and not like a Chief at all. Come to think of it, actually, he didn't feel like a Chief either. He felt like a small kid in a chair that was too big, in an office that was too large. His mouth was dry and he felt that itch grow a little bit stronger. It was a dizzy itch, the sort that was begging just to be scratched. 

"Do you have the name of the psychiatrist?"

Ballard nodded.

In retrospect, this felt like one of those formative moments. 

Derek had a few of them that came to mind; the one that he thought about the most was that night, walking into his brownstone and finding Addison and Mark just there. 

Two of them, naked skin against skin. 

He tried not to think about it too often, as if tempted his blood pressure and made a red hue stain his skin, but what he definitely thought about too much was the phone call that had followed—he'd made many of them, calling his practice partners that he was going out of town, telling Archer that he was leaving the city and, eventually, Beth. 

That phone call had felt like a milestone, it had felt like the sort of monument or landmark that would never leave him; the sensation of telling someone news like that, of refusing to give his ex-wife and best-friend a chance to explain themselves and reclaiming that power for himself—

He'd never forget the sound of Beth's heart breaking. He was so sure of that.

During his reverie, Ballard found a second set of papers. 

They were identical to the first but void of the lines that had been blocked out with a marker pen. She set them down in front of him and paused, as if to give him time to acclimatise to the sudden shift in thought—Derek read the name before she spoke it and, immediately, he was filled with a deep sense of wrenching pain.

Fuck, He didn't swear often but this called for all of the expletives in the dictionary. Crap. Shit. Fuck. Bastard. Bitch. Damn—Fentanyl. Fentanyl. They'd been high this whole fucking time.

He knew that signature on the bottom of that prescription. He recognised that signature, it was the signature. 

Non-descript letters that you had to squint at in order to decipher. (their handwriting had always been bad and this was no exception.) 

He'd seen it on countless things over the years, on apartment leases that they'd given him to look over, on birthday cards and official letterheads—that was it. 

It was her.

"Doctor Elizabeth Montgomery."

Ballard recited the name without understanding the weight it held. 

She missed the way that Derek paled right in front of her eyes like he'd been left out in the cold for too long and hypothermia had settled in. It was unceremonious but, at the same time, a defeating blow. 

She continued speaking despite the fact that Derek had stopped listening. He stared at the name, the name repeated over and over and over and over and—

He dropped the transcript as if it had physically burned him. 

Suddenly, he didn't want this job anymore. He didn't want to be in Seattle, he didn't want to be this guy—he didn't want to read the documented proof that Beth, their Beth, had relapsed over the past two months following her surgery after the shooting. 

He didn't want to read that she'd been writing out prescriptions illegally just so she could get her fix and get back to work.

It sounded plausible, right? Wasn't it exactly what Derek had accused her of doing. 

(Wasn't it exactly what had crossed the back of Teddy Altman's mind and left in Archer's voicemail box?) 

Beth relapsing was something they'd all hypothesised; she almost had when she'd arrived to Seattle and Derek was sure, when he'd found her crying in a supply closet, there had been a wobble there too. But now-- here it was, an event spelled across papers and the threat of police interference as Derek realised that Beth had gotten too reckless in her actions.

She'd convinced them all she was fine.

She'd always been a good liar.

There were other documents too, photocopies of prescriptions that had Beth's name printed across the top and her signature at the bottom. 

Ballard provided them as she continued onwards. He found himself drowning in papers, surrounded by evidence of prescription abuse, something that was very notably, a federal crime. 

 He heard the echoes of their last argument as he looked over everything, the sound of Beth calling them all liars and labelling them all as bad as each other.

She'd never been a saint. Derek wasn't sure whether he was disappointed or just in pain for her, maybe a tasteful mixture of the two-- either way, he felt vaguely humiliated. 

He'd believed her. He'd believed when she'd said she was okay. 

He'd dropped it when Addison had asked him to he'd backed off when she'd forced him to--

"And have you spoken to Doctor Montgomery about this?"

How difficult it was for him to appear so professional during something that felt so personal.

 Hadn't it just been a few days ago when he'd asked Beth, to her face, whether she was sober?

 He'd asked her if that was the reason Andrew Perkins had been so reluctant to let her work. He'd asked her and she'd scoffed at him—in retrospect, the gesture felt childish. She'd been angry but she'd been lying. This whole time. This whole fucking time—

He felt blood pounding in his ears and oddly spaced out, as if his whole body was going through a very sudden decline. 

The last time he'd felt this gripped with panic and adrenalin, he'd been bleeding out slowly on the hospital floor. It had been, by far, a finishing blow to whatever sanity Derek had left.

"No," Ballard said, completely missing how a muscle ticked over in Derek's jaw. 

He was glaring down at those papers, every inch of him strained into the most impassive, rigid position. She gathered her documents, having dropped the bombshell that this week really needed to top it off. 

"She has a concerning history with drug abuse, so the hospital board were worried about her being a flight risk," Derek heard her words very far away, as if they were on the opposite sides of the canyon growing in his chest, "Apparently, there were similar concerns with a past employer that escalated. She scheduled a meeting through my secretary earlier so I was planning on bringing it to her attention then and then just proceeding with the hospital protocol—"

(A flight risk? You say? Beth abruptly leaving Seattle? Not at all.)

"No," Derek said, his head shaking, "I'll handle it."

A dent drilled its way in between Ballard's eyebrows.

"Chief Shepherd—"

"As you said before, you're not familiar with this hospital... with this staff..." 

He spoke sharply and bluntly, too irked to quite herald politeness. Outwardly, he appeared aloof but inwards, Derek was on the verge of what felt like a tremendous break. He was disappointed, he was sad but, most importantly, he was pissed. 

"I'm happy to lead this meeting," Derek said. After a few moments, he added: "Allow you to observe, if you'd prefer."

Ballard stared at him, caught off-guard by his initiative to jump in headfirst. 

(To her, he appeared like a Chief who took the safety and security of his staff very seriously. In all honesty, his enthusiasm and determination made her relax a little, relieved by the fact that he, at least, knew how to handle this.She was new. She'd never had a job quite like this before. She hadn't known exactly how to start that sort of conversation (especially, while, at the back of her head, she had the knowledge of everything Mark Sloan had told her in confidence, skulking around.) But, seeing the fire in Derek's eyes, she left the office convinced that she'd made the right call. She would leave this to the Chief of Surgery, the man who could deal with this professionally and calmly--)

The problem was, of course, to Derek this wasn't professional at all. It was personal. In fact, it was more personal than personal.

Maybe it was a conflict of interest, or maybe it was how Derek knew it was best to deal with this. He'd done it before and he'd do it again, the only difference was that he had Addison's resignation letter in his bottom drawer and a noticeable absence from everyone's favourite plastic surgeon. 

He'd happily do it alone, he needed to do it alone. 

This really was more personal than personal--

It was family.