(no subject)
Title: Over the Rainbow
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Mark/Addison
Summary: Expanded from my ten of cups in the Gravity of Love series. It’s the triplet fic and it’s for Calla (because it's really her fault). There is angst in the beginning and then, in grand tradition, an enormous amount of fluff. Because, hey, Christmas.
Music: Judy Garland - Over the Rainbow
Hush little baby don’t say a word
Mama’s gonna buy you a mockingbird
“What do you think about kids?” Addison looks up from dinner one night, the question perfectly innocent and her face blank, as if she practiced the six words at work so she wouldn’t give any indication of her opinions and maybe change his.
But there’s an undertone in her voice that gives her away to him. Not that he expects anything else; after initial hugs with the adults she heads immediately for her tiny nieces and nephews and she keeps candy in her lab coat pocket for the children of her patients and she always, always smiles and makes faces at small children wherever they go. He never thought he’d want kids but, then again, he never thought that he’d be sitting across from her at dinner every night. He smiles. “I’m in.”
Mark leaves a series of small soft kisses on her lips before he rolls over and tugs her into his arms. She settles immediately into his chest and they work together to pull a blanket up around them because their combined body heat isn’t enough against the October air and neither wants to stand and close the window. She closes her eyes as he splays his fingers wide across her back and thinks about how wonderful this feels and how nothing compares to this. She’s been to Rome and Paris, Cairo and Sydney, Bangkok and Beijing but her favorite place in the world is right here with his arms around her. Addison embraces the cliché. They embrace it together, really, because he once told her that his favorite place is anywhere that he can hold her.
And if that mockingbird don’t sing
Mama’s gonna buy you a diamond ring
They’ve been trying for a year and a half with no luck. Addison never thought she’d see the day where she would even think a miscarriage to be a success but she knows that, while it would be heartbreaking and devastating, it would mean hope and possibility. There would be something, proof that it could potentially happen. She isn’t sure how many more times she can tell herself that she’ll wait one more day before she buys a pregnancy test but the next morning finds her using the last tampon in the box and the next evening finds her glancing longingly at the tests that taunt her across the aisle. It’s beginning to hurt too much and they’ve decided to give it one last month on their own before they fly across the country to see Naomi.
It’s hurt him, too. It was her suggestion and, though he wasn’t completely sure at the time, he agreed with her because he could see how much it meant to her. Over time, he began to want it too, maybe even more than she did. And it hurts to see her so disappointed and upset and it was like a dagger through his heart the night she asked him through a waterfall of tears how he could be with a woman who couldn’t give him children. He has eyes and ears around the hospital who tell him if Addison has even mentioned cramps and he makes sure to be there when she gets home on those nights especially. He stays with her through all of it and he learned early on that she would rather he show his emotions than block them off to stay strong for her. Because, she said, it’s something that they’re both going through.
She’s losing confidence in herself. Babies are her specialty and she can help everybody but herself. She’s certain that something’s wrong, that it can’t just be a year and a half of bad timing, and certain that it’s on her end. Mother guilt about unconceived children.
If that diamond ring turns brass,
Mama's gonna buy you a looking glass
“Hey, hey,” he catches her before she urgently kisses him again and he puts a little space between them. He knows tears are forming in her eyes and that’s why she’s suddenly dropped her head and is now staring at the floor. Mark tips up her chin and watches sadly as the tears fall down her cheeks and he envelops her in his tight embrace. He knows why she’s crying so he doesn’t bother asking. He doesn’t want to imagine how much it hurts that her job, something she used to love with so much passion and energy, has turned on her.
Addison pulls away and wipes her eyes and hates how emotional she’s been lately. She offers him a watery smile and then sits on the bed and stares at her hands, her shoulders slumped over. She doesn’t notice Mark leaving, nor does she notice him coming back with some heated massage oil and a few candles. Looking up when she hears the strike of a match on its box, she begins to ask Mark what he’s doing but he silences her with a quick kiss and a smile and shakes out the burning match before it has a chance to reach his fingers. As he turns off the other lights in the room, she strips off her clothes and lies face down on their bed.
Mark stretches out his arms a little and then leans down to kiss her cheek. “I love you, Addison,” he whispers and pours some of the oil onto her back and begins to help her relax.
And if that looking glass gets broke
Mama’s gonna buy you a billy goat
Throwing up is a normal sign of her impending period so she’s never used that as a signal. Because she can ignore how much things hurt if she writes down details that will never mean anything, she tracks her symptoms by month. She sits by the toilet, face pale and lips without color and bottle of water next to her and four Pepto tablets within reach and flips through the tiny red (color choice accidental, she’s quick to point out) book. After a few minutes and after closing her eyes against the vertigo and nausea multiple times, she realizes that some things alternate months.
Vomiting is one of them.
And she threw up for two days straight last month.
And she’s two weeks late this month.
She tries not to get her hopes up or get too excited because then her breathing will change and adrenaline will kick in at the mere possibility and her heart rate will go up and that will all end very badly with her being even later for work. After half an hour, she braces her hand on the bathroom counter and slowly stands up. She takes one look in the mirror and watches what’s left of her color disappear from her face and the vertigo returns and she drops to her knees again in front of the toilet. Trying not to move her head too much, she fumbles around blindly for her cell phone and calls into work and says that there’s no way she’ll be able to make it in until noon, if at all. She’s never sick so the Chief worriedly immediately tells her to take three days off and he sends Mark home too.
Groaning, she puts the phone back on the counter and realizes that she really has to pee. And that there’s a pregnancy test she bought three months ago sitting next to the box of tampons. The irony kills her but that’s where it ended up. She’s feeling pretty crappy already so it’s not as though a negative response will ruin an otherwise phenomenal day so she fumbles around in the cabinet under the sink and finds the box. She closes her eyes as she sits on the toilet, cursing the interior designer who decided to put patterned tile on the bathroom floor. It isn’t that she doesn’t appreciate the tile, because it’s nice and at the moment she’s enjoying the coolness radiating from it (along with the cold porcelain of the toilet bowl, but that’s getting warm because she’s leaning on it so much and she wonders why on earth anyone would want heated toilet seats), but it’s the pattern. It’s dizzying and it’s harsh and it’s blurring and she is incredibly thankful that she’s turned off the bathroom light. Once finished, she pulls up her stolen pair of boxer shorts and slides back down to the floor again and sets the test next to her. She decides not to set a timer; the beeping would send her over the edge.
Mark comes home and quietly says her name and smartly looks in their bathroom first; the Chief had told him that she said she had been throwing up for a while. He starts to rush to her when he sees her curled up on the floor but then he sees that she’s simply asleep and he can understand why; it took him two hours before he could leave the hospital and it doesn’t look as though she’s left the confines of their bathroom. He spies a small stick next to her and instantly recognizes what it is and he brushes her sweaty hair away from her face and picks it up. He blinks at it, slowly. The positive sign is unmistakable. He lets out a breath he didn’t know he was holding and he sits next to her and nudges her awake just enough to let her rest her head in his lap. Looking around, he grabs a dry towel off the rack and gently lays it over her so she doesn’t get any colder.
She wakes up a little and opens her eyes and manages to focus on his face. “Hi,” she croaks out with a pathetic smile.
“Hey.” He caresses her cheek and then offers her the stick that explains the camping out in the bathroom. “Thought you might want to see this for yourself.”
Addison had completely forgotten about the pregnancy test. She had lain down after another round of vomiting and cursing her stomach because what little breakfast she ate had to be gone by then and then had fallen asleep. She smiles a little even before her eyes can focus enough in the dark to read it. He wouldn’t give it to her if it was bad news, not when she’s pale and kind of green and lying on the floor in the dark. She closes her eyes again and her smile stabilizes and she bites her lip and nods as much as she dares.
“We’re gonna have a baby,” she whispers, her voice hoarse but solid.
He leans down and kisses her forehead. “We’re gonna have a baby.”
“Think you can carry me to bed?” She asks after a while, the hard tile burning permanent indentations into her legs and the previously-soothing cold now causing her to shiver.
After she’s settled in bed, he brings a trash can to her side just in case and makes her drink some ginger ale and take some of the Pepto that she had sitting in the bathroom. He sits with her and rubs her back and talks to her while she slowly feels better. They don’t talk about the tiny blue plus sign on the little stick sitting on the bathroom counter. They don’t want to jinx it if it’s true and they don’t want to get their hopes up if it’s a false positive. So he talks to her about the Yankees and the Rangers and the Bengals because he’s convinced that everyone has to harbor a love for a team that’s consistently bad and he hates football so it doesn’t much matter. And she talks to him about this dress she saw the other day and the new Russell Crowe movie coming out and the start of the figure skating season.
She knows that it’s not an accident that his fingers brush across her abdomen later that night and he knows that it’s not an accident that she laces her fingers with his and her own fingers linger against her skin.
They find out a few days later that she had a decent case of food poisoning but that she is definitely, beyond a doubt, pregnant.
They don’t know about the triplets until later.
And if that billy goat won’t pull
Mama’s gonna buy you a cart and bull
Nancy’s eyebrows shoot up at what she sees on the screen in front of her. They ask what was wrong and she shakes her head and says “Nothing. They’re perfectly healthy,” and turns the monitor around and holds back a laugh as Mark counts three individual heartbeats and Addison happily mutters “No more McSteamy sperm.” She tells Addison that she can’t blame Mark, the babies are identical, and Addison says she’ll blame him anyway.
Despite their shock and the decision that might need to relocate out of his apartment and into a house, they’re happy. Overwhelmed and lost and when they get home they didn’t really know what to do except say “Well, okay, we need three names now,” but they’re happy.
Derek, before they have a chance to tell him that the triplets are girls, jokingly suggests Mark, David and Chapman because he hates John Lennon and figures that the “the second” after the younger Mark’s name would cement the history of inflated egos among Sloan men. Addison hangs up on him because she’s hormonal and doesn’t speak to him until he sends her apologetic flowers from across the country.
They settle on Andrea and Claire and play three hands of gin to finish the argument between Jennifer and Emily. Addison proclaims gin very smugly with four aces and an eight-nine-ten-jack-queen-king straight and their three baby girls will be Andrea, Claire and Emily.
And if that cart and bull roll over
Mama’s gonna buy you a dog named Rover
Andrea is the loud one. She’s that girl who spends five minutes at the beginning of every year instructing her teachers that her name is not, indeed, pronounced an-dree-uh but ahn-drāy-uh. She gives substitute teachers hell and refuses to respond to nicknames and every parent-teacher conference is a memorable one. Addison’s favorite is the one when she found out that Mrs. Boyer was most unhappy that Andrea was vehemently and vocally denying that letters had to be drawn from the line upward. She stifled a laugh and said she was sorry and that they’d work on these things at home. Addison went home and tried to write the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog with each letter starting from the line (“growing up to the sun like a flower,” according to Mrs. Boyer) and found it to be incredibly inefficient. So she told Andrea to do it her way but, please, do it quietly.
Emily is the peacemaker. She tells Andrea to just be quiet already and to use her indoor voice (a command which, whenever it comes out of her mouth, sends Addison into hysterics) and convinces Claire that blowing the fluff off of dandelions and doing cartwheels in the backyard is more fun than sitting inside reading a book. She’s the first to fall asleep and the last to wake up and she refuses to have anything to do with anything that might require a ball. Mark laughs every time she puts her foot down and throws her parents a you must be joking look because she takes it right from Addison.
Claire is the quiet one. At the tender age of five she learned the high school trick of hiding what you want to read inside what you have to read and had finished Charlotte’s Web on her own before the rest of the class finished the updated editions of Dick and Jane (now with Juan and Keiko) or See Spot Run (with a thinly-veiled Humane Society PSA near the end). Though concerned of the effect it would have on her relationship with her sisters, Mark and Addison agree with her teachers that she should skip first grade in the fall. To their relief, Claire is even happier and her sisters don’t seem to care that she’s a year ahead.
And if that dog named Rover won’t bark
Mama’s gonna buy you a horse and cart
Two weeks after the triplets turn six, Santa is expected to lose two hundred pounds and slide down their chimney with a huge sack of toys and no coal because they’ve all been good this year.
By now, they’ve learned where all the squeaky spots are in the house and what doors creak when they’re opened too far. They tiptoe out their door (there are two empty rooms down the hall for when they’re ready to have their own spaces) and quietly rush around the spot right in front of a family picture and down to their parents’ room.
Because they’re small, they can slip into the room without opening the door so far that it creaks and they stand at the edge of the bed, expectantly waiting for their parents to wake up. When they don’t, the girls stand on their toes and determine that they need a better vantage point so they softly climb up on top of the bench at the foot of the bed that Addison uses when she has to wrestle with a particularly difficult shoe.
The sheets are tangled around the two in a pattern none of the girls can figure out and Mark’s arm is protectively slung over Addison’s stomach, holding her close to him and his body is perfectly spooned around hers. His other arm is comfortably under her neck, giving her the feeling of being surrounded by her husband. They’re each holding each other’s hands. Their feet just barely stick out at the end of the bed, entwined around each other almost in a rope-like twist. Expressions soft and bodies relaxed and breathing quiet, they occasionally move and settle a little deeper into each other.
Andrea yawns and Claire and Emily follow. A few minutes later, Emily tucks her messy bedhead red hair behind her ear and Andrea and Claire do the same. Claire pushes her glasses back up her nose with her finger but nobody copies her because she’s the only one who needs them and she secretly likes that about herself even though she gets called four-eyes.
They all shrug and silently look at each other and decide through their nods and blinks that something special is happening between their parents and they don’t know what it is but it means that Christmas should wait another hour. They noiselessly slide off the bench, quietly shut their parents’ door behind them and sneak back to their room where they sit and impatiently count down sixty minutes together.
“Thank God,” Addison whispers when she hears the girls’ door shut. Their faking worked. She feels bad about pretending to be asleep sometimes but for the most part, it keeps her sane.
“What time is it?” Mark groans into her neck.
Addison groggily blinks her vision into focus and stares at the glowing red numbers next to her bed. “Five.”
“Half an hour later than last year.”
She turns and nestles her head in his shoulder. Never sure what to do with her hands when they’re facing each other like this, she gently nudges him to lie on his back and she immediately rests on his chest. The sheet falls down in the process and exposes her bare back. They’d fallen asleep shortly after making love the night before and completely forgotten the vital fact that they have small children and it is Christmas and that small children like presents before breakfast. Addison was luckily woken by one of them sneezing in the hallway so they had just enough time to hastily tug the sheets up around them.
“Maybe next year the sun will be up.” She kisses his chest and lays her head down again. “I think we have about an hour.”
Mark grins with an idea and trails his fingers across her bare back. “Since we know we have uninterrupted time...”
She laughs and slides up so she can kiss him. “We can either do that now,” she whispers, “or you can put up with me being excruciatingly cranky in an hour because I’m tired and you aren’t going to let me have caffeinated coffee.” An unfortunate incident with a full pot of coffee led them to discover the culprit of Addison’s migraines.
“Go to sleep,” he suggests without hesitation and smoothes her hair back so he can kiss her forehead.
Though she knows her efforts are in vain (and that she shouldn’t even put forth the effort), Addison tries for the caffeine in an hour anyway. Mark catches her with her hand on the coffee pot and shakes his head and hands her a mug of decaffeinated green tea instead. When she glares at him, he offers her a cookie in the shape of Santa and she bites off one of his legs to make a point, not quite cruel enough to chop off the jolly old man’s head. Mark suppresses a laugh and grabs Addison’s hand and they head out to the living room where their girls are already scoping what present belongs to whom and whether they’re going to get socks again from an uncreative uncle on Mark’s side (Emily secretly hopes so because the other two hate socks and she gets their pairs).
Later, the triplets crash from their sugar high and fall asleep in the piles of wrapping paper on the living room floor. Mark catches Addison around her waist when she comes back to the couch with two sugar cookies loaded with icing and sprinkles and obviously decorated by one six year-old or the other, and pulls her into his lap. She hands him a cookie and after they both take off a few pounds of sprinkles and unnecessary mini chocolate chips, they happily munch them in silence.
“Did you ever think we’d end up here?” He whispers and gently brushes his hand over her stomach. He’s always had trouble keeping his hands off of her.
“Well, for a while there I was sure Derek was going to kill you, so no.” Addison smiles as she feels him silence a laugh in her shoulder. She slides off of his lap and onto the couch and lifts his arm up and drapes it around her shoulders before cuddling into him. “Look at them,” she says quietly and gestures toward the three sleeping girls, each with her arm around a stuffed animal.
“Yeah. We made that.” He smiles proudly. Though not one of those fathers who shows twelve wallet-sized photos of each girl to anyone who asks if he has kids, he shows them off when he can.
“Remember when we first brought them home and had to keep their hospital bracelets on so we could tell them apart?” She smiles as Claire shifts and the paper rustles and her glasses are pushed even further up her forehead and into the cushy and floppy stuffed cat she’s lying on. One of her favorite pictures of her youngest daughter is of the girl asleep in the sun in the kitchen using their napping golden retriever as a pillow.
Mark nods and kisses her temple. “We probably shouldn’t tell them that.” Andrea stretches a little and makes a cute sleepy noise before curling up even tighter than before, clutching some candy cane wrapping paper to her along with a stuffed panda bear and he silently wonders how much one six year-old can grab onto and still sleep comfortably.
“Yeah, I was thinking of keeping that one silent.” Knowing that Emily could, literally, sleep through a tornado (a disturbing revelation uncovered while visiting Mark’s parents in Indiana one summer), Addison isn’t surprised when the middle triplet doesn’t follow her sisters’ leads and move around in her sleep. She’s perfectly content to lie on her stomach with limbs everywhere and her hand tight around the horn of the unicorn she received from her grandmother.
The ringing phone knocks them out of their reveries and wakes all three girls (Emily is a little sluggish; the other two are immediately awake).
“And now it begins,” Mark mutters as Addison picks up the phone and says hi to her mother in what is the first of many familial Christmas phone calls. Technically he can’t complain, his parents and two brothers call in too, but her list is a little longer. Later on will be Derek and Meredith and (generally around six when the girls are looking fairly hungry) Addison and Mark begin to loathe that they’re still adopted by Derek’s mother and sisters but it’s once a year so they put up with it.
They all crowd on the couch after dinner, a plate of cookies on the coffee table in front of them, and as Mark sets up Miracle on 34th Street, the girls fight over who sits where and who gets stuck in the middle without a parent. Mark looks over his shoulder with a look that threatens that he and Addison will take over the couch and the three of them might be relocated to the floor if they don’t stop arguing and Addison calms them like she always does by saying that they’ll switch around somewhere in the middle.
Her words don’t seem to mean much since the argument isn’t about her lap, it’s about Mark’s. Hers is already spoken for. Claire quietly and covertly climbed up while Andrea and Emily were glaring about who should sit in the middle based on who sat in the middle last year and settled herself into Addison’s arms and effectively claimed her space. Emily hops onto Mark the second he sits down and smirks her success at her sister. Andrea frowns and sulks for a few seconds but really likes the spot in the middle anyway. The argument is just ritual.
They don’t switch somewhere around the middle because the girls have been up since before five and, while they’re certainly full of energy and the nap helped, they can’t stay awake forever. Andrea stretches out so her head is on Addison’s knee and bare feet are tucked under Mark’s leg to keep them warm and every so often she wakes up and quotes a line as if to show that she’s been watching all along. Addison keeps one arm around Claire and reaches the other out to run her fingers through Andrea’s soft curls and catches Mark’s hand when he’s done arranging a blanket over the oldest (by three minutes, she regularly informs Emily whenever they’re debating about who gets the last of something).
Mark shifts so one leg can regain feeling while the other falls asleep and he squeezes Addison’s hand. He smiles widely when she flashes him that soft smile of hers, the one she saves just for him, where her eyes light up and she gently nibbles on her lower lip. Because he knows he won’t be able to reach her without waking a daughter or two, he gently blows her a kiss and she crinkles her nose in silent laughter and returns it, the movie completely forgotten.
Deciding that their children are exhausted enough that they’ll fall right back asleep if they even wake up at all, Addison slowly and carefully rearranges herself and manages to comfortably work her way into Mark’s lap without disturbing anyone. He immediately circles his arm around her and kisses her temple, somewhat amazed at how well they all fit on the couch like this. Addison begins to drift off in his arms and he watches his four redheads sleep, breathing almost in unison. He’s almost certain that a smile hasn’t left his face for six years.
“Merry Christmas, you guys.”
And if that horse and cart fall down
You’ll still be the sweetest little baby in town
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Mark/Addison
Summary: Expanded from my ten of cups in the Gravity of Love series. It’s the triplet fic and it’s for Calla (because it's really her fault). There is angst in the beginning and then, in grand tradition, an enormous amount of fluff. Because, hey, Christmas.
Music: Judy Garland - Over the Rainbow
Hush little baby don’t say a word
Mama’s gonna buy you a mockingbird
“What do you think about kids?” Addison looks up from dinner one night, the question perfectly innocent and her face blank, as if she practiced the six words at work so she wouldn’t give any indication of her opinions and maybe change his.
But there’s an undertone in her voice that gives her away to him. Not that he expects anything else; after initial hugs with the adults she heads immediately for her tiny nieces and nephews and she keeps candy in her lab coat pocket for the children of her patients and she always, always smiles and makes faces at small children wherever they go. He never thought he’d want kids but, then again, he never thought that he’d be sitting across from her at dinner every night. He smiles. “I’m in.”
Mark leaves a series of small soft kisses on her lips before he rolls over and tugs her into his arms. She settles immediately into his chest and they work together to pull a blanket up around them because their combined body heat isn’t enough against the October air and neither wants to stand and close the window. She closes her eyes as he splays his fingers wide across her back and thinks about how wonderful this feels and how nothing compares to this. She’s been to Rome and Paris, Cairo and Sydney, Bangkok and Beijing but her favorite place in the world is right here with his arms around her. Addison embraces the cliché. They embrace it together, really, because he once told her that his favorite place is anywhere that he can hold her.
And if that mockingbird don’t sing
Mama’s gonna buy you a diamond ring
They’ve been trying for a year and a half with no luck. Addison never thought she’d see the day where she would even think a miscarriage to be a success but she knows that, while it would be heartbreaking and devastating, it would mean hope and possibility. There would be something, proof that it could potentially happen. She isn’t sure how many more times she can tell herself that she’ll wait one more day before she buys a pregnancy test but the next morning finds her using the last tampon in the box and the next evening finds her glancing longingly at the tests that taunt her across the aisle. It’s beginning to hurt too much and they’ve decided to give it one last month on their own before they fly across the country to see Naomi.
It’s hurt him, too. It was her suggestion and, though he wasn’t completely sure at the time, he agreed with her because he could see how much it meant to her. Over time, he began to want it too, maybe even more than she did. And it hurts to see her so disappointed and upset and it was like a dagger through his heart the night she asked him through a waterfall of tears how he could be with a woman who couldn’t give him children. He has eyes and ears around the hospital who tell him if Addison has even mentioned cramps and he makes sure to be there when she gets home on those nights especially. He stays with her through all of it and he learned early on that she would rather he show his emotions than block them off to stay strong for her. Because, she said, it’s something that they’re both going through.
She’s losing confidence in herself. Babies are her specialty and she can help everybody but herself. She’s certain that something’s wrong, that it can’t just be a year and a half of bad timing, and certain that it’s on her end. Mother guilt about unconceived children.
If that diamond ring turns brass,
Mama's gonna buy you a looking glass
“Hey, hey,” he catches her before she urgently kisses him again and he puts a little space between them. He knows tears are forming in her eyes and that’s why she’s suddenly dropped her head and is now staring at the floor. Mark tips up her chin and watches sadly as the tears fall down her cheeks and he envelops her in his tight embrace. He knows why she’s crying so he doesn’t bother asking. He doesn’t want to imagine how much it hurts that her job, something she used to love with so much passion and energy, has turned on her.
Addison pulls away and wipes her eyes and hates how emotional she’s been lately. She offers him a watery smile and then sits on the bed and stares at her hands, her shoulders slumped over. She doesn’t notice Mark leaving, nor does she notice him coming back with some heated massage oil and a few candles. Looking up when she hears the strike of a match on its box, she begins to ask Mark what he’s doing but he silences her with a quick kiss and a smile and shakes out the burning match before it has a chance to reach his fingers. As he turns off the other lights in the room, she strips off her clothes and lies face down on their bed.
Mark stretches out his arms a little and then leans down to kiss her cheek. “I love you, Addison,” he whispers and pours some of the oil onto her back and begins to help her relax.
And if that looking glass gets broke
Mama’s gonna buy you a billy goat
Throwing up is a normal sign of her impending period so she’s never used that as a signal. Because she can ignore how much things hurt if she writes down details that will never mean anything, she tracks her symptoms by month. She sits by the toilet, face pale and lips without color and bottle of water next to her and four Pepto tablets within reach and flips through the tiny red (color choice accidental, she’s quick to point out) book. After a few minutes and after closing her eyes against the vertigo and nausea multiple times, she realizes that some things alternate months.
Vomiting is one of them.
And she threw up for two days straight last month.
And she’s two weeks late this month.
She tries not to get her hopes up or get too excited because then her breathing will change and adrenaline will kick in at the mere possibility and her heart rate will go up and that will all end very badly with her being even later for work. After half an hour, she braces her hand on the bathroom counter and slowly stands up. She takes one look in the mirror and watches what’s left of her color disappear from her face and the vertigo returns and she drops to her knees again in front of the toilet. Trying not to move her head too much, she fumbles around blindly for her cell phone and calls into work and says that there’s no way she’ll be able to make it in until noon, if at all. She’s never sick so the Chief worriedly immediately tells her to take three days off and he sends Mark home too.
Groaning, she puts the phone back on the counter and realizes that she really has to pee. And that there’s a pregnancy test she bought three months ago sitting next to the box of tampons. The irony kills her but that’s where it ended up. She’s feeling pretty crappy already so it’s not as though a negative response will ruin an otherwise phenomenal day so she fumbles around in the cabinet under the sink and finds the box. She closes her eyes as she sits on the toilet, cursing the interior designer who decided to put patterned tile on the bathroom floor. It isn’t that she doesn’t appreciate the tile, because it’s nice and at the moment she’s enjoying the coolness radiating from it (along with the cold porcelain of the toilet bowl, but that’s getting warm because she’s leaning on it so much and she wonders why on earth anyone would want heated toilet seats), but it’s the pattern. It’s dizzying and it’s harsh and it’s blurring and she is incredibly thankful that she’s turned off the bathroom light. Once finished, she pulls up her stolen pair of boxer shorts and slides back down to the floor again and sets the test next to her. She decides not to set a timer; the beeping would send her over the edge.
Mark comes home and quietly says her name and smartly looks in their bathroom first; the Chief had told him that she said she had been throwing up for a while. He starts to rush to her when he sees her curled up on the floor but then he sees that she’s simply asleep and he can understand why; it took him two hours before he could leave the hospital and it doesn’t look as though she’s left the confines of their bathroom. He spies a small stick next to her and instantly recognizes what it is and he brushes her sweaty hair away from her face and picks it up. He blinks at it, slowly. The positive sign is unmistakable. He lets out a breath he didn’t know he was holding and he sits next to her and nudges her awake just enough to let her rest her head in his lap. Looking around, he grabs a dry towel off the rack and gently lays it over her so she doesn’t get any colder.
She wakes up a little and opens her eyes and manages to focus on his face. “Hi,” she croaks out with a pathetic smile.
“Hey.” He caresses her cheek and then offers her the stick that explains the camping out in the bathroom. “Thought you might want to see this for yourself.”
Addison had completely forgotten about the pregnancy test. She had lain down after another round of vomiting and cursing her stomach because what little breakfast she ate had to be gone by then and then had fallen asleep. She smiles a little even before her eyes can focus enough in the dark to read it. He wouldn’t give it to her if it was bad news, not when she’s pale and kind of green and lying on the floor in the dark. She closes her eyes again and her smile stabilizes and she bites her lip and nods as much as she dares.
“We’re gonna have a baby,” she whispers, her voice hoarse but solid.
He leans down and kisses her forehead. “We’re gonna have a baby.”
“Think you can carry me to bed?” She asks after a while, the hard tile burning permanent indentations into her legs and the previously-soothing cold now causing her to shiver.
After she’s settled in bed, he brings a trash can to her side just in case and makes her drink some ginger ale and take some of the Pepto that she had sitting in the bathroom. He sits with her and rubs her back and talks to her while she slowly feels better. They don’t talk about the tiny blue plus sign on the little stick sitting on the bathroom counter. They don’t want to jinx it if it’s true and they don’t want to get their hopes up if it’s a false positive. So he talks to her about the Yankees and the Rangers and the Bengals because he’s convinced that everyone has to harbor a love for a team that’s consistently bad and he hates football so it doesn’t much matter. And she talks to him about this dress she saw the other day and the new Russell Crowe movie coming out and the start of the figure skating season.
She knows that it’s not an accident that his fingers brush across her abdomen later that night and he knows that it’s not an accident that she laces her fingers with his and her own fingers linger against her skin.
They find out a few days later that she had a decent case of food poisoning but that she is definitely, beyond a doubt, pregnant.
They don’t know about the triplets until later.
And if that billy goat won’t pull
Mama’s gonna buy you a cart and bull
Nancy’s eyebrows shoot up at what she sees on the screen in front of her. They ask what was wrong and she shakes her head and says “Nothing. They’re perfectly healthy,” and turns the monitor around and holds back a laugh as Mark counts three individual heartbeats and Addison happily mutters “No more McSteamy sperm.” She tells Addison that she can’t blame Mark, the babies are identical, and Addison says she’ll blame him anyway.
Despite their shock and the decision that might need to relocate out of his apartment and into a house, they’re happy. Overwhelmed and lost and when they get home they didn’t really know what to do except say “Well, okay, we need three names now,” but they’re happy.
Derek, before they have a chance to tell him that the triplets are girls, jokingly suggests Mark, David and Chapman because he hates John Lennon and figures that the “the second” after the younger Mark’s name would cement the history of inflated egos among Sloan men. Addison hangs up on him because she’s hormonal and doesn’t speak to him until he sends her apologetic flowers from across the country.
They settle on Andrea and Claire and play three hands of gin to finish the argument between Jennifer and Emily. Addison proclaims gin very smugly with four aces and an eight-nine-ten-jack-queen-king straight and their three baby girls will be Andrea, Claire and Emily.
And if that cart and bull roll over
Mama’s gonna buy you a dog named Rover
Andrea is the loud one. She’s that girl who spends five minutes at the beginning of every year instructing her teachers that her name is not, indeed, pronounced an-dree-uh but ahn-drāy-uh. She gives substitute teachers hell and refuses to respond to nicknames and every parent-teacher conference is a memorable one. Addison’s favorite is the one when she found out that Mrs. Boyer was most unhappy that Andrea was vehemently and vocally denying that letters had to be drawn from the line upward. She stifled a laugh and said she was sorry and that they’d work on these things at home. Addison went home and tried to write the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog with each letter starting from the line (“growing up to the sun like a flower,” according to Mrs. Boyer) and found it to be incredibly inefficient. So she told Andrea to do it her way but, please, do it quietly.
Emily is the peacemaker. She tells Andrea to just be quiet already and to use her indoor voice (a command which, whenever it comes out of her mouth, sends Addison into hysterics) and convinces Claire that blowing the fluff off of dandelions and doing cartwheels in the backyard is more fun than sitting inside reading a book. She’s the first to fall asleep and the last to wake up and she refuses to have anything to do with anything that might require a ball. Mark laughs every time she puts her foot down and throws her parents a you must be joking look because she takes it right from Addison.
Claire is the quiet one. At the tender age of five she learned the high school trick of hiding what you want to read inside what you have to read and had finished Charlotte’s Web on her own before the rest of the class finished the updated editions of Dick and Jane (now with Juan and Keiko) or See Spot Run (with a thinly-veiled Humane Society PSA near the end). Though concerned of the effect it would have on her relationship with her sisters, Mark and Addison agree with her teachers that she should skip first grade in the fall. To their relief, Claire is even happier and her sisters don’t seem to care that she’s a year ahead.
And if that dog named Rover won’t bark
Mama’s gonna buy you a horse and cart
Two weeks after the triplets turn six, Santa is expected to lose two hundred pounds and slide down their chimney with a huge sack of toys and no coal because they’ve all been good this year.
By now, they’ve learned where all the squeaky spots are in the house and what doors creak when they’re opened too far. They tiptoe out their door (there are two empty rooms down the hall for when they’re ready to have their own spaces) and quietly rush around the spot right in front of a family picture and down to their parents’ room.
Because they’re small, they can slip into the room without opening the door so far that it creaks and they stand at the edge of the bed, expectantly waiting for their parents to wake up. When they don’t, the girls stand on their toes and determine that they need a better vantage point so they softly climb up on top of the bench at the foot of the bed that Addison uses when she has to wrestle with a particularly difficult shoe.
The sheets are tangled around the two in a pattern none of the girls can figure out and Mark’s arm is protectively slung over Addison’s stomach, holding her close to him and his body is perfectly spooned around hers. His other arm is comfortably under her neck, giving her the feeling of being surrounded by her husband. They’re each holding each other’s hands. Their feet just barely stick out at the end of the bed, entwined around each other almost in a rope-like twist. Expressions soft and bodies relaxed and breathing quiet, they occasionally move and settle a little deeper into each other.
Andrea yawns and Claire and Emily follow. A few minutes later, Emily tucks her messy bedhead red hair behind her ear and Andrea and Claire do the same. Claire pushes her glasses back up her nose with her finger but nobody copies her because she’s the only one who needs them and she secretly likes that about herself even though she gets called four-eyes.
They all shrug and silently look at each other and decide through their nods and blinks that something special is happening between their parents and they don’t know what it is but it means that Christmas should wait another hour. They noiselessly slide off the bench, quietly shut their parents’ door behind them and sneak back to their room where they sit and impatiently count down sixty minutes together.
“Thank God,” Addison whispers when she hears the girls’ door shut. Their faking worked. She feels bad about pretending to be asleep sometimes but for the most part, it keeps her sane.
“What time is it?” Mark groans into her neck.
Addison groggily blinks her vision into focus and stares at the glowing red numbers next to her bed. “Five.”
“Half an hour later than last year.”
She turns and nestles her head in his shoulder. Never sure what to do with her hands when they’re facing each other like this, she gently nudges him to lie on his back and she immediately rests on his chest. The sheet falls down in the process and exposes her bare back. They’d fallen asleep shortly after making love the night before and completely forgotten the vital fact that they have small children and it is Christmas and that small children like presents before breakfast. Addison was luckily woken by one of them sneezing in the hallway so they had just enough time to hastily tug the sheets up around them.
“Maybe next year the sun will be up.” She kisses his chest and lays her head down again. “I think we have about an hour.”
Mark grins with an idea and trails his fingers across her bare back. “Since we know we have uninterrupted time...”
She laughs and slides up so she can kiss him. “We can either do that now,” she whispers, “or you can put up with me being excruciatingly cranky in an hour because I’m tired and you aren’t going to let me have caffeinated coffee.” An unfortunate incident with a full pot of coffee led them to discover the culprit of Addison’s migraines.
“Go to sleep,” he suggests without hesitation and smoothes her hair back so he can kiss her forehead.
Though she knows her efforts are in vain (and that she shouldn’t even put forth the effort), Addison tries for the caffeine in an hour anyway. Mark catches her with her hand on the coffee pot and shakes his head and hands her a mug of decaffeinated green tea instead. When she glares at him, he offers her a cookie in the shape of Santa and she bites off one of his legs to make a point, not quite cruel enough to chop off the jolly old man’s head. Mark suppresses a laugh and grabs Addison’s hand and they head out to the living room where their girls are already scoping what present belongs to whom and whether they’re going to get socks again from an uncreative uncle on Mark’s side (Emily secretly hopes so because the other two hate socks and she gets their pairs).
Later, the triplets crash from their sugar high and fall asleep in the piles of wrapping paper on the living room floor. Mark catches Addison around her waist when she comes back to the couch with two sugar cookies loaded with icing and sprinkles and obviously decorated by one six year-old or the other, and pulls her into his lap. She hands him a cookie and after they both take off a few pounds of sprinkles and unnecessary mini chocolate chips, they happily munch them in silence.
“Did you ever think we’d end up here?” He whispers and gently brushes his hand over her stomach. He’s always had trouble keeping his hands off of her.
“Well, for a while there I was sure Derek was going to kill you, so no.” Addison smiles as she feels him silence a laugh in her shoulder. She slides off of his lap and onto the couch and lifts his arm up and drapes it around her shoulders before cuddling into him. “Look at them,” she says quietly and gestures toward the three sleeping girls, each with her arm around a stuffed animal.
“Yeah. We made that.” He smiles proudly. Though not one of those fathers who shows twelve wallet-sized photos of each girl to anyone who asks if he has kids, he shows them off when he can.
“Remember when we first brought them home and had to keep their hospital bracelets on so we could tell them apart?” She smiles as Claire shifts and the paper rustles and her glasses are pushed even further up her forehead and into the cushy and floppy stuffed cat she’s lying on. One of her favorite pictures of her youngest daughter is of the girl asleep in the sun in the kitchen using their napping golden retriever as a pillow.
Mark nods and kisses her temple. “We probably shouldn’t tell them that.” Andrea stretches a little and makes a cute sleepy noise before curling up even tighter than before, clutching some candy cane wrapping paper to her along with a stuffed panda bear and he silently wonders how much one six year-old can grab onto and still sleep comfortably.
“Yeah, I was thinking of keeping that one silent.” Knowing that Emily could, literally, sleep through a tornado (a disturbing revelation uncovered while visiting Mark’s parents in Indiana one summer), Addison isn’t surprised when the middle triplet doesn’t follow her sisters’ leads and move around in her sleep. She’s perfectly content to lie on her stomach with limbs everywhere and her hand tight around the horn of the unicorn she received from her grandmother.
The ringing phone knocks them out of their reveries and wakes all three girls (Emily is a little sluggish; the other two are immediately awake).
“And now it begins,” Mark mutters as Addison picks up the phone and says hi to her mother in what is the first of many familial Christmas phone calls. Technically he can’t complain, his parents and two brothers call in too, but her list is a little longer. Later on will be Derek and Meredith and (generally around six when the girls are looking fairly hungry) Addison and Mark begin to loathe that they’re still adopted by Derek’s mother and sisters but it’s once a year so they put up with it.
They all crowd on the couch after dinner, a plate of cookies on the coffee table in front of them, and as Mark sets up Miracle on 34th Street, the girls fight over who sits where and who gets stuck in the middle without a parent. Mark looks over his shoulder with a look that threatens that he and Addison will take over the couch and the three of them might be relocated to the floor if they don’t stop arguing and Addison calms them like she always does by saying that they’ll switch around somewhere in the middle.
Her words don’t seem to mean much since the argument isn’t about her lap, it’s about Mark’s. Hers is already spoken for. Claire quietly and covertly climbed up while Andrea and Emily were glaring about who should sit in the middle based on who sat in the middle last year and settled herself into Addison’s arms and effectively claimed her space. Emily hops onto Mark the second he sits down and smirks her success at her sister. Andrea frowns and sulks for a few seconds but really likes the spot in the middle anyway. The argument is just ritual.
They don’t switch somewhere around the middle because the girls have been up since before five and, while they’re certainly full of energy and the nap helped, they can’t stay awake forever. Andrea stretches out so her head is on Addison’s knee and bare feet are tucked under Mark’s leg to keep them warm and every so often she wakes up and quotes a line as if to show that she’s been watching all along. Addison keeps one arm around Claire and reaches the other out to run her fingers through Andrea’s soft curls and catches Mark’s hand when he’s done arranging a blanket over the oldest (by three minutes, she regularly informs Emily whenever they’re debating about who gets the last of something).
Mark shifts so one leg can regain feeling while the other falls asleep and he squeezes Addison’s hand. He smiles widely when she flashes him that soft smile of hers, the one she saves just for him, where her eyes light up and she gently nibbles on her lower lip. Because he knows he won’t be able to reach her without waking a daughter or two, he gently blows her a kiss and she crinkles her nose in silent laughter and returns it, the movie completely forgotten.
Deciding that their children are exhausted enough that they’ll fall right back asleep if they even wake up at all, Addison slowly and carefully rearranges herself and manages to comfortably work her way into Mark’s lap without disturbing anyone. He immediately circles his arm around her and kisses her temple, somewhat amazed at how well they all fit on the couch like this. Addison begins to drift off in his arms and he watches his four redheads sleep, breathing almost in unison. He’s almost certain that a smile hasn’t left his face for six years.
“Merry Christmas, you guys.”
And if that horse and cart fall down
You’ll still be the sweetest little baby in town